Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

“So, Mr. Reporter,” he said with a smile, “what’s the latest on the pachyderm?”

Now the reporter felt like he was talking with his grandmother and he needed to fish for the right answer. With her, questions that seemed to come out of the blue were often connected to something bigger that was directly at hand but not always visible. The reporter’s silence gave the bartender pause. I’ve let them down he thought. This guy is going to give a signal and the place will be crawling with cameras and mics in no time.

“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.