The Silent History: A Novel (30 page)

Over time, though, things started to go slightly downhill. When I first arrived from Cupertino, the compound was pretty packed. There were people wandering around at all hours of the night wearing nothing but a smile and a linen ascot, and fuck if you could tell the silent people from the talkers. Everyone was riding this whale-dick-size wave of togetherness. But then there was some sort of mess in New York, and that seemed to harsh the overall vibe of the place. It wasn’t one specific thing you could really put your finger on—but I could definitely sense that something was finished. An era had passed. People were like, “I’m done with this scene,” and the crowd started to thin out. It was cool for a while, in that I didn’t have to constantly worry about some noobs wandering into my jimson patch and having some kind of silent bukkake fest on my crops. But eventually it got so that nobody knew who was in charge, or if anybody even wanted to be in charge, and that’s when things started to slide into a big mess.

To be honest, I hardly noticed at first, but then it started to creep up on me. Last week I came out of a jimmy fog and I was like, man, I need a sauna like no one’s business. You have to do fever therapy to come down safely off a jimson high or you go really crazy. Sauna, then hot tea, then friction rub—it’s vital. I went to the sauna, but the top was all caved in, like completely buckled, as if someone had dropped a bowling ball on it. I went to the sauna guy’s cabin to complain, but he was gone and there was a big hole in the front of his cabin where a tractor was parked. It looked like it had been there for a while—there were critters living in the wheel wells and little deer-shit pellets all over the guy’s porch. I was like, Why didn’t I get the memo that the sauna guy left? I went to the main house to complain, but there wasn’t even an office there anymore, just a countertop with a Post-it note stuck to the front that said
Back in five
. I was like, Wait, was there ever an office here? I was confused and massively sad about the whole thing, so I just cooked up some more Sir James and got back in-world, where I crawled into a cave and witnessed a grizzly cub birth.

But even that couldn’t last, because then a couple days later my servers went down. It was like standing at the edge of darkness. Total bone-cold terror. I went out to the Quonset hut where the servers were set up, and I found a bunch of goddamn saplings growing up through the middle of the floor. There were vines choking all the machines. I heard this awful sound, like the cry of a drowning baby, and I looked up and saw some kind of animal on top of the server rack. This grotesque thing like a cross between a cat and a weasel, and it was yowling and baring its teeth at me, and I was like, Man, it is fully time to get out of here.

I went back to my lean-to, got my pack and my vintage consoles, and headed straight out, just like that. I’d heard there was an off-grid community up in Bellingham that was made entirely from old moon bounces, which seemed worth a try. Down the trail that led to the highway I ran into this family of silent people who’d been at Face-to-Face for as long as I could remember. And the only ones still there, far as I could tell. A real unassuming bunch who generally steered clear of all the drama, back when there was drama. They lived in a raw-looking little cabin that had a sweet vegetable garden off to the side. There was an older woman with short hair kneeling in the garden, digging with a little hand-shovel thing, which I know has a name but I’m blanking. The woman paused to watch a little naked boy chase a goat around in circles. A man came up the trail from the river carrying two buckets of water, and his wife, who was wicked hot for a silent person IMHO, went down to meet him and took one of the buckets. We made eye contact, me and her, and I felt like I should apologize for taking off, but then I thought, These people probably don’t even want me here. Look at this little thing they’ve got going on—they’ve got it pretty good. It was a real idyllic-type setup. As the woman walked in my direction, she picked two red bell peppers straight off the vine and offered them to me. They looked incredible, glowing, like the sunlight was inside them. Which I guess it was, when you think about it.

I looked up from the peppers into the woman’s face, and I saw in her eyes that she wanted nothing but to wish me luck on my journey, and it was—I mean, the jimson was fully out of my system at that point, but still I felt a little dizzy, just from the sheer reality of it all. Face-to-Face was some kind of bombed-out summer camp at this point, but this group had managed to stake out a whole little world for themselves in there. I was speechless and sort of completely disoriented, so I just waved to them, took a bow, and headed off down the road, second-guessing my decision the whole way to Bellingham.

FRANCINE CHANG

MONTE RIO, CA

2038

I left Flora and Spencer and the baby to their domestic bliss and returned to Oakland. I thought about writing a book about my time at Oaks and Face-to-Face, but all I could muster were placeholder notes:
waltz lesson, redwoods, Flora’s wedding. Bonfires. Asian plumper. Despair
. I became a shut-in, a cultivator of nostalgia. I took long food-induced naps and woke up gasping like I’d been buried alive. I had a pen-pal lover on death row. I played a game where I chatted with technical support about a minor appliance and tried to keep the technician online as long as possible.

After the implant, former students would call to thank me for everything, tell me how excited they were about their new jobs, spouses, their prospects in general. They were happy. And I was happy they were happy. After a while, though, I stopped answering. I
knew
these kids, or thought I did, and their new voices just didn’t feel right. “It’s James,” one call began, and I thought, No, it’s not. As silents, they surprised me all the time. But these phone calls were like form letters. If the caller had been at Face-to-Face, I knew to wait for a pause and then something like,
burned down … good memories … rabid animals … empty …

I hadn’t been back. Every time I rushed up there to escape whatever personal catastrophe in Oakland, I came back feeling doubly jilted. I had enough at home to make me miserable. I passed the evenings rereading my pen pal Victor Torrance’s detailed description of the three-hour-long sexual acrobatics he’d planned for us: he’d be wearing nothing but ankle weights, I’d be strapped into something he called an erotic bungee—he sent me detailed sketches of it—and we’d break every so often for blackberry daiquiris and hot pecan pie.

Every couple months I’d go visit Patti in Hayward. She’d been chained to that door for … God, it had been almost two years now, and she looked as awful as you’d expect. She’d start chattering when she saw me, like we’d been in a conversation all this time: “Man comes to dump me food and I don’t think some’s even
food
.” Her breath smelled prehistoric. She was badly sunburned, wearing a frayed full-body leotard. Said she didn’t intend to leave, ever. She sucked the end of a dirty lollipop stick and tried to stretch her leg far enough to retrieve a gravel-pebble-looking thing on the sidewalk. Her arms were stretched awkwardly over her head, chained to the handles. I wanted to leave it all behind.

But one afternoon Theo called me, and after five minutes of awkward, halting conversation, he told me the boy, who he called Slash, was turning five—and would I like to carpool up to Monte Rio? I think he wanted to bring me as some kind of buffer—apparently he and Nancy had been bickering. I hesitated, tried to think of possible excuses, but none came. On our way up, Theo stopped at a toy store and I bought a wooden train set and Theo got a make-your-own-sock-puppet kit. He held the wrapped present in his lap as he drove and talked anxiously about Flora and Spencer and the boy.

What we found at Face-to-Face was both expected and somehow worse than expected. Overgrown, trashed, abandoned, scorched. Aggressively
over
. In the camp center, though, in a patch of sunlight, stood a single building, one of the smaller dorms, sided with materials from other buildings—I recognized the pecky cypress from Patti’s old cabin, the green trim from the meditation center, and signs from the entrance, but the combination was strangely tidy. To the left was a big garden with zucchini and what looked like tomatoes coming in. To the right, a fenced-off plot with a few sheep and goats.

Flora, Spencer, the baby, and Spencer’s mom were the last occupants. Flora was happy, breathlessly happy, to see me, and I felt ashamed for having stayed away. She rested her hand on my leg, just like she had in the old days, and looked from face to face while Theo talked to her. Nancy, who was sitting on the floor, greeted me and acknowledged Theo with a curt nod.

The baby was not a baby anymore—he was an actual boy, five years old, so big and curious. After he and Theo exchanged hugs, he stood with his elbows propped on his grandfather’s bent knees and just watched. He was a dead ringer for Flora, and this started a nostalgia binge that clawed at me. Thinking about Oaks, the retreat, all my old students and their new lives. And Flora’s family, staying here, staying true to … something. Patti’s original vision, maybe. Making a blissful quiet home amidst the ruined camp.

The kitchen was filled with his homemade toys. Things made of wood and leaves and scraps salvaged from the camp. There was a flat string-and-wood table that looked like a loom, or an abacus, with painted acorn beads on the strings. Another table with wooden shapes and drawing paper. Hanging from the ceiling were mobiles made with shale and avocado pits.

We all sat down, and he brought us things: two giant pinecones, a tiny pumpkin, a section of snake skeleton. He handed me or Theo an object, we passed it to each other, and he waited for our response, which, you know, I said, “Wow,” and “That’s a big pinecone,” and so on. He must’ve handed us thirty different things. Watched us closely every time. I remembered the intensity from when Flora first started at Oaks, but never this forceful. Theo didn’t say anything—he just looked at the objects, then at the boy, whose face was so composed it felt like at any minute he’d start speaking to us, which is just backwards, of course. It was like his expression was creating space for me to fill. Theo was happy, so nakedly happy. He patiently studied each pinecone and leaf and rock, seeming to find them all just as wondrous as the boy did.

When all the treasures were through, Theo raised a finger dramatically and then handed the boy his present. Slash stared at the package for a long time before unwrapping it, then tore it free and opened the box. Right away he reached in and slipped one of the socks over his foot. Theo uncapped a marker and drew big eyes and a curlicue mustache on one of the others and then pulled it over his hand. “Well, how do, Slash,” he said, moving the puppet’s mouth. “How’s it feel to be as old as you’ve ever been and as young as you’ll ever be?”

The boy watched the puppet, mesmerized. Theo took off the sock and slid it across the table. Suddenly Nancy scooped it up, holding it in a shaking fist. “I’m sorry, this has to stop,” she said, in a choked voice.

Theo froze. “What?”

“Don’t be coy,” she said. She slipped the puppet over her hand and made its mouth open and close, then pulled it off in a crumpled ball and let it fall to the floor. “All you do is come up here and plant little poison seeds.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t see what this toy is teaching him?”

Theo leaped to his feet. “This isn’t a talker toy or a silent toy!” he said. “It’s just a
toy.
”

“It’s not just a toy,” she said. “It’s a message. One we don’t want to hear.”

“We?” Theo spluttered. “We? You and who else? Who’s we?”

Nancy said, “No one here needs your fixing. They’re not broken. Don’t do to him what you already did to
her
.” She gestured to the doorway, where Flora now stood, eyes wide and pooling.

Theo opened and closed his mouth, looking as if he might cry, then slowly nodded. He stood, went into the kitchen, past Flora and the boy, and returned with a paring knife. Which he used to carefully cut the eyes and mouth out of each sock in the kit, dropping the limp tubes to the floor. The boy watched him do it, grave. When Theo was done he panted for a moment, leaned over and hugged the boy, kissed him on the forehead, and then went outside. I heard his car start and then roll out down the pebbled trail.

I sat in that kitchen, sympathetic and vaguely horrified and mostly dazed, until the sky was dark, and eventually the boy led me upstairs to the guest room. The next morning I planned to catch the bus back south, but instead the two of us hiked up an old fire road, and I stayed another night. When I was hungry he brought me something from the kitchen. When I’d stare at him and then at Flora and remember the time I taught her to waltz in the class, he would crawl up into my lap and sit with me. He even fell asleep there once. I’d see him out in the yard with the goats, the sheep, his father, his grandmother. I stayed for a week, two weeks, and then I decided to stay a little longer. Each morning I’d come downstairs expecting someone to have cleared the faceless socks off the floor. No one ever did.

JOHN PARKER CONWAY

MONTE RIO, CA

2038

Look, I never claimed to be the silent savior. One of my opponents called me that because I welcomed them, tried to create a generally hospitable atmosphere, stimulate the local economy. I’d do the exact same for any large block of constituents. Loggers, truckers, Satanists, jugglers. All right, maybe not jugglers. That’s not to say I didn’t like the silents or respect what they were trying to create here. I thought their whole commune deal was beautiful. It failed, like most knew it would, but what commune hasn’t? It collapsed about as nobly as it could’ve—no arrests, no mass suicide, just overgrown gardens and scorched teepees.

But this implant campaign was a new kind of mess. That morning, this little girl had fallen off one of those saddle scooters and shows up in the ER with a compound fracture. The nurses ask how she’s doing, if this hurts or that hurts, and she isn’t saying. They see the mom is face-talking with her, father’s doing the same. Turns out the girl, age three, hasn’t been implanted. Which is a problem, legally speaking. In January, HHS sent notices to all hospitals and schools telling them the deal: mandatory implantation for all children under age seven. But some parents are dragging their feet. They must think … I don’t know what they think. I can’t understand why they’d delay. I’ve tried to see it from every angle, but I keep coming back to the idea of a kid being born blindfolded, with a little snap in the back where you can take it off. That’d be the first thing you’d do, right? Before you even cleaned him off? Hell, talking’s
fun
. Same with listening. Why deny yourself that, missing out on all that music happening around you?