The Silent History: A Novel (11 page)

I don’t know what Spray Ya Face does, but all young people seem to like it. I see them spraying each other with it, and then they become very calm. I can make good money selling this product. It is much better than when I was selling pretzels, because everyone had a complaint about their pretzel—not firm enough or too firm or too salty. I didn’t make the pretzels—I just unwrapped them. But nobody complains about Spray Ya Face.

One day those kids were standing around my cart looking at the flavors. A bunch of rough boys came by and pushed their way through. The kind of young man who wears a sleeveless shirt and pants around his hips, you know? They came up and pushed the quiet kids aside as if they were not even there. As I said, I did not feel comfortable around those silent kids, but I also felt like they were my customers, you know? So I told these rough boys, I said, “Hey, hey, be easy.” And the biggest one came right up to me and made a pretend punching motion, like this, right into my face. I just stood there. I could not have a scene happen at my cart. I couldn’t have a fight with this boy. It would ruin my business and I might never be able to get my green card. I was sure there was going to be a fight, and I told this boy with the sleeveless shirt to go, to get away from my stand. I didn’t want any of this happening. The rough boy relaxed his arm, and I thought it was over, but then he turned and grabbed the silent kid with the scar and put him in a hold. I came out from behind the cart and took the rough boy by the arms. I was trying my hardest to pry him off the silent boy, but he was strong like a vise. I finally had to hold my hand over his mouth and pinch his nose, and he finally let go. I threw him to the ground and shouted for him to go, and he scuttled off down the boardwalk. I was shaking. I stood back from the silent boy, who was on his knees, breathing rapidly, holding his neck. I handed him a paper cone filled with water and said, “You go now, all of you.” The boy’s friends helped him to stand, and they walked off toward the beach, looking back at me with that strange expression, like they weren’t sure if I was their friend or their enemy.

I went back to Ogoniland after the uprising there to bury my uncle. I asked around about the girl without a voice. I found out that there had been a murder in the village. A woman had disappeared, and nobody knew why. One day the wild girl returned from one of her walks carrying the missing woman’s wristwatch. She led a police officer out into the hills, where the woman’s body was stuffed in a crack. The woman had been murdered by her husband, who found out she was having an affair with a man in Port Harcourt. A famous Igbo director found out about this story and hired the girl to appear as herself in a series of movies where she helped police solve crimes by finding bodies no one else could find. I saw one of these movies while I was there. It was a very funny and very entertaining film, which ended with the wild girl jumping through a glass window onto the wing of a plane, all done with special computer effects. I was happy for the girl, who as I said was treated like an animal all her life.

The kids at the beach, I don’t know what they are up to. I don’t understand why they don’t kick a ball or throw a Frisbee to pass the time. My friends and I, at that age, were working jobs so that we could afford the clubs at night. We would do anything. So I do not understand how these young people can spend whole days wandering around without a purpose. Groups of them, roaming around, not saying anything, making everybody uncomfortable. What kind of a life is that?

STEVEN GRENIER

NEW YORK, NY

2023

Porter wanted me to do a story on the “phasic resistance transitional facilities.” I’m using air quotes because there was nothing transitional or facilitative about those places. Dumping grounds for kids no one wanted to deal with, is what they were. But Porter said the board had urged him to assign the thing to me. They’d learned from some kind of inside channel that
The Braggart
was doing a huge spread on three families with phasic-resistant kids, real heartstring-tugging shit, and they wanted me to offer some kind of timely counterpoint using the facilities as an anchor. The kids at these facilities were the forgotten ones, basically feral, cut loose from or sometimes even put there by their parents, abandoned by the whole system, just roaming the streets in an existential limbo. I thought I could cast them as a sort of organized clan. I’d somehow ingratiate myself into their ranks to get a real slice of their life, something no one had captured yet. I just had to figure out how.

Porter tried to sweeten the deal by offering me any city I wanted. New York was overexposed at that point, and it was so much easier to get laid in Philly, so I started there. I got to South Street and, okay, first of all, the place is pretty much a shithole. It feels like a superexploitative gypsy carnival. Every store sold something I’d never even heard of, things made of that cheap, flexible plastic that won’t break down for another twenty thousand years. Guys were selling old storage wafers and tubes of optic gel on bath towels laid out right on the sidewalk. And there were those weird virtual attractions that I didn’t get. Like, why would you want to know what it’s like to get thrown down a well? Why would you pay twenty dollars to experience that? Or the thing where you could temporarily deform yourself. This is what people want?

So I was wandering around trying to find the facility, but it was a hassle because there was nothing that distinguished it from any other building. I mean, looking at the place, when I finally found it—you’d never know what went on inside. Even the sign just said
FLETCHER HOUSE.
No numbers, no indication of any kind. I tried to get in, but the doors were locked. Of course, right? Because they shut it down during the day and let the kids just wander off and do fuck knows what. I could see a guy pushing a mop in the hallway, but he wouldn’t look up when I knocked. Or when I called him a chooch.

I went down South Street on the other side. A Chinese guy was rolling up the metal shutters over the entrance to a virtual action booth called Gorilla Spill, and there were about seven or eight kids standing in a semicircle watching him open the ride. He’d look up occasionally as he worked and shoo them away, but they didn’t move at all. Dirty kids, didn’t look too healthy, but with a sort of emotive glow. The guy saw me and made a face like, “Help me get these kids to leave.” I was like, “They want to go in, don’t they?” and he shook his head and said, “No money.” So I bought tickets for all of them. I was just winging it at that point. The guy sprayed a luminescent pattern on our hands and we went in.

We were all herded into a dark room. A timer was projected on the far wall, and when it got to zero we were suddenly in this cargo plane with about forty bull gorillas. The floor fell out and we all started tumbling through the air. I wasn’t prepared for this, I mean, I must have looked like a fucking … I was just flailing in utter terror and probably squealing like a baby. It really felt real. These gorillas, tons of gorillas in free fall, punching at me in the air. It was scary as fuck. But the kids, I saw them in the periphery of my vision, and they were all chained up like skydivers. They were organized. Totally coordinated. I looked over at this girl, the one I called Persephone in the segment, and she had this way of looking at me that put me completely at ease. They drifted over to me and grabbed me, and I did feel safer.

We eventually dropped into the sea and swam for the coastline. When we got to the beach, the kids started hiking through the dunes. They slipped through a tear in the border of the environment and I followed them through, which wasn’t, strictly speaking, allowed. The poly count went way, way down on the other side, but there was a massive field of low-res sawgrass that rolled away from us for miles. The place was totally unfinished and was probably never meant to be seen by anyone. It wasn’t even set up with a shadow-casting light. And no sound track or anything. Not even the swishing of the grass. It was total silence, where you can hear the sound of your own blood rushing through your body.

The kids seemed to have been there before. They’d cleared out an area in the middle of the field, and they let me sit with them in it. We sat there for what felt like several hours. It was just incredibly, unendurably boring. I remembered why I hated doing stories on these kids. They just sat and stared at each other or at the cruddy skybox. But I suffered through it. I needed to do whatever I could to fully integrate myself into their schedule.

After, I don’t know, forever, the Chinese guy showed up. He had an electric prod and he started flipping out, waving the prod in the air and telling everyone to get the hell out. The kids were quick—they beat it out of there in an instant. I was just sitting there sort of frozen in place, totally surprised, which gave the guy enough time to stick me with the prod. It didn’t hurt, but I was immobilized for long enough for him to lift me by my collar and drag me out the door.

I walked up and down the street a few more times, but I couldn’t find the kids anywhere. I was feeling like I blew it. I’d have to go to another city and start all over again. I was incredibly pissed and disappointed in myself, and then I saw the girl, Persephone, standing on a rooftop, looking down at me. It was just the most bizarre thing. I went around the back of the building and climbed the fire escape. All the kids from before were up there. There was trash all over the place. Empty canisters and chip bags skittering across the roof. Clumps of old water-damaged pillows and a few pieces of street-trash furniture, and mattresses that were stacked up like a house of cards by the elevator shaft. They had a whole thing set up there. A hangout, if you could call what these kids did “hanging out.” Persephone came up to me and took my arm. She led me over to a wooden chair under a blue tarp and sat me down in the chair. She stared at me hard for a while, doing that face stuff. It made me really uncomfortable. Like, who knew what I was telling her? Who knew what she could see there? Whatever she saw, it must not have been too bad, because she let me hang around with them for the next four days, pretty much continuously.

Then Porter called and said they needed the segment for a Wednesday night live-stream, so I went back to New York and Banks and I edited the whole thing in about two days, working straight through. I don’t know what happened to Persephone or any of those kids after the segment aired. I sometimes think about them, yeah. I wonder what they’re doing. I know that the Philly facility changed its policy about shutting down during school hours, but I also heard that a bunch of kids just left and started living in the streets. I hope that Persephone wasn’t one of them, yeah. Of course. But those kids, they were pretty much goners the day they moved into that place.

DAVID DIETRICH

DECATUR, GA

2023

Mom left. She moved in with a tile salesman named Drake who worked at Drake’s Tile, but he was a different Drake. He explained how it happened but I forget. He was bald and had uneven eyes. Once a week he took me bowling and we played the little-kid way with bumpers over the gutters. He asked if I’d ever had good sex and I told him I don’t know, even though I’d never had any kind of sex. He said did I know how to tell when I’d had good sex? I thought about it, feeling like there was no right answer to this question. And then Drake said good sex was when you pee afterward and it comes out in three separate streams. That’s how you knew. Two streams was okay, but three streams was good.

I went and bowled my turn and then came back and asked, “What about four?”

“Four’s a different ballgame entirely,” he said.

Mom said they were destined to be together.

She said I could stay in our old apartment until I graduated, but I’d already been plotting my getaway. I knew I wouldn’t finish school. The weird thing about knowing this was that class started being fun. There was none of the old pressure. It was like paying to go to a movie and then sneaking into another one afterward. Even if it’s halfway over, it doesn’t matter if it’s something about a girl and her special pony and then it dies but she gets a new one, because you look at it like a bonus. A few of my teachers actually said they could see improvement, but I was in remedial classes, so they didn’t expect much. I got second place in the remedial spelling bee, though.

I’d been listening to the podcasts the albino had given my mom on an emulator, and one went,
The power of you is perpetual
. My new goal was to be a more natural person. I was tired of wishing and wanting. All I needed was a hobby, something to bury myself under, like guitar karaoke or rehabbing hawks, but I never settled on anything. The silents were always one or two thoughts away. I didn’t think about them every second, and I didn’t see them much, but I was always aware of them. They were like the track my thoughts rode on. I used to do Internet searches for silent stuff, medical sites and message boards and interactive chats with silent schools, and lose like five hours in five minutes, but Mom had the Internet canceled, so I stopped. But I knew all about the face-talking. I knew they were starting to show themselves.

After school, I would ride my bike around and look for things to steal. One day I took a huge bag of dog food from behind a feed store, cut the bag open, and left a drizzle from a bike path into the grass, down a hill, into the woods. I waited at the end of the trail for a long time, but nobody came. When I retraced my steps back to the path, I saw a girl walking an old rust-colored cat on a leash. The girl was a silent. I don’t know how I knew, I just did. I could’ve seen a picture of only her forehead and known. She had long arms and a shirt with a rainbow around the stomach. Her cat was lying on its side in the grass, trying to claw off its harness. The girl hadn’t noticed me yet, and I first thought I’d act like a silent, like at the Air Zoo, but something said, Don’t. It said, Go and try to use the power of me to meet her and maybe something could happen. I’d watched the silents more than anyone, I knew them better than any scientist or researcher in the world. I could do this.