Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  Often I eat lunch at my bed-and-desk. A cup of lentil soup with monkey bacon. Or a soybar. The servo janitor has been programmed to feed me what I ask for from the school cafeteria. I will sit, sometimes, and play a film section over and over again, eating slowly, trying to feel my way into that dim past. Some things I see there I cannot forget. Sometimes it will be a scene of a small girl crying over a grave in a field. Or of a horse standing on a city street, with a cumpled hat on its head and the ears sticking through, or of old men drinking from large glass mugs and laughing in silence on the screen. Sometimes, watching these things, I find myself in tears.

  And then for days at a time all the feeling goes and I merely drudge on, going through a whole two-reel film from beginning to end in a kind of mechanical way: “Biograph Pictures presents Margaret’s Lament. Directed by John W. Kiley. Starring Mary Pickford . . .“ And so on, until ”The End.“ Then I shut off my recorder and remove the little steel ball and place it in its compartment in the black air-sealed case that holds the film. And then on to the next.

  That is the drudgery part, and I sustain myself with marijuana and naps when it gets to be more than I can bear.

  DAY THREE

  I saw a group immolation today, for the first time in my life. Two young men and a woman had seated themselves in front of a building that made and dispensed shoes along Fifth Avenue. They had apparently poured some flammable liquid over themselves, because they looked wet. I saw them just as the woman applied a cigarette lighter to the hem of her denim skirt and pale flames began to engulf them like a yellow blossom of gauze. They must have been filled with all the right drugs, because there was no sign of pain on any of their faces—only a kind of smiling—as the flame, pale in the sunlight, began first to redden them, then to make them black. Several passersby stopped and watched. Gradually a bad smell began to fill the area, and I left.

  I had heard of such immolations, always in groups of three, but I had never seen one before. They are said to happen frequently in New York.

  I have found a book—a real book! Not one of the slim readers that I studied from in Ohio and that only told of Roberto and of Consuela and of their dog Biff, but a real, thick palpable book.

  It was simple. I merely opened one of the hundreds of doors along the vast stainless-steel hallway outside my office and there, in the center of a small bare room, in a glass case, sat this large, fat book. I lifted the top of the case, which was thick with dust, and picked it up. It was heavy, and its pages were dry to the touch and yellow. The book is called Dictionary. It contains a forest of words.

  DAY FIVE

  Now that I have begun keeping this journal I find myself paying more attention to oddities during the day than I used to—so that I may record them here at night in the archives, I suppose. Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”

  For example, I have been noticing an odd thing at the Bronx Zoo, or several odd things. I have been taking a thought bus out to the zoo on Wednesdays for over a month and I find that I always see only five children there—and they always seem to be the same children. They all wear white shirts and they are always eating ice-cream cones and—perhaps most odd—they always seem terribly excited and filled with fun to be at the zoo. The other zoo visitors, my age or older, often look at them dreamily and smile, and, when looked at, the children point toward an animal, an elephant, say, and shout, “Look at the big elephant!” and the older people smile at one another, as if reassured. Something seems sinister about this. I wonder if the children are robots?

  And more sinister, if they are robots, where are the real children?

  Every time I go into the House of Reptiles I see a woman in a red dress. Sometimes she is lying on a bench near the iguanas, asleep. Other times she may be pacing around idly. Today she was holding a sandwich in her hand and watching the python as it slid through branches of a synthetic tree, behind the glass of its cage. Putting that down now, I wonder about the python. It is always sliding through those branches. Yet I seem to remember from the time long ago when I was a child (how long ago that was, I of course have no way of knowing) that the big snakes in zoos were usually asleep, or bunched up into dormant lumps in a corner of their cases, looking nearly dead. But the python at the Bronx Zoo is always sliding and darting its tongue and provoking gasps from the people who come into the House of Reptiles to see it. Could it be a robot?

  DAY ELEVEN

  Things have begun to flood over me. I feel shaken as I write this, shaken to report what I thought of today. Yet it was so obvious, so clear, once I saw it. Why have I never thought of it before?

  It was during a film. An old woman was sitting on the front porch (if that’s what it is called) of a dark little house. She was in what was called a “rocking chair” and holding a tiny baby in her lap. Then, looking worried, she held the baby up and the picture ended momentarily, as they do, and these words appeared on the screen: “Ellen’s baby has the croup!” And when the word “baby” appeared on the screen I suddenly realized that I had not seen a real baby for longer than can be known! Yellows, blues, reds: years beyond numbering, and I had not seen a baby.

  Where have the babies gone? And has anyone else asked this question?

  And then the voice in me that comes from my childhood training says, “Don’t ask—relax.”

  But I can’t relax.

  I will lay this aside and take some sopors.

  DAY NINETEEN

  Nineteen. This is the highest number I can ever remember using. Nothing in my life has ever been worth this high a counting before.

  Yet it would be possible, I suppose, to count the blues and yellows of one’s life. Useless, of course, but it could be done.

  Often in films I see large numbers. Often they are associated with war. The number 1918 seems especially common. I have no idea what to make of it. Could there have been a war that was fought for 1918 days? But nothing lasts that long. The mind reels to think of anything that long or that large or that extensive.

  “Don’t ask—relax.” Yes, I must relax.

  I must remember to eat some soybars and gravy before I take a sopor. For two nights together I have forgotten to eat.

  Sometimes at night I study Dictionary, to learn new words, and at times that helps me become sleepy. But then at other times I find words that excite me. Often those are words the definitions of which elude me—like “disease” or “algebra”. I turn them over in my mind, and I read over their definitions. But those almost always contain other unfathomable words, which then excite me further. And I am forced to take a sopor after all.

  I don’t know how else to relax.

  The zoo used to help, but I haven’t gone there lately because of those children. I have nothing against robots, of course. But those children. . .

  DAY TWENTY-ONE

  I went to the zoo today and spoke to the woman in red. She was sitting on the bench by the iguanas and I sat beside her and said, “Is the python a robot?”

  She turned and looked at me. There was something strange, mystical, about her eyes—like those of someone under hypnosis. Yet I could see that she was thinking, and that she wasn’t drugged. She said nothing for a long time and I began to think she was not going to answer and would pull back into her Privacy the way we are all taught to do when we are troubled by strangers. But just as I started to shrug and get up she said, “I think they are all robots.”

  I looked at her, astonished. Nobody ever talked quite that way. And yet it was the way that I had been thinking, for days. It was so disturbing that I got up and left, without thanking her.

  Leaving the House of Reptiles I saw the five children. They were all together, all holding ice-cream cones, their eyes wide with excitement. They all looked at me, smiling. I looked away. .
.

  DAY TWENTY-TWO

  One compelling thing that keeps appearing in the films is a collection of people called a “family.” It seems to have been a very common arrangement in ancient times. A “family” is a group of people that are often together, that even appear to live all together. There are always a man and a woman—unless one of them is dead; and even then that one is often spoken of, and images of the dead one (“photographs”) are to be found near the living, on walls and the like. And then there are the younger ones, children of different ages. And the surprising thing, the thing that seems characteristic of these “families,” is that the man and woman are always the mother and the father of all of the children! And there are older people sometimes too, and always they seem to be the mothers and fathers of either the man or the woman! I hardly know what to make of it. Everyone seems to be related.

  And further, much of the sense of feelingfulness that these films have seems profoundly connected with this being related. And it seems to be presented in the films as good.

  I know, of course, not to try being a moral judge of anyone. And certainly not of people from another time. I know the life in the films is contrary to the dictum “Alone is best”; but that is not what bothers me. After all, I have spent days at a time with other people—have even seen the same students every day for weeks. It is not the Mistake of Proximity that bothers me about those “families.” I think it may be a kind of shock that the people take such risks. They seem to feel so much for one another.

  I am shocked and saddened by it.

  And they talk so much to one another. Their lips are moving all the time, even though no audible words come out.

  DAY TWENTY-THREE

  I had gone to bed last night thinking of those risks the people long ago were taking in their “families” and then the first thing this morning I went through a film that showed just how serious those risks could be.

  On the screen an old man was dying. He lay in a strange old-fashioned bed at his home—not in a hospital dying center—and he was surrounded by his family. A clock with a pendulum was on the wall. There were girls, boys, men, women, old people—more than I could count. And they were all unhappy, all crying. And then when he died, two of the younger girls threw their bodies across his and heaved with silent sobbing. There was a dog at the foot of the bed, and when the man died it laid its head on its paws and seemed to grieve. And the clock stopped.

  The whole spectacle of unnecessary pain upset me so that I left the film unfinished and went to the zoo.

  I went directly to the House of Reptiles and the woman was there. She was alone in the building except for two old men in gray sweaters and sandals who were smoking dope and nodding over the crocodiles at the pool in the center of the room. She was walking about carrying a sandwich and not seeming to look at anything.

  I was still disturbed—by the film, by everything that had been happening since I began this journal—and impulsively I walked up to her and said, “Why are you always here?”

  She stopped in her tracks and turned and looked at me in that penetrating, mystical way. It passed through my mind that she might be insane. But that was impossible, the Detectors would have found out if that were the case, and she would be off on a Reservation, agape with Time-Release Valium and gin. No, she had to be sane. Everybody who walked among others was sane.

  “I live here,” she said.

  Nobody lived at zoos. Not as far as I knew. And all the zoo’s work would be done, as it was in all Public Institutions, by robots of one kind or another.

  “Why?” I said. That was Privacy Invasion. But somehow I didn’t feel as though that edict applied. Maybe it was all those reptiles slithering and wriggling around in the glass cases that surrounded us. And the heavy, green, wet-looking artificial foliage on the artificial trees.

  “Why not?” she said. And then, “You seem to be around here a lot”

  I felt myself blushing. “That’s true. I come here when I feel . . . upset.”

  She stared at me. “You don’t take pills?”

  “Certainly,” I said. And then, “But I come to the zoo anyway.”

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t take pills.”

  Now I stared at her. It was an incredible thought. “You don’t take pills?”

  “I did. But now they make me sick.” Her face softened a bit. “I mean, I vomit when I take pills.”

  “But isn’t there a pill for that? I mean, a drug robot could . . .”

  “I suppose so,” she said, “but wouldn’t I vomit up an anti-vomit pill?”

  I didn’t know whether I should smile at that but I did. Even though it all had a shocking ring to it.

  “You could take an injection. . .”I said.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Relax.” Abruptly she turned and looked toward the iguana cage. The iguanas were, as always, lively. They jumped around like toads in their glass cage. She bit her sandwich and began chewing.

  “And you live here. At the zoo?” I said.

  “Right,” she said between bites.

  “Doesn’t it get. . . boring?” I said.

  “Jesus, yes.”

  “Then why do you stay?”

  She looked at me as though she wasn’t going to answer. All she would have to do, of course, would be to shrug her shoulders and close her eyes, and Mandatory Politeness would require that I leave her alone. You can’t go around interfering with Individualism with impunity.

  But apparently she decided to answer me, and I felt grateful—I don’t know why—when I saw that she was going to speak. “I live at the zoo,” she said, “because I don’t have a job and I have nowhere else to live.”

  I must have stared at her for a full minute. And then I said, “Why don’t you drop out?”

  “I did. I lived on a Drop-out Reservation for at least two yellows. Until I started vomiting from smoking dope and taking pills.”

  I had heard of the dope at Drop-out Reservations, of course; it was cultivated in vast fields by automatic equipment and was supposed to have a potency almost beyond belief. But I had never heard of anyone becoming sick from it.

  “But when you dropped in again . . . shouldn’t you have been assigned a job?”

  “I didn’t drop in again.”

  “You didn’t. . . ?”

  “Nope.” Then she finished off her sandwich, turning her head away from me and toward the iguana cage again, chewing. For a moment I felt not bafflement but anger. Those stupid, leapfrogging iguanas!

  Then I thought, I should report her. But I knew as I thought it that I wouldn’t. I should have reported that group immolation too, as any responsible person is supposed to. But I hadn’t. Probably no one had. You never heard of people being reported anymore.

  When she had finished eating she turned to me and said, “I just left the dormitory and walked here. Nobody seemed to notice.”

  “But how do you live?” I said.

  “Oh. It’s easy.” Her eyes had lost some of their intensity. “Outside this building, for instance, there’s a sandwich machine. The kind you operate with a credit card. And every morning a servo robot comes to fill it with fresh sandwiches. I found out when I first came here, half a yellow ago, that the robot always brings five more sandwiches than the machine holds. He’s a moron robot, so he just stands there holding the five extra sandwiches. And I take them from him. That’s what I eat during the day. I drink from the water fountains.”

  “And you don’t work?”

  She stared at me. “You know what work is these days. They have to deactivate robots to find things to pay us for doing.”

  I knew that was true. Everybody did, I suppose. But no one ever actually said it. “You could garden ...” I said.

  “I don’t like to garden,” she said.

  I walked over and sat on the bench by the python cage. The two old men had left, and we were alone. I didn’t look at her. “What do you do?” I said. “What do you do when you are bored? There’s no TV o
ut here. And you can’t use the Fun Facilities in New York without credit. And there’s no way to get credit without a job. . .”

  There was no answer, and for a minute I thought she hadn’t heard me. But then I heard her footsteps and in a moment she was sitting beside me. “Lately,” she said, “I’ve been trying to memorize my life.”

  “Memorize my life.” The phrase was so odd that I said nothing. I just looked at the python writhing through the branches, none of it real.

  “You should try it sometime,” she said. “First you remember a thing that happened, and then you go over it and over it. That’s ‘memorizing.’ If I keep it up long enough I’ll have it all and I’ll know it like a story or a song.”

  My God! I thought. She can’t be sane! But here she was, and the Detectors had left her alone. And then I thought, It’s the not taking drugs. What could have happened to her mind . . . ?

  I got up from the bench, excused myself, and left.

  DAY TWENTY-FOUR

  “Memorize my life.” I couldn’t get the phrase out of my mind. All the way back from the Bronx to Manhattan and to the library on the bus, I looked at the faces of the pleasant, shy, innocuous people who sat, carefully distanced from one another, on the bus seats, or moving up and down avenues, careful to avoid one another’s eyes. And I kept thinking, Memorize my life. I couldn’t let it alone, even though I hardly understood it.

  And then, as the bus got close to the library and I sent it the wish signal to stop at the front escalator, I saw a large number of people on the streets and suddenly another phrase replaced the one that had been going so insistently through my mind: Where are all the young people?