Mockingbird by Walter Tevis Read Free Book Online

thing or something like it. Not my early life, not my childhood or in the dormitories or when I was in college, but the life that I am living now, have been living for some time. I am trying to memorize that.” I stopped. I didn’t know exactly how to go on. She was looking at my face closely.
    “Then I’m not the only one,” she said. “Maybe I’ve started something.”
    “Yes,” I said, “maybe you have. But I have something that you may find helpful. Do you know what a recorder is?”
    “I think so,” she said. “Don’t you say things into it and it says them back? Like when you call a library for information and the voice that gives it to you is not a person speaking then, but a person who spoke some time ago.”
    “Yes,” I said. “That’s the idea. I have a recorder. I thought you might like to try it.”
    “Do you have it with you now?” she said.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Good,” she said. “That would be interesting, but we’ll need light.” She got up from the bench and walked across the room out of the light from the candle flame and I heard her opening something. And then I heard a click and the room was flooded with brightness. The glass from all of the cases glowed at me and there in them all of the reptiles, the iguanas, python, the green monitor lizards, the massive brown crocodiles in the cages, there they all sat, not moving, silent in all of that synthetic vegetation. She came back over to the bench and sat beside me. I could see now that her hair was badly mussed and there were creases in her face from sleeping on the bench. Yet evert so she looked fresh and very much awake.
    “Let’s see this recorder,” she said.
    I fumbled in my pocket and pulled it out. “Here it is,” I said. “I’ll show you how it works.”
    We must have been there for over an hour. She was fascinated by the recorder and asked if she could keep it awhile but I told her it was impossible, that I had to use it in my work and they were very difficult to obtain. For a moment I almost told her about reading and writing but something restrained me from doing so. Maybe I would tell her at another time. When I told her it was time for me to return to where I stayed, she said, “Where do you stay? Where do you work?”
    “At New York University,” I said. “I only work there temporarily for this summer. I live in Ohio.”
    “What do you do at the university?” she said.
    “I work with ancient films,” I told her. “Do you know what films are?”
    “Films? No,” she said.
    “Well, films are like video records. A way of recording images that move. They were used before the invention of television.”
    Her eyes widened. “Before the invention of television?”
    “Yes,” I said, “there was a time once when television had not been invented.”
    “My God,” she said. “How do you know that?” Actually, of course, I didn’t know that, but I had guessed from the films that I had seen that they came before television because the people in those families’ houses in the films never had television sets. The idea of the sequence of events and circumstances—that things had not always been the same—was one of the strange and striking things that had occurred to me as I had become aware of what I can only call the past.
    “That’s very odd,” the girl said, “to think that there may not have been television once. But I feel I can understand that. I feel that I understand a good many things since I have begun to memorize my life. You get the sense that one thing comes after another and that there is change.”
    I looked at her. “Good God, yes,” I said. “I know what you mean.” Then I took my recorder and left the room. The thought bus was waiting. It was beginning to become daylight. Some birds were singing and I thought,
Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods
. But this time thinking it, I felt no sadness.
    When I started to walk toward the bus I somehow felt awkward. I felt as