Mockingbird

book is called The Last Autobiography and it starts like this:

When I was a young man reading was still taught in the public schools, as an elective. I can clearly remember the group of twelve-year-olds in Miss Warburton’s reading class back in St. Louis. There were seventeen of us and we thought of ourselves proudly as an intellectual elite. The other thousands of students in the school, who could only spell words like “fuck” and “shit”—scrawling them on the walls of the sports arenas and gymnasiums and TV rooms that made up most of the space in the school—treated us with a kind of grudging awe. Even though they bullied us at times—and I still shudder to remember the hockey player who used to bloody my nose regularly after our class in Mind Tripping— they seemed secretly to envy us. And they had a pretty fair idea of what reading was.

But that was a long time ago, and I am fifty now. The young people I work with—porno stars, hot young directors of game shows, pleasure experts, emotion manipulators, admen—neither understand nor care about what reading is. One day on a set we were dealing with a script written by an old-timer that called for a book to be thrown by a young girl at an older woman. The scene was part of a Good-Feeling Religion story, adapted from some forgotten ancient, and it took place in the waiting room of a clinic. The crew had put together a pretty convincing waiting room with plastic chairs and a shag rug, but when the director arrived the prop man had a quick conference with him, telling him he “didn’t quite follow that thing about the book.” And the director, clearly unsure what a book was but not wanting to admit he didn’t know, asked me what it was for. I told him it established the girl who was reading it as an intellectual and somewhat antisocial. He pretended to consider this, although he probably did not recognize the word “intellectual” either, and then he said, “Let’s use a glass ashtray. And some blood, when it cuts her. The scene’s too flat anyhow.”

I was too shocked to quarrel with him. I hadn’t really realized until then how far we had come.

And that leads me to this question: why am I writing this? And the answer is only that I have always wanted to. Back in school, learning to read, all of us thought we would someday write books and that somebody would read them. I know now that I waited too long to start this; but I’ll go on with it anyway.

That script, ironically, won the director an award. It told the story of a married woman who brings her husband, Claude, to a clinic because of impotence. While waiting for the doctors to assess Claude’s problem, she is hit in the face with an ashtray by a sex-starved young lesbian and goes into a coma, during which she has a religious awakening, with visions.

I remember getting drunk on mescaline and gin at the party where the award was given and trying to explain to a bare-breasted actress who sat on a sofa next to me that the only standards of the television industry were monetary, that there was no real motive in television beyond the making of money. She smiled at me all the time I talked, and occasionally ran her fingertips lightly across her nipples. And when I had finished she said, “But money is fulfillment too.”

I got her drunk and took her to a motel.

Writing a book, I feel as a Talmudic scholar or an Egyptologist might have felt at Disneyland in the twentieth century. Except, I suppose, I do not really have to wonder if there is anyone who wants to hear what I have to say; I know there is no bne. I can only wonder how many people are left alive who can read. Possibly a few thousand. A friend of mine who works part time as the head of a publishing house says the average book finds about eighty readers. I’ve asked him why they don’t stop publishing altogether. He says he frankly doesn’t know, but that his publishing company is such a tiny division of the recreation corporation that owns it that they have probably forgotten about its existence. He doesn’t know how to read himself; but he respects books because his mother had been a kind of recluse who read almost constantly, and he had loved her deeply. He is, by the way, one of the few people I know who were brought up in a family. Most of my friends have come out of the dormitories. I was reared in a kibbutz, out in Nebraska. But then I’m Jewish, and that, too, is a pretty rare thing these days: to be Jewish and to know it. I was one of the last members of the kibbutz; it was converted into a state-operated Thinker Dormitory when I was in my twenties.

I was born in 2137…

Reading that date I was immediately curious about how long ago Alfred Fain had lived, and I asked Bob. He said, “About two hundred years.”

Then I said, “Is there a date now? Does this year have a number?”

He looked at me coldly. “No,” he said. “There is no date.”

I would like to know the date. I would like for my child to have a birth date.

Bentley

DAY NINETY-FIVE

I am not so tired now. The work is getting easier to do, and I feel stronger.

I am sleeping better at nights, now that I have decided to take my sopors. And the food is passable now and I eat a great deal. More than I have ever eaten before in my life.

I do not exactly like the effect of sopors anymore; but they are necessary if I am to sleep properly. They stop some of the pain of my thoughts.

Today I tripped and fell between the rows of plants, and another prisoner who was nearby ran over and helped me up. He was a tall, gray-haired man whom I had noticed before because of the way he whistles at times.

He helped me brush myself off and then looked at me closely and said, “You all right, buddy?”

All of this was terribly intimate—almost obscene—but I did not mind, really. “Yes,” I said. “I’m all right.” And then one of the robots shouted, “No talking. Invasion of Privacy!” and the man looked at me, grinned broadly, and shrugged. We both went back to work. But as he walked away I heard him mutter, “Stupid goddamn robots!” and I was shocked at the strength of unashamed feeling in his voice.

I have seen other prisoners whispering together in the rows. It is often several minutes before a robot notices and stops them.

The robots walk between the rows with us; but they stop before going close to the low cliff at the end of the field. Perhaps they are programmed that way so they will not fall—or be pushed—over the cliff. Anyway they are far enough back by the time I arrive at the seaward end of the row so that there is a short time when they cannot see me, because of a dip in the ground before it comes to the edge of the cliff.

I have learned to speed up, doing two squirts of the gun to each beat of music, toward the end of each row. This gives me time to stand at the edge of the ocean for sixteen beats—and I am thankful I learned to determine this from Arithmetic jor Boys and Girls. I stand and look out over the ocean. It is wonderful to look at— broad and huge and serene. Something deep in my self seems to respond to it, with a feeling I cannot name. But I am learning again to welcome strange feelings. Sometimes there are birds over the ocean, their curved wings outspread, sailing in the air in smooth broad arcs, above my world of men and machines, inscrutable, and breathtaking to see. Looking at them I say sometimes to myself a word I learned from a film: “Splendid!”

I said I am learning to welcome strange feelings, and this is true. How different I now seem from what I was, far less than a yellow ago, when I first began to feel those feelings while watching silent films at my bed- and-desk. I know that I am being disobedient to all that I was taught about feelings toward things outside myself when I was a child, but I do not care. In fact, I enjoy doing what was forbidden once.

I have nothing to lose.

I think the ocean means most to me on rain days, when the water and sky are gray. There is a sandy beach