The Silent History: A Novel (10 page)

The two men insisted that they didn’t see anything. They sounded so condescending. I said, “Look, if I’m going insane, just tell me. Don’t coddle me.”

After six more agonizing minutes, the show ended, and I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror—nothing. Not a mark on me. Either I’d successfully rubbed it off, or the mark was on the monitor, or … oh, I don’t know.

I can’t remember why I agreed to go on TV. In the aftermath, when everyone was so excited, skeptical, fixated, overreaching, plenty of people billing themselves “nonverbal communication experts” handed out predictions. Principal Haskins was one of them. He called what the kids were doing “Oaks School Face Language.”

“We plan to study it,” he said, “and develop a vocabulary, and in a year or two we’ll be teaching fourth-graders long division with this exciting new language.” He always concluded with the line, “We’ve finally found the key to unlock the mystery of these special children.”

I didn’t agree. Don’t misunderstand, the kids were thriving around each other. After the discovery in the lunchroom, I had a little pull at Oaks, so I lobbied to add a second recess and extend lunchtime, until the school day was half class, half nonclass. By the end of that first year it seemed like all the kids were communicating, the ones who’d learned early teaching the ones who hadn’t. It was remarkable.

The face-talking—as I guess I too was now calling it—was new to me, but not exactly unfamiliar. Watching them I always felt at the edge of understanding what they were conferring about. The exchanges were a progression of familiar expressions—a look of rumination, then happiness, then reluctance, worry. The sequences were what confused me. Flora would squint at Daniel, who would slyly smile at her, and she in turn would return a different kind of squint, something I couldn’t even assign an adjective to. It reminded me, this probably sounds crazy, of the wharf at dusk. This happened with a lot of their expressions, especially Flora’s. I’d look up from my book and watch them and be reminded of a meal, a feeling, a memory, weather.

The Monday after the marker-on-face incident, I went to school in a funk. Feeling hollowed-out and filled with cotton balls and wasps. I sulked at my desk, torturing myself with book sixteen of the Erotic Time Travels series, this one set during the Civil War: love on horseback, love by campfire, amputations. By now I’d pretty much whittled my curriculum down to hang-out time and music time. Today, though, I was just gonna let music time pass by. It usually only lasted a half hour anyway, and I was way more into it than the students.

After lunch I continued reading. Stonewall Jackson had raided the home of Miss Millicent Franklin, who was hiding a Union general beneath her petticoat. She didn’t have time to put on her underthings, and of course the Union general couldn’t resist the “corky pong” of her you-know-what, so he began to expertly compromise her with his tongue …

I was distracted by the satellite radio starting up, which I recognized immediately as a waltz, “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” I love waltzes. I love how dance and song complement each other—you understand the dance and the song makes sense, understand the song and the dance makes sense. I put my book down, feeling chastened to be reading such trash, and watched as Flora and the others cleared out the desks. What were they doing?

Once the desks were cleared, all of them stared at me. It’s impossible to describe the feeling when they were really paying attention to me and studying my face. I could feel the energy and authority of their shared understanding. When Flora stepped forward and held out her hand to me, I sensed that whatever they’d agreed on was a consequence of my beleaguered condition.

Keith went to the radio and restarted the song. Flora held out her left hand, and I took it. She was a lot shorter than me, so I hunched over and we danced with a respectful distance. Flora was looking at me with intense scrutiny, reading me. It intimidated me, to be honest, but her expression wasn’t judgmental. It seemed more methodical. Diagnostic.

We went through two waltzes. One-two-three, one-two-three. When we were done, Keith came over to me and held out his hand. Someone started the song over and we danced. That day, I danced with every single one of my students. I went home feeling energized, satisfied, a little crazy.

I should’ve kept my mouth shut, but in the next faculty meeting I made the mistake of telling the other teachers what happened. “For the past year or so,” I told them, “I thought they were discussing
things
. Looking around the room and matching expressions with objects. That’s not what they’re doing at all.”

“What are they discussing?” asked one of the pre-K teachers, a woman named Shelly.

I thought about her question for a long time, so long that we’d already moved on to the next agenda item, and the next, by the time I had an answer. When the meeting was done, I took Shelly aside and asked, “How are you doing?” She said, “I’m okay,” like you would if a clerk asked you that question. “No,
really
,” I said. And she paused for a second and said, “Fine, I think,” and I said, “Keep thinking about it.” And she did. Before she could reply again I said, “Don’t answer yet.”

Shelly waited and I waited, and after a minute or so I wanted her to say something like, “The more I think about it, the less sure I am.” And then I’d tell her, “
Exactly
,” and prove something about how complicated the question was, and that was what our students were constantly discussing.

But after a while Shelly said, “You know, I really think I’m doing okay. I feel good. I just had a nice lunch.”

And then I said, “
Exactly
,” and Shelly looked at me like I was crazy.

THEODORE GREENE

RICHMOND, CA

2022

It came so suddenly, and I wasn’t sure how to respond. Really I wasn’t any more prepared to communicate with Flora than I was on the day she was born. Everything I’d done up to that point was focused on getting her to speak, getting her to use her voice or her hands. It hadn’t ever crossed my mind that she’d have some other way. I probably made it worse, actually, because all that time I was staring at her, focused on her mouth, struggling to get something out of her, and meanwhile she was—I’m just guessing, but probably she was trying just as hard to get through to me, but in a way that I wasn’t even picking up. I know it’s unproductive to think that way, to think of that time as wasted. But those are years I can’t get back. That whole stretch, I can never recover it. Whereas I feel like if I’d only known, I could have brought her so much further along. I could have taught her so much.

The teachers started offering an evening class for parents to learn about some of the facial muscles and the basic microexpressions that they could make. All the parents sat facing each other. I was the only single parent taking the class, so I had to pair off with Francine. I wished that I could have worked with anyone else, because there was something about Francine that was just … she was kind of very attractive in an almost hostile way, like a wounded animal, if that makes sense. But I didn’t want the attraction I felt to transform into an obsession or anything, because I wasn’t … I mean, I lived in a basement. I’ve never been the kind of person women were interested in, even way back before I met Mel. I didn’t have a chance with Francine, and I wasn’t sure I’d even want one if I qualified. I still felt the presence of Mel, even after eleven years. It was like a gravitational pull she had on me.

Anyway, I had to stare at Francine’s face for several hours a week while we learned things like the difference between the zygomaticus major and the zygomaticus minor, and how tightening the lips was different from pressing the lips, and that certainly led me to start thinking about her more often than I wanted to. I couldn’t help but be taken by the incredible uniqueness of her face. She had sharp eyes and a flat nose with a broad, heart-shaped bridge. And always a bit of a wistful look that the muscle exercises only made more intense. I didn’t get to know too much about her during class. We were so focused on, like, learning to detect an inner brow raise as opposed to an outer brow raise. It was frustrating and boring at first, really intensely boring. But once you kept at it for a while, once you just sort of accepted the boredom, you could reach a new level, a deeper kind of seeing. You could see tiny differences appear, subtle variations. Nothing that really made sense, you know, nothing that you could remember from one moment to the next. But I could definitely see changes in Francine’s face that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. It was hard not to fall into a sort of … it wasn’t love, but it was something. I spent so much time scanning the surfaces, the whole terrain of her face. I came to know it so well.

At home, Flora tolerated my attempts to communicate with her. She thought it was funny. I can’t imagine how it must have looked to her. Like baby talk or something, nonsense or white noise. We would sit at the kitchen table, and I would start to make the expressions I’d learned the night before. She’d stare back at me with this look like she didn’t know how to respond. But we were getting closer to the goal. Definitely closer to being able to have an actual conversation. It injected me with this new sense of hope. I felt like Mel could see us from wherever she was. I was bringing us together again, which was part of why the time I spent with Francine was so terrifying. I felt like it was some kind of test. I’m not a biblical person, but I felt like Francine was there in my life to test my mettle. To try my dedication to Mel and to the future I was working so hard for.

And then there was a social event at the school. The Spring Festival. A thing with games and food. I was looking forward to it, to being with all of the other parents. I knew Francine would be there, and I’m not going to say that didn’t play into my excitement. But there was also just a general feeling of anticipation. We were all, the whole community, we were like astronauts or explorers, all of us discovering this new way of life. Nothing was going to be the same, ever again. The principal rolled the PA out of the storage closet and started to play music. The kids stared at it like they could somehow see the sound waves or something. An old song came on, “Money, Cash, Hoes,” I think, and some of the parents got up and danced. I was sitting in a chair against the wall, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Francine. She was trying to get me to dance. She looked straight into my eyes and arched her eyebrow in a campy kind of come-hither style, but I saw her eyelid twitching and her hand trembled slightly on my shoulder, like she was nervous, too. And maybe a bit humiliated at having to be the one to make the first move. I shook my head, but I guess I wasn’t very convincing, because she took my hand anyway and led me out onto the gym floor, right underneath the proprioceptive swings, and I have to say that she looked kind of amazing. Her hair was up in a new way and she looked glad to be with me. No one had looked at me like that in a long time. I pulled her close to me and she put her head on my shoulder, and I felt about eighteen years old.

But while we danced to the song, I could see Flora sitting in a semicircle in the corner with her friends, and they were face-talking to each other. I saw them looking at her with those faces, and I saw her look back, and—I wanted to smash those kids. I wanted to really give them something to talk about. I mean, of course, I would never. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.
Fault
isn’t even the right word. But I hated them. I loathed the way they could just easily chat with my daughter, whereas I was like a flailing baby in her presence, just blathering outside the fortress of her mind. I got delirious with rage, with jealousy, to the point where I was about to be sick.

Of course, Francine sensed that I was distracted. I looked away and told her that everything was fine. We kept dancing for the rest of the night, but after that I stopped going to the classes, and eventually I started avoiding the school altogether as much as I could, which was, I guess, just as well.

KENULE MITEE

BROOKLYN, NY

2022

I had seen those kids, yes. Many times, just walking, like this, back and forth along the boardwalk. They would come to my stand and buy a single stick of Spray Ya Face, and I would see them go over to a pavilion and they would spray themselves and just lie there in the sand. Rapid Downhill Citrus was the kind they liked the best.

I knew there was something different about them. They had a way of walking, of carrying themselves. In Ogoniland, where I am from, there was a girl in the village. She never said a word. We were all scared of this girl, who was always walking far out to the edge of the village where our mothers told us we shouldn’t go. She was like a wild animal. Her mother set a bowl of pepper soup out for her, and she would come when the sun went down and eat the soup and sleep on the hard ground. This girl never harmed anyone, but we were all scared. My friend saw a show on TV about a ghost that took control of people’s brains and made them commit terrible crimes. We thought that this girl was a ghost and if we got too close to her, even if we just got her attention somehow, she would steal our brains. If I heard a noise at night, I would think, Oh, it is the wild girl coming for me.

These kids gave me the same feeling. I would come to work early, very early, and wheel my cart out onto the boardwalk, and pretty soon I would see them coming out of that big house, all at once in a large group. I asked my boss one day, I said, “What is that big house behind Lucifer’s Hammer?” And he told me it was called Barrowbrook, and it was a place where those kids stayed at night—the silent kids, he meant. This Barrowbrook was like an orphanage, he said, but during the day they kicked them out. So I would see them in the morning coming out of that place. Always very quiet, those kids. If you didn’t see them, you would not know they were there. And they would wander in packs of four or five, up and down the boardwalk, up and down, looking for food and money on the beach, in the trash, anywhere.

I don’t think they stole. They handed me change only. Sometimes it was enough, sometimes not. They didn’t seem to know how much money they had, and they didn’t seem to care when they didn’t have enough. Some days they had no money at all. They would just come and look at the selection. I would say, “Ya ye, flavor of the day is … Mango Knificide,” because that is how I do it. That is my thing, and people like it. But those kids would just look at me for a long time. I would say, “You buy something or you move along,” and they looked at me like I was a dog barking. Which was frustrating, because if anything, they were closer to being dogs! I never liked them. Especially that boy with the scar up his arm. A fat winding white thing that looked like an eel. Very unpleasant.