Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  I have seen no other vehicles and no sign of human habitation since I left Maugre.

  My God, the things I have read and learned since I left Ohio! And they have changed me so much I hardly recognize myself. Just knowing that there has been a past to human life and getting a slight sense of what that past was like have altered my mind and my behavior beyond recognition.

  I had seen talking films as a graduate student, along with the handful of others who were interested in such things. But the films —Magnificent Obsession, Dracula Strikes, The Sound of Music— had only seemed to be “mind-blowing.” They were merely another, more esoteric way of manipulating one’s mental states for the sake of pleasure and inwardness. It would never have occurred to me then, in my illiterate and brainwashed state, to observe such films as a means of learning something valuable about the past.

  But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable. “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.” “I am the way and the truth and the life. He that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” “My life is light, waiting for the death wind. Like a feather on the back of my hand.”

  And without the ability to read I would never have found a way to get this thought bus moving, taking me to New York and to Mary Lou, whom I must try to see again before I die.

  OCTOBER FIFTH

  It was a warm and sunny morning today and I decided to have myself a roadside picnic, something like the one in The Lost Chord, with Zasu Pitts. I stopped the bus around noon by a little grove of trees, fixed myself a plate of bacon and beans and a glass of whiskey and water, found myself a comfortable spot under the trees, and ate my meal slowly and thoughtfully while But chased butterflies on the grass.

  For most of the morning the bus had been out of sight of the ocean; I hadn’t seen the water for several hours. After eating and then dozing for a few minutes I decided to climb a little rise of ground to see if I could tell where we were. And when I got up there I could see the ocean and, way over to my left, the buildings of New York! Suddenly I became excited and stood there transfixed, trembling slightly and clutching my half-empty glass.

  I could see the Statue of Privacy in Central Park, the great, solemn, leaden figure with closed eyes and a serenely inward smile; it is still one of the Wonders of the Modern World. I could see its huge gray bulk from where I stood, miles away. I tried to find the buildings of NYU, where I had told the bus to take me, and where I had some hope of finding Mary Lou, or at least some trace of her, but I could not.

  And then, looking at New York there in the distance, with the Empire State Building at one end and the Statue of Privacy, so dark and leaden, at the other, something sank in my heart.

  I knew I wanted Mary Lou, but I did not want to go into New York again, into that dead city.

  And I felt it then, a heavy weight of oppression at the thought of those New York streets, on their way to becoming as overgrown as those of Maugre. And all that stupid life moving dazedly about those dying streets—stoned faces of Inwardness, lives with minds that barely flickered, lives that were like mine once had been: not worth the trouble of living. A society haunted by death and not alive enough to know it. And those group immolations! Immolations at the Burger Chef, and a zoo filled with robots.

  The city lay there under the early-autumn sunlight like a tomb. I did not want to go back.

  And then I heard a quiet voice in my mind saying, “There is nothing in New York that can hurt you.” It was the voice of my bus.

  I thought about that a moment and then I said aloud, “It is not being hurt that I fear.” I looked down at my wrist, still a bit twisted from so long before.

  “I know,” the bus said. “You are not afraid. You are only displeased with New York, and with what it means for you now.”

  “I was happy there once,” I said. “Sometimes with Mary Lou. And my films, sometimes . . .”

  “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,” the bus said.

  It was startling to hear that “You took those words from my mind?” I said.

  “Yes. They are often in your mind.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “I don’t know,” the bus said. “But they make you feel something strongly.”

  “Something sad?”

  “Yes. Sad. But it is a sadness that is good for you to feel.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

  “And you have to go to New York if you want to see her.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Get in,” the bus said.

  I climbed down the little hill, called Biff to me, and got into the bus. “Let’s get rolling,” I said aloud.

  “By all means,” the bus said. It shut its door smartly, and began to roll.

  OCTOBER SIXTH

  It was close to evening as we drove over the huge, empty, rusty old bridge onto Manhattan Island; lights were already on in some of the little Permoplastic houses along Riverside Drive. The sidewalks were empty except for an occasional robot pushing a cart of raw materials toward one of the vending shops on Fifth Avenue, or a sanitation crew collecting garbage. I saw one old woman out on the sidewalk, on Park Avenue; she was fat and wore a shapeless gray dress and was carrying a bunch of flowers in her hand.

  We passed a few thought buses on the street, most of them empty. An empty Detection car went cruising past us. New York was very peaceful but I was becoming apprehensive. I had eaten nothing since my small picnic lunch; I had been nervous all afternoon. I was not afraid, as I might once have been, but just tense. I didn’t like it. But there was nothing to do about it except bear it. A few times I thought about having more whiskey to drink, or stopping the bus at a drug machine and trying to vandalize it for sopors—since I no longer had a credit card—but I had decided long before to keep chemicals like those out of my body. So I drove such ideas from my mind and just put up with feeling uncomfortable and jittery. At least I knew what was going on around me.

  The steel buildings of NYU were dazzling in the setting sun. On the drive through Washington Square we passed four or five students in their denim robes, each of them going his separate way. The square was overgrown with weeds. None of the fountains were working,

  I had the bus park in front of the library.

  And there it was, the old half-rusted building where I had worked in the archives and had lived with Mary Lou. My heart began beating very hard when I saw it sitting there, surrounded by weeds and with no one in sight.

  I had enough presence of mind to realize that I might lose my bus to someone who merely wanted to take it somewhere. So I took my tool kit and removed the front panel, disconnected what Audel’s Guide called the “Door Activating Assembly Servo,” and then told the door to open. And it would not. I set the tool kit inside the brain opening. No one would bother it.

  I walked into the building, a little less shaky but still very excited. There was no one there. The halls were empty; the rooms I looked into were empty; there was no sound except for the echoing of my own footsteps.

  I did not feel, as I might once have, either awed or jumpy from the emptiness of the place. I was wearing one of my new sets of clothes from Maugre: tight blue jeans, a black turtleneck, and light black shoes. I had pulled the sleeves of my turtleneck up earlier in the day, because of the warmth, and my forearms were suntanned, lean, and muscular. I liked the looks of them, and I liked the gen
eral feeling in my body and in my mind that they seemed to convey: springy, taut, and strong. I was no longer over-impressed with this dying building; I was merely looking for someone in it.

  My old room was empty, and unchanged since I had been there, but the collection of silent films was gone. I was disappointed at that, since at the back of my mind I had planned to take them with me—or with us—wherever I might go in my thought bus.

  Still sitting on my old bed-and-desk was the artificial fruit that Mary Lou had picked for me at the zoo.

  I took the fruit and stuffed it into the side pocket of my jeans. I looked around the room. There was nothing else in it that I wanted. I left, slamming the door shut behind me. I had decided where to go.

  While I was replacing the wires in the thought bus by the light from a streetlamp outside, I looked up to see a fat, balding man staring at me. He must have come up while I was working, without my seeing him. His face was puffy and characterless, with a stoned inwardness that was, for a moment, shocking to see. I realized after a moment that it was not really different from hundreds of faces I had seen before, but that there were two things different now about my way of looking at him: I was no longer concerned with Privacy, and consequently I examined him more closely than I might have a year before; and I was used to being close to the Baleens and, although they took drugs too, their faces did not have the arrogant stupidity about them that most ordinary people had.

  After I had stared at him a moment he lowered his eyes and began looking at his feet. I turned back to the wires I was reattaching to the bus’s servo, and I heard him speaking in a gravelly voice. “That’s illegal,” he was saying. “Tampering with Government Property.”

  I did not even look back at him. “What government?” I said.

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That’s tampering. Tampering is a Mistake. You could go to prison.”

  I turned around and looked at him. I was holding a wrench in my right hand, and I was sweating a bit. I looked right in his eyes, and at his idiotic, mindless, pasty face. “If you don’t get away from me right now,” I said, “I’ll kill you.”

  His jaw went slack and he stared at me.

  “Move, you fool,” I said. “Right now.”

  He turned and walked away. I saw him reach in his pocket and pull out some pills and begin swallowing them, holding his head back. I felt like throwing the wrench at him.

  I finished refastening the wires and then got into the bus and told it to take me to the Burger Chef on Fifth Avenue.

  She was not in the Burger Chef; but I had not really expected her to be. The place looked different to me somehow, and then I realized that it was the booths. Two of them had been taken out altogether and almost all of the rest were badly charred. There must have been several immolations since I had last been there.

  I went to the counter and told the female Make Two to give me two algaeburgers and a glass of tea from the samovar. She got them, a bit slowly, and set them down on the counter, waiting. Suddenly I realized what she was waiting for: my credit card. And I didn’t have one, had forgotten all about them.

  “I don’t have a credit card,” I said to her.

  She looked at me with that stupid robot look—the same look the guards at the prison always had on their faces—and then she picked up the tray again, turned, and began carrying it over toward a trash bin.

  I shouted at her, “Stop! Bring that back!”

  She stopped, turned slightly, then turned back again toward the trash bin. She began moving toward it again, more slowly.

  “Stop, you idiot!” I shouted. Then, hardly thinking about it, I climbed over the counter, walked quickly over to her, and put my hand on her shoulder. I turned her around facing me, and took the tray from her. She merely looked at me stupidly for a moment, and then somewhere in the ceiling of the room an alarm bell began to ring furiously.

  I climbed quickly back over the counter and started to leave, when I saw a big heavy moron robot in a green uniform coming toward me from a back room somewhere. He was like the one at the zoo, and he began to say, “You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  “Bug off, robot,” I told him. “Get back in the kitchen and leave the customers alone.”

  “You are under arrest,” he said, but more weakly this time. He had stopped moving.

  I walked up to him and looked into his empty, nonhuman eyes. I had never looked at a robot that closely before, having been brought up to fear and respect them. And I became aware, looking at his stupid, manufactured face, that I was seeing for the first time what the significance of this dumb parody of humanity really was: nothing, nothing at all. Robots were something invented once out a blind love for the technology that could allow them to be invented. They had been made and given to the world of men as the weapons that nearly destroyed the world had once been given, as a “necessity.” And, deeper still, underneath that blank and empty face, identical to all the thousands of faces of its make, I could sense contempt—contempt for the ordinary life of men and women that the human technicians who had fashioned it had felt. They had given robots to the world with the lie that they would save us from labor or relieve us from drudgery so that we could grow and develop inwardly. Someone must have hated human life to have made such a thing—such an abomination in the sight of the Lord.

  This time I spoke to him—to it—and with fury. “Get out of my sight, robot,” I shouted. “Get out of my sight immediately.”

  And the robot turned and walked away from me.

  I looked over at the four or five people who were sitting, each in his own booth, in the Burger Chef. Every one of them had his shoulders drawn up and his eyes closed, in complete Privacy Withdrawal.

  I left quickly and was relieved to be back in my thought bus. I told it silently to take me to the Bronx Zoo, to the House of Reptiles. “Gladly,” it said.

  All of the lights were out at the zoo. The moon had begun to rise. I had my kerosene lantern lit when the bus pulled up in front of the door of the House of Reptiles. The air was cool on my skin, but I did not put on a jacket.

  The door was not locked. When I opened it and came into the room I could hardly recognize my surroundings. That was partly because of the eeriness of the weak kerosene light in the place but also because of the fact that there were white cloths or some kind of towels hanging over the tops of the cases on the back wall.

  I looked on the bench where Mary Lou had slept. She was not there. There was an odd smell in the room—warm and sweet. And the room itself was warm and stuffy, as though the temperature had been turned up. I stood still for a while, trying to accustom myself to the altered place in the dim light. I could not see any reptiles in the cases; but the light was poor. The python case looked strange, and there was something humped in the middle of it.

  I found a switch on the wall, turned the lights on, and stood there blinking at the brightness.

  And then a voice came from in front of me: “What the hell . . . ?”

  It was Mary Lou. The hump in the floor of the case had rearranged itself and I saw that it was Mary Lou. Her hair was matted and her eyes were squinted half shut. She looked the way she had on that night long before when my agitation had driven me out here and I had waked her and we had talked.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but then said nothing. She was sitting now, in the case, with her legs hanging over the side. There was no glass in the case anymore—and certainly no python—and she had put a mattress in it to make a bed; that was what she was sitting on now, rubbing her eyes and trying to focus them on me.

  Finally I spoke. “Mary Lou,” I said.

  She stopped rubbing her eyes and stared. “That’s you, Paul,” she said softly. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She eased herself down to the floor and started walking slowly toward me. She was wearing a long white nightshirt that was very wrinkled, and her face was puffy from sleep. Her feet were bare; they padded
on the floor as she walked. And when she came close to me and stopped, looking up at me from under her matted hair, sleepily, yet with that same old intense look, I felt something catch in my throat and I did not try to speak.

  She looked me up and down like that, closely. And then she said, “Jesus, Paul. You’ve changed.”

  I said nothing, but nodded.

  She shook her head wonderingly. “You look . . . you look ready for anything.”

  Suddenly I found words. “That’s right,” I said. And then I stepped forward and put my arms around her and pulled her to me, very hard. And in a moment I felt her arms around my back, pulling me even tighter. My heart seemed to expand then, holding her firm body against mine, smelling her hair and the smell of soap on the back of her white neck, feeling her breasts against my breast, her stomach against mine, her hand, now, caressing the back of my neck.

  I began to feel an arousal that I had never felt before. My whole body felt it. I let my hands slide down her back until they held her hips, pulling her against me. I began to kiss her throat.

  Her voice was nervous, soft. “Paul,” she said, “I just woke up. I need to wash my face and comb my hair . . .”

  “No, you don’t,” I said, bringing my hands together behind her, pulling her tighter to me.

  She put the palm of her hand against my cheek. “Jesus Christ, Paul!” she said softly.

  I took her hand in mine and led her to the large bed she had made from the python cage. We undressed, watching each other silently. I felt stronger, more certain than I had ever felt with her before.

  I helped her into the bed and began to kiss her naked body—the insides of her arms, the place between her breasts, her belly, the insides of her thighs, until she cried out; my heart was pounding furiously but my hands were steady.