Tahoe Silence

by Todd Borg

  Street gave me a reappraising look.

  I said, “Don’t worry, I won’t start serving you wine in paper cups.”

  With Street following in the distance, I took the bike through Carson City and turned up Highway 50 toward Spooner Summit. I left the valve in the noisy position. While a quiet Harley could hide in the woods, it would draw too much attention on the road. In the beginning I wished I had brought earplugs. But after several miles I became lost in the place that all bikers go to when they take a powerful motorcycle out on a curvy mountain road.

  It is a kind of spirit place where experience is all and memories of the past and worries about the future fade away. It’s a type of self-hypnosis. Later, you can’t really say where exactly you rode and whether there was traffic and if there were stoplights and whether you stopped at them. For a few moments I forgot about Silence and Charlie and Marlette and everything else and just felt the wind and the vibration of the machine and the grand, sweeping, leaning turns, left and right, as I cruised up the mountain.

  Halfway to the top I had the thought that it might be like Silence’s spinning. The wind and the motion and the speed pushed away at the world, smoothed the edges, softened the bright spots, tweaked some kind of pleasure center in the reptilian part of my brain and made me feel a pure joy, unencumbered by cognition and awareness of process. I just went fast and then went a little faster and fell away into the pleasure.

  At the top I slowed and cruised at the speed limit down to the lake, then south to the private drive, and powered up to my cabin. I pulled into the drive and parked, setting it down on the kickstand, figuring it was cold enough that 500 pounds of bike leaning on a narrow point still wouldn’t sink down into the asphalt.

  TWENTY-SIX

  That night Street insisted on staying at her place. Nothing frightening had happened in the last three days, so I relented. I ate an early dinner and watched Marlette’s home movies again.

  The first time I had played it, the strangeness was front and center. Even if I hadn’t known about Silence’s autism, her unusual behavior would have been obvious. Unlike Charlie, she showed no connection to the person with the camera. No telltale glance, no self-consciousness, no careful acting performance. It was like a video of a dog chasing its tail, round and round in panic or glee or something else. I couldn’t tell.

  I sat in the dark at my kitchen table, moonlight throwing a cold, white parallelogram across the kitchen countertop, DVD in the laptop on the table.

  The video was the same the second time through. The only difference was my growing sadness at how profoundly distressing it must be for the parents of an autistic child. While Silence was physically coordinated, and she didn’t do any of the head banging or other traumatic things that some kids do, she did have one of the most troubling autistic characteristics, which was a nearly complete lack of communication.

  When the video was over I went to bed.

  But Silence went round and round in my mind. I couldn’t stop wondering about what went on inside her mind. She didn’t talk or write or type or do sign language or gesture. She wasn’t warm, she didn’t cuddle, and, as Marlette had explained with great sadness, every time she ever touched Silence, even when she was a baby, the child pulled away.

  Yet she draws, and she made a drawing about her predicament, and she figured out how to get it to us.

  I lay in bed and wondered about the nature of human communication and how we tend to be blind to anything that isn’t speech or touch or certain visual signals that we’ve learned, like the “thumbs up” sign or making an “okay” sign by forming a circle with the thumb and forefinger.

  I’d read that physicists say that the reason we think there are only four dimensions is because that’s all we have an awareness of. Height, width, depth and time. But just because we can’t perceive more dimensions doesn’t mean they’re not there. A fly walking across a computer screen can’t understand how a computer works, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t communication in the email beneath his feet.

  Are we like flies when it comes to communication?

  What about Dr. Power? Was he correct in thinking that Silence is too retarded to have much mental activity? Or is he only able to see those same four dimensions?

  Despite his professional expertise, I thought that Silence’s drawings suggested a more active mind.

  Assuming the letter drawing was really what it appeared to be, Silence’s response to the incredible stress of being kidnapped didn’t cause her to fall apart or implode into a wreck. Instead, she figured out how to communicate. Her way. With her tools. Using drawing skills that most of us couldn’t acquire no matter how much training and education we had. Then she got the drawing delivered to the high school. Either she bested her kidnapper’s efforts to keep her hidden, or she cajoled or shamed one of them into doing her will. How? With more drawings? Did she get them to feel sympathy? Or did she simply figure out a way to sneak a drawing out from where she was being held, and do it in a manner that someone would find it and deliver it to the high school?

  Either way, I thought it proved she was clever and resourceful. She could scheme and plan. These were all things that people had missed about Silence. The rest of us are locked into our

  perceptions. We are so ego-centric, so confident that other people are just like us, that we can’t see a different way even when it’s right in front of us.

  I got out of bed and put the DVD of Charlie and Silence into my computer to view it a third time.

  The scenes now looked familiar. Because I anticipated the focus of each scene, I could for the first time see other things. It was like looking at an oil portrait over and over and finally noticing whether the person’s smile curves up or not.

  I’d gotten to the first scene where Silence was spinning. She went round and round, doing a little stamp with her right foot, keeping time like a musician. First, I watched the foot, then her right arm, which also bobbed with the same rhythm. I hit reverse and played it again, this time watching her face.

  It was then that I saw the little smile.

  At first I thought it was just the light catching on her front teeth as she twirled. But I stopped the DVD, then advanced it frame by frame.

  I pulled up close to the computer screen, and played the scene again in slow motion.

  Her face was directed down toward the ground so that it was difficult to see her mouth. But on close viewing the smile seemed more distinct. I advanced the video forward then backward and then froze the frame on what seemed the best moment. I zoomed in closer until her head filled the computer screen. The shot was grainy, but her smile was clear. Unmistakable, in fact.

  It was a lopsided grin, more to the left than the right.

  I leaned back in my chair, staring at the frozen image, and smiled back at Silence.

  Here was a communication that the rest of us use all the time. A simple smile. One of the richest nonverbal communications we have. But it was a communication that everyone had missed in Silence. Her mother, her teachers, her neighbors. I’d asked about her moods. Did she laugh? Did she ever giggle? Did she smile when something amused her? Everyone said no. Yet here it was.

  I raced forward and back in the video, looking for other such moments. Times when Silence wasn’t spinning but simply was looking down, times when she faced away from people.

  In a way, it was heart-breaking. Eight or nine times in the video I caught her with her surreptitious smile. It was always when she was facing mostly away and looking down. She smiled to herself. Small, half-smiles, reflecting inward pleasures, private joys.

  I went back to the second scene with Silence spinning, the last and most recent shot of Silence in the video. I found the most obvious smile of all. I stopped the video and zoomed in on the frame. Like the other spinning shot, you’d never see this smile unless you were looking for it. And it needed to be substantially magnified to be obvious. But once I zoomed in close, it was quite obvious.

  This one
wasn’t even just a smile. It was a mischievous grin. A giddy, giggling, lip-stretching happy-face.

  Was she purposely smiling in a way that no one would see it? Was she consciously denying her mother the joy of her smile? Almost certainly, the answer was no. Silence just had her smile circuits wired differently from the rest of us. Like so many of her emotions, her joys were kept private, so her smile was private, too. The doctor said that autism was a lack of communication ability. It also seemed to be a type of excessive personal privacy. Whatever autistic people felt was not shared, not communicated, hence private.

  I wanted to call Marlette right then in the middle of the night. Your daughter is more there than you think. She smiles, she grins, she has private amusements and they’re not infrequent. You’ve seen them and filmed them. You just never noticed.

  I didn’t call. It would be appropriate even at 3:00 a.m., if the news were entirely joyful. And Marlette needed to be told. She needed to see the video again. It would be joyful, but it would also be very upsetting. Frightening, even. Marlette had the right and duty to know that her daughter was not so removed as she thought. But it should wait until morning.

  I finally got some sleep, and in the morning I called Marlette and said I had something to show her.

  I brought the DVD and my laptop over to her house. I wanted to play it on the computer so I could zoom in on parts of the frames.

  Although I’d already had my breakfast, I took another cup of coffee from Marlette. “What is it you have?” she said as I set the laptop down on the dining table.

  “Remember when I asked you about Silence’s emotions?”

  Marlette nodded. “Yes.”

  “Everything you said was also echoed by Henrietta. You both said that Silence was always totally removed and unresponsive. That even when she should have been very happy, she didn’t laugh or smile.”

  “That’s true,” Marlette said. She shook her head as if she still didn’t believe it. “It’s like she doesn’t have emotions, doesn’t care about people. That has always been the hardest part. No communication at all.”

  “I want to show you something. I think that Silence does have emotions. But because she doesn’t communicate the way you and I do, she doesn’t communicate her emotions, either.” I turned on the laptop and put in the DVD. When the screen control box came up I clicked on the skip button until the scene with Silence spinning came up. Then I hit play.

  The scene unfolded as before. When the part where she smiled got close I put it on slow-motion. At the right moment I froze the frame.

  “What is it?” Marlette said. “I’ve watched this scene a hundred times. I love the way she twirls. Of course, it is always kind of robot-like. She stares at the ground as she spins like a top. Like a machine. But I think she somehow enjoys it.”

  “You were right, Marlette. She does enjoy it. In fact, she loves it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  I positioned the pointer and zoomed in on Silence’s face. “She was smiling, Marlette. Look. She was grinning madly. But because she faced the ground you didn’t see it. Henrietta didn’t see it, either. No one saw it.”

  Marlette stared at the screen for long seconds. She frowned and scrunched her brow. One hand slowly reached out toward the screen. The other hand seemed to levitate up, fingertips to her lips. “What does this...” she muttered. “I don’t understand.” Her jaw began to shake violently and tears flowed. “She never smiled. I can’t... I can’t believe it.”

  “She smiles, Marlette. But it’s private. She doesn’t mean to shut you out. It’s just like her other emotions. Her autism makes her unable to communicate regardless of the kind of communication. We’re just now learning how much she can communicate with drawings. In fact, she may only be learning that now herself. But the ability to draw has always been there. Maybe it’s the same for smiling. Maybe she’s always been able to smile and will someday learn to smile at other people. Smiling to communicate instead of smiling out of private amusement.”

  Marlette was shaking her head. “I don’t believe it. A one-time fluke doesn’t mean anything. I can’t let that get my hopes up.”

  “It wasn’t a fluke. Let me show you.” I used the computer to move through the video and stop at the other smiles, all of which were hard to see, and all of which mostly faced the ground. Marlette stared at each scene.

  After I’d zoomed in on the fourth or fifth, Marlette fell apart. She collapsed off her chair and melted to the floor. I moved quickly and was able to get my hand under her head before it hit. She lay there in a fetal position crying uncontrollably. “I never knew,” she sobbed over and over. “I never knew. All this time my daughter has been there in a way I never knew.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I stayed with Marlette until she calmed.

  I was driving away on Pioneer Trail when two bikers appeared behind me. As I went around some curves, I could better see the bikers in my rearview mirror. They rode Harleys, one with lots of chrome and a red gas tank and customized extended front forks, what bikers call a chopper. The other bike was chrome and green and looked to be a stock Fat Boy.

  Even in the mirror I could see these were out-sized men. They stayed in close and telegraphed intimidation. I turned off on a back street and went around the block to verify that I was their target. They stayed with me.

  I turned back onto Pioneer Trail.

  I went through the options as I drove. I could call Mallory and have him send out some officers to pull in behind the bikers. But unless the bikers did something wrong, nothing would be gained. I could drive to the police station, but they would just ride away and find me later. I could stop, send Spot to attack one while I tried the other. But the vision of them using chains and knives and guns on my dog ruled that out. Instead, I worked my way over to the road that runs behind the casino hotels. I pulled into one of the parking lots, stopped and got out.

  The two bikers pulled in and stopped a short distance away. They turned off their engines and got off their Harleys. One was large. One was a giant. The suspension on the giant’s bike groaned, and the bike rose dramatically, as the man stepped upright.

  He was the height of a basketball player with the girth of a small horse. He probably weighed 400 pounds. An ugly monstrosity, the height and breadth of which I’d never encountered up close.

  The merely large man swung his leg over his seat, pulled an automatic out from under his leather vest and held it at his side as he spoke.

  “We got a message for you, Mr. Owen McKenna. You stop looking for the girl. She belongs to the gang. We got a new toy. You leave us alone to enjoy her. That simple. We got to make you feel how important this is.” His words seemed rehearsed. But it didn’t lessen the impact.

  The man spoke to his giant playmate. “Okay, Tiptoe, let’s get this job done.”

  “Right, Marky,” Tiptoe said as he walked toward me. Then he giggled. “Remember what happened the last time I said that? ‘Right, Marky?’ Down in Sac?” He giggled again. “Six guys who thought they could take me.” The giant had a dribble of saliva pooling at the corner of his grin.

  I didn’t know if it was real or a performance. Either way, it was an effective intimidation trick. I put it out of my mind and concentrated on what to do next.

  There are lots of cop tricks that stay with ex-cops for life. They aren’t flashy like in the movies. Just basic moves and holds that probably come down from dirty street fighting over the centuries. What police trainers have done is collect the most effective techniques and perfect how they are taught. The result is that a young punk fighter often doesn’t stand a chance against an overweight, middle-aged cop.

  Not only do I practice the moves, I’m not overweight, and I stay in shape. At 215, I’m lean for my six-six height, but my height gives advantages of reach and leverage. Nevertheless, the size and heft of Tiptoe was astonishing, and the deadly earnestness of Marky had me doing a quick nervous pant. I forced a deep breath as we circled. I let it out
and took a deeper breath. It was a way of centering myself and forcing all extraneous thoughts to the edges of my consciousness. As in every other area of life, the person with extreme focus will outperform people with far more talent and skill if those abilities are diluted by wandering attention.

  Marky had the gun, but I figured his boss told him not to use it. I was not supposed to be killed, just beaten. As such, I sensed the greatest danger lay with Tiptoe.

  He was built like a Sumo wrestler, a great hulk of muscle and fat that perched on legs that were huge and misshapen like ancient Whitebark pine trees. Tiptoe looked strong enough to lift a car and toss it on its back. He had long stringy hair on a head the size of a prize Halloween pumpkin. And like a Halloween face, his nose and upper lip were deformed to the left in a permanent sneer the shape of the arcing slash of a knife.

  I let out my breath and quickened my circling. By their positions I could tell that Marky was the safety, hanging back, ready to dive in if things went wrong. Tiptoe was supposed to be the heavy. I figured the orders were simple, grab me, punch me up and break a bone or two. And if I were difficult, they’d kick in one of my knees as well.

  The three of us circled. I periodically moved as if I were most worried about Marky and his gun. A glance here and there, a shift of shoulders. But they were stage-actor looks, head and eyes turned just enough to make the impression that I was looking toward Marky, but not actually enough to lose sight of Tiptoe. When I glanced Marky’s way, I also dropped my arms, tempting a move from Tiptoe.

  We three went around several times. I wondered why it took Tiptoe so long to make his move. Maybe they’d been told I used to be a cop and they should be extra careful.

  I got bolder, moving closer to Tiptoe, glancing toward Marky, dropping my arms more. We went around again. Tiptoe got in close enough that I could smell his body odor competing with his breath. Either would wilt plastic flowers.