The Silent History: A Novel (13 page)

The building these kids were living in smelled like bad candy. It used to be a latex-house-paint factory, I think. You could literally taste the toxic fumes all the way from the road. I parked out on the street—the lot was all broken up and covered in weeds. So I’m walking up toward the entrance, and there’s these two kids carrying an old sofa across the asphalt. I saw them first, and I made the mistake of jogging up to them. They turned and quickly put the sofa down and ran inside. I took off after them, but they’d shut the door tight. I knocked for a while, but I felt like an idiot. Standing there pounding on the door. I was like, “I’m not a cop!” I actually said that. I don’t know why.

There was a window covered in plywood on the side of the building, and I pried it open to get a look inside. I saw a girl sitting at a card table doing some kind of sewing or something, with tons of cloth bunched up next to her. She glanced up at me, and I thought she would be frightened, but she just gave me this look like I was nothing, like I was a squirrel or a pigeon, and she was staring at me, waiting to see what I’d do next. Which what I did was one of the dumbest moves I ever made, to the point where I feel sick even thinking about it. I had the Twitch Rave peripheral in my hand, this superexpensive, irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind prototype, and I tossed it through the plywood slat, as close to the girl as I could throw. I made this gesture like, “Go ahead, give it a spin.” But she just stared at it on the floor there, like I’d just thrown her a dead rat. I know that these silent kids have had a hard life. I know that they didn’t get a fair shake from a biological perspective, but come on. Here was this superadvanced nonlinear virtual ecosphere sitting right there within arm’s reach, and this girl wouldn’t even give it a try?

NANCY JERNIK

BROOKLYN, NY

2026

In order to be in the Prescott Group you have to read and memorize
Prescott Says
, and then you have to live it, which is allegedly the hard part, only none of it was hard for me because it was the exact thing I’d been looking for all my life.
Prescott Says
is three chapters, one for each step in the Prescott Method, which is how you achieve the state of Total Flow Productivity. After I finished the first chapter I was like, “That was easy, but I’m sure this next one will be hard.” But it wasn’t hard, none of it was hard, because all I ever wanted was to shed my distractions, gather my flock, and restore my mind eye. I was like, “Is this really all I have to do to reach my maximum potential? Could someone have maybe told me this before? Maybe twenty years ago, so that I could have just skipped over all of the bad decisions I’ve made?” Why did it take this long in human civilization for someone to come up with the Prescott Method? I think about that a lot, like how much further along would we all be if Prescott had been around when Plato was alive. Or the pharaohs maybe.

Ron and I were both recruited by Dutch Guston, who was one of the founding partners at NanoGyne, where Ron worked. This was about two years after Spencer was taken away. We started out as bronze-class cadets, but Ron leveled up really quickly, because he’s like that. He also didn’t have to deal with Ambitor withdrawal, which I had to go through because of Step One, so you can’t really compare our progress. Apart from the Ambitor, though, I barely had to work at all to shed my distractions, even though I had a lot of them. I’d built up a bunch of things around me by that point, just hobbies and activities, like taking pictures of objects that looked like faces and collecting old racist folk art. They started as ways to help me stop thinking about what happened with Spencer, but I just kept going. I kept collecting. I think I was waiting for someone to tell me to stop. And then Prescott said stop, and I did, on a dime. And I never even thought about them again. That’s the thing about distractions. They’re just obstacles you put in the way of your path to prosperity. Once you take them away you see how you were really just crippling yourself.

So when it was time to commit to Step Two, that’s where I caught up to Ron. Step Two is gathering your flock, which means bringing your family close and tight. Prescott says that even the early humans knew that the family unit was like an arrow through time, and that the tighter the family was, the faster the arrow would fly. You can’t reach TFP without a family, and having a family that’s separated is like trying to shoot a broken arrow. Ron and I sat down with Dutch to see what could be done in our case, because we were legally prohibited from getting Spencer back. He was like, “Legally prohibited? To take back your son who you gave birth to?” He brought up that part of
Prescott Says
where Prescott says that there’s no greater impediment to the achievement of total prosperity than the legal system. He was like, “The answer is simple. You take back your son. You just take him.”

That night Ron plotted out a strategic timeline on his Catena while I packed some things in a little bag. We would arrive at Barrowbrook at dawn and confront Spencer. It was this incredible feeling, like we were, I don’t know, Bonnie and James, outlaws for justice. We were just going to take him back. It was so simple. I don’t know why we hadn’t thought of it earlier. But that’s the Prescott Method. There’s always a simple answer. If you’re not thinking simply, you’re simply not thinking.

We started driving in the dark before dawn. The idea was, we were going to show up and wait around on the boardwalk until they let the kids out for the day. Then we’d follow Spencer around until there was a moment of opportunity. Of course, we were hoping that he’d just fall into our arms and start weeping, and we’d all have a good cry and go home. But we were prepared to get him out of there by any means necessary.

We got to Coney Island just as the sun was coming up. I remember how beautiful it was at that hour, and I felt like it must be a nice place for Spencer to wake up to. I started to get scared about what we were doing. What if he had no interest in us anymore? Maybe he wouldn’t even know who we were. But at the same time I was thinking, Would it be ultimately worse for us to take him away from his friends and his whole world? It seemed like all of the options had some bad outcome. Prescott doesn’t believe in bad outcomes, only in bad planning. But I couldn’t think like Prescott right then. I sort of had a little breakdown, so I wasn’t even looking when the kids started coming out of the facility. Ron was watching, but he didn’t see Spencer. I had my head down in my lap, but I told him to look closer. He said again that there was no kid who looked anything like Spencer. We walked up and down the boardwalk all morning, and we saw a bunch of silent kids moping around, but no Spencer. We waited until a staff person showed up at Barrowbrook to open it for the night. Ron pretended to be a tourist—he had his wallet in his hand and he said he’d seen a silent kid drop it on the boardwalk, a kid with a big scar on his arm. The Barrowbrook guy just stared at him with this blank look. He was like, “You saw this happen today? I haven’t seen that kid with the scar for months.” We asked where he might have gone, and the guy told us that there was a warehouse down by Rockaway that some of the kids were living in.

So we took a taxi over there. It was dark out. The place was mostly unlit. And really, for the city, very quiet. You could hear the water in the distance hitting the dock or platform or whatever. Very still and empty, and the air was clammy. I felt really—I mean, I was scared. I was holding Ron’s arm, and that was the only thing keeping me from shaking right out of my skin. We went up to these huge metal doors, the kind that slide open. It looked totally dark inside, abandoned. I was ready to leave, but Ron saw this huge heap of trash bags overflowing the Dumpster that were buzzing with flies. We got closer, and you could see that the bags were new. Which I guess meant someone was squatting in there.

I didn’t want to go in. I mean, we were going on this one guy’s word that this place was real, that there were silent kids living there. But it could’ve been anyone in there. It could have been packed with rapists. And I have this fear—my worst fear is not getting raped myself but watching Ron get raped right before I get killed. Like the last image I see before I die is Ron getting held down and raped by a bunch of guys. I don’t know why, but that is much more terrifying to me than getting raped myself. So I was begging Ron, “Please don’t go in there. We’ll come back tomorrow. You don’t have to go in there.” But he told me to be quiet and that we came all this way, we weren’t going to just turn around.

He pulled back one of the metal doors and it was dark inside, but we could see that it was clean, like somebody was tending the place. I remember you could smell sawdust in the air. And there were boxes lined up against the wall, it seemed like a hundred of them. I was so distracted by that stuff that it took me a second to notice the two guys that were standing totally still in the middle of the floor. Silent kids that looked like they were waiting for us. Ron said he was there for his son. I could hear this very slight hint of fear in his voice, just a little tighter than usual. The guys took a few steps forward, and we stepped back. Ron pulled up his sleeve and made this raking movement up the length of his forearm, like trying to say “Spencer.” The guys stopped and looked at each other. I’d read about how they could somehow communicate with their faces but I’d never seen it before. It was weird, but not in the way I thought it would be. It had this familiar feeling, like a song from my childhood, where I remembered the melody but not the words.

The guys put up their hands to say no. Ron was like, “Are you trying to keep me from my son?” He puffed up his chest and moved forward, and the two guys got really close and it seemed like there was going to be a fight. They were—there was something just not right about them. Their clothes were all patched up. Like, the one guy’s shirt was made out of three shirts. But there was an order to it, like it was intentionally done. Anyway, I guess Ron decided to back down. He said, “This isn’t the end,” even though they had no idea what he was talking about. It was the one thing he had over them.

It took us forever to get back to our hotel. I slept for a long time, and when I woke up Ron was packing his bag. I said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and he said, “Prescott’s second thesis—ever heard of it?” This was so Ron, totally not getting what Prescott meant in his second thesis when he said that obstacles are opportunities to do the unexpected. The unexpected was not to shrink away in fear but to jump at this thing and take it by the throat. I told Ron I planned to go back to that place and sit out in front until I could see my son. Ron kind of snorted, like I was out of my mind, but I could seriously give a flying one at that point. I was resolved. I was going to get Spencer out of there no matter what.

JOHN PARKER CONWAY

MONTE RIO, CA

2026

That first mayoral election, while I was on the campaign trail, I knocked on every single door in Monte Rio, and if no one was home I came back. That first campaign was the best. I was a newcomer, a figure of pure anonymity, so I was able to step into their living rooms and have a real conversation about things that mattered, without needing to address some drummed-up allegations or whispers of malfeasance.

I talked to farmers worrying about the Korean pinot. Old hippies worrying about the Bohemian Grove. Tweakers just worrying. I met them all, listened to their concerns. All voices deserve to be heard. A vote is a vote, right? I was there to listen.

Because that’s what I am: a listener. I’m not one of those stumpers who harps on about his beginnings, rolling up his shirtsleeves and trotting out poverty stories about how his mom shaved pets for a living and his dad accidentally fell into a Dumpster of asbestos and sometimes all there was for dinner was expired ketchup packets, but, hey, look at me now and isn’t this country great? I want to smack those guys in their fat happy mouths. Frauds. Of course I think this country’s great, you’d be a fool to say otherwise, but my own path has nothing to do with it. What makes this country great? We leave you alone. You live and I live and let everybody else live.

So these kids. I was making my rounds out on Moscow, just a man and a dream of civic whatever, and I stopped at the old Schofield place. My notes said
Occupant
, which meant the tenant was new. The house was in serious disrepair: rain gutters sagging, driveway rutted, just soggy everywhere. Between the river and rain and the redwoods, that’ll happen. I was preparing my newcomer riff: Monte Rio, the mountains and the river, the best of both worlds. Think of all the other godforsaken places you could’ve ended up.

I knocked on the door and waited. Knocked again, waited. After a few minutes a bright-eyed teenage girl, maybe seventeen, came around the side of the house carrying a cardboard box marked
Property of Oaks
. I greeted her, took the box from her, and said, “Lead the way.” She just stood there, not so much afraid as surprised. I’m a largish man, especially now, but I try to offset it by constantly softening my features just short of smiling. “Are your parents home?” I asked the girl. She was still staring at me, arms crossed, clear plastic gloves on her hands. I didn’t mind at all—I could wait as long as she could. Then I looked into the box to maybe get a clue about this family, something I could use in my favor, and I saw that it was filled entirely with dried dog turds. I guess I lost my composure for a sec—I dropped the box, threw my arms up, and shrieked. The girl hesitated, then smiled the warmest smile at me. Not at all mocking or scornful.

I didn’t ask her what she was doing with a box of turds. None of my business, right? Personal liberty—that’s a constitutional dictate, especially out here in the woods. But my mind was putting the pieces together. Gloves, unkempt yard—she was cleaning the place up. The former tenants must’ve been dog people.

Three more teenagers, two girls and a boy, roughly the same age as her, came out to join us, and that’s when I fit the rest of the pieces together. They started face-talking like they do. I’d only seen it a handful of times before, and never up close. I’d always thought it’d be stranger than this, like watching people read minds. But no. I’m a pretty intuitive person and I felt like I could almost figure out what they were talking about, like if I spent enough time around them, I could communicate with them. The one girl was telling the others about me dropping the box—I could tell she was reenacting my surprise. After they shared a moment, they looked at me and laughed. I did too. Whatever it takes to get your foot in the door.