Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  His wife believes he is being driven to collapse by Maureen McCarthy and by the expectations of working at his company’s national headquarters, but in fact Nathaniel has found himself distorting the weight of expectation he is facing so he can spend longer hours in the office that has become, along with the work itself, a refuge and release from the horrors of home, even though the nature of his work produces a certain amount of distress. The longer he is on the project, marveling at the genius of Maureen’s vision for a criminal-labor populace subject to a form of permanent incarceration either inside or outside the walls of a prison, providing units of production for EKK while minimizing their criminal activities, the more it seems to make sense. Perhaps, he thinks, some people simply are criminal in a fundamental, immutable way that, for all he knows, might even persist at the genetic, cellular level: a selfish impulse passed down through the generations, across continents, compelling bearers of whatever gene it might be to take what is not theirs. He will find ways to safeguard against any exploitation in the system, to ensure that those who are innocent remain untouched, to allow for redress if miscarriages of justice occur. It will be important to retain the possibility of total rehabilitation. Assuming criminality might in fact be innate and the first visible crime committed a form of self-identification by the criminal that he must enter the corrections rehabilitation system (in other words to take up his rightful place, a place reserved for him, in which his own purpose in the world becomes clear), then the permanent monitoring of anyone who has been convicted of a crime, even after they have served their sentence, seems not just logical, but natural. It is the only way truly to protect the law-abiding, who are themselves, of course, also a natural group. Nathaniel has taken to heart one of Maureen’s favorite maxims: Anyone who doesn’t believe in freedom at eighteen is a fascist. Anyone who doesn’t believe in security at forty is a criminal.

  The moment he is alone in the company car, pulling out of his garage, he can begin to feel the agitation and anger that have accumulated in the hours at home disperse. Even though he is ignored by his wife and son (who do not wave from the window, never mind stand outside and wish him well the way he and his brother did when Arthur Noailles left each morning; whatever their private feelings about the man, they maintained a performance of respect), watching the garage door go down, smelling the filtered air come through the vents, a recorded female voice welcoming him by name and reminding him to fasten his seatbelt, the hatred toward his son that has been growing since before the move begins to settle into a feeling closer to annoyance, disinterest. He will speak with Julia about asking Dr. Phaedrus to boost the dosages again and increase the therapy sessions to twice a week. The EKK health insurance is generous and, even if it were not, they can easily afford whatever it takes to get the boy behaving like a normal child again, before there is any further disruption at school or damage to the home. There can be no question that Copley is the one at fault, the little brat marching through their lives with his automatic movements. It is nothing but sociopathic behavior—the daytime manifestation of the chaos he unleashes at night. If it doesn’t stop soon, Nathaniel is going to have to take more serious action: an outside lock on Copley’s bedroom door, for instance, or, if Julia won’t agree to that, then hidden surveillance cameras, whatever it takes to prove to his wife that their son is the monster in their midst.

  He turns on soft ambient music, and to avoid the flooded neighborhoods takes the freeway hot lane (faster commute, nominal cost, no junkers or trucks), arriving in only twenty minutes at his reserved parking space in the executive underground garage. Artworks hang on the concrete walls and, if he is late for a meeting, one of the attendants will park the car for him and he can dash from the driver’s seat through the palm-scanning barrier and into the elevator that takes him to the twentieth floor, his oasis of gray short-pile carpeting, potted plants, and glass doors that slide open and closed with the wave of a hand over motion sensors and never so much as a whisper of sound.

  Because she worked overtime last night to help him finish the bi-weekly report of their division’s progress toward identification of “insourceable” manufacturing, he has brought Letitia a bouquet of flowers. It is not even eight but she is already at her desk, smiling, professional, grateful, he suspects, for a job with benefits. He knows he should find a way to help her advance out of the lower ranks of administration and into a managerial position; she is well educated, intelligent, makes no mistakes with dictation, her spelling and grammar and typography are all close to flawless. But already he feels reliant on her and does not want to risk a replacement less well versed in the organization and expectations of the headquarters’ hierarchy. She has noted all the birthdays of important colleagues in his calendar, reminds him that a small token should be given, makes suggestions for appropriate gifts, undertakes the ordering on his personal credit card and keeps the receipts, reminding him they all count as tax-deductible business expenses, which he should not fail to have his accountant claim next spring.

  In the last several weeks, despite his misgivings, he has taken to phoning his mother each morning out of a sense of desperation. She has booked him a regular slot in her schedule.

  “Hello, Nathaniel. You sound hungover.”

  “I’m not hungover. I didn’t sleep well.”

  “Is your wife still snoring?”

  “Yes, Julia still snores, but so do I.”

  “What have I told you about spreading the blame around, Nathaniel? Look to the source. The source is lying next to you in bed each night. You need to put your foot down and reclaim your place as head of the household. I always said that your wife was one of these forward women who thought that because she has a career she can also subvert the traditional hierarchies that are in place for the very good reason that they work: gender hierarchies keep order, prevent chaos, and let everyone know where they stand, not only in relation to each other, but to the rest of the world. The only blame you bear is in failing to maintain your position in the hierarchy.”

  “It’s difficult. They’ve formed such a cohesive block. Every time I try, they stand together. There doesn’t seem to be a way around them.”

  “Divide and conquer, Nathaniel. You need to separate the child from his mother and enact the kind of discipline necessary to restore order to the family unit. And get rid of the nanny if you can. Remove the person from the home who is disturbing its balance. Everything was fine before you hired her, wasn’t it?”

  “Not exactly fine.”

  “But it sounds like things have gotten much, much worse since she moved in.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

  “Then you have to get rid of her.”

  “And what do we do about vacations and after school?”

  “You’ve told me your financial footing is sound. So enroll the child in day care during vacations and hire a babysitter for after school. In time, once order is restored, you might think about an au pair—but it should be a young woman, someone you can control, not an older person who thinks of herself as your equal or even your superior, which is clearly what this Washington woman thinks. I understand you were acting out of desperation and guilt when you hired her, but pay her a severance and end it. Promise me that you’ll act on this.”

  “I’ll act on it, Ruth.”

  “And remind me who you are.”

  “I am Nathaniel Noailles.”

  “Go on. Start over.”

  “I am Nathaniel Noailles. I am the head of my house, husband to my wife, father to my son. I make the decisions, I steer the ship, I cut the path through the forest.”

  “Now, tell me, have you still been having those dreams?”

  MOST OF THE DAY IS devoted to reading a report on how much EKK spent globally on paint and paintbrushes in the last year. The figure is higher than he could have imagined and it occurs to him, from previous research, that prison labor produces the majority of al
l paint and paintbrushes on the market in the country, which means, in all likelihood, that EKK is effectively paying either the government or some rival corrections corporation for paint and supplies it could be producing in its own prisons at a much lower cost. A day does not pass without him discovering a fact of this kind. In the end the question will be: what are the things that inmates can produce that will both save and make the most amount of money for the corporation? Paint is unlikely to be the answer, although it is a good place to begin. Circuit boards, telecommunications equipment, these are also possibilities, but the area that excites him most is the possibility of prisoners manufacturing domestic law enforcement drones, which, if his research is correct, could be mass-assembled in relatively little time, equipped with surveillance and other equipment, including crowd-control taser and baton rounds, and used either by EKK itself or sold on to local governments across the country and around the world. Extraordinary machines, some no larger than a hummingbird, once they reach cruising altitude they are as silent as the glass door to Nathaniel’s office.

  In the process of undertaking this vast research project, Nathaniel has begun to have other ideas as well, about a new regime of prison life that would introduce more regimentation and restriction: requirements that prisoners rise at five in the morning regardless of the season, and that they work a ten-hour day with lights out at eleven in the evening. In the hours when they are not manufacturing or sleeping, they will be given cleaning duties around the prison and compulsory education, as well as a total of one hour for eating, forty-five minutes for personal hygiene, and thirty minutes for religious observance, all at appointed and immovable times. Their days will be spent in monastic silence, with speaking restricted to working and religious hours and even then only when necessary for clarification, compliance, or ritual. Periods of hygiene, cleaning, and eating are to be conducted in silence. Any infraction will lead to a sixty-day extension of their sentence (a fact, Nathaniel is pleased to note, which is bound to result in higher profits for EKK). There is no place for recreation in Nathaniel’s new schedule, the idea being that the cleaning duties will be physically strenuous, requiring the lifting of large buckets of water, scrubbing, mopping, and sweeping. In the past, in the barbaric history of this country, prisoners were punished through pain. In the enlightened present, they are disciplined through a curtailment of rights and freedom, and through the enforcement of productive labor. If that is not progress he does not know what is.

  Nevertheless, one thing begins to concern Nathaniel. In an age in which so many people—the free, the innocent—struggle to live comfortable lives, prisoners under his notional executive supervision might, in fact, be better off than many of the people outside, so that committing a crime and submitting oneself to punishment could be seen by the underprivileged as a way of having an improved life: more stable, better fed, better housed, and of longer duration than would ever be possible for them if they remained free.

  Late in the day a memo circulates from the Vice-President of American Operations. In the clearest possible language, it suggests that all employees registered to vote should, in the upcoming election, tick the box for the candidate who is on record as looking favorably upon corporations such as EKK. Failure to elect the right candidate from the right party could, the memo explains, imperil the jobs of countless EKK employees, from the bottom all the way to the top. “If security is what you want,” the memo concludes, “then defense of your very own job security should be at the heart of your voting choice.”

  ON HIS WAY HOME THE traffic is so heavy that even the hot lane is slow, and as Nathaniel creeps along he looks across to the encampment of homeless people on an island of overpass to the north, surrounded by floodwaters. They have erected tents and makeshift shelters. A fire burns in a trashcan. Although they would be better off inside, the homeless shelters—those that have survived in the current economy—are all overcrowded. He makes a mental note to check on the rigor of municipal vagrancy laws.

  “I am Nathaniel Noailles,” he says to himself, repeating the mantra his mother has taught him. “I am the head of my house, husband to my wife, father to my son. I make the decisions, I steer the ship, I cut the path through the forest.”

  “Have you spoken to Julia yet about your longer-term plans, about Alex’s vision for your place in the company?” Maureen asked him earlier in the day.

  “She’s been really busy. We’re going through some things at home. Our son has been having problems at school. But it’s on my mind, believe me. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll speak to Julia soon.”

  “Have that conversation,” Maureen said, squeezing his arm. “Bringing her into the fold will do wonders for your career, and for your family. We want all three of you under our canopy.”

  TWO YOUNG MEN FROM THE yard service move their machines over the wet lawn during the first lull in the weather Nathaniel can remember for weeks. It will be the last mowing before winter. The cut grass clumps and clogs the mowers, the men struggle with their equipment and one of them, the younger of the two, keeps glancing at the flood on the other side of the street, at the rushing torrent between the house of his employer and his employer’s neighbor, as if he believes the water will rise fast enough to take all of them with it. The men are both tall, blond, muscular in a way Nathaniel never has been, and because it is an unseasonably warm October day, both are wearing baggy basketball shorts and oversized red jerseys whose sleeves have been cut off. What remains of the shirts has the quality of a loose smock or tunic, the sides of the men’s upper bodies all but uncovered and looking oddly vulnerable in spite of the muscular armor they bear. It takes the two men an hour to mow the front and back, to edge the lawn around the paths and driveway, to suck up the stray trimmings and the accumulations of fallen leaves into their agri-industrial vacuum bags, and shave the shrubs with electric hedge-trimmers. They skirt the northern edge of the property, leaving a swath of long grass closest to the stream. Watching them, Nathaniel thinks of his own father cutting the grass, Arthur Noailles in baseball shorts and tank top, making a brow-fixed assault on the lawn and the hedges, and then the stench of gasoline and cut grass and adult male sweat when his father came back in the house and sat, wide-stanced in the kitchen, flecks of dirt and grass on his tanned arms, blue shorts cutting into his groin, testicles sheathed in cotton boxers protruding from the cuffs as he drank a beer. Unlike some of their friends and neighbors, Nathaniel and Matthew were never allowed to mow their own lawn as a way of earning an allowance. Maintenance of the yard was exclusively their father’s domain, as so much of life seemed to be. With the odor of Arthur’s filthy body in his nostrils, he cranes his neck down to his armpits, hoping to find that he smells nothing like the man whose memory brings a shiver of nausea. Under his own arms he finds nothing but the smells of deodorant, fabric softener, myriad individual and conflicting perfumes, all of them, he thinks, poisoning his body while making it fragrant. He is sure his father would say he smelled like a woman.

  They are going next door for a barbecue, he and Julia and Copley, while Louise has driven downtown to see a friend or cousin or some other shirttail relative, the kind of person, he suspects, whose association ought to be avoided.

  The neighbor, Brandon Edwards, apologized for taking so long to introduce himself and “his partner and child.”

  “Do you think he means the man is his partner?” Nathaniel asks Julia.

  “Have you seen a woman? I’ve only seen the two men, and the little girl.”

  “No, I haven’t seen any women.”