Mockingbird (7 page)

I got that word “stunning” from a Theda Bara film. A nobleman and a servant were watching Miss Bara, in a black dress, carrying white flowers, come down a curved staircase. The servant said, as the words showed, “Pretty. Mighty pretty,” and the nobleman nodded slightly and said, “She is
stunning
.”

We had not talked much on the bus. When I got her to my bedroom-office she sat on the black plastic sofa and looked around her. The room is large and colorfully furnished—lavender rug, bright floral prints on the steel walls, and gentle lighting—and I was really quite proud of it. I would have liked a window; but it was in a basement—a fifth sub-basement, in fact—and far too deep in the ground for that.

“How do you like it?” I said.

She got up and straightened a picture of some flowers. “It’s a little like a Chicago whorehouse,” she said. “But I like it.”

I did not understand that. “What’s a Chicago whorehouse?” I said.

She looked at me and smiled. “I don’t know. It’s something my father used to say.”

“Your
father
?” I said. “You had a father?”

“Sort of. When I ran away from the dormitory a very old man took care of me. Out in the desert. His name was Simon, and whenever he saw anything that was very bright—like a sunset—he would say, ‘Just like a Chicago whorehouse.’”

She had been looking at the picture she had straightened. Then she turned her back on it and went to her seat on the sofa. “I could use a drink,” she said.

“Liquor doesn’t make you sick?”

“Not Syn-gin,” she said. “Not if I don’t drink much of it.”

“All right,” I said. “I think I can get some.” I pressed the button on my desk for the servo robot and when he came, almost immediately, I told him to bring us two glasses of Syn-gin and ice.

As he turned to leave she said, “Wait a minute, robot,” and then looked at me. “All right if I get something to eat? I’m awfully sick of the zoo’s sandwiches.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of it.” I was a bit put off by the way she seemed to be taking over, but I was pleased at the same time to be her host—especially since I had a great deal of unused credit on my NYU card. “The cafeteria machinery makes good monkey bacon and tomato sandwiches.”

She frowned. “I never could eat monkey bacon,” she said. “My father used to think monkey food was disgusting. How about roast beef? But not a sandwich.”

I turned to the robot. “Can you get a plate of sliced roast beef?”

“Yeah,” the robot said. “Sure.”

“Good,” I said, “and bring me some radishes and lettuce with my drink.”

The robot left, and for a minute there was an awkward silence in the room. I was surprised at that, and actually a bit pleased in a way. Sometimes Mary Lou seemed to have no sensitivity at all.

I broke the silence. “You ran away from the dormitory?”

“Around puberty time. I’ve run away from a lot of places.” I had never even thought that anyone might
think
of running away from a dormitory. No, that wasn’t true. I remembered, as a child, hearing boys boast of how they were going to “run away,” because they had been treated unfairly by a robot-teacher or something. But no one had ever done it. Except Mary Lou, it seemed.

“And you weren’t detected?”

“At first I was sure I would be.” She leaned back on the couch, relaxing. “I was terribly scared. I had walked for half a day down an old road and then found an empty old town in the desert. But the Detectors never came.” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “That was when I began to realize that the Detectors didn’t really work. And that you didn’t have to obey robots.”

I winced, remembering a thing that had happened to me in the dormitory, when a robot had put me in Coventry.

“You know,” she said, “they teach you that robots are made to serve humans. But the way they say that word ‘serve’ it sounds like ‘control.’ My father—Simon—called it ‘politician talk.’”

“Politician talk?”

“Some special way of lying,” she said. “Simon was very old when I met him. He died only a couple of yellows after I moved in with him, and his teeth were all gone, and he could barely hear. He said a lot of things that he had learned from
his
father—or somebody—and that were very old.”

“Was he trained in a dormitory?”

“I don’t know. I never thought of asking him.”

The robot came back, with our food and drinks. She took her plate of roast beef in one hand, her drink of Syn-gin in the other, and made herself comfortable on the sofa. She took a deep sip of the gin, swallowed it with a small shudder, and then took a slice of the meat with her fingers and ate it in a very natural way that was new to me—I had never seen anyone eat with his fingers before.

“You know,” she said, “Simon was probably the one who made a beef eater out of me. He used to rustle cattle from the big automatic ranches, or sometimes just hunt wild ones.”

I had never heard of such a thing. “Does ‘rustle’ mean ‘
steal’
?” I said.

She nodded. “I suppose so.” She took another slice of beef from the plate and then set the plate on the sofa beside her. She held the meat in her fingers and took another sip from the drink in her hand. “Don’t ask about the Detectors,” she said. “Because there weren’t any.” Then she finished her drink in one swallow. “Simon said that in his whole life he had never seen a Detector or heard of anyone being detected.”

It was terribly shocking, but it sounded true. I was not young and I had never seen one or known anyone who had been detected. But then I had never known anyone, before, to even risk it.

We stopped talking for a while then, and she concentrated on finishing the meat on her plate. I just watched her eat, still quietly astonished by her, by how interesting she was—and how physically attractive—and how I myself had got her to come here to stay with me.

I wondered about sex, of course, but I felt that would not happen for a while. I hoped it wouldn’t, since I am shyer than most people about it, and though she was powerfully attractive—a fact that seemed more evident than ever to me after I had finished my gin—I was too apprehensive now for anything of that kind.

Then after what seemed a long while, she said, “Let me see your recorder again,” and I said, “Certainly,” and went to my desk to get it. Next to the recorder was sitting the imitation fruit that she had picked from the python cage; she had not seemed to notice it since she had come to the room.

I left the fruit alone and took the recorder from my desk and gave it to her.

She remembered how to work it. “Do you mind,” she said, “if I record something?”

I told her to go ahead. Then I had the robot bring us each another Syn-gin and ice and I lay back in my bed and listened while she talked into the recorder.

It took me a moment before I realized what she was doing. She spoke in a kind of slow, hypnotized way and said the words without any apparent feeling. What she was doing, I realized eventually, was saying her “life” as she had “memorized” it—repeating the words as she had learned to repeat them by practice:

“I remember a chair by my bed. I remember a green dress that I wore to my classes. Everybody tried to dress differently from everybody else, to show our Individuality. But I think we all looked the same.

“I was very smart in my classes, but I hated them.

“I remember a girl named Sarah, with awful pimples on her face. She was the first to tell me about sex. She had done it already, while some other children watched. It sounded . . . wrong.

“There was desert all around the place where we all lived, and Gila monsters sometimes came into the dormitories to sleep. The robots would pick them up and carry them out. I felt sorry for the big, stupid lizards. In the House of Reptiles they do not have any Gila monsters, but I think they should have. . . .”

And on it went. At first I was interested, but after a while I became very sleepy. It had been a long day. And I was not used to drinking like that.

Somewhere during her talking into the recorder I fell asleep.

When I woke up this morning she was gone. At first I was alarmed to think she might have left. But I looked in the rooms along the hallway and, after opening a few that were empty, found her. She was curled up in the center of the room, on the heavy orange carpet, sleeping like a child. My heart warmed toward her. I felt like . . . like a
father
. And a lover too.

Then I came back to my office and had breakfast, and began writing this.

When I finish I will wake her up and we will go out to a restaurant for lunch.

After I woke her up I took her up Fifth Avenue on the conveyor belt and we had lunch at a vegetable restaurant. We had spinach and beans.

The two of us had not taken any pills or smoked any dope and it was surprising to notice how dazed and drugged everyone else seemed to be. Except, of course, for the robots who waited on us. An older couple at a table nearby kept repeating themselves in a kind of aimless imitation of a conversation. He would say, “Florida’s the best place,” and she would say, “I didn’t catch your name,” and he would say, “I like Florida,” and she would say, “It’s Arthur, isn’t it?” and it just went on like that throughout the meal. They must have had a sexual connection, but could not connect any other way. Such talk had never been uncommon, but there with Mary Lou, where we each had things to say to the other, and with our heads clear and wide-awake, it was especially noticeable. And saddening.

Mary Lou has been here three days now. For the first two of them she slept until noon, after telling me not to disturb her. I spent the mornings working on a film about men who were bare to the waist and who lived on the kind of sailboats that could cross an ocean. Mostly the men fought one another with knives and swords. They would say things like “Zounds!” and “
I
am master of the seas.” It was interesting; but Mary Lou was too much in my thoughts for me to pay it close attention.

I worked only in the mornings for those two days, since I was for some reason reluctant to let her see me at work. I don’t know why; but I did not want her to know about the reading.

And then on the third morning she came into my room and she was carrying a book in her hand. The sight of her was striking: she was wearing a pair of the pajamas I had given her, and the top was unbuttoned so that I could see the place between her breasts. She was wearing a cross around her neck. I could see her naveL “Hey, look!” she said. “Look what I found.” She held the book out to me.

Her pajama top adjusted itself to the gesture, and one of her nipples was briefly visible. I was confused, and must have looked like a fool standing there trying not to stare. I noticed that she was barefoot.

“Take it,” she said, and practically forced the book into my hand.

After another moment of confusion I took it. It was a small book, without the stiff cover that I thought books were supposed to have.

I looked at the cover. The picture on it—faded yellow and blue —made no sense. It was a pattern of dark and light squares, with odd-looking shapes sitting on some of them. The title was
Basic Chess Endings
and the author’s name was Reuben Fine.

I opened it up. The paper was yellow, and there were little diagrams of black and white squares and a lot of writing that did not seem to make sense.

I looked back to Mary Lou, having regained my calmness a bit. She must have noticed the way I had acted, because she had buttoned her pajama top. She was running her fingers through her hair, trying to comb it.

“Where did you get this?” I said.

She looked at me thoughtfully. Then she said, “Is it. . . Is it a
book
?”

“Yes,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

She was staring at it, in my hands. Then she said, “Jesus Christ!”

“What?”

“It’s just an expression,” she said. Then she took my hand and said, “Come on. I’ll show you where I found it.”

I followed along with her like a child, holding her hand. I was embarrassed by her touch and wanted to let go but did not know how. She seemed full of purpose and strength; I was confused and disoriented.

She took me down the hall farther than I had ever been before, around a corner and through a double door and then down another hall. There were doorways all along, and some of them were open. The rooms seemed to be empty.

She seemed to guess what I was thinking. “Have you been down this far before?” she said.

Somehow I felt ashamed that I hadn’t. But I had never thought of looking in all those rooms. It didn’t seem proper. I didn’t answer and she said, “I’ll close those doors later,” and then, “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got up after a while and started exploring.” She laughed. “Simon always said, ‘Check out your surroundings, sweetheart.’ So I’ve been wandering around the halls like Lady Macbeth opening doors. Most of the rooms were empty.”

“What’s Lady Macbeth?” I said, trying to make conversation.

“A person who walks around in pajamas,” she said.

At the end of the new hall we were in was a big red door, standing open. She led me to it, and as we walked into the room, finally let go of my hand.

I stared around me. The steel walls of the room were covered with shelves that were apparently made for books. I had seen a room somewhat like this in a film—except that there were big pictures on one of the walls of that room and tables and lamps. This one had nothing in it but shelves. Most of them were empty and covered with thick dust. There was a red carpet on the floor, with big spots of mold. But one wall, at the back of the room, had what must have been a hundred books.

“Look!” Mary Lou said, and ran over to the shelf. She ran a hand, very gently, along one of them. “Simon told me there were books. But I had no idea there were so many.”

Since I knew something about books already, it made me feel more comfortable—more in charge of things—to go over slowly and inspect them. I took one out of a shelf. The cover had a different version of that same pattern of squares, and the title read:
Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess
. Inside were the same diagrams as in the first, but more writing of the ordinary kind.