The Silent History: A Novel (39 page)

Soon there were just two squad cars left in the motel lot. And then there were none. The door to room 217 was still open, cordoned off with yellow tape. I walked up to the entrance and peered inside. I only caught glimpses of the place in the random ambient headlight glare of cars crossing the overpass. There was the dried bloodstain on the wall. There was the chipboard writing desk, the beds where they slept. None of it made anything clearer to me. No secrets were revealed.

At one point during the dance party, Slash had everyone take a turn in the center of the circle. You had to show him your wildest move. You had to really bust it out for him or he’d give you this comical look of disappointment. And no one wanted to let Slash down. We all had a go at it, with varying degrees of success. When it was Flora’s turn, she did this crazy backwards windmill move, and when she landed it she knocked her headband loose. It went rolling across the floor toward the porch. Everyone was focused on Flora, clapping and whistling, but I was watching the headband, because it had belonged to Mel. One of the only things left of her. It must have been no more than a second that I froze, watching the headband wobble toward the door, but Slash saw it—he glanced at me and seemed to intuit right away what was wrong. He ran to the porch, grabbed the headband, and reached up to slip it on Flora’s head. She took it from him, laughing, and put it on while everyone cheered. Slash gave me a quick look as if he was trying to see if he’d done the right thing. It all happened so fast. He’d known instantly what that headband meant to me. Even in the middle of all that joyful chaos, he’d known just what to do.

I walked over to the Ham Cannon and went inside. It was dark and narrow and there were just two men waiting in line for their meal. I asked the men how Ham Cannon worked, and they told me that customers stood at one end of a sort of bowling lane that had a ham cannon at the other end. The chef fired ham out of the cannon and you had to catch it in your teeth. It was free to try, but you got charged for any meat that fell to the ground. There was a great advantage, in other words, to a person catching the whole ham between his teeth on the first try. I asked the men how much they’d paid for their last meal there, and one said it cost four hundred dollars because he’d only snagged a bit of the shank. I must’ve looked surprised, because he quickly added that some people regularly paid over a thousand dollars. The other man just looked embarrassed and turned away.

I watched the men attempt and fail to catch the ham in their teeth. I consoled them as they paid for the meat, and they invited me to eat it with them at one of the square tables in the back of the restaurant. I politely declined, telling them I had somewhere I needed to be. I went back to the Burgoyne to lie down on the backseat and wait for dawn. I didn’t think I’d ever see my family again, and it occurred to me that maybe we’d all be better off that way.

FRANCINE CHANG

NEW LIBERTY, IA

2040

I was on the verge of remembering something the entire time we huddled in that dank cavity, among the spent condoms and creosote filth. At first it was the ending of a movie my mom and I went to—I was way too young for it, but she never understood the ratings, probably thought R meant Really Good—at a drive-in theater out past Manassas. In the movie everyone in a small town was imprisoned underground where their body heat was used to power casinos and arcades, and I crawled into the back of our station wagon to escape it. My mom never left movies, no matter how bad or inappropriate. Then I was almost remembering the name of this long-necked girl in my first year at Oaks who spent the entire spring trying to free a thumbtack from a corrugation in her desk where it’d gotten stuck. Started first thing in the morning and didn’t stop until the afternoon bell rang. She finally freed it on the third-to-last day of school, and I watched as she brought it closer to inspect it. The look she gave that thumbtack: sheer fatigued disappointment. She hated that her quest was over. For the rest of the day she tried to wedge it back into the corrugation, but it wouldn’t go.

Caitlin. Her name was Caitlin.

We couldn’t go, we couldn’t stay. We were all perched on the crumbling tip of the present. The silo had one working electrical outlet, no running water, and for food we had to wait for big, buzzing David to go out and kill something. He was our hunter-gatherer. He took care of us all, and without him we probably would’ve starved. My thoughts were still muddy from weeks of mai tai Mondays and tequila shooter Tuesdays and whatever Wednesdays at the Deluxe Inn, so mostly I shivered in my corner of the control room, paying back every jalapeño popper and aperitif with an ice-blood shudder, while I tried to decipher where we were, why we were here, how one reasonable decision after another had somehow led to … this.

Spencer and Flora were the abiders, the hunkerers. They interacted only with each other and their son, holding his shoulders, casting messages deep and solidly into him. Flora even tried to prettify the silo, cleaning the walls and using the ancient shelving to build a cockeyed table, which made me so sad. Spencer’s mother was their holy ghost. I don’t even know what a holy ghost is—saying the words out loud right now makes me think of a very old dog—but she followed the boy around, gave him whatever he would eat of her food, brushed his teeth three times a day with pond water. Sometimes she cried in her sleep. Hearing it, I thought, She’s doing it so we don’t have to.

I was the factory of regret, and I was extremely efficient. Anything foolish enough to enter the factory was seized and converted: memories, plans, thoughts. I regretted things I’d done to get me here, things I would do once I was out, meals I’d eat and not eat, sentiments unshared, photos untaken, and when I was done I postdated a few hundred more boxes of general, yet-to-be-named regret. I found it oddly reassuring, almost divine. Yielding to a higher powerlessness.

David I watched for a long time. He was hard to pin down, and he didn’t say much beyond “here” when he handed us food and “yeah” when we thanked him. At first I found his supplicant act sinister, like a Patti without the hugs. Also, he wore mangled track pants and a mesh shirt and acted terrified of the boy. He often left the room when the boy came in, or if he stayed he wouldn’t meet the boy’s eyes. His whole body clenched as if in the presence of a god. The boy seemed to sense David’s unease—he walked over to him and either just stood there studying him, or he handed him things he found around the silo: a key, a doll’s eye, a roll of electrical tape.

One morning I woke up to David and Patti arguing in the main hall. I quietly stood up and walked closer to listen. David was all frantic. He thought the boy was communicating to him, telling him to do something, but what? Patti insisted he calm down, what he was experiencing was explainable, nothing to get so lathered up about. “But I can hear his voice,” David kept saying.

“It’s your own voice you’re hearing,” Patti told him.

Their conversations continued. I gathered that David thought he’d been singled out to help. Patti repeatedly coached him not to do anything rash or stupid. This was a new Patti. At Face-to-Face, if I told her one of the silents was trying to communicate with me, she would’ve told me to listen with my enchanted magical inner ear, my heart-ear, whether they were telling me to kill the pope or put my head in a blast furnace.

The Patti here, now, had been harrowed, or maybe sharpened, a sharpened-bone version of her former self, the rest burned away—but she, too, seemed a little awed by the boy. She stared at him, and when he turned to meet her gaze, she either started to cough or smiled wanly and averted her eyes. One night during dinner I asked how she was feeling and she said, “Slightly closer to death than I was before you asked me that.”

So, yeah, she and David were a billion laughs. One night I found him in one of the larger storerooms butchering a … well, it had no head or skin, but it looked like a medium-size dog. He sliced off one of the legs and looked up at me, paused, then sliced off another. He used the knife expertly, not wasting any movement as he trimmed fat and gristle and threw it over his shoulder into the center of the shaft.

“You think that’s a family animal?” I asked.

David closed his eyes and stabbed his knife into its rib cage. He turned and regarded me with scowly impatience. “Not sure.”

“Did it have a collar when you found it?”

He pulled out the knife and continued to cut. I was bored, I was tired of clumping around this metal hole, I would wait him out. No matter his age or his ropey muscles, he was still a boy. Beyond the hurt feelings and bewilderment was a boy who needed someone to listen to him, to take him seriously.

“All I wanted to do was find them and help them. I’m okay that it’s only a few of them. I’m okay Wallaby’s dead. If it’s for a reason. But they won’t even move. They’ve given up.”

I asked him what he was planning to do, and he shrugged and said, “I’m like an ant. I keep going till I get stepped on.” He flipped the carcass over and began hacking at the haunches.

Like an ant. I could relate. Following a sticky trail of past students. Carrying crumbs of regret back to the anthill. Waiting for a foot to squash the whole thing.

PATTI KERN

NEW LIBERTY, IA

2040

We had tried, and tried some more, and the trying had become a thundercloud that found me and dumped on me in that silo. At night I dreamed I’d been found guilty of yearning in the third degree—for felony advancement of lost causes. My punishment was life in a cell with wall-to-wall mirrors and recordings of my own voice as I talked about the silents in the early years.
Language is a cage
, and
Listen to all they’re not saying
. Words can’t be unsaid, and I wouldn’t even want to try. Thing is, someone had to be present for the beginning and present for the end—right here, under the earth, with Flora and the child and all of the others—and it was me. I’d wept, hoped, wished, plotted, decried, witnessed, lusted, rerouted, insinuated, suffered. And now I was old, goddamnit. Unsupple, inelastic, dry, cold, old, old. Hands like brittle claws, teeth filthy as a camel’s. I thought about my nether areas only during bathroom runs aboveground, and even then the thoughts were in the realm of, Would there be blood in my voidings? There was blood in my voidings. I was dying. I’d always been dying, but now I was more. I could hear death coming like a distant sparrow wing beating ever closer in my skull.

I saw people, fragments. People from Face-to-Face. Friends. Men. Animals. I saw Amanda, the little silent girl who came to my house, the first one I met. She had come to me unsummoned, happenstance and inevitable, like everything. She started me, pushed me into the water. When I was done thinking of Amanda, I’d retrace my path back to the present, skipping over the bilge puddles of bad days. It took me hours. Those who say life is too short are mistaken. Life is long.

In the silo, we all sat huddled in our own orbits. Spencer and Flora, when I first saw them in the motel I hardly recognized them. Particularly Flora. She was still striking, more so than before. Her last traces of girlishness had burned off since leaving California, and all her charisma, allure, whatever you want to call it, had also burned down to a hard, barely aglow coal. I watched her and Spencer while we ate, waiting for some flicker of communion to pass between them, like the unguarded affection I’d seen pass so often between lovers at Face-to-Face, but I couldn’t detect anything. I couldn’t read them. Complete resignation was about all I could gather. They stayed busy fixing up the silo as best as they could, and spending time with the boy, but their usual glee was in hibernation. Which was okay by me. After the years chained to the door at Nu Ware, I knew I could survive this. I could slow down my heartbeat and mollify my organs and conquer hunger and self-loathing and lower my body temperature to ninety-four. I could survive anything. Except the obvious: life.

David smoldered with frustration, though. He was like some humpbacked warlock pounding away. He mumbled to himself, played with fuses and wires, sharpened knives, meticulously hacked-up animals. Years ago, if someone like him came to Face-to-Face with all that clenched fury I might’ve gestured for him to watch Flora or any of the others, to follow their cue. I might’ve put him in one of the more freewheeling dorms, or slept with him myself and done my Kegel exercises with him inside me to allow a transfer of … I don’t know what I would’ve called it. Devotions. Secretions. After I’d found him mooning over his broken wallaby—apparently it was a wallaby—he had been obedient, grateful even, and he still was, but he had a hard time contending with the child. When David told me the child was telling him things, I told him that he was confusing empathy for telepathy.

He insisted it was neither of those, that he knew his own mind and the silents and the sound of thoughts. He said he could feel the boy even when he wasn’t in the room.

I tried to bring him down. I told him that the boy was a true silent, a double-silent raised in silence, maybe the first of his kind. “The first and now the last,” David said—I had been thinking it too, but this didn’t seem like the right time. But yes, all the empathy in that boy, plus all the expectations David brought along? Of course he was going to feel something. But David waved me off. He wasn’t having it. He patrolled the edges of his own resolve too vigilantly for me to penetrate.

Our conversations took place in whispers. We were always awake before the others. I took thirty-minute naps every four hours and slept two hours a night. I’d yet to see David lie down.

“The end,” he said one day. “That’s what this is. All this planning and work. You steal a truck and we drive them to this bloody diaper of a hole in the ground just so we can freeze and die.”

I said, “Things end. That’s what they do. What choice do we have?”

He looked at me. His face was red and swollen. One eye drooped lower than the other and seemed to be trying to twitch itself back into place. He said, “How come they get to decide everything?” At
they
he gestured vaguely upward—I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the aboveground world or a mess of malevolent gods.