The Silent History: A Novel (44 page)

They’d brought supplies from above, and Francine, looking like a gleaming raisin, set a squeeze-brick of water next to my shoulder. Francine, always so sad and decent, so boring. But good. Good at keeping a lot of plates barely spinning. She used a plastic syringe to squirt a thick horse-nutrition paste into my mouth. Tasted like something I’d coughed loose from down deep.

I swallowed it and said to her, “Quit saving me, Francine. I can die anytime I want to. Paste won’t stop it.”

The one with the bird nest milled around with a can opener. I could barely see his eyes in the dim of the silo, but his mouth was curled at the corners as if he was drugged or mesmerized. I shooed him off and he tripped and stumbled over one of the metal floor bolts but didn’t fall.

Flora’s dad returned with the boy. Arm around his shoulders, the boy hugging the man’s waist. This, more than the arrival, pulled me out of my stupor. I got the can opener from Bird Nest, opened up cans of lymph-colored beans, and poured it into bowls. The boy ate carefully, watching his grandfather watch him, watching me, then Francine, who was trying to get Flora and Spencer and Spencer’s mom to eat the paste. I picked up my own bowl, poured its contents into my mouth, chewed, chewed some more, felt good at first, then felt bad, felt worse. I ran over to the empty missile shaft and vomited into it.

Nancy was wary, of course, but Nancy was wary of everything, and there was no sign of a platoon of black-suited soldiers—just these sad, rumpled hoboes. Theo had told Francine about David, about Maine, the bomb, the aftermath. David was dead. I sat with that for a moment, let it settle. The implants were now useless, defunct. The emergencies were isolated at first, then more widespread. Riots in Memphis. Fires in Sydney. Civilian patrols, government backlash.

Theo took out his device and showed us what was going on: some poor implanted boy shoots a mailman in Los Angeles, another runs off and drowns in Mexico City. One spur had a long report about a sheriff in Arizona who turned an old juvenile detention center into a holding pen. Footage of young boys and girls alone in dingy rooms, pacing and smacking the walls and looking scared and insensate. When Theo moved to turn off the device, the boy held his hand and wouldn’t let him. On the screen a blond-haired girl stared at her reflection in a two-way mirror, an expression like sadness but all jumbled. When it cut to the sheriff, the boy rewound the footage and watched the girl again. He paused it as he’d seen Francine do, and stared at the girl as if trying to communicate with her, then unpaused it. When it was done, he rewound it again, and again. Studying it, memorizing it.

Later he took the screen and went to his corner of the silo. We all scattered to our blanket tents, leaving the father, Francine, and Bird Nest looking for somewhere to go. Bird Nest lay down right where he was, uncovered. Francine and the father went to one of the subplatforms and sat against a low cement wall.

That night I thought about David. His impatience, his purposefulness, him. Christ, how long I’d spent all glib and overstuffed in my shell, and meanwhile David had gone quietly headlong to what he probably thought was an honorable death. How pointless, I thought. How goddamn misguided and utterly pointless. I was so jealous I couldn’t sleep.

Across the room the little boy’s pristine bloodless face was still illuminated by the screen. I started thinking about all the false revelations and epiphanies I’d propagated. The leaps I’d made and landings I’d had to roll out of, and how each one sort of inoculated me against the one that came after it. Until, here I was. Here he was. The boy was
ingesting
the news, experiencing it along with the people on the screen. He looked sad, but lately he always looked a little sad, which seemed appropriate to living in a missile silo with a bunch of decrepit husks. But the news of the fried implants, it appeared to be wounding him. He squinted, tightened his lips, sighed through his nose, a vessel of pure intent and purpose. He couldn’t stop watching.

I closed my eyes and tried to will back that feeling of openness and caring I once had. I used to be a cellar door, an empty cup. I used to salvage lessons from gurus, children, strangers, infomercials, smells, textures, snacks, songs, dreams, animals, wind chimes, wind. I used to feel things. Now? I was crusted over, stuck. I was room-temperature leftovers. I had no more space in me for the silents, the implants. Or even the boy, the double-silent, raised in face-talking from his first moments, never clogged with an implant to mute out that inner world beyond anything I could even conceive—and here he was, studying tiny pictures of his fellow humans with utmost loving belief, showing me how it could’ve been. Finding truth or meaning or beauty in that little device. Finding purpose. Actually, I don’t know what he was finding.

But I could hear him manipulating the device all night. And when I woke up in the morning he looked spent, sadder. He drank water when it was offered. But he wouldn’t stop looking at the thing, not even when the charge was spent and the screen went dead.

NANCY JERNIK

NEW LIBERTY, IA

2040

I woke up early to a strange sound, like a sheet of rain repeatedly hitting a tin roof, and then dying off. I sat up and saw Theo through the blast door, alone, hunched over at the table, spinning the rear wheel of the boy’s skateboard with his index finger, watching the bearings whir. It came to a stop, and he took a sideways pull from a tarnished flask. The boy had found the skateboard in a drainage ditch one night on one of our food runs. I let him take it back to the silo, but he was only allowed to ride it in the lower hallway. I didn’t want him riding it outside, where the pavement was cracked and crumbling, more or less a guaranteed accident just waiting to happen. I had this vision of him sailing though the air, landing on his neck, and going into a coma, and when I thought about that my hands froze with fear. And I’m not a superstitious person, but it did feel very much like the presence of the treacherous skateboard and the arrival of Theo were cosmically linked somehow. It was hard to deny as I watched him sitting there gazing at it in a drunken haze. Francine tried to convince me that Theo hadn’t turned us in back at Monte Rio, but all she had were his words, and since words were what put us in our situation in the first place, I wasn’t inclined to ignore my intuition. I tried hard to let it go, for the sake of the family, but I knew that eventually we’d pay for this decision to let a wolf into our midst.

Theo stood up and placed the skateboard on the floor. He pushed off and skated down the corridor, waving his arms for balance. As he approached our dining table he crouched down, scooped the tail of the board with his back foot and kicked out his front leg, which sent him up onto the bench, hurtling forward, his arms out in front of him and his face pinched shut. He slammed chest-first into the table, toppling the bench onto his left arm. The boy, who I guess had been watching the whole time from under the covers, shot up from the floor and ran out to him. He ran to Theo and knelt down. Theo groaned and slid over onto his side and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He said something I couldn’t understand and started to chuckle. The boy started laughing as well. Theo struggled to stand, still laughing and wheezing. He put the board down and modeled the trick he’d just attempted. The one that had just resulted in him getting crushed by a piece of furniture. He showed the boy how to push down on the tail of the board in order to lift off. The boy watched him intently, taking in every nuance of his posture. Theo then slid the board out with his foot for the boy to try. The boy stepped on the board and then hesitated. He glanced back into the sleeping area and locked eyes with me. I held my breath. I didn’t want to be the one to ruin this moment between the boy and his grandfather, but my disdain for Theo seeped through my every pore. The boy stepped off the board and looked away. Theo made a puzzled expression that quickly shifted into something else, something darker.

He stepped quietly into the room and knelt in front of me. He whispered—hissed, really—“Do you have a problem with this?” I told him I did. I said he was going to hurt the boy, he’d just proven how unsafe it was. Theo snorted and frowned. “Hurt? He’s a kid,” he said. “He’s a goddamned kid and he’s going to get hurt. That’s what happens. That’s childhood.” I looked away. “You’re serious about this?” he said. I didn’t say anything. Anything else would’ve been a lie that the boy could see from a mile away. Theo stepped back, furious and baffled. He started pacing angrily. Spencer and Flora woke up, not knowing at first what was going on. Theo kept pacing, muttering to himself. The man who had come with him stirred in the corner. Theo rushed over to him and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Here,” he said. “Here’s a helmet. The kid can wear this helmet. See? That’s safe. You’ll let him ride if he wears this thing, right?” He gestured for the man to remove the helmet, which he did after some amount of prodding. Theo brought it over to the boy, who eagerly took it. The thing was covered in wires—it didn’t look like a safety helmet at all. Everyone was awake at this point. Everyone was looking at me. I felt cornered. “You’re not giving me a choice, are you?” He just stared at me without blinking. “Inside only,” I said, waving my hand at the board. It was about as much as I could bring myself to say. The boy smiled and slipped the helmet on, yanking the straps to fit it over his ears. He laughed with anticipation as Theo fastened the straps under his chin. When it was on he turned and took a bow for us. Everyone applauded.

I faced the wall and feigned sleep while Theo led the boy through a series of basic maneuvers. The room was dead quiet except for Theo’s voice and the grinding of the skateboard wheels against the concrete floor. Everyone was rapt. I boiled and fumed.

The next morning I woke up early and went out to the strip mall on 130 to pick through whatever the local junkies had missed. I filled half a bag with leftovers, fantasizing the whole time that when I returned Theo and the other man would be gone. But as I climbed the hill back to the entrance to the silo I saw Theo emerge in broad daylight carrying the board under his arm, followed by the silent man and the boy, who was wearing the helmet. Francine tagged along at a distance, looking nervous and awkward. I rushed up the hill through the brambles and came up behind them, trembling, my body as light and sharp as an arrow.

“I told you not to take him outside,” I said to Theo, short of breath, not even trying to conceal my rage.

He waved his hand, not even looking at me, and put the board down on a loaf of broken pavement. I came up behind him and slapped him hard across the ear. He crumpled and shrieked, backing off sideways as he gripped his head. I moved in and swung at him a second time, clipping his temple. The silent man took me from behind and held me as I struggled. “You want them to find us,” I shouted. “You know what they’ll do to him. You’ve wanted this all along.” The last words came out as a throaty hiss, barely recognizable as language.

He stood up, pressing the side of his head where I’d connected with my knuckles, and said, “So this is why you’re acting like a fucking lunatic?” “So you admit it,” I shouted. Francine rushed in between us. “Guys,” she said, “this is not…” And then she trailed off. Theo was staring intently at something, and his face was so strange that I turned to look in the same direction. There was the boy, standing completely still in the high grass. He opened his mouth and closed it again, like he was popping his jaw. The helmet was enormous on his head, and his eyes were dull and far away, trained on some interior space. The silent man loosened his grip on me. He dropped to his knees and clasped his hands to his forehead. The rest of us were still.

FRANCINE CHANG

NEW LIBERTY, IA

2040

The sky was gray-blue and littered with clouds. Windy, an odor of far-off pig manure. Nancy and Theo had gone quiet, both staring at the boy. Theo’s friend was on his knees, looking across the field, face still frozen in a queasy half smile. Everyone seemed slow and off. Except the boy, who was now wading in high yellow grass, wearing the spider helmet low over his eyes, strangely intent.

We followed behind him to a nearby oak, part of a windbreak along the edge of a field of straggly briars and shrubs and scrub. The landscape was so ugly it was almost pretty. The oak had a few rotted footholds, and the boy scaled them, all the way up to a tiny platform near the top. He stood on the platform, shadowed in the low light, king of the barren fields, holding a flat palm over each side of the helmet. I was cold, straining to see him. His features were pinched into a point, crumpling tight around his mouth.

Nancy was standing directly beneath him, hands fluttering, ready to catch him if he came crashing down. She called up to him to be careful, to watch out for birds and fire ants and loose branches. She still wore those immaculate scrap clothes—shirts patched together with blanket fabric and men’s ties. Shoes made from other shoes. Theo’s friend, meanwhile, was still on his knees in the tall grass, looking off at the silo, the empty field, the almost-collapsed barn.

The boy relaxed his jaw slightly, released his hands from the sides of the helmet, and sighed audibly. I thought I could hear a low humming sound coming from the helmet, but it might’ve been from the factory way beyond the fields, which belched out columns of pus-colored smoke. The boy’s strained expression beneath the helmet softened. Sympathetic, almost. It went places. I watched him, and my mind went places, too. I realize I sound like Patti now. But this is how it was.

I cycled through old things. Mostly loose memory puffs I didn’t bother grasping on to—pictures, bad dreams, my mother. She spoke almost no English when I was growing up. She’d take us to movies, to school plays and orchestra recitals and a thousand other things, without complaining. I watched her watch the movies sometimes, and wondered why she looked so content. So unconfused. She couldn’t be understanding a thing, I thought. Maybe that’s why.

I focused on the boy, and he seemed to be focusing on me too, even though he wasn’t looking at me. One morning in second grade my mom dropped me off at school like she always did and there were no kids in the halls. I went to my classroom, but the door was locked. I looked in the window—the light was turned off. The desks were empty. I tried the classroom next to mine, but that door was locked, too. Turns out it was a school holiday. An obscure one, Flag Day or something. I slumped in front of the my classroom door and cried for probably a half hour. When I finished crying I stood up and walked around.