Mockingbird

impulsively I walked up to her and said, “Why are you always here?”

She stopped in her tracks and turned and looked at me in that penetrating, mystical way. It passed through my mind that she might be insane. But that was impossible, the Detectors would have found out if that were the case, and she would be off on a Reservation, agape with Time-Release Valium and gin. No, she had to be sane. Everybody who walked among others was sane.

“I live here,” she said.

Nobody lived at zoos. Not as far as I knew. And all the zoo’s work would be done, as it was in all Public Institutions, by robots of one kind or another.

“Why?” I said. That was Privacy Invasion. But somehow I didn’t feel as though that edict applied. Maybe it was all those reptiles slithering and wriggling around in the glass cases that surrounded us. And the heavy, green, wet-looking artificial foliage on the artificial trees.

“Why not?” she said. And then, “You seem to be around here a lot”

I felt myself blushing. “That’s true. I come here when I feel… upset.”

She stared at me. “You don’t take pills?”

“Certainly,” I said. And then, “But I come to the zoo anyway.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t take pills.”

Now I stared at her. It was an incredible thought. “You don’t take pills?”

“I did. But now they make me sick.” Her face softened a bit. “I mean, I vomit when I take pills.”

“But isn’t there a pill for that? I mean, a drug robot could…”

“I suppose so,” she said, “but wouldn’t I vomit up an anti-vomit pill?”

I didn’t know whether I should smile at that but I did. Even though it all had a shocking ring to it.

“You could take an injection…”I said.

“Forget it,” she said. “Relax.” Abruptly she turned and looked toward the iguana cage. The iguanas were, as always, lively. They jumped around like toads in their glass cage. She bit her sandwich and began chewing.

“And you live here. At the zoo?” I said.

“Right,” she said between bites.

“Doesn’t it get… boring?” I said.

“Jesus, yes.”

“Then why do you stay?”

She looked at me as though she wasn’t going to answer. All she would have to do, of course, would be to shrug her shoulders and close her eyes, and Mandatory Politeness would require that I leave her alone. You can’t go around interfering with Individualism with impunity.

But apparently she decided to answer me, and I felt grateful—I don’t know why—when I saw that she was going to speak. “I live at the zoo,” she said, “because I don’t have a job and I have nowhere else to live.”

I must have stared at her for a full minute. And then I said, “Why don’t you drop out?”

“I did. I lived on a Drop-out Reservation for at least two yellows. Until I started vomiting from smoking dope and taking pills.”

I had heard of the dope at Drop-out Reservations, of course; it was cultivated in vast fields by automatic equipment and was supposed to have a potency almost beyond belief. But I had never heard of anyone becoming sick from it.

“But when you dropped in again… shouldn’t you have been assigned a job?”

“I didn’t drop in again.”

“You didn’t…?”

“Nope.” Then she finished off her sandwich, turning her head away from me and toward the iguana cage again, chewing. For a moment I felt not bafflement but anger. Those stupid, leapfrogging iguanas!

Then I thought, I should report her. But I knew as I thought it that I wouldn’t. I should have reported that group immolation too, as any responsible person is supposed to. But I hadn’t. Probably no one had. You never heard of people being reported anymore.

When she had finished eating she turned to me and said, “I just left the dormitory and walked here. Nobody seemed to notice.”

“But how do you live?” I said.

“Oh. It’s easy.” Her eyes had lost some of their intensity. “Outside this building, for instance, there’s a sandwich machine. The kind you operate with a credit card. And every morning a servo robot comes to fill it with fresh sandwiches. I found out when I first came here, half a yellow ago, that the robot always brings five more sandwiches than the machine holds. He’s a moron robot, so he just stands there holding the five extra sandwiches. And I take them from him. That’s what I eat during the day. I drink from the water fountains.”

“And you don’t work?”

She stared at me. “You know what work is these days. They have to deactivate robots to find things to pay us for doing.”

I knew that was true. Everybody did, I suppose. But no one ever actually said it. “You could garden…” I said.

“I don’t like to garden,” she said.

I walked over and sat on the bench by the python cage. The two old men had left, and we were alone. I didn’t look at her. “What do you do?” I said. “What do you do when you are bored? There’s no TV out here. And you can’t use the Fun Facilities in New York without credit. And there’s no way to get credit without a job…”

There was no answer, and for a minute I thought she hadn’t heard me. But then I heard her footsteps and in a moment she was sitting beside me. “Lately,” she said, “I’ve been trying to memorize my life.”

“Memorize my life.” The phrase was so odd that I said nothing. I just looked at the python writhing through the branches, none of it real.

“You should try it sometime,” she said. “First you remember a thing that happened, and then you go over it and over it. That’s ‘memorizing.’ If I keep it up long enough I’ll have it all and I’ll know it like a story or a song.”

My God! I thought. She can’t be sane! But here she was, and the Detectors had left her alone. And then I thought, It’s the not taking drugs. What could have happened to her mind…?

I got up from the bench, excused myself, and left.

DAY TWENTY-FOUR

“Memorize my life.” I couldn’t get the phrase out of my mind. All the way back from the Bronx to Manhattan and to the library on the bus, I looked at the faces of the pleasant, shy, innocuous people who sat, carefully distanced from one another, on the bus seats, or moving up and down avenues, careful to avoid one another’s eyes. And I kept thinking, Memorize my life. I couldn’t let it alone, even though I hardly understood it.

And then, as the bus got close to the library and I sent it the wish signal to stop at the front escalator, I saw a large number of people on the streets and suddenly another phrase replaced the one that had been going so insistently through my mind: Where are all the young people?

For there was nobody young. Everybody was at least as old as I. And I am older than many of the fathers in the films. I am older than Douglas Fairbanks in Captain Blood—much older.

Why is no one any younger than I? The films are full of young people. In fact, they predominate.

Is something wrong?

DAY TWENTY-FIVE