Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  My life is light, waiting for the death wind,

  Like a feather on the back of my hand.

  I heard chairs scraping the floor as men and women stood, and I heard the footsteps of people leaving the big room, not speaking; but I did not look up.

  Finally I felt a hand, strong but gentle, on my shoulder and I opened my eyes. It was the old man, Edgar Baleen.

  “Reader,” he said. “Come with me.”

  I stared at him.

  “Reader. You passed the ordeal. You’re baptized. You’re safe from the fire. You need some rest.”

  I sighed then and said, “Yes. Yes. I need some rest.”

  And so I had come from prison to this—to being “Reader” for a group of Christians, to being some kind of priest. From that time on for months I have read to them from the Bible in the mornings and the evenings while they listen in silence. I read and they listen and nothing is said.

  Writing it now, here in my house at Maugre, alone and safe, and now well-fed, I can hardly remember that strangeness of living with the Baleens. In many ways my older memories of Mary Lou and of the silent films are more vivid and present to me, even though I will be expected to appear for an evening reading only a short time from now. I have spent this entire day writing, since my morning reading. I will stop now and feed Biff and have a glass of whiskey. Tomorrow I will try to finish this new account of my life. And to tell the sad story of Annabel.

  That first night old Edgar put me in a room upstairs to sleep, and left me. There were two beds in the room, with headboards made of brass tubes that looked like the one the old man had died in in the film where the clock stopped and the dog cried. I took my shoes off and got into the bed with my clothes on and Biff got up on the quilt, curled up at my feet, and went immediately to sleep. I felt envious of her. Although I was exhausted, and although the bed was the most comfortable thing I had ever had to sleep on, with its hugely thick mattress and its big, flower-printed quilt that had a tag reading SEARS’ BEST—GOOSE DOWN sewn to its pink binding, yet I could not sleep. My mind was becoming full. In the darkened room and with my senses sharpened by fatigue, I began to picture a multitude of things from my past with a preternatural clarity. It was something like the vivid mind control that I had studied and taught in Ohio, with clear, hallucinatory images; but it was not aided by the usual drugs, and I had no control over it.

  I saw clear images of Mary Lou at her reading on the library office floor, of the blank faces of the aging students in my little seminar in Ohio, their eyes downward as they sat in their denim student robes with their minds blown and serene, and of Dean Spofforth, tall, intelligent, frightening, dark brown, and inscrutable. I saw myself as a child, standing in the middle of a square outside Sleeping Quarters for Pre-teens at the dormitory. I had been put in Coventry for a day as a punishment for Invasion of Privacy, when I had shared my food with another child. The Rules of Coventry required me to stand still and be touched—on the face, or the arms, or the chest—by every child who crossed the square; I would writhe inwardly at the touch of each and my face was hot with shame.

  Then I saw the little Privacy cubicle that was the first place I can remember sleeping in, with its narrow, hard, monastic bed and the Soul Muzak that came from the walls of soundproof Permoplastic, and the little Privacy rug on the floor on which I would say my prayers: “May the Directors make me grow inwardly. May I move through Delight and Serenity to Nirvana. May I be untouched by all outside . . .” And the private wall-sized TV that I learned to give myself to wholly, leaving my child’s body behind for hours at a time while images of pleasure and joy and peace flashed over its glittering, holographic surface, and my body served only to provide my brain with the chemicals needed for blank passivity, from the pills that I would take on cue from the TV when the lavender sopor light would flash.

  I would watch the TV from supper until bedtime and when I slept I would dream of TV: bright, hypnotic, a constant fulfillment in the disembodied mind.

  And then, lying there in that strange old bedroom at the end of a day when I had been baptized in water and nearly immolated in nuclear fire and had read from the Book of Genesis to a family of strangers, I could not sleep because of an imagination I could no longer control. I became flooded with a wish for the simplicity of my past life as a true child of the modern world. I wanted, I craved my sopors and marijuana and my other mind-flowering dope, and my Chemical Serenity and televised experience and my prayers to whatever a “Director” might be, and the sweet, drugged, dream-ridden sleep in my tiny Permoplastic room—air-conditioned, silent, safe from the confusions, the yearnings, the restlessness, and the despair that my new life was made of. I did not want to live with thereal anymore; it was too much of a burden. A sorry, heavy burden.

  I thought of the old horse in the film, with his ears stuck up through holes in his straw hat. And of the words “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.” I thought of myself and of Mary Lou, possibly the last generation of man on the face of the earth, in a place with no children and no future. I saw faces burning in the Burger Chef, embracing in their own fiery conclusion the eventual death of the species.

  I was overcome with sadness. And yet I did not cry.

  I saw the faces of the robots that tended us as children, blank and stern. And the face of the judge at my hearing. And Belasco, with his wise, old, cynical eyes, grinning at me.

  Finally, when I began to feel that the images would never stop crowding into my tired mind, I turned on a battery-powered lamp by my bedside, found my little Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide, and opened it to the blank pages at the back where I had copied down some poems before I left prison. I read “The Hollow Men,“ the poem Mary Lou and I had been reading when Spofforth had arrested me:

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  It was no comfort, true as it sounded, but it helped make the pictures fade from my mind.

  And then, just as I was becoming relaxed, while reading a poem by Robert Browning, something very unsettling happened.

  The door to my room opened and old Baleen’s son, Roderick, came in. He did not speak to me, but nodded in my direction. Then he proceeded to undress himself in the middle of the room, heedless of Privacy, Modesty, or my Individual Rights, stripping himself to his naked hairy skin, and humming softly. He knelt at the side of the other bed and prayed aloud, “O Lord, most powerful and most cruel, forgive my miserable afflictions and sins, and make me humble and worthy. In Jesus’ name. Amen.” Then he got into the bed, curled up, and began almost immediately to snore.

  I had nodded earlier in almost involuntary assent to the Baleens’ phrase “the sin of Privacy”; but this raw intrusion of another person in my bedroom was overwhelming. And I had been alone so long, on the empty beaches with only Biff.

  I tried to continue reading, from “Caliban upon Setobos,” but the words, always difficult, made no sense at all, and I could not relax.

  And yet, surprisingly, I fell asleep after a while and woke up in midmorning refreshed. Roderick was gone, and Biff was over in the corner of the room poking at a little ball of lint with her paw. The sun was coming through lace curtains. I could smell food from downstairs.

  There was a big communal bathroom down the long hallway outside my room; old Edgar Baleen had shown it to me before putting me in the bedroom. The bathroom had an ancient, greenish metal plate on the door that said, in raised letters, MEN. There were six clean white lavatory bowls and six toilet stalls. I washed myself as best I could and combed my hair and beard. I needed a bath but had no idea of how to take one, and my clothes were worn and dirty. The new ones I had picked out had been left behind at Sears. Then I went down the big front stairway and into the kitchen.

  There had been letters engraved in the stone arch over the doorway of the building: HALL OF JUSTICE: MAUGRE. The s
ign had made little impression on me the day before, but standing in the kitchen now, I imagined that the room, like the one I had done my Bible reading in, had been a courtroom in the ancient world; it was very large and high-ceilinged, with tall, thin, arched windows on each of the longer walls. The huge, now empty table in the center of the room looked as though it had been roughly made a long time before with a Sears chain saw; rough benches were placed around it.

  Along one wall under the windows was a wide black institutional stove, with a pile of wood on each side of it, and wooden counters with tops that looked polished and scrubbed and worn. Over the stove were white enameled oven doors, and on each side of them hung a row of pots and pans, large ones, stretching half the length of the room. On the opposite wall were eight battery-powered white refrigerators; each said KENMORE on its front. Next to the refrigerators was a long and deep sink. At this were standing two women, in floor-length blue dresses, their backs toward me, washing dishes.

  Everything seemed completely different from the way it had been the night before. There were glass bowls of freshly cut yellow tulips on the table, and the room was filled with daylight and smelled of bacon and coffee. The women did not look over at me, although I was sure they had heard my footsteps on the bare floor.

  I walked over toward the sink and hesitated. Then I said, “Excuse me.”

  One of them, a short, dumpy woman with white hair, turned and looked at me, but said nothing.

  “I wonder if I could have something to eat.”

  She looked at me a moment, then turned and reached up and got a yellow box from a shelf over the sink and handed it to me. There was writing on the box that said: SURVIVAL COFFEE, INSTANT TYPE. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE. IRRADIATED TO PREVENT SPOILAGE.

  While I was reading that she had gotten me a large rough ceramic mug and a spoon from the dish drainer beside the sink. “Use the samovar,”, she said, and nodded toward the stove across the room.

  I went over and made myself a mug of strong black coffee, seated myself at the table, and began to sip it.

  The other woman opened a refrigerator and got something out and then turned and walked across the room to the stove. I saw that she was the woman whom I had stared at, and who had exhorted me to read, the night before. She did not look at me. She seemed shy.

  She opened one of the ovens on the stove, took something from it, put it on a platter and brought it over to the table. Avoiding my eyes, she put it in front of me along with a dish of butter and a knife. The dishes were heavy and dark brown.

  I looked up at her. “What is it?” I said.

  She looked at me, surprised at my ignorance, I suppose. “It’s a coffee cake,” she said.

  I had never seen such a thing and did not know how to deal with it. She took the knife and cut a piece from the cake. She spread butter on it and handed it to me.

  I tasted it. It was sweet and hot and had nuts on it. It was completely delicious. When I finished it she handed me another piece, smiling shyly. She seemed flustered, and that was odd, since she had appeared quite bold the night before.

  The cake and the coffee were so good, and her shyness was so much like what I had been trained to expect from people, that I felt emboldened and spoke to her in a friendly way. “Did you make this cake?” I said.

  She nodded and said, “Would you like an omelette?”

  “An omelette?” I said. I had heard the word, but had never seen one. It had something to do with eggs.

  When I didn’t reply she went over to the refrigerator and came back with three large, real eggs. I had eaten real eggs only on rare occasions, such as my graduation from the dormitory. She took them to the stove and cracked them into a brown ceramic bowl, and then placed a small and shallow black pan on the stove, put butter in it and let it heat. She stirred up the eggs vigorously, poured them into the pan, and with a great deal of agility slid the pan rapidly back and forth on the stove while looping the eggs around with a fork. She was very beautiful, doing this. Then she took the pan by its handle, brought it over to the table, upended the handle, and neatly slid a yellow crescent of eggs onto my plate. “Eat it with a fork,” she said.

  I took a bite. It was wonderful. I finished it silently. I believe, even now, that omelette and coffee cake were the best meal I had ever eaten in my life.

  I felt even bolder after eating and I looked at her, still standing by me, and said, “Would you show me how to make an omelette?”

  She looked shocked, and said nothing.

  Then from the sink the other woman’s voice said, “Men don’t cook.”

  The woman beside me hesitated a moment, and then said softly, “This man is different, Mary. He’s a Reader.”

  Mary did not turn around. “The men are in the fields,” she said, “doing the Lord’s work.”

  The woman by me was shy, but she knew her own mind. She ignored Mary and said to me, “Did you read the writing on the coffee box when she gave it to you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She went to the stove and got it from where I had left it. “Read it to me,” she said. And I did. She was very attentive to the words and when I was finished she said, “What’s ‘Maugre’?”

  “The name of this town,” I said. “Or I think it is.”

  She looked open-mouthed. “The town has a name?” she said.

  “I think so.”

  “The house has a name,” she said. “Baleena.” That is how I have chosen to spell it: It was not written anywhere until I wrote it, much later, for old Edgar.

  “Well, Baleena is in the town of Maugre,” I said.

  She nodded thoughtfully, and then went to the refrigerator and got a bowl of eggs. Then she began to show me how to make an omelette.

  That is how I got to know Annabel Baleen.

  Annabel taught me how to make an omelette that morning, and a souffle. She made a coffee cake with me, showing me how to make dough from flour and how to use yeast. The flour came from a large bin under the counter that we worked on; she said it was grown “out in the field.” That was where all the other members of the family were. Annabel was always in charge of the kitchen; she had been given that job, she said, because she was a “loner.” The other woman was assigned to help her with the cleaning up after meals. At other times she worked in the flower garden outside the house. Annabel had worked for a few years in the fields, but she hated the work and hated the way no one ever talked while working. When an older woman who had been in charge of the kitchen died Annabel asked for the job and got it. She had been cooking for thirteen years, she said. First as a married woman and now as a widow. Counting time in years and being “married” were no longer new concepts to me and although it was strange to hear them from her I understood what she was talking about.

  Aside from the flour and eggs, all the other cooking ingredients came from the shelters in the mall. She had me read the labels for her, on yeast packets, on a can of pepper, on a box of irradiated pecans. All of the boxes read: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE.

  While showing me how to cook, Annabel was quiet and pleasant and asked no questions except for her requests to read box labels. There were several times I wanted to ask her about herself and her family and how they seemed to avoid having anything to do with the modern way of life, but when I would start to ask a question I would think: Don’t ask; relax, and it seemed, for once, to be good advice. She was very beautiful, and her movements in the kitchen were deft and graceful; it was a pleasure just to watch her at work.

  But as noon approached she seemed to become more harried, and somehow a bit sad. Finally she reached under a counter into a cabinet and took out a large blue box and gave it to me to read.

  It said VALIUM, in big letters, and under this in small ones: Fertility-inhibiting. And under that: U.S. Population Control. To be taken only under the advice of a physician.

  When I had read it she said, “What’s a ‘physician’?”

  “Some kind of ancient healer,” I said, no
t really sure of myself. And I was thinking: Is that why there are no children anywhere? Could all the downers and sopors be like that? Fertility-inhibiting?

  She took two of the pills and chased them with coffee. When she offered the box to me I shook my head and she looked at me quizzically but said nothing. She merely put a small handful of Valium in her apron pocket, and replaced the box under the counter. Then she said, “I must prepare lunch.”

  For the next hour she worked at high speed, heating two kettles of soup and making cheese sandwiches on big slabs of dark bread that she cut with a knife. I asked if I could help, but she appeared not even to have heard the question. She set the table with the big brown plates and soup bowls. Trying to be helpful, I carried a stack of plates to the table from one of the cabinets and said, “These are unusual plates.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I made them.” That was a surprise; I had never heard of anyonemaking things like plates. And there had been a whole department at the Sears store with plates and dishes. I had no idea of how anybody would personally make a dish.

  When she saw me looking surprised she picked up one of the dishes and turned it over. On its bottom was a mark that looked somehow familiar to me. “What is it?” I said.

  “It’s my pottery mark. A cat’s paw.” She smiled at me faintly. “You have a cat.”

  She was right. It was the same mark that Biff left when she walked on sand—but smaller.

  Then she said, “My husband and I used to have a cat. It was the only one. But it died before my husband did. One of the dogs killed it.”

  “Oh,” I said, and began setting plates on the table.

  After a while I heard noise outside and looked up to see, outside the window, two old green thought buses pull up and the men and the dogs silently pile out of them.

  I went outside into the sunlight and saw that they were washing up from a pair of faucets at the back of the building. They were silent and careful about it. I was surprised; I would have expected the kind of laughing and splashing around of the prisoners I had known. Even the dogs were quiet, huddling their white bodies together on the other side of the men from me, their pink eyes occasionally staring at me.