The Silent History: A Novel (12 page)

I went and stood in front of her. I knelt down and tried to pet her cat on the stomach. Before I did, the cat grabbed my hand with its front paws and bit down on the meaty part, right by the thumb. I yelped and sort of fell back. The girl swooped up her cat in one arm and came over to me and took my hand to look at it. I felt all the old longing coming back, but it was different. This time it felt good.

I didn’t try to communicate with her that first time. I just stared for as long as she would let me, and she let me for a while. She had tiny bumps on the bridge of her nose and on her neck, and I wanted to run my tongue along them. I wanted to carry around a picture of her and show people. I wanted her to wear my clothes. I was so excited that I even told Drake about her. I don’t know why I did it. He high-fived me and asked about her rack.

“It’s pretty good,” I told him.

She was there again the next day. With her cat. This time, I went up and pretended I was going to pet the cat and then raised my hands up like, “No way, not again!” She smiled. She had braces. I love braces. She let me walk with her a little ways down the trail. I picked a yellow flower from a bush and she put it behind her ear. The next day I’d made her a card with pictures of cats I drew, but she didn’t bring her cat. She looked at the card, looked at each picture and then at me, and I saw wrinkles pass beneath her eyes, and I felt thanked. I tried to signal “You’re welcome,” but she kept staring, like she was waiting for something else. I tried to signal “That’s all I wanted to say,” but she kept waiting. We walked down the trail to a man-made lake with these deformed ducks in it. Some had red welts all over their faces and beaks. The day after that she let me hold her hand. And the day after that, too.

On the fifth day she took me to a playground behind the closed library. She let go of my hand and I followed her to the playground, where two boys and a girl were sitting in sand. They were just looking at each other, and when the girl came up to them they all gestured toward her, and she sat down, too. I kept standing. They barely looked at me. These weren’t the kind of silents I remembered. The guys both wore fake basketball jerseys over long-sleeve shirts. Like anybody. They looked happy and greedy for each other’s company. What’s the point of being silent if you’re going to be like everyone else, I wanted to ask.

I walked away from the playground really slowly, in case she wanted to catch up to me. I guess she didn’t. I went back the next day, walked all around looking for her, and the day after, and then a bunch more days, but I never found her again.

I ate dinner with Drake and Mom a few days later. Tacos. I was feeling awful. When Mom was in the kitchen washing dishes, Drake said, “All right. Now let me smell your fingers. I want to know if you’ve been getting some.”

I didn’t yell at him to quit burdening me with his horribleness. I stuck out my hand and let him smell my fingers. He said, “Outlook not so good.”

Before I rode home, I took the cinder block he used to block his tires and dropped it through the back window of his car.

On good days I think maybe there’s something inside you that wants you to be happy. Even if you don’t want to, it forms thoughts and tries to lead you there. On most days, though, I think it’s the opposite. No matter what you do, or think, or tell yourself, you’re going to end up in the same place.

ARTURO CORDERO GARCIA

BALTIMORE, MD

2024

The first rule of miming is, get the fuck out of my face, I’m fucking miming. But these kids would not get the picture. Coming right up around me in a tight circle so that no one else can even see. The people with money—
my people
, my livelihood, the whole reason I’m out there. They’re there to see me and they can’t, because of these kids standing right up close. I never had to deal with this before. Competition, I’ve had to deal with. The urban street dancers, the cattle-prod swallowers, that woman who puts herself in a box with a snake. Of course I’m going to lose business to those people. I already know that. I’m not miming for the fucking masses. I’m miming for the discerning upper middle class. The ones that matter, the kind of people who can tell the difference between Noh and Kathakali. If you don’t know the difference, go fuck yourself with your own fucking ignorance, you fucking degenerate. I mean, if you can’t tell me when Decroux wrote
Words on Mime
, you might as well be in diapers. I studied with Decroux the year he died. I fucking saw him become the wind, so who the fuck are you? I came out of Decroux’s class like some kind of mountain climber. Climbing up to the highest plateau of human achievement, where my body is in an act of pure fucking expression, not even recognizable as a body anymore but just a sculpture in time representing the entirety of man’s struggle against the world, and if you can’t appreciate that, go take a flying fuck into your mother’s dickhole.

Those kids, they circled me, and they wouldn’t take their eyes off of me. At first I was okay with it. At least they were watching me and not one of those ass-eaters down at the food court. But the way they stared at me, it was relentless. It was hard to deal with—I mean, it was almost an existential crisis I went through with these kids, because in a certain way that is what the artist aspires to, am I right? A fucking rapt audience, totally under my sway. But these kids, I mean, I knew that they were in essence completely retarded. Whatever it was they were responding to, it wasn’t art. It wasn’t what I was putting out there. I tolerated it, though. I was okay with it until they started trying to mimic me. I was doing some very intensely corporeal shit, fucking supertechnical nonrepresentational shit. The real deal. And it started with this one kid, a young man of about thirteen or so. He just started, out of nowhere, mirroring me. Now, I’ve dealt with this kind of thing a lot. You work the park, you work the boardwalk, you’re going to get these fucking mooks who come along and try to break your concentration. They try to get you to talk, they try to humiliate you, they try to do whatever they can to bring you down to their level. Fucking primates. But this kid who started mirroring me … that’s not even the word, because it was more like he was capturing me, or amplifying me. I have this passage in my act where I dramatize the life and struggle of the French composer Mustapha Boumedienne exclusively through the use of my trunk. It took me seven years to perfect this narrative. The Theatre de l’Ange Fou saw it and said that I had gone where no mime had gone before. And yet here were these kids, these little cocksucking street urchins more or less nailing it on their first try. But not just nailing it. Adding to it. Enriching it, rounding it out. It was an insult and an affront and it made my fucking blood boil.

So yeah, I started to get really fucking pissed. Who were these fucking kids, you know? And pretty soon people started watching the spectacle. A lot of people. I was in a precarious situation. Do I break down in the middle of my act to tell these kids to go jump into a fucking wood chipper, which is what I wanted to do, but which would be going against everything I believed about the art form and the sanctity of the live performance? Or do I just try to ignore them, finish the performance with my dignity intact, and just never come back to Ocean City? I decided to go with the latter. I decided to ignore the little pricks. But the crowd kept getting bigger and bigger. They were watching the retarded kids, almost like they were the act and I was the one taunting them! Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t just stop.

What? Yeah, yeah. I regret that I didn’t have the foresight to just put an end to it. I let it get really out of control. The first kid who started copying me, he somehow became the locus of all of my frustration. I was locked on him, getting so fucking pumped up with rage at this skinny prick in his thrift-store getup. I don’t even think he was doing it to fuck with me. I think he was maybe just trying to understand what I was putting out there. In any other context, you know, I might have been fine with it and even flattered. But everyone’s eyes were on this. Everything was at stake.

Yeah, so I lunged at him. It was fucking animal—like, animal me coming out and taking over the human part of me. I felt this streaking rush of something and I concentrated all my power, all my energy and force into my fist, and I fucking popped the kid right in his face. I felt his teeth against my knuckles, is how fucking hard and fast I hit that little cocksucker. Of course, I was in a world of shit for a while after that. You know, coldcocking a kid in public. I’d never done anything like it before, I mean, I had no prior record, so I got off relatively easy from a legal perspective, but something like that’s going to follow you around for a long time if you’re a performer. And it haunted me for a long time. It still does, because I remember looking down at the kid after I hit him, and I saw that it was fear that made me do what I did. I was afraid of how easily he’d taken my life’s work from me and made it his own. Like it was no big deal. Like it was, I don’t know, second nature.

PRASHANT NUREGESAN

CHARLOTTE, NC

2025

You want to know about Twitch Rave. I’ll tell you what I can, but I can only tell you so much. Because the appeal of Twitch Rave is that you can’t know what it is. You can look at the Twitch Rave peripheral and say, “Oh, looks like that’s a kind of headset,” and you can watch a silent kid put it on and go, “Okay, yeah, looks like he’s really having a good time there,” but you can’t really know what the good time is. You want to know, but you can’t. That’s my design. That was my plan, from the first moment I came up with Twitch Rave.

All the market research said you’ve got to think like teens to sell to teens, and I sat there for a long time just concentrating, trying to think like a teen. But how could you possibly think like a teen? You can’t. But then I realized—because realization is what I’m essentially all about, you know?
Making ideas real
—I realized that lack of understanding had to be at the core of the product’s design. I had reams of test data that supported this: the thing contemporary teens wanted least in life was to be understood. Literally, that was numero uno on the list. So while it was impossible for me to actually think like a silent teen, I was sure I could come close. If I could just manage to bring a product to market without ever understanding exactly what it did, I’d be able to tap into the silent teen demographic like nobody else had.

The basic Twitch Rave interface was left over from an abandoned prototype for the ill-fated PlayStation Escape, which gamers had completely trashed in focus testing. But what I did was, I built a randomizing routine in Twitch Rave that made sure that it behaved differently every time you used it, and there was no way to replicate a single experience twice. Teens can sense that kind of authenticity. It’s primal. They just know when an adult has had an active hand in any product. But all I knew about Twitch Rave was that you put on the peripheral and it used “the motion of your face to create intense and life-altering technicolor visualizations that are cosmic in scope”—that’s a direct quote from the box copy, which was written by my intern, Sasha—she’s twelve—but the randomizer makes it impossible to predict what the product does. It might be dangerous, or wildly pleasurable, or insanely dull—you just never know what will happen.

This all sounds obvious now, but my investors were less than thrilled. Was it frustrating when they withdrew funding? Sure, but now I’m supergrateful, because it left me with no option but to hit the streets myself, to really grind with my customers, shake their hands and get up in their faces and whatnot.

I started up the West Coast, hitting some of the communities where I’d built connections over the years. I found I had a bottomless reserve of energy to burn—there was something about selling directly to real people, showing up at a silent school or a community center with a briefcase and demoing the thing. Really demoing the hell out of it. Watching the kids react to it. Watching them fall in love with it. People in the industry are always writing off the silent market, but I’m telling you—these kids are out there, and their parents have cash. If you need proof, look in my garage, where you’ll find a Z8, a Nissan GT-R, and a concept blade scooter by Earl McGinnis.

But about three weeks into my epic road trip—which I was calling “the Nu Deal” to myself and to the ex-investors I texted after every sale—I rolled into Asheville, where my sister lived. My niece, Isabelle, went to a silent school there, Breen Academy. The school was one of the biggest in the Southeast, which made it all the more bizarre that there were only a handful of kids there. I set up my demo table in the cafeteria and I was just really creeped out by all the empty tables, in a place that was already pretty dead quiet, obviously. My niece was the first one to try the Twitch Rave, and while she was testing it out I asked one of the aides what the deal was. She said that over the last year or so kids just stopped showing up to school. It started with these two boys who went missing, she said. They disappeared one morning on the way to school, and the whole city got up in arms. There was a massive search for these kids, who an electrician finally found loitering around outside a condemned manufacturing plant. Turned out those kids had willingly gone—like, they ran away. There were other silent kids living in this plant, apparently. And even more kids who just hung out there during the day. She said that the school tried to round kids up, but they weren’t staffed for that kind of thing. It was like trying to herd cats, she said.

If you show me a dead end, you’re just pointing out to me the exact place where you became a quitter. That’s not the Nu way. So I drove out to the plant superearly the next morning. I had three things on my mind, which I’m going to tell you in order. One, I didn’t want these kids luring my niece into some diseased squat, and two, I was just curious about what they thought they were doing. Three was, I had this hunch that the kids would be so blown away by Twitch Rave that they’d go back to their homes, back to their parents, just so that they could get the money to buy Twitch Rave, which would, as a sort of side effect, be pretty solid PR.