Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Soon enough, though, that feeling falls away again, and you and Whitby—survivors of the topographical anomaly—stand in the remains of your mother’s cottage. It’s just a floor and a couple of supporting walls with the wallpaper so faded you can’t figure out the pattern. On the sunken splintered deck, a battered and smashed rot of wide planks that used to be the walkway leads to the dunes, and from there to a metallic-blue sea that tosses up whitecaps and drags them down again. Perhaps you shouldn’t have come here, but you needed something like normalcy, some evocation of those days before it all went wrong—days that had seemed so ordinary at the time.

  “Don’t forget me,” Saul had said back then, as if speaking not just for him but for your mother, too, and the rest of the forgotten coast. Now truly forgotten, Whitby standing at one end and you at the other, needing the space. He’s unsure of you, and you’re definitely unsure of him. Whitby wanted to abort the mission after the tower, but at no point did you think you should just leave. This was your home, and Whitby isn’t going to stop you, though he might protest, though he might whimper and try to get free, though he might plead with you to return across the border immediately.

  “Where’s your optimism now?” you want to ask, but wherever he’s wound up he’s still not in your world.

  Long ago, a fire or two was kindled on the cottage floor, in what used to be the living room, under the shelter of one sagging wall. Blackened splotches left behind provide the evidence, tell you that even after Area X, people lived here for a time. Did your mother make those fires?

  Dead beetles litter the floor, crushed into glossy emerald pieces, teal moss and thick vines creating a chaotic green sea. Wrens and warblers hop through the underbrush outside, settle on the gaping window frame that looks out landward, then are gone again. The window you’d look through when expecting your dad to come for visits, driveway outside erased by a proliferation of bushes and weeds.

  Cans of food, long since rusted and rotted, along with a thick layer of soil erupting out of the corners, through the insect-chewed floorboards, what’s left of them. The anomaly of cracked, ancient dishes barely recognizable, and stacked in a sink that has fallen in on itself and been transformed by mold and lichen, the cupboards below rotted away.

  There’s a regret in you, a kind of daymark you’ve let become obscured. The expeditions are never told that people had lived here, worked here, got drunk here, and played music here. People who lived in mobile homes and bungalows and lighthouses. Better not to think of people living here, of it being empty … and yet now you want someone to remember, to understand what was lost, even if it was little enough.

  Whitby stands there like an intruder as you explore, knows you’re hiding something from him about the cottage. The flat, grim line of his mouth, the resentment in his gaze—is it natural, or is Area X already turning him against you? When you burst out of the tower, escaping whatever had risen up with such speed, you found him still screaming, babbling about something that had attacked him. “There wasn’t any sound. Nothing. Then … a wall behind me, running through me. Then it was gone.” But since then he hasn’t said more, nor have you shared what you saw right before you leapt up those last steps into the light. Perhaps neither thinks the other would believe. Perhaps you both just want to be back in the world first.

  No bodies here in the cottage, but what did you think? That you would find her huddled inside this place, cocooned from disaster somehow as the world changed around her? That was never your mother’s nature. If there had been something to fight, she would have fought it. If there had been someone to help, she would have helped them. If she could have struck out for safety, she would have. In your daydreams, she held on, like you have held on, hoping for rescue.

  Sitting there at the Star Lanes Lounge, scribbling, you found the cottage coming back to you at odd moments, along with the lighthouse. Always that riptide compulsion dragging you down into the water, that need to know overriding the fear. The sound of the midnight waves at high tide, how from the window of your room in your mother’s bungalow back then you could see the surf under the moonlight as a series of metallic-blue lines, dark water squeezed between them. Sometimes those lines had been broken by her figure as she walked the beach late at night, kept awake by thoughts she never shared, her face turned away from you. As if searching even then for the answer you seek now.

  * * *

  “What is this place?” Whitby asks, again. “Why are we here?” His voice giving away his stress.

  You ignore him. You want to say, “This is where I grew up,” but he’s endured one shock too many already, and you still have to deal with Lowry, with the Southern Reach, when you get back. If you get back.

  “That vine-strewn shadow there—that was my room,” you would tell him if you could. “My parents divorced when I was two. My dad left—he’s kind of a small-time crook—and my mom raised me, except I spent the winter holidays with him every year. Until I stayed with him for good because I couldn’t go home anymore. And he lied to me about the reason why until I was older, which was probably the right thing to do. And I’ve been wondering my whole life what it would be like to come back here, to this place. Wondered what I would feel, what I would do. Sometimes even imagined there would be some message, something my mom had had the foresight to put in a metal box or under a rock. Some sign, because even now I need a message, a sign.”

  But there is nothing in the cottage, nothing you didn’t already know, and there’s the lighthouse at your back—laughing at you, saying, “I told you so.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll go home soon,” you say. “Just the lighthouse, and we’ll go home.” Saving the best for last, or the worst for last? How much of a childhood can be destroyed or twisted before the overlay replaces the memories?

  You push past Whitby—abruptly—because you don’t want him to see that you’re upset, that Area X is closing in on you all over again.

  The few remaining floorboards of the cottage creak and sigh, making a rough music. The birds chirp urgently in the bushes, chasing each other, spiraling up into the sky. It will rain soon, the horizon like a scowling forehead, a battering ram headed for the coast. Could they see it coming, even Henry? Was it visible? Did it sweep over them? All you could process as a child was that your mother was dead; it had taken you years to think of her death in other ways.

  All you can see is the expression on Saul’s face the last time you saw him as a child—and your last long look at the forgotten coast through the dusty back window of the car as you turned off the dirt road onto a paved state road, and the distant ripple of the sea passed from view.

  0007: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

  Two freighters and a coast guard vessel sighted last night. Something bigger out on horizon—oil tanker? “There is the sea, vast and spacious, and there the ships go to and fro.” Western siren still not right—loose wire? Feeling a little sick, so visited doctor. Went on a hike late in the day. Sighted: a horned owl atop a tortoise, trying to eat it. Didn’t know what I was seeing. Disturbed me at first. Thought it was something odd with a feathery body and an armored stump. The owl looked up at me and just stared, didn’t fly away until I shooed it off the tortoise.

  Acts of loving-kindness. The uselessness of guilt.

  Sometimes Saul did miss the sermons, the cadence of them, the way he could raise the words up from within him and send them out, never severing the deep connection between them. Could name a thing and in naming it enter so many minds. But there had come a day during his ministry when he had no words left, when he knew he was enjoying the cadence of the sentences he spoke more than the meaning—and then he was lost for a time, swimming across an endless sea of doubt, certain he had failed. Because he had failed. Hellfire and apocalyptic visions, the coming destruction of the world by demons, could not sustain a man for long without robbing him of something, too. At the end, he did not know what he meant or what he believed, and so he had given it up in one prolonged shudder that cast
off an entire life and fled as far south as he could, as far remote as well. Fleeing, too, his father, who had fed off that growing cult of personality, had been at once manipulative and envious, and that had been too much to bear for long: that a man so distant, who had projected so little light, should now reveal to Saul only those emotions he did not want.

  Everything had shifted when he’d moved. There were ways in which he felt so different in the south than in the north, ways in which he was different because he was happier, and he didn’t want to acknowledge sickness or anything that might hint at a change in what had been so ideal.

  Yet there was a slight numbness when he lay in bed with Charlie a week after the incident in the yard, an episode of perhaps ten minutes during which his body seemed disconnected from him. Or the disconcerting moments on the walks he took along the coast near the lighthouse, supposedly to patrol for trespassers but that were really just about his joy in bird-watching.

  He would look out to sea and find things swimming in the corners of his eyes that he could not quite explain away as black sun dots. Was this paranoia or some nagging doubt, some part of his brain trying to ruin everything, wanting him to be unhappy—to force him to deny himself the life he’d made here?

  Next to these developments, the presence of the Light Brigade had become less and less real, and in the days since the photograph there had been a kind of truce, a mutual agreement not to accuse the other. He’d fixed the hole in the lens, cleaned up the glass, and told himself everyone deserved a second chance.

  But their encounters were still fraught at times.

  Today, he had walked into his own kitchen to find Suzanne making a sandwich there without any shame or embarrassment at being found out. His ham and his cheese slices in a pile on the counter, along with his wheat bread, his onion, and a tomato from the garden. Perched on the kitchen stool at such an extreme angle, one leg straight, foot on the floor, and the other bent, Suzanne and her posture had compounded his irritation. Because it almost looked as if she was clenched there, rigid, holding a position as artificial to her as it looked to him.

  Henry had come in then and forestalled Saul’s own questions, his lecture about not taking people’s things for granted. About not making a sandwich without asking first, which seemed both invasive and ridiculously trivial later.

  Henry said, almost conversationally, “There isn’t any spooky action here, is there, Saul? Near or far?”

  All that warranted was a pained smile. Everybody knew the ghost stories about the forgotten coast.

  “And it’s probably just a coincidence, but ever since your freak-out in the yard, our readings are off—distorted. Sometimes it is like the equipment is junk, doesn’t work, but we’ve tested it. There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m right, am I not, Saul?”

  His “freak-out” in the yard. Henry definitely was trying to get a rise out of him.

  “Oh yes, it’s working, all right.” Saul tried to sound cheery.

  Anyone would have thought Henry, especially, a kind of buffoon and his stilted attempts at conversation signs of social awkwardness. But he was often unnerving to Saul, even just standing there.

  So he kicked them both out, called Charlie to ask him if he could have lunch, locked up his living quarters, and drove to the village bar to take a break.

  The village bar was an impromptu place, ad hoc style depending on who was around. Today it was a barbecue station out back and a cooler full of domestic beer. Paper plates from some kid’s birthday party, cake with candles against a pink background. Saul and Charlie sat outside, on the worn deck that faced the sea, at a table under a faded blue umbrella.

  They talked about Charlie’s day on the boat and a new resident who’d bought a house half demolished by a hurricane, and how Old Jim really needed to refurbish the village bar because “it’s not cool to have a dive bar in a place with no decent bars to compare it to.” How maybe they’d check out that rock band Charlie’d been telling him about. How maybe instead they’d just stay in bed all day.

  How the Light Brigade was getting on Saul’s nerves.

  “Henry’s a freak,” he said to Charlie. “He’s got a stare like some kind of uncanny undertaker. And Suzanne just follows him everywhere.”

  “They can’t come around forever,” Charlie said. “One day they’ll be gone. Little freaks. Freak Brigade.” Testing out words for the fun of it, perhaps because they’d both had some beers already.

  “Maybe, but in the meantime they’re giving me the creeps.”

  “Could be they’re undercover agents from forestry or environmental protection?”

  “Sure, because I’m dumping chemicals all night long.”

  Charlie was joking, but the forgotten coast had suffered from a decade or two of lax regulations in what was an “unincorporated area.” The wilderness hid its share of rotting barrels, some of them hidden on old abandoned farmsteads, half sunk into the pine loam.

  They took up the conversation later, at Charlie’s two-room cottage just down the street. A couple of photographs of his family, some books, not much in the fridge. Nothing Charlie couldn’t toss in a knapsack if he ever decided to take off, or move in with someone.

  “Are you sure they’re not escapees from an insane asylum?”

  Which made Saul laugh, because just the summer before two sanitarium residents had escaped from outside of Hedley and made their way down to the forgotten coast, managing to remain free for almost three weeks before being caught by the police.

  “If you took away the insane people, no one would be left.”

  “Except me,” Charlie said. “Except me and, maybe, you.”

  “Except the birds and the deer and the otters.”

  “Except the hills and the lakes.”

  “Except the snakes and the ladders.”

  “What?”

  Except by then they had so lit each other up under the sheets that they could have been saying anything, and were.

  * * *

  It was Gloria who changed his mind about seeing a doctor. The next day, with Henry and Suzanne back up in the lighthouse, him down below, she appeared in the early afternoon to shadow him. He was so used to her that if she’d not shown up, he would’ve thought something was wrong.

  “You’re different,” Gloria said, and he chewed on that for a bit.

  This time she was leaning against the shed, watching him as he resodded part of the lawn. Volunteer Brad had promised to come in and help, but hadn’t shown up. The sun above was a huge gob of runny yellow. The waves were a rushing vibration in his awareness, but muffled. One of his ears had been blocked since he’d woken up, no doubt because he’d slept on it funny. Maybe he was getting too old for this kind of work after all. Maybe there was a reason why lighthouse keepers had to retire at fifty.

  “I’m a day older and wiser,” he replied. “Shouldn’t you be in school? Then you’d be wiser, too.”

  “Teacher work day.”

  “Lighthouse-keeper work day here,” he said, grunting as he broke the soil with a shovel. His skin felt elastic, formless, and a tic under his left eye kept pulsing in and out.

  “Then show me how to do your work and I’ll help.”

  At that he stopped and, leaning on the shovel, took a good long look at her. If she kept growing, she might make a decent linebacker someday.

  “You want to become a lighthouse keeper?”

  “No, I want to use a shovel.”

  “The shovel is bigger than you.”

  “Get another one from the shed.”

  Yes. The mighty shed, which held all things … except when it did not. He took a glance up at the lighthouse tower where the Light Brigade was no doubt doing unimaginable things to his beacon.

  “Okay,” he said, and he got her a small shovel, more of a glorified spade.

  Shaking off his attempt at shovel instruction, she stood beside him and awkwardly scuffed bits of dirt around, while he was careful to keep well away. He’d once been smacked in
the head by a shovel handle wielded by a too-close, overenthusiastic helper.

  “Why are you different?” she asked, direct as ever.

  “I told you, I’m not different.” A little grumpier than he’d meant to be.

  “But you are,” she said, ignoring his tone.

  “It’s because of the splinter,” he said, finally, to keep it simple.

  “Splinters hurt but they just make you bleed.”

  “Not this one,” he said, putting his back into his work. “This one was different. I don’t really understand it, but I’m seeing things in the corner of my eye.”

  “You should go to the doctor.”

  “I will.”

  “My mother’s a doctor.”

  “So she is.” Her mother was, or had been, a pediatrician. Not quite the same thing. Even if she did give unlicensed advice to residents of the forgotten coast.

  “If I was different, I’d go see her.” Different. But different in what way?

  “You live with her.”

  “So?”

  “Why are you really here? To interrogate me?”

  “You think I don’t know what ‘interrogate’ means, but I do,” she told him, walking away.

  * * *

  When Henry and Suzanne left for the day, Saul climbed to the top of the lighthouse and looked out onto the rich contrast of sea and beach, the deep bronze glint of afternoon sun. From this spot, a light had shone out through storms and human-made disasters, in calms and in crises. Light that cascaded or even interrupted itself. Light that pulsed and trembled, that pulled the darkness toward it and then cast it out.