Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

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.