Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

CLIMBING BACK UP THROUGH THE branches and debris, when I once again reached the height of the men I stopped, looked at them, could have sworn they had changed positions, the one in the dress no longer looking down, as he had been, but up at me, sunken black sockets staring into my own. “Don’t ghost me, Great-uncle George,” I said, “I haven’t come to disturb, just to check, be sure you’re all right. I can see you are, the both of you, so I’ll leave you be.”

  ALL CURRENTS STOPPED TWO MONTHS ago: no power no water no gas. Potatoes are ready to dig in the garden, pumpkins still ripening, apples red in the orchard, things I would have packed into the cellar in previous years, storing up for winter. The memory of sheltering among that subterranean horde of plenty when the air turned green, the rain stopped, and the sound of a locomotive came driving down from the sky, never hitting us square but often rolling close enough to take out an acre of crops. What reassurance those roots offered, that fruit, the smell of earth and cool walls, Donald holding my hand, heavy wool blankets pulled over our bodies for protection, Rebekah sleeping through it all, deepsleeper daughter, nodding her way through life. She did not spend enough hours playing in the mud, never had any love for the land, no feeling for trees or stones, thinks dirt is something to cover with concrete, always wanted to be clean as a girl. I told her there was nothing cleaner than dirt but somehow failed to impart this belief to my farm child who was ever too eager to leave the farm. “Why can’t we have a house like that?” she used to say, passing the cereal-box neighborhoods filling old cornfields east of our own. I blame myself for that as well, for not making my daughter see the beauty of this place or have pride in the house she inhabited instead of always lusting after a thing better or newer. I don’t know where she came from, what midwife intervened to prick her finger and make her sleepwalk through life. She has her suburban California house now, made of drywall and plywood and a fake stone façade, and she’s as proud as if it were an unusually bright child: coddles it, shines its floors, scolds when it gets dirty, dresses it in frills and bows, and keeps it scrubbed so hard it looks uncomfortable with itself, barely alive, afraid of its owner’s reproof. I knew children like that when I was still teaching, saw them arrive each morning spotless, trembling, avoiding any risk of mark or stain on their clothes and shoes. When I met the mothers at parent–teacher conferences it was clear those tired women often had nothing to give their children but cleanliness: the line between one state and another, the precipitous edge, the vertigo of falling from no height at all to an impossible depth.

  I STEAL OUT THE KITCHEN door, off the porch, and along the concrete path that leads in a straight line to the barn. The rain slackens, giving less of itself, and I am scarcely wet when I arrive under the pent where hay used to be pulleyed up into the loft on the long beam jutting out from the top of the barn. From under the gas can I unearth the spare key that has always been kept by the door, unlock it, edge it open just wide enough to dart into the warm dark space that still smells of gasoline, old hay, and more faintly of Donald.

  The rain strengthens, dropping pools in the dusty floor, drizzling through the loft and running flame-quick along beams. It will all come down. Without the city, time and nature would have done its work: slower, but destined for the same end. This barn and all these buildings have lived longer than their builders intended. The fight may be lost but I am still not ready to say good-bye. The dead are here, waiting, asking for a word.

  A galvanized bucket filled with dust hangs from a nail in the corner of the side aisle nearest the road. I flip it over and rap on the bottom, watching the rain of particles catch and cascade in the light. Outside I lift the singing handle and bring it down and up and down and after a dozen of these blows the gouts of groundwater come, spurting into the bucket. Fill it, swirl it, toss it out, making more mud for the mud that’s there. Just as the rain stops I take the third filling inside, leaving it on the porch by the kitchen door while I unlock the storm cellar and in the light that comes despite the rain I can see my pile of wood and kindling. Fuel will be a problem in another month or two.

  I make a fire in the old kitchen stove that I kept even after the electric one arrived forty years ago. It has been useful for power outages in winter and in the storm season, for making the house hot when the winds drag the chill below zero. Coaxing kindling into flame I layer the larger pieces in the way my mother taught me, and while the fire takes and water boils in the cast iron pot I return to the vegetable patch with the bucket, harvesting tomatoes and peppers, pulling leeks from the ground, digging three potatoes from the sandy mud, pulling carrots, yanking up celery root, washing it all at the hemorrhaging pump.

  I peel and cut, making a late summer soup, and stand at the kitchen window for the next hour, the fingers of my right hand tipped against my teeth, elbow resting under the rib cage, the left hand on my hip: pose of preoccupation and worry, of what-next and wherefore.

  I taste the carrot-sweet broth and set it aside to cool until I can eat it. My mother is here, standing at the window looking up at the Krovik doom house. Although the image shifts in my mind, I can see her clearly, mother in her young-womanhood, middle years, and death throes, the ages flowing over the ghostly presence as the light changes, a furrow of sun cutting down through clouds and bringing mama out all matronly, in her prime, the age she was when Donald and I got married. She speaks in her soundless voice.

  You can’t stay, LouLou.

  And what happens to you, mama, if I go for good, and when the house comes down?

  You don’t worry about us. We’ll all head to the woods. And if they chop down the woods we’ll go to the river. And if the river runs dry we’ll run into the ground, go deep, wait out the rest of this age, down where all is quiet and dark and good.

  Will you eat? I raise my cup of soup to her face. Mama laughs and the laughter breaks her up, an evanescence that sings the clouds apart, clears the sky, dries out the land.

  The national headquarters of Nathaniel’s company occupy a fifty-acre campus on the edge of the old downtown, divided from the once bustling streets around the county courthouse by a twelve-lane freeway built in the 1970s, which required the eviction of thousands of people who were subsequently relocated into federal housing projects. These have in turn been demolished in the last decade, as Nathaniel’s company purchased entire city blocks of surrounding slum neighborhoods, razed them, and built an interlocking complex of apartment buildings with integrated restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners, movie theaters, and health clubs. Billed as the CITY WITHIN THE CITY, the centerpiece of the company’s headquarters is a reflective glass-sheathed corporate high-rise occupying the traditional place of the town hall, church, or meetinghouse. On some days the tower appears silver, on others almost black, and under the most favorable conditions it seems not to be there at all, disappearing into its own reflective surface. The meetinghouse has become the mall or, as is more recently the case, the shopping strip or plaza. A church remains untouched on the periphery of the new development, while the actual town hall is a mile away in the old downtown, surrounded by empty lots and vacant skyscrapers built in the previous century and adjacent to the county jail and police headquarters. The downtown remains the preserve of the law: of charges, trials, and temporary incarceration before transit to the state penitentiary on the edge of the city. To the east, near the river, there has been successful redevelopment of the warehouse district Nathaniel loves, the riverfront with its privatized parkland, walking paths, marinas, sidewalk cafés, luxury hotels, conference centers, sports stadia, concert arena, and thicket of public art: a plaza is filled with bronze statues depicting nineteenth-century pioneers with ox wagons, the women in bonnets and ankle-length dresses, men in buckskin with rifles taking aim at bison, children frolicking, a family of American Indians looking on stoically from one corner, as if already in reservations.

  Nathaniel has no illusions about the nature of his company’s corporate campus development, or of the kind of
work EKK is doing in the city. It is promoting a vision of how, from the core of self-professed corporate personhood, a new conception of the body politic can radiate across and subsume the previously blighted urban landscape. Companies must, by their nature, attend to the image they project in the world, and by suggesting in its national headquarters, located dead in this country’s heartland, that it is not just an inward-looking corporation, but one focusing its gaze outward, seeing the world around it, attending to it, to the people who live within it, to the way its presence might be interpreted by those who look upon it, the company communicates the truth of its mission: involvement in all kinds of business, in potentially every kind of business. The creation of this city-within-the-city, in which the corporation provides and manages all aspects of life and leisure, reflects its own corporate ethos. In recent years it has started calling itself “holistic,” because, as current CEO Alexander Reveley likes to put it, “we’re in the business of being the planet.” Although it started off as a security company and defense contractor, EKK—which was, at its genesis, a merger of three companies, one British, one American, and one South African—has expanded into so many different sectors it would be incorrect to describe it simply as a security company, or only a maker of advanced defense systems and weaponry, or merely, as its website says, a provider of solutions for all sectors of society including corporate, domestic, government, and parastatal security architecture—facilities to meet all protection needs. The heads of the corporation have a vision, Nathaniel understands, in which the next wave of global business will be global in all senses of the word: active everywhere, touching all aspects of a person’s life, from conception (there is a new fertility and biotech division), to birth (health care provision, medical subcontracting), education (charter school administration and curriculum development, private tertiary institutional expansion through profit-making universities and technical schools), employment (welfare-to-work contracting), employee relations (end-of-contract consultation), financial and asset management (merchant bank division, pension and retirement planning, hedge funds), security and incarceration (the original core of the business), immigration centers and foreign-national detention, entertainment (film production and financing, games, amusement parks, immersive fourth-wave entertainment environments, publishing, television and radio production, theater management), travel (global positioning systems, transportation management and security, hotel and resort administration, urban bicycle rental schemes, traffic signaling and interstate toll concessions), old age (long-term care insurance and nursing home management; the pharmaceutical wing is just getting started), all the way to death and disposal (cremation, organ and tissue recycling, human remains management). There are no limits to what the corporation might do. This, Alexander Reveley is always keen to remind his employees from the company’s world headquarters in Switzerland, is going to be the future of business: a small number of holistic, synergistic corporations managing all aspects of life on the planet. They will be managing the planet itself, and who knows what else; the company has recently broken ground on a space port and is already in the advanced stages of developing next-generation craft and “a transitional low-earth-orbit infrastructural presence” that will one day allow the manufacture of off-planet installations, preparing for what Reveley foresees as the inevitable mining boom on Mars, however far in the future it may prove to be. EKK will be ready. It has two million employees worldwide and expands every day.

  The scope of the company’s business is as humbling as it is awe-inspiring. Nathaniel knows he is but part of a tiny circuit in a machine whose size and complexity he cannot discern, and whose true nature is perhaps not just unknowable but covert by design, only capable of being understood in its totality by some future society that will look back to assess the position of people like Nathaniel within it. While there are aspects of the company’s work he finds troubling—the defense contracting, the neoliberal welfare-to-work division, the asset-stripping finance divisions—he believes the kind of rehabilitative program he oversees has a true social value that makes the world more secure for everyone. Who would not want criminals to be rehabilitated? If the corporation can produce revenue at the same time, monies to fund other worthwhile divisions, then that must be all to the good. All over the world this kind of work is moving from the public to the private sphere, and to continue in the field, as Nathaniel wishes to do, he has no choice but to accept the nature of the machine.

  His undergraduate degree was in sociology with a minor in criminology, a strand of study he passed off to his parents as the foundation for advanced degrees in more robustly intellectual subjects. When he decided to pursue an MBA straight out of college, his father gave him the smug smile that even now, years after the confrontation, comes smirking out of the back of his mind in the middle of the night.

  “I’m not going to say you don’t disappoint me, Nate,” his father said, the smirk tearing open his face, teeth clenched, jaw muscles twitching. Nathaniel had not gone by the abbreviated form of his name since high school, but his father persisted for years, sometimes shortening it even further to “Nat,” which Nathaniel can only ever hear as “gnat”: a tiny irritant, an unwanted domestic invader, flitting around and alighting on overripe fruit. “You’ve always disappointed me,” his father continued, “even more so than your brother, and he’s been a monumental disappointment. You’ve never been strong enough. Just look at you. What do you weigh now, anyway? One-ninety, two hundred? Don’t you exercise at all?”

  “Exercise takes time, I study—”

  His father laughed, that smile ripping his jaw free from the top of his head. “You’ve always lacked the drive to put in the kind of work that would allow you to overcome your intellectual challenges.”

  “I have a 4.0 GPA. I scored 1500 on my SATs.”

  “You are hardly unique in that respect. You’ve done very little in the way of extracurricular activity, and I would hazard a guess that your intellectually slack choice of major has a great deal to do with the relative success you’ve enjoyed.”

  “Then what do you want me to do?”

  “Show a little intellectual spine. God knows I’ve tried to get you to stand up for yourself, to stop being so goddamn weak and submissive. That’s been the driving purpose in everything I’ve done for you.”

  Nathaniel remembered then all that his father had done before: the taunts and teases and visits in the night when his mother was away at conferences, the whispering and heckling, all in the name of making him more assertive, harder and tougher. His father used to nudge the door open, pad into Nathaniel’s room, look around at the contents of his shelves, open his closet and rummage through his clothes, then come over to his son’s bed, kneel down next to him, put his hand flat on Nathaniel’s back, push his son’s body down hard into the mattress, and whisper: You are nothing. You are no one. You do not matter. Nathaniel would hardly be able to breathe. He would cough, choke, and spend the rest of the night awake. When Nathaniel got home from school each day, he would survey his room, noting small changes to the positions of his belongings, knowing that his father had been there, fingering his books and toys. For years he thought he was imagining it, even the visits in the night, certain it was all a dream. But then one day his father left his coffee mug in Nathaniel’s room. It was a mug that only his father was allowed to use: a cheap brown one given away by a chain of pancake houses. No one else ever wanted to use the mug with a chip in its handle but his father would accuse Matthew and Nathaniel of taking it whenever it went astray. Nathaniel put the mug outside the door to his father’s study and taped a note to its rim: Next time you want to snoop don’t leave any evidence.

  “You could have been a professor at a minor liberal arts college,” his father said on that day Nathaniel told him about his plans for business school. “You might even have made a fairly decent family doctor or corporate attorney. You don’t have to be a genius to do any of those things.�
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  “I’ve been accepted into the top MBA program in the country. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “What kind of business is going to want someone who’s never had any practical experience? Business is not just theoretical. As with everything, you’re going about it entirely the wrong way.”

  His father shook his head and spat into the grass in the backyard; it was the spring break of Nathaniel’s senior year in college. In fact, he did have experience. He’d interned every summer at a security company. Security was important to him in ways he would only understand much later in life. When Nathaniel turned thirteen he had installed a lock on his bedroom door and after that Arthur Noailles stopped coming into his youngest son’s room at night, opting instead for sudden and violent physical attacks that were only ever inflicted at home, the curtains and blinds closed against the neighbors, a fire more often than not roaring in the living room, Nathaniel’s body somersaulting through landscapes of brocaded pillows and magenta toile de Jouy drapery, coming to rest on floorboards and crashing into the black bedrock of the marble hearth. Such attacks were most frequent in winter, clustering from November through mid-March, from Thanksgiving to Easter: the academic term, the long annual season of Arthur’s rage, when he took out the frustrations of his professorial career on his children. One night, when Nathaniel was around the age of fifteen, his father ripped the shirt from his son’s back because, when Arthur asked about his day, Nathaniel reported that nothing ever happened at school. Their mother was away, or perhaps she was still with a patient. His father was short but heavily muscled, his reflexes quick, hands full of such power that ripping a shirt in two seemed to present no challenge. Matthew rose to his feet and although he was by then both taller and even more muscular than his father, Arthur shoved his eldest son back into his chair, giving Nathaniel the opportunity to run from the house and out into the snow, shirtless and barefoot, fat and horrified to find himself half-naked in public, the white melon of his stomach blanching scarlet. Arms outstretched, his father ran after him, silent except for the sound of his shoes breaking through layers of ice over snow. Nathaniel looked down at his legs and found his own ankles lacerated and bleeding. He screamed for help, but when two separate neighbors came to his assistance and he told them what had happened, watching his father stop suddenly a hundred yards back, panting in the middle of a frozen lawn, up to his calves in snow, they suggested he go back inside and talk it over with his parents. Although he never learned if the neighbors said anything to his father or to anyone else, the physical attacks stopped, only to be replaced with a litany of verbal abuse and psychological intimidation that has continued into the present. Matthew and Julia are the only people who know the truth. “Maybe business is the best place you could possibly end up,” his father spat. “Business is for the intellectually indolent and the morally adipose.” It was one of Arthur’s favorite maxims, practiced and polished and routinely deployed to dismiss, castigate, and inflame. Nathaniel understood even then that it was a philosophy his father was free to embrace because he had been born into a family where no one ever had to worry about money.