Mockingbird

ONE

Reading gets to be a bore sometimes, but every now and then I find out something that I enjoy knowing about. I’m sitting in an armchair by the window as I write this, holding a board in my lap to write on, and for a long time before starting I just sat and stared at the snow coming down. Big, heavy, clumped-together flakes falling straight down from the sky. Bob has told me to take it easy so I won’t get a backache from carrying around this stuck-out belly. So I watched the snow for a long time. And I began to think of something I’d read a few days ago about the water cycle, about how the whole elaborate business of evaporation and condensation and winds and air really works. I watched the snow coming down and thought about how those white clumps had recently been the surface water of the Atlantic Ocean, turned to vapor by the heat of the sun. I could visualize clouds moving together far above the water, and the water in them crystallizing into snowflakes, and those flakes falling and clumping and falling further until I could see them, outside this window in New York.

Something makes me feel very good about just knowing things like that.

When I was a little girl Simon talked to me about things like the water cycle and the precession of the equinoxes. He had an old piece of blackboard and chalk; I remember him drawing me a picture of the planet Saturn with its rings. When I asked him how he knew about such things he told me he had learned them from his father. His grandfather had, as a boy, looked at the night sky through a celestial telescope, way back in the days not long after what Simon called “the death of intellectual curiosity.”

Although he couldn’t read or write and had never been to school, Simon had some knowledge of the past. Not just of Chicago whorehouses but of the Roman Empire and of China and Greece and Persia. I can remember him in our little wooden shack, a marijuana cigarette hanging from his toothless mouth while he stood at the wood stove stirring rabbit stew or bean soup, and saying, “There used to be big men in the world, men of mind and power and imagination. There was St. Paul and Einstein and Shakespeare…” He had several lists of names from the past that he would rattle off grandly at such times, and they always gave me a sense of wonder to hear. “There was Julius Caesar and Tolstoy and Immanuel Kant. But now it’s all robots. Robots and the pleasure principle. Everybody’s head is a cheap movie show.”

Jesus. I miss Simon, almost as much as I miss Paul. I wish he were here in New York with me, during the hours in the morning when Bob is at work at the university. While I was writing the first part of this journal, this memorizing of my life, when Paul and I were living together, I wanted Simon to be able to answer questions for me about the days when I first showed up at his place in the desert. About how I looked as a girl, and whether I was pretty and smart and whether I really learned things as fast as he said I did. Now I wish I had him for his sense of humor, and his wildness. He was an old, old man; but he was far wilder and far funnier than either of the two I have lived with since.

Paul was pathetically serious. It’s comical just to remember how his face looked when I threw the rock at the glass on the python cage, or how gravely he went about teaching me how to read. And he used to read over the first parts of this journal, when we were living at the library, and purse his lips, and frown—even at the parts I thought were funny.

Bob is hardly better. It would be silly to expect a robot to have a sense of humor, but it is still hard to take his gravity and his sensitivity. Especially when he tells me about that dream he keeps having and that he has had all of his long life. At first I was interested, but I eventually became bored with it.

I suppose that dream has much to do with my living here in this three-room apartment with him. It was almost certainly the beginning of his desire to live and act like an ordinary human being of a long time ago, to try to live a life like the life of the dream’s original dreamer.

So I am the wife or mistress he would have had. And we play out some kind of game of domesticity, because Bob wants it that way.

I think he’s insane.

And how does he know his brain wasn’t copied from a bachelor’s? Or a woman’s?

He won’t listen to any of my objections. What he says is: “Do you really mind it, Mary?”

And I guess I don’t. I miss Paul. I think I loved Paul in some small way. But when I get right down to it I don’t really mind this life, this being the companion of a brown-skinned robot.

What the hell, I used to live at the zoo, for Christ’s sake. I’ll make out.

It’s still snowing outside the window. I’m going to finish this entry in my memory journal and then just sit for an hour and drink beer and watch the snow and wait for Bob to come home.

Sure, it would be nice to have Paul back. But, as Simon said, you can’t win them all. I’ll make out.

TWO

Bob has been telling me about his dream again, and as usual I can do little but smile politely at him when he talks and try to be sympathetic. He dreams of a white woman, but she is nothing like me. I am dark-haired and physically strong, with good, solid hips and thighs. She is blond and tall and thin. “Esthetic,” he says. And I am not that—although the word might well fit Paul. The woman in Bob’s dream is always standing by a pool of black water, and she wears a bathrobe. I don’t think I have ever worn a bathrobe in my life, and I am not inclined to stand by pools of anything for very long at a time.

I think what I’m trying to say is that he is in love with her and not with me. And, further, it is for the best.

I certainly don’t love Bob—hated him, in fact, when he took Paul away from me and had him sent to prison. Cried and hit him, a lot of times, after the initial shock. And one of the hardest things to get used to was that he really is a Detector—that, in fact, there really are Detectors after all. It didn’t bother me that he was a robot, or black; the main thing about the experience was in discovering that I could be detected. It took away a thing that had given me a great deal of strength all my life: the feeling that I wasn’t being fooled by this society-for-idiots I live in. It hurt some of the confidence that Simon had given me—Simon, the only person I’ve ever loved, or am ever likely to love.

Well. Paul was a dear, sweet man, and I worry for him. I have tried to make Bob have him released from whatever prison he was sent to, but Bob will not even discuss it with me. He merely says, “No one will hurt him,” and that’s all he will say. There were times, at first, when I felt like crying for Paul; I missed his sweetness and his naïveté, and the childish way he liked to buy me things. But I never really shed tears for him.

Bob, on the other hand, is a creature of consequence. He is, I know, very old—older than Simon would be if he were still living; yet that seems to be of no importance except that it gives him a world-weariness that is appealing. And his being a robot means nothing to me except a certain simplicity in our relationship because there can’t be any sex between us. That was a disappointment when I first discovered it; but I have become used to it.

THREE

It has been a half a year since Paul and I were separated and I have become comfortable living with Bob, if not altogether happy. It would be ridiculous to berate a robot for a lack of humanity and yet that is, after all, the problem. I do not mean that he lacks feelings—far from it. I must always remember to ask him to sit with me while I eat or his feelings will be hurt. When I am angry with him he looks genuinely baffled. Once when I was bored I taunted him with the name “Robot” and he became furious-frightening—and shouted at me, “I did not choose my incarnation.” No. He is like Paul in that I must always be alert to his sensitivities. I am the one who is cool about other people.

But Bob is not human, and I cannot forget that. I forgot it a few times during our first months together. It was after my anger with his taking Paul from me had subsided, during the second month; I tried to seduce him. We were sitting at the kitchen table silently, while I was finishing a plate of scrambled eggs and my third glass of beer and he was sitting next to me, his handsome head inclined toward me, watching me eat. He seemed touchingly shy. I had long since become accustomed to the fact that he did not eat and had totally forgotten the implications of that simple fact. Maybe it was the beer, but I found myself seeing for the first time how really good-looking he was, with his soft brown, youthful skin, his short and curly and shiny black hair, his brown eyes. And how strong and sensitive his face was! I had a sudden rush of feeling then, not so much sexual as motherly, and I reached out and placed my hand on his arm, just above the wrist. It was warm, like anybody’s arm.

He looked down toward the table top, and said nothing. We did not talk to one another very much back then anyway. He was wearing a short-sleeved beige Synlon shirt, and his brown—beautiful brown—arm was smooth, warm to my touch, and hairless. He was wearing khaki trousers. I set my glass down and slowly—as if in a dream—reached out my hand toward his thigh. And during the short moment it took, setting the glass down, pausing a moment in hesitation, and then reaching out to him while my other hand was still lightly gripping his arm, the whole thing had become specifically, excitingly sexual; I was suddenly aroused and was, for a moment, dizzy with it. I set my palm on the inside of his thigh.

We sat like that for what seemed a long time. I honestly did not know what to do next. My mind was totally without any calculation of the situation; the word “robot” did not for a moment enter it. Yet I did not go any further, as I might have with other… with other men.

Then he lifted his head and looked at me. His face was strange. Yet there seemed to be no expression at all on it. “What are you trying to do?” he said.

I just looked at him dumbly.

He inclined his head toward mine. “What in the hell are you trying to do?”

I said nothing.

Then he took my hand from his leg with his free hand. I took my hand from his arm. He stood up and began to take off his pants. I stared at him, not thinking of anything.

I had not even expected the point he was making. And when I saw, I was truly shocked. There was nothing between his legs. Only a simple crease in the smooth, brown flesh.

He was looking at me all this time. When he saw that his lower nakedness had registered with me he said, “I was made in a factory in Cleveland, Ohio, woman. I was not born. I am not a human being.”

I looked away and, a moment later, heard him putting his pants back on.

I took a thought bus to the zoo. A few days afterward I discovered that I was pregnant.

FOUR

Instead of talking about his dream last night, Bob began talking about artificial intelligences.

Bob says his brain is not at all like the telepathic one of a thought bus. They receive instructions and drive themselves by what he calls an “intention signal receiver and route seeker.” He says neither he nor any of the other six or seven Detectors left in North America have any telepathic ability whatever. Telepathy would be too much of a burden for their “human model” intelligences.

Bob is a Make Nine robot. He says Make Nines, of which he may be the last one remaining, were of a very special “copied intelligence” type and the last series of robots ever made. They were designed to be industrial managers and senior executives; Bob himself ran the automobile monopoly until private cars ceased to exist. He tells me that not only were there private cars but there were machines, once, that flew through the air and carried people in them. It sounds impossible.

My way of getting used to being with Bob, after he insisted that we live together, was to ask him questions about the way things worked. He seemed to enjoy answering them.

I asked him why it was that thought buses weren’t driven by robots.

“The real idea,” he said, “was to make the ultimate machine. It was the same kind of idea that had led to me—to my kind of robot.”

“What’s ultimate about a thought bus?” I said. They seemed to me such ordinary things, always around, with their comfortable seats and with never more than three or four passengers. Sturdy, gray, four-wheeled aluminum vehicles and one of the few mechanical things that always worked and that did not require a credit card to use.

Bob was sitting in a dusty Plexiglas armchair in the kitchen of our apartment; I was boiling synthetic eggs at the nuclear stove, on the one burner that worked. Over the stove a portion of the wall covering had fallen away years before to reveal copies of a green-jacketed book that had been nailed there by some long-gone former tenants, for insulation,

“Well, they always work, for one thing,” he said grimly. “They don’t need spare parts. The brain of a thought bus is so good at finding wear and stress points in the machinery, and making critical adjustments to distribute the wear and tear, that it just wasn’t necessary to make any.” He was looking out the window, at snow falling. “My body works the same way,” he said. “I don’t need spare parts either.” He became silent.

He seemed to have drifted off the point. I had noticed him doing it before and had called it to his attention. “Just getting senile,” he had said. “Robot brains wear out like anybody else’s.” But apparently, thought-bus brains did not wear out.

I think Bob is too obsessed by that dream of his, and by his attempt to “resurrect his lost self”—the attempt that led him to send Paul away and take me as his wife. Bob wants to find out whose brain he has and to recover its memories. I think it’s impossible. I think he knows it’s impossible. The brain he has is an erased copy of a very intelligent person’s brain. Erased completely, except for a few old dreams.

I’ve told him he should let it go. “When in doubt, forget it,” as Paul says. But he says it’s the only thing that keeps him sane—that interests him. In their first ten blues Make Nines had burned out their own circuits with household current and transformers, had smashed their brains in heavy plant equipment, or had merely freaked out and begun to drool like idiots, or had become erratic, screaming lunatics—had drowned themselves in rivers and buried themselves alive in agricultural fields. No more robots were made after the Make Nine series. Never.

Bob has a way, when he is thinking, of running his fingers through his black, kinky hair, over and over again. It is a very human gesture. I certainly have never seen another robot do it. And sometimes he whistles.

He told me once that he remembered part of a line of a poem from his brain’s erased memory. It went: “Whose ‘something’ these are I think I know…” But he could not remember what the “something” was. A word like “tools” or “dreams.” Sometimes he would say it that way:

“Whose dreams these are I think I know…” But it did not satisfy him.

I asked him once why he thought he was any different from the other Make Nines, when he told me that as far as he knew none of the others had shared these “memories.” What he said was: “I’m the only black one.” And that was all.

When he drifted off like that on that snowy afternoon in our kitchen, I brought him back by asking, “Is self-maintenance the only ‘ultimate’ thing about a thought bus?”

“No,” he said, and ran his fingers through his hair. “No.” But instead of going on right away he said, “Get me a marijuana cigarette, will you, Mary?” He always calls me “Mary” instead of Mary Lou.

“Okay,” I said. “But how can dope work on a robot?”

“Just get it,” he said.

I got a joint from a package in my bedroom. They were a mild brand, called Nevada Grass, that were delivered with the Pro-milk and synthetic eggs twice a week to the people in the apartment complex where we live. The people who have, as most of us do, the use of the yellow credit card. I say “people” because Bob is the only robot who lives here. He commutes to work by thought bus and is gone six hours a day. Most of that time I read books, or ancient magazines on microfilm. Bob brings me books from work almost every day. He gets them from some archives building that is even older than the one I lived in with Paul. He brought me a microfilm projector after I asked him once if there were other things to read besides books. Bob can be very helpful—although, come to think of it, I believe all robots were originally programmed that way: to help people.

I am certainly wandering in this account, in this continuation of my plan to memorize my life. Maybe I’m getting senile—like Bob.

No, I’m not senile. I’m just excited to be memorizing my life again. Before I started this I was merely bored—as bored as I had been after Simon died in New Mexico, as bored and freaky as I was getting at the Bronx Zoo before Paul first showed up, looking so childlike and simple, and appealing…

I’d better quit thinking about Paul.

I brought Bob his joint and he lit it and inhaled deeply. Then, trying to be friendly, he said, “Don’t you ever smoke? Or take pills?”

“No,” I said. “They make me sick, physically. And I don’t like the idea of them anyway. I like being wide awake.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “I envy you.”

“Why envy me?” I said. “I’m human and subject to diseases, and aging, and broken bones…”

He ignored that. “I was programmed to be wide awake and fully aware twenty-three hours a day. It has only been in the last few years, since I’ve begun to allow myself to concentrate on thinking about my dreams, about my former personality and its erased feelings and memories, that I’ve learned to… to relax my mind and let it wander.” He took another puff from the joint. “I never liked being wide awake. I certainly don’t like it now.”

I thought about that for a minute. “I doubt if that marijuana could affect a metal brain. Why don’t you try programming yourself for a high? Can’t you alter some circuits somewhere and make yourself euphoric, or drunk?”

“I tried it. Back in Dearborn. And later, when I was first assigned by Government to this nonsense of being a university dean. The second time I tried harder than the first because I was furious at the pretense of learning that the university was committed to— the learning of nothing by students who come here to learn nothing except some kind of inwardness. But I didn’t get high. I got hung-over.”

He stood up from his chair and walked over to the window and watched the snow for a while. I took my eggs off the fire and began to peel them.

Then he spoke again. “Maybe it was the buried memory of a classical education in my brain that made me feel so furious. Or maybe it was just that I had been really trained to do my job. I know and understand engineering. Not one of my students knows any of the laws of thermodynamics or vector analysis or solid geometry or statistical analysis. I know all these disciplines and more. They are not on magnetic memories built into my brain, either. I learned them by playing library tapes over and over again, studying along with every other Make Nine robot, in Cleveland. And I learned to be a Detector…” He shook his head, and turned away from the window to face me. “But that doesn’t matter anymore, either. Your father was right. There aren’t many working Detectors anymore. There is no need for them. When the children stopped being born…”

“The children?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. Then he sat down again. “Let me tell you about thought buses.”

“But what about children?” I said. “Paul told me once…”

He looked at me strangely. “Mary,” he said, “I don’t know why children aren’t being born. It’s something to do with the population control equipment.”

“If no one gets born,” I said, “there won’t be any more people on the earth.”

He was silent for a minute. Then he looked at me. “Do you care?” he said. “Do you really care?”

I looked back at him. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I did care.

FIVE

We moved into this apartment a week after Paul was sent away and over the months I have grown to like it fairly well. Bob has tried to get repair and maintenance robots in to fix the peeling walls and put on new wallpaper and repair the burners on the stove and reupholster the couch, but so far he has had no luck. He is probably the highest-ranking power in New York; at least I don’t know of any creature with more authority. But he can’t get much done. Simon used to say to me when I was a little girl that things were all falling apart and good riddance. “The Age of Technology has rusted,” he would say. Well, it’s gotten worse in the forty yellows since Simon died. Still, it’s not too bad here. I wash the windows and clean the floors myself, and there is plenty of food.

I have learned to enjoy drinking beer during my pregnancy and Bob knows a place where there is an inexhaustible supply that comes from an automated brewery. Every third or fourth can turns out to be rancid, but it’s easy enough to pour those down the toilet. The sink drain is too stopped up.

The other day Bob brought me a hand-painted ancient picture from the archives to hang over a big ugly spot on the living-room wall. There was a little brass plaque on the frame, and I could read it: “Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” It is very good-looking. I can see it when I look up from the table where I am writing this. There is a body of water in the picture— an ocean or a large lake—and sticking up out of the water is a leg. I don’t understand it; but I like the stillness of the rest of the scene. Except for that leg, which is splashing in the water. I might try to get some blue paint someday and paint over it.

Bob has a way of picking up on a conversation days after I thought we had finished with it. I suppose it has to do with the way his mind stores information. He says he is incapable of forgetting anything. But if that is true why was it necessary for him to labor at learning things during his early training?

This morning while I was eating breakfast and he was sitting with me he started talking about thought buses again. I suppose he had been thinking about it while I was asleep. Sometimes it seems spooky to me when I get out of bed in the morning and find him sitting in the living room with his hands folded under his chin or pacing around in the kitchen. I offered, once, to teach him to read so that he would have something to do all night, but he just said, “I know too much already, Mary.” I didn’t pursue it.

I was eating a bowl of synthetic protein flakes and not liking the taste of them much when Bob said, appropos of nothing, “A thought bus brain isn’t really awake all the time. Just receptive. It might not be too bad to have a brain like that. Just receptiveness and a limited sense of purpose.”

“I’ve met people like that,” I said, chewing the tough flakes. I didn’t look at him; I was still, rather sleepily, staring at the bright identification picture on the side of the cereal box. It showed a face that everyone presumably trusted—but whose name almost no one knew—a face smiling over a big bowl of what were clearly synthetic protein flakes. The picture of the cereal was, of course, necessary to let people know what was in the box, but I had been wondering about the meaning of the man’s picture. One thing I have to say about Paul is that he gets you wondering about things like that. He has more curiosity about the meanings of things and how they make you feel than anyone I have ever known. I must have picked up some of it from him.

The face on the box was, Paul had told me, the face of Jesus Christ. It was used to sell a lot of things. “Vestigial reverence” was the term Paul read somewhere that was supposed to be the idea, probably a hundred or more blues ago, when such things were all planned out.

“All the brain of a bus does,” Bob was saying, “is read the mind of a passenger who has a destination thought out, and then work out a way to drive him there without any accidents. And to fit his destination in with those of the other passengers. It probably isn’t a bad life.”

I looked up at him. “If you like rolling around on wheels,” I said.

“The first models of thought buses that were made at the Ford works were two-way telepaths. They would broadcast music or pleasant thoughts into the heads of their passengers. Some of the night runs would send out erotic thoughts.”

“Why don’t they do that anymore? The equipment broke down?”

“No,” he said. “As I told you, thought buses are different from the rest of the junk. They don’t break down. What happened was that nobody would get off the buses.”

I nodded. Then I said, “I might have.”

“But you’re different,” he said. “You’re the only unprogrammed woman in North America. And certainly the only pregnant one.”

“Why would I be pregnant if no one else is?” I said.

“Because you don’t use pills or marijuana. Most drugs for the past thirty years have contained a fertility-inhibiting agent. I checked some control tapes at the library after the subject came up between us the other day. There was a Directed Plan to cut back population for a year. A computer decision. But something went wrong with it, and the population was never turned back on again.”

That was a shocker. I just sat there for a moment, thinking about it. Another equipment malfunction, or another burned-out computer, and no more babies. Ever.

“Could you do anything about it? Fix it, I mean?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m not programmed for repair.”

“Oh, come on, Bob,” I said, suddenly irritated. “I bet you could paint these walls and fix the sink if you really wanted to.”

He said nothing.

I was feeling strange, annoyed. Something about our conversation about the lack of children in the world—a thing I had never noticed until Paul had pointed it out to me—was bothering me.

I looked at him hard—with that look that Paul calls mystical and says he loves me for. “Are robots able to lie?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

SIX

Yesterday afternoon Bob came home early from the university. I’m seven months pregnant now, and I loaf around the apartment a lot, just letting the time pass by and watching the snow falling. Sometimes I read a little, and sometimes I just sit. Yesterday when Bob came in I was bored and restless and I told him, “If I had a decent coat I’d take a walk.”

He looked at me strangely a moment. Then he said, “I’ll get you a coat,” and he turned around and walked out the door.

It must have been two hours before he got back. By that time I was even more bored, and impatient with him for taking so long.

He had a package with him and held it a minute, standing in front of me, before he gave it to me. There was something odd about his face. He looked very serious and—how can I say this?—vulnerable. Yes, big as he is, and powerful, he looked vulnerable to me, like a child, as he handed me the box.

I opened it. In it was a bright red coat with a black velvet collar. I took it out and tried it on. It was certainly red. And I didn’t much like the collar. But it sure was warm.

“Where did you get this?” I said. “And what took you so long?”

“I searched the inventories of five warehouses,” he said, staring at me, “before I found it.”

I raised my eyebrows but said nothing. The coat fit pretty well as long as I didn’t try to button it over my belly. “How do you like it?” I said, turning around in front of him.

He said nothing, but stared at me thoughtfully for a long moment. Then he said, “It’s all right. It might look better if you had black hair.”

That was an odd thing for him to say. And he had never given any sign before that he ever noticed how I looked. “Should I have the color changed?” I said. My hair is brown. Just plain brown, with no particular character to it. Where I have it is in the figure. And the eyes. I like my eyes.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to dye your hair.” There was something sad about the way he said it. And then he said another strange thing: “Would you like to take a walk with me?”

I looked up at him, not letting myself blink for a moment. Then I said, “Sure.”

And when we were out on the street he took my hand. Surprised hell out of me. He began to whistle. We walked like that for about an hour on the nearly empty streets in the snow and through Washington Square, where only a few zonked old ladies sat smoking their joints in silence. Bob was careful to walk slowly so that I could keep up with him—he really is enormous—but he said nothing the whole time. He would stop whistling every now and then and look down at me, as if he were studying my face; but he did not say a word.

It was strange. Yet I felt somehow pleased with it. I felt there was something important to him about the red coat and the walking and the holding of my hand, and I didn’t really feel it necessary to know exactly what it was. If he had wanted me to know he would have told me. Somehow I felt needed by him, and for a while very important. It was a good feeling. I wish he had put his arm around me.

Sometimes the thought that I will soon be a mother frightens me and makes me feel alone. I’ve never talked to Bob about this, would not know how to talk to him; he seems so absorbed in bis own longings.

I have read a book about having babies and taking care of them. But I have no idea of what it will feel like to be a mother. I have never seen one.

SEVEN

Here in New York, when walking by myself through the snow I watch the faces. They are not always bland, not always empty, not stupid. Some are frowning in concentration, as if difficult thought were trying to burst out in speech. I see middle-aged men with lean bodies and gray hair and bright clothing, their eyes glazed, lost in thought. Suicides by immolation abound in this city. Are the men thinking of death? I never ask them. One doesn’t.

Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics; but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said: I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.

Why can no one read? What happened?

I have a copy of the last book ever published by Random House, once a place of business that caused books to be printed and sold by the millions. The book is called Heavy Rape; it was published in 2189. On the flyleaf is a statement that begins: “With this novel, fifth in a series, Random House closes its editorial doors. The abolition of reading programs in the schools during the past twenty years has helped bring this about. It is with regret…” And so on.

Bob seems to know almost everything; but he doesn’t know when or why people stopped reading. “Most people are too lazy,” he said. “They only want distractions.”

Maybe he is right, but I don’t really feel that he is. In the basement of the apartment building we live in, a very old building that has been restored many times, is a crudely lettered phrase on the wall near the reactor: WRITING SUCKS. The wall is painted in an institutional green, and scratched into the paint are crude drawings of penises and women’s breasts and of couples engaged in oral sex or hitting one another, but those are the only words: WRITING SUCKS. There is no laziness in that statement, nor in the impulse to write it by scratching into tough paint with the point of a nail or a knife. What I think of when I read that harsh, declarative phrase is how much hatred there is in it.

Perhaps the grimness and coldness that I see everywhere exist because there are no children. No one is young anymore. In my whole life I have never seen anyone younger than I am. My only idea of childhood comes from memory, and from the obscene charade of those robot children at the zoo.

I must be at least thirty. When my child comes he will have no playmates. He will be alone in a world of old and tired people who have lost the gift for living.

EIGHT

There must have been a period in the ancient world when there were still television writers who wrote their scripts, even though none of the actors could read them. And, although there were some writers who would use tape recorders to write with— especially for the sex-and-pain shows that were popular at the time—many refused to out of a kind of snobbery and would continue to type their scripts. Although the manufacturing of typewriters had ceased years before and spare parts and ribbons were almost impossible to find, typewritten scripts continued to be turned out. Every studio therefore had to have a reader—a person whose job it was to read aloud the typed scripts into a tape recorder so the director could understand them and the actors could learn their parts. Alfred Fain, whose book was used to insulate the walls of our apartment against the cold weather after the Death of Oil, was both a scriptwriter and a reader during the last days of story-television—or Literal-Video. His book is called The Last Autobiography and it starts like this:

When I was a young man reading was still taught in the public schools, as an elective. I can clearly remember the group of twelve-year-olds in Miss Warburton’s reading class back in St. Louis. There were seventeen of us and we thought of ourselves proudly as an intellectual elite. The other thousands of students in the school, who could only spell words like “fuck” and “shit”—scrawling them on the walls of the sports arenas and gymnasiums and TV rooms that made up most of the space in the school—treated us with a kind of grudging awe. Even though they bullied us at times—and I still shudder to remember the hockey player who used to bloody my nose regularly after our class in Mind Tripping— they seemed secretly to envy us. And they had a pretty fair idea of what reading was.

But that was a long time ago, and I am fifty now. The young people I work with—porno stars, hot young directors of game shows, pleasure experts, emotion manipulators, admen—neither understand nor care about what reading is. One day on a set we were dealing with a script written by an old-timer that called for a book to be thrown by a young girl at an older woman. The scene was part of a Good-Feeling Religion story, adapted from some forgotten ancient, and it took place in the waiting room of a clinic. The crew had put together a pretty convincing waiting room with plastic chairs and a shag rug, but when the director arrived the prop man had a quick conference with him, telling him he “didn’t quite follow that thing about the book.” And the director, clearly unsure what a book was but not wanting to admit he didn’t know, asked me what it was for. I told him it established the girl who was reading it as an intellectual and somewhat antisocial. He pretended to consider this, although he probably did not recognize the word “intellectual” either, and then he said, “Let’s use a glass ashtray. And some blood, when it cuts her. The scene’s too flat anyhow.”

I was too shocked to quarrel with him. I hadn’t really realized until then how far we had come.

And that leads me to this question: why am I writing this? And the answer is only that I have always wanted to. Back in school, learning to read, all of us thought we would someday write books and that somebody would read them. I know now that I waited too long to start this; but I’ll go on with it anyway.

That script, ironically, won the director an award. It told the story of a married woman who brings her husband, Claude, to a clinic because of impotence. While waiting for the doctors to assess Claude’s problem, she is hit in the face with an ashtray by a sex-starved young lesbian and goes into a coma, during which she has a religious awakening, with visions.

I remember getting drunk on mescaline and gin at the party where the award was given and trying to explain to a bare-breasted actress who sat on a sofa next to me that the only standards of the television industry were monetary, that there was no real motive in television beyond the making of money. She smiled at me all the time I talked, and occasionally ran her fingertips lightly across her nipples. And when I had finished she said, “But money is fulfillment too.”

I got her drunk and took her to a motel.

Writing a book, I feel as a Talmudic scholar or an Egyptologist might have felt at Disneyland in the twentieth century. Except, I suppose, I do not really have to wonder if there is anyone who wants to hear what I have to say; I know there is no bne. I can only wonder how many people are left alive who can read. Possibly a few thousand. A friend of mine who works part time as the head of a publishing house says the average book finds about eighty readers. I’ve asked him why they don’t stop publishing altogether. He says he frankly doesn’t know, but that his publishing company is such a tiny division of the recreation corporation that owns it that they have probably forgotten about its existence. He doesn’t know how to read himself; but he respects books because his mother had been a kind of recluse who read almost constantly, and he had loved her deeply. He is, by the way, one of the few people I know who were brought up in a family. Most of my friends have come out of the dormitories. I was reared in a kibbutz, out in Nebraska. But then I’m Jewish, and that, too, is a pretty rare thing these days: to be Jewish and to know it. I was one of the last members of the kibbutz; it was converted into a state-operated Thinker Dormitory when I was in my twenties.

I was born in 2137…

Reading that date I was immediately curious about how long ago Alfred Fain had lived, and I asked Bob. He said, “About two hundred years.”

Then I said, “Is there a date now? Does this year have a number?”

He looked at me coldly. “No,” he said. “There is no date.”

I would like to know the date. I would like for my child to have a birth date.