I looked back to the book. And suddenly it was simple. The big, black letters that filled most of the page said, “Holy Bible,” in capital letters.
I read it:
And then, under that, the letters were smalclass="underline"
And at the bottom of the page:
That was all that page said. I turned to the next, which was filled with print, and began, more calmly now, to read:
“Genesis, by Moses. At first God made the world and the sky, but the world had no shape and there was nobody living on it. And it was dark, too, until God said, ‘Give us some light!’ and the light came on…”
I went on, more and more easily, and calmly. It was not at all like the Bible I had read from back at the prison, but that one had been much older.
When I finished the page I looked up.
The beautiful woman was staring at me with her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. On her face was a look of wonder or of adoration.
And I was peaceful again, inside. And suddenly so tired, so worn and used and overcome, that I dropped my head there at the podium and closed my eyes, letting my mind become blank, empty of everything except the words:
I heard chairs scraping the floor as men and women stood, and I heard the footsteps of people leaving the big room, not speaking; but I did not look up.
Finally I felt a hand, strong but gentle, on my shoulder and I opened my eyes. It was the old man, Edgar Baleen.
“Reader,” he said. “Come with me.”
I stared at him.
“Reader. You passed the ordeal. You’re baptized. You’re safe from the fire. You need some rest.”
I sighed then and said, “Yes. Yes. I need some rest.”
And so I had come from prison to this—to being “Reader” for a group of Christians, to being some kind of priest. From that time on for months I have read to them from the Bible in the mornings and the evenings while they listen in silence. I read and they listen and nothing is said.
Writing it now, here in my house at Maugre, alone and safe, and now well-fed, I can hardly remember that strangeness of living with the Baleens. In many ways my older memories of Mary Lou and of the silent films are more vivid and present to me, even though I will be expected to appear for an evening reading only a short time from now. I have spent this entire day writing, since my morning reading. I will stop now and feed Biff and have a glass of whiskey. Tomorrow I will try to finish this new account of my life. And to tell the sad story of Annabel.
That first night old Edgar put me in a room upstairs to sleep, and left me. There were two beds in the room, with headboards made of brass tubes that looked like the one the old man had died in in the film where the clock stopped and the dog cried. I took my shoes off and got into the bed with my clothes on and Biff got up on the quilt, curled up at my feet, and went immediately to sleep. I felt envious of her. Although I was exhausted, and although the bed was the most comfortable thing I had ever had to sleep on, with its hugely thick mattress and its big, flower-printed quilt that had a tag reading SEARS’ BEST—GOOSE DOWN sewn to its pink binding, yet I could not sleep. My mind was becoming full. In the darkened room and with my senses sharpened by fatigue, I began to picture a multitude of things from my past with a preternatural clarity. It was something like the vivid mind control that I had studied and taught in Ohio, with clear, hallucinatory images; but it was not aided by the usual drugs, and I had no control over it.
I saw clear images of Mary Lou at her reading on the library office floor, of the blank faces of the aging students in my little seminar in Ohio, their eyes downward as they sat in their denim student robes with their minds blown and serene, and of Dean Spofforth, tall, intelligent, frightening, dark brown, and inscrutable. I saw myself as a child, standing in the middle of a square outside Sleeping Quarters for Pre-teens at the dormitory. I had been put in Coventry for a day as a punishment for Invasion of Privacy, when I had shared my food with another child. The Rules of Coventry required me to stand still and be touched—on the face, or the arms, or the chest—by every child who crossed the square; I would writhe inwardly at the touch of each and my face was hot with shame.
Then I saw the little Privacy cubicle that was the first place I can remember sleeping in, with its narrow, hard, monastic bed and the Soul Muzak that came from the walls of soundproof Permoplastic, and the little Privacy rug on the floor on which I would say my prayers: “May the Directors make me grow inwardly. May I move through Delight and Serenity to Nirvana. May I be untouched by all outside…” And the private wall-sized TV that I learned to give myself to wholly, leaving my child’s body behind for hours at a time while images of pleasure and joy and peace flashed over its glittering, holographic surface, and my body served only to provide my brain with the chemicals needed for blank passivity, from the pills that I would take on cue from the TV when the lavender sopor light would flash.
I would watch the TV from supper until bedtime and when I slept I would dream of TV: bright, hypnotic, a constant fulfillment in the disembodied mind.
And then, lying there in that strange old bedroom at the end of a day when I had been baptized in water and nearly immolated in nuclear fire and had read from the Book of Genesis to a family of strangers, I could not sleep because of an imagination I could no longer control. I became flooded with a wish for the simplicity of my past life as a true child of the modern world. I wanted, I craved my sopors and marijuana and my other mind-flowering dope, and my Chemical Serenity and televised experience and my prayers to whatever a “Director” might be, and the sweet, drugged, dream-ridden sleep in my tiny Permoplastic room—air-conditioned, silent, safe from the confusions, the yearnings, the restlessness, and the despair that my new life was made of. I did not want to live with the real anymore; it was too much of a burden. A sorry, heavy burden.
I thought of the old horse in the film, with his ears stuck up through holes in his straw hat. And of the words “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.” I thought of myself and of Mary Lou, possibly the last generation of man on the face of the earth, in a place with no children and no future. I saw faces burning in the Burger Chef, embracing in their own fiery conclusion the eventual death of the species.
I was overcome with sadness. And yet I did not cry.
I saw the faces of the robots that tended us as children, blank and stern. And the face of the judge at my hearing. And Belasco, with his wise, old, cynical eyes, grinning at me.
Finally, when I began to feel that the images would never stop crowding into my tired mind, I turned on a battery-powered lamp by my bedside, found my little Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide, and opened it to the blank pages at the back where I had copied down some poems before I left prison. I read “The Hollow Men,“ the poem Mary Lou and I had been reading when Spofforth had arrested me:
It was no comfort, true as it sounded, but it helped make the pictures fade from my mind.