Mockingbird

came on.

I looked around me eagerly, hoping to find the walls lined with books. But they were empty. I stared for a long time, feeling almost sick. There were ancient wooden tables and chairs, and a few small boxes along one wall, but there were no shelves and the pockmarked walls were empty even of pictures.

“What’s the problem?” Belasco said.

I looked at him. “I was hoping to find… books.”

“Books?” He apparently didn’t know the word. But he said, “What’s in those boxes over there?”

I nodded, without much hope, and went over to look at the boxes by the wall. The first two I opened were filled with rusty spoons—so badly rusted that they were all frozen together in a reddish mass. But the third box was filled with books! I began taking them out eagerly. There were twelve of them. And at the bottom of the box was a pile of sheets of blank paper that was hardly yellow at all.

Excitedly I began to read the titles. The biggest was called North Carolina Revised Statutes: 1992. Another was called Woodworking for Fun and Profit and a third, also very thick, was called Gone With the Wind. It felt wonderful just to hold them and think of all the writing inside.

Belasco had been watching me with mild curiosity. Finally he spoke. “Are those things books?” he said.

“Yes.”

He picked one up from the box and ran his finger through the dust on the cover. “Never heard of such a thing,” he said.

I looked at him. “Let’s get the cat and get these back to my cell.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

We got Biff and carried the books back without any trouble at all.

It is very late now and Belasco has gone back to his cell. I will stop writing now and look through my books. I have them hidden between my water bed and the wall, near where Biff is sleeping.

DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE

I am very tired because I read almost all night last night and had to work all day today. But what excitement I have found! My tired mind was busy all day, with all of the new things I had to think about.

I think I will make a list of my new books:

• North Carolina Revised Statutes: 1992

• Woodworking for Fun and Profit

• Gone With the Wind

• Holy Bible

• Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide

• A Dictionary of the English Language

• The Causes of Population Decline

• Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries

• A Backpacker’s Guide to the Carolina Coast

• A Short History of the United States

• Cooking Shore Dinners: Let’s Have a Party!

• The Art of the Dance

I have been reading the history books, going from one to the other and to the dictionary to find the meaning of new words. The dictionary is a pleasure to use, now that I know the alphabet.

There is much in the history books that I do not understand, and it is hard for me to accept the idea that there have been so many people in the world. In the history that is about Europe there are pictures of Paris and Berlin and London, and the size of the buildings and the number of people are staggering.

Sometimes Biff jumps up into my lap while I am reading and goes to sleep there. I like that.

DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY-NINE

For ten days now I have spent every moment that I can in reading. No one has bothered me; the guards either do not care or, more likely, their programming does not take into account the phenomenon. I even take a book to social time with me and no one seems to notice that I am reading it during the films.

My blue prison jacket—already a bit faded—has large pockets and I always carry one of my smaller books in it. A Short History of the United States and The Causes of Population Decline are both small, and they fit very comfortably. I read during my five-minute breaks at the shoe factory.

The first sentence of The Causes of Population Decline says: “In the first thirty years of the twenty-first century the population of the earth declined by one-half, and it is still declining.” To read things like this, that consider the nature of all of human life, and at far-off times, fascinates me for reasons that I do not understand.

I do not know how long ago the twenty-first century was, although I understand that it is more recent than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that my history book is about. But I was never taught about “centuries” in the dormitory; I only know the meaning of the word from the dictionary: it divides up human history into groups of one hundred years—of two hundred yellows.

The twenty-first century must have been a long time ago. For one thing, there are no mentions of robots in the book.

Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide has the date 2135 on it, and I know from reading history that the date is from the twenty-second century.

Holy Bible begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not give the century of the “beginning,” nor is it clear who “God” is, or was. I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real.

The robots in the Audel’s book are shown in pictures and diagrams. They are all of a very simple kind made for elementary chores like fieldwork and record keeping.

Gone With the Wind resembles some of the films I know. It is, I think, a made-up story. It is about some silly people in big houses, and about a war. I don’t think I will ever finish it, since it is very long.

Many of the other books make no sense at all to me. Still, they seem to fit into some larger, only dimly clear, pattern.

What I like most is the strange sensation I get in the little hairs at the back of my neck when I read certain sentences. And, oddly enough, there are sentences that are often quite unclear to me, or that make me sad. I still remember this one from my days in New York:

My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.

I will stop writing now, and go back to reading. My life is very strange.