Fallen Land (34 page)

Copley tells me the house did not look like this when they moved in: “It was like other people’s houses. My parents wanted it to look like our apartment in Boston. When I have dreams about being at home I’m still in the apartment. And then I wake up here.” He is unfailingly polite, reserved, self-contained, all of his processes and emotions hidden behind his face, which almost never betrays any emotion, not even pleasure or happiness. Expression of sentiment is unusual and confession of this kind truly rare. If he enjoys the food I prepare he does not show it, does not laugh at my jokes. I’ve learned not to take it personally, recognizing that Copley would be like this with anyone, and is just like this with his parents after I go to bed or when I leave them alone together for an hour in the evening. His voice is flat, monotonous, without affect. It is a house bled of joy, deprived of laughter, and except when I sing or turn on the stereo, a house without music. Di works in silence, the vacuum cleaner itself silent, its machinery hidden in the basement in a soundproofed cupboard the shape and size of a coffin. I move through these rooms lost in a space that feels as much mausoleum as maze.

Because the rain has been constant for weeks, apart from walking back and forth to school, Copley and I have been outside to play only once, for a walk in the woods. We looked at the old storm cellar, the ruins of the chimney and fireplace in the trees, and in the backyard the granite slabs marking the place where two bodies lie.

“Why are the stones over there if they’re supposed to mark the sinkhole?” he asked.

“Out of fear they might also be consumed if the hole broadened out to take more of the land.”

“What are the stones for?”

“History.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“They’re for remembering. And you remember this, like I told you through the fence. Don’t ever walk on the compost heap. It’s like quicksand. It could swallow you up.”

W
E SPEND WET AFTERNOONS
INDOORS
occupying ourselves with drawing and reading. Each Thursday night, either Julia or Nathaniel takes the garbage cans out to the curb. Today, as the sun goes down, Copley and I watch the garbage trucks, one for household waste, the other for recycling, each truck equipped with a mechanical arm that extends, grips the container, lifts it in the air, raises it up over the truck’s stomach of waste, and empties it before returning the bin to the ground, the driver never leaving the cab of the truck.

“Used to be, there were three or four men on each truck, one or two in front, one or two hanging off the back. Someday soon I bet there won’t even be a driver. The truck’ll drive itself, pick up whatever it sees fit to throw away, whether it’s in a trashcan or not.”

Copley looks at me, eyes wide, hazel-green crystals surrounded by milk glass. “Machines are smart,” he says, as if he knows something I do not. We go back to drawing on the floor of the playroom at the top of the house, the rain shifting its aim, peppering the windows with liquid shot.

“What are you drawing?” I ask, looking at his careful depiction of men in hats holding cartoon bombs out of doorways and windows, dropping them on an empty street.

“Terrorists,” he says.

“Why terrorists?”

“They’re bombing things.”

“And what’s that in the sky?” I ask, pointing to a small black mass of lines in the upper right hand corner of the white page.

“One of our drones.”

“And what’s the drone doing?”

“Bombing the terrorists.”

I remember when children drew gardens and parks: a band of green for the earth, flowers and trees sticking up straight, birds and squirrels and dogs, outlines of cloud, a personified sun, a band of blue at the top of each page to signify sky. Children today know too much, should be protected from some knowledge. He turns over the page and starts a new drawing, a room, a bed, a child in the bed, a door, fat legs, a fat body, a tall fat man with mechanical arms coming through the door, a tall fat man with mechanical arms dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase who bears a certain resemblance to Nathaniel, the monstrous creature menacing the boy in his bed.

“Who’s that?” I ask, pointing at the child in the drawing.

“A little boy.”

“And who’s that?” I point at the figure with robotic arms.

“The man who moves furniture.”

The man who moves furniture: who ties nooses from bedclothes, lives in the basement, is born from the elements of Julia’s workbench, who shadows the boy’s nightmares as a mask for his father. I can see no other explanation, given the security of the house. We move freely within it, but any breach, any coming or going between inside and outside, would trigger alarms to bring down the neighborhood. No, I am convinced the monster is a man who may not even be conscious of what he is doing, who perhaps believes himself as blameless as a child.

A
F
RIDAY MORNING
IN LATE
October. The vandalism evolves. If any part of me doubted Copley’s innocence, this new development is something he cannot have done. As usual since coming to live with them, I am up first in the morning, showered, dressed, down the stairs to make my breakfast before the family is up. I empty buckets because the roofers have not or perhaps cannot come, the rain never stopping long enough to fix the leaks. I make coffee, falling back into habitual rhythms, looking out the kitchen window at the mess of muck where my house used to be, the work still stalled because of the weather. I grind the coffee in their slick black machine, boil water in a stainless steel electric kettle, brew it in a French press, drink it black, five minutes elapsed from pouring to reach the optimal temperature for drinking. I would read the paper but these people do not subscribe. Listening to news on the radio, I think about the day to come. I do not even notice what has happened until I open the white curtains in the white living room and see it, all that white furniture pushed up against the walls, and in great bright red arcs, gouts of ketchup sprayed across the floor, ranging from wall to wall, climbing up those egg-interior curves, crisscrossing and crosshatching the white room.

I drop my coffee, hear the mug catch and smash, am aware of the warm liquid splashing against my legs, making brown marks on the white boards, a single drop flying up and landing on the back of the white couch. Copley could not have done this. I go back to the kitchen for a towel, return to wipe up my coffee, collect the pieces of mug, put them in the trash compactor before Julia notices, because the woman gets twitchy about breakages. It’s only an inexpensive mug, white like all the other china and crockery, no decoration or embellishment on it, but Julia will have fits if she discovers one is broken. I bury the fragments under paper towels and food scraps.

To whom is the message directed, for message it must be? I can only think, given the noose on the stairs and now this, that it must be meant for me. But if it is, then why is it in the living room and not against my door? If meant for me, then surely it should be directed at me alone, instead of in the space that, not for nothing, people in these parts still call “the family room.”

For all my talk of the dead, I do not believe in ghosts, not in the usual sense, but nonetheless I wonder if a kind of haunting is at work. From the kitchen I look at the place where the land lies in a dark depression, to the side of which rest the two granite slabs. I have not explained the spot to Nathaniel and Julia, never explained it to Krovik, but somehow the man understood it should not be touched, that to dig too close would tempt and tease an old and angry history. Through the veils of rain I can see the depression has changed: no longer concave, it has pushed upward, expanding, a boil on the earth craving a lance, all that dark river water trickling down, deeper waters rising to fill the half-filled void, drawing history back to the surface.

In the rain’s lull I rush out under the eaves of the garage, stepping on land thick with unnatural lawn, and find a long leafless stick fallen from one of the cottonwoods. I poke at the swollen place where grass will not grow, disturbing that dark wound, and as I feel the stick penetrate the surface, sliding through a layer of fallen leaves, there is a sudden shift in tension, a trembling tug as it slips from my fingers and slides, sucked down fast by the earth.

A BRIEF ANALYSIS OF MY PRESENT STATE OF MIND

by Professor Julia Lovelace-Noailles

Intention

The following text I have written for myself and for any future health professional I may need to consult, as well as for my son, assuming I predecease him, and any issue he may eventually produce. It is a document both for my own improvement and a historical curiosity for those I will eventually leave behind, or for the scientific community, if my life or my work is believed, ultimately, to hold any lasting interest. Nathaniel, if you are reading this, do not; it is not for you. Copley, if you ever read this, I hope you do so in better health than you find yourself at the moment. I know these pages may be painful for you to read, but it is solely in the interest of forensic truth that I say everything I do, my perspective being but one of several possible.

Immediate Concerns

1. Copley

2. Nathaniel (our marriage)

3. The (“new”) house

4. My father

5. Nathaniel’s relationship with his parents

Immediate Actions & Possible Solutions

1. Copley: talk therapy & psychopharmaceutical regime

2. Nathaniel/Marriage: couples therapy

3. The house: quotes for new roof and remedial work on siding

4. My father: investigate long-term care facilities, explore independent/assisted living

5. Nathaniel & his parents: encourage him to undergo individual therapy and sever all contact with his parents

Personal Medical History

No surgeries. Natural childbirth. Occasional treatment for seasonal allergies. Less than half a dozen prescriptions for antibiotics over the course of my life to date, with no adverse effects. One broken toe, but no other serious bodily damage aside from a brief bout of tendinitis in my right foot at the age of twenty. At thirty-nine, I show no signs of menopause. Sex drive optimal, cycles all regular.

Current Medications

No prescription medications taken. Multivitamin, Vitamin D
₃
supplement, Vitamin C and Zinc supplements during rhinovirus season.

Beliefs

1. I am surrounded by crazy people (my computer tells me this is a passive-voice construction, but I cannot put the crazy people before myself; I am at the center of a community of madness, or incipient madness; I refuse to see the crazy people first, as those who define what I am or may yet be; I come first, I find myself, on this journey, suddenly surrounded by them, plagued, followed, pursued). My son is crazy, my husband may well be crazy, and even the woman we have hired to look after our son appears to be crazy. She tells me that history is ready to explode from out of our yard, from beneath the compost heap. I told Nathaniel I didn’t think it was a good idea to hire someone who had been living illegally in a condemned structure without any utilities for goodness knows how long but he insisted that he felt a certain responsibility for the actions of his corporation, even those carried out by a division entirely separate from his own; he also said that he could see Copley had an immediate rapport with Louise and it might be just what we’ve been looking for to help him snap out of the strange behaviors that have arisen since moving from Boston. Although I have grown to like her and believe she is good for Copley, so far bringing Louise Washington into the house has done little to ameliorate my son’s behavior, which remains robotic in a way I cannot help thinking is intended, consciously or not, as a criticism of his mother, because it is my work that has brought us here, to this city and this house that we are growing to hate in our individual ways. (Nor does the medication seem to be having a positive effect. Quite the reverse, in fact: Copley’s physical affect has become, if anything, less human the more medication he takes, and under Dr. Phaedrus’s supervision the doses have been steadily increasing.) Even I can now see that buying this house was a mistake. It was poorly built and poorly finished, and no amount of internal redecoration, of which we have done more than most would dare, is going to make this anything like the apartment in Boston we loved and where we were, I know, happy beyond our rights. Now that the roof has started to leak and the siding is coming away from the northwest corner of the house, I can see how this place could easily gobble up all of our savings, most of our disposable income, and leave us still unhappy within it, trapped in a house in a market where houses are not selling. Nathaniel complains that it does not feel like a home, but instead like a soundstage or series of hospital waiting rooms, and even though I often have a similar feeling, I resent him every time he voices these doubts. A house does not magically become a home. Goodness has to be put into it, weekly if not daily. We are too absent here, or at least Nathaniel is, spending more and more of his life in the office under the gaze of a boss whom I believe he desires as much as he fears, a woman who, along with this house and the weird jollity of the people in this city (despite the flood engulfing them), is making a formerly sensible man crazy. Thus, this belief is both simple and horrible: my child is mentally unwell, diagnosed with psychotic depression, and consequently medicated with pills that seem only to remove him further from my affections, and my husband is also apparently unwell. I have no proof for the latter presumption. These, in fact, are not beliefs so much as truths, of whatever quality or degree. The belief is this: that I am responsible in some way for their illness or apparent illness. Increasingly, I worry about my own sanity as well, as if the house itself, and the land on which it stands, were poisoning our minds. Nathaniel and I used to joke about people who might be “certifiable,” including his parents and my late mother; I can no longer joke about mental illness when my son is not just certifiable but
certified
, diagnosed with an illness his doctor says is likely to require long-term medication. He already has the thousand-yard stare of the medicated mind. Louise looks at him and says to me: “There’s nothing wrong with him that a daily walk in the woods and a little homegrown food won’t cure.” I want to believe her homespun advice, but the rain does not stop, the gullies that were dry when we moved here a month ago are practically rivers, and I have had to change my route to work to avoid the spreading flood. How can I allow my child to go venturing out into the world on foot, even under Louise’s supervision? Bridges have been washed out and five people have already died in the city, which, if we are to believe the aerial photography, is now a series of islands: some small, others large, surrounded by water that is alternately coursing and stagnant, the low-lying north–south highways turning into torrents, the neighborhoods around us a vast and spreading lake. Two bodies remain unrecovered. On the way to work I passed a half-submerged stretch of interstate. An island of overpass was the only dry spot and on the island was an encampment of tents and makeshift shelters. An inflatable boat appeared to be bringing more people to the site. I learned later that those are the homeless who have been displaced from their previous shelters
under
the overpasses and bridges, who had no choice but to escape the flood by going out into the rain. I dream of bodies floating through the city. Last night I dreamed that the unfinished foundation across the street became filled with corpses, a drain pulling all the flood’s victims, the animals who walk on two legs as well as four, down into its depths.

2. My marriage is not what I believed it would be. I love my husband. I miss him during the days at work. I look forward to seeing him each evening. I look forward to seeing him in the morning in the moments before I open my eyes. But the man I want and hope to see is no longer the man I find before me. When I dream about sex I dream about him, the familiarity of his body, which is homey in a way that comforts rather than arouses: he is not an Adonis, not a man of great physical beauty; he does not go to the gym or run or do anything to look after his physical health; he has let himself go since we first met, when he was perhaps chubby, although hardly fat, a man of small stature who had never thought about diet or exercise and who, after the age of thirty, began as so many do to slip into the saturation of this country’s appetite for overindulgence, walking only from one form of transportation to another (car to elevator, escalator to car, moving walkway to airplane, monorail to taxi), eating more calories than he needs but which his body has been trained to demand. I do not dream of hard-bodied men with chiseled features and deep tans. I dream of goodness and warmth and (what shall I call it?)
nominal
attractiveness, the qualities about Nathaniel that first drew me to him. The goodness I believe is still there, but the warmth has cooled, its energy drained by his obsession with what he regards as the mistake our move from Boston entails. Our sex life is reserved but mostly still fulfilling; I supplement my needs in private, in the bath, and even, on one or two occasions, in the basement at night after everyone else has gone to bed, observed only by my machines, who, for all I know, will learn from their observation of my behavior. But even then I think of my husband, I visualize his face, imagine his mouth against my body, drawing tremors from my gut, turning the gears that make me arch my back, sensations I am able to summon more powerfully alone. (I don’t know if this is his failing or mine, or if failure is not a factor in these phenomena, if it is simply a matter of chance and physiology united with behavioral psychology and cultural aversion: Nathaniel has a small, inexpert mouth, flinches when I look down the length of my body and nod, asking without speaking for what I most want him to do, what he is so bad at doing, but for which, even at his worst, he makes me long, warm wet human tissue being more desirable than cold slick silicon brought to life through an artificial power source.) And then, too often, when I do see him after these separations of space or consciousness or temporality, I find myself disappointed, not because of the way he looks or the person he is, but because he returns to the same narrative we now seem unable to escape: the house, and all that is wrong with the house. This disappointment and frustration has only surfaced since we moved from Boston. I cannot remember ever being truly disappointed with Nathaniel before the move, except in the weeks leading up to it, when I could see him already deciding we had made a mistake, second-guessing a decision I believed, and that I continue to believe, we reached together. He now says he never wanted to move; he claims he told me it was a bad idea, but I do not recall ever hearing him say such a thing. My own career may have spurred this migration, but I did not force it on Nathaniel, I did not dictate to him that we had to leave Boston. Rather, I presented it as an option, because my new job was in the same city as his own company’s national headquarters and it seemed then (perhaps less so now) to present an ideal opportunity for us to progress. Granted, we would undoubtedly have advanced along different lines if we had remained in Boston, where there are more and objectively better universities than there are here, and where there are more and objectively more interesting other kinds of work Nathaniel might have done if he had chosen to move on from his company. When we talk to each other it no longer feels as though we are speaking the same language, or else we are using different dialects, always accusing the other of misinterpreting what we say. I misinterpret his panic as aggression, he misinterprets my absorption with work as
froideur
and sexual disinterest, while I interpret, wrongly or rightly, his growing obsession with his own work as sexual attraction to his boss. There are moments when a silent and invisible interpreter seems present between us, when fluency flows once again and we understand each other as completely as two human agents with entirely private senses of language specific to their own socio-geographic and familial contexts can possibly manage. No one speaks the same language. This is a planet of X billion languages. There are, I would hazard, verbal
structures
and
vocabularies
—the things we call “languages”—but the common speakers of any one of these will use the structures in different ways, bending and breaking them to fit their needs, and employ the vocabularies with their own private dictionary of associations and understandings that no one else will ever wholly understand. When two people understand each other in a way that feels genuine to both of them, even for a few minutes or hours (what a gift if they have years of this kind of understanding), it is something like a miracle. Nathaniel and I still have minutes, sometimes even whole hours, of what seems like near perfect understanding. I listen and believe that I understand. I reply and feel as though I am understood. There is no need for further explanation or elaboration or rephrasing. In times like these the meanings conveyed are often simple: talk about transportation, about food, about schedules. The value of understanding such small matters is not to be underestimated, and knowing I can speak and be understood about the most basic actions and contents of our daily lives reassures me, pulling me back from the edge of feeling as though I am about to fall into a miasma of isolation, where only the machines I create can understand me because I have programmed them to speak and understand in the way I speak and understand. In these times of apparent fluency with Nathaniel, I have to concede this is only my
sense
of the tenor of our exchanges; I cannot speak for him since so often I cannot even speak
with
him. I have no idea whether he feels understood, or that he understands, or if he feels as though he is moving through a world in which he is the only true speaker of his own private language.