The Silent History: A Novel (33 page)

I never stopped moving. I knew if I slowed down, the wallabies would kill and eat me. I learned mixed martial arts, started running eight miles a day, always carried my buck knife. I mastered my perimeter.

The ranch was miles from a paved road, but ever since I put the
FARM-RAISED WALLABY LOW FAT HIGH PROTEIN
signs out on Highway 25 I had lots of knockers, mostly moms and their potpie kids who wanted to pet my “kangaroos.”

“They’re wallabies,” I’d say. “And the only way you’ll see one is to buy twenty pounds of meat, minimum.” I’d pull some wallaby shanks from the deep freeze, mom and kid would blubber off. No matter how bad beef shortages got, no one was ready for wallaby. Never mind that it tasted like lamb. Wallabies were too cute to eat, they said. Pretty soon almost no one stopped by, which was fine. Then nobody did. Which was even better.

Well, not nobody—if a silent knocked, I’d let them in. As long as they respected my perimeter, my rules. If they didn’t, if they were one of those implanted cows, I had my shambler—an electromagnetic pulser that temporarily scattered implant signals or just shorted them out altogether. I loved to see an implant waltz in all cream-eyed and ready to carp on like a ventriloquist dummy, and then he’d open his mouth and it’d come out all shambled—gasping and burping like, “Furason ermhorst, eebly eebly feebly.”

Still, it was a little sad to look at my monitors and see Rosewater, one of the guys from the algae farm crew, trying to buzz his way in, now wearing a suit and tie and an awkward smile. I zoomed in and could see the small implant port, which was depressing but not entirely surprising, not anymore. I walked outside, feeling a bad mix of cheer and pity.

“I guess come in,” I told him. “But don’t try to talk. Won’t do any good.”

What a sad nutsack Rosewater had turned into. He carried a brown leather briefcase and had this perfectly manicured imperial beard. Pleated slacks, fake muscles. He probably sold tornado insurance or managed apartment buildings. In the old days, he’d been a king, hard-core, pure. Knew who he was, lived how he wanted. Guided by instinct. Uncorrupted. Like me on my farm.

Which I showed him around—fields, feed room, slaughterhouse, which was just a ringed area with a drain in the floor. I killed all my wallabies personally, and always in hand-to-hand combat. I didn’t tell Rosewater any of this, of course—I just walked around the compound, gave him a few looks, and then paused in front of the meat locker. Rosewater paused along with me, looked at me in this unhesitant vomity way, and then spoke: “So, long-away friend, you actually
eat
these things?”

Motherfuck. I ran inside to turn on the shambler, but it was already on. I rebooted it. While I waited the ninety-eight seconds it took for full coverage, I oiled my sharpening stone and ran my buck knife across it. I had no plans to use it—I was just trying to shrink that loose-orbit feeling.

I returned and asked him to repeat himself. It’d be an extra pleasure to see his smug new face crumble when the shambled gibberish came out.

“My fiancée and I,” Rosewater said, “we’re pretty much pescatarians. We tried to do a macro diet for a few weeks, but it was torture.”

His voice came out clear and unpinched. I pulled down a flank of meat from its hook and began randomly poking it with my knife until I felt able to speak. I said, “What in the shit-touching fuck is a macro diet?”

He started explaining, but I interrupted him. “Vacate,” I said.

“Vacate?”

“I don’t know what you’ve done to my shambler, but you have forty seconds to exit my perimeter before I do us both a favor and render your voice moot.”

“Shambler? Old friend, you must not get out much! Shambler technology? Still? Seriously! There’s nothing here to shamble.” He explained the new improved centralized whatever—all I could hear was roaring in my ears and the sound of my knife sucking in and out of the wallaby flank.

Eventually I speared it on the end of the knife, lifted, and dumped the bloody mass on the counter in front of this polluted fop. “You disgrace,” I said. “You and all your friends. Forfeiting without resistance. Letting the government geld you just so you can join the herd and get a job in middle management.”

“Middle management? Friend, you’re out here butchering overgrown hamsters. Alone, losing your mind. I was only trying to be friendly, maybe talk about the old days.” As I sliced and sliced the countertop meat, he told me about what he called the silent underground. The last of the nonimplanted, the resisters, on the move in the Midwest somewhere. Maybe a dozen, maybe over a hundred. Most likely armed, lying in wait for the right moment to release their statement to the world. By the end of his speech, the counter was just a thick red smear.

“Me, I can’t fool around like we used to, what with my new responsibilities,” Rosewater said. “But I thought an outfit like that could probably use a guy like you.”

I don’t know if he was teasing me or what. This was the trouble letting someone talk. Flattery and insult and yearning came out distorted a hundred different ways. I remember that book of dying words I looked at once, what people say when it matters. It was the same fake uplifting trash.
Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of the trees
and shit. Don’t tell me to cross the river with you. Don’t invite me to your sad little puppet show.

I’d been out here for over four years, I’d mastered my terrain, and now I saw it all amounted to nothing. No perimeter would ever be secure enough. No wall would ever be high enough to keep out the chatter and lies. I had been selfish, trying to heal myself just when the true silents needed me most. I felt summoned. I turned and walked out to the corral, leaving Rosewater alone at the meat-smeared counter. Two dozen wallabies lazed in the sun, farting and snoring.

I didn’t sleep that night. At dawn I went out into the slaughterhouse ring, naked except for a thick smear of wallaby butter all over my body. I let out a blood-boiled war cry, and it was echoed first by the slaughterhouse walls and then by twenty-seven marsupial throats. They came charging into the ring. I proceeded to grapple with every single wallaby on my farm, even the dwarf ones, the females, even the peaceful albinos. I left them with their necks broken, entrails flapping loose. It was a fair fight, and they landed some good blows. But soon there was only one remaining alive.

He was a male in rut, I could smell it. Our battle stretched for hours. I gouged one of his eyes, and he bit my left nipple clean off. He retreated and I advanced. He advanced and I retreated. As the sun began to rise high and hot I lured him close and flipped him into a sleeper hold. I choked him down, and then passed out myself. The two of us awoke at the same time, hours later, nestled together amid the cooling corpses of his brethren. I nodded to him, and I believe he nodded back. I walked back into the house, gathered my money and weapons and lab notes, and loaded up my truck. The wallaby was waiting by the cab, snorting quietly. I opened the door and he jumped into the passenger seat.

We set out for the Midwest.

PATTI KERN

HAYWARD, CA

2039

Weeks passed. Seasons. Years, maybe. I remember lying in a freezing downpour knowing I’d die if I closed my eyes, which I did, which I always did once the arc lights of the lab parking lot winked out until morning, and their afterimage still pulsed on my eyelids and I prayed for that false light to turn into a tunnel, a sun door, star map, utter night. I wanted out. I wanted to dry up and flake into sediment and blow away. Sometimes I saw nature’s real intent in far-off screams and bloated seagulls who perched on the eaves closest to me until I fell asleep and glided down to peck at my feet and legs. Testing my readiness. I awoke to the heat of my own breathing, covered in a reeking blue tarp. Rain continued to fall. Somewhere a car alarm cycled through amplified squeals and shrieks like an assortment of murders. Spring came. The grass beneath the air-conditioner window unit near me grew faster than the other grass.

A man with a wheelbarrow came and told me to close my eyes and he doused me in dish soap and sprayed me off with a hose. He was very old and he grunted when he carried the hose away. He came back and laid a towel just past the reach of my feet, and I struggled and struggled for it until I gave up. Then he came back and moved it a little closer, and I struggled again.

My arms were dead from the shoulder down, or shoulder up, since my hands were chained above my head. Early days I had flexed my legs and did Kegel exercises and toe rolls, but I stopped after long. Best I shrivel into kipper. Whenever I’d had a few nights without eating, I’d start to see what I needed to. I talked and talked to myself until I blacked out. I knew I’d been hoaxed into language too young and the only way to recover was to suffer. Suffer and persist until I was beyond pain and relief and thought and hope, and then see what was left.

I shouted at the ones going into Nu Ware and the ones leaving. It was mostly young children guided by parents. They looked so elastic and bright on the way in, and when they left they looked beige. The power gone from their eyes. Their real sentiments jigsawed into letters and words. It was tract housing, a war reenactment. “Come meet me,” I yelled. The parents saw. They heard. Everyone knew my name. “I need just a minute with your happy little reborn camper there.”

When they walked off, I yelled, “Mutality!” Or “Slapshod!” Or whatever came out. Sometimes I didn’t yell anything.

I closed my eyes, ground my teeth, and willed the sequence to reverse itself. Parents backing drubbed chit-chattering children into the clinic for doctors to silence. Return them to their natural state of expression. Eyes closed, I could see the children back-stepping out of the clinic, cleansed, whole again.

This girl came up on me while I was sleeping. She nudged my shoulder with her hand. “Are you alive?” she asked. Even-toned, scoured of joy. I always dreamed of unattaching the implant with my teeth if one of them was close enough, but I couldn’t even figure out where the wires went in, because there were no wires. All I could see was a nickel-size disc below her ear.

“Sit next to me,” I said. Her father was in the parking lot unlocking their car, getting it ready to pull around. “Let me see what they did to you in there.”

She stayed where she was. I saw she was holding a little bear doll that had a matching implant disc. “One of your teats is showing,” the girl said. “And your eyes are all red and viscid.”

“Viscid? My teats? Not even an hour with that thing and you’re already … this isn’t a teat.” I peeked down at it, tapered, sun-withered. Actually, it looked every bit like a teat. Like something drooping off a hog. I stared at the girl again, tried to locate a spark and fan her flames as I’d done so many times. But she was already iced over, unreachable. Nothing, not me, not a million mes, was going to breach that new docile permanent frost.

“Go away,” I said. “You’re blocking my sun.”

Summer ended. Three boys tried to set me on fire, but I wouldn’t burn. A woman in a silver-thread suit kneeled next to me and made me sign my name to some papers. “My name doesn’t mean shit,” I told her. “I don’t care if you use it to give people rabies.” She wiped the pen off when I was done. The wheelbarrow man poured cold chai and water all over me and I sucked it out of my body sock. He brought me no-rinse shampoo and a thick hotel-room robe that stank of smeared pussy. He set a spackle bucket next to me and I filled it with my voidings.

I’d ask who he was, and he’d clear his throat and spit and tell me I was too near death for such idiot questions.

I lost hope. Then I’d think I had no more hope to lose, and then I’d lose some more. Subsistence, existence, whatever you want to call it—it’s a birthday candle. Someone lights it, you blow it out. You fight to rid yourself of wanting, but when they say make a wish and blow, you wish for a pair of leather riding boots though you don’t own a horse, have never ridden a horse, you don’t even
like
horses. What do you like? You like when Mom passes out early and you walk through the house with her makeup mirror pointed toward the ceiling and you stare into it and step over ceiling fans and lights. You like the clicks your dog makes dreaming. And when you see taxicabs or buses approaching from opposite directions and each driver holds up a hand as he passes. Life.

“You hear about them?” the man with the wheelbarrow was saying. I think he was smiling, but his face seemed to be encrusted in a hard shell of makeup.

“Yes,” I said. Everything was a gasp by then. I was curled up tight to myself, shivering. I’d already died thirty-seven times. Metamorphosed into a crab, river rock, snake, flag, sunlight. My mouth was filled with thick saltine paste. “No,” I said.

He talked about the government mandate, the forced implantings. “You’re not alone,” the man said. I noticed the black disc beneath his ear. “Right now three hundred of them have mobilized outside of Idaho. Led by that couple and their baby. In either Idaho or Ohio. Almost five hundred of them.”

They don’t need me, I told him. They have Spencer, Flora. They have vision. They don’t need me. They have numbers.

I had chewed a hole in my lip. On the sidewalk all around me were puddles of secretion and filth in various stages of decay. He continued to talk, and his words maggoted themselves into me. His story went on long after he’d gone. Long after the sun died again. And then he came by and drizzled Slush onto the pavement around me. I’m done, I told him. I’m getting up. About time, he said. None of this was out loud.

I’d require bolt cutters and probably some long-term medical attention. But I needed to find that boy before anything else. The story wasn’t over yet. The time for stoicism had run its course. Righteous action was now needed, and I was finally prepared to be the actress, the protector, the defender of the last hope for a new era.

I breathed in deep and decided to yank my hands out of the chains, but when I pulled I saw that my hands were right in front of me. I couldn’t feel them but there they were. Plus, when I looked behind me there were no chains on the door. Just a bunch of pizza-slice-shaped coupons. Goddamn. I tried to shrug the robe tighter around my shoulders. It took me almost a day to stand up on my own.