Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  I left the fruit alone and took the recorder from my desk and gave it to her.

  She remembered how to work it. “Do you mind,” she said, “if I record something?”

  I told her to go ahead. Then I had the robot bring us each another Syn-gin and ice and I lay back in my bed and listened while she talked into the recorder.

  It took me a moment before I realized what she was doing. She spoke in a kind of slow, hypnotized way and said the words without any apparent feeling. What she was doing, I realized eventually, was saying her “life” as she had “memorized” it—repeating the words as she had learned to repeat them by practice:

  “I remember a chair by my bed. I remember a green dress that I wore to my classes. Everybody tried to dress differently from everybody else, to show our Individuality. But I think we all looked the same.

  “I was very smart in my classes, but I hated them.

  “I remember a girl named Sarah, with awful pimples on her face. She was the first to tell me about sex. She had done it already, while some other children watched. It sounded . . . wrong.

  “There was desert all around the place where we all lived, and Gila monsters sometimes came into the dormitories to sleep. The robots would pick them up and carry them out. I felt sorry for the big, stupid lizards. In the House of Reptiles they do not have any Gila monsters, but I think they should have. . . .”

  And on it went. At first I was interested, but after a while I became very sleepy. It had been a long day. And I was not used to drinking like that.

  Somewhere during her talking into the recorder I fell asleep.

  When I woke up this morning she was gone. At first I was alarmed to think she might have left. But I looked in the rooms along the hallway and, after opening a few that were empty, found her. She was curled up in the center of the room, on the heavy orange carpet, sleeping like a child. My heart warmed toward her. I felt like . . . like a father. And a lover too.

  Then I came back to my office and had breakfast, and began writing this.

  When I finish I will wake her up and we will go out to a restaurant for lunch.

  DAY FORTY-THREE

  After I woke her up I took her up Fifth Avenue on the conveyor belt and we had lunch at a vegetable restaurant. We had spinach and beans.

  The two of us had not taken any pills or smoked any dope and it was surprising to notice how dazed and drugged everyone else seemed to be. Except, of course, for the robots who waited on us. An older couple at a table nearby kept repeating themselves in a kind of aimless imitation of a conversation. He would say, “Florida’s the best place,” and she would say, “I didn’t catch your name,” and he would say, “I like Florida,” and she would say, “It’s Arthur, isn’t it?” and it just went on like that throughout the meal. They must have had a sexual connection, but could not connect any other way. Such talk had never been uncommon, but there with Mary Lou, where we each had things to say to the other, and with our heads clear and wide-awake, it was especially noticeable. And saddening.

  DAY FORTY-SIX

  Mary Lou has been here three days now. For the first two of them she slept until noon, after telling me not to disturb her. I spent the mornings working on a film about men who were bare to the waist and who lived on the kind of sailboats that could cross an ocean. Mostly the men fought one another with knives and swords. They would say things like “Zounds!” and “I am master of the seas.” It was interesting; but Mary Lou was too much in my thoughts for me to pay it close attention.

  I worked only in the mornings for those two days, since I was for some reason reluctant to let her see me at work. I don’t know why; but I did not want her to know about the reading.

  And then on the third morning she came into my room and she was carrying a book in her hand. The sight of her was striking: she was wearing a pair of the pajamas I had given her, and the top was unbuttoned so that I could see the place between her breasts. She was wearing a cross around her neck. I could see her naveL “Hey, look!” she said. “Look what I found.” She held the book out to me.

  Her pajama top adjusted itself to the gesture, and one of her nipples was briefly visible. I was confused, and must have looked like a fool standing there trying not to stare. I noticed that she was barefoot.

  “Take it,” she said, and practically forced the book into my hand.

  After another moment of confusion I took it. It was a small book, without the stiff cover that I thought books were supposed to have.

  I looked at the cover. The picture on it—faded yellow and blue —made no sense. It was a pattern of dark and light squares, with odd-looking shapes sitting on some of them. The title was Basic Chess Endings and the author’s name was Reuben Fine.

  I opened it up. The paper was yellow, and there were little diagrams of black and white squares and a lot of writing that did not seem to make sense.

  I looked back to Mary Lou, having regained my calmness a bit. She must have noticed the way I had acted, because she had buttoned her pajama top. She was running her fingers through her hair, trying to comb it.

  “Where did you get this?” I said.

  She looked at me thoughtfully. Then she said, “Is it. . . Is it a book?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

  She was staring at it, in my hands. Then she said, “Jesus Christ!”

  “What?”

  “It’s just an expression,” she said. Then she took my hand and said, “Come on. I’ll show you where I found it.”

  I followed along with her like a child, holding her hand. I was embarrassed by her touch and wanted to let go but did not know how. She seemed full of purpose and strength; I was confused and disoriented.

  She took me down the hall farther than I had ever been before, around a corner and through a double door and then down another hall. There were doorways all along, and some of them were open. The rooms seemed to be empty.

  She seemed to guess what I was thinking. “Have you been down this far before?” she said.

  Somehow I felt ashamed that I hadn’t. But I had never thought of looking in all those rooms. It didn’t seem proper. I didn’t answer and she said, “I’ll close those doors later,” and then, “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got up after a while and started exploring.” She laughed. “Simon always said, ‘Check out your surroundings, sweetheart.’ So I’ve been wandering around the halls like Lady Macbeth opening doors. Most of the rooms were empty.”

  “What’s Lady Macbeth?” I said, trying to make conversation.

  “A person who walks around in pajamas,” she said.

  At the end of the new hall we were in was a big red door, standing open. She led me to it, and as we walked into the room, finally let go of my hand.

  I stared around me. The steel walls of the room were covered with shelves that were apparently made for books. I had seen a room somewhat like this in a film—except that there were big pictures on one of the walls of that room and tables and lamps. This one had nothing in it but shelves. Most of them were empty and covered with thick dust. There was a red carpet on the floor, with big spots of mold. But one wall, at the back of the room, had what must have been a hundred books.

  “Look!” Mary Lou said, and ran over to the shelf. She ran a hand, very gently, along one of them. “Simon told me there were books. But I had no idea there were so many.”

  Since I knew something about books already, it made me feel more comfortable—more in charge of things—to go over slowly and inspect them. I took one out of a shelf. The cover had a different version of that same pattern of squares, and the title read: Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess. Inside were the same diagrams as in the first, but more writing of the ordinary kind.

  I was holding the book open, trying to guess at what the word “chess” might mean, when Mary Lou spoke. “What is it exactly that you do with a book?”

  “You read it.”

  “Oh,” she said. And then, “What does ‘read’ mean?
”

  I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, “Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently.”

  She stared at me for a long time. Then she took a book from the shelf, somewhat awkwardly, and opened it. She was finding it a strange and complicated thing to handle, as I had a yellow before. She looked at the pages, felt of them with her fingers, and then handed the book back to me, her face blank. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  I started to explain it again. Then I said, “I can say aloud what I am reading. It’s what I do in my work—reading and then saying it aloud.”

  She frowned. “I still don’t understand.” She looked at me and then at the books on the steel shelves, and then at the moldy carpet on the floor at her feet. “Your work is ... reading. Books?”

  “No. I read something else. Something called silent films.” I took the book from her. “I’ll say aloud, if I can, what I read. Maybe that will make it understandable.”

  She nodded and I opened to the middle and began. “Mostly preferred is five B to B four, followed by the Lasker Variation, for, while White may regain his pawn, he obtains no great attack. It will be seen that, after the ninth move of White, a well-known position is arrived at, and most authorities consider it all in favor of the White side.”

  I thought I read it well, hardly stumbling over the unfamiliar words. I had no idea what it meant.

  Mary Lou had moved next to me, pressing her body against mine, while I was reading. She was staring at the page. Then she looked into my face and said, “Were you saying things that you heard in your mind from just looking at that book?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Her face was uncomfortably close to mine. She seemed to have forgotten all the rules of Privacy—if she ever knew them. “And how long would it take to say aloud everything . . .” She squeezed my arm and I had to fight to keep from jumping and pulling away from her. Her eyes had become terribly intense, the way they sometimes disturbingly became. “To say aloud everything you hear in your mind from looking at all the sheets of paper in that book?”

  I cleared my throat, and pulled slightly back from her. “A whole daytime, I think. When the book is easy and you don’t say it aloud you can do it faster.”

  She took the book out of my hand and held it in front of her face, staring at it so intensely that I half expected her to start saying the words aloud by sheer force of concentration. But she did not. What she said was: “Jesus! There is that much . . . that much silent BB recording in this? That much . . . information?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “My God,” she said, “we should do it with them all. What’s the word?”

  “Read.”

  “That’s it. We should read them all.”

  She began to gather up an armful of books and I meekly did the same. We carried them down the hallways to my room.

  DAY FORTY-EIGHT

  I spent the rest of that morning reading to her from different books. But it was difficult for me to continue paying attention; I had almost no idea of what was being said. Several times we changed books, but it was still chess.

  After several hours of this she interrupted to say, “Why are all books about chess?” and I said, “I have books at my home in Ohio that are about other things. About people and dogs and trees and things. Some of them tell stories.” And then, suddenly, I thought of something I should have thought of before and I said, “I can look the word ‘chess’ up in Dictionary.” I opened up the cabinet in my desk and took it out and began leafing through it until I found the words that began with “C.” I found it almost right away. “Chess: a board game between two players.” And there was a picture of two men seated at a table. On the table was one of those black-and-white arrangements with what my reading had taught me were called “pieces” sitting on it. “It’s some kind of a game,” I said. “Chess is a game.”

  Mary Lou looked at the picture. “There are pictures of people in books?” she said. “Like on Simon’s walls?”

  “Some books are full of pictures of people and things,” I said. “The easy books, like the ones I learned to read with, have big pictures on each page.”

  She nodded. And then she looked at me intensely. “Would you teach me to read?” she said. “From those books with the big pictures in them?”

  “I don’t have them here,” I said. “They’re in Ohio.”

  Her face fell. “Do you only have books about . . . about chess?”

  I shook my head. Then I said, “There might be more. Here in the library.”

  “You mean books about people?”

  “That’s right.”

  Her face lit up again. “Let’s go look.”

  “I’m tired.” I was tired, from all that reading and running around.

  “Come on,” she said. “This is important.”

  So I agreed to go search more rooms with her.

  We must have spent over an hour going down hallways and opening doors. The rooms were all empty, although some of them had shelves along the walls. Once, Mary Lou asked me, “What are all these empty rooms for?” and I said, “Dean Spofforth told me the library is scheduled for demolition. I think that’s why the rooms are empty.” I supposed she knew that buildings all over New York had been scheduled for demolition long before we were born, but nothing happened to them.

  “Yes,” she said, “half of the buildings at the zoo are that way, too. But what are all these rooms for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Books?”

  “That many books?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And then, at the end of a long, especially mossy hallway, where some of the overhead lights were dim, we came to a gray door that had a sign saying: STORAGE. We pushed the door open with some difficulty; it was a much heavier door than the others and it had some kind of seal around it. We got it open by pushing together and I was immediately surprised by two things. The air inside smelled strange—it smelled old—and there were steps going down. I had thought we were on the lowest floor of the library already. We took the steps, and I almost slipped and fell. They were heavily layered with some kind of slippery, yellowish dust. I caught myself just in time.

  As we descended, the air smelled even stronger, older.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a hallway. There were overhead lights, but they were very dim. The hallway was short, and at the end of it were two doors. One said: EQUIPMENT, and the other said: BOOKS, and below this, in smaller letters: TO BE RECYCLED. We pushed the door open. There was at first nothing but darkness and sweet-smelling air behind the door. Then, suddenly, lights flickered on and Mary Lou gasped. “Jesus Christ!” she said.

  The room was huge and there were books everywhere.

  You could not see any walls because of the shelves filled with books. And books were stacked up on their sides in the middle of the room, and in piles along the walls in front of the full shelves. They were of every color and size.

  I stood there not knowing what to do or say. I was feeling something that was like what some of the films had made me feel— a sense that I was in the presence of great waves of feeling that had once been felt by people who were now dead and who understood things that I did not.

  I knew that there had been books in the ancient world, of course, and that most of them were probably from that time before television, but I had no idea there were that many.

  While I stood there, feeling what I have no name for, Mary Lou walked toward a pile of big, thin books that was not as high as the others. She reached up, the way I had seen her reach up for the inedible fruit in the python cage at the House of Reptiles, and took the top book down carefully. She held it awkwardly in both hands, and stared at its cover. Then very carefully she opened its pages. I could see that there were pic
tures. She stared at some of the pages for a long time. Then she said, “Flowers!” and closed the book and handed it to me. “Can you . . . say what you read on this?”

  I took it from her and read the cover: Wildflowers of North America. I looked at her.

  “Paul,” she said softly, “I want you to teach me how to read.”

  Spofforth

  Every afternoon at two o’clock Spofforth took a walk, for about an hour. Like his habitual whistling, which was the only manifestation of his to-him-unknown ability to play the piano, the habit of taking walks had been, willy-nilly, copied into his metal brain from the start. It was not a compulsion; he could override it when he wished to; but he usually did not. His work at the university was so slight, so trivial to him, that he could easily spare the time. And there was no one with the authority to tell him not to.

  He would walk through the city of New York, his arms swinging, his tread light, his head erect, usually looking neither to the right nor to the left. Sometimes he would look in the windows of the small automatic stores that distributed food and clothing to anyone with a credit card, or stop to watch a crew of Make Twos emptying garbage, or working on the repair of ancient sewers. These matters concerned him; Spofforth knew far better than any human being did the importance of supplying food and clothing and removing waste. The ineptitudes and malfunctions that plagued the rest of this moribund city could not be allowed to stop those services. So Spofforth would walk through a different part of Manhattan every day and check to see if the food and clothing equipment were functioning and if the wastes were being removed. He was not a technician, but he was smart enough to repair ordinary breakdowns.

  He generally did not look at the people he passed on the street. Many of them would stare at him—at his size, his physical vigor, his black earlobes—but he ignored them.