“It depends,” the reporter replied, “on whether you’re concerned with the message on its hide or its health.”
“Is that an either-or proposition?”
“Am I unwelcome here because I have the wrong take on the elephant?”
“Who says you’re not welcome?”
“Who’s being protected from what?”
“There’s a woman came in here days, weeks, or months ago with a machine. I thought I recognized her. She looked like a younger, lighter version of a woman who used to come in here all the time but years ago. The younger, lighter woman looked around the place like a . . . a surveyor, like somebody that had come back to a house they used to live in to see what the new folks had done to it. She had a machine with her, a white box. She was drinking heavy, depressed, I could tell. I cut her off. She was pissed but didn’t leave. She noticed the juke box, walked over to it looking real sad. She waited for the songs on it to play out, asked for change, and started feeding it coins. She put about twenty quarters in it and played Dinah Washington till I thought I was going to die, two songs over and over: “Where Are You?” and “This Bitter Earth.” I told her Dinah had lots of other tracks on there. Eventually, she pulls out her machine, starts fiddling with it and chuckling. I just thought she was drunk. The next day, I open the place up, go over to the box to put something on, and I start to feel strange, like I knew the machine or it knew me.”
With that, the bartender handed him the drink.
The Librarian’s boss had been fiddling with the white machine the media consultant had left behind. At first, he loathed the machine because it reminded him of all the money he’d spent on the consultant that was now probably being spent with his erstwhile friend, the Egyptologist. Then he realized the consultant may have left notes or other materials that could prove useful and so opened the machine and began to try and figure out how it worked. It wasn’t very intuitive. He screwed around with it for over an hour, forgetting that he had a meeting with the newly hired political consultant, who left increasingly angry voicemail messages. But the Librarian’s boss had become entranced.
At one point he touched a pad on the machine that glowed. A fingerprint image, presumably his, appeared on the screen. Immediately after that, he discovered a program the consultant had never used. He knew it had gone unused because it triggered an initial setup screen. Even that was fascinating. The screen was accompanied by voices, velvety voices that reminded him of a girl from high school and a teacher he’d had a crush on. Stranger than that, the voices reminded him of the time he’d gone skydiving, the exhilaration and liberation he’d felt as he sailed through the air just before the chute opened, how he’d felt that he could do anything, having had death more than flash through his mind. It was at that moment the machine asked how it could help.
A vision came to him all but welded to his remembrance of the brush with death. It was hardly grand. But the flood of emotion and release was strong enough to make it grandiose. Suddenly, he had the crux of his mayoral campaign, and it was all in his hands. He didn’t have to rely on a school girl’s shallow plea to support the wishes of a man who, even when he was alive, wouldn’t have been able to afford a good night out. The new plan would endear him to the people who could pay for his campaign and keep him in a manner to which he would love to become accustomed. Most beautifully, the pilot project could begin right there in the library.
After the Girl’s teacher had visited the library, the Librarian felt the same wave of doubt that had come over her when she had learned of Ipso’s fate at the hospital. She went home and began drinking. When the phone rang, she answered with “Can I help you?” broke into tears and hung up. Seconds later, the phone rang again, and before she could say anything, the media consultant said, “Don’t hang up!”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I don’t feel well. I’m surprised you—”
“We were each other’s only connections. Once we started talking, our lives.”
“I can’t leave. I can’t leave her there alone.”
“What the hell! Is she locked in a tower or something? You’re not her mother. You got to learn to—”
“Walk away from the problem like—”
“Actually the reason I called is that I need your help and you can only do it there. Hello, are you still there? Look, I am sorry. I know this may not be a good time to call but I stupidly left before I . . . you remember that machine?”
The Librarian’s boss was putting the machine through its paces, helping it find its voice, his voice, the voice that would propel him to nights out in the finer establishments:
“Can I help you?”
“If pandering means following the will of people even when it leads to tough decisions, then I pander.”
“It appears you were three days late returning a book within the last six months. What were the circumstances of your lapse?”
“Do you deny the source of your campaign contributions make you beholden to a certain constituency with views outside of the mainstream?”
“The restrooms are currently at capacity. Your toddler must simply be patient until after our janitorial staff can make the area more hygienic.”
“I believe the voters are too angry to be misled.”
“Based on our conversation, I suggest that you may need to take on an intermediate volume before you read the one you’re requesting, a stepping stone as it were.”
“While these services were offered in the past, I suggest you may want to find alternatives. Begin to build community with neighbors of like mind.”
He pushed the “reframe” button.
“While these services were offered in the past, now is an excellent time to assert your personal responsibility and move these issues from the public to a more personalized sphere.”
The next step would be to get it to write layoff notices. How hard could that be?
“You don’t seem to realize how her death affected you.”
“Do you want your boss’s print on the machine? Do you really want to see his mind manifest in digital form?”
“I saw his mind manifest every day at work. Why didn’t you take the machine to the elephant?”
“Because, it’s an elephant! It’s not like it missed a step on the ladder; it’s a whole other species, no prints, very little in the way of social memories and no language we can discern, huge feet instead of hands and an olfactory sense that probably overwhelms most of its cognitive ability. In short, it’s an elephant!”
“She really misses you.”
“The elephant?”
“The Girl.”
“All the time we’ve been talking and you’re still drunk. Listen, you need to make an appointment to see him as soon as possible. Pretend you’re interested in him; tell him you’ll help him pimp out the mayor’s campaign—”
“He’s working for the mayor?”
“He wants to run for mayor and the machine might help him.”
“Don’t you feel a void without her?”
“The Girl?”
“No, your mother.”
The consultant was about to hang up. But then she had visions of the Librarian’s boss ascending to ever higher office, his lips pausing only long enough to kiss the machine in private rooms. As she searched desperately for the right words, the Librarian broke the silence.
“If you knew what the machine was capable of, why didn’t you use it for something good?”
“I’m not sure what it can do. I just have a bad feeling about programs I didn’t open.”
“You don’t know the programs on your own machine?”
“Technically speaking, it isn’t mine.”
The Librarian and the Girl had come to see the Librarian’s boss to confirm preparation for the news conference, which was scheduled for the next day. They had been waiting outside of his office for twenty minutes. The administrative assistant, who usually waved the Librarian through to the boss, had asked them to have a seat and notified the b
oss that the Girl and the Librarian were waiting. After that, the clock on her desk had her full attention.
Since the video with her and Ipso had been posted on the web, The Librarian had become used to not waiting so long to see the boss. In fact, she had often been ushered into his office with but a moment’s notice and been given overwhelming tasks. Now she was worried. The waiting time had her worried and her agreement with the consultant had her worried. She had promised to retrieve the white machine in exchange for the consultant promising to see a therapist about how the loss of her mother had influenced her career change. The Librarian did not know if the consultant could be trusted to actually see a therapist and she had no idea what she was going to say to retrieve the machine.
The Girl was not worried. She had come to realize that what she knew about the elephant was not common knowledge, that the message that was so plain to her was indecipherable to everyone else. She had been overwhelmed when the Librarian had revealed that fact to her, but not overcome. She felt as if she had something of extreme value, that she had only to bide her time and reveal it at the right moment. She had, though, already composed an introduction to the message.
“Could you please read this?”
The Girl handed the Librarian a small piece of paper with handwriting:
I remember an old picture. Was I asleep? A woman clipped clean wet sheets to a thin line in the sun. People did not expect things to come so quickly. Did people dream of the wind that took the water from their clothes pinned to the line or did the scent of the sun in the sheets turn their sleep over and over? Black and silver one after the other, is this how the sun spoke at night, through the smell of its heat in a dream? Was I asleep?
“You wrote this?”
“I just handed it to you. It introduces the message. When are we going to be on television?”
“Who knows? Who cares? You wrote this? Your family didn’t have a dryer?”
The Librarian began to feel a strange guilt that she had thought the Girl was barely literate. Then the Librarian became distracted. The administrative assistant’s eyes lit up as the clock hit five o’clock. She stood to leave.
“I hope you have a good time on television,” she said.
“When are we going to be on television?” the Girl said.
The Librarian had no reply. What’s more, to her mind, there was no good answer except never. She hated being on television, in front of the media, especially with her boss. He never said anything she could support and he never stopped talking. She didn’t especially like the more powerful, aggressive reporters either.
She had only become a media relations person because of an incident at college where she had been studying library science, a major into which she had also drifted. She had not declared a major, but a professor from religious studies whom she found both physically attractive and intimidating confided in her that he had once fallen in love with a librarian.
“Did you get to the library often?” she asked, then blushed at her own question.
“I think you’d do well behind the help desk,” he replied, and she blushed again.
After that, she officially declared her major as library science, landing a work-study position in the psychology section of the library. Ironically, just as she was hired, the school fell on hard financial times and, with more students finding materials online, library staff was in serious danger of being cut.
That began to change when a graduate student, of whom she was vaguely aware outside of class, wrote a play, The Official Report on Human Activity. The text of the play got mixed reviews in the local media, but the fact that a play that was yet to be performed got any notice was a testament to the media relations skills of the playwright. He made five-by-five-foot posters with oversized text of quotes from the reviews, good, bad, and unintelligible, and plastered them illegally in strategic areas around town. Smaller text on the posters alluded to some of the more salacious parts of the play. The playwright granted the university library sole proprietorship over the text, effectively setting it loose in the public domain. The play was scheduled to be performed off campus thirty days after the posters went up.
The professor of religious studies had come to the library during the hours the Librarian was there, ostensibly to find his way through some lost books of the Bible. He approached the Librarian at her desk, oblivious to the line of students seeking her help. He was soon ushered to the rear where he waited a half hour to see her. He noticed all the computer terminals also had waiting lines. When his turn to speak to her finally arrived, the Librarian was frustrated and tired.
“The library has become quite the place. Are they serving beer somewhere?”
“If they are, I’ll take two.”
A group of three students rushed the desk.
“Excuse me, but we’re looking for a copy of The Report,” said their designated spokeswoman.
The Librarian looked up exasperated and handed her a form and a slip of paper with the number 244 on it.
“Take this number, complete this form, and return it to the next desk. Be sure to put your contact information next to the number from the slip. Any perceived alterations to the number will result in forfeiture of your position in the cue and you will have to begin the process from the start. Thank you and good luck.”
With that the students walked away, staring at the information and forms.
“Is this play going to be performed—”
Before the professor could finish his question, another student approached the desk looking for a copy of The Report. The Librarian repeated the routine with the number and forms. The professor’s curiosity was piqued. He lied to a security guard, who parted a line of students to allow him access to the text online.
The more he read it, the more upset he became. The play was about a young woman of indeterminate ethnicity who leaves her family to go fight in the brown hemisphere’s water wars sparked by global warming, though it is unclear who she supports. Her grandfather is an old man who struggled with his career choice and only becomes disciplined enough to choose on his death bed. Her father is a banker who forces his most attractive clients to have sex with him but is plagued by nightmares.
In one recurring dream, he is a white woman in the nineteenth-century southern US, who, when it is discovered she is having sex with a half-dark house slave, is forced to escape with Harriet Tubman. Of course the house slave also has to vacate the premises.
The only thing that makes the trip even slightly bearable is that the woman and her lover are together. Though once, when they slip off to have sex, Tubman nearly leaves them behind to fend for themselves without map or weapon in the wilderness.
Right after that episode, the sky to the north darkens. That afternoon, it begins to rain. The party comes to a mountain as rocky as it is steep. Hounds bay in the distance behind them. The woman turns around to find Tubman and the escaped house slave arguing. His eyes that had always seemed soft to her are wild and tired looking. Tubman, on the other hand, is firm and fearsome. She flails her arms and points behind them, the direction from where they’d come. Then she stops. Her voice is low and calm.
“You trained the dogs, right?”
He shakes his head and looks around as if there was a path of escape just beyond his sight.
“Then it’s settled. You go talk to the dogs before they get back to the slave catchers. Put ’em off our trail. Otherwise, we die trying to climb this mountain.”
“What if the dogs don’t act like they recognize me? What if they’re too close to their masters right now?”
“Then we all die tryin to climb the mountain. I got one rifle and six shots left. I’d have to kill all of them with a couple shots. You think they gonna stand there, let me shoot ’em and reload?”
“Tell the truth, you want me to die. You hate me. Tell the truth.”
“The problem with the truth is that there are all kinds of truth. There’s the truth you can see, you know, dropped-rocks-fall sor
t of truth. There’s the truth little children tell before grown folks get to ’em and teach ’em how to lie to get along. Then there’s the unwelcomed, unclean, uglier-than-a-mule’s-butt truth, and that’s what’s waiting on us right now.”
The former house slave turns to his lover, his mouth open to shout but with no sound. He runs toward her, then past her.
The banker wakes up. It takes a moment for him to realize whose bed he’s in. The sheets smell like the ones his mother used to pull off the line when he was younger, that she continued to pull off the line even after he’d bought her a state-of-the-art clothes dryer. (She had in fact refused to use many of the things he had given her even though she praised him sincerely for each and every gift. She wondered but could never ask what he remembered.) The sheets on the bed where he awoke smell like sun because the glass windows allow sun onto the bed. It is the home of one his clients. He can hear the ocean. He knows he is in California, but should not be close enough to the ocean to hear it. People are arguing, running up the stairs toward him. He hears a shotgun being cocked.
The religion professor did not read any further and remained perplexed as to the popularity of the text among the students. He missed the wilder hallucinations of the banker as he ran wounded from the client’s home only to drown in the ocean that had made its way miles inland. He never saw the links to recipes for birth control and aphrodisiacs made from common clover and a particular circuit found in wide-screen televisions. He was completely focused on the slight relativity of truth to which Tubman had alluded, assessing the situations in the rain with the dogs behind and the mountain ahead. He decided not to attempt to ban the text but to expose it to the world (meaning the students’ parents) so that they might ban it.
Though they tried to hide it with businesslike questions, the librarians were thoroughly upset when the professor threatened a campaign against the play if they didn’t remove the text from the library (something they couldn’t have done if they’d wanted). The play had made the library the place to be. The librarians had a gateway drug and they were using it to hook students to other writers, from Merce Cunningham and John Cage to the more traditional writers like James Joyce and Jimi Hendrix. It was a dream come true. What’s more, the increased traffic had at least delayed impending budget cuts and layoffs.
The Official Report on Human Activity Page 5