The Silent History: A Novel (16 page)

I stood in the hallway watching Flora. The heartburn was killing me, but I didn’t want to move. I
couldn’t
move. I had an urge to go in and shut down the feed. Like the news was a kind of poison floating through the air, and she was inhaling it just by sitting there. I didn’t know what those kids on the beach were doing, but I had this sense that it was something I needed to protect her from. What kept me from just going over there and shutting it off? Well, I had this other notion that if I took it away from her, she’d just be more curious. It would instantly become a thing. I’d just give it power by trying to hide it, so I just stood there—what do you call the thing when you can’t make up your mind? I stood there doing that, looking at her, wondering what to do next. And in that light, I could see that she wasn’t a young kid anymore—that sounds, I know, like one of those things a parent says, or maybe not even a real parent but one in a movie, but you do really have these moments when you look at your kid and you think, Oh my God, this is happening so fast. So much has already slipped away. I had to face the fact that she was sixteen years old, fully capable of going across the country if she really tried. And that opened up a whole new kind of fear for me.

Mincing. That’s the word. I was mincing, is what I was. Just standing there like an idiot. I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I had to pick a direction. I decided that shutting off the feed was worth the consequences. I went in and said, “You need to get your sleep, sweets,” and I turned the thing off. I tried to make it not about the feed itself, the content of the feed. I just wanted her to get her rest. But I was sort of trembling as I swiped the power bar. And when the feed was shut it was pitch black, but I could tell that she knew I was cutting her off. I could sense it in the way she stood up and went to her room.

The next morning we went through our customary ritual—she had graduated that spring, but Oaks had brought her back as a sort of teacher’s aide. I packed her lunch in the thermal bag she brought to school every day. I put the boxes of cereal out for her to choose from. I sat at the kitchen table and waited, and she came in at the normal time. She picked the yogurt-drizzled Os. I put them in a bowl for her and filled a little pitcher with milk, and she sat down at the table and we ate. To me, it was like every movement had a weight to it. I felt like I was in quicksand. But she seemed unaffected. It was as if we hadn’t even seen each other in the night. Maybe she had been sleepwalking or something, was what I started to think, because she just didn’t seem any different. I started to loosen up and feel a little better about things. She was a smart girl. She could handle seeing those kids on the beach. They were kids like her, so of course she’d be interested in what they were doing—but that didn’t mean she was going to go out to New York and throw her life away. Right? I felt kind of foolish for the reaction I’d had in the night, because she had everything going for her at the school. Those students she worked with were her life. She was just going to walk away from all that? I was a little embarrassed, actually, for even thinking about her running off to join a cult or something.

We got in the car and the news was on. I always had the news running in the car, just so she could have more practice hearing words. But, of course, that morning they were talking about Coney Island. The woman on the news said that there were over a thousand silent kids on the beach. They’d stayed overnight, which was illegal, but there were too many of them to drag off, so the cops just kept an eye on them. More and more kids kept showing up throughout the night, apparently, and no one really knew how they were getting there or what they were going to do. I sat in the driver’s seat, listening with my hands on the steering wheel, and for the first time I found myself hoping that she really couldn’t understand a single word. I started to have a mini–panic attack, because, suddenly, this thing I was trying so hard to drill into her brain, suddenly I didn’t want it there at all. Not this way. I didn’t want her to start understanding words just in time to hear about these vagrant kids and their big sleepover or whatever it was. I looked over at Flora and she was just looking out the window at the houses. Just like the day before. She wasn’t getting any of it. I could tell the words meant nothing to her. The news report was just another sound to her, some strange boring music that her dad made her listen to on the way to school.

I led her to the primary classroom and gave her three hugs plus one bonus hug, which was what we did at the beginning of every day. I watched her go into the class and pick out a carpet square, and all of the little kids came up to her to see what the morning work would be. Outside in the hallway there were a couple parents talking about the Coney Island thing. Fred Prior said his cousin had a silent child who had run away to go there. He didn’t have any real information, though. His cousin was just as surprised and confused by the whole thing as we were. The kid was just gone, apparently, and then they saw him in some footage of the crowds. Sejal Pranesh was like, “Your cousin didn’t go and fetch him out of there?” And Fred Prior shrugged. Carolyn Crosby said, “Honestly, where are the parents in all of this?” We were all supposed to feel pity for the parents of the kids at the beach. The implication was that we knew how to raise our kids, and those other parents didn’t. It felt comforting to frame it that way. It was convenient. But while we kept talking in the hallway there, I found my attention drifting again and again to the classroom, where Flora was kneeling in front of those kids, rolling sand dough in her hands, and I felt my sense of satisfaction evaporate into the air.

DAVID DIETRICH

BROOKLYN, NY

2027

As soon as I saw the gathering on the news, I took a thirty-six-hour bus ride to Penn Station and the subway to Coney Island. I didn’t know how to work the transfers, so a woman in tight orange shorts traced my route for me on a map and I ended up sitting by her. She was going there, too. She had a face like this papier-mâché American cockroach I made in seventh-grade art class—we were supposed to come up with an animal to represent some ideal. Mine was survival. The reason the woman was going to Coney Island was to study silents—she was doing some research about them. I kept snipping off strands of things I wanted to say to her. I do this chant that helps when I feel like I’m about to start talking a lot to someone I probably hate—it goes,
Nothing in common but arms, nothing in common but legs
—but the woman, even though some college probably paid her actual money to study silents, was getting it all wrong. For starters, she said that they were assembling on the beach as a display of solidarity. She called it the silents’ “imperative moment.”

A pair of kids in the seat next to us were playing with one of those stupid-ass sound wands, using it to make death rattles. I said to the woman, “I don’t think that’s what they’re doing. It’s not for you. Or me. It’s for them. They have this living … thing inside, and now they’re using it. Have you ever held a gun? It’s like a gun.”

I’d said probably two words up until now to her, so she was staring at me with her mouth wide open. She really did look like that cockroach—like she wanted a mother cockroach to come lay eggs in her mouth. I turned my lips down and shrugged my eyelids. It was my sorry face, but she didn’t understand.

I said, “I study them too.”

She pulled out a Catena and started scribbling in it, and she didn’t look up again.

Make a rule, make an arbitrary rule for yourself. Now stick to it.
That’s from the impulse-mastery chapter on my
Body-Free Mind
recording.

I had a rotten mind-set when the train let us out at Coney Island. Thinking about how I either say two words to people or two hundred—it’s never forty-four, or seventy-one. And how I act like I’ve achieved impulse mastery but I go right on breaking every rule I make for myself: no more beef-and-cheddar tub dinners from Captain Hat’s, no more fapping to silent-porn sites—which were all fake and total boner-wilters anyway—no more pretending, no closing my eyes and picturing me playing upside-down drums on the song I’m listening to, no imagining myself being reborn as a silent. I broke them all.

I was so fogged I didn’t notice the beach right away. At the back of my mind I was thinking it would probably be over by the time I got there, that’s how it usually worked—but it wasn’t over. The beach was shoulder-to-shoulder silents. Some vendors had shown up and walked around yelling about tank tops and lemon ices and dissolvable tattoos. And a group of sweaty protesters, some carrying homemade signs, some chanting things like “Speak up” and “We can’t hear you.” And plenty of gawkers, standing high up on the boardwalk, which was littered with rotting junk that people were too lazy to push into the ocean. But the real activity was down on the sand. I can’t say how many there were, maybe ten thousand. I stood there watching them for so long I lost track of my body—it felt like the sight of them was slowly hollowing me out, getting me ready. What I wanted, what I thought, what I did—none of it mattered. Because here they were. I kept waiting for them to do something. To fight. To scream. But nothing. I wanted to be with them so bad, I bit the inside of my cheek every time I was tempted to run down and join them. But I wasn’t going to ruin their gathering. Down there things were airtight, sacred. And, as I stared into the sea of them, I knew why I’d come. I was here to prove I could be around the biggest group of them ever without lurching out or clinging. I could protect them and make sure nobody did anything stupid. Starting with me.

But the first girl I saw, the
very first girl
, turned around a few seconds after I started staring at her. She did that upper-cheek wriggle that silent girls do that makes me want to pray and make promises. My first urge was to do my politely longing face, but I refrained. Today was their day. They didn’t need me sidling up to them and ogling them.

It’s just skin
, I whispered to myself.
It’s just tissues and muscle
.

Nothing ever works. I didn’t last twenty minutes. I was going crazy. I looked at the ocean, which nobody was swimming in—there were huge signs posted with pictures of babies dissolving in the surf—and admired its calmness. I decided I’d go out to the end of the rotting pier and dive in. I would put a natural barrier between me and them, and master my impulses from there. I hid my bag behind a pile of discarded extension cords, took off my shirt, and dove into the low surf. Goddamn, it was cold. It was an all-over sting. But I got used to it. I can get used to almost anything. To warm myself, I swam parallel to the shore and then found a sandbar that I could sit cross-legged on, with just my head exposed. The water wasn’t bad if I stayed low. Baggies floated by, some plastic chew toys, other trash. This was when I heard the men talking. They must’ve been about fifty yards away, but their voices carried clear across the water. Four griefers in this swan-bird paddleboat rigged with dull black megaphone-looking things. I floated closer, just my eyes and ears and nose above water, and listened to them planning their plans—something about a sound gun, something about “enforced conversation,” something about “giving the silents something to talk about.” “Bowel-loosening decibels of pure noise.” I heard all of it.

I waited for hours, it felt like. I turned into a prune while the crowd of silents continued to grow. I sat motionless, the waves slapping my cheeks.

At the beach, the crowd swelled and contracted, like a giant breathing animal. I tried to imagine all the little transfers between them, all the exchanges of happiness. I felt shivers. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I was also very very cold.

But inside, I felt good. I felt in control. The paddleboat started heading toward the beach, and I followed, simple as a machine. I swam faster than the boat, underwater the whole time except quick guppy breaths, and waited right underneath, in a hidden den made by the bird’s plastic tail feathers.

“Wait for the signal,” one of the men in the boats said. “Then we’ll shock these fuckers out of their happy fog.”

With all the force I could muster I pushed on the boat. It didn’t tip over easily, and the four guys tried to paddle away, but I swam faster. I caught up to it, gripped on to the side, and used all my weight to capsize it. I swear I could hear all the speakers zip-zapping and shorting out. A guy from the boat came swimming at me with flailing arms, hitting me again and again, and I was unconscious for the rest, but I guess the silents were watching everything happen and a bunch of them swam out and saved me.

When I came to, I was lying in an ambulance parked on the boardwalk. An oily-looking paramedic was testing my vitals, asking me the most irrelevant questions, just talking, talking. The sirens turned on and the beach stayed behind.

PALMER CARLYLE

HOBOKEN, NJ

2027

I was at the Book Bash in Dyker Heights browsing the clearance bins when Tate called me to the beach for crowd control. Book Bash was selling off all of its physical inventory, and there were still some treasures to be found, like a London Magazine Editions print of Bukowski’s
Life & Death in the Charity Ward
, fine condition in a near-fine dust jacket. I bought it for a dollar, and I challenge you to find a copy in similar condition for less than two hundred. Thing was just sitting in the bin, waiting for the chipper. I was at the register paying for a bunch of books, when Tate called all the patrolmen over to Luna Park. Apparently the mayor was getting nervous. Someone’d estimated over three thousand kids on the beach, and it didn’t look like they were going anywhere. Everyone was waiting for some sort of demands, but no demands were coming, which made everyone even more uncomfortable. I asked Tate how he thought these kids were supposed to
deliver
their demands, but he just told me to hang my dick on a hat stand and get over there.

The bookstore clerk said, “Mutetards getting out of hand?” and I told him all due respect, I didn’t like him using that term, and by the way, I’d just bought about seven hundred dollars’ worth of books from him, including a fair copy of the original Ace edition of Burroughs’s
Junkie
, for twenty bucks, fuck you very much.