The Silent History: A Novel (19 page)

“Four of them went in,” I said. I do this thing where it’s like I’m a voiceover for a movie. “But none of them came out. They thought they were there to celebrate freedom. They thought the silents would be friendly and harmless. But they were wrong. Dead wrong.”

It was my way of saying I’m nervous.

“I will pay you to shut up,” Bert said.

“One of them offered to pay the other to shut up,” I said. “But that offer was declined.”

Carrie interrupted by exclaiming how excited she was. She loved her some silents. “They’re going to teach us so much!” she said.

“Like what? About what?” I asked, but Carrie was on a solo trip. I always pressed people when they got all lathered about face-talking. It was so amazing, like our truest essence making sweet love to someone else’s true essence! Then why couldn’t I learn it? Why couldn’t I at least say hello? I thought the silents were fine, just shelled-up and sort of churchy-acting. I also didn’t like the followers, who were these sun-dried turbohippies.

This new Grove, compared to the days when friends and I would hang there and smoke cigarettes and pretend we worshipped the devil, was unrecognizable. It was dim under the huge trees, but I could see as far back as the buildings where we used to paint pentagrams and bring roasted chickens to scatter the bones like offerings to Lucifer. The cabins sparkled with new lacquer, the trim had been repainted, roofs reshingled. They appeared to be candlelit from within.

Once the fireworks started, I had all three dimensions back, but there was a whistling, like a steaming kettle, and I felt like pretty soon I might need to ice-pick my own knees. I put my hands over my ears, but it wouldn’t stop. Then I saw how many people were gathered—the whole town, it seemed—and the whistling got all train tunnel. We were mixed together, silents and not. No one spoke, but there was a weird energy. It might’ve been the Nox, but I sensed something would happen here, either very good or very bad. My internal sound track was going haywire as I scanned faces in the flickering light, just loose words zip-zapping around in my head:
fungible lezzie hat-trick noodles beehive
. I knew I was going to scream out “Origami sandwich meat!” if something didn’t happen really soon. What were we waiting for? I couldn’t see Carrie and the others anywhere—they were either hiding or, most likely, dead.

To my left, a silent girl, maybe nineteen, looked at me. I stared back. She was probably testing me, seeing if I’d look away, and then she would trank me and drag me out to the deep woods and steal my eyes. This was my thinking at the time. I gave her a sort of a snarl-slash-scowl, but she didn’t look away. Then I fake-smiled. And she real-smiled. And then I frowned and she did, too. And I thought, Great. Mirrors. I was so misted I just kept eyes on her for I don’t know how long, and then the whistling stopped and I was no longer paranoid, I wasn’t thinking a damn thing. I felt like I’d come out of the cold. Like, being allowed to stare at this girl, for more than a minute, and not having to explain myself or challenge her or listen to that whistling or that voice, my voice. It released some vital heat.

They split us up. Two silents accompanied me and some others to a cabin with a yellow-and-red bar above the door and showed me my bed. I wanted to tell them I’d only be staying for two hours, so I held up two fingers and pointed to myself, but how was I going to tell them hours? What did an hour mean to them? They probably thought I was telling them peace out.

That night the silent girl from the staring thing came and visited me. I couldn’t sleep because the Nox was still live, so I looked at the ceiling, remembering all the stupid stuff I used to do. Painting my fingernails, burning shapes in my arm with a hot coat hanger, acting Austrian, peacocking. The girl quietly came up onto my bed and sort of overwhelmed me. Helped me with my clothes and did everything. I didn’t mind, no. It happened to others in our cabin, too, men and women both. A few hours later, she came back, at least I thought it was her. But when we were face-to-face, I saw it was a different girl. She was more aggressive—she stared at me so hard while on top of me—and I felt weird afterward, like I’d been milked.

I’d planned to stop by for a few hours. I ended up staying three months. The girls didn’t visit every night, but they visited a lot. Without someone to talk to about how strange it was, it stopped being strange. I was tired all the time—there was alcohol but no uppers, or at least no one offered them. I watched people come for a few days and leave. One of my favorite things was the plays. The first time, I followed a crowd to the outdoor amphitheater. I didn’t know what was going on, but I got drafted into it. Things there just sort of happened. Inside these boxes of Halloween clothes I found a Roman gladiator’s costume. A dozen of us went out onstage, and the rest, silents, followers, townspeople, were in the audience. What was the play about? I have no idea. I walked over a bridge and came upon some lovers, and I pulled out my sword to attack them. Just as I did, a guy in a lion costume jumped on me and I fell to the ground. The audience clapped.

You probably think I stayed for the night visits, but that wasn’t it. I liked the vibe there. I helped dig irrigation ditches, spread compost, danced, meditated, made chili for two hundred people. I wore commune clothes: white T-shirt and a pair of starched slacks. Three times a day, during group silence sessions, I’d seek out someone I’d never met and I’d stare until everything died away. The thoughts, the voice, the desire to join the two. I’d arrived somewhere clear.

Three months later, once I was back in Monte Rio, I didn’t want to do anything. I especially didn’t want to go back to the Elephant. But I did. My friends were always there, every night. Turns out they never even made it into the commune. They said I was creeping them out, so they wandered around the woods, then went home. I tried to explain what it was like—I left out the night visits—but it didn’t translate. They said I was brainwashed. Fine. Sometimes, Bert or someone would come sit next to me, and, where I used to say, “You’re higher than a skyscraper,” now I just sat there and stared. And if Bert really was high, he’d stare too. We’d stay like that for a long time.

FRANCINE CHANG

MONTE RIO, CA

2029

It was at one of the Thursday bonfires—late, too late. I should’ve been asleep. Thing is, I was going a little crazy in my cabin among the redwoods. I hadn’t spoken in six days, unless you count mumbling nursery rhymes in the shower. I had no books, nothing to distract me from my own puckered brain. So I and about seventy-five others sat on giant stumps around the fire. I was next to Dane and Michael, who I’d known since I’d taught them in second grade. We passed around a bottle of Denizen Red, from the first batch we made here on-site. It tasted like grape hand soap. Nobody talked, but, drunker and drunker, I became aware of a certain collective vibration. The silents mingled among the newcomers, people who came in RVs and rentals from all over the place. Followers, nervous and giddy. The silents opened bottles of wine and poured it into any glass that was empty, and then they’d engage the person until he or she realized this meant to drink deep from the glass. I was reminded of college, those post-soccer-game parties—the bonfire had that kind of atmosphere. A power structure, a tacit hierarchy. I saw it with Michael and Dane, so nervous and aloof when they came to my class. But the way the two of them studied me now, then each other—I felt naked, prehistoric. I had the distinct feeling that they could read every past regret, every current delusion, and that they were peeking into my future and judging me unfondly.

By midnight people had started to pair up and leave. Just making eye contact, communicating intensely for a moment, and then walking off hand in hand. It was so simple, so overt. Dane stared into the bonfire and I followed his gaze and saw that it was Patti he was looking at. Aggressively peaceful berobed way-older-than-him Patti. Fire shadows moved across Dane’s face as he communicated something pretty easy to decipher—a roll of the lips and lowering of the eyelids. Patti made a face that I still can’t banish from my mind. Like a cross-eyed monkey getting ready to bite. Soon the two of them were headed toward the empty woods.

Yes, I was surprised. It looked consensual, but the ease with which they exchanged intentions—a look, another look, boom. It wasn’t supposed to be that easy.

I didn’t have much time to dwell on it, because someone seemed to have placed his hand on my sweaty thigh. I looked over, and there was Michael looking not at all beseeching or persuasive but … proprietary. Michael, who wore pull-up diapers in the second grade. Who drew lightning bolts on his folders and ate Cheese Nips he found on the floor and was scared of Slim, the class gerbil. He slid his hand back and forth on my thigh, and I caught myself thinking, Is that what all this has come to? All this work? I shook my head, roughly picked up his hand, set it back on the stump, and broke my six-day silence to tell him no.

In class, late from lunch, he would’ve given a contrite frown. I was expecting something similar at the bonfire, but I sure as hell didn’t get it. He shrugged as if to say, “Your loss,” and walked over to a pair of women at least twice his age—they looked like fat storks—and soon the three of them were walking off together. Unbelievable.

The next morning, after meditation, I did the earlobe-tugging thing to Patti, which meant I needed to talk. She touched her lips twice, which meant that in a little while I should check the compost heap behind the cafeteria. It was one of the places she left me notes. No, not on top of the compost where I could find it, but elbow-deep under gnawed apples and shrimp peels and beet greens. The note was scribbled on the top flap of an orzo bag. Directions, address, time to meet. I imagine she wanted me to eat the note afterward, or shred it into tiny pieces and set them on fire. How else did she think we were going to navigate logistics like fire-code compliance and mayonnaise invoices without talking every once in a while?

We met at the Rio Theater, a converted Quonset hut, which was showing something called
Up in Flames
. Patti was slumped in the front corner, right next to the speakers, and I sat next to her.

She said she felt bad about the thing with Dane but it happened organically. She’d been to enough intentional communities to know that this kind of thing happened early on, but something something something. The movie had started and I couldn’t really hear what Patti was saying, no matter how far I leaned in. Guys in black leather rode motorcycles through a crowded plaza, and there was a lot of slo-mo of people getting flung into the air. I found myself transfixed by it and only caught snippets from Patti, like “expressing their loving natures” and “emotional connectivity.”

“We can’t just do nothing,” I said. “They need some kind of guidance, or a task. They’re starting to act like royalty, like entitled bullies. I mean, I’m not anti-sex. I’m anti…” Just then the motorcycle jumped a fountain, and the rider landed on the second floor of a building. “Anti-this,” I finished.

Patti mumbled something. I leaned in closer and she mumbled it again.

“Speak up!” I yelled, and she said, “It’s all part of the plan.”

I’ll spare you the verbatim conversation. Fast-forward past five minutes of on-screen kidnappings and stabbings through confessional lattice and Patti saying stuff like “facilitating their desires” and “promoting physical connectivity.” Turns out, for the past few weeks Patti had been dosing the morning tea ceremony with yellow wolfsbane, an herbal “libido enhancer.” She said she was just trying to get talkers past that “final hurdle,” the walls erected by society and socialization and all that.

“Sometimes people need help submitting to the natural order,” she said. “Evolution is a party, and we’re all invited.”

Everyone but me, apparently. I stood and walked out of the theater. And once I left the Quonset, I just kept on going—back to the Grove, filling a suitcase, then out to the car. Flora came up to me as I was going, held my shoulders, and regarded me with a look of precise concern and solicitude and sympathy—and I couldn’t meet it with anything but brittle frustration. I ran back to my car, stumbling on roots and rocks.

Driving back to Oakland, I replayed our conversation again and again, stoking my righteous outrage. I missed my students, the pliant, docile kids who I stewarded at Oaks by doing nothing at all. By watching. I wanted that back. I wanted to care for them without complication. I guess I thought that Face-to-Face would be the perfect site for this—like summer camp, all of us frozen in time.

Before I got home my outrage had turned to regret, like always, and there was a letter on my door dated two months ago saying that the sewers had backed up and there was a likelihood that my bathroom was flooded with my neighbors’ “evacuations.” I unlocked the door, opened it, and waited for the smell to come to me.

NANCY JERNIK

BROOKLYN, NY

2029

Ron left but he didn’t leave me. I mean, he thought I was insane. He thought it was repulsive, you know, that I was going to go sit in the dirt in front of an abandoned warehouse in the shadiest part of a city I didn’t even know. He called it an extreme measure. How is sitting an extreme measure? I was going to sit out there and wait for Spencer to take me back. And if he never took me back, at least I would be as close to him as possible. Even if I died out there. The birds would come and pick at my bones, and I’d be closer to Spencer than I had been for the last twenty years. I said all of this to Ron that night in the motel, and he nodded and thought about it and said I needed to go on this journey. He couldn’t go with me, but he would support me from a distance. Some people might think that’s cold, but I saw it as incredibly loving. Like, somehow that night all of the longing we both had for Spencer got transferred to me. Holding vigil for Spencer was suddenly my duty, and we both recognized it.

At the time, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure of my motives. Was I trying to prove something to Ron? Or was I just trying to, I don’t know, generate some kind of inspirational anecdote that I could one day tell to a reporter on Bloomberg, about how I put everything aside to get my son back? I think my initial decision to go on the stakeout had elements of all of those. But in the end I just felt like something was happening inside that I couldn’t ignore any longer. If I went back to New Jersey without Spencer—I mean, nothing there seemed to matter anymore. I couldn’t think of a good reason to go back to that life. So the next morning I said goodbye to Ron, bought some meal bars at one of those Korean convenience stores, and took a cab out to the warehouse. And that was the last money I spent for a long, long time.