The Silent History: A Novel (5 page)

I rode my bike around town looking for silents. Well, looking for them and also sometimes I’d return groceries my mom bought and keep the money. Sometimes I’d ride around and pretend I was in a commercial for bikes, so I had to make it look really easy. I had no idea where the silents would be, but I knew there were lots of them. I could feel it. I wanted to find the park where they all played and introduce myself. Introduce like an organism does, not by talking. I wanted to be part of their group.

The school thing just happened, I didn’t plan it. I was walking to class on the first day after the bus dropped me off, thinking how dismal my old school was, and by the time I walked into class I had my arms out and I was doing the underwater stuff. The teacher was young and she said “okeydoke” a lot, and when she saw me shuffling into class with bugged-out eyes she nodded very slowly and then clapped her hands together, way less flustered than I would have thought.

She changed my name card with another on one of the front desks, and went to check her roll book, maybe to see if there was a note about me. I didn’t expect her to look so happy, but people don’t always make sense. Once everyone was sitting she introduced herself, and then, right after that, me. I made a face like the lights were too bright. Mrs. Lipkin called me “a unique visitor.” For the rest of the day, she didn’t go thirty seconds without looking at me. I counted. Fifteen seconds, eight seconds, twenty-one seconds. She looked at me an average of once every 14.6 seconds. I turned the counting into part of my style, rocking in my seat while I did it. I had no idea how a silent would really act, but by lunch everyone in school was on board.

Some were extra nice, some clowned me. No one ignored me. They talked about me when I was a foot away, like I was out of the room. Was I dangerous? If they hit me would I hit them back? I had power. I cast a shadow. And all I had to do was nothing.

Not talking was fine, but not listening was incredible. In Art I drew with charcoal on the wall, before PE I bumped some sports fiends into the lockers. Nothing happened.

I was surprised how long it lasted. Until just after Halloween. The first parent-teacher conference, Mrs. Lipkin told my mom how proud everyone was of me. I can imagine my mom—who’d become used to teachers saying things like, “Is David this way at home?”—saying, “Uh, why?”

Mrs. Lipkin made me stand in front of the class and confess. She was so mad she refused to look at me, and to the other kids I became double what I had been before. Zero times two. Just another part of a cold classroom, like the chalkboard, or Phileas, the terrarium turtle who soon would teach us about death. There’d be no diagnosis for me. After I confessed, I went back to being nothing at all.

THEODORE GREENE

RICHMOND, CA

2017

I did everything I could to trigger some kind of speech in Flora. It was my whole life. Time is constantly slipping away. The window is always closing. If you’re not there for her, if you’re not by her side for every waking hour, flooding her with words, you’re not doing it right. She’ll never talk, and it’s because you failed to give her the things she really needed.

I was determined to live in the house after Flora was born, but it became impossible to stay there. My plan was to hold on to the place, I guess to try to keep the idea of Mel alive. I saw a point in the future where I would lead Flora from room to room telling her things like, “This is where your mom quilted your receiving blanket,” and “This is where your mom and I made a hundred origami swans to hang over your crib.” I couldn’t handle it, though. Without that joy that Mel brought to things, I saw the house for what it was—a shabby eyesore at the end of a dangerous street in a bad neighborhood. We spent most of our time holed up inside, and the silence was just chilling. Every night I’d wake up with a jolt, convinced that I’d heard the front door smashing open, and I would lie frozen in the king-size bed with Flora next to me in her Moses basket and wait for the intruders I imagined were in the house to climb the stairs and murder us. It felt like we were at the end of the world.

So I found a small finished basement apartment down by the highway. It was not the kind of place I ever thought I’d live in, but maybe that’s what appealed to me about it. It had smooth concrete floors and little street-facing windows, and it was cool in the summer and chilly in the winter. I never went back to my job when my paternity leave was up. I just wasn’t interested in seeing any of those people again. So I was in rough shape financially that first year. But then my sister’s husband, who worked for the state, told me about these pallets of computers they auctioned off on a regular basis, hundreds of laptops and tablets from various state organizations that were only a few years old. I bought two pallets for cheap and started refurbishing the units to sell online. With about four hours of work I could sell a tablet for almost twice what I’d paid for it. At first I was storing so many boxes that the apartment became a maze of narrow tunnels, but gradually I worked out a system.

I put Flora in day care so that I could focus on the business, but when she still wasn’t talking on her third birthday I knew I had to confront the situation head-on. Something was seriously wrong, and no one was doing anything about it. I decided to teach her at home during the day and work on computers at night. I cobbled together a learning regimen from posts I found online. Books, rumors, random suggestions—I had it all charted on an elaborate color-coded schedule. I tried everything, packed it all in, because I read that after three years it became harder and harder for a kid to learn language. I was hoping that whoever had made that observation was wrong.

Every day we went through the full regimen. There were flash-card drills, sign-language videos, vocalization exercises using audio playback and a mirror. Every couple weeks there’d be a good day, some detail I could latch on to. I remember that she got really skilled at identifying objects on flash cards. I’d put three cards out on the table and say, “Which one is the cat?” I’d point to the picture of the cow, and she’d look at me without making any expression. I’d point to the picture of the frog and she’d have the same look. Then I’d point at the cat, and she’d smile. I tried it with several different animals and with many cards at once, and almost every time she was able to pick out the card I’d said out loud. I thought I’d made this incredible breakthrough. I had visions of the two of us in that basement apartment ten years into the future, laughing about a prank she pulled at school, or naming all of the countries in Africa for her Social Studies test, or me just telling her stories about Mel over the table in the kitchenette. I posted a video of Flora doing the card identification exercise to the community site, and the parents went wild. It was real evidence that these kids could learn language.

There were other parents posting videos of their kids’ progress, and we all went crazy with envy every time a new one went up. One woman posted a clip of her kid who’d been gluten-free for several months, and was uttering syllables—he was saying “chi chu chu chu chi” in response to his mother, and in a sort of sentence-like rhythm. So Flora and I immediately went on a gluten-free diet. When this didn’t help things, I tried removing all plastic from the house, which another parent claimed was offgassing toxins that paralyzed vocal development. For a while we stopped eating dairy, and then there was a brief stint where I was making my own bread from a starter yeast I bought from this tax attorney in Bakersfield who claimed his kid was learning to read—somehow the enzymes activated comprehension neurons, or at least that was the idea. The bread was good but it didn’t help, and neither did the root-vegetable cure that was floating around briefly. Nothing seemed to have any effect in the long run. Nobody was able to replicate the card identification exercise I’d posted, which made me feel a little surge of quiet pride until an anonymous poster pointed out that Flora wasn’t looking at the cards—she spent most of her time in the video looking at my face. She could somehow tell when I was pointing at the card I wanted her to respond to. She had no idea that “cat” stood for a cat—she just wanted to make me happy. That was a dark week.

Time passed, and nothing seemed to work—the language wasn’t taking root, and at a certain point I just ran out of steam. I called my parents to tell them that I was officially giving up on getting Flora to talk. I don’t think I really believed I was going to go through with it—I think I wanted my parents to convince me otherwise. To, you know, tell me not to lose faith, to keep trying, whatever. But when I told them I was giving up, they barely even spoke. I think my mother said something along the lines of, “You seem so exhausted. It must be a relief, at least a little.” They’d doubted me all along. Right from the moment Flora was diagnosed. And I just remember a sort of rushing sound in my ears. We were alone, me and Flora. I doubled my resolve to get her to talk. I was convinced, more than ever, that someday we’d have conversations about ancient Egypt and deep-sea creatures and the weight of Jupiter, and that no one but me could make that happen.

AUGUST BURNHAM

NEWTON, MA

2017

The urge to speak is deeply human. It’s woven into our DNA, into the structures of our brains. In a very real sense, thought requires language. Without it, we can’t do the kind of heavy processing required to perform any complex ordered thinking. Try to imagine making your way through a world in which nothing has a name. How could you do it? What would that world look like? How would you even know that you were “looking”? Some time ago I researched a case of a Mexican man who was born completely deaf. His parents treated him essentially like an animal. He never learned sign language, didn’t learn to read lips, had no way to communicate until his twenties, when he was discovered by a psychologist who actually taught him how to sign. Throughout the rest of his life, he refused to describe the world he lived in before he learned sign language except to call it a time of darkness. He was literally terrified of it. I think about that case a lot when I’m working with these kids. They must be similarly terrified, or worse—they’re not even aware of what terror is yet.

The thing that fascinated and troubled me about the phasic-resistant children in my study was that they seemed totally uninterested—or
unwilling
might be a better term—to adopt the necessary language skills, despite what appeared to be a normal, healthy brain. We can’t really speak with any confidence about their intentionality, but the fact remains that these children made no progress toward basic language concepts through any of the established teaching methods we had at our disposal. They could laugh, cry, scream, make any kind of sound you could think of, but they just wouldn’t cross the threshold into the world of words, no matter what we tried.

Of course, my first thought was that it must be some sort of environmental toxin. The blood work that ruled out that theory also led me to believe that the condition was viral in origin, but with very unusual characteristics. If it was, indeed, a virus, it didn’t appear to be contagious, and in fact there was no easily identifiable mode of transmission. The strangest part for me, though, was that only the neural pathways governing language were affected. The rest of the brain was spared in every case and with alarming precision. And so my thought was that if I could somehow stimulate the dormant areas, I might be able to, in a sense, prime their language instincts—it would be the equivalent of jamming my foot in the door of a phasic-resistant kid’s mind. Allowing them to peek through the narrow opening to the vibrant world beyond, the world of language, which I imagined would be a little like Dorothy landing in Oz. If I could just get in there somehow and trigger that activity, it might act as a way to jump-start the brain.

I developed an appliance that used remote neural-stimulation tech to apply gentle, focused currents of electricity to Broca’s area—the region of the brain that typically produces speech. I managed to affect this area with enough precision to actually generate a set of reproducible utterances in the patient—not words, but a handful of distinctive phonemes. These utterances were paired with an image of something the patient liked but didn’t have immediate access to. Calvin Andersen, my initial phasic-resistant patient, was the first child in the study to undertake this experiment. Calvin’s parents told me that he was fond of fruit rounds, so when we fastened the appliance to Calvin’s head and sat him at a table, there was a fruit round under glass just out of his reach. I switched on the appliance, which immediately caused Calvin to enunciate the phoneme /oo/. It didn’t even sound as clear as I just made it sound. It was more of a throaty hum, but it was distinct and reproducible. When Calvin made the sound, we lifted the glass and slid the fruit round across the table for him to eat. We did this for two weeks. We wanted to see if eventually we could etch this association into Calvin’s brain between an object and the means to indicate a desire for it. We thought that he would eventually utter “/oo/” when he wanted a fruit round, but Calvin was incapable of uttering the phoneme on his own. We couldn’t generate any sort of voluntary neural activity no matter how hard we tried—and we tried very hard with several children using a variety of incentives. It was tremendously frustrating.

And yes, some of the children did eventually start making the utterances in their sleep. Sometimes for the entire night. There wasn’t anything necessarily wrong with this. I mean, they were just sounds. But some of the parents were disturbed. They claimed that it sounded like their child was being choked all night long. Eventually we gave up on that approach altogether.

You asked to see a picture of my son from around this time. This is him in his soccer outfit. This was right before a match with Wakefield Middle School. Yes, I know, you can barely see the scar. But if you look closely here, you can see it sort of traversing his left upper lip. A little white crescent where the cleft used to be. We were never really worried about it. Dr. Anupam is the best craniofacial surgeon in the Northeast. But we obviously had to contend with Hector’s speech issues, which were pretty serious. And, sure, as you suggested, that experience of working with a speech pathologist to overcome the challenges probably influenced my work with the phasic-resistant population. But those kids were not like Hector. The way he went from barely speaking at all to being able to read aloud with perfect diction in just a few years—you know, the way he attacked it. You could really see his dedication. He was going to talk like a normal kid or else. It was a huge inspiration for me personally and professionally, and I feel, for lack of a better term, blessed.