Free Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

side.”
    I thought I read it well, hardly stumbling over the unfamiliar words. I had no idea what it meant.
    Mary Lou had moved next to me, pressing her body against mine, while I was reading. She was staring at the page. Then she looked into my face and said, “Were you saying things that you heard in your mind from just
looking
at that book?”
    “That’s right,” I said.
    Her face was uncomfortably close to mine. She seemed to have forgotten all the rules of Privacy—if she ever knew them. “And how long would it take to say aloud everything . . .” She squeezed my arm and I had to fight to keep from jumping and pulling away from her. Her eyes had become terribly intense, the way they sometimes disturbingly became. “To say aloud everything you hear in your mind from looking at all the sheets of paper in that book?”
    I cleared my throat, and pulled slightly back from her. “A whole daytime, I think. When the book is easy and you don’t say it aloud you can do it faster.”
    She took the book out of my hand and held it in front of her face, staring at it so intensely that I half expected her to start saying the words aloud by sheer force of concentration. But she did not. What she said was: “Jesus! There is that much . . . that much silent BB recording in this? That much . . . information?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “My God,” she said, “we should do it with them all. What’s the word?”
    “Read.”
    “That’s it. We should
read
them all.”
    She began to gather up an armful of books and I meekly did the same. We carried them down the hallways to my room.
     
     
DAY FORTY-EIGHT
     
     
    I spent the rest of that morning reading to her from different books. But it was difficult for me to continue paying attention; I had almost no idea of what was being said. Several times we changed books, but it was still chess.
    After several hours of this she interrupted to say, “Why are all books about chess?” and I said, “I have books at my home in Ohio that are about other things. About people and dogs and trees and things. Some of them tell stories.” And then, suddenly, I thought of something I should have thought of before and I said, “I can look the word ‘chess’ up in
Dictionary
.” I opened up the cabinet in my desk and took it out and began leafing through it until I found the words that began with “C.” I found it almost right away. “Chess: a board game between two players.” And there was a picture of two men seated at a table. On the table was one of those black-and-white arrangements with what my reading had taught me were called “pieces” sitting on it. “It’s some kind of a game,” I said. “Chess is a game.”
    Mary Lou looked at the picture. “There are pictures of people in books?” she said. “Like on Simon’s walls?”
    “Some books are full of pictures of people and things,” I said. “The easy books, like the ones I learned to read with, have big pictures on each page.”
    She nodded. And then she looked at me intensely. “Would you teach me to read?” she said. “From those books with the big pictures in them?”
    “I don’t have them here,” I said. “They’re in Ohio.”
    Her face fell. “Do you only have books about . . . about chess?”
    I shook my head. Then I said, “There might be more. Here in the library.”
    “You mean books about people?”
    “That’s right.”
    Her face lit up again. “Let’s go look.”
    “I’m tired.” I
was
tired, from all that reading and running around.
    “Come
on
,” she said. “This is
important
.”
    So I agreed to go search more rooms with her.
    We must have spent over an hour going down hallways and opening doors. The rooms were all empty, although some of them had shelves along the walls. Once, Mary Lou asked me, “What are all these empty rooms
for
?” and I said, “Dean Spofforth told me the library is scheduled for demolition. I think that’s why the rooms are empty.” I supposed she knew that