The Bradbury Report Read Online Free

she was reticent. But she did not once stoop to recrimination. Was there something wrong? Was Sara all right? Her concern was authentic. I said so far as I knew Sara was fine. Then, relieved, giddy to have someone to talk to, someone to listen to me, to comfort me, I fell apart. I began to weep convulsively. Anna sat down beside me on the daybed. She took my hand, and I collapsed into her arms, my head on her breast.
    I told Anna about Ann—it was the first she’d heard of her—and our conversation. I kept nothing back. I told her things about Ann and me, things about myself, I would not tell Sara. I confessed to her my fears, rehearsed my failings and frailties, delineated, in fastidious detail, my self-loathing. I was relentless, grotesquely self-absorbed. Anna listened to all of it, the whole woeful inventory. She cosseted me. She tried to be reassuring. I was not so bad as I claimed. I was not evil, just flawed, broken. As she was. As was everyone. (These were the days before Direct Germline Intervention.) Somehow, she was neither patronizing nor disdainful. She was able, even, to evince some joy in the idea that Sara and I were together. When it was over, when I was completely purged and spent, when I had squeezed myself dry and taken everything I could take from her, Anna helped me to the door
and sent me back to Sara, who was, by then, sleeping cozily in our apartment.
    Within the week, Anna had left the university. I did not see or speak to her for forty-five years.
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    I am not a religious man. Few people are, these days, religious. I was an infant, too young to remember the tyrannous, hateful, pseudo-Christian mania that took hold of the country in the reign of George Bush (“the Pretender,” now, to distinguish him from his less malignant father). I was too young to remember the violent and mass recoil that accompanied his downfall, away from a zealously theocratic state, in which regressive stupidity was institutionalized, to an equally zealous secular one, in which science was allowed to proceed unchecked. Ours was a tepidly Presbyterian house. My parents were not at all serious about matters of faith, and we barely registered these radical shifts in policy and mood.
    This past year, led by the events I tell of here, I have begun reading through the Bible, in a methodical but unscholarly way, Old Testament to New, without a clear understanding of why I am doing it. I have the Authorized Version, the King James. It was not easy to obtain a copy. I bought it when we first got to Montreal, in a secondhand bookstore on the Rue de la Montagne. I have taken it with me through every move. It is with me now. It is a beautiful book, in fairly good condition. Oversized and heavy. I am a slow reader. I am finding some of it familiar, some of it utterly strange, some of it dull and useless, some of it beautiful and moving. I have not, as yet, turned to God. It is the story one comes to first, the story of Adam and Eve, which for me has been most provocative. Eve was made from Adam’s rib. It follows: Adam, the first man, was also the first original. Because she was made from him, Adam would have felt a special warmth for this last, derivative animal. Through this asexual mode of reproduction—unprecedented and, until recently, unrepeated—God, as I read the story, opened up a gap in the otherwise sturdy, previously impeccable rib cage. That is, He made in Adam a highway to his, Adam’s, heart. Forgive the bumptious metaphor, but I have been opened up
just so. I have been re-made. I had forgotten who I once was, who I once might have become. I have been made to remember. (Eve was born knowing deep down the way to Adam’s heart, and, fatefully, with the means to turn his heart from God.) In our systematically de-scriptured world, the copy is made from the genetic material of the original. The original thus serves as a new Adam, a peculiarly modern Adam, a voluntary Adam, an Adam with