Fallen Land (27 page)

2:00 AM:
He is shaking, waiting for his parents to come. He looks at his watch. His parents do not wake up. Sometimes they wear earplugs because they both snore and if they don’t wear earplugs they can’t sleep. This must be one of those nights. He would have to pound on their door to wake them. It is a stupid thing to do, wearing earplugs when someone could break into the house or when your child might be screaming for help. He is too afraid at first to get out of bed and follow the man. He can hear the man walking down the stairs,
thump
,
fmmp
,
thump
,
fmmp
, and then a creak. After a moment he decides he has to follow the man to see where he goes. If he can see where the man goes, then he will be able to show his parents, and then they will have to believe him. His teeth are chattering and his whole body is trembling but he drops out of bed and puts on his flannel robe. Tiptoeing to the door of his room, he peers around the edge of the door and looks out into the moonlit hall: it is empty, the man is not there; he must have gone down the back stairs. This is a man, he understands, who only comes and goes by back stairs, back doors, who does not present himself at the front of anything. He slides his bare feet along the whitewashed floorboards and pauses at the top of the back staircase, looking down into darkness. No shapes are visible in the middle of the staircase, but the light from the kitchen falls on the bottom few steps. The man might be hiding in the shadows in the middle of the staircase, waiting for him to come, to grab him in his arms and take him away. Before leaving his room he put his flashlight in his pocket. If he turns it on and the man is there, then at least he will be at the top of the stairs and can close the door to the staircase, scream for his parents, run to their door, and bang until they wake up. He pulls out the flashlight, hesitates for a moment as he thinks about what he will have to do if the man is crouching there in the dark, waiting for him, and then pushes it on, his hands trembling. Although the staircase is empty he hears a thin creak recognizable as the sound made by the top step on the stairs to the basement. The man must be going down to hide in one of the dark corners full of boxes. He knows he should pound on his parents’ door and beg them to come, but he fears if he does the man will disappear entirely and once again no one will believe him. Taking the banister in his other hand, he turns off the flashlight, half-swinging himself down the stairs, trying to put as little weight as possible on the wooden steps so the man won’t know he’s coming. The man’s smell has taken all the oxygen out of the staircase and he gags, gasping for breath. It is a smell like the boys’ locker room at the pool: wet and cold and clanging: bleach and all the mold and mildew bleach is supposed to kill but has not. In the kitchen he stops, listening for sounds from the basement. He hears the scraping of wood against concrete and knows the man is there. If he could close the door and lock it and be sure the man would not escape then he could summon his parents to see the proof of the man’s existence. But the door to the basement has no lock and he is unsure whether the man might have some hidden escape route out of the basement, through one of the windows. He knows the windows have latches and locks, so it is possible this is the way the man is coming and going. He does not think the alarm people remembered to put sensors on the windows in the basement. He followed them around when they were installing the sensors, disguising them in the upper corners of rooms, placing them on windows and doors, and he does not remember them installing sensors on the basement windows. Realizing this he feels a momentary sense of relief that he has figured it out: the sound of wood against concrete must have been the man dragging a ladder to one of the basement windows. But he has to hurry if he wants to prove this is true. A different part of his mind takes over, one without fear: he turns on the flashlight again and runs down into the basement, turns on the overhead lights and waits as they flicker, revealing the huge space with his mother’s workshop in one corner. He spins around into the open pantry tucked under the stairs, but it’s empty, the whole basement is empty, the windows are closed, and the only ladder in the house, which was left here by the former owner, is hanging on the wall, suspended in space, its wooden legs dangling far from the concrete floor. There is nowhere for the man to hide. The space is clean, empty, polished. In one half there is carpeting and a bar, and in the wall a plaque that says
PAUL KROVIK BUILT THIS HOUSE.
He runs his hand over the engraved letters and the angle of a “
K”
bites into one of his fingers, pierces the skin, and draws out a drop of blood. The man must have been tall enough to pull himself up through the window, or perhaps he had a rope to climb, a rope he took with him, closing the window when he left. Blood is salty, setting his teeth on edge like spinach. From behind him he hears the scraping of wood on concrete again and his head snaps around on its own before he even knows he wants to look. The sound came from the pantry. His heart rumbles and his body starts to shake again as he walks toward the noise, but the space is empty and no one is there. He looks at the bare shelves, the floor, the dust on the floor, the shoeprints in the dust, an arc of dust at the far end of the pantry, an arc like the shape a door makes when it swings across carpet. He drops to his knees, puts his hands on the floor, and examines the lengths of wood under the lowermost shelf. Sticking out underneath the panel there is a wooden tab that looks as though it holds up the shelf, but there is a gap, a space between the tab and the shelf. He pulls at the tab and as the panel swings toward him there is a sudden rush of air from behind the panel and in the same moment a cushioned metallic
thump
whooshes like a car door slamming. A noise comes flying out of his throat as he rears up, hitting his head on the shelf above him. He backs up, pulls the panel wide open, and runs his hand over the black metal surface behind it, pushing against it, but the surface does not budge. He tries to understand, does not understand, a part of him knows the metal surface does not belong to the house, is not a part of its foundation or construction, is not what the house looks like behind its white plaster walls. He understands that windows have nothing to do with it: the man is there, on the other side: the panel is just a mask hiding a door.

2:10 AM:
He closes the door to the basement and jams one of the kitchen stools up under the knob. Even if the man can break down the door, at least they will know he is coming. His hands are shaking but he pours himself a glass of milk from the fridge and stands in the kitchen looking out at the yard. From the kitchen window he can’t see the old white house down the hill; their fence is in the way, and the house is too far below theirs. The angles are wrong:
lines of sight
, a phrase he remembers, the lines of sight are wrong from the kitchen. He puts the glass in the dishwasher and walks through to the dining room. Everything is as it should be. The blinds are closed but he can sense that the space is the way he and his mother arranged it before bed. His parents will never believe him about the man. Even if he showed them the hatch in the pantry, they would open it, see the black metal behind it, and tell him it was just a part of the foundation. Nevertheless, he knows what he knows.

4:53 AM:
Since coming back to bed he has not been able to sleep. His mind works on the white wooden hatch and the black metal wall behind it. He sits up and turns on his bedside light. In the mirror on the opposite wall he can see gray half-moons hanging under his eyes, his hair scarecrowing in tufts and waves. The sickness he feels makes him wonder if the new medicine might be speeding up his illness rather than retarding its progress. It is difficult to imagine how he will make it through a whole day at school, how he will be able to keep his patience with Mrs. Pitt, survive the hissing in the restrooms, the looks of the other students who always find something about his appearance to criticize. At first it was his hair, and now it is the kind of shoes he wears. All students are supposed to wear brown shoes, but his loafers are, apparently, the wrong kind, different from the brand that most other students own. They say he walks like a girl: this, in fact, is part of the reason for the toy soldier behavior, perhaps the essential reason: to walk more like a boy, to practice keeping his hips straight because Joslyn told him he “switches,” swaying as he walks down the hall. He knows he did the toy soldier walk before ever coming to the Pinwheel Academy, but within a week of being at the new school he realized those military movements could be put to some orthopedic purpose: he would train his body to walk in the way a boy is supposed to walk, by limiting his range of motion. He has to be careful, however, for sometimes he falls into that knee-locking gait at school and then Mrs. Pitt grimaces and tells him to stop drawing attention to himself or he will be fined. At least today there is no swimming or PE, although music class, which comes in place of the others, is almost as bad: because he has a good, high voice, the music teacher, Mrs. Schrein, always makes him sing solo parts. The boys say he sings like a girl, the girls—except for Joslyn—suggest he should wear a skirt instead of slacks. When they laugh and whisper Mrs. Schrein does nothing to stop them, until finally she loses her temper with the entire class and turns off the lights to make them all sit in silence, threatening that everyone will be fined for misbehavior. It is impossible to see how he will make it through the day. Perhaps he has a fever and his parents will let him stay home, except he knows one of them would have to stay home with him; this was never a problem in Boston. When he was sick in Boston he would stay in Mrs. Cuddebank’s apartment and sleep all day, waking up only when she brought him soup or medicine, or when her own children got home from school. Sometimes, his mother used to say, it felt like Mrs. Cuddebank needed more looking after than he did but not much could go wrong in an apartment as long as there was an adult who could keep him away from danger and phone an ambulance if he became seriously ill. His father said there was no reason to worry so much, and that saying those kinds of things in front of a child will only make the child feel endangered or, worse, exceptional. He has looked up
ENDANGERED
and
EXCEPTIONAL
in the dictionary. It is true that he feels himself to be both things: sometimes in danger, and frequently, more often than not, unusual, special, even, perhaps,
abnormal
. Here in this new place, his parents have not figured out what to do if he gets sick: more proof of them not thinking about him. It will be better if he dies quickly and they can move on with their lives. Dying will also free him from the Pinwheel Academy and Mrs. Pitt and Mrs. Taylor and all the students who look at him and see only someone who is not like them, who walks in the wrong way, wears the wrong shoes, speaks with an accent and a voice that is strange to them. He understands they are afraid of him, but he does not understand why: he looks at himself and, apart from the gray half-moons and the scarecrow hair, can see nothing frightening about his appearance. Of course their fear is not only to do with the way he looks but also to do with the way he acts: how he speaks, how his answers to questions are always correct, how he raises his hand to offer comments and thoughts that Mrs. Pitt never knows how to handle. On several occasions he has said things in class that even Mrs. Pitt does not know and she has been forced to check his answer on the computer, and then, with a frown, will say, “Copley’s right, but . . .” and try to dismiss what he has said in a way that is never convincing. When he dies he will miss his parents and Joslyn. He will miss Grandpa Chilton, his mother’s father, but he will not miss Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Arthur since they have never been warm, never like the idea of grandparents suggested in books. Apart from those few people, he will miss no one else when he leaves the main rooms of the house of
REAL LIFE
to explore the rooms that are not at first visible but which he is certain are there, opening out from the back of his parents’ closet, unfolding through metallic darkness beyond the white wooden hatch at the back of the pantry, rooms into which he will disappear and never return. Looking at himself in the mirror, only the top of his body visible from where he sits in bed, his vision blurs and doubles, the two images separating and moving away from each other. Watching his two selves divide, he believes that one of them waves to the other.

5:00 AM:
When his alarm goes off he gets out of bed, his body shaking, as though it has not stopped shaking since the man breathed onto his neck, touched his face, examined his fingers, gripped his shoulder, called him by a name not his own, demanding to know if he was alive or dead. He stands in front of the mirror looking at his stomach and chest, at the loose waistband of his pajama bottoms, at the furrows between his ribs. He wonders if he is, as Dr. Phaedrus suggested,
undernourished
. He looked it up in the dictionary when they got home—that and a number of other words he heard Dr. Phaedrus say to his mother through the door when they did not imagine he was listening or could hear.

5:23
AM:
Raising his arms above his head, he stretches, looking at the way his body elongates, the ribs protruding, his stomach scooping into itself. As he is doing this he becomes aware of noise outside. He takes a t-shirt from his closet and puts it on before opening the curtains to look out the window. Although it is still mostly dark, under the streetlights he can see a large yellow excavator and a matching dump truck on the front lawn of the old white house, and a black van with the initials of his father’s company printed on its sides and hood. Six men in black EKK uniforms with helmets and vests and guns come out of the truck. Two go to the front door, two to the back, and one on either side. Because the men are from EKK, because he told his mother yesterday that Louise was living in the house, he is certain his father must have made this happen. He runs out of his room and across the hall, banging on the door of his parents’ bedroom over and over again, shouting, “I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU!” As the door opens he turns and runs down the front stairs, hearing his mother and father come after him, shouting his name, his father’s voice flying on wings of flame.