Fallen Land (22 page)

5:00 AM:
Before the alarm goes off he is already awake. His parents do not know he sets the alarm for such an early hour, nor do they know that most nights since leaving Boston he has hardly slept. There are many things they do not know. They know only what is unimportant: that he gets up before them, that he has showered and is dressed with his hair dried and combed by the time they get up. Sometimes his father asks him if he has really had a shower and checks his bathroom to see if the stall is wet and the towel damp. It is a stupid and unnecessary thing to do. Showering is not something he would try to avoid. Showering is essential. He is already awake before five because he has set his body to be awake at that hour, whether or not he has slept through the night, and his body always wakes him up a few minutes before five. If he gets up early he does not have to rush to be ready when his mother says it is time to go. This has started only since the move. He did not get up so early in Boston. Everything about life was simpler there. It is still dark outside and he gets out of bed without disturbing the sheet or blanket. His parents do not know how well he can see in the dark. Except for reading, he could live without light. He walks over to one of the two large windows in the room and looks out at the old white house down the hill. There is a light in one of the windows and he can see the woman moving inside. He has been watching her since the day they arrived, each morning lighting her candle and working in the kitchen. A few weeks ago, while his mother was working in the basement one Saturday and his father was busy in his study, he was alone in the backyard. The rain had stopped for a few hours. Time was slow. He looked at the grass and tried to tell himself stories, then found a hole in the fence where there used to be a knot in one of the wooden planks. He looked through the hole and saw the woman in her garden. When he said hello she dropped her trowel and looked up at the sky. “I’m here,” he said, and knocked on the fence. She straightened her back and walked over to introduce herself. “I’m Louise,” she said. “Copley,” he said. “You see that soft spot where grass doesn’t grow behind your garage,” she said. “Yes, I can see it. The place with two rocks and all the grass from the yard service.” “That’s the one,” she said. “You be careful of that place. Don’t go walking on top of it. There’s a deep hole underneath it. I wouldn’t want you to fall in.” Since their meeting through the fence, each morning before dawn he has raised his hand to wave to her from his bedroom window. This morning he turns on the light in his bedroom and waves again, but he can no longer see the woman or the candle, only his reflection in the glass. Although he keeps hoping he will see her again outside, on the street, or in her backyard, he has not.

5:02 AM:
Since moving to this new city, each morning he has asked himself the same question: “Where are you?” The answer has been the same every day: “I’m in my new house, in a new town, but it does not feel like I am actually here. I feel like I am somewhere else.” “In Boston?” he asks himself. “No, not in Boston. I don’t know where I feel like I am, but I don’t feel like I am where I know I must be.”

5:10 AM
:
He takes off his pajama shirt and pants and underwear and puts them on the low white wooden chair in his bathroom. He did not have his own bathroom in Boston and having one here is one of the few changes he likes about the new place. He turns on the shower and waits until the water is the right temperature. He remembers the first shower he took, last year, and how proud he was of making the transition from baths. Before taking that first shower he had assumed there was a risk of drowning because the water came down on top of the head and it seemed impossible you could breathe and be under water at the same time. The discovery that it was all much more straightforward, and that he preferred the feeling of showering to taking a bath, was a revelation. He stands under the water, wets his hair, opens the bottle of shampoo and squirts a portion of the honey-colored liquid into his palm, then works it through his hair while the water slams into his back. Once he has worked up a lather he rinses his hair, picks up the bar of soap, passes it between his hands until suds form, puts the bar back in its tray, and smooths the soapsuds over his face, into his ears, behind his ears, washing thoroughly, careful to get rid of all the dirt, and then turns around to face the stream of water and rinse off his face. He leans over to pick up the sponge, squirts a blob of green shower gel into the middle, and kneads it until handfuls of bubbles form and the air is heavy with peppermint. He wipes the sponge down the outside of his left arm, along the underside, into his armpit, scrubs his chest and stomach and sides, and then the other arm, outside first, inside, armpit. He washes his lower abdomen, passes the sponge over his private parts, washes his right leg, right foot, left leg, left foot. He always cleans his body in the same sequence, always takes his shower in the same way, beginning at the top and working down to his toes. He rinses off, stands under the water for another minute, enjoying the intense heat, and then turns it off by pushing the lever all the way to the right. Standing in the steam that lingers in the room, he listens to the thrumming
fan hidden in the ceiling. In Boston his father and mother used to sit in the bathroom reading to him while he took his bath each evening. Since starting to take showers, he no longer wants them to be in the bathroom and, more than that, when he is in the bathroom he now always wants to be left alone. Once, his father came in while he was taking a shower in Boston and after that he began locking the bathroom door. When his father asked why he did this, he said that he did not come into the bathroom when his father or mother was taking a shower and it did not seem fair that they would come into the bathroom now when he was showering. Going to the bathroom is private. Showering is private. Being naked is private. These are all private things, to be done alone.

5:20 AM:
Next to the shower stall is a bar where his towel hangs. Someone, his father or mother, has put out a fresh towel and he enjoys the stiffness of its pile as he dries his head, his face, the back of his neck, his arms, chest, back, stomach, legs, feet: each day he dries his body in the same way, head to toe, top to bottom. He does not know if this is something his parents taught him to do, but he believes it is not. Instead, it is one of many tricks he has learned on his own, although he cannot remember a process of trial and error, only his arrival at the perfect system. He wraps the towel around his waist, turns on the hairdryer and directs the hot stream all over his head until his hair lies in a way he recognizes as his own. After he has dressed he will come back into the bathroom to put gel in his hair and comb it a final time. His father does not like that he uses gel; he says it is something children don’t need to do. What his father fails to understand is that it is not a matter of need or desire. It is everything to do with the expectations of the other children at school.

5:25 AM:
While he gets dressed he hangs the towel over a hook on the back of his bedroom door. With the door locked he goes to his dresser, where he finds a pair of underpants: dark blue ones that are new and snug. They make him feel good when he pulls them on. From his closet he takes his khaki school slacks and his blue cotton shirt. First he puts on the shirt, buttons it, and leaves the buttons at the wrist for his mother or father to fasten. He puts on the slacks, tucking the shirt in as he pulls them up. This is the uniform all the boys are required to wear. In winter, and on cold days, they will also be allowed to wear a red wool V-neck sweater or a red wool V-neck sweater vest because the combination of colors, his teacher Mrs. Pitt tells them, makes them look like little patriots. The girls have the same uniform except they have to wear khaki skirts that come to just below the knee. Pupils are not allowed to wear shorts except during PE and the shorts are kept at school, where they are washed and dried after each use. He finds blue socks in his dresser and sits on a chair next to his bed while he puts them on, right foot first. Just before walking out the door to drive to school he will put on his shoes, which are downstairs in the drop zone between the back door and the kitchen.

5:45 AM:
He makes his bed, pulling up the sheet, tucking it in on both sides, and smoothing the blanket over the top. He fluffs his pillow, centers it at the head of the bed, and arranges his stuffed animals in front of it. When all is arranged as he wants it, he takes his towel back to the bathroom, remembers his pajamas and returns them, folded, to their place under the pillow on his bed, and sits in the chair next to the window facing the old white house down the hill, watching in the dark as the woman moves back and forth with her candle. After the sun begins to come through the tops of the trees in the woods to the east, he notices smoke rising out of the woman’s chimney. He wonders why they have not met any of the other neighbors and whether there are any children in the neighborhood, as there were children in their building in Boston, or if he is now going to have a different kind of life altogether, one in which his time outside of school is filled only with adults. He has heard children at school talk about “play dates” and has been able to infer this is the only way children here get together to see each other: they make appointments for designated times and locations, their parents drive and pick them up. In Boston, he sometimes had play dates but often, if he wanted to play with a friend in the building, his parents would phone the other apartment, see if the child was available, and in minutes, after riding up or down the elevators and running along the hallways, the two of them could be playing. Appointments were usually made only for birthday or holiday parties. He watches the tart reddening sky, but within fifteen minutes the rising sun has disappeared, the clouds unpacked, the rain valve opened, the deluge resumed. In Boston, he did not mind school, but minded it even less on rainy days. Here, the rain does nothing to improve his feeling about the kind of day likely to unfold.

6:15 AM:
In the kitchen he takes a box of dry, sugarless cereal from the cabinet, milk from the fridge, and a bowl from a cupboard underneath the silverware drawer, where he finds a spoon. He climbs on a stool to sit at the kitchen island, opens the box of cereal, pours some into the bowl, cuts up a banana with a butter knife, and rakes the sliced fruit from the cutting board into the bowl. He pours the milk, screws the lid back on the carton, and turns on the radio in the center of the island to listen to the morning news on public radio. Some mornings he is down in the kitchen in time to hear the opening melody and first headlines, but he was distracted this morning by watching Louise in her old white house and has missed those first fifteen minutes of reassurance. It was not uncommon in Boston for his schoolmates to have listened to the morning news on the radio as well, but he understands already that in this new place his behavior is unusual. He eats his cereal, listening to reports of a weather pattern in the Pacific, and how it is going to mean a very wet autumn and heavy winter snows for this part of the country. When he finishes his cereal he climbs down from his stool and puts the bowl and spoon in the dishwasher. The milk he returns to the fridge, the box of cereal to the cabinet. He pushes the stool in under the overhanging ledge that extends out from the island to create what his father calls “the breakfast bar.” It is not a name he likes since the ledge is clearly just a part of the island, and “island” has a nicer sound and means nicer things than “bar,” which reminds him of buildings in Boston with men clustered outside smoking: places where the windows were always dark, at most with a dim light or two inside, and a garish red neon sign outside. He cannot understand why his father would want to impose that kind of space into the heart of the kitchen, but his father, he knows, does not understand why the word so disturbs him. It is a feeling he has not been able to explain. Because he can hear one of his parents in the shower in their own bathroom and knows that when they come downstairs they will also want to listen to the morning news, he does not turn off the radio.

6:35 AM:
Walking across the hall to the den, where he will spend the next two hours until his mother is ready to drive him to school, he notices a change. The table against the staircase where a bowl of flowers usually sits has been moved to the opposite wall and the bowl is on the floor, while the flowers—large yellow chrysanthemums—lie on the white floor facing the same direction, each bloom and stem occupying the width of a single board. The man must have done it. The man is not his father. At first he was unsure, thinking that the man sitting in his room at night, the man who picked him up outside and carried him back inside on the night they arrived, was his father in some kind of costume. Now he understands that this is not so, but when he has tried to tell his parents there is a man coming into the house they insist he has been dreaming and remind him that the alarm system would alert them if someone did try to get in: it would go off and the guards with guns would come to protect them. He has not yet figured out how the man can be in the house at night without the alarm going off, unless there is a problem with the alarm. This is the first time the man has done anything to try to get his parents’ attention, and he is sure this is the reason for the movement of the table and the dispersal of the chrysanthemum blossoms. The man wants them to know they are not alone in the house. Leaving the table in the wrong place and the flowers where they are, he goes into the den where he finds all the furniture pushed away from the center of the room and up against the walls. It is the same in the living room and dining room, where the white table and chairs have been pushed against the white western wall of the house. Now his parents will have to believe him when he says something is happening, that a dark giant man is present who is waiting for them to acknowledge his presence. There is no point in trying to move the furniture back into position: it is too heavy, there is too much of it, and it is better if his parents see it and learn the truth.