The Silent History: A Novel (20 page)

Of course, it started raining almost immediately. But I just thought to myself, This is the rain that will wash away the past. I sort of couldn’t believe I was thinking that way, you know? A few weeks before, it would’ve made me gag. But I thought the thought and it made sense, so I went out to the entrance and sat there. My whole body was soaked after a few minutes. The rain was going sideways, like a monsoon, and I was getting pounded by these massive sheets of water—not even drops anymore but sheets. I just kept focusing on the past, feeling it all leach away from me. And slowly—I know this sounds dramatic, but I really did feel it—even the guilt and shame that I guess I’d been harboring for all those years about essentially abandoning Spencer, that all cracked and dissolved, as well, and when that was gone all that was left was a sense of pure yearning. Just a simple sensation, totally disconnected from everything else in my life, like, I don’t know—a bell ringing in an empty room. I looked up into the windows of the building and I could just barely make out Spencer’s face through the rain. He was looking out the window at me without any kind of expression, just a dead stare. I’d put myself into this situation where the next move was his, and the fear of that, of not being in control anymore, was crippling. But he knew I was out there.

The rain eventually stopped, and I kept sitting. I had some bottled water and a few meal bars, but I honestly didn’t expect to be out there for so long. So by, I think, the sixth day, I was starving. I had nothing left inside, no energy or will or even thought, really. I was completely empty. Everything got really bright and I sort of fainted. When I woke up, there were three silent kids standing over me, and one more who was kneeling by my head, mopping my brow with a rag soaked in cold water. They dragged me inside the entrance of the building, where it was a little cooler, and gave me some water and left me there.

I think they expected me to go on my way when I felt better, but once I was in I was staying in. They were going to have to drag me out of there. I rested for a long time, and eventually a girl came with some bread and honey on a chipped plate. It was the most incredible meal I’ve ever eaten. I wondered why people ever ate anything else.

I started doing everything that they did. I accepted that the area by the entrance was my space and that’s where I slept and waited, and I didn’t go any farther inside the building. Anyway, there were beehives everywhere—I’ve always had a really intense fear of all swarming insects. It was safe at the entrance and that’s all I needed, so I just made my little home there. When they went out, usually at night, I followed them. We went way out, deep into the city, looking for food. They led me through this secret city within the city, the underbelly—the spaces between and behind buildings, or the tunnels and passages underneath. The roofs and fire escapes. The kids knew their way through all of this. It was almost impossible to keep up with them on the first few missions. I’d be completely winded by the time we got to the first bank of Dumpsters.

I thought I was going to be disgusted eating garbage, but do you know what people throw away? We’d get inside these Dumpsters and there would be whole meals, completely uneaten, sealed inside foil or those paper cartons. Perfectly edible food. Just tossed aside. I found that I really loved the idea of reclaiming this stuff. It was like what I was trying to do with Spencer, but on a much smaller and more achievable scale.

Spencer never went on the Dumpster runs. I barely ever saw him. I knew he spent most of his time on the second floor of the building, because I could see him through the window at night when we’d come back from the Dumpsters with loads of food. He never made eye contact with me after that first day, and I was fine with it. I understood that this was what I deserved. It was enough for me to just be close to him. We spent the better part of a year leading this very simple life, together but apart.

Then one morning I woke up and a guy in a leather jacket and khaki pants was standing over me. He seemed really upset and scared—he was swearing, I remember, and palming his chin, raking his fingers across his cheeks. He was the owner, he kept saying in this really agitated voice. He was the owner of the building and what was I doing there, looking like a dead person on the floor, ruining his property value? It was such a strange thing, having someone fire all these words at me. Apart from a couple phone calls to Ron back during the first few months, I hadn’t really had anyone talk to me. I tried to tell the guy to stop, just for a second, so that I could explain myself, but when I opened my mouth I found I could hardly even make a sound, let alone find any words to say. Even the words in my head, I realized, had a kind of a different shape to them.

I ran down the hall to find someone. My heart felt like it was about to explode. I knew that everyone was asleep on the second floor, so I sprinted up the stairs, even though that’s where the bees were. And I could hear the sound of the bees getting louder and louder as I got closer to the landing. I was panting with fear, and I got to the top of the stairs and I could see the bees going crazy in the air, a big whipping cloud of them tearing around in circles up by the rafters. I was trembling, trying to force myself to move forward even though I was sure I was about to be swarmed. But suddenly there was a hand on my chest. A palm right here, pressing against my chest. And I looked up the length of the arm, which had long scars running up and down, and it was Spencer, staring at me in the darkness. I had watched him from far away for so long that I thought I would be prepared to see him close-up. But when I saw his face so close to mine, all I could think of was the boy he used to be, hiding under his bed, rolling marbles up and down the floor. He was a grown man, without my help. He looked at me with this sense of—there were layers and layers, and I knew that he knew who I was and why I was there, and that he wanted me to be safe, and that he might someday be able to forgive me for what I’d done to him, but not yet.

YARIV BASSANI

FLORAL PARK, NY

2029

I come out of the attorney’s office and there’s Fatima sitting in the Blade, and she has this look like, “What did you expect, Yudchik?” I knew that I was going to get screwed in the will, but an abandoned warehouse? This is the revenge my father takes on me, from the grave, no less? To saddle me with this burden? It was worse than nothing at all.

I sit in the car and slap the picture of the place on the steering wheel. Big huge warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This crumbling piece of worthless junk. Fatima asks me, “What is this place?” and I tell her the whole sappy story about my grandfather and his import business. How, when he moved to the States from Israel, he missed the taste of true Jaffa oranges so much that he had his brother ship them over, and he started distributing them to grocery stores all over the city and eventually the whole Northeast and beyond. The mission of my family’s business was to “bathe the world in Israeli sun,” but it was all a bunch of bull. My grandfather was not interested in spreading the joy of Israeli culture. He was a cold, calculating tycoon who worked his family to the bone and gave nothing in return. My father, if you can imagine, was even more shallow and vile. I don’t want to go into the ways he made life hell for all of us, my mother, my sisters, the whole brood. Suffice it to say that on the day he died I sat in the darkness in my living room and drank champagne to his corpse.

Fatima put the picture on my lap and squeezed my thigh. She knew it was because of her that my father put this damned millstone around my neck, while my sisters came out with four hundred thousand dollars between them. Because in addition to being a fake Israeli who did not care one iota for the people or culture, he was a rotten bigot who, on the day that I announced I was going to marry Fatima, collapsed—literally collapsed from a panic attack—into his potatoes at the dinner table, in front of Fatima and her mother and sister, and stuck me with the ambulance bill. Every time I saw him after that he would say, “Yariv, I died on that day. You assassinated me on that day. I was like Kennedy, with my brains sprayed all over your mother.” He never looked at our twins. Never once picked them up, never even congratulated me when they were born after twenty-two hours of labor. When I told my parents about the struggle we went through, he nodded his head as if to suggest that it was somehow God’s will that I was being punished for breeding with a Muslim Cushi.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t stop thinking about this place, this warehouse. I wondered what was inside. I foolishly thought maybe there was something valuable inside—maybe it was all some big practical joke. My father was not a funny man, so it made no sense that he’d play a trick on me. But I hoped. I stayed up most of the night praying that this was true. My sisters with all the family money and me with this curse of a building? No man, I thought, would be so cruel as to do this to his own son.

The next morning I took Fatima and the twins out to the warehouse. It was a mess. Paint peeling off the brick face in long ribbons. Rotten window casings and broken glass. Multiple beehives plastered to the overhangs. There was some crude half-finished graffiti on the wall by the entrance, like some kids had tried and given up, half a head with just the eyes and nose. I told Fatima to wait in the Blade with the girls. I wasn’t sure what I’d find in that place.

I went up to the entrance and pulled back the sliding door, and immediately I saw this woman spread out on the floor. An older woman with hair the color of dishwater, all in clumps like some sort of derelict. She was wearing old clothes stitched together with butcher string, and I thought, Oh, no—you know? This is the icing on the gravy—a dead woman on my hands. I cursed and the woman’s eyes snapped open immediately. She jumped up, suddenly completely awake and alert. She opened her mouth like she was going to howl, like she was some sort of banshee. But instead the sound she made was a weak sort of hiss, which was, in a way, much more terrifying than if she’d screamed. A scream, I was prepared for. But a hiss? Was she part of some snake cult? That is what I was thinking, silly as it seems now. This woman could’ve had a knife or a broken bottle or who knows what? I’m a virtual conference coordinator—I don’t know what goes on in the streets, and I didn’t want to die at the hands of some middle-aged urchin. But the woman ran off down a dark hallway and disappeared.

I followed her down the hall, moving as slow and careful as I could. The place reeked of some combination of organic stenches that I hope you never have to experience. Imagine an orange rind slowly rotting in the folds of a fat man’s jowls over the course of his entire lifetime and you have some inkling as to how bad it was. The woman went up a stairwell, and that’s when I heard the bees. This insane chorus of them, like a hundred power tools running all at once. I crept up the stairs, and when I reached the second floor landing I saw the woman standing there with a young man who was maybe in his twenties, wearing a gray shirt and pants that were worn down to threads, but with what looked like brand-new wingtip shoes. Behind them, though, was this—I don’t even know if I can accurately describe the state of the place, which looked like something out of a bad dream. Mattresses, tons of them, set up everywhere like a house of cards—like, end on end, carefully balanced. All arranged around a big circle in the middle of the floor with all kinds of junk strewn everywhere. Pillows, broken chairs, a giant purple bear like the kind you win at a roadside carnival. And in the back there were the packaging machines and orange juicers, and the bees covering them to suck away the residue, swarming over the entire surface. There were a dozen or more kids hiding behind some of the mattresses. It was just me in the building against this fleet of hoodlums.

The young guy approaches me and I get a chill down my spine, the coldest, most awful feeling, to the point where I start actually shaking. My knees are quivering, because this guy is coming at me and who knows how many more of these people there are living in this place? It might as well be an army of the living dead, is how I’m feeling. The guy comes up to me and holds out his hand. I jerk back like he’s going to throw a grenade at me or something. I’m ready for the worst, but I look at his hand and there’s a wad of cash sitting there in his palm. He holds it out to me, like I’m supposed to take it. I go, “What is this?” and he doesn’t say anything, just sort of waves it at me. I’m like, “You want me to take this money?” He just looked at me like I was talking nonsense. It was a little like how, when I go to visit Fatima’s family in Rabat, it’s like I’m a baby again, is how little I can communicate with her relatives. I know now that he was one of those silent kids, sure, but at the time I wasn’t thinking rationally. I thought he could be anyone, a terrorist or a prankster or someone else, who knows? But I could tell he had no idea what I was asking him. I took the cash—why not?—and counted it. Four thousand and change. I wanted to make sure I understood what was going on, so I pointed at him, then I went and slapped the wall of the building, and then I made a movement like I was taking the cash from him. And he smiled. That was our handshake. That was the start of a rewarding and mutually beneficial relationship. I don’t know where this kid got his money from, but he paid me every month, on the nose, from then on. I was earning cash for nothing. The warehouse might as well have been a gigantic ATM. God was smiling down on me, despite my rotting father’s best attempts to tear me apart.

AUGUST BURNHAM

RAHWAY, NJ

2030

There was one in Newark right next to the Jackson Street Bridge, and another off 280 where kids were living in retired school buses. There were a few in Elizabeth and a huge one in Bayonne in the old Manhattan Chocolate & Nuts building. In Jersey City there was a condemned ballpark where a small group of them made a home out of the concession area. I’m just thinking of some of the places I’d visit most frequently. And of course there were a bunch more in New York City. I tried to get out to each of the larger communities at least once a month. Some of them I visited more often, if it seemed like they needed extra medical attention. The place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a real concern because of the bees. I couldn’t believe that those kids were living in that space with what looked like hundreds of hives ready to drop from the ceiling at any moment.