Mockingbird

As I grew up in the dormitory, along with the other boys and girls in my class, there was no group of younger children behind us. We were the youngest. I do not know how many of us there were in that big old cluster of Permoplastic buildings near Toledo, since we were never counted and did not ourselves know how to count.

I remember that there was a quiet old building called the Pre-Teen Chapel where we would go for Privacy Drill and Serenity Training for about an hour each day. The idea was to sit there in a room full of children of your own age and become oblivious of their presence while watching moving lights and colors on a huge television screen at the front of the room. Weak sopors would be served by a moron robot—a Make Two—at the beginning of each session. I remember developing myself there to the point where I could enter after breakfast, stay for an hour after letting my sweet-flavored sopor dissolve in my mouth, and leave for my next class without ever being aware of the presence of anyone else—even though there must have been a hundred other children with me.

That building was demolished by a crew of large machines and Make Three robots when we graduated from it and moved up to Teen Training. And when I was moved to the Sleep Center for Big People about a blue later, our old Sleep Center for Pre-Teens was demolished too.

We must have been the last generation of children, ever.

DAY TWENTY-SIX

I saw another immolation today, at noon.

It was at the Burger Chef on Fifth Avenue. I often go there for lunch, since my NYU credit card quite generously permits more extra expenses than I really need. I had finished my algaeburger and was having a second glass of tea from the samovar when I felt a kind of rush of air behind me and heard someone say, “Oh my!” I turned around, holding my tea glass, and there at the other end of the restaurant were three people, seated in a booth, in flames. The flames seemed very bright in the somewhat darkened room, and at first it was hard to see the people who were burning. But gradually I made them out, just as their faces began to twist and darken. They were all old people—women, I thought. And of course there was no sign of pain. They might have been playing gin rummy, except there they were, burning to death.

I wanted to scream; but of course I didn’t. And I thought of throwing my glass of tea on their poor old burning bodies, but their Privacy of course forbade that. So I merely stood there and watched.

Two servos came out from the kitchen and stood near them— making sure, I suppose, that the fire didn’t spread. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.

Finally, when the smell had become unbearable, I left the Burger Chef. But I slopped when I saw a man staring from outside through the window at the people in flames. I stood next to him for a moment. Then I said, “I don’t understand it.”

The man looked at me, blankly at first. And then he frowned with a look of distaste and shrugged his shoulders and closed his eyes.

And I began to blush from embarrassment as I realized that I was crying. Crying. In public.

DAY TWENTY-NINE

I have begun actually to write this down. This is one of my days off and I have not looked at the films today. What I did was get sheets of drawing paper and a pen from the Self-expression Department and begin to write down the words from my recorded journal, using the large letters from the first page of Dictionary as a guide. At first it was so difficult that I felt I could never keep it up; I would replay from my recorder a few words and then print them down on paper. But it soon became an ordeal. And trying to spell the larger words is most difficult. Some of them I have learned from the films and, fortunately, some of the really big ones I have recently learned from Dictionary and I usually can find them there, although it takes some searching.

I believe there is some kind of principle of arranging the words in Dictionary— perhaps so they can be found easily—but I do not understand it. For pages, all of the words begin with the same letter, and then, abruptly, they start beginning with another, wholly different letter.

After a few hours of writing my hand began to ache and I could no longer hold the pen. I had to take pain pills; but when I did I discovered that they made it more difficult to pay attention to what I was doing, and I would miss whole words and phrases.

I had suspected that drugs might affect a person this way; but I had never had so convincing a proof before.

DAY THIRTY-ONE

I did not go to the zoo today.

I’ve printed words on paper constantly all day. Through lunch-time until now, when it’s beginning to get dark outside. The pain in my hand became intense but I did not take pain pills and after a while I seemed even to forget about it. In fact, there was—how shall I say it?—something rewarding about the experience of sitting there at my desk, my hand and wrist filled with pain, printing words onto a piece of paper. I finished my journal up until day twenty-nine, and although I am here recording this now, into the voice recorder, I am anxious to pick up paper tomorrow and return to the task of printing the words.

There is something in my mind that will not stop insisting itself. That is the phrase “Memorize my life,” which the woman at the House of Reptiles had spoken the other day. Writing it down as I did about an hour ago, I could see something in the words, something that took me a moment to grasp entirely. What I was doing myself was memorizing my life. Putting these words on paper, unlike just reading them into a recorder, was a mental act—what the woman called “memorizing.” I stopped my work after I had written down the words “Memorize my life,” and I decided to do a little thing. I took Dictionary and kept going through all the pages until I came to all the words that together began with the letter “M” and then I began to look through those. After a while I realized it was a sort of pattern, because words that started with an “M” followed by an “E” were all together. I looked through that group of words until finally, after some searching, I discovered the word “memorize.” And this was the definition given: “To learn by heart,” and how strange that was—heart, to learn by heart. I could not understand it all. And yet the word “heart” seems somehow right, for I know that my heart has always beaten. Always.

I have never in my life seemed to see and hear and think so clearly. Can it be because I have not used drugs this day? Or is it this act of writing? The two are so new and have come together so closely that I cannot be sure of which it is. It is extremely strange to feel like this. There is exhilaration to it, but the sense of risk is almost terrifying.

DAY THIRTY-THREE

Last night I could not sleep. I lay in bed awake, staring at the stainless-steel ceiling of my room in the archives. Several times I started to call for the servo robot and ask for sopors but I was determined not to. In a sense I enjoyed the feeling of sleeplessness. I got up for a while and began to walk around the room. It is a bright room with a thick, heavy, lavender carpet. There is a desk that is combined with my bed and on the desk is Dictionary. I spent about an hour turning through the book looking at the words. What meanings are locked in those words, and what a sense of the past!

I decided to go out. It was very late. There was no one on the streets, and although New York is certainly