Free The Bradbury Report by Steven Polansky Page B

would be a penalty to their taste, ruthless and condign: originals, for their crime against the state, made copies. In any case, you are most certainly in danger. And it is my fault.”
    â€œBecause of what you’ve told me.”
    â€œYes. And because of what I’ve come to ask you to do.”
    â€œSo what is it?”
    â€œTo start, we want you to meet with this clone.”
    â€œ You don’t.”
    â€œNo,” she said. “I don’t.”
    â€œWhy me?”
    You will be wondering, here, how it was possible, at this late moment in the conversation, for me not to know what her answer would be. I will say only that I didn’t know.
    â€œThe clone is yours,” Anna said.

Four
    T his is how it turns out, with me all but confined to a bed in Calgary. Writing this report.
    I am in Canada, having effectively traversed—a kind of forced march—that benevolent and enlightened country. Do I miss America? I do, yes. It is my home. Though I know very little of it, it is all I know. There are parts of northern New Hampshire and the Northeast Kingdom that for me are sacred places. I continue to make this claim to myself, though I am not sure it is true. Mount Cardigan, Mount Assurance, Mascoma Lake, Squam Lake, Zealand Hut at Zealand Falls at the base of Zealand Peak, Lake Willoughby. Even Weirs Beach on Winnipesaukee. I went to such places more than once with my father when I was a boy. My mother was never along. More than all else I remember the smell of conifers, the light at dawn and the mist in the morning thick on the lakes, the lakes like pearl in the moonlight, the snapping clearness of the night sky. Conventional stuff, I suppose. I’m afraid I remember these things better than I do my father, who has been dead a long time. When we first came back to New Hampshire to live, I took Sara to the White Mountains. She had lived most of her life in Indianola; she was appreciative. (When she’d lived several years in New England and had some basis for the comparison, she admitted she preferred the less exacting Greens, and Vermont in general—
“It just seems better groomed,” she said, as unemphatically as she could.) But in the forty-odd years intervening, I have not gone again to any of those spots. Maybe because they are sacred to me. After Sara died, and the baby, my infant son (thank God we had not named him), I pretty much stayed put. America is not easy to miss.
    Too late, but I’d have liked, I think, to have lived, or died, by the sea.
    By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea.
You and I, you and I, oh how happy we’ll be.
I long to be beside your side, beside the sea,
Beside the seaside, by the beautiful sea.
    These are the only words I remember from a song my mother sang to me. As her mother had sung it to her. When my mother sang it, and I was no longer an infant, I cringed at the grammatical rectitude of “You and I, you and I,” thinking she must have got it wrong, that, for every musical reason, it ought to go: “You and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be.” She was right. The mistake was not hers. After her death, in a spurt of piety and the first flush of orphanhood—November 2027, I was in my early twenties—I looked it up. The song was more than one hundred years old, written in 1914 by Harold Atteridge (words) and Harry Carroll (music). Reading what I’ve written here, I see I have substituted, as I do always when I think of this song, when I sing these lines to myself, the word “long” in the third sentence for the “love” of the original. I prefer my version.
    I was born and raised and, after college and graduate school, spent all my adult life in western New Hampshire, as far, in that state, from the Atlantic littoral as one could be. My mother and father and I would once or twice a summer make the drive to the shore, to Hampton Beach, where, even then, the water was full