The Silent History: A Novel (48 page)

I stopped. I had come all that way for no reason. Pride had kept me from my father, and now the door was closed forever. There was no way for me to tell him how, as much as I hated him for saying what he said, he was responsible for my success in the world. I knew he was not dying, but it did feel like a sort of death in that moment. It felt like his soul had left his body, and his spirit would wander the earth forever, hurt and betrayed that his son had abandoned him, always wondering why.

I stood and backed away from the recliner, apologizing to everyone in the room. I hadn’t come thousands of miles just to make him feel worse, I said, which made nobody laugh. I wanted to evaporate in that moment. I wanted to crumble and be carried away on the wind.

But then Isoke approached my father. She walked up to him very slowly, staring at him intently. He had never met her—he knew her only from pictures my brother had shown him. But she came forward and stood at his feet. And as he watched her, his face softened. He relaxed his grip on the arms of the recliner. The creases along his forehead disappeared. Everyone in the room saw this happen. My aunts and uncles, cousins and siblings, all watching my father, who was staring at my wife’s face as though it held the secrets of the universe. She extended her hand and he took it. He rose slowly from the chair. My family is not generally superstitious, but I could tell that they were thinking to themselves that she had performed some kind of enchantment on my father. But this is just who Isoke is. She sees into a person’s soul and reflects it back to them in some way I cannot even describe. To look into her eyes is to relive your childhood, the whole thing, in a single moment. And my father, he was standing, now more steadily, still wearing his old robe. He and Isoke were an arm’s length apart, seeing nothing but each other’s face, and his eyes narrowed and his features sharpened and he almost began to smile. It was as if he just then remembered that he was still Beko Mitee, even if those words had no meaning for him. Even if he could no longer speak his name.

Isoke guided my father toward me, and I took him into my arms. I felt his stiff, bone-thin arms cross my back and the mat of his beard scratching my collarbone, and I knew that I was home.

FRANCINE CHANG

OAKLAND, CA

2041

At the hospital, I watched as the doctors hooked Nancy up to a dozen different monitoring machines, and I knew immediately that something was wrong. All that scrutiny and pinpoint industriousness, it was scary. I wanted to stay behind, be there for Nancy, since everyone else had disappeared. But a hospital administrator found me in the cafeteria and told me I could no longer hang around. I think her precise words were, “Our liability exceeds your utility.” Nancy was now in an isolation ward, so I couldn’t even say goodbye. I boarded a train for Oakland.

The trip started out fine, but by Utah just about everybody in my train car was in an uproar over news of the virus. I just wanted peace, the solitude of my own inner reverie, and after that a bath and my own single bed, but I couldn’t help listening. Everybody had heard or seen or read something, and they were all trying to outshout one another, eager to share what they thought they knew. Something like seventy-five percent of the test group had come up positive for the virus, but so far there were only about two thousand cases of people who showed Nancy’s symptoms. This sounded perfectly scientific, verifiable. Rooted in numbers. Then someone behind me said, “Government doesn’t want you to know this, but the virus actually originated from an infected satellite. They’re trying to manually override it, but the satellite’s outsmarted them. It’s gone rogue. Only recourse now is to blow it out of the sky.”

By the time we passed Reno the landscape had turned green again, and everyone around me seemed angry and forlorn. Some kept their eyes closed. Others stared into the seatbacks. A woman announced that the proper linguatherapeutic method for delaying the onset of the virus was to ration how many words you used per day, to save them up. But then somebody on the other side of the train found a neuroverbalist in Germany who said that the only way to combat it was to maintain a constant chatter, so as to keep the brain’s language regions perpetually stimulated.

A teenage boy let loose a string of profanities. A woman in the seat across from mine held a sleeping baby and stroked its head and cried as softly as she could.

I just sat there, stunned. Someone on the train should’ve taken control. Someone should’ve stood up and said, “Listen, even if the worst happens and we’re all stricken, who’s to say what being silent will be like? Maybe it’s like a purge, or a clarifying cleanse. We can’t begin to know, so the only thing to do is just stay calm, keep our heads, and wait.” It should’ve been me.

But not now. No. For the rest of the trip I could feel panic edging in, I could taste it easing upward in my throat. As a way of distracting myself I started to name everything I saw, outside and inside the train, trying to find the most precise word I could.
Espadrille, briefcase, pistachio, sequoia.
It wasn’t a strategy, just something my brain started to do on its own. And kept doing.

When I arrived home, my toilet was backed up again, and a pair of raccoons had broken in through the crawl space and made babies in my bedroom. I went to work right away. Stripped the bed, the couch cushions, scrubbed the entire place, went on a trashing spree. Eight big bags of artifacts I named as I threw them away.

For the next few weeks I pecked around for something else to do. I watched the news. I stayed inside. I chattered to myself. I thought about volunteering at one of the makeshift transitional centers by the shipyards on Alameda. Some church had set up beds and a cafeteria and were trying to help ease the shift into silence. On the news the centers looked to be already brimming with patients. There was footage of two placid-looking women painting circles on a giant sheet of paper. I watched the women and tried to imagine myself in their place. Sitting with a brush in my hand and not a single sentence in my head, just some murky geometry. Would I still remember things? Would I think? Would I feel? Or would I just be a loose stew of inner spasms and urges, lurching around from room to room in my house? I couldn’t imagine it. That’s the thing that made my neck shiver—no matter how hard I tried, I simply didn’t have the imagination to picture what it would feel like when the virus started to work its way through me.

One night, after too much red wine, after going on a visual dictionary site and memorizing the names of different kinds of bulldozers so I could identify them out loud whenever I passed the construction site on San Pablo, I recorded a video memo for myself. It started as a pep talk, like, “Francine, sister, you really need to marshal your inner whatever and come to grips with your
destiny
.” The way it came out, I sounded like one of those old bouffant-haired Motown singers. I liked it. So I kept going. “Your sugary, lovelorn, hard-timing destiny. Dreamcatchers and wildflowers in your rearview. And old men coming at you with parking tickets in their wallets and bags under their eyes. Wanting to spread their love all over your new pillowcases.”

I then began to record a reverse list of all the men I’d ever slept with, starting with Donald, in the back of his refrigerated truck in Rock Island. Donald, Briden, TJ, Klint … and then I blanked on the name of a man I’d dated for at least three months. Jesus. I mean, Jesus wasn’t his name, it was what I said out loud. I could name the guy’s dog, his ex-wife, I could recite the catechism tattooed in Latin below his navel. But his name was gone. It was something like Sam. Or Mike or Bill, Paul, Vic, Chuckie … I felt my heart speeding up, panic edging in again. I knew this is how it’d hit me, a bloodletting, a reverse acquisition, one word at a time. First it was his name, then it would be his dog’s name, then his ex-wife’s, and pretty soon the catechism. Sure, who cares about what’s-his-name and his tattoo, but pretty soon I’d start losing things I did care about. And once the names were gone, how would I know what the names were attached to? Without names, all the men I’d ever slept with would be a sloppy pile. Not even that, because I wouldn’t know what sloppy was, or pile. Without names they’d be gone.

Already a steady snow was starting to fall on my mind, removing all color and contour, whiting everything out. I could feel the first flakes coming to rest.

Theo and I met downtown and walked around the lake. Sometimes we talked and sometimes we just matched each other’s stride and listened to the birds and kids. When there wasn’t anything around to name, I counted each step in a whisper. Theo laughed at my word games. When I asked if he was worried about the virus, he shook his head and said he hadn’t exactly decided what he was about the virus, but he definitely wasn’t worried. He said, “I just wish it’d happened sooner.”

That night we sat in my apartment watching a Danish movie about a twelve-year-old dogfighter whose favorite dog runs away and then the boy becomes a lonely shepherd but for goats. I think that’s what it was about—I couldn’t really follow what was happening on-screen, because whenever the subtitles appeared I couldn’t help but read each word aloud. I did it as softly as I could, but Theo and I were sitting close enough for him to hear me. At one point he paused the movie and asked if I really needed to do that, and I thought about it for a minute and told him no, I didn’t
need
to do it, but it made me feel better. It soothed me.

He unpaused the movie and we watched for a little while longer with me whispering the subtitles to myself. The boy met a man who said he’d seen the boy’s dog, but I wasn’t sure whether this was true. All I had were the words. I kept reading, and Theo paused the movie again and smiled. He fiddled around with the menu, and when he restarted the movie the subtitles were gone. Just the action on the screen and the indecipherable dialogue. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I studied the boy’s face as he’s tending the goats, and all of a sudden I could tell he’s pining for the lost dog. And the man comes back, and now I knew he was lying to the boy, I could see it in the way his mouth smiled but his eyes didn’t.

We watched the rest of the movie without subtitles, and I still felt those flakes falling but they weren’t so loud.

GORTON VAHER

PHILADELPHIA, PA

2041

After the riot the
Muir
was dry-docked indefinitely, while the kids on the streets went mental. I drank lukewarm tea and sulked all day in my apartment. It was more a room than an apartment—actually, more like a shared kitchenette. I laid my sleeping bag next to the minifridge and thought of Persephone while clenching and unclenching each muscle, starting with the scalp down to my feet. I dreamed of her floating away, trapped in prehistoric ice. While I slept, the other boarders, mostly nocturnal Laotians, slid open the curtain and used the sink to animate their powdered vodka, then turned on the screen to watch badminton. They chatted along with the action, but it didn’t bother me. They urinated in the sink, which did bother me.

I knew the virus was sending people haywire, but I needed to get out of there. I looked for work, but there was even less call for ice sculptors. I tried selling whimsical tinfoil caricatures on the street, but no one would look at me—they didn’t want whimsical, they were too busy buying water and propane, preparing for their personal typhoons. I studied the crowds for Persephone, scanned city buses when they went by. I peeked in the Mexican pastry shop on South Eighteenth, because I knew she liked Mexican pastries.

After a week of nothing I walked across town to the
Muir
. Captains are supposed to go down with their ships, so I thought maybe some night manager would still be there sifting through the rubble. Maybe he could tell me where Persephone was. The back door was open, swaying on its hinges, so I made my way through the pretend boiler room and into the darkened building. Three engorged rats were munching on the remnants of that last dinner, straight off the dusty china. My ice station lay on its side under a table.

In the break room I went straight to Persephone’s locker. I knew it because I used to leave stuff in there—acorns, flowers, bits of agate I found, anything I thought she’d like. Inside was a spare apron, her ID keycard with her home address on it, and a red felt-tip pen. Seeing the pen gave me a jolt. Persephone often kept it behind her ear. It would sit there all shift, going where she went, never wavering. It was her pen. She needed that pen.

I tied the apron around my waist, put the ID card and pen in the front pocket, and set out for the address on the card. I was halfway to her apartment before I realized I hadn’t even bothered to clean out my own locker.

She lived in one of the studio warrens along Shunk, apartment 14FP. There was no answer when I knocked, so I tried the apartment next door. A man wearing a yellow neoprene face mask answered. When I held up the ID card and asked if he knew where this woman lived, I needed to give her something, his jaw moved and a thick reddish fluid dribbled out from under the mask, onto his sweatshirt. I reared back, but he just brushed at his sweatshirt, pulled the mask away from his face, and said, “Antibacterial toothpaste.”

The man told me Persephone was out, and did I want to leave whatever it was with him? No, no, I told him, patting the front of the apron, what I wanted to give Persephone was far too valuable. The man raised his eyebrows. In retrospect, probably where I patted gave it a lewd connotation. He said Persephone spent all day every day at the Center City Transitional Facility, up on Broad Street.

I walked to Broad and found the building. An old hotel with a big pulsing sign out front. As I entered the lobby I rooted around in the apron to make sure the ID card and pen were still there. I held the pen tightly so it wouldn’t jostle out. I needed to look casual but not uncaring, needy but not desperate, like a man of dignity, scruples, grace, gratitude, et cetera. Mostly I worried Persephone would be able to tell, by my stunned look, that I hadn’t gone more than two hours without thinking about her since we parted over a month ago.