The Silent History: A Novel (6 page)

STEVEN GRENIER

NEW YORK, NY

2018

When Royce’s big article on phasic resistance came out—fucking Royce, who was if you remember the dumb shit who “accidentally” shot his production assistant in the shoulder in Uganda—how he ended up doing a cover story for
Time
is beyond me, but the article came out and caused a sort of low-grade panic to sweep through the country. I think there were at the time only around four or five thousand cases in the U.S., but the way people were talking about it—there was a current in the air that this was just the beginning of something huge, on the scale of polio or something. The
Time
piece left a lot of questions unanswered, of course. And when people don’t get answers they’re going to seek out the claims of whatever charlatan is most persuasive. I knew I had to dig up that charlatan. I had to get there first. Royce could go fuck himself with his own spidery dick, if he could even find it. Thing is like a pho noodle. I’d even help him look for it if I knew how to operate an electron microscope.

An intern turned me on to this woman Kirsten Strang, who’d written an article in one of those leftist mothering magazines, if you can believe that there’s more than one. The headline was something like, “Plastics Ruined My Children and Yours Are Next.” Strident, over the top, just the worst kind of clichéd example of loopy overprotective parenting that was, as far as I was concerned, as much to blame for the silence as anything else. The article claimed that babies were getting exposed to a laundry list of toxins starting the minute they came out of their mothers’ wombs, and that these toxins were to blame for the silence. The main culprit was a new plastic that was being used in medical equipment, toys, and kitchen products—this substance called E-11T, which was designed to biodegrade smoothly but apparently also leached small amounts of cyanide when it was first introduced. The FDA didn’t even catch it, the amount was so small, but Strang heard “cyanide” and her mind was made up. In the article she stopped short of directly blaming hospitals for silence, but I saw that she was claiming this online and even offering “alternative care” out of her home, which included midwife services and vintage medical supplies made of glass and metal. I was like, “Bingo.” Perfect fucking storm.

Banks and I went to Ridgedale to interview Strang and get a look at her twins, who were both silent. She greeted us on her porch, wearing an ankle-length dress and a waxed-canvas respirator, and told us that we weren’t allowed to film inside the house. She said the camera emitted enough heat to offgas small amounts of mercury into the air. This was disappointing, but I agreed to her terms, thinking we might be able to sneak in some footage when she wasn’t looking.

Inside, it was like a derelict’s hoard. She took us into the kitchen, and there were hundreds of mason jars stacked on the table and on all the counters. Some were filled and some were waiting to be filled, and she was boiling something in a pot at the wood-burning stove. Everything in the kitchen was wood or glass or metal. She told us there were so many toxin-leaching materials in modern products, all getting trapped inside of people’s houses because of the energy-efficient windows and walls and everything, that it’s inevitable kids’ brains are going to be affected. She knew that her children’s might never be normal, but why keep poison in your house just because the damage has already been done? I shot a glance at Banks, who gave me that look, that smile without a smile. We had seriously lucked into something.

She led us into the living room, which had no television, of course, just a few wooden chairs with no cushions, because she told us that the foam they used to make the pads was incredibly dangerous. Even the lamps in the room, she showed us, were bought from a thrift store because of the fabric-wrapped cords and Bakelite fixtures. This woman had thought of everything.

Next was the twins’ room. The kids were kneeling on the floor playing with marbles. We could just barely see them, because the shades were drawn and the lights were off. I knelt on the floor to try to make some sort of contact with them. They both wore blue dust masks, and they stared at me the way a doctor looks at a gunshot wound—with the utmost clinical resignation. Strang hissed and said, “You’ve ruined their artwork.” I looked down and saw that I’d put my knee right in the center of a wild pattern of concentric marble rings. The kids didn’t seem too broken up by it, but Strang took them by the arms, kind of stiffly, and led them out of the room. They stopped at the threshold and stared at Banks and me until Strang moved them along down the hall. When she was gone, Banks looked at me, and I nodded. He turned on the camera and started taking some quick footage of the two homemade beds on pine platforms, as well as the marbles and wooden blocks the kids had arranged in bizarre patterns. I pulled back the shade and peeked out over the fence to the next lawn, where there was another kid wearing a kerchief sitting on a swing, slowly gyrating with her head down. I saw that the roof of the house had been done over in slate tile and that there was no car in the driveway.

Strang came back, and I distracted her by asking how many other parents in the neighborhood were taking these measures. She started to answer but cut herself off to sniff the air. She shouted, “You were filming in here. I told you not to film in here and you filmed in here. You just put poison in the air.” She chased us out of her house, calling us murderers. Some of the other families came out and watched from their porches as we got the hell out of there.

We produced the segment in such a way that ostensibly exposed Strang as a nutty extremist but also left just a little doubt in the viewer’s mind, like, “My kid was born in a hospital, with all of this plastic stuff all around him, and now he doesn’t speak—maybe this woman is right,” you know? Just the suggestion of that opens the door for more compelling material. Strang, too, benefited in the end from the thing in that she became a sort of fringe hero for about twenty minutes, inspiring other weak-minded parents to take on her wacko ideology. I suppose we were all partners, in a way.

PATTI KERN

PACIFICA, CA

2018

Most Benevolent Thomas gave us children when we became fully vested. Mine was a small mint cockatiel, and Most Benevolent Thomas told me not to name him, that words, especially names, were an obstruction to loving belief, the kind we’re all aspiring toward. I still accept this. Did I think the cockatiel was actually my child? No, not in the literal way Most Benevolent Thomas encouraged me to. But I stared at my bird during emptying time, and centered my love on him. I believe there’s truth in even the most divergent mentalities. I spent my twenties following figures with conflicted relationships to honesty, but no matter what, I always came out with a takeaway. And so now I possess a lovely bouquet of acquired belief.

I was drafted into existence to help people. We have so little time in the manifest world, and we spend most of our lives fortressing. Erecting personal walls because we are frightened. Often, when I’m out for a walk, or on my front porch waiting for a client, I’ll see a neighbor or someone I don’t know and I’ll approach them and say, “Tomorrow is an impossibility. Today is our day.”

I extend my hands for them to hold and look closely into their eyes and wait. “Any response is okay,” I tell them.

They rarely take my hands. They move on, or thank me perfunctorily, but it’s okay. A missed connection is still a connection. And my reaching out is what finally provided the foundation for contact with the silent girl.

Business was slow. I do personal consultations, life coaching, some play-based conferencing with children. I love my job. Advising others allows me a chance to advise myself. It centers me.

Her name was Amanda. Her mother lived a few streets over—she was someone I often called out to from my porch. I must’ve known she was the mother of a silent. I must’ve sensed it. If you spend all your life studying subtle alignments you’re going to have moments like this. There was a knock on my door one morning and this woman, very open and soulful with a gingham headscarf, stood there with her daughter. I had never had the privilege of close proximity with a silent. I’d seen them on television, of course, and in public, and I thought they were wonderful, but nothing prepared me for Amanda. She looked about eight years old, but with none of the chaotic energy that most children emit. She was frightened, I knew this right away. Her eyes, which fixed very suddenly on mine, told me this. She was tired of being incompletely understood, and her tiredness would soon give way to despair. I also knew that she was intrigued by me and my meditative bearing, as well as my pleasantly eclectic living room.

The mother said, “Can you just help me with her for a little while? You seem so kind and patient and wise.”

This is approximately what she said. Words are the least important part of this story. They both entered my foyer. The mother, too, seemed tired. She thanked me and gave me her phone number and left. I held Amanda’s hand as we walked into the living room. She was a polite and sturdy and beautiful little girl. I poured her a glass of water without ice and gave her two flaxseed crackers.

Please don’t ridicule what I’m telling you. If it helps, forget about anything that makes you skeptical. It doesn’t matter. Forget how she got there. Forget the crackers. Forget me, even. I have my techniques, some learned, some instinctive. If I told you about spirit colors and constancy mapping, you wouldn’t believe me about what came next, and it’s important for you to believe me.

We sat facing each other on my couch. I held both her hands and I started breathing deeply—involuntarily, mind you—and Amanda stared at me and began reciprocating. In-out-in-out. We were imprinting on each other. I nodded very slowly and Amanda did the same. It moved me. I could feel my inner places hollowing out to make room for something.

“You don’t need to speak,” I said. “What bridges us is nameless.”

Amanda continued to nod. Her pupils glowed with a pure ineradicable sincerity. Most of us keep our fires deep within our caves, but Amanda’s burned in every blink of her eyes.

I extended to her a volley of fellow feeling. Amanda accepted the volley and answered simply. People are always asking me what it was she said. She didn’t say anything. She emitted. She doused me with her inner stream.

When her mother arrived we were still holding hands. Amanda had fallen asleep, but we’d continued communicating.

“She’s a medium,” I told the mother. “She’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”

“What happened?” she asked.

I reached out and took her hands. “Love,” I said. “Communication.”

I’m not unaware of the effect I have on people. I know I alarmed this woman. It’s just, I knew I had found what I’d been searching for. This kind of natural communion.

We have so much to learn from these people. You have to understand, words are just conduits. We invented them because we needed something to hook at the truth—but words have become an obstacle, a smoke screen. Even what I’m saying right now, it doesn’t approximate what I actually mean. There was a time, not as long ago as you think, when we had no words. We were just pure intention and purpose and spirit and feeling. An open fire. These children were put here to return us to those days. Watch them, understand them. Meet them with love. Listen to all they’re not saying.

PRASHANT NUREGESAN

ATLANTA, GA

2018

Isabelle, my niece, was diagnosed with the silence, and that was a real lightning rod for me, in that it really gave me the focus to come up with the design for the Chatter. If I see a need, the first thing I’m thinking is how to fill it. That’s just me. That’s how I operate. Cereal takes a long time to eat. Bang: Cereal Milk. I can’t see in the dark. Bang: Light Jackets. I can’t leave my cat at home. Bang: Pet Björn. I just came up with all of those concepts right now. I don’t even like them. You see, though? I try not to waste too much time between the problem and the solution. That’s where a lot of businesses flounder. I guess it’s just my nature, you know, ever since my father. We grew up in Pennsylvania, an old industrial town, and my father owned a furniture store in an old mill building. In wintertime he noticed people weren’t shopping for furniture. It was too cold out! They didn’t want to leave their cars, so my father, what he did was add a drive-thru option. The store was named Nuregesan’s but people called it Drive-Thru Nu’s, and every weekend there would be cars backed up for blocks waiting to pass through and check out the merchandise. This was a big thing in our town, until the Raymour & Flanigan opened in Scranton and suddenly everyone wanted to go there, quality and service be damned.

I got a degree in engineering from Rutgers and started working for a company called TrendNest, which was a kind of think tank that produced patents for products that other companies would then buy and bring to market. My most successful product design there was the Dype, which I don’t know if you heard of but it was an undergarment aimed at men in their early twenties who liked to party but who sometimes lost control of their bodily functions as a result. You might not think there was a need for that, but I saw many of my classmates soil themselves while at Rutgers, and it was a thing that tarnished their reputation, sometimes for good. The Dype was made with a superabsorbent four-way stretch material that was protected under a separate patent I also created. It could be branded with any sports team or popular video game or singer. Anything you could print on clothes. The cobranding is key for that segment, or really every segment.

Then Isabelle was born. An adorable little girl who had everything going for her until the diagnosis. I didn’t understand much about the mind science behind emerging phasism, but I knew it was a problem for the parents and the kids and everyone else, too. I wanted to do something, to make a product that could help Isabelle and everyone in her situation. But I have a proprietary five-phase design process, okay? Discovery, Analysis, Strategy, Design, Implementation. And the discovery phase here was almost impossible, because how do you really know what these kids need? You can’t know. You can’t get this out of them, obviously. I had to fall back on the core principles that I apply to any product I’m thinking about designing, which are comfort, convenience, and safety. If your product isn’t somehow tied in to one or more of these, you might as well get out of the business. You’ve got to fill a need. Your product or service or whatever has to make someone’s life easier. It’s got to have some emotional tie, something that would convince a person they can’t live without it. I spent a lot of time observing Isabelle, taking notes on her activities. I followed her around at the park and in the woods behind her house and at Rumpus Run, that restaurant with the illuminated treadmill. I gathered a ton of data, and when I ran it through VisChart the answer was as clear as day. The main difference between Isabelle and normal, talking kids was that they were moving their mouths and she wasn’t. Maybe silent kids just weren’t talking because they hadn’t gotten enough mouth exercise. Just like how a weightlifter has to train for a long time before he can bench four hundred pounds, maybe these kids just needed to get their jaws and lips working a lot harder. Maybe if they understood what a mouth was for, they’d start to really use it.