6:30 PM: His father is not home for dinner: he phoned to say he’s going to be late because he’s working on a report for his boss and they should go ahead without him. His mother makes braised tofu with green beans and rice. They sit at the kitchen island eating their dinner, and when they have both finished she opens the bag from the pharmacy and puts two plastic bottles on the table. One bottle has orange pills, the other pale green. To start, he will take two orange pills each day: one with breakfast and one with dinner. He will take three pale green pills each day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The doses will gradually increase. To take the pale green pill at lunch he will have to go to the nurse at school. “Are you going to keep picking me up from school? What’s going to happen over winter break?” His mother looks as though she is going to cry again. She pours him a glass of water and puts the two pills on the counter, pushing them in his direction. He swallows the pills one at a time and feels nothing, neither better nor worse. “I don’t know,” his mother says. “We haven’t figured out any of that. It’s not like in Boston. In Boston the university had a day care. The university here doesn’t have one except for little kids. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry.” He cannot help worrying. They haven’t thought ahead, they aren’t thinking about him, and now he might be dying. “Am I dying?” he asks. His mother looks surprised and shakes her head and starts to sob, but manages to say, “No, no, no. You’re not dying, sweetheart.” She waves her hand in front of her face as though she’s trying to wave away the crying; he knows she’s lying because this is what she does whenever she lies: waves her hand in front of her face, trying to distract him from the truth on her cheeks and in her eyes and flowing out of her nose. “You talk for a while,” she gasps, but he has nothing to say. He sits there looking at her. After a few minutes she stops crying, wipes her face, and puts her hands on his shoulders, squeezing him, moving his body back and forth a little, almost as though she wants to start shaking him. She swallows several times and her jaw is pulsing. “I’m sorry,” she says, “the pills are just to make you feel even better than you do already.”
7:30 PM: His father is still not home. They put all the furniture back where it should be. This only takes a few minutes. He is surprised how easy it is, how quickly and silently it can be put back in place. It is possible he really did move all the furniture in his sleep and has no memory of doing it: the casters make almost no noise and when the couches and tables and chairs are moving they feel as if they weigh very little at all. After they finish his mother suggests he should begin getting ready for bed, although the sun has only gone down in the last half hour or so. He asks his mother if he can have a play date with Joslyn and his mother says, “Yes, of course, but we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” He knows that unless he reminds her she will forget. His parents do not think about him very much, he suspects. They think about their work, but they do not think about things like the kind of school he should be attending, whether or not he has any friends to play with, or what is going to happen to him during the day once winter vacation begins. He closes the door to his room and locks it, leaving the light turned off so he can look outside at the old white house where a candle is burning in the window. Louise appears. She looks up at him and he raises his hand, moves it back and forth, and smiles. She raises her candle, moves it back and forth, and then raises her hand. He waves once more and then closes the curtains while he changes, putting his school uniform into the laundry hamper in the back of his closet. He hates the blue shirt, red sweater, khaki slacks, and brown leather shoes, which are a shape and color that make him feel as ashamed as when he has to undress for swimming or go to the bathroom and listen to the other boys hissing names at him. In Boston he did not have to wear a uniform to school, and so every day of the week he got to wear gray: gray slacks, gray shirt, a gray sweater in winter, or sometimes a black one to match his black loafers. His father used to say he looked as though he was trying out for a part in 1984. He did not understand what this meant, and when his father explained that it was a book, he asked how it would be possible to try out for a part in a book. His father had told him to “stop being so literal” and “imagine a film version of the book.” He asked if there was a film version of the book and if he could see it. “No,” his father said, “not until you’re older.” “Can I read the book instead?” he asked. “No,” his father said, “not until you’re older.” He is going to see if the school library has a copy of the book but he suspects it will not. The only books they have are children’s books, and half the library is only open to students in grades five and six, and only then if they have parental permission slips. All this has been explained to him. He knows not even to go into the part of the library with red carpeting. If he does, he will receive an automatic fine of twenty-five dollars because “violations of library policy are taken very seriously,” Mrs. Taylor explained during his orientation tour. The library, like the rest of the rooms in the school, has a large black glass hemisphere in the ceiling. Mrs. Taylor pointed at it and then pointed at him. She shook her finger and smiled and said, “We’ll be watching,” as if it were a very funny joke.
7:45 PM: His mother is reading him a story, although he would rather be reading his own book about the boy going to rescue his father on the planet where everyone has to move and act and speak in the same way. Once his mother leaves the room, he will pull the book out from under his pillow and turn on the flashlight under the covers. His parents do not know that he reads in the middle of the night. They do not know he can’t help himself: even if he goes to sleep, he always wakes up a few hours later and feels compelled to read. If he does not read, he believes he will die: he has believed this since long before discovering, today, that he is actually dying. His mother is reading him the final volume of The Lord of the Rings. She tells him that when he is older, he will be allowed to see the movie versions of the books. “Can I try out for a part in them?” he asks. “No,” she says, laughing, “they’ve already been made.” “But they could be made again,” he says. “I suppose they could,” she says. “And if they are, then I can try out for a part in them.” “I suppose you could,” she says, and turns out the light. “Who would you want to be?” He pretends to think for a moment. “Frodo.” Only when the light is out does his mother lean over to kiss him on the forehead. He has never been asked to go to bed this early, not since he was much, much younger. His mother’s face is wet. Her crying exhausts him. He wants to shout at her to stop crying, to grow up and be an adult. He is the one who is dying, so he should be the one crying, but in fact the idea does not really upset him. He has learned the word romantic and he thinks that dying this young will somehow be romantic because he will become even more beautiful the sicker he gets. He knows he is beautiful because Joslyn told him so last week. She said, “You know you’re pretty like a girl, don’t you? That’s why they make fun of you.” He asked her if it was a bad thing. “No, it’s not bad,” she said, “but it’s different. You don’t look like anyone else.” “Neither do you,” he said, and it was then that he understood they were friends.
9:00 PM: He knows the time by his watch, by the minute and hour hand and the creeping second hand. Some of the students at his new school do not know how to read a watch or a clock unless it is digital. In Boston, everyone knew how to read a clock with hands. He has been listening to his mother crying downstairs in the kitchen. She must not realize how sound carries in the house; otherwise she would not make the mistake of crying so loudly. His father is still not home. He is almost finished with his book and decides to stay up until he turns the final page.
11:45 PM: His eyes are closing every few minutes but he has only two pages to go. The story is ending happily. He is disappointed. Happy endings always disappoint him. He hopes for a last-minute disaster.
11:58 PM: As he finishes the final sentence he hears the garage door open, close, the sound of his father on the path from the garage to the back door, the back door open
ing, his father putting down his briefcase in the drop zone, his mother asking his father where he has been and what took so long, why he did not call again to tell her how late he would be. He hears his father telling her to lower her voice. They talk for a long time, at first about Louise in the condemned house next door, and then in voices so low that he cannot hear what they’re saying, but when the crying starts again he knows they have been talking about him. He is certain he must be dying. He is no longer certain it will be romantic. He fears it will be painful. He fears pain more than death. His stomach is upset and his throat grows cold and hard.
12:35 AM: His parents go to bed. They close their door and he can hear the lock click into place. Some nights they lock their door. Some nights they do not. Usually they lock their door only when everyone is going to bed early, so the locking tonight is unusual. They are going to cry: they want privacy to cry together, in expectation of his imminent death. It will be important to make it romantic and beautiful so it is not so hard on them.
—:— AM: He does not know what time it is. The sky is dark and his door is open. He can hear the man breathing in the room. He can hear his parents both snoring in their own room. He does not want to turn over to see where the man is, because he fears the man will see he is awake and attack him, hit him, drag him out of the house and kidnap him. If he pretends to be asleep, the man will leave him alone. In Boston, his greatest fear was that a vampire or witch would come into his room at night, come floating just above the floorboards and bend over to—he never knew what it was they might do to him. He knows now that those were childish fears, since there are no vampires or witches, at least not witches like the ones he used to imagine. He knows now, for the first time, what real fear is: it has the same feeling as thinking about school and Mrs. Pitt. His stomach churns, his heart roars, he wants to vomit, hide, become invisible. He wants to scream but he can’t find his breath or his voice. He is frozen, his body won’t move, he cannot move, he cannot speak or scream. He wants to jump out of his bed and run into the hall and lock the man in his room and scream for his parents to come and see that the man exists, that he is right there in the bedroom, right in the midst of them, to see that the alarm makes NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL because even with an alarm, this man has ways of getting into the house that might as well be magic. He is aware of a warm breeze on his neck and then a sound that goes with it and he knows the man is right there, leaning over him, breathing onto his body. The man’s rough fingers are suddenly on his head, touching his eyelids and eyelashes, combing through his hair and down to his scalp, picking up his hands to touch his fingers, as though the man is trying to identify all the separate parts of a machine. When the man’s fingers touch his eyelids again he begins to shake and the water shoots from his eyes and nose. “Carson,” the man says. “Carson. Carson. CARSON. Are you alive?” The man’s hands are on his back, gripping his shoulder, shaking him, as if the man were trying to wake him up. He’s either going to throw up or he’s going to scream. “You came back. You came back,” the man says, pulling him over. He looks at the dark man and screams, screams a short choking cry right into the face of this giant. He tries to form words, to say, “I’m not Carson,” but the words will not come. He screams again but feels strangled as the man looks at him, eyes suddenly wide and terrified. The man opens his mouth, lets go of his body, and runs from the room.
2:00 AM: He is shaking, waiting for his parents to come. He looks at his watch. His parents do not wake up. Sometimes they wear earplugs because they both snore and if they don’t wear earplugs they can’t sleep. This must be one of those nights. He would have to pound on their door to wake them. It is a stupid thing to do, wearing earplugs when someone could break into the house or when your child might be screaming for help. He is too afraid at first to get out of bed and follow the man. He can hear the man walking down the stairs, thump, fmmp, thump, fmmp, and then a creak. After a moment he decides he has to follow the man to see where he goes. If he can see where the man goes, then he will be able to show his parents, and then they will have to believe him. His teeth are chattering and his whole body is trembling but he drops out of bed and puts on his flannel robe. Tiptoeing to the door of his room, he peers around the edge of the door and looks out into the moonlit hall: it is empty, the man is not there; he must have gone down the back stairs. This is a man, he understands, who only comes and goes by back stairs, back doors, who does not present himself at the front of anything. He slides his bare feet along the whitewashed floorboards and pauses at the top of the back staircase, looking down into darkness. No shapes are visible in the middle of the staircase, but the light from the kitchen falls on the bottom few steps. The man might be hiding in the shadows in the middle of the staircase, waiting for him to come, to grab him in his arms and take him away. Before leaving his room he put his flashlight in his pocket. If he turns it on and the man is there, then at least he will be at the top of the stairs and can close the door to the staircase, scream for his parents, run to their door, and bang until they wake up. He pulls out the flashlight, hesitates for a moment as he thinks about what he will have to do if the man is crouching there in the dark, waiting for him, and then pushes it on, his hands trembling. Although the staircase is empty he hears a thin creak recognizable as the sound made by the top step on the stairs to the basement. The man must be going down to hide in one of the dark corners full of boxes. He knows he should pound on his parents’ door and beg them to come, but he fears if he does the man will disappear entirely and once again no one will believe him. Taking the banister in his other hand, he turns off the flashlight, half-swinging himself down the stairs, trying to put as little weight as possible on the wooden steps so the man won’t know he’s coming. The man’s smell has taken all the oxygen out of the staircase and he gags, gasping for breath. It is a smell like the boys’ locker room at the pool: wet and cold and clanging: bleach and all the mold and mildew bleach is supposed to kill but has not. In the kitchen he stops, listening for sounds from the basement. He hears the scraping of wood against concrete and knows the man is there. If he could close the door and lock it and be sure the man would not escape then he could summon his parents to see the proof of the man’s existence. But the door to the basement has no lock and he is unsure whether the man might have some hidden escape route out of the basement, through one of the windows. He knows the windows have latches and locks, so it is possible this is the way the man is coming and going. He does not think the alarm people remembered to put sensors on the windows in the basement. He followed them around when they were installing the sensors, disguising them in the upper corners of rooms, placing them on windows and doors, and he does not remember them installing sensors on the basement windows. Realizing this he feels a momentary sense of relief that he has figured it out: the sound of wood against concrete must have been the man dragging a ladder to one of the basement windows. But he has to hurry if he wants to prove this is true. A different part of his mind takes over, one without fear: he turns on the flashlight again and runs down into the basement, turns on the overhead lights and waits as they flicker, revealing the huge space with his mother’s workshop in one corner. He spins around into the open pantry tucked under the stairs, but it’s empty, the whole basement is empty, the windows are closed, and the only ladder in the house, which was left here by the former owner, is hanging on the wall, suspended in space, its wooden legs dangling far from the concrete floor. There is nowhere for the man to hide. The space is clean, empty, polished. In one half there is carpeting and a bar, and in the wall a plaque that says PAUL KROVIK BUILT THIS HOUSE. He runs his hand over the engraved letters and the angle of a “K” bites into one of his fingers, pierces the skin, and draws out a drop of blood. The man must have been tall enough to pull himself up through the window, or perhaps he had a rope to climb, a rope he took with him, closing the window when he left. Blood is salty, setting his teeth on edge like spinach. From behind him he hears the scraping of wood on concrete again and
his head snaps around on its own before he even knows he wants to look. The sound came from the pantry. His heart rumbles and his body starts to shake again as he walks toward the noise, but the space is empty and no one is there. He looks at the bare shelves, the floor, the dust on the floor, the shoeprints in the dust, an arc of dust at the far end of the pantry, an arc like the shape a door makes when it swings across carpet. He drops to his knees, puts his hands on the floor, and examines the lengths of wood under the lowermost shelf. Sticking out underneath the panel there is a wooden tab that looks as though it holds up the shelf, but there is a gap, a space between the tab and the shelf. He pulls at the tab and as the panel swings toward him there is a sudden rush of air from behind the panel and in the same moment a cushioned metallic thump whooshes like a car door slamming. A noise comes flying out of his throat as he rears up, hitting his head on the shelf above him. He backs up, pulls the panel wide open, and runs his hand over the black metal surface behind it, pushing against it, but the surface does not budge. He tries to understand, does not understand, a part of him knows the metal surface does not belong to the house, is not a part of its foundation or construction, is not what the house looks like behind its white plaster walls. He understands that windows have nothing to do with it: the man is there, on the other side: the panel is just a mask hiding a door.
Fallen Land Page 24