The Silent History: A Novel (29 page)

I had wanted the implant ever since the surveillance-scrubbing company fired me for failing their language test. They offered it in English, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, and I failed them all. They had figured out I was a silent months before, but I guess they just liked watching me babble incoherently in four different tongues. After that I worked in one of the ag towers downtown, picking and sorting fruit under blistering hydroponic grow lights. When I sorted two hundred pounds I was done for the night. I worked on the twenty-seventh floor, strawberries and blueberries. I worked hard.

One woman I sorted beside would talk to me for at least ten minutes each time. I listened to her and watched her face trumpet and scowl. She was easy to read—most of her talking was about the boredom of the work. I frowned and nodded. She had a dry snuffed lantern face. It was all-over calming. Even now, after the implant, I have difficulty stressing the importance of photosynthetic algae. Difficulty explaining why I was so drawn to talkers. Once I had sorted my two hundred pounds I would wait in the break closet for someone to come in, and then would try to hold them there as long as possible. Even though the work was emptying I liked the ag tower more than the surveillance company because there were more stillbirths. More talkers around. When our shift ended another began. I would have slept there if they let me. I tried, but they did not let me. Then the ag tower was raided and all the employees were interviewed and I was fired.

So once the implant became available, I didn’t need to wait two times. And I was excited to get right back into the world, but the rehabilitation doctors recommended delaying six weeks before applying for a job. They also recommended I do the at-home reentry exercises for no more than two hours a day. The rehabilitation involves simple recognition, sentence forming, philosophy, training yourself to withhold. I did the exercises twelve hours a day, and in under two weeks I was applying for recognition under the Endangered Species Act. Applying for every job I could. I interviewed to be a docent in a museum of medical oddities, to be a hostess at a restaurant specializing in tea parties for little girls. I tried to follow all the hints from the rehabilitation.
Allow yourself two seconds before responding to another speaker. Don’t dwell too long when answering perfunctory questions, especially ones about your well-being.

I do not know how I seemed to the interviewers. I could understand their questions pretty well, but I had difficulty deciphering what I myself was saying, even after I had said it. The interviewer at the tea party restaurant asked me what my biggest weakness was, and I counted to two and told her that I have never liked how my name is shaped. When she asked me to elaborate, I said, “It makes me feel…” And my pause was longer than salubrious, and they thanked me and told me they had a tough decision ahead of them. “Me too,” I said, trying to be empathetic. They decided other than me.

Finally I was hired at the SS
Muir
, a zero-impact conservationist day cruise out near East Lansdowne. We set sail inside a high-ceilinged warehouse with surround screens on the walls. It was really just a long movie with two meals in between. I was hired as a junior hospitality technician, starboard side. My first day, I woke up tight in my upper body with brittle percolating happiness. I arrived in my khaki safari uniform forty-five minutes early. I stood outside memorizing my script and fact-supplement and shivering with white ache until the manager unlocked the door. “Jesus. It’s freezing out here,” he said. “You could’ve just knocked. I would’ve let you in.”

I said the line I had rehearsed on my way over: “I am very happy to be working here today.”

It came out perfect. “Well, all right,” the manager said, and that was the beginning of the extinction cycle. Beginning of my first day.

Once the cruise goers boarded and we were headed out of Iquitos and down the Amazon, I went around to my section and asked for drink orders. I had an exact script: “Much like the pea aphid in the dry season, you are probably thirsty. What can I get you?”

When we arrived at the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, I asked if they wanted refills, and, if they did not, I said, “An adult crocodile can survive two years without eating.” Then I paused to allow it to sink in. “But I bet you can’t.” Wait for laughter. “I’m happy to answer any questions you have. Our giant panda burger is delicious—it’s one-hundred percent panda-free.” Smile, wait for laughter. “It’s made from red beans, smoked wheat-meat, and reengineered photosynthetic algae.”

My shift was twelve hours long. There was not much downtime to meet and talk with my coworkers. I did fold silverware into napkins next to an older woman named Callie, who told me, “The script’s a real pain in the ass at first, but you get used to it. Shit, I like it now. I just smile and veg out and don’t say anything I’m not supposed to say.”

If the customers were hostile and abusive, the script called for conflict avoidance. Smile, try to establish physical contact with them. Put your hand on their shoulder and say, “I’ll come back in a few minutes. I need to go milk the oxen.” There were a lot of other latent predatory—a lot of other quips. Menu jokes, trivia questions to see who would be the one to wear the toucan mask during the Gathering of the Birds. And also the SS
Muir
motto: “The first
S
is for
Satisfy
, the second is for
Smile
.” And then, “Make Understood Inconvenient Realities.”

At the end of that first day, I smelled like the hot jungle stench that was pumped into the warehouse. My mouth hurt from smiling. My neck hurt from nodding and tilting my head at a sympathetic angle. I had never talked to so many people before in my life. I swept out my station feeling laundered—I mean, scooped dry.

Callie invited me out with a few of our coworkers. We went to a bar with paintings of naked clowns on the wall. When the waitress came around, I pointed to something on the drink menu and she said, “That’s my favorite.” Then I heard her say it again about a different drink a few minutes later. While we waited, one of the floor managers tapped my knee and said, “So, your first big cruise, huh? How you feeling?”

I was so tired, so overdrawn. I wasn’t thinking about any of my rehabilitation hints. All that mattered was me coming up with a satisfactory answer to this question, for him, for me. I closed my eyes and considered it. I took my mind fully inward and thought about the various flavors—the strands—the colors of my inner … I sighed. I felt an answer, a slippery fish I could touch but not hook.

“Relax,” he said. “Have a drink, you’ll feel better. If not, have another.” The woman next to him laughed, and he turned and asked her the same question. She said, “Beat.”

When he turned back to me a few minutes later, I said, “I’m beat, too.”

His face swelled with a satisfied bloat. I sipped my drink, tried to think the words for how I was feeling, and then ordered the village elders to empty the cistern. Ordered everyone off the beach because of red tide. Ordered another.

SENATOR RANSFORD SWEENEY

DES MOINES, IA

2038

The worst kinds of tragedies are the ones you could’ve prevented. He was a six-year-old boy, Isaiah, last name withheld, out shopping with his stepmother and two half sisters. They’re at an artisan mall in Muscatine, the one where you make everything yourself. Isaiah walks a few feet behind his family, but they’re used to it. He looks slightly confused, bereft. He’s a silent. Watch him for a few minutes and you see how he stares at people too long, trying to find someone he understands, someone who understands him. His stepmother barely tolerates him, his uncombed hair, his searching eyes. His half sisters steal his food and blame him for broken windows and missing toys.

The four of them are walking to the place where you can make your own flavored toothpicks, when Isaiah gets distracted by a wig-shop window. All these long-necked mannequin heads. When the boy looks up, his family’s gone. What can he do? He doesn’t know where they were going, can’t tell anyone their names, or his name. He’s smart enough to find an adult with a nametag and uniform—an old janitor. The boy’s pointing and frowning and sighing at the old man, who deals with this kind of thing several times a week with silents. Did they lose their money in the candy spinner? Were they just confused? He never knows. He had a job to do, and ambassador-to-wayward-silents wasn’t part of the description.

All this was observed by another man, a man who came to the artisan mall to look for a victim. He noticed Isaiah by the merry-go-round and pegged him for a silent immediately. He watched the boy go up to the ticket-taker and try to tell her, or express to her, what was going on. The man smiled when she waved him off. She probably thought Isaiah’d lost his ticket. No ticket, no ride.

Isaiah tried one more person, who put his arm around the boy and was apparently walking him toward the information kiosk. The man saw his chance. He ran up to them, embraced Isaiah, and said, “There you are. Had me worried sick.” No recognition from the boy, no relief, but there was so much he couldn’t understand.

The man hustled Isaiah out to the parking lot, into his van, where he handcuffed him to a cleat in the back. Gagged him with an old dishrag.

The boy was missing for thirty-nine days. After a week the nature of the search changed from a missing persons to a homicide. The family lit candles. Churches prayed. I met with local and state officials. Then one morning the boy walked into a gas station in Sioux City, the other side of the state, and collapsed there in front of the cashier. Dehydrated, nearly starved, visibly abused. A wreck. But alive. He was reunited with his father and stepmother and half sisters the next day. In borrowed clothes, clean, but still terrified. I went to his house and met him and his family. Everyone was trying to smile for me and the cameras, they knew that’s what was expected, but I could see his parents were still just ravaged. The father was stone-faced, and he kept saying, “We should’ve gotten the implant. We just…” and then would trail off. Because what more could he say?

He was punishing himself more than anyone else ever could, but the more I looked into it, the angrier I became. To be honest, I didn’t know a lot about silents before Isaiah went missing. I was aware of the implant but didn’t know all the specifics. When it first came onto the market, it cost roughly $225,000, and most health insurance companies only covered the hardware and anesthesia. Way too expensive for most families. But as of last year all but some negligible lab costs had been subsidized by matching grants from the federal government, in partnership with Nu Ware. And the father
knew
this. He’d received notice in the mail, had been contacted by Nu Ware representatives, had heard about it from his doctor. The procedure was on par with having your wisdom teeth pulled. Isaiah could have gone in, and after a week or so it’d be like he’d never been a silent at all.

The father had learned his lesson, but my staff did some digging and discovered he wasn’t an isolated case. It was staggering that parents would allow this to happen. But I guess the only way you’re going to get full compliance is to actually force people to do it. It was the same way a hundred years ago with the polio vaccine. You can show parents a million pictures of polio children swimming in public pools, tell them how easy the vaccine is. But there will always be holdouts.

Isaiah’s ordeal shows that the implant is no less vital than a lifesaving vaccine. If you’re a parent, think about all the work you do, and then imagine never once hearing your child say that he loves you. Can you feel it? All that emotional investment, those sleepless nights, and you’ll never hear those three words? Plus all the others? This amazing invention is a blessing, American ingenuity at its finest. To not take advantage of it would be nothing less than child abuse.

Which is why I proposed Isaiah’s Law in the Senate. Essentially, the law made it mandatory for every child under the age of seven to be implanted, going into effect on the first of the year. Isaiah’s was a cautionary tale, and surely not an isolated one. Think of all the voiceless children out there, think of their stories. These are children who, with the flick of a switch, could have their lives enriched and augmented, safe and thriving among healthy society.

The bill also allotted more funds for the distribution of the implants, and set up a subcommittee to oversee and expedite the implantation process, especially in underserved urban and rural communities. The law passed both houses by a wide margin, and the president signed it into law soon afterward.

Isaiah’s story does have a happy ending. Some of my senior aides worked with his family to get him implanted, and the surgery was a complete success. Once Isaiah had completed his rehabilitation, he was smiling a lot more, telling everyone how happy he was to be alive. Plus, he was finally able to recount his nightmarish tale, providing the necessary information for police to find his attacker, a retired accountant from Waterloo named Sander Dougal, who kept kids locked in a storm cellar while he brutally assaulted and then drowned most of them, seven confirmed. Isaiah had managed to escape through a heating vent. And, thanks to the implant and Isaiah’s testimony, Dougal is now in prison for life, where he’ll probably either commit suicide or be murdered.

This law will be Isaiah’s legacy. “Remember the silents?” people will say years from now. Some will, the younger ones won’t. And before too long, the whole sorry story will be forgotten.

ZANE NOERPER

WALDRON ISLAND, WA

2038

Ever play
Big Buck Hunter: Open Season 3—Unfenced
on jimson? When I got to Face-to-Face, I was pretty much exclusively doing jimson and playing
BB:OS3
. It’s such a classic. Really the best, most realistic open-world hunting adventure game ever. I know the terrain like the back of my hand. I don’t even play for score anymore—I’ll just shoulder my rifle and climb to the top of a rise to watch the migration patterns of the Aniak caribou. Breathtaking doesn’t even begin to describe it. And on jimson, you look at a caribou charging across the snow and you’re like, “Is that a snake with legs?” Which is sort of what a caribou really is, if you think about it but not too much. That’s what jimson can do for you. I ran a fan site, BigFansOfBigBuckHunter3-Unfenced.com, where you could access a cracked version of the game with all of the geobounders removed. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, totally legal, but the people who ran Face-to-Face didn’t seem to mind my installing a server farm in one of the old Quonsets in the backwoods behind the compound. They didn’t really bother me at all, in fact. Just kind of kept to themselves. A chilled-out people, those silents. Super noble and soulful, like how I’d imagine the early Native Americans, or maybe Mayans. Or the Druids? Anyway, looking back, I took for granted how sweet life was in those days. My schedule was, get up, check the
Buck 3
forums, tend to my jimson patch, get as ballistic as possible, and spend the rest of the day wandering around in the game, watching a family of badgers tunnel for field mice, or maybe happening upon a whitetail doe getting studiously boned by a sixteen-point buck.