Walter Tevis - Mockingbird

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?

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:

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.

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.