Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

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:

  ALEXANDER REVELEY’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.

  At the end of the hour Reveley puts down his text and, without looking at anyone else in the room, asks if there are any questions. Maureen raises her hand and Alex nods in her direction.

  “Thank you, Alex, for that extraordinary illumination of the way you see the landscape of security qua surveillance evolving. I wonder if you could communicate to everyone else how you envision this manifesting in a given sphere—say, the domestic security product range for instance.”

  “Wasn’t it clear?” he asks.

  “I think a little more elaboration would be helpful for those who don’t have your comprehensive grasp of the subject.”

  “What business are we in here? If my executives don’t have a comprehensive grasp of the subject then we might as well go home,” he says. “You might as well all retire to your gated communities and let some real professionals take over, hey?”

  “It’s just that what you’re proposing is so visionary,” Maureen says, her voice quavering, “that I fear some of our newer and more junior associates might not entirely have grasped the finer points of what you’re proposing.”

  “Oh, right,” he says, scratching his neck. “Ja, okay, well—. Right! Here it is. It’s really quite simple. As a company our new mission is global transparency of the second and third tiers, meaning the public that is the ordinary citizen, and the incarcerated population comprised of the ex-citizen. The only tier that retains privacy, and this has to be the case for the sake of global stability, is the top tier, made up of governments and corporations, which will become increasingly indistinguishable from each other. So total transparency of the second tier, for instance, Maureen, begins with something like the surveillance of the self, or the home. Burglar alarms are unexploited tools. Motion sensors can only tell the global security infrastructure—in other words the first tier—so much about what’s happening in a given domestic or commercial space, am I right?”

  There is a murmur of cautious assent around the table.

  “Imagine wedding motion sensors to surveillance optics, so the technics of a given security system work not just to identify intruders, but also and not exclusively to monitor the health and wellbeing of the citizens it is employed to protect. So, if you have optical and audio surveillance of the home, what then becomes possible is a holistic analysis of domestic health, climate, spending, energy and food consumption, sleep patterns, work patterns, brand preference, time allocation, interpersonal activity, hygiene, nutrition, et cetera, as well as the more traditional armature of property and bodily security from external harms. How can we assume the threat is always peripheral to the home? That’s at the heart of this reconception of security architecture and purview, and the belief that people will want the benefits of security systems that help them live better, healthier, safer, more productive lives, in which they can see their own place in the system, in which they could, perhaps, even compare their habits with those of their neighbors, or a family in Springfield could compare their lives with a family in Bangalore or Beijing or Johannesburg, living in real time, entirely out in the open, with everyone else in the world. That is the future of security.”

  Nathaniel has taken notes throughout Reveley’s presentation; at the end, when it all becomes clear, he feels dizzy, intoxicated by the landscape envisioned. This, surely, is what the future should look like: not just governm
ents and private corporations monitoring security, but anyone anywhere checking up on their neighbors, friends, associates, peers, even strangers, to see that everyone is living responsibly, all the time, waking or sleeping.

  After the meeting, Maureen steers Reveley toward Nathaniel. Up close, he can see that there is no visible division between the CEO’s pupils and irises, or rather that the pupils are fully dilated, making the irises disappear. Whatever the cause, the effect is like looking into a tunnel, and finding one’s own reflection deep inside.

  “Alex,” Maureen says, “this is Nate Noailles, who joined us recently from the Boston office. He’s doing amazing work in corrections rehabilitation. A very fast mover, going great guns.”

  Reveley’s skin is so tight his pores are invisible, age impossible to discern, although anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five seems likely. “Of course, Nate. Maureen can’t stop talking about you. Great work. We have our eye on a place for you in Switzerland. Make it work here and the job is yours for the taking. VP of Global Rehabilitation. That’s what I see for you.”

  Nathaniel shakes Reveley’s hand, musters his glossiest tone, and thanks Alex “for the opportunity to do such exciting and important work.”

  “We’re grateful to you, Nathaniel. We need responsible officers, people who understand that the way they live their personal lives, at home, is a reflection on the work they do in the corporation, and out in the world. I think you already understand that. I can see, looking at you,” Reveley says, his pupils seeming to grow ever larger, eclipsing even the whites of his eyes, “that you are entirely in sync with the aims of this organization, with the way we see the future of our place in the world.”

  “Yes, Alex, that’s absolutely right. I am totally on board,” Nathaniel says, doubting that Julia would ever countenance a move to Switzerland.

  “There could be a position for your wife as well, you know. We need top scientists, people who can activate the kind of technological advances necessary to realize the surveillance possibilities we haven’t yet unlocked,” Reveley says, nodding his head, black eyes hypnotizing.

  “I’ll be sure to mention that to her. She’s a great scientist. She does amazing work. Mostly not to do with surveillance, though. She’s more interested in assistive technology, for the disabled and elderly.”

  “What could be more assistive than domestic monitoring? What I’m saying, Nate, is that it would be good to have both you and your wife on board. We’re a family company. We like to have families involved from top to bottom, through and through. It’s not just a matter of company philosophy, but also one of corporate security. We’d love for Nathaniel and Julia and Copley Noailles to be an EKK company family. We want all of you involved, so let’s keep in touch,” he says, slipping his smooth hand once again into Nathaniel’s own.

  Nathaniel thinks back to that moment in Maureen’s office, when her hand slid along his leg, when he failed to respond to what appeared to be a sexual provocation. Perhaps that moment was designed to gauge the kind of man he might be, a test he undoubtedly passed. He is aware that only a few months ago, if he had discovered the company knew half what it seems to about his family, he would have been surprised, perhaps even alarmed. And yet now, high inside the national headquarters, with the shimmering promise of ascension to even greater heights, the feeling overwhelming all others is that he must find a way to bring his family into line.

  The waters have risen, or fallen, fallen to rise, autumn rainfall bringing them up, rivers engorged, coming down from the high west, meandering across borders, state lines, down inclines, a surge of whitewater coming, the browning of the water as it collects silt along its course, rivers swelling, great muddy veins of hypertension, clogged and closing in, spilling out over the earthen levies, breaking through, inundating the low-lying counties, the pancake flats of bone-rich farmland, the quick, dark earth, all of it coming back up, rising.

  Standing with Copley at the window of his playroom at the top of the house we look out on the neighborhood, water drip-dripping from the ceiling into a large plastic bucket I have to remember to empty every few hours during the day. In becoming a tutor I have also become a skivvy. Other leaks and buckets ping through the bedrooms and all the rooms on the ground floor, the whole house an upturned sieve, the outside coming in through numberless cracks and fissures, water running along corners and seams, turning white from the powder of plaster and drywall, milky with gypsum. A crow perches on the balcony railing, shakes its body, spreads its wings, looks at us and lowers its head, breathes out a mewling cat noise, laughing.

  I remember past floods, the way our creek would fill, spilling out over crops, but there was never water so deep as this. The road is dry but across the street the unfinished foundations have turned into treacherous swimming tanks for wild creatures of the woods, and the houses to the west, at the lowest point of the land, have seen water lick around doors, swamping basements. No drawbridges to lower, no way out but wading or boating. People in those houses have left already, evacuated, while these forest folk sit tight, rest easy on their hill, sandbagging all around the front except the driveway. “We’ll do it last,” Nathaniel said, looking out at the abandoned properties, the red alarm boxes flashing for now, until some electrical short circuit renders them unprotected. I shook my head, warned him: “Sometimes the water won’t wait. I’ve seen floods before, but never like this. Never so fast, never so widespread.”

  I keep a bag packed, ready to go at the moment I hear water cross the road, knowing I can escape out the back gate to higher ground in the woods, up the ridge and all the way to Demon Point, wait there until the waters recede or give myself over to them, letting all that I’ve conjured consume me.

  After that first meeting, Copley’s hand flying out to welcome me into his house, his parents asked him to give me a tour. He took me from room to room, naming spaces: “the living room,” “the den,” “the dining room,” “my parents’ room,” “my room,” “the playroom.” He pointed at the basement from the top of the stairs in the kitchen, as if he didn’t want to descend into its dull ivory glow.

  I am responsible for administering his medication at breakfast and dinner, and I have no doubt that the pills are making him withdrawn, sour, flattening him, wrapping his movement in tight-wound muslin heavy with starch. Last night I thought I heard a noise from his room but when I went to check he was sound asleep, his body so rigid he might have been dead; even his eyelids were blast-furnace forged.

  On the day of my arrival—a day that was, for me, also one of final departure—they made up a bedroom for me next to Copley’s, a room among many that all feel like being trapped inside a series of squared-off, hollowed-out eggs with windows and doors, a clutch of people waiting to hatch out of their collective confinement. There is nowhere to go in this kind of rain, no way to travel except by car, which, despite their promises, I do not yet have at my disposal. From the beginning, at unpredictable times during the daylight hours I spend here alone, I have heard noises whose source I cannot locate: the sounds of distant construction, doors slamming, water running. The day after I came, Copley said to me in a whisper, even though the two of us were alone in the house, “Things happen.”

  “What things?”

  “The furniture moves.”

  I felt the hair on my neck stand up.

  “What do you mean it moves?”

  “At night. We go to bed and everything is normal and when we get up it’s not.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “No,” Copley said. “My parents think it’s me. But it’s not. It’s him.”

  “Who?”

  “The man in the basement.”

  My first thought was Krovik, but I knew it could not be possible. I have looked there myself, went down one evening when Julia was working, hunched over the strange tools and metal limbs, the case filled with glass eyes. “See, the pupil is a camera. It doesn’t have to
look like an eye,” she explained, “but it makes interaction less alienating.” I wonder if the boy might be inventing to cover his crime, seeing the components of his mother’s work as a man with movement and agency. Or perhaps he is thinking in substitutions: a fantasy man in the basement in place of the only other man in the house: his father.

  When I saw him that evening, I looked at Nathaniel Noailles sitting at his computer in the office created from the remaining spare bedroom, humming and sighing over his work, the swish and twirl of his chair, the rage in his shoulders, and wondered if he was altogether present. The following morning I listened to hear if there might be an off-key chord in the music of his voice, looked to see if the balance of color in his eyes and skin and hair betrayed a deeper instability, if it might be possible to imagine him sneaking around at night, moving sofas, blaming his tricks on the child. I know he does not want to live here, does not believe they should have moved from Boston, and is searching for a way to force their return.

  As Copley said, things have, indeed, started to happen. One morning I found the faucet running in the kitchen sink and all the burners on the stove red hot, the freezer and refrigerator doors open on another. After a day of shopping—the four of us all going together on a Friday evening, as if a trip to the mall were a leisure activity—two loaves of bread went missing the next morning and the milk had all been poured into the sink, the cartons left dripping from the counter onto the floor. After that, Nathaniel took me aside.

  “Copley’s been having some problems. That’s why he’s medicated. That’s why he goes to the doctor. We’re trying to deal with it.”

  I looked at Nathaniel’s eyes, the cushions of soft skin around them, searching for deceit in his face.

  “He tells me he hasn’t done any of this.”

  “He has problems with truth. With reality and fantasy. Dr. Phaedrus—”