The Official Report on Human Activity

by kim d. hunter

  “Mom, it’s really hard for you to know what’s really going on with Nat and Tina if you don’t—”

  “Anyway, that’s all behind us now. I feel like I can breathe again now that you’re back.”

  “We have to get him out.”

  Her mother put her head in her hands as the Girl continued.

  “He’ll die in there. It’s too much.”

  “Yes,” the Author said, closing her eyes for a long moment. “It’s all I think about. But no matter how much I spend, they spend more, and they bury us, just bury us. The insanity of your father purposely harming anyone—” She closed her eyes again. “If only there was a trace of the real killer.”

  Something in her mother’s tone gave the Girl a flash. She sat up suddenly as she realized why there was no material trace of the killer.

  “What’s the matter?”

  The Girl could not tell her, she didn’t have the inner strength to say she would be leaving and soon, that she had to return to the Revue.

  “Oh, nothing. I thought I heard something.”

  ***

  Nat came into the house with more trepidation than usual. In fact, something made him promise himself that this would be the last killing, that he would find another way to contribute to the struggle, especially since he’d seen few if any of the changes he thought he’d see. The killings had become less and less cathartic.

  The house, though clearly constructed and decorated with a ridiculous amount of money, somehow avoided the decadence that had become trendy. It was as tasteful and aesthetic a place as he’d ever entered, which, at this point in his career, was saying something indeed. The rooms were large enough to contain good-sized art installations and still seem airy and light. Wall-sized screens with juxtaposed film clips from the twentieth century and from the current day (why did they skip so much?) were the main sources of light in each room.

  He was startled when he realized the soft sound he heard was not from the screen, but was the noise of someone snoring and then waking up at the far end of the room. There was a woman with what might have been mathematical formulas tattooed on her arms and legs just visible below a bright orange short-sleeved top and dull green dress. She was suddenly very awake and brandishing what was probably a weapon. It seemed like a weapon, the way she pointed it at him, and by the look of utter determination combined with disgust that froze her face. He could see his face in a screen that had suddenly become visible above her. It pulsed red and flashed symbols he could not read.

  “There’s only one way for you to leave here alive,” the woman snapped. “Carry a message back to your employer, my ex-husband, the asshole, or they will drag you out of here like the garbage you are. I want the message delivered personal, no goddamn screens. He will never get close enough to lay a hand on me again. Do you fucking hear me?”

  “My employer?” Nat puzzled. “But I’m—”

  Before he could say “self employed,” his image disappeared from the screen, and he felt as though he’d suddenly plunged miles beneath the ocean. The pressure on every inch of his body was tremendous. His legs felt broken by the sudden weight. The blood in his nose forced him to breathe through his mouth. It all happened in a flash that seemed elongated by the pain and shock. Fortunately, he wasn’t conscious very long.

  ***

  The Girl had deeply mixed feelings about everything now, about seeing the Bird in the window of the room, what she used to think of as her room. She almost laughed at how she’d been fooled into thinking her hearing had improved because the Bird’s call was so loud. Her father was out of prison and Nat was back in.

  ***

  Nat was not fully awake, but he could hear people and music, and the two began to blend like different colored liquids mixed together until they were a new and indistinguishable color. It must have been there all the time. Why hadn’t he seen it, heard it, figured out how the Old Woman talking was the Old Woman singing, was the blues in any cadence—the rhythm never left—the notes were always blue and even tinted the silence that was deeper and more open with its blueness.

  Nat awoke without opening his eyes, but with a fearful smell and a familiar burning in his lungs. His head and stomach were both very clear and very sore. He did want to open his eyes because of the smell. It was different from the body odor and warm plastic smell of the prison from which he’d been released after the storm and finding the Singer, but he still knew it was prison, just different bodies and newer plastic, so he did not want to open his eyes. But he could not close his ears, though he almost wished that he could.

  He could hear everything. He heard so much that for a moment he thought he may have been dreaming he was back in prison because there had never been so much—what? What could he call it but music? But it was just sound, and music was music. He played music from memory in his head and realized the curtain between those things was gone. Indeed, why had he not noticed how flimsy the curtain had always been, how shadowy and smoke like? Sound that was music, music that was sound had become something akin to light or perhaps even air and was more vivid than both. Everyone and everything had become an instrument that was in the process of tuning or playing a melody, sometimes apart, sometimes ensemble.

  He thought it unwise to give in to what he feared must have been the world’s dumbest smile in this place, where smiles were an invitation to disaster. He could not help himself. The sound was too much even after he opened his eyes and confirmed what he feared. His fear receded just a bit. The ceiling of the place was as low as it was in any prison and the foul stories etched in the glass walls that allowed no privacy were just as foul as ever, words that might as well have been old bloodstains, and all of it was nearly lost in what he was hearing, in the joy of sound.

  ***

  No one cried at Nat’s memorial. Tina was sedated. The Old Woman fainted and had to be carried out. It could have been that the funeral added too much weight to the interrogations she’d undergone. The Girl’s head was about to explode as it raced between the relief she still felt at her father’s release and the possibility that she had set the table for Nat’s execution.

  ***

  Where would she go? The Girl who was no longer a girl turned the question in her half-sleep, the question that felt like an abrasion and had kept her from solid rest all night long. The Bird had not come, but a sound woke her. No screen was open. Someone was actually at the door of the house.

  “Everybody call’s me LJ,” the man said after the Scientist placed a cup of tea in front of him. “Like I said, I was inside with Nat. I know what he did but . . .” the man rubbed his chin and squinted as if he was trying to solve an equation.

  “I knew him before the Revue, when he was just getting started. At first I was happy about the Revue, you know, cause of the publicity and what not, brought money, you know what I’m saying? Brought them goddamn units too. I was so busy counting the money and spending it, I didn’t even notice at first, took my eye off the damn ball. I’d been out of there so quick.

  “Anyway, they arrested the Old Woman. What the hell kinda threat is a 112-year-old? If she hadn’t been dark . . . Her arrest got my attention but that was way too late. I had to resort to screens for the shows, didn’t know nothing about that crap, still don’t and don’t wanna know. One day, this guy I hired to open the screens grows about two feet right in front of me, I mean a hundred percent brick and steel, muscles in his shit, you know what I’m saying? Anyway, he’s got records of everything, but I’m still thinking, what the hell: they’ll beat me, fine me, I’ll get modified as best I can and go on about my business.

  “Next thing I know, I’m screening Nat getting knocked out in the home of some rich, and I mean rich, woman. Then there’s all kinds of probes slicing my head, never felt nothing like it, never want to feel it again. They scheduled the trial. I have to talk to six lawyers before I find one that’s not connected, no company units in her family or what not. Doesn’t matter.

  “I wake up in a c
ell with Nat or in the same area with barriers; who knows how they do that shit. My head’s spinning like a tornado. I know he’s gonna die and I’m thinking they got me in there cause I’m gonna die too, even though they gave me years at the so-called trial. Now Nat’s all calm, you know, and I’m thinking it’s cause he’s sorta lost his mind, the way folks get when everything crushes ’em and they sit there like they just been born.

  “He’s got all the death row communication privileges. You know about that? They figure everybody is too scared to be associated with condemned folks so they let you screen whoever. Mostly it’s just relatives, crying and saying stuff they been holding back. But Nat’s was different. Tina was the only relative. God it was good to hear her. It didn’t hurt that she’s beautiful and all, but that voice. She wasn’t even singing real music. It was that opera stuff. Couldn’t understand a damn word.

  “Besides Tina, there’s all these professor types and these others people in white clothes, you know the type, look like they don’t walk from place to place but just float. I can only understand snatches of the conversations. Mainly, I’m waiting for Tina to come back.

  “One day, I told Nat about how good her voice made me feel and asked him if he knew what she was singing. He said it was about a woman at the end of her rope, about to fall into the clutches of a real asshole, and she was singing that she had lived all her life for art and for love and that she didn’t deserve none of the crap that was happening to her. I hadn’t lived for art and love, but I could seriously relate.

  “Before I could ask anything else, he asked me what’s the difference between her singing and us talking? I thought, oh boy, the flipped out side of him is taking over. Any child knows that singing ain’t talking and vice versa. Then he goes on to tell me about the Old Woman and how dark people talk like they sing and vice versa and I had to back up a bit. Yeah, I could hear the Old Woman in my head and I could hear that Billie Holiday woman Nat used to play just before he left, and I thought, he’s right. They talk like they sing and vice versa. The wall between singing and talking is thinner than I thought. Nat goes on about this other old musician, Charlie Parker, and how he used notes that were really speech to show how speech was really music because everything was music and that his speed was just the flip side of Billie Holiday’s slowness and easiness, same coin just turned over.

  “From there it was just a hop skip to understanding, if I ever really will, why Nat was so calm. He hadn’t lost his mind, or not the way folks usually lose their minds. He explained that what he had lost was the thing in his mind that allowed him to tell the difference between music and every other sound. It was all music now, a big symphony that only died down when he went to sleep.

  “At first, I thought that would make it easier for him. But regardless of how calm and even happy he seemed at times, he said it saddened him more than he could say. He talked about how the last two times he walked into a rich person’s home intent on probing, it had made him almost ready to confess so that he could die and wipe the confusion from his mind. He hadn’t set out to kill folks. He actually just wanted to talk. But when that didn’t work and the probe did, well, you know the story.

  “But here he was now condemned to die and had just found more reason to live, to do the thing that he enjoyed doing most in the world: hearing, hearing like he never had before. He even said it changed how and what he saw and how he would have danced had he not been modified for death row.

  “We didn’t know when he was actually supposed to die. The schedules don’t mean nothing nowadays. They changed the law to make it so the prisons would have ‘more flexibility.’ I mean, what the hell? Anyway, I’m getting more interested in his idea and I’m actually feeling it, you know, it’s changing the way I hear stuff and it’s making it a little easier to be there.

  “Other inmates are coming to me because they can’t come to Nat—the rules are nuts, don’t ask me—but they’re coming to me because the professors and the people with the white clothes are all over the screens talking about Nat, and how they have to save him, and how what he’s discovered could revolutionize this, that, and the other. You know as soon as somebody on death row gets anything that looks like an out, they become first-class Hollywood screen action. But some of the inmates just wanted to know if it’s true that me and Nat can hear everything like music because we were close to the Old Woman.

  “I try to explain things as best I can that the Old Woman was a sign of something that should have been obvious to us all the time, that Billie Holiday and that Charlie Parker guy were there for us to see, or I should say to hear, and that there were others before them but they were the closest or maybe just the most obvious or maybe just the ones we knew about, not like enough people know about them, I’m just saying.

  “Besides that, there was the scanner, well, not really a scanner, but a weapon they sell as a scanner; you know, rich folks can get anything tricked out. Anyway, the thing the woman used on him when he finally got zonked and caught, he thinks that what did it to him. Who knows?

  “For the first time ever, I’m wanting to stay in prison cause I am finally beginning to understand, though what, I don’t know. So naturally, my lawyer, God bless her dark, bookworm soul, finds a way to spring me. I should have been happy. The woman wins a major case proving that folks with unconnected lawyers are getting screwed and convicted falsely.

  “Not only do I get a hard release date, but the guards start treating me like my mama never had sex. It’s LJ this and LJ that. All I want to do is talk with Nat while Nat’s still there to talk to.

  “Other inmates are telling me it’s all been planned, that I was supposed to be there with Nat and get out and spread the word about how he could hear everything for what it truly is. When I tell this to Nat, he almost laughs. He said the companies love when people say stuff that keeps the spotlight off how companies are screwing everyone raw.

  LJ looked at the Woman who sat between the Author and the Scientist. “Nat said I should talk to you.”

  Outside Chance

  I

  It was so dark in the pool hall that the sunlit scene outside framed by the open door seemed like a movie of the sidewalk, the strip of grass and the traffic rather than the real thing. Rick moved in what he hoped was a casual manner toward the exit because his cousin Andre had missed in his previous two turns and was now calling for a bank shot of such exquisite difficulty that you could almost hear eyes rolling in folks’ heads. Rick, on the other hand, knew the shot was a cinch for Andre, and his fear of the reaction once the ball sank into the pocket gave the already 90-degree air more charge as well as a tightness. He hoped his legs would not betray all that he was feeling as he inched toward the door.

  Andre’s right hand held the thick end of the cue. As he slid it back and forth, preparing the shot, it came tantalizingly close to a wad of rubber-banded bills that sat on the thick polished wooden edge of the pool table. The money was the wager Andre was about to snap up, a big sucker bet that contained the better part of some poor sap’s weekly check.

  Said sap sat smiling, sipping suds under one of the many plastic cone-shaped lamps that hung from the ceiling. Andre, in his twenties, was in pretty good shape, but he still wondered if he could make the shot, pick up the money, and move to the door before things got ugly, prohibitively ugly.

  It had been easier than he thought to recruit his younger cousin Rick to the scam. Rick had always come across to him as a bookworm and a do-gooder. He’d introduced Andre to movies you had to read because the actors didn’t speak English. Even if they had, things they did made no sense and couldn’t hold Andre’s attention for very long.

  “Why would anyone want to go to a movie where you watch somebody read?” he’d asked Rick in an almost too loud voice during a Godard film. “We took two buses to watch a movie where people went on vacation and read books.”

  On the way back from the film it was late and the bus was nearly empty. They commandeered the back bench seats a
nd propped up their feet.

  “You know you owe me,” Andre chided Rick, “for forcing me to see that shitty movie, no action, no sex, no nothing.”

  “What do you mean no action? What about how they treated one another; doesn’t that count?”

  Andre looked skyward, palmed the top of Rick’s head, raised his other hand and pleaded, “God, help this boy see the light. Let him understand the difference between talk and action.” They both laughed.

  “If you want action, come with me to the demonstration against the war,” Rick retorted.

  “You know JB was on Ed Sullivan tonight,” Andre said before breaking into song. “I got the feeling!”

  “So you don’t want to go to the march?”

  “That’s just a bunch of white folks making noise,” Andre said dismissively and turned toward the back window.

  But, even as he spoke, Andre thought of how he dreaded seeing the mail truck parked on his street. He tried not to think about the draft, fearing he would jinx the whole deal. Somehow, at least so far, he’d escaped. No Army notice had appeared in his mailbox calling him to a jungle battlefield in a country he’d never heard of before the war. Others he knew had not been so lucky.

  He recalled Wilson’s homecoming party. Wilson was a guy who had terrorized Andre and many others well into high school. Wilson made sure everyone knew he carried a knife. Those who had seen him use it talked about it, but never on the witness stand.

  Wilson’s welcome-back party had featured the typical loud music that greeted you at the doorstep. Streamers and balloons were taped to the porch. Andre knew something was up when he opened the door and saw no one dancing. There was a knot of people around the bathroom, which wouldn’t have been unusual except that, even over the music, he could hear what he thought was the guest of honor cursing on the other side of the door. “It’s that bag they attached to him,” complained a girl he didn’t recognize. “It doesn’t work sometimes. It’s that damn bag.”