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.
Not long after the house was finished his parents came for a barbecue. His father scrutinized the building materials and design while his mother, Dolores, kept shaking her head. Her own family, far away in Arizona, had always danced along the edge of destitution, and Paul could not tell whether she was proud or disbelieving or both.
“You were always gonna build houses, Pablito. Remember how you loved those bricks? I could keep you occupied that way for hours. You would just sit there in your fort talking to yourself, playing with your little action figures and whatnot.” Now, lying alone in the dark, hands pressed against the stock of the rifle, Paul can see the way his mother ravaged a fingernail between her teeth, as if she had already guessed how things would end up, how he was going to lose everything, the way society would turn against him, the way everyone, even she, was going to abandon him. “You remember that?”
“Yeah, mama. I remember.”
“‘I’m buildin’ a house,’ that’s what you’d say.”
“A house not a fort?”
“I guess sometimes it coulda been a fort. But usually it was just a house. ‘I’m buildin’ my house.’ Whenever you had friends over you wouldn’t let anyone play with those bricks. You hated sharing your toys, but the bricks were the worst. No one except me could touch them—you wouldn’t even let your dad. You used to say, ‘anybody who touches my bricks I’ll butcher ’em.’ You were always so angry. You didn’t want to do anything I told you.”
“A man has to be his own star, mama. Isn’t that right, dad, isn’t that what you always said?”
His father, talking to Amanda on the other side of the back porch, sucked his beer and nodded as he fingered the vinyl siding. “Plastic,” he muttered. “Plastic in tornado country. What you want is brick and mortar.”
“You always knew what you wanted to be. You were always going to build houses. I saw that from the beginning, chiquito. Not like your father,” his mother whispered.
As a toddler, his favorite toys were a collection of blocks made from corrugated cardboard printed to resemble red bricks. Stacked on top of one another they formed walls that stood straight but were light enough to come tumbling down without causing damage. He built uncommonly straight walls for a child and the only time they ever fell was when he knocked them apart with his fists or his feet, imagining himself as one of the hulking superhuman characters he watched on television. “You shouldn’t watch so many cartoons,” his mother would say, “they make you too angry. Go play with your bricks.”
In the corner of his bedroom—the many he had over the first twelve years of his life, bedrooms in four American states as well as in England and Germany—he built forts of two walls with no exit or entrance where he would sit for hours, fortifying and refortifying them with successive layers of cardboard brick until he had exhausted the whole collection, leaving himself almost no room to move.
“You’ve boxed yourself into a corner,” his mother would say. “Now what you gonna do?”
“Stay here. Put a blanket over it.”
Dolores would drape a sheet over the opening at the top of those cardboard walls, sealing her son inside until some bodily need forced him to punch through the structure, growling and roaring as he emerged into the world of whatever house they were then occupying. “Too many cartoons. You get so angry. It scares me, Pablo. What did I do to make you angry? Why you biting me all the time? Why you hitting me?”
In the years before they settled in this city, they always lived in tiny impersonal houses that his mother struggled to domesticate, in one case gluing lids from aluminum cans over holes in the baseboards to keep out mice, or dyeing burlap bags to make navy blue bedroom curtains for Paul in another, where the houses were so close together they could hear everything happening in their neighbors’ lives. There was nowhere to retreat, no place of refuge. Every man should have a bunker to protect himself and his family, but Paul’s own family has now fled. Before the foreclosure was final he received the divorce papers and restraining orders, keeping him away not only from his wife and sons, but even from his in-laws, safe in their gated community on the other side of the continent. Now he is not even allowed to speak to his boys.
The noise seems to grow louder, the helicopter getting closer, readying itself to land. The police a
re coming to drive him from his hiding place, to flush him out so that sharpshooters can mow him down, spraying him with flamethrowers, burning down the woods to drive him from his lair. He has committed no crime. There is no reason the authorities should come after him, but the noise continues to grow louder, pulsing, rhythmic and mechanical. The streets of Dolores Woods were designed to accommodate a helicopter in case of a newsworthy happening in the neighborhood, or in the event of a major civil or natural disaster requiring the immediate evacuation of the development’s residents, or even the prosaic emergency of a neighbor needing a lifesaving medevac to one of the city’s several private hospitals. At one point, when things seemed to be going well with the business, he even imagined clearing more trees to make room for his own private helipad.
Fallen Land Page 3