Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

This Singer in the Girl’s mind did not hold back much in singing or in life in general and the Bird, being a bird, had no way of knowing or interpreting the emotion that swirled around the room. So, before it sang, it emitted a percussive sound to get the attention of the listener, to say oye , hear ye hear; bright, loud beats in the place of welcoming trumpets.

Then the Bird would really open up, and the voice of the Singer was somehow more plaintive coming from something that looked like it rose from the drawing of a child that couldn’t resist combining unlikely colors or making the wings so chubby that they brought to mind feathered bees, rotund, with blue and pink stripes.

In the run up to the running away, the Girl had begun to read some of her mother’s work. It made her ponder.

“You know mom, I don’t get the vampire thing,” the Girl began one of her interrogations. “I mean, this poem feels serious but, vampires?”

“It’s just a stand in for people who run the society and please don’t go repeating that outside of the home,” her mother admonished.

“And we’re supposed to know that how? Seriously, I could recite this poem all day and no one would get it so what’s the problem with going public?”

“No, no, not the poem, it’s the explanation you shouldn’t repeat.”

“Mom, if no one’s interested in the poem, I don’t think you have to worry about anybody fighting to find out what it means.”

“Thanks for your support. Don’t you have some required reading to do?”

This was not how the Girl had intended the conversation to go. There were other things in the poem she admired, and later she even understood that the vampire thing was about how people who did bad things to other people were compelled to do so. It didn’t just happen. Nothing just happened. But the Girl had difficulty restarting the conversation.

Whenever she thought she’d worked herself up to the point where she could say, “Mom, I get it: everything is caused,” the Singer would pop into her mind, the Singer who emoted seemingly without cause, who could have sung in a dead language or in nonsense syllables and still put across everything she felt and had known and wanted.

As much and as many times as the Girl wanted to go back to her mother to resolve things, it all seemed somehow useless. What she wanted was to be held by her mother as she had been when her mother had come into the room and discovered the Bird. In that moment, the Girl had had everything, her mother’s warm slender arms around her back and a hand on the Girl’s head pressing her into her mother’s shoulder where there was just enough room to breathe and between the Girl’s eyes and the base her skull was the song that ran out of the Singer and through the Bird.

But now, thinking on the moment, the Singer she imagined as the source of the Bird’s pleading song left her feeling as if there was no use talking to her mother. The most brilliant words were stupid and her words weren’t even as brilliant as her mother’s that had to be explained, and explanations were stupid and so on and so on. It was much easier to remember and to be lost in the song and so that is where she remained, even through her required reading.

Before the Author learned to tell a story that could be sold to many people, and after her husband the Scientist lost his job, he became desperate to find work. It seemed unwise to him to rely on his wife selling a book as a good source of income. He loved her work but had stopped trying to tell people about it because they would become unconscious and that would bring the conversation to a close. As you have probably guessed, he spent a lot of time with his own thoughts, which was ironic given the nature of his research.

The thrust of his research had begun years ago. There had been an incident that made him certain he could find a way to link people into one another’s conscious minds, if not the subconscious. It was all part of a clinical trial where he and his wife had met. She had volunteered to be a test subject for a study on psychotropic, or psychedelic, drugs, depending on how you pronounce it.

He just happened to walk into the area where she was being interviewed when the screening device began to ask the same question over and over. She was about to walk out before he cut off the machine and began conducting the interview himself.

The sound of her voice took him away from the content of her answers. What she said was clear enough to him. She did seem to use many words for things he thought of as being easier to describe, and though she was not speaking loudly, there was a certain stream of force to her words. It enthralled him. He was sure he’d heard nothing like it. It was perhaps the one thing he’d encountered since childhood for which he had no point of reference but that nonetheless made him happy.

Towards the end of the interview, he realized his speaking had not caused her to fall asleep, that she had not so much as yawned. He became so nervous with happiness that he had to enter codes more than once to process the interview. Despite his agitation, the woman thought he was now more real and relaxed than when he calmly took over the interview from the device. She hoped that she’d had something to do with that.

As for the actual experiment, she’d had psychotropics before and found the idea of being paid to take them quite attractive. She wondered what he would be like on mushrooms. Perhaps it would open his more human side up to the codes he knew and the codes would be changed.

She didn’t take all of the drugs the experimenters gave her and managed to smuggle what she saved past the guards and into the control area where the Scientist sat, somewhat isolated at his workstation.

“Have you had any of this Bliss Garden brand?”

Her voice caught everyone’s attention. Hardly anyone there communicated by speaking and she was not authorized to be there in any event. She set the container of relief drink down on the area of his desk where she thought he would put food from home or personal items, though she couldn’t imagine him with either. She smiled at him as no one else had, as if the two of them had a history of the most intimate communication.

He was in an unnatural state. Little else mattered to him beyond the sound of her voice. For instance, it barely registered to him that the container she gave him was open. Even the Bliss Garden, the only relief drink dispensed in his area for all of the years he’d been there, seemed new in her hands.

The study was well under way when he began to notice a distinct change in his perception. He was watching himself conducting the interview with the Author. But instead of answering the questions, she was laughing approvingly and pointing to a set of wings growing out of his back.

He didn’t know what to make of her laughter or his wings. He was wholly focused on the sensation that he was seeing the world from inside the woman’s mind. This new perspective excited him so, he had the urge to run out of the facility and re-experience all the books of fiction and poetry he’d avoided in school, every piece of artwork, music, film, and dance he’d ever had to screen. He managed to fight that urge because it might cost him his job. At the same time, the thought of getting paid for doing science became more absurd by the moment.

Everything in his head was now madly spinning around the desire to exchange what was in him with someone else, to trade who he was with another person and simultaneously to know that experience through what he had always thought was his own consciousness.