Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and sex better and brighter than in life.’

‘When the drugs and the television were perfected by the computers that made and distributed them, the cars were no longer necessary. And since no one had devised a way of making cars safe in the hands of a human driver, it was decided to discontinue them.’

And the automobile prepared the way for the more profound—more inward—dependencies upon television and then robots and, finally, the ultimate and predictable conclusion to all of it: the perfection of the chemistry of mind.

‘It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.’

Fall in love. The oddness of the phrase—the ancient phrase—occupied my attention for a moment there in the living room in the middle of the night. There was something about the words that struck me. And then I realized that I had never heard them spoken before; they were something from silent films and from books and not from the life that I knew.

I wanted to recover my buried life. This erased part of my memory. I would like to know, before I die, what it was like to be the human being I have tried to be all my life.’

There was a couple holding hands and looking like lovers; but they were obviously in their forties.

Baleen began to recite what seemed to be a memorized, ritual prayer: ‘God grant us safety from the fallout past and the fallout to come. Preserve us from all Detectors. Grant us thy love and keep us from the sin of Privacy. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.’

tired, so worn and used and, overcome, that I dropped my head there at the podium and closed my eyes, letting my mind become blank, empty of everything except the words: My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.

I would watch the TV from supper until bedtime and when I slept I would dream of TV: bright, hypnotic, a constant fulfillment in the disembodied mind.

And then, lying there in that strange old bedroom at the end of a day when I had been baptized in water and nearly immolated in nuclear fire and had read from the Book of Genesis to a family of strangers, I could not sleep because of an imagination I could no longer control. I became flooded with a wish for the simplicity of my past life as a true child of the modern world. I wanted. I craved my sopors and marijuana and my other mind-flowering dope, and my Chemical Serenity and televised experience and my prayers to whatever a ‘Director’ might be, and the sweet, drugged, dream-ridden sleep in my tiny Permoplastic room—air-conditioned, silent, safe from the confusions, the yearnings, the restlessness, and the despair that my new life was made of. I did not want to live with the real anymore; it was too much of a burden. A sorry, heavy burden.

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

looked at her, not knowing what to say and upset by her tears. ‘Church,’ I knew, was the Sears store. It was used for weddings and funerals. In the old days children had been baptized there, in the same fountain that I had been baptized in.

I think of Annabel as a little girl when I look around me now at my living room, as though she were standing there now as a frightened child. If the place is haunted, it is she who haunts it. A beautiful shy child, who loved to sing.

never tried to make love to her again. I have thought since that I should have tried; but once she had told me how she felt about lovemaking I was too confused and uncertain. I would think about Annabel and Mary Lou, loving them both and knowing both were unattainable. And somehow it was almost good that way. There were no risks. Or so I thought until the morning that I came down to find a dirty kitchen with scraps of bread and eggshells on the table and in the sink where the family had fixed their own breakfast.

We sat in chairs in the shoe department with the lights turned on softly and Baleen made some kind of a speech and then he handed me the Bible that he had brought with him and told me to read from it. I opened the Reader’s Digest Bible but did not read from its text.

I put two small ones in my jacket pockets: Youth, by Joseph Conrad, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by R. H. Tawney. Then I went to the thought-bus parking lot and spent an hour looking at the signs on the fronts of the buses.

They were willing to accept their stringent piety, and silence, and sexual restraints, all unthinkingly, along with a few platitudes about Jesus and Moses and Noah; they were overwhelmed, however, at the effort it would require to understand the literature that was the real source of their religion.

But although I had watched television in the same way many times in my life before, I found I could no longer watch it and not think. ‘Give yourself to the Screen,’ they had taught us. It was as basic as ‘Don’t ask; relax.’ But I could no longer give myself to it. I no longer wanted to keep my mind silent, or use it as a vehicle for disconnected pleasure; I wanted to read, and think, and talk.

The prisoners I had lived with had talked whenever they could, and they had to wait for opportunities to do so, as with the time at the beach. But the Baleens were different; they were pleased with one another’s company; but they had nothing to say except for an occasional ‘Praise the Lord.’

When he is alone with me like that his face can show more feeling than even Paul’s or Simon’s and his voice is sometimes so deep and so sad that it almost makes me cry. So queer that this robot should be the repository of so much love and melancholy—powerful feelings that mankind has rid itself of.

His anger frightened me for a moment and I stayed silent. Then I said, ‘I’m Homo sapiens, Bob. And I’m not like that. And you are nearly human. Or more than human.’ He turned away from me, taking his hand away from my shoulder. ‘I am human,’ he said. ‘Except for birth and death.’ He walked back to his ladder. ‘And I am sick of life. I never wanted it.’ I stared at him. ‘That’s the name of the game. I didn’t ask to be born either.’ ‘You can die,’ he said. He began to climb the ladder again.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I said. ‘Are you the reason no babies are being born?’ He looked at me. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I used to run Population Control. I understand the equipment.’ ‘Jesus Christ! You fed the world with birth control because you felt suicidal. You’re erasing mankind…’ ‘So I can die. But look how suicidal mankind is.’ ‘Only because you’ve destroyed its future. You’ve drugged it and fed it lies and withered its ovaries and now you want to bury it. And I thought you were some kind of a god.’ ‘I’m only what I was constructed to be. I’m equipment, Mary.’

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

Afraid of? I was not, really, afraid of anything. It was only my old, almost forgotten sense of decency that trembled at the idea of taking a chisel and a hammer to the brain of a thought bus. It was a part of my insane upbringing—an upbringing that was supposed to liberate my mind for full ‘growth’ and ‘self-awareness’ and ‘self-reliance’ and that had been nothing but a swindle and a cheat. My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered, drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.

I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds.

Driving along the rutted, ancient green highways as I am now, with the ocean on my right and the empty fields on my left under the bright springtime sun, I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.

What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved, And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.

But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable. ‘Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.’ ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. He that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live.’ ‘My life is light, waiting for the death wind. Like a feather on the back of my hand.’

I walked up to him and looked into his empty, non-human eyes. I had never looked at a robot that closely before, having been brought up to fear and respect them. And I became aware, looking at his stupid, manufactured face, that I was seeing for the first time what the significance of this dumb parody of humanity really was: nothing, nothing at all. Robots were something invented once out of a blind love for the technology that could allow them to be invented. They had been made and given to the world of men as the weapons that nearly destroyed the world had once been given, as a ‘necessity.’ And, deeper still, underneath that blank and empty face, identical to all the thousands of faces of its make, I could sense contempt—contempt for the ordinary life of men and women that the human technicians who had fashioned it had felt. They had given robots to the world with the lie that they would save us from labor or relieve us from drudgery so that we could grow and develop inwardly. Someone must have hated human life to have made such a thing—such an abomination in the sight of the Lord.

Finally then, with his face serene, blown coldly by the furious upward wind, his chest naked and exposed, his powerful legs straight out, toes down, khaki trousers flapping above the backs of his legs, his metallic brain joyful in its rush toward what it has so long ached for, Robert Spofforth, mankind’s most beautiful toy, bellows into the Manhattan dawn and with mighty arms outspread takes Fifth Avenue into his shuddering embrace.