The Silent History: A Novel (9 page)

Typical human thought processes are deeply interwoven with language, as we all know, and patients suffering from aphasia often also display difficulties with categories, memory, and other cognitive faculties that have been constructed around a scaffold of language. But remember, aphasia is about the
loss
of one or more functions of the brain. These silent children never had language to begin with, so their brains evolved from the start using a very different set of tools.
Tools
may not be the right word, of course—words in general are unreliable narrators in these attempts at explanation. The existence of these children and their unusual skills, however, does not depend upon our ability to explain them, and we must have the humility to accept realities beyond our understanding.

These children, then, have met the deep human need for social interaction by capitalizing on the brain’s natural compensatory abilities—effortlessly and unconsciously, resulting in a form of communication we can only grasp through analogy. What does sonar feel like to a bat? What does a scent look like to a bloodhound?

This phenomenon represents the greatest opportunity for linguistic research since Nicaraguan Sign Language. I’m waiting eagerly for the charges against me to be dropped so that I can get back to my study of Bay Area silent schoolchildren. I’m not really at liberty to speak about my case at this point, but anyone who takes even a cursory glance at the evidence will see that I was living in the ventilation system of the Oaks School purely in the interest of science, and that I took great care in setting up the observation cameras so that the identities of the children would be kept confidential. Check the line-of-sight diagrams and you will see that not one of the cameras offered a clear view into any of the bathroom stalls. Only a deeply cynical imagination would interpret my routine fieldwork as any kind of invasion of privacy, which is why I’m hopeful that I’ll soon be released from custody, and can continue to document this incredible, existential transformation, which is happening in real time, right before our eyes.

PATTI KERN

PACIFICA, CA

2021

No, I wasn’t surprised to see the news from the school across the Bay. I’d already been conducting many silent communions of my own. Once, at the fabric store, I knelt down in front of a remarkable little boy hiding among velvet draperies. He was really experiencing these draperies, rubbing them against his cheeks and neck. I waited until he was done, and then, when he emerged, I reached out my hands for him to hold on to, and he did. I looked into his eyes, which were blue with bursts of green around the pupil, and I wordlessly conveyed to him that he could draw from my stream. He could have whatever he needed of me. And he emitted his deep appreciation of this.

I didn’t realize it but the boy’s mother was standing directly behind me. I stood up and opened my arms for her to hug me, but she was carrying a long bolt of gingham.

“He’s going to teach us all so much,” I told her. “He already is.”

She lowered her free hand, and the boy took it. He was still transfixed. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Please don’t touch my son ever again,” his mother said.

“I won’t need to,” I told her. “Our exchange of truths is complete.”

There were other breakthroughs, many small ones orbiting a single larger reality. The parents never fully understood. How could they? They were so obsessed with teaching their children to speak, to normalize, to be like us, that they couldn’t see what the children really were, couldn’t hear what they had to teach us. The parents tried to lock their kids in those jails disguised as schools—but the silents were irrepressible. They used their confinement as an opportunity for a greater communion.

We’re taught at a very young age that memories and emotions are somehow less valid than actions. I reject that. If you’ve ever made love in the backseat of a small car, and then, very soon after, made love on a blanket in a forest with warm rain coming down, you know what I’m talking about. Same action, more or less, but different energies, different emotions, so a manifestly different experience. I’ve spent years following various charismatic figures, each making one claim or another on me, and what they’ve all done is taught me the folly of mediation, the barriers between us.

The moment I first connected with a silent, I knew that we were on the cusp of discovering the true language. Call it heart-speak, call it universal communication. We were on the verge of understanding that words were waterlogged boxes—unsuited to contain the meanings inside. With the true language, intention and meaning and expression are all one.

Some recognized it as a new psychic language, others said it was involuntary facial nervousness. I watched their teacher try to describe what she’d seen, but she didn’t have the words for it. No one does. All of the speculation was so misdirected. I wished someone from the news would’ve asked me. No, I don’t necessarily think I’m the one who started the silents communicating, but perhaps I helped project it further. Ideas are always breathed into life by multiple creators, and I was among them. Was it just coincidence that the breakthrough happened within twenty miles of my house? The moment I heard the news, I felt—not knew, felt—beyond doubt that this is where it’d all been leading me. I’m not a planner—I was taught you disrupt the natural rhythm of the day when you impose too rigid a structure—but I began to make plans.

The gatherings at my house were an organic occurrence. I talked about the silents to anyone who would listen, and also to many who wouldn’t, and after a while a congregation of sympathetic individuals began to arise. There were about ten of us: massage therapists, disillusioned missionaries, an ex–merchant marine … but those are labels. We all united over a hunger for kinship with the silents. We met on Tuesdays.

We began to hone our own silent speech. Our goal was to be ready once we made contact with the silents, once we had that access. I tried to teach the group what I knew, not verbally, but through silent deliberative projection. We sat in a circle on the floor and stared intensely at each other. Women weren’t allowed to wear any makeup or earrings, men had to shave their beards. I wanted our language to arise out of nothing, out of that pure well of nothingness, and be born. We didn’t even assign partners, we just locked in on whomever we were getting the strongest tremors from. With me it was often Patrick, a freelancing spine consultant—I could feel an aspirational quality to his eye contact. We sat there for as long it took, and when we were done we shared our findings.

“I felt fondness coming from you,” Patrick said one evening. “I was returning it, did you sense it?”

“No,” I said, even though I had. “I was trying to convey a sentiment about tolerance.”

The former missionary said to his partner, “Are you hungry? Were you trying to tell me you’re hungry? I sensed a hunger.”

“I am, now that you mention it,” his partner said, excited. “I didn’t even know it. The language was communicating without me!”

“Was anyone in here thinking about the St. Louis International Airport?” the massage therapist asked.

There weren’t major communication breakthroughs at our gatherings, just little ones, and this was okay. We had no clue as to what the future would hold but, like I said, I began making plans. My landlord found out I’d been doing consultations at the house, which apparently was illegal, and so he was trying to evict me. But not only did I not need my house, I didn’t want it. I began devising plans for a new community, a new way of life.

AUGUST BURNHAM

NEWTON, MA

2021

I was as surprised as anyone to turn on the news that evening and hear that phasic-resistant children were “talking.” Maybe even more surprised than the average person, seeing how I’d been studying them closely for the previous nine years, probably more closely than anyone else in my field and certainly more thoroughly than a few schoolteachers. I’d spent over half of my professional career working with these kids every day, and that’s long enough to know that what these self-proclaimed experts were calling communication—the evidence that supposedly revealed that these kids had some sort of “secret intelligence”—was perilously weak. But this is what always happens, isn’t it? A few influential people see what they want to see and have the means to spread the word, and suddenly they’ve got everyone in the country believing in this fantasy.

The fact is, I’d already been observing these peer-to-peer facial tics for over a year before the incidents that led to this “breakthrough” were announced on the news. I’d even presented video footage of the phenomenon at NAN in Seattle. There were two boys in my study who would always pass each other in the waiting room when one’s session was over and the other’s was beginning. I saw that they spent an awful lot of time just looking at each other, lingering on one another’s faces, and while the parents commented on how cute it was that the boys were so fond of each other, I saw that they were altering their expressions just slightly. Almost imperceptibly. I started to study the children in pairs after that, and then in small groups. I had plenty of kids in my study back then, a lot of really useful data. But then it became a news phenomenon and everything changed.

I’m sorry if I sound like a jilted lover here. That’s not my point. What I want to get across is that even though this behavior might look like communication—and yes, phasic-resistant kids have worked out a way to pass certain types of basic information among one another—it just doesn’t have the potential to escalate. All animals communicate—even the branches of a coral reef have a fairly complex weblike biological communication system. So it’s not surprising to me that we’d eventually see these kids make contact with each other. But the level at which they’re communicating doesn’t have the structural underpinnings needed for a language, or at least not the kind of sophisticated language that would enable these kids to, say, discuss politics or write an essay. The human face just isn’t expressive enough to accommodate an ordered system of arbitrary symbols, which are the building blocks of any true language. Look at it this way: our faces weren’t evolved to convey language. They’re just not the right tool for the job, just like you wouldn’t use a hammer to cut a pane of glass. The only way these kids are going to be able to speak is if we find a way to restore the parts of their brain that process language. It’s as simple as that.

Of course, this is not the kind of thing parents want to hear. They want hope, but more important, they want results. And the kind of hope I was offering at the time was too far off in the future for them. It was too long a road, working steadily toward a real systemic solution. I’ve always believed that this condition could be reversed, but when all of this talk about peer-to-peer communication started happening, many parents stopped thinking about a cure. Maybe they felt that after a few years of the SpeakNow curriculum or one of the other schools that were springing up, their kids were suddenly going to be reading and understanding Shakespeare. I understood the appeal of it. I understood why they stopped coming to sessions. They were more interested in the short-term gains of the schools, whatever that amounted to, and I let the first few go without argument. But after a certain point the hospital cut the budget for my lab, and I suddenly had to make do with half the patients and a quarter of the resources. And it was a struggle just to keep the remaining families in the program. It was ludicrous.

I still get angry when I think about that period. I had to play nice, to appear to the parents like I was exploring the facial communication therapy. I had to get into bed with the people who’d come up with this half-baked theory, even as they were slowly dismantling my credibility as a doctor. I had to do a lot of things I’d rather not have done, just to hold on to the rapidly vanishing funds that kept the lab afloat. It was a very caustic environment, and this was right around the time that Bruce left me, as well, so that wasn’t helping things. He moved to Brooklyn when the resident he was fucking got a job at Brookdale. Which meant that I was always at the train station shuttling Hector back and forth. Hector didn’t say much about it, but I knew it was killing him inside, to have to live two lives like that. Predictably, his grades started slipping and—you know how they say bad things come in threes? This felt like maybe nine or ten.

FRANCINE CHANG

OAKLAND, CA

2022

I couldn’t control myself in front of the cameras. I twitched. I sweated. Did I think the silents were on the verge of speaking? Could I show the viewers at home what face-talking looked like? Or at least theorize about what they were talking about? The worst was when I went on the
Twenty-Four-Hour NewsHour
. They talked about the same thing they always did—plasticity, nonlinguistic communication, microexpressions, on and on. The host said something about “plumbing the emotional depths of these pliant youths,” and I tried not to snicker.

And then my own face began to involuntarily twitch, and when I glanced in the monitor I could see a streak of black marker on my cheek, below my eye. I mean, I could
feel
it. So I started trying to subtly rub it off with my hand. Meanwhile, all the experts were agreeing with each other: the silents weren’t just equal to us, they were probably better, maybe the best thing ever.

Which was fine and all, but there was a big black line on my cheek, like war paint. I don’t know how it got there, but I could see it clearly in the monitor now. And, plus, I looked feral. Like something that belonged underground. My lips were as shiny and moist as digestive organs. I was wearing a dress I bought at the mall, after asking a saleslady at a department store if they had any clothes that might look good on TV. After a long pause she said, “Oh, you want something
slimming
.”

The host said, “You okay, Miss Chang?” I was rubbing at my cheek with my shoulder, trying to scrub the marker off.

“I’ve got something, marker, on my cheek,” I told him. I could see both him and the communication expert, squinting at their monitors. “Right here,” I said, pointing at my cheek.