Mockingbird

of the ancient films. I wanted to buy her flowers and to dance with her.

When we had finished Mary Lou said, “Let’s get out of this sex factory,” and then, as we were leaving, “I think that place is what Simon meant by a ‘Chicago whorehouse.’”

And I did buy her flowers, at a vending machine. White carnations, like Gloria Swanson wore in Queen of Them All.

And before we went to bed that night I asked her to dance. I pinned a flower to her Synlon dress and I played the background music from a TV program, and we danced together. She had never heard of two people dancing together before, but any serious student of films knows about dancing. I had seen it many times. We were awkward and we stepped on each other’s feet several times, but it was fun.

But when we went to bed something, I don’t know what, frightened me. I held her close until she fell asleep. Then I lay awake for a long time, thinking. Something about the quick-sex place had frightened me, I think.

So I got out of bed and finished writing this. I am tired now, but I still feel frightened. Am I afraid she will leave? Am I afraid I will lose her?

DAY SEVENTY-SIX

She has been here eighteen days now, and I have not written anything down for the last nine.

My happiness has grown! I do not think about the immorality of our cohabitation, or of its being probably against the law. I think about Mary Lou and about what I see in films and what I read and what she reads.

All day yesterday she read a new kind of writing called poems. Some of them she read aloud. In places they were like chess—incomprehensible—and in other places they said strange and interesting things. She read this one to me twice:

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ! That my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

I had to look up “thou” in Dictionary. The second time she read the lines I felt the feeling I have felt in watching some of the strong scenes in films. An expansive feeling, painfully joyful, in my chest.

When she had finished I said, for some strange reason, “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.”

She looked up from the book and said, “What?” and I said it again: “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.”

“What does that mean?” she said.

“I don’t know. It’s from a film.”

She pursed her lips. “It’s like the words I just read, isn’t it? It makes you feel something and you don’t know what it is.”

“Yes,” I said, astonished, almost awed, to find that she had said what I wanted to say. “Yes. Exactly.”

Then she read more poems, but none of them made me feel that way again. I liked hearing her read them anyway. I watched her sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the book, and listening to her serious and clear voice as she read to us both. She holds the book much closer to her face than I do, and there is something very touching about her when she reads.

We take walks together every day and have lunch in a different place.

DAY SEVENTY-SEVEN

Mary Lou went out this morning, as she often does, to buy some Quik-Serv food for us. She uses my credit card for this. When she was gone I started up the projector and began to watch a film with Lillian Gish and to read the dialogue from it into the recorder when suddenly the door opened and I looked up to see Spofforth standing there in the doorway. He was so tall and so powerful-looking that he seemed to fill up all the space just standing there. And yet I was not frightened by him this time. Spofforth is, after all, only a robot. I turned off the projector and invited him in. He came in and sat in the white plastic chair by the far wall, facing me. He was wearing khaki pants, sandals, and a white T-shirt. His face was unsmiling, but not harsh.

After we had sat silently for a while I said, “Have you been listening to my journal?” I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and he had never been in my room before.

He nodded. “When I have time.”

Something about this annoyed me, and I felt bold with him. “Why do you want to know about me?” I said. “Why do you want me to keep a journal of my life?”

He didn’t answer. After a moment he said, “The teaching of reading is a crime. You could be sent to prison for it.”

That did not frighten me. I thought of what Mary Lou had said about Detection, about how no one ever got detected. “Why?” I said. I was violating a Rule of Conduct: “Don’t ask; relax.” But I didn’t care. I wanted to know why it should be a crime to teach someone to read. And why Spofforth hadn’t told me this before, when I had first suggested teaching reading at NYU. “Why shouldn’t I teach Mary Lou how to read?”

Spofforth leaned forward, putting his huge hands on his knees, staring at me. His stare was a bit frightening, but I did not look away from it.

“Reading is too intimate,” Spofforth said. “It will put you too close to the feelings and the ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you.”

I was beginning to feel a bit frightened. It was not easy to be in Spofforth’s presence, and to listen to his deep, authoritative voice and not want to be obedient, and unquestioning. 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?”

Spofforth stared at me. “Don’t you want to be happy?” he said.

I had heard that question asked before, by my robot-teachers at the dormitory; it had always seemed unanswerable. But now, here in my room, with Mary Lou’s things in it and with my projector and cans of film, and with my mind undrugged, it made me suddenly angry. “People who don’t read are killing themselves, burning their bodies with fire. Are they happy?”

Spofforth stared at me. Then, suddenly, he looked away, toward the back of another chair where Mary Lou’s red dress was lying, crumpled, with a pair of her sandals sitting on the seat by it. “It is also a crime,” he said, but softer now, “to live for over a week with another person.”

“What is a week?” I said.

“Seven days,” Spofforth said.

“Why not seven days?” I said. “Or seven hundred? I am happy with Mary Lou. Happier than I ever was before, with dope and with quick sex.”

“You’re frightened,” Spofforth said. “I can see that you’re frightened right now.”

Suddenly I stood up. “So what?” I said. “So what? It’s better to be living than to be—to be a robot.”

I was frightened. Frightened of Spofforth, frightened of the future. Frightened of my own anger. For a moment I had a strong desire, standing there silently, to take a sopor—to take a whole handful of them and to make myself calm, unruffled, unfeeling. But I liked being angry, and I was not ready to let go of it. “Why should you care if I’m happy?” I said. “What business is it of yours what I do? You’re some kind of machine, anyway.”