The Silent History: A Novel (18 page)

Sometimes he helped, usually he didn’t. In the process, I discovered something extraordinary: I liked hard work. I pulled nails out of old boards. I measured and leveled a footprint of land big enough for the center. I used a solution of baking soda and rainwater to scrub the guano off the chicken coop particleboard all by myself. While Patrick was in the tent “taking a break,” which meant clouding his mind with the bong, I sat on the bare foundation of the communion center and stared at the wall of redwoods that lined the edge of the property. A hot wind blew through me, and I closed my eyes and felt witchy and old, an all-body fatigue. My will was flagging. I was the only one sustaining this idea. Patrick thought it was ill-conceived, the silents pretty much ignored us, the teacher Francine considered me ridiculous. I didn’t tell her that she was one of the spiritual foremothers of the plan, whether she knew it or not. “We don’t always make plans,” I said to her when we were sharing a bottle of red zin next to the bonfire. “Sometimes plans make
us
.”

I told her this the night before. Francine usually ignored me, but last night she responded by telling me about Flora, one of her former students, how she’d just arrived and had called a meeting with everyone in the house. Something was happening, Francine said. The negative voice inside me said that Patrick and I would be evicted by the end of the week.

I looked down at the bare foundation, dismayed by how little progress we’d made. Patrick returned, cream-eyed, going on about how much money he’d pay for a crawfish sandwich right now, and I told him how much I hated it when he talked covetously about seafood. He picked up the saw and said, “Fried catfish. Danish lobster tails.”

“Please, Patrick,” I said.

“Seared scallops. Shrimp cocktail served with fish roe on a bed of crabmeat inside a giant smoked squid.”

“
Shut up
,” I yelled. I told him to just go back into the tent and finish himself off. Let me be. It was reductive language, but I needed silence right now.

Moments after he left I heard a snapping sound and looked over at the north wall-frame just in time to see it collapse to the ground. I put my head in my hands and sobbed my eyes out. That was it. As soon I finished crying I would stand and walk out of Monte Rio with nothing, just as I had from the dozen other places I’d deluded myself into thinking I’d been called to.

I stood up, determined to leave. That’s when I saw about forty of them, the entire population of the house and the yard tents, standing all together, all facing me.

I felt the cables of a hundred different possibilities starting to make their way through me. I picked up one end of a joist and began heaving it into place.

Flora, I’d find out later it was Flora, moved first—she grabbed a hammer and a box of nails. Another woman picked up the handsaw. And then the rest of them found some part of the job to attend to, and soon we were all working side by side. We finished the frame for the north wall in a few hours, then the south wall. We connected the joists. Previously, I’d worked deliberately, nagged by a monologue I’d absorbed from some do-it-yourself show.
Build the back wall a foot shorter than the front wall. Be sure to add support braces every four feet
. With everybody working alongside me, that voice was silenced. The only sound I heard was Patrick, who’d rejoined us, and continued his exasperating food monologue: steak au poivre, steak Oscar, carne asada.

I insisted that he go back to the tent and fill it with as much noise as he wanted.

Were we going to win any architectural awards? No. Was the roof watertight? Not even close. But the revelation was how easily that inner voice died on the vine. I finished sawing a board, and before I looked up and thought, I need someone to take this over to the east wall, someone had already grabbed it from me. I felt pulled to where Keith and Flora were putting up drywall, and when I arrived I saw that they needed a third to nail it while they held it in place. Flow. Action and intention becoming one. I remember my first guru talking about the goal of extended meditation. First your family and friends leave your mind. Then your fears and inhibitions leave your mind. Then you leave your mind.

When we were done working on that first day, after we’d eaten and I’d had a little too much wine, we danced around the bonfire until late. The kids were all smiles. It was like the loaded prelude before a kiss, except unsexual. We stayed up all night, permeating each other, and when I went back to the tent, Patrick was mumbling in his sleep. Something about fantasy baseball. I grabbed my pillow out of the tent and slept on the communion center’s concrete foundation.

JOHN PARKER CONWAY

MONTE RIO, CA

2028

It was in my third year in office, just after the men’s bath scandal. Nonscandal, I mean. Biggest sack of trumped-up horseshit ever. Bathgate. It happened in the sauna at the new Monte Rio Racquet Club. I’m sitting in a cloud of steam and some Green Party mole comes in, and the next day he claims I repeatedly stroked his shaft. That’s what he called it, his shaft. Like he’s a goddamn airplane. Said I bit his earlobe and whispered nasty stuff. Listen, I’m ready to admit that I might’ve accidentally
grazed
the guy’s dong—it’s not like I’m wearing my glasses in the sauna—but my days of looking for action in locker rooms and campsites and movie theaters, neighborhood barbecues, airport bathrooms, Renaissance Faires, are done. Monte Rio’s my full-time bride, my soul mate. Only reason I go to the baths is to relax. Can’t two men sit naked together in a steam-filled room without all this tawdry innuendo? Hasn’t anyone ever heard of the freaking Romans?

So, once the winds of truth came in and blew this calumny to pieces, I wanted to celebrate. A few months back all the silent kids had moved their whole operation from the old Schofield ranch to Bohemian Grove, which had been abandoned a decade ago. It had fallen into serious disrepair—picked over by loggers and squatters and souvenir hunters—but it was way better than the Schofield place. What a hellhole that was, a warren of tents and homemade buildings that smelled like stewed chicken, everything connected by tarps and cast-off signs. A hobo beehive. I sold all twenty-seven hundred acres of Bohemian Grove to that Patti woman, the leader, the one who forever looks like she’s on the edge of orgasm, for a dollar.

We’d planned to have a simple ribbon-cutting ceremony in early July, and, visionary that I am, I doubled the budget for the Independence Day celebration, threw in an extra ten grand to get the Bay o’ Wolves to do a concert, and decided to stage the whole thing at the Grove. We’d cut ribbons, drink wine, spray the water curtain, watch fireworks explode, and listen to the greatest folk-rap fusion jam band since … ever. We’d celebrate freedom—mine, theirs, yours.

Well, I’ve long believed the credo that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. So I planned the whole event without exactly consulting any of the commune people. Maybe I felt entitled to because I’d essentially given them the place. We arranged everything on the fly, scheduled it for July 3—the fireworks company charged less the day before the actual day—and mailed fliers to everyone in town telling them to come out.

Setup started the week before, and that’s when Patti came into my office. Wearing a poncho thing, titties bobbing, her hair pulled back—she looked like a surgery patient. We couldn’t do it, she kept saying. We were going to upset the equilibrium. We’re doing to them what Monroe did to the Indians.

“Did Monroe throw the Indians a party?” I asked. “Did he bring out the whole town to celebrate them? Because that’s what we’re doing for you guys. Just roll with it. It’s America’s birthday.”

They didn’t want to be celebrated, she said. It was an incredibly fragile time. If the community was ever going to take root and prosper, we couldn’t come barging in with our fireworks and fusion jam bands.

I told her it was too late, but I didn’t want her to leave angry. I asked if there was anything we could do to make it work for everyone, and she said yes, yes there was. She would agree to the Fourth of July party if the town and I respected
all
the rules of the place while we were there. “Of course we will,” I told her. “You have my word.”

She left. And I pretty much put that promise out of my head until I arrived at the old Grove the morning of the third. I walked the half-mile trail to the entrance, beneath those towering redwoods, and looked at the new sign—
FACE-TO-FACE: THE COLLECTIVE RETREAT OF THE WEST
. Lofty. I liked it. On another sign were the rules. First one: no isolation allowed. You had to be around someone else at all times, except in the bathrooms. I didn’t quite understand that one, but all right. Wasn’t the craziest thing I’d ever heard. Next one: no cameras or recording devices. Okay. The Bohemians had that one, too, after a reporter snapped a frontal shot of Vladimir Putin pissing on the leg of his horse, who was just standing there, taking it. The next rule: no talking anywhere within camp property. I guess it was part of the whole mind-set they wanted: They can’t talk, why should you? And I’d understand it on any other night. But a no-talking Fourth of July? A no-talking Bay o’ Wolves, a band lauded for their complex lyrical wordplay? Monte Rio is big on personal liberties, on live and let live, and I was positive that a mandate like this wouldn’t fly.

I went to find Patti. First off, walking the grounds, I was impressed. They’d cleaned it up, torn down some buildings and renovated others. All this in a few months. Hammocks, fire pits, outdoor theaters, food gardens, sun showers, a climbing wall, an open-pit barbecue, and picnic tables. I don’t know what I expected, maybe something closer to the hobo beehive. Or the Manson Family’s outpost. But those huge trees and this little haven within them, it all felt miniaturized, perfect. I was sold.

I found Patti in what looked like a ballet studio, on her knees, eyes closed, apparently meditating. I asked how I could help her win the town over on this no-talking idea, and she glared at me, then motioned for me and Jenny to walk back to the entrance of the retreat. Outside the grounds. Patti smiled all serene and said, “You’d be surprised what people do when they sense it’s the right thing. This place is hallowed ground already. People will respect that.”

You know when you get to a party late and all the booze is gone, and you look around and realize you’re never going to catch up? That’s what it felt like listening to her.

The celebration went better than I thought it would. I looked around, trying to catch one of my constituents talking, even whispering, but I never did. Everyone was gathered in a massive outdoor amphitheater, about two or three thousand of us, and once Bay o’ Wolves finished, the fireworks began, blasting from an open clearing over the redwoods, which was sort of illegal, but tonight was worth an exception. In the bursts of light I could see big groups of people staring attentively at each other, townspeople and silents alike. It was the craziest thing. The whistle of the rocket, the explosion, and then this view of the town, united in silence. It felt like love. It shouldn’t have surprised me—I mean, Monte Rio has always welcomed restless spirits, questing undecideds. But it did, it surprised me.

Sure, the drunker people got, the more they slipped and shouted “woo-hoo!” and “America!” and a lot of the little kids couldn’t help but ask their moms and dads for more popcorn, no matter how much their parents shushed them, but I didn’t see Patti or the teach or any of the others get angry. It was the principle they were trying to instill, the
idea
of silence. I might’ve had a little too much summer-ale homebrew, but I felt this great upsurge of pride. It was a privilege to be the mayor of the town where they settled. Not only had we made room for them, helped them get acclimated, but many of the residents actively revered them—treated them like royals. I saw the Tipton brothers step aside and let one of the silent men skip ahead in the beer line. At the line to the food tent, Shirley Easton, one of the vilest souls you’d ever want to meet, gave a little silent girl a double serving of potato salad. We were a sanctuary for these people. We fed off their presence.

It made me happy but also sad. I felt that stir of loneliness again, and I looked around to see if there was anyone worth pursuing. Worth taking a risk for. All of the men were too young, too happy. One of the silents caught my eye—he had well-kempt stubble and a prominent forehead—and I stared at him until he looked at me. He didn’t return my smile but gazed at me with the most despairing look I’d ever seen. I felt confident that he was looking beyond my smile and returning my true inner expression. He was actually
seeing
me. I turned away to shake someone’s hand, and then when I looked back he was still staring at me. I left quick, before any trouble could arise.

TERRY “BUG” DELAROSA

VILLA GRANDE, CA

2028

A bunch of regulars from the Elephant came out for the commune’s grand opening. Piled into Carrie’s windowless hydro van and followed the river line until the Equinox kicked in. We’d bought eight microtabs to split between four of us, so by the time we were in the parking lot of the old Bohemian Grove, things had slipped a dimension. Carrie looked cut out of crepe paper, and Bert was just rough scratch marks in the air, like something swatted to life by a cartoon cat in the beginning of a show. The thing about Nox, it always disturbed you differently. I don’t mean like wine does you different from whiskey. It wasn’t subtle. The first time you do it, you might find yourself hearing organ music for five hours, overcome on your sister’s couch by wave after wave of gasm shivers, and the next time you dose, you’re in the bathroom berating your own crushed-looking penis, getting angrier and angrier at how it wears a monocle and talks in a bullshit Irish accent—but if you took another tab you might totally change your outlook and become lifelong friends with that same penis all of a sudden.

Tonight it started with two-dimensional stuff. No problem. I could handle that. On the trail to the entrance, I unloaded some of my internal thoughts because I knew we couldn’t talk inside. It was a big rule. Everyone said I talked too much, which I guess was true, but when I was quiet they always asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t win, so I tried to do what came most natural, which, nothing really came natural.