Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.

The work is dreary at times; but it may have its rewards. I have been at it five days now; this is the first on which I have felt at ease enough with the little recording machine to begin talking about myself into it. And what is there to say about myself? I am not an interesting person.

I will sit, sometimes, and play a film section over and over again, eating slowly, trying to feel my way into that dim past. Some things I see there I cannot forget. Sometimes it will be a scene of a small girl crying over a grave in a field. Or of a horse standing on the city street, with a crumpled hat on its head and the ears sticking through, or of old men drinking from large glass mugs and laughing in silence on the screen. Sometimes, watching these things, I find myself in tears.

This certainly can’t be eaten,’ she said. Her voice was surprisingly calm, resigned. I took it from her. ‘Why did you pick it?’ I said. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It seemed to be the thing to do.’

When I first moved in here, the feeling of walking about in this vast, empty building was frightening. But now I derive a kind of comfort from it.

You know,’ she said, ‘they teach you that robots are made to serve humans. But the way they say that word “serve” it sounds like “control.” My father—Simon—called it “politician talk.”’ ‘Politician talk?’ ‘Some special way of lying,’

Simon always said, “Check out your surroundings, sweetheart.” So I’ve been wandering around the halls like Lady Macbeth opening doors. Most of the rooms were empty.’ ‘What’s Lady Macbeth?’ I said, trying to make conversation. ‘A person who walks around in pajamas,’ she said.

Had he been able to he would have replicated himself, putting another hundred Make Nines into the world to keep things running in Baltimore and Los Angeles and Philadelphia and New Orleans. Not because he cared that much for humanity, but because he hated to see machinery that worked poorly. He thought of himself as a machine sometimes, and he felt responsible.

But had he been able to produce more Make Nines he would have made certain they would come into the world without the ability to feel. And with the ability to die. With the gift of death.

But I remembered something I had read in a book: ‘Others can be wrong too, you know,’ and I held on to that. ‘Why should it be a crime to be disturbed and confused? And to know what others have thought and felt?’

This is the ultimate inwardness, praise Jesus Christ our Lord!’

Finally she said, still staring at the street, ‘Did they do it to themselves?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think it happens often.’ ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Why? Why would people do that?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t know why they don’t do it alone, either. Or in private.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Maybe it’s the drugs.’ I didn’t answer for a minute or so. Then I said, ‘Maybe it’s the way they live.’ She stood up, looked at me with a look of surprise, and reached out and held my right arm. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s probably right.’

Mary Lou, Mary Lou. I cannot stand this.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass…

It feels terrible. Being in love feels terrible.

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.’

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.

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.

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.’

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.

Writing a book, I feel as a Talmudic scholar or an Egyptologist might have felt at Disneyland in the twentieth century.

If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living.

They are—the phrase is from Intolerance—an abomination in my sight.

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.

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.

Distant and clear in the pale dawn it stood, higher than anything else outside: the Empire State Building, the high grave marker for the city of New York.

When literacy died, so had history.