The Official Report on Human Activity Read online

  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.

  “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, casset
te 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.

  In the meantime, it gave them what seemed like secret knowledge because they spoke openly, at least amongst themselves, about something no one else mentioned. It seemed that it took others longer to realize the change in the elephant’s skin, and even when those outside of their circle noticed it, they refused to acknowledge it openly.

  At the height of the media attention, the deepening of the skin folds was evident even to the casual observer. But it took the obscuring of the symbols to spark public acknowledgement that something was very wrong, though that acknowledgement was not nearly as intense as the drive to understand the symbols. The shiny blackness became less black and less shiny and, for the first time, the elephant began to make noise.

  The sound was surprisingly deep for a creature that was no more than four feet tall. It was voluminous. It could have come from a creature as big as the building. You could hear nothing but the sound when the elephant raised its trunk into an “S” shape and bellowed. The PA system near her in the emergency department could not be heard when she let loose. It was clearly a sound of distress and despair, but as large and overwhelming as it was, some thought they could discern finer, more nuanced emotions and messages from the sound. Those who dreamt about it were afraid to speak of it in the light. Just as the questions from the media previously had seemed to bathe the interviewees in glory, discussion of the sound brought something no one wanted to mention. “What do you think it means?” someone would ask. The response was often a shake of the head and a look towards the floor.

  Veterinarians and zoologists that specialized in pachyderms were flown in, and they asked that the elephant be kept quiet, that the reporters and cameras be moved away. They were moved for a few days. The animal began to perk up. Though it stopped bellowing, the folds didn’t reverse.

  But after about a week of no media coverage, people began to call reporters and media outlets to ask what was going on. The hospital legal team got an injunction to keep reporters, videographers, and other photographers away. Soon, people began to show up at the hospital. Cars circled the parking lot like vultures. People fought over the spaces. Patients and their families were being outnumbered in the lobbies and other waiting areas. Everyone wanted to glimpse the elephant. Everyone wanted to cast off the pall that came when the animal’s true condition arose in conversation. Everyone talked about deciphering the symbols. But the few who managed to struggle into the inner sanctum to actually see the animal just stared, surprised at how small it was, how the black they saw was not the black they had seen on television and other video, but was still blacker than anything they had seen or imagined. When spectators remarked on the color, the guards would close their eyes to recall the elephant’s color when they had first been brought in to guard it. Every once in a while a guard would bend down to talk to a curious child and say, “I wish you could have seen it.”

  Cameras had been banned but, eventually, someone snuck one into the viewing area, recorded video of the elephant, and posted it online. It was too much for the rest of the media, especially the TV stations. A judge granted a court order that prohibited the hospital from keeping the media out. The cameras returned and the elephant’s health began failing again. The “S” shaped trunk was raised and the deafening sound returned, this time with enough force to show up as visual noise in
the live video transmissions. People covered their ears. Some wore the same protective ear coverings as airport ground crews. Nothing worked.

  The last thing on most folks’ minds was moving the elephant from the hospital as the Librarian’s boss was planning, but he still pressed ahead. The Librarian and the media consultant completed their respective tasks of recording and packaging a message that said the best thing for the elephant was to have it moved to where its “author” had wanted it to be in the first place. The Librarian’s boss held a news conference with the consultant and the Librarian. He showcased the recording of the Librarian even though she was there. He spoke about “the need to fulfill the wishes of the creator of the symbols so that then perhaps scholars will be able to discern their meaning.”

  This was the first time anyone had publically referred to Ipso as the “author.” It set off a bit of a debate. Clearly, the elephant had emerged from him. But now that it was out, he was dead, and no one (except the Girl) could make heads or tails of the message. Was there a message? If no one could read the message, was Ipso an author? If there was a message, was Ipso the author?

  The little Girl’s father was shouting so much at the TV that she ran into the room. “They don’t know what he was really like!”

  “He who?” she asked.

  “My brother, your sniveling uncle,” the Girl’s father replied. “His genes must have passed right through to you. You deserved him more than I ever did.”

  “Deserved what?”

  “Do you know what it was like? He was always distracted. He concentrated so hard when he cut the unsliced loaves of bread that he cut himself, and I always got the bloody piece. Our parents insisted on buying uncut loaves. I ate bloody bread every day until I moved out.”