Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

“He can’t read the elephant, can he?” she replied.

He guessed she was talking about the Egyptologist.

“Why do you call him my friend,” the nephew replied.

“He thinks he should know how to read it and he doesn’t know why he doesn’t know,” she said.

“About the elephant, you mean?”

“No, about the whale hiding in the toilet. Yes, the elephant!”

“But he’s not my friend. I don’t know…”

“You want to know. You think you should know. You don’t know why you don’t know. That makes you and him friends. Only, he can mess things up and you can only tell people how he messed up after the mess, which is amazing considering that’s what you get paid to do.”

This is when the reporter decided to contact the Egyptologist.

The Librarian and the media consultant sat together in a room with the white device that looked like a briefcase. It whirred.

“The sample please,” said the consultant.

The Librarian handed her a small electronic storage device on which the Librarian had placed her dissertation. The consultant began to transfer the dissertation from the device to the machine and to read it during the transfer. She was surprised in part because she had expected a smaller sample and also because of the content.

“I thought you were a librarian.”

“I obviously am a librarian or we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

“Usually people’s graduate work has some semblance of relevance to their chosen profession.”

“I was hired to run the Media and Public Relations Department. Then I was the department. Then the department was eliminated. Things happen like that. You get backed down or into something you never imagined and then you’re stuck.”

“Or, you get what you deserve.”

The Librarian chuckled and said, “I know it’s our fault we were tossed from the garden we never made.” Then she stopped laughing abruptly and said, “Let’s get on with it.”

The consultant continued feeding the dissertation into the device. She could not help but read it even though much of it seemed incomprehensible. As best the consultant could make out, the Librarian proposed a link between the US cultural take on original sin and the growing fascination with and diversity of fried foods, drawing a parallel between how Carnival and Lent necessitated one another and provided the basic fuel for cable television.

People had come to batter and fry all manner of sweet and savory foods from candy bars to beer. But the big breakthrough had come when a scientist in a lab funded by a very large and relatively new church discovered a way to soften metal and other inorganic materials with a chemical that bonded particularly well with a patented mixture of sugar, salt, and genetically modified lard. Now segments of the population were frying and eating whatever was not poisonous. This included nails, bits of used tires, cassette tapes, coins, old toys, keys, the tops to coffee mugs that no longer fit, mismatched socks, earphones, the name tags and leashes of dead pets, floppy discs, bobbleheaded Elvis statues, and pre-digital identification cards.

Certain congregants of the church that funded the new chemical for frying were reenacting their wedding ceremonies and chemically treating, frying, and eating their wedding rings as a way to internalize their commitment to one another. They did this with little or no consideration for the ultimate fate of consumed objects that couldn’t be absorbed by the body, unlike those who fried and ate their mortgages and reveled in the items’ transformation.

“Why did you bring a dissertation and not letters or something smaller for the machine to read?”

“My boss insisted upon the dissertation. He’s friends with folks who were on my committee at school.”

With that, the consultant rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, of course, the committee.” After a few moments, the machine produced a sample script. The consultant handed it to the Librarian, who examined it.

“This is pretty simplistic,” said the Librarian without looking up from the paper.

“It’s designed to sound like you,” the consultant said with a sugary smile that she let fall immediately.

“Then I could have written this by myself.”

The consultant smiled again and said, “Well then, you should be able to record this in one take and we can both be on our respective ways.”

There were many things the little Girl liked about the elephant. Its color was amazing. She had never seen anything so black. At one point, she wished the pages of her books were that black so that she might be able to read everything as easily as she read the symbols on the elephant’s skin. Then she realized the reason the symbols on the animal were easy to read was not so much because of the blackness but because of the lustrous sheen that contrasted with the blackness and was made possible by the blackness, the silver that gave the symbols their knife’s edge clarity. Then there was the message itself, how it seemed to speak directly to her even though she was sure everyone could read it, had read it, and was as comforted by it as she. The very simple message was so powerful because it came from an unknown source but spoke directly to her needs. Someone, something she had never encountered, had by purest chance made a place for her where before there had been no place or virtually no place.

She was perhaps most comforted by the thought that things could have gone the other way. It was as if she could see to the bottom of the ocean, the ocean that cared for her not one whit yet could not help but to reveal glowing fish of indescribable hues, plants that shimmered and waved, and wrecks made anonymous by new life, all of which the sea had made possible.

There could have been another message or no message at all. The man could have died instead of divulging the elephant. The elephant could have come with illegible markings or no markings. There could have been nothing there for her and she could have still found comfort because the message had changed nothing but her attitude. It was as if she had just discovered that the sun shines when there are clouds, shines when your part of the world has turned for relief to night, and shines when you die. Her mother was gone and the star that held the earth in orbit still burned.

It was the guards who began to notice the elephant was dying or at least were the first to take the situation seriously. They had all won lotteries to take the job of guarding the elephant in the hospital. Everyone thought their jobs would be more glamorous than they were if not easier than they seemed. When they had won their positions, most of their coworkers at the agency slapped them on the back, hugged them and wished them well.

The real trouble started when reporters began to swarm around the hospital until administrators had to call editors and publishers and, ironically, threaten the media outlets with bad publicity if the reporters kept crowding the emergency room and parking areas where ambulances should have been. Every janitor and surgeon was recorded giving his or her take on the meaning of the markings on the elephant. For a moment, each interviewee seemed to take on some of the silvery blackness of the puzzling symbols on the hide.

Of course, the guards spent a great deal of time simply staring at the elephant. They began to notice how the wrinkles in its skin were becoming slightly deeper, day by day. They only spoke of it amongst themselves, at first because they assumed others would notice it and they didn’t feel it was up to them to go beyond their job description. They were hired to keep the elephant from harm from the outside. They couldn’t tell what brought on the changes. They also assumed other people were paying such close attention that surely someone would note the changes in the elephant’s skin.