Mockingbird (3 page)

A red light began to blink on Spofforth’s desk. He pressed a button and said, “Spofforth here.”

“My name is Bentley, Dean Spofforth,” the voice on the other end said. “Paul Bentley. I’m calling from Ohio.”

“Are you the one who can read?” Spofforth said.

“Yes,” the voice said. “I taught myself how. I can read.”

The great ape sat wearily on the overturned side of a bus. The city was deserted.

At the center of the screen a white vortex appeared and began to enlarge and whirl. When it stopped it had filled more than half the screen. It became clear that it was the front page of a newspaper, with a huge headline.

Spofforth stopped the projector with the headline on the screen. “Read that,” he said.

Bentley cleared his throat nervously. “Monster Ape Terrifies City,” he read.

“Good,” Spofforth said. He started the projector again.

The rest of the film had no written words on it. They watched it in silence, through the ape’s final destructive rampage, his pathetic failure to be able to express his love, on through to his death as he fell, as though floating, from the impossibly tall building to the wide and empty street below.

Spofforth threw the switch that brought the lights back on in his office and made the bay window transparent again. The office was now no longer dark, no longer a projection room. Outside, amid the bright flowers of Washington Square, a circle of elderly graduate students sat on the unkempt grass in their denim robes. Their faces were vacant. The sun was high, distant, in the June sky. Spofforth looked at Bentley.

“Dean Spofforth,” Bentley said, “will I be able to teach the course?”

Spofforth watched him thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, “No. I’m sorry. But we should not teach reading at this university.”

Bentley stood up awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I thought. . .”

“Sit down, Professor Bentley,” Spofforth said. “I believe we can use this skill of yours, for the summer.”

Bentley seated himself. He was clearly nervous; Spofforth knew that his own presence was overwhelming.

Spofforth leaned back in his chair, stretched, and smiled at Bentley amiably. “Tell me,” he asked. “How did you learn to read?”

The man blinked at him a moment. Then he said, “From cards. Reading cards. And four little books:
First Reader
, and
Roberto and Consuela and Their Dog Biff
, and . . .”

“Where did you get such things?” Spofforth asked.

“It was strange,” Bentley said. “The university has a collection of ancient porno films. I was trying to cull material for a course, when I came upon a sealed box of old film. With it were the four little books and the set of cards. When I played the film it was not porno at all. It showed a woman talking to children in a classroom. There was a black wall behind her and she would make marks on it that were white. For example, she would make what I later learned was the word ‘woman,’ and then the children would all say ‘woman’ together. She did the same for ‘teacher’ and ‘tree’ and ‘water’ and ‘sky.’ I remembered just having looked through the cards and seeing a picture of a woman. It had the same marks she had made under it. There were more pictures, more white marks on the black wall, more words spoken by the teacher and by the class.” Bentley blinked, remembering. “The teacher was wearing a blue dress and her hair was white. She seemed to smile all the time. . .”

“And then you did what?” Spofforth said.

“Yes.” Bentley shook his head, as if trying to shake away the memory. “I played the film again, and then again. I was fascinated by it, by something that was going on in it that I felt was . . . was . . .” He stopped, helpless for a word.

“Important?” Spofforth asked.

“Yes.
Important
.” Bentley looked at Spofforth’s eyes for a brief moment, against the rule of Mandatory Politeness. Then he looked away, toward the window, outside of which the stoned graduate students still sat silent, their heads nodding occasionally.

“And then?” Spofforth said.

“I played the film over, more times than I could count. Slowly I began to realize, as though I had known it all along but hadn’t known that I knew it, that the teacher and the class were looking at the marks and saying words that were represented by the marks. The marks were like pictures. Pictures of words. A person could look at them and say the words aloud. Later I was to learn that you could look at the marks and
hear
the words silently. The same words and words like them were in the books I had found.”

“And you learned to understand other words?” Spofforth said. His voice was neutral, quiet.

“Yes. That took a long time. I had to realize that the words were made of
letters
. Letters made sounds that were always the same. I spent days and days at it. I did not want to stop. There was a pleasure in finding the things that the books could
say
within my mind . . .“ He looked down at the floor. ”I did not stop until I knew every word in the four books. It was only later, when I found three more books, that I discovered that what I was doing was called ‘reading.’“ He became silent and then, after a few moments, looked shyly up toward Spofforth’s face.

Spofforth stared at him for a long moment, and then nodded his head slightly. “I see,” he said. “Bentley, have you ever heard of silent films?”

“
Silent
films?” Bentley said. “No.”

Spofforth smiled slightly. “I don’t think many people have heard of them. They’re very ancient. A great many were found recently, during a demolition.”

“Oh?” Bentley said politely, not understanding.

“The thing about silent films, Professor Bentley,” Spofforth said slowly, “is that the speeches of the actors in them are not spoken but written.” He smiled again, gently. “To be understood, they must be read.”

Spofforth suggested I do this. Talk into the recorder at nights, after work, and discuss what I had done during the day. He gave me extra BB’s just for this.

The work is dreary at times; but it may have its rewards. I have been at it five days now; this is the first on which I have felt at ease enough with the little recording machine to begin talking about myself into it. And what is there to say about myself? I am not an interesting person.

The films are brittle and must be handled with the greatest of care. When they break—as they frequently do—I must spend a careful time splicing them back together. I tried to get Dean SpoSorth to assign me a technician robot, perhaps a moron robot trained as a dentist or in some kind of precision work, but Spofforth merely said, “That would be too expensive.” And I’m certain he’s right. So I thread the films into strange old machines called “projectors” and make certain they are adjusted properly and then I begin projecting them on a little screen on my bed-and-desk. The projector is always noisy. But even my footsteps seem terribly loud down here in the basement of the old library. Nobody ever comes here, and moss grows on the ancient stainless-steel walls.

Then, when words appear in print on the screen I stop the projector and read them aloud into a recorder. Sometimes this only takes a moment, as with lines like “No!” or “The End,” where only the slightest hesitation is needed before pronouncing them. But at other times harder phrases and spellings occur, and then I must study for a long time before I am certain of the wording. One of my most difficult was on one of those black backgrounds on the screen after a highly emotional scene where a young woman had expressed worry. It read, in full: “If Dr. Carrothers does not arrive presently, Mother is certain to take leave of her senses.” You can imagine the trouble I had with that one! And another went: “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,” spoken by an old man to a young girl.

The films themselves are at times fascinating. I have already gone through more of them than I know how to count and more than those remain. All of them are black and white, and they have the kind of jerky motions of the huge ape in
Kong Returns
. Everything about them is strange, not just the way the characters move and react. There is the—how can I say this?—the sense of involvement to them, the sense that great waves of feelingfulness wash over them. Yet to my understanding they are sometimes as blank and meaningless as the polished surface of a stone. Of course I do not know what a “mockingbird” is. Or what “Dr.” means. But it is more than that which disturbs me, more even than the strangeness, the sense of antiquity about the life that they convey. It is the hint of emotions that are wholly unknown to me—emotions that
every member
of the ancient audience of these films once felt, and that are now lost forever. It is sadness that I feel most often. Sadness. “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.” Sadness.

Often I eat lunch at my bed-and-desk. A cup of lentil soup with monkey bacon. Or a soybar. The servo janitor has been programmed to feed me what I ask for from the school cafeteria. I will sit, sometimes, and play a film section over and over again, eating slowly, trying to feel my way into that dim past. Some things I see there I cannot forget. Sometimes it will be a scene of a small girl crying over a grave in a field. Or of a horse standing on a city street, with a cumpled hat on its head and the ears sticking through, or of old men drinking from large glass mugs and laughing in silence on the screen. Sometimes, watching these things, I find myself in tears.

And then for days at a time all the feeling goes and I merely drudge on, going through a whole two-reel film from beginning to end in a kind of mechanical way: “Biograph Pictures presents
Margaret’s Lament
. Directed by John W. Kiley. Starring Mary Pickford . . .“ And so on, until ”The End.“ Then I shut off my recorder and remove the little steel ball and place it in its compartment in the black air-sealed case that holds the film. And then on to the next.

That is the drudgery part, and I sustain myself with marijuana and naps when it gets to be more than I can bear.

I saw a group immolation today, for the first time in my life. Two young men and a woman had seated themselves in front of a building that made and dispensed shoes along Fifth Avenue. They had apparently poured some flammable liquid over themselves, because they looked wet. I saw them just as the woman applied a cigarette lighter to the hem of her denim skirt and pale flames began to engulf them like a yellow blossom of gauze. They must have been filled with all the right drugs, because there was no sign of pain on any of their faces—only a kind of smiling—as the flame, pale in the sunlight, began first to redden them, then to make them black. Several passersby stopped and watched. Gradually a bad smell began to fill the area, and I left.

I had heard of such immolations, always in groups of three, but I had never seen one before. They are said to happen frequently in New York.

I have found a book—a real book! Not one of the slim readers that I studied from in Ohio and that only told of Roberto and of Consuela and of their dog Biff, but a real, thick palpable book.

It was simple. I merely opened one of the hundreds of doors along the vast stainless-steel hallway outside my office and there, in the center of a small bare room, in a glass case, sat this large, fat book. I lifted the top of the case, which was thick with dust, and picked it up. It was heavy, and its pages were dry to the touch and yellow. The book is called
Dictionary
. It contains a forest of words.

Now that I have begun keeping this journal I find myself paying more attention to oddities during the day than I used to—so that I may record them here at night in the archives, I suppose. Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”

For example, I have been noticing an odd thing at the Bronx Zoo, or several odd things. I have been taking a thought bus out to the zoo on Wednesdays for over a month and I find that I always see only five children there—and they always seem to be the same children. They all wear white shirts and they are always eating ice-cream cones and—perhaps most odd—they always seem terribly excited and filled with fun to be at the zoo. The other zoo visitors, my age or older, often look at them dreamily and smile, and, when looked at, the children point toward an animal, an elephant, say, and shout, “Look at the big elephant!” and the older people smile at one another, as if reassured. Something seems sinister about this. I wonder if the children are robots?

And more sinister, if they are robots, where are the
real
children?

Every time I go into the House of Reptiles I see a woman in a red dress. Sometimes she is lying on a bench near the iguanas, asleep. Other times she may be pacing around idly. Today she was holding a sandwich in her hand and watching the python as it slid through branches of a synthetic tree, behind the glass of its cage. Putting that down now, I wonder about the python. It is always sliding through those branches. Yet I seem to remember from the time long ago when I was a child (how long ago that was, I of course have no way of knowing) that the big snakes in zoos were usually asleep, or bunched up into dormant lumps in a corner of their cases, looking nearly dead. But the python at the Bronx Zoo is always sliding and darting its tongue and provoking gasps from the people who come into the House of Reptiles to see it. Could it be a robot?

Things have begun to flood over me. I feel shaken as I write this, shaken to report what I thought of today. Yet it was so obvious, so clear, once I saw it. Why have I never thought of it before?