Fallen Land Read Online Free

“It’s for when they have to do a body cavity search.” He cocks his head in the direction of the curtained bays and glances over at Dave, who grins. “They wear gloves but they still clean themselves afterward. Just to see you today, I had to be strip-searched. Every time I get a visitor, I have to take everything off, put my arms out at my side, lean over, cough, spread my ass, let them finger me if they think they have cause. And after this interview is over, they do it all again. I say to them, come on, just let me do the visit naked, it’ll save a lot of time.” He raises an eyebrow as if he expects some kind of response: laughter or disgust. Louise looks at Dave, but his face goes blank, hands tucked into his armpits.
    “I didn’t realize,” she says, wondering if Paul wants her to thank him, if he believes that he is somehow doing her a favor by initiating this meeting.
    “You know, I guess you’re right.” His eyes jerk up to the camera. “I guess we weren’t even neighbors, not really.”
    “I’d be curious to know what it was I did to make you so angry, Mr. Krovik. Why did you hate me?” She wants to say,
You are the agent of my destruction, Paul Krovik, and you have no right to be so glib. After everything that’s passed between us, all the ways you worked to destroy my world, your tone offends me.
    Paul throws back his head and laughs, as though he cannot begin to count the number of ways Louise inspired his hate. “
Whoo
. What
didn’t
you do, Mrs. Washington?” He sounds cocky and defensive, a kid still testing the boundaries. It is an attitude she remembers from countless boys she taught in the past, a quality that never failed to put her on guard. If he did not look so composed, if it was not clear that any hatred is now long spent, Louise would be out the door and running down the hall. Paul swallows his laughter and makes a strange warbling grunt, as if he knows it would be safer to leave the hills of hate between them unexplored. “Never mind all that, though. Because, you know, it’s really, really nice to see you here now.”
    As his eyes blur wet and sultry in an almost feminine way, he fumbles the air across the table, his thin fingers, white nails cut in straight blunt lines, clawing at the empty space between them. She has never seen anyone make a movement like this, as though he is blind and has no sense that the hands he wants to grasp are within easy reach, just below his own. Louise understands that he wants her to take his fingers, to turn this interview into something like a conjugal visit under the eyes of the guard and the fish-eye lenses of the prison’s security cameras. She leans back in her chair, and then, almost losing control of her body, begins to extend one hand to Paul until, regaining sense at the last moment, she pulls it back. No part of her wants to touch him. She needs to get out of this white room and back into sunlight and open space, where visible distance is measurable in units greater than feet, where she can think with clarity, remember her purpose in the world, put her feet on earth instead of concrete. It was a mistake to visit him. There is nothing he can say that will change what he has done.
    L OUISE LEAVES THE PRISON FEELING sick, her body shaking, eyes flowing. Watching her pass out of their jurisdiction, Dave and Kurt act as though she is the funniest thing they have seen in weeks, this old woman in tears. She drives northwest, skirting the city, until she finds herself in front of a house with a sharp gable and contorted verge boards, the lace border on a starch-stiffened napkin. Despite what she might wish, this house has put down roots in her brain: she wakes to see its gable twisting, the porch fattening, the windows blinking. Under the moon and a clear sky the house stands still, the whole neighborhood frozen in hot vapors. She hears the buzzing that is now always audible, a noise that might only be cicadas, although she knows it is