The Silent History: A Novel (31 page)

Even so, I’m not happy about how we’re doing it. We’re at the hospital, an institution based on dignity and compassion, and now you’ve got these nervous young parents, their crying toddler, three doctors, more nurses—a tense scenario regardless, but then the mayor’s also there, me, a beloved civic figure, and also Dr. Ng, from the state public-health department, whose morgue-worker look wasn’t really helping my easygoing atmospherics. At first the parents looked surprised to see me, but once the nurses wheeled their girl into the OR, that got their full attention. She was already anesthetized, all soft in the face, placid. Every once in a while a nurse or assistant looked up at us, standing like enforcers behind the parents at the observation window. Dr. Ng had his hands behind his back and was making sucking noises with his teeth.

The first part of the procedure was no big deal. The doctors worked on the kid’s arm, fitting the bones back together. The parents leaned right up against the window. The father was small and stringy—I was sizing him up because I had no idea what he’d do when the doctors finished the arm and started the second part, which we hadn’t exactly told him about. I mean, how could we? Mostly I was hoping he wouldn’t even notice till it was over. The mother was just a girl still, a little turtleish and cave-mucked from being out in the woods so long. Her eyes, though, when she turned to look at me and Ng, were tropically clear.

I whispered to Ng, “Can’t we just wait out in the hall and give them some privacy in here?”

He turned and regarded me with unconcealed impatience. His whole solemn bullshit undertaker act made me tired. “You can,” he said.

So I left and went to the bathroom. I studied myself in the mirror, and I thought what I always thought: You are a fat motherfucker. I could’ve stayed there and killed time until the surgery was finished. Let Ng do the dirty work, whatever that involved. I made a conciliatory face, practiced how I’d look at the parents once everything blew over. Like, sorry about having to strong-arm you like this—it wasn’t me, Ng’s the bad guy. I did my reluctant smile, well honed from endless council meetings. Staying in the bathroom would’ve mostly kept me above the fray. Whatever happened, I could act like I didn’t know about it.

But, of course, my sworn duty is to uphold the law, whether I agree with the law or not. I took an oath to ensure domestic tranquillity and promote the general welfare and all that. To make sure that girl left the hospital as healthy as those doctors could make her. And after plucking a few nose hairs in the bathroom mirror, that’s exactly what I was going to do. All of a sudden I felt a rush of adrenaline. Readiness for whatever was going to come next.

The doctors had moved faster than I’d thought, or else I’d moved slower, because when I got back to the observation room I could already feel the change. Mom and Dad were looking at each other inflamed and crazy, then looking back through the window. The dad rapped on the glass. The mother started to hyperventilate. Over her shoulder, I could see two doctors in blue scrubs and a nurse were working behind the girl’s ear. Dr. Ng was calmly scribbling notes on a clipboard, real helpful.

I turned to the parents and said, “The doctors are here to heal your daughter.” It sounded pretty good. Then I looked at them, they looked at me, and their faces were just exploding or collapsing or burning or … I don’t have the words. I tried to talk soothingly. Told them how safe and nice the implant is. How their girl will be given opportunities that neither of them had. How they might want to consider getting the implants themselves someday, so they could talk to her.

That’s when the father bolted for the door of the OR. I was ready. I wrapped him up and hugged him tight, and when he tried to wriggle free I kept hugging. I shouted for Ng to drop the clipboard, but he was already on his way over to me. He took a trank pen and poked it into the father’s neck, and then went over to the mother, who was just standing there wailing like nothing I ever heard, and did the same to her. I felt the father wilting in my arms, so I set him on the ground as gentle as I could.

The girl actually woke up before they did—she was standing at her dad’s bedside by the time his eyes fluttered open. He stared blankly for a moment, then realized where he was, who she was. He reached up and kissed the girl, and then kept his face within inches of hers. They both looked at the mother, who hadn’t yet come to.

The girl took a deep breath, coughed, and said, “You look dizzy, Father.”

Her first words. The father jumped back a little, and the girl said, “I can make words. Vertigo. I can make words,” and he sat up in bed and brought his hand to his mouth and stared at his daughter making words.

NANCY JERNIK

MONTE RIO, CA

2039

I saw two men coming up the trail from the intersection with the county road. The mayor and someone else—a serious man with a coarse bowl cut, carrying a leather valise with brass snaps. Nobody took the county road to get to the compound, even when there were actually other people living there. When it wasn’t just us. So it was an alien thing to see the mayor heading up the path wiping his brow with a handkerchief, accompanied by the bag-eyed man. So this was how Theo was going to play it, I thought as I watched them approach the house. He couldn’t make us follow the law, so he was going to bring the law to us.

I dashed upstairs to find Flora and the boy. They were in the bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the floor playing with Spencer’s old marbles. I took Flora by the arm and showed her anxiety and the need to act quickly. There was a rapping on the screen door. Flora’s eyes went wide with fear. I put my hand to her cheek and showed her that I would handle the visitors, and that she should hide the boy. I knew that she was upset at the way I reacted to her father at the birthday party, and I guess I understood, despite how deeply wrong he was about everything. But now there was no space for ambivalence—the men were on our porch. She gave me a look of confused acceptance and took the boy into her arms.

I straightened my dress and went down to the front entrance, where the mayor stood knocking on the metal frame of the screen door. The other man scanned the yard with his hand visored against his forehead. The impact of the mayor’s knuckles against the screen cut through the stillness of the cabin. I composed myself and opened the door. I hadn’t spoken to an outsider in years. Almost since the boy was born, I think. Very few conversations with anyone at all. I sometimes chatted with Francine when we were safely out of earshot of the boy. And there was the argument with Theo. But I was not well practiced. I suddenly regretted having let that faculty slip away from me. The one power I had to protect my family from the rest of the world.

I let the mayor in, and he thanked me, stuffing his handkerchief in a back pocket. He introduced the other man as Dr. Ng. They entered the cabin, and the mayor looked around but didn’t say anything. It was as if he’d searched hard and failed to come up with a single nice thing to say about where we lived—a place that I saw, suddenly through his eyes, for the crumbling shack that it was. I felt a moment of humiliation, immediately followed by angry pride. I asked them to sit at the table by the cooking area. The cabin was dead quiet. I didn’t know what Flora had done with the boy. I just hoped they had enough sense to keep still.

“Nobody much comes up here anymore,” the mayor said, and I agreed. “I mean, I haven’t even been up here for a while. How long’s it been, Nancy?” It was so strange to hear my own name like that, released into the air. I wasn’t sure I even knew who that person was. I told the mayor I didn’t know how long it had been. “Well, I was here for your grandson’s first birthday—how old is he now?” I told him the boy was five years old. “Five years,” he said, shaking his head. “It really just passes in an instant, doesn’t it?” He snapped his fingers and looked at Dr. Ng, who didn’t respond—he was too busy staring directly at me. “Unbelievable,” the mayor said, accentuating his disbelief by making a high whistling sound through clenched teeth. “Is the boy around? I would love to see him—you know, how he’s grown?” I told him the boy wasn’t there. “Oh really?” the mayor said, almost as if he knew—as if he was honestly surprised to catch me in a lie so easily. He cleared his throat and said, “When you say he’s ‘not here,’ are you talking ‘not in the house,’ or are you saying he’s gone-gone, like in another part of the state?” I told him I didn’t know. I said I was pretty sure the boy was with his mother. Which was true. “Flora? You think he’s with Flora?” I didn’t respond.

The mayor looked at the doctor, and then looked back at me. “Well, I tell you,” he said, rubbing his thumb against his lower lip, “I, for one, really wish the boy was here. And I’m sure that Dr. Ng wishes that, as well. Am I right, Doctor?” He looked at Ng, who made no expression of acknowledgment—it was as if he’d been trained to zero out his face, freeze all of his muscles into a smooth unreadable death mask. “You see,” the mayor went on, “as you’ve probably guessed, Dr. Ng has come all the way up here to diagnose the boy. And, well, it’s been quite a trek. Not one that either of us is inclined to repeat. So if you could produce the boy, we could get the diagnosis out of the way and everything would become just much easier after that.” I told them again that I didn’t know where the boy was. We were all quiet then. I was about to say something then, but the silence was broken by a sound from above. The sound of a marble hitting the floor and then rolling slowly down along a seam in the floorboards, passing right over our heads. All three of us looked up and followed the sound as it traversed the ceiling, coming to rest with a click at the other end of the cabin.

“You’re sure he’s not here?” the mayor said. He bared his teeth in a smile that barely concealed a frustrated rage. “You’re absolutely sure he’s not, I don’t know, somewhere in the house, maybe even right upstairs?” I said I was sure the boy was gone. “Mind if I have a look around up there?” he said, and I said I did actually mind, because it was our house and he had no right. “Okay,” he said. “Why don’t you go up there, then?” I turned and went up the crude stairs to the bedroom where I saw Flora backed into a corner, holding the boy with her hand over his mouth, both of them tight-faced and trembling.

I went back downstairs. “Just as I told you, there’s no one here. It’s just me. You’re welcome to wait—” but he interrupted me. “I really don’t want to have to come back here,” he said. I told him he didn’t have to. “But you know that I have to,” he said. “You know that I have to uphold the law.” “What law applies here?” I said. I know I should have remained more neutral, but I couldn’t help it. Dr. Ng chose that moment to speak. “The law protects everyone equally, Ms. Jernik,” he said, and in the moment he uttered the phrase he was forced to loosen control of his facial muscles, so that I saw a glimpse of a man stricken with a terrible decay.

“You’re sure this is the way you want to do this?” the mayor asked, getting up from his chair. I said I wasn’t aware I was doing anything. “Don’t patronize me, okay?” he said. He seemed genuinely hurt. “You think this is easy for me? You think I want to come out here like this and tell you—” but he didn’t finish the sentence. He walked to the door, and Dr. Ng followed him. At the threshold he turned around and said, “I won’t have you bullying me into thinking this is wrong.” His neck was pink with desperation and rage. “This is—I’m trying to help—I’m the good guy here.” I said I thought that was true. I could see that, of the two of them, he truly was trying to be the better man. “You know we’re going to be back,” he said as they stepped off the porch. “I fear it will be less cordial,” he added. I nodded and waved stiffly, theatrically, the way my mother used to wave to my father as he pulled out of the driveway on his morning commute. I stood at the threshold and watched them disappear beyond the trees until it was quiet again.

I heard someone on the stairs. It was Flora, holding a duffel bag half-filled with her things. The boy stood behind her, peering out the screen door with a look of startled curiosity. Flora did not look at me but went straight into the kitchen and started wrapping utensils in a faded terry-cloth dish towel. I followed her in and separated the food we could take with us from the food we’d have to leave behind. My hands shook. In the end the pile of things we could carry was small. What of the old life was worth the effort to carry around? The answer was always less than what I’d predicted.

THEODORE GREENE

RICHMOND, CA

2039

I felt bad about leaving Slash’s party even as I was walking out the door. I knew that with every step I took I was making things worse—just compounding the damage I’d done by cutting up his toy in front of him, in front of everyone. Everyone I cared about in the world. I could already taste the regret—I could see myself in the future, looking back and wishing I’d had the strength to take Nancy’s criticism in stride, to act even remotely like an adult. But I walked out anyway and drove back to my apartment, where I ate a carton of pasta pudding and blacked out watching an Indonesian knife fight. I thought the regret would fade after a few days, but it festered and swelled. I had a dream where I drove an implant into Slash’s neck with the whole family standing around me. My back seized, and I was bedridden for days. I couldn’t eat. Without them, I had nothing.

Eventually I tried to get back to work. I went to the flea market in Fruitvale to look for old meshes I could refurb, and that’s where I saw the game, buried under a pile of old storage drives. I could only see the corner of the box, really, but there was the logo with the big red question mark on the side and the montage of cartoonish faces, and I knew instantly that it was Guess Who?, which I’d had as a kid and totally loved. I remember I’d figured out a way to play it against myself by memorizing the faces of all of the people. I created names and these elaborate stories for each one. I saw the game and instantly thought of Slash. I thought about how much he’d love it. He’d take all the cards out one by one and lay them on the floor of the porch in some intricate pattern. I suddenly had to give it to him. Right then. The game was the bridge back to them. The olive branch, I guess you could call it. I bought the game and drove straight north to the compound.