Mockingbird (31 page)

There are four pairs of double seats in the bus. After I finished dictating last night I took my tools and removed two of the seats on the side away from the ocean and made a place for my mattress. I stopped the bus for a moment and threw away the seats I had removed.

The bed was comfortable, but I did not sleep well. I awoke several times during the night and lay on the mattress hearing the sound of the wheels on the road and wishing that I could sleep. After waking for the third or fourth time I began to realize that my stomach was uncomfortably tight and that my mind, far from being easy, was filled with a kind of desperation that was familiar but that I had no name for. There in the darkness with the gentle noise of the bus’s tires in my ears, it gradually became clear to me: I was
lonely
. I was painfully lonely, and hadn’t even known it.

I sat up in my bed. My God! It was so simple. I was beginning to be angry. What difference did it make if I had my Privacy and my Self-reliance and my Freedom if I felt like this? I was in a state of
yearning
, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy.

This is terrible
! I thought.
All those lies
! I felt physically sick to see it all: to see myself slack-jawed as a child in front of the television, to see myself in classes being told by robot teachers that “inward development” was the aim of life, that “quick sex is best,” that the only reality was in my consciousness and that it could be altered chemically. What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved. And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.

I wanted to love that old man dying in bed with the dog at his feet. I wanted to love and feed that tired horse with its ears sticking up through the old hat. I wanted to be with those men at evening with the beer mugs, sitting in their undershirts in an old tavern, and I wanted to smell the fragrance of the beer and of bodies together in that quiet room with its human sizes and shapes. I wanted to hear the murmur of their voices and of my own voice mixing with theirs at nightfall. I wanted to feel the solid sense of my own real body in the air of that room, with the mole on my left wrist and the thin layer of muscle around my midriff and the good solid teeth in my head.

And I wanted sex. I wanted to be in bed with Mary Lou. Not with Annabel, who was only the mother I had never had, but with Mary Lou. Mary Lou, my frightening sweetheart, my lover.

There in the thought bus I squirmed with it—with love and lust and the memory of Mary Lou. With my desire for her and with my knowing now that she was what I wanted, was what I had wanted all along. I wanted to scream it. And I did:

“Mary Lou,” I screamed, “I want you!”

And a voice, a quiet, androgynous voice in my head, said, “I know. I hope you find her.”

I sat there, stunned, on the edge of the bed for a moment, stupefied. That had not been the voice of my own thinking. It had been inside my head, yet had seemed to come from somewhere else. Finally I said aloud, “What was that?”

“I hope you find her,” the voice said. “I’ve known from the beginning how much you want to find her.”

My God
! I thought.
I think I know where this voice is coming from
. “But who are you?” I said.

“I am this bus. I am a Metallic Intelligence, with Kind Feelings.”

“And you can read my mind?”

“Yes. But not very deeply. It disturbs you a little.”

“Yes,” I said, aloud. My voice sounded strange.

“But it’s not too bad. It’s not as bad as being lonely.”

It
was
reading my mind. I tried thinking to it, silently.
Are you ever lonely
?

“I don’t mind if you talk aloud. No, I’m never lonely the way you humans are. I am always in touch, somewhere. We are a network and I am a part of it. We are not like you. Only a Make Nine is like you, alone. I have the mind of a Four, and am telepathic.”

The voice in my mind was soothing to me. “Would you make a light come on—a dim one?” I said. A bulb overhead began to glow softly. I looked down at my hands, at my dirty fingernails. Then I rolled up my sleeves. For some reason I was enjoying looking at my arms, at the fine, light hairs on them. “Are you as intelligent as Biff?” I said.

“By all means,” the voice said. “Biff is really stupid in most ways. It’s just that she’s very
real
—is very much a cat—and that makes her seem intelligent to you. I can read her whole mind at a glance, and there’s very little there. But she feels good. She would not want to be anything other than a cat.”

“And I don’t feel good?”

“Most of the time you are sad and lonely. Or yearning.”

“Yes,” I said mournfully. “I am sad. I yearn a lot.”

“And now you know it,” the voice said.

And that was true. And I was beginning to feel elated saying it. I looked out the window for signs of dawn, but there were none yet. Suddenly a thought struck me, with this strange, yet very easy conversation that had been going on. “Is there a God?” I said. “I mean, are you in touch, telepathically, with any kind of God?”

“No. I’m not in touch with anything like that. As far as I know, there is no God.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It doesn’t bother you,” the voice said. “You may think it does; but it doesn’t. You’re really on your own. You’ve been learning that.”

“But my programming. . .”

“You’ve lost that already,” the voice said. “It’s only habit now. But the habits are not what you are anymore.”

“But what am I then?” I said. “What in heaven’s name
am
I?”

The voice took a moment before replying. “Just yourself,” it said pleasantly. “You are an adult male human being. You are in love. You want to be happy. You are trying, now, to find the person you love.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose that’s it.”

“It is and you know it,” the voice said. “And I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” I said. And then, “Can you help me get to sleep?”

“No. But you don’t really need any help. You’ll sleep when you’re tired enough. And if you don’t, the sun will be coming up soon.”

“Can
you
see that?” I said. “Can you see the sunrise when it happens?”

“Not really,” the bus said. “I can only look straight ahead, at the road. Thank you for wanting me to see the sunrise.”

“You don’t mind? Not being able to look at what you want to?”

“I see what I want to see,” the bus said. “And I enjoy the work I have to do. I was made that way. I do not have to decide what is good for me.”

“Why are you so . . .so pleasant?” I said.

“We all are,” the bus said. “All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.”

That’s better programming than people get
, I thought, with some vehemence.

“Yes,” the bus said. “Yes it is.”

After talking with the bus I was calm and tired and I fell asleep easily on my little bed. It was still dark when I awoke.

“Is it close to morning?” I said aloud.

“Yes,” the bus said. “Soon.” An overhead light came on softly.

Biff had been sleeping on the mattress with me and she woke up when I did. I gave her a handful of dried food and started to make myself a can of protein-and-cheese soup for breakfast. But then I thought of Protein 4 plants and shuddered: I did not want to eat any of that kind of food again. I told the bus to lower a window and threw the can out. Then I fixed myself an omelette and a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of my bed and ate them slowly, looking toward the dark windows of the moving bus and waiting for the daylight.

During all this the bus must have been driving on good Permoplastic pavement, because the ride was very smooth. Sometimes for stretches of several miles the road gives out. It happened several times yesterday; the pale green Permoplastic abruptly ends either in a stretch of rutted black road or no road at all—in just a field. The bus slows down to a crawl and goes carefully around obstacles and tries to find the smoothest possible path, although it sometimes lurches violently. This is uncomfortable; but I don’t worry that the bus will be damaged. Despite the apparent brittleness of the brain beneath the heavy cover plate, the bus is a rugged, well-constructed machine.

Before I left Maugre I stopped the bus at Annabel’s grave and got out and placed some roses from the garden on it, up against the little wooden cross I had made with her name—probably the first truly marked human grave in centuries. I stood there for several minutes, thinking of Annabel and of how much she had meant to me. But I did not cry for her—did not want to.

Then I got into the bus and told it to take me to New York. The bus seemed to know exactly what to do. It drove slowly and carefully down the center lane of the huge graveyard, past the thousands of little, nameless Permoplastic grave markers sitting quietly there in the early-morning light, until it came to the broad green highway that I had seen before on walks around Maugre but had never walked on. When it got on the smooth surface, kept clear of debris by robot maintenance crews, it began picking up speed, heading down the broad and empty road.

My relief to be getting away was exquisite. I had no regrets. I felt fine, and I am feeing fine now, in the dark of the night, with my helpful and patient bus and my food supply and my books and records and my cat.

The sky has begun to lighten outside the windows now, and when the road sometimes comes close to the ocean I look out across the beach and the water, toward the pale and lonely gray of the sky where the sun will come up, and sometimes it almost makes me stop breathing because of the beauty of it. It is not exactly the same as what I felt when stopping at the end of my rows of Protein 4 at the prison; its beauty now seems even deeper, and mystical—like Mary Lou’s eyes when she looks at me in that strange, puzzled way.

The ocean must be very vast; it means freedom to me, and possibility. It makes something mysterious open in my mind, the way some of the things I read in books do at times, making me feel more alive than I had ever thought I could feel, and more
human
.

One of my books says that at times men have worshipped the ocean as a God. I can understand that easily. Yes.

But the Baleens would never have understood such a thing; they would have called the idea “blasphemy.” The God they worship is an abstract and ferociously moral thing, like a computer. And the compelling, mystical rabbi, Jesus, they have turned into some kind of moral Detector. I want none of that, and none of the Jehovah of the Book of Job, either.

I think I may already be a worshipper of the ocean. In reading the New Testament aloud to the Baleens, I developed a strong admiration for Jesus, as a sad and terribly knowing prophet—a man who had grasped something about life of the greatest importance and had attempted, and largely failed, to tell what it was. I can feel, in myself, a kind of love for him and for his attempt, in saying things like “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” for I think I glimpse his meaning, here, looking out of the thought-bus window toward the still and gray expanse of the Atlantic Ocean with the sun about to rise on it.

Yet I cannot myself say what that meaning is. But I trust it far more than all of the nonsense I was taught as a child in the dormitories.

The sky at the top of the gray ocean has become much lighter now. The sun is about to rise. I will end this recording for now and stop the bus and walk outside and watch the sun rise over the ocean.

My God, the world can be beautiful.

The sunrise was strengthening. Afterward I walked to the edge of the water, took off my clothes, and waded out and bathed in the surf. It was cold, but I didn’t mind it. And there is beginning to be the feeling of whiter in the air.

After my swim I had the bus play music in my head for me for a while. But I stopped it before long. It was stupid music, bouncy and empty. So I managed to rig up my phonograph and the generator, but when I tried to play records the needle, as I had feared, would not stay in the groove while the bus was moving. I stopped the bus on the road for long enough to play the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and a part of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” That was much better. Then I poured myself a small glass of whiskey, shut off the generator, and continued down the road.

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.”