The Silent History: A Novel (46 page)

I made it to Edwards later that afternoon, and we flew in a Peregrine 12 out to the location in Iowa. It was easy to spot the missile silo from the air. Just a disc of concrete cut into a scrubby wooded area. The driver barked something into his headset, and we looked out to see two men running across the clearing toward the entrance of the silo, which was a little wooden shed that looked like nothing. The pilot asked whether he should deploy the long-range Tasers, but I was relieved to hear the command from Durso come back saying no.

By the time we touched down the two men had run into the shed and down the spiral stairwell. We went down after them, one by one, descending into this black, wet, shit-smelling void until we got to a room lit with Christmas LEDs, where an old woman stood in the doorway, struggling to hide her terror. She spoke in shuddering fragments, like, “You … can’t … my family.” I told her to stay calm, that it was not a raid, that we just wanted to see the helmet. I told her what had happened topside, and she was dumbfounded.

It was a real desperate place those people had crawled into. Steel doors on steel drums for a table, crates sagging against the walls, stocked with salvaged cans and bottles. Everywhere the smell of rotten waste and fermenting sweat. The woman’s family hid behind her, crowded on a collapsed mattress, shrinking back against the wall. I could see Calvin Andersen among them. He looked thin, gray—they all did, to varying degrees. I could tell which ones were silent by the way their eyes darted from the old woman to me and back. The boy was sitting in front of his father, who had his arms clasped tightly around the boy’s chest. The boy had the helmet between his knees, and he looked at us with a disarming curiosity. I knelt before him and held my hands out to see if he’d give me the helmet. He turned it over and looked inside, as if he was trying hard to understand why I might be interested in such a beat-up piece of headgear. I took it from him and tried to put it on, but it barely fit. I made a face as I pretended to struggle to force it over my ears, and he laughed.

It took a lot of negotiating, but we convinced them it was safe to come out. We escorted them back to the Peregrine and headed north to Chicago, where a crew was preparing a hotel suite for them. I had already been informed that Burnham’s team was on its way to the hotel to pick up the boy for a long-term neural analysis at Mass General, but I didn’t mention it. It wasn’t my business. I just sat and watched the boy looking out the window of the Peregrine as we swept over the Loop, his eyes round with wonder at the sight of the miniaturized world below. Kind of amazing to witness—you know, to be able to experience that thrill again through a kid’s eyes. I remember thinking that we were out of the darkness—that after what we’d all shared, nothing could be the same again. I guess I was right about that much.

NANCY JERNIK

CHICAGO, IL

2040

They put us up in a suite on the top floor. Flora, Spencer, and the boy in one room, Francine and Patti in another, and then Theo and me in the small alcoves that flanked the kitchenette. They said it was a secret location. They said, “To throw off the press.” They told us we could spend the night and as many nights after that. We should think of this as our home for now. Even though nothing there was ours. Nothing but the helmet, which the boy left on the coffee table. The hotel sent up platters of food on wheeled carts. Fresh juice, fresh coffee. I hadn’t had a cup of coffee in years at that point. I stood at the corner window that looked out on the skyline and drank slowly, reverently. Thinking about what to do next. I did not trust the people who’d brought us to the hotel. I knew we had to leave. I just hadn’t figured out how.

There was a bus station across the street down below, and I watched the people streaming in and out. When Spencer was just a baby, I would sit by the window of the house we lived in and put him on my lap and make up stories about the students passing by. In the fall, with the window open, the white gauzy drapes billowing against Spencer’s face. He didn’t respond to the stories I told him, of course, and I think I was crushed by that. But he loved to sit there. He would hold out his hand and let the drapes envelop it, laughing uncontrollably at what must have been something like—I can’t think of the word. Magic? That memory, as distant and opaque as it was, came to me as something new. It was not part of the story I’d told about myself. It didn’t figure into who I thought I was. But it was there anyway. It had happened despite my best sweating. Despite my best effort. Efforts.

Theo joined me at the window, and he said an awkward something about the view. I nodded without turning his way. I still couldn’t look at him. He’d finally gotten what he wanted. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him opening and closing his mouth, but he didn’t speak a word. He turned as if he was about to approach the food cart, but then stopped and grabbed my arm. He said, “I just wanted to talk with them. I wanted to listen. I just wanted them close. You have to understand that.” My throat tightened. Theo said, “Tell me you never once wanted to hear your son’s voice.” I opened my mouth, but there was no answer I could find.

A man in teal scrubs entered the room pushing a gurney. There was a fin-shaped apparatus sunk into the cushion with bundles of multicolored leads hanging from a port in its side, and what looked like a set of defibrillators.

“What is going on,” I said, the words sputtering as I spoke them. The technician smiled sheepishly as he parked the cart in a corner. “What is that?” He said that Dr. Burnham would explain everything when the team arrived. “When the
team
arrives?” I said. I turned to Theo, who stood frozen in place next to me. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say to him, so I just stared. I wanted him to see himself as I saw him, handing his family over to these people. He looked at me for just a moment and then turned away. But when our eyes met, I saw doubt and fear where I expected triumph. I saw that he was just as scared and confused as I was. Not just about the man in the scrubs and the imminent arrival of the doctor, but about every decision that had brought us here, starting with the moment we first held our children, these living bundles of unanswerable questions. Why were we given these children? Why
us
? We wandered through our days, groping for anything that looked like an answer, each of us living in monastic isolation with our boundless uncertainty. Picking through the despair for some kind of absolute truth. If only our children were more like us, we thought, we might find peace. But our children were not like us. They were nothing but themselves, and it was finally time to let them be. We had traveled very different paths to this hotel room, but now we were in the same place, and we both knew what we had to do.

“They should be here in a few minutes,” the man in the scrubs said, propping the door open so that he could wheel another set of devices into the room. “You just make yourselves comfortable.” He pulled the second cart into the room, and then brought in a cert—a set—a set of lights—like the kind you’d see in an operating room.

I went cold, all over my body. My breath caught in my throat. Theo leaned toward me and whispered, “Take them to the bus station. Send them to Canada. Whatever’s farthest. Get them out of here.” He pressed his credit swipe into my palm, and then quickly went over to the equipment. He pointed to the equipment and tried to start up a conversation with the man. He poked at the keypad of the machine and it made a buzzing sound. The technician grabbed Theo’s wrist and pulled him away from the gurney. Theo glanced at me with a look that told me to move quickly, and then he leaned into the man and jolted him with his shoulder, and the man pushed back, shouting.

I rushed into the bedroom where Spencer was playing a marble game with the boy. He looked up at me smiling, but his face turned serious as I took him by the elbow and pulled him close to me. I tried to embrace him but he was like a giant in my arms. I could barely hold him. He got Flora up from the bed and the four of us slipped out of the room. Theo was straddled to—he was straddling the technician, pinning him to the floor while a woman in purple scrubs tried to pry him away. He reared back, sending the woman crashing into the gurney. Calvin stood in the doorway to his room, watching with confusion and maybe amusement. And then we were out and down the hallway and down the stairs and then outside.

In the bus station I asked the clerk how far away the bus went and he said there was one about to leave for Vancouver. When he said “Vancouver,” it sounded like an animal noise, but I bought three tickets anyway. There was no time to negotiate goodbyes. I just put them on the bus and walked away. I should’ve felt some unbearable sadness, but I did not. Regardless of what I’d done to him—or what I’d failed to do—Spencer was strong. He was happy. He was the kind of person I’d never been able to be, and I could only see that as an achievement.

There was nothing left to do but wait. I sat outside the bus station. It was almost an hour before the police arrived, and by the time of the—interrogation—I found I could hardly put together a sentence. I had no idea what was going on, and of course they thought I was trying to protect my family by not responding. They thought I was faking. Until reports of other cases came, started coming, in. Today I can only talk in phrases and snippets. Words come in waves and seizures. Some mornings I am almost normal, and some afternoons I can’t find the right name for a single thing. This testimonial I am recording is the result of hours and hours of focused effort stretched out across days. Everyone was surprised by my sudden condition. Nobody thought it was possible. A medical anomaly, they said. Until I wasn’t an anomaly. Until I was just one of thousands of people everywhere, losing words one by one until there is nothing left to say.

JOHN PARKER CONWAY

MONTE RIO, CA

2040

Once the kids calmed down, for the next three days I was left cleaning up the mess—sometimes literally, like at the chocolate-covered-fruit stand out on Railroad Ave., but mostly it was a matter of herding up the lost ones who were wandering around town and beyond. They still couldn’t talk, of course, so we had to bring them back to the station and figure out which kids went with which parents. We sorted it out, together, as a community, just like old times. Afterward I went to the Pink Elephant, feeling almost normal, but not so normal that I could just go home without stunning myself some.

Inside, I found a half-dozen regulars crowded around Bug. He was the de facto lord of the Elephant, a lifer who wore coveralls and drank nonalcoholic beer out of a giant gas-station mug. He was staring at everyone with his head slightly tilted, lips tight like he was storing something inside and couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it. When I walked in, Lewis was insisting to one of the she-regulars that Bug had been drinking his usual N/A beer all night long, that he’d already been acting a little awry when he’d come in for his noontime chili dog. A moist-lipped roofer named Garrett piped up, “Probably he’s dosing again.”

Garrett waved his thumb in front of Bug’s face and said, “How many fingers am I holding?” Bug smacked the thumb away and said, “Bone cows. Storm oxygen knuckles fall rousted dry dry dry.”

“He ain’t even here,” Garrett said, shaking his head. “He’s departed earth.”

Bug, the overhead light shining off his bulbous nose, kept his gaze steadily focused on Garrett. Slowly, painstakingly, he pointed at him. He blinked and looked around and pursed his lips ardently and coughed, and finally said, “Foot …
fall
.” He shook his head violently, banged his fist on the table, upsetting his mug onto the floor. “
Foot
,” he yelled. Foamy spittle shot out at everybody. He shook his head some more and banged his fist.

“I haven’t seen him this messed up in a long, long time,” Lewis said. “Not since his morphine phase, when he carried around an empty guitar case and wanted everyone to call him Black Andy.”

I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to drink in peace until this situation was taken care of, so I walked over to the group and asked what seemed to be the matter.

“Did somebody hear something?” the she-regular asked. “Like a gnat, or a fly? Or maybe like a tiny lawn mower just for ass hair?”

I forgot to mention that none of the other Elephant regulars ever actually acknowledged my presence, except to each other, since that bad business with Dr. Ng and the implants. Others in town understood, but the Elephant had always been full of grumblers and silent sympathizers. I guess they still thought I was a monster. I think they even blamed me for the implants shorting out.

“Terrance,” I said, edging in closer. Terrance was Bug’s given name. “I would like you to please try to nod if you can understand what I’m saying to you. Or blink your eyes three times.”

He blinked once but didn’t nod. He turned to look at me, and his expression sort of caught and gathered itself. His face grew livid. He let out another string of words. Things like
cellroids prow lork, pelligran sapination
. Gibberish, but nothing was the slightest bit hesitated or slurred. The way he gestured when he spoke, it seemed like he knew exactly what he intended to say. But something was coming in to overdub the sentences with nonsense.

I stood up, paused while everyone’s attention focused on me, and announced that something needed to be done. And if none of them had any idea about what to do, then I’d drive Bug to Sebastopol, where there were trained professionals who could diagnose and treat what was going on. I began an ad-libbed disquisition on community spirit and personal responsibility, when the she-regular cut me off, telling me to go ahead and take him but not to expect a special medal or campaign donation.

“I knew your father,” I said to her. I don’t know why I said this, I had no idea who her father was, but it kind of froze her for a minute as Lewis helped Bug out of his chair. I got him into my car and we started driving east. Up close he smelled kind of gamey, so I lowered the windows and opened the vents. It was about 10:30 and the roads were empty. I tried to keep Bug calm as we drove. I turned on the passenger console and told him he could play video games, watch TV, check the news, make a call, listen to music, whatever. He just poked at the screen forlornly.