The End of Silence

Fiction

Photo by Norbert Buduczki on Unsplash

He saw the stabbing with his own two eyes. It went down very fast. A flash, a jab, a groan, finito.

He’d been sitting in the playground-park area down the street from the apartment he and his wife rented in Lavapies, Calle Meson de Parades 47, a fun, cultured but somewhat rougher neighborhood in Madrid, Spain. The area was a clash of cultures from Senegalese and Mauritanian Africans to Indians to various different Asian cultures to Spaniards and more. Into this morass Kenneth Wayland and his wife, Jenny, had moved from the United States, Portland, Oregon to be specific.

They’d only been in Madrid two weeks. It had been exhausting: The two-day drive from Portland to LAX, the 11-hour flight to the Madrid-Barajas Airport, the long—and insanely fast and reckless—Uber ride from the airport to the apartment. They’d been together seven years and they’d always dreamed of moving out of the States and over to Europe. They’d wanted to have the American “outsider” experience.

Jen was a freelance book jacket designer; she worked for Penguin-Random House. Kenneth worked for himself as a novelist, freelance journalist (CNN, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, etc) and sometimes fly-by-night developmental book editor (which he hated but it paid the bills). They had the “digital nomad” visa.

Whenever people asked what he did for a living he said he was a novelist. When they inevitably smirked—and their eyes widened in disbelief—he arrogantly and casually let drop about his latest novel, The End of Silence, which was published in 2018 and had garnered him a (wait for it) $450,000 advance, paid out in $64,000 yearly installments since then, the last of which he was about to receive next month. This always made the strangers’ eyes widen even more, he hoped in shock and resentment if not straight-up apoplectic pseudo-non belief and jealousy.

Read it and weep, baby.

What these imbeciles didn’t know, of course, was that the publisher—Simon & Schuster—had taken a massive gamble on his book and in the end it had only sold a paltry 17,348 copies, not bad for 2025 but still terrible given the advance. It had been his fourth book. The main reason for the huge advance was the content. The End of Silence—a slim 250 pages whittled surgically and incisively down from an absurd, David-Foster-Wallace-ish 720 original draft pages—was a story about identity, but not in the way you might expect.