Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

But everyone understands what an author is or does or has some idea that such a person uses words to communicate ideas even if those ideas are at times obscured by their expression. Such was the case with the Girl’s mother, whose work was praised unceasingly by people who had even more difficulty earning money than she did.

At one point, her husband’s company was sold to another company and, try as he might, her husband found himself unable to explain, and thereby justify, what it was he did. The people in the newly formed personnel department and even their supervisors ended up with their heads on the table or slumped in their chairs minutes after he began talking. They had scheduled meetings with him because they’d even become sleepy when they’d tried to engage his video presentations. They didn’t realize that his actual speech brought on a level of stupor rivaled only by the most powerful drugs. One unfortunate executive had to recuse herself from assessing his work altogether, because whether she engaged his presentations or his voice, she had flashbacks of lapsing into a coma from a rare tropical illness.

There were two other scientists at the newly formed company who had some interest in trying to harness and sell this infectious, narcoleptic ability. But they were too busy working on their own discovery. They had found a way to merge humans with insects, a project they thought might save their jobs despite the merger. So the husband of the Author was left to his own brain-deadening devices.

The effect on the family income was such that the Author had to step up and try to write a traditional story, one that would attract more than academics that were just shy of inducing the sort of boredom so deftly brought on by her husband. It was not easy for her.

Morning after morning, she would rise early and try to create a straight narrative and to resist lapsing into obscure poetics.

She did feel herself getting closer to being able to construct stories that might attract the money of large numbers of people when she began reading fairy tales at night to prepare for the next morning’s writing. It brought her poetry more down to earth.

It was during this phase in her writing that the Author began to notice strange sounds. But it was summer, and as bad as the air outside had become, they could no longer afford climate control, and it was the duty of the first person who woke to open the windows. With the windows open, it was hard to tell where the sound was coming from. But after a few days of distraction, she decided she had to find the source of the sound and stop it if she could. The investigation led her to her daughter’s room.

Standing outside the door, the Author assumed the Girl must have been screening something odd. Actually, the family wasn’t much for video, so most screen fare seemed as odd to them as their Author and Scientist work was to most other people. But this sound seemed both odd and familiar. The Author recalled an audio news item just as she knocked on her daughter’s door.

When the Girl opened the door, the bird, perched in the open window, loudly seemed to ask, “What’s really in there? What’s really in there?” Fortunately, its head was poking in the room and its butt was outside, because the bird delivered each question with massive droppings.

The Author was happy that the bird’s waste fell outdoors. But she wanted the entire bird to be outdoors. It startled her, and the sound it made was even more startling, off-centered. It did not look like a bird that should be able to talk, like a parrot or myna, and that, combined with the that fact it didn’t even look real—it was pudgy with a short beak, pink feathers, and blue-tipped wings—made it feel like it could have been a chicken or, for that matter, a chipmunk talking. Its voice seemed like a Frankenstein part grafted on to it, something that worked against the laws of nature.

You have probably guessed that the Girl felt quite differently about the bird. While she was also glad its butt was sticking out of the window when it dropped its load, that was about the only point of agreement she and her mother had on the creature.

The Girl was a great reader who had trouble hearing. She had awoken one morning thinking her hearing was normal because the bone-cracking call of the bird pulled her from sleep like nothing ever had. The source of the sound was just as startling as the sound itself, for she recognized the bird from a painting she’d seen in a picture book about communists ( Don’t Try This at Home ), a picture of a woman and a man holding hands, the man’s strange eyes and disproportionate size relative to the small woman whose head was tilted at a slight angle that somehow matched her quizzical smile and her eyebrows being almost one line. Above her, with a banner in its beak, was a pink bird with blue-tipped wings that seemed too chubby to fly, a feathery carnival prize come to life just for the painting.

It had taken days for the Girl to make out the sounds that followed the breaking noises, which she did not associate with the sound of bones cracking. The sounds following the breaking noise were quieter and quicker. They were almost whispers, reminding her of how her parents sounded when they were arguing, which was often, and not wanting her to know they were arguing.

She could tell that her mother thought the bird was as startlingly ugly as she thought it beautiful. What to do?

“The first time I heard it, I thought my hearing was fixed,” said the Girl in as matter-of-fact a manner as she could.

The mother wasn’t sure about the hearing part. She was sure that the Girl so loved the bird that she associated it with healing. The Author fought her inclination to kill the bird with the heaviest, sharpest object she could find, bury it, or better still, pay someone to incinerate it with an added bonus if they provided proof of its demise. Instead, she bent her unsteady knees and clasped the Girl in her arms.

After the Girl had run away to be with a group of musicians—real, barely legal, live performing musicians—the Author would often replay the scene with the bird in her head. It had been the most connected moment she and the Girl had had since the Author had birthed her, and the only one both of them could share. For the rest of her life, the Author alternately regretted and second-guessed her choice to write about musicians.

But here it should be noted that the Girl didn’t exactly run away, or it didn’t exactly feel like running away. The Girl’s hearing was thought to be bad, but it was simply extraordinary in a somewhat dysfunctional way. To her ears and mind, the Bird’s chest-cracking sound was slightly muffled percussion, and the questions that followed (if there was not sloshing) were singing—a pleading, plaintive singing—but singing nonetheless, and singing that called to her in a way nothing else had.

After days and nights of pondering the sound, sometimes losing sleep over it (why did it matter to her so?), she somehow imagined or decided the Bird was not the original source of the sound, but that it was imitating someone, a human that it had once been with. She imagined it at the window of a singer, day after day silently absorbing the rigorous practice, or thrilling the singer with its imitations of her. The singer she imagined was a woman younger than her mother, who looked a bit like her mother and perhaps even a bit like the Girl, and who sounded like her mother but with a deeper, clearer voice that when pushed had a bit of an edge to it.