Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  When Nathaniel’s mother heard that he was going to business school, she turned away from him even more than she had in all the years leading up to that decisive moment when he concluded he could be nothing like the person his parents wanted. Matthew had already done that by becoming a painter and moving to Berlin where he lives with his Turkish partner and two adopted children in an apartment in Kreuzberg, which his parents have refused to visit.

  “We’re not going to pay for an MBA. If you insist on doing it you can fund yourself,” his mother said, flipping through a patient’s file. “I suppose you think you’re escaping from us in making such a clean break professionally, but you haven’t—neither has Matty. If you wanted to go to law school, that would be another question entirely.” They were standing in the enclosed porch where his mother saw her patients. Nathaniel started to cry. He couldn’t stop himself. He remembers his mother looking at him as if she were about to give him a sheet of paper with a squiggle on it and command him to draw whatever came into his head. “Now what do you think it means that you’re crying?” she asked. He shook his head. He didn’t know whether he was crying because of the tone of her voice or the fact that support was being cut off so summarily. He tried to stop himself but the harder he tried the faster the tears seemed to come and the more acute his paralysis became. At last he was sobbing, his body rigid as his mother stood, arms crossed, never touching him but studying his outburst as if observing an arcane purification rite. “You need to be in therapy,” she said. He choked down sobs, shaking his head. “I won’t have any protest. I’ll make an appointment for you to see Gordon.” Gordon was one of his mother’s former lovers, a Freudian who lived a few streets away. Fearing what might emerge in therapy, Nathaniel did not wait for the threatened appointment: the following morning he flew to Berlin where he spent the rest of the break trying to convince Matthew they should press charges against their father, hauling the past out into the light for the first time. As boys they never spoke with each other about what happened and even as adults, up until that week, they had failed to compare their experiences. Nathaniel was not even sure whether Matthew’s treatment had been better or worse or equivalent to his own. The language sputtered, gave out, had to be jump-started in ways that kept them barely moving forward, and words were not the only barrier: nausea overwhelmed Nathaniel on each outing of the subject—a queasiness hot and gushing and knife-twistingly sharp.

  “Nathaniel—it’s—don’t you see? We have nothing.” Matthew choked as he lifted the hem of his red t-shirt and pulled down the waist of his jeans to expose the faint undulating scar that snaked from the cleft of his buttocks, across his waist and around the left side of his body to just above his navel. Nathaniel had not seen the mark for many years, but he knew its contours as well as his own face. Before that day they had never discussed its origins. “It’s not evidence,” Matthew said. “I can’t do it. I’m done with both of them.”

  Apart from their own bodies, which have healed, there has never been any evidence to prove the monstrosity of their childhood.

  BECAUSE THEY OWN ONLY ONE CAR, Nathaniel and Julia drive together to the Pinwheel Academy, built as a concrete abstraction of the toy. “The Hub,” in the center of the building, houses the principal’s office, while around it radiate six triangular wings filled with classrooms. One of the guidance counselors, Mrs. Taylor, registers and fingerprints Copley while Nathaniel and Julia try to look reassuring. He was never fingerprinted at his school in Boston, but here they insist it is a necessary part of the school’s security protocols, and fingerprint scanners are the means by which students check out books from the library and pay for their lunch each day.

  “The child’s fingerprint is linked to his record, and parents pay lunch money into an individualized account that can be debited for supplies, fieldtrip fees, and disciplinary fines,” Mrs. Taylor explains.

  “Disciplinary fines?” Nathaniel has no recollection of reading about fines in the school brochure provided by his company.

  “If a student defaces or destroys school property, the cost of repair or replacement is debited to his or her account. Detentions and tardiness carry set fines: five dollars for each incident of tardiness, twenty-five dollars for every detention. We find that fines have a very positive effect on classroom behavior. Unexcused absences are charged at the rate of forty dollars a day, and excused absences in excess of five per semester at the rate of one hundred dollars per day. All the information about school policies and procedures is online. This is the parent–child–school contract, which you need to sign in order to complete the registration.”

  Nathaniel and Julia skim their portion of the contract. It outlines not only what Mrs. Taylor has explained, but also a host of other rules, expectations, restrictions, punishments, incentives and disincentives, benchmark goals, and outright threats. Mrs. Taylor leaves them for a moment to take a call.

  “We can always move him to another school,” Julia whispers. “If this doesn’t work out.”

  Nathaniel lacks the energy to tell her it is not a choice they have. This is the school Copley will attend, whether they like it or not, because it would be bad for Nathaniel’s career if they sent their son anywhere else. They sign the form, show Copley where to sign, and watch as the guidance counselor signs on her return.

  “Are we good?” Mrs. Taylor asks. Nathaniel nods but Julia is rigid, clasping Copley’s hand. “That’s all taken care of then. You don’t know what a relief it is to have parents who understand what we’re trying to accomplish here. You would not believe the resistance we get from some people.”

  “I can imagine,” Nathaniel says.

  “I don’t think you can,” the woman laughs. “I’m not talking about good people like the two of you. Some of the parents we get these days—straight off the plane if you know what I mean. We like all the expectations to be out in the open. It makes for a much better environment. You’ll see the longer you’re with us that we pride ourselves on students with good, normal behavior.”

  To Nathaniel’s relief, none of Copley’s toy soldier mimicry is on display this morning, nothing to suggest that his son is in any way abnormal. The boy walks a natural straight line, bends his knees, swings his arms like any child. They accompany him to meet his teacher, Mrs. Pitt, who says she approves of parents taking the trouble to introduce themselves to their child’s custodians. Something about Mrs. Pitt makes Nathaniel wonder whether much actual teaching occurs in this new school, and how much of the program is just about managing the child, making sure he or she does not get into any serious physical harm or destroy valuable property. Mrs. Pitt has an oval face and, though she is young, certainly younger than Nathaniel and Julia by five or more years, her hair is already graying and she has the figure of a much older woman. She speaks down to Copley in a way that Nathaniel imagines his son’s teachers in Boston never did, and he sees in the long wooden pointer she holds in her hand the threat of a different Mrs. Pitt once the parents are safely out of school.

  IN THE LOBBY OF THE main building on the EKK corporate campus, Nathaniel presents himself to one of the guards. The man pulls up his record, asks him to place the index finger of his right hand on an electronic sensor and to approach another device that reads his iris; Nathaniel’s biometric records are on file from his time in the Boston office. Once the system establishes that he is who he claims to be, the guard directs him up to the twentieth floor. At the barrier between the lobby and the bank of elevators, Nathaniel touches the palm and fingers of his right hand to another sensor, confirming his identity once more, before it opens the glass gate and allows him access to the left bank of elevators, which serves the first thirty floors of the building; the top fifteen floors are accessible from the right bank of elevators, and only to people with higher internal security clearance than Nathaniel is ever likely to possess.

  He knows that the new job comes with more perks than his previous position, but no one m
entioned that he would be assigned a corner office on a high floor with views to the east and north over the skyline of the old downtown, the enclave of gentrified riverfront, the distant farmland, hills pitching and tumbling in tiles of brilliant green and dark brown, or the white cube of a nuclear power station north of the city just visible on the horizon. At forty-five stories, the EKK building is the tallest in the city, one of a crop of new skyscrapers that shot up in the peak years of the boom, and it has the most expansive views of any building in a radius of two hundred miles. The city is still nothing to compare with Boston, but its solidity, spaciousness, and attention to human scale are reassuring.

  There is a secretary named Letitia, and, to his surprise, a company car already at his disposal, with a reserved parking space in the executive garage. All this privilege requires a kind of recalibration of his sense of himself: a man who has in his possession, if not his outright ownership, two cars, a five-thousand-square-foot house with not one but two furnaces, a wife and a child, nearly an acre of land, a good job doing something he believes is valuable to society, a pension plan, investments, a life insurance policy, and an affordable mortgage. He will make new friends in this new place. He will be outgoing and gregarious. He will invite the neighbors for backyard barbecues. He will settle into the life he and Julia have designed for themselves. He will spend every day forgetting about his father. What better reason to leave Boston than to escape a sphere of the world still dominated—at least for him—by the presence of his parents?

  “Here’s your welcome pack, Mr. Noailles,” Letitia says, handing him an embossed leather binder two inches thick. “Inside you’ll find information about building procedures, emergency contingency plans, services available to you on site, et cetera, et cetera. I’m assuming you already have a copy of your new contract, but if you ever need another copy I can put in a request for one to be delivered through confidential internal mail, either hard copy or digitally encrypted. It’s no problem.”

  She gives the impression of having everything under control, and, unlike so many other people, even knows how to pronounce his name.

  “That’s impressive,” he says. “Most people don’t get it right the first time.”

  “My mother came from Louisiana, so it kinda made sense, a French name, but I also phoned the Boston office to find out. I wanted to be sure we started off on the right foot.”

  Letitia introduces him to his colleagues, the men and women who will be working under his supervision, and the other secretaries on the floor: most of them women, all of them Latina or black; Letitia, he understands, is at the top of a particular stratum of the divisional hierarchy, which reflects the seniority of his own position. She takes him on a tour of the EKK campus, pointing out the executive dining room on the thirtieth floor, the staff canteen, on-site gym and swimming pool on the fifteenth. At her encouragement, he makes an appointment with the internal financial consultant for a review of his investments and pension plan. After lunch, he schedules the installation of the home security system and agrees to take the armed response package. “It’s super-reassuring,” the man in Domestic Security Products tells him. “I wouldn’t want any of the other ones myself. I mean you could go with the package that just triggers a call to the local police and whatnot, but I’d trust our own EKK guys more than the cops. A lot of ours are ex-military; we even have a retired Navy SEAL. Before I went to work here my wife and I had a really bad break-in. We weren’t home, you know, but they stole fucking everything.” Nathaniel knows what Julia will think of armed response, but decides to take it and see if she notices.

  Nathaniel has been brought over as the new National Director of Offender Rehabilitation and Letitia has made him an appointment with his new boss, Maureen McCarthy, Vice-President of Corrections Management. The last several years in the Boston office he worked on rehabilitation at the state level and his innovative programs were judged a model of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, while also auguring well for reduced rates of recidivism.

  “So you’re the bright young thing, the great white hope who’s going to solve the nation’s rehabilitation problem and get all those offenders back on track, isn’t that right?” Maureen takes his hand in her fists, pumps his arm once before letting it drop, and indicates a black leather couch. Her office is three times the size of his and has a terrace with a table and two chairs.

  “I don’t know about all that, Maureen.”

  “I do. I asked for you. You did great things in Boston. But now I need you to take all that experience and do something really radical with it, turn it on its head. So let me ask you this deceptively simple question: what is the problem with prisons?”

  It is unclear whether Maureen means this rhetorically until she raises her eyebrows and nods, indicating, Nathaniel understands, that she expects him to answer.

  “I’m not sure about one single problem. As I don’t have to tell you, Maureen, there are a number of problems: overcrowding, aging infrastructure, inmate violence, poor staff training, guard corruption, drugs and other contraband.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, although those aren’t so much problems as irritations or impediments. And they certainly aren’t the problem with prisons. Think, Nathaniel. What do all governments hate about prisons? Why is EKK in the business of prisons?”

  “They cost money. They cost a whole lot of money.”

  “Exactly. And that’s where you come in.” She points at him, smiles for a moment, pauses, stares with her fixed green eyes. He wonders once more if he is supposed to speak, but then she starts up again. “Rather than making prisons cost, we want to turn them into engines of pure profit. In states like this one, we have a permanent contract for corrections management that can only be broken if some jackass introduces a bill that makes it through the legislature and gets signed by the governor. Such a scenario would require gross failure on our part, and that’s just not going to happen. The states pay us a fee to look after their criminals: to catch them in some cases, to process them, to house them, maintain them, rehabilitate them,” she says, opening her eyes wider and nodding as if to indicate she recognizes this is Nathaniel’s part in the process, “release them, manage their parole, monitor their movements, and start all over again when they reoffend. We know that most of them do, and—I’ll let you in on a little secret—in a way, you know, we kind of like that. Recidivism is not necessarily a bad thing from our perspective.”

  “It isn’t?”

  She shakes her head, nods it, shakes it again. “So far, we’ve managed to make modest profits on the incarceration division of our Corrections unit. We’ve drastically reduced the number of guards, imposed more restrictions on prisoner movement, equipped all inmates with GPS ankle monitors so their exact location in the prison is always known, and rolled out a seamless blanket of video surveillance in all our facilities. Guards, in some ways, are the problem. Psych profiling and behaviometrics suggest that in a majority of cases guards are on the right side of the law by pure chance; in other words, our data show that guards are, more often than most people would imagine, criminals who have not yet offended. What I’m saying is that they can be bought off and bribed by inmates. Guards are corruptible. Cameras are not, and when the person monitoring the cameras has no direct contact with prisoners, you increase security fivefold. Now, upper management is largely pleased with our progress so far, and they have taken note of your successes, particularly in reducing overheads in the Northeastern Division. But they also think there’s a lost opportunity here. And that’s where you come in, Nathaniel. That’s why we brought you here, to the heart of the operation. We want you to upgrade our rehabilitation programs, implementing them across the national infrastructure before moving on to global roll-out, and engineer them to generate more revenue.”

  “I wasn’t aware that rehabilitation programs were revenue-generating.”

  “Some would say it’s a gray area. Wed rehabilitation to highly skille
d vocational training,” Maureen continues, meshing her hands into a single fist, “introduce core low-security manufacturing across the board. Require minimum forty-hour workweeks of all able-bodied prisoners regardless of age; our prison doctors are prepared to declare all but terminal cases able-bodied. At the moment inmates only have to work one hour each day, which is ludicrous.”

  “And if they refuse to work?”

  “You throw them in the hole. Put them in isolation. Describe them as non-cooperative. Prisoners spend too much time lying around with their dicks in their hands. We’re on target to have more than a hundred thousand inmates in our protection by the end of the decade, and we can grow that number through continued lobbying across federal, state, and local government for mandatory minimum sentencing, three strikes laws, you name it. Crime is our oyster: it’s an amazing workforce just waiting to be “rehabilitated” into positive labor production. Let’s not kid ourselves about these people, we know what they’re like, and for the most part we know who they are even before they do. Am I right?”