The Silent History: A Novel (25 page)

When I was done eating, I threw the husk in the trash and put my hands in the sanitizer, and when I looked up I saw Flora and Spencer standing at the shell game. The woman running the game had a sideways mouth full of curved brown teeth, but she knew how to use it to rope people in. She was fast and persuasive, and Spencer and Flora stood there mesmerized by the sight of her. She held up four fingers at them, and Spencer gave her four tickets. She moved the shells around and stopped, and Spencer pointed to the shell with the marble underneath. She gave him a stuffed crayon, but he shook his head and pointed at a shelf of Siamese fighting fish in tiny plastic globes. She said he had to guess three more times to get the fish. Spencer handed over all the tickets I’d given them. The woman shrugged and did the shell game, and Spencer guessed the right shell three times in a row. The woman was flabbergasted, but I saw that Spencer had been looking at her face instead of the shells. To him, the answer was obvious. She thrust the fish at Spencer and gave him a withering look, but Spencer just turned to my daughter and held out the globe, and she took it from him as if he was presenting her with a holy chalice. She put her arms around him and they stood there in the parking lot, totally oblivious to the screams of the kids on the Whiplash and the Double Penetration, to the ride operators coughing up their lungs and the barkers shouting down everyone that passed by, just swaying there in slow motion like they were alone on a dance floor listening to a song of their own.

PATTI KERN

MONTE RIO, CA

2033

I heard the news about Flora while I was weeping the fluid from the fiberlight all-body cleansing glove I’d been wearing. I’d been doing this every morning for the past three months. First I’d unscrew the small bung at the ankle, hold my gloved foot over a steel-cut-oatmeal can, and let all the viscid juice from the previous twenty-four hours drain into it. That took about two hours total. When it was done I used what was in the can and pestled together fenugreek seeds, ginger, thistledown, baking soda, elderflower, pulped wheatworm, and some ingredients I’d prefer not to reveal. Which I added to the juice. Then I filled the specialized baster, rescrewed the bung, and discharged all the tepid fluid back into the glove, at my collarbone.

The body glove was my attempt at rebirth, a cocoon for the new me, a personal confession for my trunk and limbs. I thought it would help me out of my rut. It didn’t. The suit had become my punishment, the stone I was pushing up a hill and watching roll back down, and repeat, repeat, repeat. Punishment for letting outside parties spoil Face-to-Face, for losing sight of the pure mission. I should’ve been stronger, should’ve been braver and more devoted.

I was waiting for the rest of the fluid to weep out when Francine knocked on my cabin door. I knew it was Francine, because she was the only one who came around. I answered maybe once every tenth visit. This time I yelled, “Unavailable!” but Francine kept knocking. I swiped the volume up on my Irving Berlin record and waited for her to leave. She knocked again. She clearly wasn’t going to stop, so I told her to come in. When she saw the dripping excretion, which was sort of white and pulpy, her shoulders crumpled in a retch-shiver, but I assured her that she was witnessing something ancient and Asian—at least spiritually Asian, if not literally.

“Flora’s pregnant,” she said, just like that, without any ceremony or suspense. This was Francine’s operating technique. She was guileless, uncoy, unaware of the effect she was having on other people. Mostly, I think, she was lonely. She covered her mouth, shivered, turned for the door, and said, “Spencer’s the father.” Spencer. The newcomer. The slender, dark-haired loverman.

Did I grasp the full weight of this news the instant she told me about it? Yes, I did. This baby, this fruit of the union of two native speakers, I knew right away what she represented. She—I was sure it would be a she—was a new start, a do-over. She’d be born and raised here at the retreat, and the first faces she would see would be those of her people. The first sounds she would hear wouldn’t be words, blurring, disorienting—they’d be the unpolluted silent transmissions of love and trust and peace. A brand-new human to show us where we went wrong. And where we could go right. Flora’s baby would be pure. She would be the first native native speaker.

I reached out to Flora immediately. I found her in the cabin where she and Spencer had been living. He was there, and so were about seven or eight others, who were visibly unwelcoming. This wasn’t a surprise, no—I was no longer the leader here but a ghost wandering around a graveyard. And also—I didn’t realize this until I looked at myself in the mirror later—I was wearing a sleeveless bathrobe over the cleansing glove, which was salt-stained and which probably emitted a difficult odor, though I was used to it. Flora was sitting on the edge of a cot, like a snake who swallowed a potato, skinny everywhere except for the belly. Seeing her made me all-over joyous. I’d wanted to bring her an item, something to wordlessly declare my sisterhood, but all I could find in my rush to leave the cabin was a deck of poultry-themed playing cards from a truck stop in Petaluma, where Patrick and I stopped on our way up to Monte Rio so many years ago. She accepted it with a grateful sigh.

Midwife seemed to be my logical role. We didn’t want a whole lot of nonnative involvement—I mean, Francine and the other woman, Spencer’s mother, had abandoned the no-talking rule, which there was nothing I could do about, but I discouraged them from talking anywhere near Flora. Babies in utero could tell a man’s voice from a woman’s—it was where they obtained the first lineaments of language.

I called a meeting with Francine and Spencer’s mother to offer my services. We met outside, on one of the derelict picnic tables by the compost heap, which hadn’t been aerated in months, I could see. I stressed to them how important this baby was to the native speakers. How all the damage they, that is,
we
, suffered over the years was about to be repaired, because we would soon be welcoming into the world this amazing, prelapsarian—

“We’ve already found someone to take care of everything,” Spencer’s mother said. “A doctor. A medical doctor. You don’t need to worry yourself.”

In my state of heightened alertness, I found her easy to pin down. She was an atoner, a penitent, a hollowed gourd with no room for hope. Her hands were creased and battered and her murky eyes hid a constricted sort of intelligence. I found her beautiful and scary.

She said, “You can keep your distance. Flora’s life is hers alone now. And no one knows what’s going to happen with the baby.”

“It’s going to be stunning,” I said.

“We can’t even know if it will survive the delivery,” Spencer’s mother said.

Who told her that? I wanted to know. Someone who practiced medicine with calculators and actuary charts?

Francine said, “You should get some rest, Patti. You look really tired.”

Tired? That’s strange, because I’d slept thirteen hours the night before. I could’ve slept longer, too, but if I didn’t drain my cleansing glove, my entire body started to burn and itch. Undeterred, I went back to my cabin and set Irving Berlin to loop three times and emptied my glove again.

For the next two months, I worked behind the scenes. I went into town and hired a handyman to install reverse-osmosis filters at the retreat, and I dosed all the icemakers with folic acid crystals and bought gender-neutral wood-block toys. These were the more practical things I did. I also executed some lucid dreaming, which I hadn’t done in years, and communicated with the baby that way. I was careful not to talk to her—I simply emoted the gravity of the moment.

I tried to coordinate my schedule with Flora’s. Spencer was always with her, holding her arm, fetching things for her. I tried to communicate to the both of them that I would never do anything to compromise them or their child. But maybe my body language was off or my face didn’t express what I wanted it to.

In fact, everyone at the retreat was avoiding me, so after a while I went back to my cabin. I watched Flora from my window, watched her bump get bigger, then lower. Then one day, during an endless rain, there was a rush of activity outside, and then I heard an ambulance approaching. I’d been envisioning Flora having the baby at Face-to-Face, but they whisked her away so quickly I didn’t have time to go outside and communicate my good wishes. By the time I put on the waterproof wrapping for my body glove, she was gone.

DR. MADELINE SORM

SEBASTOPOL, CA

2033

Ms. Greene was already in transition when she arrived at the hospital. The people who brought her in—a serious-looking Korean woman and a mother and son—initially didn’t make it clear to the nurse on duty that Ms. Greene was in active labor, so she had them wait in an examination room while the birthing suite they’d requested was prepped. The mother returned to the front desk a short while later to inform the nurse that Ms. Greene was pale and bleeding. The nurse examined the patient and discovered that she was dilated to ten centimeters. The bloody discharge was typical of an in-transition patient. The nurse asked the family members why they were so late in getting Ms. Greene to the hospital, and they said that they themselves had not realized she was in active labor. Ms. Greene, they said, had spent the majority of the day lying still in a field on their property, not giving any outward indication of pain until roughly an hour before their arrival at the hospital.

Orderlies arrived and helped Ms. Greene onto a gurney, which they wheeled directly to the Alternative Birthing Center. They caught us by surprise—Nurse Lashari was still preparing the bedclothes and I was filling out forms on another patient. As soon as Ms. Greene saw the bed, she slid off the gurney and made her way across the room without assistance. The orderlies rushed to her side to support her, but she didn’t seem to notice them as she crawled up onto the half-made bed. I told everyone it was all right—if Ms. Greene was indeed in transition, I knew that we wouldn’t be there for long.

She got into position on the bed, gripping the rails for leverage as she began to push, before anyone had given her any instruction to do so. I approached the bed and squeezed her hand. I spoke to her, knowing she couldn’t understand me, but feeling the need to run through my usual speech of encouragement and affirmation anyway. I said, “I’m not going to deliver this baby—you are.” And, “I’m just here to help in whatever way I’m able. You can even pretend I’m not here.” But even as I said these words, I saw in her face a kind of raw determination that deflated the admittedly canned sentiment I’d intended to convey. I’d never dreamed that a patient might actually take me up on my offer to be ignored, but Ms. Greene was doing just that. She didn’t need me. She was in absolute control of her body, and she was going to give birth no matter what. It was an extraordinary and humbling moment.

The room became very quiet after that. Ms. Greene was visibly in the grips of stage-two labor, but aside from her perfectly timed rhythmic breathing she barely made a sound. We were in the basement, insulated from the rest of the hospital by thick concrete walls originally designed to withstand a nuclear blast. The family had requested we turn the overhead fluorescents off and so Nurse Lashari and I worked in a sort of warm dusklight. The family members circled the bed and held on to Ms. Greene, whispering and clicking as they stroked her arms and kept her hair out of her face. We all proceeded through the evening in a reverent hush, as if we were observing a religious rite. It was so quiet that we could hear the ticking cycle of the HVAC system. The tall young man who was Ms. Greene’s partner crouched close to her as she pushed, staring directly into her eyes, never blinking.

The baby, when he came, emerged without a hitch. I held him while Nurse Lashari offered the umbilical cord scissors to the father. The young man took on the task with perhaps a small excess of gravity that I found endearing. The child weighed in at a perfectly healthy six and a half pounds, and with a full head of hair. Nurse Lashari cleaned him off and handed him to Ms. Greene, who looked calm for someone who’d just been through labor. Her face was glistening with sweat and her hair was plastered to her forehead, but this was the only sign that there had been any struggle at all. She seemed at peace, holding the baby to her naked chest while her partner kissed her temple gently and repeatedly.

VOLUME FOUR

THEODORE GREENE

RICHMOND, CA

2034

I was already awake when I heard Slash start whimpering, almost like my body knew the boy’s moods in advance—like it was prepared at any moment to leap into action. I got up and slipped into the room Flora and Spencer shared when they visited me and scooped him out of the fruit crate they used for his crib. The boy was a light sleeper in those first months, and once he was awake there was no getting him to go back down except by taking him on long drives. I was happy to do it. I think Flora and Spencer felt like they were taking advantage of me, relying on me to whisk Slash away in the dark of night whenever he got out of hand. I sort of let them believe that it was a burden, but really I loved the ritual of it. I loved the look of the city in the middle of the night—how even the most gruesome decay was renewed somehow in the light of those tall gooseneck lamps. I loved this power I had in the dark, being the only person in the world who was able to silence the loud, finicky tyrant. But mostly it was just that I got to be with him, alone, without anyone or anything to bother or distract us. We gave each other exactly what we needed.

“Slash” is what I call the boy. I know it’s not a perfect name, but it’s something. I call him Slash because when you lay him out on a blanket on the floor he makes these slashing motions with his arms, like a knight hacking his way through hordes of infidels. It started out as a joke, but it stuck. I couldn’t just go on calling him “the boy” for my whole life, and Flora and Spencer certainly weren’t going to name him. I mean, maybe they had some special wink for him, but that wasn’t a name to me. Not a real one.