Walter Tevis - Mockingbird

I decided to go out. It was very late. There was no one on the streets, and although New York is certainly safe, I felt tense and a bit frightened. I had something on my mind and I could not let it go and I was determined not to take a sopor. I summoned a thought bus and told it to take me to the Bronx Zoo.

I was alone on the bus. I watched out its windows as it went winding the long way between the bungalows and empty lots of Manhattan. I looked at the lights in the buildings where some people still sat watching their television. New York is very peaceful, and especially at night, but I thought of all those people, those lives, watching television, and I kept thinking, They know nothing of the past, not of their own past, nor of anyone else’s past . And of course it was true and I had known it all my life. But here at night, alone on the bus going through New York toward the zoo, I felt it most strongly and the strangeness of it began to overwhelm me.

The House of Reptiles was dark but it was not locked. I made noise when I came in the door and I heard the girl, startled, say, “Who’s there?”

I said, “Only me.”

And I heard her gasp and say, “My God! At night now, too.”

“I guess so,” I said, and then I saw the flash of her striking a light with a cigarette lighter and then the light steadied and I saw that she had lit a candle. She must have taken it from her pocket. She set it on the bench.

“Well,” I said, “I’m glad you have light.”

She must have been asleep on the bench, for she stretched herself, and then she said, “Come on. You might as well sit down here.”

So I went over and sat beside her. I could feel my hands trembling. I hoped she didn’t notice. For some time we were silent, sitting on the bench. I could not see the reptiles in their glass cases, nor did they make any sounds. The room was silent. The light from the candle flame moved on her face. Finally she spoke.

“You’re not supposed to be at the zoo at night,” she said.

I looked at her. “Neither are you.”

She looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. There was something nice about the gesture. I had seen it in the old films many times. Mary Pickford. She looked up at me. The intensity of her stare was softened a bit by the candlelight.

“Why did you come here?” she said.

I looked at her a long time before speaking and then I said, “It was the words you used the other day. I have not been able to get them out of my mind. You said you were going to memorize your life.”

She nodded.

“At first I didn’t know what that meant,” I said, “but now I think I do. In fact, I think I am trying to do the same thing or something like it. Not my early life, not my childhood or in the dormitories or when I was in college, but the life that I am living now, have been living for some time. I am trying to memorize that.” I stopped. I didn’t know exactly how to go on. She was looking at my face closely.

“Then I’m not the only one,” she said. “Maybe I’ve started something.”

“Yes,” I said, “maybe you have. But I have something that you may find helpful. Do you know what a recorder is?”

“I think so,” she said. “Don’t you say things into it and it says them back? Like when you call a library for information and the voice that gives it to you is not a person speaking then, but a person who spoke some time ago.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the idea. I have a recorder. I thought you might like to try it.”

“Do you have it with you now?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “That would be interesting, but we’ll need light.” She got up from the bench and walked across the room out of the light from the candle flame and I heard her opening something. And then I heard a click and the room was flooded with brightness. The glass from all of the cases glowed at me and there in them all of the reptiles, the iguanas, python, the green monitor lizards, the massive brown crocodiles in the cages, there they all sat, not moving, silent in all of that synthetic vegetation. She came back over to the bench and sat beside me. I could see now that her hair was badly mussed and there were creases in her face from sleeping on the bench. Yet evert so she looked fresh and very much awake.

“Let’s see this recorder,” she said.

I fumbled in my pocket and pulled it out. “Here it is,” I said. “I’ll show you how it works.”

We must have been there for over an hour. She was fascinated by the recorder and asked if she could keep it awhile but I told her it was impossible, that I had to use it in my work and they were very difficult to obtain. For a moment I almost told her about reading and writing but something restrained me from doing so. Maybe I would tell her at another time. When I told her it was time for me to return to where I stayed, she said, “Where do you stay? Where do you work?”

“At New York University,” I said. “I only work there temporarily for this summer. I live in Ohio.”

“What do you do at the university?” she said.

“I work with ancient films,” I told her. “Do you know what films are?”

“Films? No,” she said.

“Well, films are like video records. A way of recording images that move. They were used before the invention of television.”

Her eyes widened. “Before the invention of television?”

“Yes,” I said, “there was a time once when television had not been invented.”

“My God,” she said. “How do you know that?” Actually, of course, I didn’t know that, but I had guessed from the films that I had seen that they came before television because the people in those families’ houses in the films never had television sets. The idea of the sequence of events and circumstances—that things had not always been the same—was one of the strange and striking things that had occurred to me as I had become aware of what I can only call the past.

“That’s very odd,” the girl said, “to think that there may not have been television once. But I feel I can understand that. I feel that I understand a good many things since I have begun to memorize my life. You get the sense that one thing comes after another and that there is change.”

I looked at her. “Good God, yes,” I said. “I know what you mean.” Then I took my recorder and left the room. The thought bus was waiting. It was beginning to become daylight. Some birds were singing and I thought, Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods . But this time thinking it, I felt no sadness.

When I started to walk toward the bus I somehow felt awkward. I felt as though she had done me a great service. The nervousness that had driven me out here to the zoo in the middle of the night was now as dissipated as though I had taken two tabs of Nembucaine…. But I did not know how to thank her, so I merely stepped back into the building and said, “Good night” and started to leave again.

“Wait,” she said, and I turned around to face her.

“Why don’t you take me with you?”

That came as a shock. “Why?” I said. “For sex?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Not necessarily. I would… like to use your recorder.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have an agreement with the university. I’m not sure…”

Suddenly her face changed. It became frighteningly twisted in anger—anger as great as on the faces of some of the actors in the films. “I thought you were different.” Her voice was trembling, but controlled. “I thought you didn’t care about making Mistakes. About Rules.”

Her anger was very upsetting. Showing anger in public—and this was, in a sense, a public thing—was one of the worst of Mistakes itself. Almost as bad as my crying outside the Burger Chef had been. And then I thought of myself, of my crying, and I did not know what to say.