Some of the trendily dressed young folks there stared in rapt wonder, creeped out and fascinated. Acts waiting to go on, or who had been on before her, sat poker-faced, though I sensed a grim enviousness. Some had writing pads, others had computers, and they seemed to literally note her every move. It was all too funny and, naturally, alcohol didn’t remove the comic element for me. Halfway through a Long Island Iced Tea, I realized I was going to have to walk out right then or have someone call EMS. My stomach still hurt the next morning.
The next morning was also when the true sadness of that song she sang hit me. How many times had I heard my grandmother sing it and let the words wash over me, meaningless as stained glass, never realizing the singer’s only joy comes with death, or so she hopes. It wasn’t until then that I remembered I had come to the bar to find the CEO. I had to admit the Veiled Woman had power.
***
The CEO
I booked other ventriloquists at the Dragon besides the Veiled Woman, just as one could say there are other classical composers besides Beethoven. It was her video on the web that brought the place notoriety of every shade. Certain religious types were on her side, though her songs were often cryptic. Many came to see her because her work was cryptic. Cryptic or not, I noticed a shift in the crowd. It was the day she arrived with two cases. LJ was in one. She pulled him out and began singing a spiritual about sin, but stopped half way through. She laid LJ down and called for help from the audience. A young man with a shaved head walked to the stage area, opened the other case, and pulled out a female puppet that was naked except for paper leaves over its breasts and crotch. He helped her get both puppets ready, propping them on her knees. There was much expectation. What would the new puppet sing? Would the voice that spoke through it be even higher than LJ’s?
LJ and the Veiled Woman looked at Eve silently for a few too many seconds. Then the VW nodded and very somber music engulfed the room like fog. Eve rose slowly from her chair into a hotter part of the stage light as LJ began the aria, even though the VW sang with her own female voice. I would later learn it was “Casta Diva” from Norma, an opera by Bellini. The aria was a plea, a supplication to a goddess.
As she sang in Italian, it took a few days for the controversy to surface. But when it was out that “Little Jesus” was pleading with “Eve,” certain religious types stopped coming. Others took the VW to task. They interrogated and shouted. With every encounter, she would wait until there was quiet and end with the same question. “What would Jesus do, who would he be if there was no sin?”
***
What happened to me in Texas, specifically, Galveston, was an off and on mystery, but it was the first clue that my own transformation was flawed, temporary. Those born with my original form, my original species, are far more prevalent in Texas, in the southwest United States in general. There are a few of us (them?) in Michigan but not in the urban areas. As for the company, geography was immaterial. We sold value we suspected would exist to people we never met. Such an operation is unfettered by location.
One of the other important items to note about my firm is the acquisition. My scientists were originally employed by a biotech firm, whose purchase was financed through leverage. The company was about to be sold again to another biotech firm. That transaction would have made my scientists redundant. They had, however, great confidence and held great store in the process that eventually facilitated my transformation.
It had not initially occurred to them that the process may have no good practical use. Only in the midst of creating their presentation to the Board did they begin to ask themselves how or why anyone could or would make use of the merging of humans with insects, to say nothing of who would be the transferee. It almost took them longer to answer those questions than it did to create the process in the first place. But, after watching a cartoon about a singing frog that refuses to sing when his ostensible owner would be paid for the performance, they stumbled upon the idea of reverse engineering the process to create an insect with human consciousness and using the creature as an industrial spy. Of course, the Board thought US intelligence agencies would pay just as much, if not more, than the private sector and would be at much lower risk of scandal.
With that, they needed but one more component. Then they found him, us, me.
***
The Librarian
Before the CEO was a CEO, he was a factory worker. Records, mostly police records, show he arrived from Texas and wandered around Detroit like a blind dog in a meat house, as my grandmother used to say, didn’t know if he wanted to shit or go fishing. All-night poker, tours of topless bars and dope houses, blind pigs, you name it. How he managed only short stints in the joint is beyond me.
One day, somehow, he winds up on the east side of Detroit. One thing you have to know about Detroit, there is ghetto and there is slum. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of these white folks who’s unaware of racism, the Detroit metro area being the most segregated in the US. But one of the first questions two Detroiters meeting for the first time will ask one another is “you from the east side or the west side?” There are good pockets on the east side. But most of the lower east side that wasn’t destroyed by I-75 or “urban renewal” is slum. That is where our hero found himself one Sunday morning, in an abandoned car near the door of a storefront church on Cadillac Street (if a filtered, somewhat secondhand memory is to be believed). Did I mention that he was a white guy in a black neighborhood a few weeks after the city’s riot that left forty-two dead?
He was discovered by a middle-aged black woman who had left church early to go to a union meeting. He was sleeping with his back against the door of the car. She stepped outside just as the hinges gave way and he fell out onto the sidewalk, bloody and gagging on his own spit. She went back inside and called an ambulance. Have you ever waited for an ambulance in a large, urban, mostly African-American area after a riot? She eventually got some folks to take him inside. She went to her meeting and didn’t think she would see him again.
The storefront church pastor tried to sober him up and decided to send his family home while he watched over the drunk that had landed at the church doorstep. It would be the pastor’s contribution to healing the racial rift that had managed to grab folks’ attention.
The woman that found him, the union rep, was not happy about her pastor staying behind. She had convinced the preacher to come with her to the meeting directly after church. She’d been hounding him day in, day out, trying to get him to meet with black union members, a militant offshoot who’d gathered to fight racism in the union. Some folks were reluctant to join. But she knew if she got even one preacher to back them, doors would open.
His church was small, but the pastor’s influence on the east side in particular was phenomenal. There were folks in the surrounding block clubs who claimed to be church members but rarely showed up. Maybe it was guilt, but these folks voted based on his recommendations and went to the PTA meetings at his urging, did everything but go to church. There were others who felt beholden to him who had no pretense of going to that church or any other. But their relatives had been snatched from heroin addiction by his street ministry. The guy had pull.
She’d shown up at the church that morning totally excited about the preacher meeting with her and her friends after the service. But now, the preacher was watching over this guy from nowhere. The idea of closing the loop on all the things she cared about seemed lost. And it was the fault, of all things, of a drunken white man falling out of an abandoned car. Why the hell did he have to come all the way over to the east side to show his ass? Didn’t they have bars in Melvindale?
***
The CEO
I mentioned the graduate student earlier, how I (and the CEO as well) stole ideas from her. But she was not the first woman that moved him; there was a black woman, a socialist (though she never admitted to such). He was not long arrived in Detroit and was about to exhaust his meager savings when he stumbled upon her. Actually,
she stumbled upon him as he all but fell into her lap.
He was found in a quite foul state near the church she attended. The pastor of the church took him in and eventually tried help the CEO-to-be to find his home. He even enlisted the aid of the Women’s Auxiliary to supply the man with decent meals. This somehow enraged the woman who’d found the CEO. Her rage blossomed into an altercation that caused her to leave the church. Certainly, she thought she’d seen the last of that particular drunken white man. But, with the help of the pastor, the man was hired by the factory where the woman worked.
One day, in the cafeteria, she was surreptitiously handing out leftist literature. The man was sitting next to another white worker who asked the woman what she was handing out. The inquiring man didn’t wait for an answer but grabbed a flyer. The woman was infuriated but wanted to maintain a low profile. She scowled but said nothing. Our hero suddenly recognized her and was about to speak as she turned to walk away. Then the man who’d snatched her flyer spoke up.
“This seems like some communist stuff to me,” he said with a lilting, melodious southern accent while smirking at the flyer. “They wouldn’t ’low this where I come from.”
“Then why don’t you go back to where you come from?” the woman spat out. “I’ll tell you why,” she retorted before he could answer, “because you wouldn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. That mammy-made Mississippi crap is backwards as the day is long and they got the poverty to prove it. You wanna bring sharecropping and outhouses up here and we ain’t going for it.”
In mere moments, she had removed whatever vestiges of homesickness the man who was to become CEO had. But her seriousness also made his northern days of drinking, gambling, and sex seem all the more wasteful. It was no longer a sin against a God he’d never known, but somehow it still seemed a betrayal. Over and above what she said, the passion of her delivery, the shape of the words that left her mouth, merged with her glorious soft eyes. She was beautiful in a way he could not imagine another woman being beautiful at that moment. Even the color of her skin, which he knew to be an obstacle to his wish fulfillment, was at once unique and immaterial. She was who she was. There could be no one like her and he had to find a way to be with her.
***
I gave the union woman’s diary to my biographer. I don’t know if she read it or remembers reading it. I did not see her for a few days afterward. It was a particularly bad moment for the biographer. The father of a child she knew had killed himself. It was unclear how the child discovered her father was dead. It was, as you may have surmised, the Girl who said she deciphered the so-called message on the hide of the small, long elephant birthed by that other truly unfortunate creature. It seemed nothing but tragedy came in his wake.
I vaguely recall some shooting incident perpetrated by a factory worker fired because he was unable to focus on his job. He’d become wholly obsessed with deciphering the “message” on the elephant. In any event, after the Girl’s father died, my biographer returned to her task a changed woman. She was at once more relaxed and, to my great but short-lived relief, less focused on me. If only her state of mind had lasted.
***
The Librarian
Coming out of prison, I thought I had a good grip on my perspective. The fact is I pretty quickly fell back into normal mode except for doing whatever it took not to go back in. Then, I found myself holding the Girl, a thirteen-year-old orphan, at her father’s funeral. It was a short affair. The longest part was the drive to the cemetery. A bunch of us got lost. We couldn’t have a car procession, some new ordinance based on cuts to the police budget. I passed the Heidelberg Project, slowed down, wanted to stop, wanted to get lost in the colors and rows and rows of discarded things people once thought were going to make them happy. I got to the gravesite just as they were lowering the casket. The Girl sat in a row of folding chairs in front of the grave, her head buried in someone’s lap.
Later, the woman I recognized as her teacher came up to me with a conspiratorial look. She had arranged for the Girl to visit her and even spend some overnights. The Girl had also requested to visit me. (She had tried to visit me in prison, but couldn’t get a ride.) Sadly, the Girl’s family was only too glad to make the arrangement. I couldn’t figure out why they seemed to want nothing to do with her. But it left me hollow inside.
As you know, I got to spend quite a bit of time with her during the Black Elephant debacle. She told me the whole fairy-tale story of her mother passing away and how much she missed her. The ugly story got an ugly coda when I met her father and discovered he was a true and unique asshole. But she was always anxious to see him at the end of the day and grieved his loss as deeply and profoundly as I have seen anyone grieve.
Having her over was a serious adjustment. As you might guess, I’m not in a palace. What’s more, I never had kids, and now here I am with one going through trauma and puberty (who can tell the difference?) at the same time. It was a good thing school was almost out. At first, all she did was cry and sleep. Now she just writes reams and reams in notebooks. On second thought, school may be better.
Days passed before the Girl talked to me unsolicited. Mostly, she left notes. So I began to leave her notes too, at first about simple stuff. Finally, I took the plunge and asked what she was writing about. That killed the “conversation” for a few more days.
Then, out of the blue, one Saturday afternoon during a late lunch, I turned on the radio. It happened to be the CBC and the opera was on. “Traviata!” she shouted, pushed back her chair, and began twirling around the room. She grabbed me out of my chair. I tried to waltz with her, barely remembered the moves, and ended up with a sort of polka hybrid. But it worked. We danced around the room until what she later told me was “the drinking song” ended.
“It was my mother’s favorite,” she told me as she plopped back into her chair. Then she was up again, into the bedroom for a few moments, and emerged with two notebooks. They were full of writing, front and back pages, with notes in the margins, and dog-eared, food stained, and, I suspect, tear-stained as well. Every word and paragraph was her mother, what she wore, what she liked to eat, driving habits, education, how she talked when she was excited, the way she held her mouth when something puzzled her, it was all there. I was going to make a joke about seeking out dental records when she asked if doctors gave out information about their patients. Sections of her notebooks reminded me of the interminable list section in Moby Dick but, her intro was good.
My Mother in Words
I wanted to resurrect my mother with words and with what can’t be spoken. You and I will work together. I will make her present. You will draw her picture with the music in your head. I will take you into the rooms where we all danced.
***
The CEO
The CEO’s father stumbled back into what he thought was his son’s life like a dazed beast onto a firing range. I, we, recognized him in the hotel vaguely before the air around him pulsed red. I saw him while riding down in a glass elevator from the hotel suite where the event was held, then again from an interior balcony of the hotel. Strange they would dress janitors in white shirts and pants, but there he was with his red-and-blue cap, a broom, a long-handled dust pan, and the hotel’s circular logo on his back.
I was about to discover the instrument and a memory. The former was a cylindrical organ that felt as though it was attached to the base of my spine. That was anatomically impossible, of course. The instrument slept in my throat, efficiently stored and dormant until the proper moment. The memory also slept, but in a far deeper recess.
***
Years ago, as a child, the CEO we were to become was returning home from school. It was towards the end of winter, a surprisingly warm day even for Texas. He removed his jacket and almost skipped home past his friends. While he didn’t smile, his buoyancy was evident. He arrived at his small wood shingle house to discover the shades drawn and the windows closed. This, he thought, required correction
. The sun and sky were too inviting and brilliant to be stopped by such gloomy, trivial barriers. As soon as he let himself in, he called out, got no reply, dumped his coat on the living room couch, and began going through the house, making sure there was light and air in all the rooms downstairs. He didn’t dare ascend to his father and mother’s attic bedroom. Satisfied that the small grayish house had released most of its shadows and stale air, he began rummaging the bread box and refrigerator, taking care not to disturb food designated exclusively for his father. Though he thought no one would miss a spoonful of the half gallon of ice cream that had already been scooped.
He heard feet half stumbling down the stairs and fumbled to replace the lid on the ice cream, get it all back into the freezer, and clean and replace the eating utensils before the door to the attic swung open. He was still rinsing the spoon when his father appeared, bleary-eyed, in the kitchen doorframe.
“What you been eating?”
“I just found this spoon in the sink and rinsed it.”
“Don’t let me catch you in something you ain’t supposed to be.” The father turned his head toward the living room and his eyes suddenly popped open. “What did I tell you about the couch?”
Stones fell into the boy’s stomach as he struggled to recall which rule he may have violated.
“Where are you supposed to put your coat when you come in?”
The boy dropped the spoon he realized he was still holding when he saw his father begin to loosen his belt. Just as suddenly, the man stopped and dove with surprising agility to grab something on the floor under one of the kitchen chairs. As he bent down, he passed close enough for the boy to catch the smell of beer. The father got to his feet clutching the tangle of wire coat hangers that were the remnants of the boy’s school project.
The Official Report on Human Activity Page 8