Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

while I said, “Have you been listening to my journal?” I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and he had never been in my room before.
    He nodded. “When I have time.”
    Something about this annoyed me, and I felt bold with him. “Why do you want to know about me?” I said. “Why do you want me to keep a journal of my life?”
    He didn’t answer. After a moment he said, “The teaching of reading is a crime. You could be sent to prison for it.”
    That did not frighten me. I thought of what Mary Lou had said about Detection, about how no one ever got detected. “Why?” I said. I was violating a Rule of Conduct: “Don’t ask; relax.” But I didn’t care. I wanted to know why it should be a crime to teach someone to read. And why Spofforth hadn’t told me this before, when I had first suggested teaching reading at NYU. “Why shouldn’t I teach Mary Lou how to read?”
    Spofforth leaned forward, putting his huge hands on his knees, staring at me. His stare was a bit frightening, but I did not look away from it.
    “Reading is too intimate,” Spofforth said. “It will put you too close to the feelings and the ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you.”
    I was beginning to feel a bit frightened. It was not easy to be in Spofforth’s presence, and to listen to his deep, authoritative voice and not want to be obedient, and unquestioning. But I remembered something I had read in a book: “Others can be wrong too, you know,” and I held on to that. “Why should it be a crime to be disturbed and confused? And to know what others have thought and felt?”
    Spofforth stared at me. “Don’t you want to be happy?” he said.
    I had heard that question asked before, by my robot-teachers at the dormitory; it had always seemed unanswerable. But now, here in my room, with Mary Lou’s things in it and with my projector and cans of film, and with my mind undrugged, it made me suddenly angry. “People who don’t read are killing themselves, burning their bodies with fire. Are they happy?”
    Spofforth stared at me. Then, suddenly, he looked away, toward the back of another chair where Mary Lou’s red dress was lying, crumpled, with a pair of her sandals sitting on the seat by it. “It is also a crime,” he said, but softer now, “to live for over a week with another person.”
    “What is a week?” I said.
    “Seven days,” Spofforth said.
    “Why not seven days?” I said. “Or seven hundred? I am happy with Mary Lou. Happier than I ever was before, with dope and with quick sex.”
    “You’re frightened,” Spofforth said. “I can see that you’re frightened right now.”
    Suddenly I stood up. “So what?” I said. “So what? It’s better to be living than to be—to be a robot.”
    I
was
frightened. Frightened of Spofforth, frightened of the future. Frightened of my own anger. For a moment I had a strong desire, standing there silently, to take a sopor—to take a whole handful of them and to make myself calm, unruffled, unfeeling. But I
liked
being angry, and I was not ready to let go of it. “Why should you care if I’m happy?” I said. “What business is it of yours what I do? You’re some kind of machine, anyway.”
    And then Spofforth did a surprising thing. He threw back his head and laughed, loud and deep, for a long time. And, crazily, I felt my anger going away and I began to laugh with him. Finally he stopped and said, “Okay, Bentley. Okay.” He stood up. “You’re more than I thought you were. Go on living with her.” He walked toward the door and then turned around and faced me. “For a while.”
    I just looked at him and said nothing. He left, closing the door behind him.
    When he was gone I sat down on my bed-and-desk again and found that my arms were trembling uncontrollably and that my heart was pounding. I had never talked like that to anyone before and certainly not to a robot. I was terribly frightened of myself. But, deeper, I was elated. It was strange. I had