Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  His childhood home in Cambridge was on a large lot with mature trees. In the backyard there was a crab apple that was his fort and retreat for as long as he was small enough to climb it, disappearing into its thicket of branches, hooking his legs over a smooth limb and hanging upside down, watching the world as blood rushed to his head, then swinging his arms, pulling his body back up when he was still limber with youth. At some point he stopped climbing, lost the strength in his upper body, and his core muscles atrophied. He grew up slack and heavy, often gorging himself out of depression.

  Of course he wants Copley to have a childhood of trees and lawns before the possibility of houses and yards like the one they have bought disappears into a future of hot and unpredictable chaos, of high-density living as the only possible way for the species to continue. The world Copley will inhabit as an adult is bound to be a far more difficult place than the one Nathaniel has inherited. If it has not already happened, humanity is about to enter a new era, when security will matter more than anything else: not just of person and property but also of food, water, health, medicine, the environment. Security will become the defining quality and concern of human existence on the planet and beyond; to guarantee the long-term security of the human species (if such a thing is desirable), we are going to have to leave the earth. Hawking has already said it, and others agree. Nathaniel believes this, and believes in the work his company is doing to make the world incrementally more secure—not just for nations and corporations, but also for people like him, his wife, and his child.

  Nevertheless, it is clear there is far too much house in this house. It was a bad, backward-looking choice. This is a historically conservative state and he fears the neighbors will be religious fanatics bent on converting nonbelievers, while the house itself will need—will demand—to be filled with new furniture, ornaments, and art, and before they know it they’ll be spending their lives decorating and filling up this monstrosity, because unlike some of the sleek minimalist houses Nathaniel has admired in the past, and indeed unlike their own apartment in Boston, which benefited from a mind-easing lack of disorder, this house will look vacant unless it is packed to the rafters with a life’s accumulation of stuff. It will demand that they become different people altogether. Unpacking a box of dinner plates in the kitchen, Nathaniel feels one of them slipping from his fingers, watches it falling in an observable arc, and winces as it hits the floor at just the right angle so the china explodes into three large sections surrounded by a number of waxy, feathery little shards. He finds the dustpan and broom, already in the kitchen’s utility closet, and cleans up the mess. The trash compacter is already lined with a new bag. Nathaniel dumps the three large pieces of plate and all the shards on a sheet of heavy brown packing paper, folds it up, and throws it away. Julia is in the basement and if she heard the crash she says nothing about it. It is better to let it pass. He has tried to convince her that objects are not important; if a plate breaks, it should be dealt with at once without melodrama. Sentiment is for people, not for possessions, but she attaches meaning and importance to things in ways that still surprise him after more than a decade of life together.

  One of the four bedrooms and the room in the attic remain empty, without so much as a stray box to unpack. Their entire Boston apartment would fit, with room to spare, in the basement alone. They have no furniture to put in the den, though at least their books—the college textbooks and self-help manuals and various design catalogs they have acquired—finally have a proper home. They possess no pool table or other games to fill the basement recreation area, but at least the workshop space is more or less in a condition Julia can use.

  They order pizza, eating off their own china at the dining room table. After dinner, they allow Copley to watch half an hour of television before Julia puts him to bed. Everything has been unpacked, put away in cupboards and closets, even if not in quite the right order. There will be weeks of reorganization: optimization of storage, Julia says. Nathaniel will defer to her in this as in so much else, watching in amazement while she creates not just exact, but ideal order throughout the house. Perhaps it is obsessive, but he knows it is also born of a gift for efficiency and classification that Julia can adapt to almost any problem.

  With the front door locked, he turns off the lights and goes upstairs where he finds Julia reading Copley a story. At the age of seven, the child should be old enough to read his own books, but Nathaniel says goodnight and Copley, acting fully human for the first time all day, says goodnight as well, reaching out his hands for Nathaniel to embrace him. Nathaniel hugs his son, kisses his forehead, and says goodnight again, leaving Julia to finish the story while he goes to take a shower. Stripping off his clothes, he puts them in the hamper Julia has already placed in the master bathroom, and turns on the shower, standing under the water for a long time until he finds himself crying. As steam fills the room he can no longer see his feet and has the illusion of floating, his toes numb from the heat of the water, and for several moments he is certain of hovering in the shower stall, his lower body dispersing as his head is drawn up to the extractor fan, drawn in and cut to ribbons, sucked out through the ventilation pipe and sprayed across the side of the house.

  He dries himself off and gets into the bed he and Julia reassembled earlier in the day. It was their first major purchase together ten years ago, costing as much as a good used car. For a year he could never turn off the lights without making the sound of brakes squealing. It was the closest they have ever come to divorce: the teasing, he discovered in retrospect, nearly drove Julia to leave him. He listens as she turns off the lights in the hall and takes her own shower, hangs the towel on the hook behind the door, and slides into bed beside him.

  As sleep comes, he is troubled for the first time in nearly twenty years by recurring childhood dreams: of two burly men concealed behind the juniper bushes in the backyard in Cambridge; of a creature, black and featureless and covered with mud, under his bed, hidden by the dust ruffle, waiting for night so it can emerge, fingering the bedspread, pulling itself up onto the mattress, crawling on top of Nathaniel, pinning his arms and legs, suffocating him with its hot oily hands, the fingers slipping into his nostrils and mouth, filling his ears and gouging out his eyes, drilling holes through his nipples and into his lungs, hooking his navel and pulling out his guts, fingers finding their way into every opening, rending him apart while leaving him horrifically intact, blinded, voiceless.

  Nathaniel wakes minutes or hours later, aware of someone in the hall. Without disturbing Julia, whose breathing is heavy, eyelids twitching, he rolls out of bed and tiptoes across the room to the open door. It was closed when he fell asleep. Julia must have opened it before returning to bed.

  In the hall Copley is walking toward the oriel window at the front of the house. The moon is shining with an intensity that registers in Nathaniel’s ears as a sustained C# bell tone that makes the floor vibrate.

  “Copley,” he whispers, trying to pitch his voice in the direction of his son’s dark shape, but the boy does not stop or respond: he keeps walking to the window until he knocks his forehead into the glass, pressing his palms against the neighboring panes, making a clicking noise that may be coming from his mouth or from his fingernails against the window. Nathaniel shivers and closes the bedroom door behind him.

  CROUCHING IN THE SHADOWS A few steps down the back stairs, Paul watches as the man walks along the hall, picks up the child in his arms and carries him across the hall to what was once Carson’s room. The man is out of shape, his outline bunched and rounded, and he moves with the heavy soft tread of someone who never thinks about his body. It is the kind of body Paul could overcome and subdue, the body of a coward, ignorant of the ways a body in peak condition can move: quick and stealthy and silent.

  Half an hour passes in the dark staircase and then the man is standing again in the hall, where he stares out the window at the front of the house. Paul watches him looking at th
e neighborhood and breathing in clogged asthmatic gasps. The man has no clue how to be silent: his whispers could wake the dead; his tiptoeing makes the boards creak and sing. At last the man lumbers back to the master bedroom, closing the door behind him, and for a moment Paul feels as though he is the only living presence in the house, these new people nothing more sinister than ghosts sent to torment him.

  As a boy he once saw a ghost in his grandmother’s house. The foundations had been constructed around a granite boulder, and in the basement a great mound of the rock protruded up from the concrete floor. His grandmother had no air conditioning and it was a hot summer day, so he was playing in the basement, building forts and staging miniature wars with a motley collection of plastic soldiers and intergalactic warriors when all of a sudden, even though no one had come down the stairs, he knew he was not alone. A man appeared on the other side of the boulder, as though he had been lying down and simply sat up straight, bending from the waist. The man looked at Paul and nodded and then lay himself down again. It had not occurred to Paul to be afraid and when he went over to see what was there it was just the floor and the boulder, except that where the floor met the boulder on that side of the basement there was a kind of crevice. The concrete, added at some point long after the house’s original construction, had been poured leaving a gap between the floor and the rock that was wide enough for Paul’s hand to fit through, big enough for mice and insects, perhaps even snakes, to come and go. He stuck his fingers into the gap and, reaching deeper into the crevice, could feel the earth and then a larger cavity, the contour of the granite boulder, its seams and wrinkles, a mass of fine roots, a harder root like the branch of a tree, and something round and smooth and cold to the touch. He’d broken away some of the surrounding concrete and had his arm stuck in almost up to the shoulder, feeling around in the void, when that smooth cold round thing moved, escaping his touch, then sliding against his hand, a muscle of ice stirred to life.

  Paul does not know what he is doing sitting here now in this house that is no longer his, watching an empty dark hallway where a man and a boy, father and son, have just staged their strange nocturnal dance. He does not know what brought him out of the bunker in the first place. He has no clear intention or purpose, no design he is conscious of trying to enact. He simply found his body moving, followed it, and is waiting to see what it will do.

  Snores at two different registers begin to come from the master bedroom, resonating through the hall and down the stairs. Paul has created a house that echoes, a chamber of noises. The heavy vibrations of the truck woke him at dawn and throughout the day he listened at the hatch, monitoring the sounds of the house as the movers moved and the new people unpacked, banging boxes on floors, shifting furniture into place, and then, late in the day, arranging tools in the basement workshop, reclaiming and repurposing the space he had designed to meet his own requirements. Expecting to find the man busy with saws and power tools, he edged his body out through the hatch, scurrying to the door of the pantry from where he could see straight into the workshop area. The woman was unpacking a collection of plastic crates, stacking the empty ones in a far corner of the basement next to an existing pile of metal suitcases. While she worked the woman spoke to herself, or perhaps, Paul began to think, to the things she was unpacking. From the distance of the pantry he could not see what kinds of tools she might be arranging, but the way she moved and spoke to herself raised a shudder on Paul’s spine and made him retreat to the hatch, pulling it closed and throwing the lock. All the sounds of the house coalesced, pouring into the bunker where they were amplified and clarified—clearer and louder than if he had been in the same room as the people talking. He could hear every word, the whispers and significant silences that passed between the adults, the curious sounds made by the child, the words the child spoke only to himself when his parents left him alone and he tried to narrate the change that was taking place: I don’t know, no. Boston. Yes, we’re from Boston. Where are you from? Are you from here? I said I don’t know. Corrections. Rehabilitation. No. A scientist. She works in a lab. In this way, Paul has come to know where these new people are from, the outlines of personalities and behaviors, all in the course of a day. The movers called them Mr. and Mrs. No-ales, but the man, Nathaniel, corrected them: No-eye. The s, like so much else in the name, remains unspoken, coming out as nothing but breath. Paul tries to form the name on his tongue in the way he hears Mr. Noailles do it, but he cannot make the right sounds.

  At last when he believed the family was in bed he emerged again from the bunker, examining the basement with a flashlight, ready to recede into some dark corner if he heard approaching footsteps. On the worktables were three computers and a tool collection, unlike any he had ever seen, composed of circuitry, colorful wires, cutters, screwdrivers, pliers, hammers, vises, strippers, wrenches, ratchets, tweezers, vacuums, heat sinks, inserters, extractors, pullers, retrievers, knives, mirrors, soldering tools, meters, and other instruments that looked like medical or dental equipment. All the tools, parts, and instruments—including several larger machines he could not name—were arranged on a series of vinyl mats, while alongside the tools and equipment was a collection of what looked like amputated limbs, all of them in order, like with like: arms with arms, hands with hands, a row of feet and ankles, another of legs, a grid of articulated joints, all made from colorless materials both rigid and flexible. He was too afraid to touch any of it, and afraid, in another cold flash, a blade at his nape, of the people who have invaded his house.

  In the darkness, time thins and stretches as Paul crouches on the steep back stairs, watching the hallway that connects the four bedrooms his family once occupied. A green-blue glow from the street fills the landing, defining the outline of the boy, who is suddenly standing above Paul. At the top of the stairs the child’s small bare toes, pale and luminous in the night, curl over the nosing to touch the riser. The boy looks in Paul’s direction but seems not to see him. He can hear the child’s breath alongside his own, and the acceleration of his heart in his ears.

  The boy looks right through him and then walks down the stairs, sour air streaming from a small open mouth. A cold smooth hand brushes against Paul’s own as he leans against the wall to move out of the way and a shudder rises from his tailbone, breaking loose along his spine as the hairs rise along his neck and arms. The staircase is full of the boy’s breath, acrid and decaying. Paul turns to watch the boy’s descent, the small hands reaching out to either side of the staircase, one of them gripping the banister when, all of a sudden, he disappears into darkness.

  As the child approaches the bottom of the stairs he reappears, caught by the light from the kitchen windows, moonlight gazing in. When he turns the corner Paul follows him, tiptoeing down the steps to the kitchen. The child is either hidden in shadow or has already left the room. Pulling his flashlight from the pocket of his jeans, Paul presses it on, aiming the beam into the corners of the kitchen, but the room is empty.

  Sounds come from the front of the house: an unlocking rasp and then the seal on the glass storm door sucking open, the hiss as it closes again. He kills the flashlight and puts it back in his pocket, running into the dining room and out to the hall. Through the storm door he can see the boy walking down the lawn to the road. Without pausing to think, Paul pushes open the door, flies across the grass, and catches the child up in his arms just as the boy reaches the street. As Paul cradles him the boy’s expression remains fixed, unresponsive, blind, although the eyes are open, looking past Paul, the whites caught in the light of the moon, the irises and pupils uniformly black. Gazing into those vacant eyes, transfixed by their whiteness, Paul nearly drops the boy.

  Sleepwalkers should never be woken. Paul’s mother told him that as Carson began to walk. He holds the child tenderly, one arm supporting the boy’s back, one his legs, and carries him back into the house. That blank face, those staring, empty eyes. The body weighs almost nothing.

  Pau
l puts the boy down in the hall and watches as he begins to climb the main stairs, disappearing again into darkness. At the second floor landing the child turns, walks down the hall, and begins climbing to the third floor, disappearing once more. He follows the child up endless flights, the boy receding always into gloom, the house expanding past the limits Paul knows, the two flights of stairs, public and private, crisscrossing each other, ever higher, beyond the three stories he built, the boy climbing and climbing without pause or fatigue, a ghastly unending ascent straight out of the house and into the remoteness of space, the world falling away around them.

  He finds the boy at the far end of the attic playroom, forehead pressed against the balcony doors and looking out at the front lawn, across the empty street to the gaping foundations of two unfinished houses, cavities, twin eye sockets scraped clean with a spoon. Moonlight falls around the boy until a bank of fast-moving clouds turns the room black. The boy turns and walks past him, creeping down the stairs one step at a time.

  At the boy’s bedroom Paul watches the child slip back under the covers and turn on his side to face the door. It is too dark to see whether his eyes are open or closed. The face, the triangular shape of chin and cheeks, the hemisphere of skull, the way the parts have put themselves together, remind Paul of his son’s face. For a moment Paul wonders if, by some miracle, this boy is Carson. The child sighs and turns over to face the wall. His whole body twitches, arms seizing and shaking as he cries out, a wail that shakes the windows. Eyes open, the boy sits up in bed looking straight at Paul, and screams.