Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

But what if the man didn’t have the worm? Nat pressed forward and probed him. But the man’s obvious suffering, distorted facial features—had the others grimaced so?—and deep, wretched, involuntary noises made Nat pull back, drop the questions, and make a staggered run out of the house past groggy guards and a flickering security apparatus.

The Girl was in a near fetal position on the couch at her parents’ home. A cup of tea steamed on the table next to her and gave the room a rich warm smell. Her mother would come into the room occasionally to check, hoping she would drink before the tea became cold.

The Girl’s silence and worry became too much for her mother and she sat down next to her daughter on the couch.

“You don’t know how relieved I am to have you back. If both of you had wound up in prison, I’d don’t know what I’d do.”

“Prison? How would I have ended up in prison?”

“You were with people that were interrogated. One of them was killed. The Revue is very close to being shut down.”

“Mom, it’s really hard for you to know what’s really going on with Nat and Tina if you don’t—”

“Anyway, that’s all behind us now. I feel like I can breathe again now that you’re back.”

“We have to get him out.”

Her mother put her head in her hands as the Girl continued.

“He’ll die in there. It’s too much.”

“Yes,” the Author said, closing her eyes for a long moment. “It’s all I think about. But no matter how much I spend, they spend more, and they bury us, just bury us. The insanity of your father purposely harming anyone—” She closed her eyes again. “If only there was a trace of the real killer.”

Something in her mother’s tone gave the Girl a flash. She sat up suddenly as she realized why there was no material trace of the killer.

“What’s the matter?”

The Girl could not tell her, she didn’t have the inner strength to say she would be leaving and soon, that she had to return to the Revue.

“Oh, nothing. I thought I heard something.”

Nat came into the house with more trepidation than usual. In fact, something made him promise himself that this would be the last killing, that he would find another way to contribute to the struggle, especially since he’d seen few if any of the changes he thought he’d see. The killings had become less and less cathartic.

The house, though clearly constructed and decorated with a ridiculous amount of money, somehow avoided the decadence that had become trendy. It was as tasteful and aesthetic a place as he’d ever entered, which, at this point in his career, was saying something indeed. The rooms were large enough to contain good-sized art installations and still seem airy and light. Wall-sized screens with juxtaposed film clips from the twentieth century and from the current day (why did they skip so much?) were the main sources of light in each room.

He was startled when he realized the soft sound he heard was not from the screen, but was the noise of someone snoring and then waking up at the far end of the room. There was a woman with what might have been mathematical formulas tattooed on her arms and legs just visible below a bright orange short-sleeved top and dull green dress. She was suddenly very awake and brandishing what was probably a weapon. It seemed like a weapon, the way she pointed it at him, and by the look of utter determination combined with disgust that froze her face. He could see his face in a screen that had suddenly become visible above her. It pulsed red and flashed symbols he could not read.

“There’s only one way for you to leave here alive,” the woman snapped. “Carry a message back to your employer, my ex-husband, the asshole, or they will drag you out of here like the garbage you are. I want the message delivered personal, no goddamn screens. He will never get close enough to lay a hand on me again. Do you fucking hear me?”

“My employer?” Nat puzzled. “But I’m—”

Before he could say “self employed,” his image disappeared from the screen, and he felt as though he’d suddenly plunged miles beneath the ocean. The pressure on every inch of his body was tremendous. His legs felt broken by the sudden weight. The blood in his nose forced him to breathe through his mouth. It all happened in a flash that seemed elongated by the pain and shock. Fortunately, he wasn’t conscious very long.

The Girl had deeply mixed feelings about everything now, about seeing the Bird in the window of the room, what she used to think of as her room. She almost laughed at how she’d been fooled into thinking her hearing had improved because the Bird’s call was so loud. Her father was out of prison and Nat was back in.

Nat was not fully awake, but he could hear people and music, and the two began to blend like different colored liquids mixed together until they were a new and indistinguishable color. It must have been there all the time. Why hadn’t he seen it, heard it, figured out how the Old Woman talking was the Old Woman singing, was the blues in any cadence—the rhythm never left—the notes were always blue and even tinted the silence that was deeper and more open with its blueness.

Nat awoke without opening his eyes, but with a fearful smell and a familiar burning in his lungs. His head and stomach were both very clear and very sore. He did want to open his eyes because of the smell. It was different from the body odor and warm plastic smell of the prison from which he’d been released after the storm and finding the Singer, but he still knew it was prison, just different bodies and newer plastic, so he did not want to open his eyes. But he could not close his ears, though he almost wished that he could.

He could hear everything. He heard so much that for a moment he thought he may have been dreaming he was back in prison because there had never been so much—what? What could he call it but music? But it was just sound, and music was music. He played music from memory in his head and realized the curtain between those things was gone. Indeed, why had he not noticed how flimsy the curtain had always been, how shadowy and smoke like? Sound that was music, music that was sound had become something akin to light or perhaps even air and was more vivid than both. Everyone and everything had become an instrument that was in the process of tuning or playing a melody, sometimes apart, sometimes ensemble.

He thought it unwise to give in to what he feared must have been the world’s dumbest smile in this place, where smiles were an invitation to disaster. He could not help himself. The sound was too much even after he opened his eyes and confirmed what he feared. His fear receded just a bit. The ceiling of the place was as low as it was in any prison and the foul stories etched in the glass walls that allowed no privacy were just as foul as ever, words that might as well have been old bloodstains, and all of it was nearly lost in what he was hearing, in the joy of sound.

No one cried at Nat’s memorial. Tina was sedated. The Old Woman fainted and had to be carried out. It could have been that the funeral added too much weight to the interrogations she’d undergone. The Girl’s head was about to explode as it raced between the relief she still felt at her father’s release and the possibility that she had set the table for Nat’s execution.

Where would she go? The Girl who was no longer a girl turned the question in her half-sleep, the question that felt like an abrasion and had kept her from solid rest all night long. The Bird had not come, but a sound woke her. No screen was open. Someone was actually at the door of the house.