“Women,” the gray-haired man beside me said, breaking the silence.
Something about that one word seemed to open up the older man. “I used to fix coffee for her,” he said, “and we’d drink it in bed. Real coffee with real milk in it, and sometimes when I could find it a piece of fruit. An orange, maybe. She’d drink that coffee out of a gray mug and I’d just sit at the other end of the bed facing her and pretend to be thinking about my own coffee but what I was really doing was watching her. God, I could watch that woman.” He shook his head.
I could feel his sadness. There were goose bumps on my arms and legs from hearing him talk like that. I had never heard another person speak for me like that before. He had said what I felt and, sad as I was, there was relief for me in it.
Someone else said softly, “What become of her?”
For a while the old man didn’t answer. Then he said, “Don’t know. One day I come home from the mill and she wasn’t there. Never saw her again.”
There was silence for a moment and then one of the younger prisoners spoke up. He was trying, I suppose, to be helpful. “Well, quick sex is best,” he said philosophically.
The old man turned his head slowly and stared at the man who had just spoken. And then he said to him, strongly and evenly, “Fuck that. You can just fuck that.”
The younger man looked flustered, and turned his face away. “I didn’t mean…”
“Fuck it,” the old man said. “Fuck your quick sex. I know what my life’s been like.” Then he turned toward the ocean again and said softly, repeating himself, “I know what my life’s been like.”
Hearing this and seeing the way the old man looked toward the ocean with his thin shoulders squared under his faded blue prison shirt and the breeze blowing the few wisps of hair on his old, tight-skinned head, I felt such sadness that it was beyond tears. And I was thinking of Mary Lou and of the way she had looked, in the mornings sometimes, drinking tea. Or of her hand on the back of my neck and the way that, sometimes, she would stare at me and stare, and then smile…
I must have sat there thinking these things about Mary Lou and feeling my own grief for a long while, looking out toward the ocean, past the old man. And then I heard the gray-haired man next to me say softly, “You wanta swim?” I looked up at him, startled, and said, “No,” perhaps too quickly. But the thought of getting naked with all those strangers had brought me back to the present with a start.
Yet I love to swim.
In the Thinker Dormitories, each child has the pool to himself for ten minutes. Dormitories are very strict about Individualism.
I was thinking about this when the gray-haired man suddenly said, “My name’s Belasco.”
I looked down at the sand at my feet. “Hello,” I said.
And then, a moment later, he said, “What’s your name, buddy?”
“Oh,” I said, still looking at the sand. “Bentley.” And I felt his hand on my shoulder and looked up, startled, at his face. He was grinning at me. “Good to know you, Bentley,” he said.
After a while I got up and walked down to the water’s edge but away from the swimmers. I know that I have changed much since I left Ohio; but all that intimacy and feeling were more than I could stand at once. And I wanted to be alone with my thoughts of Mary Lou.
At the water’s edge I found a hermit crab, in a small, curled whelk shell. I knew it was a hermit crab from a picture in a book Mary Lou had found: Seashore Creatures of North America.
There was a strong, briny, clean smell along the edge of the water, and the waves, gently rolling in along the wet sands, made a sound like I had never heard before. I stood there in the sun watching, and smelling the smell, and listening to the water-sound, until Belasco’s voice called me back. “Time to go, Bentley. They’ll have him fixed before long.”
We all climbed silently up the stairs and went back to our positions in the field and waited.
After a while the robots came back. They did not notice that we had made no progress in their absence. Stupid robots.
I bent to work, in time to music.
When I got to the seaward end of the row, I looked down at the beach. Our fire was still burning.
I realize that I have just written “our fire.” How strange, that I should think of it as belonging to all of us—to us as a group!
As we were going back to the fields from the beach I walked beside the white-haired old man. I wanted, for a moment, to say something kind to him, to thank him for making my own sadness more bearable, or, even, to put my arm around his frail-looking old shoulders. But I did none of these. I do not know how to do such things. I wish I knew how; I sincerely wish it. But I do not.
DAY NINETY-NINE
Alone in my cell at night I think a great deal. I think sometimes of the things I have read in books, or about my boyhood, or about my three blues as a professor in Ohio. Sometimes I think about that time when I first learned to read, over two yellows ago, when I found the box with the film and the flash cards and the little books with pictures. The words on the box said: “Beginning Readers’ Kit. They were the first printed words I had ever seen, and of course I could not read them. Whatever gave me the patience to persist until I learned to read words from a book?
If I had not learned to read in Ohio and then come to New York to try to become a professor of reading, I would not be in prison now. And I would not have met Mary Lou. I would not be filled with this sadness.
I think of her more than I think of any other thing. I see her, trying not to look frightened, as Spofforth took her out the door of my room at the library. That was the last time I saw her. I do not know where Spofforth took her, or what has become of her. She is probably in a prison for women, but I’m not certain of that.
I tried to get Spofforth to tell me what would become of her, while we were riding in the thought bus to my hearing; but he would not answer me.
I have tried to draw a picture of her face on my sheets of drawing paper, using colored crayons. But it is no good; I was never able to draw.
Yellows and blues ago there was a boy in my dormitory who could draw beautifully. One time he put some of his drawings on my desk in a classroom and I looked at them with awe. There were pictures of birds and of cows and of people and trees and of the robot who monitored the hall outside the classroom. They were remarkable pictures, with clear lines and with amazing accuracy.
I did not know what to do with the pictures. Taking or giving private things to others was a terrible thing to do and could cause high punishment. So I left them on my desk and the next day they were gone. And a few days after that the boy who drew them was also gone. I do not know what became of him. Nobody spoke of him.
Will it be the same with Mary Lou? Is it all over, and will there be no mention of her in the world again?
Tonight I have taken four sopors. I do not want to remember so much.
DAY ONE HUNDRED FOUR
After supper this evening Belasco came to my cell! And he had a small gray-and-white animal under his arm.
I was sitting in my chair, thinking about Mary Lou and remembering the sound of her voice when she read aloud, when suddenly I saw my door come open. And there Belasco stood, grinning at me, with that animal under his arm.
“How…?” I said.