“I believe Copley, Nathaniel. Your son’s not a liar.”
He looked at me as though he did not understand.
EACH DAY I WALK IN the rain to pick up Copley from school. Each day the EKK guards at the Pinwheel Academy demand to see my identification and the letter from Julia and Nathaniel confirming that I am empowered to escort their son from school to home. Each day Copley says less to me, seeming more withdrawn, not as verbal. He holds my hand but speaks only when I ask him a question. We walk from school, through River Ranch, sometimes along Poplar Road, past the gravesite of my home, the city’s construction stalled by the rain, and up Abigail Avenue. Alone in the house I make him a snack and read to him. He wants fantasy and horror. We finished The Return of the King and now he is demanding Frankenstein. I worry the book is too advanced for him, but he listens and does not fall asleep or squirm and after an hour of reading he sits to do his homework before dinner. He never complains. He never throws tantrums. Each day he does his assignments, checks his work, shows it to me, and if he is having problems, which is almost never, I try to send him in the right direction without giving him answers. Mistakes are ones of speed rather than ignorance. If I point out that an error has been made, most of the time he can find it and correct it on his own. In four decades of teaching, I can remember only one or two children as bright as Copley Noailles.
Each day during the week I make his dinner and give him his medication. I look at him and look at the pills and he looks at me. I smile in a way I hope communicates more than I feel I can say: I am giving you this poison because I have no choice, but I know it is doing you harm. He nods, takes the pills, and swallows.
IN THE LAST FEW DAYS, the nocturnal disruptions have become more acute: dining room chairs pushed against the wall, windows opened and rain driving in, curtains and blinds torn down and cut into pieces, rugs rolled up and shoved into the fridge, all the cupboard doors in the kitchen opened, the television turned on, the stereo tuned to static, the art taken down and all the glass in the frames smashed.
“He’s done this before,” Nathaniel says, “this kind of furniture thing. He’s an inventive child. We should have warned you. I feel like we’ve lured you into a living horror. That’s what it’s beginning to feel like to me. That’s why I spend so much time at work, Louise. My life at home is a living horror. Do you understand that?” His voice is high and strained and his eyes bulge as he juts out his jaw at my face.
I shake my head and step backward, trying to puzzle out what might be happening. “I can go when I want. And if it gets too much, I will go, Nathaniel. But for now, I don’t believe that Copley’s doing any of this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean, but I don’t believe that a child like Copley could do half the things you think he’s doing.”
When these conversations happen, Julia absents herself, leaving the room or simply refusing to speak, as if she also doubts her son is a midnight demon stalking his family.
Each morning I wake bracing for a new outrage. The vandalism was confined to the ground floor until yesterday, when I woke to find the contents of the linen cupboard emptied into the upstairs hall and spilling down the front staircase, sheets and towels twisted together into a long rope, tied at the end into what I can only describe as a noose. Copley could not have done it. The materials were tied too expertly, the noose too clear in its formation: a functioning knot that slipped like rope and held fast when tugged. For a moment I thought of putting it all away, untying it and folding the sheets before anyone else was up, but then I decided that they should see, or at least that if Julia did, she would understand. Nathaniel told me he grew up boating with his father off Cape Cod. The man knows how to tie a knot.
WHEN THE SUN COMES OUT again, if it comes, how blinding this house will be, its white surfaces throwing light back in our faces. Julia insists that shoes are always removed on entering the house, to keep the floors white. A cleaner comes once a week, hooks up the hoses to the central vacuuming system, an inlet in each room, scrubs off any streaks or scuffs, dusts, wipes the mirrors and cupboards of fingerprints, arranges everything into perfect order. The cleaner speaks no English and I do not know where she is from, whether she might speak Spanish or Russian or Inuit, Arabic or Urdu or Kazakh. She works for a company that sends cleaners all over the city, a tribe of women who are known for their silence and efficiency, for their white slacks and red smocks and matching cars. After the first week, I stop trying to make conversation, allowing the woman, whose name is Di, to go about her business and finish her work. She does not look happy. She wants to arrive, to work, to eat a sandwich at noon, to go home at five, to come back the following Friday and repeat the pattern, as she must repeat it at other houses on other days of the week. I try smiling at her, but she does not smile back. Today I ask her if she would like a piece of the pumpkin bread I baked for Copley, but the woman shakes her head, says, “Green card. I win lottery,” and goes back to work, tucking her artificially blonde hair back up under her blue cotton head-wrap. Next time we will not speak, not even nod in acknowledgment of each other. I must attend to Copley and nothing else. The boy requires all the attention I can muster. Not because he does anything wrong. There is nothing wrong about him except what the pills I must administer are liable to do.
I call out to my mother but she no longer speaks to me. My people have gone deep, submerging themselves to wait out this era. I move in silence, with only my own voice to accompany my thoughts. Living in this house has changed my thinking, making it colder, harder, iced over, while a warmer current flows somewhere deep and still alive: I have to think in this way to stay alert, to stay alive, to watch out for the child. I try to sleep lightly, listening for sounds, but whoever or whatever is terrorizing this house does so in a way that never wakes me. I have tried to stay awake, sitting up in the chair in my room, reading a book, rewriting my account of the Freeman ancestors and Mr. Wright, but I always falter, lids heavy-drooping, spine going late-wilt limp. In the rounded interior of my bedroom I have recurring dreams that my blood is being drained away, tubes tapped into my arms, snaking down and out of the room through the central vacuum system, tubes disappearing into the portal just above the slope where the wall slides into the floor.
Copley tells me the house did not look like this when they moved in: “It was like other people’s houses. My parents wanted it to look like our apartment in Boston. When I have dreams about being at home I’m still in the apartment. And then I wake up here.” He is unfailingly polite, reserved, self-contained, all of his processes and emotions hidden behind his face, which almost never betrays any emotion, not even pleasure or happiness. Expression of sentiment is unusual and confession of this kind truly rare. If he enjoys the food I prepare he does not show it, does not laugh at my jokes. I’ve learned not to take it personally, recognizing that Copley would be like this with anyone, and is just like this with his parents after I go to bed or when I leave them alone together for an hour in the evening. His voice is flat, monotonous, without affect. It is a house bled of joy, deprived of laughter, and except when I sing or turn on the stereo, a house without music. Di works in silence, the vacuum cleaner itself silent, its machinery hidden in the basement in a soundproofed cupboard the shape and size of a coffin. I move through these rooms lost in a space that feels as much mausoleum as maze.
Because the rain has been constant for weeks, apart from walking back and forth to school, Copley and I have been outside to play only once, for a walk in the woods. We looked at the old storm cellar, the ruins of the chimney and fireplace in the trees, and in the backyard the granite slabs marking the place where two bodies lie.
“Why are the stones over there if they’re supposed to mark the sinkhole?” he asked.
“Out of fear they might also be consumed if the hole broadened out to take more of the land.”
“What are the stones for?”
“History.”
“They’re for remembering. And you remember this, like I told you through the fence. Don’t ever walk on the compost heap. It’s like quicksand. It could swallow you up.”
WE SPEND WET AFTERNOONS INDOORS occupying ourselves with drawing and reading. Each Thursday night, either Julia or Nathaniel takes the garbage cans out to the curb. Today, as the sun goes down, Copley and I watch the garbage trucks, one for household waste, the other for recycling, each truck equipped with a mechanical arm that extends, grips the container, lifts it in the air, raises it up over the truck’s stomach of waste, and empties it before returning the bin to the ground, the driver never leaving the cab of the truck.
“Used to be, there were three or four men on each truck, one or two in front, one or two hanging off the back. Someday soon I bet there won’t even be a driver. The truck’ll drive itself, pick up whatever it sees fit to throw away, whether it’s in a trashcan or not.”
Copley looks at me, eyes wide, hazel-green crystals surrounded by milk glass. “Machines are smart,” he says, as if he knows something I do not. We go back to drawing on the floor of the playroom at the top of the house, the rain shifting its aim, peppering the windows with liquid shot.
“What are you drawing?” I ask, looking at his careful depiction of men in hats holding cartoon bombs out of doorways and windows, dropping them on an empty street.
“Terrorists,” he says.
“Why terrorists?”
“They’re bombing things.”
“And what’s that in the sky?” I ask, pointing to a small black mass of lines in the upper right hand corner of the white page.
“One of our drones.”
“And what’s the drone doing?”
“Bombing the terrorists.”
I remember when children drew gardens and parks: a band of green for the earth, flowers and trees sticking up straight, birds and squirrels and dogs, outlines of cloud, a personified sun, a band of blue at the top of each page to signify sky. Children today know too much, should be protected from some knowledge. He turns over the page and starts a new drawing, a room, a bed, a child in the bed, a door, fat legs, a fat body, a tall fat man with mechanical arms coming through the door, a tall fat man with mechanical arms dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase who bears a certain resemblance to Nathaniel, the monstrous creature menacing the boy in his bed.
“Who’s that?” I ask, pointing at the child in the drawing.
“A little boy.”
“And who’s that?” I point at the figure with robotic arms.
“The man who moves furniture.”
The man who moves furniture: who ties nooses from bedclothes, lives in the basement, is born from the elements of Julia’s workbench, who shadows the boy’s nightmares as a mask for his father. I can see no other explanation, given the security of the house. We move freely within it, but any breach, any coming or going between inside and outside, would trigger alarms to bring down the neighborhood. No, I am convinced the monster is a man who may not even be conscious of what he is doing, who perhaps believes himself as blameless as a child.
A FRIDAY MORNING IN LATE October. The vandalism evolves. If any part of me doubted Copley’s innocence, this new development is something he cannot have done. As usual since coming to live with them, I am up first in the morning, showered, dressed, down the stairs to make my breakfast before the family is up. I empty buckets because the roofers have not or perhaps cannot come, the rain never stopping long enough to fix the leaks. I make coffee, falling back into habitual rhythms, looking out the kitchen window at the mess of muck where my house used to be, the work still stalled because of the weather. I grind the coffee in their slick black machine, boil water in a stainless steel electric kettle, brew it in a French press, drink it black, five minutes elapsed from pouring to reach the optimal temperature for drinking. I would read the paper but these people do not subscribe. Listening to news on the radio, I think about the day to come. I do not even notice what has happened until I open the white curtains in the white living room and see it, all that white furniture pushed up against the walls, and in great bright red arcs, gouts of ketchup sprayed across the floor, ranging from wall to wall, climbing up those egg-interior curves, crisscrossing and crosshatching the white room.
I drop my coffee, hear the mug catch and smash, am aware of the warm liquid splashing against my legs, making brown marks on the white boards, a single drop flying up and landing on the back of the white couch. Copley could not have done this. I go back to the kitchen for a towel, return to wipe up my coffee, collect the pieces of mug, put them in the trash compactor before Julia notices, because the woman gets twitchy about breakages. It’s only an inexpensive mug, white like all the other china and crockery, no decoration or embellishment on it, but Julia will have fits if she discovers one is broken. I bury the fragments under paper towels and food scraps.
To whom is the message directed, for message it must be? I can only think, given the noose on the stairs and now this, that it must be meant for me. But if it is, then why is it in the living room and not against my door? If meant for me, then surely it should be directed at me alone, instead of in the space that, not for nothing, people in these parts still call “the family room.”
For all my talk of the dead, I do not believe in ghosts, not in the usual sense, but nonetheless I wonder if a kind of haunting is at work. From the kitchen I look at the place where the land lies in a dark depression, to the side of which rest the two granite slabs. I have not explained the spot to Nathaniel and Julia, never explained it to Krovik, but somehow the man understood it should not be touched, that to dig too close would tempt and tease an old and angry history. Through the veils of rain I can see the depression has changed: no longer concave, it has pushed upward, expanding, a boil on the earth craving a lance, all that dark river water trickling down, deeper waters rising to fill the half-filled void, drawing history back to the surface.
In the rain’s lull I rush out under the eaves of the garage, stepping on land thick with unnatural lawn, and find a long leafless stick fallen from one of the cottonwoods. I poke at the swollen place where grass will not grow, disturbing that dark wound, and as I feel the stick penetrate the surface, sliding through a layer of fallen leaves, there is a sudden shift in tension, a trembling tug as it slips from my fingers and slides, sucked down fast by the earth.
A BRIEF ANALYSIS OF MY PRESENT STATE OF MIND
by Professor Julia Lovelace-Noailles
Intention
The following text I have written for myself and for any future health professional I may need to consult, as well as for my son, assuming I predecease him, and any issue he may eventually produce. It is a document both for my own improvement and a historical curiosity for those I will eventually leave behind, or for the scientific community, if my life or my work is believed, ultimately, to hold any lasting interest. Nathaniel, if you are reading this, do not; it is not for you. Copley, if you ever read this, I hope you do so in better health than you find yourself at the moment. I know these pages may be painful for you to read, but it is solely in the interest of forensic truth that I say everything I do, my perspective being but one of several possible.
Immediate Concerns
1. Copley
2. Nathaniel (our marriage)
3. The (“new”) house
4. My father
5.Nathaniel’s relationship with his parents
Immediate Actions & Possible Solutions
1. Copley: talk therapy & psychopharmaceutical regime
2. Nathaniel/Marriage: couples therapy
3. The house: quotes for new roof and remedial work on siding
4. My father: investigate long-term care facilities, explore independent/assisted living
5.Nathaniel & his parents: encourage him to undergo individual therapy and seve
r all contact with his parents
Personal Medical History
No surgeries. Natural childbirth. Occasional treatment for seasonal allergies. Less than half a dozen prescriptions for antibiotics over the course of my life to date, with no adverse effects. One broken toe, but no other serious bodily damage aside from a brief bout of tendinitis in my right foot at the age of twenty. At thirty-nine, I show no signs of menopause. Sex drive optimal, cycles all regular.
Current Medications
No prescription medications taken. Multivitamin, Vitamin D3 supplement, Vitamin C and Zinc supplements during rhinovirus season.
Beliefs
1. I am surrounded by crazy people (my computer tells me this is a passive-voice construction, but I cannot put the crazy people before myself; I am at the center of a community of madness, or incipient madness; I refuse to see the crazy people first, as those who define what I am or may yet be; I come first, I find myself, on this journey, suddenly surrounded by them, plagued, followed, pursued). My son is crazy, my husband may well be crazy, and even the woman we have hired to look after our son appears to be crazy. She tells me that history is ready to explode from out of our yard, from beneath the compost heap. I told Nathaniel I didn’t think it was a good idea to hire someone who had been living illegally in a condemned structure without any utilities for goodness knows how long but he insisted that he felt a certain responsibility for the actions of his corporation, even those carried out by a division entirely separate from his own; he also said that he could see Copley had an immediate rapport with Louise and it might be just what we’ve been looking for to help him snap out of the strange behaviors that have arisen since moving from Boston. Although I have grown to like her and believe she is good for Copley, so far bringing Louise Washington into the house has done little to ameliorate my son’s behavior, which remains robotic in a way I cannot help thinking is intended, consciously or not, as a criticism of his mother, because it is my work that has brought us here, to this city and this house that we are growing to hate in our individual ways. (Nor does the medication seem to be having a positive effect. Quite the reverse, in fact: Copley’s physical affect has become, if anything, less human the more medication he takes, and under Dr. Phaedrus’s supervision the doses have been steadily increasing.) Even I can now see that buying this house was a mistake. It was poorly built and poorly finished, and no amount of internal redecoration, of which we have done more than most would dare, is going to make this anything like the apartment in Boston we loved and where we were, I know, happy beyond our rights. Now that the roof has started to leak and the siding is coming away from the northwest corner of the house, I can see how this place could easily gobble up all of our savings, most of our disposable income, and leave us still unhappy within it, trapped in a house in a market where houses are not selling. Nathaniel complains that it does not feel like a home, but instead like a soundstage or series of hospital waiting rooms, and even though I often have a similar feeling, I resent him every time he voices these doubts. A house does not magically become a home. Goodness has to be put into it, weekly if not daily. We are too absent here, or at least Nathaniel is, spending more and more of his life in the office under the gaze of a boss whom I believe he desires as much as he fears, a woman who, along with this house and the weird jollity of the people in this city (despite the flood engulfing them), is making a formerly sensible man crazy. Thus, this belief is both simple and horrible: my child is mentally unwell, diagnosed with psychotic depression, and consequently medicated with pills that seem only to remove him further from my affections, and my husband is also apparently unwell. I have no proof for the latter presumption. These, in fact, are not beliefs so much as truths, of whatever quality or degree. The belief is this: that I am responsible in some way for their illness or apparent illness. Increasingly, I worry about my own sanity as well, as if the house itself, and the land on which it stands, were poisoning our minds. Nathaniel and I used to joke about people who might be “certifiable,” including his parents and my late mother; I can no longer joke about mental illness when my son is not just certifiable but certified, diagnosed with an illness his doctor says is likely to require long-term medication. He already has the thousand-yard stare of the medicated mind. Louise looks at him and says to me: “There’s nothing wrong with him that a daily walk in the woods and a little homegrown food won’t cure.” I want to believe her homespun advice, but the rain does not stop, the gullies that were dry when we moved here a month ago are practically rivers, and I have had to change my route to work to avoid the spreading flood. How can I allow my child to go venturing out into the world on foot, even under Louise’s supervision? Bridges have been washed out and five people have already died in the city, which, if we are to believe the aerial photography, is now a series of islands: some small, others large, surrounded by water that is alternately coursing and stagnant, the low-lying north–south highways turning into torrents, the neighborhoods around us a vast and spreading lake. Two bodies remain unrecovered. On the way to work I passed a half-submerged stretch of interstate. An island of overpass was the only dry spot and on the island was an encampment of tents and makeshift shelters. An inflatable boat appeared to be bringing more people to the site. I learned later that those are the homeless who have been displaced from their previous shelters under the overpasses and bridges, who had no choice but to escape the flood by going out into the rain. I dream of bodies floating through the city. Last night I dreamed that the unfinished foundation across the street became filled with corpses, a drain pulling all the flood’s victims, the animals who walk on two legs as well as four, down into its depths.
Fallen Land Page 31