The Silent History: A Novel (28 page)

I waited until the woman’s friend excused herself to go to the bathroom. I walked up to the woman and attempted to tell her how much I admired her compassionate restraint in dealing with her friend, whose relentless self-pity seemed to frustrate and depress her. But what came out was something along the lines of, “I bested your wellness clinic, you fellow.”

My cheeks became red. I might as well have been urinating in my pants, was how vulnerable and exposed I felt. She broadened her face and pulled back to give me room to try again, which I thought was more generous than I deserved. I tried again to explain myself: “I was granding over there and I foreshortened your Calypso style.” I knew the things that were coming out of my mouth were wrong, but I couldn’t find the right words. I raced through my mind to try to dislodge a phrase that would express what I felt, but I couldn’t find any stable platform for the ideas in my head to land on. I could see in her face that the woman was prepared to give me yet another chance to explain myself to her. She was that forgiving. But I backed off and stumbled out into the night. Dr. Burnham said I would eventually hit my wall—he called it a wall, which was a metaphorical limit of what the Soul Amp was capable of. He said that it would learn as I went through my days. He said it would adapt and improve. I wasn’t worried, but I was anxious to put the memory of that woman behind me.

Do you want to know a funny thing? I have even begun speaking in my dreams. Recently I had a dream where I was standing in the middle of a dirty pond and a crocodile was swimming toward me. There was nobody else in the vicinity. I was very scared of the crocodile, but I didn’t dare move. I simply shouted, “Go away!” and the crocodile burst into a flock of birds that flew up into a dark cloud in the center of the sky. Isn’t that a great dream? Its meaning is that I now have the power to do things I never thought I could before. Did you understand that when you heard the story as I told it?

PRASHANT NUREGESAN

REDWOOD CITY, CA

2037

Looking back, the creation of the implant seems almost inevitable. After I found Isabelle hanging from the rafters in that warehouse, I disappeared. I left the country for about a year and a half. I lived with my cousin in New Delhi for a spell and then went on to Barsana, where I secured a job working as a customer-support specialist for Chiller Industries, one of my own companies in the States. I had a one-room apartment with a single window that looked out on another building that had a nice view of Shri Radhikaji’s temple, and I sat in a folding chair with my headset on and solved the technical issues of my customers with a prowess that was unstoppable. All of my grief at having failed to save Isabelle, at having failed my entire family, not to mention myself, I kept that tightly wound inside of me, and like a clock spring it kept me going. I lived on rice and street trash and thought of nothing but whatever task was directly in front of me.

My cousin visited me when I was in this condition, and I saw the horror on his face when I greeted him at the door. “You have to confront this, Nu,” he said, taking me by the arm. “You can’t keep hiding.” We went straight to the temple, where he enrolled us in a course in vipassana as a way to, I guess, cleanse my soul. For ten days we took a vow of silence. Total, numbing silence. I wasn’t much of a traditionalist, so it didn’t bother me that the temple was being used for such an infantile bastardized form of meditation. What did bother me was the silence itself. For the first day, I admit, it had a leveling effect on my consciousness. I felt the great expanse of my mind unfurling before me, so much real estate that I hadn’t yet occupied. So much ripe, open terrain to leverage. But by the second day this elation settled into a sort of dull pulse, and on the third day I felt I could actually hear the paint on the walls. Five days in, the silence consumed me. I literally felt as if my body had caught fire. I no longer knew which way was up. I had no idea what my hands were anymore. This was much more alarming than when I’d drunk opium tea with those two hot Belgian transfer students at Rutgers. I was no longer able to identify the world I inhabited. Even my own skin—I saw it as this blanket that some distant god had spread over my bones to keep me warm. The course turned me into an idiotic space infant, and the moment I stepped out of the damn temple I knew my calling. I knew that everything in my life had happened for a purpose. Isabelle’s death was not my fault. My failure to rescue her was not rooted in some personal flaw. She died because of silence. It was the silence that made her tie that cord to the rafter. And if there was one thing I was put on this earth for, it was to find a cure. A real, lasting cure. This was my future. This was my destiny.

I’d saved nearly everything I made from working the support line, so I was able to get the next flight back to New York. I showed up to work the next day in an old suit of mine that was two sizes too big for my shrunken frame and got the ball rolling on the Isabelle Foundation. Our mission was to find a cure at any cost. To find a cure within a decade. There was nothing else inside me but the desire to extinguish the silence. It coursed through me.

So you can imagine how I felt when I partnered with Burnham to bring the Soul Amp to market. He did all the heavy lifting, and I shielded him from the rest of the world, using the Foundation to build up an incubating wall of capital so that he could do what he did best in a stress-free environment. I made sure the guy had anything and everything he needed. When the news of the Soul Amp hit the streets, he was the one who got all the interviews and accolades. He received all of the awards. Rightfully so. I never wanted or expected any kind of praise. I never have. I just want to get a job done, and the wave of excitement that flooded the country and then the world when the Soul Amp came out was a reward beyond anything you could imagine. Before, you’d walk along any main street in any town and there’d be at least one disheveled silent, a ward of the state, clinging to the rim of the fountain in the park, peering into the basin with a vacant look in his eye. But once the federal integration policy went into effect, all the silents in transitional facilities got the implant and the places shut down. People who’d never been able to work before were suddenly given this incredible second chance. And the response from the community at large was just completely inspiring, the way these new members of society were welcomed without a trace of fear-mongering or bitterness. Every kid I saw on the street with the little telltale port behind his ear—I’d look at that kid and think, “I’m in there. I’m actually inside that boy’s mind. I’ve literally changed the course of that kid’s life.”

Once the implant had an install base of almost a hundred thousand, I decided it was time to roll out my next innovation—a suite of user-configurable mods that would allow anyone with an implant to customize their speech—or the speech of their children—to suit the individual context. The accent mod would allow you to pick one of several thousand regional dialects, and you could insert a second dialect and set the blend however you wanted. There was some controversy surrounding the content-blocker mod that allowed parents to gate their children’s speech, which, okay, some people abused, but you’re always going to get hackers and griefers no matter what you release. You can’t let that stop you from providing useful services to people who are desperate for them. Once we had all that, the obvious next step was to release a pack of famous voices from history, which people went crazy for. You actually started to see natural talkers getting jealous of their formerly silent peers. And who could blame them? There were times when I was working on the mods and I’d listen to our QA testers talking to each other like Napoleon and Kenny Rogers and Mother Teresa, and I felt the same way. Maybe if Isabelle had been around to get one, she’d sync to a Pocahontas or Nina Simone, or whoever she decided she should sound like, and we’d have sat on the glass platform of my trimaran and talked about a future that, for her and me both, was suddenly much, much brighter.

KENULE MITEE

BROOKLYN, NY

2037

Isoke is thinking about having one of those devices put in her head. There is a glass jar under her side of the bed, and every day there is more money saved in it. I have been watching it carefully. I don’t know what to think.

People look at Isoke and they say, “Oh, Kenule, how is it you have taken such a beautiful young bride?” and then they find out she is silent and they don’t ask any more questions. As though they suddenly discovered that I found her in the damaged goods aisle. I know they are saying behind my back, “Yes, she is pretty, but any man can win the heart of a cripple.” I don’t let it bother me. In fact, it makes me laugh, because I have a relationship with Isoke that is deeper and more unshakable than any of the so-called marriages I see around me. At night we are like pearl divers, knifing through the depths to explore each other’s bodies, always finding something startling and new. These men who judge me, they are just children. Boys who throw stones at a squirrel because it can climb so well. They simply have no idea what love is. They do not know the language of the soul, and in a strange way I feel sorry for them. I see
them
as the cripples, not my wife.

I have seen this device up close, because I have six silent men working my fleet of food carts in the Astroland Mall—all of them I have known since they were young boys, gathering around my cart to buy fat bread. They have all gotten the implant in them, which has been good for my business, without a doubt. Before, when they were silent, I was earning just enough to buy the slurries for the next day. My carts were the least desirable in the mall. They were the carts people went to only when there were long lines at the other vendors’ carts. Customers tolerated my boys, but many people felt uneasy about having to deal directly with a young man who took their money and gave them change without a single “hello” or “thank you” or “enjoy your day at the mall.” Some customers refused to indicate their desired product with a gesture or nod—they insisted on words and nothing else. My boys were obstacles, problems. It’s sad to say this, but people are cruel. That is the everlasting truth.

Now my boys are very well-spoken. Gentlemen, all of them. They make their customers feel appreciated. And the money I am earning now? I never dreamed of it. I will soon be able to put carts in several other area malls. I have my eye on a property in Bushwick that has, if you look out the window just right, a view of the sea. I have gained so much. But sometimes I still miss the past. Not the fat bread days, never that. But, well, it is strange to say but sometimes I miss those boys. Even though they are still right here.

One of them, Ezekiel, recently turned twenty-four. He is a great young man who spent many years in an orphanage until he was adopted by the wife of a popular jazz musician here in Brooklyn. I took all of my boys out to a nightclub near my house to celebrate Ezekiel’s birthday. I thought we could just chill to the Afrobolly music they were always playing there, but these boys only wanted to have a conversation. They couldn’t stop talking, showing off their new powers, the way a wealthy man might drive an expensive sports car to the grocery store. I thought it was silly, but I joined in with them, because, as I said, I love my boys. I would do anything for them. They asked me to tell them a joke, and so I leaned in and told the joke about the missionaries and the bedpan. When I got to the punch line, where the passing soldiers see the missionaries pouring the gasoline from the bedpan into their jeep and say, “Now that’s faith!” the boys nodded gravely. Ezekiel said something I could not understand for the life of me, and they nodded again. I changed the subject, trying to start up a conversation about the things men talk about, you know, the secrets of a woman and things along these lines, and they seemed interested, but again, whenever they tried to speak, it was like another person was interrupting their every word. They didn’t seem to truly understand each other either. It was very awkward. They are very gifted at saying the expected things, but they cannot seem to just relax and have a nice chat. I prefer the old days, where we would sit and feel the warmth of the alcohol and listen to the tunes. Those were good times.

I look at my boys sometimes and I see in their faces a new thing—a weight of some kind, like they are carrying a great yoke around their necks. A normal person might not even see this, but I am so used to reading Isoke’s face. And so now I must admit, I am nervous about Isoke joining them. Because what if she changes? What if we can no longer communicate with our bodies the way we now do? What if, when she can speak, she decides that I am no good? That I am nothing but a breadslinger, a small man near the bottom of the food chain? She is so radiant, I am sure that if she could talk she could attract the attention of a wealthy, powerful man. There is no question of this. The way she is looked at on the street, it is almost scandalous. I know she is motivated to get the implant so that she can be closer to me, but what if the thing that is supposed to bring us together only flings us apart?

PERSEPHONE GOLDIA

PHILADELPHIA, PA

2037

I was implanted four weeks ago tomorrow. Some begin to talk instantaneously after the anesthesia wears off and some require an elongated unlocking period, and I must have been one of the primary threats to the osprey’s nesting habitat. Must have been one of the latter ones. Very quickly I felt I could understand what the doctors were saying to me, but I could not reply to them. The doctors told me what I was experiencing was similar to the sensation of your mind waking up before your body. To me it felt itch-crippled, like trying to unlock a door with four different keys all together. Usually the surgery takes just a few hours, you don’t even have to spend the night, but I was in the hospital for three days, working with two different therapists. Adult implants are still more difficult due to our diminished brain plasticity. I did the breathing and the projection exercises while they made adjustments. My first real sentence was, “Back porch bitches beat front porch bitches at they own tricks.” The therapist told me this was likely a thing I heard on the radio towers killing songbirds. Heard on the radio and internalized.