Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

The next morning was also when the true sadness of that song she sang hit me. How many times had I heard my grandmother sing it and let the words wash over me, meaningless as stained glass, never realizing the singer’s only joy comes with death, or so she hopes. It wasn’t until then that I remembered I had come to the bar to find the CEO. I had to admit the Veiled Woman had power.

I booked other ventriloquists at the Dragon besides the Veiled Woman, just as one could say there are other classical composers besides Beethoven. It was her video on the web that brought the place notoriety of every shade. Certain religious types were on her side, though her songs were often cryptic. Many came to see her because her work was cryptic. Cryptic or not, I noticed a shift in the crowd. It was the day she arrived with two cases. LJ was in one. She pulled him out and began singing a spiritual about sin, but stopped half way through. She laid LJ down and called for help from the audience. A young man with a shaved head walked to the stage area, opened the other case, and pulled out a female puppet that was naked except for paper leaves over its breasts and crotch. He helped her get both puppets ready, propping them on her knees. There was much expectation. What would the new puppet sing? Would the voice that spoke through it be even higher than LJ’s?

LJ and the Veiled Woman looked at Eve silently for a few too many seconds. Then the VW nodded and very somber music engulfed the room like fog. Eve rose slowly from her chair into a hotter part of the stage light as LJ began the aria, even though the VW sang with her own female voice. I would later learn it was “Casta Diva” from Norma , an opera by Bellini. The aria was a plea, a supplication to a goddess.

As she sang in Italian, it took a few days for the controversy to surface. But when it was out that “Little Jesus” was pleading with “Eve,” certain religious types stopped coming. Others took the VW to task. They interrogated and shouted. With every encounter, she would wait until there was quiet and end with the same question. “What would Jesus do, who would he be if there was no sin?”

What happened to me in Texas, specifically, Galveston, was an off and on mystery, but it was the first clue that my own transformation was flawed, temporary. Those born with my original form, my original species, are far more prevalent in Texas, in the southwest United States in general. There are a few of us (them?) in Michigan but not in the urban areas. As for the company, geography was immaterial. We sold value we suspected would exist to people we never met. Such an operation is unfettered by location.

One of the other important items to note about my firm is the acquisition. My scientists were originally employed by a biotech firm, whose purchase was financed through leverage. The company was about to be sold again to another biotech firm. That transaction would have made my scientists redundant. They had, however, great confidence and held great store in the process that eventually facilitated my transformation.

It had not initially occurred to them that the process may have no good practical use. Only in the midst of creating their presentation to the Board did they begin to ask themselves how or why anyone could or would make use of the merging of humans with insects, to say nothing of who would be the transferee. It almost took them longer to answer those questions than it did to create the process in the first place. But, after watching a cartoon about a singing frog that refuses to sing when his ostensible owner would be paid for the performance, they stumbled upon the idea of reverse engineering the process to create an insect with human consciousness and using the creature as an industrial spy. Of course, the Board thought US intelligence agencies would pay just as much, if not more, than the private sector and would be at much lower risk of scandal.

With that, they needed but one more component. Then they found him, us, me.

Before the CEO was a CEO, he was a factory worker. Records, mostly police records, show he arrived from Texas and wandered around Detroit like a blind dog in a meat house, as my grandmother used to say, didn’t know if he wanted to shit or go fishing. All-night poker, tours of topless bars and dope houses, blind pigs, you name it. How he managed only short stints in the joint is beyond me.

One day, somehow, he winds up on the east side of Detroit. One thing you have to know about Detroit, there is ghetto and there is slum. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of these white folks who’s unaware of racism, the Detroit metro area being the most segregated in the US. But one of the first questions two Detroiters meeting for the first time will ask one another is “you from the east side or the west side?” There are good pockets on the east side. But most of the lower east side that wasn’t destroyed by I-75 or “urban renewal” is slum. That is where our hero found himself one Sunday morning, in an abandoned car near the door of a storefront church on Cadillac Street (if a filtered, somewhat secondhand memory is to be believed). Did I mention that he was a white guy in a black neighborhood a few weeks after the city’s riot that left forty-two dead?

He was discovered by a middle-aged black woman who had left church early to go to a union meeting. He was sleeping with his back against the door of the car. She stepped outside just as the hinges gave way and he fell out onto the sidewalk, bloody and gagging on his own spit. She went back inside and called an ambulance. Have you ever waited for an ambulance in a large, urban, mostly African-American area after a riot? She eventually got some folks to take him inside. She went to her meeting and didn’t think she would see him again.

The storefront church pastor tried to sober him up and decided to send his family home while he watched over the drunk that had landed at the church doorstep. It would be the pastor’s contribution to healing the racial rift that had managed to grab folks’ attention.

The woman that found him, the union rep, was not happy about her pastor staying behind. She had convinced the preacher to come with her to the meeting directly after church. She’d been hounding him day in, day out, trying to get him to meet with black union members, a militant offshoot who’d gathered to fight racism in the union. Some folks were reluctant to join. But she knew if she got even one preacher to back them, doors would open.

His church was small, but the pastor’s influence on the east side in particular was phenomenal. There were folks in the surrounding block clubs who claimed to be church members but rarely showed up. Maybe it was guilt, but these folks voted based on his recommendations and went to the PTA meetings at his urging, did everything but go to church. There were others who felt beholden to him who had no pretense of going to that church or any other. But their relatives had been snatched from heroin addiction by his street ministry. The guy had pull.

She’d shown up at the church that morning totally excited about the preacher meeting with her and her friends after the service. But now, the preacher was watching over this guy from nowhere. The idea of closing the loop on all the things she cared about seemed lost. And it was the fault, of all things, of a drunken white man falling out of an abandoned car. Why the hell did he have to come all the way over to the east side to show his ass? Didn’t they have bars in Melvindale?

I mentioned the graduate student earlier, how I (and the CEO as well) stole ideas from her. But she was not the first woman that moved him; there was a black woman, a socialist (though she never admitted to such). He was not long arrived in Detroit and was about to exhaust his meager savings when he stumbled upon her. Actually, she stumbled upon him as he all but fell into her lap.