Fallen Land (35 page)

3. I believe that the house is a major part of the problem. The house is driving each of us insane. I am alone in the basement now, and think that I hear a noise, not from above, but from behind, as if it were coming from the ground itself, a churning thud, or series of thuds. I focus my attention on the computers in front of me and on the machine the computers direct. I give verbal commands, I watch as the machine tries to complete them, learning from observation of its surroundings and from whatever it can discover online. I ask it to make me a cup of coffee and for the first time ever it completes the task, although the coffee is weak. As it delivers the coffee to me in a hand more finely articulated than my own, I hear a noise again, but instead of a deep thud like I heard a few minutes ago, this one is a high-pitched whine, almost mechanical itself, like a dentist’s drill boring into enamel, the screech of metal against some softer substance, shrill and wet. I listen at the walls but the noise stops, or my sense of it stops. I look at the machine and it looks back at me, tilting down its head, turning left to right, waiting for me to tell it what to do as it listens and observes the room, the noise, and me. I ask it if it hears a noise, knowing that its auditory senses are more acute than my ears. “Yes,” it says in Copley’s recorded voice, “I hear a noise.” I ask it if it can identify the source of this noise. It pauses, turning from side to side as we wait in silence. “I think it is a drill,” it says. If it could walk, I might ask it to investigate, although there is nothing here I cannot see: the basement is a white space, its limits visible, nothing hidden except the pantry, and I can look behind me into its space and be sure there is nothing inside but empty shelves, which I know I should fill in case of emergency. There is no one here but my machines and me. If there is a drill, it is coming from a distance, perhaps all the way from the next-door neighbors’ basement, but not from this house. Nathaniel, Copley, and Louise are all upstairs in bed. I heard a noise and the machine confirmed what I thought I heard, although that proves nothing except that I am not hearing imaginary sounds, only sounds whose origin I cannot locate. But then there is the greater question, the problem of the continued disruption to the house. Copley has the strength and strangeness to move furniture, but the noose of bedclothes seems beyond the capabilities of a boy who, for all his intelligence and physical control, failed to learn to tie his shoes until last year, a boy who has always had difficulties with buttons and laces and ties, who prefers zippers and snaps and velcro. There are, then, only two other people who might have tied the noose, and, assuming Copley is wholly innocent, moved the furniture on countless occasions, wasted food, electricity, and water (despite the solar tiles the first power and water bills were astonishingly high). The two suspects are Louise and Nathaniel. I should, by virtue of loyalty, assume Louise must be the culprit, except that the first incident occurred before she came to live with us and it seems not only unlikely but also impossible that she could have entered the house then, bypassing the alarm. All this means that my husband must be the one who is terrorizing us, and yet at each new assault Nathaniel looks as wounded as I feel, though unlike me he believes—and is very vocal in his belief, even faced with the newest incident—that it
must
be Copley because there can be no other logical explanation. I wonder about the rigor of his logic. And then I realize with horror that there is another possible suspect: me. I work my way through the front-line symptoms of schizophrenia, but believe myself clear and healthy.

a. I don’t hear voices; my thoughts do not echo in my own mind.

b. I have no delusions of control, no belief that anyone is modifying my thoughts: injecting their own, taking mine away or disseminating them for anyone else to access.

c. I do not believe that I have any symptoms of heightened or altered perception.

And yet the strangeness of the events that have taken place since we moved here is so acute, any explanation so impossible to reach, that I am moved to wonder whether I might be suffering from some dissociative disorder, a derangement that might allow me to commit these domestic atrocities, if this is not too strong a word for what is happening, and have no conscious awareness of my actions. The ketchup is a mystery like all the others, because we never have ketchup in the house. I look through my recent financial records, hoping to find evidence of a purchase at a grocery or convenience store, but there is nothing on the statement I cannot remember, and no occurrence of ketchup on any of the recent grocery receipts. I feel relieved and at the same time long to find proof that it
is
me who has done these things because it would mean it is
not
Nathaniel and it is
not
Copley: to implicate myself is to exonerate them, to be able to go on believing in their goodness as people, in their health and sanity and morality. When I heard Nathaniel interrogating Copley about the most recent bout of vandalism all I could do was remain mute, on the verge of shouting out—although I do not believe it for a moment—“I did it!” I want to love my husband, I do love my husband, but with each new event of defacement and disorganization I believe more firmly in only two possible explanations: my husband is either sick or evil, either profoundly mentally unwell, or a cruel genius, so capable of deceit that he only ever looks innocent.

4. Fathers are the root of all evil. Nathaniel does not come from a healthy family: I know what his father did to him when he was a boy. I know that charges should have been pressed a long time ago; if Nathaniel had the courage he could still do so and, if nothing else, put to rest the memories that plague him. Last night when I came to bed he was already asleep. I closed our bedroom door, locked it, took a shower, dried off, put on pajamas, turned out the light in the bathroom and crept across to our bed, but Nathaniel was already snoring. I slipped under the sheet and bedspread, rolled up my earplugs and stuffed them into my ears. I closed my eyes, I tried to go to sleep. I counted backward from 1000 in French and knew when I was still awake at 322 that the counting was not going to work, Nathaniel’s snores punctuating every three or four numbers. Then, around 200, he turned over onto his side, back to me, the snores stopping, and I never reached 0. I dreamed that Nathaniel was on top of me, inside me, but I could not open my eyes. I touched his back and buttocks, gripped his arms, trying to shove him off, and although I knew it was him he felt unfamiliar: harder, thinner, muscular, his skin smooth where it should have been hairy. I dreamed that a hand was clapped over my throat and the sex was brief and brutal and painful. I woke up at 2:37 to the feeling of a distant thud, a vibration rather than a noise, and sat up in bed. I was wet and my pajama pants were around my knees. The dream was not only a dream. Nathaniel has never done this to me before, at least so far as I am aware. Perhaps he thought I was awake—perhaps a part of me was. But on waking I was alone, the covers all in order, as though Nathaniel had slipped out of bed and smoothed them back into place. I waited, breathing fast, wondering if I should go investigate, until finally I threw my legs out of bed and tiptoed across the floor. Our bathroom was empty and dark, the door to the hall standing open. The landing was dark, the doors to Copley’s and Louise’s rooms closed, the rain spitting against the windows. The door to Nathaniel’s study was closed, the light on inside. I pulled the plugs from my ears and held them in my hand. I thought I heard him typing. I knocked on the door but he did not answer, and at that time of night I did not want to wake anyone else. I was hyperventilating from shock, and as I walked down the front stairs, trying to steady my breath, I saw a dark shape in the shadows of the foyer, or perhaps not a shape but only a shadow. I stopped and the shape moved, disappearing into the dining room, although I heard no noise accompanying the movement. For a long time I stood on the stairs, unable to move, certain I saw the shadow return, shift, move backward and forwards, sway and convulse, although it had an indistinct outline, amorphous and globular, and resembled nothing so much as condensed smoke. As I stood watching the silent shape I was reminded of Nathaniel’s stories of his father, which he told me only after we were married, about how he lost certain senses when his father entered his bedroom at night, how his vision became dulled, outlines blurring, his hearing dampened, voice choked, tongue ashen tasting, those four senses receding as his somatic senses became more acute, making him painfully aware of his bodily position, the heat of his father’s own body, the sharp and dull pains Nathaniel suffered, a hand clapped over his mouth, sealing shut his lips, another one over his eyes. His father raped him repeatedly. I do not think Nathaniel has called it this, but there is no question in my mind that rape is what happened, whether or not penetration occurred. He told me that in the days following such events, the sensory dampening continued, so that everything and everyone became blurred: he could only see his father, the great man and scholar, as a dark shape moving through the house like a thundercloud. My own father was never cruel or abusive or criminal in the way that Nathaniel’s father was and still threatens to be, but that is not to say my father is innocent of any wrongdoing, for how can any parent be completely good? His failure was to pretend, even though I, at six years old, found my mother hanging from the chandelier in the front hall of our house, that mom had left him for another woman, a fiction that hit upon a kind of truth, although I was too young to understand it at the time. He did not attend the funeral and prevented me from attending; all the events of her death and mourning were placed in the hands of her two sisters and grieving parents while my father and I played a grotesque farce according to which mom, the youngest and brightest of her family, had run off to live in San Francisco. Young as I was at the time, there were moments when I believed this might be true, thinking that to hang oneself in the home was to effect a kind of transcontinental migration of the mind into the body of someone else. I imagined mom in a body almost recognizable as her own, but with red hair instead of brown and thin curves instead of round ones. I was ten before I understood completely, comprehensively, that my mother was in her family plot in Portsmouth, reverting to dust, and not living a queer new life with another woman on the opposite coast, and when I realized this was the truth, I began to hate my father for persisting in the fiction of her leaving him. As his own health declines, it is difficult not to feel sympathy for the blow my mother’s suicide struck, but I still cannot bring myself to want him anywhere near me. A visit once a year is more than enough because each time I see him there is a moment when the old fiction gets aired again, with him speculating about the life he imagines mom leading in San Francisco, “in the Marina District, probably,” he’ll sneer, “with her new ‘family.’” I huff and lose my temper and say to him, “Enough already, dad. She killed herself and I found her. I saw the body. It had nothing to do with us. She was sick.” I wondered, looking at the shifting darkness below me in the hall last night, whether I too might be sick, or if it is in fact my husband, as I believe now in the daylight (such light as there is in this endlessly rain-shadowed city), whose illness is undoing us all. At last the shape disappeared and after several more minutes of standing, listening to water drop into buckets scattered around the house, sounds I had not registered up until that point because they have become, in the last week or so, a constant accompaniment to our lives, I heard a noise upstairs. But instead of moving toward the noise, I went down to the ground floor, circling through the living room, the dining room, the den, the kitchen, looking out onto the back porch, expecting to find some new outrage, the furniture stacked up on itself, the food in our refrigerator thrown on the floor, shit smeared across the walls. There was nothing. Everything was in order, the refrigerator humming but no other noise, no movement. The lights in the basement were off, the doors locked, the security system armed. I made a cup of warm milk and drank it in the dark, holding myself, trying to decide how I would address the events of that night the next morning. When I was ready I went back upstairs by the rear staircase, found darkness and silence, and the door to our bedroom ajar. Inside, Nathaniel was in bed, snoring, and the sight of him there, where I knew he
had not been
only half an hour before, made my legs soften, my spine curve in on itself. I slumped against the wall for a moment, listening, still gripping my earplugs, and then went back to bed, although I could not sleep again and got up first this morning, determined not to have any time alone with him, no moment when I could look at my husband and ask what he was doing, why he was walking the house at night, why he fucked me when I was sleeping. Then I realized I had no proof he was doing anything of the kind, except my belief that he was not in the bed when I woke in the middle of the night, that my own body was wet, that I had both a dream and a lingering physical sensation that suggested we had been intimate. I have incontrovertible proof for only one conclusion: last night
I
was the one walking the house, seeing phantoms that might or might not have been there.

5. Mothers, I know, are not always good.

a. I have difficulty saying that my mother was bad. She was depressed, certainly, and, given what I have been able to extract from her surviving sisters, she was also in all likelihood suffering from some form of what is now described as bipolar disorder. My aunts, Cassandra and Helen, told me only last year about the way my mother fell into a prolonged depression when, although she was accepted to Smith, my grandmother refused to let her go, instead keeping her home to help look after their father. “Isidora was the brightest of the three of us,” Helen told me, “and no one deserved to go to college more than she did.” “Such a good student, always,” Cassandra said, “never missed a day of school. She even timed the chickenpox to occur over summer vacation between second and third grades.” But instead of going to college, as she should have done, preparing for a career in any of the subjects in which she had excelled as a girl, she stayed home and looked after her father, a New England patriarch who had inherited all his money, the baby of his own family, spoiled and moody and incapable of even making coffee for himself. My mother and grandmother took it in shifts to look after him, tending to illnesses that were never diagnosed but always excruciating: pains in his legs and feet, pains in his back, a persistent cough, a general malaise that kept him orbiting his bedroom and study for thirty years, moving from bed to couch to the bathroom down the hall, almost never changing out of pajamas and dressing gown and slippers. My mother and father met on the beach one summer, or at least that is the version I know from my father. My aunts have no idea how the two met: “Your father came to the house one day and asked for Isidora’s hand. Our parents were many things, stubborn, backward looking, but they were not inherently cruel. They could see that Chilton and Isidora were in love and our father gave his consent,” Helen explained, although Cassandra interrupted: “You could see it was somewhat grudging. Helen says they weren’t cruel, and perhaps that’s true in a way, cruelty was not the overriding character of their interactions with us, but they were certainly capable of cruelty. I felt the willow switch more than once, and when I brought home my first beau, who went on to be president of a bank and later a state senator, my father escorted him out the front door because his shoes weren’t shined.” My mother’s manic spells, my aunts told me, only came after the marriage, when my parents set up house in Portsmouth, my father driving to work in Durham while my mother tried to keep order in a house that needed constant attention; a house, I cannot help thinking, not so unlike the one Nathaniel and I now own: recently built, but already falling down. “It was the house that drove her mad,” Cassandra continued, “trying to keep up something that never should’ve been built in the first place, at least not where it was, in the middle of a
swamp
for heaven’s sake.” “It doesn’t work that way,” Helen interrupted, “mental illness, I mean. A place can’t make a person crazy. Crazy is in the blood, in the genes, I mean look at daddy, Cassandra. Crazy is a wind that blows through the generations, not just a momentary storm. Your mother had her first breakdown after you were born, Julia. Terrible post-partum blues, and then when you started walking, the manias returned. She was so worried you’d walk yourself into harm that she tied you down in the crib and flew round the house taping and retaping foam padding on every corner, sharp or dull. Your father was beside himself. He tried to talk sense into her, and managed to do so to a certain extent.” “The depressions just got
worse
, Helen,” Cassandra interrupted. “When the mania went it never came back, but Isidora kept sinking deeper and deeper into that swamp until she couldn’t see any way out of it except to hoist herself up by the only means she could find.” The image shocked me, not least because I had always thought of my mother’s suicide as an act of aggression against my father and me; I had only occasionally stopped to think that we might not have played a part in her actions except as extras to fill out the back of the stage in a crowd scene, powerless to revise the conclusion she wrote without ever consulting the two of us. Even before she died, I grew up without a mother. For the first six years of my life, there was a woman who lived in my house, who lifted me from my cot in the morning, washed me in the bath, brushed my hair, put me in immaculate dresses, fed me bland food, and tied me to chairs, put me in playpens and never allowed me to go outside unless I was with her, wrapped my head and arms in foam padding tied with elastic bandages, little bells glued to the backs of my shoes and slippers so she could always hear where I was if she lost track of me for a moment. Her name was Isidora Crutcher Lovelace. I survive her. And what she was, what she did to me, I think now, was no fault of her own.