Sitting on the high stool at the bench, the woman, although her hair is darker, reminds him of Amanda. She has the same narrow shoulders and strong back, a similar way of tilting her head to one side while concentrating. This woman might in fact be Amanda, come to reclaim Paul’s house with a new husband. Perhaps the boy he carried in from the street might actually be Carson. It was dark, the child was the right size, he moved like Carson, he spoke like Carson, and they could have dyed his hair to disguise him.
It is nearly eleven before the woman puts down her tools and goes up to the kitchen, turning off the basement lights from the switch at the top of the stairs. In the darkness Paul squints, waiting for his pupils to dilate and take in the ambient streetlight from the window wells tucked along the length of the basement ceiling. He listens until the house is silent, the last shower taken, and when all movement has stopped he wriggles out through the hatch and across the floor of the pantry whose shelves remain empty. These people need to plan ahead, fill up their house with food and water for the coming crisis, arm themselves and learn how to defend their property. When the emergency comes they will succumb quickly, starve or be killed off in the chaos, and that will be the moment to retake the house, build a high wall around the perimeter, make it impregnable, and live out the last days of this dark tribulation.
There is a light over the workbench but when he turns it on to see what is there everything apart from the tools and computers has been packed up and put away. Drills, tiny screwdrivers, soldering irons, chips and bolts and coils of wire are arranged in neat order, as though the elements speak to one another, defining relationships through the orientation of their parts. On the far end of the workbench is a six-foot metal case secured with padlocks.
THE CHILD’S ARM, WHITE AND disembodied in the dark, is the only thing visible above the covers; from underneath the blankets there is a flickering glow, as if a flashlight were being partially covered and uncovered. Paul has the rifle in his hands, the noise suppressor screwed to the barrel. It would be possible to put his hands around the boy’s throat and strangle or suffocate him. The boy cannot be Carson, the woman is not Amanda, these people are nothing but intruders. If the boy is gone the parents will go, too, perhaps even take their own lives. He does not want to be caught, and he will not be caught if he does it right, if he can shoot the boy before he makes a sound and then retreat to the bunker, remaining there until the investigations are finished, the case closed. The parents will be in turmoil for weeks or months afterward, but in time they will leave. By then he will have been able to find work again and have enough money to buy the house when it comes back on the market.
He crouches just inside the boy’s room. Across the hall, the door to the parents’ room is closed.
“Can I help you? How? How can I help you?” the boy says.
Paul shivers and adjusts his grip on the rifle. As he raises the sights to his right eye, his finger starts to close in on the trigger, but stops when the boy continues.
“Can I help you? Me. How. Can you help me? How can you help me? I. Can. How can I help you? Help me.” A pause, silence, the sound of soft tapping. Paul lowers the gun and opens his mouth. “Help me,” the boy says, sounding more than ever like Carson.
The boy’s exposed arm disappears under the blankets before the light dims and then becomes bright again, and the boy speaks once more. “How can I help you? She. How can she help you? We. How can we help you? How. How. How. How. Cab. Cabbage. Cache. Cachet. How can I cachet you?”
From the parents’ bedroom there is the thud of feet hitting floorboards. The light under the boy’s blankets goes dark as Paul creeps along the wall and into the corner of the room, folding himself up in shadow. He hears the door of the master bedroom open but for a moment nothing happens: the boy is silent, no one moves, and then the boy’s father crosses the hall and stands just inside his son’s room.
“Copley?” the man says, tiptoeing to his son’s bed; he pulls back the covers to look at the boy, who moans, turns on his side, and throws an arm across his forehead. The man pulls up the blankets, tucking them under his son’s chin, and goes to open the curtains. Light unspools across the white floorboards, catching Paul’s extended foot. He draws it back into the shadow where he hides, between a dresser and the wall. The man must not look into corners. He must close the curtains, turn in the other direction, walk out of the room. Cloud must cover the moon, the storm must return. He must not be discovered.
For several minutes the man stands at the foot of his son’s bed, and as he does the light from outside only grows stronger, the shadows weaker. It seems impossible that the man will not see him but when Paul next looks up the man is gone and he hears the door to the master bedroom swing shut.
“What are you doing?” the boy whispers, his voice different than before, less formal, more present, but warped by fear. Paul shudders and loses his balance, his arms dropping into the light. “I can hear you breathing.”
As Paul stands up to leave the room he keeps his eyes on the child’s bed and tiptoes backward, rifle raised, fleeing all the way down the rear stairs.
“THE MAN I SAW OUTSIDE was in the house last night,” Copley says at breakfast. “He came into my room.”
“It was just me, Copley,” Nathaniel says. “You were having a nightmare. I heard you talking in your sleep. I came to make sure you were okay.”
“No, it wasn’t you. He was in my room when you came. I wasn’t asleep. I was awake. You were in my room but the other man was also in my room.”
“If there was someone in your room, sweetie, and I’m not saying there was, then why didn’t you scream?” Julia asks.
“I tried. I couldn’t make the noise. I was too afraid. And then the man disappeared.”
Trying to forget the hand he thought he saw plastered against the window last night, Nathaniel remembers what the guidance counselor said, that the boy is inclined to lie. He is certainly lying now, unless he has had some kind of delusion, or remembers a nightmare as if it really happened. It is time to make an appointment for Copley to see a psychiatrist, as much as it pains Nathaniel to think of submitting his son to the kind of analytical intrusions he himself suffered under the attentions of his mother, the shuttering of his psyche into a neatly labeled box, the naming and classification of his neuroses, the tracing of all his problems to early traumas he still does not wholly remember, claims about his father dismissed as Oedipal fantasy. Yes, of course you think your father is trying to kill you, his mother would say, because that liberates you to do violence to him. He was never his mother’s patient in any official sense, but she used him nonetheless, treated her own family as a group of laboratory rats submitted to various stimuli, deprivations, and hostile conditions to see how they might react. It was all so ingenious, the construction of what were effectively research sessions as “family talking time” once a day every day, when the recorder was switched on and he and his mother would have a conversation, just after his brother had suffered the same treatment. When he asked her why he could not go first for once his mother explained it was because birth order is important in these matters. It helps me to understand your day if I first understand your brother’s. So wait your turn in the other room. He cannot remember ever loving his mother; at best he has memories that are neutral, but in the case of his father all the memories are negative, even and including the most recent ones. If he were able to divorce himself from his parents, to insist on no further communication, perhaps even to take out restraining orders against them, he would, but the promise of inheritance is too substantial to ignore in the interest of happiness and peace and the possibility of forgetting. He knows that as long as he has contact with them, even contact it is possible to police and mediate and dispense in manageable doses, he will never be able to leave the memories behind: new memories will always be made, rolling off the line with every interaction.
There must be better therapists th
ese days, more sensitive, less entrenched in a particular theoretical school. They will find someone for Copley who is caring and intuitive, who knows how to ask questions they have failed to ask and who will give him ways to cope with his new environment. It is up to Nathaniel to undertake the research and planning, to find the doctor who will rescue his son from whatever brink he is approaching, before the plunge into madness.
“I think it was just a complicated dream you were having, honey,” Julia says. “Nothing you have to be afraid about. No one can get inside the house. Everything is locked up at night. We’re safe inside, absolutely safe.”
Copley sighs, putting his head in his hands. “Why won’t you believe me?” he whines. “Why won’t you help me?”
5:00 AM: Before the alarm goes off he is already awake. His parents do not know he sets the alarm for such an early hour, nor do they know that most nights since leaving Boston he has hardly slept. There are many things they do not know. They know only what is unimportant: that he gets up before them, that he has showered and is dressed with his hair dried and combed by the time they get up. Sometimes his father asks him if he has really had a shower and checks his bathroom to see if the stall is wet and the towel damp. It is a stupid and unnecessary thing to do. Showering is not something he would try to avoid. Showering is essential. He is already awake before five because he has set his body to be awake at that hour, whether or not he has slept through the night, and his body always wakes him up a few minutes before five. If he gets up early he does not have to rush to be ready when his mother says it is time to go. This has started only since the move. He did not get up so early in Boston. Everything about life was simpler there. It is still dark outside and he gets out of bed without disturbing the sheet or blanket. His parents do not know how well he can see in the dark. Except for reading, he could live without light. He walks over to one of the two large windows in the room and looks out at the old white house down the hill. There is a light in one of the windows and he can see the woman moving inside. He has been watching her since the day they arrived, each morning lighting her candle and working in the kitchen. A few weeks ago, while his mother was working in the basement one Saturday and his father was busy in his study, he was alone in the backyard. The rain had stopped for a few hours. Time was slow. He looked at the grass and tried to tell himself stories, then found a hole in the fence where there used to be a knot in one of the wooden planks. He looked through the hole and saw the woman in her garden. When he said hello she dropped her trowel and looked up at the sky. “I’m here,” he said, and knocked on the fence. She straightened her back and walked over to introduce herself. “I’m Louise,” she said. “Copley,” he said. “You see that soft spot where grass doesn’t grow behind your garage,” she said. “Yes, I can see it. The place with two rocks and all the grass from the yard service.” “That’s the one,” she said. “You be careful of that place. Don’t go walking on top of it. There’s a deep hole underneath it. I wouldn’t want you to fall in.” Since their meeting through the fence, each morning before dawn he has raised his hand to wave to her from his bedroom window. This morning he turns on the light in his bedroom and waves again, but he can no longer see the woman or the candle, only his reflection in the glass. Although he keeps hoping he will see her again outside, on the street, or in her backyard, he has not.
5:02 AM: Since moving to this new city, each morning he has asked himself the same question: “Where are you?” The answer has been the same every day: “I’m in my new house, in a new town, but it does not feel like I am actually here. I feel like I am somewhere else.” “In Boston?” he asks himself. “No, not in Boston. I don’t know where I feel like I am, but I don’t feel like I am where I know I must be.”
5:10 AM: He takes off his pajama shirt and pants and underwear and puts them on the low white wooden chair in his bathroom. He did not have his own bathroom in Boston and having one here is one of the few changes he likes about the new place. He turns on the shower and waits until the water is the right temperature. He remembers the first shower he took, last year, and how proud he was of making the transition from baths. Before taking that first shower he had assumed there was a risk of drowning because the water came down on top of the head and it seemed impossible you could breathe and be under water at the same time. The discovery that it was all much more straightforward, and that he preferred the feeling of showering to taking a bath, was a revelation. He stands under the water, wets his hair, opens the bottle of shampoo and squirts a portion of the honey-colored liquid into his palm, then works it through his hair while the water slams into his back. Once he has worked up a lather he rinses his hair, picks up the bar of soap, passes it between his hands until suds form, puts the bar back in its tray, and smooths the soapsuds over his face, into his ears, behind his ears, washing thoroughly, careful to get rid of all the dirt, and then turns around to face the stream of water and rinse off his face. He leans over to pick up the sponge, squirts a blob of green shower gel into the middle, and kneads it until handfuls of bubbles form and the air is heavy with peppermint. He wipes the sponge down the outside of his left arm, along the underside, into his armpit, scrubs his chest and stomach and sides, and then the other arm, outside first, inside, armpit. He washes his lower abdomen, passes the sponge over his private parts, washes his right leg, right foot, left leg, left foot. He always cleans his body in the same sequence, always takes his shower in the same way, beginning at the top and working down to his toes. He rinses off, stands under the water for another minute, enjoying the intense heat, and then turns it off by pushing the lever all the way to the right. Standing in the steam that lingers in the room, he listens to the thrumming fan hidden in the ceiling. In Boston his father and mother used to sit in the bathroom reading to him while he took his bath each evening. Since starting to take showers, he no longer wants them to be in the bathroom and, more than that, when he is in the bathroom he now always wants to be left alone. Once, his father came in while he was taking a shower in Boston and after that he began locking the bathroom door. When his father asked why he did this, he said that he did not come into the bathroom when his father or mother was taking a shower and it did not seem fair that they would come into the bathroom now when he was showering. Going to the bathroom is private. Showering is private. Being naked is private. These are all private things, to be done alone.
5:20 AM: Next to the shower stall is a bar where his towel hangs. Someone, his father or mother, has put out a fresh towel and he enjoys the stiffness of its pile as he dries his head, his face, the back of his neck, his arms, chest, back, stomach, legs, feet: each day he dries his body in the same way, head to toe, top to bottom. He does not know if this is something his parents taught him to do, but he believes it is not. Instead, it is one of many tricks he has learned on his own, although he cannot remember a process of trial and error, only his arrival at the perfect system. He wraps the towel around his waist, turns on the hairdryer and directs the hot stream all over his head until his hair lies in a way he recognizes as his own. After he has dressed he will come back into the bathroom to put gel in his hair and comb it a final time. His father does not like that he uses gel; he says it is something children don’t need to do. What his father fails to understand is that it is not a matter of need or desire. It is everything to do with the expectations of the other children at school.
5:25 AM: While he gets dressed he hangs the towel over a hook on the back of his bedroom door. With the door locked he goes to his dresser, where he finds a pair of underpants: dark blue ones that are new and snug. They make him feel good when he pulls them on. From his closet he takes his khaki school slacks and his blue cotton shirt. First he puts on the shirt, buttons it, and leaves the buttons at the wrist for his mother or father to fasten. He puts on the slacks, tucking the shirt in as he pulls them up. This is the uniform all the boys are required to wear. In winter, and on cold days, they will also be allowed to wear a red wool V-neck sweater or a red
wool V-neck sweater vest because the combination of colors, his teacher Mrs. Pitt tells them, makes them look like little patriots. The girls have the same uniform except they have to wear khaki skirts that come to just below the knee. Pupils are not allowed to wear shorts except during PE and the shorts are kept at school, where they are washed and dried after each use. He finds blue socks in his dresser and sits on a chair next to his bed while he puts them on, right foot first. Just before walking out the door to drive to school he will put on his shoes, which are downstairs in the drop zone between the back door and the kitchen.
5:45 AM: He makes his bed, pulling up the sheet, tucking it in on both sides, and smoothing the blanket over the top. He fluffs his pillow, centers it at the head of the bed, and arranges his stuffed animals in front of it. When all is arranged as he wants it, he takes his towel back to the bathroom, remembers his pajamas and returns them, folded, to their place under the pillow on his bed, and sits in the chair next to the window facing the old white house down the hill, watching in the dark as the woman moves back and forth with her candle. After the sun begins to come through the tops of the trees in the woods to the east, he notices smoke rising out of the woman’s chimney. He wonders why they have not met any of the other neighbors and whether there are any children in the neighborhood, as there were children in their building in Boston, or if he is now going to have a different kind of life altogether, one in which his time outside of school is filled only with adults. He has heard children at school talk about “play dates” and has been able to infer this is the only way children here get together to see each other: they make appointments for designated times and locations, their parents drive and pick them up. In Boston, he sometimes had play dates but often, if he wanted to play with a friend in the building, his parents would phone the other apartment, see if the child was available, and in minutes, after riding up or down the elevators and running along the hallways, the two of them could be playing. Appointments were usually made only for birthday or holiday parties. He watches the tart reddening sky, but within fifteen minutes the rising sun has disappeared, the clouds unpacked, the rain valve opened, the deluge resumed. In Boston, he did not mind school, but minded it even less on rainy days. Here, the rain does nothing to improve his feeling about the kind of day likely to unfold.
Fallen Land Page 20
