The Silent History: A Novel (50 page)
Read The Silent History: A Novel Online
Authors: Eli Horowitz,Matthew Derby,Kevin Moffett
And I tried. I did whatever I could. But I was so consumed with giving Flora
more
that I never stopped to consider what she actually needed from me. Not until I let her slip out of the hotel suite that night.
When I got back to El Cerrito, I drove out to that house—the house that Mel and I lived in. I asked Francine to go with me. I sensed she was slightly uncomfortable when it came to the subject of Mel, but I risked it anyway. I think I was still a little frightened of the place and I wanted a human shield in case things got out of hand. In my mind it loomed over everything around it, a stabbing column of black smoke that threatened to consume the whole neighborhood. But when we pulled up, we saw that the whole street was nothing but a cordoned-off pile of rubble. Where the house once stood, there was just a cushionless pink couch sagging on a heap of pulverized bricks. A sign posted on the fence around the property said that the area was being converted into a silent transitional center. Which was amusing and sad. I thought about all those videos I’d made of Flora as a child, where I’d held up a cucumber and said, “Cucumber,” in an exaggerated voice, and she’d just watch my hand like I was about to perform a magic trick that never happened. What will those videos look like when all the words have been sucked out of us? Will future people think of them as avant garde theater pieces, or will they see them for what they really are—desperation at sixty frames per second?
We got out and approached the fence. Francine said, “This must feel weird.” I agreed. I took the key out of my pocket and said, “You want to take a look around inside?” She laughed a little. I ran my finger over the Kama Lounge logo and she said, “You know, you did a pretty good job, all things considered.” I had no idea what she meant. She said, “You walk around like you caused all this suffering yourself. As if you had anything to do with it. Bad things happened to you. There’s nothing you can do to change that.” My eyes stung, and I realized with some embarrassment that I was crying. And then I really gave in—I couldn’t remember when I’d last been able to weep, and I was glad to finally be rid of the tears. I flung the key in a high arc over the fence. It glanced off the arm of the couch and landed in a shallow puddle.
My daughter was who she was not because of anything I did or didn’t do but because she was part of me and part of Mel. Everything that could’ve been done had already been done. By the time our kids are born, the fire is already lit. All we are doing as parents is helping them find the kindling. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel that I’d done a good job raising Flora. It wasn’t the job I thought I was doing. It wasn’t the thing I was so focused on—the healing, the fixing. It was something else that happened when I wasn’t looking. It was, maybe, that other half that Mel had asked me to give.
The ride back was quiet. The billboards along the highway displayed public service messages in pantomime. How to care for a newly silent loved one. How to deal with the trauma following the onset of symptoms. Where to go to have medical records translated to pictographs. I could tell Francine wanted me to talk about the past, but I wasn’t ready to say anything, not yet. So I turned on the music service and told her to pick whatever she wanted. I told her to surprise me. She scrolled through the playlists while I drove.
A pregnant pause, is that the expression? Something taking shape in the spaces between words, something growing there, waiting to take on a life of its own. Like the silence that’s now coiled up inside us, biding its time. I’m not missing the irony that after all my attempts to get Flora to talk, to bring her over to my side, it’s me who’ll eventually cross over. That’s the big cosmic joke. But I’m ready. I’m ready for that morning when I answer the ringing phone and instead of words I’ll hear staccato tones, rising and falling, the tumbling incomprehensible streams. The silence, when it comes, will bring me closer to Flora than I’ve ever been. I’ll hear what she hears, see what she sees, and I will finally know her for the person she is instead of the person I tried to carve her into.
Francine found a song and said, “Oh, I haven’t heard this in forever.” She tapped the screen and a single guitar chord rang out, sending a jolt down my spine even before I recognized it as “Purple Rain.” I immediately reached to turn it off, like a reflex, a physical thing. But halfway through the motion I stopped. “What?” she said, looking slightly alarmed. I said, “I just like to listen to this one superloud,” and I turned up the volume until the snare hurt my ears. I reached out and dared to take Francine’s hand, and the world didn’t end.
EPILOGUE
CALVIN ANDERSEN
TERLINGUA, TX
2043
There is a dog that follows me around the property, so I feed him. Or does he follow me around
because
I feed him? I don’t remember how it was that we were paired up. But now we are a pair. We get up early. Find the goat. Milk the goat. Drink the milk. Check the cables on the wind turbines. Hunt for snakes and beat their heads with the knotted pole. Skin them and boil them. Eat. Drink snake wine from a hollowed-out cactus trunk. Drink until the stars begin to blur. Sleep.
The dog is orange and white and he makes no demands on me. He barks when he is scared, but otherwise he is quiet. He pants by my side as we go looking for the goat. It is really all the companionship I have ever wished for. We live in a wooden hut that once housed miners. The ceiling is broken in half. A big crack that would let in the rain if it rained here. I sleep on the packed-dirt floor. The dog eats the scorpions that are drawn to the heat of my body in the night.
They left the hotel first—the boy with his parents, led by the old woman. I watched them leave, then watched the man, my drinking friend, still grappling on the floor. I moved to help him, but his face told me to go. I walked to the table, picked up the calibration helmet, and went down the hall to the emergency stairwell. The helmet was never mine, but I took it. I brought it with me to the desert. It still works the same as it did—there is no PhonCom network anymore, but I can send signals to my own implant. I can still speak. But I can only send signals outward. Without PhonCom there is no language processing. No comprehension. I can make words, but I cannot understand them. I have been recording this testament in pieces. I listen back, and it sounds like a long, tuneless song. But I can talk if I need to. If I want to. I do not know where Dr. Burnham is or what he is doing, but I know that someday he will lose his words and I will have mine. One day, perhaps, I will be the last talker on earth. This amuses me.
I don’t often think about the past. But when I do, I think only about my boyhood. My parents drove me to Dr. Burnham’s office twice each week, every week, from the time I was two until my twelfth birthday, but I remember very little about the office visits themselves. I can remember the posters on the walls, which showed the brain sliced and exposed in various ways. I remember the smell of the nurse when she leaned in close to apply the monitor nodes, a scent like a crackling beach fire. But what I recall most clearly is being in the car. I would sit in the backseat and look out the window at the passing trees while my father drove and my mother embroidered monograms on satin baseball jackets. I felt safe in the car. It was the only time in my life that nothing was expected of me that I couldn’t deliver.
My parents wanted a boy who could tell them he loved them. My doctor wanted a success story. The rest of the talkers wanted to see the handicapped man struggle to rise to their level of perfect health. I tried hard to be all of these things. I did whatever they wanted. But I couldn’t rid myself of this feeling of being somebody’s experiment. Not until I came here. In the desert you are who you are simply because you choose to stay. There isn’t anything beyond this choice.
This dog will not fetch. I throw a stick out into the desert as far as I can, and he just looks. I clap my hands and whistle, pointing in the direction of the stick, and he sits on his haunches and stares at me. I go to fetch the stick myself, and he follows behind me. I throw the stick again, and again he sits and watches it sail through the sky and scuff the dry earth in the distance. I don’t know why the dog won’t run for the stick. Maybe it wants to show its loyalty to me by staying close. Maybe it is just not interested. I cannot begin to guess, and I do not need to. Let the dog have its thoughts, whatever shape they may take. Let the unknown be unknown. The things we need will reveal themselves in time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks to Russell Quinn, Chris Ying, Richard Parks, Chris Adrian, Rachel Khong, Max Fenton, Corinna Vallianatos, Mary-Kim Arnold, Max Winter, Ben Marcus, Simon Huynh, Amity Horowitz, Kathleen Alcott, Skip Horack, Chris Flynn, Josh Tyree, Sean McDonald, Andrew Wylie, Kristina Moore, Luke Ingram, PJ Mark, Kassie Evashevski, Lauren Meltzner, Owen Shiflett, Ivana Schechter-Garcia, Jenno Topping, Scott Bromley, Keleigh Thomas Morgan, Kat Jawaharlal, Michelle Satter, Cullen Conly, Carrie Beck, Mark Bomback, and Marge Lafferty.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ELI HOROWITZ
was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney’s. He is the coauthor of
The Clock Without a Face
, a treasure-hunt mystery;
Everything You Know Is Pong
, an illustrated cultural history of Ping-Pong; and
The New World
, a collaboration with Chris Adrian, forthcoming from FSG.
MATTHEW DERBY
is the author of the short-story collection
Super Flat Times
. His writing has appeared in
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories
,
McSweeney’s
,
Conjunctions
,
The Believer
, and
Guernica.
He lives in Rhode Island.
KEVIN MOFFETT
is the author of
Permanent Visitors
and
Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events
. He lives in Claremont, California.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Ying Horowitz & Quinn
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horowitz, Eli.
The silent history: a novel / Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-53447-9 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-374-71094-1 (ebook)
1. Communicative disorders in children—Fiction. 2. Nonverbal communication in children—Fiction. 3. Children—Language—Fiction. I. Derby, Matthew, 1973– II. Moffett, Kevin, 1972– III. Title.
PS3608.O7675 S55 2014
813'.6—dc23
2013041340