The Silent History: A Novel (2 page)

Without warning, Camara strode out into the light, holding up a pair of hygiene kits. “Everybody, listen up,” he said in a firm voice that shattered the cool stillness of the space. Everyone turned. “You may not understand me,” he said, “but the Camara is here to help you. I understand that this is your home, but the city has different plans for this space. I am here to transport you to a facility just north of here, where you can live in peace. There is running water, three meals a day, and cots for everyone. I understand that it will be difficult for you to leave. And that is why I am providing you with these kits, free of charge. They contain a full day’s worth of meal strips, vermin spray, first-aid gel, and a shelter bag.” He turned to show the room the kits. The silents watched him carefully. They couldn’t possibly have had any idea what Camara was saying, but they seemed to respond to him. As he displayed the contents of the kits, their fear seemed to dissipate. They appeared genuinely curious and interested, and began to congregate in the center of the lobby. Camara’s act was working.

“Is everybody in here?” he asked. Again, they continued to stare. “I’m going to go get the kits for you. Do you understand? I’ll be back in one minute.” Camara scanned the people in the room, nodding encouragingly. They nodded in response, but did not move. “Okay? Just wait right here.”

We went into the foyer. Camara winked at me and said, “Real bunch of troublemakers.” He checked his watch and called the contract soldiers. “Okay, they’re all in the lobby,” he said. “Roger that,” a thin voice replied, and we waited. There was a dull burst as four soldiers broke down the front doors with percussion cannons. They rushed in with gas guns drawn, right past us. I could hear them converging on the lobby from every access point, quickly and quietly, spreading out into the space like a rolling cloud. Their boots ground against the concrete subfloor as they secured all of the exits and moved in.

I waited to hear some sort of struggle, but the building sounded oddly dead. I ventured into the lobby and saw that it was empty, save for the soldiers frantically pacing back and forth, searching the rafters with Maglites. The silents were nowhere to be found.

“You had the place surrounded, didn’t you?” Camara asked the CO, who nodded in irritation. There was no sign of an alternate exit anywhere. The soldiers began tipping over tables and kicking chairs. “Over here,” one of them said, standing over a vent in the floor, which led down into darkness. Camara knelt and peered in with a flashlight. “I’ll be shitcut,” he said, scratching the back of his head. The hatch was no more than two feet wide. There was no way it could accommodate more than one person at a time. But somehow a group of fifty silents had managed to spontaneously coordinate an escape without being detected.

We quietly filed out of the building, and I walked all the way back to the sanitary district on the outskirts of town, my head still buzzing. The next morning I was back out on the streets. All summer I recorded more testimonials, seeking out communities of silents and observing everything I could. Up until that moment in the bank building, I, like most people I knew, had defined silents by what they lacked. I thought of them as hollow vessels, defective parasites feeding upon the speaking world. But in that lobby I saw them for what they might
possess
. What unknown abilities had filled this void? Was the world somehow brighter, more tangible, without the nagging interference of language? Was the absence of words actually a form of freedom? I’ve often tried to quiet that constant voice in my mind, to try to experience the world the way they might—but always the questions rush in faster than I can carve out a moment of true silence.

That September I was promoted to regional coordinator, and sixteen years later I’m still here, now the director of the project. For years my colleagues and I scoured the globe to interview parents, siblings, teachers, health professionals, law enforcement, faith healers, neighborhood-watch groups, businesspeople—a diverse chorus of voices touched in some way by emergent phasic resistance. Starting in 2021, we introduced Mémo, the ambient dictation application that allows key subjects to record testimonials at their convenience from anywhere in the world, expanding our reach even further. Every day we are learning more about this strange condition, and every day there are more questions—questions that are, themselves, bound by language, a chamber sealed so tightly that we can hardly even imagine an experience beyond its walls.

But, of course, it’s this experience that waits for us all. It’s inside our brothers and sisters, daughters and sons and lovers. This document presumes nothing about the future; it is strictly a record of the past, of what we looked like before, and how we got here. Are words our creation, or did they create us? And who are we in a world without them? Are there wilder, more verdant fields out beyond the boundaries of language, where those of us who are silent now wander? Each of us must find our own path through these questions. We enter and leave the world in silence, after all, and everything else is simply how we walk that middle passage.

VOLUME ONE

THEODORE GREENE

EL CERRITO, CA

2011

She already looked half-dead on the drive to the hospital, but I wouldn’t admit this until much later. I was pretty determined, I guess, to remain upbeat. In all the classes we’d taken to prepare for the birth, that was the one thing the instructor kept repeating to the men in the room, the future fathers. “There’s no magic involved,” she said. She told us that what our wives needed most was our support. Our patience. The idea was—and I totally believed this—that a calm mother would produce a healthy child. It had a logic to it, and we had no reason to doubt the instructor. We were all first-timers except for this one guy who showed up to class with a wife half his age. He already had three or four kids, I think, from previous marriages, and the instructor pointed to him and said, “Mitch has been through this before. He knows all about the idea of support, right, Mitch?” Everyone laughed but Mitch, who just kind of stared back at the instructor with a look of bemusement. It was almost more of a—even though his wife was pretty attractive—more of a look of defeat.

There were other aspects of that day that made me feel like something bad was coming. Things that made it hard to focus on the goal, that one task of keeping the birth free of panic and dread. First there was the humidity. Everything was drenched in it. By the time I got home from work my clothes were damp. I went inside the house and Mel was on the couch with her head back, sweating with the fan off. “Why are you here?” I said, and she said, “I stayed home today.” I said, “What?” and “Why didn’t you call me?” You know? “I would have come home.” But she didn’t say anything. Just stared at the ceiling with her eyes half-closed like she was drugged. I went to the kitchen and took off my shirt. I put half a box of noodles in a pot, and when I went back to the couch to check on her she was crying. “Are there contractions?” I said, and she nodded. “Are they close together?” I said, and she nodded again, and I was like, This is it. I put my shirt back on even though it was soaked, and I helped her out to my car. She had her full weight against me. I felt like if I let go of her she would just collapse into a pile. I tried hard not to get worked up. But then when I opened the passenger-side door the half-eaten taco from my lunch break slid off the seat and onto the driveway. I looked at the taco on the blacktop and I felt this, like, pulsing kind of terror.

Of fatherhood, yeah, I guess. I remember thinking, This is the car we’ll use to bring Flora home. This will be her first car ride, in my ten-year-old hatchback with mismatched seat covers that smell like burning human hair. Mel’s car was newer, but I’d blocked her in and there was no time. No time left to back out into a more respectable set of circumstances. I was working at a company I hated and wolfing down tacos in the parking lot of a strip mall down the road. It was not where I wanted to be, and anyway what difference would it have made? Mel and I were the people we were, and there wasn’t anyone to blame but ourselves for how we lived.

I got Mel in the car and started driving, like I said, toward the hospital. The clouds were wild and dark like right before a heat storm. They looked almost like smoke from a fire, sort of billowing in reverse behind the cell towers at the interchange. I glanced over at Mel, who was doubled over in the passenger seat. Her eyes were rolling around under her closed lids and her skin was a sort of light gray color. I looked hard at the road and told myself that we were all going to make it through the day, but only two-thirds of that statement was actually true.

NANCY JERNIK

TEANECK, NJ

2011

I started taking Ambitor about a year before I found out I was pregnant with Spencer. This was right around the time it first went on the market, and almost half the women at Yan Talan started taking it. I remember seeing this ad for it, a three-panel foldout in the front of
Fortune
. It had a picture of a woman sitting behind a huge wooden desk in a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows. She had her legs propped up on the desk and she was sitting back—like, reclining in a big upholstered leather chair, smoking a cigar. She was in the middle of blowing a smoke ring, and the caption said something like
Call the Shots.
That was it, except for the Ambitor logo and the tiny text that described all the side effects, which seemed like a small list to me, as someone who had taken a bunch of different antidepressants and weight-control pills and stuff. I looked at this woman in the ad and thought, That’s me. That’s where I want to be. I want everything in that picture. Not in a shallow way. Not like, I want to have a big desk, or smoke cigars, or I guess anything in the actual picture, which actually was really not very well done. But more of a feeling like, I want to be in control.

So I started taking it, and suddenly I had this capacity to
do
things. I had access to a whole new reservoir of energy. It was pretty incredible, actually. I mean, I still think about what it was like to be on Ambitor, and I would probably be taking it right now if I could. If it was still on the market.

I found out I was pregnant in December, and Ron, who I thought would be scared or upset, given that we were just a few months into our marriage, was actually really excited. I can remember that first trimester being the last really happy time. Because I was made VP in February and put in charge of the whole Schick Quattro for Women account. And I won’t bore you with the whatever hours I spent at the office or at Schick headquarters in Milford, but it had the effect on my marriage that you’d expect. I saw it all happening. Like, I could remember watching as my relationship with Ron sort of split apart like a dissolving glacier, but—and maybe this was the Ambitor doing what it did best—I saw things drifting, but I didn’t really care so much. Or, I cared, but only in the way you care for the people in a movie, watching them as their lives go down the tubes.

I hardly remember anything about Spencer’s birth except that it took forever. Forty hours from start to finish. In the end they had to do a C-section, because he just wasn’t coming. Or I wasn’t trying hard enough. So I was completely out of it for the actual birth, and I didn’t know that Spencer came out without making any noise. Ron was really worried about that, but the doctor told him it was a myth that all babies come out crying. Of course, nobody knew at that time about Spencer—about what was wrong with him. So Ron just sort of took the doctor at his word. If I’d been awake I would’ve said something. I wouldn’t have let that go.

We took Spencer home a few days later. Ron had a week of paternity leave from his job and we were almost able to get back to that place where we were happy. But Spencer wasn’t nursing. Nothing at all. They said that you should wait a few days before panicking, that sometimes the kid just doesn’t want to nurse in the beginning. But by the fifth day of nothing we started to get really stressed out. Ron was going to have to go back to work the following Monday, and it suddenly seemed so small, the window of time we had to be all together. I didn’t know what I was going to do alone in the house with this kid who wouldn’t eat. We called the doctor and she asked if we’d tried formula. I was like, “You said we should never give the kid formula.” And she said that normally breast milk is the best, but if the kid is not nursing, you try the formula, so Ron went out in the middle of the night to a drugstore and got this stuff. He put the nipple of the bottle to Spencer’s lips and he immediately started nursing. I remember lying on my side in the bed watching Ron hold the bottle while Spencer was just nursing like crazy, like he’d been starving—which he was, I guess. And Ron started laughing with this mixture of relief and joy, because finally here was something, here was Spencer showing that he needed something. And I focused on Spencer—I tried to block Ron out of my vision, because I could see him glancing over at me, trying to get me to laugh about it or even smile, but I just felt sick, absolutely sick to my stomach. I couldn’t see it as anything other than a line on the battlefield, and Spencer, this baby that had wanted so much to stay inside me that they had to cut him out, had just crossed over to Ron’s side. I eventually got him to take my milk, but I couldn’t rid myself of that feeling.

The three months of maternity leave were like being underwater. Everything was so still and silent with me and Spencer alone in the house. He’d cry when he was hungry or tired, but that was about it. He never made any of those little trickling sounds that babies make. He’d stare at me, but it was like I was some kind of complex math problem on a chalkboard. I don’t know how to explain it, but it just seemed like he didn’t need me that much. And if I’m being honest, I guess it irritated me. I somehow expected that when I had a baby, we would be connected by a golden thread. There would be this bond between us that I could feel, even if we were in separate rooms or cities. But I didn’t feel any connection to him at all. He was like an alien in my house.