2:10 AM: He closes the door to the basement and jams one of the kitchen stools up under the knob. Even if the man can break down the door, at least they will know he is coming. His hands are shaking but he pours himself a glass of milk from the fridge and stands in the kitchen looking out at the yard. From the kitchen window he can’t see the old white house down the hill; their fence is in the way, and the house is too far below theirs. The angles are wrong: lines of sight, a phrase he remembers, the lines of sight are wrong from the kitchen. He puts the glass in the dishwasher and walks through to the dining room. Everything is as it should be. The blinds are closed but he can sense that the space is the way he and his mother arranged it before bed. His parents will never believe him about the man. Even if he showed them the hatch in the pantry, they would open it, see the black metal behind it, and tell him it was just a part of the foundation. Nevertheless, he knows what he knows.
4:53 AM: Since coming back to bed he has not been able to sleep. His mind works on the white wooden hatch and the black metal wall behind it. He sits up and turns on his bedside light. In the mirror on the opposite wall he can see gray half-moons hanging under his eyes, his hair scarecrowing in tufts and waves. The sickness he feels makes him wonder if the new medicine might be speeding up his illness rather than retarding its progress. It is difficult to imagine how he will make it through a whole day at school, how he will be able to keep his patience with Mrs. Pitt, survive the hissing in the restrooms, the looks of the other students who always find something about his appearance to criticize. At first it was his hair, and now it is the kind of shoes he wears. All students are supposed to wear brown shoes, but his loafers are, apparently, the wrong kind, different from the brand that most other students own. They say he walks like a girl: this, in fact, is part of the reason for the toy soldier behavior, perhaps the essential reason: to walk more like a boy, to practice keeping his hips straight because Joslyn told him he “switches,” swaying as he walks down the hall. He knows he did the toy soldier walk before ever coming to the Pinwheel Academy, but within a week of being at the new school he realized those military movements could be put to some orthopedic purpose: he would train his body to walk in the way a boy is supposed to walk, by limiting his range of motion. He has to be careful, however, for sometimes he falls into that knee-locking gait at school and then Mrs. Pitt grimaces and tells him to stop drawing attention to himself or he will be fined. At least today there is no swimming or PE, although music class, which comes in place of the others, is almost as bad: because he has a good, high voice, the music teacher, Mrs. Schrein, always makes him sing solo parts. The boys say he sings like a girl, the girls—except for Joslyn—suggest he should wear a skirt instead of slacks. When they laugh and whisper Mrs. Schrein does nothing to stop them, until finally she loses her temper with the entire class and turns off the lights to make them all sit in silence, threatening that everyone will be fined for misbehavior. It is impossible to see how he will make it through the day. Perhaps he has a fever and his parents will let him stay home, except he knows one of them would have to stay home with him; this was never a problem in Boston. When he was sick in Boston he would stay in Mrs. Cuddebank’s apartment and sleep all day, waking up only when she brought him soup or medicine, or when her own children got home from school. Sometimes, his mother used to say, it felt like Mrs. Cuddebank needed more looking after than he did but not much could go wrong in an apartment as long as there was an adult who could keep him away from danger and phone an ambulance if he became seriously ill. His father said there was no reason to worry so much, and that saying those kinds of things in front of a child will only make the child feel endangered or, worse, exceptional. He has looked up ENDANGERED and EXCEPTIONAL in the dictionary. It is true that he feels himself to be both things: sometimes in danger, and frequently, more often than not, unusual, special, even, perhaps, abnormal. Here in this new place, his parents have not figured out what to do if he gets sick: more proof of them not thinking about him. It will be better if he dies quickly and they can move on with their lives. Dying will also free him from the Pinwheel Academy and Mrs. Pitt and Mrs. Taylor and all the students who look at him and see only someone who is not like them, who walks in the wrong way, wears the wrong shoes, speaks with an accent and a voice that is strange to them. He understands they are afraid of him, but he does not understand why: he looks at himself and, apart from the gray half-moons and the scarecrow hair, can see nothing frightening about his appearance. Of course their fear is not only to do with the way he looks but also to do with the way he acts: how he speaks, how his answers to questions are always correct, how he raises his hand to offer comments and thoughts that Mrs. Pitt never knows how to handle. On several occasions he has said things in class that even Mrs. Pitt does not know and she has been forced to check his answer on the computer, and then, with a frown, will say, “Copley’s right, but . . .” and try to dismiss what he has said in a way that is never convincing. When he dies he will miss his parents and Joslyn. He will miss Grandpa Chilton, his mother’s father, but he will not miss Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Arthur since they have never been warm, never like the idea of grandparents suggested in books. Apart from those few people, he will miss no one else when he leaves the main rooms of the house of REAL LIFE to explore the rooms that are not at first visible but which he is certain are there, opening out from the back of his parents’ closet, unfolding through metallic darkness beyond the white wooden hatch at the back of the pantry, rooms into which he will disappear and never return. Looking at himself in the mirror, only the top of his body visible from where he sits in bed, his vision blurs and doubles, the two images separating and moving away from each other. Watching his two selves divide, he believes that one of them waves to the other.
5:00 AM: When his alarm goes off he gets out of bed, his body shaking, as though it has not stopped shaking since the man breathed onto his neck, touched his face, examined his fingers, gripped his shoulder, called him by a name not his own, demanding to know if he was alive or dead. He stands in front of the mirror looking at his stomach and chest, at the loose waistband of his pajama bottoms, at the furrows between his ribs. He wonders if he is, as Dr. Phaedrus suggested, undernourished. He looked it up in the dictionary when they got home—that and a number of other words he heard Dr. Phaedrus say to his mother through the door when they did not imagine he was listening or could hear.
5:23 AM: Raising his arms above his head, he stretches, looking at the way his body elongates, the ribs protruding, his stomach scooping into itself. As he is doing this he becomes aware of noise outside. He takes a t-shirt from his closet and puts it on before opening the curtains to look out the window. Although it is still mostly dark, under the streetlights he can see a large yellow excavator and a matching dump truck on the front lawn of the old white house, and a black van with the initials of his father’s company printed on its sides and hood. Six men in black EKK uniforms with helmets and vests and guns come out of the truck. Two go to the front door, two to the back, and one on either side. Because the men are from EKK, because he told his mother yesterday that Louise was living in the house, he is certain his father must have made this happen. He runs out of his room and across the hall, banging on the door of his parents’ bedroom over and over again, shouting, “I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU!” As the door opens he turns and runs down the front stairs, hearing his mother and father come after him, shouting his name, his father’s voice flying on wings of flame.
Maybe the boy was trying to warn me, raising his hand, that little ghostface at the window. I don’t know what these men expect me to do. They could yell come out with your hands up, but since the city put the big black lock on the front door I can’t come out in the most logical way, and if I go out the back they’ll think I’m trying to escape.
From my place on the boards I listen: wind, heavy boots on the porch, the idling of their engine outside, sirens in the distance, and now, the men fumbling the lock,
the screen doors at the front and back whining open and closed. They must have the wrong code. One of them, his face a black visor reflecting the window and me, a genie, trapped tiny within, looks inside from the porch, shining a flashlight, and shouts to the others, “She’s on the floor. She might be armed.”
“Land sakes, you fools, I’m not armed!” I scream, holding up my hands, palms to the front: read these open tracks with your blind flashing faces.
The men give up on the front entrance, circle round to the back, kick in the kitchen door. I try to hold my body stiff as they spill down the hall, a storm of jet-black vermin surrounding me, shouting, “Face down, hands where we can see them,” until I extend my body, roll onto my stomach, hands at my sides. One of them pins my head, another clamps my feet, one holds my right hand, the other my left, and then they bring the two hands together behind my back, truss me up with plastic ties, haul me to my toes, pulling my arms almost out of joint. I bite my tongue, refuse to scream. I don’t know if I’m being arrested or evicted: no reading of rights, no actual police. I know who they are. Welcome to town: this city is privatized.
So with two of the men leading the way, the other four drag me out the rear of the house. I struggle, scream, and as they pull me through my back door, across the porch, out to the garden and around to the front yard, I see the machine moving on its tracks, cutting into turf, bringing up clods of soil through long-tailed ryegrass.
That skinny little child is screaming in the street and his parents are next to him now, putting hands on his shoulders and arms, small woodland animals emerged from their hollowed-out trunks and warrens, looking like dawn might scare them back inside.
There are hands on my own arms, hot hands, bloody stumps chewed down to nothing on one set, the others perfectly pared, French manicured, and those are the hands that pinch hardest. No misgivings in that man’s mind about the work he does. Mr. Chewer doesn’t grip as hard. I can tell from the way he shifts and shuffles that he knows something’s wrong with this assignment, a private action on behalf of an imaginary public.
Sun begins to shoot over the treetops, bouncing gold off the barn’s shingle roof, and then comes a sudden passing shower, burst of waters through slanting light and an apparition of color haunting the air: rain and early sun mixing, come together for a moment before the wind blows them apart.
The new neighbor man approaches, whipping out his wallet, flashing identification, talking to visor-faces with their strong hands and their strong-arm car, saying they should let go, there’s nothing more to be done, I pose no threat and can do nothing to stop them. What does he know about the kind of threat I pose? I bite my tongue again. This, surely, is the neighborliness I always missed.
These latter-day storm troopers give me ten minutes to go back inside and take whatever I want to save: jewelry, letters, my notebooks, the albums and frames full of photographs, files of a life, ledgers of the farm, the only history I have left. Mr. Chewer volunteers to escort me into my own house, and the little neighbor comes with us. The guard cuts me loose and the two men stand now in the kitchen, securing the exit, as I make a pile of my life in the hallway, all cold concentration. Forget nothing, Louise. Check each room, open every drawer, pack all your clothes, your documents.
“I need more than ten minutes. Give me half an hour. That’s all I need,” I say to the men, aware of my voice veering off its track of composure even as I try to hold it steady.
Little neighbor man looks at the guard, his visor up, and the guard nods, speaks through his walkie-talkie to the others outside. I move from room to room, filling four suitcases and an old steamer trunk, taking more than I would choose to keep under rational thought, fearing I might later regret some minor loss. I raise loose boards and prize out the cache of Kennedy half-dollars I once collected in belief they would one day bear value greater than their mark. Pens, blank paper, cards and gifts from forty-three years of classrooms go into cloth sacks. Kitchen utensils from mama and Grandma Lottie go in the cast iron pot. A rope braided by my great-grandmother coils up in a bread bin Donald made when I was pregnant. As I pack, I look down, wondering why my hands are wet; realizing the source, I keep working. There is no way to dry them now. The water rises in silence but flows, unstoppable, a spring opening up to cover the land. Watch me fill the world with my deluge. I am the sea-dark spirit, shaken to torrent.
There is so much to carry I cannot do it alone. With my purse on one shoulder I grip the photo albums against my stomach and watch as the guards all return looking humbled, every one of them, as they cart my life to the curb. They lead us off the property, holding my arms again, the child whimpering against his mother, while the rain slaps faces in passing showers. Standing on the lawn of the Krovik house, we watch as the machine approaches, raising an arm to tear off a corner of my porch with its bucket, reaching again, ripping a gash, opening wide all that should remain private: couches, tables, wallpaper and drapes, sheets and blankets, the oddments of a life. Fragile as balsa my house splinters, collapsing under the moaning hydraulic arm. The house is my Corsican twin: each blow she suffers pulls a sob from my throat. I cover my eyes and feel the child reaching out to take my hand. “Can I help you?” he asks. “Can’t we make them stop?”
“No, we cannot make them stop,” I say.
In the lull between movements of machinery I hear a rushing in my ears, panting breath, my voice claggy and clotting, words so distorted I don’t know what I’m saying, or if the source is even my body. A voice that might be mine, or a multitude, suddenly hollers: house, home, theft! Forget the connections, truncate the syntax. Broken apart and wet to the skin, water pools at my feet. Bare feet. I have no shoes. I stand in the waters I summon to wash away this collapse and demise. I scream against the wantonness. If they hoped for an adversary they have created one, kindled me out of soft dry wood, leaf mold, the desiccated moss of forest floors. Lord knows my house could have been moved, lifted off its foundations, put somewhere else on that great patch of empty land Krovik cleared, quartered, and failed to fill.
In less than ten minutes there is nothing but a heap of wood, glass, metal: splinters of things once whole. I can no longer name them. To name what no longer exists is a form of conjuring I cannot muster. I watch the workers—two thin young men, a middle-aged fat woman with a ponytail—collect the damage, put it in trucks, cart it away.
“This is carnage!” I scream, glimpsing the pile of plants and vegetables uprooted from the kitchen garden.
Mr. Chewer says someone reported an intruder: me, an intruder on my own land. But it is no longer mine. The father of the child nods, trying to be reasonable, says he’ll take responsibility, as if I ever needed a man to take responsibility for me. I start to protest but decide it might be better to let myself fall under the protection of this little mole-man than to go to wherever my brigade of mirror-faced fools might deliver me: some private prison, unseen and unlooked for, unable to reach anyone from there. They would have me disappear. Grips loosen on both arms and I feel the blood run back into my hands, a flashing physical cosmos as the circulation returns to my fingertips. And then they give me a push in the direction of chubby nocturnal father who squints in the dim light, rain coming harder now, turning the last stand of Poplar Farm into a mud wallow putsch. The mourning of it, the weeping and keening, the foot-stamping grief, all of that will have to come later, in private, not before these men. I shall beat the ground, shriek to the trees who remain, call the submerged world to rise up and fight on my side.
Through the holding and restraint the child has not let go. His parents help carry my salvaged belongings and, silent, the boy leads me up the lawn into the Krovik house that now belongs to these small creatures. The boy tells me to come in, invites me across the threshold. My gut rumbles with visions of rocking-chair mothers and shower-curtain victims, of high contrast shadows and screaming violins.
Once inside I catch my breath. All is whiteness, now
here for the eye to set down and relax, everything the whitest of whiteness. “It’s okay,” the child says, “I’ll explain later.” I look into his eyes and see he has already decided how things will be.
“We thought we should get your stuff out of the rain,” the father says; he and the mother make trips back and forth from the street to the house. I watch my life piled up at my feet.
Fallen Land Page 25