Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  The smell in the shed was overpowering. A rigid thin body, with its skin burned black and with what was once its hair now a charred black mat around the skull, stood with its back to me, facing the potter’s wheel. The arms were straight and the hands still gripped the edges of the wheel.

  Along with the burned flesh there was still the smell of gasoline in the little room.

  I turned and ran, all the way to the ocean. I sat on the beach and stared out at the water until Rod Baleen found me there that evening.

  We buried her the next day. I was sent with Rod and an older man named Arthur to get a coffin.

  The coffins were in a deeper level of the Mall, one that I had not known about before. It was down a stairway with a sign that said DEEP SHELTER.

  There was a warehouse full of coffins, all of them made of green-painted metal. Stenciled on each were the words DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE. They were piled to the ceiling, in neat rows, in a room labeled MORTALITY ROOM.

  Rather than go back up the stairs we carried the empty coffin down through a hallway on the other side of the warehouse. We passed under an arch with the sign RECREATION AREA, and past a huge empty swimming pool and then past a doorway that said LIBRARY AND READING ROOM. Grieved as I was, silently carrying that grim and ugly coffin, my heart leapt when I saw the sign and I had to restrain myself from leaving Annabel’s coffin right there and rushing through the doorway.

  At the end of the hallway there was a large door with the sign GARAGE AND VEHICLE STORAGE. Rod pushed it open and we came into a room that was filled with thought buses. They were parked next to one another in row after row. All of those whose fronts I could see had the sign MAUGRE AND SUBURBS ONLY.

  At the end of this room, down past a long row of buses, was a pair of sliding doors big enough to admit a bus. Rod pushed a button on the wall by the doors and they opened. We stepped in, carrying the coffin, and rode a big elevator that took us back out into the sunshine through doors at the back of the obelisk. We drove to the pottery shed, where the women had done the best they could to make Annabel’s body presentable. They had put a new black dress on her and a blue apron. But there was nothing that we put in the coffin that I could recognize as Annabel.

  There was a beautiful slim vase on a shelf in the pottery shed. Annabel had told me she had made it years before but that old Baleen would not let it be used in the kitchen because it was “too fragile.” I went and got it and placed it in the coffin, in what was left of Annabel’s arms. Then I closed the lid and fastened it down.

  The funeral was held in Sears. Annabel’s coffin was brought down on the elevator on a thought bus. I am grateful to old Baleen that he let me be one of the pallbearers; he had never said anything but I think he knew something of how I felt about Annabel.

  We sat in chairs in the shoe department with the lights turned on softly and Baleen made some kind of a speech and then he handed me the Bible that he had brought with him and told me to read from it.

  I opened the Reader’s Digest Bible but did not read from its text. Instead I looked at Annabel’s coffin in front of me and said, “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord. ‘He that believeth in me, though he perish, yet shall he live.’”

  The words were no comfort. I wanted Annabel to be alive and with me. I looked at all the Baleens in front of me with their heads reverently bowed and I felt no communion with them and with their faith. Without Annabel I was alone again.

  The cemetery was several miles north of Maugre, near an ancient four-lane highway. There were rows of thousands of tiny white Permoplastic grave markers with no writing on them. We took Annabel out there in a thought bus.

  That night when everyone was asleep I left the house quietly, went to the Mall, and found the library. It was a room bigger than the kitchen at Baleena, and all of its walls were covered with books. The small hairs on the back of my neck prickled, standing there in the middle of the night in that silent room with its thousands and thousands of books.

  I put two small ones in my jacket pockets: Youth, by Joseph Conrad, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by R. H. Tawney. Then I went to the thought-bus parking lot and spent an hour looking at the signs on the fronts of the buses.

  They all said MAUGRE AND SUBURBS ONLY.

  Upstairs in Sears, I found a shelf board, some black paint, and a brush. I painted the name ANNABEL SWISHER on the board and then with a hammer and some nails from the hardware department I managed awkwardly to nail the board to a stake. Then I took one of the Baleens’ buses to the cemetery and with my hammer drove the marker into the ground at the head of Annabel’s grave. Afterward I told the bus to take me to New York. It went to the ramp that led to the highway and stopped. It would go no farther.

  I stayed up all that night reading the book by Joseph Conrad, only partly understanding it. In the morning Mary and a woman named Helen prepared breakfast; I ate with the family.

  After breakfast I told old Edgar that I would like eventually to move into this house and he did not object. In fact, he seemed to be expecting some such thing from me.

  The place, all redwood and glass, was a home for mice and birds. I cleaned out the birds’ nests and Biff went to work on the mice in a manner that I can only describe as professional. She had the last mouse out of there within a week.

  The old furniture was rotted; I had a bonfire with it on the beach and watched it burn for an hour, thinking of Belasco and of that charmed moment back in Carolina.

  I was not supposed to take things from Sears, but I went there every night for a week and no one objected. I think the Baleens did not really mind as long as I did not do it openly. Their sexual morality may have been that way too, and had Annabel and I been secretive about being lovers it probably would have offended no one. Probably they thought we were lovers anyway.

  I got furniture from Sears, and kitchen equipment, and bookshelves. And I began making a collection of books from the library.

  After the funeral I had wanted in my grief to leave; but that impulse had quieted itself in me for the time. I think it was the finding of the books. I decided that I would finish my education and update my journal, there in the house by the side of the sea. Then I would decide whether to continue my search for Mary Lou or to stay. Or to leave and go to some place altogether new—heading westward, maybe, toward Ohio and beyond.

  In one of the many books from below the Mall that I have read I learned that the season after summer was called, in the ancient world, the Fall of the Year. It is a beautiful phrase and it speaks to me deeply.

  The trees outside my house by the sea have begun to lose their green, are becoming more yellow and red and orange as each day passes. The blue of the sky is paler now and the sea gulls’ cries sound somehow more distant. There is a fine chill in the air, in the mornings, when I take my long walk on the empty beach. Sometimes I see where clams have buried themselves, but I never dig for them. I walk and jog in the autumn air—in the air at the Fall of the Year—and I think more and more, each day, of leaving Maugre and continuing northward toward New York. Yet I have a fine place to live here and I furnish myself with food from the Mall. I have become a good cook. If I want company I can visit the Baleens and read for them, as I sometimes do. They are glad enough to see me, even though they seemed almost relieved when I left.

  It is strange. I think now that they expected something miraculous to happen when they started to hear the words from the Bible read aloud, opening up that mystery to them—the message of an inscrutable book they had learned to revere. But no miracle occurred, and they soon lost any real interest. I think that to know what those words said required an attention and a devotion that none of them—except perhaps old Edgar—possessed. They were willing to accept their stringent piety, and silence, and sexual restraints, all unthinkingly, along with a few platitudes about Jesus and Moses and Noah; they were overwhelmed, however, at the effort it would require to understand the literature that was the real source of their religio
n.

  I asked old Edgar once why there were no robots in Maugre and he said, “It took us ten years to rid the place of those agents of Satan,” but when I asked him how they had done it he would not answer. Yet they could devote ten years to a thing like that and not take the time I was with them really to understand what was meant by “Satan”—a word that I now know means “enemy.”

  Before Annabel’s death I suppose I was content enough to live with them. And the food was wonderful: the mashed potatoes and strudel and biscuits and pork bacon (they had never even heard of monkey bacon) and omelettes and soups. There were chicken soup and vegetable soup and pea soup and cabbage soup and lentil soup, all served hot and with crackers.

  And there were times during those months when I felt very strongly a thing I had learned to feel at prison—a sense of community. I could sit at the table in the kitchen with the entire silent family around me, eating soup, and feel a kind of spiritual warmth starting in my stomach and spreading around my body, sensing the presence of those placid, sturdy, and hard-working people. They touched one another a good deal—just little touches, like the light placing of a hand on an arm or a gentle touching of elbows, while sitting close to one another at the table. And they touched me too, with a gentle shyness at first but then more casually, easily. What I had felt toward the other men at prison had prepared me for this and I grew to like it—to need it even. It is why I still go back there, from time to time. Just to be with them, to touch them and to feel their human presences.

  But unlike families in films that I have seen, the Baleens hardly ever talked to one another. After each of my evening readings the huge television screen behind the lectern would be turned on. There would be the heavy rumbling of the gasoline-powered generator that sat on the floor behind it, and then the screen would light up with the dazzling colored holographs of mind shows—abstract shapes and hypnotic colors and numbingly loud music—or sex-and-pain shows or trial-by-fire shows, and everyone would watch in silence, just as in the dormitories or in a college class, until bedtime. Sometimes people would get up and go to the kitchen for a piece of fried chicken or a can of beer and some peanuts (beer and snack food were brought over in wheelbarrows from the Mall every ten days or so) but there was never any conversation in the kitchen; no one wished to break the mood of the shows.

  But although I had watched television in the same way many times in my life before, I found I could no longer watch it and not think. “Give yourself to the Screen,” they had taught us. It was as basic as “Don’t ask; relax.” But I could no longer give myself to it. I no longer wanted to keep my mind silent, or use it as a vehicle for disconnected pleasure; I wanted to read, and think, and talk.

  Sometimes, after Annabel’s death, I would be tempted to take the sopors that were kept around the house in her ceramic candy dishes, but then I would think of Mary Lou and of my decision when old Baleen offered me sopors before taking me to “the Lake of Fire that burneth forever”—and I would not use the drugs.

  It was good to sense the warmth of being part of a family, to wake up sometimes at night in the room I shared with Rod and hear him softly snoring and sense the presence of all those people in the house. I felt at times that something very good inside myself was beginning to come alive. But then the big television set would come on, or people would drift off to the sets in their own rooms, and I would feel that I would go crazy if there were no talk—no conversation. The prisoners I had lived with had talked whenever they could, and they had to wait for opportunities to do so, as with the time at the beach. But the Baleens were different; they were pleased with one another’s company; but they had noth-ing to say except for an occasional “Praise the Lord.”

  So I see them only enough to retain some minimum human contact. It seems to be enough. Since I moved in here in midsummer, I have listened to records from Sears and written in my journal in ledger books from Sears and I have read books. Sitting by day on my balcony overlooking the ocean, with Biff, now grown fatter, at my side, or using kerosene lamps in the big room downstairs at night, I have read over a hundred books. And I have played, over and over, recordings of the symphonies of Mozart and Brahms and Prokofiev and Beethoven, and chamber music, and operettas, and various musical works by Bach and Sibelius and Dolly Parton and Palestrina and Lennon. This music sometimes, even more than the books, enlarges my sense of the past. And the enlargement of that sense, the growth of my sympathies outward from what had been the small, dormitory-trained center of my self, the growth backward in time to include generations of my fellows who have lived on this same earth as I, has been the passion of these months alone.

  I am sitting now at the oaken table in the kitchen, writing this journal in a new ledger book, with a Sears ball-point pen. Biff is curled in a chair beside me, asleep. I have a half bottle of whiskey —J. T. S. Brown Bourbon—and a pitcher of water and a glass on the table. It is late in the afternoon and autumn light is coming in through the window over the sink. There are two kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling above the table, and I will light them when it becomes necessary. After I write for a while I will fix something to eat for Biff and me and will probably start the generator downstairs and play a record or two, if I feel I can spare the gasoline for it.

  It was my intention in beginning this to summarize what I have learned about human history and how that history appears to be coming to an end. But the prospect of trying actually to do it, after thinking about it for so long, is more than I am up to facing. There are many times still that I am overcome with a desire to have Mary Lou with me again; and I feel that now, thinking of the difficulty of the task. There is no question that Mary Lou’s mind is better than mine. She might not have the patience that I have shown in my studies; but I would love to possess some of what I have come to recognize as her intellectual vigor and quickness, and her quick grasp. She had an enthusiasm about her too that I lack.

  I am not certain that I still love her. It has been a very long time and a great deal has happened. And I still grieve for Annabel.

  Writing that, I found myself looking at my wrists, at the white scars on each of them where those prison bracelets tore into me under the knife in the factory.

  I was ready to die then, at that time of my life, to bleed to death under that knife or to burn my body with gasoline—to join the world’s long sad rank of suicides. I would have died for loneliness and for the loss of Mary Lou.

  Well. I didn’t die. And a part of me still loves Mary Lou, although I have made no move to go northward to find her for a long time now. I think sometimes of trying to find a road that has cross-country buses running on it and to take one to New York the way I had come from Ohio the first time, so long ago. But that would be folly. The scanner on such a bus might well detect me as a fugitive. And I have no credit card anymore; they took it away from me in prison.

  How different I am now from what I was then. And how strong my body is. And how unafraid I am.

  I will leave Maugre soon. While it is still the Fall of the Year.

  Mary Lou

  The baby is due any day now. It’s the perfect time of year for having a baby—the very first part of spring. I’m sitting now by the living-room window that overlooks Third Avenue. Downtown and to the west I can see, over empty lots and low housetops, the Empire State Building. Bob often sits in this green chair and looks toward it; I like to watch the tree outside the window. It’s a big tree, one that long ago must have cracked the crumbling pavement around its enormous trunk; it rises way above our three-story building. I can see from here where little leaves have begun to come out on the lower branches; it makes me feel good to see them, to see that fresh and pale green.

  Since Bob can’t read titles I had to go with him two weeks ago to find books on baby care and obstetrics; I found four—two of them with pictures. I’ve never had any instructions in my life about childbirth and of course have never known anyone to have a baby; I’ve never even seen a pregnant woman. But while re
ading one of the books and looking at its pictures I realized that I did have some associations that must have been picked up from older girls when I was a little misfit in the dormitory: cramping pains, blood, lying on your back and screaming and biting your forearm; a dark process called “cutting the cord.” Well. I know about such things now, and feel better. I want to get it over with.

  One afternoon about three weeks ago Bob came home early. I had been thinking all day about how little I knew about babies, and then he came in carrying a huge, god-awful box filled with tools and cans and paintbrushes. Without even speaking to me he went into the kitchen and began working on the sink drain. I was astonished and after a few minutes I heard water running in the sink and then the gurgling of it going down. I got up and walked over to the kitchen door.

  “Jesus!” I said. “Whatever possessed you?”

  He wiped his hands on a dish towel and then turned around toward me. “I get tired of things that don’t work,” he said.

  “I’m glad to hear it. Can you fix the wall where those books are falling out of it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “After I paint the living room.”

  I started to ask him where he had gotten paint, but I didn’t. Bob seems to know where everything is in New York. I suppose he’s the city’s oldest citizen—the oldest New Yorker.

  He had some dusty old paint cans in his box. He came into the living room and pried the lid off one of them with a screwdriver and began mixing the paint. It looked all right and after he stirred it awhile I could see it was going to be white. Then he went outside for a few minutes and came back with a ladder. He set it up and took his shut off, climbed the ladder, and began to paint the wall over my bookcases by the light from the window.