Fallen Land (32 page)

3:28 PM:
He is on his back on the concrete at the side of the pool and Mr. Bruce is leaning over him saying his name: “Copley, Copley, Copley,
Copley
.” He is fine. He opens his eyes. He tells Mr. Bruce he is fine. He hears Austin shout, “She belly-flopped!” He looks down on himself from a high corner of the building and sees, for an instant, a shiny red disk on the concrete under his head.

3:55 PM:
Louise is waiting just inside the front door of the school, arguing with the security guards over a piece of paper. It is not the first time this has happened. He does not know what is on the paper, but when he approaches, the two men look at the paper and look at Louise’s driver’s license and then one of them says, “Okay, you look like your picture.” Louise takes his hand and they both open their umbrellas for the walk home. It takes ten minutes on foot to get from the school to the house, cutting through River Ranch, the Demon Point nature reserve, and the woods behind their house. He likes coming home this way, through the gate into the backyard. It feels secret, hidden, protected from the neighbors, although he has met none of them and knows nothing about their lives. If they are anything like the students and teachers at his school, he does not want to meet them.

4:30 PM:
While he changes out of his uniform and puts on dry clothes, Louise makes him peppermint tea and they meet in the playroom on the top floor. He thinks most clearly at the top of the house and his tongue moves faster, getting the words out before they flatten, slide, and collapse. He tells Louise about his day at school. She shakes her head and says, “I can see why you don’t look forward to it. I’ll speak to your parents.” “You know I could fly if I wanted to,” he says, putting his hands on the glass of the balcony doors and looking out at the sodden platform. Wet ashen drapes sweep across land and houses. “What do you mean?” Louise asks. “If I thought hard enough I could fly. It wouldn’t be difficult. I don’t weigh very much. I could. And anyway, weight doesn’t matter.” Louise puts her hands on his shoulders and turns him around. She kneels down in front of him so they are face-to-face, and then takes both of his hands. “I want you to promise me,” she says, “that you won’t do anything of the kind. I want you to promise me you will not jump off of anything anywhere. Flying is for birds and insects, not for humans. I know what a bright boy you are, Copley, and I want you to think about this like it’s a math problem. It does not add up, your body and the air and high places. You understand?” He nods but knows she does not understand. He tries to tell her without words, to show her the way he has already left his body, the way he is watching both of them from outside the window. “Watch yourself,” she says. “I am,” he says. “I’m always watching myself.”

9:22 PM:
Although he is supposed to be in bed he has crept onto the landing to hear the conversation in the kitchen. The voices of his parents and Louise rise up the back stairs, their words all coming with such ease and speed that he knows this is the way people are supposed to talk.

Louise: “He’s being bullied by the other students, and by his teacher.”

Mom: “Bullied in what way?”

Louise: “Teasing, name-calling. Picking on him, making an example of him in class.”

Mom: “He’s told you this?”

Louise: “He’s been dropping hints since I came but today it all came out.”

Dad: “And you believe him? You don’t think this is just another one of his tall tales?”

Mom: “Nathaniel, please. Calm down.”

Dad: “I’m perfectly calm. I just don’t understand how Louise can listen to someone who is so clearly a practiced and talented liar and fail to see that anything he says can’t be trusted.”

Louise: “I don’t know why you chose that school, but I’d move him sooner rather than later. There’s a perfectly good public school two miles away where an old friend of mine is the principal. You’d have no trouble getting him in there.”

Dad: “The reason he’s at the Pinwheel Academy is because it’s funded and sponsored by my company. If I didn’t send him there it would look weird. And frankly, I can’t believe EKK would have anything to do with a school that allowed bullying. We’re an equality-minded organization. And if there were
real
bullying going on, then the security cameras would catch it. Do you see bruises on him? Do you see injuries? He’s fine. If he were really being bullied, we’d know it just by looking at him.”

He doesn’t need to hear more. Nothing will change. He will continue at the school through the rest of his dying days and his parents are not going to save him.

11:15 PM:
He fell asleep for an hour and has now woken from a dream he might call a nightmare. He was bouncing on the end of the diving board but did not want to jump because Austin and Ethan were in the water below, calling out to him, saying, “She’s going to fall.” He leaped into the air, flipped, and made a perfect dive. As he swam back up to the surface, their hands reached out to hold him down, pushing his head underwater, and he ran out of air. And then, when he felt as though he was going to die, larger hands gripped him around the waist and pulled him away, deeper underwater, and then up, backward, dragging him out of the pool. He sucked in air, spat, shook the water from his ears, and squirmed around in the hands that had saved him until he could see the face of his rescuer. It was the man from the street, from his basement, the giant who lifted him up on the lawn and carried him back inside.

12:30
AM:
Everyone has gone to bed, the lights are out under the doors. Though he knows he should be afraid of whatever lurks behind the pantry wall, he tiptoes down the back stairs, through the kitchen, and into the basement. At the far end of the pantry, he wriggles down under the shelf, and knocks against the short door that he knows is there, although he cannot see hinges or anything else to prove what he knows. His knuckles rap softly against the wood as he whispers, “Help me. Please, help me. Help me.”

W
hy do you keep siding with him?” he asks her. She’s still wet from the shower, running a towel round her head. Julia has always been thin but in the last month she has started to look even thinner. He can see all of her ribs, the bony knot of her sternum, the arc of her clavicles. To look at her body you would never say she had given birth. The towel hangs over her face as he asks the question. She whips it away and looks at him, her eyes dark and sunken between cheekbones and brow.

“What are you talking about, Nathaniel?”

“Why do you always side with Copley?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she says. “Are there sides? I don’t side with Copley.”

“Every time we have an argument you side with him. He’s always right.”

She sidles past him into the bedroom and flicks through the hangers on her side of the closet. It would be easy to push her inside, close the door, and then she’d see how serious he was.

“Don’t put me in the middle, Nathaniel. If you have problems with Copley you need to work them out on your own.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“That’s not fair. You have no right to say such a thing.” She puts on a bra and underwear, steps into a pair of black slacks and sticks her arms through the holes of her beige blouse. All her clothes hang loose on her. He is sure they used to fit.

“You sound
exactly
like my mother. Don’t your books say parents should be united? You try to be the kid’s friend when he doesn’t need a friend, he needs authority.”

“He does need a friend, Nathaniel. In case you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t have any friends. We haven’t done anything to meet our neighbors. He asked me if I could arrange a play date and I haven’t even helped him with that, so don’t tell me I’m siding with our son against you. This is not a competition.”

“You let him get away with murder, Julia. That kid could walk in here right now, hit me in the gut, and you wouldn’t do anything. You’d tell me it was
my
fault.”

“What’s got into you?”

“You’re like a team, you and him and Louise, all ganged up together to run this place. I don’t know why we ever hired her.”

“It was
your
idea, Nathaniel. And I think it was a good idea. I admit I was skeptical but she’s been wonderful with him so far. Even if he hasn’t stopped acting out at home, at least there haven’t been any more problems at school. He seems less troubled, don’t you think?”

“I’m not at all convinced—”

“Has he spoken in that weird voice?”

“I—no, I don’t think so. But that’s as much to do with the drugs as anything else. I’m talking about relationships, Julia, and when it comes to relationships, the three of you are this tight little unit, all aligned against me, because I’m the one who tries to impose order and discipline and rules. Louise is always telling me the kid needs more freedom. I never should have hired that woman.”

“Then why
did
you?”

“Because there was no one else!”

He almost says,
because you refuse to stay home and look after our son
, although this is not, in fact, what he thinks.
He cannot tell Julia he hired Louise Washington on the spot because when he saw her sitting in their kitchen, dispossessed, turfed out of her house by agents of his own company, he remembered a woman from his past he had nearly forgotten, the black woman who was briefly his nanny as a child while his mother went to study in London for six months. He was only six at the time, and remembers calling her Mozelle, although when he later asked Matthew about it his brother insisted the woman’s name was Maisie. Louise instantly reminded Nathaniel of Maisie or Mozelle, of her quiet, challenging presence, and of the way she had hugged him, saying what a tiny boy he was for his age. “Like a little munchkin,” he can hear her saying, “a chubby little munchkin running away from the wicked witch.” Looking at Louise, seeing Mozelle, he had also seen the shadow of his own guilty conscience, his aiding and abetting and association with a corporation capable of evicting an elderly woman who wanted nothing more outrageous than to remain in her house—that was as much as he could explain to Julia. When he’d heard that she was living there, he had assumed a straightforward case of trespass, nothing more. The truth, when he learned it from Louise herself, had so devastated him that he could see nothing else but to offer help in the only way that seemed just.

As the weeks have passed, and he sees more of Louise, of her quiet, lurking ways, slipping up and down the stairs, front and back, the way she can suddenly appear in a room without warning, he has remembered another thread of Maisie-Mozelle’s relationship with his family. The woman had a brother or husband, a male relative at least, who sometimes came to pick her up when she went back to her own house on weekends. The first time this relative came to fetch her the doorbell must have been out of order, because the man, in dark brown overalls, with a tight spherical afro, came round to the back garden, bounding through deep January snow, and knocked furiously at the window to be let inside.

“Well, now we have her, Nathaniel, and as far as I’m concerned she’s here to stay, for as long as she wants,” Julia says, leaving the room and closing the door behind her. It was not a slam, but neither was it uninflected.

As Nathaniel gets dressed alone in the bedroom, he thinks perhaps the man he remembers approaching their house in Cambridge through the snow one January afternoon came again, another time, returning where he was not wanted. He remembers an evening in the summer after Maisie-Mozelle had stopped working for them. Nathaniel and his brother sat on either side of the long dining table, his parents at opposite ends, blue candles blazing. The curtains had not been drawn and they were eating in silence, looking out on the twilit backyard, when the doorbell rang.

His father turned to his mother and said, “Are you expecting anyone, Ruth?”

“My last appointment canceled.”

Arthur Noailles put his napkin on the table, stood, and went to answer the door. He remembers his father sounding surprised, uncertain, and then Nathaniel and his brother and mother listened in silence as an argument escalated, culminating in his father shouting, “We never promised Mozelle a permanent job! It was always going to be a temporary thing! You have no right to disturb my family, mister!”

There was a sound like a scuffle and he remembers—or perhaps he imagines—that the other voice shouted, “But my wife needs that job! You can’t just hire a person and let her think she’s gonna work for you forever and then six months go by and you let her go. It isn’t right, sir. I’m telling you it isn’t
right
.”

The door slammed. His father came back and sat down at the dinner table, put his napkin in his lap, and the doorbell began to ring.

“
Mister
Mozelle, I take it,” his mother said.

“The one and only,” said his father. The doorbell rang for at least five minutes and then stopped, abruptly, and his parents both exhaled. His mother was just standing to clear the dishes when Nathaniel saw the man appear in the backyard, suddenly revealed by the motion-sensitive porch light, approaching the house, walking up to the dining room windows, and hammering in fury until the glass split and blood trickled down the panes.

IN THE KITCHEN AT 2001
Abigail Avenue, everyone speaks at once:

A
LEXANDER
R
EVELEY’S MEETING
WITH THE
executives of the Security and Corrections division is announced only half an hour before it begins. The EKK CEO and heir of the South African branch’s founder sits at the far end of the long black boardroom table, dressed in black, with black hair, and eyebrows that point down to his nose in a V, matching the widow’s peak of his hairline. He wears a deep tan and a third of the way along his thin arm is a fat gold watch. As the room fills, Reveley twitches, crossing first his left leg over his right, then right over left, perching at the edge of his seat, pushing it back and forth, paging through notes, crumpling in on himself, doubling over the table and bursting into a spasm of sudden movement, bouncing the balls of his feet against the floor. Nathaniel looks at him and thinks of a long-legged spider reacting to electrical stimuli.

When all the seats around the table are occupied Reveley begins speaking, but throughout the subsequent hour he never makes eye contact with any of his officers.

“What I want to sketch here is a topography of the future security landscape. There will no longer be such a thing as private
qua
private. Private is now public, in the interests of security, the private must be revealed to be within the ambit of the public, always visible to the public
qua
public, the public constituted at its primary stratum by governments, corporations, and security-surveillance entities, and at secondary stratum by ordinary citizens, beneath which there is a permeable membrane dividing the public from the non-person, the disenfranchised, the disenfranchised
qua
criminal, the non-voting, the non-politically active ex-citizen, who self-abrogates citizenship through criminality, removing himself from the protective liberty of public status to the total restriction of the carceral. The house
qua
home is no longer a space of privacy. The only privacy that remains must therefore be the privacy of governments and corporations for the good of the public, for the security of the public, for the security of the public
qua
franchised citizen living a transparent life.”

Reveley’s wallet falls out of his pocket. He looks at it, notes its place on the floor, but continues speaking without pause. Later, a gold lighter falls out of the same pocket but on that occasion he does not even seem to be aware any loss has occurred. As he speaks, his eyes tunnel into the table, piercing black pupils making more connection with the furniture than with his audience. It is difficult to tell if he is nervous or merely oblivious, although his hands tremble as he turns the pages of his text. At one point he loses his place, goes silent, spends several minutes trying to find it again. Nathaniel cannot decide if the head of his company is a moron or a genius.