The Bradbury Report by Steven Polansky

of sewage and runoff, industrial and medical waste, all sorts of marine garbage, and a tarry sludge that stuck to the bottom of your feet. You would get sick swimming in that water, though hordes of very wealthy people swam there. I wasn’t much of a swimmer. I didn’t at all like being in the ocean. I
didn’t like not knowing what I might be stepping on, what might be scuttling around my feet. My mother was an enthusiast and a strong swimmer. If you wanted to swim in clean, non-toxic water, you had to drive up the coast into Maine, to be safe, as far north as, say, Booth-bay, and then the water would be too cold until late in the summer. In college, I was not too far from the Chesapeake Bay, and, in the spring of my freshman year, I went several times to Virginia Beach with two boozy, showy boys from Nashville. In my sophomore year, I went with Ann—in our final, apocalyptic phone call, she used the word “discarded” to describe what I had done to her—to a place on the Eastern Shore called Chance. Iowa is landlocked, of course, and the two years I spent there in graduate school—the first of which as an engine of dismay for Anna—I didn’t see the sea.
    I have just ended a year on the run, living in close quarters—for me a year of unprecedented intimacy—with Anna and, in one person, a genetic facsimile of myself and a recognizable version of myself as a twenty-one-year-old. I have claimed, in the spurt of self-abasement with which I began, that this report will not be about me; but it is no accident, no surprise that, from time to time, my past will seem to intrude upon the narrative, will want to infiltrate, to subvert the express and more than sufficient purpose of this report. It appears I will not keep it out, that I will welcome it, solicit it. When your parents are gone, when your wife is gone, when you have no children who survive, no family at all, no friends, when there is no one who shares your past, no one who remembers it, then, for all you can prove, or even determine, your past might as well never have been. It might never have been. This report, whoever’s idea it was I write it, whatever use others will make of it, however reluctant I was at the start, is my report now.
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    When Anna told me, “The clone is yours”—a crystalline, phase-shifting point beyond which nothing would for either of us ever be the same—I did not respond as you’d expect. I did not say, as might some half-cooked, pasteboard character in a novel, anything remotely like, “Mine? The clone is mine? What do you mean?” In the instant she
said, “The clone is yours,” I moved past any confusion, past any doubt about the veracity of her statement. “You’ve seen him?” I said.
    â€œI have.”
    â€œHe looks like me?” An unscientific question, more than a trace narcissistic, but I was steady. I could have had no real idea what I was facing.
    â€œHe looks just like you.” She smiled. “Like you used to look. A bit bigger.”
    â€œTaller?”
    â€œTaller. Broader.”
    â€œHe’s twenty-one,” I said.
    â€œThat’s right,” she said. “You’re a whiz.”
    â€œI’m not. The doctor asked me about it. About him. What is his name?”
    â€œI don’t know. We don’t think he has a name,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing. I don’t know what to call him.”
    â€œBut he’s all right?”
    I don’t think I yet felt for the clone any kind of proprietary concern, which, directed towards the clone, would also constitute a new and misbegotten opening for the propagation and expression of self-love. In the swamplands of self-love, it happens, I am a pioneer.
    â€œHe’s all right,” she said. “He’s bewildered. Scared. He was completely narcotized when he was found. Full of drugs. That’s been hard. He’s just now