I did seven films today, and hardly remember a word that I read into the machine. ,
I cannot get her off my mind. I see her with the trees and ferns in their glass cases behind her, holding the plastic fruit out to me.
DAY FORTY-ONE
Most Burger Chefs are small Permoplastic buildings, but the one on Fifth Avenue is larger and made of stainless steel. It has red lamps on the tables in the shape of tulips and its Soul Muzak from the speaker walls is the music of balalaikas. There are big brass samovars at each end of the red serving counter and the waitresses —Make Four robots of a female clone—wear red bandannas on their heads.
I was there this morning for a breakfast of synthetic scrambled eggs and hot tea. While I was waiting in line to be served, the man in front of me, a short man in a brown jump suit and with a face of blank serenity, was trying to get himself served an order of Golden Brown Fries for his breakfast. He had his credit card in his hand and I saw that it was orange, which meant that he was someone of importance.
The robot waitress behind the counter told him that Golden Brown Fries were forbidden with breakfast. Abruptly his look of serenity vanished, and he said, “What do you mean? I’m not eating breakfast.”
She stared stupidly down at the counter and said, “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef.” Then she looked over to the robot with identical features who was standing next to her. On both of them the eyebrows grew together right above the nose. “Only with the Super Shef. Isn’t that right, Marge?”
I looked behind the counter and saw that there were stacks of fries sitting there in little plastic bags.
Marge said, “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef.”
The first robot looked back at the man, briefly, and then cast her eyes down again. “Golden Brown Fries come only with the Super Shef,” she said.
The man looked furious. “All right,” he said. “Then give me a Super Shef with them.”
“With the Golden Brown Fries?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but the Super Shef machine is not working properly today. We have Syn-eggs and monkey bacon, and Golden Brown Toast.”
For a moment the man looked as though he would scream. But instead he reached into his breast pocket, took out a little silver pill holder, and swallowed three green sopors. After a moment his face became serene again and he ordered toast.
DAY FORTY-TWO
I have her here at the library! She is sleeping now, on the thick carpet in an empty room down the hall.
Let me put down how it happened.
I had resolved never to go back to the zoo. But yesterday I could not stop thinking about her. It was not sex, or that idea called “love” that so many of the films are about. The only way I can explain it to myself is to say that she was the most interesting person I had ever met.
I think if I had not learned how to read I would not have been interested in her. Only frightened.
Yesterday after lunch I took the bus out to the zoo. It was a Thursday, so it was raining. There was no one in the streets except for a few moron robots emptying garbage and trimming hedges and working in the parks and city gardens.
She was not in the House of Reptiles when I got there. And I was stunned—frightened that she might have left and I would never see her again. I tried to sit down and wait for her, but I was so restless that I had to walk. First I looked at some of the reptiles. The python cage had been repaired; but the python was not in it. Instead there were four or five diamond-backed rattlesnakes, shaking their rattles enthusiastically, with the same kind of zeal as the child with the ice-cream cone that I had seen outside.
After a while I tired of looking at all those overbusy creatures and, seeing that the rain had stopped, I went outside.
The child, or one of the others just like it, was out there on one of the paths. Since there were almost no people at the zoo on a rain day, the child must have decided to concentrate its attention on doing some kind of performance for me alone. It walked up to me and said, “Hi, there, mister. Isn’t it fun to watch all the animals?”
I walked on by it, not answering. I could hear it tagging along behind me as I walked down a path toward a moated island that had zebras on it.
“Boy!” the child said. “The zebras sure look lively today.”
Something about that made me feel a thing I hadn’t allowed myself to feel since I was a child: anger. I spun and stared down at the chubby little freckle-faced creature, furious. “Bug off, robot,” I said.
He did not look at me. “The zebras…” he said.
“Bug off.”
And then he turned and, abruptly, began to hop and skip away down another path.
I felt fine about it. Even though I wasn’t completely sure he was a robot. Robots are supposed to be identified by their colored earlobes, but like everyone else, I had heard all my life rumors that that wasn’t always the case.
I tried to pay attention to the zebras for a while. But I couldn’t keep my mind on them, because of all the various feelings I was experiencing: a kind of exultation from silencing that child—or whatever it was—and a whole group of mixed feelings about the woman, the most important of which was a dread that she might be gone. Or could she have been detected, after all?
The zebras were none too animated; perhaps that meant they were real.
After a while I began walking again and then I looked up the path ahead of me, toward a small gray fountain, and there she was in her red dress, walking toward me, carrying a bunch of yellow jonquils in her hand. I stopped walking, and for a moment it felt as though my heart had stopped beating.
She walked up to me carrying the flowers and smiling. “Hello, there,” she said.
“Hello,” I said. And then, “My name’s Paul.”
“I’m Mary,” she said. “Mary Lou Borne.”
“Where’ve you been? I went to the House of Reptiles.”
“Walking. I went for a walk before lunch and I got caught in the rain.”
And then I saw that her red dress and her hair were wet. “Oh,” I said. “I was afraid you were… gone.”
“Detected?” She laughed. “Let’s go back to the snake house and have a sandwich.”
“I’ve already had lunch,” I said, “and you should put on some dry clothes.”
“I don’t have any dry clothes,” she said. “This dress is all I have.”
I hesitated a moment before I spoke. And then I said it. I don’t know where it came from; but I said it. “Come back to Manhattan with me and I’ll buy a dress.”
She seemed hardly surprised at all. “I’ll just get a sandwich…”
I bought her a dress from a machine on Fifth Avenue—a yellov dress of a handsome, rough fabric called Synlon. By the time wi got there on the bus her hair had dried, and she looked stunning. She still had the flowers, and they matched the dress.
I got that word “stunning” from a Theda Bara film. A nobleman and a servant were watching Miss Bara, in a black dress, carrying white flowers, come down a curved staircase. The servant said, as the words showed, “Pretty. Mighty pretty,” and the nobleman nodded slightly and said, “She is stunning.”
We had not talked much on the bus. When I got her to my bedroom-office she sat on the black plastic sofa and looked around her. The room is large and colorfully furnished—lavender rug, bright floral prints on the steel walls, and gentle lighting—and I was really quite proud of it. I would have liked a window; but it was in a basement—a fifth sub-basement, in fact—and far too deep in the ground for that.