The Silent History: A Novel (35 page)

The next day Burnham uploaded a patch to the device and all of a sudden I could no longer say “Burned Ham” when I said his name. No matter how hard I struggled, I couldn’t make “Burned Ham” out of “Burnham.” He’d put some kind of block on that phrase. Everything he did from that point on, every word he uttered, made me want to crush him to a pulp. His constant posturing and preening for the media, his self-congratulatory quotes about saving silents from themselves—it was sickening. And the way he cavorted with implanted celebrities—like that novel-writer woman with the inverted eyelids and soft gray mustache who had become famous just for writing a few awful books—was too much to take. But the worst thing by far was the way he paraded me around as his shining trophy—the living, breathing, walking embodiment of his genius.

The greatest irony about all of this? The five-hundred-pound yak or however you say the expression, the thing in the room that Burnham doesn’t dare contemplate, is that becoming his living experiment has in no way set me free. I am not a happier person. My soul is not singing. So I can banter with chattering fools—so what? Before I became this manacled freak, a sideshow curiosity, a party game, I had my room in my parents’ house, RC boats in the county park, and cinnamon rolls on Sunday mornings after Mass. My life was a simple, beautiful routine. I was alone inside my own head, and it was a sacred place I couldn’t even begin to describe to you. There are no words for it, because it was a place outside of words. It was pure color or—or a thousand folding sheets—or swirling wind. Before Burnham switched on the implant for the first time, I had no voices in my head—no roaring chorus that now plagues me from the moment I open my eyes to when I fall on the bed, exhausted after yet another day of intensive testing.

Does Burnham want to hear this, any of it? Of course not. How could a person possibly find peace without language? How could someone fully appreciate the glory of the night sky without knowing the names of the constellations? Who could enjoy the warmth of the sun without labeling its source? So instead of leaving me alone, he makes me the design director of this accursed device. It is a vanity position, in case you had any doubts about that. I do not design. I sit in the glass lab all day with the calibration helmet pinching my jaw, watching pigfilth sparrows as they flit around their bullshit nests and vomit into the mouths of their young. When Burnham takes his conference calls, I stream silent pornography on the wallscreen and slowly rub myself into oblivion until the workday ends and it is time for me to accompany him to another charity event, another radio interview, another industry booze cruise. The next version of the Soul Amp will bear my name in the credits, but instead of Director of Design my title should be something more like Puppet, Prisoner, and Lead Guinea Pig.

PERSEPHONE GOLDIA

PHILADELPHIA, PA

2040

It was defective, or maybe I was. My brain wouldn’t surrender certain small-to-important items. There were glitches in the stream. Something daily, something hourly wasn’t right. The bank dispenser asked me how I would die. How I would like, but I mean, my money—how I would die was what I was anticipating when she asked how I would like my money, sensible enough, and I said, “Twenty-seven exit wounds.” The bulletproof glass, a pain in the lungs that wouldn’t go away, a news moment I saw on the bus screens a few hours earlier. A manager came on and I told him tens, twenties, money was money. He paused for a moment, then dispensed my cash. My connections were often crisscrossed and time forfeited, and it was becoming worse not better. Worse. Rain delay.

The online rehab liaison told me I needed to stop torturing the undercurrents of the language and just allow it to flow out naturally. He gave me an address of a weekly conversation group for erstwhiles. It met in the back banquet room to a orphanage called—a Greek restaurant. Not an orphanage. I went after my shift on the day cruise SS
Muir
. Bled-out drained. Walking there from the bus stop with my head full of expired notes, tombstones:
remember extra blue cheese 86 crab bisque push summer rolls crocodile joke
. At the group we paired up or talked in small clusters, and at first I couldn’t detect anything wrong in the others. One of my first partners was Trinidad, who wore a colorful robe and welcomed me and cackled my errors away. A lot of Trinidad was borrowed from movie trailers, but a lot of all of us was.

“You look perplexed,” he said one night. “I hope someone hasn’t been French-frying your gizzards, sister.”

“No one’s French—no, I’m okay. I’ve been a little I don’t know lately. But I mean, under, feeling underwater. Deep. Shark-infested.” I hesitated. It was always when someone asked me about me that I lost the cause. How I felt. How I looked. How I was. Simple questions. I tried to pin thick words on fast-sliding clouds in the span from birth to mouth.

Trinidad patiently fanned himself with a menu. I asked, “How would you say…” And then I just showed it, the way we all used to.

He nodded. He thought about it. He said “hmm” a few times. Then he said, “I wouldn’t know where to…” He looked down at his menu for a moment, mouthing something. His face cycled through a few retorts. Finally he said, “Shark-infested isn’t close, but it isn’t far away.”

Yeah, all of us had heard about Flora and the rest. From other erstwhiles, and on television. We watched a news stream called “The Last Holdouts,” which showed Flora’s high school graduation over and over and also the surveillance footage of the family from the Utah gas station, where Flora walked in holding her son’s hand and they stood transfixed in the candy aisle, the boy studying each candy bar, trying to decide. He stands there for three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, the hours minutes seconds passing in the bottom right corner, until Flora lightly touches his shoulder and he selects a Honey Brick. I replayed the footage on my Catena and watched it on the bus to work, at home. “Brittle-outside-resilient-inside-hope,” I said, trying to override the implant’s close-enough shortcutting. “Curious-longing-dry-heave.”

I talked to the others over the weeks. Our conversation began with an exchange of information. A popular icebreaker was telling each other our first words. Then we practiced transitional strategies, moving to a new topic, like, “Your sweater reminds me, I can’t shake this wooly feeling in my throat. Bet I’m coming down with something.” Then argumentative strategies by choosing movie trailers and debating which was better, and why. Then slang strategies. Everything would have been fine if not for me. Everybody would have bounce-housed from icebreaker to strategy to strategy. I asked too many questions, and my questions were icemakers. My favorite icemaker was, “How do you feel at night, those few moments before you go to sleep?” Also, sometimes I’d repeat back what they just said, and then ask, “Was that exactly what you wanted to say?”

It seemed like all of us had a deep inside itch. I just happened to come by and bother it. All of them were sad at night and hopeful in the morning and spent the day building up to solos that never came. Debating movie trailers wasn’t fixing it. Trading slang—like, I’m ’bout to get cowboyed out in this fuckity—wasn’t making anything disappear. No. We were building private stocks of unsayables, making substitutions, conceding.

Trinidad had heard that the resistance was mobilizing in an abandoned turkey slaughterhouse in eastern Colorado. They’d joined with a bunch of other unimplanted silents, and together they were assembling an army and no one really knew what they were planning. I asked Trinidad what he thought, and his face above the eyes softened and his chin ticked. “I think they are plotting around for a very loud statement,” he said. “Something international. Perhaps similar to the trailer for
Blood Oath 6: Shanghaied by Vengeance
.”

Others disagreed. One woman knew for certain that they were setting up another commune, something in the Black Hills, “where they can live close to the earth in peace.” Another heard that they’d already bombed a Nu Ware clinic in Ann Arbor, but no one reported it because the government didn’t want people inside—didn’t want them to panic. I heard every possibility and I believed them all, because it did not matter. I kept watching the gas station footage, the boy, the woman, the hand, the choice. It was perfect. They were perfect. All I wanted was to be as fearless and pure as they were.

We started to meet more often—any night of the week there’d be five, six of us in the banquet room. We practiced our conversation over the next few weeks by talking about the underground. Argumentation strategies. Hypothetical and emotional strategies. Someone had heard someone who heard something. We each nursed along our own theories and fantasies. We just knew they were planning something huge, they had to be—why would we be talking about it so much if they weren’t?

I practiced overriding the implant, staying silent as the language streamed past, waiting. Or repeating the same simple phrase a dozen times and seeing what I came up with. When Trinidad answered my questions with movie quotes, I made him try again. When someone said “fine” or “good” or “pretty much.” I wanted them to hear what I heard.

One day I gave Trinidad a promotional hat from the SS
Muir
. It wasn’t much, but he liked hats, which he wore even indoors. He studied the hat and said, “Thanks, sister.” I waited. I watched him. He stewed his nose and bowed his bottom lip. He said, “Okay, embarrassed-thanks, distracted-thanks.” He coughed into his hand and added, “Sister.”

On the bus ride home I watched the surveillance footage again, my sixth time that day, which was the maximum number of times I allowed myself. I imagined where they’d gone, pictured them sharpening tools somewhere, applying grease-paint, drawing battle formations on a whiteboard. Who knew what they were really doing. Mostly I hoped they were away from harm. My bus got caught in deadly crossfire, I mean traffic, so I watched the segment one more time.

FRANCINE CHANG

ROCK ISLAND, IL

2040

Nancy panicked for a moment when the motel worker demanded that we leave him some sort of ID, but for this bit of life on the run I was actually prepared—a fake gym-membership card that my ex-sort-of-boyfriend Niles had made for me. Niles, who I found out later smuggled living coral from Australia. He had made the ID for me as a joke, like ha ha, could you please be someone different? The picture on the front was incredible. Blond hair, mauve eye shadow, and lipstick. An aging Dallas hooker with my face and a different name. Tiffany Park. Nothing pretty, but then neither was the Deluxe Inn Waterfront.

All of us sat staring at each other in that crime scene of a room, greasy and bleary from the road. Defeated. Except the boy, who, even at this nothing motel, investigated every bit of newness we passed. The housekeeping carts, the ice machines. He followed me out to the Breeze Mart for supplies. I bought him a paddleball, and he patiently tried to master it on the way back to our suite, which wasn’t a suite but two mirror-exact rooms separated by a doorless doorway. Farm equipment lithographs on the wall. The odor of chemicals used to cover up other odors. And, of course, the blood splatter on the far wall—faded, but with a violent spray that suggested … I didn’t want to imagine what it suggested.

I stayed with Spencer’s mom, who unplugged the television the second we arrived and lay down, eyes closed, rigid as a corpse. Any minute, I knew, she’d start talking in her sleep, mumbling “no no no” over and over. In the other room Flora tended to Spencer’s wound while the boy sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of them, fiddling with a skydiving brochure. When he saw me, he came over and showed me what he’d made: a small tightly folded boat with two sails. He went and filled the bathroom sink with water, and set the boat in. It sank immediately.

I had to get out of that room. And where better than the Deluxe Inn Lounge, population four? I drank Singapore Slings next to a woman who eventually introduced herself as Evie. She was reading aloud an article on her Catena to whoever would listen. It was about the head of a cell farm who said he would give a prospective customer a second set of arms if the price was right. When she was done reading, she turned to me—she must have seen me listening—and declared, “Now that’s some spider shit.”

I laughed involuntarily. She dimmed her Catena and said, “Who I found myself talking at?”

I hesitated. Fuck it, I thought. Literally, a neon-pink sign in my head flashed
fuck it
. “Tiffany Park,” I told her.

Where was I from? Myrtle Beach. What’d I do? Little of this, little of that. What else? Men are dogs. We drank another round. I told her that the biggest problem facing the world today was men who wanted me to be their mama. I said, “Come at me all strong and assertive and then I hear you talking in your sleep, like, Oh, Mommy, can I pretty please climb up in that womb? Tiffany Park is
not
your mama. Or your little sister or friend. Don’t baby talk in my ear. Don’t wave your little nightstick at me. Don’t try to wake me up by slipping me your imitation crabmeat tea bag.”

I wasn’t drunk. I knew what I was saying—I felt it, directly. Francine Chang would’ve politely nodded to Evie and stared at the burst capillaries on her nose, her chipped front tooth. She would’ve felt scared and superior. But Tiffany Park did not care. She had some things inside needed saying. She had certain feelings. In the far corner of the lounge I noticed a karaoke machine, and so I interrupted Evie’s story about slumlords and Irish wolfhounds and court summonses. It was time to sing.

Evie was reluctant, but after I knocked out a few songs, my standards—“Understand Me” and “Tornado Comin’”—she warmed to it. The half-dozen drunks huddled around the bar sighed and looked all constipated when we started our duets. To hell with them. I strutted around the lounge with the cordless mic, stopping at each of their tables, belting out the hits. The two of us didn’t stop until the bartender blinked the lights and yelled for last call.

Walking upstairs, I felt like a bank robber fleeing the scene. I was whispering the chorus of “Slip Him the Pill,” all hoarse from singing so much, when I noticed the boy sitting outside the room. Almost 2:00 a.m., and he’s outside fooling around with a pair of earbuds Spencer’s mom had given him. Just begging for the night clerk to come by and ask him questions. “You can’t be out here,” I said, shaking my head. He met my eyes, tightened his expression, and did the same thing. Not mimicking me but … appraising me. He was piecing my night together, it felt like. Going through the transcript. No thanks. I led him back into the room. The TV was on, muted. Flora and Spencer slept in the bed on the left, surrounded by pamphlets and brochures folded into boats and planes. The boy sat at the foot of the other bed and continued to play with the earbuds.