The Official Report on Human Activity

by kim d. hunter

  “I’ll go to the demonstration if you come with me to the pool hall and keep an eye out,” Andre had offered.

  “An eye out for what?”

  “Better yet, shoot a game with me.”

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “You will win, guaranteed,” Andre smiled.

  That’s what Rick had been afraid of, but something in Andre’s easy manner enticed him to be part of the plan, to stay connected. He also didn’t want to imagine Andre in the pool hall without backup, trying to work a hustle. Though his experience with such things was limited, Rick had tried to push his fear down somewhere he couldn’t feel it. It made his throat tight and dry.

  Minutes before they had entered the pool hall, Andre had dropped more details about the escape plan they might need after the trap had been sprung. Rick was now in the early phase of that loose plan, close to the door, making sure, as much as anyone could, that no one blocked it. He didn’t understand how he was supposed to do that and remain inconspicuous.

  As Rick had feared, the man sitting under the cone lamp had become a bit upset after Andre made the nearly impossible bank shot and summarily stuffed the wad of cash into his pocket. The man rose from his seat slowly, his jaw tighter than a submarine hatch. Worse yet, he was looking back and forth between Rick and Andre. During one of his glances over at Andre, Rick took the opportunity to bolt. When the man turned to see Rick fleeing into the sunlight, Andre jumped over the bar and shot out the back.

  Rounding the corner to meet Rick, Andre smiled as they trotted until they heard footsteps and saw not one, but three men racing toward them. One of them had what looked like a metal pipe.

  “You take the alley. I’ll take the street,” Andre panted.

  This was a change in the plan that left Rick cold. Andre was supposed to run down the alley if they had to split up. Rick was from Detroit and didn’t know DC well enough not to get lost once he left familiar streets. But the men chasing them were closer, and even though there was a rock in one of his shoes that were not made for running (why hadn’t he worn his sneakers?), this was no time for questions. He did not even look back to see the source of the pounding feet and curses that followed him to the alley.

  He managed to put distance between him and his pursuers, turn left back on the sidewalk, and duck into a street level apartment with an unlocked screen door. There was a closet in the room to his right. He jumped in and shut the door seconds after he heard someone else open the screen door.

  Rick was trying so hard to quiet his breathing he thought he’d pass out. Someone came down a flight of stairs, close to the closet. A woman spoke nervously to the man who’d just chased Rick to the apartment.

  “Wow, you just walked into my pad?” she said, sounding white to Rick’s ears.

  “I’m looking for somebody,” the man panted, “just robbed me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Another set of footsteps fast and heavy could be heard on the stairs.

  “At the pool hall, guy just cheated me out of—”

  “Whoever it is ain’t here, so just split,” a man’s voice interrupted him.

  There was silence, then footsteps going away.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “Some crap at the pool hall. I’m glad you woke up.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t serious. Things are just beginning to—”

  The sudden silence took Rick’s breath away. Oddly, he noticed that he’d been smelling expensive marijuana and cheap incense. Before he could notice anything else, the closet doorknob rattled and the door swung open.

  Rick didn’t even look up. He put his head down and pushed off the back wall with one foot. The man was knocked to the ground. The woman jumped back. Was she reaching for something in the drawer?

  Rick was in the doorway, but the man leapt from the floor and was on him, two sinuous arms around Rick’s waist, wrestling. The man dropped one arm only to throw a punch that missed and grazed Rick’s ear with a nasty sting.

  “Tyrone, don’t. He’s just a boy,” the woman shouted. He had Rick against the wall.

  “I was just hiding. I swear to God. I had to hide.”

  “You came damn close to hiding in a hole in the ground.”

  The woman sat and exhaled. She was pregnant. She and the man could have been brother and sister. He was a shade darker but with long, straight hair.

  “You scared the crap out of me. I thought I was going to have it right then.”

  “Please, I haven’t done anything. I just want to go home.”

  “Come and sit down and tell us what the hell is going on.” The woman pushed a kitchen chair toward him with her foot. “I think you owe us that much.”

  Rick sat, feeling the unsteadiness in his legs just as he made contact with the chair.

  “You look pretty young to be cheating someone out of their money.”

  “How do you know he was cheated?” Rick asked. “Sometimes, you just lose.”

  Tyrone smiled despite himself.

  ***

  “They charge a lot of money for these papers?” Andre tried to ask in a nonchalant way.

  “It depends,” Rick replied. “If Tyrone has to write the paper, they charge more than if they just buy it already written from another student.”

  “But how does the student that’s buying the paper know? He should charge everybody based on how many pages are in the paper.”

  “You can be his business manager.”

  “Sounds like somebody needs to.”

  “The folks from the pool hall can’t be still looking for us,” Rick said, changing the subject. “I didn’t come here to spend my summer inside.”

  “You want to spend it in the hospital? Besides, the Smithsonian ain’t going nowhere. Tell me about this Tyrone and the Schwartz guy too.”

  “Schwartz is actually a woman, pregnant, as a matter of fact.”

  “OK, but what about the operation?”

  “What difference does it make? You don’t even like to read subtitles. How are you going to help crank out papers to sell?”

  “You pay to read subtitles. He gets paid for the papers. That’s a whole other world.”

  ***

  On his second visit to Tyrone and Schwartz’s, Rick got high and had sex. He had seen people when they were drunk and/or high and had read about the effect of psychoactives: cannabis leaf, hashish, LSD, mushrooms, and the like. He had noted the similarities between the more intense psychedelic experiences and meditation. But this was the thing itself.

  Time puzzled him. It suddenly seemed like he’d always been high and had simply failed to realize it. The moments when Tyrone had gone upstairs to write and Schwartz had turned to Rick smiling and lit a joint and asked him if he’d ever felt a baby moving all collapsed into the moment his ear was on her stomach, and then, thoughtless and clear, he turned his lips to brush against the gentle swell.

  When had she actually handed him the cigarette? It was warm. Why had it surprised him that something lit on one end and that she had been holding on the other end was warm? He inhaled, choked, drank some water and tried again. The upright chair in the kitchenette that had been utterly comfortable a moment ago now seemed to urge him to sit on the softer, tiny couch near the stairs.

  There, the title of a book—Black No More—caught his attention. It looked old and, as he began to read it, he was amazed that it had been published in the 1930s. It began with a black man, the apparent protagonist, who paid to turn himself white using a method developed by a black scientist whose aim was to get rid of racism in the US. The man who paid to become white made the change in no small part to pursue a white woman who wouldn’t go out with black men. Racial identities leap-frogged over and over in Rick’s head and then exchanged themselves in some sort of mirror and took him back to Schwartz.

  She turned on the radio. Strange rock music smeared itself into the smell of the smoke in the room. He chuckled hearing the obviously white
singer say “Lord have mercy.” He didn’t know white people even knew the phrase existed. Then there was the curious refrain, “white light, white heat.”

  It seemed to her like he’d been reading forever, though he was flipping pages faster than even she could have done. She tried to use her fascination with watching him read to replace the other thoughts that rose in her like a swift current. He was underage, right? If she asked him how old he was and he lied or confirmed what she feared, what then?

  She saw his eyes when she closed her eyes as he had moaned against her stomach and the vibration made her wet. She did not want to admit that being pregnant had made her want sex in a way she never had before. She also had not wanted to admit that she missed her lover, nor that the only thing that dampened her anger at what her brother had done to him was the memory of making love in a space cleared in the woods. She told herself smoking marijuana would calm her disruptions and urges but suspected that was close to being a lie.

  How old was he, really, this boy plowing through the novel? It seemed like he’d been reading forever.

  Whatever happened would be alright, she thought. The apartment was temporary. Everything in that place was just for a time.

  When he looked up from the book to ask her the question reading had given him the courage to ask—why was her name Schwartz?—she was unbuttoning her blouse and walking towards him.

  ***

  After having sex for the first time while being high for the first time, it took every ounce of self restraint for Rick to try not to go back the very next day very early in the morning. She had told him it was best if they remained “discreet.”

  As far as Rick was concerned, “discretion” also meant going back alone, without Andre. Though it took a lot to convince Andre not to accompany him on his third visit to Tyrone and Schwartz’s place.

  “It’s still new. I am working things out. It’s delicate because of the way I rushed in there and everything,” Rick worked to persuade his cousin. He had to promise over and over to mention Andre’s idea about charging per page and to tell whose idea it had been.

  Even before he’d made love with Schwartz, Rick wanted the visits to himself to talk books. He couldn’t imagine Andre talking anything but business. He wondered why Andre was adamant about being part of the academic paper scheme. For that matter, he began to question his own motivation.

  He had never been part of anything illegal or even unseemly until that summer. Was it the money? Certainly, he had never had as much money as the pool hall split with Andre. The paper mill hustle was different from the pool hustle but it was still a hustle, albeit one that was now conflated in Rick’s mind with seduction. Rick was unsure of where the college paper scheme was in terms of legality and didn’t feel up to asking. The prospect of another hustle ending in fiasco did not encourage him. He could still feel where the sharp pebbles from the alley had dug into his feet while he ran desperately from the pool hall pursuers. His shoes had taken a beating and he remembered how his hands shook even after he’d been sitting for a while.

  Hustle or no, he glowed at the idea of spending time with Schwartz and Tyrone. He’d never talked about Ann Petry or William Faulkner with anyone outside of class. The couple seemed to live with books the way his family and friends lived with music. He’d also never before considered a pregnant woman attractive, and then there was her voice. He remembered how during his accidental first visit she sang a Marvelettes’ song as Tyrone poured their tea. In the song, tables are turned, reality shifts, and the world becomes a new place as it had become with his escape into their small, jerry-rigged apartment.

  Tyrone had smiled as if he had just closed his mouth over the last sweet crust of peach cobbler.

  “That’s one of those songs,” he’d said.

  Rick look at him expectantly.

  “He means,” Schwartz spoke up, “it’s code, not really a love song.”

  “Robert Johnson was the master of that, baby!” Tyrone said beaming. “All those songs about the Devil, and stuff like “Hellhound on my Trail.” If you told the straight truth back then, you didn’t shame the Devil, you called him out of his lair followed by the lynch mob.”

  “Oh yes,” Schwartz said, rolling her eyes, “I’m sure the Marvelettes were really singing about turning the tables on the White Citizens’ Councils.”

  Rick had gone to the bathroom after several cups of tea and walked out with a copy of Native Son he found on the shelf with stacks of toilet paper, anti-war protest flyers, and paperback copies of Hamlet and Ellison’s Invisible Man.

  “You like the bleak stuff?” Tyrone said, nodding at the Wright novel.

  “Hamlet is bleak too, no conflict, no motivation,” Rick replied.

  “No motivation! You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Tyrone smirked.

  “I know it’s only people who’ve got their behinds on pillows with nothing better to do who sit around wondering whether life is worth living. Everyone else is too busy trying to live.”

  A mocking laugh almost caused Schwartz to spit out her tea. “Tyrone used to say the same thing,” she said, looking directly at him, “until I showed him all the father figures in the play.”

  “Yeah,” Tyrone agreed grudgingly. “It’s not ‘to be or not to be.’ It’s about who’s your daddy, the dead father, the usurper king . . .”

  “Laertes,” Rick added, suddenly coming to a realization.

  ***

  Essentially, there was no third visit to Tyrone and Schwartz’s even though Rick came prepared with a list of books and literary questions to discuss. He’d put that in his pocket. In his wallet, he’d folded the start of a love letter. He’d dreamt he was home with Schwartz on Belle Isle on a blanket beneath a tree, eating fruit as she sang.

  The reality check came when he was a block away from their place. Two black “unmarked” police cars were parked in front. He crossed the street and decided to observe discreetly. Closer, he saw Schwartz at the door talking to two beefy white, uniformed cops and two more in plain clothes. He walked by, fighting the urge to look directly at them. Resisting that urge fell in line with everything Rick had learned about how to act when the police stop you, what to watch for, down to whether or not the small strip of leather over the butt of the holstered gun was snapped or unsnapped, readied.

  “Never, ever look at the gun until the cop is looking at your ID,” he heard Andre’s voice in his head.

  He turned to see what was happening when he thought he heard Schwartz’s voice catch and release in what sounded like a sob.

  ***

  It was near night when the police finally tired of Schwartz’s silence and decided to let her leave the precinct. Besides, they felt they had her brother cold and he was their target. She left the police station but was not free. She felt tied to the jail as if she was evacuating a disaster leaving her brother behind. She would have to call her mother, after all this time, with bad news. She wished it was later, that sleep would come sooner, that the city night would deliver stars as intoxicating as the ones she’d seen in Virginia. At the same time, she wished she’d never set foot in the woods near the cabin.

  Schwartz had never thought of paradise as having night until she’d spent a few evenings with her new lover out in the open, staring at the sky. She didn’t know or care about the constellations like he did, but she loved to hear him talk about what he called “signs of heaven,” his voice cool and colorless as the stream. He was plain spoken and smiled at the slightest provocation, red bow lips on pale skin. The stars they shared were static fireworks, a painting of white Christmas bulbs flung out on endless black. He was happy to show her what he kept calling “the real sky,” away from the city.

  He had first seen her walking in and out of sunlight by a nameless creek beneath a stand of trees in unnaturally straight rows, river birches with their ever-peeling, cinnamon-red barks with dull orange undersides that reminded him of sunburn-flaked skin. Her walk was aimless. He couldn’t tel
l if she was bored or amused. She wasn’t local. She may not have been from Virginia at all. That made her beauty all the more exotic. He had once seen a Swedish actress on the cover of a magazine with lips as thick as hers. She was not quite as pale as the actress but her amazingly curly hair was just as gold.

  Her mother had rented an isolated cabin for the week. Her brother was supposed to join them for the long weekend when he could get off work. They had all planned to do nothing but read during the day and talk about what they read when it got dark. The cabin had no electricity. The brother was late.

  When Schwartz finally introduced the young man she had met in the woods to her mother, she looked at him with a curious smile. Schwartz recognized the expression from when she was young and had presented her mother with a drawing or homemade gift that her mother couldn’t quite make out. The mother wondered if Schwartz and the young man were lovers or would become lovers. Though the lovers knew the answer, they didn’t know a child was coming.

  ***

  Tyrone had been in a panic because he’d delayed his reading assignment and subsequent paper due the Wednesday after the long weekend. He’d gotten off work early and thought he would just scan the book to get a feel for it but, to his surprise, Paradise Lost was a page turner, from the psychedelic fire of creation to the unexpectedly nuanced and tortured Satan, a sort of cosmic film noir protagonist. Eve had just arrived on the scene when Tyrone noticed the sun was low and realized he was supposed to have been on the road to the cabin some time ago.

  He had to stop reading. It felt unnatural for him to leave the world he’d entered, as if something had been pulled out of socket, dislocated. The purple clouds on the horizon, magnificent as they were, loomed as sudden threats. He hadn’t finished packing. He was supposed to have asked the man down the street about the rattling noise in the car’s gearbox.

  The last thing he’d wanted was to try to find the cabin in the dark, but it was almost two am when he arrived. He slept in while Schwartz and his mother fixed breakfast and read. He awoke groggily, ate cold eggs, and eventually learned that Schwartz had a new boyfriend. He laughed sardonically at the discovery.