The Silent History: A Novel (7 page)

So that’s how I came up with the Chatter, which was a hinged mouthpiece made out of a proprietary silicone blend. The mouthpiece fit comfortably in the kid’s mouth, and it would do all sorts of exercises—opening and closing, side-to-side motions, circular grinding, tongue positioning. I brought in consultants, expert people who knew the methods and techniques you find in speech therapy. And the Chatter incorporated it all. It had a bunch of settings that the parent could control via a small remote. You could technically leave the Chatter in all day and just put it on random, which is what a lot of parents decided to do, because it was so comfortable and easy to wear that the kids seemed not to mind at all.

Some parents got upset about the Chatter, because it didn’t make their kids talk. But I never claimed it would do that. If you look, even on the front of the box, it says this. It’s as clear as day that it was intended as a mouth exerciser. And in that spirit it was very effective. And I do think that kids got a lot out of it. And the parents, too, you know, because it did look, even at a short distance, like the kids were talking. Parents could take their kids out in public and not feel like they were being judged. I had many parents write to me thanking me for this. I don’t need their thanks, but I accepted it anyway, and I feel privileged that I was, you know, that they thought of me as a sort of advocate. And I was certainly able to get my business off the ground as a result. The Chatter was just the first of many products I developed to help that community. Helping those people cope became my core competency, if you will. Right in my wheelhouse.

NANCY JERNIK

TEANECK, NJ

2019

Spencer got kicked out of school. Or, they dismissed him from the school, which apparently they had every right to do, because they were a private institution, which was—I mean, I was paying for the school and they still kicked him out? I’d been getting these papers in his cubby. Incident reports, they called them. They would be like,
The teacher’s aide was removing Spencer’s snow pants when he bit her and did not seem to understand that this is not allowed
, or,
Spencer punched another student in the back and didn’t apologize or express remorse
. I specifically remember them using that term, as if he was capable of expressing remorse. And there was no more information than that. No suggestions for working on the behavior. No advice. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t monitor him day and night, and wasn’t that the school’s job? He got a lot of these incident reports, so many that I guess one day they decided they’d had enough. I’m sure they were just looking for an excuse to get rid of him anyway. I had this sense that they looked at him as a walking vegetable, just this mute kid silently sucking up all their time and resources. They gave up, if you ask me. They just assumed he was never going to learn like the other kids. Never going to adapt. And I ran out of arguments to keep him there, because I think that underneath it all I essentially felt the same way.

So we had nowhere to put Spencer, which was pretty much the main thing that made me lose my job at Yan Talan. The HR person said it was just because of what had happened on Wall Street the previous quarter, but I know that it was because I’d lost so much productive time staying at home with Spencer. I’d worked out a complicated child-care schedule with Ron, but he had just joined the nanofiber start-up and he was away all the time, and it was impossible to find a special-needs nanny in the dead of February. With my job, you know, it’s all about meeting with people face-to-face. Every day in the office was like a long conversation that started when you entered the building and didn’t end until you were home again, asleep—assuming you could sleep. Assuming you had time to sleep. That’s just advertising. That’s how it works. You can’t phone it in. Which I found out in a big way.

So then I was alone in the house with Spencer every day, from six forty-five in the morning to about eight at night. Ron was usually gone before either of us woke up, and he didn’t come home until after Spencer was asleep, which seemed a bit too convenient, but whatever. I’d wake up and lie in bed just waiting until I could hear Spencer moving around in the next room. He used to come in our bedroom when he woke up. He’d slide up next to me and bury his head in the crook of my neck, and we’d look up at the ceiling fan and watch it spin. When he got kicked out of school, he stopped coming into our bedroom, though. I’d lie there waiting for him, craving the smell of his messy, unwashed head of boy hair, because that was the only time in the day when I felt close to him at all. It was the only acknowledgment he gave me that he cared who I was. But instead he’d just sit on the floor in his room, moving marbles around. It wasn’t only that—Spencer changed in lots of ways once he got kicked out of school. He must have known, somehow, that he’d been rejected. He stopped doing things for himself, like getting dressed or brushing his teeth or going to the bathroom. I had to basically dress him myself if I wanted to go anywhere. He just seemed to be slipping back into a younger state, and it seemed like it was on purpose. Like he was doing it to me.

After a while of doing this—of sort of having to be his maid—I got sick of it. I had no part of my life that was really my own. Everything I did in a day was in the service of Spencer. I was feeling starved for some kind of space where I had control, something that was mine and no one else’s. The idea to start dressing Spencer up came out of that feeling of desperation, I think. I had this beautiful yellow Shirley Temple dress that I wore when I was flower girl for my mom’s second wedding, and I just decided to put it on Spencer one morning. He looked down at the dress and seemed to be—well, he didn’t try to take it off, and that’s about all I had to go on, so I kept evolving the project. I had a few other outfits I’d saved from when I was younger, and I put them on Spencer, as well. But I couldn’t stop there. I became, I guess, fixated on dressing Spencer up and putting him in these scenarios from my childhood. Almost like I was a director or a set designer or something. I mean, that’s really what I started to think of myself as. Like one of those famous photographers, like the woman who took pictures of those insane-asylum people. I put Spencer in these scenes and took pictures of him. And he let it happen, so I assumed he was okay with it. Looking back, I can see how I was starting to take it too far by going on all of those shopping trips, but nobody understands how hard it is to sit in a house and have your child’s breathing be the only sound.

One day I saw that the horses from a carousel I rode when I was a girl were being sold off. I tried to get Spencer to go with me, but he wouldn’t leave the house no matter what I tried. “I’m going to leave without you,” I said, like you know how parents always say to get their kids to start moving? But, of course, he had no idea what I was trying to say. So I actually did it. I just left him there. I was only going to be gone a couple hours, and when I came back he was under his bed as usual, rolling marbles along the seams in the floorboards, wearing the purple jumper with the smiling cat pattern. He was fine, so I started leaving him in the house for longer periods. I was feeling, finally, like I was doing something important. I had these photographs, and I felt like I was learning something about myself. But one day I came back from an estate sale and there was a sheet of plywood nailed over the front window. I went inside and there was a cop sitting on our living room couch writing something on a pad. He told me about Spencer punching though the window with his bare fist. Apparently a neighbor saw it happen. He shattered the glass, and I guess when he pulled back his arm after the impact a shard just slid through him. I saw a big smeared blotch of blood on the carpet by the window, which is where the cop told me the neighbors had found him. The cop said that Spencer was at the hospital, that they were operating on his arm, which was torn up pretty badly. I asked him what was going to happen next, and he sort of shook his head.

DCYF put Spencer in Barrowbrook, which was an institutional facility out on the edge of Brooklyn—apparently it was the place where all those kids went. Because it was my first offense I was just put into a rehabilitation program for abusive parents, which I breezed through because I wasn’t one of those people. If you want to call what I did “abuse,” then I guess I can understand, but all I did was give both of us the thing we really wanted, which was to be as far away as possible from one another.

DAVID DIETRICH

DECATUR, GA

2019

I finally found them. Downtown there was an indoor graveyard of airplanes called the Air Zoo. I borrowed my mom’s MasterCard to buy an annual membership. They called it an interactive museum, but it was nothing but aerodynamic facts and seven-minute movies. I went there a bunch. The silents were always with families: moms all desperate, dads just blurry, brother, sister, and then a silent. They went there after school, like me. Seemed like their parents treated them the same as their brothers and sisters. Like they were hungry, interested. At least they treated them that way for a while.

I loitered every day until dinner. This was about the time my mom was dating the albino, and she forgot who she was. And who I was. The albino said he was a magician, but he never showed me any tricks. My mom listened to these podcasts he gave her—
A drop of nothing from nothing is nothing
—and stopped eating anything cooked or red. Who knows what else they did. Probably some sex things. She never asked me where I’d been. I wouldn’t have told her. At the Air Zoo I could pass myself off as a silent.

If Korean kids go back to Korea after being in the United States for a while, the other Koreans know. Doesn’t matter what the Korean is wearing or how good his accent is, they can tell by looking at his face. When I first started, I only cared about fooling the nonsilents, because I didn’t know any silents, so I overdid it. I wiggled my fingers, bugged out my eyes. Silents aren’t silent, it’s a dumb name, but my movements were way too loud. I wanted people to notice. It was embarrassing. With silents, it’s all about their intensity. Intense concentration and intense calm and intense everything else. I’ve studied them more than anything, I probably know more than anybody. Intense eyes, mostly, and shoulders and arms and chest, legs, and feet. All over, I guess. I tightened myself, made it restrained. I stared in the bathroom mirror until I didn’t recognize myself.

I’ve trained myself to do a lot. I can eat the same meal for months. I have. I do. Breakfast cereal, I’m not going to tell you which one, with rice milk on it. I went to the Air Zoo five days a week. I interacted with the silents. I fully occupied their space. I trained myself to forget which word went with which thing. I wanted to unword all of it. It got so I could look at my bike and manually separate those four letters from the physical object. I stared so long at words they broke apart. I wrote
fruit
two dozen times on my biology folder until it disintegrated into nonmeaning. It was freed. I did it with
donkey
,
school
,
mother
. With my own name.
David David David David David David David David David David
.

At the Air Zoo there’s a fake
Enola Gay
in a warehouse-size room, and the guard didn’t bug me there. When I used to wander the whole museum, he’d kick me out, grab my arm way too hard, and call me “zombie” and “retard,” but I sent a really good e-mail to the museum director like I was my dad and told them that if they didn’t want a full-on silent boycott, to leave me be. I always saw silents in the
Enola Gay
room. Whenever I saw one I would walk up close to the family and follow them like I was with them. I was so good. The parents recognized what was wrong with me right away and commented on it, or nudged each other, and sometimes waited to see what would happen between me and their son or daughter. Usually nothing. Sometimes something. That something ranged from quick eye contact to other moments I have no interest in telling you about. I don’t have to tell you everything. I’ll just say that once or twice I was able to hold hands with one of the silents. Okay, I’ll also say that another time one of them put her hand on my face. Oh, and one took Fireball Haley’s helmet off of its stand and handed it to me and I put it on, and then the security guard kicked me out again, but gentler. And once a silent girl almost fell over an escalator rail onto some war planes and I stopped her. I held her body and guided her back up.

The parents and other people were fooled, but I had the feeling that the silent kids weren’t. I don’t know. Sometimes it seemed like they were playing along. I didn’t care. It was one of the first times I had a permanent feeling about myself.

But more and more, I noticed that the parents started to seem annoyed. Not just with me but their own kids too. They pulled their children through the museum quickly, from exhibit to exhibit, and then they left. Lots of heavy sighs. They stopped pretending they were normal families.

And then they stopped coming at all. It didn’t happen all at once. At first I tried to figure out where they were going instead. I mean, the Air Zoo’s a pretty crappy spot. Maybe word had spread. Maybe they were at the Fernbank Museum or the park or something. It was like before, when I’d ride my bike around town looking for them. But I could hardly find one anywhere.

I went onto some silent message boards, where parents chatted and asked questions.
I know this is off topic
, I wrote in one of the threads about life expectancies,
but the Air Zoo is a really fun place for silents and their families to go. I’d totally recommend it
.

It didn’t work. Turned out that the silents were being pulled from the schools. The parents were giving up. Sending their kids away so they didn’t have to think about them anymore. Special residential facilities, they called them. First a few kids here and there, then a mass retreat. I didn’t even want to think about what those places looked like, but I dreamed about them. Prisons. Windowless. One day the silents and me were all together, a rogue army, and then it was just me, again, riding around on my bike. Stealing chromies off cars just for something to steal. Trying to figure out why I always lost.