The Bradbury Report (9 page)

“I can't tell you,” she said.

“But you know?”

“No. I don't know.”

“Where was he found?” I said. “What was he doing?”

“I don't know that either. I assume it was somewhere just outside the Clearances. He couldn't have gone far the shape he was in. It's a wonder he could stand. The poor boy. I don't know what he was doing.”

“What do you know?”

“Enough,” she said.

“You've been with him? You've been in his presence?”

“Yes,” she said. “I spent six days with him.”

“Where? What were the circumstances?”

“In ______.” Here she named the town in Iowa. “In my house. He lived with me.”

“He lived with you?”

“I took care of him. He was in awfully rough shape. It was not my decision.”

“Your group.” I was already sick of them.

“They brought him to me,” she said. “Yes.”

“Is he still there? In your house?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“I can't tell you,” she said.

“Because you don't know.”

“No,” she said. “But I can't tell you. Not yet.”

“When can you tell me?”

“If you agree to do what they ask,” she said, “I'll take you to him.”

It was here, or hereabouts, our conversation stopped for the evening. I was exhausted and surly. The floor had fallen away, but I refused to drop.

We went to sleep on terms awkward and unresolved. The next morning I lay in bed ungraciously late, in a flagrant attempt—Anna would not have missed it—to foreshorten the last day of her stay. If I could have avoided her altogether, I think I would have. I came out into the living room in my pajamas and a robe. I was wobbly. It was nearly eleven. The drapes were drawn back, all the windows open. The morning was already hot. We would need the air-conditioning. I would have to go from room to room, lowering the storms and sashes, which, in my
state, would entail exertion and, I let myself think, risk. Anna was not in the house. I could be dead before she returned. There was some evidence in the kitchen she'd made herself breakfast. There was no note. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and noticed that even on this sweltering morning my toes were cold and had a bluish tinge. My fingers, too, were cold, the palms, the heels of my hands, blue as well. I was not getting enough blood to my extremities. I felt the tip of my nose. I was reminded again of my own frailty. When the time came, I would not be loath to admit it: Anna, and what she'd brought with her, were too much for me. I would be unembarrassed; I would be content to plead infirmity, incapacity, to whatever she proposed, which, if she was to be believed, would please her. The kitchen smelled of toast and syrup. Through the open window I could hear one of the twins next door, Sophie or Marie, crying. Whichever one it was, she was spitting mad, pitching a whale of a fit. I hated to think of that sweet face contorted in anger.

When I was a boy, the three of us, my father, mother, and I, went to church on Sunday morning. We went twice a month, every other Sunday, to the Presbyterian church. It was a nineteenth-century brick building, an upstart church in the colonial town, set a humbling three blocks off the green, close enough to our house so we could walk to it. Over the years, the church had been subjected to a continuous and capricious architecture, as if successive building committees had played a sort of inter-generational dominos. The randomness in the style of the additions—wings perpendicular and oblique, glazed breezeways, ornamental cloisters—and in their points of attachment to the original structure was jarring. By the time we joined it, the church as a physical entity had ceased to make sense. There was a foolishness in the way it was laid out that I loved. I wandered the halls, eluding my parents, finding myself lost within its illogical precincts. I was christened there. The pastor was a giant. He was six-foot-eleven, and even as a boy—we stopped attending church when my father died—I could tell he was a fine preacher. I can't remember any music, though there must have been an organ or a piano and hymns. For the offering my father took a folded check from the inside pocket of
his suit coat and put it on the collection plate. He avoided looking at anyone when he did this. After the service, there were often doughnuts, homemade baked goods, in the narthex. There was a church camp in summer I didn't go to, and every once in a while, all the kids in the congregation were invited to come and sit on the floor in front of the altar to listen to a children's sermon. I was too shy to go forward, and watched from a pew with my parents. I remember there were hand puppets once, barnyard animals—a donkey, a cow, a rooster, a lamb, maybe a dog. The pastor played the banjo. A woman who worked at the post office sang on occasion. So there was music. Of the three of us, only my father took communion.

I didn't know where Anna was, and I had not given any thought to her attitude towards God, but I couldn't imagine she had gone to church. Virtually no one in Lebanon now goes to church. On Sunday, the church bells don't ring. The carillon on the Catholic church is at all times quiet, the rectories and parish houses have been sold, the ministers are itinerant, and the churches themselves are used primarily for weddings, funerals, and various civic functions.

At one o'clock, when Anna came back, I was still in my robe and pajamas. I was sitting, still, at the kitchen table, a mug of cold milky tea in front of me. I might have fallen asleep. I had not washed. I had not gotten to the air-conditioning or the windows, and the house was stifling. Anna came in through the side door, which opened into a small mudroom/pantry directly off the kitchen.

“Sleeping Beauty,” she said.

She was wearing khaki shorts, running shoes, a white T-shirt with little flowers embroidered on the neck, and a yellow visor. In each hand she had a shopping bag loaded with groceries. Her forearms and calves were sinewy and mottled with freckles. She was spry. She hoisted each bag onto the counter. She had gotten stronger, livelier with age. I was a slug, a sorely diminished thing. Watching her move about my kitchen, sorting through her purchases, putting them away in my cabinets, I wanted only to go back to bed.

“What have you got there?” I said.

“I had to lay in supplies for the trip home.”

“That's right,” I said. “When are you leaving?”

She smiled at me. “You know exactly when I'm leaving. You jerk. You've been counting the minutes.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“First thing. But you're not off the hook yet.”

“I had that sense,” I said. “How did you sleep?”

“Okay,” she said. “You were snoring.”

“You could hear me?”

“I could hear you. You were snoring away. Then you'd make this horrific gasping sound, and you'd stop. As if you'd stopped breathing. I was worried.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn't know I snored.”

“My husband was a great snorer,” she said. “The same thing. Suddenly he'd gasp and stop breathing. He went to a sleep clinic. They gave him a machine to use at night. A mask to wear over his nose. It helped him sleep. Helped me, too. If there's time, you should look into it.”

“If there's time?”

“Well,” she said. “Let's wait. Have you had lunch? You haven't, clearly. I'll fix us some lunch. We'll eat, you'll put on some clothes, and then we'll talk. We'll finish it up, see where we are.”

“I had the thought,” I said, “that maybe you'd gone to church.”

“No,” she said. “Not today.”

 

Anna made a delicious chicken salad with apples and celery and walnuts and grapes. It was perhaps the most comprehensive dish prepared in that kitchen in the last forty-five years, and it took her just over fifteen minutes (when had she cooked the chicken?) to put it together. We ate without conversation at the kitchen table. The house heated up. After lunch, as she'd stipulated, I showered and dressed. She washed the dishes and, sparing me, closed the windows. I switched on the air-conditioning. It was past two in the afternoon when we re-convened. She was waiting in the living room, sitting on the edge of the couch, inclined forward, her forearms on her knees. I sat down in the wing chair opposite. We had taken our positions, but before she
could start, I asked a question I'd been thinking about since the night before.

“You spoke to him?”

“Yes,” she said. “As much as I could. Whenever he was conscious and reasonably comfortable. I talked myself silly.”

She smiled.

“What?”

“I even sang to him,” she said. “And I don't sing.”

“What did he say?” I said. “What did he tell you?”

“He didn't speak.”

“At all?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It's not clear,” she said, “that he
can
speak.”

“Why not?” We had just begun, and already I was the querulous child.

“I don't know. It may be that, physically, he can't speak. Or that he doesn't have language. We'll have to see.”

“When?”

She looked at me, as if to say, “If you must ask questions, ask the right ones.”

“What is it you want from me?” I said.

“I don't want anything from you. If it were up to me, I wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be involved.”

“Yes. Yes. You've said this.”

“It's important you know it. It's important I say it. It's what I mean.”

“But you're here,” I said. “We're talking. You've taken great pains, gone to great lengths.”

“You can't imagine,” she said.

“All right. So?”

“So no more questions. Here's what they,” before I could interrupt, “here's what my group wants you to do. They want you to meet your clone. Face to face. They want you to spend time with him. Then
they want you to write about how that feels, to write about what that means. To you. To meet your clone.”

“Why? Because they think what? It will be devastating?”

“That's what they think. Obviously, there's no one who could know how it will feel. I can tell you it will not be easy, or pleasant.”

“Why would they want me to write about this?”

“Come on, Ray. They believe—I have to admit I believe it, too—that when it is published, your account will be of tremendous importance to their cause.” She hesitated. “It's just as much my cause. And it's worthy. Whatever else about the group may be corrupt, the cause is worthy.” She came back to me. “Listen. Can you possibly think that of all the clones in the Clearances—all two hundred fifty million, or however many there are—not one of them ever dies—by accident, from illness, from natural causes—before he or she is used?”

“I haven't thought about it. As you know.”

“Think about it now. Of course they die. They must die all the time. As we do. Thousands and thousands a day. More. I don't know how many. No one is ever contacted. No one ever hears his clone has died. Why do you think that is? What do you think happens?”

“I don't know, Anna. Clearly, I don't know.”

“You're not meant to. But if the system is to continue, it must be that when an original needs a part after his clone is dead, he is given a compatible part from some constantly replenished store of spares and left to believe the part comes from his clone. I told you it is the key to survival for the whole business, that an original never meet his copy. Do you remember?”

“For Pete's sake.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, it is only slightly less important that an original never have cause to think about his clone. At least until the clone is required. And then you don't question it; you're simply glad he's there for the taking.”

“And my account, as you're calling it, will do what? Make us think about our clones? Is that it?”

“That's the operative idea,” she said.

I laughed. I had not laughed, not really laughed, wholeheartedly,
in decades. The idea of my writing an account, an account of anything, struck me as very funny and, not incidentally, unimaginable. But it was more than that. The larger situation, and my part in it, seemed, just then, preposterous. I laughed so strenuously I thought I would injure myself. I could not catch a breath. The word “operative.” “That's the operative idea,” she'd said. I found this surpassingly funny. My stomach went into spasm, my ribs hurt. I begged Anna to help me. “Help me,” I said. It was all I could say. I thought my heart would stop. I thought I might die laughing this way. Right, I thought, to die, now, as I was, laughing. I had overstayed. My life was ludicrous.

“Why are you laughing?” Anna said.

I thought she could not have said anything funnier. Despite what I've just written—all hindsight—it is unlikely I had any idea why I was laughing.

“Tell me,” she said. “I'd like to laugh.”

I couldn't speak.

“Then stop,” she said. “Please. No more.”

I stopped.

“That was shabby,” she said. “You make me sad, Ray. Again.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Again.”

“Can you collect yourself?”

“I'm fine,” I said. “I don't know why I did that.”

“I need you to be sensible,” she said.

“I will be. Give me a second.”

“All right,” she said.

“I can't write anything,” I said. In part, at least, to show her I had kept track.

“You can,” she said. “If you decide to.”