The Silent History: A Novel (37 page)

We finally broke out of Missouri. Into Kentucky, whose every citizen should be mustard-gassed for parts, and Indiana, which smells like condoms and scorched birds. Indiana wouldn’t leave me and Wallaby alone. Wallaby sort of captured everyone’s heart there, and no matter how angrily I dismissed them they kept asking to touch him, photograph him, buy him. “He’s not a goddamn pet,” I informed them. They asked what he was and I told them, “He’s a goddamn
companion
.” That didn’t sound right, so I started saying, “He’s a goddamn
associate
.” Didn’t matter. They just laughed and snapped his picture, and sometimes mine, too. Which, because of the self-pulser I kept on my key chain, showed up on their screen as a white smear. A small victory.

I kept going. Every time my brain asked what I was doing, I sucked on another phospop to deaden its noise. I knew I had to lose myself before we could find what we were looking for. So I did, and then we did, at a pay shower depot outside Cedar Rapids. Wallaby and I were sharing a single booth to conserve money, which I guess was illegal, so the owner called the police. We came out of the dryer chamber and saw a pair of doughy officers waiting for us. “Is that one of those rabbit mutates?” they asked. I guess a blow-dried wallaby was the funniest thing to ever appear in Iowa, or maybe the prettiest thing, the way these officers were ogling him. I clenched my teeth, thinking of all the illegal knives in my truck.

“Must’ve been quite a wedding ceremony,” one of them said to the other, who wiped the side of his mustache with his thumb.

“She seems like just the right height for—” the other one said, holding out his hands and lazily thrusting an imaginary boner. Two Iowa cops, bored out of their skulls. I was going to be the highlight of their week. I didn’t buckle. I didn’t crash. I just went blank. I hadn’t really done it since I was a kid, but it felt right. I remembered all the flourishes, the nuances.

“Hey, sports fan,” the mustache cop said. “We asked you a question. Does your bunny like it freaky or what?”

“If the perp don’t reply, then the bunny does definitely supply,” the first one said.

“Or is what we have here some kind of silent holdout?” the mustache one said. “Better watch yourself, bro—guy camped out at Shaver Park is looking for little silent kids. You’re too old for his tastes, but you never know.”

“Yeah. I bet Professor Undertaker and his little-boy army would love to practice their tricks on him.”

“Too many bounty hunters, not enough bounty,” said the mustache cop.

The first turned to me and spoke loud and slow, with broad irrelevant gestures. “Stay … away … from … Shaver … Park. Gloomy man want to implant you. Spooky … fucker … hunting … silents.”

My heart flared, but I played it cool—just gave them my best dazed stare. Soon they lost interest and walked off, though not before telling me to have a nice life with my rabbit mutate bride. Ha ha ha. Fuckers. I will shave you both and fill balloons with your hair and give them to clowns. I will cut off your ears and feed them to Wallaby, but he’s an herbivore, so he won’t touch them, and I’ll end up throwing them on some sidewalk, where they’ll dry until a crow eats them and flies off and shits the remains onto the roof of your wife’s long-dicked lover’s double-wide.

As soon as they were out of sight, we jumped into the truck and circled around till we found Shaver Park. We crouched behind a swing set and observed: a school bus, a dark-suited man with a clipboard, a dozen children filing onto the bus like a special forces battalion. The kids were all stunned toothy mongrels—implants. Wallaby was sniffing the air like he could smell every molecule of their pollution. He looked back at me, shook his hind legs, and loosed a furious jackpot of turds onto my foot.

I took this as a sign. Wallaby knew. He was trying to tell me that the world’s made up of two kinds of people, a few okay ones and a swarm of others, which is eternally chapping the ass of the okay kind. If the resistance was anywhere nearby, this school bus crew would be trying to murk them up with their fraudulence. Either way, for the first time since leaving the farm, Wallaby and I had some real purpose.

We waited for them to load into the bus and slowly pulled out behind. Wallaby leaned out the window and sniffed the bus’s off-waft. He had their scent. He was using his animal power to memorize them.

We followed the bus through the night like pilot fish behind a whale. I lost hope. Then gained it back. Then lost it again. I licked my supplement lollipops and tried to keep Wallaby away from my hard-on. On the road I peed into a baggie and took dozens of micronaps, just a couple seconds at a time. Whenever I opened my eyes, the bus was always exactly where I expected it to be.

BRIAN NG

ROCK ISLAND, IL

2040

We got their whereabouts from that sad old man and set out east, stopping only for quick readiness drills in feedlots and baseball fields. What I saw of the Midwest was all through the school bus window: birds, motor lodges, grain silos, can-you-eat-all-this buffets, Army Navy supply stores, police stations. Tire fires. It seemed nice.

Just before we entered Illinois, Dr. Ng motioned for the driver to pull over, so we could secure a special interdistrict exemption from the regional compliance board. Approval came through immediately, and we roared across the border. I was so excited to help that hobo family.

Dr. Ng had adopted me, signed my renaming papers, and implanted me, and then I was born. We were to address him as “Doctor” in front of the parents, and not at all when the parents weren’t around. Once, after two days of implanting seventy islander kids who smuggled themselves into Oakland on a container ship, he shook my hand and then coughed. The cough sounded like
thanks
. The next morning there were twenty extra snack points on my meal account. I would have done anything for him.

At the motel he cross-referenced the guest registration with a housekeeping log, and then all twelve of us techs fanned out and searched the place. First floor, clean. Pool area, vacant. Supply closets, full of supplies. On the back side of the motel, second floor, overlooking the scummed-over pool, we walked past rooms 213, 215, then a sign that said
NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
. Dr. Ng looked down at the housekeeping log, and then at the room, and back down at the log. I saw a smile appear on his face and then quickly fall. He only smiled like that when we were about to really help someone.

We assembled in a four-deep half circle around the door, just as we’d been trained. I was in the way back, with Anthony and Simon and the other losers. Simon slept in the bunk above mine at the warehouse. He sobbed at night, and I’d kick his mattress to wake him up and he’d say, “I’m not sleeping.” Some runts splashed poolside while their parents waited to see what was going to happen.

We waited by that door for hours. We had a four-person battering ram in the bus, but I guess we needed a warrant to bust in the door, and Dr. Ng never did anything without the necessary papers. He led by example, by the strength of his calm.

Every so often one of the techs would try the knob. Melissa called out, “Hurry up in there and get your medicine!” Someone said she could hear whispering, then Karen banged on the door and the whispering stopped. The doctor just stood there with his eyes half-closed. He wore dark blue trousers, off-white shirt, and dark-blue coat. We did, too. I’d never seen him sleep or eat. One of the other techs saw him take a sausage link from the breakfast island at a gas station in Colorado, but who knows what he did with it.

Sad lodgers continued to stare out their windows, and we maintained our formation. Next to me, Anthony kept sniffing. “Smells like fear,” he said. “Smells like someone shit themselves,” Simon said. Just then a housekeeper pushed a cart slowly down the hallway. He wore mirrored sunglasses and had a reddish beard with lint and food and stuff in it, and he was muscular, especially his arms, which were ropey, covered with some kind of oil, it looked like. For someone who cleaned rooms for a living, he was strangely filthy.

“Fire hazards,” he said. “All of you. Clear away, please. Back to your rooms.”

He pushed his cart through the line of techs, into the center of the circle. Melissa looked at him, then his cart, and said, “You clear away. We were here first.”

The man-maid put on a smile-grimace and said, “Sorry, that’s the rules, little lady. Have to get through to clean the room.”

“Go on ahead. Open the door. We’ll make space, won’t we?”

We nodded and eyed each other, waiting for something to happen. All of us wanted something to happen.

“You need to exit the walkway first,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s a serious violation. Of the code.”

Just then Anthony shouted, “A bunny!” He pointed to the middle rack of the cart where, peeking out behind towels, I could see a white snout and small black eyes.

“It’s not a bunny,” Simon said. “It’s a badger.”

The maid looked down at the rodent, and then at the doctor. I realized the obvious: this was no maid. The nonmaid realized my realizing. Dr. Ng realized everything. For a moment all was still—and then we swarmed.

We came at him from all sides, three or four at a time, but somehow he warded off wave after wave—a mop handle to the midsection, a towel snap to the neck, a spray of industrial cleaning fluid to the eyes. Karen got a plunger rap on the temple. Simon was tossed over the railing, into the pool. I thumb-gouged at the man’s testicles, but he didn’t seem to notice. Clearly we were in the presence of an evil spirit.

Through the crying and yowls of my fellow techs I heard a voice. “Pardon me, sir,” Dr. Ng was saying. “Sir?”

The doctor’s voice was like someone at the end of a long tunnel. The maid looked up from our whimpering pile. Dr. Ng was at the top of the stairs holding the kangaroo under one arm. In his other hand he held the implant gun, which was pointed at the base of the kangaroo’s skull, just like we had been trained. The kangaroo wriggled, and Dr. Ng squeezed more tightly. The man swallowed once, hard.

“Leave now,” said Dr. Ng. “We have the authority to implant anyone and anything within the state of Illinois.”

“What do you know,” the man said, “about author—” and then Dr. Ng snapped the trigger. The kangaroo’s eyes widened, then dulled.

The man didn’t move for a long moment. Slowly his posture straightened. “The rest of you should run,” he said, not looking at us. “Fast.” He grabbed a toilet plunger from his cart. “Now.”

We looked from him to Ng and back again. The muscles on his arm started to go all twitchy. We ran.

I scrambled down the walkway, the other techs sprinting behind. We tore across the parking lot and up the steps of the school bus. Melissa pulled the lever and the door slammed shut. We stood there for a moment, panting, dazed, craning our necks out the windows.

Up on the second floor, the demonic maid was standing over Dr. Ng, who was laid out on the ground. The maid was plunging the doctor’s face, looking around, crying, yelling something. Dr. Ng had his hand gripped around the railing, screaming in a voice I had never heard before. His legs were kicking like someone getting heart-attack paddles. One by one we all turned away.

I looked around. Who was going to tell us what to do now? Who’d file the clearance forms so we could get our meal vouchers? I watched Karen and Zev, two of the oldest, stand up from their seats and make for the driver’s seat at the exact same time. Karen got there first. Zev tried to fight his way over her, but she kicked him onto the rubber flooring, started up the engine, and we drove off.

PATTI KERN

ROCK ISLAND, IL

2040

Since releasing myself from the laboratory doors, I’d quit anticipating or envisioning or presuming anything past the immediate, physical moment. I had calm hands, tunnel vision, and a ten-wheel rig, permanently borrowed back in Cheyenne, which I drove all the way to the motel parking lot. Now, pulling into the lot, I was vacant. I expected nothing. I might’ve found the place reduced to sizzling ash rubble or a soft-focus Bethlehem with Flora and Spencer and the child wearing robes and nursing each other. I didn’t peck around for portents and auguries. My rig was a rig. The highway was a highway. The motel was a motel. The young man I found huddled next to a defunct swimming pool was just a young man huddled next to a defunct swimming pool, except he was cradling a furry white animal.

He was shirtless, red from the cold, blubbering loudly into the animal’s fur.

“Blue doctor,” he said through the sobs. “Blue doctor messed my
life
.”

I knelt in front of him—I’d expected to go straight to the room Francine said they were staying in and shepherd them out of here, but it could wait a few minutes. This was just another necessary step toward. The man’s features were big and unfinished, a distracted sketch. He had snot and tears in his beard. I took one of his hands between mine and told him, “Listen. Your life isn’t a piece of patio furniture. So long as you’re here, it remains intact. Stop crying for a minute and let’s see what you have there.”

“Scrambled eggs,” he said, trembling with new sobs. He handed me the animal. “Smy
friend
.”

Turned out it was some sort of small kangaroo. Little red-veined ears. A winsome squirrel face. It was beautiful. And very still, breathing but limp. It stared into my eyes and I stared into its eyes and felt a light knuckling down the length of my spine. The kangaroo was gently cooing, its mouth opening and closing rhythmically. I leaned closer, and its hot breath warmed my face. The man’s weeping crescendoed. I cradled the animal’s head and felt some wetness on the neck fur, which I followed to a small black bump, the implant.

“Who did this?” I asked.

“Doctor Face-suck,” he said, then gripped his hair and sobbed. On the front of his pants a wet mark began to form at the zipper and bloomed wider and wider. He looked down at his pants, then at me, and cried some more.

I had located the motel via Francine. She’d called me three days earlier, seven weeks into my walk. I was in Elko. She was drunk. The call began something like, “Patti, you dumb cockeye, I’m at the Deluxe Inn Lounge with Evie and I’m not even Francine anymore, I did some things, and we’re getting ready to sing the shit out of some shit and where are you? I am so sick of—
Evie, shut up, I’m talking
—Patti, I hope you’re not a ghost. Why don’t you come here and sing some—
Goddamnit, Evie
—we’re in a blood room, a crime scene, number two-seventeen, except everyone else just
sits
there. Nobody’s any fun. Except the boy.”