The Silent History: A Novel (23 page)

I put my notice in at the viviplant clinic immediately. I had no idea how I was going to raise the funds for a new research facility, but I had to make a break with the past. I ate fat bread and Slush for the next several months while I developed a business plan and talked to potential investors. The real breakthrough was the Isabelle Foundation, which the girl’s family had formed to fund exactly the kind of research I wanted to conduct. They gave me the support I needed to get off the ground.

By the time I was officially open for business, though, things were even worse for the silent community. The voting issue was a huge concern, naturally, and the slashing of the silent service programs at the state and federal level, but I saw it permeate all aspects of the culture, right down to a hand-written sign taped to the door of the gas station down the street from the facility that said
No Shirt, No Shoes, No Speech, No Service
. It was astounding to me to see things come undone to such a degree. To see people circling their wagons in the basest way against a threat that was manufactured purely out of ignorance—it boggled my mind. I think there was a very real sense in the public’s mind that people afflicted with EPR were somehow less human. And that was precisely the sort of abominable, archaic thinking that I was driven to eradicate.

The new facility wasn’t much to look at, but rent was cheap and I was so elated to move in and get back to the EPR research that I’d had to put aside for so long that I would’ve set up shop just about anywhere. I sat alone in the empty office space that first night, crouching on the floor, riffling through the old files, pinning charts to the bare wall, reacquainting myself with my own research.

The biggest obstacle at that point was simply getting subjects into the facility. I had the database from the old clinic, so I sent out an invitation targeted primarily at the families I’d worked with in the past. I figured the response rate would be relatively low, since the children I’d worked with were by now into their early adulthood. But within hours I was contacted by the parents of Calvin Andersen. Calvin was my first officially diagnosed patient, and his parents said that they’d very much like Calvin to participate in any study I was conducting. They were still located in Hadley, but they would make the trek down to Rahway whenever I was ready for them. They included several recent photographs of Calvin that revealed the earnest boy I’d studied, buried in the gaunt, bearded face of a man I didn’t recognize.

I looked at the sequence of Hoekman renders, MRIs, and PET scans I took of Calvin’s brain, from when he was two to fourteen. From frame to frame, the brain grows, but Wernicke’s, Broca’s, all the typical language centers remain dark and occluded as the night sky. It seems so obvious now, but at the time I hadn’t quite realized the value of my data. I had literally reams of patient documentation that predated the research done by anyone else. Certainly people like Kimura and Goodrich had more resources at their disposal, and they were more widely recognized in the field, but my data had the depth. I had been thinking longer and harder than anyone about EPR, and it was time—I could feel it—to shift the whole paradigm. A cure, essentially, if I’m being frank. I held the scans delicately, like they were holy texts. I couldn’t believe my good fortune—that Calvin Andersen and his parents were on their way to my office. I panicked, because the facility wasn’t properly set up for me to perform the tests that I suddenly realized I needed to do. So I used the lion’s share of my savings to purchase a refurbished Hoekman and a portable PET scanner from a Russian wholesaler in Elizabeth. My cred account was drained, with overdraft fees left and right. It was a huge risk, but I’d never felt closer to my goal.

Calvin and his parents arrived the next day. It felt strange to see them again. Their faces were immediately familiar, though I could see all of the tiny ways in which time and anxiety had aged them—crow’s feet appearing whenever the mother smiled, and the father’s hanging jowls like the dewlap of a desert lizard. They told me that when my clinic shut down they’d given up on trying to find a cure for Calvin. They focused on accepting him for who he was, and that had brought them some peace, but they were never really able to convince themselves of it. They were still haunted by the possibility that trapped inside Calvin was a man capable of the full range of linguistic expression that his talking cohort enjoyed with the unconscious ease of breathing. The Navy Yard incident and all of the aftermath had convinced them that their son deserved another chance at freedom.

Calvin seemed to recognize me instantly, despite the thick white beard I’d grown since I’d moved in with Raph. I felt an instant rapport. I tugged on my beard and pointed to his and we both laughed. I showed him some photographs of my son, Hector, who operated high-altitude surveillance drones for the CIA. Hector and Calvin had spent many afternoons playing together in the waiting room of my old clinic while I discussed Calvin’s progress—or lack thereof—with his parents in my office. Calvin seemed intrigued by the pictures. I used my old symbol cards to say
Calvin
+
Look
+
Hector
, and Calvin grinned as though the cards were old friends he hadn’t seen in years.

I brought out the Hoekman and placed it on the table between us. Calvin’s face changed, and he examined very closely all of the parts—the buttons and snaps, the leads with their multipin terminals, the padded cavity where the head went. Here was a memory that Calvin clearly felt a little more ambivalent about. I asked him through symbols if he’d let me take a study of his brain. He thought about it for a long, almost interminable minute before taking the thing in both hands and placing it carefully on his head. I nodded and synced the device. I’d forgotten almost entirely how to work the Hoekman, and even though the model I’d purchased was a few years old, it was still far more advanced than the one I’d used at my clinic. I stumbled my way through and within a few minutes I was looking at Calvin’s brain in real time, watching the whiplash neural traffic surging through his cortex. I had a clearer view than ever before of the dark areas where his neurons failed to spark. What had seemed so vast and mysterious before was now constrained, finite. The darkness, finally, had a shape.

NANCY JERNIK

MONTE RIO, CA

2032

We spent the winter living in that Kazakh jetliner that had crashed into the Hudson during the Olympics protests. There were just six of us remaining from the warehouse—the rest had gone back to their families, or were taken back, or else they just wandered off to other squats. We never saw any of them again, and it seemed to really destroy people’s spirits. I grieved with them, but secretly it didn’t bother me too much. I stuck with Spencer, and that was all that mattered. The winter was harsh, and the plane was partially frozen in the ice, so the cold was almost unbearable. But we made a crude kind of chimney out of some aluminum piping and put it in the flight attendant’s area, and occasionally the warmth made us forget where we were and what we’d lost.

Spring might have taken some of the pressure off of our mourning, but it never seemed to arrive. The morning chill hovered throughout the day, and everything that had died in the fall stayed dead and withered. The bleakness really seemed to be getting to Spencer, a hunch that was confirmed one day when he came up to me—actually approached me, voluntarily—with this photograph of the Face-to-Face facility in Monte Rio. It was torn from a permazine, and it showed a group of young people standing waist-deep in a jade-colored river with a colony of humble cabins standing in the background among a cool stand of redwoods. The figures looked healthy, happy, at peace—they had everything that we lacked. I held the picture out and looked at Spencer questioningly, like, “This looks like a nice place, but what does it mean?” And he put his hand to his chest and then pointed to the destination on the map. I pointed to myself, and then to him, and then to the map as if to ask him if he’d like me to drive him there. And he looked away and sort of nodded. I was so excited. The thought of us taking this trip, of making this colossal change—the thrill was almost like high school, as if Spencer had asked me out on a date, except not weird. Just that feeling of having the attention, finally, of the person you’ve longed for in your mind for however long.

Of course, I had to get a car. I had one in my previous life, a wine-red Megara 110. But Ron, when he moved in with that woman from the Handbag Network, had the title transferred to her. So I looked into cheap rental places, and it turned out that there was a car you could rent for a dollar a day if you agreed to have a chip injected at the base of your neck that made you thirsty whenever you saw a tub of Slush. I didn’t know what Slush was, but they promised me the chip would dissolve to nothing after a month, and it just seemed like the simplest, easiest way to get us across the country. We went to the rental place, where a small man in a lab coat gave us shots that you could barely even feel, and we got in the car and took off.

The trip was hard for a lot of reasons. I don’t think we were really prepared for the harsh treatment we got. Things had changed since I went to live with Spencer and his friends. Back then, there was confusion and even some suspicion, sure, but it was mixed with curiosity and a strange sort of respect. Maybe even awe, a little. But now the confusion had become exasperation, and the suspicion was outright animosity. Wherever we stopped people gave us looks, or wouldn’t fill our orders, or would tell us that a bathroom wasn’t working, when in fact it was working just fine. They treated us like we were both silent because of the way we were dressed, and that made me both proud and angry—proud that we were seen as equals, even if the treatment we got was awful. The chips in our necks also made things difficult, because I didn’t realize when I signed us up that there were Slush machines literally everywhere. So we were always incredibly thirsty.

But the weirdest, hardest part was just spending so much time alone with Spencer. For all the time I’d lived in the same place as him, I still didn’t really
know
him. When we were all together in a group, I could successfully play the part of acolyte. It was a role I found easy to take on. But when it was just Spencer and me sitting side by side in the car, things changed. I started to feel restless. I wanted to be his mother again. I wanted him to look at me the way a son looks at his mother.

We rode through the remains of Cincinnati. We spent days carving through the farmlands and plains, past Borden Peak and the Badlands and Zap World. We got lost in South Dakota and ended up at Mount Rushmore, which I’d never been to before. We spent a long time just staring at those faces. Spencer seemed sort of entranced by them, and I wondered what he must be thinking. Who were those men up there, and what had they done to have their faces carved into the rock? There was no way I could think of to tell him, and anyway I was only really sure about two of the four heads.

Afterwards we walked into a souvenir shop, and the man behind the counter took one look at us and stopped the music that was playing on the loudspeakers. We’d barely set foot in there, and he’d already made his judgment. There was no one else in the shop but a family of four eating freeze-dried ice cream. The shopkeeper stared at us blankly from behind the counter, and then suddenly began squinching and stretching his face in a grotesque mockery of face-talking. Rolling his eyes and licking his lips, really pleased with himself. The family stopped eating their ice cream and looked at us, eager and excited, waiting to see what happened next.

I decided that I’d officially, right then, had enough. I’d suffered the last of a hundred little paper cuts of intolerance. I picked up a Rushmore snowglobe and hurled it at the cash register, where it shattered into a million little fragments of glitter and glass. I stormed out of there and went into the parking lot, and for the first time in a long time I just wept and wept. I got down on my knees behind the rental car and put my forehead to the blacktop and sobbed. And Spencer followed me—he knelt beside me and put his arms around me. The first hug he’d given me in I don’t know how long. Fifteen years, at least.

We finally crossed into California, and that was the most incredible part of the trip. The scenery was unbelievable—I mean, after you’ve spent so much time living in, essentially, a trash heap, it really is like a completely different world. Even the air felt richer, clearer. Spencer seemed to be drunk with the beauty of it. He put his head on my shoulder and closed his eyes, and the weight of him against me felt like the most incredible accomplishment—like getting Spencer across the country was the one genuine thing I had done in my life.

We pieced our way to Monte Rio, across the bridge and down that long winding road, the impossible redwoods on either side of us, and pulled past a series of burned-out shacks into a clearing with a ramshackle but neat cabin. We got out of the car and a group of people came out to greet us. A handful of kids roughly Spencer’s age followed by an older Korean lady. This one young woman stepped forward, and there was something about her face, something familiar. I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen her before until the Korean woman, Francine, told me she was Flora Greene, the silent girl who’d been in that documentary years ago, back when Spencer was just a boy. She approached Spencer and took him by the shoulders to look deeply into his face. He stepped back, startled by her bold gesture. This was not how silent people greeted each other—at least not where we were from. She smiled a little at Spencer’s bashfulness, and he smiled, and they both laughed.

They took us to a sort of geodesic dome made out of aluminum pie tins and Clabbershot. It was hot and damp inside even though the air temperature was cool. We crouched in the dome while someone went to fetch some food. I tried to protest—I didn’t want to call attention to ourselves in this way, but Francine just shook her head at me, looking resigned. “This is just their thing,” she said. We stayed in the dome for a long time. Our hosts sat around Spencer and stared hard at him with a disconcerting earnestness. Finally, a young man in a red apron brought steamed, honey-soaked lichen wrapped in tree leaves and a bitter red juice that had a mineral aftertaste.