Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

There really was almost no discipline, once you learned how to avoid being beaten by the guards, just by keeping an eye out for them. Obviously, once the device of the metal bracelets had been invented, everything about running a prison had gone slack, as with so much else. There was plenty of dope, and I was used to the food and the labor. And there was TV, and Biff, my cat… But that was only part of me. There was another, deeper part that said, ‘You must leave this place.’ And I knew, knew even to my terror, that I had to listen to that voice.

I stood there a moment looking at it and thinking of how much wasted energy that little jammed-up piece of silicon or whatever it was must have caused. I remembered when the toaster in my dormitory had broken down and how we had had no toast ever after that. Then I reached out and jiggled the hopper with my hand until the chip came loose. The mechanical hand took it from the bottom of the hopper and placed it inside the next toaster, just below the switch on its side, and a small laser beam flared briefly and welded it there.

One of my books says that at times men have worshipped the ocean as a god. I can understand that easily. Yes. But the Baleens would never have understood such a thing; they would have called the idea ‘blasphemy.’ The God they worship is an abstract and ferociously moral thing, like a computer. And the compelling, mystical rabbi, Jesus, they have turned into some kind of moral Detector. I want none of that, and none of the Jehovah of the Book of Job, either.

I developed a strong admiration for Jesus, as a sad and terribly knowing prophet—a man who had grasped something about life of the greatest importance and had attempted, and largely failed, to tell what it was.

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.