Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

“Everybody call’s me LJ,” the man said after the Scientist placed a cup of tea in front of him. “Like I said, I was inside with Nat. I know what he did but…” the man rubbed his chin and squinted as if he was trying to solve an equation.

“I knew him before the Revue, when he was just getting started. At first I was happy about the Revue, you know, cause of the publicity and what not, brought money, you know what I’m saying? Brought them goddamn units too. I was so busy counting the money and spending it, I didn’t even notice at first, took my eye off the damn ball. I’d been out of there so quick.

“Anyway, they arrested the Old Woman. What the hell kinda threat is a 112-year-old? If she hadn’t been dark… Her arrest got my attention but that was way too late. I had to resort to screens for the shows, didn’t know nothing about that crap, still don’t and don’t wanna know. One day, this guy I hired to open the screens grows about two feet right in front of me, I mean a hundred percent brick and steel, muscles in his shit, you know what I’m saying? Anyway, he’s got records of everything, but I’m still thinking, what the hell: they’ll beat me, fine me, I’ll get modified as best I can and go on about my business.

“Next thing I know, I’m screening Nat getting knocked out in the home of some rich, and I mean rich, woman. Then there’s all kinds of probes slicing my head, never felt nothing like it, never want to feel it again. They scheduled the trial. I have to talk to six lawyers before I find one that’s not connected, no company units in her family or what not. Doesn’t matter.

“I wake up in a cell with Nat or in the same area with barriers; who knows how they do that shit. My head’s spinning like a tornado. I know he’s gonna die and I’m thinking they got me in there cause I’m gonna die too, even though they gave me years at the so-called trial. Now Nat’s all calm, you know, and I’m thinking it’s cause he’s sorta lost his mind, the way folks get when everything crushes ’em and they sit there like they just been born.

“He’s got all the death row communication privileges. You know about that? They figure everybody is too scared to be associated with condemned folks so they let you screen whoever. Mostly it’s just relatives, crying and saying stuff they been holding back. But Nat’s was different. Tina was the only relative. God it was good to hear her. It didn’t hurt that she’s beautiful and all, but that voice. She wasn’t even singing real music. It was that opera stuff. Couldn’t understand a damn word.

“Besides Tina, there’s all these professor types and these others people in white clothes, you know the type, look like they don’t walk from place to place but just float. I can only understand snatches of the conversations. Mainly, I’m waiting for Tina to come back.

“One day, I told Nat about how good her voice made me feel and asked him if he knew what she was singing. He said it was about a woman at the end of her rope, about to fall into the clutches of a real asshole, and she was singing that she had lived all her life for art and for love and that she didn’t deserve none of the crap that was happening to her. I hadn’t lived for art and love, but I could seriously relate.

“Before I could ask anything else, he asked me what’s the difference between her singing and us talking? I thought, oh boy, the flipped out side of him is taking over. Any child knows that singing ain’t talking and vice versa. Then he goes on to tell me about the Old Woman and how dark people talk like they sing and vice versa and I had to back up a bit. Yeah, I could hear the Old Woman in my head and I could hear that Billie Holiday woman Nat used to play just before he left, and I thought, he’s right. They talk like they sing and vice versa. The wall between singing and talking is thinner than I thought. Nat goes on about this other old musician, Charlie Parker, and how he used notes that were really speech to show how speech was really music because everything was music and that his speed was just the flip side of Billie Holiday’s slowness and easiness, same coin just turned over.

“From there it was just a hop skip to understanding, if I ever really will, why Nat was so calm. He hadn’t lost his mind, or not the way folks usually lose their minds. He explained that what he had lost was the thing in his mind that allowed him to tell the difference between music and every other sound. It was all music now, a big symphony that only died down when he went to sleep.

“At first, I thought that would make it easier for him. But regardless of how calm and even happy he seemed at times, he said it saddened him more than he could say. He talked about how the last two times he walked into a rich person’s home intent on probing, it had made him almost ready to confess so that he could die and wipe the confusion from his mind. He hadn’t set out to kill folks. He actually just wanted to talk. But when that didn’t work and the probe did, well, you know the story.

“But here he was now condemned to die and had just found more reason to live, to do the thing that he enjoyed doing most in the world: hearing, hearing like he never had before. He even said it changed how and what he saw and how he would have danced had he not been modified for death row.

“We didn’t know when he was actually supposed to die. The schedules don’t mean nothing nowadays. They changed the law to make it so the prisons would have ‘more flexibility.’ I mean, what the hell? Anyway, I’m getting more interested in his idea and I’m actually feeling it, you know, it’s changing the way I hear stuff and it’s making it a little easier to be there.

“Other inmates are coming to me because they can’t come to Nat—the rules are nuts, don’t ask me—but they’re coming to me because the professors and the people with the white clothes are all over the screens talking about Nat, and how they have to save him, and how what he’s discovered could revolutionize this, that, and the other. You know as soon as somebody on death row gets anything that looks like an out, they become first-class Hollywood screen action. But some of the inmates just wanted to know if it’s true that me and Nat can hear everything like music because we were close to the Old Woman.

“I try to explain things as best I can that the Old Woman was a sign of something that should have been obvious to us all the time, that Billie Holiday and that Charlie Parker guy were there for us to see, or I should say to hear, and that there were others before them but they were the closest or maybe just the most obvious or maybe just the ones we knew about, not like enough people know about them, I’m just saying.

“Besides that, there was the scanner, well, not really a scanner, but a weapon they sell as a scanner; you know, rich folks can get anything tricked out. Anyway, the thing the woman used on him when he finally got zonked and caught, he thinks that what did it to him. Who knows?

“For the first time ever, I’m wanting to stay in prison cause I am finally beginning to understand, though what, I don’t know. So naturally, my lawyer, God bless her dark, bookworm soul, finds a way to spring me. I should have been happy. The woman wins a major case proving that folks with unconnected lawyers are getting screwed and convicted falsely.

“Not only do I get a hard release date, but the guards start treating me like my mama never had sex. It’s LJ this and LJ that. All I want to do is talk with Nat while Nat’s still there to talk to.

“Other inmates are telling me it’s all been planned, that I was supposed to be there with Nat and get out and spread the word about how he could hear everything for what it truly is. When I tell this to Nat, he almost laughs. He said the companies love when people say stuff that keeps the spotlight off how companies are screwing everyone raw.