The Silent History: A Novel (14 page)

The rest I gathered by deduction and guesses. I walked around with them as they moved in. There were six of them total, four girls and two boys, only one of whom looked to be of voting age. No adults, no chaperones. The electricity hadn’t been turned on, and they had almost nothing in the way of furnishings—an old lamp, a cheap folding chair. I looked in the cupboards and couldn’t find any food. Plenty of our citizens have challenges, but these kids … It was a new variety of challenge, and they weren’t going to last long like this. The youth of today are the voters of tomorrow, that’s what I believe. And everyone gets a vote, talking or not.

“Any new resident of Monte Rio is a friend of mine,” I told them before I left. “We’re all bonded by an investment in the community. I’m going to do what I can to help you.”

I put one of my
Which Way? Conway!
promo magnets on their refrigerator, and it was still there the next time I visited, to make sure the power had been turned on. And the time after that, to bring them groceries, and again, to help unload a cord of firewood. They never exactly thanked me, but they never complained either, and sometimes that’s plenty enough for an elected official like myself. After we stacked the firewood together, I shook each of their hands. One of the boys stared at me for a long time, and I stared back at him, and I feel like we both looked good and deep into each other’s souls. And we were both pretty well pleased with what we found.

“Is it all right if I put one of my campaign signs out front?” I asked.

My opponent called it “political opportunism,” but he has a cynical outlook—a tool of the dying Bohemians. I just respected these kids as citizens, as residents, same as everyone else. And if they are a little different, why isn’t that a good thing? A small town like ours can always use another distinguishing characteristic.

So I defeated my opponent, and one thing led to another, and one of my proudest moments of that first year was having Monte Rio designated an official sanctuary area for phasic-resistant citizens. The first one in the country. Sanctuary from what? Well, from whatever. Monte Rio is a place where people can be people—talk if you want, not if you don’t.

I don’t know exactly how word spread, but it did. So we rode that train. We sent letters to their schools, I made some phone calls. Come to Monte Rio, I encouraged them. We have the river and the mountains. It’s quiet here.

FRANCINE CHANG

OAKLAND, CA

2027

The year that first class graduated from Oaks, we held weekly committee meetings, videoconferences with the other schools in our consortium, to set up some kind of postgrad program. Fellowships for them to assist incoming students and work as mediators, things like that. They couldn’t just leave—they weren’t ready. They needed us. That’s what we assumed.

At commencement, Flora took the stage and addressed the students on the six brand-new macro screens NuCorp had donated, projected to the crowd of relatives, advocates, onlookers, fellow silents. I felt like I could just about understand her. At least, I sensed a general message of optimism and gratitude, a culmination of their time at Oaks. It was amazing to see the whole school communicating with each other—it was as if they were an orchestra and Flora was conducting them. For long stretches it didn’t seem like she was doing anything up there, but the graduates and their classmates were still stirring. Staring at her, at each other.

I was, too. For seven years I’d been with this same group of kids, and now they were no longer kids. The boys had stubble, and I could tell some lifted weights. The girls wore makeup. You could see a sort of alarming pucker to their lips. Everyone had changed into warm, nubile, fearless near-adults, and I’d changed, too, into a woman who brooded on her arm fat and who spent a half hour that morning plucking hairs from her neck, nose, upper lip, ears.

When Flora was done, her classmates stood up and applauded wildly, and everyone else joined in. It was the first time I’d ever seen my students clap.

Principal Haskins gave me the next year off. A gift. Full pay and benefits, a travel stipend if I wanted to go to conferences or visit other schools. It was awful. I stewed. I actually did an online seminar to adopt a Filipino war orphan, but I failed the personality test, the one where you try to estimate how much love you have to give. They said I had “low nurturing capacity.”

I registered for a dating site. Destinationheartlink.com. I started by doing some of their online jigsaw puzzles, which may sound like the most despairing activity ever created, but is actually only the second-most, behind online needlepoint, which I also did. I spent hours making virtual pillow covers and then slowly transitioned to accepting some of the requests to grow my Heartlink profile and upload video quick-flicks and personality tests, which I filled out with pretend answers. I created a virtual gallery with artwork and found objects. I got some link-up requests, which I ignored, until a guy named Bastien Hvorecky sent me a quick-flick of himself smiling and gesticulating at an outdoor café in Bratislava and I realized how lonely I was.

We started with basic v-chats, talking like two people in a restaurant. I’d prep myself for almost an hour beforehand, putting on makeup, figuring out what to wear that didn’t make me look like someone’s sad online needlepointing aunt. I sprayed myself with perfume, just in case, I guess. I don’t know. We scheduled our chats at 9:00 p.m. and at 9:00 a.m., and I went to bed pulsing and woke up pulsing. God, he was handsome. He had a thin tan face and his hair was dyed blond. He didn’t speak English, which was perfect. His questions came through twice, once in Slovak in his voice, and then in English, brokenly translated by a v-chat robot:
So you live appropriately California and work concerning dumb children?
Close enough. He was an engineer, or engine repairman, divorced with two children—I think. In our v-chats there was a lot of dead time, and he was as content as I was to just stare. Heartlink would post randomly generated questions in both languages for discussion, basic first-date things early on, like
What is your most treasured memory of childhood? What’s your favorite color?
The questions became more and more personal each time we v-chatted. After a few weeks they were
What turns you into a total horndog? What’s your favorite color dildo?

And then the questions became less like questions and more like … requests. At first we’d look down at them and laugh, but then we didn’t anymore. One asked us to take off three items of clothing each, which we did. I took off my blouse, skirt, and sandals. He took off his socks, pants, and cravat. The two of us just sat there, stunned. When we signed off I drank three glasses of wine and did a five-thousand-piece basket-of-kitties online jigsaw puzzle.

We got used to the requests. The fact that Bastien didn’t speak any English put me at ease. It made him seem more harmless. He looked like an artist, the way some Europeans do, and the bits of his apartment that I could see from the v-chats seemed book-filled and modern. We started doing this mutual self-gratification thing with one of the v-chat programs, where it would somehow gauge how close we were. Masturbation, yes, I hate that word. I watched him and he watched me, and we tried to synchronize our countdown clocks. Honestly, it was really … nice. It was certainly better than jigsaw puzzles or needlepoint. When we were finished we’d blow kisses to each other and say, “Good night,” or “Have a good day,” or nothing.

We did this for months. Then the notification came from Heartlink that said there’d been a security breach. They were contacting everyone who this Bastien from Slovakia had been chatting with—and he’d been chatting with dozens and dozens—to make sure they hadn’t given out any sensitive information. Worse, he’d been recording the v-chats and posting them all around. Randomly sending them to people’s profiles. The Heartlink people forwarded me a message with the subject heading
Asian Plumper Gives It to Herself Hard
. And attached was a video of me, giving it to myself hard.

I cried. I got my hair cut in hopes of disguising myself. I did a lot of things, and then I fled. With two bags of clothes I drove north to Monte Rio. I knew a few of the recent graduates had drifted up there and were all living in a two-story house among the redwoods. It sounded like a recipe for disaster, but that particular recipe was one I already knew well. I pulled up to the house, a crazy-looking thing—it seemed like each past owner had just added a new room rather than fixing up any of the old ones. I nudged open the door, and found much more than a few of my former students—they were sleeping six to a room, on the living room floors, in the bathrooms. It was insane, quiet and anarchic at the same time. They welcomed me, let me sleep on the couch. There was a lot of game-playing out in the backyard. Frisbees and croquet. It was oddly normal.

The locals had welcomed them from the start. Admirers from town came through daily with food and water and firewood. There was enough firewood in the carport to build another house. Someone had brought several cases of canned artichoke hearts, and the kids used them in every meal. I don’t think they had ever cooked for themselves. The food was randomly generated, a confused mass of ingredients in a hellish swirl. They wouldn’t let me work. They always served me first. I felt this immense gratitude from them, a protection. When I first showed up they’d all hugged me, everyone clamoring to get their arms around me, then they all looked at me deeply for almost a minute, showing their delight and also trying to read why I was there. While they might not have known exactly what happened, they could see what I needed. There’s something immediately ennobling about a group incapable of thinking or saying the phrase “Asian plumper.”

I couldn’t stay forever, but it was enough for now. I recommenced watching them as I had back at Oaks. They interacted purposefully during the day, making repairs to the house and setting up tents in the yard. My own personal goal was to drink enough wine to fall asleep at night without remembering Bastien and his deceitful Slovakian penis.

Sometimes I fell into a dreamless sleep right away and made it through the night without waking up. Other times, I couldn’t. I lay awake listening to the stragglers outside, cutting wood and throwing it on the bonfire, playing various instruments. I could hear everything at night. The outside sounds, house sounds, sleeping sounds, and, often, the sounds of my former students casually coupling. It was huffy, rhythmic, greedy. Familiar enough to keep me awake until it stopped.

PATTI KERN

MONTE RIO, CA

2027

I read about the Monte Rio compound in the
Russian River Gazette
, and by the next morning we were there, the van packed with bulk-bagged megavitamins, organic nonperishable yogurt leather, and ten cases of cucumber water.

Upon my arrival, my determination doubled. The silents had settled in the main house, a two-story with one of the least ameliorative floor plans I’d ever come across. Houses should aspire to echo the bardo, our path from birth to rebirth, but this one was all low closets and rooms leading into rooms leading into rooms. Sofas that smelled like cat sperm. I let myself linger on the bright spots: a wood-burning stove in the living room, the bathroom’s beautiful mosaic tile, the large teepee-shaped tents in the backyard where a lot of them slept. When we arrived two girls came out to our van and I was so overcome that I hopped out and engirdled both of them with a profound hug. They were rigid with the kind of passive, long-standing distrust of nonsilents that I’d expected. I held firm and tried to relax them with an outlook conveying roughly, “You young people will soon be embraced like prophets.” After a few moments in my arms they loosened a little, enough to slip away and help Patrick unload the van, and I followed them into the house.

There’s an awareness that guides you when you do something spontaneous, something out of step. Some of us have inner songs, some have inner lights, some inner maps—it all serves to help rechart our destinies. My inner awareness was my own voice saying, On on on. Every few minutes, on on on, for seventy-nine days now. I didn’t need to speak. I told this to Patrick as we drove north through the redwoods. Patrick and I had become involved, but he was in a more primitive stage of attachment than I was. He would nod to billboards and scenic overlooks on the highway and make comments on them. An attempt at bridging. It forced me to keep saying, “Let’s withhold, Patrick. Let’s not mistake vocalization for true communion.”

He turned all huffy. At one point he said, “I guess I won’t comment on the fact that there’re about a dozen network transmitters over there shaped exactly like grazing cows.” He turned on the radio and found a classic-rock station. He said, “I guess I won’t ask you if this is okay.”

Oh, squander. So often we use speech as plumbing. We redirect needless emotional waste and dump it onto others. One of our sixty-four goals was to make people aware of this. To rid us of this petty flushing.

That’s what went through my mind when I met the teacher, Francine. She was sitting on a barstool in the kitchen while another girl waited for butter to melt in a sauté pan. I focused so intently on this girl, ignoring the teacher, whose clothes and demeanor projected an aura of harsh casualness. She was stout, not pleasing to look at. But the girl had a lovely open face, a calming and synchronous outfit, and an intelligence in her eyes that went beyond knowing. Francine asked if I was part of the town welcoming committee.

“I’m on a deeper errand,” I told her. “Which I’ll communicate with them when no one else is around. It’s too important to disclose.”

By this time the girl was watching me, ignoring the butter smoking in her pan, and so I turned and expressed fellowship with my mouth and admiration with my eyes. I said aloud, “Right now we are standing inside the seed of tomorrow.”

“I’m actually sitting,” the teacher said.

“I meant me and her,” I said, motioning to the girl.

“Her name’s Angela,” the teacher said. “It’s probably good to know the name of who you’re standing inside the seed with.”