Fallen Land (23 page)

7:15 AM:
His father has to leave the house earlier than his mother because he is supposed to be in the office by eight if not before that. “What the hell?” his father says, coming down the stairs, “Copley?” He gets up from the couch in the den where he has been sitting, reading his book, and goes into the hallway. As he walks his limbs stiffen, his knees lock. He cannot explain why he feels compelled to walk in this way, but when he sees his father’s face he knows it is a bad idea, he loosens his limbs, he lingers at the door to the den. “Did
you
do this?” his father asks. It is difficult to tell how angry his father may be, or if the thing his father is feeling at this moment is in fact anger and not something else. “No,” he answers, shaking his head, “the dark giant man did it.” His father scowls. “There is no man, Copley. You have to stop talking about the man.
There is no man
. It’s just the three of us in this house. Why would you do this?” He shakes his head, he cannot believe his father is accusing him of doing something he knows he did not do, could not have done; does his father not know how much he hates mess, how he can’t bear to see anything left on the floor, just how agitated it makes him feel? “I didn’t
do it
,” he says. “Look in the other rooms. You’ll
see
.
I didn’t do it
.” His father seems confused and brushes past him into the den. He hears the air damming up in his father’s mouth, his father is about to speak, and then he goes into the living room, “Copley!” and across the hall into the dining room, “for goodness’ sake, Copley, what the hell were you thinking?” his father shouts. “But I
didn’t do it! How could I do it?
”

7:30 AM:
He is sitting in the den listening to his parents arguing in the kitchen. They have closed the doors and are talking about him, but he can still hear most of what they say because sound travels in this new house in ways it never did in the Boston apartment. They both conclude he must have moved the furniture and arranged the chrysanthemum blossoms on the floor—that is not the point of their dispute. His mother contends he must have done it in his sleep, and therefore he could not have been aware of what he was doing, whereas his father insists it had to be
intentional
, because there is too much
purpose
and
design
in the rearrangement. The furniture is all on industrial casters with little locks, so it is possible, he now understands, that he might have been able to move everything on his own. He wonders if his parents are right. In sleep things happen that are often difficult to remember on waking. From the events on their first night in the house he has no memory of getting out of bed and going outside. He only remembers the man picking him up on the lawn, and being so terrified of waking up outdoors in the arms of a man he did not know, whom he could only, for that moment, believe was his father in disguise, that he had not dared to move: he could only play dead. It is possible, though, that if he does not remember how he got outside on the first night, then there might be other events during the hours he assumed he was asleep that are also unknown to him.

7:40 AM:
While his parents argue, clanging bowls and silverware and turning up the radio to mask their voices, he unlocks the casters on the couch in the den and tries to push it: the thing is heavy but he manages to put it back where it is supposed to live. If he can do this, then he might have been able to move every piece of furniture on the ground floor. Not wanting his parents to have proof that he is capable of rearranging the house, he pushes the couch back up against the wall and locks the casters in place, lies down on the couch, and returns to his book, to the story of a young boy who is a genius and his journey to a distant planet to rescue his father. His own father has said the book is for older children, and is a religious parable, but this is not what makes the book interesting. What intrigues him are the discussions about time: the single point, the straight line, the box, the cube, the first three dimensions, the fourth dimension that is time itself, the possibility of interstellar and intertemporal travel. He has spent hours making careful drawings on graph paper of the fourth dimension, and is thinking about these forms again, his mind wandering as he reads, wandering so far that he loses sense of his body and wonders again where he is since he does not feel as though he is lying on this couch with a book in his hands, when his father opens the kitchen door and calls out to him across the hall, “Good-bye, Copley, have a good day at school. I’ll see you tonight.” He calls back, “Good-bye,” without looking away from his book.

8:30 AM:
As usual, his mother is running late. She is on the phone to one of her graduate assistants, apologizing and explaining that she needs
an army of virtual helpers just to get out the door in the morning
. They have only fifteen minutes before school starts. He watches as the two men next door, in the house north of their own, say good-bye. One of the men is white: he reverses down the driveway in a car and pauses to speak to the other man, who is brown and stands in the driveway holding an umbrella in one hand with a little girl clutched in his other arm; the girl is also brown, but not as brown as the man. It is the first time he has seen the girl. The white man leans out the car window and kisses the little girl, whom the brown man holds down to the white man. After the brown man looks around at the other houses he leans over to kiss the white man. It would be nice to meet the girl and the men and he wonders why they have not met them already.

8:42 AM:
His mother taps in the code for the alarm. As he waits for her to do this he thinks he sees movement from the doorway to the basement, as if the basement door has just swung open or shut, but it is too late to say anything. His mother locks the door behind her and they run through the rain to the garage. While his mother is unlocking the door to the garage he looks back at the kitchen window and sees the man inside the house, standing at the alarm console, pushing in the code. “The man—” he says to his mother, but she pulls him into the garage before he can continue. “We’re going to be late and Mrs. Pitt won’t be happy,” his mother says. “But the man was turning off the alarm,” he says. His mother looks at him and sighs and pulls the car out of the garage, reversing down the driveway, past the house that is no longer protected because the man is already inside and knows all their secrets.

8:47 AM:
The first bell rang two minutes ago. They are still several blocks from the school, but there has been an accident on the wet gray roads and traffic is at a standstill as hail begins to fall, turning everything white. “Dammit, the car,” his mother says. He tries to forget about the man. This is not difficult because the thought of the approaching school day preoccupies him, making him feel sick, as though he might vomit. In Boston, he never dreaded going to school because school was where he wanted to be; it was where he saw friends and where he learned new things. In this new school he learns nothing and has only one friend. “I’ll have to pull over until it passes or your father will kill me.” “Will he really kill you?” he asks. His mother looks alarmed and shakes her head. “No, honey, it was a figure of speech.” “A what?” “A poor choice of words. Your father would never kill anyone.”

8:59 AM:
They arrive at school. He pleads with his mother to come inside to explain why he is late, that it was not his fault. She parks the car and runs into the building, shakes water from her jacket, and speaks to Mrs. Taylor, the guidance counselor, who says, “A tardy is a tardy, even when it isn’t the fault of the child.” He does not think he will be going to this school again after the winter break. He overheard his mother tell someone on the phone that she does not approve of the school, but feels unable to take him out because they have failed to make any other plans and it would be bad for his father’s career if they enrolled him somewhere else. “Why would it be bad for dad’s career?” he asked his mother. “Because his company runs the school and all the executives send their children to company schools,” she said, and then, in a whisper, “or at least that’s what he tells me. Don’t worry. It won’t be forever.”

9:05 AM:
He has missed the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of “America the Beautiful” and Mrs. Pitt is already ten minutes into math, which is the first period of the day. They are still working on adding and subtracting and fractions, and are spending the week on word problems, which most of his classmates find difficult. No one else in class knows how to multiply or divide and when he has asked Mrs. Pitt about when they will be doing multiplication and division, she has explained that those topics will only be covered next year—the first half of the year on multiplication tables, the second half on division. The delay makes no sense to him because he is comfortable with numbers, understanding them as if they were people, boys and girls. One is a boy, two is a girl, three is a boy, four a boy, five a boy, six a girl, seven a boy (his own age), eight a girl, nine a girl, ten a boy, eleven a boy, twelve a girl, thirteen a boy, fourteen a boy, and so on. Ask him any number and he can tell you if it is a boy or a girl. 312 is a girl. 1791 is a boy. 1829 is a girl. When Mrs. Pitt sees him come in the door she frowns. Like the students, she wears a uniform: khaki skirt, blue shirt, red wool sweater: “a grown-up patriot for all of you little patriots to emulate,” she tells them. “Have you been to the office?” she asks. “Yes, Mrs. Pitt,” he says. “Take your seat, Copley,” she says, and he finds his place in the desk at the very back of the first row. His name is written on a piece of yellow paper that is supposed to look like a ruler, but to his mind it has been poorly drawn and the “o” has been left out of his last name. When he told Mrs. Pitt his name was misspelled, she said a new sign would be made for his desk, but one has never appeared and he knows he will spend the semester labeled with a name not his own. Although the day is dark and rain is pouring outside, the blinds have been lowered over the bank of windows that extends the whole length of the classroom: the slats are open but the effect is deadening. In the adjacent wing, he can see other classrooms with their blinds also lowered, the lights on inside. The room smells damp, and next to him sits a girl called Emily who has blonde hair that looks gray near her scalp. She has pinkish-gray skin and has missed several days of school since he first arrived. He suspects she is slowly dying because she always smells like rotten eggs and her skin and hair are always gray; she is rotting from the inside out and no one is bothering to notice but him. Of the twenty students in his class, he knows all their names, and almost nothing about any one of them except Joslyn, who sits in front of him; not only is she the only black person in the whole school apart from the lunch ladies, she is also his only friend, although he is not even sure if they are actually friends. Every day Mrs. Pitt finds an excuse to say to the two of them something like, “There, Joslyn and Copley, right where I can keep an eye on you two,” as if they have done something wrong. Joslyn is the only person who has ever spoken to him at recess, because, he thinks, no one speaks to her: the two outsiders of the classroom, thrown together by virtue of being ignored by everyone else. He understands that if he is going to have a “play date,” Joslyn is the only possible candidate. They are the two smartest students in class and this, he realizes, is the reason Mrs. Pitt fears them. They know better than to speak before lunch. Speaking is never allowed unless Mrs. Pitt calls on them when they raise their hands to answer a question. Speaking is not allowed during water and bathroom breaks because they might disturb other classrooms. Speaking is only allowed at lunch and recess. In his Boston school there was group time and free periods when you could speak to each other and work on creative projects. At the Pinwheel Academy there is no group time and no free periods. He looks up at the black glass hemisphere in the center of the ceiling but cannot tell whether there is only one camera monitoring the room or a number of cameras nesting inside. Sometimes he hears a whirring, churning noise and imagines it is the camera turning, focusing, taking a picture of him and his work.

10:00 AM:
Mrs. Pitt ends the math lesson and asks them to put away their pencils before passing their work to the front of each row. When she has collected the worksheets she asks them to stand next to their desks. “Fingers on lips,” she says, placing her right index finger on her closed mouth with the tip of the finger pointing up to her nose. They all mimic her. “Row One, please line up in the hall.” The five of them file out of the room and form a line outside. The first person in the row, a boy called Ethan, who is Row Monitor, stops next to the fire extinguisher, which functions as the guide for the row that is called to go first. The next row that comes out, which happens to be Row Three, lines up next to Row One; Row Four lines up behind Row One, and Row Two, punished because Emily passed forward her work before putting away her pencil, lines up behind Row Three. Mrs. Pitt takes her place at the head of the two lines, finger still on her lips, as their fingers are still on their lips, and leads them down the hall to the restrooms. Four boys and four girls are allowed in the restrooms at any one time. He and Ethan and two other boys, Austin and Max, are the first boys in. There are four urinals and four stalls, but the stalls do not have doors. He goes to a stall while the other three boys line up at the urinals. He has tried using urinals but finds he cannot urinate with anyone else present. Although they are forbidden to speak, the other boys whisper words about him he does not understand: they are words he does not know and does not recognize. He gets parts of the words, individual sounds, but cannot piece together any meaning except the malicious, teasing sense he gets from the way the words are whispered. He stands in the stall and is only able to urinate once Ethan, Austin, and Max have left and as the next boys are coming in. He washes his hands and sees that the others are Todd and Steven and Joe, who hiss similar words at him as he leaves the restroom, glancing up at the black glass hemisphere above the door. When he comes out of the restroom he pauses at the drinking fountain, tastes the warm chlorinated water on his tongue, and goes to stand at the rear of the line. Mrs. Pitt comes to stand next to him. She puts a hand on his shoulder, presses down on his body, and says, “
You
took a long time, didn’t you?” In Boston, he once went into a girls’ restroom at school by mistake and was astonished to see no urinals, only stalls. It would be easier to be a girl at the Pinwheel Academy. At his school in Boston no one ever said anything about him using the stalls, which had doors as well as locks, instead of the urinals. He does not understand why his parents have sent him to this school, but it seems to be a form of punishment.