Fallen Land (21 page)

“Hey, Cop. Are you finished with mom? Ready for a story?”

Face drawing to a vicious little point, his neck hyperextended, Copley shouts, “Go away!” Nathaniel frowns, looking at the fine white skin of his son’s neck, and sees a noose of prickly fibers tighten around it. “Go
away
!”

“That’s enough, Copley. Why would you say such a thing?”

“I’m not
talking
to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m talking to the
man
.”

“What man?”

“The man in the rain!”

Copley’s whole body shakes as he points at the window where Nathaniel failed to draw the curtains all the way closed. He looks out into the dark but sees nothing.

“There’s no one out there, Copley. That’s not a very funny joke.”

“I
T’S-NOT-A-
JOKE
,” his son squawks, turning to march back into the hallway, knees locked in goosestep. Nathaniel knows what his own father would have done if he’d acted like that as a child. It would have been a knock to the head, a palm clapped against his ear, a foot slamming into his perineum and nights of bed-wetting to follow.
Don’t talk back to me. Stop walking like a Nazi,
his father would have said.
You’ll disgrace us all
.

The structural alterations and expanses of white paint seem to have deadened sound inside the house so that Copley is always now catching him by surprise, lurking in corners and appearing just when Nathaniel thinks he is alone. Perhaps the concerns of the guidance counselor are not misplaced, and there are behavioral issues he and Julia have overlooked in the interest of making the shift from Boston less traumatic for a boy who has always been sensitive. There is nothing wrong with fair punishment, and Nathaniel is certain it would be possible to discipline Copley without ever straying into the kind of abusive treatment he suffered at the hands of his own father. He can feel Arthur’s long fingers, the skin always loose, thick veins standing out on the backs of the man’s hands, scoring the space between wrist and knuckles. In recent years his father’s skin has become prone to injury, hands and fingers bleeding from traumas as minor as brushing against rough surfaces, the engorged ropey blueness of the veins standing out against yellow-gray skin. Looking out the window once more, Nathaniel sees his father’s hands reach to grab him, fingers stretched in darkness at the ends of the arms, muscled limbs sheathed in loose skin, extended at shoulder height, attached to the running body, the body of his father chasing him from the house, screaming at him, screaming for his son’s body, for the end of his life. As his father leaps out of memory, a hand suddenly comes to rest on the outer glass of the window, the fingers spreading, digits articulated, like something hardly human at all.

W
hen he has dried himself off and cleaned the mud from his boots, Paul makes his way to the other end of the bunker, opening the pantry hatch wide enough to see the woman bent over her workbench. A high voice says, “Can I help you?” It does not sound like the woman and although Paul cannot see him, he knows it must be the boy. The woman does not respond and the child says it again, faster this time, “Can I help you? Can I?” There is a pause, silence for several seconds, and then, “How? How can I help you?” The woman ignores the boy and keeps working. Perhaps she is wearing earplugs and cannot hear her son, or is so focused on her work that nothing else can intrude. She continues in silence for another hour while Paul watches, lying on his stomach in the dark, resting his body against the open containment door, ready to retreat if the woman approaches.

Her body is tense: head, neck, shoulders, arms held still, and there are none of the usual noises Paul has come to associate with the woman’s work. Instead he hears the sound of smaller metal instruments being put down on the table and picked up again as she makes fine, precise adjustments. He begins to crawl through the hatch and into the pantry to get a closer look but then stops, realizing he cannot announce himself by clearing his throat, asking her what the hell she imagines she’s doing. Making other words on his lips, he pushes air stripped of sound across his tongue: “Can I help you? How can I help you?” The last thing he wants is to help these people. His hands grip the rifle; he could draw it forward, cock it, pull the trigger, put an end to the woman’s life and disappear. Bringing the scope to his face, he finds the back of her head in his sights. If he could get rid of her, he has no doubt the man and boy would leave as well.

Sitting on the high stool at the bench, the woman, although her hair is darker, reminds him of Amanda. She has the same narrow shoulders and strong back, a similar way of tilting her head to one side while concentrating. This woman might in fact be Amanda, come to reclaim Paul’s house with a new husband. Perhaps the boy he carried in from the street might actually be Carson. It was dark, the child was the right size, he moved like Carson, he spoke like Carson, and they could have dyed his hair to disguise him.

It is nearly eleven before the woman puts down her tools and goes up to the kitchen, turning off the basement lights from the switch at the top of the stairs. In the darkness Paul squints, waiting for his pupils to dilate and take in the ambient streetlight from the window wells tucked along the length of the basement ceiling. He listens until the house is silent, the last shower taken, and when all movement has stopped he wriggles out through the hatch and across the floor of the pantry whose shelves remain empty. These people need to plan ahead, fill up their house with food and water for the coming crisis, arm themselves and learn how to defend their property. When the emergency comes they will succumb quickly, starve or be killed off in the chaos, and that will be the moment to retake the house, build a high wall around the perimeter, make it impregnable, and live out the last days of this dark tribulation.

There is a light over the workbench but when he turns it on to see what is there everything apart from the tools and computers has been packed up and put away. Drills, tiny screwdrivers, soldering irons, chips and bolts and coils of wire are arranged in neat order, as though the elements speak to one another, defining relationships through the orientation of their parts. On the far end of the workbench is a six-foot metal case secured with padlocks.

T
HE CHILD’S ARM,
WHITE AND
disembodied in the dark, is the only thing visible above the covers; from underneath the blankets there is a flickering glow, as if a flashlight were being partially covered and uncovered. Paul has the rifle in his hands, the noise suppressor screwed to the barrel. It would be possible to put his hands around the boy’s throat and strangle or suffocate him. The boy cannot be Carson, the woman is not Amanda, these people are nothing but intruders. If the boy is gone the parents will go, too, perhaps even take their own lives. He does not want to be caught, and he will not be caught if he does it right, if he can shoot the boy before he makes a sound and then retreat to the bunker, remaining there until the investigations are finished, the case closed. The parents will be in turmoil for weeks or months afterward, but in time they will leave. By then he will have been able to find work again and have enough money to buy the house when it comes back on the market.

He crouches just inside the boy’s room. Across the hall, the door to the parents’ room is closed.

“Can I help you? How? How can I help you?” the boy says.

Paul shivers and adjusts his grip on the rifle. As he raises the sights to his right eye, his finger starts to close in on the trigger, but stops when the boy continues.

“Can I help you? Me. How. Can you help me? How can you help me? I. Can. How can I help you? Help me.” A pause, silence, the sound of soft tapping. Paul lowers the gun and opens his mouth. “Help me,” the boy says, sounding more than ever like Carson.

The boy’s exposed arm disappears under the blankets before the light dims and then becomes bright again, and the boy speaks once more. “How can I help you? She. How can she help you? We. How can we help you? How. How. How. How. Cab. Cabbage. Cache. Cachet. How can I cachet you?”

From the parents’ bedroom there is the thud of feet hitting floorboards. The light under the boy’s blankets goes dark as Paul creeps along the wall and into the corner of the room, folding himself up in shadow. He hears the door of the master bedroom open but for a moment nothing happens: the boy is silent, no one moves, and then the boy’s father crosses the hall and stands just inside his son’s room.

“Copley?” the man says, tiptoeing to his son’s bed; he pulls back the covers to look at the boy, who moans, turns on his side, and throws an arm across his forehead. The man pulls up the blankets, tucking them under his son’s chin, and goes to open the curtains. Light unspools across the white floorboards, catching Paul’s extended foot. He draws it back into the shadow where he hides, between a dresser and the wall. The man must not look into corners. He must close the curtains, turn in the other direction, walk out of the room. Cloud must cover the moon, the storm must return. He must not be discovered.

For several minutes the man stands at the foot of his son’s bed, and as he does the light from outside only grows stronger, the shadows weaker. It seems impossible that the man will not see him but when Paul next looks up the man is gone and he hears the door to the master bedroom swing shut.

“What are you doing?” the boy whispers, his voice different than before, less formal, more present, but warped by fear. Paul shudders and loses his balance, his arms dropping into the light. “I can hear you breathing.”

As Paul stands up to leave the room he keeps his eyes on the child’s bed and tiptoes backward, rifle raised, fleeing all the way down the rear stairs.

“
T
HE MAN
I
SAW
OUTSIDE
was in the house last night,” Copley says at breakfast. “He came into my room.”

“It was just me, Copley,” Nathaniel says. “You were having a nightmare. I heard you talking in your sleep. I came to make sure you were okay.”

“No, it wasn’t you. He was in my room when you came. I wasn’t asleep. I was awake. You were in my room but the other man was also in my room.”

“If there was someone in your room, sweetie, and I’m not saying there was, then why didn’t you scream?” Julia asks.

“I
tried
. I couldn’t make the noise. I was too afraid. And then the man disappeared.”

Trying to forget the hand he thought he saw plastered against the window last night, Nathaniel remembers what the guidance counselor said, that the boy is inclined to lie. He is certainly lying now, unless he has had some kind of delusion, or remembers a nightmare as if it really happened. It is time to make an appointment for Copley to see a psychiatrist, as much as it pains Nathaniel to think of submitting his son to the kind of analytical intrusions he himself suffered under the attentions of his mother, the shuttering of his psyche into a neatly labeled box, the naming and classification of his neuroses, the tracing of all his problems to early traumas he still does not wholly remember, claims about his father dismissed as Oedipal fantasy.
Yes, of course you think your father is trying to kill you,
his mother would say,
because that liberates you to do violence to him.
He was never his mother’s patient in any official sense, but she used him nonetheless, treated her own family as a group of laboratory rats submitted to various stimuli, deprivations, and hostile conditions to see how they might react. It was all so ingenious, the construction of what were effectively research sessions as “family talking time” once a day every day, when the recorder was switched on and he and his mother would have a conversation, just after his brother had suffered the same treatment. When he asked her why he could not go first for once his mother explained it was because
birth order is important in these matters. It helps me to understand your day if I first understand your brother’s. So wait your turn in the other room.
He cannot remember ever loving his mother; at best he has memories that are neutral, but in the case of his father all the memories are negative, even and including the most recent ones. If he were able to divorce himself from his parents, to insist on no further communication, perhaps even to take out restraining orders against them, he would, but the promise of inheritance is too substantial to ignore in the interest of happiness and peace and the possibility of forgetting. He knows that as long as he has contact with them, even contact it is possible to police and mediate and dispense in manageable doses, he will never be able to leave the memories behind: new memories will always be made, rolling off the line with every interaction.

There must be better therapists these days, more sensitive, less entrenched in a particular theoretical school. They will find someone for Copley who is caring and intuitive, who knows how to ask questions they have failed to ask and who will give him ways to cope with his new environment. It is up to Nathaniel to undertake the research and planning, to find the doctor who will rescue his son from whatever brink he is approaching, before the plunge into madness.

“I think it was just a complicated dream you were having, honey,” Julia says. “Nothing you have to be afraid about. No one can get inside the house. Everything is locked up at night. We’re safe inside, absolutely safe.”

Copley sighs, putting his head in his hands. “Why won’t you believe me?” he whines. “Why won’t you
help
me?”