Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

“Every time I come down to see my mother, there’s somebody here for the freak show that needs directions.” With that, she extricated her sleeping daughter from the car seat and carried her into the house.

After some time, I stumbled onto my destination. I don’t know what I thought I would accomplish. It was locked. The street was deserted. Someone had taped a note, handwritten on cardboard, next to the padlock.

To Tyrone and Schwartz: We are so sorry to see this place closed. We thank you for all you have done and for the jukebox. We will miss you more than you know.—Your Friends, “Order of the Black Elephant”

In a flash of perhaps the purest emotion I ever felt, rivaled only by what overtook me when I was alone with my victims, I was transported back to the images of the worn dark wood I knew to be inside, the chairs I imagined as waiting. What had kept these patrons from saying goodbye in person? The cardboard note was talismanic. I had it matted and would later keep it in the safe with the deed. Even so, it passed through my hands like the place itself.

Like me, my former co-worker from the Main Branch had taken on media work as a second career. She began life as a storyteller and I could feel the sales pitch when we met to discuss the gig that would eventually get me out of prison.

“I know you’re not crazy about corporations, to say nothing of working for one,” she began, “but these folks have the means to bend anything to their will and a history of doing just that.”

“You mean they’re fascist,” I replied. “Don’t get me wrong. I’d almost go to work for Stalin to get out of here and I imagine their body count is lower than his.”

“That’s the spirit!” she encouraged.

I commenced the story with what may have been a false impression. I wanted to escape my biographer not because she is a bad person but because of the nature of my biography. That also relates, in part, to why I referred to her as being unfortunate. The other part of her misfortune was her incarceration. Her previous supervisor was, I gather from her and from news reports, a bad actor: absorbed in his own ambition to the point of being comical. Nonetheless, the poor fellow did not deserve to have a solid oak door crash against his cranium, however cathartic it may have been for my biographer to have her boss truly and finally come to grips with something outside of him. In fact, despite her innermost desires, she’d had no intentions of harming him. Had he not refused her entry after summarily firing her by e-mail for no apparent reason, the door might well have stayed on its hinges. But that is more speculation on my part. I met her after what I knew was going to be a long conversation with Media Relations. Whenever they mentioned my “origins,” I knew to put in an earpiece so that my hands could be free to continue work while I mostly listened.

It’s been an amazing fall for everyone, including those members of Media Relations in the inner circle. Before things fell, their normal duties were suspended to safeguard my identity. Their salaries had been increased heftily. Their offices were plush, well-lit, and airy. The doors opened to but a chosen few. They don’t answer their doors now either, but for very different reasons. The first day I met the VP for Media Relations, I could tell he didn’t believe that I had not been human before the transformation. I told him I could offer no proof. Even the friends of the man I replaced were fooled and that had been the acid test. I did have to end one of his relationships that had become physical. He’d been involved with a woman who’d just gotten a graduate degree in business. She was a veritable fount of innovative practices, most of which I was only too happy to introduce to the firm and take credit for.

As for the man I “replaced,” perhaps my first victim, how or why should I tell you about him? I could give intimate details: hair color, scent, nail rigidity, spinal curvature, organ decline, and so on. You can find the pictures online. You can find his quotes in the annual reports and see his pre-transformational interviews in company blogs. Download them, if you wish. But perhaps none of that reveals as much as the look of anguished relief on the graduate student’s face when she realized the affair with him/us was over. I can also tell you that, long before I entered, he had abandoned childhood as though it were a burning building.

You will take just about any job to get out of prison. The job I was offered was not just any job. It gave me a direct connection with a CEO, a rising star in the corporate world, not my first choice. But, you may know, life isn’t a series of first choices. I assumed there would be a camera crew there for the interviews I was to conduct for the bio pic of this guy. That was before I found out how reluctant the CEO was to be interviewed. I could relate. That’s what helped us bond, if that’s what you want to call hours of nonverbal communication. Don’t get me wrong. He was never hostile or anything. In fact, he always apologized for not having a more interesting life. Those of you who haven’t been under a rock for the last little while will find that apology more than ironic.

Which brings me to one of the many questions that would never have occurred to me outside of this job: is there an effective difference between discovering someone you know has been murdered and finding the body of that person? Will the nightmares be fewer or less intense? Well, of course, you say, the complete shock of an unexpected dead body has got to be greater than being told or concluding that someone has been killed. I say it depends. Maybe the nightmares cause me to say that, nightmares caused by people I came to know being found dead: executives from rival firms; people I would have never met were it not for this job; people I would have never wanted to meet were it not for this job; people whose kids and cats I played with while I waited to interview them for the biopic; people that took me to breakfast, lunch, and dinner and told me bad jokes before they got comfortable and worse jokes after they got comfortable. Maybe I want to rid myself of any smidgen of guilt for having been close, however unwittingly, to the murderer. It may be all of that combined with the sheer surprise of the whole thing, the layers of surprise. I still can’t wrap my brain around what the “original” CEO and the scientists did (and this is from someone who was almost present to witness a guy birth a small elephant). They started with an assassin bug. Is that clumsy scientist-poetry or what?

My programming, training, infusion, or whatever you’d label it, is, to me, at least as interesting as anything that happened afterward. Not only do I have access to the human memories but to my own, and they’ve been fused and supplemented. In my new form, I saw an old film that was supposed to be about the future. Much of it takes place in a year that has already passed but with none of the predicted incidents. At one point, near the end, a protagonist, on his way to the next stage in evolution, travels through what I can only describe as a traumatic array of color, a corridor of traveling hues. Part of the trauma is the relative length of time it takes the viewer to witness, or shall I say endure, this sequence. It does go on.

Now, imagine each sheet of passing color as a novel someone has read, a lecture, a formula that person has learned, a piece of information about someone he or she knows. Imagine any and all memories plying themselves into your brain with the speed of those passing colors. As you know, these are not discrete packets of knowledge. They build and interconnect and interact, and not in orderly or even logical or predictable ways. For instance, you may develop the habit of eating breakfast quickly even though you like breakfast. The person that prepares it, almost certainly your mother, takes care. Whether it’s savory: eggs whipped by hand for fifteen minutes, delicately fried in butter with bits of aged cheddar, then chopped garlic and shreds of spinach thrown in just in time to barely wilt; or the meal is sweet: oatmeal cooked in milk with honey, cinnamon, and allspice, bananas and raisins, fried sliced pears on a small side plate with a glass bowl over them to keep them warm until you are ready, and the glass bowl steams up and makes a mystery of the pears—in either case, you want all the flavors at once.