Mockingbird

Bentley

The winter must have been coming to an end, for it was never as cold again after I left the toaster factory as it had been before. And I was never that sick again, even though I was still a bit weak when I left the unholy security of that place.

My progress northward became faster and the food I had taken from the factory, evil-tasting though it was, gave me strength. I continued to find clams and, later, mussels. And I frightened a sea gull on the beach away from a fish it had just caught; the stew it made lasted three days. Eventually my health returned better than it had ever been. I had become very firm and tough, and I could walk all day without fatigue, at a steady pace. I began to allow myself to think about Mary Lou and about the possibility of truly finding her. But I had a long way to go, I was certain; although I had no idea of just how far.

Then one afternoon I looked ahead of me and saw a road that wound its way across a field and down to the beach.

I ran up to it and saw that it was of ancient cracked asphalt, in places overgrown with weeds, with its surface old and faded and crumbled, but still walkable. I began to follow it, away from the beach.

I saw in the high weeds along the side of that decayed road something I had never seen before: a road sign. I had noticed them in films and read about them in books, but I had never seen one. It was of faded green and white Permoplastic, with its lettering almost obscured by dirt and vines; but when I pushed the vines away I could read it:

I looked at it for a long time. Something about the presence of this ancient thing, there in the weak sun of early spring, gave my body a sudden chill.

I picked up Biff in my arms and walked quickly down the road and around a bend.

And I saw spread out in front of me, half buried by trees and bushes, a cluster of Permoplastic houses—perhaps five hundred of them, filling a kind of shallow valley below me. The houses were set rather far from one another, with what once must have been parks and concrete streets between them. But there was no sign of human habitation. In what must have been the town’s center were two large buildings and a huge white obelisk.

As I approached the town I began to push through rosebushes and honeysuckle, near-dead from winter, and I saw that the houses, perhaps once brightly colored, were all faded to a uniform bone white.

I walked into Maugre with trepidation. Even Biff seemed nervous, and squirmed in my arms and clawed at the straps that held my backpack. Where the town began was a haphazard trail through the underbrush between the houses; I began to follow it. I could not tell if the houses had porches, since the fronts of them were so overgrown; on only a few of them were doors visible through the bushes and weeds and honeysuckles.

I was heading toward the obelisk. It seemed to be the thing to do.

One house I passed had fewer obstructions between me and its door and I set Biff down and pushed my way through the growth and came up to it, scratching myself several times on rosebushes as I did so. But I hardly noticed the scratches, the sensation of being in a dream or a hypnotic trance was so strong.

I was able, after some tearing of weeds, to get the front door open and, with a kind of awe, step inside. I was in a big living room with nothing in it. Absolutely nothing. The light was dim from the mold-covered and dusty plastic windows.

Opaque Permoplastic is the most tenacious—the most dead— material designed by man, and the entire room was merely a huge seamless hollow cube of it, all pink with rounded corners. There was no indication that anyone had ever lived there; but I knew that the nature of the material was such that the house could have been lived in for a hundred blues and have no signs—no scuff marks on the floor, handprints on the walls, smoke stains on the ceiling, no visible remnants of children playing or fighting or of where a favorite table had sat throughout the life of a family.

For some reason I shouted, “Is anybody home?” It was a phrase I had learned from films.

There was not even an echo. I thought sadly of those men in the film drinking from large glasses and laughing. Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods. I left. Biff was waiting for me, and I picked her up in my arms.

We headed for the obelisk. As we got closer the path became wider, easier to walk, and we came to the near-clearing of two big buildings and the obelisk more quickly than I had expected.

The obelisk was whiter than the bone white of all the buildings. It was about sixty feet wide at its base and rose about two hundred feet into the air, resembling the Washington Monument that I had seen in so many books and films and that was all that remained of the city of Washington, D.C.

There was a glass double door, only partly overgrown by blue morning glories, at the base of it, and as I walked around I saw that each of the four faces of the structure had a huge door. And on the fourth side I saw, up high and in large, raised letters, these words:

I read it over twice. Was the “shield” the obelisk itself? Or was it within the doors?

I set Biff down and began trying the doors. The third one slid open with no effort.

Inside was a lobby, lit by the light through the glass doors. Two broad staircases, descending, were on either side of me. Another, narrower staircase went up. I hesitated only a minute and then began to go down the stairs on my left. After six or seven steps down, just as it was beginning to get dim, a soft light began to come from the yellow walls on either side of me, and on one wall were written these words:

And then, six or eight steps further down, other soft lights came on and I saw these words on the wall, which at this level was of a different color—gray:

And when I came to the bottom of the staircase I found myself in a huge, long, wide hallway with glass chandeliers of soft pink that came on gently at my approach and signs on each side of me that glowed:

And then, astonishingly, there began the sound of soft music, light and airy, of flutes and oboes; and, about fifty yards ahead of me, a great spray of water began to rise from a broad pool, and varicolored lights—blue and green and yellow—began to play over it and there came the sound of the water falling, the sound of the fountain.

I walked toward the fountain, marveling. Biff jumped from my arms and ran ahead of me and, without hesitating, perched herself on the edge of the pool, put her head down, and began to drink.

I came up slowly to her, bent down, cupped my hands with the cool, fresh water, raised it to my hot and dry face, and smelled it. It was clean and pure. I drank handfuls of it, and then washed my face in it.

The pool’s sides were made of thousands of little squares of silver tiles, with white lines of mortar between them, and in the bottom of the pool, under the water, was a giant mosaic, in black and gray and white tiles, of a humpbacked whale with its back arched and its flukes spread.

The water of the fountain jetted up from between a group of three dolphins, curved and vertical, carved in black. I had seen something like it in a picture book called The Fountains of Rome. I stood back and stared at it, at the silver rim of the pool, the great picture of the whale, the dolphins, the great upward jet of water, feeling fine spray from the water on my face and body, hearing the music of flutes, and the hairs on my arms and the hairs on the back of my neck seemed to raise themselves and a fine tingle, almost painful, spread through my body.

It was like seeing the birds at the edge of the sea turning in flight, or a storm on the gray ocean, or the great ape Kong in his slow and graceful falling.

Beyond the fountain the great hallway ended at the top of a “T,” with huge double doors going to the right and to the left. Over the doors to the left were the words:

and over the other door was simply:

This door opened automatically as I approached it and I found myself in another long, wide, tiled hallway. On either side of this were store entrances, far more of them than I had ever seen in my life. I have seen windows with merchandise displayed in them in New York and in the university where I live and teach; but I had never seen anything on a scale like this, and with such abundance.

The nearest store to me was called Sears; in its huge, curved windows was an array of merchandise that was almost beyond belief. More than half of it consisted of things I did not recognize. Some of them I was familiar with. But there were colored balls and electronic devices and mysterious bright-colored things that could have been either weapons or toys, for all I knew.

I slid the door open and walked inside, dazed. I was in a part of the huge store that had clothing in it. All of it looked new, fresh, wrapped in some kind of clear plastic that must have kept it sealed for hundreds of years.

My own clothes were worn and frayed, and I began to find myself new ones.

And then, when I was trying to determine how to take the plastic covering off a blue jacket that seemed as though it would fit me, I happened to look at the tiled floor at my feet.

There were muddy footprints all over the tile, and they looked fresh.

I kneeled and reached out my hand and touched the mud. It was slightly damp.

I found myself standing up and looking all around me. But I saw nothing but the racks upon racks of clothing and beyond them shelves of brightly colored goods of all descriptions—shelves after shelves as far as I could see. But nothing moved. Then I looked down at the floor again and saw that the footprints were everywhere—some fresh, some old. And they had been made by different-sized shoes and had different shapes.

Biff had wandered off somewhere and I called for her, but she did not come. I began looking, walking down aisles with apprehension. What if the makers of the footprints were still about? But, then, what did I have to fear from another human being? Or from a robot, for that matter, since none had followed me from prison and there had been no sign of any Detector or anything else searching for me. Still, I was afraid—or “spooked,” as the Dictionary of American Slang would have it.

I found Biff eventually, greedily eating from a box of dried beans that had been opened and left on a counter top alongside hundreds of similar but unopened boxes. Biff was purring mightily and I could hear her teeth crunching into the beans. I picked up one of the unopened boxes from next to her; she did not even bother to look up at me. The box—unlike food boxes I had known before—had writing on it:

There was a picture of a steaming plate of beans, with a slice of bacon on top of them, on the side of the box. But the beans Biff was still devoting her entire attention to looked dry, withered, and unappetizing. I reached into her box and took a small handful. Biff looked up at me and bared her teeth for a moment, but turned her attention back to the eating. I put one of the beans into my mouth and chewed it. It was not really bad, and I was hungry. I popped the rest of the handful into my mouth and, chewing, studied one of the sealed boxes, trying to determine how to get it open. There were directions at the top, about pressing a white dot and then pulling on a red tab, while twisting. I tried all the combinations I could think of, but the box wouldn’t open. By this time I had finished the beans I had, and Biff’s were all gone too. My appetite had been aroused and I was becoming furious with the apparently unopenable box. Here I was, the only man on earth able to read the directions for opening a box of beans, and it was no help.

Then I remembered passing an aisle where various tools were displayed. I went to it. My anger and hunger had made me forget my former apprehensions and I strode over, walking firmly and loudly. I found a hatchet, much like the one in Wife Killer Loose, except that it was wrapped in plastic, and I could not get it open either.

I was becoming furious, and the fury increased my appetite for those beans. I tried to bite into the plastic on the hatchet so that I could tear it; but it was too tough for my teeth. Then I saw a glass case holding some kind of small boxes, on another aisle, and went over there, raised the hatchet, brought it down, and crashed open the glass. Some jagged pieces were left in the frame of the case and I hooked a point of one on the plastic, and pulled. The plastic began to tear and, finally, I was able to twist it away from the hatchet.

Then I went back to the beans and began to chop away at the top of the box until it tore open and the beans came spilling out. I set the hatchet down on the counter and began to eat.

And it was while I was chewing my third mouthful that I heard a deep voice behind me saying, “What the hell are you doing, mister?”

I spun around and saw two large people, a dark-bearded old man and a large woman, standing there staring at me. Each held a leash in one hand, with a large dog, and in the other hand each was carrying a long butcher knife. The dogs were staring at me as intently as the people were. The dogs were white—albinos, I think —and their eyes were pinkish.

Beside me Biff had arched her back and was showing her teeth toward the dogs and I realized that it was probably not me but Biff beside me that they were staring at.

The people were older than I, as well as larger. Their stares were well past the limits of Privacy, but more curious than hostile. But their knives were long and frightening.

My mouth was still half full of the beans. I chewed a moment and then said, “I’m eating. I was hungry.”

“What you’re eating,” the man said, “belongs to me.”

The woman spoke up. “To us,” she said. “To the family.”

Family. I had never heard anyone use that word, except in a film.

The man ignored her. “Which town are you from, mister?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m from Ohio.”

“He could be from Eubank,” the woman said. “He looks like he might be a Dempsey. They’re all kind of thin.”

I managed to swallow the last of the beans in my mouth.

“Or a Swisher,” the man said. “Out of Ocean City.”

Suddenly Biff turned from the dogs and leapt across the counter she was standing on and ran—faster than I had ever seen her rundown the counter tops away from us. The dogs had turned to follow with their eyes, straining at their leashes. The man and woman ignored her.

“Which of the seven towns do you come from?” the man said. “And why are you breaking the law by eating our food?”

“And,” the woman said, “violating our sanctuary in here?”

“I’ve never heard of the seven towns,” I said. “I’m a stranger, passing through. I was hungry and when I found this place I came in. I didn’t know it was a… a sanctuary.”

The woman stared at me. “You don’t know a church of the living God when you see one?”

I looked around me, at the aisles covered with plastic-sealed merchandise, at the racks of colored clothing and electronic equipment and rifles and golf clubs and jackets.. “But this is no church,” I said. “This is a store.”

They said nothing for quite a long while. One of the dogs, apparently tired of staring after the direction Biff had left in, settled itself down on the floor and yawned. The other began sniffing at the man’s feet.

Then the man said, “That’s blasphemy. You’ve already blasphemed by eating holy food without permission.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea…”

Abruptly he stepped forward and took me by the arm in what was an extremely strong grip and he held the point of his knife to my stomach. While he was doing this the woman, moving very quickly for her size, stepped over to the counter and took the hatchet I had been using. She had, I suppose, expected me to try defending myself with it.

I was terrified and said nothing. The man put his knife in his belt, stepped behind me, brought my arms together behind my back, and told the woman to get him some rope. She went over to a counter several rows away where there was a large roll of Synlon cord and cut off a piece with her knife, leaving the hatchet there. She brought it to him and he tied my hands together. The dogs watched all this languidly. I was beginning to pass beyond fear into some sort of calmness. I had seen things of this sort on television, and I was beginning to feel that the situation was one that I was merely watching, as though there were no real danger to me. But my heart was pounding wildly and I could feel myself trembling. Yet somehow my mind had moved above this and I felt a calmness. I wondered what had become of But—and what would become of her.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“I am going to fulfill the scripture,” he said. “He who blasphemes my holy place shall be cast into the lake of fire that burneth forever.”

“Jesus Christ!” I said. I don’t know why I said that. Possibly it was the Bible language that the man had used.

“What did you say?” the woman said.

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ.’”

“Who told you that name?”

“I learned it from the Bible,” I said. I did not mention Mary Lou, nor did I mention the man who, burning in immolation, had shouted the name of Jesus.

“What Bible?” she said.

“He’s lying,” the man said. And then to me, “Show me that Bible.”

“I don’t have it anymore,” I said. “I had to leave it…”

The man just stared at me.

Then they took me out into the grand hallway of the Mall where the fountain was, past stores and restaurants and meditation parlors and a place with a sign that said:

As we passed a large shop with a sign that read: DISPENSARY, the man slowed down and said, “The way you’re shaking, mister, I guess you could use some help.” He pushed open the door of the shop and we came into a place with rows and rows of large sealed jars filled with pills of all sizes and shapes. He walked up to one that said “SOPORS: Non-addictive. Fertility-inhibiting” on it, reached into his pants pocket and took out a handful of old and faded credit cards, selected a blue card from the pack, and slipped it into the mechanical slot at the bottom of the jar on the counter.

The glass jars were some kind of primitive dispenser—certainly not as sleek and quick as the store machinery I was accustomed to —such as in the place on Fifth Avenue where I had bought Mary Lou that yellow dress. It took it at least a minute of clicking over the card before returning it, and then a half minute before the metal door in the base opened and dispensed a handful of blue pills.

The man scooped them up and said, “How many sopors you want, mister?”

I shook my head. “I don’t use them,” I said.

“You don’t use them? What in hell do you use?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Not for a long time.”

The woman spoke up. “Mister, in about ten minutes you’re going into the lake of fire that burneth forever. I’d take ever damn one of them pills.”

I said nothing.

The man shrugged. He took one of the pills himself, handed one to the woman, and put the rest in his pocket.

We walked out of the shop, leaving its rows of hundreds of bottles and jars of pills, and as we left, the automatic lighting in the shop went off behind us.

We turned a corner and a new fountain came on, with lights and with new, softer music. It was, if anything, larger than the first.

On either side of us now were stainless-steel walls, with occasional doorways. Over each doorway was a sign that read:

or

“Who sleeps in those places?” I said.

“Nobody,” the woman said. “They was for the ancients. Those of old.”

“How ancient?” I said. “How old?”

The woman shook her head. “The ancient of days. When they was giants in the earth and they feared the wrath of the Lord.”

“They feared the rain of fire from Heaven,” the man said. “And they didn’t trust Jesus. The rain of fire never come, and the ancients died.”

We passed by more and more sleeping quarters, and by at least a half mile of stainless-steel walls merely marked STORAGE, and then, finally, we came to the dead end of the corridor, where there was a massive door with a sign in red: POWER SOURCE: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

The man had taken a small metal plate from his pocket. He held it against a matching rectangle in the center of the door and said, “The key to the Kingdom.”

The door slid open and a soft light came on.

Inside was a smaller corridor, and the air in it was distinctly warm. The dogs were left outside and we walked down it, toward another door. It became warmer as we walked. I was beginning to perspire and would have liked to wipe my forehead but my hands were still tied behind me.

We came to the door. The sign on it was in large orange letters:

The man held a different card to this door and when it opened the heat was palpable and intense. There was another door just inside this one and the man this time put yet another card into a slot beside it and the door opened about two feet wide. There was a brilliant orange glow behind it that illuminated some kind of enormous room. A room without a floor. Or with a floor of orange light. The heat was overwhelming.

Then the man’s voice said, “Behold the eternal fire.” And I felt myself being pushed from behind, and my heart almost stopped beating and I could not speak. I looked down and was able to hold my eyes in a squint for only a split second, but long enough to see that a great circular pit was directly in front of my feet and that down, incalculably far down in that pit, was a fire like that of the sun.

And then I was pulled back, limp, and the man’s hands turned my body around to face his and he said, quietly, “Do you have any last words?”

I looked at his face. It was impassive, quiet, sweating. “I am the resurrection and the life,” I said. “He that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live.”

The woman shrieked, “My God, Edgar! My God!”

The man looked at me firmly. “Where did you learn those words?” he said.

I groped for something to say, and finally found only the truth— which I felt that he would not understand. But I said it anyway. “I have read the Bible.”

“Read?” the woman said. “You can read scripture?”

I felt that I would die from the heat at my back if I did not get away in less than a minute, I could see that the man’s face was showing pain from the heat, or doubt.

“Yes,” I said. “I can read scripture.” I looked him directly in the eyes. “I can read anything.”

The man stared at me with his broad face twisted for one more horrible moment and then, abruptly, he pulled me forward, away from the fire, and pushed me through the outer door and then closed it. Then we went through the second door, and it closed itself, and the air was bearable. “All right,” the man said. “We’ll go to the book and see if you can read it.”

Then he took his knife and cut the ropes that held my hands.

“I must find Biff first,” I said.

And I found her, halfway to Sears, and took her up in my arms.

We had passed another fountain on my frightened way to the Lake of Fire; returning to Sears, as we approached the fountain again a scene from an ancient film came into my mind: in King of Kings the actor H. B. Warner asks a man named John to “baptize” him, by wetting him in a river. It is clearly a moment of great mystical significance. My steps down the wide and empty corridor of the Mall seemed light. The man and woman flanked me, but this time without restraint; they had untied me. Their dogs were silent and submissive; all that could be heard was the regular pattern of our footsteps and the music that came from invisible speakers and bathed us in airy sound. And louder now came the splashing of the fountain water, returning to the pool from its graceful arcing toward the high ceiling.

I thought of Jesus, bearded and serene, in the Jordan River. Abruptly I stopped and said, “I want to be baptized. In this fountain.” My voice was clear and strong. I was staring at the water in the great circular pool beside me and there was a light spray in my face.

Out of the side of my vision I saw the woman, as if in a dream, sink to her knees, her long, full denim skirt slowly ballooning around her as she did so. And her voice, weak now, was saying, “My God. The Holy Spirit told him to speak them words.”

Then I heard the man’s voice saying, “Get up, Berenice. He could have been told about that. Not everybody keeps church secrets.”

I turned to watch her as she got up from her knees, pulling her blue sweater back down over her broad hips. “But he knew the fount when he saw it,” she said. “He knew the place of holy water.”

“I told you,” the man said, but with doubt in his voice. “He could of heard from anybody in the other six towns. Just because Baleens don’t backslide don’t mean the Graylings don’t. Manny Grayling could of told him. Hell, he might be Grayling—one they been hiding from Church.”

She shook her head. “Baptize him, Edgar Baleen,” she said. “You can’t refuse the Sacrament.”

“I know that,” he said quietly. He began taking off his denim jacket. He looked at me, his face grave. “Sit down. On the edge.”

I seated myself on the edge of the fountain and the woman kneeled and took off my shoes and then my socks. She rolled up my pantlegs. Then she sat on one side of me, and the man, jacketless now, on the other side, and they both took off their shoes and socks. They had released the dogs and the two white animals just stood there patiently, watching us and watching Biff, who had curled herself on the floor.

“All right,” the man said. “Step into the fount.”

I stood up and stepped over the edge into the water, which was cold. Looking down, I saw that the pool had its tiles arranged into the shape of a giant fish, much like the one I had found on the shore and eaten—a huge silver fish with fins and gills. The water came up to my knees, and the rest of me was drenched by the spray, and it was very cold. But I felt no discomfort.

I was staring down at the giant fish on which I stood when the two of them came up beside me. The man bent, cupping his hands together, held them under water for a moment and then raised them, dripping, to my head. I felt his hands, open now, on my head and then the water from them was streaming down my face.

“I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he said.

The woman reached out and placed her large soft hand on my head. “Amen and praise the Lord,” she said softly.

We stepped out of the fountain and I waited, with the man, the dogs, and Biff, while the woman went to Sears and came back with towels for our feet. We dried our feet and legs, put on our shoes, and continued walking, in silence.

I felt even lighter than before, more remote and yet more truly present at the same time, extremely alive to what was outside me and inside me at the same time. I felt that I had crossed some invisible line, one that had been waiting for me ever since I had left Ohio, and had now entered some symbolic realm where my life was light, “like a feather on the back of my hand,” and where only my own experience of that life, my own undrugged experience, was all that I was living for. And if that experience meant death in the Lake of Fire, it would have to be acceptable.

I wonder now, writing this down, if that is how those who immolate themselves feel when they decide to do it. But they are drugged, unaware. And they cannot read.

Could baptism really work? Could there be a Holy Spirit? I do not believe so.

We walked in silence down the wide hall and back up the broad staircase, and the lights behind us dimmed and darkened, and the music became silent and the fountains stopped as we left.

Near the top of the stairs I was able to turn for a moment to look down on the vast and empty Mall, with its chandeliers dimming and its fountains dying down, and its storefronts still bright as if waiting for customers who would never come. I could sense the sad dignity of that place, of its broad, clean emptiness.

They took me back outdoors into what had become evening, and led me, still silently, to one of the large buildings that flanked the obelisk—a big, official-looking building with a well-trimmed lawn and no weeds around it. We went to the back of the building and I saw a garden there and, added on to the building itself, an incongruous back porch made of wood, looking like one I had seen in Birth of a Nation.

We entered by a door on this porch and I found myself in a huge, high-ceilinged room with perhaps thirty people in it, all plainly dressed, all silent, sitting around an enormous wooden table as though they had been waiting for me. The people at the table had been silent when we came in; they remained silent as the old man and his wife led me through the room and around the table—as silent as the eating rooms of a dormitory or of a prison.

We went down a narrow hallway into another, equally large room, with rows of wooden chairs in it, facing a podium. Behind the podium was a wall-sized television screen, now off.

Baleen led me up to the podium. There was a large black book on it and, although whatever lettering might have once been on its cover was now completely worn off, I was certain the book was the Bible.

The lightness and strength I had felt in the Mall were leaving me. I stood there, slightly embarrassed, looking at this quiet old room with its worn wooden chairs and its pictures of the face of Jesus on the walls and the big television screen, and before long the people from the kitchen started coming into the room and sitting down, men and women walking in quietly in twos and threes and sitting wordlessly and then looking at me with a kind of shy curiosity. They all wore jeans and simple shirts, and a few of the men were bearded like me but most were not. I watched them with a certain hope that I might see young people, but that hope was disappointed; no one was any younger than I. There was a couple holding hands and looking like lovers; but they were obviously in their forties.

And then when all of the chairs were full Edgar Baleen stood up and suddenly threw his arms out wide, palms upward, saying loudly, “My brethren.”

Everyone watched him attentively; the lovers let go of one another’s hands. Most of the people were in couples, but in the second row was a woman of about my age, sitting alone. She was tall and, like all of them, simply dressed, wearing a denim shirt with a blue apron over it, but she was striking to look at. Despite my nervousness I found myself watching her as much as I could without being obvious about it. She really was, I began to see, a beautiful woman; it was pleasant to look at her and to get my mind partly off what I had just been through at the Lake of Fire and of what might be in store for me. Whatever might happen, I felt that the crisis was past now; and I deliberately made myself think about the woman.

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:

And then, under that, the letters were small:

And at the bottom of the page:

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:

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:

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.

There had been letters engraved in the stone arch over the doorway of the building: HALL OF JUSTICE: MAUGRE. The sign had made little impression on me the day before, but standing in the kitchen now, I imagined that the room, like the one I had done my Bible reading in, had been a courtroom in the ancient world; it was very large and high-ceilinged, with tall, thin, arched windows on each of the longer walls. The huge, now empty table in the center of the room looked as though it had been roughly made a long time before with a Sears chain saw; rough benches were placed around it.

Along one wall under the windows was a wide black institutional stove, with a pile of wood on each side of it, and wooden counters with tops that looked polished and scrubbed and worn. Over the stove were white enameled oven doors, and on each side of them hung a row of pots and pans, large ones, stretching half the length of the room. On the opposite wall were eight battery-powered white refrigerators; each said KENMORE on its front. Next to the refrigerators was a long and deep sink. At this were standing two women, in floor-length blue dresses, their backs toward me, washing dishes.

Everything seemed completely different from the way it had been the night before. There were glass bowls of freshly cut yellow tulips on the table, and the room was filled with daylight and smelled of bacon and coffee. The women did not look over at me, although I was sure they had heard my footsteps on the bare floor.

I walked over toward the sink and hesitated. Then I said, “Excuse me.”

One of them, a short, dumpy woman with white hair, turned and looked at me, but said nothing.

“I wonder if I could have something to eat.”

She looked at me a moment, then turned and reached up and got a yellow box from a shelf over the sink and handed it to me. There was writing on the box that said: SURVIVAL COFFEE, INSTANT TYPE. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE. IRRADIATED TO PREVENT SPOILAGE.

While I was reading that she had gotten me a large rough ceramic mug and a spoon from the dish drainer beside the sink. “Use the samovar,”, she said, and nodded toward the stove across the room.

I went over and made myself a mug of strong black coffee, seated myself at the table, and began to sip it.

The other woman opened a refrigerator and got something out and then turned and walked across the room to the stove. I saw that she was the woman whom I had stared at, and who had exhorted me to read, the night before. She did not look at me. She seemed shy.

She opened one of the ovens on the stove, took something from it, put it on a platter and brought it over to the table. Avoiding my eyes, she put it in front of me along with a dish of butter and a knife. The dishes were heavy and dark brown.

I looked up at her. “What is it?” I said.

She looked at me, surprised at my ignorance, I suppose. “It’s a coffee cake,” she said.

I had never seen such a thing and did not know how to deal with it. She took the knife and cut a piece from the cake. She spread butter on it and handed it to me.

I tasted it. It was sweet and hot and had nuts on it. It was completely delicious. When I finished it she handed me another piece, smiling shyly. She seemed flustered, and that was odd, since she had appeared quite bold the night before.

The cake and the coffee were so good, and her shyness was so much like what I had been trained to expect from people, that I felt emboldened and spoke to her in a friendly way. “Did you make this cake?” I said.

She nodded and said, “Would you like an omelette?”

“An omelette?” I said. I had heard the word, but had never seen one. It had something to do with eggs.

When I didn’t reply she went over to the refrigerator and came back with three large, real eggs. I had eaten real eggs only on rare occasions, such as my graduation from the dormitory. She took them to the stove and cracked them into a brown ceramic bowl, and then placed a small and shallow black pan on the stove, put butter in it and let it heat. She stirred up the eggs vigorously, poured them into the pan, and with a great deal of agility slid the pan rapidly back and forth on the stove while looping the eggs around with a fork. She was very beautiful, doing this. Then she took the pan by its handle, brought it over to the table, upended the handle, and neatly slid a yellow crescent of eggs onto my plate. “Eat it with a fork,” she said.

I took a bite. It was wonderful. I finished it silently. I believe, even now, that omelette and coffee cake were the best meal I had ever eaten in my life.

I felt even bolder after eating and I looked at her, still standing by me, and said, “Would you show me how to make an omelette?”

She looked shocked, and said nothing.

Then from the sink the other woman’s voice said, “Men don’t cook.”

The woman beside me hesitated a moment, and then said softly, “This man is different, Mary. He’s a Reader.”

Mary did not turn around. “The men are in the fields,” she said, “doing the Lord’s work.”

The woman by me was shy, but she knew her own mind. She ignored Mary and said to me, “Did you read the writing on the coffee box when she gave it to you?”

“Yes,” I said.

She went to the stove and got it from where I had left it. “Read it to me,” she said. And I did. She was very attentive to the words and when I was finished she said, “What’s ‘Maugre’?”

“The name of this town,” I said. “Or I think it is.”

She looked open-mouthed. “The town has a name?” she said.

“I think so.”

“The house has a name,” she said. “Baleena.” That is how I have chosen to spell it: It was not written anywhere until I wrote it, much later, for old Edgar.

“Well, Baleena is in the town of Maugre,” I said.

She nodded thoughtfully, and then went to the refrigerator and got a bowl of eggs. Then she began to show me how to make an omelette.

That is how I got to know Annabel Baleen.

Annabel taught me how to make an omelette that morning, and a souffle. She made a coffee cake with me, showing me how to make dough from flour and how to use yeast. The flour came from a large bin under the counter that we worked on; she said it was grown “out in the field.” That was where all the other members of the family were. Annabel was always in charge of the kitchen; she had been given that job, she said, because she was a “loner.” The other woman was assigned to help her with the cleaning up after meals. At other times she worked in the flower garden outside the house. Annabel had worked for a few years in the fields, but she hated the work and hated the way no one ever talked while working. When an older woman who had been in charge of the kitchen died Annabel asked for the job and got it. She had been cooking for thirteen years, she said. First as a married woman and now as a widow. Counting time in years and being “married” were no longer new concepts to me and although it was strange to hear them from her I understood what she was talking about.

Aside from the flour and eggs, all the other cooking ingredients came from the shelters in the mall. She had me read the labels for her, on yeast packets, on a can of pepper, on a box of irradiated pecans. All of the boxes read: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE.

While showing me how to cook, Annabel was quiet and pleasant and asked no questions except for her requests to read box labels. There were several times I wanted to ask her about herself and her family and how they seemed to avoid having anything to do with the modern way of life, but when I would start to ask a question I would think: Don’t ask; relax, and it seemed, for once, to be good advice. She was very beautiful, and her movements in the kitchen were deft and graceful; it was a pleasure just to watch her at work.

But as noon approached she seemed to become more harried, and somehow a bit sad. Finally she reached under a counter into a cabinet and took out a large blue box and gave it to me to read.

It said VALIUM, in big letters, and under this in small ones: Fertility-inhibiting. And under that: U.S. Population Control. To be taken only under the advice of a physician.

When I had read it she said, “What’s a ‘physician’?”

“Some kind of ancient healer,” I said, not really sure of myself. And I was thinking: Is that why there are no children anywhere? Could all the downers and sopors be like that? Fertility-inhibiting?

She took two of the pills and chased them with coffee. When she offered the box to me I shook my head and she looked at me quizzically but said nothing. She merely put a small handful of Valium in her apron pocket, and replaced the box under the counter. Then she said, “I must prepare lunch.”

For the next hour she worked at high speed, heating two kettles of soup and making cheese sandwiches on big slabs of dark bread that she cut with a knife. I asked if I could help, but she appeared not even to have heard the question. She set the table with the big brown plates and soup bowls. Trying to be helpful, I carried a stack of plates to the table from one of the cabinets and said, “These are unusual plates.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I made them.” That was a surprise; I had never heard of anyone making things like plates. And there had been a whole department at the Sears store with plates and dishes. I had no idea of how anybody would personally make a dish.

When she saw me looking surprised she picked up one of the dishes and turned it over. On its bottom was a mark that looked somehow familiar to me. “What is it?” I said.

“It’s my pottery mark. A cat’s paw.” She smiled at me faintly. “You have a cat.”

She was right. It was the same mark that Biff left when she walked on sand—but smaller.

Then she said, “My husband and I used to have a cat. It was the only one. But it died before my husband did. One of the dogs killed it.”

“Oh,” I said, and began setting plates on the table.

After a while I heard noise outside and looked up to see, outside the window, two old green thought buses pull up and the men and the dogs silently pile out of them.

I went outside into the sunlight and saw that they were washing up from a pair of faucets at the back of the building. They were silent and careful about it. I was surprised; I would have expected the kind of laughing and splashing around of the prisoners I had known. Even the dogs were quiet, huddling their white bodies together on the other side of the men from me, their pink eyes occasionally staring at me.

From the flower garden and from some small outbuildings where they were working the women came and joined the men. All of them filed into the kitchen and seated themselves. Baleen motioned for me to be seated and I found myself a place on a bench that was as uncrowded as I could find.

When everyone except Annabel was seated they all bowed their heads over their plates and old Baleen began to pray, starting the same way Rod had the night before: “O Lord most powerful and most cruel, forgive our miserable afflictions and sins.” But he went on differently. “Make us safe from the nuclear rain from Heaven and the sins of the Men of Old. Make us know and feel thy absolute dominion over the lives of men, in this the final age.”

Everyone ate in silence. I tried to speak to the man next to me, praising the soup; but he ignored me.

No one thanked Annabel for the meal.

I spent the afternoon alone in my room, reading.

At dinner that evening I was pleased to see Annabel again, although she was too busy serving dinner to talk. I watched her face when I could and it seemed somehow sad, melancholy, as she kept putting food on the table and taking away empty plates. She worked very hard. There should have been someone to help her do more than wash dishes.

After dinner I hoped to see Annabel and possibly talk with her, but Baleen ushered me into the Bible Room and she was left in the kitchen to wash dishes.

The television was already on in the Bible Room when we came in and the seats soon filled with Baleen men and women, silently watching. The program was one of the old Literal Videos—a kind of rare old television that told a logical, rational story, with actors. It was impossible to tell whether the actors were human or robots. The story was about a young girl who was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a gang of anti-Privacy drop-outs who had escaped from a Drop-out Reservation. They abused the girl in a variety of ways. Even though similar programs had been a part of my training as a child and part of my study as a university student, I found myself sickened by watching it, in a way that I would not have been a few years before.

Halfway through the program I closed my eyes tightly and saw no more of it. I could hear occasional responsive grunts from the Baleens around me. From the beginning they had all been passionately absorbed in the story on the screen. It was horrible.

After the television show had ended—with Detectors saving the girl, judging from the sound track—the screen was turned off and I was brought to the lectern to read.

During my reading I came before long to the part about Noah, which I remembered from prison. Noah was a man whom God had decided to save from drowning during a flood that destroyed all of the rest of life on earth. There was a passage in the reading that went like this:

God said to Noah, “The loathsomeness of all mankind has become pain to me, for through them the earth is full of violence. I intend to destroy them.”

And when I read: “I intend to destroy them,” I heard old Baleen beside me shout out, very loudly, “Amen!” and another shout of “Amen!” came from the people in front of me. It was startling, but I read on.

After the reading I had hoped to be able to talk with Annabel, but old Baleen took me over to the Mall and waited while I picked myself some new clothing at Sears. I wanted to stay for a while and look over all of the ancient things in that vast store, but he merely said, “This is sacred ground,” and would not let me. He did not say so but I felt I had better not let myself be caught over here alone again.

And I did intend to return. I was not as awed by Rules as I had once been. And I was not afraid of Edgar Baleen.

We left the Mall. With fresh new jeans and a black turtleneck next to my skin I felt oddly elated, and while we were crossing the short moonlit distance over to Baleena, I was struck by an idea and said, “Do you mind if I help Annabel in the kitchen for a few days? I’m not very good at farm work.” That wasn’t exactly true; I merely hated farm work.

He stopped walking and was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You talk a lot.”

Somehow that angered me slightly. “Why not?” I said.

“Talk’s cheap,” he said, and I wondered: What has that got to do with it?

There was silence for another long moment, and then he said, “Life is serious, Reader.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say, and that seemed to placate him, for he went on, “You can help Annabel.”

Annabel did not think talk was cheap, and she was the only one of them who felt that way. In a sense, she was not one of them. She was originally a Swisher, from one of the other Seven Families, and had changed her name to Baleen when she had married one of old Baleen’s sons. The Swishers had been a more talkative breed, but a less prolific one than the Baleens. There were only three Swishers left, two very old men and a half-crazy old woman, Annabel’s mother. They lived in what was called Swisher House, several miles up the coast, and bartered gasoline with the Baleens in return for food and clothing from the Mall. The rest of the families in what was called the Cities of the Plain were smaller and weaker than the Baleens. All of them farmed a little. The Baleens, Annabel told me, were more religious than the others, but all were “Christians.”

I asked her about the reaction to Noah that I had received. I can still picture her vividly as she told me this, with her light hair pulled back in a bun, a coffee cup in her hand, and her blue-gray eyes shy and sa3.

“It’s my father-in-law,” she said. “He thinks he’s a prophet. He thinks the reason there are no more children is that the Lord is punishing the world for its sins—as with Noah. Everybody knows the story of Noah. My mother told it to me—but differently from the way you read it. She didn’t tell about his being drunk, and about his sons.”

“Is Edgar Baleen expecting to be saved, like Noah?”

She smiled. “I don’t really know. I don’t know how he could be. He’s too old to have children.”

I asked her a more personal question. It was difficult for me to become used to Invasion of Privacy, even though the Baleens did not believe in that rule. “What became of your husband?” I asked.

She sipped from her coffee. “Suicide. Two years ago.”

“Oh,” I said.

“He and two of his brothers took thirty sopors and then poured gasoline on themselves and lit it.”

I was shocked. It was the same thing I had seen in New York, at the Burger Chef. “People have done that in New York,” I said.

She lowered her eyes. “It’s happened here—in all of the families,” she said. “My husband wanted me to be the third in the group. I was attracted to the idea, but I declined. I want to live a while longer.” She got up from the table where we were sitting and began to take dishes over to the sink. “At least I think I want to live.”

I was made silent by the weariness that had suddenly come into her voice.

After clearing the table she got herself another cup of coffee and sat down again.

After a minute I spoke. “Do you think you will marry again?”

She looked up at me sadly. “It’s not allowed. To marry a Baleen you must be a… a virgin.” She blushed slightly, and lowered her eyes.

This kind of talk was all rather strange to me, since I had never before met people who married. But I was familiar with such things from books and films, and I knew that it had been once considered a Mistake for a man to marry a “fallen woman” of the kind that Gloria Swanson often was—but I had not thought a widow was spoken of as “fallen.” Still, all such masters were basically alien to my education. I had been taught “Quick sex is best.” I was only beginning to realize that the world might be full of people who had not received the education I had.

It was in the middle of the morning when we had that conversation, and I remember now that was the first time I felt a sexual attraction toward Annabel. She was sitting there quietly, her face melancholy, holding one of the big ceramic coffee mugs that she had let me watch her make in the pottery shed that sat on the other side of the rose garden. I had watched her then at the wheel with awe, amazed at the sureness of her movements as she shaped wet clay into a flawless cylinder, her hands and wrists wet with gray and clayey water, and her eyes focused in complete, intelligent attention on her work. My respect and admiration for her at that time had been great; but I had felt nothing physical.

But now, sitting alone at the big table with her, I realized that I was becoming aroused. I had changed. Mary Lou had changed me; and the films and the books and prison and afterward had changed me too. The last thing I wanted with Annabel was quick sex. I wanted to make love to her; but more importantly I wanted to touch her, and to comfort her from the sadness that seemed to . hold her spirit.

She had set her coffee cup down and was staring toward the windows. I reached my hand out and laid it gently on her forearm.

She jerked her arm away immediately, spilling the rest of her coffee. “No,” she said, not looking at me. “You mustn’t.”

She got a cloth from the sink and wiped up what she had spilled.

During the next several weeks Annabel remained pleasant, but distant. She taught me to make corn pudding from the frozen corn in the refrigerators, and cheesecake and dill pickles and ice cream and soup and chili. I would set the table for lunch and dinner, and prepare the soups and help with the cleaning up. Some of the Baleen men looked at me strangely for doing such work, but none of them spoke aloud of it and I did not really care what they thought. I enjoyed it well enough, although it grieved me to see how sad the repeated work made Annabel feel. I would praise her cooking occasionally, and that seemed to help a little.

Once, when we were alone, I asked her about her sadness. Even though there was nothing physical between us, I had come to feel an intimacy with her from the work we did together and from the feeling I sensed we both had that we would never be like the Baleen family.

“Have you always been unhappy?” I said, once, when we were putting a stack of coffee cakes into irradiation bags for storage. I was wrapping the cakes in the plastic bags and she was working the Sears machine that sealed them and shone the yellow preserving light on them.

At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. But then she said, “I was a very happy young girl. I used to sing often. And I loved to hear my mother tell me stories. There was a lot more of that within Swisher House than there is here.” She gestured with her arm, talcing in the big, empty kitchen.

“Would you like to go back?” I said.

“It wouldn’t be any good,” she said. “They’re all too old now.”

“You should let me teach you to read,” I said. We had talked about that before.

“No,” she said. “I’m too busy. And I don’t think I could make the effort.” She smiled shyly. “But I love to hear you read. It sounds like… another world.”

I finished wrapping the last of the coffee cakes, handed it to her, and poured myself a cup of coffee. I looked out toward the garden and the chicken house. “Is it your husband’s death that makes you sad?”

“No,” she said. “My husband was never… important to me. Not after I found that I wouldn’t have any children. I always wanted very much to have children. I would have been a good mother.”

I thought about that before I spoke. “If you quit using pills…” I had told her about the label on the Valium box.

“No,” she said. “It’s too late. I’m really… really worn out with it all. And I don’t think I could live around here without the pills.”

“Annabel,” I said, “you and I could leave here together. And if you didn’t take pills for a yellow you might be able to have a baby. My baby.”

She looked at me strangely, and I could not tell what she was thinking. She said nothing.

I took a step over toward her and then reached out and gently took her shoulders in my hands, feeling the bones beneath the cloth of her shirt. She did not pull away from me this time. “We’re different from these people. We could be together, and we might be able to have children.”

And then she looked me in the face and I could see that she was crying. “Paul,” she said, “I could not go with you unless Edgar Baleen gave me to you and married us in church.”

I looked at her, not knowing what to say and upset by her tears. “Church,” I knew, was the Sears store. It was used for weddings and funerals. In the old days children had been baptized there, in the same fountain that I had been baptized in.

Finally I thought of something to say. “I’m not a Baleen. And you aren’t either.”

“That’s true,” she said. “But I could never live in sin with a man. It would be… immoral.”

The way she said that last sentence had more feeling in it than I knew how to deal with. I knew about “living in sin”; I had learned about it from silent films. But I had had no idea that she would have possessed such a notion.

“It wouldn’t have to be ‘sin,’” I said. “We could have our own ceremony—over at the Mall at night, if you wanted it.”

“No, Paul,” she said, and then she wiped her eyes with the hem of her apron. My heart went out to her at the gesture. For that moment I was in love with her.

“What is it, Annabel?” I said.

“Paul,” she said, “I have heard of women who enjoy… making love.” She looked down toward the floor. “That may be right for them to… to fornicate. To commit adultery. But we women from the Plain are Christian.”

I did not know what to make of it. I knew the word “Christian”; it was used for people who believed that Jesus was a God. But Jesus, as far as I could understand what I had read about him in the Bible, had seemed very tolerant of sexual behavior. I remembered some people called “scribes” and “Pharisees” who had wanted to punish women who had committed adultery. But Jesus had disagreed with them.

I did not pursue that with her, though. Possibly it was something final about the way she pronounced the word “Christian.” Instead I said, “I don’t know that I understand.”

She looked at me, half pleadingly and half angrily. Then she said, “I don’t like sex, Paul. I hate it.”

I did not know what to say.

It remained at that between Annabel and me for the rest of that spring; we did not discuss it again. But we worked together and got to know each other’s ways very well and I came to feel closer to her than I have to anyone else in my life—closer even than to Mary Lou, with whom I had made love many times with a great and deep pleasure for both of us. She was such a good person. I can cry to remember how good she was—and how melancholy. And how competent at what she did. I can see her standing by her potter’s wheel, or at the stove, or feeding the chickens with her blue apron blowing in the wind, or just pushing a light-colored wisp of hair back off her forehead. And I can see her as she stood facing me that day with tears streaming down her cheeks, telling me that she could not live with me.

And it was she who got rid of Biff’s fleas, and she who always prepared breakfast for me when I came downstairs in the early mornings. It was she who told me that I should consider fixing up this old house to live in. She was the first to take me to see it, a mile from the Maugre obelisk and on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

It was a house she had known of when she was a girl, one that had been lived in by some recluse who had died years before. The children from the Cities had thought of it as “haunted.” She told me she had sneaked into it once on a dare, but had been too frightened to stay for more than a minute.

I think of Annabel as a little girl when I look around me now at my living room, as though she were standing there now as a frightened child. If the place is haunted, it is she who haunts it. A beautiful shy child, who loved to sing.

I loved Annabel. What I felt for her was different from what I felt—and, to some degree, still feel—about Mary Lou. What Annabel needed was a way to put her talent and her energy to use. She did a great deal of work; but no one thanked her for it and most of it could have been done by a Make Three robot without the Baleens’ knowing the difference—all the cooking so lovingly and skillfully done, all the sweeping and dishwashing and pottery making, for years. And no one thanked her for it.

I must write this down quickly, before the emotion of it paralyzes me while I sit here, on this morning in early summer, as I approach the end of this part of my journal.

We went on like that, Annabel and I, doing kitchen work together and talking after my readings in the mornings. I learned of many more things than the art of cooking and the sense of sexual puritanism that was not only Annabel’s but was a basic part of the culture of the Seven Cities of the Plain. Where the Baleens had come from Annabel did not know, except that they had been wandering preachers at one time, generations before, until the Bible and the literacy that went with it were gradually lost. She had been born in Swisher House, but her mother had been a wanderer in her youth. Once they had been singers of religious songs, but the “Plague of Childlessness” had caused old Baleen to silence them from singing, when Annabel was a young girl. She had been the last one born in the Cities.

I never tried to make love to her again. I have thought since that I should have tried; but once she had told me how she felt about lovemaking I was too confused and uncertain. I would think about Annabel and Mary Lou, loving them both and knowing both were unattainable. And somehow it was almost good that way. There were no risks.

Or so I thought until the morning that I came down to find a dirty kitchen with scraps of bread and eggshells on the table and in the sink where the family had fixed their own breakfast. Annabel was not there. I went outside to look for her.

She was not anywhere near the chicken house. I went around the side of Baleena to where I could see the empty, overgrown city of Maugre. There was no sign of life there. I started to go toward the obelisk and then, on a sudden impulse, opened the door of the pottery shed.

The smell in the shed was overpowering. A rigid thin body, with its skin burned black and with what was once its hair now a charred black mat around the skull, stood with its back to me, facing the potter’s wheel. The arms were straight and the hands still gripped the edges of the wheel.

Along with the burned flesh there was still the smell of gasoline in the little room.

I turned and ran, all the way to the ocean. I sat on the beach and stared out at the water until Rod Baleen found me there that evening.

We buried her the next day. I was sent with Rod and an older man named Arthur to get a coffin.

The coffins were in a deeper level of the Mall, one that I had not known about before. It was down a stairway with a sign that said DEEP SHELTER.

There was a warehouse full of coffins, all of them made of green-painted metal. Stenciled on each were the words DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE. They were piled to the ceiling, in neat rows, in a room labeled MORTALITY ROOM.

Rather than go back up the stairs we carried the empty coffin down through a hallway on the other side of the warehouse. We passed under an arch with the sign RECREATION AREA, and past a huge empty swimming pool and then past a doorway that said LIBRARY AND READING ROOM. Grieved as I was, silently carrying that grim and ugly coffin, my heart leapt when I saw the sign and I had to restrain myself from leaving Annabel’s coffin right there and rushing through the doorway.

At the end of the hallway there was a large door with the sign GARAGE AND VEHICLE STORAGE. Rod pushed it open and we came into a room that was filled with thought buses. They were parked next to one another in row after row. All of those whose fronts I could see had the sign MAUGRE AND SUBURBS ONLY.

At the end of this room, down past a long row of buses, was a pair of sliding doors big enough to admit a bus. Rod pushed a button on the wall by the doors and they opened. We stepped in, carrying the coffin, and rode a big elevator that took us back out into the sunshine through doors at the back of the obelisk. We drove to the pottery shed, where the women had done the best they could to make Annabel’s body presentable. They had put a new black dress on her and a blue apron. But there was nothing that we put in the coffin that I could recognize as Annabel.

There was a beautiful slim vase on a shelf in the pottery shed. Annabel had told me she had made it years before but that old Baleen would not let it be used in the kitchen because it was “too fragile.” I went and got it and placed it in the coffin, in what was left of Annabel’s arms. Then I closed the lid and fastened it down.

The funeral was held in Sears. Annabel’s coffin was brought down on the elevator on a thought bus. I am grateful to old Baleen that he let me be one of the pallbearers; he had never said anything but I think he knew something of how I felt about Annabel.

We sat in chairs in the shoe department with the lights turned on softly and Baleen made some kind of a speech and then he handed me the Bible that he had brought with him and told me to read from it.

I opened the Reader’s Digest Bible but did not read from its text. Instead I looked at Annabel’s coffin in front of me and said, “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord. ‘He that believeth in me, though he perish, yet shall he live.’”

The words were no comfort. I wanted Annabel to be alive and with me. I looked at all the Baleens in front of me with their heads reverently bowed and I felt no communion with them and with their faith. Without Annabel I was alone again.

The cemetery was several miles north of Maugre, near an ancient four-lane highway. There were rows of thousands of tiny white Permoplastic grave markers with no writing on them. We took Annabel out there in a thought bus.

That night when everyone was asleep I left the house quietly, went to the Mall, and found the library. It was a room bigger than the kitchen at Baleena, and all of its walls were covered with books. The small hairs on the back of my neck prickled, standing there in the middle of the night in that silent room with its thousands and thousands of books.

I put two small ones in my jacket pockets: Youth, by Joseph Conrad, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by R. H. Tawney. Then I went to the thought-bus parking lot and spent an hour looking at the signs on the fronts of the buses.

They all said MAUGRE AND SUBURBS ONLY.

Upstairs in Sears, I found a shelf board, some black paint, and a brush. I painted the name ANNABEL SWISHER on the board and then with a hammer and some nails from the hardware department I managed awkwardly to nail the board to a stake. Then I took one of the Baleens’ buses to the cemetery and with my hammer drove the marker into the ground at the head of Annabel’s grave. Afterward I told the bus to take me to New York. It went to the ramp that led to the highway and stopped. It would go no farther.

I stayed up all that night reading the book by Joseph Conrad, only partly understanding it. In the morning Mary and a woman named Helen prepared breakfast; I ate with the family.

After breakfast I told old Edgar that I would like eventually to move into this house and he did not object. In fact, he seemed to be expecting some such thing from me.

The place, all redwood and glass, was a home for mice and birds. I cleaned out the birds’ nests and Biff went to work on the mice in a manner that I can only describe as professional. She had the last mouse out of there within a week.

The old furniture was rotted; I had a bonfire with it on the beach and watched it burn for an hour, thinking of Belasco and of that charmed moment back in Carolina.

I was not supposed to take things from Sears, but I went there every night for a week and no one objected. I think the Baleens did not really mind as long as I did not do it openly. Their sexual morality may have been that way too, and had Annabel and I been secretive about being lovers it probably would have offended no one. Probably they thought we were lovers anyway.

I got furniture from Sears, and kitchen equipment, and bookshelves. And I began making a collection of books from the library.

After the funeral I had wanted in my grief to leave; but that impulse had quieted itself in me for the time. I think it was the finding of the books. I decided that I would finish my education and update my journal, there in the house by the side of the sea. Then I would decide whether to continue my search for Mary Lou or to stay. Or to leave and go to some place altogether new—heading westward, maybe, toward Ohio and beyond.

In one of the many books from below the Mall that I have read I learned that the season after summer was called, in the ancient world, the Fall of the Year. It is a beautiful phrase and it speaks to me deeply.

The trees outside my house by the sea have begun to lose their green, are becoming more yellow and red and orange as each day passes. The blue of the sky is paler now and the sea gulls’ cries sound somehow more distant. There is a fine chill in the air, in the mornings, when I take my long walk on the empty beach. Sometimes I see where clams have buried themselves, but I never dig for them. I walk and jog in the autumn air—in the air at the Fall of the Year—and I think more and more, each day, of leaving Maugre and continuing northward toward New York. Yet I have a fine place to live here and I furnish myself with food from the Mall. I have become a good cook. If I want company I can visit the Baleens and read for them, as I sometimes do. They are glad enough to see me, even though they seemed almost relieved when I left.

It is strange. I think now that they expected something miraculous to happen when they started to hear the words from the Bible read aloud, opening up that mystery to them—the message of an inscrutable book they had learned to revere. But no miracle occurred, and they soon lost any real interest. I think that to know what those words said required an attention and a devotion that none of them—except perhaps old Edgar—possessed. They were willing to accept their stringent piety, and silence, and sexual restraints, all unthinkingly, along with a few platitudes about Jesus and Moses and Noah; they were overwhelmed, however, at the effort it would require to understand the literature that was the real source of their religion.

I asked old Edgar once why there were no robots in Maugre and he said, “It took us ten years to rid the place of those agents of Satan,” but when I asked him how they had done it he would not answer. Yet they could devote ten years to a thing like that and not take the time I was with them really to understand what was meant by “Satan”—a word that I now know means “enemy.”

Before Annabel’s death I suppose I was content enough to live with them. And the food was wonderful: the mashed potatoes and strudel and biscuits and pork bacon (they had never even heard of monkey bacon) and omelettes and soups. There were chicken soup and vegetable soup and pea soup and cabbage soup and lentil soup, all served hot and with crackers.

And there were times during those months when I felt very strongly a thing I had learned to feel at prison—a sense of community. I could sit at the table in the kitchen with the entire silent family around me, eating soup, and feel a kind of spiritual warmth starting in my stomach and spreading around my body, sensing the presence of those placid, sturdy, and hard-working people. They touched one another a good deal—just little touches, like the light placing of a hand on an arm or a gentle touching of elbows, while sitting close to one another at the table. And they touched me too, with a gentle shyness at first but then more casually, easily. What I had felt toward the other men at prison had prepared me for this and I grew to like it—to need it even. It is why I still go back there, from time to time. Just to be with them, to touch them and to feel their human presences.

But unlike families in films that I have seen, the Baleens hardly ever talked to one another. After each of my evening readings the huge television screen behind the lectern would be turned on. There would be the heavy rumbling of the gasoline-powered generator that sat on the floor behind it, and then the screen would light up with the dazzling colored holographs of mind shows—abstract shapes and hypnotic colors and numbingly loud music—or sex-and-pain shows or trial-by-fire shows, and everyone would watch in silence, just as in the dormitories or in a college class, until bedtime. Sometimes people would get up and go to the kitchen for a piece of fried chicken or a can of beer and some peanuts (beer and snack food were brought over in wheelbarrows from the Mall every ten days or so) but there was never any conversation in the kitchen; no one wished to break the mood of the shows.

But although I had watched television in the same way many times in my life before, I found I could no longer watch it and not think. “Give yourself to the Screen,” they had taught us. It was as basic as “Don’t ask; relax.” But I could no longer give myself to it. I no longer wanted to keep my mind silent, or use it as a vehicle for disconnected pleasure; I wanted to read, and think, and talk.

Sometimes, after Annabel’s death, I would be tempted to take the sopors that were kept around the house in her ceramic candy dishes, but then I would think of Mary Lou and of my decision when old Baleen offered me sopors before taking me to “the Lake of Fire that burneth forever”—and I would not use the drugs.

It was good to sense the warmth of being part of a family, to wake up sometimes at night in the room I shared with Rod and hear him softly snoring and sense the presence of all those people in the house. I felt at times that something very good inside myself was beginning to come alive. But then the big television set would come on, or people would drift off to the sets in their own rooms, and I would feel that I would go crazy if there were no talk—no conversation. The prisoners I had lived with had talked whenever they could, and they had to wait for opportunities to do so, as with the time at the beach. But the Baleens were different; they were pleased with one another’s company; but they had nothing to say except for an occasional “Praise the Lord.”

So I see them only enough to retain some minimum human contact. It seems to be enough. Since I moved in here in midsummer, I have listened to records from Sears and written in my journal in ledger books from Sears and I have read books. Sitting by day on my balcony overlooking the ocean, with Biff, now grown fatter, at my side, or using kerosene lamps in the big room downstairs at night, I have read over a hundred books. And I have played, over and over, recordings of the symphonies of Mozart and Brahms and Prokofiev and Beethoven, and chamber music, and operettas, and various musical works by Bach and Sibelius and Dolly Parton and Palestrina and Lennon. This music sometimes, even more than the books, enlarges my sense of the past. And the enlargement of that sense, the growth of my sympathies outward from what had been the small, dormitory-trained center of my self, the growth backward in time to include generations of my fellows who have lived on this same earth as I, has been the passion of these months alone.

I am sitting now at the oaken table in the kitchen, writing this journal in a new ledger book, with a Sears ball-point pen. Biff is curled in a chair beside me, asleep. I have a half bottle of whiskey —J. T. S. Brown Bourbon—and a pitcher of water and a glass on the table. It is late in the afternoon and autumn light is coming in through the window over the sink. There are two kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling above the table, and I will light them when it becomes necessary. After I write for a while I will fix something to eat for Biff and me and will probably start the generator downstairs and play a record or two, if I feel I can spare the gasoline for it.

It was my intention in beginning this to summarize what I have learned about human history and how that history appears to be coming to an end. But the prospect of trying actually to do it, after thinking about it for so long, is more than I am up to facing. There are many times still that I am overcome with a desire to have Mary Lou with me again; and I feel that now, thinking of the difficulty of the task. There is no question that Mary Lou’s mind is better than mine. She might not have the patience that I have shown in my studies; but I would love to possess some of what I have come to recognize as her intellectual vigor and quickness, and her quick grasp. She had an enthusiasm about her too that I lack.

I am not certain that I still love her. It has been a very long time and a great deal has happened. And I still grieve for Annabel.

Writing that, I found myself looking at my wrists, at the white scars on each of them where those prison bracelets tore into me under the knife in the factory.

I was ready to die then, at that time of my life, to bleed to death under that knife or to burn my body with gasoline—to join the world’s long sad rank of suicides. I would have died for loneliness and for the loss of Mary Lou.

Well. I didn’t die. And a part of me still loves Mary Lou, although I have made no move to go northward to find her for a long time now. I think sometimes of trying to find a road that has cross-country buses running on it and to take one to New York the way I had come from Ohio the first time, so long ago. But that would be folly. The scanner on such a bus might well detect me as a fugitive. And I have no credit card anymore; they took it away from me in prison.

How different I am now from what I was then. And how strong my body is. And how unafraid I am.

I will leave Maugre soon. While it is still the Fall of the Year.