Fallen Land (3 page)

For years his face has appeared in her dreams, screaming and grimacing. As if from a nervous tic or too much time spent in the dark, his eyes, large and round, the color of arctic seawater, rove and squint. He must have been in solitary confinement. It would not be surprising to discover he is a prisoner prone to fighting with other inmates or assaulting guards, the leader of brigades of men bent on escape or on nothing more elaborate than dominating the space in which they have been confined. But the skin under his eyes, across the cheekbones, although naturally olive, is an unhealthy shade of brown, a tan so deep that much of his face must be precancerous, pores swollen and popping like goose bumps. Inmates spend most of their waking hours outside under the sun, even in winter.

At first they have nothing to say to each other and she struggles to move her tongue.

“I came, Mr. Krovik. Here I am, just like you asked in your letter. So—.”

His feet drum the floor, two rubber mallets in motion, and then all at once they fall still as the echo of pounding thunders around the room. In other circumstances he could be mistaken for a department store mannequin or an animatronic model in an amusement park diorama of early man. The features are primitive, with a heavy crudeness in the brow and jaw and cheekbones that is just less than human.

Even if he no longer has full control over his appearance, he looks and smells clean. His eyes are clear, so like other eyes she now knows, irises a fine transparent glaze, crackling with iron oxide. When he adjusts his hands, searching for a position closer to comfort, the veins stand out as if he has been flayed alive. This small movement triggers a series of twitches that contort the left side of his face and brow, rolling back over his scalp until they cascade down his spine, making the whole body shake for a moment before once again falling so still that he looks lifeless but for the spasm that pulses down his arm, bringing to life the tattoo on his bicep of a bird struck through the chest with an arrow.
Cock Robin
it says in cursive lettering under the dying bird. He looks down at his arm as though the twitching belongs to someone else, or as if the bird were an illumination that might escape from its vellum.

“I really never imagined you’d come see me,” he says.

“No, I bet you didn’t. And to be frank, neither did I.”

His twitching slows, intervals of stillness expanding until the bird is frozen again on the surface of the skin, the arc of its wing matching the curve of muscle, which flutters with sudden purpose as he pulls himself up against the table.

“I guess we used to be neighbors, though, sort of. Didn’t we? Friends, even.”

“No. I don’t think so,” Louise says. “We weren’t really neighbors, and we certainly weren’t friends.”

Although Paul’s story made national news, after her appearance at his trial Louise found herself avoiding all the media coverage, refusing requests to be interviewed; every time she saw his face she turned away from the gaze of a man she did not wish to remember. She never could have imagined that he would contact her, an acquaintance only, hardly a neighbor, nothing like a friend. If she knows anything certain about Paul it is that he never liked her.

The letter came to her in pencil on blue-lined white school paper. Paul’s handwriting was in block capitals and, like the houses he built, the letters were out of proportion, the strokes too long, the bars and arms too short, the words stretched along the vertical axis. Although his writing was tidy she could not suppress the feeling that there was something sinister about the exclusive use of capitals.

DEAR MRS. WASHINGTON,

I KNOW I HAVE NO RIGHT TO EXPECT A REPLY BUT I THOUGHT I WOULD GIVE IT A TRY. I DON’T HAVE MANY VISITORS AND I WONDERED IF I COULD PERSUADE YOU TO COME SEE ME. I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO OFFER YOU, AND MAYBE THIS IS A SELFISH REQUEST, BUT GIVEN THE WAY THINGS ARE GOING IT WOULD BE NICE TO SEE A FAMILIAR FACE, EVEN YOURS.

SINCERELY,

YOUR FORMER NEIGHBOR, PAUL (KROVIK)

P.S. I AM ALSO WRITING BECAUSE I COULD USE A FRIEND RIGHT NOW.

The letter took Louise so much by surprise that, after reading it the first time, she put it aside, looking at it from time to time where it lay on the desk in the room she now occupies in a house that is not hers. She wondered at first if the letter was genuine or some kind of forgery. The return address was the state penitentiary and the zip code on the postmark corresponded. When she passed the desk in the morning or late at night, the paper seemed to emit an odor that reminded her of gunpowder, dried cornstalks, and manure.

It took her weeks to decide to visit. Reservations aside, she found herself intrigued by the possibility that Paul could think of her as a friend (in fact, against all her instincts, she was moved by the suggestion), while being unsettled and alarmed that he might have ulterior motives, or that any avowal of friendship was only a way to seduce her into helping him. The lighter notes of gunpowder attached to the letter faded, and those of decay mellowed, sweetened, grew as fertile-smelling as good compost.

Louise knows she has nothing to fear from Paul at the moment since the guard remains just inside the door and two cameras monitor the room from opposite corners of the ceiling. When Paul slides to one end of the table, she can hear the camera behind her shift, reframing and focusing on his new position. It is unclear whether sound is also being recorded.

“You know what the hand sanitizer is for?” he asks, nodding at the dispenser. “It’s for when they have to do a body cavity search.” He cocks his head in the direction of the curtained bays and glances over at Dave, who grins. “They wear gloves but they still clean themselves afterward. Just to see you today, I had to be strip-searched. Every time I get a visitor, I have to take everything off, put my arms out at my side, lean over, cough, spread my ass, let them finger me if they think they have cause. And after this interview is over, they do it all again. I say to them, come on, just let me do the visit naked, it’ll save a lot of time.” He raises an eyebrow as if he expects some kind of response: laughter or disgust. Louise looks at Dave, but his face goes blank, hands tucked into his armpits.

“I didn’t realize,” she says, wondering if Paul wants her to thank him, if he believes that he is somehow doing her a favor by initiating this meeting.

“You know, I guess you’re right.” His eyes jerk up to the camera. “I guess we weren’t even neighbors, not really.”

“I’d be curious to know what it was I did to make you so angry, Mr. Krovik. Why did you hate me?” She wants to say,
You are the agent of my destruction, Paul Krovik, and you have no right to be so glib. After everything that’s passed between us, all the ways you worked to destroy my world, your tone offends me.

Paul throws back his head and laughs, as though he cannot begin to count the number of ways Louise inspired his hate. “
Whoo
. What
didn’t
you do, Mrs. Washington?” He sounds cocky and defensive, a kid still testing the boundaries. It is an attitude she remembers from countless boys she taught in the past, a quality that never failed to put her on guard. If he did not look so composed, if it was not clear that any hatred is now long spent, Louise would be out the door and running down the hall. Paul swallows his laughter and makes a strange warbling grunt, as if he knows it would be safer to leave the hills of hate between them unexplored. “Never mind all that, though. Because, you know, it’s really, really nice to see you here now.”

As his eyes blur wet and sultry in an almost feminine way, he fumbles the air across the table, his thin fingers, white nails cut in straight blunt lines, clawing at the empty space between them. She has never seen anyone make a movement like this, as though he is blind and has no sense that the hands he wants to grasp are within easy reach, just below his own. Louise understands that he wants her to take his fingers, to turn this interview into something like a conjugal visit under the eyes of the guard and the fish-eye lenses of the prison’s security cameras. She leans back in her chair, and then, almost losing control of her body, begins to extend one hand to Paul until, regaining sense at the last moment, she pulls it back. No part of her wants to touch him. She needs to get out of this white room and back into sunlight and open space, where visible distance is measurable in units greater than feet, where she can think with clarity, remember her purpose in the world, put her feet on earth instead of concrete. It was a mistake to visit him. There is nothing he can say that will change what he has done.

L
OUISE LEAVES THE PRISON
FEELING
sick, her body shaking, eyes flowing. Watching her pass out of their jurisdiction, Dave and Kurt act as though she is the funniest thing they have seen in weeks, this old woman in tears. She drives northwest, skirting the city, until she finds herself in front of a house with a sharp gable and contorted verge boards, the lace border on a starch-stiffened napkin. Despite what she might wish, this house has put down roots in her brain: she wakes to see its gable twisting, the porch fattening, the windows blinking. Under the moon and a clear sky the house stands still, the whole neighborhood frozen in hot vapors. She hears the buzzing that is now always audible, a noise that might only be cicadas, although she knows it is not: there is nothing natural about the drone.

The house is just off the extension of Poplar Road, the main east–west thoroughfare through the city and a forty-minute drive to the old downtown that has been regenerated in phases over the last decade, the warehouses turned into lofts, derelict buildings razed and replaced with parks. Nonetheless, some neighborhoods that were genteel a decade earlier have seen their houses turned into rental properties, the porches sagging and gutters filling up with leaves that are never cleared to make way for the snowmelt in spring and the torrents of rain that come at unpredictable intervals in the warm months. Out here, on the western fringe of the city, everything remains new. Anything that ages is torn down to make way for shiny replacements.

Downstairs the lights are off, curtains closed, the windows dark and reflective. On the second and third floors there is light and movement; the curtains are open, the people who live inside forgetting that someone might be watching. She pulls the car into the driveway, gets out, and shuts the door without making a noise.

It is nearly nine o’clock and the neighboring houses are dark except for the small red pulse of light on each of their alarm boxes. She looks through the window in the front door and sees light seeping down the stairs from the second floor, shadows moving, someone standing still and then in motion again. Feet come down the stairs. Louise ducks behind one of the half-dozen plantation rocking chairs on the porch, listening as the body inside approaches the door. She edges into deeper shadow as the door opens for an instant and then slams shut. Somewhere a window is open.

“It wasn’t locked! You said you locked it!”

“I said I couldn’t remember.”

“Anyone could have come in. This isn’t the 1950s!”

This is the place she has brought herself at last, the place where she now must remain. She sits in one of the rocking chairs, looking out at the other houses, blurring her vision so the structures begin to dissolve, giving way to the black mass of trees in the distance, the dim western glow as the earth spins itself again into darkness.

Past

All felled, felled, are all felled . . . not spared, not one.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

PART I

SHELTER

T
he helicopter has been hovering overhead for the last twenty minutes. He knows he can hear the rapid thwacking buzz of a flying lawnmower cutting down clouds, and if he can’t hear it through the lead lining of the bunker then he is sure he can feel the vibration of rotors churning the air, buffeting the earth above his head, stirring up the atmosphere, designed to stir him up too.

When people asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up, Paul Krovik did not say he was going to be a fireman or soldier or pilot, as some boys will before they know the kind of drudgery and danger such jobs entail. He did not want to be an actor or rock star or astronaut, nor did he harbor secret desires to dance, design clothes, or write poetry—the kinds of dreams most in his world would have regarded as evidence that his parents had failed to raise a true man, whatever that might mean.

He always wanted to build houses.

And now they are trying to take away the only house that belonged to him. He is not about to give up the one thing he ever wanted.

At first when he heard it he thought the helicopter must be circling the general area, filming rush-hour traffic to transmit to one of the local news affiliates, the shellacked Channel 7 anchors in rictus masks reporting snarl-ups and accidents and slow-motion car chases, transmitting live from a breaking story with innocents sobbing in the background or bystanders weighing in with nonsensical sound bites about the shiftiness of a suspected killer or the long-observed weirdness of a family that has taken itself hostage in a broken-down motor home none of the neighbors have seen move from the driveway in a decade. Paul remembers that story: a mother, father, three sons living in a ramshackle house. The children armed themselves, told their parents enough was enough, that life on the terms they were suffering was not worth living. Following a two-day standoff the parents yelled out the window to say they were no longer hostages, then knelt down in front of their teenage children, accepted the gun to the temple, and rolled backward, descending into death before they could watch the boys turn the guns on themselves.
MOTOR HOME MASSACRE
was how Channel 7 described it, the blond anchor smiling as if he were reporting the mass surrender of terrorists. How Paul admired that family, the logic of the boys and the courage of their parents.

If not a traffic helicopter overhead then it must be the police tracking a fugitive racing circles through subdivisions, trying to catch her before she can slip down a rabbit hole or into the woodland thickets of undergrowth that enclose the platter-flat river flowing west of the city. Ten minutes pass and the vibration does not change in intensity or frequency as the helicopter lingers over his neighborhood. Unless he is mistaken, unless it is all in his imagination, the machine is just above the house, watching and waiting for him to betray his position, perhaps even using thermal imaging cameras. Holding his limbs rigid he draws shallow breaths and imagines his temperature dropping, making him invisible to whatever equipment they may be using to locate him. The lead lining of the bunker should obscure him but there are always new advances in sensing technology, ways to see what is supposed to remain hidden. He cannot understand how the authorities found him so quickly since no one knows where he is—not Amanda, not his sons, not his parents. Everyone believes he has moved out of the house, found an apartment, is putting his life back together, starting over from the beginning with nothing but his hands and his tools. And yet the
thwacker-thwack
vibration comes in steady waves, moving down the wall, shaking the frame of his bed in the dark vault of the bunker. Let them seek him with their blindfolded eyes. In his retreat underground he is the only one who can see.

As Paul was building this house he discovered the foundations of a nineteenth-century farmhouse the widow Washington told him had burned down long ago. At the edge of the woods he uncovered the original storm cellar, still intact, wooden doors latched, and beyond them stairs leading down to a vaulted stone ceiling, the entrance obscured by shrubs and accumulations of dead leaves. After cleaning out the debris, he repointed the walls and vault of the cellar, knowing there must be a way to use such a space: he would build a fallout shelter, a bunker, a place of safety for his family. It seemed so logical that when Amanda asked him why they needed it, he lost his temper.

“Read the headlines! Watch the news! Look around you, babe! Because of the base this city will be one of the first to go. When I was a kid dad told me that in a nuclear war we don’t have to worry because in the first twelve minutes the whole city is going to be obliterated. That was supposed to make me feel like, I don’t know, some kind of reassurance because we wouldn’t be suffering in the aftermath. You have to understand, I’m planning ahead. I’m trying to protect you. We’re going to survive whatever this thing is that’s coming down the pipe.”

“What thing, Paul?”

“The
future
. We’ll ride out the apocalypse together, safe underground.”

Amanda looked at Paul then, for the first time in their relationship, as if she did not trust him, perhaps did not even recognize him. He can see the way her brow drew together in a demonic-looking point. Over and over he tried to explain it to her but she had never been convinced. Now, left alone, he could write a book about all the ways his wife failed him, and in retrospect that was the first moment he knew she was turning away from what had always seemed a happy marriage.

Thwacker, thwacker, thwack
. Keep the body still, think beyond life, think death into life and the stillness of the other side. Calm yourself, Paul, stop being a child. You’re on your own, your wife has left you. You have no one but yourself. You must look forward. He remembers the way his father preached an edict of self-reliance to him as a boy.
Remember the teachings of the great man, Paul. Regret is nothing but a false prayer. Trust the gleam of your own mind. Be brave: God does not want cowards to manifest His work. Your hands are trustworthy. Society is nothing but a conspiracy against you. If the country is at war, then the average citizen has to look out for his own even more than in peacetime, government be damned.

In building the bunker he was only thinking about the safety and welfare of his family. He loved his wife, still loves her, loves the boys as well, only ever wanted to protect them and still does. If he had the money, he would fly across oceans to find them and bring them back, knowing he is the only one who can truly protect them. It is no longer enough to worry about nuclear warheads from China or Russia or Iran or North Korea hitting the Air Force base south of town. It is essential to plan not just for attack by foreign terrorists or governments, but also for the possibility of hostile fellow Americans, for a new civil war, or for an environmental, technological, or biochemical conclusion to the human era on this planet. Those who have planned for the other side of now, the wise and prepared, are the only ones who will survive the plains of uncertainty that must be crossed in the coming decades.

Once he had the idea for the bunker there was just the question of how to connect it to the basement of the house since he had already filed plans with the city; to make a change would cost even more and be a bureaucratic headache and by then Amanda was feeling that she had taken enough chances trying to help him out in ways that were not strictly legal. So as soon as the house was finished, and the city inspectors were satisfied, Paul began excavating the tunnel for the bunker. There was no one to observe him except Mrs. Washington, in her old wreck down the hill. Trees blocked the building site on three sides and he raised a six-foot-high fence around the backyard to ensure even greater privacy for the work he was undertaking without permit. What permission does a man need except that granted by his heart and his God?
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members
, so the great man said
.
He covered the bunker’s walls with lead-lined sheetrock, borrowed a crane and a buddy to help him lower the containment doors into place one night, and encased the whole structure in a layer of concrete, connecting it with the old storm cellar in the woods and knocking through the finished foundation into his new basement at the opposite end. The bunker has electricity and plumbing, just as if it were another part of the house, except it is not, because it appears on none of the plans. With the bunker complete he bricked up the entrance to the basement, leaving a small hole hidden behind a wooden hatch under a shelf at the back of the pantry, just large enough that Paul could pull himself through on his stomach.

On paper the bunker does not exist, but under the earth of the backyard, behind its containment doors, it has two bedrooms, a full bathroom, an open-plan kitchen and living space, a store of canned and dry goods, a supply of water and water purification tablets, hunting and assault rifles, two thousand rounds of ammunition, energy-saving lightbulbs, an extra washing machine and dryer, and an air filtration system vented into the woods, its exhaust pipe disguised within the trunk of a tree hollowed out by lightning. This is his refuge, the last part of his home he is able to occupy. Surrender is out of the question. When technology fails, he will spend his days in the woods, hunting and fishing, descending into his burrow at night, living in darkness, eating and sleeping as a creature beyond light, a demon kept safe by the earth.

If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.

He worries about exits, believes that perhaps he should puncture the walls of the bunker in other places, create new tunnels, extend the parameters of the space beyond the confines of its impregnable structure. One night he painted the outline of half a dozen doors into his kidney-red walls, imagining the places where other tunnels might branch off, burrowing deeper into the earth.

His fingers find their way along the three-and-a-half-foot length of rifle, from the stock to the trigger and scope, sliding across the tapering blued barrel. When the moment comes, he will be ready. He retreated here only a few weeks ago, more than a year since Amanda had taken the boys, most of the furniture, and the whole of their life off to Florida. At first he tried to be rational: he knew he had lost the game; it would be sensible to pack up what remained after the estate sale, file for bankruptcy, and move to Miami. He had lost the lawsuits brought by his neighbors and that was the deathblow, the end of his limited solvency. Spending one night after another underground, often sleeping with all the lights on, Paul began to realize he could never abandon his house, not even after the foreclosure sale. Necessity forced him to conceal himself beneath the earth, in the den of his nightmares, where all he can do is plot his return. There is no reason anyone should ever discover his presence if he is careful. No one but Amanda knows about the bunker—not even the boys. He will wait in silence, bide his time, do whatever it takes to reclaim his house, and once it is back in his possession, his family will return. They will have to return: he will give them no other choice.

“Do you like it, babe?” he asked Amanda, when the structural work on the house was finished and only decorating remained to be done.

Saying nothing, she smiled as she walked from room to room, climbing up one staircase to the top of the house and down the other to the basement. She went outside and around the back, came inside and put her hands on the banister in the foyer. When he asked again if she liked it, fearing he might have disappointed her, she cried through her nodding smile.

“This is a wonderful house, Paul. You’ve done a great thing,” she said, stretching up to kiss him. He’d picked her up then, carried her outside onto the front porch and then back inside, to make it official. She laughed and jumped out of his arms. “You said you’d build me a dream home. I like a man who keeps his promises.”

If only she had always been like that, so susceptible, so easily pleased, not so focused on her own career. After a good beginning between them, it wasn’t long before things had changed.

Listening to the rotors of the machine moving in the sky above, littering the land with clippings of clouds or the feathers of birds whose wings got caught up in its blades, Paul tries to lie as still as possible, willing his body temperature to drop, hoping that whatever technology the police possess cannot penetrate the layers of concrete and lead enclosing the bunker—or, if it does, that his attempts at psychological control of the body will be enough to camouflage him, diffusing the outline of his form, turning a panicked, hot-hearted biped into a mass of low-level thermal radiation. His father once tried to teach him how to cool the surface of his skin without ever breaking a sweat. “War is psychology,” his father explained, voice always calm, patient with him. “If you win the psychological war you win the physical one as well.” Paul tried to concentrate but when his father measured Paul’s heart rate and temperature he shook his head: “You’re a good kid but you’re mentally undisciplined, Paul. Game over. You’ve already lost. God bless your mother but she’s been coddling you.” After that they started hunting together on “father–son weekends,” sleeping in a two-man tent in the woods, shitting and pissing outdoors with no privacy but a tree or a bush. Ralph made it clear that these weekends away were not just about bonding. “I’m teaching you survival, Paul. I need to know that you’re prepared for this world, for when you leave the house and have to make your own way. That’s my responsibility to you. I’m not gonna baby you, and from now on, neither is your mother. I’ve been remiss. I’ve let you down. I want you to be able to look after yourself. That’s the best gift I can give you. You have to learn to trust yourself, but first I need to turn you into your own best Trustee, help you develop your animal intuition. You have to learn to stand tall as God made you: do not be timid, do not apologize. Your height as a man is your virtue, as the height of this country is our nation’s virtue. It is by nature’s law that the great among men shall
overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not
. The great man said that, son, and I want you also to be a great man, to take your deserved place in this greatest of nations, to ride atop the lesser who will try to bring you down.” He can hear the incantation of his father’s voice, the way the words both inspired and soothed.