The Silent History: A Novel (47 page)

I asked him questions, tried to prompt him to say something. What’s your first memory, tell me three things not many people know about you—things like that. I even tried to talk to him in his gibberish language from the Elephant: “Big frozen holes tall neck undertaker?” Nothing.

Suddenly he began banging on the window. I looked out his side and saw trees, a mailbox, the old side entrance to the Bohemian Grove, more trees. “What’s out there, Bug? You see a deer?” He turned to me, eyes wide, and pointed forcefully toward the rusty gate. “You want to go to the Grove?”

Bug’s mouth opened and closed, and he gestured again towards the window.

“There’s nothing there anymore, buddy. Believe me. It’s all gutted and gone.”

He coughed violently, trying to get something, anything, to come out. I turned in my seat and saw tears streaming down his cheeks. “Terrance, listen, everything’s going to be fine. We’re just getting you somewhere safe.”

He swallowed, exhaled, breathed deep, and formed his hands together in a ball. I poked at the stereo, trying to find some sort of distraction, and landed on a show where you give them ingredients and they tell you what to make for dinner. By the time the first meal was finished, spaghetti with beans, Bug had given up trying to articulate anything. He lowered his head and held it in his hands and stayed that way until we pulled up outside the emergency room.

Inside, I asked for Dr. Shaw, who I’d worked with on the implant drive years ago. He came out of his office looking ragged. I started to explain what was going on, and the doctor looked at Bug, then at me, and cut me off. He said, “We have a problem.”

AUGUST BURNHAM

CHICAGO, IL

2040

They were gone by the time I got to the hotel. Ms. Chang and Ms. Kern were there, sitting on the couch, looking tired but strangely amused, and there was a paramedic wrapping Mr. Greene’s forehead in gauze, but the others—the family, including the boy, and Calvin—had disappeared. An officer informed me that the mother, Ms. Jernik, was the last to see them, and that she was in police custody but wouldn’t respond to their questions. I’d flown all the way out there to study the boy, so of course I was frustrated and disappointed that he was gone. I was also extremely concerned about Calvin. It’s a mystery to me how he ended up in the company of these implant resisters, who must be taking advantage of his disoriented state. They also stole the calibration helmet, which is puzzling—I’d certainly like to look through the logs to see how it’s been used since Calvin saved it from the explosion of the PhonCom facility, but I’m much more concerned about his safety.

I asked to see Ms. Jernik myself—I thought I could take a gentler approach, explain to her the nature and importance of our research. They brought her back to the hotel. She was a frail old woman with hair like tarnished silver and a curious look on her face. I took her into one of the bedrooms and sat her down in the recliner. “Is there any reason in particular you don’t want to tell us where your family is?” I asked. “Do you think they’re in trouble? Do you think we’re going to hurt them?” She studied me intently as I talked, but wouldn’t respond. “If I assure you they won’t be harmed in any way, would that persuade you to tell me where they are?” Again, she didn’t say a word. Just scanned my face. There was no acknowledgment on her part that she understood anything I was saying. I thought possibly she’d suffered a head injury in the process of helping her family escape, or that she was on some sort of medication.

The portable MRI didn’t pick up any sign of trauma, and the urine test was negative for intoxication. I asked her if she’d agree to a blood test, and while she didn’t verbally consent she willingly put her arm out when she saw the needle. I ran the sample through the hemo scanner and everything came up normal—except for a spike indicating active EPR antibodies. Which, of course, was surprising, to say the least. We drew a new sample and ran the test again and got the same results. It didn’t make sense to me, but there it was: she was infected with the EPR virus. We did a PET scan and confirmed that her brain activity was nearly identical to that of a typical phasic-resistant patient. Just like her son, I presumed. Just like her grandson.

Of course, Ms. Jernik’s status as my Patient Zero was short-lived—there were cases emerging all over the country at just that moment, and we soon began connecting the dots. The progression of symptoms varies—some patients first lose their ability to process language, others can understand speech but are unable to produce meaningful phrases, still others can speak individual words but have no sense of grammar. In some cases, the total loss of language skills happens within a week, and with others it can take a month or more. But the basic facts soon became clear: the virus—previously a prenatal risk only—had mutated and broken loose. It was contagious, and it appeared to be airborne.

We’re still trying to understand exactly how this might have happened. The initial source of the mutation had to be the carriers, the silents, and so I instantly focused on the PhonCom meltdown, which had affected all implanted silents. The symmetry of Dietrich’s attacks—the onset of the worm and the physical destruction of the facility—appear to have conveyed a small surge of electromagnetic radiation through the implants as they shorted out. This pulse, we now believe, stimulated the mutation in the virus, drastically altering its means of transmission. Whether this was an unexpected side effect of the suicide bombing or, in fact, Dietrich’s actual intention is still unclear, although the possibility that it’s some sort of cosmic coincidence diminishes with each new piece of evidence the authorities uncover.

By the time we understood even this much, it was too late to quarantine or control the virus in any meaningful way. The implanted silents are so widespread, both geographically and demographically, that almost the entire population, at least in this country, was exposed during that first week post-explosion. An early survey appears to confirm that roughly seventy percent of the subjects tested are now positive for the virus. The blessing, if you can call it that, is that in the vast majority of cases the virus appears content to remain asymptomatic, almost dormant—at least for the moment. We have made no progress in determining what prompts its onset. Currently only a small portion of the carriers are displaying symptoms of linguistic deficiency. How long that will last, we have no idea.

I spent several days with Ms. Jernik, studying her condition as reports of new cases continued to roll in. She did not seem to be terribly bothered by her absence of language. I gathered from reports by the other talkers who lived with her in the silo that she rarely spoke even when she could. That she saw talking as almost a vulgar act, never to be performed in the presence of her son. She now appeared to be almost content, even amused. I found it difficult to maintain a clinical distance from this woman who seemed so blithely accepting of a condition that will cripple her for life. I was consumed by the urge to reach across the table and shake her awake. It’s one thing to be born without access to the realm of language, but it’s quite another to be robbed of it. And for an entire civilization to retreat into this lonely and isolated space—a lifetime of solitary confinement … it’s not something I can tolerate.

I am not a virologist, and I concede that I’m out of my depths on the work I’m now doing to map the neurological progression of the virus. But we
all
must contribute in any way we can, and we must do it immediately. When all of the men and women who are capable of fighting this virus are silenced, when our access to the great pool of knowledge is shut off, where will we be then?
What
will we be? How will we be able to go on living in communities, as nations? Can we then really consider ourselves human? I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want to know. But we cannot deny the reality of our circumstances, and preparations must be made. Like so many others, I too have tested positive for the virus. I too have no idea when the curtains will be drawn. Which is why I am attempting to translate Weise’s
Encyclopedia of Microbiology and Virology
from words into simple pictographs that I believe I’ll still be able to parse after the virus takes its toll, if and when that day arrives. It is a painstaking process, to be sure—I am currently only halfway through the introduction—but my own loss of language cannot be the end of my fight for a cure. Even if I can no longer benefit from that cure—even if I’m only fighting for some distant reader of this history. If we lose this, we lose everything.

KENULE MITEE

LAGOS, NIGERIA

2041

Akintunde was born so quickly—we barely made it to Columbia Presbyterian in time. Isoke went right up on the delivery bed and got on all fours, and she pushed the baby out before the doctor had even arrived. The nurses were very impressed. They weighed and washed Akintunde and wrapped him in a blanket. Isoke and I lay in the bed with the baby between us, and it was, just as they say, an experience like nothing else in the world.

We were alone for a very long time. After an hour nobody had come to check on us, so I went out to find something for Isoke to eat. The whole ward was quiet. There was just one young woman at the reception desk, who would not look up from her screen as she pointed me in the direction of the vending machines. I went down the hall and saw on the other side of the glass doors a big throng of people. There was a man in a red jacket who shouted through a megaphone at the crowd. He was saying, again and again, “This is not a medical emergency. Please return to your homes. This is not an emergency.” I went back to the receptionist to ask what was going on, and she told me about the virus. She was surprised I hadn’t heard the news. I returned to Isoke with a tray of buffalo stackers and tried to pretend there was nothing out of the ordinary, but she could see right away that something was up.

We were released two days later, and things had calmed down a bit. Truthfully, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the outside world, because I was so taken with my boy that nothing else mattered to me. That first month went by in a blur of dissolvable diapers and nutrient bricks. And then my brother called with the news of my father. I had just nodded off in the bedside chair next to Akintunde’s crib, where the boy lay exhausted after hours of twisting and screeching in the heat. The buzzing of the phone shook me from my dream and woke Akintunde, who started screaming again immediately, as if he had never stopped. I could hardly hear my brother through all the noise as he told me that our father was coming down with the silence. They’d just been in to Lagos to see the doctor, and he said that our father had maybe a week left to talk. Isoke took the boy into our bed to feed him while I looked at flights. I had not seen my father since I left home. We had not parted on good terms. He’d wanted me to help him run the women’s clothing store he’d built from nothing, and he begged me to stay. He said, “Kenule, I have such a bad feeling about this. I fear that you are going to fail in America.” He did not attempt to hide his disgust at my proposition, and I hated him for saying it. These words my father put on me were like poison running wild in my blood. But they were also the thing that kept me going. Without those words, I would not have my own business, my home. I would not have Isoke in my life. I felt the need to tell this to my father. While he could still understand me.

Forty-eight hours later we were in my brother’s car, slowly coasting out of Lagos in a sea of vehicles. In Manhattan you could see people everywhere who were worried about the virus. In the airport some workers were wearing those surgical face masks. The man behind me in line for the pretzel hammer was reading straight from a dictionary, trying to cram his brain with words, as if this might help him. His son held a ticker to count how many adjectives he was using. But in Lagos, nobody seemed very concerned. It was still the city as I remembered it. Jam-packed, filthy, but pulsing with energy. I asked my brother about why nobody seemed worried, and he shrugged. “Those who are worried have enough money to hide from the rest of us,” he said. “And we are used to it anyway. Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Fulfulde—half the time we are communicating without words already.”

We pulled into my father’s house at dusk. My brother’s wife, who I’d never met, came out to embrace us all. She took Akintunde and held him high in the air, and the boy calmed down immediately, even after the hell he’d been through in getting there. Isoke looked amazed and relieved. We went inside and there was my father, sitting in a recliner in the center of the living room, with all of my family around him like a portrait by one of the great painters. I approached him cautiously. Through all the chaos of the travel arrangements, I had not prepared myself for our actual meeting. I kept trying to rehearse something in my head, but Akintunde’s ever-present needs always won out in the battle for my attention. So there I was, standing like a little boy in front of my father, who stared at me with a curious look on his face. You know how sometimes a person you know will make an expression you’ve never seen before, and it is as if, just for a split second, you are looking at a stranger? That was what it was like. He opened his mouth to say something, but all that emerged was a soft tone. A single note, almost musical. He turned away from me, as if he was ashamed to have made the sound. Nobody in the room had to tell me that it was too late. That it had already taken hold of him.

And yet this did not stop me from kneeling at his side, taking his hand, and telling him that I had returned to him as a successful man. I told him about my business, about how I had built it up from a single, broken-down cart to an entire fleet. My brother put his hand on my shoulder to try to get my attention, but I did not stop. I kept talking to my father, going on like an idiot about all of my accomplishments. My brother shook me again, and I looked into my father’s eyes. They were like the eyes of a rabbit that’s just been snared in a trap. Terrified and bewildered, darting back and forth from me to the rest of the room and back. He was backed up into his chair as if I was threatening him with a knife.