Fallen Land (39 page)

“That’s terrible, Louise,” Julia says. She reaches out to touch the old woman’s arm, the alliance as clear to Nathaniel as ever. “What kind of company are you working for, Nate?”

What gives her the right to call him
Nate
? She’s never done it before, not in all their married life. He shrugs, looking at them both, and says the only thing he can think to say: “They were just doing their jobs. We have a search-and-detain contract with Immigration & Customs. You can’t fault them for what they have to do. In fact, you might say they
failed
to do their jobs properly. They shouldn’t have let you go until they could reach me to confirm you work for me. These days, you just can’t go around without carrying ID, Louise. We have to think about national security.”

The old woman shakes her head. “All I know is I haven’t been treated like that since the sixties. And I thought those days would never come back.”

Louise excuses herself and thuds up the back stairs to her bedroom while Nathaniel and Julia stand in silence. She loads cups and plates into the dishwasher, avoiding looking at him until she has no choice. There’s an expression on her face he hasn’t seen before. When she opens her mouth, her lips pull tight and her chin trembles.

“Who
are
you?” she says.

“It’s been a long day,” he says, “you’re tired.”

“I’m not tired. I’m—in shock. I don’t recognize you.”

“I’ve just been saying what’s true. We have to stop living such soft lives.”

H
E SWITCHES
ON THE TELEVISION
in the den and turns up the volume so everyone knows what he’s doing, flicking from news to weather before settling on
Saturday Night Live
. For an hour he laughs as loud as he can, even when nothing funny is happening on the screen, and only turns it off after midnight. When he comes to bed he finds the door locked, light seeping out from the threshold into the dark passage. He jiggles the knob, knocks, calls out in a low voice to Julia but she never answers. As the light goes off he kicks the door at its base and rakes his fingernails down the wall.

He makes out the couch in his study and locks himself inside. Just let them try to wake him up in the morning. He’ll spend the day alone, ignore them all, show them what it means to be ostracized.

When he finally sleeps he dreams of the man in the woods with the gun and the deer. The man has him on the ground, prone, Nathaniel’s hands tied behind his back with a plastic cord, and the man is pulling the jeans from Nathaniel’s body. He struggles against the man’s grip, trying to squirm away as he feels a cord looping his feet, twining in and out around his bare ankles as the man huffs and grunts, smelling of gasoline and sweat and cut grass. Nathaniel looks up to see a deer hanging from a tree, suspended over a ruined chimney, smoke wafting up as the carcass turns, slowly roasting, its two front legs huge, engorged with blood and throbbing. He feels the man pushing into him, the hard sharp shock of pressure slamming up through his body, skin against his skin, rough and slick.

His father never took him hunting. His father does not hunt. His father would never know what to do with a gun or a deer except to chart the social and manufacturing history of the gun, the legacy of hunting deer and their place in the American diet, the law passed down from Deuteronomy that sanctioned their eating and sacrifice as a species. He opens his eyes to find it is already light—or at least dawn, gray and fog-choked. The dream, like so many of his most vivid nightmares, occurred in the shallowest period of sleep, when his brain was already half awake, mulling and stewing. His father is no hunter.

It is only six but he gets up, goes to the adjoining bathroom, puts on the clothes he wore yesterday after sleeping all night in the nude. There is a stain on the fitted sheet covering the foldout mattress. He removes the sheet, balling it up, and sees that the stain is dark, still wet, and appears to be spreading, turning the pale blue mattress a deep navy. He returns to the bathroom, moistens a towel, and tries to scrub away the stain, succeeding only in making it larger, wetter, more incriminating. Placing a dry towel over the spot, he folds up the bed, putting the cushions back in position. At some point he will need to replace the mattress, although there is no urgency; no one else is going to sleep on it, no one else will bother to open it.

Mulling over the events of Saturday, he feels close to remorse, if not for the intention behind his words and actions, then for the way they were expressed. Aggression has never been his style; if anything, he has sought to bleed aggression from his interactions with other people as a way of being less like his father. He sees now that yesterday was a slip, brought on by fatigue and stress. As much as he wants to believe in the new work he is doing, he suspects it is wrong. He knows that what happened to Louise is wrong, that the right of EKK employees to pull over city buses and detain, however briefly, law-abiding American citizens, demanding they prove their right to be in the country of their birth, on public transit, is at best a legal gray area, although one not without some precedent. The problem is one of style and tone, the overbearing aggression, which is, he fears, poisoning his own way of being in the world. The white leather couch stares back at him and he can see the dark navy stain rising up from the cloth and metal innards, surfacing and spreading along the bleached hide, a blue so deep it is almost black. He runs his hands across the cushions, feeling for moisture, sniffing his fingertips for the ozone smell of his own fluids. Nothing. Dry. Odorless.

It is time to start fresh, to make coffee and waffles for everyone, set them all on a new course. “I am Nathaniel Noailles, head of the house, leader of my family, captain of the ship.” A good leader admits fault: he will apologize if what he said upset or frightened Copley, and find a way to rephrase his exhortation, explaining that he is only concerned about his son’s long-term health and livelihood and wellbeing since he is such an obviously intelligent and sensitive child. He loves his son—no, of course he does.

Thoughts catch and tear; these are the things Julia will want to hear, will perhaps even expect to hear if he has any hope of mending the situation. Put it right,
Nate
, get it back together. Don’t be so small, don’t be such an insect.

But when he opens the door to the hall, he knows he will not be making waffles and he will not be apologizing to anyone. All along the floor and rising up the walls, scrawled in red crayon, in handwriting that could only belong to a child, are the words
GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY.

The graffiti covers the doors of his study and the master bedroom, the floor and walls of the landing to a height of four feet, and on the door to Louise’s bedroom, surrounded by the storm of
GO AWAY
, there is another word, a single utterance, blocked out in black marker:

NIGGER

The only surface untouched by graffiti is Copley’s own door.

Nathaniel feels the pressure rise again in his chest, the old rage expanding.

“Copley!” he screams, “Copley! Out here now! COPLEY!”

The door to his son’s room opens and the small white face appears, hands trembling. He feels nothing but hate for this boy, wants to obliterate the monster he created, make him disappear, or transform him into something else altogether.

“Stand with your back against the wall,” he shouts. Copley gapes at the vandalism, looking surprised, such a good, mincing little actor. “Raise up your arms,” Nathaniel says, as Copley starts to whimper. The boy’s arms reach above the line of the graffiti. Julia and Louise are standing in the hall now, idiot jaws slack. Nathaniel’s hands shake, he watches himself telling his son to go to his room, hears himself tell his wife that something serious is going to have to be done. After the warning he gave Copley yesterday, to have this shit thrown in his face is too much, never mind the offense directed at Louise. The camel’s back is broken, this is a hundredweight of straws. Even Julia, he can see, who has been the kid’s champion from the beginning, looks at Copley now with confusion and disappointment. Doors slam. Rage pumps him full, fills his veins, his lungs; his temples throb, he sees meteoric silver stars everywhere he looks: the red wax, the time it will take to clean it off, Nathaniel’s whole body shaking, his chest inflated, bursting, and then, arising from deep in his gut, a howl that flies out of his mouth, flies and fills every room, shaking the house into silence.

6:20
AM:
He sits on his bed, sniffling although he is trying to stop. He hears his father shouting in the hall, “I hate that kid, I’m gonna kill him.” He believes what his father says and starts to cry, waiting for his mother or Louise to come, to bring him his breakfast. His father is going to kill him, but first he hears him go downstairs. There is shouting in the kitchen, his mother and father, but he cannot understand what they are saying. The door opens and Louise comes in, closing it behind her. “You didn’t do it, did you?” she asks. He can’t speak, he chokes and hiccups and sobs, shaking his head. “Hold on to yourself,” she says, “and don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. We’ll fix it.” She rubs his back for a moment and then leaves him alone again. He knows it is the man in the basement, the man they saw in the woods with the gun and the deer. He has tried to tell them in every way he knows. He has showed his mother the hatch in the pantry and even then she did not believe him. While he is thinking about how he can convince them he is telling the truth, he lies back down and begins to fall asleep, thinking of the shock he felt when they arrived at the barbecue yesterday and Austin was standing in the middle of the neighbors’ backyard. He dreams that Austin pushes him off the diving board and out into space, and as he is falling, he looks down, only to see there is no water left in the pool.

7:10 AM:
He can smell his mother sitting on the chair next to his bed. He opens his eyes and pulls himself up to look in the mirror on the opposite wall. His cheeks and eyes are red, his hair angled in waves all over his head. When he sees the image of the boy in the bed at first he does not recognize himself. “I want you to tell me the truth,” his mother says, “did you write those words in the hall?”
“No,”
he says, “I never did any of those things. It was the
man
.” “Which man, Copley?” “The man in the woods yesterday, with the gun, he lives in the basement.” His mother exhales, “Oh, Copley. Come on, sweetie. There is no man in the basement.” He knows she has run out of patience. “Why don’t you believe me?” he asks. “I want—” she says. He does not understand what she wants. It almost seems like she wants to believe that he
is
responsible. “Let me show it to you again. Let me show you where he lives.” “Enough! Copley, honestly, enough already. There are four people in this house. Me, you, your father, and Louise.” “No,” he says, “not just the four of us.” “Stop. You have to stop lying. Do you know what the word means that you wrote on Louise’s door?” “I didn’t
write
it,” he shouts, outraged that she would believe him capable of such a thing. Of course he knows what the word means. He has heard other students at school whisper it when he and Joslyn pass. He never heard the word before that, and did not, at first, understand what it meant until he asked Joslyn. “Don’t ever say that word,” she said, “if you’re my friend you won’t say that word.” “I don’t understand what it means,” he said, “why do they call us that word?” “Not
us
,” she said, “they’re calling
me
that word.” “But what does it mean?” “It’s what nasty, stupid people call people like me. And it’s the
worst
thing you could call me.” That was enough of an explanation. He didn’t need to hear anything more than that. He looks at his mother and tells her about Joslyn. He says that he would never use that word. His mother gives him his morning pills and he swallows them. She looks at the bottles and turns them over in her hands and looks at him. “So you knew that word already,” she says. She shakes the pills and takes them into the bathroom. He can hear her opening the bottles and throwing the pills into the toilet and then dropping the plastic bottles into the metal trashcan. When she comes back, she’s smiling but does not look happy. “No more pills,” she says. “We’re stopping the pills today. That was your last dose.” “Why?” he asks. “Because I think they’re doing more harm than good. I think they might be making you do things you don’t even know you’re doing.”

8:00
AM:
His mother leaves him alone and he takes a shower, gets dressed, and goes downstairs for breakfast. His father and mother are standing up at the island, while Louise is sitting on one of the stools, eating a bowl of oatmeal. “You come sit next to me,” she says. His father looks at him and says they expect him to apologize to Louise. He thinks that the three of them have been arguing. His mother bites her lip and Louise raises a hand to his father but his father puts up his own hand and pats the air, as if he were a teacher telling Louise to be quiet. “I want to hear Copley apologize for what he’s done,” his father says. Copley looks at the three adults. His father stares at him, his face cut into many small triangles; his mother looks at him and then at the floor, chewing her lip. Louise won’t look at him at all and stares out the window instead. He can see there is only one way out of this, even though it means admitting a thing he knows he did not do and would never do. Then he notices the box of crayons that are usually in the activities drawer in the kitchen. His father taps the lid of the box. “These were thrown all over the floor of the kitchen.” He isn’t sure what his father expects him to say in response. He would never leave anything a mess. He hates messes. “Come on, Copley. Let’s hear it.” His father’s voice is calm in a way that makes the back of his neck prickle and crawl. “I’m
sorry
,” he says, “but I didn’t do it. I didn’t do
any
of it.” His father throws the box of crayons on the floor and stomps out of the kitchen, shouting at his mother, “I expect
him
to clean it up. No one else is going to help him!” His mother runs after his father, shouting, “
Nate
, be reasonable. He can’t clean it up. It’s going to be way too much work. I’ll call Di tomorrow and see if she can come earlier in the week.” “No!” his father shouts. “I want it cleaned NOW.”