The Bradbury Report by Steven Polansky Page A

coming off them. Just now coming clear.”
    â€œWhat kind of drugs?”
    â€œAll kinds,” she said.
    â€œThey found him?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWho did? You?”
    â€œNo,” she said. “I didn’t find him.”
    â€œWho did then?”
    â€œI can’t tell you,” she said.
    â€œBut you know?”
    â€œNo. I don’t know.”
    â€œWhere was he found?” I said. “What was he doing?”

    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhat do you know?”
    â€œEnough,” she said.
    â€œYou’ve been with him? You’ve been in his presence?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “I spent six days with him.”
    â€œWhere? What were the circumstances?”
    â€œIn ______.” Here she named the town in Iowa. “In my house. He lived with me.”
    â€œHe lived with you?”
    â€œI took care of him. He was in awfully rough shape. It was not my decision.”
    â€œYour group.” I was already sick of them.
    â€œThey brought him to me,” she said. “Yes.”
    â€œIs he still there? In your house?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhere is he?”
    â€œI can’t tell you,” she said.
    â€œBecause you don’t know.”
    â€œNo,” she said. “But I can’t tell you. Not yet.”
    â€œWhen can you tell me?”
    â€œIf 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