Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  The recording sessions have become, in a larger symphony of disquiet, a recurring motif, a melodic line echoing through each movement of this work with no fixed parameters, open to constant revision and expansion as the sources of unease proliferate, all of them chanting at Nathaniel, warning him about the danger of the changes he and Julia have made. Here, in this new city, at home in their new neighborhood, there are not nearly enough people. In the weeks since moving into the house, they still have not met their neighbors, managing to leave each morning and return each night without seeing anyone on foot, learning nothing about names, identities, careers, family structures. People drive into garages in cars with tinted windows, move from garages—behind high fences—into houses, close curtains and blinds, turn on lights. They go about their evenings and then turn off the lights, except for a front porch or back door light, and go to bed. In the mornings the solitary outside lights are turned off, cars reverse down driveways, garage doors close automatically, the houses remaining shut up and silent for the next eight to ten hours. Perhaps next spring, when the warm dry weather returns, neighbors will appear in their backyards and it will be possible to meet people, to find some sense of community in this neighborhood that feels as far from home as Nathaniel has ever been.

  At least the changes they have made to the interior of the house reassure him, making it feel more like their Boston apartment, with its perfect balance of the transparent, the hidden, and the observable, where it always felt as though darkness and light existed within each other, creating a poised but variable radiance. In this new house, because of the conservatism of its structural design, the only way to impose a sense of light has been to banish darkness entirely. The dining room is almost finished, the kitchen and basement will be next; the white walls, softened lines, and white furniture make him feel cleaner, calmer, able to forget for a moment the burden and allure of his work, the way the task to which he is having to bend his mind seems to be changing his personality in ways he is already beginning to notice: shorter temper with his family, suspicion of strangers, a strict adherence to rule and law. A few days ago he phoned the moving company to report the odd behavior of the men, whom he described as “definitely criminal types,” and when Julia ran a red light last weekend he lectured her for half an hour on civic and personal responsibility, how a ticket on her record would reflect badly on his position in the community and his company. “We have to be models of propriety,” he explained, reminding her that cameras on the traffic lights catch every infraction. “We have to assume that everything we do is always under scrutiny.”

  “Oh please, Nathaniel, don’t be such a puritan,” she laughed.

  The redecoration of the house has been undertaken according to Julia’s belief that domestic space should be both an extension of their own bodies and a protection against the world. “A house is like an oversized and highly complex prosthetic limb,” she explained to him, “allowing us to move in ways we couldn’t without it, letting us rise through space by means of stairs, helping us remain clean, our temperatures optimal, assisting us in the preparation and storage of food, while at the same time acting as a shell that protects us from the damage of the outside world.” Nathaniel had only been able to nod when she said this, asserting that he wanted nothing more complicated than clean white lines and a minimization of clutter, not that clutter would ever be a problem in this house where there is more room and more storage than the three of them can possibly hope to fill.

  After finishing the dishes he sits in the den listening to the rain that has not stopped for more than a few hours at a time since their arrival. In the last several days the sky has been lighter, the rain’s noise on the windows and roof more melodic and less aggressive: a rhythm section instead of a shooting range. He cannot remember a time when he has felt as oppressed by the weather as he does in this new place: weather is constant and inescapable, the rain ever falling, thunder grumbling, lightning bolts shearing open squat gunmetal days, wind threatening to pluck up the house, spin it round in the air and drop it across the river. It feels like a land of extreme evil tempered only now and then by idiosyncratic, fallible good. Between his house and the neighbors’, the creek that was nothing more than a trickle of mud when they moved in has swollen to a stream more than six feet across and three feet deep, running into a drain at the edge of his lawn. Their house is on a hill, the stream in a depression, but Nathaniel worries their insurance may be inadequate, or that the surveys on the property failed to account for climate change, topography, and proximity to larger bodies of water. He knows the entire parcel of land that makes up Dolores Woods flattens and declines from the hill on which their house sits, falling away into the pancake flats spreading out from the floodplain of the great broad river to the west of the city. In recent nights he has dreamed of the river rising, water flowing downstream from states north and west, merging together to build and spread out from the riverbanks, climbing across the floodplain until it inundates Dolores Woods and surrounds his house, making it an island in the midst of the great inland sea that once covered the region and will soon return, engulfing the country, submerging them all. Twice now he has woken covered in perspiration from a dream in which he struggles to escape the water and get back to land, fighting his way through currents, past submerged trees, surrounded by the detritus of his neighbors’ lives, by their drowned pets and their own drowned bodies, bloated with floodwater, floating face down, covered with rats and caught up in the snags of trees where their children once climbed. Julia turned to him the second time it happened, placing her hand on his back to make him realize he was awake and not still asleep, asking him if he was ill. Of course I’m sick, he wanted to say, this whole goddamn place is making me sick. Instead he told her he was fine, he should not have had the blue cheese and wild mushroom risotto, he should eat milder food, blander ingredients to match this bland life. He dreamed of a wild-eyed man, his hair a two-inch afro receding from his scalp, a jet-dark Bozo approaching the house across lawns covered in snow, looking in the windows to stare as they went about their lives. Nathaniel shouted at the man, screaming at him to go away, but the clown kept coming: eyes shining in the dark, he put his fists on the bay window in the living room, pounding his balled-up hands against the lowest panes of glass, his eyes and hair filling the whole space of the window. Nathaniel shouted again at the man, shouted and shouted until he was shouting out loud. Julia shook him, told him it was okay, asked him what he was dreaming. He was too embarrassed to tell her the nature of the dream, to admit the color of his deepest fear, claiming instead he could not remember. Early in life he learned the danger of recalling his dreams, the way his mother would record them, ask him questions, make pronouncements about Nathaniel’s dark unconscious. You should be in therapy, his mother would have said. Unresolved traumas. I can’t imagine what they are, but clearly they’re haunting you.

  The research and implementation of Maureen McCarthy’s vision for revenue-positive rehabilitation is another thing that makes his nights fitful and preoccupies his days: from waking to falling asleep at night, if he is not thinking about all the problems associated with the scheme then he is researching what legal restrictions may need to be overcome, while monitoring the work of those beneath him assigned to investigate areas where the corporation as a whole is overpaying for products and services that might be “insourced” (Maureen’s favorite buzzword) to the “corrections populace.” In a follow-up meeting, Maureen elaborated the true scope of her plan.

  “See, Nathaniel, prisons can no longer be in the business of providing cheap labor to the state. We’re not going to have our corrections populace making license plates or furniture and providing it at cost to the government anymore.”

  “And what about the charitable work they’ve been doing? Don’t you think that’s important?”

  Maureen squinted, bunching up her lips and nose. “We just can’t afford to have them refurbishing church pews or training dogs fo
r the blind or doing anything else that costs us money or fails to exploit the labor potential of the system. The other factor is that we urgently need to down-adjust inmate income.”

  “What kind of adjustment do you have in mind? Right now we’re only paying them ten percent of minimum wage.”

  She shook her head: “I think we need to aim for a top-tier pay of one percent of minimum, with penalties for poor work and failure to meet quotas.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “That’s your job, Nate.”

  “Nathaniel.”

  “Nathaniel, I’m sorry. The thing is, as I see it—would you like a coffee or something?”

  “No, I’m—”

  “You’re good? Fine. See, we pay to house these people, and now it’s time for them to start paying back. This is the crunch. Depending on what happens with state and federal politics, the tide could turn against us as an industry if we’re not careful. We’re not worried about global reach, because there’s always going to be a market for the kind of work you and I are committed to doing. We need to imagine a world in which prisoners are doing something truly positive, producing useful things for a useful corporation that is invested in looking after the whole planet and keeping the law-abiding populace safe.”

  “Yes, I know,” Nathaniel said, looking up at the portrait of their CEO Alex Reveley hanging on Maureen’s wall. In gold embossed letters on the mount surrounding the photo was Alex’s motto: We’re in the business of being the planet.

  “That means we have to think about the business potential of every aspect of what we already do, Nate, and what we might do in the future.” She smiled, and lowered her voice, whispering, “I’ve got big ideas. And I’ve got Alex’s ear.”

  “Oh? Can you give me a hint?”

  She closed her office door and crouched next to Nathaniel, both of them looking up at Alex’s photograph as she continued to whisper: “Once we’ve got this up and running, we’re going to be looking at the semi-permanent tagging and employment of parolees so we can mobilize corrections labor for jobs as various as firefighting to data entry.”

  “Really? That sounds—”

  “Revolutionary. I know. Think of it this way: what is the major problem that the ex-con faces? Finding a job. No problem. No brainer. Let us employ the parolees. That’s true rehabilitation. And when they fall out of line, we’ll put them back inside. This is just the tip of it, Nate. I have complete confidence in your ability to dream as big as I do about the future of our corrections infrastructure.” She put a hand on his knee, squeezed, and then ran her fingers halfway up his inner thigh. Nathaniel did not know whether to push her away or see what might happen. He felt no attraction for his boss, and had never thought of being unfaithful to Julia. When he failed to respond, Maureen patted his shoulder as if nothing had just happened. “You’re a good man, Nate, and you’re going to do big things. I have a vision for your place in this company. Play my game and you’ll go straight to the top.”

  He left that meeting reeling, as much from what she had done as what she had said. “Facility” seemed a strange way to describe the places where the dangerous are sequestered, perverse in its twisting of a word that has long meant and still means “ability” and “capability.” It strikes Nathaniel that this may be a peculiarly American usage, in the same way that Americans describe public restrooms as “facilities.” Perhaps it is only appropriate that the place where we shit and piss and where not a few people fuck illicitly should be saddled with the same euphemism as the place where we warehouse the people we want to forget, where pissing and shitting is no longer private, where plenty of illicit and unwelcome fucking goes on all the time. In an ideal world, the prison would act like a toilet, flushing away the waste of society into a sewer hidden from view, where the filth is either cleaned and rehabilitated into fertilizer and drinking water or contained in some dark and secret place where it need never be seen again, rendered into a festering sludge that will, in time, be reabsorbed into the earth itself.

  Even without Maureen’s message in front of him her words jangle in Nathaniel’s ear, a contrapuntal rhythm working against the rain, which strengthens and rages, biting into the side of the house, gnawing at the windows. “Straight to the top,” she said, but he is not sure he wants to go straight to the top, wherever that might be, whatever it might mean for himself and his family. The black sky flashes silver for an instant and moments later a spasm grips the house, shaking it so hard it feels as though it may split apart. Made from nothing, it was not built to withstand the weather of the future. Sitting up straighter in his chair, he places his palms on the white leather upholstery, strokes the ostrich hide, tries to remain calm. Provided he works diligently in the evenings and over weekends he will be able to do the job Maureen has assigned him, although he worries about neglecting Copley and Julia, as well as his own health. He is no longer just out of shape, but verging on fat. The only consolation is the belief that he will not be in this situation forever; he will either be promoted to a less compromising position, or last long enough to get a good reference—a year, at most two—and then move on, transitioning out of the private sector and into the public, if the state has not, at that point, ceded all responsibility for civic life and public wellbeing to private corporations.

  Lightning and thunder break together in the dark, dropping a blade that cleaves Nathaniel’s head in two as it hits a tree in the neighbors’ yard, bringing down a limb as big around as a man and three times as long. By instinct, Nathaniel puts his hands to his forehead, ducking down in the chair, but the sky is black again, rain tapping an irregular dull staccato on the glass. As he closes the curtains, he thinks again of his dream, the clown in brown overalls and a darker brown shirt, pounding his fists on the window, his face full of rage and desperation, eyeballs yellow, crazed with blood. Nathaniel jumps, aware that Copley, unexpected as lightning, is standing in the living room watching him.

  “Hey, Cop. Are you finished with mom? Ready for a story?”

  Face drawing to a vicious little point, his neck hyperextended, Copley shouts, “Go away!” Nathaniel frowns, looking at the fine white skin of his son’s neck, and sees a noose of prickly fibers tighten around it. “Go away!”

  “That’s enough, Copley. Why would you say such a thing?”

  “I’m not talking to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m talking to the man.”

  “What man?”

  “The man in the rain!”

  Copley’s whole body shakes as he points at the window where Nathaniel failed to draw the curtains all the way closed. He looks out into the dark but sees nothing.

  “There’s no one out there, Copley. That’s not a very funny joke.”

  “IT’S-NOT-A-JOKE,” his son squawks, turning to march back into the hallway, knees locked in goosestep. Nathaniel knows what his own father would have done if he’d acted like that as a child. It would have been a knock to the head, a palm clapped against his ear, a foot slamming into his perineum and nights of bed-wetting to follow. Don’t talk back to me. Stop walking like a Nazi, his father would have said. You’ll disgrace us all.

  The structural alterations and expanses of white paint seem to have deadened sound inside the house so that Copley is always now catching him by surprise, lurking in corners and appearing just when Nathaniel thinks he is alone. Perhaps the concerns of the guidance counselor are not misplaced, and there are behavioral issues he and Julia have overlooked in the interest of making the shift from Boston less traumatic for a boy who has always been sensitive. There is nothing wrong with fair punishment, and Nathaniel is certain it would be possible to discipline Copley without ever straying into the kind of abusive treatment he suffered at the hands of his own father. He can feel Arthur’s long fingers, the skin always loose, thick veins standing out on the backs of the man’s hands, scoring the space between wrist and knuc
kles. In recent years his father’s skin has become prone to injury, hands and fingers bleeding from traumas as minor as brushing against rough surfaces, the engorged ropey blueness of the veins standing out against yellow-gray skin. Looking out the window once more, Nathaniel sees his father’s hands reach to grab him, fingers stretched in darkness at the ends of the arms, muscled limbs sheathed in loose skin, extended at shoulder height, attached to the running body, the body of his father chasing him from the house, screaming at him, screaming for his son’s body, for the end of his life. As his father leaps out of memory, a hand suddenly comes to rest on the outer glass of the window, the fingers spreading, digits articulated, like something hardly human at all.

  When he has dried himself off and cleaned the mud from his boots, Paul makes his way to the other end of the bunker, opening the pantry hatch wide enough to see the woman bent over her workbench. A high voice says, “Can I help you?” It does not sound like the woman and although Paul cannot see him, he knows it must be the boy. The woman does not respond and the child says it again, faster this time, “Can I help you? Can I?” There is a pause, silence for several seconds, and then, “How? How can I help you?” The woman ignores the boy and keeps working. Perhaps she is wearing earplugs and cannot hear her son, or is so focused on her work that nothing else can intrude. She continues in silence for another hour while Paul watches, lying on his stomach in the dark, resting his body against the open containment door, ready to retreat if the woman approaches.

  Her body is tense: head, neck, shoulders, arms held still, and there are none of the usual noises Paul has come to associate with the woman’s work. Instead he hears the sound of smaller metal instruments being put down on the table and picked up again as she makes fine, precise adjustments. He begins to crawl through the hatch and into the pantry to get a closer look but then stops, realizing he cannot announce himself by clearing his throat, asking her what the hell she imagines she’s doing. Making other words on his lips, he pushes air stripped of sound across his tongue: “Can I help you? How can I help you?” The last thing he wants is to help these people. His hands grip the rifle; he could draw it forward, cock it, pull the trigger, put an end to the woman’s life and disappear. Bringing the scope to his face, he finds the back of her head in his sights. If he could get rid of her, he has no doubt the man and boy would leave as well.