Mockingbird

DAY ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAY THREE

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

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

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

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

DAY FIVE

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

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

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

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

DAY ELEVEN

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

It was during a film. An old woman was sitting on the front porch (if that’s what it is called) of a dark little house. She was in what was called a “rocking chair” and holding a tiny baby in her lap. Then, looking worried, she held the baby up and the picture ended momentarily, as they do, and these words appeared on the screen: “Ellen’s baby has the croup!” And when the word “baby” appeared on the screen I suddenly realized that I had not seen a real baby for longer than can be known! Yellows, blues, reds: years beyond numbering, and I had not seen a baby.

Where have the babies gone? And has anyone else asked this question?

And then the voice in me that comes from my childhood training says, “Don’t ask—relax.”

But I can’t relax.

I will lay this aside and take some sopors.

DAY NINETEEN

Nineteen. This is the highest number I can ever remember using. Nothing in my life has ever been worth this high a counting before.

Yet it would be possible, I suppose, to count the blues and yellows of one’s life. Useless, of course, but it could be done.

Often in films I see large numbers. Often they are associated with war. The number 1918 seems especially common. I have no idea what to make of it. Could there have been a war that was fought for 1918 days? But nothing lasts that long. The mind reels to think of anything that long or that large or that extensive.

“Don’t ask—relax.” Yes, I must relax.

I must remember to eat some soybars and gravy before I take a sopor. For two nights together I have forgotten to eat.

Sometimes at night I study Dictionary, to learn new words, and at times that helps me become sleepy. But then at other times I find words that excite me. Often those are words the definitions of which elude me—like “disease” or “algebra”. I turn them over in my mind, and I read over their definitions. But those almost always contain other unfathomable words, which then excite me further. And I am forced to take a sopor after all.

I don’t know how else to relax.

The zoo used to help, but I haven’t gone there lately because of those children. I have nothing against robots, of course. But those children…

DAY TWENTY-ONE

I went to the zoo today and spoke to the woman in red. She was sitting on the bench by the iguanas and I sat beside her and said, “Is the python a robot?”

She turned and looked at me. There was something strange, mystical, about her eyes—like those of someone under hypnosis. Yet I could see that she was thinking, and that she wasn’t drugged. She said nothing for a long time and I began to think she was not going to answer and would pull back into her Privacy the way we are all taught to do when we are troubled by strangers. But just as I started to shrug and get up she said, “I think they are all robots.”

I looked at her, astonished. Nobody ever talked quite that way. And yet it was the way that I had been thinking, for days. It was so disturbing that I got up and left, without thanking her.

Leaving the House of Reptiles I saw the five children. They were all together, all holding ice-cream cones, their eyes wide with excitement. They all looked at me, smiling. I looked away…

DAY TWENTY-TWO

One compelling thing that keeps appearing in the films is a collection of people called a “family.” It seems to have been a very common arrangement in ancient times. A “family” is a group of people that are often together, that even appear to live all together. There are always a man and a woman—unless one of them is dead; and even then that one is often spoken of, and images of the dead one (“photographs”) are to be found near the living, on walls and the like. And then there are the younger ones, children of different ages. And the surprising thing, the thing that seems characteristic of these “families,” is that the man and woman are always the mother and the father of all of the children! And there are older people sometimes too, and always they seem to be the mothers and fathers of either the man or the woman! I hardly know what to make of it. Everyone seems to be related.

And further, much of the sense of feelingfulness that these films have seems profoundly connected with this being related. And it seems to be presented in the films as good.

I know, of course, not to try being a moral judge of anyone. And certainly not of people from another time. I know the life in the films is contrary to the dictum “Alone is best”; but that is not what bothers me. After all, I have spent days at a time with other people—have even seen the same students every day for weeks. It is not the Mistake of Proximity that bothers me about those “families.” I think it may be a kind of shock that the people take such risks. They seem to feel so much for one another.

I am shocked and saddened by it.

And they talk so much to one another. Their lips are moving all the time, even though no audible words come out.

DAY TWENTY-THREE

I had gone to bed last night thinking of those risks the people long ago were taking in their “families” and then the first thing this morning I went through a film that showed just how serious those risks could be.

On the screen an old man was dying. He lay in a strange old-fashioned bed at his home—not in a hospital dying center—and he was surrounded by his family. A clock with a pendulum was on the wall. There were girls, boys, men, women, old people—more than I could count. And they were all unhappy, all crying. And then when he died, two of the younger girls threw their bodies across his and heaved with silent sobbing. There was a dog at the foot of the bed, and when the man died it laid its head on its paws and seemed to grieve. And the clock stopped.

The whole spectacle of unnecessary pain upset me so that I left the film unfinished and went to the zoo.

I went directly to the House of Reptiles and the woman was there. She was alone in the building except for two old men in gray sweaters and sandals who were smoking dope and nodding over the crocodiles at the pool in the center of the room. She was walking about carrying a sandwich and not seeming to look at anything.

I was still disturbed—by the film, by everything that had been happening since I began this journal—and impulsively I walked up to her and said, “Why are you always here?”

She stopped in her tracks and turned and looked at me in that penetrating, mystical way. It passed through my mind that she might be insane. But that was impossible, the Detectors would have found out if that were the case, and she would be off on a Reservation, agape with Time-Release Valium and gin. No, she had to be sane. Everybody who walked among others was sane.

“I live here,” she said.

Nobody lived at zoos. Not as far as I knew. And all the zoo’s work would be done, as it was in all Public Institutions, by robots of one kind or another.

“Why?” I said. That was Privacy Invasion. But somehow I didn’t feel as though that edict applied. Maybe it was all those reptiles slithering and wriggling around in the glass cases that surrounded us. And the heavy, green, wet-looking artificial foliage on the artificial trees.

“Why not?” she said. And then, “You seem to be around here a lot”

I felt myself blushing. “That’s true. I come here when I feel… upset.”

She stared at me. “You don’t take pills?”

“Certainly,” I said. And then, “But I come to the zoo anyway.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t take pills.”

Now I stared at her. It was an incredible thought. “You don’t take pills?”

“I did. But now they make me sick.” Her face softened a bit. “I mean, I vomit when I take pills.”

“But isn’t there a pill for that? I mean, a drug robot could…”

“I suppose so,” she said, “but wouldn’t I vomit up an anti-vomit pill?”

I didn’t know whether I should smile at that but I did. Even though it all had a shocking ring to it.

“You could take an injection…”I said.

“Forget it,” she said. “Relax.” Abruptly she turned and looked toward the iguana cage. The iguanas were, as always, lively. They jumped around like toads in their glass cage. She bit her sandwich and began chewing.

“And you live here. At the zoo?” I said.

“Right,” she said between bites.

“Doesn’t it get… boring?” I said.

“Jesus, yes.”

“Then why do you stay?”

She looked at me as though she wasn’t going to answer. All she would have to do, of course, would be to shrug her shoulders and close her eyes, and Mandatory Politeness would require that I leave her alone. You can’t go around interfering with Individualism with impunity.

But apparently she decided to answer me, and I felt grateful—I don’t know why—when I saw that she was going to speak. “I live at the zoo,” she said, “because I don’t have a job and I have nowhere else to live.”

I must have stared at her for a full minute. And then I said, “Why don’t you drop out?”

“I did. I lived on a Drop-out Reservation for at least two yellows. Until I started vomiting from smoking dope and taking pills.”

I had heard of the dope at Drop-out Reservations, of course; it was cultivated in vast fields by automatic equipment and was supposed to have a potency almost beyond belief. But I had never heard of anyone becoming sick from it.

“But when you dropped in again… shouldn’t you have been assigned a job?”

“I didn’t drop in again.”

“You didn’t…?”

“Nope.” Then she finished off her sandwich, turning her head away from me and toward the iguana cage again, chewing. For a moment I felt not bafflement but anger. Those stupid, leapfrogging iguanas!

Then I thought, I should report her. But I knew as I thought it that I wouldn’t. I should have reported that group immolation too, as any responsible person is supposed to. But I hadn’t. Probably no one had. You never heard of people being reported anymore.

When she had finished eating she turned to me and said, “I just left the dormitory and walked here. Nobody seemed to notice.”

“But how do you live?” I said.

“Oh. It’s easy.” Her eyes had lost some of their intensity. “Outside this building, for instance, there’s a sandwich machine. The kind you operate with a credit card. And every morning a servo robot comes to fill it with fresh sandwiches. I found out when I first came here, half a yellow ago, that the robot always brings five more sandwiches than the machine holds. He’s a moron robot, so he just stands there holding the five extra sandwiches. And I take them from him. That’s what I eat during the day. I drink from the water fountains.”

“And you don’t work?”

She stared at me. “You know what work is these days. They have to deactivate robots to find things to pay us for doing.”

I knew that was true. Everybody did, I suppose. But no one ever actually said it. “You could garden…” I said.

“I don’t like to garden,” she said.

I walked over and sat on the bench by the python cage. The two old men had left, and we were alone. I didn’t look at her. “What do you do?” I said. “What do you do when you are bored? There’s no TV out here. And you can’t use the Fun Facilities in New York without credit. And there’s no way to get credit without a job…”

There was no answer, and for a minute I thought she hadn’t heard me. But then I heard her footsteps and in a moment she was sitting beside me. “Lately,” she said, “I’ve been trying to memorize my life.”

“Memorize my life.” The phrase was so odd that I said nothing. I just looked at the python writhing through the branches, none of it real.

“You should try it sometime,” she said. “First you remember a thing that happened, and then you go over it and over it. That’s ‘memorizing.’ If I keep it up long enough I’ll have it all and I’ll know it like a story or a song.”

My God! I thought. She can’t be sane! But here she was, and the Detectors had left her alone. And then I thought, It’s the not taking drugs. What could have happened to her mind…?

I got up from the bench, excused myself, and left.

DAY TWENTY-FOUR

“Memorize my life.” I couldn’t get the phrase out of my mind. All the way back from the Bronx to Manhattan and to the library on the bus, I looked at the faces of the pleasant, shy, innocuous people who sat, carefully distanced from one another, on the bus seats, or moving up and down avenues, careful to avoid one another’s eyes. And I kept thinking, Memorize my life. I couldn’t let it alone, even though I hardly understood it.

And then, as the bus got close to the library and I sent it the wish signal to stop at the front escalator, I saw a large number of people on the streets and suddenly another phrase replaced the one that had been going so insistently through my mind: Where are all the young people?

For there was nobody young. Everybody was at least as old as I. And I am older than many of the fathers in the films. I am older than Douglas Fairbanks in Captain Blood—much older.

Why is no one any younger than I? The films are full of young people. In fact, they predominate.

Is something wrong?

DAY TWENTY-FIVE

As I grew up in the dormitory, along with the other boys and girls in my class, there was no group of younger children behind us. We were the youngest. I do not know how many of us there were in that big old cluster of Permoplastic buildings near Toledo, since we were never counted and did not ourselves know how to count.

I remember that there was a quiet old building called the Pre-Teen Chapel where we would go for Privacy Drill and Serenity Training for about an hour each day. The idea was to sit there in a room full of children of your own age and become oblivious of their presence while watching moving lights and colors on a huge television screen at the front of the room. Weak sopors would be served by a moron robot—a Make Two—at the beginning of each session. I remember developing myself there to the point where I could enter after breakfast, stay for an hour after letting my sweet-flavored sopor dissolve in my mouth, and leave for my next class without ever being aware of the presence of anyone else—even though there must have been a hundred other children with me.

That building was demolished by a crew of large machines and Make Three robots when we graduated from it and moved up to Teen Training. And when I was moved to the Sleep Center for Big People about a blue later, our old Sleep Center for Pre-Teens was demolished too.

We must have been the last generation of children, ever.

DAY TWENTY-SIX

I saw another immolation today, at noon.

It was at the Burger Chef on Fifth Avenue. I often go there for lunch, since my NYU credit card quite generously permits more extra expenses than I really need. I had finished my algaeburger and was having a second glass of tea from the samovar when I felt a kind of rush of air behind me and heard someone say, “Oh my!” I turned around, holding my tea glass, and there at the other end of the restaurant were three people, seated in a booth, in flames. The flames seemed very bright in the somewhat darkened room, and at first it was hard to see the people who were burning. But gradually I made them out, just as their faces began to twist and darken. They were all old people—women, I thought. And of course there was no sign of pain. They might have been playing gin rummy, except there they were, burning to death.

I wanted to scream; but of course I didn’t. And I thought of throwing my glass of tea on their poor old burning bodies, but their Privacy of course forbade that. So I merely stood there and watched.

Two servos came out from the kitchen and stood near them— making sure, I suppose, that the fire didn’t spread. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.

Finally, when the smell had become unbearable, I left the Burger Chef. But I slopped when I saw a man staring from outside through the window at the people in flames. I stood next to him for a moment. Then I said, “I don’t understand it.”

The man looked at me, blankly at first. And then he frowned with a look of distaste and shrugged his shoulders and closed his eyes.

And I began to blush from embarrassment as I realized that I was crying. Crying. In public.

DAY TWENTY-NINE

I have begun actually to write this down. This is one of my days off and I have not looked at the films today. What I did was get sheets of drawing paper and a pen from the Self-expression Department and begin to write down the words from my recorded journal, using the large letters from the first page of Dictionary as a guide. At first it was so difficult that I felt I could never keep it up; I would replay from my recorder a few words and then print them down on paper. But it soon became an ordeal. And trying to spell the larger words is most difficult. Some of them I have learned from the films and, fortunately, some of the really big ones I have recently learned from Dictionary and I usually can find them there, although it takes some searching.

I believe there is some kind of principle of arranging the words in Dictionary—perhaps so they can be found easily—but I do not understand it. For pages, all of the words begin with the same letter, and then, abruptly, they start beginning with another, wholly different letter.

After a few hours of writing my hand began to ache and I could no longer hold the pen. I had to take pain pills; but when I did I discovered that they made it more difficult to pay attention to what I was doing, and I would miss whole words and phrases.

I had suspected that drugs might affect a person this way; but I had never had so convincing a proof before.

DAY THIRTY-ONE

I did not go to the zoo today.

I’ve printed words on paper constantly all day. Through lunch-time until now, when it’s beginning to get dark outside. The pain in my hand became intense but I did not take pain pills and after a while I seemed even to forget about it. In fact, there was—how shall I say it?—something rewarding about the experience of sitting there at my desk, my hand and wrist filled with pain, printing words onto a piece of paper. I finished my journal up until day twenty-nine, and although I am here recording this now, into the voice recorder, I am anxious to pick up paper tomorrow and return to the task of printing the words.

There is something in my mind that will not stop insisting itself. That is the phrase “Memorize my life,” which the woman at the House of Reptiles had spoken the other day. Writing it down as I did about an hour ago, I could see something in the words, something that took me a moment to grasp entirely. What I was doing myself was memorizing my life. Putting these words on paper, unlike just reading them into a recorder, was a mental act—what the woman called “memorizing.” I stopped my work after I had written down the words “Memorize my life,” and I decided to do a little thing. I took Dictionary and kept going through all the pages until I came to all the words that together began with the letter “M” and then I began to look through those. After a while I realized it was a sort of pattern, because words that started with an “M” followed by an “E” were all together. I looked through that group of words until finally, after some searching, I discovered the word “memorize.” And this was the definition given: “To learn by heart,” and how strange that was—heart, to learn by heart. I could not understand it all. And yet the word “heart” seems somehow right, for I know that my heart has always beaten. Always.

I have never in my life seemed to see and hear and think so clearly. Can it be because I have not used drugs this day? Or is it this act of writing? The two are so new and have come together so closely that I cannot be sure of which it is. It is extremely strange to feel like this. There is exhilaration to it, but the sense of risk is almost terrifying.

DAY THIRTY-THREE

Last night I could not sleep. I lay in bed awake, staring at the stainless-steel ceiling of my room in the archives. Several times I started to call for the servo robot and ask for sopors but I was determined not to. In a sense I enjoyed the feeling of sleeplessness. I got up for a while and began to walk around the room. It is a bright room with a thick, heavy, lavender carpet. There is a desk that is combined with my bed and on the desk is Dictionary. I spent about an hour turning through the book looking at the words. What meanings are locked in those words, and what a sense of the past!

I decided to go out. It was very late. There was no one on the streets, and although New York is certainly safe, I felt tense and a bit frightened. I had something on my mind and I could not let it go and I was determined not to take a sopor. I summoned a thought bus and told it to take me to the Bronx Zoo.

I was alone on the bus. I watched out its windows as it went winding the long way between the bungalows and empty lots of Manhattan. I looked at the lights in the buildings where some people still sat watching their television. New York is very peaceful, and especially at night, but I thought of all those people, those lives, watching television, and I kept thinking, They know nothing of the past, not of their own past, nor of anyone else’s past. And of course it was true and I had known it all my life. But here at night, alone on the bus going through New York toward the zoo, I felt it most strongly and the strangeness of it began to overwhelm me.

The House of Reptiles was dark but it was not locked. I made noise when I came in the door and I heard the girl, startled, say, “Who’s there?”

I said, “Only me.”

And I heard her gasp and say, “My God! At night now, too.”

“I guess so,” I said, and then I saw the flash of her striking a light with a cigarette lighter and then the light steadied and I saw that she had lit a candle. She must have taken it from her pocket. She set it on the bench.

“Well,” I said, “I’m glad you have light.”

She must have been asleep on the bench, for she stretched herself, and then she said, “Come on. You might as well sit down here.”

So I went over and sat beside her. I could feel my hands trembling. I hoped she didn’t notice. For some time we were silent, sitting on the bench. I could not see the reptiles in their glass cases, nor did they make any sounds. The room was silent. The light from the candle flame moved on her face. Finally she spoke.

“You’re not supposed to be at the zoo at night,” she said.

I looked at her. “Neither are you.”

She looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. There was something nice about the gesture. I had seen it in the old films many times. Mary Pickford. She looked up at me. The intensity of her stare was softened a bit by the candlelight.

“Why did you come here?” she said.

I looked at her a long time before speaking and then I said, “It was the words you used the other day. I have not been able to get them out of my mind. You said you were going to memorize your life.”

She nodded.

“At first I didn’t know what that meant,” I said, “but now I think I do. In fact, I think I am trying to do the same thing or something like it. Not my early life, not my childhood or in the dormitories or when I was in college, but the life that I am living now, have been living for some time. I am trying to memorize that.” I stopped. I didn’t know exactly how to go on. She was looking at my face closely.

“Then I’m not the only one,” she said. “Maybe I’ve started something.”

“Yes,” I said, “maybe you have. But I have something that you may find helpful. Do you know what a recorder is?”

“I think so,” she said. “Don’t you say things into it and it says them back? Like when you call a library for information and the voice that gives it to you is not a person speaking then, but a person who spoke some time ago.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the idea. I have a recorder. I thought you might like to try it.”

“Do you have it with you now?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “That would be interesting, but we’ll need light.” She got up from the bench and walked across the room out of the light from the candle flame and I heard her opening something. And then I heard a click and the room was flooded with brightness. The glass from all of the cases glowed at me and there in them all of the reptiles, the iguanas, python, the green monitor lizards, the massive brown crocodiles in the cages, there they all sat, not moving, silent in all of that synthetic vegetation. She came back over to the bench and sat beside me. I could see now that her hair was badly mussed and there were creases in her face from sleeping on the bench. Yet evert so she looked fresh and very much awake.

“Let’s see this recorder,” she said.

I fumbled in my pocket and pulled it out. “Here it is,” I said. “I’ll show you how it works.”

We must have been there for over an hour. She was fascinated by the recorder and asked if she could keep it awhile but I told her it was impossible, that I had to use it in my work and they were very difficult to obtain. For a moment I almost told her about reading and writing but something restrained me from doing so. Maybe I would tell her at another time. When I told her it was time for me to return to where I stayed, she said, “Where do you stay? Where do you work?”

“At New York University,” I said. “I only work there temporarily for this summer. I live in Ohio.”

“What do you do at the university?” she said.

“I work with ancient films,” I told her. “Do you know what films are?”

“Films? No,” she said.

“Well, films are like video records. A way of recording images that move. They were used before the invention of television.”

Her eyes widened. “Before the invention of television?”

“Yes,” I said, “there was a time once when television had not been invented.”

“My God,” she said. “How do you know that?” Actually, of course, I didn’t know that, but I had guessed from the films that I had seen that they came before television because the people in those families’ houses in the films never had television sets. The idea of the sequence of events and circumstances—that things had not always been the same—was one of the strange and striking things that had occurred to me as I had become aware of what I can only call the past.

“That’s very odd,” the girl said, “to think that there may not have been television once. But I feel I can understand that. I feel that I understand a good many things since I have begun to memorize my life. You get the sense that one thing comes after another and that there is change.”

I looked at her. “Good God, yes,” I said. “I know what you mean.” Then I took my recorder and left the room. The thought bus was waiting. It was beginning to become daylight. Some birds were singing and I thought, Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods. But this time thinking it, I felt no sadness.

When I started to walk toward the bus I somehow felt awkward. I felt as though she had done me a great service. The nervousness that had driven me out here to the zoo in the middle of the night was now as dissipated as though I had taken two tabs of Nembucaine…. But I did not know how to thank her, so I merely stepped back into the building and said, “Good night” and started to leave again.

“Wait,” she said, and I turned around to face her.

“Why don’t you take me with you?”

That came as a shock. “Why?” I said. “For sex?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Not necessarily. I would… like to use your recorder.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have an agreement with the university. I’m not sure…”

Suddenly her face changed. It became frighteningly twisted in anger—anger as great as on the faces of some of the actors in the films. “I thought you were different.” Her voice was trembling, but controlled. “I thought you didn’t care about making Mistakes. About Rules.”

Her anger was very upsetting. Showing anger in public—and this was, in a sense, a public thing—was one of the worst of Mistakes itself. Almost as bad as my crying outside the Burger Chef had been. And then I thought of myself, of my crying, and I did not know what to say.

She must have interpreted my silence as disapproval, or as the beginning of a Retreat into Privacy, because suddenly she said, “Wait.”

She walked quickly out of the House of Reptiles as I stood there, not knowing what else to do. In a moment she returned. She was carrying a rock as big as her hand. She must have taken it from one of the flower borders outside. I watched her, fascinated.

“Let me show you about Mistakes and Rules of Behavior,” she said. She drew back and hurtled the rock right into the glass front of the python’s case. It was astonishing. There was first a loud noise and the front of the case caved in. A large triangle of glass crashed to the floor at my feet and broke. While I stood there horrified, she walked up to the case, reached in with both hands, and pulled out the python. I shuddered; her confidence was overwhelming. What if the snake were not a robot?

She dragged the creature over headfirst, pulling open its mouth as she did so and bending to peer down into it. Then she held the head out toward me, with the broad, evil-looking mouth gaping wide. We had been right. About a foot or so down the throat was the unmistakable nuclear battery pack of a Class D robot.

I was too horrified by what she had done to be able to say anything.

And as we stood there in what must have looked like a “tableau” in the old movies, she triumphantly holding the serpent and I watching in horror at the magnitude of what she had just done, there was a sudden noise behind me and I turned just as the door between two of the reptile cases in the wall opened and a tall, fierce Security robot came striding out. As he came toward us his voice boomed: “You are under arrest. You have a right to remain silent, you may…”

The woman had been looking up coolly at the robot, who towered over her. And then she interrupted him sharply. “Bug off, robot,” she said. “Bug off and shut up.”

The robot stopped talking. He was immobile.

“Robot,” she said. “Take this damn snake and get it fixed.”

And the robot reached out, took the snake from her into its arms, and quietly walked out of the room into the night.

I hardly knew what I felt, seeing it all. It was a little like watching those violent scenes in some of the films, like the one in Intolerance where the great stone buildings came crashing down. You just stare at it all and feel nothing.

But then I began to think, and I said, “The Detectors…”

She looked at me. Her face was surprisingly calm. “You have to handle robots like that. They were made to serve people, and nobody knows it anymore.”

To serve people? It sounded as though it might be true. “But what about the Detectors?”

“The Detectors don’t detect anymore,” she said. “Look at me. They haven’t detected me. For stealing sandwiches. For sleeping in a Public Place. For leaving the Drop-out Reservation without Re-entry.”

I said nothing, but the shock must have shown on my face.

“The Detectors don’t detect anything,” she said. “Maybe they never did. They don’t have to. Everybody is so conditioned from childhood that nobody ever does anything.”

“People burn themselves to death,” I said. “Often.”

“And do the Detectors stop that?” she said. “Why don’t the Detectors know that people are thinking unbalanced, suicidal thoughts, and restrain them?”

I could only nod. She had to be right, of course.

I looked at the broken glass on the floor and then at the broken case with the plastic tree in it, now empty of movement. Then I looked at her, standing there in the House of Reptiles in the bright artificial light, calm, undrugged, and—I was afraid—totally out of her head.

She was looking toward the python’s case. From one of the higher branches of the tree inside there was hanging some sort of fruit. Abruptly, she reached her arm inside the cage and stretched up toward the fruit, clearly intending to pick it.

I stared at her. The branch was quite high, and she had to stand tiptoed and reach as far up as she could reach, just to catch the bottom of the fruit with her fingertips. With the strong light from the inside of the case coming through her dress her body was outlined clearly; it was beautiful.

She plucked the fruit, and stood there poised like a dancer with it for a moment. Then she brought it down level with her breasts and, turning it over in her hand, looked at it. It was hard to tell what kind of fruit it was; it seemed to be some kind of mango. For a moment I thought she was going to try to eat it, even though I was certain it was plastic, but then she stretched her arm out and handed the thing to me. “This certainly can’t be eaten,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly calm, resigned.

I took it from her. “Why did you pick it?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seemed to be the thing to do.”

I looked at her for a long time, saying nothing. Despite the age lines and the sleep lines in her face, and despite the uncombed look of her hair, she was very beautiful. And yet I felt no desire for her—only a kind of awe. And a slight sense of fear.

Then I stuffed the plastic fruit into my pocket and said, “I’m going back to the library and take some sopors.”

She turned away, looking back toward the empty case. “Okay,” she said. “Good night.”

When I got back I put the fruit on top of Dictionary that sat on my bed-and-desk. Then I took three sopors. And slept until noon today.

The fruit is still sitting there. I want it to mean something; but it doesn’t.

DAY THIRTY-SEVEN

Four days without pills. And only two joints a day—one after supper and one before going to bed. It is all very strange. I feel tense and, somehow, excited.

I am often restless and must have taken to walking up and down in the halls outside my room in the library basement. The halls are endless, labyrinthine, mossy and gently damp. I pass doorways and, occasionally, open a door and look in, remembering when I found Dictionary, apprehensive, almost, that I may find something. I’m not certain that I want to find anything. I have had enough new things since I came to this place.

But there is never anything in the rooms. Some have shelves in them, from floor to ceiling, but there is never anything on the shelves. I look around, then close the door and continue down the hall. The halls always smell musty.

The doors of the rooms are of different colors, so that you may tell them apart. My room has a lavender door, to match the carpet inside.

When I first moved in here, the feeling of walking about in this vast, empty building was frightening. But now I derive a kind of comfort from it.

I no longer take naps, as I once did.

DAY FORTY

Forty days. It is all written out and on my desk in front of me, on seventy-two pages of art paper. All of it printed by me.

It is the greatest achievement of my life. Yes, I have used that word: a great achievement. My learning to read was an achievement. Nobody knows that but me. Spofforth doesn’t know it. But then Spofforth is a robot; and a robot might just know anything. But robots can achieve nothing; they have been constructed to do what they do, and cannot change.

I did seven films today, and hardly remember a word that I read into the machine. ,

I cannot get her off my mind. I see her with the trees and ferns in their glass cases behind her, holding the plastic fruit out to me.

DAY FORTY-ONE

Most Burger Chefs are small Permoplastic buildings, but the one on Fifth Avenue is larger and made of stainless steel. It has red lamps on the tables in the shape of tulips and its Soul Muzak from the speaker walls is the music of balalaikas. There are big brass samovars at each end of the red serving counter and the waitresses —Make Four robots of a female clone—wear red bandannas on their heads.

I was there this morning for a breakfast of synthetic scrambled eggs and hot tea. While I was waiting in line to be served, the man in front of me, a short man in a brown jump suit and with a face of blank serenity, was trying to get himself served an order of Golden Brown Fries for his breakfast. He had his credit card in his hand and I saw that it was orange, which meant that he was someone of importance.

The robot waitress behind the counter told him that Golden Brown Fries were forbidden with breakfast. Abruptly his look of serenity vanished, and he said, “What do you mean? I’m not eating breakfast.”

She stared stupidly down at the counter and said, “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef.” Then she looked over to the robot with identical features who was standing next to her. On both of them the eyebrows grew together right above the nose. “Only with the Super Shef. Isn’t that right, Marge?”

I looked behind the counter and saw that there were stacks of fries sitting there in little plastic bags.

Marge said, “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef.”

The first robot looked back at the man, briefly, and then cast her eyes down again. “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef,” she said.

The man looked furious. “All right,” he said. “Then give me a Super Shef with them.”

“With the Golden Brown Fries?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but the Super Shef machine is not working properly today. We have Syn-eggs and monkey bacon, and Golden Brown Toast.”

For a moment the man looked as though he would scream. But instead he reached into his breast pocket, took out a little silver pill holder, and swallowed three green sopors. After a moment his face became serene again and he ordered toast.

DAY FORTY-TWO

I have her here at the library! She is sleeping now, on the thick carpet in an empty room down the hall.

Let me put down how it happened.

I had resolved never to go back to the zoo. But yesterday I could not stop thinking about her. It was not sex, or that idea called “love” that so many of the films are about. The only way I can explain it to myself is to say that she was the most interesting person I had ever met.

I think if I had not learned how to read I would not have been interested in her. Only frightened.

Yesterday after lunch I took the bus out to the zoo. It was a Thursday, so it was raining. There was no one in the streets except for a few moron robots emptying garbage and trimming hedges and working in the parks and city gardens.

She was not in the House of Reptiles when I got there. And I was stunned—frightened that she might have left and I would never see her again. I tried to sit down and wait for her, but I was so restless that I had to walk. First I looked at some of the reptiles. The python cage had been repaired; but the python was not in it. Instead there were four or five diamond-backed rattlesnakes, shaking their rattles enthusiastically, with the same kind of zeal as the child with the ice-cream cone that I had seen outside.

After a while I tired of looking at all those overbusy creatures and, seeing that the rain had stopped, I went outside.

The child, or one of the others just like it, was out there on one of the paths. Since there were almost no people at the zoo on a rain day, the child must have decided to concentrate its attention on doing some kind of performance for me alone. It walked up to me and said, “Hi, there, mister. Isn’t it fun to watch all the animals?”

I walked on by it, not answering. I could hear it tagging along behind me as I walked down a path toward a moated island that had zebras on it.

“Boy!” the child said. “The zebras sure look lively today.”

Something about that made me feel a thing I hadn’t allowed myself to feel since I was a child: anger. I spun and stared down at the chubby little freckle-faced creature, furious. “Bug off, robot,” I said.

He did not look at me. “The zebras…” he said.

“Bug off.”

And then he turned and, abruptly, began to hop and skip away down another path.

I felt fine about it. Even though I wasn’t completely sure he was a robot. Robots are supposed to be identified by their colored earlobes, but like everyone else, I had heard all my life rumors that that wasn’t always the case.

I tried to pay attention to the zebras for a while. But I couldn’t keep my mind on them, because of all the various feelings I was experiencing: a kind of exultation from silencing that child—or whatever it was—and a whole group of mixed feelings about the woman, the most important of which was a dread that she might be gone. Or could she have been detected, after all?

The zebras were none too animated; perhaps that meant they were real.

After a while I began walking again and then I looked up the path ahead of me, toward a small gray fountain, and there she was in her red dress, walking toward me, carrying a bunch of yellow jonquils in her hand. I stopped walking, and for a moment it felt as though my heart had stopped beating.

She walked up to me carrying the flowers and smiling. “Hello, there,” she said.

“Hello,” I said. And then, “My name’s Paul.”

“I’m Mary,” she said. “Mary Lou Borne.”

“Where’ve you been? I went to the House of Reptiles.”

“Walking. I went for a walk before lunch and I got caught in the rain.”

And then I saw that her red dress and her hair were wet. “Oh,” I said. “I was afraid you were… gone.”

“Detected?” She laughed. “Let’s go back to the snake house and have a sandwich.”

“I’ve already had lunch,” I said, “and you should put on some dry clothes.”

“I don’t have any dry clothes,” she said. “This dress is all I have.”

I hesitated a moment before I spoke. And then I said it. I don’t know where it came from; but I said it. “Come back to Manhattan with me and I’ll buy a dress.”

She seemed hardly surprised at all. “I’ll just get a sandwich…”

I bought her a dress from a machine on Fifth Avenue—a yellov dress of a handsome, rough fabric called Synlon. By the time wi got there on the bus her hair had dried, and she looked stunning. She still had the flowers, and they matched the dress.

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

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

“How do you like it?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Liquor doesn’t make you sick?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” the robot said. “Sure.”

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

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

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

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

“And you weren’t detected?”

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

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

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

“Politician talk?”

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

“Was he trained in a dormitory?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere during her talking into the recorder I fell asleep.

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

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

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

DAY FORTY-THREE

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

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

DAY FORTY-SIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where did you get this?” I said.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was holding the book open, trying to guess at what the word “chess” might mean, when Mary Lou spoke. “What is it exactly that you do with a book?”

“You read it.”

“Oh,” she said. And then, “What does ‘read’ mean?”

I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, “Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently.”

She stared at me for a long time. Then she took a book from the shelf, somewhat awkwardly, and opened it. She was finding it a strange and complicated thing to handle, as I had a yellow before. She looked at the pages, felt of them with her fingers, and then handed the book back to me, her face blank. “I don’t understand,” she said.

I started to explain it again. Then I said, “I can say aloud what I am reading. It’s what I do in my work—reading and then saying it aloud.”

She frowned. “I still don’t understand.” She looked at me and then at the books on the steel shelves, and then at the moldy carpet on the floor at her feet. “Your work is… reading. Books?”

“No. I read something else. Something called silent films.” I took the book from her. “I’ll say aloud, if I can, what I read. Maybe that will make it understandable.”

She nodded and I opened to the middle and began. “Mostly preferred is five B to B four, followed by the Lasker Variation, for, while White may regain his pawn, he obtains no great attack. It will be seen that, after the ninth move of White, a well-known position is arrived at, and most authorities consider it all in favor of the White side.”

I thought I read it well, hardly stumbling over the unfamiliar words. I had no idea what it meant.

Mary Lou had moved next to me, pressing her body against mine, while I was reading. She was staring at the page. Then she looked into my face and said, “Were you saying things that you heard in your mind from just looking at that book?”

“That’s right,” I said.

Her face was uncomfortably close to mine. She seemed to have forgotten all the rules of Privacy—if she ever knew them. “And how long would it take to say aloud everything…” She squeezed my arm and I had to fight to keep from jumping and pulling away from her. Her eyes had become terribly intense, the way they sometimes disturbingly became. “To say aloud everything you hear in your mind from looking at all the sheets of paper in that book?”

I cleared my throat, and pulled slightly back from her. “A whole daytime, I think. When the book is easy and you don’t say it aloud you can do it faster.”

She took the book out of my hand and held it in front of her face, staring at it so intensely that I half expected her to start saying the words aloud by sheer force of concentration. But she did not. What she said was: “Jesus! There is that much… that much silent BB recording in this? That much… information?”

“Yes,” I said.

“My God,” she said, “we should do it with them all. What’s the word?”

“Read.”

“That’s it. We should read them all.”

She began to gather up an armful of books and I meekly did the same. We carried them down the hallways to my room.

DAY FORTY-EIGHT

I spent the rest of that morning reading to her from different books. But it was difficult for me to continue paying attention; I had almost no idea of what was being said. Several times we changed books, but it was still chess.

After several hours of this she interrupted to say, “Why are all books about chess?” and I said, “I have books at my home in Ohio that are about other things. About people and dogs and trees and things. Some of them tell stories.” And then, suddenly, I thought of something I should have thought of before and I said, “I can look the word ‘chess’ up in Dictionary.” I opened up the cabinet in my desk and took it out and began leafing through it until I found the words that began with “C.” I found it almost right away. “Chess: a board game between two players.” And there was a picture of two men seated at a table. On the table was one of those black-and-white arrangements with what my reading had taught me were called “pieces” sitting on it. “It’s some kind of a game,” I said. “Chess is a game.”

Mary Lou looked at the picture. “There are pictures of people in books?” she said. “Like on Simon’s walls?”

“Some books are full of pictures of people and things,” I said. “The easy books, like the ones I learned to read with, have big pictures on each page.”

She nodded. And then she looked at me intensely. “Would you teach me to read?” she said. “From those books with the big pictures in them?”

“I don’t have them here,” I said. “They’re in Ohio.”

Her face fell. “Do you only have books about… about chess?”

I shook my head. Then I said, “There might be more. Here in the library.”

“You mean books about people?”

“That’s right.”

Her face lit up again. “Let’s go look.”

“I’m tired.” I was tired, from all that reading and running around.

“Come on,” she said. “This is important.”

So I agreed to go search more rooms with her.

We must have spent over an hour going down hallways and opening doors. The rooms were all empty, although some of them had shelves along the walls. Once, Mary Lou asked me, “What are all these empty rooms for?” and I said, “Dean Spofforth told me the library is scheduled for demolition. I think that’s why the rooms are empty.” I supposed she knew that buildings all over New York had been scheduled for demolition long before we were born, but nothing happened to them.

“Yes,” she said, “half of the buildings at the zoo are that way, too. But what are all these rooms for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Books?”

“That many books?”

“I don’t know.”

And then, at the end of a long, especially mossy hallway, where some of the overhead lights were dim, we came to a gray door that had a sign saying: STORAGE. We pushed the door open with some difficulty; it was a much heavier door than the others and it had some kind of seal around it. We got it open by pushing together and I was immediately surprised by two things. The air inside smelled strange—it smelled old—and there were steps going down. I had thought we were on the lowest floor of the library already. We took the steps, and I almost slipped and fell. They were heavily layered with some kind of slippery, yellowish dust. I caught myself just in time.

As we descended, the air smelled even stronger, older.

At the bottom of the stairs was a hallway. There were overhead lights, but they were very dim. The hallway was short, and at the end of it were two doors. One said: EQUIPMENT, and the other said: BOOKS, and below this, in smaller letters: TO BE RECYCLED. We pushed the door open. There was at first nothing but darkness and sweet-smelling air behind the door. Then, suddenly, lights flickered on and Mary Lou gasped. “Jesus Christ!” she said.

The room was huge and there were books everywhere.

You could not see any walls because of the shelves filled with books. And books were stacked up on their sides in the middle of the room, and in piles along the walls in front of the full shelves. They were of every color and size.

I stood there not knowing what to do or say. I was feeling something that was like what some of the films had made me feel— a sense that I was in the presence of great waves of feeling that had once been felt by people who were now dead and who understood things that I did not.

I knew that there had been books in the ancient world, of course, and that most of them were probably from that time before television, but I had no idea there were that many.

While I stood there, feeling what I have no name for, Mary Lou walked toward a pile of big, thin books that was not as high as the others. She reached up, the way I had seen her reach up for the inedible fruit in the python cage at the House of Reptiles, and took the top book down carefully. She held it awkwardly in both hands, and stared at its cover. Then very carefully she opened its pages. I could see that there were pictures. She stared at some of the pages for a long time. Then she said, “Flowers!” and closed the book and handed it to me. “Can you… say what you read on this?”

I took it from her and read the cover: Wildflowers of North America. I looked at her.

“Paul,” she said softly, “I want you to teach me how to read.”