by Walter Tevis
“What is there to know about life?” I asked.
“Everything,” she said. “They keep us so ignorant.”
I wasn’t certain I understood that—or who “they” were—so I said nothing.
“Let’s have breakfast,” she said. And I called the servo and we ate soybars and pig bacon. I felt very good, even though I had slept little.
During breakfast she leaned over the desk and kissed me. Just like that! I liked it.
After breakfast I decided to work on a film, and Mary Lou watched it with me. It was called The Stock Broker and its star was Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton is a very intense man who has many unusual difficulties in his films. They would be funny if they were not so sad.
Mary Lou was fascinated. She had never seen any films of any kind before and was only familiar with holographic TV, which she did not like.
Early in the first reel, when Buster Keaton was painting a house and kept painting the face of a man who would put his head out the window, Mary Lou said, “Paul, Buster Keaton looks exactly like you. He’s so ... serious!”
And she was right.
After the film we spent the day studying reading. She learns amazingly fast and asks interesting questions. I have had many students in the university where I teach, but none like her. And my reading is improving too.
Everything about her is delightful.
It is evening now, and Mary Lou is watching me write this at the desk propped against the wall. I explained to her about writing and she was excited and said that she must learn to do that too so that she could write down the memory of her life. “And write down other things I think of. So I can read them,” she said.
That was interesting. Maybe that is the true reason that I write this—since I write so much more than Spofforth ever meant for me to record—I write it so I can read it. Reading it does something strange and exciting in my mind.
Perhaps one reason Mary Lou is bolder than I is that she lived in a Worker Dormitory before she ran away and I, of course, am a graduate of a Thinker Dormitory. Yet she is so fiercely intelligent! Why would she have been trained to be a Worker and not a Thinker? Perhaps the choices are made on some basis other than intelligence.
I must remember to get more paper, so that Mary Lou can learn to write and can begin to print out the memory of her life.
DAY SIXTY-FIVE
She has lived with me nine days now, against all principles of Individualism and Privacy. I feel guilty at times, compromising my Interior Development by the whims of another person, but I don’t think about the immorality of that very often. In fact, these have been the happiest nine days of my life.
And she already reads nearly as well as I do! Amazing! And she has begun to write the memory of her life.
We are together constantly. It seems at times like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford—except they were too well-trained to have sex.
There is no sex at all in the old films, although many of the people live together in the most intimate and immoral ways. Porno, of the kind normally taught in Classics courses, was apparently undiscovered, like TV, at the time these silent films were made.
We make love as often as I am able. Sometimes it just happens while we are reading together, with her repeating the sentences after me. Once it took us almost all afternoon to finish a little book called Making Paper Kites because we kept stopping.
Neither of us smokes pot or takes pills. I am often very nervous and excited and feel that I cannot sit still. Sometimes we take short walks when that happens. And, although a part of me seems to cry out against the intensity of the way I am living and working and making love, I know that it is better this way than any other way that I have ever been.
Once, on a walk, we became excited and I suggested we go to a quick-sex bar at Times Square. So we did, and I used my NYU credit card to get the best cubicle they had. There were the usual big porno holographs in the lobby, and two robot doxies with naked breasts and black boots offered to assist us in an orgy, but Mary Lou, thank goodness, told them to bug off. And I turned down the offer of sex-up pills that the bartender made. We went to the cubicle alone, turned off the lights, and made love on the padded floor. But it was not really any good that way.
That was the way my lovemaking had always been before, and the way it is supposed to be. “Quick sex protects,” as my Interpersonal Relations teacher used to say. But I wanted to be at my own place with Mary Lou, making love in my own bed and talking afterward. Except for the sex, I wanted to be like Mother and Father in one of the ancient films. I wanted to buy her flowers and to dance with her.
When we had finished Mary Lou said, “Let’s get out of this sex factory,” and then, as we were leaving, “I think that place is what Simon meant by a ‘Chicago whorehouse.’”
And I did buy her flowers, at a vending machine. White carnations, like Gloria Swanson wore in Queen of Them All.
And before we went to bed that night I asked her to dance. I pinned a flower to her Synlon dress and I played the background music from a TV program, and we danced together. She had never heard of two people dancing together before, but any serious student of films knows about dancing. I had seen it many times. We were awkward and we stepped on each other’s feet several times, but it was fun.
But when we went to bed something, I don’t know what, frightened me. I held her close until she fell asleep. Then I lay awake for a long time, thinking. Something about the quick-sex place had frightened me, I think.
So I got out of bed and finished writing this. I am tired now, but I still feel frightened. Am I afraid she will leave? Am I afraid I will lose her?
DAY SEVENTY-SIX
She has been here eighteen days now, and I have not written anything down for the last nine.
My happiness has grown! I do not think about the immorality of our cohabitation, or of its being probably against the law. I think about Mary Lou and about what I see in films and what I read and what she reads.
All day yesterday she read a new kind of writing called poems. Some of them she read aloud. In places they were like chess—incomprehensible—and in other places they said strange and interesting things. She read this one to me twice:
O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ! That my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
I had to look up “thou” in Dictionary. The second time she read the lines I felt the feeling I have felt in watching some of the strong scenes in films. An expansive feeling, painfully joyful, in my chest.
When she had finished I said, for some strange reason, “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.”
She looked up from the book and said, “What?” and I said it again: “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.”
“What does that mean?” she said.
“I don’t know. It’s from a film.”
She pursed her lips. “It’s like the words I just read, isn’t it? It makes you feel something and you don’t know what it is.”
“Yes,” I said, astonished, almost awed, to find that she had said what I wanted to say. “Yes. Exactly.”
Then she read more poems, but none of them made me feel that way again. I liked hearing her read them anyway. I watched her sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the book, and listening to her serious and clear voice as she read to us both. She holds the book much closer to her face than I do, and there is something very touching about her when she reads.
We take walks together every day and have lunch in a different place.
DAY SEVENTY-SEVEN
Mary Lou went out this morning, as she often does, to buy some Quik-Serv food for us. She uses my credit card for this. When she was gone I started up the projector and began to watch a film with Lillian Gish and to read the dialogue from it into the recorder when suddenly the door opened and I looked up to see Spofforth standing there in the doorway. He was so tall
and so powerful-looking that he seemed to fill up all the space just standing there. And yet I was not frightened by him this time. Spofforth is, after all, only a robot. I turned off the projector and invited him in. He came in and sat in the white plastic chair by the far wall, facing me. He was wearing khaki pants, sandals, and a white T-shirt. His face was unsmiling, but not harsh.
After we had sat silently for a while I said, “Have you been listening to my journal?” I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and he had never been in my room before.
He nodded. “When I have time.”
Something about this annoyed me, and I felt bold with him. “Why do you want to know about me?” I said. “Why do you want me to keep a journal of my life?”
He didn’t answer. After a moment he said, “The teaching of reading is a crime. You could be sent to prison for it.”
That did not frighten me. I thought of what Mary Lou had said about Detection, about how no one ever got detected. “Why?” I said. I was violating a Rule of Conduct: “Don’t ask; relax.” But I didn’t care. I wanted to know why it should be a crime to teach someone to read. And why Spofforth hadn’t told me this before, when I had first suggested teaching reading at NYU. “Why shouldn’t I teach Mary Lou how to read?”
Spofforth leaned forward, putting his huge hands on his knees, staring at me. His stare was a bit frightening, but I did not look away from it.
“Reading is too intimate,” Spofforth said. “It will put you too close to the feelings and the ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you.”
I was beginning to feel a bit frightened. It was not easy to be in Spofforth’s presence, and to listen to his deep, authoritative voice and not want to be obedient, and unquestioning. But I remembered something I had read in a book: “Others can be wrong too, you know,” and I held on to that. “Why should it be a crime to be disturbed and confused? And to know what others have thought and felt?”
Spofforth stared at me. “Don’t you want to be happy?” he said.
I had heard that question asked before, by my robot-teachers at the dormitory; it had always seemed unanswerable. But now, here in my room, with Mary Lou’s things in it and with my projector and cans of film, and with my mind undrugged, it made me suddenly angry. “People who don’t read are killing themselves, burning their bodies with fire. Are they happy?”
Spofforth stared at me. Then, suddenly, he looked away, toward the back of another chair where Mary Lou’s red dress was lying, crumpled, with a pair of her sandals sitting on the seat by it. “It is also a crime,” he said, but softer now, “to live for over a week with another person.”
“What is a week?” I said.
“Seven days,” Spofforth said.
“Why not seven days?” I said. “Or seven hundred? I am happy with Mary Lou. Happier than I ever was before, with dope and with quick sex.”
“You’re frightened,” Spofforth said. “I can see that you’re frightened right now.”
Suddenly I stood up. “So what?” I said. “So what? It’s better to be living than to be—to be a robot.”
I was frightened. Frightened of Spofforth, frightened of the future. Frightened of my own anger. For a moment I had a strong desire, standing there silently, to take a sopor—to take a whole handful of them and to make myself calm, unruffled, unfeeling. But I liked being angry, and I was not ready to let go of it. “Why should you care if I’m happy?” I said. “What business is it of yours what I do? You’re some kind of machine, anyway.”
And then Spofforth did a surprising thing. He threw back his head and laughed, loud and deep, for a long time. And, crazily, I felt my anger going away and I began to laugh with him. Finally he stopped and said, “Okay, Bentley. Okay.” He stood up. “You’re more than I thought you were. Go on living with her.” He walked toward the door and then turned around and faced me. “For a while.”
I just looked at him and said nothing. He left, closing the door behind him.
When he was gone I sat down on my bed-and-desk again and found that my arms were trembling uncontrollably and that my heart was pounding. I had never talked like that to anyone before and certainly not to a robot. I was terribly frightened of myself. But, deeper, I was elated. It was strange. I had never felt that way before.
When Mary Lou returned I told her nothing about my visitor. But when she wanted to go on with our reading I made love to her instead. She was a little angry with that at first; but my desire for her was so strong, and we made love so powerfully, on the carpet on the floor, with my holding her body tightly and forcing myself into her strongly, that before long she was kissing me all over my face and laughing.
And afterward I felt so good, so relaxed, that I said, “Let’s read for a while.” And we did. And nothing happened. Spofforth did not return.
Mary Lou has been writing down the memory of her life at the same time that I have been writing this. I am at my desk and she is sitting in my< extra chair, using a large book in her lap as a writing surface. She prints beautifully, methodically, in small, neat letters. I am embarrassed that after such a short time she can write better than I. Yet I was her teacher, and I am proud of that. I think now that in my years at the university I never taught anyone anything worth knowing; I have more pleasure from what I have taught Mary Lou than in all my work in Ohio.
DAY SEVENTY-EIGHT
We saw a group immolation today.
We decided to do a new thing and eat breakfast in the Burger Chef. It is a seven-block walk, and I mentioned that to her, telling her how I had got into the habit of counting things. At the dormitories everyone learns to count to ten, but counting is used mainly for the eight different prices of things a person can buy. A pair of pants costs two units and an algaeburger costs one unit and so on. And when you have used up all your units for the day your credit card turns pink and won’t work anymore. Most things, of course, are free—like thought-bus rides and shoes and TV sets.
She counted the blocks and agreed that there were seven. “But I always counted my five sandwiches at the zoo,” she said.
I thought of Arithmetic for Boys and Girls. “After you ate three sandwiches how many were left?” I said.
She laughed. “Two sandwiches.” Then she stopped on the street and made herself look like the moron robot at the zoo. She , held out her left hand stiffly as though it were holding five sandwiches. And she made her eyes blank and held her head cocked to the side and let her lips open slightly, like a moron robot’s, and just stood there, staring stupidly at me.
At first I was shocked and didn’t know what she was doing. Then I laughed aloud.
Some students passing by in denim robes stared at her and then looked away. I was a little embarrassed at her. Making a Spectacle; but I could not help laughing.
We went on to the Burger Chef, and there was an immolation already in progress.
It was exactly the same booth that I had seen it happen in before. It must have been almost over because the smell of burnt flesh in the room was pungent and you could feel the strong breeze from the exhaust fans that were trying to clear the air.
There were three people again—all women. Their bodies had burned black, and in the breeze short flames flickered from what was left of their clothing and hair. Their faces were smiling.
I thought they were already dead when one of them spoke—or shouted. What she shouted was: “This is the ultimate inwardness, praise Jesus Christ our Lord!” Her mouth inside was black. Even her teeth were black.
Then she became silent. I supposed she was dead.
“My God!” Mary Lou said. “My God!”
I took her arm, not even caring if anyone saw me do it, and took her out the door. She walked to the curb and sat down, facing the street.
She said nothing. Two thought buses and a Detection car went by in the street, and people passed her on the sidewalk, all ignoring her as she ignored them. I stood beside her, not knowing what to say or do.
Finally she said, still stari
ng at the street, “Did they do it to themselves?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it happens often.”
“My God,” she said. “Why? Why would people do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why they don’t do it alone, either. Or in private.”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe it’s the drugs.”
I didn’t answer for a minute or so. Then I said, “Maybe it’s the way they live.”
She stood up, looked at me with a look of surprise, and reached out and held my right arm. “Yes,” she said, “that’s probably right.”
DAY EIGHTY-THREE
I am in prison. I have been in prison five days. Just printing the word “prison” itself, on this coarse paper, is painful to me. I have never felt more alone in my life. I do not know how to live without Mary Lou.
There is a small window in my cell and if I look out it I can see the long, dirty green buildings of the compound, with their rusted metal roofs and heavily barred windows, under the late-afternoon sun. I have just come back from an afternoon working in the fields, and the blisters on my hands have opened and are wet, and the tight metal bracelets on my wrists sting the chafed skin beneath them. There is a bluish bruise on my side that is bigger than my hand where a moron guard clubbed me for losing time when I stumbled, my first day in the fields; and my feet ache from working in the heavy black shoes that were issued me when I first came here. I can hardly hold the pen that I am writing with, because of the cramping in my hand.
