Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

“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 sort 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.

Even so, the religion professor informed the librarians that he believed that students were sent to the university to learn the truth, not to learn that the truth can shift based on circumstance, context, or perspective.

“Bringing pressure and light onto this work will give you a point of reference, an anchor from which you’ll make better judgments when you are assisting the young minds that come to you for help,” he told them.

The other librarians, who noticed the religion professor’s fondness for their younger colleague, urged her to dissuade him from his campaign. One day she decided to try to engage him in a group discussion.

“Would you be willing to discuss this, perhaps with my colleagues and me?”

“Perhaps you and I should get together and lay the groundwork for the meeting. I know of an excellent restaurant. They know me there and would set aside a room for us.”

She didn’t blush as he expected. She had approached him with a rock in her gut. Before the arrival of The Report , mortgages, car payments, and college tuitions had been in the balance. The religion professor may have known that or he may have been as oblivious to it as he was to the line of students that preceded his turn in front of the Librarian. In either case, he appeared to her now in a strange unflattering light. She refused his offer with a lack of emotion that caused him to squint at her as if she had suddenly become difficult to see.

She managed to create a media campaign to inoculate the library and The Report against the religion professor’s attack. The university hierarchy noticed a serious increase in inquiries and applications that seemed to coincide with the mailing of the Ban Barriers, Not Books brochure (though in truth, the increased interest was based on the play, which the Librarian had not read) and decided to promote the Librarian to Media and Public Relations.

Now, here she was, walking back to her office with a strange grade-schooler in tow after having been kept waiting for no apparent reason, having been effectively refused a meeting with her boss on the eve of a crucial news conference. On top of everything else, her distress over her demotions of the past few months began to feel like garbage she’d forgotten to take out. Back in her office, she tried to distract herself with a casual check of her e-mail and found a layoff notice from her boss, sent while she had been waiting outside his office. She called the Girl’s father, told her to wait there in the office, and marched back up to the administrative area.

The Librarian’s boss was about to send out his news release announcing that he would soon have an announcement (he intended to run for mayor and cut labor costs dramatically with “an ingenious new computer program to help and direct citizens that need help and direction without all the fussy human inconsistencies, moods, meal breaks or pay scales”); the consultant was just about to call a therapist; the Girl’s father had finally arrived at the library to pick her up; the Girl had just added the last word to her revised essay (complete with her new treatise on the relationship of silver and black being more symbiotic than that of black and white, later to be cited as her first serious art theory text) in preparation for the next news conference (whenever that might be scheduled); and the Librarian had surprised herself by hefting a fairly heavy chair over her head in preparation for bashing down her erstwhile boss’s door, when the news hit the media.

The Teacher, who didn’t own a computer, had dusted off her television and was struggling with a distorted picture and no audio when she recognized the elephant’s hide. There was video of the elephant’s guards hugging each other and weeping along with some seemingly unrelated footage of a place called the Deep Seven. Someone placed a hand over the camera lens and it all went black.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never starved or been without shelter. I haven’t done physical labor for pay since I stopped waiting tables. But you’re reading this mostly because I’ve had desperate jobs; every one of them has turned into something that would never be on any job description unless you worked for the mafia or the CIA. In each case, the real description was unwritten and what was written described only a fraction of what was real or was an outright lie. Now, I know there are folks out there thinking that sounds cool. It’s about as cool as going to a nice hotel and finding out you’ve checked in to a prison. It got to the point where I had to look up the history of the phrase “pig in a poke” because it was on a loop in my skull.