Mockingbird by Walter Tevis Page A

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