The Silent History: A Novel (8 page)

The last day I went to the Air Zoo I sat by the fake
Enola Gay
and waited, in case one of them might show. Fat tourists plodding around me. Before, I had been afraid of most people, but now I was starting to just not like them very much.

A pair of twins wearing matching hats laughed at the name of the airplane. They thought the word
gay
was funny.
Gay
didn’t mean
gay
, I wanted to tell them. It didn’t mean happy. It meant less than
Enola
, nothing.

On my way out of the museum I found the security guard eating pretzels out of a can, and I told him that I was going to come back with a whole bunch of my silent friends and we were going to burn the museum to the ground. While he was inside. They weren’t gone, I told him. They were getting organized. They were silently plotting his doom.

THEODORE GREENE

RICHMOND, CA

2020

The day that our school opened was hard for me. I know it shouldn’t have been. I know it was the thing I’d been working for, the thing that all of us had struggled to get up and running. I can’t tell you how many times we sat in those city council meetings waiting to be heard. Flora sitting next to me, drawing concentric circles in her spiral notebook. All of that time we spent developing the curriculum, sorting out logistics, an insane amount of work that we all did on top of our regular jobs. Raising the money to buy the old bakery on Myrtle and converting it ourselves. Everyone working together, just pouring all of our energy into the place, day after day. I was actually hanging sheetrock, which I had no idea how to do. All of us were driven by that hope, you know, that the school would save our children. I think that’s what made it come together so quickly.

Flora had been making progress in our apartment. There was no actual speech yet, but she was engaging with the lessons, doing the activities I developed for her. I could get her to open and close her mouth, to roll her jaw and move her tongue from side to side. I even got her to make a few sounds, letter sounds that she was sometimes able to repeat. These were seen as great victories by other parents. They watched videos of her doing these things and got inspired. They started to contact me, asking for advice and techniques, and I told them everything I was doing. A few of the other parents lived nearby and we started to get together, and the idea of the school quickly caught fire.

But by the time the school was finished and ready for students, I felt like … I mean, it never came to the point where I gave up on Flora completely. I still felt like there was an answer out there. I knew her mind was active. But she just wasn’t changing. Or, if she was changing, it wasn’t in any way that was improving her condition. Physically she was fine, and she was even starting to help me out with basic motherboard repair, but she wasn’t any closer to talking than she was when she was three. And so when I was standing out in front of the school, holding her hand, I felt a—I’m going to call it a sagging. Of the spirit. When you get that heaviness in your chest. It hit me suddenly that we’d essentially just built this temple to our own fears. It didn’t have anything to do with the children. I mean, it did, of course. It did. We really did believe that our kids would learn there. And just having them be together—to be around other kids like them. All of that would help. But it wasn’t only about the children. It was about us, the parents. The school building was this crazy clown house that we were using to keep us focused on the future, on this dream of the day when we believed our kids would be normal, where they could talk to us, tell us what was going on in their heads. Instead of the present, which was where our kids were sort of dead. Walking dead.

Or maybe it was just me who felt like this. All the other parents did seem happy enough. And the Oaks building itself was warm and inviting. I walked Flora to her classroom, which had walls and countertops I’d built myself, and I brought her to her rug area on the floor and spread the marble works out in front of her. Her teacher Ms. Chang came up and put a hand on Flora’s shoulder to introduce herself. I was sort of taken aback by her—not only because she was younger and more attractive than I’d expected from seeing her application, but because she instantly knew how to act with Flora. They seemed to bond in that first moment, and I felt a little better knowing I was leaving my daughter in the hands of this well-trained expert. And I walked out of the school and drove home to the apartment, and for the first time I spent the day there myself. Sitting with the piles of chips and optic fiber and other silicon junk. And I could actually hear her absence. The silence had a vacuum quality to it. I know it sounds weird, but I think my sense of hearing was actually different, more sharp or something, for having spent so many years with no one but Flora. Her presence had a warmth, a texture. I could sense, in this palpable way, from moment to moment, that she was not in the apartment. I remember almost laughing. Not that it was funny, but just because I’d worked as hard as I possibly could to build that school and all I’d done was send her away from me.

FRANCINE CHANG

OAKLAND, CA

2020

My first week at the Oaks School I went in with this vague sense of righteous indignation—like, it was me and the kids and together we were going to show all the skeptics how wrong they were. But that didn’t last. At orientation I was given a binder of newspaper articles, diagrams of cortexes, anecdotal evidence, firsthand accounts, to show what we were working against. I skimmed them. God, it was depressing. Dr. So-and-So says the silents are incapable of what we would describe as thought. They possess no language, no symbolic vocabulary. And Professor XYZ declares that without some new procedure, or miracle intervention, these children will be profoundly retarded, if not permanently defective, by age eight.

I’d been without a job for a while, too long. After I quit teaching at Clarendon, I did temp work, walked dogs, waited tables. Then came the opening at the Oaks School, the first all-silent school in the Bay Area, one of the first in the country. I hadn’t forgotten a minute of that terrible kindergarten year, but I remembered Colin and how he seemed different, so I decided … I don’t know what I decided, exactly. Mostly I needed to pay my rent.

Two months into the school year, between Halloween and Thanksgiving, three of the four teachers at Oaks basically quit. They still showed up, they continued eating their microwave lunches in the faculty lounge, but in class they mostly sulked. The clay therapy, the massages, the marbles, the recognition exercises—none of it worked. It felt like praying, a big wish into an empty space. The others contented themselves with teaching the kids how to sit still, in alphabetical order, for hours.

It’s ridiculous how long I held out. I won’t pretend I was nobler or imbued with a higher purpose than the other teachers. Yes, English is my second language and I was made fun of when I was in elementary because of my pronunciation and how my mom packed my lunch with tins of putrefied kimchi that other kids thought was gross. It
was
gross. I’m over it now. Maybe I was just more stubborn than the others. In class, one day I’d think we were making major progress, like when I came in to find them all starting their recognition exercises without prompting, and the next I’d have to pantomime what I expected of them, or distract them from looking at each other instead of me. I was working against this ineffective new curriculum but also the novelty of them being together, more or less for the first time, with other kids who were like themselves.

But I was okay with it. I wasn’t a savior, and the kids didn’t expect me to be. I understood what it was like to flail at something. To fall short of other people’s expectations.

One student, Flora, seemed the most receptive. I think she was used to the curriculum, and her dad was superinvolved, and maybe she’s proof that you can be born confident, silent or not. If there was a leader of the classroom, it was her, not me, and when I was at my wit’s end I’d gesture to her and say to the other seven students, “See Flora? See her? Act like Flora.” Not my proudest pedagogical moment.

Item by item, we abandoned the curriculum. I didn’t tell my fellow teachers—I wasn’t about to marinate with them in their constant gleeful misery during lunch. But the clay therapy was stupid. It seemed like something designed for photo ops. I replaced it with Ms. Chang’s Magical Musical Hour. I’d pull up some symphony or concerto over the speakers, and I—this is embarrassing, but I danced around the classroom and stood the kids up and invited them to do the same. And they did! They danced and hopped around and laughed. The other teachers acted like the kids were deaf, and their classrooms were total silence factories all day—but these kids were completely tuned in to noise, whether they understood or not.

They could pay attention when they wanted to; they could understand when I was mad, or frustrated, or pleased, and react to it; and they were intensely interested in each other. Once, during music hour, I noticed Keith and Laura, who were probably the two worst students in the class, marching rhythmically to Puccini and staring at each other, looking like … well, in normal circumstances, I’d say it was a flirty stare. I danced over to them, just to get a closer look, and they quickly stopped.

I saw this more and more, this intense mutual attention. Not just with Keith and Laura, and not just boys and girls. During recognition exercises, during recess. They stared at each other, I stared at them, we all sat quietly until 3:30 and then went home.

Meanwhile, the other teachers were burning out. When Mrs. Mullins quit monitoring lunch to spend more time napping in the teachers’ lounge, they needed someone to take the cafeteria. Mullins was a small-time tyrant, and she had created this lunchroom atmosphere that went past orderly into state-prison territory. I don’t know how she did it. There were forty students in the school, and they sat in groups of ten at four big round tables, four circles of silents. Looking back, I think these round tables did more for the kids than anything we tried in the classroom.

Anyway, I volunteered to do lunch. Mostly I just wanted to get away from the other teachers. I sat at a table by myself, the cold dead sun to the four planets of silents. I drank coffee and read. In any other school I’d have a stack of papers in front of me to grade, but here I could just sit with a soft-core novel about interspecies love on a forbidden planet and relax. The kids ate purposefully and continued the staring and threw their food away when they were done. This is how it went day after day. Pretty soon I stopped paying attention. Months of pleasant oblivion passed.

Until the day of our annual self-study. Even though the principal, Mr. Haskins, said the study was just a formality, the other teachers were stressed. Turns out, as much as they complained about their jobs, they had no desire to go back to a normal school, where they’d have to actually teach.

Mr. Haskins was touring the lunchroom, so I had to abandon my novel for the day. Sometimes Haskins seemed almost human, other times he was this ugly remorseless machine of jurisprudence. He was in machine mode that day, making the kids get up from their chairs so he could check if the floor was clean. This is how it happened: he was crawling around under one of the tables, hunting for crumbs, and then I saw Keith slyly pouring out his chocolate milk on the other side. Baiting the trap. Mr. Haskins crawled around some more, wriggling around on the floor army-style because the tables were so low, and when he came back up, the front of his white dress shirt was covered in chocolate milk. He looked down at the shirt and let out this spastic huff of air.

I was staring at Flora, who kept glancing under the table. She turned to Aileen, a girl in my class, and I saw it … like a brief surface ripple across her face. Perceptible only because I had looked at Flora so much. And then Aileen smiled just short of laughing. Okay, I said to myself, that’s new. I could feel my heart beating clear to my spine. Aileen glanced under the table just like Flora had. She looked across the table at Keith and Laura, whose backs were to me, and I saw something similar happen in Aileen’s face. That brief ripple, like fog across a mirror. I couldn’t believe it.

Keith and Laura smiled too.

This was it. This was the moment I knew. They had begun communicating.

VOLUME TWO

KOUROSH AALIA

OAKLAND, CA

2021

The discovery at the Oaks School only confirmed what we’d suspected all along—that our brains are much more flexible and adaptable than any computer or machine. Brain plasticity, we call it—seamlessly repurposing cognitive real estate depending on the needs and abilities of the individual. Blind people, for example, adapt their visual processing networks to process tactile information, and sometimes even develop qualitatively new skills like echolocation.

What, then, is the compensation when the individual is born without language? The language instinct is so fundamental to our self-conception that it’s nearly impossible for us to imagine life without it. We can close our eyes or cover our ears and guess what it’s like to be blind or deaf, but how could we begin to imagine ourselves without words? I’m not sure it’s possible, and yet that is the daily reality for these silent children—children who, whatever their disability, must on some level crave communication and fellowship just as much as the rest of us.

So we see the collision of a profound hunger, a profound limitation, and a profound adaptability. And now for the first time, in these specialized schools and facilities, these children have found themselves in a community of like minds, minds as strange and hungry as their own. It’s an unprecedented set of circumstances, an ideal starting point for an unprecedented flowering of alternative communication.

And this is what we’ve witnessed, first at the Oaks School and quickly elsewhere—a form of nonlinguistic communication with a depth and breadth that continues to surprise us. We are only just beginning to unravel the inner workings of the communication, but the central locus appears to be the children’s faces—hence the inaccurate but understandably popular term “face-talking.” The field of microexpressions has been gaining prominence for the past thirty years, generally via easily quantifiable, arguably gimmicky uses such as lie detection. The communication between these kids operates on similar principles, but at a level of precision and subtlety that quickly exposed the shortcomings of the FACS taxonomy. What’s most compelling, perhaps, is not the strangeness of the phenomenon but rather the
familiarity
—the children are doing something we all do every day, gathering information from each other’s faces and actions, constantly, intricately, and often to an extent far greater than we’re conscious of. It’s not a language—glares and smiles are not nouns and verbs—but it is a rich form of communication nonetheless, capable of conveying emotional nuance more accurately, deeply, and immediately than any proper language could.