The Silent History: A Novel (22 page)

When I realized what I had to do, it was like I couldn’t believe my good fortune. This situation called for the exact kind of techniques I’d been training for. Deep Mind Persuasion is all about moving beyond the antiquated notions of products and services and into the practice of pure insinuation and seduction. Convincing another person to do something using only the power of your own presence—that’s really the vanguard strategy for anyone who wants to do more than tread water these days. So I saw the standoff as a perfect way to test out my skills in a real-world scenario. We return to the Bronze Age in Deep Mind Persuasion training because of its dead-simple commerce model. You have to go back to basics if you’re going to learn anything new. So now I was ready—I was going to go there and convince the cops that the standoff was a waste of their time. It was going to be tricky but totally worth a try, from a risk-reward perspective.

On the first night of IPI training the tribe leader binds your hands with leather straps and leads you down an unlit trail. All around you are the sounds of guys howling in pain. All you can smell is pine sap and burning meat. You have no idea what’s about to happen to you. You’ve got to stay in Deep Mind or you’ll go nuts. Persuasion begins with the self. If you can get yourself to believe something that isn’t true, it’s a snap to get someone else to believe something. So I convinced myself that I was going into a business meeting. This was a sales pitch. The cops were the investors and Isabella was the capital.

It was dark when I got to the warehouse. You could feel something in the air, like something big was going down. There were a couple of city cops at the outer perimeter of the place, and they stopped me when I tried to get around the Jersey barriers they’d put up. I handed them my ID and the cops read it in the light of the flares that they were shooting in high arcs over the warehouse. They were like, “Go away,” and I said, “I’ve got a better proposition. What if
you
go away, go home to your families, and I’ll take care of this?” They seemed amused, but not in a good way. Which was fine. My father always said, “Fail faster,” meaning that every failure is just an opportunity to come back stronger the second time. I was brewing up an alternate approach when we heard someone scream. The flares revealed the heads of a bunch of kids peeking over the, what do you call it, lip or edge of the roof. There were two SWAT guys down below aiming these weird rectangular guns up at the kids. One of the guns had wires extending up from its nozzle to the rooftop. Later I found out that they were some kind of long-range Taser, those guns. I was just standing there with the cops, watching all of this, when the kids suddenly chucked something over the edge of the roof. A big chunk of something—it looked like a paper lantern—that sailed down in a slow curving path and hit the hood of a black truck that was parked by the entrance. The thing barely made a sound on impact, but a few seconds later the guy who was sitting inside the truck started shouting. He jumped out, and you could just barely see this cloud surrounding him, almost swallowing him. He was swatting at his face and chest, and someone shouted, “Bees!” It was an entire beehive those kids had dropped. The officer went down and flailed on the ground. The cop holding my ID tossed it at me and started sprinting toward the guy who’d gone down. A paramedic knelt in front of the guy and jammed an EpiPen in his leg while a whole bunch of cops and EMTs and other people wearing black outfits and masks rushed the building. There was a cluster of gunfire and I saw the white contrail from a gas grenade launcher go right up in through the top window.

Everything happened quickly after that. I picked up my ID and started running toward the entrance. I was about halfway there when I heard an engine start up. A big, low, growling engine, like from a tank, which was basically what the thing was that they started driving toward the doors of the warehouse. I ran as fast as I could, trying to catch up. The tank had a low profile, bigger in front than in the back, which was part of what made it so terrifying. It was about the same size and shape as the animatronic mammoths that wandered through the woods in the training sessions, so in my mind I just transposed the thing into one of those mammoths. That was my focus point, my Mind Metaphor. I charged the beast just like any man would who had to protect his tribe from a terrible threat. I came up behind the thing and jumped on it, spread-eagling myself across the sloping rear part, whatever that’s called. My plan was to—well, in truth I didn’t exactly have a plan, but I had this notion that I could climb into the cockpit, or whatever, of the tank and stop it from blowing down the doors of the warehouse. I did a Deep Mind Visualization of the scenario and I could see all of the possibilities, all of the outcomes. My plan was airtight, with one exception—the tank was way closer to the warehouse than I thought it was. I was just mounting the roof where the hatch was when the tank smashed through the doors, which knocked me back onto the ground. Some cops rushed in through the opening the tank had made, and then everything got superquiet. I got up and limped slowly toward the entrance. It was like the tank had punched a hole in the fabric of the universe and all the sound had gone out, because you could hear every footfall of every guy moving around. Every cough.

I peered in through the hole, and that’s when I saw Isabelle. She was hanging there by her, you know—just, from the rafters. My sister said later that she probably did what she did because she thought they were coming to take her away. She just didn’t think any other life was going to bring her the kind of joy or whatever she experienced when she was in that warehouse. So there she was, hung from the ceiling with an orange extension cord, and the cops were shining their lights on her body like she was a side of beef. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was just—what happened to my heart in that moment, I can’t even describe to you. The cops were standing there, doing nothing, just letting her sway back and forth.

STEVEN GRENIER

PHILADELPHIA, PA

2031

I’d been trying to pitch
Twenty Years of Silence
for some time, but I couldn’t generate any interest until the Navy Yard warehouse incident. That really crystallized the public’s concern about the silents, I think. It gave their anxiety a shape. It worked out well for me—initially, all I was pitching was an hour-long incidental stream, but in the aftermath of the standoff, when the
Post
ran those photos of the dead girl, the hosting network actually shelled out for a five-part miniseries with synchronous distribution across fifty or sixty of the major markets. Which allowed me to really give the piece the depth and breadth it needed. Of course, they also wanted it fast. Things were changing rapidly. The public’s perception of the silents as lovable quirky mystics was dissolving. It was harder to pretend they were harmless once they started tossing beehives at cops and killing themselves.

Once that hit the news—I mean, that photo of the girl swinging from the power cord, that was a pretty impactful image. It really changed people’s opinions. And because the silents had no PR rep who could swoop in and course-correct, reassuring people that this was just an anomaly, the fear and apprehension just kept rolling. You started to see towns and cities reevaluating the funds they distributed to silent initiatives. Some schools started shutting down, and the social services and outreach programs dried up entirely. The silents who’d gotten driver’s licenses using the new nonverbal tests had their IDs revoked. And the transitional facilities—which got all their money from state grants—contracted in scope to where they were really nothing more than detention houses.

I don’t want to sound callous, but sometimes you have to call things as they are, and this whole shift gave me a lot of really great material to work with. The tension was already out there—I just had to harness it. So I went straight to the warehouse where everything got started. I got footage of the actual beam that the girl used to hang herself, with whitened streaks where the cord had eaten away at the wood. I interviewed the kid’s parents and her uncle who was on the scene during the siege, apparently trying to save her. He kept blaming himself for her death and seemed pretty much destroyed by the experience. We also visited a school on the West Coast, one of the first silent schools. I talked to some of the teachers there who were trying to hold on to their jobs while the state deliberated on how much funding to allocate for the following school year. A sort of gloom pervaded everything in that place. The kids were unfocused and erratic in a way that seemed new to me.

What I really wanted to do, though, was track down Persephone, the girl who was the leader of that group of kids I’d followed around in Philly something like eight years before—the segment that won me the Rangar Prize. She always stuck in my mind, like the photo of the girl running from the napalm, and I thought it would be powerful to follow up on her story. To see what kind of woman she’d turned into.

Fletcher House was the name of the facility where Persephone had met her friends, but it had been shut down a few years previous and the building was converted into a pet-friendly gambling park. I had the names of some of the Fletcher House staff from the release forms they signed, so I tracked them down to see if they knew Persephone’s whereabouts. The former personnel manager was working in a ladies’ ammo store, and he told me he’d seen Persephone a bunch, standing with day laborers on the corner of Girard and North American. I took a cab out there the next morning and there they were, huddled under a statue of Don Quixote, waiting to get picked up. I recognized her immediately. The bronzed, chiseled face, the hard eyes—she was just like the girl I remembered, but more fully rendered, more clearly drawn. I got out of the cab a bit down the block and casually made my way into the throng. They spoke to one another in Spanish and Laotian and Ganda, and I picked up threads and fragments here and there, but mostly I focused on Persephone, who stood listening to a group of women complaining about their daily rate. Persephone seemed to be following along, nodding in agreement or shaking her head in disbelief with the other women. I even heard her cluck and hum when someone made an emphatic point. I was shocked—I briefly thought that maybe I had the wrong person. But my gut told me it was her.

An orange bus pulled up and all the women lined up to get on board. I stood in line with them, hoping to sneak on, but the driver told me to wait for the purple bus as he shut the door and pulled away. I hailed a cab and followed the orange bus to a hangar by the Delaware. This was one of those tabloid sweatshops where they paid people to look at uncountable hours of surveillance footage for any unsavory images of public officials that the AI software might have missed. I got there as the last of the women were filing in. I showed my press credentials and told them I was evaluating their service for
The Braggart
. I signed about forty NDAs and they let me out on the workshop floor. Persephone was over in a corner, scrubbing through footage taken at a traffic cam, frame by frame. There was a big head shot of the city solicitor propped on her workstation, and she kept looking back and forth between the footage and the photo. A supervisor came by at one point and put his hand on her shoulder. He told her she was doing a great job and asked what her favorite flavor of Slush was, because he was on his way to the vending machines and would she like one? She sort of smiled and tittered and went back to her work. He said his favorite flavor was Brownerator Brown, and she nodded. He said, “Oh, do you not speak English or something?” and she nodded again. She was pretending. She was actually trying to pass as a talker.

I waited until her shift was over and followed the orange bus back to the Don Quixote statue. It was late—must’ve been ten or eleven at night—and she was walking down North American Street without any kind of weapon that I could see. She ducked into a pulverized brownstone, and I waited outside to see which window would light up when she entered her apartment. She was on the third floor, so I went in and crept up the stairs, which were littered with shell casings and used condoms. I stood outside her door for a minute, listening. All I could hear was the shotgun sample from a Pho Hop song booming down the hall. I put my ear to the door, assuming it was locked, but it swung open and I stumbled over the threshold. Persephone jumped up from a table where she’d been crying, I guess, and we were standing face-to-face after however many years. Her eyes were blotchy and slick, but she knew instantly who I was. She didn’t move aside to let me in, but I could see over her shoulder that there was basically nothing in her apartment, just a card table under a hanging lamp with a bowl and a spoon. White walls and white wall-to-wall carpet. It was the living space of a person who didn’t feel she was really living. And, I mean, everything had more or less been taken from her. The squat she’d called home had been condemned and torn down. The people she’d lived with had scattered throughout the city, eking out a shadow existence. I stood there waiting for her to let me in. But I was also suddenly aware of the impossible distance between us, in every imaginable way. To her, I was nothing but an unwelcome reminder, the ghost of her irrecoverable past coming back for a final haunting.

AUGUST BURNHAM

RAHWAY, NJ

2032

As you can imagine, the Navy Yard standoff had a profound effect on me. I’d been working with those kids for years. The girl, Isabelle—I’d treated her for rickets and viviplanted a new molar for her. I sensed that she was suffering from depression—many of those kids were—but of course it’s almost impossible to make a definitive diagnosis. In any case, I’d failed. I didn’t do enough. I’d seen it all coming from a mile away, but I hadn’t been able to stop it. Not just Isabelle, but all of those kids—the whole silent community. I was angry—partly at the system, a society that would allow a whole population to collapse on itself, but also at myself. I’d been coasting along, trying to fit my research in the periphery of my life, when what I needed to do was to drop everything immediately and get back to work—the real work, a hunt for a genuine cure for the silence. If I didn’t, Isabelle’s death would be meaningless.