The Official Report on Human Activity Read online

  When the clouds fall to the ground

  You will know where I can be found.

  Trackin’ crimes bigger than the sea

  Can’t see the forest strung up in a tree.

  Stalkin’ the fog,

  I’m just a stalkin’ the fog.

  Emmett said ain’t nothing to it.

  He’ll show you how to stalk the fog.

  Ipso saw Rufus Thomas with a James Brown cape open wide like wings. Did it matter that Rufus wasn’t a vegetarian or that he had never so much as entertained the idea? Not now, because the trunk of the elephant was out, smaller than Ipso would have thought and so shiny black it seemed silver in certain turns of the light.

  The reporter told the Librarian that when the elephant had fully emerged, Ipso’s blood drained from its skin as if washed by invisible rain. Besides being smaller than any other elephant, its tail was curlier, and the distance between its front and hind legs was greater. The elongation clearly facilitated what everyone assumed to be a message on its hide. If it was a message, it was not delivered with words. The markings may have been hybrid hieroglyphs. Someone suggested calling the Egyptologist who had helped to curate the exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Just before the call was made, a security guard walked over to ask Ipso about the meaning of the markings on the elephant’s hide. Of course, it was too late.

  No one ever confessed to posting the security camera video of Ipso pleading with the Librarian as the seemingly random shapes emerged from his body. She had stumbled upon the video online herself, searching for a long out-of-print book called The Suburban Bitch, about an African-American woman working as a domestic servant in the mid-late twentieth century, which of course meant the people she worked for were white. It seems the Librarian’s grandmother had known the woman who wrote the book. It was written in prison as a part of the author’s therapy, a way to work out the anger so clearly manifest in her crime. The story, virtually forgotten now, had made very serious headlines at the time, the same way the civil disturbances in Detroit in 1967 had made headlines and then been all but forgotten except as a touchstone for the city’s decline.

  What had really struck the nearly all-white jury, including the white foreman of the jury—elected foreman by the whites in the room because he had worked at Ford Motor Company as foreman and was thought to have the most experience with African Americans—was that the killing spree began and ended with the family pets.

  The prosecutor had ended his opening and closing statements with references to the pets, how the former maid could have left them alone as they were unlikely to be called as witnesses, how the autopsy on the cat showed it had been slain first, before the people were killed, and how the dog’s autopsy had shown it was the last victim. As it had been quoted in the paper, “This woman, who the family had trusted for years, effectively created a pet sandwich of death with the family as the mainstay and the corpses of the dogs and cats acting as the bread.”

  Among the things left out of most media stories was that the animals had been ritualistically slaughtered, while the people had been poisoned and slept into death, and that the family had been tied to chairs and sat waiting for the police at the dining room table, plates of exquisitely prepared food before them with a centerpiece of flowers on the table.

  Later, in his blog, a graduate student, a playwright (was the name familiar to her?) in the combined disciplines of Art and American Studies referred to the murders as oddly paralleling and presaging some of the more extreme performance art. That reference had a link to the video of Ipso standing before the Librarian with a giant question mark popping out of his body.

  The video surprised her on two accounts. First and foremost, she didn’t realize the library had security cameras. Why had she never seen video of any of the other strange goings on at the library, like one of the library’s biggest benefactors, who at every holiday festival would bring in her talking bird that recited the names of the US presidents in backwards order of their election or the homeless guy who only read two books: the dictionary and the city’s ordinances, and would always have to be dragged from the building laughing hysterically? There were other odd recurring events in the building that had never been subject to an internet posting.

  Second, who had posted the video? The security guards who monitored the cameras were the most obvious and therefore the least likely suspects. Why risk your job to post a video on the web? Then there was the site upon which it was shown, the site formerly known as I-Fuel, which had been bought by Unicorp and renamed U-Fuel. Being posted on such a well-known site would surely help it go viral.

  The Librarian’s mother called and asked if she had seen the video and was it the Librarian on the video. When the Librarian admitted yes to both questions, her mother became frantic. She wanted to know how the Librarian was going to cash in on the video. Why hadn’t the Librarian called her to let her know what had been going on? And, finally, was Ipso in pain when the shapes emerged? The Librarian did not have answers to these questions when her mother asked them. Nor did she have answers when her boss asked virtually the same questions.

  The Librarian’s boss did not want to continue to be the Librarian’s boss. He wanted to be the mayor or someone who made more money, got on TV more often and ate at better restaurants. He was unsure how he would become the mayor or someone like her. He had been casting about for a campaign color for his yet-to-be-created yard signs, a bumper sticker slogan, a light or even a tunnel from which a light might emerge. The black shiny elephant on the shadowy video came to him like a bolt of illumination, a tailor-made antidote for the semi-shadow he barely admitted even to himself that he was floundering in.

  When the Librarian’s boss called her into his office and interrogated her, there was a woman in the room who seemed to her strikingly out of place. The Librarian could not tell if it was the woman’s flowing clothes in browns, blues, and oh so cautiously muted reds and oranges, or if it was the white briefcase-like container next to the woman that made everything odd. The Librarian could not recall ever having seen a white briefcase, nor was she sure it was a briefcase as it seemed soft as cloth, but in fact was standing up like a briefcase and not like a cloth item which would have collapsed. The Librarian also thought about how the advent of portable computers had made briefcases all but obsolete.

  About halfway through the conversation, the woman put her hand on the white briefcase as one would put a hand on a dog that needed calming. The hand all but floated down toward the metallic latches, undid them, and placed the case in the woman’s lap. So the case must have been harder and lighter than it appeared. It wasn’t until the Librarian’s boss repeated himself that the Librarian realized the woman was moving slowly because she was focused on what the Librarian’s boss was saying as the Librarian should have or could have been doing.

  “Yes,” the Librarian finally answered, “It was after the question mark emerged that I called the ambulance.” The consultant wondered to herself how the Librarian or indeed anyone could tell the difference between the backward “S” and the question mark.

  The audio on the surveillance video was always low, but the segment with Ipso was distorted as well. As the video was passed from viewer to viewer on the Internet, people began to speculate in the comments sections of various sites as to what Ipso was saying or if he was saying anything. Some began to supply their own words, some with music and some without. One person turned the grainy black-and-white video to sepia tone, slowed down the movement, and added the music from an old song:

  Glory glory, hallelujah, when I lay my burdens down

  Glory glory, hallelujah, when I lay my burdens down

  All of my troubles will be over, when I lay my burdens down

  All of my troubles will be over, when I lay my burdens down

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

  it is deaf to color

  blind to music

  and holds them both

&nbs
p; like atlas holds the world

  only as he would be

  for real

  herniated

  wishing for death

  unable

  to lay his burden down

  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.

  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 g
ood 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.