Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

On their first visit, the dark red woman brought tea which he did not drink. This was always where he would end the story when he told it to his daughter. He didn’t tell the Girl that, though at first he wouldn’t drink the tea, he was comforted by the fruity smell, jasmine. The woman always reminded him of it. His talks with her were the first and only times he ever reassessed his family, the first time he was able to empathize with his brother.

“Did you get a good look at his hands?” the woman asked him. Then she would wait. No one had ever really waited for him to answer. He began to take comfort from silence.

She liked him from the start and had to check herself that she didn’t cross the boundary from professional therapist to romantic interest. But this was futile. He was the most honest person she had ever met, the most transparent patient. Her mind drifted to what he would be like in the throes of passion. She had never imagined that the patient that presented the least challenge she had ever had would be one with whom she would fall in love. She let their sessions run over time. She began bringing recordings of Miles Davis’s first great band with Coltrane, Adderley, Evans, and Jones. It helped him open up about his relationship with his brother. She would touch his knee when she reflected upon something significant he had said.

“So, you actually liked the unsliced bread. It was the blood in it that didn’t play so well,” she had said during one of the breakthrough sessions. During the last of their scheduled meetings, she brought him flowers and held his hand, clearly steps over the line. He was stunned. He had been trying to figure out a good way to meet her outside of the factory-authorized therapy sessions. This seemed like a good opportunity to ask about that and so it was.

As it happened, he was an amazing and intuitive cook. Before marriage he had always gone out to eat (remnants of the bloody bread episodes, perhaps). But their new house seemed like a new world and he began exploring cookbooks, only to leave them behind after a few months, creating his own concoctions that were at least as good as what he had found in the books. When their daughter was born, he learned to prepare food for infants, toddlers, then pre-teens. The lunches the Girl took to school were the envy of all her classmates. She began asking her father for larger and larger quantities as it gave her joy to share what she had.

She had fond memories of her father joyously puttering around the kitchen, especially on Saturdays, while her mother sang along with opera on the radio, making fun of the bass parts she could never hope to reach. If there was an opera being broadcast that they didn’t especially like, her mother would put on La Traviata . She wouldn’t start the recording at the beginning. “The overture is wonderful, but too sad to start,” she would say. “Let’s go to the drinking song.” And so, the father would have to take a break from cooking and waltz around the house with the mother to Libiamo ne’ lieti calici .

His wife, like many of African descent that lived in her country, loved barbecued ribs, one of the hand-me-downs from their ancestors’ southern slavery experience. The husband developed an astonishing rib sauce. People came from miles around to try it. He was on the verge of starting a business with it (Astonishing Rib Sauce or ARS as it came be known) when she became ill.

The doctor told her no more greasy barbecued ribs with the Astonishing Rib Sauce, no more red meat, but especially no more pork. Baked chicken and broiled fish were okay on the odd occasion. She didn’t heed the warnings and insisted that her husband continue cooking pork ribs. He did so reluctantly but reveled in the joy she took from eating pork.

One day, though, he found himself at her bedside surrounded by weeping relatives. She had been allowed to come home because there was nothing doctors could do for her. The Girl recalled the scene with a double sadness: the change in her father and the loss of her mother, the inspiration for Saturday waltzes, the singer of songs.

For his part, it was as if all the intervening years of recovery and happiness had suddenly collapsed beneath him like a broken chair. He was back to the day of the killing spree. Nightmares crept forward and sleep waned. He felt as if he’d had no right to normalcy, to say nothing of joy. The murders and suicide became his sun and moon.

He posted the ARS recipe online along with his business plan. Opera was banned from the house. He did not consciously stop eating meat. It just happened. He never spoke openly about becoming a vegetarian, even to those who had witnessed the murders with him, though; they were the only people with whom he exchanged anything but pleasantries. He took no joy in it, but his cooking was as good as ever. He lost weight and spoke to his relatives less often, especially his brother.

As his relatives abandoned him, only his daughter, the Girl, was left to witness his decline. He tolerated her for a time, even comforted her as they grieved together. But, as she began to take solace in memories of her mother, he resented her recovery and resented that he could not dismiss her as he dismissed those who had not been traumatized and therefore, in his mind, could not understand. She had sunk to the bottom and managed to rise again seemingly on her own, and that was as far beyond his understanding as the markings on the elephant.

The Egyptologist who worked at the Art Institute began to notice a shift in the calls he was getting. When the elephant first emerged, reporters took him to lunch in restaurants he could not afford. In a couple of cases, he was unaware of their very existence even though he had been in Detroit for years. But now, people were sending him notes that questioned his expertise and professionalism. Many of these letters came with copies of Ishmael Reed’s “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.” Sometimes, they would send the poem alone. Soon he stopped opening letters, especially those with no return address.

One reporter who wrote for a weekly media outlet addressed directly to people of African descent had seen his ancient-looking great-grandmother that hardly ever spoke perk up when the elephant hit the media. In fact, when she saw the elephant on TV she became downright agitated. After a few days, she stopped wearing her wig, and spent more time outside asking young people in particular questions that, in their minds, confirmed her as mentally ill, questions like: “What do you wear in the dark when you wear the dark?” “When was the last time you read something you wrote and heard another voice that was also your own?”

Years ago, she’d been buoyed but not overjoyed by the election of the first black US president. Though she did have tears over a slow smile when she heard him speak at his inauguration and say, “I know all this isn’t for me.” But the arrival of the elephant was different. She did not smile. She could not take her rest.

Her great-grandson, the reporter, had noticed the change in her. He sat down with her on different occasions to find out why she was so agitated. She would only repeat the questions she asked people from her front porch. While other members of the family thought she was becoming senile, the reporter saw something in her eyes and face that belied senility: the way she turned her head and nodded as she cut her eyes and smirked. There was the very slight but sardonic chuckle that made her body rock very slightly.

One day, his persistent questioning seemed to have paid off. Though the smirk and chuckle were still there, she said something out of the ordinary.

“Your friend doesn’t know his trip,” she said.

The reporter was so startled it took him a moment to ask what friend and what trip was she talking about.