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an enlightened self-interest, an Adam who is asked to risk not very much (a blood cell or two) in this peculiarly modern version of the biblical investment—for health rather than love, human or divine. The copy is made to serve the original, as—here it gets turned around—Adam served Eve. If it should ever be required.
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    Before Anna contacted me and initiated this series of events, in the twenty-one years since it had been made not only legal, and socially and ethically legitimate, but also routine—it is the exceptional case that an original does not have his umbilical cord blood collected and banked—I had not given much thought to the matter of clones and cloning. I’d given no thought at all to my clone, wherever he was. (I knew where he was, if I’d permitted myself to think about it.) In this way I was like the rest of the American populace. After a year of conversation with Anna—she did most of the talking and provided all of the knowledge—I am convinced that the government has done everything in its power to keep us from thinking about the subject. The very terms we use—“original,” “copy”—were designed to be flattering to the former, dismissive to the latter, to be less scientific, less clinical, more palatable, ultimately blinding. When it is considered at all by the American public, cloning is taken, gratefully, for the centerpiece of a federal health care system. This fiction persuades and placates us (and, not incidentally, allows the government to do little else for us in the way of health care). I use Anna’s language of protest. It does not come naturally to me. My involvement in this is personal, not political, but you must see, as I now do, that we are all complicit. We are guilty, individually and collectively, of a staggering narcissism. From the inception of this inhuman practice, which diminishes and
defines us—we are consummate sheep; the only real public debate was about whether or not to privatize the business of cloning—there have been pockets of resistance. These groups are tolerated, co-opted, impotent. (Anna and her husband were active in the opposition. Both refused to participate in the replication program. This refusal was to cost Anna’s husband perhaps twenty or thirty years of life.) There is a terrible symmetry to be noted. The United States is the only country in the civilized world where cloning is legal and state-sponsored. It is everywhere else outlawed. We are again the rogue among enlightened nations, as, for so long, we were in our refusal to abjure capital punishment. Having finally abolished that barbarous usage, the United States now reserves its sanctioned executions—few know about this; no one talks about it—only for superfluous or, in the rarest of cases, wayward clones. And their abettors.
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    Anna’s call came a year ago last July, ominously, as I’ve said, on the 25th. That spring I’d taught my final semester at the high school in Lebanon. I’d been more than ready to quit, but I had not yet found the rhythm for retirement. At a low level, I was restless, bored, disoriented, but willing to loaf and idle. Without knowing it, I had begun to feel the debilitating effects of a diseased heart. I had vague plans to travel. I wanted to go back to Scotland, to the Trossachs, Loch Voil, where Sara and I had been on our honeymoon. I wanted to live for a while, maybe two or three months, in Italy, in Umbria, in, say, Spoleto, which I knew little about, except that the very expensive olive oil Sara used in cooking was made there. I’d always imagined a leisurely, picturesque drive across the northern part of the country, from New Hampshire to Washington State, taking the Minnesota ByPass up through Canada. I thought about riding out a New England winter or two in Hawaii, or Arizona, or American Samoa. I had read too few of the major works of English literature,