Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  2. My marriage is not what I believed it would be. I love my husband. I miss him during the days at work. I look forward to seeing him each evening. I look forward to seeing him in the morning in the moments before I open my eyes. But the man I want and hope to see is no longer the man I find before me. When I dream about sex I dream about him, the familiarity of his body, which is homey in a way that comforts rather than arouses: he is not an Adonis, not a man of great physical beauty; he does not go to the gym or run or do anything to look after his physical health; he has let himself go since we first met, when he was perhaps chubby, although hardly fat, a man of small stature who had never thought about diet or exercise and who, after the age of thirty, began as so many do to slip into the saturation of this country’s appetite for overindulgence, walking only from one form of transportation to another (car to elevator, escalator to car, moving walkway to airplane, monorail to taxi), eating more calories than he needs but which his body has been trained to demand. I do not dream of hard-bodied men with chiseled features and deep tans. I dream of goodness and warmth and (what shall I call it?) nominal attractiveness, the qualities about Nathaniel that first drew me to him. The goodness I believe is still there, but the warmth has cooled, its energy drained by his obsession with what he regards as the mistake our move from Boston entails. Our sex life is reserved but mostly still fulfilling; I supplement my needs in private, in the bath, and even, on one or two occasions, in the basement at night after everyone else has gone to bed, observed only by my machines, who, for all I know, will learn from their observation of my behavior. But even then I think of my husband, I visualize his face, imagine his mouth against my body, drawing tremors from my gut, turning the gears that make me arch my back, sensations I am able to summon more powerfully alone. (I don’t know if this is his failing or mine, or if failure is not a factor in these phenomena, if it is simply a matter of chance and physiology united with behavioral psychology and cultural aversion: Nathaniel has a small, inexpert mouth, flinches when I look down the length of my body and nod, asking without speaking for what I most want him to do, what he is so bad at doing, but for which, even at his worst, he makes me long, warm wet human tissue being more desirable than cold slick silicon brought to life through an artificial power source.) And then, too often, when I do see him after these separations of space or consciousness or temporality, I find myself disappointed, not because of the way he looks or the person he is, but because he returns to the same narrative we now seem unable to escape: the house, and all that is wrong with the house. This disappointment and frustration has only surfaced since we moved from Boston. I cannot remember ever being truly disappointed with Nathaniel before the move, except in the weeks leading up to it, when I could see him already deciding we had made a mistake, second-guessing a decision I believed, and that I continue to believe, we reached together. He now says he never wanted to move; he claims he told me it was a bad idea, but I do not recall ever hearing him say such a thing. My own career may have spurred this migration, but I did not force it on Nathaniel, I did not dictate to him that we had to leave Boston. Rather, I presented it as an option, because my new job was in the same city as his own company’s national headquarters and it seemed then (perhaps less so now) to present an ideal opportunity for us to progress. Granted, we would undoubtedly have advanced along different lines if we had remained in Boston, where there are more and objectively better universities than there are here, and where there are more and objectively more interesting other kinds of work Nathaniel might have done if he had chosen to move on from his company. When we talk to each other it no longer feels as though we are speaking the same language, or else we are using different dialects, always accusing the other of misinterpreting what we say. I misinterpret his panic as aggression, he misinterprets my absorption with work as froideur and sexual disinterest, while I interpret, wrongly or rightly, his growing obsession with his own work as sexual attraction to his boss. There are moments when a silent and invisible interpreter seems present between us, when fluency flows once again and we understand each other as completely as two human agents with entirely private senses of language specific to their own socio-geographic and familial contexts can possibly manage. No one speaks the same language. This is a planet of X billion languages. There are, I would hazard, verbal structures and vocabularies—the things we call “languages”—but the common speakers of any one of these will use the structures in different ways, bending and breaking them to fit their needs, and employ the vocabularies with their own private dictionary of associations and understandings that no one else will ever wholly understand. When two people understand each other in a way that feels genuine to both of them, even for a few minutes or hours (what a gift if they have years of this kind of understanding), it is something like a miracle. Nathaniel and I still have minutes, sometimes even whole hours, of what seems like near perfect understanding. I listen and believe that I understand. I reply and feel as though I am understood. There is no need for further explanation or elaboration or rephrasing. In times like these the meanings conveyed are often simple: talk about transportation, about food, about schedules. The value of understanding such small matters is not to be underestimated, and knowing I can speak and be understood about the most basic actions and contents of our daily lives reassures me, pulling me back from the edge of feeling as though I am about to fall into a miasma of isolation, where only the machines I create can understand me because I have programmed them to speak and understand in the way I speak and understand. In these times of apparent fluency with Nathaniel, I have to concede this is only my sense of the tenor of our exchanges; I cannot speak for him since so often I cannot even speak with him. I have no idea whether he feels understood, or that he understands, or if he feels as though he is moving through a world in which he is the only true speaker of his own private language.

  3. I believe that the house is a major part of the problem. The house is driving each of us insane. I am alone in the basement now, and think that I hear a noise, not from above, but from behind, as if it were coming from the ground itself, a churning thud, or series of thuds. I focus my attention on the computers in front of me and on the machine the computers direct. I give verbal commands, I watch as the machine tries to complete them, learning from observation of its surroundings and from whatever it can discover online. I ask it to make me a cup of coffee and for the first time ever it completes the task, although the coffee is weak. As it delivers the coffee to me in a hand more finely articulated than my own, I hear a noise again, but instead of a deep thud like I heard a few minutes ago, this one is a high-pitched whine, almost mechanical itself, like a dentist’s drill boring into enamel, the screech of metal against some softer substance, shrill and wet. I listen at the walls but the noise stops, or my sense of it stops. I look at the machine and it looks back at me, tilting down its head, turning left to right, waiting for me to tell it what to do as it listens and observes the room, the noise, and me. I ask it if it hears a noise, knowing that its auditory senses are more acute than my ears. “Yes,” it says in Copley’s recorded voice, “I hear a noise.” I ask it if it can identify the source of this noise. It pauses, turning from side to side as we wait in silence. “I think it is a drill,” it says. If it could walk, I might ask it to investigate, although there is nothing here I cannot see: the basement is a white space, its limits visible, nothing hidden except the pantry, and I can look behind me into its space and be sure there is nothing inside but empty shelves, which I know I should fill in case of emergency. There is no one here but my machines and me. If there is a drill, it is coming from a distance, perhaps all the way from the next-door neighbors’ basement, but not from this house. Nathaniel, Copley, and Louise are all upstairs in bed. I heard a noise and the machine confirmed what I thought I heard, although that proves nothing except that I am not hearing imaginary sounds, only sounds whose origin I cannot locate. But then there is the greater question, the problem of the continued dis
ruption to the house. Copley has the strength and strangeness to move furniture, but the noose of bedclothes seems beyond the capabilities of a boy who, for all his intelligence and physical control, failed to learn to tie his shoes until last year, a boy who has always had difficulties with buttons and laces and ties, who prefers zippers and snaps and velcro. There are, then, only two other people who might have tied the noose, and, assuming Copley is wholly innocent, moved the furniture on countless occasions, wasted food, electricity, and water (despite the solar tiles the first power and water bills were astonishingly high). The two suspects are Louise and Nathaniel. I should, by virtue of loyalty, assume Louise must be the culprit, except that the first incident occurred before she came to live with us and it seems not only unlikely but also impossible that she could have entered the house then, bypassing the alarm. All this means that my husband must be the one who is terrorizing us, and yet at each new assault Nathaniel looks as wounded as I feel, though unlike me he believes—and is very vocal in his belief, even faced with the newest incident—that it must be Copley because there can be no other logical explanation. I wonder about the rigor of his logic. And then I realize with horror that there is another possible suspect: me. I work my way through the front-line symptoms of schizophrenia, but believe myself clear and healthy.

  a. I don’t hear voices; my thoughts do not echo in my own mind.

  b. I have no delusions of control, no belief that anyone is modifying my thoughts: injecting their own, taking mine away or disseminating them for anyone else to access.

  c. I do not believe that I have any symptoms of heightened or altered perception.

  And yet the strangeness of the events that have taken place since we moved here is so acute, any explanation so impossible to reach, that I am moved to wonder whether I might be suffering from some dissociative disorder, a derangement that might allow me to commit these domestic atrocities, if this is not too strong a word for what is happening, and have no conscious awareness of my actions. The ketchup is a mystery like all the others, because we never have ketchup in the house. I look through my recent financial records, hoping to find evidence of a purchase at a grocery or convenience store, but there is nothing on the statement I cannot remember, and no occurrence of ketchup on any of the recent grocery receipts. I feel relieved and at the same time long to find proof that it is me who has done these things because it would mean it is not Nathaniel and it is not Copley: to implicate myself is to exonerate them, to be able to go on believing in their goodness as people, in their health and sanity and morality. When I heard Nathaniel interrogating Copley about the most recent bout of vandalism all I could do was remain mute, on the verge of shouting out—although I do not believe it for a moment—“I did it!” I want to love my husband, I do love my husband, but with each new event of defacement and disorganization I believe more firmly in only two possible explanations: my husband is either sick or evil, either profoundly mentally unwell, or a cruel genius, so capable of deceit that he only ever looks innocent.

  4. Fathers are the root of all evil. Nathaniel does not come from a healthy family: I know what his father did to him when he was a boy. I know that charges should have been pressed a long time ago; if Nathaniel had the courage he could still do so and, if nothing else, put to rest the memories that plague him. Last night when I came to bed he was already asleep. I closed our bedroom door, locked it, took a shower, dried off, put on pajamas, turned out the light in the bathroom and crept across to our bed, but Nathaniel was already snoring. I slipped under the sheet and bedspread, rolled up my earplugs and stuffed them into my ears. I closed my eyes, I tried to go to sleep. I counted backward from 1000 in French and knew when I was still awake at 322 that the counting was not going to work, Nathaniel’s snores punctuating every three or four numbers. Then, around 200, he turned over onto his side, back to me, the snores stopping, and I never reached 0. I dreamed that Nathaniel was on top of me, inside me, but I could not open my eyes. I touched his back and buttocks, gripped his arms, trying to shove him off, and although I knew it was him he felt unfamiliar: harder, thinner, muscular, his skin smooth where it should have been hairy. I dreamed that a hand was clapped over my throat and the sex was brief and brutal and painful. I woke up at 2:37 to the feeling of a distant thud, a vibration rather than a noise, and sat up in bed. I was wet and my pajama pants were around my knees. The dream was not only a dream. Nathaniel has never done this to me before, at least so far as I am aware. Perhaps he thought I was awake—perhaps a part of me was. But on waking I was alone, the covers all in order, as though Nathaniel had slipped out of bed and smoothed them back into place. I waited, breathing fast, wondering if I should go investigate, until finally I threw my legs out of bed and tiptoed across the floor. Our bathroom was empty and dark, the door to the hall standing open. The landing was dark, the doors to Copley’s and Louise’s rooms closed, the rain spitting against the windows. The door to Nathaniel’s study was closed, the light on inside. I pulled the plugs from my ears and held them in my hand. I thought I heard him typing. I knocked on the door but he did not answer, and at that time of night I did not want to wake anyone else. I was hyperventilating from shock, and as I walked down the front stairs, trying to steady my breath, I saw a dark shape in the shadows of the foyer, or perhaps not a shape but only a shadow. I stopped and the shape moved, disappearing into the dining room, although I heard no noise accompanying the movement. For a long time I stood on the stairs, unable to move, certain I saw the shadow return, shift, move backward and forwards, sway and convulse, although it had an indistinct outline, amorphous and globular, and resembled nothing so much as condensed smoke. As I stood watching the silent shape I was reminded of Nathaniel’s stories of his father, which he told me only after we were married, about how he lost certain senses when his father entered his bedroom at night, how his vision became dulled, outlines blurring, his hearing dampened, voice choked, tongue ashen tasting, those four senses receding as his somatic senses became more acute, making him painfully aware of his bodily position, the heat of his father’s own body, the sharp and dull pains Nathaniel suffered, a hand clapped over his mouth, sealing shut his lips, another one over his eyes. His father raped him repeatedly. I do not think Nathaniel has called it this, but there is no question in my mind that rape is what happened, whether or not penetration occurred. He told me that in the days following such events, the sensory dampening continued, so that everything and everyone became blurred: he could only see his father, the great man and scholar, as a dark shape moving through the house like a thundercloud. My own father was never cruel or abusive or criminal in the way that Nathaniel’s father was and still threatens to be, but that is not to say my father is innocent of any wrongdoing, for how can any parent be completely good? His failure was to pretend, even though I, at six years old, found my mother hanging from the chandelier in the front hall of our house, that mom had left him for another woman, a fiction that hit upon a kind of truth, although I was too young to understand it at the time. He did not attend the funeral and prevented me from attending; all the events of her death and mourning were placed in the hands of her two sisters and grieving parents while my father and I played a grotesque farce according to which mom, the youngest and brightest of her family, had run off to live in San Francisco. Young as I was at the time, there were moments when I believed this might be true, thinking that to hang oneself in the home was to effect a kind of transcontinental migration of the mind into the body of someone else. I imagined mom in a body almost recognizable as her own, but with red hair instead of brown and thin curves instead of round ones. I was ten before I understood completely, comprehensively, that my mother was in her family plot in Portsmouth, reverting to dust, and not living a queer new life with another woman on the opposite coast, and when I realized this was the truth, I began to hate my father for persisting in the fiction of her leaving him. As his own health declines, it is difficult not to feel sympathy for the blow my mother’s
suicide struck, but I still cannot bring myself to want him anywhere near me. A visit once a year is more than enough because each time I see him there is a moment when the old fiction gets aired again, with him speculating about the life he imagines mom leading in San Francisco, “in the Marina District, probably,” he’ll sneer, “with her new ‘family.’” I huff and lose my temper and say to him, “Enough already, dad. She killed herself and I found her. I saw the body. It had nothing to do with us. She was sick.” I wondered, looking at the shifting darkness below me in the hall last night, whether I too might be sick, or if it is in fact my husband, as I believe now in the daylight (such light as there is in this endlessly rain-shadowed city), whose illness is undoing us all. At last the shape disappeared and after several more minutes of standing, listening to water drop into buckets scattered around the house, sounds I had not registered up until that point because they have become, in the last week or so, a constant accompaniment to our lives, I heard a noise upstairs. But instead of moving toward the noise, I went down to the ground floor, circling through the living room, the dining room, the den, the kitchen, looking out onto the back porch, expecting to find some new outrage, the furniture stacked up on itself, the food in our refrigerator thrown on the floor, shit smeared across the walls. There was nothing. Everything was in order, the refrigerator humming but no other noise, no movement. The lights in the basement were off, the doors locked, the security system armed. I made a cup of warm milk and drank it in the dark, holding myself, trying to decide how I would address the events of that night the next morning. When I was ready I went back upstairs by the rear staircase, found darkness and silence, and the door to our bedroom ajar. Inside, Nathaniel was in bed, snoring, and the sight of him there, where I knew he had not been only half an hour before, made my legs soften, my spine curve in on itself. I slumped against the wall for a moment, listening, still gripping my earplugs, and then went back to bed, although I could not sleep again and got up first this morning, determined not to have any time alone with him, no moment when I could look at my husband and ask what he was doing, why he was walking the house at night, why he fucked me when I was sleeping. Then I realized I had no proof he was doing anything of the kind, except my belief that he was not in the bed when I woke in the middle of the night, that my own body was wet, that I had both a dream and a lingering physical sensation that suggested we had been intimate. I have incontrovertible proof for only one conclusion: last night I was the one walking the house, seeing phantoms that might or might not have been there.