Mockingbird (25 page)

Her hair was blond, curling slightly around the sides of her face. Her complexion, despite the roughness of her clothes, was clear white and flawless. Her eyes were large and light-colored and her forehead was high, clear and intelligent-looking.

“Brethren,” Baleen was saying. “It’s been a good year for the family, as all know. We’ve been at peace with our neighbors, and the Lord’s provisions at the Great Mall have continued in their bountiful abundance.” Then he bowed his head, thrust his arms forward and upward, and said, “Let us pray.”

The group bowed their heads, except for the woman I had been watching. She inclined her head only very slightly. I bowed mine, wanting to take no risks. I had seen meetings like this one in films and I knew that the idea was to bow and be silent.

Baleen began to recite what seemed to.be a memorized, ritual prayer: “God grant us safety from the fallout past and the fallout to come. Preserve us from all Detectors. Grant us thy love and keep us from the sin of Privacy. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”

 I could not help being startled by the words “the sin of Privacy.” It was completely contrary to my teaching, and yet something in me responded favorably to the phrase.

There were a few coughs and squirmings from the group when Baleen finished, and everyone looked up again.

“The Lord has provided for the Baleens,” he said, in a more ordinary tone of voice now, “and for all of the Seven Families in the Cities of the Plain.” Then he leaned forward at his lectern, grasping its sides with what I suddenly noticed were small, white, womanish hands—hands with well-manicured nails—and spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. “And it may be that now the Lord has sent us an interpreter of his word or a prophet. A stranger has come into our midst, has passed an ordeal of fire before my own eyes, and has shown a knowledge of the Lord.”

I saw that everyone was looking at me. Despite the new calmness I had seemed to find in myself, it was very disconcerting. I had never been an object of attention like that before. I felt myself blushing and had a sudden wish for the old rales of Privacy that forbade people to stare at one another. There must have been thirty of them—all of them looking at me with open curiosity or suspicion. I put my hands in my pockets to keep them from trembling. Biff was at my feet, rubbing herself between my ankles. For a moment I even wanted her to go away, to stop paying attention to me.

“The stranger has told me,” Baleen was saying, “that he is a carrier of the old knowledge. He says he is a Reader.”

Several of them looked surprised. Their stares at me became even more intense. The woman I had been watching leaned slightly forward, as if to get a closer look.

Then, with a dramatic wave of his arm in my direction, Baleen said, “Step forward to the Book of Life and read from it. 
If
 you can read.”

I looked at him, trying to appear calm; but my heart was beating powerfully and my knees trembled. All those 
people
 assembled in that one place! I had expected something like this to happen, but now that it had come I seemed to have reverted to the person I once had been—before Roberto and Consuela, before Mary Lou, before prison and my escape and my new, rebellious self-sufficiency. Even as a shy professor, lecturing on mind control by repeating words I had memorized and said many times before, I would be nervous in the presence of my largest classes—of ten or twelve students at one time. And students were all properly trained to avoid my eyes while listening to me.

Somehow I managed to walk the few feet to the lectern where the book sat. I almost tripped over Biff. Baleen stepped aside for me and said, “Read from the beginning.”

I opened the cover of the book with a trembling hand and was grateful to be able to look down, avoiding the eyes of the congregation. I stared at the page for a long time, in silence. There was print on it; but somehow the letters did not make any sense. Some were very big and some were small. I knew that I was looking at a title page, but I could not make my mind work. I kept staring at it. It was not a foreign language, I knew that somehow; but I could not make my brain assemble the letters into coherence; they were just inked marks on a yellowed page. I had stopped shaking and was frozen. This lasted an intolerably long time. Into my mind had come a frightening image blanking out the page on the oak lectern in front of me: the yellow-orange fire at the bottom of the pit in the mall; the nuclear core that could vaporize my body. 
Read
, I told myself. But nothing came.

I could feel Baleen moving closer to me. I felt that my heart would stop.

And then, suddenly, a clear, strong female voice from in front of me spoke out: “Read the book,” it said. “Read for us, brother,” and I looked up, startled, and saw that it was the beautiful tall woman who was sitting by herself and was now staring at me pleadingly. “You can do it!” she said. “Read to us.”

I looked back to the book. And suddenly it was simple. The big, black letters that filled most of the page said, “Holy Bible,” in capital letters.

I read it:

HOLY BIBLE

And then, under that, the letters were small:

 “Abridged and updated for modern readers”

And at the bottom of the page:

 “Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Omaha. 2123”

That was all that page said. I turned to the next, which was filled with print, and began, more calmly now, to read:

“
Genesis
, by Moses. At first God made the world and the sky, but the world had no shape and there was nobody living on it. And it was dark, too, until God said, ‘Give us some light!’ and the light came on. . .”

I went on, more and more easily, and calmly. It was not at all like the Bible I had read from back at the prison, but that one had been much older.

When I finished the page I looked up.

The beautiful woman was staring at me with her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. On her face was a look of wonder or of adoration.

And I was peaceful again, inside. And suddenly so tired, so worn and used and
overcome
, that I dropped my head there at the podium and closed my eyes, letting my mind become blank, empty of everything except the words:

 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 the
real
 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.