The Silent History: A Novel (15 page)

Patrick, finished unloading the van, extended his hand to the teacher and said, “She’s got great plans for these people. She’s filled out three spiral notebooks already. She’s a woman on a mission.”

My inner reserves wilted to hear Patrick say it like this. He had a great gift for reductive summary. There in the kitchen I made a note to establish practice regimens for all the nonsilents who would be living among the silents. Something akin to a collective meditation that would place us in a common register. Watching Angela cook, I made more plans. Vegetarian diets. Permaculture farming and a barter economy and goats with bells around their necks. Hourly hugs. Meditation hikes. A smoothie barn. Rustic permanent housing for the dedicated nonsilents, and temporary housing for the curious ones. A focus on individual spirituality and worship of the seasons. Group laughing sessions.

Francine interrupted my reverie. She said, “It’s time for dinner. I’d invite you, but it sounds like you’re a pretty busy woman. With that mission and all.”

Some use words like crowbars. I could tell that the teacher thought she was acting in the silents’ best interests, so I nodded curtly to her and withdrew. I tried to exchange a meaningful stare with Angela, but she was dumping a can of artichoke hearts over what looked like cubed Spam. Stay strong, I thought. Soon you will be cooking organically grown stir-fries. The silents’ compound was an extraordinary canvas upon which we could paint a vision of true communion.

Ten days later Patrick and I were living in a tent across the creek from the compound. My plan was to keep to ourselves, keep quiet, and wait. I could’ve waited indefinitely. But Patrick was impatient. With the silents. With me. He said he was having a hard time seeing what was so important and special about them. All they did was murder perfectly good songs on out-of-tune instruments, he said, and play Frisbee, video games, and some chase game he couldn’t figure out, and drink the wine that he was sure they traded in our cucumber water for. They were no different from other kids their age, in other words.

“Some journeys require us to be blindfolded part of the way,” I told him.

“I liked you a lot better before you knew everything,” he said.

Shortly before our pilgrimage, Patrick and I had become intimate, but so far I’d resisted sexual intercourse. Inside the tent, I allowed him to give me sensual massages and administer cunnilingus, after which we stared at each other for hours. Something about Patrick’s face, the tightness of his features, turned my mind inward. I retraced my spiritual path. All those missteps, or what I thought at the time were missteps: the head-shaving, the starvation quests, Most Benevolent Thomas, the suicide pact—I knew they’d been right and necessary, because they’d inoculated me against falseness. And then, right when I’d be near that stream of truth, just about to fill my pail, I’d feel Patrick slipping under the covers and his wet mouth trailing down my navel toward my lap, and my mind would go gray.

One night I had a vision. Not a dream but a waking foresight of the future. Someone else and I were holding hands, and we were leading the silents toward an open field. The farther we walked, the more this inner feeling of predestination grew. Suddenly we stopped at a place where a perfect half moon hung low in the sky, and I knew that we’d arrived. I turned to the person next to me, expecting to find Patrick, and instead it was the teacher, Francine. A man flew through the air on a motorcycle and a thousand babies cried.

KENULE MITEE

BROOKLYN, NY

2027

I’m telling you that I will never forget that week. Things were already crazy in my life even before those kids started to show up on the beach. I had met this girl, a girl from Kpor. I should have known not to get involved with a small-town girl. She was beautiful, but Anglican and very, very religious. We dated for several months, and I thought that things were going well until I found out that she had a baby with another man in Ogoniland, and her parents were taking care of the baby until it died from meningitis. She said, “I am going to Kpor to bury my daughter,” and my jaw fell out. I was like, “How do you go around keeping secrets like this from me?” I was furious with this girl.

She had left on a plane the day before. I was still mad in the morning when I got my cart from the storage locker. I had a feeling of utter darkness toward this girl who had deceived me. I remember that I was acting like a small boy. Angrily wheeling the cart up and down the boardwalk, shouting out, “Fat bread, fat bread, fifty bucks a stick.” Like I wanted to hurt a man.

Oh. Yes. That was the other thing. They had just taken Spray Ya Face off the market about a month before, because of some boys that died. My boss said to me, “Now you will sell fat bread,” and I was out the next day, selling this new product. I did not want to eat this thing, but I had to taste it so that I could know what I was selling. I found the sour filling to be awful. Maybe the worst thing I had ever put in my mouth. Those silent kids, they were not happy about fat bread at all. They had bought Spray Ya Face from me every day. They were my most loyal customers. I tried to tell them, “Look, it’s not me. They took it off the market. It’s dangerous. You shouldn’t be messing around with it,” but you know these kids. The things you say make no difference to them. They were very angry, and they did not come to my cart for many weeks. They would do whatever they could to avoid me. And I have to say that it hurt my feelings a little. Because those kids, they were part of my every day. I took great comfort in their presence, you know. With everything going on in my life, they were the one thing that didn’t change.

So all of this made me very angry and sad on that morning. I hated this girl with her deceiving ways. I hated the fat bread. I hated its smell. I hated the people who bought it. I was pushing the cart down the boardwalk and I saw a group of kids standing by the entrance to the roller coaster. They were silent kids, I knew because of the way they moved, but I had never seen these ones before. That was strange to me. And there was one boy climbing up over the fence. I don’t think they knew that it was closed down. I don’t think they could read the signs. The yellow tape meant nothing to them, so the boy was climbing over, I don’t even know why.

I wheeled the cart toward them and I said, “Hey, that’s not safe there.” They turned around quickly, and the boy on the fence fell right down on the other side. He started to groan, I mean, it must have been a ten-foot drop, you know? Onto his shoulder. The other kids, they ran away and left him there. I called after them, but they were gone. I was alone with this hurt boy. I asked him if anything was broken, but he had no way to tell me this. I climbed over the fence and jumped down the other side. He was breathing like there was no air in his lungs. I didn’t know how to help the boy. I couldn’t carry him over the fence, and the gate was locked, and there seemed to be no other way out of the coaster area.

There was a small hut where they must have sold tickets to the coaster at some point. I went inside to see if there was a key in there, but it was dark and empty except for some trash, empty beer bottles and wrappers and things. I stood there thinking what I should do next. I felt responsible for this hurt boy, but I didn’t have a single idea of how to solve the problem. I was just standing there like a statue, frozen in thought, and the girl called me. Right then, of all the times to call. She was sobbing. They had just buried the baby and she was in a state. I don’t know why she chose me to turn to. I said all the things that a man should say in this kind of situation, but nothing more. I knew right then that I would not see the girl again, that small-town girl with her church and her secret affairs. I did not want to waste a single extra word on her. I hung up the phone and sighed. I had already had the worst day a person could have.

I came out of the little hut and I couldn’t believe it. There were about a hundred of those kids standing on the other side of the fence looking in at me. They started to climb up, two at a time, a whole wave of them coming up over the top. They got down and made a—I don’t know the word for this—a temple out of their bodies to lift the boy up. They worked together to bring him over the fence. Like ants carrying a leaf over a hill, maybe, but really I had never seen anything like it. When they had gotten the boy up over the fence, a young woman came up to me and offered to lift me over the fence the same way. I waved my hands at her to say, “I’m okay, I will climb.” For some reason I cannot describe, I just didn’t want them to touch me. The girl turned around and climbed over the fence with the rest of them.

I stood watching through the wires as a group of those kids carried the injured boy to the beach. I could see that there were more of them farther down the shore, just sitting there in the sand, and they all gathered around the boy who had fallen to comfort him. And even more of those kids, not one of whom did I recognize, started to form a line in front of my cart. Many, many more of these silents than I had ever seen in one place. I said a prayer to myself then, which was, “Let nothing else happen today but that I sell all of this cursed fat bread.”

EMILY ROARK

QUEENS, NY

2027

When Becca moved to that tilting pink house in Jackson Heights, I followed her there. Not right away. First I worked on Mom for months, told her how useful I could be to Becca and the other silents who lived in the group home. I could give Mom up-to-the-minute briefings so she’d know Becca was okay and the house wasn’t being condemned and demolished while Becca sat around playing her vibraphone. I moved there in June. Most days Becca and I woke up early and took the train into the city. We’d sit facing each other and exchange smiles when someone came on screaming about sulfur lakes or how the police stole all his white blood cells. We’d play the drawing game like when we were kids—she’d start with a line or a few circles and give it to me, and we’d pass it back and forth until it was finished.

That’s what we were doing the morning the man came and sat down next to her. He wore cutoff corduroys and had a high forehead. He looked at us, and right away I knew he was silent. I spent so much time with Becca that I felt I could almost communicate with them. He was facing us, friendly and probing, but I could tell there were other layers beyond my reach. Becca, though, was clearly interested. They went back and forth for a few minutes, and then seemed to settle the matter. I took the drawing from her and worked on it a little, added an alligator, some splashes.

At Bryant Square, Becca didn’t climb the stairs like usual. Instead, we followed the guy with cutoffs to the D train and took it all the way to the end of the line, Coney Island. Or, I mean, Becca followed him, I followed her. Out of the station, past the condemned shops, down a crumbling boardwalk. Then, farther along the old midway, on the beach, a throng of people. I could hear the ocean rumble, crazed birds calling to each other, but down on the beach hundreds of boys and girls Becca’s age were standing, sitting, watching. I stood there with my hand over my mouth. Becca was scrutinizing me, waiting, waiting, and then she smiled. She skittered down the stairs to the beach, and I followed.

I tagged along with her the rest of the day. We found a spot by some purple sawgrass and sat in the hot sand with our backpacks. Becca pivoted to a group of girls to the left of us, and everyone interacted for a while. At one point Becca gestured my way and all of them looked at me and I gave a halfhearted wave. They found this hilarious. We left our packs in the sand and followed the girls up to the boardwalk. There were funnel cakes and weird games, but mostly everyone just seemed excited about the sheer fact of it, of each other. The only sound was the sand on the wooden planks.

When we returned to the beach, some boys had come and claimed our spot. Two of them, sun-fried and ratty. As we got closer, I saw they were rooting through our packs. Becca ran over and tried to yank away the bags, but the boy who was holding hers wouldn’t budge. His whole neck was tattooed with green snakeskin. I don’t even remember what was in my pack, probably just some pens and gum and my subway card. They could have it. I wasn’t going to mess with those guys.

Then down the stairs came a few more boys, no less terrifying—reinforcements, I assumed, but this new group ignored us and stepped up to Snake Neck. The one in front eyed him with almost no expression—but only almost. He didn’t blink, he didn’t move. It was stunning. He was stunning. He had this stern but animated face, big brown eyes. He and his friends wore tank tops and weathered work pants, and he had raised red scars on his arms. Parallel like a claw scrape. Snake Neck handed the pack to Becca, and the other guy handed mine back to me, and the two of them walked up the stairs and down the boardwalk and, I have no doubt, away from the gathering forever.

The main boy waited for Becca to search through her bag and make sure everything was there. When she was done he nodded to us, and the boys walked off. Becca was transfixed. She stood there stunned for a few minutes, then took my hand. We followed the gang around while they roved around the beach, then up the stairs to the boardwalk. Beyond one of the barbwire fences, a pair of boys were trying to rip planks off the old wooden roller coaster, which was about ninety percent demolished, and the gang intervened. A girl with a huge sun hat sat on one of the benches crying, and they gathered around her. Becca hovered at the edge of their group, and I hovered at the edge of hers.

Eventually Becca and I went back down to the beach, where we found some friends of hers from the home and others I’d never seen before. Becca kept looking behind her to make sure I was still there, and the girls would wave to me every so often, like I was a baby or a pet bird. The sky began to darken, but I knew from the look of calm glee on Becca’s face that we wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

THEODORE GREENE

RICHMOND, CA

2027

I woke up in the middle of the night with this terrible heartburn. The doctor had given me a medicated throat mist that was supposed to help, but it barely had any effect anymore. I went out into the hallway to get a drink of water and saw a blue glow coming from the living room. I walked in there and Flora was sitting at my worktable again, watching the news feed on the wall. Just sitting completely still in the darkness. I could barely make out her face, lit up by the wallscreen, almost hovering there without a body, like a spirit. I knew what she was looking at, because I’d seen her stealing glances throughout the day. Everyone was covering it—you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing some mention of the thing. Tons of silent kids sort of taking over the beach at Coney Island. These faraway shots of a sea of bodies. You might not even know they were silent kids if you—I mean, I could tell they were silent by the way they were acting, but you might just look at the news and think it was some sort of mass prank. A bunch of kids decide to meet up at a certain place at a certain time, the kind of dumbass stuff I used to do with my friends in high school. But the reporters were like, “The jury’s still out on how these uniquely abled young people found each other or what it is they’re doing on the beach.”