The Silent History: A Novel (42 page)

I started with something simple, the Serengeti’s legendary baobab in lime and chocolate syrup. The kids banged their forks, licked their plates, pulled hair, but I forged on, sketching out the trunk and fuzzing the leaves. But when I reached for the green syrup to give the foliage some depth, the nozzle was already unholstered. I followed the tube under the table, where a mule-faced girl was suckling straight from the hose, pure concentrated sugar. I snatched it away from her. Her top lip raised and I thought she might start bawling, but instead she, this toddler in a lace dress, she snarled at me. That’s when my hoses fell limp. I looked down to see a boy with a ponytail slurping the syrup straight from the canister, with two others punching and clawing at him. I dumped the three kids and tried to push the cart clear.

That was when I heard my rotary drill start up, and I saw that Mule Face was aiming it dangerously close to my
varpa
. I gave a shrill little yelp, I’m not ashamed to admit it, and leaped back, but my feet got tangled in the tubes and hoses and I fell. The girl came closer, and I frantically wriggled under the table, ready at any minute to feel something awful.

Persephone suddenly appeared between the two of us. She gave the kids a look that froze them where they stood, syrup dribbling onto the floor. I stared up at her, trying to keep my eyes from watering. I separated her face into quadrants, like you would a sculpture, but each quadrant seemed to be doing something different. Persephone yanked out the tubes and helped me to my feet, and we ran toward the kitchen while behind us the kids were still fighting over the syrup. At some point the scrum heaved toward Ramiro’s flambé station, which tipped over. A paper albatross caught fire, and spread to the tablecloth. Parents were shouting orders, trying to corral their families, pushing others out of the way. Then the sprinklers went off, and pretty soon everyone was jostling toward the exits. Except, no one knew where the exits were.

I took Persephone’s hand and yelled, “Follow me,” to everyone, and headed for the employee exit beneath the kitchen. Behind us a propane tank exploded, a loud deep blast followed by a billow of white smoke into the hallway. I let go of Persephone in the sweaty swirling chaos but then found her hand again, and this time her grip was tight.

We made our way into the kitchen, through the prep station, and downstairs to the employee door. I kicked the emergency exit handle, and we all streamed out of the ship and onto the rainy sidewalk. Still holding hands, I turned to Persephone, except instead of Persephone it was a tall older man with serious-looking scratch marks on his cheek. He said, “Thanks for helping.” I told him, “No need to thank me, I would’ve done it for anybody.” I had done it for anybody. He continued to hold my hand while he sat down on a curb. In the distance I could see Persephone walking away, into the lit-up tangle of buildings and signs.

KENULE MITEE

BROOKLYN, NY

2040

I was fixing a flat on one of my carts in the storage bay when the policeman came rushing up at me, waving his baton. He said I needed to get out fast. Some of the wild children were running loose in the mall, and they were closing it down until they could control the situation. I was angry, because I had to make a living. My boys had to make a living. And we were being shut down because of a bunch of children? How dangerous could they be? I put my tools away and locked up the cart.

As I was leaving I saw Fish, one of my crew, laid out on the floor next to the Nachoteria. His cheek was swollen and bloody. I knelt down and saw that his face was really bad—there were teeth marks, and a flap of torn skin was hanging loose. Blood all over, and his shirt was ripped and stained. “What happened?” I said to him. He just stared at me. I kept forgetting that he could no longer speak, that his implant was just a tiny dead speck lodged in his head.

I lifted him by the arm and we headed toward the east wing of the mall, where there was a Wound World outlet. An evacuation notice played on the loudspeakers, and people ran past us in the opposite direction, holding their bags close. We saw two security guards hauling a fat woman out of the Zen Pond while her motorized wheelchair slowly sank to the bottom. The woman had a bite on her arm that looked like Fish’s cheek, and she wailed as the men struggled to bring her on land. I thought of Isoke, at home in our apartment, eight months pregnant with our son, and I went cold with dread—I knew I needed to leave this place.

Farther down the main promenade we saw one of the wild children. A small girl, maybe nine or ten, clinging to the top of a palm tree. She had a golf club in her hand and she was swaying back and forth like a trapped animal, growling at a police officer in riot gear holding a net. The officer swatted at the kid as we went by, but she just knocked the net away with the golf club and then climbed up onto one of the rafters that held up the sky-dome.

We entered Wound World cautiously. Half of the lights were out and it was deathly quiet. I walked slowly down the dressings and splints aisle. Fish was right behind me. I was reaching for a box of bandages when something crashed to the floor at the end of the aisle—a box of metal scalpels that scattered across the linoleum. I jumped back, and Fish clamped his hand on my shoulder. He pointed down the aisle, and through the gloom I could make out three children huddled by a dialysis chamber. I let out a little yelp, a sound beyond my control. The kind of noise a frightened dog would make. The children hissed at us, and we turned and ran so fast, as fast as our legs would carry us. I did not care or think about anything else but getting as far from those children as possible. We ran straight across the promenade into the Sunglass Hut and hid behind the counter.

I found a roll of masking tape in a plastic bin beneath the register, and I wrapped this around Fish’s head to stop the bleeding. He slumped against the wall and shut his eyes while I watched the children lurk inside Wound World. They seemed to be as anxious to leave as we were, but every time they approached the glass entrance they’d jerk back from some threat we couldn’t see. There was a girl in cornrows and two white boys, and they kept taking swings at one another and scratching and making terrible guttural noises. Sounds of confusion and suffering that I had never heard before from a human being. It was a terrible thing to witness.

We heard a popping sound that I remembered well from my youth—the bursting of a tear-gas grenade. It rolled through the entrance to Wound World, spraying out a grayish-brown cloud of smoke as it disappeared into the store. Three men and a woman in respirators and padded black jumpsuits were sneaking slowly toward the entrance. One of the men held a long chrome tube with a nozzle that was attached to a tank on his back, and when the little girl emerged from the store, coughing and spitting, the man sprayed a tan foam at her—that kind of foam that hardens instantly, like what they used to hold back the crowds in the Pusan riots. The foam stiffened around the girl, stopping her in her tracks. The woman ran forward and dragged the girl in her foam cocoon onto a green metal caddy. The others went inside and sprayed the remaining children. I could see the fear in their faces as they were wheeled out of the store and down the promenade to the police vehicle backed up to the entrance of the mall. They were like animals that had found their way in but couldn’t figure out how to leave.

When all of the kids had been extracted from Wound World, we darted in and grabbed a few boxes of bandages. I tore off the tape from Fish’s face and drizzled antiseptic gel over the area. Fish winced as I wrapped a bandage around his head, and then we sprinted out of the mall and across the vacant fields to the medical center by the expressway, which was packed with people. Fish stopped me in the entranceway and put his hand over my heart, which I took to mean, “Go home to your wife.” I hated to leave him there, but I was anxious to see Isoke. I embraced him and told him I would check on him as soon as I could. The words meant nothing to him, but he nodded.

I took a bus back to my apartment. The driver had to stop several times to avoid hitting children who were skittering across the street. It took almost two hours to go just a couple miles. When I finally got back to my apartment, there was a man in the doorway of the elevator holding his daughter down while his wife shouted into a phone. The elevator doors kept closing and reopening on the man and his daughter. I went up the back stairs and burst into the apartment, where I found Isoke in bed under the covers. I held her while we watched the news. An armored van pulled up to the local gymnasium, and a team of police dragged frantic children out one by one. I lay there stunned and numb, running my hand along the curve of Isoke’s belly. I was breathing so fast. We were going to bring a new life into this crazed place? It felt like Isoke and I were the very last people on earth, living on a piece of land the size of a postage stamp, surrounded by a wicked and treacherous forest. There was no room for another.

VOLUME SIX

CALVIN ANDERSEN

ROCK ISLAND, IL

2040

I don’t remember the night of the explosion very well. Only that when I woke up I began to walk. I walked through the woods in the darkness, away from the burning lab. I used the light from the fire to find my way, and then the light was gone and even the shrieking of the birds was done, and I was just walking in the pure dark. My mind was clear and clean. I was aware that words had once occupied some territory in my brain—I could sense the power they once had over me, but I knew that they were gone. It was impossible to imagine what they looked or sounded like, or how my tongue could be convinced to shape one. I did not feel exhilaration or relief. I just felt focus, complete focus on the task at hand.

The sun rose over the ocean and I was walking south on a coastal highway. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and there was dirt and flecks of caked blood in my palm. I had no pants on, and I was still wearing the calibration helmet, but I felt right. I felt like myself for the first time in years. Something inside of me was newly aligned. I thought about Burnham, and I could not understand why I had spent so much of my life trying to do what he wanted.

The brawl at the motel in Rock Island had been a momentary flare in the news stream. An isolated novelty, just barely worth reporting. But I understood the real story. The explosion at the lab was the opening salvo in a long war, one that I wanted to be a part of. The resisters were out there, living on the frontier beyond language, and they were thriving. I would find them, and they would teach me how to live this way, how to protect this quiet that I had forgotten I possessed.

I walked along the highway for many more hours. Eventually a trucker stopped and leaned across the cab to open the door for me. I saw that he wasn’t wearing pants either. I backed away, but he looked at me reassuringly and said something that appeared genuinely comforting. His face suggested a casual confidence, as if he was just saying, “Hey, there’s nothing weird about this. We’re just two guys driving along the highway without pants on.” He looked like a whiskey barrel with a Santa Claus beard. I told him where I wanted to go, but when I went to speak it didn’t feel like a string of words. It was more like a song playing in reverse. But the driver seemed to understand. I climbed into the cab and buckled my seat belt. He found a Kazakh black-metal playlist on his dashboard, and we listened all the way to the Iowa state line. He bought me cheesequakes and bacon rings whenever we stopped at service stations, and all I had to do in return was sit next to him and hold his hand as the black-metal vocalists brayed from some deep hidden hollow in their throats.

The driver let me out on an overpass above the motel. It was smaller than it had seemed in the news footage. The rooftop was littered with bits of junk that had been blown from the road, hubcaps and rearview mirror casings and headlamp fragments. Two young girls crouched in the lee of a dryer vent that stuck out between shingles, sharing a glass pipe while a man in a jumpsuit nervously kept watch. Part of the marquee had fallen away, revealing one of the motel’s previous identities as a horse-themed motor inn. There was a star-shaped pool cordoned off with yellow safety tape and a deflated bounce house at the far end of the parking lot, which was mostly empty.

I walked down to room 217, which was where they had said the family was staying. I stood at the door and tried to bring myself to knock. I even raised my fist, but somehow the idea of the sound was terrifying. Instead, I crouched by the window and tried to peer between the slats in the blinds. The room was dark and seemed deserted. The bed was unmade, the sheets wadded up by the nightstand. Empty beer cans on the floor. It looked more like a squatter’s hideout than the cradle of the silent revolution.

I turned around and slumped against the wall. Everything since the explosion had been a long dream, and now suddenly I was awake, with absolutely no idea what to do next. There was a soft pink light pulsing through a window next to the reservations desk, and I got up and followed the light to a lounge, where an older woman in a purple sequined blouse sang karaoke on a small stage. I sat down at the bar and watched her, just so that my body would have something to do. The bartender placed a drink before me, and when I looked up he pointed down the bar to an old man with wild, matted hair. The man smiled and waved his hand over his head, mimicking the contours of the calibration helmet. I had been wearing it for so long that I had forgotten it was there. I’d just accepted it as a part of my own head. I stared at the man deliberately without expression. When he saw me look at him like that, his face changed. His smile faded by a degree and he crinkled his eyes a little, almost like he was about to wink at me, but stopping just short of it. I could tell he knew why I was there, and that he’d come for the same thing. There was nothing else for us to do but sit there for the rest of the night, slowly drinking ourselves to a state of blindness while the woman struggled at the microphone to hit even one correct note. I had to admire her courage.