Fallen Land (10 page)

Until this year, every night in summer I walked the street from my home to the last of Krovik’s finished houses, swinging a flashlight at my side so the people indoors could tell I wasn’t trying to pass unnoticed. I did not want the police called with reports of a prowler, knowing what my neighbors would see, a shadow grown huge by the light of the moon, a
spook
—and I knew when they spoke it they would mean more than just a
ghost
, would hiss that ugly word with the dark bellows of history in their lungs. People like that, they see darkness everywhere and try to create a world without night, believing that light is the only source of good. They do not know the beauty of blackness, the glory of the dark earth. Their lights are everywhere, flooding gardens and houses, blocking out stars. For the first time, I knew summer evenings with no fireflies, as though the creatures saw the light of those blazing houses and realized they were outmatched.

Now, I light my candle in this house I am no longer meant to occupy, condemned for committing the crime of surviving the development of the city around it. I clutch curtains tight where they meet and hope I will be allowed to sleep undisturbed for another eight-hour stretch. I am not leaving my house. I will not leave it until the city comes to tear it down, and even then only in a body bag, suffering under its collapse, repenting for the sale that brought all this to pass, for my lack of faith in the land and what it might still bring forth. I walk the planks, slip off my shoes and peel out of my socks to let my feet feel the boards worn smooth by the passage of lives, boards warm in this late summer night, as if the wood has its own life force, interrupted by the felling and planing but still pulsing a latent rhythm, waiting to be reawakened by purpose: wood put to use with function and utility, practicality and reason, instead of the willful clearing of trees to improve the view or increase the property value, to make room for swimming pools and decking made from lumber shipped across thousands of miles. No chopping down and using the odd trunk to make gingerbread boards for dishonest houses. That was never the spirit of this land. The photos from Grandma Lottie and Grandpa John’s days record the trees I have known all my life. They are more intact, with fewer limbs missing from the high winds and tornado days that have intervened, but they are recognizably the same. Most of them are now gone to the Krovik chainsaw, the cottonwoods of history brought down. Only the great body of woods remains, and for that I must be grateful: that Krovik did not penetrate the heart, satisfying himself with dismemberment and decapitation. The woods can no longer think or move, and yet they will go on beating in their hard-diminished way, dull-witted but living.

I
n the middle of their three-day drive from the East Coast, buffeted by semi-trucks and four-wheel-drive sport utility vehicles through rain so dense and blinding they eventually cannot see the cars in front of them, they are forced to break for the second night sooner than planned in a tiny town ten miles off the interstate where the only motel is all but full of truckers. Although he has allowed himself to be persuaded by Julia this is the right decision, that their futures lie somewhere beyond—far beyond—the city where they have built their lives together so far, Nathaniel can’t escape the feeling that the move is not just idiotic but potentially catastrophic. The feeling, he thinks, handing over his credit card to one of the two fat girls behind the desk at reception (the other one watches the local weather report, which forecasts more of the same, “
Biblical rain
,” the meteorologist shouts into the camera, eyes goggling), is rooted not only in a negative reaction to moving away from his hometown, or the panic he feels at transferring to a more senior position in his company, but in the new house itself and in the prospect of living out a span of his life on the margins of a provincial city. He is unprepared for suburban life. He does not speak the language of lawns and yard maintenance, of barbecues and block parties and Independence Day picnics, soccer and Little League and all the social pressures he imagines will accompany their days in Dolores Woods. His parents never taught him that language. They did their best, he knows, to be sure he had no chance to learn it.

With the keys in their possession, and the time until their arrival at the new house measurable in hours rather than days or weeks, the three of them sharing a motel room last redecorated twenty years ago, the curtains and bedspreads reeking of cigarette smoke even though it is supposed to be a non-smoking room, the crunch of the ice dispenser outside their door pulling him out of sleep every half hour as the party of truckers down the hall stumbles along to fill up their buckets for another round of beers, Nathaniel feels feverish with doubt and regret, holding his breath as three men laugh outside in the hall, cigarette smoke filtering under the door, ice cubes rattling into cheap plastic, stories of sexual conquests stage-whispered among the men and audible in the room. He wants to tell them to shut up and go back to bed, to warn them they are disturbing the sleep of his wife and child, but he fears what they might do to a man as small and obviously weak as he is. He picks up the phone to complain to the front desk but it rings and rings and no one answers.

T
HE HOUSE HAS BEEN
EMPTY
for some time, and their realtor, Elizabeth, warned them it would need to be cleaned before their arrival. Remembering the many rooms, they decided to hire professionals. Julia, who, after her mother’s suicide, grew up under the distracted care of her father in a subsiding eighteenth-century house outside of Portsmouth, has always been fanatical about cleanliness in a way that Nathaniel is not. This morning she showers twice—once before breakfast at the diner across the street from the motel, once after. “It was filthy,” she says as they pull back onto the interstate, “it made my skin crawl. Didn’t you want to shower again?” There are times when Nathaniel wonders, noticing his wife’s occasional tendency toward compulsive behavior, whether Julia might have inherited some aspect of her mother’s mental illness.

Approaching the city from the east, they cross a bridge over a river that makes its way through several states in its course from the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The river is high, out of its banks around the airport, flooding the parking lot of a waterfront restaurant and swamping the marina. Despite this, the city does not look as bleak as Nathaniel remembers: the new baseball stadium gleams and a handful of skyscrapers suggest larger ambitions. In the last fifteen years the city limits have expanded five miles to the west, from 144th to 204th Street, with countless residential subdivisions enveloping outlying small towns. The city is now wider than Manhattan is long by more than three miles, occupying almost four times the total land area, but has only half a million residents—twice that if the even larger “metropolitan area” of farming communities is included, homesteads laid out in this stretch of country between two rivers, a territory so resolutely unmetropolitan the designation as such would be laughable, Nathaniel thinks, if it were not at once both so desperate and so patronizing.

As the highway turns into Poplar Road, shooting east to west in a straight line, the polish of the riverfront fades. Most of the downtown area is a patchwork of the new and the recently abandoned: buildings only twenty or thirty years old, which must have glistened in their day, are now vacant, the windows boarded up or smashed,
OFFICE SPACE
and
FOR RENT
signs covered in graffiti of floating genitalia and cartoons of sexual couplings, captioned with language that makes Nathaniel want to cover his son’s eyes. For a mile or more Poplar cuts through urban wastelands at the fringe of the downtown before crossing the major six-lane highway running north and south, then climbs a hill past the glass and steel conglomeration of buildings that makes up the national headquarters of Nathaniel’s company.

“There it is,” he says, trying to sound proud, hoping Copley will look at the place where his father is going to work and feel some sense of significance. But the neighborhood quickly diminishes once again, sidewalks cracked and overgrown, pavement buckling, houses with flaking paint, broken windows, and rotting woodwork, a stretch of stores and mid-twentieth-century developments largely vacant, and then a sudden flourishing of wealth: mansions from the 1920s and ’30s built on small lots along curving streets thick with trees that surround the university and the largest of the city’s parks. Nathaniel and Julia looked at houses in this neighborhood but could find nothing in their price range. After that brief stretch of residential prosperity, Poplar rolls into a corridor of commercial development, of strip malls and fast food restaurants, big box stores and medical centers, corporate offices, a shopping mall, banks, another labyrinth of highways racing beneath it in all directions, and then the beginnings of the most recent suburban developments, one after another, until the road narrows from six lanes to four to two, and seems about to peter out into gravel and dirt, to bisect farmland, easing them down to the abrupt right turn into Dolores Woods, which feels in the hot misty late summer like nothing so much as a mosquito-ridden swamp, waiting for the next torrent of rain in the system that is sweeping across the continent. They will not stay here tonight; the movers come tomorrow, but they wanted to be sure everything is in order, the floors polished, shelves dusted, the basement and garage mopped.

At their direction, a landscaping company has cut the grass and pruned the shrubs on either side of the flagstone path that leads from the driveway to the front porch, leaving the cuttings in an existing compost heap behind the garage. For a moment Nathaniel wonders if he should carry Julia over the threshold, but his back would never manage it and Julia would protest even if he tried. They have never been that old-fashioned kind of couple, nothing like Nathaniel’s parents, who did not allow Julia to stay in their house until she and Nathaniel were married. In any case, there is no longer time for gallant silliness: once again rain is slashing and bucketing and blanketing down, and although they are dry in the shelter of the front porch, the three of them rush indoors.

P
AUL IS IN THE KITCHEN
when the new people arrive. The cleaners nearly caught him yesterday, clattering their equipment against his floors. He was in Carson’s old room as the brigade of six women in red and white uniforms surged shouting through the front door. When he heard them, he crept down the back stairs, angling through the kitchen and into the basement before anyone knew he was there.

Car doors slam. He ducks below the height of the windows but not before catching a glimpse of brown hair under a green hood. Keys in the front door, the rush of sound when it opens, rain on the pavement and roof. Crouching in the kitchen, he listens as the man and woman talk in loud voices, and then hears a third set of footsteps.

No-ales. No-els. No-ills.

Three of them: two vocal, a silent third.

Trying to decide what to do, he waits while they stand just feet away from him in the hall. If he coughed they would hear him. If he squeaked his heels they would know they were not alone.

“God, it’s so dark in here,” he hears the woman say. “I’m going to check the kitchen.”

Holding his breath, he hears her weight against the boards. She’s coming down the hall rather than through the dining room. He can smell her perfume—roses, like his mother—as he slips out of the kitchen and down the stairs to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs he hides behind the banister, looks up, glimpses shoes and slacks, and ducks away before he can be seen, dashing into the pantry, wriggling through the hatch, easing it closed as all three of them stomp around his kitchen. Without closing the containment door he stretches out the length of his body along the floor, his ear grating against the wooden hatch, listening to the intruders.

M
ARCHING AHEAD
OF HIS PARENTS
through the house, Copley is making his odd noises, the whirring, whistling, churning sounds that unnerve Nathaniel, seeming, as they do, to suggest that his son may be not merely an eccentric child but a disturbed one. The noises only started in the last few weeks, after boxes began to appear, clothes and ornaments packed, trifles given away. The noise-making began with chirps in place of “yes” or “no,” birdlike trills that evolved into more guttural mechanical sounds, which in turn replaced other words and phrases: “maybe,” “uh-oh,” “not now,” “good morning,” “goodnight,” “please stop,” “leave me alone,” “I’m hungry.” Julia kept what she called a “lexical and syntactical score,” writing musical notation keyed to the meanings of the sounds so far as she understood them.

“This is just acting out,” Nathaniel told her as the pace of the noise production increased in the days leading up to the move. “It’s attention-seeking behavior.”

“It may be, but it’s not random. He’s consistent. It’s all very considered,” Julia said.

Since leaving Boston it has been noises instead of speech most of the time, but in place of the intricate sonic vocabulary of recent weeks, there has been a marked regression: beeps and shrill ascending notes in affirmative answer to questions; descending ones if Copley means “no”; a flat, staccato
zzzhhh
if he feels noncommittal or unwilling to express more complex meaning. There are times when Nathaniel wants to throw something at his son—a glass of water, an apple, a vase—and tell him to knock it off and act like a human being. Nathaniel’s own father had done this very thing, once throwing a cup of coffee in his face over breakfast when he judged Nathaniel’s responses to questions were somehow inadequate: too monosyllabic, too churlish. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” Arthur Noailles had snapped. “Don’t be a goddamn savage.” The coffee had been sitting in the cup for ten minutes and was no longer hot but it was warm enough to hurt for a moment, and the act so violent that Nathaniel had fled from the dining room and locked himself in his bedroom for the rest of the day. It was not the only time Arthur had done such a thing.

When Nathaniel now feels himself moved to throw something at Copley, he retrieves that memory of coffee splashing in his face, how he chucked out the clothes he’d been wearing, putting them in a neighbor’s trashcan the next morning on his way to school with the note from his mother pressed into his hand while his father was glowering in the other direction, a note explaining he had been sick the previous day. If he happens to smell the mass-produced brand of coffee his father drank, he invariably feels a passing surge of nausea.

Until the last few months, Nathaniel and Copley have had a happy if sometimes challenging relationship—challenging because Copley is so intelligent and, at the same time, even before the mechanical noise-making began, not the most natural, the most human, communicator: a boy late to speak and willing to converse only ever on his own terms. The joy of having a child, Nathaniel always imagined, would be in reaching the point when said child could reason and have intelligent conversations. Copley learned to read at three and should, at the age of seven, finally be at that stage. To Nathaniel’s growing frustration and distress, however, when he now asks Copley a question, his son often looks as though the terms of the query are so illogical that he does not know how to respond and out will come the mechanical
zzzhhh
, the sound of an older computer processing itself to the point of smoking exhaustion. In a particularly good mood, Copley might shrug in silence, but most of the time the boy acts like his father has said nothing at all, paternal speech a thing his neural circuits cannot interpret. Even though she is opposed to the idea, Julia has agreed it might be worth taking the boy to see a psychiatrist: “The books say it’s the move. He needs to adjust. He
will
adjust. But yes, I agree,” she says, “it’s getting a little out of hand.”