Fallen Land (4 page)

Not long after the house was finished his parents came for a barbecue. His father scrutinized the building materials and design while his mother, Dolores, kept shaking her head. Her own family, far away in Arizona, had always danced along the edge of destitution, and Paul could not tell whether she was proud or disbelieving or both.

“You were always gonna build houses, Pablito. Remember how you loved those bricks? I could keep you occupied that way for hours. You would just sit there in your fort talking to yourself, playing with your little action figures and whatnot.” Now, lying alone in the dark, hands pressed against the stock of the rifle, Paul can see the way his mother ravaged a fingernail between her teeth, as if she had already guessed how things would end up, how he was going to lose everything, the way society would turn against him, the way everyone, even she, was going to abandon him. “You remember that?”

“Yeah, mama. I remember.”

“‘I’m buildin’ a house,’ that’s what you’d say.”

“A house not a fort?”

“I guess sometimes it coulda been a fort. But usually it was just a house. ‘I’m buildin’ my house.’ Whenever you had friends over you wouldn’t let anyone play with those bricks. You hated sharing your toys, but the bricks were the worst. No one except me could touch them—you wouldn’t even let your dad. You used to say, ‘anybody who touches my bricks I’ll butcher ’em.’ You were always so angry. You didn’t want to do anything I told you.”

“
A man has to be
his own star
, mama. Isn’t that right, dad, isn’t that what you always said?”

His father, talking to Amanda on the other side of the back porch, sucked his beer and nodded as he fingered the vinyl siding. “Plastic,” he muttered. “Plastic in tornado country. What you want is brick and mortar.”

“You always knew what you wanted to be. You were always going to build houses. I saw that from the beginning,
chiquito
. Not like your father,” his mother whispered.

As a toddler, his favorite toys were a collection of blocks made from corrugated cardboard printed to resemble red bricks. Stacked on top of one another they formed walls that stood straight but were light enough to come tumbling down without causing damage. He built uncommonly straight walls for a child and the only time they ever fell was when he knocked them apart with his fists or his feet, imagining himself as one of the hulking superhuman characters he watched on television. “You shouldn’t watch so many cartoons,” his mother would say, “they make you too angry. Go play with your bricks.”

In the corner of his bedroom—the many he had over the first twelve years of his life, bedrooms in four American states as well as in England and Germany—he built forts of two walls with no exit or entrance where he would sit for hours, fortifying and refortifying them with successive layers of cardboard brick until he had exhausted the whole collection, leaving himself almost no room to move.

“You’ve boxed yourself into a corner,” his mother would say. “Now what you gonna do?”

“Stay here. Put a blanket over it.”

Dolores would drape a sheet over the opening at the top of those cardboard walls, sealing her son inside until some bodily need forced him to punch through the structure, growling and roaring as he emerged into the world of whatever house they were then occupying. “Too many cartoons. You get
so
angry. It scares me, Pablo. What did I do to make you angry? Why you biting me all the time? Why you hitting me?”

In the years before they settled in this city, they always lived in tiny impersonal houses that his mother struggled to domesticate, in one case gluing lids from aluminum cans over holes in the baseboards to keep out mice, or dyeing burlap bags to make navy blue bedroom curtains for Paul in another, where the houses were so close together they could hear everything happening in their neighbors’ lives. There was nowhere to retreat, no place of refuge. Every man should have a bunker to protect himself and his family, but Paul’s own family has now fled. Before the foreclosure was final he received the divorce papers and restraining orders, keeping him away not only from his wife and sons, but even from his in-laws, safe in their gated community on the other side of the continent. Now he is not even allowed to speak to his boys.

The noise seems to grow louder, the helicopter getting closer, readying itself to land. The police are coming to drive him from his hiding place, to flush him out so that sharpshooters can mow him down, spraying him with flamethrowers, burning down the woods to drive him from his lair. He has committed no crime. There is no reason the authorities should come after him, but the noise continues to grow louder, pulsing, rhythmic and mechanical. The streets of Dolores Woods were designed to accommodate a helicopter in case of a newsworthy happening in the neighborhood, or in the event of a major civil or natural disaster requiring the immediate evacuation of the development’s residents, or even the prosaic emergency of a neighbor needing a lifesaving medevac to one of the city’s several private hospitals. At one point, when things seemed to be going well with the business, he even imagined clearing more trees to make room for his own private helipad.

Closing his fingers tighter around the rifle resting against his chest, Paul reassures himself that the gun is where he remembers placing it. The seven-pound weight of the arm seems to have changed so that its numbness has become a part of his own numbness, the failure of feeling that extends up from his hands and along his forearms to his shoulders and chest. He is lucid, clear of mind, knows what he is doing, where he is, what weapons are in his possession. If he has to, he will flee out the back entrance and into the woods, through the shallow river and across this sparsely populated state until he is no longer traceable. At the county line several miles away, the trees of the reserve pile up against the edge of a cliff that drops to the river. Some of the cottonwoods uproot themselves, tumbling into the brown water where they lie submerged and hidden, rising as snags. In earlier days they drew sternwheelers down into the mud and silt that consumed luggage and china and silverware, a horde that later generations, hearing apocryphal stories of a submerged cargo of mercury, dredged into life, cleaned, and housed under glass in the county museum. Any mercury that was there had dispersed long ago to poison the river and its tributaries.

The house will always be his; no one can take it from him. He has dreamed of this house since he was a small child, after seeing a similar one during the brief time they lived in Maine. On one of the few vacations he remembers taking as a family they drove down from the remote northeastern corner of the state where they were living, less than four miles from the Canadian border, to the southern seacoast. For a week they stayed in a motel on Highway 1, and every morning drove fifteen minutes to a beach where they sat in silence until lunch, trudged to a hotdog stand, ate in silence, and trudged back to the beach for the afternoon. At four they would walk to a different concession stand for ice cream, and then at precisely six-fifteen climb back in the roasting car and drive to a lobster shack for dinner. At the end of the week they went to a barbecue at the summer home of one of his father’s superiors. Before then Paul had not believed that ordinary people lived in houses with more than one story. There was a maid, a black woman, who kept bringing around a wooden tray filled with glasses of lemonade and a silver tray with punch that was only offered to adults. Perhaps it was because they had been staying in such a dismal motel room, but having seen the house just that once, the form stuck in his vision, grew distorted, and became something different but related to the original, a house of three stories, composed of gables and wings, symmetry and light. It was a house he had to have for himself.

Some time ago—he can no longer remember how many weeks—his house sold in a foreclosure auction on the steps of the county courthouse. Rain was beginning to fall as Paul hovered near the small crowd gathered to seize what was his. When he heard the final sale price he stumbled to a trashcan and vomited. It was a fraction of what the house had cost to build, not to mention all the money that went into decorating and furnishing it, never mind what the bunker itself had cost. In addition to all that, he still owes his father-in-law hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans that will now never be forgiven. He can no longer count what he owes to the banks. On the steps of the courthouse the crowd stared at him as if he were a vagrant or a drunk.

“Food poisoning,” he mumbled, to himself as much as to anyone else. A woman nodded, and then an older man, as crumpled and mud-footed as Paul, came forward from the bushes to offer him a handkerchief.

“Hey brother, wipe your face,” the man said. “Stand up straight. Let’s go get some soup.”

By that time the house was already empty. When at last it was clear there was no way to stop the foreclosure, Paul had held an estate sale, keeping only those small items that could be pushed through the man-sized hole at the back of the pantry leading into the bunker. In the end there was little to sell since Amanda had taken most of the furniture. “I’ll leave you the appliances,” she said when she moved out, “I’m not heartless. But I’m taking the antiques and beds. After all, it was my father’s money that paid for them. You can get yourself a cot until you figure out what you’re going to do. If you have any sense you’ll come with me. We can start over, Paul. This isn’t really about you, what I’m doing, it’s about the choices you’ve made.”

It was stupid not to protest then, foolish and weak not to fight for his sons, but he was in such a profound state of shock he could only shake his head.

“What I’m saying is, I want you to understand that moving out would definitely not be my first choice, Paul, but I don’t feel like you’ve given me another one. I’m doing this because you refuse to be reasonable. I have to think about the boys. And I’m thinking of my own future too.” As she spoke to him, her shaking hands smoothed down a feathery white-blond cowlick on Carson’s head. “I still love you, Paul.”

“But you’re giving up on me.” It seemed impossible that his wife would abandon him just as the lawsuits from the neighbors were coming to a head, as they were falling behind on their mortgage payments, as the credit card debts were mushrooming and the cost of health insurance doubled. All that debt was in Paul’s name alone. Amanda was free to start over.

“I’ve given you
so
many chances to turn things around, Paul. You could have sold off the rest of the land. You could have changed your mind and done something different when it was obvious that this dream of yours wasn’t going to work.”

“It wasn’t just
my
dream.”

“No, honey,” she said, jaw rigid as she tried not to cry or scream, he wasn’t sure which, “you’re not rational anymore. I don’t know if it’s the house or the land or your own mind, but you’ve become someone else in the last couple of years. Do you see the way the neighbors avoid you?”

“They’re suing me, Amanda, what do you expect?”

“They’re suing because you’re being so unreasonable. These houses are a
mess
and you refuse to see it. You built houses that look great in the beginning but start falling apart after six months. Look at this one! Everything creaks, the roof leaks, the whole thing sounds like it’s going to be blown into the air when there’s a strong breeze. The neighbors are right.”

His sons gazed up at him, Carson pale and staring through reflective sunglasses, Ajax lying on the carpet swimming his arms and legs in the air, rolling over on his stomach and laughing so hard that Amanda shouted at him to stop. She never shouted at the boys. Paul looked from his sons to the antiques he and Amanda had picked out together. He loved every line of that furniture, the way it all seemed made for the house. The boys—Ajax at least—seemed anxious to go. Carson was a puzzle, the kind of child who might throw himself off the roof of a garage in the belief he could fly, a great billowing piece of dark material fluttering behind him as cape and shroud. Paul never understood Carson. His face was unreadable, a shifting maze of intention and desire. He was not the kind of son Paul ever bargained on having, quiet and studious and attached to his mother, nothing like the boys who had been Paul’s childhood friends. Ajax made more sense, was less mysterious, more like Paul himself. But it was Carson he was going to miss most, and whom, by law, according to the order his wife had taken out against him, he could no longer contact. If he had money and lawyers, if he were free to pursue them across the country, everything would be different. He would fly to them now, fly and rescue them before the coming cataclysm.

After half an hour of silence Paul moves his hands, shifts the rifle, slides the safety catch into place, sits up, places the gun under his bed. The helicopter might have been monitoring traffic or a fugitive, but not him. He has done nothing wrong. He shakes his hands and arms to call back sensation, wincing as the blood returns to his fingers. Sitting still for several more minutes, he feels his feet begin to throb. The ration regime is too strict. He will need to augment his diet with food he can gather or kill. If necessary he will retreat to the woods, standing still and silent like his father taught him, building a platform in the trees or a blind on the woodland floor, mounting the suppressor on his rifle, hunting regardless of the season. He will do whatever he must to survive.

Let us enter into the state of war
.

T
he foreclosure auction took place on the steps of the county courthouse, a palatial domed building in the French Renaissance Revival style completed in 1913, built of brick faced in pale sandstone and occupying a whole city block. A fifteen-foot statue of Justice stands atop the dome, which is constructed from iron and sheet metal distressed to approximate stone. Even at the time of its completion, everyone in town seemed to agree that the result was less than satisfactory, and the building earned a host of unflattering nicknames including “the Coffee-Pot,” “the Spittoon,” and “the Tin-Pot Town Hall.” Nathaniel Noailles has learned this only now that he and Julia have made all the arrangements to move, signed the papers, bought a house, and sold their apartment. He never imagined living in a regional city—not great like Chicago or New York or even Boston, where he has spent all his life, but somewhere newer and less sure of its claim to history. To his mind, it is the kind of city still uncertain about what it may become and unwilling to accept what it has been. There is possibility in that position, but also a kind of historical denial that makes him uneasy.

Nathaniel himself has a clear sense of where he has come from and, until very recently, where he believed he was going. Originally French, his father’s family has been long established in Massachusetts, while his mother’s family came over to America on the
Canterbury
in 1699, on the second voyage of William Penn: stories of the three-month voyage have been passed down, the ancestor who was a stowaway surviving on pilfered scraps of food and emerging only when the ship was attacked by pirates, behaving with such valor in the vanquishing of the buccaneers that he was given his own hammock for the remainder of the voyage. Nathaniel has always assumed the story is apocryphal but already finds himself telling it to his seven-year-old son, Copley, in an attempt to give the boy a sense of his heritage.

When Julia was poached to head up one of the leading labs in the country and Nathaniel’s company offered to promote him to a more senior position at its national headquarters, which happened to be located only a mile from Julia’s new university offices, it seemed churlish to complain about the location. So here they are, packed, about to depart for a new life in a new city, and all Nathaniel can think is that they should stop before it is too late. Now that the move is in progress, he feels its cold hands pulling him forward, dragging him down. “Julia?” he says, turning to find her as the movers take the last of their belongings out of the apartment and the rooms they have filled for the past decade begin to echo. A sweat breaks out under his arms, his palms are clammy, and sunlight blazes through the windows.

“Yes, Nathaniel?” Boxes fly out the door and Julia ticks corresponding numbers off her packing manifest, double-checking that each parcel of their lives is properly secured.

“Julia?” he says again, his voice rising though they stand only feet from each other. “I’ve been thinking. I wonder. I’m just not sure—.” He can see that she understands he wants to call it off, to make the movers bring everything back inside, unpack, and restore their lives to the balance that seems, in a matter of hours, to have evaporated around him. They have spent a decade creating a life of equilibrium and beauty, a space that feels secure despite all the encroaching traumas. High in a tower overlooking Back Bay, Nathaniel realizes how little he wants to abandon his world of white walls, white carpeting, white furniture, white blinds and appliances: a domestic haven of minimalist calm. He is not sure he can face the chaos of this move, or the challenge of starting a new life so far from anything familiar, in a city where they have no friends or acquaintances, no family, no networks of support.

“Nathaniel, sweetheart, it’s too late. This is what we’ve decided.” Julia takes his arm, draws him close to her, and kisses him, holding his gaze. “I promise you, I’ve taken care of everything. You don’t have to worry.”

“Where’s Copley?”

“He’s saying good-bye to his room. Will you tell him it’s almost time to go?”

Nathaniel wants to shout
no
, to rip the manifest and clipboard from her hands and take charge of their lives in a way he never has. The movers return once more, loading the last of the boxes onto their hand truck, and in an instant the apartment is empty. How efficient they’ve been. Burglars couldn’t have done it any faster. Julia runs out the door after the two men, and Nathaniel is alone in his home with his son for the last time.

“Copley? Copley?” he calls, finding his son standing a few feet from the windows of his bedroom, looking out on the square that is his namesake. Friends had seemed puzzled when Nathaniel and Julia announced their son’s name, as if it suggested some hipsterish desire to embrace localism and history. They had been too embarrassed to admit to anyone else that he was conceived after a New Year’s Eve party at the hotel on the square.

“Are you ready? What are you doing? Everything’s loaded. Copley. Look at me.”

His son turns and blinks, makes a low beeping noise, and marches past Nathaniel out of the room. Without furniture the space is only a white box with two portals on a more colorful world. Nathaniel leans against the glass and has a passing sense of vertigo. He has never wanted to live anywhere else, and yet, troubled as he feels by the decisiveness and magnitude of this change, a part of him recognizes that, more than anything else, moving away from Boston for the first time in his life offers the possibility of escaping from his parents.

I
T WAS IN FRONT
OF
the County Courthouse, “the Tin-Pot Town Hall,” that a realtor acting on behalf of Nathaniel and Julia bought the house in Dolores Woods, a house they understood to have been the original model home for the unfinished subdivision. Of the two hundred “luxury, executive homes” planned, each located on a three-quarter-acre plot, only twenty-one were finished before the business fell apart; another ten foundations have been dug, the cement floors poured, the concrete basement walls raised. These are now empty spaces lapsing back into wildness, an assortment of abandoned archaeological excavations gaping between the finished houses, scattered widely around half a dozen broad streets, beyond which stretches a low rolling landscape of empty fields that spill down toward the river. The realtor assured them the stalled development would be going ahead now that other contractors had stepped in, buying up the remaining parcels of vacant land and the ten houses left unfinished by the original developer. Part of the appeal of moving to the Midwest was the promise of a house unlike any they might have been able to afford in Boston. With this in mind, Nathaniel and Julia had hoped to buy an elegant home in one of the city’s historical preservation neighborhoods, a house old and characterful like the large New England homes in which they were both raised—Nathaniel in Cambridge, Julia in New Hampshire—but when the realtor insisted on showing them the recently built house in Dolores Woods, Julia had been overwhelmed.

“Old-style charm, but every modern convenience,” said Elizabeth, their realtor. “It’s a house with one eye on the present, and one on the past.”

“It feels like my grandparents’ house, only cleaner. Everything’s
new
,” Julia said. “And the yard. Imagine the garden we could have. It feels safe. I want this one.”

“It’s awfully dark, isn’t it?” Nathaniel said, looking at the patterned wallpaper, the intricately painted crown molding and heavy red drapes.

“I think we have to see past the decoration, honey,” Julia said. “This house could look just like our apartment, only bigger.”

“But it doesn’t look anything like us. It’s so dark. And so cold.” In each room Nathaniel heard the sound of air rushing through the vents. It was ninety-three degrees outside and sixty-four in the house. “Do we need a house with two furnaces and two central air systems?”

“Still a little warm in here,” said Elizabeth. She turned down the thermostat to sixty.

Nathaniel also had reservations about buying a foreclosed house, fearing it was not the most ethical thing to do, profiting off the loss of another person, and in this case the former owner had designed and built the house himself. “The house’s
creator
,” Nathaniel said, asking Julia to convince him it was the right decision. “This is bad karma, isn’t it?”

“The man—”

“Paul Krovik,” Nathaniel interrupted.

“He over-reached,” Elizabeth continued, taking Nathaniel’s arm as she led him back through the living room, den, and hallway. “Let me paint you a picture. This Paul Krovik was not a good man. He went into debt—but
serious
debt, Nathaniel. He was sued by some of the people who bought the other houses in Dolores Woods for failing to complete the work as promised. He could have made good on his guarantees but instead he fought them in the courts and he lost. As a result, he lost his business, and then he lost his family. His wife left him. Rumors are she even had to take out a restraining order because after she left he kept phoning her, endless calls at all hours, cursing at her, threatening her. He must have been a monster. He was certainly . . . unhinged. And now he’s disappeared completely, leaving unpaid bills all over the city. He was
triple mortgaged
. Debt collectors want his head. If you buy this house you’ll be doing a good thing. You’ll be helping the neighborhood get back on track. You’ll be giving people hope again. You’ll be helping them
heal
. This house is the jewel in the crown of Dolores Woods, and it needs good owners, people like you who understand how to take care of a house, how to live in a neighborhood, how to be outgoing and friendly.”

“We’re not—”

“Of course you are, Nathaniel. The community needs you. This house needs you. I think your wife sees that already. She needs this house, too, I think, don’t you?” Elizabeth whispered, patting his arm. He thought of how happy he and Julia had been in Boston, the way they had become settled in their jobs and apartment, content with the way life was unfolding around them. His work had kept him occupied if not stimulated, he was making good money, Julia’s research had gained her increasing prestige, their son was intelligent and well liked by his teachers, and they had nurtured a community of congenial friends.

Walking the winding streets of Dolores Woods, Nathaniel understood the neighborhood’s particular aesthetic philosophy, one in which the past was preferable and this country was at its greatest before it tried to tear itself apart in the middle of the nineteenth century, before the rift and emancipation and urbanization. While each house had its own unique design, they were stylistically congruous, pastiches of Victorian architecture just out of scale, the verticals too long, the pitch of the roofs too acute or too shallow, as though the houses had been stretched or subjected to a deforming growth hormone that left one aspect of their shape enlarged—houses with elephantiasis or localized gigantism, houses that belonged in a sideshow of architectural grotesques.

The streetlights were reproductions of black Victorian gas lamps and the street signs were made from hand-lettered wooden shingles. Most of the garages were separate two-story structures designed to look like carriage houses, with dormer windows and fake dovecotes jutting out of steep gabled roofs. It struck him as New England architecture transposed to an inhospitably open landscape. The finished portion of the neighborhood came to an end in an oval at the center of which was a miniature park with a cluster of trees, a white wooden gazebo, three wrought-iron benches, and a few neglected flowerbeds. Immature trees dotted the large expanses of lawn, and past the gazebo the streets cut a gray and illogical labyrinth through weed-filled wasteland, bordered to the east and north by the woodland that merged into the nature reserve.

On the day they viewed the house, a red-tailed hawk sat on one of the streetlights in the territory of vacant lots, scanning the rolling grassland. Apart from the roads, the fields were punctuated only by a regular rhythm of utilities points awaiting houses that might never be built. Someone had made a patriotic attempt to sow chicory and daisies and pale red columbines in the area closest to the last of the finished houses, but it was impossible to deny that what remained was a sign of failure and waste, fertile land lying fallow. Fine silt blew from the places where the ground remained bare. All the finished houses were occupied, but a majority of the residents owned properties worth less than half what they had paid for them. No one was buying. Everyone wanted to sell. The population of the city, after rising for decades, was in sharp decline. Birth rates were dwindling and the whole region was contracting. Nathaniel had read an article that suggested a bill might soon make its way through the state legislature that would propose leasing more than a third of the state to the federal government, either to be run as a nature reserve, or to build a vast prison farm complex of detention centers for illegal immigrants, failed asylum seekers, enemy combatants, and domestic terrorists. We must be crazy, Nathaniel thought, the hot summer wind hurling grit into his face, to imagine we’d want to live here. The truth was that they could not begin to afford the kind of solid historic home they thought they wanted. A simulacrum was the closest they were going to get, and Dolores Woods, however unfinished it might have been, had pretensions to historical awareness that most suburbs lacked.