Fallen Land (12 page)

It stopped raining just after dawn and Copley is playing by himself in the backyard. Julia told him to stay outside, but Nathaniel feels compelled to keep checking that his son has not strayed beyond the high back fence or tried to shimmy up one of the tall cottonwood trees. High-rise apartment living presented few opportunities for major physical harm: with no trees to climb there was no risk of catastrophic falls.

“Cop? You okay?” Nathaniel stands under the canopy of the back porch watching as Copley walks what appears to be a grid pattern, his knees locked as he negotiates a slight rise that runs down the center of the backyard, from the porch to the fence at the edge of the woods. “Copley?”

The boy pauses, bows at a forty-five-degree angle from the waist, turns his head to face his father, and lowers his arm at a fixed angle. Nathaniel’s hands twitch for something to throw at the boy, and he finds himself reaching for an absent object. He picks up a stick, a broom, beats his son’s body until the boy agrees to speak and behave like a normal person. Such scenes flame in front of him from time to time, the two of them igniting, going up in smoke, skin bubbling and charring.

They look at each other for a moment, and then Copley blinks twice, turns his head, stands up straight, and returns to his campaign across the lawn.

“Do you want to climb a tree?”

Copley does not respond, but persists in his marching.

“If you do, just call me and I’ll help you. But don’t try it on your own, okay? I don’t want you to fall, kiddo.”

E
VEN WITH TWO LONG
CIGARETTE
breaks it takes the movers less than three hours to carry everything into the house. It has always seemed to Nathaniel that they own far too many things, but here he discovers entire rooms remain vacant. Rather than looking as though Nathaniel and Julia have just moved in, the house seems to suggest by its substantial emptiness that, quite to the contrary, other people are still in the process of moving out.

While yesterday he felt claustrophobic, today the rooms feel immense and intimidating, looking so unfillable that Nathaniel wants to tell the movers to pack up everything and take them straight back to Boston. They bought this house without giving adequate thought to the kind of furniture they own and the way it would look in the new space. It is only with everything now in the house that Nathaniel realizes, with a surging, acidic burst of anger and confusion, that the spare lines of their couches, chairs, sideboard, and dining set are like dolls’ furniture in the vast territories of this new house. Everywhere Nathaniel looks he has the sense that a substantial quantity of the bulk and mass of their old life in Boston must be missing. Since Julia organized the move, Julia must have an explanation. He calls out to her and after ten minutes of searching finds her alone in the basement.

“Things are missing. They’re about to leave and this can’t be everything. Where’s all our stuff?”

“Be calm, Nathaniel,” she says. Her mind is on her work. She ticks numbers off her packing manifest, opens cases, runs her fingers over metal and plastic surfaces.

“But where are our things, Julia?”

“Calm down. Stop acting like a child. Everything is under control.” She holds up the manifest for him to examine. “Everything is here, delivered intact. I’ve checked off all the boxes and furniture and I can’t find a scratch on anything.”

Nathaniel knows he should trust her but at the last moment he rushes back outside, catching the movers just as they close up the truck.

“Would you mind if I have one last look?” he shouts, flailing his arms. “I have a hunch you might have forgotten something.”

The evil clown looks from Nathaniel down to the clipboard that holds the form Julia has already signed to confirm receipt of their belongings. In the clown’s other hand is a wad of damp-looking bills, the tip Julia has just given the men. Nathaniel understands that by deferring to Julia’s superior organizational skills he has ceded any respect the movers might otherwise have paid him. The coordination of moves and the paying of tips are activities in the course of life that most men—men like these movers—will expect other men to handle. Nathaniel has no idea how much it would even be appropriate to tip, nor did he realize, until this moment, that Julia thought far enough ahead to have cash on hand. Like so many others, it is a detail they never discussed.

“Your
wife
,” the clown says in a tar-clogged voice, “she had that
list
.”

“I know, the checklist, the inventory. The manifest.”

“She checked
everything
off that list, boss. It’s all inside. There ain’t nothin’ in the truck.” He chuckles and stubs out a cigarette on the slate roof of the mailbox. Nathaniel reaches out to brush away the ash, rubbing the mark left by the cigarette.

“I’d still like to look inside—I have this feeling that something might have been forgotten. I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault, you know, but it would put my mind at ease. Come on, just a quick look. It won’t take a minute.”

The clown glances at the ferret, who is wiping his hands on an oil-streaked blue rag, and jerks his head at the back of the truck. Nathaniel follows the wiry younger man, watching as he fumbles with the latch mechanism. More congenial men packed the apartment in Boston, loading Nathaniel and Julia’s belongings into a much larger truck than this. At some point the boxes and furniture must have been transferred to this smaller delivery vehicle, which means that anyone could have interfered with their possessions: it certainly seems possible that various items might have gone missing, or perhaps were even stolen en route. Nathaniel trusted the original movers, two men from Roxbury who were both ten years or more his seniors, who made small talk and jokes and teased Nathaniel in an amiable way, wondering why anyone would want to move away from Boston.

When the doors open again Nathaniel sees it: at the back of the truck, closest to the cab, a small gray cardboard box. He pulls his body into the cargo container, worrying for a moment that the men will close the door on him and drive away, sell him into white slavery and traffic him abroad where he would never be found or recovered, spending the rest of his life assembling phones or computers or processing technological waste in a developing nation, or kept alive just long enough for his organs to be harvested and flown out on the black market, transplanted into the bodies of warlords and oligarchs and the children of dictators. He sees all these possibilities in the eyes of the men, waiting, preparing for the moment when he reveals his critical vulnerability.

There is a stink of underarm and the floor of the truck is rough with grit. Long streaks of rust look enough like dried blood for Nathaniel to wonder if the truck might have been used for some macabre butchery. Canvas straps hang from the sides of the space, straps used to hold boxes and furniture in place, but which might just as easily be used to tie up a body until the unscrupulous doctor who must be in league with these men could subdue him, anesthetize him, and flay the skin from his back.

In handwriting Nathaniel does not recognize as either his or his wife’s, the box has been labeled
CHILD–BEDROOM
, but unlike all the other boxes from the move this one lacks an identifying number; it has no place on Julia’s orderly manifest of possessions. Without a number, the box does not exist. How many other things, now long dispersed, may also have been overlooked, unnumbered, sold on to a different kind of black market of stolen goods? He picks up the box, tucks it under his arm, and hurries out of the truck. The panic reminds him of a day in his childhood when he was locked alone inside his house while the babysitter and Matthew were outside and he could find no way to open the door. He must have been no more than three or four years old at the time—too small to understand the automatic workings of a Yale lock, or to know that the baroque toy plastic key he retrieved from his bedroom would be useless. He had felt not only trapped, but also cut off from anyone who might render assistance, and unable to understand the mechanisms that could liberate him.

When Nathaniel holds the box up for the men to examine they say nothing. To make a fuss about this oversight might lead somewhere unpleasant and dangerous, to a street brawl in sight of the new neighbors, to a shiv sinking into his gut, the fat man finding reserves of hideous strength and pummeling him without mercy so he would have no choice but to submit to their punishments, finding himself hog-tied with nylon cord and bundled into the back of the truck where his throat would be slit even if his organs were never touched. Whatever the precise nature of their intent and underworld connections, Nathaniel has no doubt these two men are capable of evil. Together they have been in and out of his house, discovered all of its secrets, perhaps even found ways of copying the front door keys: those men will be able to creep undiscovered through rooms that will always now feel somehow tainted, insecure.

At the edge of his new lawn Nathaniel watches as the ferret climbs back into the cab. The clown smiles and gives an odd salute. “Sorry about that. See you, buddy,” he says. Not so bad after all, quite friendly in fact.

Nathaniel watches as they drive up the street to the little Dolores Woods traffic circle and back around to exit the neighborhood. On the turn, the ferret leans out the window and aims his finger at Nathaniel, cocks his thumb, and fires off an invisible shot, grinning and then spitting a brown viscous arc out the window. Laughter. Squeals. An obscenity Nathaniel chooses not to hear.

He has not lived in a house since leaving home to go to college. After two decades of apartment living, he feels a sudden and vertiginous weightlessness, a total vulnerability. The men whoop again out the open windows as the truck passes the old farmhouse at the entrance to Dolores Woods, swerving onto Poplar Road and almost hitting a yellow school bus whose driver, leaning hard on the horn, swerves into Abigail Avenue before crashing through the planks of the subdivision’s faux-Victorian sign. Everything is unsteady, the pavement mobile and fluxing under Nathaniel’s feet. There is a reason they lived in the city for so many years and avoided the suburbs. The suburbs are a place of isolation and danger and exposure. Without waiting for the police, the school bus starts up again, reverses a few feet, and pulls back onto the road, continuing its route.

He needs air. He puts the box on the driveway and steps out to the street, staring at the finished houses, the abandoned foundations, the empty fields to the north. Turning around to look back at what is now his own house, he sees the light changing, clouds passing, and, as shadows slip across the siding, the house seems to shift, as a sleeping animal will change its position: the large gable at the front twists, the windows blink, the porch expands into an over-stuffed stomach. The sun comes out for a moment and once again the house stands still, but there is a constant, low-level buzzing, perhaps from air conditioning units or generators, except that the sound has an insistent if modified organic timbre: nanotech cicadas tuned to a new frequency. All of a sudden a blind rolls up in one of the second-story windows and Nathaniel is certain for an instant that a man is there, standing just beyond the glass, looking down at him, fists raised. But then the light shifts, the clouds turn the windows to mirrors, and the man disappears.

“
T
HEY FORGOT SOMETHING,”
NATHANIEL CALLS
out, putting the cardboard box on the hall floor.

“That’s
impossible
,” Julia says, no place for a stray box in her system. “I checked
everything
off the list, Nathaniel. It can’t be one of ours.”

“It is. You missed it,” he says, although they have been making an effort not to score points off each other over trivialities.

Julia leans over to scrutinize the handwriting.

“I didn’t write this.”

“It must have been one of the packers in Boston.”

Julia makes a soft noise of disavowal before whipping open the cardboard flaps with her box cutter.

“Shit.” She holds up a pair of stiff fabric butterfly wings her blade has sliced in half. Nathaniel can see her trying to assemble a rationalization for the failure to inventory this box; the hypotheses and proofs map across her forehead and then clear into a smooth blank field. “This must have been the first box I packed and I forgot to put it on the list and then the movers labeled it. It doesn’t have a number. A logical oversight, if an annoying one.”

As well as several photo albums from his infancy, the box contains all of Copley’s Halloween costumes: the butterfly rig, a foam egg suit from his first year, a bumblebee, a bluebird, and an assortment of other benign creatures from the natural world. He has not graduated to the ghoulish costumes favored by older children and Nathaniel hopes he never will. Gore is not a thing he can stomach.

Later, unpacking in the kitchen, Nathaniel catches sight of his son gazing up at the trees, as if unsure how to relate to them. They stuffed him into a windbreaker when he went out earlier, but by lunchtime he had shed the outer layer, leaving it hanging over the railing of the back porch. Singing to himself, he is always looking up, staring in a kind of delirium, his small body further dwarfed by the expanse of backyard, the woods beyond the fence menacing the enclosed space. The unease that gripped Nathaniel as the movers departed begins to expand, opening into an agitation he tries to neutralize by dismissing it as nothing other than ordinary buyer’s remorse, his subconscious telling him it would have been more practical to live downtown in one of the converted warehouse lofts on the riverfront, closer to Julia’s lab at the university and his own new office. There is street life in the regenerated industrial district, sidewalk cafés and quirky art galleries, independent grocery stores, and a sense of youth and energy that Dolores Woods, with its jarring silence and antiseptic landscape, utterly lacks. Here there is space, to be sure, and space was the very thing they dreamed of having during all the cramped, happy years in Boston, but space is the only thing that has been missing from their lives. In Boston they always lived with the sound of other people. Several years ago Nathaniel listened to his next-door neighbor confess to his wife that he had been fucking his accountant for the previous fifteen years. At two in the morning, every word and sob and recrimination was audible; the two bedrooms abutted each other and there was nothing to do but try to live through it, to ignore the way every time the neighbors pushed the rolling drawers of their dresser closed Nathaniel could not only hear the noise but feel the vibration. Times like those, Julia would turn to Nathaniel in bed, throw an arm across his body, shake him in a good-natured but exasperated way, and say,
We need more space. We can’t live like this forever.