Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

But the other reason you may learn to eat quickly is that breakfast is the time your father discovers your older sister has been out all night, has come to breakfast from the outside. Young as you are, you surmise this is not like the “sleepovers” she used to attend. Your sister and father exchange what you can only discern as code, keyless as it is grim. The light in the room falls. You suddenly realize how amazingly ugly and nominal the bare bulb over the gray kitchen is, how what was supposed to be illumination conspires with the gray walls. In a moment, the room is closed off. You, your brothers and mother are listening to clutched wire coat hangers swing through the air, almost whistling. Somehow, that ghost of a sound is as clear as your sister’s cries, her pleading for your father not to beat her anymore, not to kill her. The fear he has planted along with the suddenness of the beating keeps everyone in place. None of you can take your eyes from his arm slicing the air, her useless contortions to avoid the wire, the welts that rise on her hands and exposed legs and arms.

Later, as you prepare for school, you feel as though your brain has been wiped clean with fire. You happen to look toward a spot on the wall and notice a nail in the otherwise blank space where one of your school projects, a dragon made from wire, had hung. Now the tears can roll. You take the long way to school, slow and alone.

The beatings happen more than once, yet seem to happen only once. The days meld and fall over the edge. You learn to eat quickly. But, eventually, the violence spills out of the morning. There is only so much the brain can hold and precious little of that is available to the conscious mind. Most of what humans encounter goes into a reservoir, a primordial soup that slops to the surface now and again, and the incredible aromas cause what seem like unmotivated acts.

There is nothing like getting out of jail, especially if you had never been there before and didn’t expect to go there in the first place. I barely remember walking up to my boss’s office. I have no recollection of smashing the door off the hinges with a chair that should have been too heavy for me to lift. All of that made the trial even more surreal. That all seemed behind me when I walked with my co-worker and her uncle to their car. I was so happy; I even considered visiting my boss but realized that would be pushing it.

I had lots of questions about what had been happening while I was inside. When she visited me in prison, my former co-worker always talked about the gig on the outs that eventually persuaded the parole board to let me go. It was high enough profile and they didn’t consider me a flight risk. During those visits, my co-worker promised that once I got out, she would lay out the whole story of what had happened with Ipso, the guy that birthed the little elephant with the message on its hide. I kept asking about the little girl whose school essay about the message had brought her to the attention of my boss (really, the beginning of the end, now that I look back on it). The more I asked, the more my co-worker kept telling me about the gig with the CEO and promising the other stories when I got out.

But, do I have to tell you what happened when I got out? You guessed it; the “storyteller” had no story. No fucking story, nothing about the CEO’s company “acquiring” a biotech firm, or the scientists that were about to lose their jobs, or the bizarre presentation/proposal they gave to the Board to keep their jobs. That all came out later. Even so, when you’re hired to do a bio for a guy that barely speaks, the clue phone should be ringing. But that’s what incarceration will do for you. Don’t get me wrong. It does have a tendency to put things in focus, but at the same time, ironically, it’s a sharp focus with a skewed view. It’s like a fetus trying to become a human. All you want is out. If I just get out, it’ll be okay. The only problem is, you get out.

I didn’t know I was going to work for a murderer. How was I supposed to know that? The guy had a corner office and a driver that made more than I did as a librarian. I know many of those folks are ruthless, but outright murder? I’m getting ahead. Before I get to the murders, which you can read about in detail in my book, I Have Eaten Nothing but the Fire in My Heart (go to the independent bookseller’s site, www.indiebound.org), I want to tell you about the stuff my editor insisted I leave out. We argued about this, let me tell you. I have been trying to work this up into a screenplay of some sort.

He disappeared for a time. This was when things got pretty hot. People were missing and folks were slowly beginning to connect the dots. People in the company assumed the guy had fled to some unmapped island just west of nowhere. But I remembered how he’d once let slip that he was fascinated with this dive bar called the Deep Seven (also chronicled in my book). I was getting nowhere with his story and hadn’t had much luck following up with the whole Ipso thing beyond what I already knew. So I decided to drive by the Deep Seven. I actually drove past the place a couple of times because the front of it had changed so much, that is to say expanded. The places on either side had been subsumed by what was now the Whistling Dragon. Among the myriad strange things about this place (and trust me, I know strange) was that, despite the modern, clean exterior, it was still a dive inside. Did I tell you the Deep Seven was a dive? The Deep Seven was a dive, let me tell you. I never understood how anyone walked in there without a hazmat. In the old days, when the exterior reflected the interior, you drove past quickly just to make sure nothing got on your car. It was a dive; did I mention that?

Okay, so I did go inside a few days before it was rumored to close. I did not wear a hazmat and I even had a drink. I came to check out the juke box because my coworker had some tales about that, vinyl records of classical and jazz on it, everything from Arnold Schoenberg to Julius Hemphill. But the machine wasn’t even plugged in when I got there.

Anyway, getting back to the Dragon, it’s strange how certain experiences shift when you try to relive them. I would have never guessed there was any significance to the CEO’s reaction to a clip of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, ventriloquist and dummy respectively. But that was one of the CEO’s turning points, one of his better ones I might add.

You all know by now that he was programmed. But there was slippage. You couldn’t have programmed the way he came up with the name for the place or how he thought of the place as an escape, literal or otherwise. At the same time, it seems it would take a person whose brain and guts had been merged with an insect to start karaoke night for ventriloquists, an idea so stupid it had to explode.

It just so happened that my first night at the Dragon I walked in on the woman with the veil holding what has come to be known as LJ or Little Jesus. I laughed till my stomach hurt and I wasn’t alone, believe me. How could you not be convulsed in waves of ironic laughter when Jesus is a puppet singing like a dolphin with a cross duct taped to his back; when the woman making him sing is all in white, including a veil, but for red gloves, a red waistband, and red high-tops; when there are Band-Aids in the palms of his hands where the spikes went in? And what was “he” singing? It was an old hillbilly spiritual:

Some of the trendily dressed young folks there stared in rapt wonder, creeped out and fascinated. Acts waiting to go on, or who had been on before her, sat poker-faced, though I sensed a grim enviousness. Some had writing pads, others had computers, and they seemed to literally note her every move. It was all too funny and, naturally, alcohol didn’t remove the comic element for me. Halfway through a Long Island Iced Tea, I realized I was going to have to walk out right then or have someone call EMS. My stomach still hurt the next morning.