Mockingbird

DAY NINETY-FIVE

I am not so tired now. The work is getting easier to do, and I feel stronger.

I am sleeping better at nights, now that I have decided to take my sopors. And the food is passable now and I eat a great deal. More than I have ever eaten before in my life.

I do not exactly like the effect of sopors anymore; but they are necessary if I am to sleep properly. They stop some of the pain of my thoughts.

Today I tripped and fell between the rows of plants, and another prisoner who was nearby ran over and helped me up. He was a tall, gray-haired man whom I had noticed before because of the way he whistles at times.

He helped me brush myself off and then looked at me closely and said, “You all right, buddy?”

All of this was terribly intimate—almost obscene—but I did not mind, really. “Yes,” I said. “I’m all right.” And then one of the robots shouted, “No talking. Invasion of Privacy!” and the man looked at me, grinned broadly, and shrugged. We both went back to work. But as he walked away I heard him mutter, “Stupid goddamn robots!” and I was shocked at the strength of unashamed feeling in his voice.

I have seen other prisoners whispering together in the rows. It is often several minutes before a robot notices and stops them.

The robots walk between the rows with us; but they stop before going close to the low cliff at the end of the field. Perhaps they are programmed that way so they will not fall—or be pushed—over the cliff. Anyway they are far enough back by the time I arrive at the seaward end of the row so that there is a short time when they cannot see me, because of a dip in the ground before it comes to the edge of the cliff.

I have learned to speed up, doing two squirts of the gun to each beat of music, toward the end of each row. This gives me time to stand at the edge of the ocean for sixteen beats—and I am thankful I learned to determine this from Arithmetic jor Boys and Girls. I stand and look out over the ocean. It is wonderful to look at— broad and huge and serene. Something deep in my self seems to respond to it, with a feeling I cannot name. But I am learning again to welcome strange feelings. Sometimes there are birds over the ocean, their curved wings outspread, sailing in the air in smooth broad arcs, above my world of men and machines, inscrutable, and breathtaking to see. Looking at them I say sometimes to myself a word I learned from a film: “Splendid!”

I said I am learning to welcome strange feelings, and this is true. How different I now seem from what I was, far less than a yellow ago, when I first began to feel those feelings while watching silent films at my bed-and-desk. I know that I am being disobedient to all that I was taught about feelings toward things outside myself when I was a child, but I do not care. In fact, I enjoy doing what was forbidden once.

I have nothing to lose.

I think the ocean means most to me on rain days, when the water and sky are gray. There is a sandy beach below the cliff; its tan color looks beautiful against the gray water. And the white birds in the gray sky! My heart beats noticeably when I even imagine it, here in my cell. And it is sad, like the horse with the hat on its head in the old film, like King Kong falling—so slowly, so softly, so far—and like the words that I now say aloud: “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.” Like remembering Mary Lou, cross-legged on the floor, her eyes on her book.

Sadness. Sadness. But I will embrace the sadness, and make it a part of this life that I am memorizing.

I have nothing to lose.

DAY NINETY-SEVEN

An astonishing thing happened today, out in the field.

I had been working for about two hours; it was nearly time for the second break. I heard a rustling sound behind me where the robot overseer normally stood and I looked around and there the robot was, staggering jerkily in the row. Just as I looked his heavy foot came down on a Protein 4 plant. The plant split open with a disgusting noise and covered his foot with purple juice.

The robot’s mouth was grimly set and his eyes stared upward. He staggered for a few more moments, stepped on another plant, and then stood completely still for a moment, as if dormant. Then he fell flat to the ground like a dead weight. The other robot walked over to him, looked down at his inert body, and said, “Rise.” But the other did not move. The standing robot bent down and picked up the fallen one and began to carry him back toward the prison buildings.

A minute, later I heard a loud voice in the field shout, “Malfunction, boys!” There were the sounds of running. I looked in astonishment and saw a group of blue-uniformed prisoners running between the rows and then, suddenly, there was an arm around my shoulder—a thing that had never happened before in my life: a stranger putting an arm around my shoulder!—and it was the man with gray hair and he was saying, “Come on, buddy! To the beach,” and I found myself running, following him. And I was feeling frightened. Frightened but good.

There was a place where the cliff was low and there was a cleft in the rock where you could climb down worn old steps, themselves made of rock. As I was going down with the others, astonished at the back-slapping and friendly shouting among them— a thing I had never seen even as a child—I noticed a strange thing on one of the cliff rocks beside the stairs. There was writing, in faded white paint. It said: “John loves Julie. Class of ’94.”

Everything was so strange that I felt almost hypnotized by it. Men were saying things to one another and laughing, just as in pirate films. Or, for that matter, in some prison films. But seeing it in a film and then actually seeing it happen are two very different things.

And yet, thinking about it now in my cell, I can see that I was not as upset as I might have been, possibly because I had seen such intimacy in the films.

Some of the men gathered together pieces of driftwood and built a fire on the beach. I had never seen an open fire before and I liked it. Then some of the men actually took off their clothes, ran laughing down the beach and into the water. Some splashed and played in the shallow waters; others went out deeper and began to swim, just as though they were in a Health and Fitness pool. I noticed that they stayed in little groups, both those who were playing and those swimming, and they seemed to want it that way.

The rest of us sat in a circle around the fire. The gray-haired man pulled a joint from his shut pocket and took a twig from the fire and lit it. He seemed to be accustomed to fires—in fact, all of them seemed to have done this many times before.

One man, smiling, said to the man next to nun, “Charlie, how long since the last malfunction?” and Charlie said, “It’s been a while. We were overdue.” And the other laughed and said, “Yeah!”

The gray-haired man came over and sat by me. He offered me the joint but I shook my head, so he shrugged and gave it to the man on the other side of me. Then he said, “We’ve got at least an hour. Repair on robots is slow here.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Everybody gets knocked out in court and they don’t wake him up till he gets here. But one guy told me once he thought it was North Carolina.” He spoke to the man who had taken the joint. The man was passing it to the next man. “Is that right, Foreman? North Carolina?”

Foreman turned around. “I heard South,” he said, “South Carolina.”

“Well, somewhere in there,” the gray-haired man said.

For a while we were all silent around the fire, watching its flames in the afternoon air, listening to the sound of the surf against the beach and hearing the occasional cry of a gull overhead. Then one of the older men spoke to me. “What they put you in for? Kill somebody?”

I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say. He would not have understood about reading. “I was living with someone,” I said finally. “A woman…”

The man’s face brightened for a moment and then almost immediately went sad. “I lived with a woman once. For over a blue.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Yeah. A blue and a yellow. At least. That isn’t what they put me here for, though. Shit, I’m a thief is why. But I sure do remember…” He was wrinkled and thin and bent; there were only a few hairs on his head, and his hands shook as he took the joint and inhaled from it and then passed it to the younger man next to him.

“Women,” the gray-haired man beside me said, breaking the silence.

Something about that one word seemed to open up the older man. “I used to fix coffee for her,” he said, “and we’d drink it in bed. Real coffee with real milk in it, and sometimes when I could find it a piece of fruit. An orange, maybe. She’d drink that coffee out of a gray mug and I’d just sit at the other end of the bed facing her and pretend to be thinking about my own coffee but what I was really doing was watching her. God, I could watch that woman.” He shook his head.

I could feel his sadness. There were goose bumps on my arms and legs from hearing him talk like that. I had never heard another person speak for me like that before. He had said what I felt and, sad as I was, there was relief for me in it.

Someone else said softly, “What become of her?”

For a while the old man didn’t answer. Then he said, “Don’t know. One day I come home from the mill and she wasn’t there. Never saw her again.”

There was silence for a moment and then one of the younger prisoners spoke up. He was trying, I suppose, to be helpful. “Well, quick sex is best,” he said philosophically.

The old man turned his head slowly and stared at the man who had just spoken. And then he said to him, strongly and evenly, “Fuck that. You can just fuck that.”

The younger man looked flustered, and turned his face away. “I didn’t mean…”

“Fuck it,” the old man said. “Fuck your quick sex. I know what my life’s been like.” Then he turned toward the ocean again and said softly, repeating himself, “I know what my life’s been like.”

Hearing this and seeing the way the old man looked toward the ocean with his thin shoulders squared under his faded blue prison shirt and the breeze blowing the few wisps of hair on his old, tight-skinned head, I felt such sadness that it was beyond tears. And I was thinking of Mary Lou and of the way she had looked, in the mornings sometimes, drinking tea. Or of her hand on the back of my neck and the way that, sometimes, she would stare at me and stare, and then smile…

I must have sat there thinking these things about Mary Lou and feeling my own grief for a long while, looking out toward the ocean, past the old man. And then I heard the gray-haired man next to me say softly, “You wanta swim?” I looked up at him, startled, and said, “No,” perhaps too quickly. But the thought of getting naked with all those strangers had brought me back to the present with a start.

Yet I love to swim.

In the Thinker Dormitories, each child has the pool to himself for ten minutes. Dormitories are very strict about Individualism.

I was thinking about this when the gray-haired man suddenly said, “My name’s Belasco.”

I looked down at the sand at my feet. “Hello,” I said.

And then, a moment later, he said, “What’s your name, buddy?”

“Oh,” I said, still looking at the sand. “Bentley.” And I felt his hand on my shoulder and looked up, startled, at his face. He was grinning at me. “Good to know you, Bentley,” he said.

After a while I got up and walked down to the water’s edge but away from the swimmers. I know that I have changed much since I left Ohio; but all that intimacy and feeling were more than I could stand at once. And I wanted to be alone with my thoughts of Mary Lou.

At the water’s edge I found a hermit crab, in a small, curled whelk shell. I knew it was a hermit crab from a picture in a book Mary Lou had found: Seashore Creatures of North America.

There was a strong, briny, clean smell along the edge of the water, and the waves, gently rolling in along the wet sands, made a sound like I had never heard before. I stood there in the sun watching, and smelling the smell, and listening to the water-sound, until Belasco’s voice called me back. “Time to go, Bentley. They’ll have him fixed before long.”

We all climbed silently up the stairs and went back to our positions in the field and waited.

After a while the robots came back. They did not notice that we had made no progress in their absence. Stupid robots.

I bent to work, in time to music.

When I got to the seaward end of the row, I looked down at the beach. Our fire was still burning.

I realize that I have just written “our fire.” How strange, that I should think of it as belonging to all of us—to us as a group!

As we were going back to the fields from the beach I walked beside the white-haired old man. I wanted, for a moment, to say something kind to him, to thank him for making my own sadness more bearable, or, even, to put my arm around his frail-looking old shoulders. But I did none of these. I do not know how to do such things. I wish I knew how; I sincerely wish it. But I do not.

DAY NINETY-NINE

Alone in my cell at night I think a great deal. I think sometimes of the things I have read in books, or about my boyhood, or about my three blues as a professor in Ohio. Sometimes I think about that time when I first learned to read, over two yellows ago, when I found the box with the film and the flash cards and the little books with pictures. The words on the box said: “Beginning Readers’ Kit. They were the first printed words I had ever seen, and of course I could not read them. Whatever gave me the patience to persist until I learned to read words from a book?

If I had not learned to read in Ohio and then come to New York to try to become a professor of reading, I would not be in prison now. And I would not have met Mary Lou. I would not be filled with this sadness.

I think of her more than I think of any other thing. I see her, trying not to look frightened, as Spofforth took her out the door of my room at the library. That was the last time I saw her. I do not know where Spofforth took her, or what has become of her. She is probably in a prison for women, but I’m not certain of that.

I tried to get Spofforth to tell me what would become of her, while we were riding in the thought bus to my hearing; but he would not answer me.

I have tried to draw a picture of her face on my sheets of drawing paper, using colored crayons. But it is no good; I was never able to draw.

Yellows and blues ago there was a boy in my dormitory who could draw beautifully. One time he put some of his drawings on my desk in a classroom and I looked at them with awe. There were pictures of birds and of cows and of people and trees and of the robot who monitored the hall outside the classroom. They were remarkable pictures, with clear lines and with amazing accuracy.

I did not know what to do with the pictures. Taking or giving private things to others was a terrible thing to do and could cause high punishment. So I left them on my desk and the next day they were gone. And a few days after that the boy who drew them was also gone. I do not know what became of him. Nobody spoke of him.

Will it be the same with Mary Lou? Is it all over, and will there be no mention of her in the world again?

Tonight I have taken four sopors. I do not want to remember so much.

DAY ONE HUNDRED FOUR

After supper this evening Belasco came to my cell! And he had a small gray-and-white animal under his arm.

I was sitting in my chair, thinking about Mary Lou and remembering the sound of her voice when she read aloud, when suddenly I saw my door come open. And there Belasco stood, grinning at me, with that animal under his arm.

“How…?” I said.

He held a finger to his lips and then said softly, “None of the doors are locked tonight, Bentley. You might call it another malfunction.” He pushed the door shut and then set the animal on the floor. It sat and looked at me with a kind of bored curiosity; then it began scratching its ear with a hind foot. It was something like a dog, but smaller.

“The doors are locked at night by a computer; but sometimes the computer forgets to lock them.”

“Oh,” I said, still watching the little animal. Then I said, “What is it?”

“What is what?” Belasco said.

“The animal.”

He stared at me with great surprise. “You don’t know what a cat is, Bentley?”

“I never saw one before.”

He shook his head. Then he reached down and stroked the animal a few times. “This is a cat. It’s a pet.”

“A pet?” I said.

Belasco shook his head, grinning. “Boy! You don’t know anything they don’t \\each in school, do you? A pet is an amimal you keep for yourself. It’s a Mend.”

Of course, I thought. Like Roberto and Consuela and their dog Biff, in the book I had learned to read from. Biff was the pet of Roberto and Consuela. And the book had said, “Roberto is Consuela’s friend,” and that was what a friend was. Somebody you were with more than a person should be with anyone else. Apparently an animal could be a friend, too.

I wanted to bend down and touch the cat, but I was afraid to. “Does it have a name?”

“No,” Belasco said. He walked over and sat on the edge of my bed, still speaking only barely above a whisper. “No. I just call it ‘cat.’” He pulled a joint out of his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth. His blue prison jacket sleeves were rolled up and I could see that he had some kind of decorations that looked as if they were printed in blue ink on each of his forearms, just above the bracelets on his wrists. On his right arm was a heart and on his left the outline of a naked woman.

He lit the joint. “You can give the cat a name if you want to, Bentley.”

“You mean I can just decide what to call it?”

“That’s right.” He passed me the joint and I took it quite casually—considering that I knew sharing was illegal—and drew a puff from it and passed it back.

Then, when I let the smoke out, I said, “All right. The cat’s name will be Biff.”

Belasco smiled. “Fine. The beast has been needing a name. Now it’s got one.” He looked down at the cat, who was walking slowly around, exploring the room. “Right, Biff?”

Bentley and Belasco and their cat Biff, I thought.

DAY ONE HUNDRED FIVE

The prison buildings are, I believe, the most ancient structures I have ever seen. There are five of them, built of large green-painted blocks of stone, with dirty windows with rusted bars on them. I have only been in two of the five buildings—the dormitory with the barred cells where I sleep, and the shoe factory building where I work in the mornings. I do not know what is in the other three buildings. One of them, which sits a bit apart from the others, seems to be even older than the rest, and its windows have been boarded up, like the summer house in Angel on a String, with Gloria Swanson. I have walked over to this building during the after-lunch exercise period and looked at it more closely. Its stones are covered with a smooth, wet moss, and its big metal doors are always locked.

Around all of the buildings is a very high double fence of thick wire mesh, once painted red but now faded to pink. There is a gateway in the fence through which we pass to work in the fields. There are four moron robot guards at this gateway at all times. As we pass through on our way to work they check the metal bands that are permanently fastened to our wrists before we are let through.

I was given a five-minute orientation lecture by the warden—a large, beefy Make Six—when I first was issued my uniforms. Among other things he explained that if a prisoner left without having his wristbands deactivated by the guards the bands would become like white-hot wires and would burn his hands off at the wrists if he did not return to within the gates immediately.

The bands are narrow and tight; they are made of an extremely hard, dull, silvery metal. I do not know how they were put on. They were around my wrists when I awoke in prison.

I think it is near to wintertime, because the air outside is cold. But the field around the plants is heated somehow, and the sun continues to shine. The ground is warm beneath my feet as I fertilize the obscene plants, and yet the air is cold on my body. And the stupid music never stops, never malfunctions, and the robots stare and stare. It is like a dream.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

It has been eleven days since I have written anything about my life. I would have lost count of the days if I had not thought to make a crayon mark on the wall every evening after supper. The marks are under the huge TV screen that fills up most of the back wall of my cell, and which my chair, bolted to the floor, permanently faces. I can see the marks now when I raise my head from the paper on the drawing board in my lap; they look like a design of neat gray stripes on the wall, under the TV.

I am losing interest in writing. I feel, sometimes, that if I do not get my books back or see any more silent films I will forget how to read and will not want to write.

Belasco has not been back since the first night. I suppose it is because the computer has not forgotten to lock the doors after supper. After I make the mark on the wall I always check the door and it is always locked.

I do not think of Mary Lou all of the time, as I once did. I do not think of very much at all. I take my sopors and smoke my dope and watch erotic fantasies and death fantasies in life-sized three dimensions on the TV and go to sleep early.

The same shows are repeated every eight or nine days on the TV, or I can watch Self-improvement and Rehabilitation shows from a file of thirty recorded BB’s that are issued to each prisoner at his orientation. But I do not play the BB’s. I watch whatever is on. I am not interested in watching television shows; I only watch television.

This is enough writing. I am tired of it.

DAY ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

There was a storm this afternoon, while we were at work out in the field. For a long time the robot guards seemed confused by the wind and the heavy rain and they did not call to us when we found ourselves standing at the edge of the cliff with rain blowing on our bodies, staring at the sky and ocean. The sky would go quickly from gray to black and back to gray again. Lightning kept flashing in it almost constantly. And below us the ocean pounded and roared. Its waves would inundate the beach and slap heavily at the base of the cliff and then recede for only a moment before they would be back—dark, almost black, foaming, loud.

All of us watched, and no one tried to speak. The noise, of thunder and of the ocean, was deafening.

And then, as it began to quiet down a bit, we all turned and began to head back toward the dormitory. And as I was walking through the Protein 4 field and the rain, gentler now, was still hitting my face and my drenched clothing, I realized that I was cold and shivering and suddenly these words came into my mind:

And I fell down on my knees in the field and wept, dumbly, for Mary Lou and for the life that I had, for a time, lived, when my mind and my imagination were, so briefly, alive.

There were no guards near. Belasco came back for me. He helped me up silently and, with his arm around me, helped me back into the dormitory. We did not speak to each other until I was at the open door of my cell. Then he took his arm away from me and looked me in the face. His eyes were grave, and reassuring. “Hell, Bentley,” he said, “I think I know how you feel.” Then he slapped me gently on the shoulder and turned and walked to his cell.

I stood leaning against the cold steel bars and watched the other prisoners, their hair wet and their clothing drenched, walk back to their cells. I wanted to put my arm around each of them. Whether I knew their names or not, they were, all of them, my friends.

DAY ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE

I got into the boarded-up building today.

It was simple. I was out in the gravel yard between buildings during the exercise period after lunch. I saw two robot guards walk up the steps to the building, unlock the door, and go inside. After a few moments they came out, each carrying a box of the kind our toilet paper comes in. They carried their boxes over toward the dormitory building. The door stayed open. I went in.

Inside, the floors were of Permoplastic. The walls were of some other material, filthy and crumbling, and there was very little light since the windows were boarded up. I walked quickly through dark hallways, opening doors.

Some of the rooms were empty; others had things like soap and paper towels and toilet paper and food trays, stacked up on shelves. I took a stack of paper towels, for this journal. And then I saw a dim and faded sign over a pair of double doors at the end of a hall. It was the only other sign with writing I had ever seen except for the ones in the basement of the library in New York.

I could not make out the words at first; they were faded and covered with dirt. And the hallway was dark. But when I got up close and looked carefully I made them out: EAST WING LIBRARY.

I almost jumped at the word “Library.” I just stood there, staring at the sign, and felt my heart pounding.

And then I tried the doors and found that they were locked. I pulled and pushed and tried to twist the knobs, but I could not make anything budge. It was horrible.

I became overwhelmed with anger and beat my fists against the door. But it did not move and I only hurt myself.

I slipped out of the building after I heard the guards return and go into one of the storage rooms.

I must get inside that library! I must have books again. If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living.

Synthetic gasoline is used in the harvesting machines. I know that I could get some and burn myself.

I will stop writing now and watch TV.

DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO

For eleven days I have been despondent. In the afternoons I have not bothered to go to look at the ocean when I get to the end of my row, and I have not tried to write in the evenings. My mind is as blank as I can make it while I work—I concentrate only on the thick, rancid smell of the Protein 4 plants.

The guards say nothing, but I still hate them. It is all I really feel. Their thick, slow bodies and their slack faces are like the synthetic, rubbery plants I feed. They are—the phrase is from Intolerance—an abomination in my sight.

If I take four or five sopors it is not unpleasant to watch TV. My TV wall is a good one, and it always works.

My body no longer hurts. It is strong now, and my muscles are firm and hard. I am suntanned, and my eyes are clear. There are tough calluses on my hands and on the soles of my feet, and I work well and have not been beaten again. But the sadness in my heart has come back. It has come to me slowly, a day at a time, and I am more despairing than during my first days in prison. Ev-erything seems hopeless.

Days pass, sometimes, without my thinking of Mary Lou. Hopeless.

DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE

I have seen where the synthetic gasoline is kept. It is in the computer shed at the edge of the field.

All prisoners have electronic cigarette lighters, for smoking marijuana.

DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SIX

Last night Belasco came to my cell again, and at first I did not want to see him. When I found the door to my cell was unlocked I became nervous. I did not want to leave, and I did not want anyone coming in.

But he walked in anyway and said, “Good to see you, Bentley.”

I just looked at the floor at my feet. My TV was off, and I had been sitting like that for hours, on the edge of my bed.

He was silent for a while and I heard him seat himself in my chair, but I still did not look up. I did not feel that I could even raise my head.

Finally he spoke again, softly. “I seen you in the fields the last few days, Bentley. You been looking like a robot.” His voice was sympathetic, soothing.

I made myself speak. “I suppose so,” I said.

We were quiet again. Then he said, “I know how it is, Bentley. You get to thinking about dying. Like they do in the cities, with gas and a lighter. Or here we got the ocean. I seen guys go out all the way. Hell, I used to think about it myself: just swim as far as I can and not look back…”

I looked up at him. “You felt like that?” I was astonished. “You seem so strong.”

He laughed wryly and I looked up toward his face. “Shit,” he said, “I’m like everybody else. This kind of living ain’t much better than being dead.” He laughed again, shaking his head from side to side. “And it ain’t much better on the outside, to tell the truth. No real work to do, except the same kind of crap you do in here. At the Worker Dormitories they told us, ‘Labor fulfills.’ Horseshit.” He took a joint from his pocket and lit it. “I was stealing credit cards the first blue after I graduated. Been in prison half my life. Wanted to die the first two or three stretches, but I didn’t. Nowadays I got my cats, and I sneak around a little…” Then he interrupted himself. “Hey!” he said. “You want to have Biff?”

I stared at him. “For my own… pet?”

“Sure. Why not? I got four more. Pain in the ass to find food for sometimes, though. But I can teach you how.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d like that. I’d like to have a cat.”

“We can go get her now,” he said.

And I found myself leaving my cell easily. As we went out the unlocked door I turned to Belasco and said, “I feel better.”

He slapped me lightly on the back. “What are friends for?” he said.

I stood there a moment, not knowing what to say. And then, almost without thinking of the gesture, I reached out and put my hand on his forearm. And I thought of something. “There’s a building I want to get in. Do you think it might be unlocked?”

He grinned at me. “That’s more like it,” he said. And then, “Let’s go see.”

We left the building. It was simple and there were no guards in sight.

We got into the deserted building with no trouble, but inside it was too dark to see, and we stumbled over boxes in the hallways. Then I heard Belasco say, “Sometimes these old places have a switch on the wall,” and I heard him fumbling, heard him trip and curse, and then there was a click and a big overhead light came on in the hallway. For a moment I was frightened that the guards might see the light, but then I remembered the boarded-up windows and was relieved.

But when I found the library door it was still locked! I was tense enough already, and I could have screamed.

Belasco looked at me. “Is that where you want to go?”

I said, “Yes.” Without even asking me what I wanted to get in the room for, he began to examine the lock. It was of a kind I had never seen before, and didn’t even appear to be electronic.

Belasco whistled quietly. “Wow!” he said. “This bastard is old.” He began feeling in his pockets until he found his prison-issued lighter. Then he put it on the floor and stamped on it two or three times with his heel, until it was broken. He reached down, picked up the mess of wires and glass and plastic, and, after studying it a moment, pulled out a piece of stiff wire about as long as my thumb. I watched him silently, having no idea what he was doing this for.

He bent to the lock on the door carefully, placed the end of his wire into a slot in it, and began probing around. Every now and then a little clicking sound came from inside the lock somewhere. He cursed a couple of times, quietly, and continued. And then, just as I was about to ask him what he was trying to do, there was a softer sound inside the lock and Belasco grinned, took the doorknob in his hand, and opened the door!

It was dark inside, but Belasco found a switch on the wall again and two somewhat dim overhead lights came on.

I looked around me eagerly, hoping to find the walls lined with books. But they were empty. I stared for a long time, feeling almost sick. There were ancient wooden tables and chairs, and a few small boxes along one wall, but there were no shelves and the pockmarked walls were empty even of pictures.

“What’s the problem?” Belasco said.

I looked at him. “I was hoping to find… books.”

“Books?” He apparently didn’t know the word. But he said, “What’s in those boxes over there?”

I nodded, without much hope, and went over to look at the boxes by the wall. The first two I opened were filled with rusty spoons—so badly rusted that they were all frozen together in a reddish mass. But the third box was filled with books! I began taking them out eagerly. There were twelve of them. And at the bottom of the box was a pile of sheets of blank paper that was hardly yellow at all.

Excitedly I began to read the titles. The biggest was called North Carolina Revised Statutes: 1992. Another was called Woodworking for Fun and Profit and a third, also very thick, was called Gone With the Wind. It felt wonderful just to hold them and think of all the writing inside.

Belasco had been watching me with mild curiosity. Finally he spoke. “Are those things books?” he said.

“Yes.”

He picked one up from the box and ran his finger through the dust on the cover. “Never heard of such a thing,” he said.

I looked at him. “Let’s get the cat and get these back to my cell.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

We got Biff and carried the books back without any trouble at all.

It is very late now and Belasco has gone back to his cell. I will stop writing now and look through my books. I have them hidden between my water bed and the wall, near where Biff is sleeping.

DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE

I am very tired because I read almost all night last night and had to work all day today. But what excitement I have found! My tired mind was busy all day, with all of the new things I had to think about.

I think I will make a list of my new books:

• North Carolina Revised Statutes: 1992

• Woodworking for Fun and Profit

• Gone With the Wind

• Holy Bible

• Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide

• A Dictionary of the English Language

• The Causes of Population Decline

• Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries

• A Backpacker’s Guide to the Carolina Coast

• A Short History of the United States

• Cooking Shore Dinners: Let’s Have a Party!

• The Art of the Dance

I have been reading the history books, going from one to the other and to the dictionary to find the meaning of new words. The dictionary is a pleasure to use, now that I know the alphabet.

There is much in the history books that I do not understand, and it is hard for me to accept the idea that there have been so many people in the world. In the history that is about Europe there are pictures of Paris and Berlin and London, and the size of the buildings and the number of people are staggering.

Sometimes Biff jumps up into my lap while I am reading and goes to sleep there. I like that.

DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY-NINE

For ten days now I have spent every moment that I can in reading. No one has bothered me; the guards either do not care or, more likely, their programming does not take into account the phenomenon. I even take a book to social time with me and no one seems to notice that I am reading it during the films.

My blue prison jacket—already a bit faded—has large pockets and I always carry one of my smaller books in it. A Short History of the United States and The Causes of Population Decline are both small, and they fit very comfortably. I read during my five-minute breaks at the shoe factory.

The first sentence of The Causes of Population Decline says: “In the first thirty years of the twenty-first century the population of the earth declined by one-half, and it is still declining.” To read things like this, that consider the nature of all of human life, and at far-off times, fascinates me for reasons that I do not understand.

I do not know how long ago the twenty-first century was, although I understand that it is more recent than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that my history book is about. But I was never taught about “centuries” in the dormitory; I only know the meaning of the word from the dictionary: it divides up human history into groups of one hundred years—of two hundred yellows.

The twenty-first century must have been a long time ago. For one thing, there are no mentions of robots in the book.

Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide has the date 2135 on it, and I know from reading history that the date is from the twenty-second century.

Holy Bible begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not give the century of the “beginning,” nor is it clear who “God” is, or was. I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real.

The robots in the Audel’s book are shown in pictures and diagrams. They are all of a very simple kind made for elementary chores like fieldwork and record keeping.

Gone With the Wind resembles some of the films I know. It is, I think, a made-up story. It is about some silly people in big houses, and about a war. I don’t think I will ever finish it, since it is very long.

Many of the other books make no sense at all to me. Still, they seem to fit into some larger, only dimly clear, pattern.

What I like most is the strange sensation I get in the little hairs at the back of my neck when I read certain sentences. And, oddly enough, there are sentences that are often quite unclear to me, or that make me sad. I still remember this one from my days in New York:

I will stop writing now, and go back to reading. My life is very strange.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-NINE

I read continuously, and take no sopors and smoke no marijuana. I read until I can stay awake no longer and fall in bed and lie there with my mind whirling and with faces and people and ideas from the past crowding and confusing me until, exhausted, I fall asleep.

And I am learning new words. Thirty or forty a day.

Long before robots and Privacy, mankind had a violent and astonishing history. I hardly know how to think or feel about some of the dead people I have read of, and of the great events. There is the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and the Great Flood of Fire and World War III and the Denver Incident. I was taught as a child that all things before the Second Age were violent and destructive because of a failure to respect individual rights; but it was never more specific than that. We had never developed a sense of history as such; all we knew, if we ever thought about it, was that there had been others before us and that we were better than they. But no one was ever encouraged to think about anything outside of himself. “Don’t ask; relax.”

I am amazed to think of the number of people who must have screamed and died on battlefields in order to fulfill the ambitions of presidents and emperors. Or of the aggregation into the hands of some large groups of people, like the United States of America, great reserves of wealth and power, denied to most others.

And yet, despite all this, there seemed to have been good and kind men and women. And many of them happy.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-TWO

The back part of Holy Bible is about Jesus Christ. Some sentences in it have been underlined by a former reader.

Jesus Christ died violently when he was still young, but before he died he said and did a great many striking things. He cured many sick people and talked strangely to many others. Some of the underlined sayings resemble what I was taught in my Piety classes. “The kingdom of God is within you,” for example, sounds much like our being taught to seek fulfillment only inwardly, through drugs and Privacy. But others of his sayings are quite different. “Ye must love one another” is one of these. Another one that is very strong is: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” And another: “Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”

If someone should come to me and say, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” I would want with all my strength to believe him. I want those things: a way, the truth, and life.

As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With the Wind, or a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.

Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a “great man.” I am not certain I like the idea of “great men”; it makes me uncomfortable. “Great men” often have had very bloody plans for mankind.

I think my writing is improving. I know more words, and the making of sentences comes more easily.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-SEVEN

I have read all of my books, except for Gone With the Wind and The Art of the Dance, and I want more. Five nights ago the doors were unlocked again and Belasco and I went back to the abandoned building and searched it thoroughly, but we found no more books.

I must have more to read! When I think of all those books in the basement of the library in New York I hunger to be back there.

In New York I saw some films that showed prison escapes. And in those prisons the guards were human and vigilant, while here ours are only moron robots.

But there are these metal bracelets that cannot be deactivated for more than a half day at a time. And how would I get to New York if I escaped?

In the Backpacking book there is a map of what is called the Eastern Seaboard; North and South Carolina are on this map, and so is New York. If I walked along the beach, keeping the ocean on my right, I would come to New York. But I have no idea how far it is.

Cooking Shore Dinners tells about finding clams and other things to eat on beaches. I could feed myself that way, if I escaped.

And I could copy this journal, in smaller writing, on the thin paper I found with the box of books and carry it with me in my pocket. But I could not carry all the books.

And there is no way to remove the bracelets. Unless there is something that would cut them.

DAY ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-EIGHT

In the shoe factory there is a very large machine that cuts the sheets of plastic that the shoes are made from. It has a shining blade of adamant steel that cuts through about twenty sheets of tough plastic at a single stroke. There is a robot guard by the machine, and no human worker is supposed to go near it. But I have noticed that at times the guard seems dormant; he may be a nearly senile robot that has been assigned to the simple task of standing by a machine.

If, when I saw him looking dormant, I went to the machine and held my hands in exactly the right spot, the knife might be able to cut my bracelets.

If I made a mistake it would cut my hands off. Or it might not be able to cut through the metal and the blade would catch on it and twist my arms out of their sockets.

It is too frightening. I will stop thinking about it.

DAY ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY

The Causes of Population Declinesays this interesting thing about the number of people in the world:

The reduction of the planet’s inhabitants has been accounted for in a diverse and conflicting number of ways by contemporary demography. The most persuasive of these accounts usually suggest one or more of the following factors:

1. fears of overpopulation

2. the perfection of sterilization techniques

3. the disappearance of the family

4. the widespread concern with “inner” experiences

5. a loss of interest in children

6. a widespread desire to avoid responsibilities

The book then analyzes each of these things.

But nowhere does it speak of a possibility that there might be no children at all. And that, I think, is the way the world has come to be. I do not think there are any more children.

After we all die, there may be no others.

I do not know whether that is bad or good.

Yet I think it would be in many ways a good thing to be the father of a child, and to have Mary Lou be the mother. And I would like to live with her, and for us to be a family—despite the great risks to my Individuality.

What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?

DAY ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR

Today the Protein 4 plants were harvested. When we went out in the field to work there were two huge yellow machines already there, noisily moving down the rows like giant thought buses, throwing up clouds of dust and scooping up the ripened plants twenty or thirty at a time and feeding them into hoppers, where I supposed they would be pulverized, to be made into soybars and synthetic protein flakes.

We kept our distance from the field because of the smell, which was far worse even than usual, and watched the machines in silence for a while.

Finally someone spoke. It was Belasco, and he said grimly, “There goes another season’s work, boys.”

Nobody said anything else. Another season’s work. I looked around and behind me, looking at things closely for the first time in weeks. The trees on the hills beyond the prison buildings had all lost their leaves. The air was cold on my skin. I felt a tingling, thinking of the feeling of my skin, looking up at the pale blueness of the sky. At the edge of the hills a great crowd of birds were flying, wheeling, and turning in unison.

And I decided then that I must escape from this prison.