The Silent History: A Novel (17 page)

I parked the Interceptor at Surf and West Tenth, and I could already feel the weird energy pulsing through the air. There were guys from every Brooklyn precinct there. I saw Chao, a buddy from the academy days, standing alone by the human-target range smoking a fake cigarette. I asked what the scene at the beach was like and Chao goes, “A silent mob scene is like a hand job without the hand.” I didn’t know how to take that statement, because you could go either way with it. I could imagine a roundly satisfying hand job from a ghost, but maybe I’m overthinking it. That’s what Tate says. “You’re thinking too much, Carlyle.” I let him read my novel manuscript, and he said it felt “overworked.” He was like, “Thrust your hands deep into the lifestream, Carlyle. Don’t be such a pussy.” He’s a hard man with a bullet still lodged in his thigh, so I’ve got to trust he knows what he’s talking about.

Chao and I walked through the restricted area, where a tech crew was stat-gunning an inverted swan boat under a pair of LED floods, and stepped up onto the boardwalk. The beach was literally packed with these kids. I’ve worked crowds of almost fifty thousand before, so I was prepared to meet a mass of bodies. I was also prepared for long-shot taunts and jeers from hooligans hiding in the throng, maybe a couple piss-filled plastic bottles hurled at me, and the general rowdiness and panic that you get when a cop enters any crowd of young people. But there was none of that. There was no sound at all, apart from the water and the hum of the portable generators. You could see the kids outlined in the light from the coaster, which the park guards had switched on even though the thing had been closed for years. We weaved through rows and rows of heads extending all the way out to the water, but any sound the kids made by moving around was drowned out by the tide. They were like a mass of seagulls out there, quietly strutting around or exploring or just sitting. In a way, I guess I found myself longing for a couple sick epithets—some kid saying, “Hey, do you smell bacon?” or something. Some kind of pushback, no matter how aggravating. Something to remind me what I was doing there.

We came to a group of kids who were bunched up in a wild kind of scrum. Chao trained his Maglite on them so that you could see how slowly they were moving, almost as if they were reenacting something. I really couldn’t even describe it to you, what they were doing out there, but whether it was sport or theater or some kind of lame clothed orgy, it was unsettling. They put up their hands to block out the glare from Chao’s Maglite, but didn’t scatter. “They’ve been doing this for days,” Chao said. I just nodded. I didn’t know what it was they were trying to do, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

We waded through the crowd for about a half an hour. Chao said, “Seen enough?” and I said I had, so we climbed back up to the boardwalk and showed off the uniform. It was this weird mix of tension—I mean, who knew what these kids were planning, and how were we going to do anything about it?—this mix of tension and calm. So quiet, but somehow growing, preparing, readying. For what, I had no idea, and when, neither.

Chao and I just stood there, catching up and passing the fake cigarette back and forth. The most action we saw was some kid trying to climb up the side of the funnel-cake booth. Other than that they were just out there in the dusk. It became obvious to me that the mayor had sent us there not for crowd control but to assert our authority, to let the kids know that, whatever it was they thought they were doing out there in the sand, it was happening in our world. It was happening only because Brooklyn was allowing it to happen. But those kids just barely noticed us. They might have been squatting on city property, but they were going to do their thing whether we were there or not. By this point we were almost eager for the shit to go down, for the penny to drop, whatever, so we’d at least have something to work with, or work against. It was the waiting that was driving us crazy. These kids could do anything, but all they were doing was nothing.

And then, after all that, they just left. It was around three in the morning when it started. We were standing under the Astroland rocket and they just started streaming across the boardwalk in huge clumps. Ten and twenty of them at a time, passing under the portable halide floods we’d set up by the entrance. I looked at Chao and he shrugged. More and more of them kept coming up off the beach. A whole surge flowing past us, kids with bedrolls and canvas bags or sneakers tied together and slung over their shoulders. Some of them arm in arm, drowsy and buzzed, others striding solo with a kind of stoic purpose. The only sound was the padding of their feet as they crossed the boardwalk. A reporter stood at a distance, for some reason whispering into a mic while the camera captured retreating kids as they passed in the background like soldiers returning from battle. I didn’t know whether they had finished what they had come to do or if they were just moving on to the next step. We just watched them all go by, powerless to do anything but gawk.

The sky was overcast, so dawn never seemed to come. The beach world just turned lighter shades of brown. Gradually we could make out staggered shelters and smoked-out fires dotting the beach all the way up to the end of the boardwalk. It was deeply peaceful there with the whole operation closed down. Chao and I were told to search for holdouts and herd them to a white bus that was parked across from the coaster. They were transporting the kids to an auxiliary gym at Kingsborough Community College, where they were going to figure out what to do with them next. So we went along the shore kicking apart the plywood lean-tos and makeshift pallet shanties. There were a few stragglers, half-naked kids entwined in hollowed-out drifts or loners determined to hang on for another day. We led them up to the bus, where they sat facing each other, doing their face thing, popping and rippling their muscles in tightly orchestrated tides. It was wild to see it for real, close up. The thing you don’t get when you see it on the news is the raspy little clicks and puffs that are a by-product of those little expressions. And the sense of, I don’t know, something familiar that’s just out of reach. Like the way a certain smell can bring back a whole part of your life. You don’t know what the smell belongs to anymore—you can’t identify it no matter how hard you try, but you remember where you were, how you felt, what was happening in your life. That was what it was like to watch those kids in their face-talk.

The bus hissed and lurched away from the sidewalk and pulled slowly down West Tenth in the barren morning. There was nobody out on the streets. In the light of day the rides and booths looked acutely shoddy. I went home and read that Ace copy of
Junkie
cover to cover in a single uninterrupted session—it was only in fair condition, so I didn’t feel bad about cracking the spine. I just felt this almost uncontrollable desire to dive headlong into the world of words again. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it was almost like walking around among those kids had somehow drained the language right out of me.

VOLUME THREE

THEODORE GREENE

RICHMOND, CA

2028

We threw a party for Flora the night before she left for Monte Rio. Fred Prior let us use his lawn, because he actually had a lawn, and Sue Ng ran a catering service, so she donated a whole setup with a couple staff people. There was a big white tent and globe lights strung all around the yard. It looked impressive, almost professional, and lots of people from the school showed up. There were kids everywhere, running around in the dark, kicking balloons up into the air and head-butting them, doing forward rolls through Fred’s hedges. It was like some kind of magic was loose in the air.

I somehow managed to twist even this happy event into an occasion for regret, because I never really let Flora run loose like that. I never allowed her that kind of freedom. I was so destroyed by Mel’s death, and I let it overshadow everything. And then I used Flora—I focused on her silence with what I see now as a kind of rage. Not rage in a violent sense, except for maybe what it did to me inside. But I had so much anger to burn and no way to let it out except through my obsessive quest to get some meaningful phrase out of her. Just get her to say something, anything, in any language at all. It was like Flora was a puzzle Mel had left me with, and if I could only solve the puzzle, Mel would come back to me. I really almost believed that. And of course, all I got out of all my obsessing was a girl who, I don’t think, had ever actually had fun.

And the real stinger was that Flora looked so much like Mel. Francine Chang came back from Monte Rio just for the party, and she brought a photo-stream of Flora from over the years, from literally the first day the school opened until Francine left the school. There was a family tree that Flora and I had made at one point, and it had a picture of Mel in it, and everyone kept asking about that woman who looked just like Flora. It was true. Flora was the living embodiment, like an exact mirror image of Mel. Francine came by at some point during the night and put her hand on my shoulder. “I wasn’t sure that was a good idea,” she said, about the photos. She was worried that she’d stirred up old feelings. I said it was okay, and I put my hand over hers. I was half hoping she’d look up at me and we’d—you know, that something would happen. I mean, I had seen the video of her on the Web, like, more times than I probably should have. And that sort of changed the way I thought of her, but even before that, I’d always felt a kind of resonance between us. Just the, I guess, doughy lonesomeness that she projected was always attractive to me in a way I could never put into words. But she just patted my hand and went over to the bean buffet to talk to Sue Ng.

Flora sat under a big willow tree at the other end of the yard with her friends. Occasionally a Wee Three or a Sprout would come up and give her a hug or sneak up behind her and drop a handful of grass in her hair, and she’d turn and laugh and try to get them. I could barely look at her. I don’t know how I managed to raise such an incredibly kind and beautiful woman out of the blackest rotting rinds of my gloom. It was sort of astonishing. I drank myself stupid and passed out on Fred Prior’s back-porch glider.

Then it was morning and we were driving up along the coast. She had a light orange scarf around her neck that was tied into a kind of flower, something she’d made herself. It was a particular thing they were wearing that summer up at the Monte Rio house, and she wanted to show up with it already in place. The Coney Island gathering had changed her. Ever since she saw that footage, all those kids together in one place, it was like something had shifted inside her. Everything about her life in Richmond was structured, ordered, and safe, and I imagine it was beginning to feel a little like a cage. But there were people like her gathering on their own, without the guidance—or, I guess, control—of the speaking world. It must have been exhilarating to see that. So I guess I wasn’t entirely taken by surprise when she came to me with a hand-drawn map of California with a path to Monte Rio. I knew that some part of her was already there.

I could have prevented her from going, but what kind of life would we have had? She wasn’t an insect pinned to a board. I could’ve kept her in the apartment, with her bedroom still painted to look like the ocean at night with the big fucking—sorry—big crescent moon around the street-level window. But what kind of life would it have been?

We pulled up to the house in the middle of the afternoon. The weather was weirdly hot and uncomfortable, nothing like what I expected up north. The house was set back a little from the street, nestled among redwoods that seemed to go back forever. The exterior was in pretty bad shape. The whole place needed an overhaul. But it was tidy enough. And I had to admit that it had something on the basement apartment. I took Flora’s bags out of the trunk and set them down on the driveway, and I tried to scowl but as always she could see right through—she could tell exactly how I was feeling no matter how I contorted my face. She grabbed my shoulders and looked into my eyes and went AU6C plus AU12D with AU43A, which was a raising of the cheeks with her lips pulled back and her eyes slightly closed, which might have meant something more than “I’m happy here,” but I was just thankful for whatever I could get.

PATTI KERN

MONTE RIO, CA

2028

Patrick and I argued from the start. I had plans for the first intentional silent community in Monte Rio, and I needed someone to help me see it through. We’d start by building the communion center, right behind the main house, and then construct outbuildings that radiated like yantra petals from a mandala. Whatever we needed, we’d build. It was going to be our place, the silents and us, fully integrated, purposeful. Seeing the gathering at Coney Island, I could tell that a movement was brewing. A hungering for community. We’d provide the retreat, but not a retreat
from
anything. A retreat
to
. To knowing, to the true language. A place for the dedicated and the curious to live and work among the silents. A site of refuge, of constant serenity. We’d grow what we needed, abandon what we didn’t. The silents would be at the heart of it all.

We bought Quikrete, hand tools, nails and screws, two-by-fours, and particleboard recycled from derelict chicken coops. We went to the dump and salvaged old street signs and fence posts. I wanted to construct most of the communion center in recycled materials, but Patrick kept saying it was going to collapse on everyone. His enthusiasm for the project was ebbing, so he viewed everything I said through his own smeared scope. What did I know about wiring? he asked. About plumbing? Support braces, foundations, wainscoting?

What did I know? Nothing. I had very little prior expertise, no blueprints. I’d built a doghouse once, but the dog found it oppressive and liberated himself soon after. My plan was to bring all the supplies to the back edge of the compound and let the work dictate itself. I was sick of heeding these mandatory voices, especially Patrick’s. Lately all he did was smoke pot and read encyclopedias out loud. He’d borrowed them from the main house, and when he was stoned he found them mesmerizing.
Fuck, listen to this, Patti. There are over seven hundred different types of curry
. His voice was like a drinking straw with a hole in it. Every word made him smaller and smaller.