Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

Years ago, as a child, the CEO we were to become was returning home from school. It was towards the end of winter, a surprisingly warm day even for Texas. He removed his jacket and almost skipped home past his friends. While he didn’t smile, his buoyancy was evident. He arrived at his small wood shingle house to discover the shades drawn and the windows closed. This, he thought, required correction. The sun and sky were too inviting and brilliant to be stopped by such gloomy, trivial barriers. As soon as he let himself in, he called out, got no reply, dumped his coat on the living room couch, and began going through the house, making sure there was light and air in all the rooms downstairs. He didn’t dare ascend to his father and mother’s attic bedroom. Satisfied that the small grayish house had released most of its shadows and stale air, he began rummaging the bread box and refrigerator, taking care not to disturb food designated exclusively for his father. Though he thought no one would miss a spoonful of the half gallon of ice cream that had already been scooped.

He heard feet half stumbling down the stairs and fumbled to replace the lid on the ice cream, get it all back into the freezer, and clean and replace the eating utensils before the door to the attic swung open. He was still rinsing the spoon when his father appeared, bleary-eyed, in the kitchen doorframe.

“What you been eating?”

“I just found this spoon in the sink and rinsed it.”

“Don’t let me catch you in something you ain’t supposed to be.” The father turned his head toward the living room and his eyes suddenly popped open. “What did I tell you about the couch?”

Stones fell into the boy’s stomach as he struggled to recall which rule he may have violated.

“Where are you supposed to put your coat when you come in?”

The boy dropped the spoon he realized he was still holding when he saw his father begin to loosen his belt. Just as suddenly, the man stopped and dove with surprising agility to grab something on the floor under one of the kitchen chairs. As he bent down, he passed close enough for the boy to catch the smell of beer. The father got to his feet clutching the tangle of wire coat hangers that were the remnants of the boy’s school project.

My scientists were supposed to have transferred every memory. Every detail was to have been at my immediate disposal. It was the only way I could convincingly take on the life of the CEO. I had dates, times, where he and others stood at various moments, details he could never have pulled to the surface. As I relived the memory of the beating the CEO took as a boy, I realized there are memories and there are memories. Seeing his father popped the lid on a charred crusty pot that had been quietly boiling for decades.

As you know, the juiciest parts of the CEO’s life never made it to the script for the biopic I was assigned to write. For example, it wasn’t until the trial that we found out that the CEO’s father had not been randomly assigned to clean the hotel where his son was being honored. The father asked for the assignment to clean that building. He hadn’t been in contact with his son for years but saw him in the newspaper, one of those local-kid-is-rich-so-now-we-love-him stories. The father started bragging to his coworkers about his son, the big shot. Naturally, they felt even sorrier for him. Only occasionally was he truly sober, and even then, he had winding, untenable stories to tell.

He managed to trade building assignments with a guy that owed him a favor. He wanted to be there when his son spoke and made all those bigwigs bow down. What he somehow hadn’t counted on was being too busy to get to the ballroom where the event was. But, no matter, he and his “son” were indeed reunited.

He did not see my face until it was too late. I had watched him wheel a pail of soapy water into the men’s room. He’d put a barrier at the door to indicate it was closed for cleaning. I went in and latched the door behind me. His smile lasted perhaps a second before he stumbled backward over the toilet, voiceless in his horror as I tried to speak. But the instrument held my tongue and I realized he could see it protruding from my mouth.

I had wanted to tell him the exact time of day that he’d beaten me, what we were both wearing, the rooms where I’d left blood on the walls, how I’d almost knocked myself out as I ran from him looking backwards and rammed my head into the edge of an open door. I wanted to ask him why he’d dropped the coat hangers he had been using to beat me. But, in the oddest moment, I suddenly thought the wires would leave cuts that would be visible in the short sleeves I would soon be wearing, whereas his fists had struck me mostly beneath my clothes, or maybe the wire had begun to cut his hand. Did he remember how many days it would take me to get out of bed afterward, to say nothing of being able to walk to school?

Those thoughts and inquiries spun and raced inside me but I could utter nothing. Our mouths were joined. I heard small, rhythmic, involuntary sounds that may have come from him, from me, or the two of us grinding together. The instrument had parted his lips, broken his front teeth, and probed his insides, searching for internal organs to disconnect them like reluctant, unripe fruit being snapped from a tree.

Another thing revealed at the CEO’s trial was that the original, (all) human CEO only consented to the transformation because he thought certain memories would be wiped from his head.

I took his key and discreetly locked the restroom door behind me. It was the next day before anyone tried to open the room and later still before his body was discovered. It was in a stall far from the door, face down in the toilet. The person who’d come to clean thought he may have drowned, somehow, until he saw the skin shrunken around the skull.

The son had rarely spoken of his father or any family. All printed biographic material began with his rise in Detroit. The father’s years of desperate drinking had obscured much of his physical resemblance to his son, so no one made that connection. Their worlds had come apart.

The death became news only after I was back in Detroit and even then was only local. That gave me much relief at that time. Identifying the body or acting bereaved would have required more resources than I have. The mere sight of even his corpse may well have caused the instrument to swell. This was the only murder to which I wanted to confess and found myself somehow unable to do so. It was as if there was another instrument, an instrument of the psyche that refused to own the act as a crime, refused to let me to speak the truth of it, even as the words darted within me and clawed for release.

While the Librarian was busy with the trial, I wandered the apartment and found some diaries, dozens of notebooks. At first, I thought they were hers and then I realized how old they were, referencing the ’67 riot and the Renaissance Center being built. Actually, there were lots of things in them that didn’t exist anymore. It was not that long ago, but it felt so old. I almost wanted to go through them and add notes in the margins about what had changed or had not happened as she thought it would.

It was clear whoever had written them worked in the factory and was deep in the union. It seemed like she had two jobs. She was busy and the entries were sporadic.

She found a man passed out drunk who fell out of an abandoned car. She wrote some pretty mean things about him even though she was on drugs at one time herself. She did help save him from being drunk all the time. She’d had no one to find her and take her into a safe place like she did for him. She dropped drugs Miles Davis–style, cold turkey, locked away in a room in the house of a true friend; used what was left of her will to close off any escape routes or tunnels; and, unlike Miles, she never went back. The room was bigger than the walls.