Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

It started with us both deciding to skip church even though neither of us said it out loud. Looking back, I know it was just me. Lately, going to church meant driving fifteen minutes trying to find somewhere to park. The people were nice, but there were too many of them to know who they really were.

Anyway, it was the kiss. He always had nice lips, especially for a white boy. But that morning, after we had suddenly stopped getting dressed, I felt his hand stroke my cheek. His skin was rough but his hand was gentle and cool to the touch. When I looked into his eyes, I couldn’t help but close mine. They were closed when we moved together, when our lips touched. It felt like we were having sex right at that moment. When we did, everything rushed together. Something came to me. It felt like what happens sometimes with the music at church, I’m dancing outside of my body and my voice is gone. This time, it was the silence even though I could hear everything. It was bright even with my eyes closed. The sheets on the bed felt different. I could smell the sun in them like when mama used to take them off the line in the summer. I stopped thinking. All the words disappeared from my head. I was only making love at that moment in that room and even that was fine because the room didn’t really hold me anymore. Nothing was outside of me. I didn’t have to look at the sun or sky or river or know what the birds sang. I was there.

It’s almost like when I was using, only instead of being blurred, everything is clear. Even so, I almost ran into a moving hi-lo the other day. I used to feel like I was dying waiting for the weekend. But the names of weekdays are just names now. The sun comes and goes like it always has. I know when I’m supposed to be at the plant, but time is one long river.

Is it my fault? I have given up trying to explain to him why I don’t have to go to church, why no one has to go. It’s all inside (and outside for that matter). I thought he’d be happy since he doesn’t really know God, he just fears God. Like work, he only goes because he’s afraid not to. These days, he’s either at work or church. He’s taking every bit of overtime he can get and doesn’t have any time for us. He tracks every penny. Making money takes time and you’ve only got so much time. I remember when my father started working like that. It wasn’t long before he had a heart attack, and even if he hadn’t, he and my mother had started fussing. You need time, not just to talk, but to sit and say nothing.

I finally convinced Justine that we had to make that move, go to the newspapers with the story to force them to hire more black men into skilled trades. Even if we only get in the Chronicle, we can’t wait on the union another second. It’s so in our face. My folks think I am not as concerned because I don’t yell anymore but I got everything uptight. I can see where the cracks are. I know what lies management’s going to tell before they tell them. I feel like I am around the corner before they know it’s time to turn.

He may be coming around to his old self. I would be in heaven then. He brought me proof that management lied about not getting Jimmy’s doctor’s notice before they disciplined him. Justine asked how he got that info. I don’t want to think about it.

I finally learned how to do the honey-baked chicken he likes. So I cooked a whole bird even though he’s MIA and it just made me think about him all the more. It’s the closest I’ve been to being truly sad since that day everything opened up after we made love. I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to him once work and church can’t pass the days for him anymore. It’s good and bad that he’s not on the shop floor. Even before everything became clear, I knew people weren’t made to be in the factory. But at least there you make something besides money.

The last time we were really together, he tried to pretend the problem was me not going to church, not being my old self. All of a sudden, a question jumped to the front of my brain and, before I knew it, I almost shouted: “What the hell is an ‘old self’?”

Once, there was a bird whose call was the sound of the human chest cavity being cracked open, a sound usually heard by heart surgeons and those who worked with them. That sound was followed by, or seemed connected to, sometimes, very rarely, the sound of sloshing that was the movement of liquids in the body on the operating table when the breastbone had been particularly thick or stubborn, and the body had to be wrestled with a bit, thus causing its various liquids to slosh about both inside and outside the body depending, of course, on the width of the chest opening. That sound was followed by a slightly more melodious sound. Though, indeed, virtually anything would seem slightly more melodious in comparison.

In any event, that other sound, the second or third sound, depending on if it was followed by the sloshing, was a cackling, whistling sound, or at least that is how lay people described it, because ornithologists had a very long and scientific description that no one else used. The cackling, whistling second or third sound also could have been someone speaking very quickly, repeating the question, “What’s really in there? What’s really in there?”

Of course, this sounded nothing like a parrot or other talking birds. Some denied that it sounded like words at all, and for them it was an earworm relentlessly dogging them during dreaming or waking. The worst of the bunch had the sloshing before the voices. Yes, there were multiples, asking, “What’s really in there?” repeatedly, sometimes with annoying irregular gaps between and sometimes with hints of the sloshing.

The wealthier ones with the earworm issue, a decidedly disproportionate but by no means exclusive sector of that population, hired people to kill as many of these birds as possible. Older and more confused members of the earworm group, those who did not wander in front of transports and kill themselves or wind up in virtual comas, had some vague fear and memory of something called “the endangered species list” and secretly worried that the birds might be put on it if too many were killed. That was a baseless concern and one that, in any event, did not plague most of their ilk.

Anyway, these birds had once been in the tropical climes exclusively but began coming further and further north as the Earth heated and corpses began to mount in the brown hemisphere from heat and storms. That is not our concern.

This is the story of a girl who, at first, only knew about these things through video implants and screens and one such bird she happened to take in as a pet. It would be more correct to say that the bird lived with her for a while. She called it a pet because she’d never had a pet, had only seen pets in videos and didn’t realize that even the people from the last century had stopped using that word to refer to non-humans that lived with them. But that may have been difficult for even a smart child to discern.

She was indeed a smart child. Her mother wrote books, though very few people read them, and her father did something scientific with the innards of video implants or their plasma or both that related to how we see and perceive digital video, how we are now absorbed in it the way we used to be absorbed with each other and with trees and clouds and things like that.

His explanations of his work were hypnotic in that, a few seconds after he began talking, a narcotic drowsiness overcame even the most alert listener. Only his coworkers had the vaguest outline of what the company paid him to do.