The Silent History: A Novel (43 page)

THEODORE GREENE

ROCK ISLAND, IL

2040

The clerk initially wasn’t going to let me stay in room 217, even though the cops had already scoured the place, taken all the evidence, and left. It made her nervous even to consider it, and she offered up a litany of excuses to dissuade me. She said the shower wasn’t working and I said, “Don’t give a flying one.” She said there was blood on the wall and I said, “That sounds about right.” She said bad things happened in that room, that it was unlucky, that nothing good had come of anyone who stayed there. I just stood at the counter, cleaning my nails with a complimentary refrigerator magnet until she sighed and gave me the key.

I went to the room and lay on the cold bed. I lay there for as long as I possibly could. I tried to visualize my body turning to ashes. I thought I might actually be able to burn myself alive using only my mind. My body would flake apart into a cloud of black fragments and drift in tiny eddies around the room, disintegrating in midair, nothing left of me in the end but a gray impression on the comforter. I thought about Flora lying in this same exact spot, just a day before, before she had slipped away from me yet again.

I woke up to the sound of a crowd cheering. The motel had set the monitor to automatically turn on at 7:00 a.m. I opened one eye and saw the screen smeared with pulsing garish colors, gauzy silhouettes of men in pitched action. I rubbed my eyes and blinked. It was the opening rounds of the Reno Invitational Bi-Continental Jai Alai Championship Series. Hartford had just beaten Des Moines. Three hours later I was still in the same position, still watching.

It was an intense day. The 11:30 match, Asheville against Tuscaloosa, was especially grinding. In a battle of a single point, Olabe, who as far as I could tell was Asheville’s finest, finally got a shorter reply and flung a left side as a low
cortada
with outside placement, but the shot just hit too low. Olabe went ballistic. It was the first time anybody had seen him blow up like that, the announcers said. They replayed the tantrum again and again, frame by frame. They commented on the twisted look of anguish that spread across his face in ultraslow motion—they were surprised, but I knew that particular expression well, the dawning realization that the future will be pretty much like the past.

Eventually I sat up in the bed. The room listed and swam. I crawled to the quarter fridge under the desk and saw that it was full of tallboys. I could have as many as I liked for eighteen dollars each. I felt a bit like a fool for taking the first one, because I could’ve probably walked down the highway and bought a whole case for less than that. But it got easier and easier to pop them open as the day went on. By nightfall the fridge was empty, but the tournament was just heating up, so I decided to venture down the hall to the motel bar to keep the buzz alive.

The lounge was a dark narrow passage that let out on a trapezoidal stage area. A woman stood at the mic singing early Usher to an empty house while the bartender studiously worked at a quiz game on the counter. There was a high school skeleton police procedural running on the wallscreen, and I asked the guy if he could change it to the Jai Alai Network. He nodded, waving his hand until Olabe’s noble profile filled the screen. I had everything I needed. I ordered a Blood & Sand and settled onto the leftmost stool, which afforded the best view. The color commentary was indecipherable through the karaoke woman’s labored recitations, but I didn’t mind—at that point I’d seen enough of the game to produce my own detailed mental play-by-play. Maybe I started saying it out loud, too, at some point. Maybe the bartender asked me politely to stop, and then asked again, later, and finally poured a liter of bathtub vodka on my crotch. Maybe I was eventually instructed to leave.

Somehow I made it back to 217 that night, and somehow I made it back to the bar the next morning. I did little else in those few weeks but get obliterated and watch jai alai. The tournament culminated in a blistering series between Tulsa and Orlando, which became increasingly hard to follow as the network kept cutting away to news reports of the implant lab blowing up, and then the kids losing their minds, running wild in the streets, hiding out in Dumpsters and treetops. Shaky footage of the kids swarming a grocery store, shots of parents shuddering in tearful disbelief. Head shots of concerned state officials. The significance of it all wasn’t lost on me, but I felt it the way you might feel the heat from a distant star. Meaning, not at all. My focus was entirely on that fronton in Reno. Everything else was just an obstacle.

It was during the side-change of game 12 that the kid wandered into the place. Not really a kid—about Flora’s age, I guess. All the regulars stopped dead to watch him. Evie the sad karaoke fiend, Jeff the Aleutian bartender with a set of fake eyes, and two lonely truckers who had given up halfway across the country, I guess realizing that there was nothing waiting for them on the other side. We all watched him take a seat four stools to my right. He was filthy in a raised-by-wolves sort of way, and just dazed. Vacant. Implanted, wearing a conical helmet with a bunch of wires coming out of it, some sort of neoindustrial lab shirt, and no pants—just boxer briefs covered in cheerful script that said
I’d Rather Be Warbling!
He looked on the outside like I felt on the inside. I had Jeff pour the kid a dungeonmaster. He stared at the drink for a long time, then looked over at me. I raised my glass, gestured vaguely towards the screen, raised the glass again, and chugged it down. The kid did the same.

I got him completely wasted that night, handing him drink after drink, stuff he’d probably never even heard of. He’d just take the glass from me and pound it in a single swig, no matter what I gave him. I got a sort of sick pleasure out of it. It was a pretty hateful, ruinous thing to do, but it felt good, like scratching a rash you know is going to eventually spread. Meanwhile, Orlando came back from six points down to take a commanding 8–4 lead in the series. The kid was hooked—I mean, between the broken implant and the drunken haze, he couldn’t convey much at all, but he seemed intrigued.

I hauled him back to my room that night, because I had no idea where he was staying. I put him on the bed and took his shoes off. It felt weird, taking another man’s shoes off, but I found an odd comfort in the process of putting the kid to bed. The helmet I left alone. I sat down on the mattress next to him and put my feet up. He was snoring faintly, and I liked him more than anyone else in the world at that moment. Before I passed out I experienced a brief, lukewarm tremor of peace.

The next morning we were back on our stools by 9:57, just in time for the pregame show.

FRANCINE CHANG

NEW LIBERTY, IA

2040

We were all starving. David had left one morning with the cooler empty, and we waited like we always did for him to return with his bloody laundry bag of freshly killed drifter animals. But he never did. We kept waiting. Nancy ventured aboveground—I thought maybe she was hunting for herbs or meat or berries, but all she came back with was a long dragon kite, all moldy and shredded, which Flora and the boy went to work on, cleaning it and sewing it together with dental tape. Patti said maybe two words a day. She had rappelled down into the bomb cavity and found some rusted medieval-looking cans of albino asparagus and spiced apple pulp, and we split what the boy didn’t eat between the rest of us. The boy filled up our jugs of water in a nearby creek and brought them back one by one. When he came to sit next to me, I’d point a flashlight at my jug, and together we’d watch all the silt or plankton or sea monkeys or whatever float aimlessly around. We’d do that for a long time. Afterward he’d stand and extend his hand and make me follow him out to this tree with a rotted platform built into it. It was almost as desolate outside as it was inside, but the fresh air always made me feel better. Sort of better.

About a week after David disappeared, we finally accepted that he wasn’t just out tracking some particularly elusive poodle. Maybe he’d twisted his ankle. Or was tangled up in barb wire. Or was just tired of constantly providing for us. I decided to head out on a search. Someone had to. I started in the overgrown fields around the silo. Calling his name like an idiot, as if he’d just gone out for a weeklong game of hide-and-seek. I was hungry, sore, vitamin-deprived. I felt like I had a urinary tract infection. Plus, my eyes were clouding over, so I probably had glaucoma too. And shingles. Though I have no idea what shingles are. I kept walking south, closing my eyes against the blinding sunlight and picturing David in an oversize mousetrap. The humane kind, the ones that trap you but keep you alive. “David,” I called out every once in a while, because it felt good to hear my voice in a big open space. He wasn’t anywhere nearby.

I walked and walked until I came to a tram line. I found myself repeating what my mother used to tell me when I lost something, a Korean phrase which translated roughly to “Do backward what you did forward.” Up the escalator were two arrows, one pointing to Cedar Rapids on one side of the tracks, the other pointing to Davenport/Rock Island. I got on the tram to Rock Island.

Whenever we went into a tunnel, I had to turn away from the window, because I couldn’t bear to look at myself. The silo had turned me into a filthy, addled spider lady. On the tram were a bunch of single elderly men and greedy-looking teenagers and a few families. I expected stares and horrified looks from other riders, but everyone was distracted by a young girl leashed to one of the leather handholds. A man and woman sat next to her—mother and father, I assume—and they didn’t even look up as she lurched and bucked around, trying to free herself. That face. I couldn’t not stare. Muddled and seething. It was the face we usually point inward, and only when no one’s looking. I had no clue what was wrong with her, no. She must’ve been implanted, but I didn’t notice at the time.

The Deluxe Inn hadn’t changed, but after three weeks entombed in the silo it seemed like a sultan’s compound. Paint, windows, electricity, intentional plants. Largely deserted, as always. I went to room 217, which was locked. I looked in the window and saw a pair of beat-up sneakers, some crumpled boxer shorts, and cans everywhere. I washed my face and combed my hair in the lobby bathroom, then went to check the Lounge. Neither Evie nor any of the other female regulars were there. It was just Corporal, a craggy old river rat, Jeff the bartender, and two slouchers at the bar with their backs to me. They were watching jai alai, and one of them was wearing headgear, like some party hat of crisscrossing metal spiders. When the bartender saw me, he turned his back without acknowledgment and grabbed a bottle of Midori sour. I took a seat in the far corner with my back to everyone else. Dietrich was nowhere near this place. I knew it like I knew I wouldn’t stop drinking praying mantises until I was sloshy and glum.

I heard one of the men at the bar say, “That jerkoff grabbed his cesta. You can’t do that. You can’t
do
that.” Shout, actually. I glanced over and saw the other man, spider hat, lean forward and look at him confused, dismayed. He stared at the screen, which showed a replay of a catch and shoot, one of the players spinning around the other and whizzing against the wall. Helmet turned back to the man, slowly opened his mouth and closed it.

The man sipped his drink and said, “Everything tastes chafed. I could understand if it was one thing, or maybe two things. But it’s everything.” Staring at the screen, he said, “Will someone tell these crotch fleas to
protect
the fucking
blind side
?”

Now I turned fully around, because I knew that voice. I walked toward it, ignoring Jeff’s arm outstretched with my praying mantis. I put my hand on Theo’s shoulder, and he turned to me sidelong as if he’d been snagged from behind by a fishing hook.

Theo. Here. Improbable, inevitable, just like everything else. He was himself but crumpled. Stiff-necked, eyes orbiting loosely in their sockets. Drunk, intensely drunk, but intensely something else, too.

He said, “You,” and inhaled deeply, and waited a long time to exhale. He stared, pivoting his body around so that he was completely facing me. His face was like a rough sketch. The other man turned to me too, tilting his head slightly. He looked right through me, nodding, waiting, his expression unclouding until it was perfectly blue, and he gave me the briefest flicker of a smile and nodded. Then he fell off the barstool.

Theo gently helped the man to his feet, and took one long gulp from his drink and emptied his wallet onto the bar—bills, change, crushed straw wrappers, and sugar packets. With one hand on my shoulder and the other on the stool to steady himself, he turned back to me, straightened, and said, “Take us to her.”

PATTI KERN

NEW LIBERTY, IA

2040

The world goes away without much complaint. Then you do. All you need is the right crawl space, a place to get steady, becalmed, expectationless under blankets all day, huffing stuck air. I wasn’t trying to extinguish myself—I just had no stomach anymore for food or water or lurching survival gestures. I was secure in my shell. I had to descend to ascend, had to lock myself up to free myself, get low to get high. And plenty of other necessary paradoxes. Months of days I spent in Hayward thinking I could eat air, leech nutrients from it. Months of nights I spent in the ground-pussy of that missile silo thinking I was back in Hayward. What the others were doing wasn’t important—I heard them, smelled them, but their consciousnesses were arrested to me. The others, they could’ve been sun-rotted blood pudding. I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Except one day the top hatch conked open, then mumbles and footfalls on the metal ladder—first came Francine, then a man crowned with a metal bird nest, then Flora’s dad. I remembered him from Face-to-Face. I didn’t bother with wonder or surprise at his arrival, but I did feel a slight inner gear tick, a recalibration to this added presence.

Flora’s dad found her and Spencer in their happy domestic hollow. He and Spencer exchanged an awkward handshake. Then he and Flora stared at each other for a while, hugged each other, tentative at first, then less so, then held each other for a long time. Everyone around them waited. The dad looked pained while they embraced. But he wasn’t going to let go before Flora did. Eventually they released, and he ran a flashlight back and forth over the heap of blankets and metal walls. He lifted the blankets where the boy had been sleeping, kicked through some trash, and went into the control room with the flashlight.