Mockingbird

Mary Lou

The baby is due any day now. It’s the perfect time of year for having a baby—the very first part of spring. I’m sitting now by the living-room window that overlooks Third Avenue. Downtown and to the west I can see, over empty lots and low housetops, the Empire State Building. Bob often sits in this green chair and looks toward it; I like to watch the tree outside the window. It’s a big tree, one that long ago must have cracked the crumbling pavement around its enormous trunk; it rises way above our three-story building. I can see from here where little leaves have begun to come out on the lower branches; it makes me feel good to see them, to see that fresh and pale green.

Since Bob can’t read titles I had to go with him two weeks ago to find books on baby care and obstetrics; I found four—two of them with pictures. I’ve never had any instructions in my life about childbirth and of course have never known anyone to have a baby; I’ve never even seen a pregnant woman. But while reading one of the books and looking at its pictures I realized that I did have some associations that must have been picked up from older girls when I was a little misfit in the dormitory: cramping pains, blood, lying on your back and screaming and biting your forearm; a dark process called “cutting the cord.” Well. I know about such things now, and feel better. I want to get it over with.

One afternoon about three weeks ago Bob came home early. I had been thinking all day about how little I knew about babies, and then he came in carrying a huge, god-awful box filled with tools and cans and paintbrushes. Without even speaking to me he went into the kitchen and began working on the sink drain. I was astonished and after a few minutes I heard water running in the sink and then the gurgling of it going down. I got up and walked over to the kitchen door.

“Jesus!” I said. “Whatever possessed you?”

He wiped his hands on a dish towel and then turned around toward me. “I get tired of things that don’t work,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear it. Can you fix the wall where those books are falling out of it?”

“Yes,” he said. “After I paint the living room.”

I started to ask him where he had gotten paint, but I didn’t. Bob seems to know where everything is in New York. I suppose he’s the city’s oldest citizen—the oldest New Yorker.

He had some dusty old paint cans in his box. He came into the living room and pried the lid off one of them with a screwdriver and began mixing the paint. It looked all right and after he stirred it awhile I could see it was going to be white. Then he went outside for a few minutes and came back with a ladder. He set it up and took his shut off, climbed the ladder, and began to paint the wall over my bookcases by the light from the window.

I watched him for quite a while in silence. Then I said, “Do you know anything about childbirth?”

He went on painting, not looking at me. “No. Nothing except that it’s painful. And that any Make Seven can abort a pregnancy.”

“Any Make Seven?”

He stopped painting and turned toward me, looking down. There was a white spot on his cheek. His head seemed to be touching the high ceiling. “Make Sevens were designed at a time when there were too many pregnancies. Someone had the idea to program them for abortions—for abortions right up through the ninth month. All you do is ask one.”

That phrase, “through the ninth month,” shook me for a second. He had said it casually, but I didn’t like hearing it. And then I laughed, thinking of a Make Seven abortionist. Make Sevens are usually in charge of businesses or dormitories or stores. I could see myself walking up to one of them behind its desk and saying, “I want an abortion,” and having it whip out a little scalpel from a desk drawer… except that wasn’t funny.

I stopped laughing. “Could you find me a book about having babies?” I held my hands cupped over my belly, protectively. “So I’ll have some idea what to expect?”

Surprisingly, he didn’t answer me. He stared at me for a while. Then for a moment he whistled, softly. He seemed to be deep in thought. At such times I am amazed at Bob’s humanness. When he is alone with me like that his face can show more feeling than even Paul’s or Simon’s and his voice is sometimes so deep and so sad that it almost makes me cry. So queer that this robot should be the repository of so much love and melancholy—powerful feelings that mankind has rid itself of.

Finally he spoke and shocked me with his words. “I don’t want you to have the baby, Mary,” he said.

Instinctively I pulled my hands tighter against my belly. “What are you talking about, Bob?”

“I want you to abort the baby. There’s a Make Seven in my building that can do it.”

I must have stared at him in disbelief and fury. I remember standing up and taking a few steps toward him. All that was in my head were words I had learned from Simon years before and I said them: “Fuck you, Bob. Fuck you.”

He looked at me steadily. “Mary,” he said, “if that child lives it will eventually be the only person alive on earth. And I will have to go on living as long as it does.”

“To hell with that,” I said. “Besides, it’s too late. I can get other women off their pills and get them fertile. I can have other babies myself.” The thought of all that wearied me suddenly, and I sat down again. “And as for you, why shouldn’t you go on living? You can be a father to my children. Isn’t that what you wanted when you took me away from Paul?”

“No,” he said. “That wasn’t it.” He looked away from me, holding his paintbrush, out the window toward the tree and the empty avenue. “I just wanted to live with you the way the man whose dreams I have might have lived, hundreds of years ago. I thought it might allow me to recover the past that lies around the edges of my mind and memory, might give me ease.”

“And has it?”

He looked back at me, thoughtfully. “No, it hasn’t. Nothing has changed in me. Except for loving you.”

His unhappiness gripped me; it was like a living thing in the room—an inaudible crying, a yearning. “What about the baby?” I said. “If you had a baby to be a father to…”

He shook his head wearily. “No. This whole arrangement has been folly. Like having Bentley read those films for me so that I could touch the past a little more through him. Allowing him to impregnate you before I took him from you. It has all been stupid —the kind of thing that emotions do when you yield to them.” Then he came down from the ladder, walked over toward me, and set his large hand gently on my shoulders. “All I want, Mary, is to die.”

I looked up at his sad, brown face with the broad forehead wrinkled and the eyes soft. “If my baby is born…”

“I am programmed to live for as long as there are human beings to serve. I can’t die until there are no more of you left. You…” And suddenly, surprisingly, his voice seemed to explode. “You Homo sapiens, with your television and your drugs.”

His anger frightened me for a moment and I stayed silent. Then I said, “I’m Homo sapiens, Bob. And I’m not like that. And you are nearly human. Or more than human.”

He turned away from me, taking his hand away from my shoulder. “I am human,” he said. “Except for birth and death.” He walked back to his ladder. “And I am sick of life. I never wanted it.”

I stared at him. “That’s the name of the game. I didn’t ask to be born either.”

“You can die,” he said. He began to climb the ladder again.

Suddenly a horrible thought came to me. “When we all die off… when this generation is all dead, then you can kill yourself?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

“You don’t even know?” I said, my voice rising.

“No,” he said. “But if there are no human beings to be served…”

“Jesus Christ!” I said. “Are you the reason no babies are being born?”

He looked at me. “Yes,” he said. “I used to run Population Control. I understand the equipment.”

“Jesus Christ! You fed the world with birth control because you felt suicidal. You’re erasing mankind…”

“So I can die. But look how suicidal mankind is.”

“Only because you’ve destroyed its future. You’ve drugged it and fed it lies and withered its ovaries and now you want to bury it. And I thought you were some kind of a God.”

“I’m only what I was constructed to be. I’m equipment, Mary.”

I could not take my eyes off him, and try as I might, I could not make his physical beauty ugly in my mind. He was beautiful to see, and his sadness was itself like a drug to me. He stood there with his chest bare and paint-spattered, and something deep in me yearned toward him. He was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and my wonder and my anger seemed to make that beauty glow around his heavy, relaxed-looking body, his sexless body, his incredibly old and incredibly youthful body.

I shook my head, trying to shake the powerful feeling off. “You were constructed to help us. Not to help us die.”

“Dying may be what you really want,” he said. “Many of you choose it. Others would if they were brave enough.”

I stared at him. “God damn it,” I said. “I don’t choose it. I want to live and to raise my baby. I like living fine.”

“You can’t raise that baby, Mary,” he said. “I can’t stand to live for another seventy years, awake for twenty-three hours a day.”

“Can’t you just turn yourself off?” I said. “Or swim out into the Atlantic?”

“No,” he said. “My body won’t obey my mind.” He began to paint. “Let me tell you. Every spring for over a century I have walked up Fifth Avenue to the Empire State Building, gone to the top, and tried to jump. It is, I suppose, the ritual that my life centers on. And I cannot jump. My legs will not take me to the edge. I stand, two or three feet from the edge, throughout the night, and nothing happens.”

I could see him up there, like that ape in the movie. And I would be the girl. And then, suddenly, I thought of something. But first I said, “How did you stop babies from being born?”

“The equipment is automatic,” he said. “It gets an input from Census to let it know whether to increase or decrease pregnancies, and it controls the equipment that distributes sopors. If pregnancies are up it is supposed to increase the amount of birth-control sopors. If pregnancies are down the sopors are only sopors.”

I sat there listening to this as though I were hearing a child’s lecture on Privacy. I was learning about the death of my species and it seemed to mean nothing to me. Bob was standing there with a paintbrush in his hand and telling me why no children had been born for thirty years and I felt nothing. There had never been children in my world. Only those obscene little white-shirted robots at the zoo. I had never seen anyone in my life who was younger than I. If my child did not live, humanity would die with my generation, with Paul and with me.

I looked at him. He turned, bent, dipped his brush in paint, and turned back to the wall above my bookcases.

“About the time you were born,” he said, “a resistor failed on the input amplifier. The machinery began getting signals that said population was too high. It still gets them and is still trying to cut population down, by distributing sopors that stop ovulation, even after it had sterilized almost your entire generation, in the dormitories. If you had stayed there one more yellow your ovaries would be gone.” He finished off the upper corner with paint. The wall looked clean, shiny.

“Could you have fixed that resistor?” I said.

He came down the ladder silently, holding the brush at his side. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never tried.”

And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, of what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself . everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it.

“My God, Bob,” I said. “My God.” Suddenly I hated him, hated his coolness, his strength, his sadness. “You goddamned monster,” I said. “Devil. Devil. You’re letting us die that way. And you’re the one who is suicidal.”

He stopped painting and turned to look at me again. “That’s right,” he said.

I took a breath. “And if you wanted to, could you stop those birth-control sopors from being made in this country?”

“Yes. In the whole world.”

“Could you just stop sopors? All of them?”

“Yes.”

I took another long breath. Then I said softly, “About the Empire State Building.“ I looked downtown, toward it. ”I could push you off.“

I looked back toward him. He was staring at me.

“After my baby is born,” I said, “and when I’m well again and know how to take care of it, I could push you off.”