The Silent History: A Novel (36 page)

My room was full of Nancy and her tuberculosis snores. I went to the bathroom, balled up pieces of toilet paper, and put them in my ears, but it made no difference. I lay awake all night, my body humming, finally drifting off just after dawn.

I woke up surprisingly lucid. The others were already awake, faces grave and inert. What were we doing in Rock Island? What was our mission? Collectively, who knows. To hide? Till when? To prepare? For what? Individually, though, I knew what I had to do. Rock Island was where I’d cast off the dead weight of Francine Chang, hapless, plodding, middle-aged remorse machine. I’d revise myself for good.

I went to the Deluxe Lounge that evening, and the next. I liked everything about the place. The anchor-pattern carpet, the metal bowls of slightly stale cashews, the bartender, cross-eyed and unintelligible. I wore some new forestine-blue eye shadow and matching lipstick. I sat on a stool at the bar and talked to Evie, Ying, Sheila, Lee, whoever. I introduced myself to everybody. I asked questions and tried to provoke them. Who else has a thing for jai alai players? Paraplegics? Implanted silents? Toward the end of the night Evie and I would always hit the karaoke machine and everyone would groan, but nobody left the bar, now did they? Plus, Tiffany Park didn’t give a red damn what a few slouchy old drunks in some prison town thought of her.

Lots of things happened there over the next couple weeks. I laughed, I cried, I got into a hair-pulling fight with some troll who didn’t like how I stared at her man. I told the whole bar about how Bastien Hvorecky tricked me into masturbating for the entire free world. I traded shots of whiskey with a man named Donald who drove a refrigerated truck. Then later we had subzero sex in the back of the truck. When we were done I didn’t mope, didn’t cry. I told him I was gonna have another drink and he could join me or not, whatevs.

One night I got a little drunker than I intended. Empty stomach, I don’t know. I tottered around, singing “Ape Kiss” without the mic, arguing with people who all looked at me like they were getting ready to vote me off this talent show. I felt a hand on my waist. I looked down, and there was the boy. Christ. He reached up and took my hand.

“Who’s this?” said Evie, who I didn’t even realize was there.

“Great-nephew,” I told her. “Plus, none of your goddamn business.”

Of course Evie starts talking to him and he doesn’t say anything, just stares at her. I look at him more closely and I see the tiny black implant port on his scalp behind his ear. Implant hardware. Christ, I think, how much time has passed? Then I remember the earbuds he’d been playing with, one of which he’s somehow glued to himself. Evie’s still trying to talk to him, looking at the implant. “Still hasn’t mastered it,” I said, and yanked him out of the bar.

He walked me back to the room. Before I opened the door, I smiled at him, held him by the shoulders, and said, “Everything’s fine. Don’t worry.”

He looked worried. He held on to my hand after we’d gone inside, and paused at Flora’s bed. Both of us watched her sleep. Her face twitched and jittered. The boy studied her carefully. I wondered if he could tell what she was dreaming about, by the way her face moved. I wondered if he liked what he saw. I just stood there holding his hand and watching until I felt like I’d throw up. Which, after I excused myself and went into our shared bathroom, was what I did.

THEODORE GREENE

RICHMOND, CA

2040

I knew a call would come eventually, so I spent the days and weeks preparing myself. I prayed the call would come from them rather than a policeman or a reporter or the morgue. But if I were being totally honest, part of me hoped the police would call telling me they’d been arrested and locked away. Even Flora, sure. Even Slash. And then, for once, I’d be the one who was free.

When the call finally did come, I was calm—I saw the blocked ID and lack of origin code, took a deep breath, and pressed Answer. The wallscreen bloomed to life, and there was Flora. It had been about five months, at that point, since I’d last seen her, not counting the security camera footage I’d found of her and Spencer and Slash at that gas station. She hunched her shoulders like an old arthritic woman, and the overhead tube lights shrouded her eyes with long shadows, which further muted any communication. She looked every bit as lost and hunted as she was.

I composed myself and stared hard at the screen. I wanted to show her I was relieved but also intensely concerned. She nodded and gave me a reassuring look. Just the sight of her face, as pale and thin as it was, put me at ease. I shuddered in the wake of the anger that had taken hold of me just a minute earlier. She looked at me curiously and I brushed it off, mugging in an effort to change the subject. I let her know I wanted to see Slash. She looked away, biting her lower lip as she tugged at a ribbon of hair that had come loose from the tortoiseshell band she’d worn since high school. Slash appeared in the frame, kneeling on the floor in front of Flora. I held my breath as he scanned my features, trying, I guess, to remember where he’d last seen me. It was only a split second that he didn’t recognize me, but it might as well have been a decade. When he placed me, though, he broke out into a laugh and did an impression of me. I could still see some of Flora in his eyes, but it was clear—he’d changed. Unalterably changed, and he’d continue to change, year after year, the boy fading into the shadows of the man he’d become.

I put my hand up and he put his hand out and we gave one another a single high five. He saw that I was tense, and I tried my best to assure him that everything was fine. I tried to show him that I missed him, but he became distracted with something on the floor, out of the camera’s view. I looked at Flora then, imploring her to come back home, come back from wherever she was. Come back now. She furrowed her brow in response and started heaving. She pressed her wrist to her mouth, and I was forced to watch her sob. I could do nothing but sit and watch.

Then there was a noise on the other end. Spencer burst into the room, followed by a man in a pressed shirt and tie. Flora stood and made a sound like a reverse shriek. I caught sight of a feathered spurt of dried blood on the wall behind her, and the nerves at the back of my neck burned. The man said, “I thought I told you never to leave this room.” Flora glanced back at the camera. Spencer followed her gaze, locking eyes with me. The man rushed toward the screen. “What the—you’re fucking making calls?” He slammed his fist against the wall and the call went dead.

I frantically hit the call-back button, but of course the number was blocked. I hit it again and again, striking the surface with more force each time, convinced that I might through sheer force of will shake the electrons to life and reestablish the connection. But the call was lost, my family was gone, and I was alone in my empty apartment once again.

I did a search for call-tracing scripts but there was nothing out there that could track down an ID for a call without an origin path. I sat at my desk and started roughing out a script of my own. I made some headway, but I was so beside myself with fear that I could barely write the code. I went back to my desk and played back the call. Frame by frame, I thought, there had to be something that I could use, some sort of clue to identify their location. I watched the images advance, scouring the blurred objects in the scene, but beyond Flora’s face there was just the eggshell wall and the light tubes. The brown blood flecks. But then the man appeared. With the footage slowed down, I could see that he’d pushed Spencer through the door. There was a hand, palm-up, hovering behind Spencer for just a few fleeting frames. And then the man entered the room, and I saw that his shirt had a logo embroidered over the right breast pocket. I magnified the frame and applied a sharpening filter, and there it was—the Deluxe Inn Waterfront, stitched in navy thread, with the
W
stylized to look like a wave. I took a screenshot of the logo and did a search on it. They were in a crumbling motel on the border between Iowa and Illinois.

I went into the kitchen and filled a glass with water at the sink. I watched the water ripple in the glass as my hand shook. So this was what they wanted. To end up in some dingy motel room in the middle of the country. Fine—they didn’t need me. That was clear. I wished them luck in all that lay ahead. And then I cursed the wicked way they left me behind. And then the sun was down and I was standing in front of the hallway mirror, perfecting the speech I was going to deliver when I saw them again, when they came crawling back. I wanted to keep my face entirely smooth. I wanted to show them nothing.

Two days passed like two hours. I paced the apartment, strong in my newfound armor. I envisioned the devastation and confusion I would leave in my wake.

On the third day there was a knock at the door. I steeled myself and turned the knob, but instead of my family there was a man standing on the concrete landing. A gloomy-looking Asian man in a dark suit with a clipboard tucked under his arm and a leather briefcase at his side. Behind him were six children, four boys and two girls, all wearing the same dark suits.

“Mr. Theodore Greene?” he said in a deep, clipped monotone. “I am an archivist with the silent oral-history project.”

I told him I didn’t need anyone recording me. I’d been using the Mémo for years to record my testimonials.

“Of course,” the man said. “I am not here to record you, Mr. Greene. I am simply collecting census data. These are my assistants.” He kept his eyes on me the entire time he spoke, and the boys and girls, all implantees, kept their eyes on him.

“You have a daughter—a silent daughter, am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“And a grandson?”

“That’s correct.” I maintained the blank composure I had rehearsed over the past days.

“You must be proud. They’re not living with you here, by chance, are they?”

I told him they’d moved out of state, and the man wrote something down on the clipboard. A wasp landed on his shoulder and one of the boys stepped forward to brush it away. “Which state?”

“Illinois. Rock Island. Some motel. Or, that’s where they were last. I don’t know.”

He wrote something else on the clipboard and then passed it behind him. Another boy received it and folded it into a carrying case. “It must be hard having your family so far away, Mr. Greene. But their mistakes are not your responsibility. No one will blame you for whatever happens now.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We have everything we need,” he said. He turned around, flanked by the children, and crossed the street to an unmarked white school bus.

I shut the door. I realized that I was shaking—my whole body was trembling. All of the rage I’d built up slowly fizzed away. I wasn’t worried about blame. I wasn’t worried about responsibility. My family needed me. I needed them. I sprinted into the bathroom, put my toothbrush in a bag, and headed out toward the highway.

DAVID DIETRICH

ROCK ISLAND, IL

2040

If America’s a body, then the middle part’s those in-between organs you don’t know or care what they do. Spleen, gallbladder, pancreas. Pretend they’re all vital and then when you carve them out nothing happens. I was looking everywhere for the resistance, but so far all I’d found were mumblers and smilers who, noticing me eavesdropping, would ask me where I’d come from, or where I was headed, and I’d say, “Are you writing a motherfucking book about me?” And they’d frown like I’d done them real harm, and I’d try to soften it by adding, “This is the part of the book where the main hero goes deep cover and rides around incognito. If that’s okay with you, you groping mealworm?”

For two weeks I drove around Missouri because I found its shape calming. On maps all the other states look like weaponry and buttholes and tongues. I was in an anxious daze—all I’d been eating on the road were carob smoothies and these phosphocreatine supplement lollipops, which increased my core strength and messed with my decision making and gave me a permanent hard-on. I stared over the dashboard into the vaporized horizon.

I grew a beard. It was a sad beard that didn’t connect all the way, like the mustache part thought it was all superior to the rest of it. I had a bunch of decoy hats that I wore. I flexed my wrist strengthener while driving, and lost ten pounds of stomach flab, which went straight to my biceps and triceps. The wallaby was still with me—I named him Wallaby, because I thought there was dignity in being named what you were—and we’d developed an okay repartee except he refused to shit on the newspaper in the bed of my truck. He did it wherever he pleased, and the only warning he gave me was he’d sort of shake his hind legs a little and then evict a handful of pebbly, foul-smelling turds, which I’d let harden in the sun before scooping out. After he was done, he’d climb back between the seat and the window, where I kept my knife pack and rope and
shuriken
, and sleep there—must’ve been too refined to nap next to his own droppings. He whinnied and snored like a drugged stewardess.

After two weeks in Missouri the closest we’d come to a lead was finding an unimplanted silent working an oyster bed near where we were camping. We followed him to a sooty group home and Wallaby and I peeked in the window, but the guy didn’t do anything but play superchess on his Catena and then go to sleep. I heard about a militia in Joplin, but when I called and asked what kind of militia it was, the guy who answered told me to go to the nearest prison and get raped. I told him that actually I was headed to Joplin right now, and I was going to find his sorry ass and tie him up and take off his clothes and then I’d shave him bald and make him wear a blue swim diaper—then I stopped liking where my list was going so I hung up.

I used to think life had these points in it where you got to choose. You could decide, I’m gonna be the kind of person who does
this
, and then do it. I hadn’t come across anything like that yet. Just vague yearnings and low impulses. At night I lay in my sleeping bag with Wallaby curled next to me and tried to will myself closer to the resistance. I knew I’d find them soon enough. And I knew something else: they were going to need me every bit as much as I needed them. I wasn’t going to come to them all empty-handed and beseeching. I was ready. I was able. I remembered all these sentences from the old podcasts the albino gave my mom.
You are what you project
. And
Harness the power of an actualized you
. I finally believed it. I fell asleep with Mom rattling around my head, images of her sad in some hospital somewhere, and woke up to Wallaby trying to bite nits out of my scalp. We packed up, hopped in the truck, and continued to search.