The Silent History: A Novel (38 page)

Then she must’ve dropped the phone, so I had to yell to be heard.
“What town are you in, Francine?”
It took a few tries, but she finally picked up the phone and said, “Is that you, Patti? What’re you doing on the floor? I was just gonna call you. You’re—”

“What town are you in?” I interrupted. “I need a town and a street name.”

“Town? Oh, hell.
Evie!
What’s the name of this, what, Rock. Rock Island. We’re on the highway in the land of barking dogs. Hey, Patti, you remember when we—”

I hung up on her. I had what I needed. I hitched a ride with a guy hauling house batteries in a sixteen-wheeler who asked me to “polish his knob” for gas money, which I did, twice, between which I watched and memorized how he drove the truck, then I stole it after he’d parked alongside the highway to scope out a suitable place for us to rut in outer Cheyenne.

In front of me, the kangaroo panted more heavily. Room 217, I guessed, was up above, beyond the balcony overlooking the pool.

I clutched the kangaroo, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply to slow my heartbeat. The air smelled like animal protein: throat crust, urine, blood. Rancor. I could feel the kangaroo’s suffering, felt the distressed cacophony in its skin and muscles and tendons and bones.

It was simple triage. Before me were two suffering animals, and their mutual suffering was a pathetic vacuum. The kangaroo gurgled, and the man was too far gone to realize his arid wallowing just prolonged the distress. I put my ear to the animal’s chest and listened to its heartbeat and the murky fluid-filled insuck of its lungs. I also heard something deeper and meaner and more worrisome, the beginnings of a warning. I was sick of navigating from warning to warning.

“Funmentally,” the man was saying, “life’s a dry piece of shit with a
tooth
in it.”

That did it. I stood and lifted the kangaroo by its stout neck, gripped it tight with both hands, and twisted until I felt the last cartilage snap. I gently set the animal on the ground in front of the man and said, “Now cease your crying, dust yourself off, put on a goddamn shirt, pour some talc on your balls, locate some mouthwash, wait for me to find some important individuals, and get ready to hop in that rig if you’re at all interested in getting beyond the present whatever this is.”

He leaned over the kangaroo, bent close as if whispering something into its ear. The kangaroo, eyelids wide, tongue lolling, looked cartoonishly outraged. Its eyes had gone cloudy. Blood bubbled from underneath the implant. “I can’t just leave him there,” the man said. “He and I made a pact—we’d never desert each other.”

Hooked to his belt was a big sheathed antler-handled knife. I pointed to it and said, “Get all the meat you can from him. That’s his last gift to you. While you do that, I need to find the others.”

He looked pitifully at the kangaroo, at me, at the kangaroo again, and said, “You came for them too? You’re powerful. Strength recognizes strength, and you’re like some kind of bird from under the ocean. You came to take care of everything.”

I didn’t like the foolish way he was looking at me. I turned and started toward the motel. “Start butchering those haunches,” I said with my back to him. “We’ll need them wherever we’re going.”

I climbed the stairs to 217 and pounded on the door. I tried to peek between the shades and the wall but I couldn’t see anything. “It’s Patti,” I said. “Open up.” I waited. There were smear marks on the ground, a single child-size sneaker, a toppled hospitality cart. I banged on the door again. “Francine, it’s me. Let me in.” The shade slowly moved aside, and I saw Francine’s round face. She opened the door and let me in, held on to my arm tightly. “We, the kids, that woman. There was a war, we almost, they almost. Everything just.”

“Save it,” I said. In the corner Spencer, Flora, and the mother were cowering with the boy. It was the first time I’d seen him since he was a toddler. He was exactly what I would’ve expected if I hadn’t quit expecting. He looked at me and I looked at him. I heard an audible click inside my head, heard it as clearly as I’d heard the cracking of the kangaroo’s vertebra. “Gather any food and weapons and clothing and come with me,” I told them. The boy shined a small flashlight beam at me, just below my eyes. I held out my hand and he took it, and the six of us ran to my big rig.

The man had just finished butchering the kangaroo, the blood eddying into the deep end of the pool. “You in the front and them in the back,” I said.

We drove.

NANCY JERNIK

NEW LIBERTY, IA

2040

We huddled around the boy’s bookworm flashlight in the back of Patti’s truck. We should’ve been more careful. We should’ve struck out for the deep wilderness, where they’d never track us down. But we’d let our guard down in that motel, and if it hadn’t been for a young man with a beard showing up out of nowhere and holding off that child army, the whole family would have been implanted. I was not going to let it happen again. We were going to keep moving until there were no more maps, no more roads, not a trace of talkers anywhere.

After what seemed like a day but was probably only a few hours, the truck stopped. We waited, each of us holding our breath, until the bearded man cracked open the cargo doors and slipped inside. We were at a gas station, he told us. He tried to calm us with his expressions, but of course Spencer, Flora, and the boy could tell he wasn’t calm at all—they could see the swells and peaks of anxiety roiling beneath his wooden face. It was obvious even to me. He told us that he couldn’t crack the key code on the truck’s gas cap, so we left it by the pumps and carefully filed out one by one. There was a worn dirt path that led to a wooded area set back from the highway, and we followed it. When the path ended we kept going, pressing forward through the brush until we came to a high mesh fence that had rusted yellow warning signs bolted to it. We scaled the fence, the boy clinging to Spencer’s back as he climbed over. There was a hill, and when we got to the top there was a small angled shed next to a concrete lot. Spencer and Mr. Dietrich pried open the door of the shed with a branch, and we went inside.

The shed sat atop a spiral staircase that led down to an ancient oxidized blast door. A missile silo. The door was half-open so we slipped through, feeling our way in the near-total darkness. Inside, the air was heavy and sour, smelling of chemicals and sweat. It was clear that many different people had passed through over the years. There was trash everywhere, decades of it piled and fused in drifts on the floor. Graffiti covered every surface, slogans and tags from different eras—
REAGANS A FAGG
was written in huge block letters over the second blast door, across from a massive clown face that was saying
Woop Woop
. In the bathroom there was a drawing of a vagina with eyes and the phrase
Vag Jobs Are For Pussies
. The boy managed to find a working outlet that powered a web of Christmas tree lights stapled to the ceiling of the control room, and when the space lit up we all felt a little tremor of relief. Maybe
relief
is not the right word, but I looked at my family in the dim glow of the lights overhead and thought, Here we are. We were home. It wasn’t the pure frontier existence I was hoping for, but it would do.

We began cleaning up the place, tossing the debris down an open hatch. I made a crude broom out of a broken shelving unit and pushed the loose papers and balled dust clods and rotten condoms into the hole. There was a pyramid of old magazines in a corner of the control room, and when I took a stack from the top of the pile I saw a picture of a woman smoking a cigar with her feet propped up on a huge executive desk. The caption said
Call the Shots
. It was an ad for Ambitor—the same ad I’d loved back in that other life, the life I had when Spencer was born. Not even a life, really. Thinking about that period of time was like when you wake up in an odd position and your hand is still asleep. You know that it’s part of your body—you know that it belongs to you, but it doesn’t feel like you. I can just barely recall the sensation of paralysis, of time stopped, and the wishing away of days, weeks, months. I was trying to destroy myself, I think, for having brought Spencer into the world. For having made this being, this broken child. I was like one of those Spanish monks, beating myself with a leather thong to demonstrate the true depth of my penitence—punishing myself just for being alive, just for being human—only my whip was the Ambitor, and I had no God to watch over me and record my suffering. I was tumbling through the night sky without a parachute, thinking only that when I hit the ground I’d be as broken as Spencer, and we’d find some sort of kinship in our matching flaws. But, of course, there was nothing wrong with Spencer. Spencer was always Spencer, not a broken shard of a person but a whole being, alive in the world. I kept falling, never touching down, getting farther and farther from him until I lost sight of him completely.

That first night in the silo we all slept on the floor of the control room, Patti and Mr. Dietrich folded in among us, everyone under the fleece emergency blanket we’d taken from the cab of the semi. The next morning I woke up and the boy was gone. I disentangled myself from the pile of sleeping bodies and searched the rooms for him. I followed the faint sound of a chain rattling, which seemed to emanate from the top of the shaft. I climbed the spiral stairwell, and when I got to the landing at the top I saw the boy standing in the frame of the blast door. He looked at me with a sly sort of half smile and then leaped into the shaft. My heart, at that moment—it was like it burst into flame and dropped through my body cavity. I bolted toward the opening, where I could see that he was actually swinging on a thick chain that dangled in the center of the shaft. He broke into hysterical, giddy laughter and pumped his legs to swing in wider arcs. He circled the perimeter of the shaft, shrieking with joy as he clung to the rusted links on the chain. It must have been at least an eighty-foot drop to the bottom. I beckoned for him to come out, climb back up, but he just kept pumping harder, swinging more wildly. He was ecstatic. He had an exuberance that was so different from his father. Or had I just made a ruin of his father’s childhood? I stood in the frame of the blast door for a while, watching the boy in the grips of all that unmediated pleasure, wondering what sort of life was in store for him. We were underground, literally underground in every way, and we seemed to be safe, at least for now—but safe for what? What kind of life was this for a boy? How much darkness could his little soul endure before it surrendered?

THEODORE GREENE

ROCK ISLAND, IL

2040

I’d seen the halos of pulsing red and blue light from the exit ramp, and already I sensed that I was too late. There was a line of squad cars curbed outside the motel, and cops were milling in the open doorway to room 217, tapping screens, snapping photos of the flayed pelt of some kind of white animal on the blacktop out front. The room was empty, from what I could see. No trace of my family anywhere, just a boy in a bloody T-shirt sitting in the backseat of one of the cars, holding an ice pack to his forehead, and a couple preteen girls sniffling on the curb. I’d been tearing from state to state in the Burgoyne, driving nonstop just to get to the motel, just to make it to my family. I ate only what fit in my hand, what I could carry from the service station door to the passenger seat of my car. I pissed in ditches, in bottles, from the steel girders of overpasses. And once I arrived at the Deluxe Inn Waterfront it was like my body couldn’t stop moving.

I pulled up alongside the cruiser with the kid in it and got out. I was pretty out of breath. I approached the kid and he turned away and I saw the implant port in his neck. A cop came up to me, shouting for me to stand back. A woman with sleepy eyes and a dense, squared-off face. She waved me on, but I wasn’t moving until I found out what happened. She asked if I was a witness and I said I was a relation. I demanded she tell me what had happened, and she clicked her teeth and said that distributing confidential information about the crime was way above her pay grade. “Who’s that?” I said, pointing at the kid. She started to walk away. I said, “Can you just tell me, is my family safe?” and she repeated that she wasn’t at liberty. I told her how far I’d just driven to get there, but she wasn’t moved. I pointed to the animal bones and she just shrugged.

I parked across the street in the neon shadow of a Ham Cannon marquee and sat. I was just waiting for something to erupt from my soul. I craved some kind of external, physical counterpart to the clawing agony of having just missed my family. Once again, limping just a few steps too far behind. I struggled to fabricate a stream of tears, tried to will myself to regurgitate the bacon cheese sliders I’d eaten on the road, because if I was lucky maybe some part of my stomach or lungs would come spewing out as well. What I maybe wanted most of all was to turn myself inside out, to puke out a perfect inversion of myself that had all the most fragile parts on the outside where they could be most easily destroyed. But nothing came out. My eyes were dry and my stomach was settled. I sat calmly in the Burgoyne and watched the neon pig on the marquee repeatedly burst from the cannon and into the waiting mouth of a man in a cowboy hat.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the past. I wanted to conjure a memory of my family before everything came undone. It was hard. I was so fixed on the present, on my ridiculous quest, that I couldn’t imagine the world I lived in before. The last one I could muster, we were all in the cabin in Monte Rio, just sitting around the kitchen table picking at leftovers, when Slash came stomping in carrying a carved wooden baton, swinging it around like some sort of marching tribesman. We started to goad him on, clapping and hooting in time to the beat he was laying down with his feet. Pretty soon we were all gathered in a circle around him, following his routine—even Nancy, who usually moved with the cold deliberation of a praying mantis. Even a weird tweaker who’d sleepwalked into the celebration from the woods. Slash would strike a pose and we’d all have to replicate it. Before we could catch our breath he’d be on to something else. Francine was Slash’s star acolyte that night, and when she danced she radiated all the light and poise that had drawn me to her all those years ago. I’d backed off from her then, just like I had before, when she was Flora’s teacher. I’d stabbed and buried my attraction, for Flora’s sake, but what had I achieved? How had that—or anything else I’d ever done—benefited Flora? Now I’m alone, I thought, sitting numb in a shitpod of a car in the middle of nowhere, and Francine was with them, living day to day with my daughter and my grandson. I laughed out loud, a fake chuckle, as if it was some kind of rich irony, not just a fucking mess of a life. Everything I’d ever done for Flora had only set us further apart.