by Walter Tevis
Perhaps the grimness and coldness that I see everywhere exist because there are no children. No one is young anymore. In my whole life I have never seen anyone younger than I am. My only idea of childhood comes from memory, and from the obscene charade of those robot children at the zoo.
I must be at least thirty. When my child comes he will have no playmates. He will be alone in a world of old and tired people who have lost the gift for living.
EIGHT
There must have been a period in the ancient world when there were still television writers who wrote their scripts, even though none of the actors could read them. And, although there were some writers who would use tape recorders to write with— especially for the sex-and-pain shows that were popular at the time—many refused to out of a kind of snobbery and would continue to type their scripts. Although the manufacturing of typewriters had ceased years before and spare parts and ribbons were almost impossible to find, typewritten scripts continued to be turned out. Every studio therefore had to have a reader—a person whose job it was to read aloud the typed scripts into a tape recorder so the director could understand them and the actors could learn their parts. Alfred Fain, whose book was used to insulate the walls of our apartment against the cold weather after the Death of Oil, was both a scriptwriter and a reader during the last days of story-television—or Literal-Video. His book is called The Last Autobiography and it starts like this:
When I was a young man reading was still taught in the public schools, as an elective. I can clearly remember the group of twelve-year-olds in Miss Warburton’s reading class back in St. Louis. There were seventeen of us and we thought of ourselves proudly as an intellectual elite. The other thousands of students in the school, who could only spell words like “fuck” and “shit”—scrawling them on the walls of the sports arenas and gymnasiums and TV rooms that made up most of the space in the school—treated us with a kind of grudging awe. Even though they bullied us at times—and I still shudder to remember the hockey player who used to bloody my nose regularly after our class in Mind Tripping— they seemed secretly to envy us. And they had a pretty fair idea of what reading was.
But that was a long time ago, and I am fifty now. The young people I work with—porno stars, hot young directors of game shows, pleasure experts, emotion manipulators, admen—neither understand nor care about what reading is. One day on a set we were dealing with a script written by an old-timer that called for a book to be thrown by a young girl at an older woman. The scene was part of a Good-Feeling Religion story, adapted from some forgotten ancient, and it took place in the waiting room of a clinic. The crew had put together a pretty convincing waiting room with plastic chairs and a shag rug, but when the director arrived the prop man had a quick conference with him, telling him he “didn’t quite follow that thing about the book.” And the director, clearly unsure what a book was but not wanting to admit he didn’t know, asked me what it was for. I told him it established the girl who was reading it as an intellectual and somewhat antisocial. He pretended to consider this, although he probably did not recognize the word “intellectual” either, and then he said, “Let’s use a glass ashtray. And some blood, when it cuts her. The scene’s too flat anyhow.”
I was too shocked to quarrel with him. I hadn’t really realized until then how far we had come.
And that leads me to this question: why am I writing this? And the answer is only that I have always wanted to. Back in school, learning to read, all of us thought we would someday write books and that somebody would read them. I know now that I waited too long to start this; but I’ll go on with it anyway.
That script, ironically, won the director an award. It told the story of a married woman who brings her husband, Claude, to a clinic because of impotence. While waiting for the doctors to assess Claude’s problem, she is hit in the face with an ashtray by a sex-starved young lesbian and goes into a coma, during which she has a religious awakening, with visions.
I remember getting drunk on mescaline and gin at the party where the award was given and trying to explain to a bare-breasted actress who sat on a sofa next to me that the only standards of the television industry were monetary, that there was no real motive in television beyond the making of money. She smiled at me all the time I talked, and occasionally ran her fingertips lightly across her nipples. And when I had finished she said, “But money is fulfillment too.”
I got her drunk and took her to a motel.
Writing a book, I feel as a Talmudic scholar or an Egyptologist might have felt at Disneyland in the twentieth century. Except, I suppose, I do not really have to wonder if there is anyone who wants to hear what I have to say; I know there is no bne. I can only wonder how many people are left alive who can read. Possibly a few thousand. A friend of mine who works part time as the head of a publishing house says the average book finds about eighty readers. I’ve asked him why they don’t stop publishing altogether. He says he frankly doesn’t know, but that his publishing company is such a tiny division of the recreation corporation that owns it that they have probably forgotten about its existence. He doesn’t know how to read himself; but he respects books because his mother had been a kind of recluse who read almost constantly, and he had loved her deeply. He is, by the way, one of the few people I know who were brought up in a family. Most of my friends have come out of the dormitories. I was reared in a kibbutz, out in Nebraska. But then I’m Jewish, and that, too, is a pretty rare thing these days: to be Jewish and to know it. I was one of the last members of the kibbutz; it was converted into a state-operated Thinker Dormitory when I was in my twenties.
I was born in 2137. . .
Reading that date I was immediately curious about how long ago Alfred Fain had lived, and I asked Bob. He said, “About two hundred years.”
Then I said, “Is there a date now? Does this year have a number?”
He looked at me coldly. “No,” he said. “There is no date.”
I would like to know the date. I would like for my child to have a birth date.
Bentley
DAY NINETY-FIVE
I am not so tired now. The work is getting easier to do, and I feel stronger.
I am sleeping better at nights, now that I have decided to take my sopors. And the food is passable now and I eat a great deal. More than I have ever eaten before in my life.
I do not exactly like the effect of sopors anymore; but they are necessary if I am to sleep properly. They stop some of the pain of my thoughts.
Today I tripped and fell between the rows of plants, and another prisoner who was nearby ran over and helped me up. He was a tall, gray-haired man whom I had noticed before because of the way he whistles at times.
He helped me brush myself off and then looked at me closely and said, “You all right, buddy?”
All of this was terribly intimate—almost obscene—but I did not mind, really. “Yes,” I said. “I’m all right.” And then one of the robots shouted, “No talking. Invasion of Privacy!” and the man looked at me, grinned broadly, and shrugged. We both went back to work. But as he walked away I heard him mutter, “Stupid goddamn robots!” and I was shocked at the strength of unashamed feeling in his voice.
I have seen other prisoners whispering together in the rows. It is often several minutes before a robot notices and stops them.
The robots walk between the rows with us; but they stop before going close to the low cliff at the end of the field. Perhaps they are programmed that way so they will not fall—or be pushed—over the cliff. Anyway they are far enough back by the time I arrive at the seaward end of the row so that there is a short time when they cannot see me, because of a dip in the ground before it comes to the edge of the cliff.
I have learned to speed up, doing two squirts of the gun to each beat of music, toward the end of each row. This gives me time to stand at the edge of the ocean for sixteen beats—and I am thankful I learned to determine this from Arithmetic jor Boys and Girls. I stand and look out over
the ocean. It is wonderful to look at— broad and huge and serene. Something deep in my self seems to respond to it, with a feeling I cannot name. But I am learning again to welcome strange feelings. Sometimes there are birds over the ocean, their curved wings outspread, sailing in the air in smooth broad arcs, above my world of men and machines, inscrutable, and breathtaking to see. Looking at them I say sometimes to myself a word I learned from a film: “Splendid!”
I said I am learning to welcome strange feelings, and this is true. How different I now seem from what I was, far less than a yellow ago, when I first began to feel those feelings while watching silent films at my bed-and-desk. I know that I am being disobedient to all that I was taught about feelings toward things outside myself when I was a child, but I do not care. In fact, I enjoy doing what was forbidden once.
I have nothing to lose.
I think the ocean means most to me on rain days, when the water and sky are gray. There is a sandy beach below the cliff; its tan color looks beautiful against the gray water. And the white birds in the gray sky! My heart beats noticeably when I even imagine it, here in my cell. And it is sad, like the horse with the hat on its head in the old film, like King Kong falling—so slowly, so softly, so far—and like the words that I now say aloud: “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.” Like remembering Mary Lou, cross-legged on the floor, her eyes on her book.
Sadness. Sadness. But I will embrace the sadness, and make it a part of this life that I am memorizing.
I have nothing to lose.
DAY NINETY-SEVEN
An astonishing thing happened today, out in the field.
I had been working for about two hours; it was nearly time for the second break. I heard a rustling sound behind me where the robot overseer normally stood and I looked around and there the robot was, staggering jerkily in the row. Just as I looked his heavy foot came down on a Protein 4 plant. The plant split open with a disgusting noise and covered his foot with purple juice.
The robot’s mouth was grimly set and his eyes stared upward. He staggered for a few more moments, stepped on another plant, and then stood completely still for a moment, as if dormant. Then he fell flat to the ground like a dead weight. The other robot walked over to him, looked down at his inert body, and said, “Rise.” But the other did not move. The standing robot bent down and picked up the fallen one and began to carry him back toward the prison buildings.
A minute, later I heard a loud voice in the field shout, “Malfunction, boys!” There were the sounds of running. I looked in astonishment and saw a group of blue-uniformed prisoners running between the rows and then, suddenly, there was an arm around my shoulder—a thing that had never happened before in my life: a stranger putting an arm around my shoulder!—and it was the man with gray hair and he was saying, “Come on, buddy! To the beach,” and I found myself running, following him. And I was feeling frightened. Frightened but good.
There was a place where the cliff was low and there was a cleft in the rock where you could climb down worn old steps, themselves made of rock. As I was going down with the others, astonished at the back-slapping and friendly shouting among them— a thing I had never seen even as a child—I noticed a strange thing on one of the cliff rocks beside the stairs. There was writing, in faded white paint. It said: “John loves Julie. Class of ’94.”
Everything was so strange that I felt almost hypnotized by it. Men were saying things to one another and laughing, just as in pirate films. Or, for that matter, in some prison films. But seeing it in a film and then actually seeing it happen are two very different things.
And yet, thinking about it now in my cell, I can see that I was not as upset as I might have been, possibly because I had seen such intimacy in the films.
Some of the men gathered together pieces of driftwood and built a fire on the beach. I had never seen an open fire before and I liked it. Then some of the men actually took off their clothes, ran laughing down the beach and into the water. Some splashed and played in the shallow waters; others went out deeper and began to swim, just as though they were in a Health and Fitness pool. I noticed that they stayed in little groups, both those who were playing and those swimming, and they seemed to want it that way.
The rest of us sat in a circle around the fire. The gray-haired man pulled a joint from his shut pocket and took a twig from the fire and lit it. He seemed to be accustomed to fires—in fact, all of them seemed to have done this many times before.
One man, smiling, said to the man next to nun, “Charlie, how long since the last malfunction?” and Charlie said, “It’s been a while. We were overdue.” And the other laughed and said, “Yeah!”
The gray-haired man came over and sat by me. He offered me the joint but I shook my head, so he shrugged and gave it to the man on the other side of me. Then he said, “We’ve got at least an hour. Repair on robots is slow here.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Everybody gets knocked out in court and they don’t wake him up till he gets here. But one guy told me once he thought it was North Carolina.” He spoke to the man who had taken the joint. The man was passing it to the next man. “Is that right, Foreman? North Carolina?”
Foreman turned around. “I heard South,” he said, “South Carolina.”
“Well, somewhere in there,” the gray-haired man said.
For a while we were all silent around the fire, watching its flames in the afternoon air, listening to the sound of the surf against the beach and hearing the occasional cry of a gull overhead. Then one of the older men spoke to me. “What they put you in for? Kill somebody?”
I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say. He would not have understood about reading. “I was living with someone,” I said finally. “A woman . . .”
The man’s face brightened for a moment and then almost immediately went sad. “I lived with a woman once. For over a blue.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Yeah. A blue and a yellow. At least. That isn’t what they put me here for, though. Shit, I’m a thief is why. But I sure do remember . . .” He was wrinkled and thin and bent; there were only a few hairs on his head, and his hands shook as he took the joint and inhaled from it and then passed it to the younger man next to him.
“Women,” the gray-haired man beside me said, breaking the silence.
Something about that one word seemed to open up the older man. “I used to fix coffee for her,” he said, “and we’d drink it in bed. Real coffee with real milk in it, and sometimes when I could find it a piece of fruit. An orange, maybe. She’d drink that coffee out of a gray mug and I’d just sit at the other end of the bed facing her and pretend to be thinking about my own coffee but what I was really doing was watching her. God, I could watch that woman.” He shook his head.
I could feel his sadness. There were goose bumps on my arms and legs from hearing him talk like that. I had never heard another person speak for me like that before. He had said what I felt and, sad as I was, there was relief for me in it.
Someone else said softly, “What become of her?”
For a while the old man didn’t answer. Then he said, “Don’t know. One day I come home from the mill and she wasn’t there. Never saw her again.”
There was silence for a moment and then one of the younger prisoners spoke up. He was trying, I suppose, to be helpful. “Well, quick sex is best,” he said philosophically.
The old man turned his head slowly and stared at the man who had just spoken. And then he said to him, strongly and evenly, “Fuck that. You can just fuck that.”
The younger man looked flustered, and turned his face away. “I didn’t mean. . .”
“Fuck it,” the old man said. “Fuck your quick sex. I know what my life’s been like.” Then he turned toward the ocean again and said softly, repeating himself, “I know what my life’s been like.”
Hearing this and seeing the way the old man looked toward the ocean with his thin
shoulders squared under his faded blue prison shirt and the breeze blowing the few wisps of hair on his old, tight-skinned head, I felt such sadness that it was beyond tears. And I was thinking of Mary Lou and of the way she had looked, in the mornings sometimes, drinking tea. Or of her hand on the back of my neck and the way that, sometimes, she would stare at me and stare, and then smile. . .
I must have sat there thinking these things about Mary Lou and feeling my own grief for a long while, looking out toward the ocean, past the old man. And then I heard the gray-haired man next to me say softly, “You wanta swim?” I looked up at him, startled, and said, “No,” perhaps too quickly. But the thought of getting naked with all those strangers had brought me back to the present with a start.
Yet I love to swim.
In the Thinker Dormitories, each child has the pool to himself for ten minutes. Dormitories are very strict about Individualism.
I was thinking about this when the gray-haired man suddenly said, “My name’s Belasco.”
I looked down at the sand at my feet. “Hello,” I said.
And then, a moment later, he said, “What’s your name, buddy?”
“Oh,” I said, still looking at the sand. “Bentley.” And I felt his hand on my shoulder and looked up, startled, at his face. He was grinning at me. “Good to know you, Bentley,” he said.
After a while I got up and walked down to the water’s edge but away from the swimmers. I know that I have changed much since I left Ohio; but all that intimacy and feeling were more than I could stand at once. And I wanted to be alone with my thoughts of Mary Lou.
At the water’s edge I found a hermit crab, in a small, curled whelk shell. I knew it was a hermit crab from a picture in a book Mary Lou had found: Seashore Creatures of North America.
