The Silent Type

When my grandfather was grown, more so than I, his mother sat him down outside the house on West Street and told him he needed to listen closely, because she wanted him to write down what she was about to tell him — why she was there and why, by proxy, was he. She said a lot; this was the first he had heard of any of it. Shortly thereafter she willed herself into dying because she was getting old and didn’t want to become a burden. 

What she told him about, what she had never mentioned before, was the genocide — the Turks killing her father, killing her brother, destroying their home and sending she and her younger remaining siblings on a death march through the desert, where she walked until she somehow reached California, where she spent the last years of her life alone in that three bedroom house on West Street where it was always cold, and it was always quiet, and the the blinds were always drawn. 

Today it is still quiet and cold on West Street and the house is worth almost a million dollars, more than the life insurance policy the British American Tobacco Company paid out to my great grandmother and her siblings after their father was murdered while under their employ. A million dollars. To live on West Street, in Hollister, California.

The pale pink exterior I remember from childhood has now been painted a dull, charmless gray; twinkling lights suspended in the front yard’s olive tree indicate that the current owner’s entire personality is that of someone who watches the Food Network. If you stand on the sidewalk and look inside, the television will be on but you won’t be able to hear it. You won’t be able to hear anything, as there’s nothing to hear. 

Walking through Hollister is like walking through still air, like piercing a picture. Everyone is inside but you; the desiccated husk of downtown resembles a backlot. Whenever you encounter another human being, it’s never for a good reason. Tweakers hover in pairs like video game characters waiting to be activated, wearing those flat-billed caps they sell at gas stations where the word “California” is spelled out in enormous, embroidered Old English typeface. 

A million fucking dollars. For this. 

When I attempt to sleep in my grandparents’ house, which is on the outskirts of town and wedged within the middle of an orchard which is willing itself into death as it knows my grandfather can no longer care for it and doesn’t want to become a burden, the silence is all encompassing, amplifying the low level tinnitus present in mine and everyone’s head. It’s unnerving, the silence. Even though every day is the same in Hollister, the silence is still suffused with the unknown, and that’s where the fear comes in.

I’m not talking about a silence of culture, though there’s also that; a head shop across the street from a head shop, one of which used to be a bookstore, and two McDonald’s, which bookend the town.

“They redid that McDonald’s,” my grandmother said the other day, by way of introducing the native landscape to my husband as we drove past.

“I know, they remodeled it,” I said, attempting to humor her. “No, they didn’t just remodel it,” she retorted. “They tore it down and built a new one.”

“Why bother?” I replied, incredulous. “Who goes to McDonald’s for the ambience?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head, in that way that indicated she wanted me to stop talking, that she would rather sit in silence. 

Her house, with its wood paneling and brown carpeting and washing machine that smells of mold, is worth over a million. With time, I fear it will be worth even more. How this is possible is beyond me.

End Note: I make myself do this newsletter every week but I couldn’t do it last week, as residual Covid-related horseshit has rendered my mind somewhat absentee. I couldn’t competently think enough to write satisfactorily, and what’s the point of writing if it makes no goddamned sense? (If you were a drug addicted white male in the ‘60s, it would make sense, as it would somehow make a legacy, but that’s beside the point.)

It’s an odd sensation, the brain fog, and it has lingered much longer than the fatigue which originally accompanied it. Words come slow, conversational threads get lost. If you’ve somehow still avoided Covid and you’re terrified you’re going to get it, I don’t know what to tell you. I believe it to be an inevitability, like death, but at the same time I wouldn’t recommend it. That being said, I’ve never experienced death.