Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

One person added her own lyrics to be sung with voice alone:

Inevitably, someone added dialogue from an antacid commercial:

Feel like you swallowed something big enough to swallow you? Get rid of that beached whale feeling with…

“This video belongs to the Detroit Public Library, its patrons, and the Main Branch in particular. As Director, it is my duty to see to it that the video either becomes part of the Library’s collection or that we put our own stamp on it by putting our stamp on the situation that created it, you with me on this one?” The boss nodded to the other two people in the room as if he were speaking to children or as if there were invisible rods connecting the other two heads to his own and the others would nod in unison with him if he moved just right.

The woman with the white briefcase nodded. The Librarian was perplexed. “How do we put a stamp on events that have transpired before so many eyes,” she asked somewhat rhetorically.

“That’s why I’m here,” said the woman with the white briefcase.

“To birth another elephant?” asked the Librarian.

“I’m a consultant,” the woman smiled, as something in the briefcase on her lap began to whirr softly.

The Girl had done as much of her math homework as she could tolerate and had gone over to the reading assignment. As best she could determine, the story was about a woman who had to tell stories or something bad would happen to her. It reminded her of the storyteller who used to come to her school. She thought about the long flowing clothing the woman wore and how she had all the stories memorized so she could look directly at her audience the whole time she was telling the story. The Girl sat in her favorite chair, closed her eyes, and tried to tell herself one of the storyteller’s stories. She got as far as the part where two little girls had opened their door to a cold bear so that he could warm himself by the fire. That’s when she was distracted by the noise from a television news story.

The Girl’s father, per the instructions of the newscaster, had turned up the volume of the TV to hear the barely audible shriek of a woman who stood before a man whose body undulated in very strange ways. Then there was video of an elephant, though it was rather long for an elephant, its tail curlier and its skin blacker than black. It was so black no one had anything to which it could be compared. Nor could anyone determine the meaning of the writing on the side of the elephant, except for the Girl. The messages she saw were so clear to her that she assumed everyone else could decipher them as well. She was, though, so mesmerized by the sight of the elephant that she didn’t hear the newscaster say that linguistic experts and code breakers from around the world had gathered to study what appeared to be a message on the elephant’s hide because no one had any idea what the markings meant. She also didn’t get the hints between the lines that the animal’s health was in a slow but noticeable decline.

The Librarian’s boss had given her an assignment. She was to work with the media consultant to bring the elephant to the library. The goal was to turn public opinion towards demanding the elephant be brought to the place where Ipso had tried to have it. The Librarian was supposed to speak publicly, with firsthand knowledge, about Ipso’s demands to birth the elephant at the library. They would run the audio of her “testimony” under the video of Ipso and his various body shapes. The Librarian’s boss would then speak and intimate that the code on the elephant’s hide might be broken and the message revealed, if the animal were to come back to the place its “author” had wanted it to be in the first place.

The media consultant was brought in with the anticipation of at least two obvious questions likely to arise once the scheme was made public. First, if the library thought it was such a great idea for the elephant to be there, why had they called the Emergency Medical Service to take Ipso away to the to the hospital? Second, if the library had some way of deciphering the code, why couldn’t they just do it at the hospital?

“Aren’t you glad they don’t have you all trying to figure out the elephant thing?” the Girl’s father said to her as they drove to school. “You have a hard enough time with the school work they give you.”

“I like the elephant,” the Girl replied.

“Of course you do,” her father snorted back. “That’s probably why it’s going to die.”

At times like these, the thought of joining her mother would cross her mind. But that was as frightening as anything.

“I liked mama too,” she said and turned her face to the window, and thought without speaking— and I still like the elephant .

Rides to school used to be among the best times in her life. That was when her mother was still alive. The Girl and father drove to school and listened to music her father had chosen just for her. If there were long instrumental passages, he would tell the Girl how her mother had found him working in the factory, how he thought he’d be there his whole life doing the things outside of the factory that made coming to the factory inevitable. Then one day, a man who worked at the factory who was neither a good hunter nor a good factory worker came to the factory to hunt.

The worker who could not hunt worked in a spot with a window just above his head and behind him. Birds nested there. He could hear them rustling and flapping against the window. Even when he resisted turning around, he was distracted. His distraction caused problems. Once another man further up the line almost lost a hand because the man who was not a good hunter or worker became distracted, forgot which button gets pushed before which lever. He was often suspended without pay. So he would go hunting to get more food.

Of course, when he reached the woods, he was overtaken by the sun in the trees, the birds in the trees, the sun on the grass, which trees grew near which rivers, the sound and sight of running water. One day in the woods, he was trying to remember if the gun he’d brought was for shooting birds or deer. Both were within range. He got a phone call from his wife with good and bad news. The factory people had mailed him a letter. He would never have to worry about being distracted in the factory again. He thought for a moment about staying in the woods. Then he decided that whatever gun he had brought would work fine on humans. He jumped into his car, drove to the factory, and began shooting.

Many people died and the shooter made himself the last among them. The man who was not yet the Girl’s father was shifted to a different part of the factory while police gathered evidence in the area where he normally worked. That didn’t take as long as removing the blood stains.

In the meantime, he refused to speak to anyone about it except those who had witnessed it with him. Then he noticed some of those folks drinking and taking other drugs more and more. Two of them became unable to leave their houses. Some couldn’t walk through the gate. One person committed suicide. The people who owned the factory were besieged by reporters and referred the media to the people hired to help the workers cope with the killings.

One of those people was a dark woman with dark red hair. The man who was not yet the Girl’s father was scheduled to talk to this woman about what had happened, about the fire from the gun that came through the night into his sleep. Whenever he came to a flight of stairs with other people around, he had to fight himself not to push them out of the way and run. He heard screaming when there was no screaming. He was losing weight, showing less and less interest in food, even though, now, the factory owners had made sure there was food laid out all over the factory.