Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  * * *

  That person, the person you’d been back before Ess Arr, had been careful—so careful trying to get to the point where you could do something reckless like cross the border into Area X.

  Your father had been paranoid about the government, every once in a while took on something shady to supplement the day job as a part-time bartender—a low-level grifter. He didn’t want any involvement. He didn’t want any trouble. So he kept the government out of it, didn’t tell you your mother was probably dead and that you weren’t going back to the forgotten coast ever again until he absolutely had to. Told you to give vague answers to the men who came to interview you about your mother—it would be better for your mother that way. Anything to avoid a light shining on his “business ventures.”

  “You don’t know this, ’cause you’re too young,” came the usual lecture, “but politicians run all the big scams. Government’s the thief of all time. That’s why it tries so hard to catch thieves—it doesn’t like the competition. You don’t want that on your back your whole life just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  When he did tell you that she was gone, you cried for a month, even as that look on your father’s face, the gruff warning, the way everything in your constantly moving household operated on caution, indoctrinated you in the merits of silence.

  Over time your memory of your mother faded, in the way of not knowing if an image or moment was something you’d experienced or seen going through the photographs your dad kept in a shoe box in the closet. Not in the way of keeping something close rather than pushing it away. You would stare at pictures of your mother—on the deck with friends, a drink in her hand or on the beach with your dad—and imagine that she was the one saying, “Don’t forget me,” feel ashamed when it was the lighthouse keeper’s face that kept coming back to you.

  Tentative and then with more determination, you started your own investigation. You learned there was something called the Southern Reach, devoted to cleaning up the “environmental devastation” in what had been the forgotten coast and was now Area X. Your scrapbook grew so fat it was hard to open, filled with clippings from books, newspapers, magazines, and, later, websites. Conspiracy theories dominated, or speculative recastings of the government’s official story. The truth always something vague and out of focus that had nothing to do with what you’d seen, with the sense you’d had of the lighthouse keeper becoming different.

  In your first year of college, you realized that you wanted to work for the Southern Reach, no matter what their role, and, with your grifter’s sense of the truth, that your past would be a liability. So you changed your name, hired a private investigator to help you hide the rest, and went on to pursue a degree. Cognitive psychology, focused on perceptual psychology, with a minor in organizational psychology as well. You married a man you never really loved, for a variety of reasons, divorced him fifteen months later, and spent close to five years working as a consultant, applying and reapplying to Central with application-form answers tailor-made to give you a shot at the Southern Reach.

  The director at the time, a navy man, loved by all but not hard enough by far, hadn’t interviewed you. Lowry had—still at the Southern Reach back then and with his own agenda. He liked to acquire his power sideways. There had been the formal meeting in his office, and then you’d gone out to the edge of the courtyard and had a different kind of interview.

  “We can’t be overheard out here,” he’d said, and alarm bells had gone off. Irrational thought that he was going to proposition you, like some of Dad’s friends. Something beyond his polite demeanor, his well-made clothes, his air of authority, must have warned you.

  But Lowry had something more long-term in mind.

  “I had my own people check you out. It was a good effort there, all that work to disguise yourself. A solid B for effort, all of that, sure. Not bad at all, considering. But I still found out, and that means Central would have, too, if I hadn’t covered up your tracks. What was left of them.” A broad smile, a genial manner. You could have been talking about sports or the swamp sweltering there in front of you, seeming to simmer in its own thick broth.

  You cut to the important bit: “Are you going to turn me in?” Throat dry, it seeming hotter than it had a moment before. Memories of your father being taken off to jail for petty fraud, always with the bravado of a smile and a blown kiss, as if the point after all was to get caught, to have an audience, to be noticed.

  A chuckle from Lowry, and you intimidated by what struck you back then as his sophistication despite his failings. His verve. The way he filled out the suit, and the way his face reflected experience, like he’d seen what you wanted to see, been where you wanted to be.

  “Turn you in, Gloria … I mean, Cynthia. Turn you in? To whom? The guys in charge of keeping track of fake names and false identities? The forgotten coast truthers? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m going to turn you in to anyone.” The unspoken thought: I’m going to keep you all for myself.

  “What do you want?” you asked. Thankful, for once, that being your father’s daughter meant sometimes you could cut right through the bullshit.

  “Want?” Disingenuous to the core. “Nothing. Nothing yet, anyway. In fact, it’s all about you … Cynthia. I’m going to walk back in there with you and recommend you for the job. And if you pass training at Central, then we’ll see. As for all the rest of it … that’ll just be our secret. Not really a little secret, but a secret.”

  “Why would you do that?” Incredulous, not sure you had heard right.

  With a wink: “Oh, I only really trust people who’ve been to Area X. Even pre–Area X.”

  * * *

  At first, the price wasn’t so bad. All he wanted, off the record, told to him and him alone, was an account of your last days on the forgotten coast. The lighthouse keeper, the Séance & Science Brigade. “Describe the man and the woman,” he said, meaning Henry and Suzanne, and all of his questions about the S&SB sounded as if you were filling in pieces of some story he’d already heard part of before.

  Within months, the favors asked for and reluctantly given multiplied—support for this or that initiative or recommendation, and when you had more influence, to push against certain things, to be less than enthusiastic, to stall. Mostly, you realize, on certain committees connected to the science division, to undermine or curtail Central’s influence within the Southern Reach. All of it clever and by degrees so that you didn’t really notice the escalation until you were so mired in it that it was just part of your job.

  Eventually, Lowry supported your bid to become director. Coming to the Southern Reach had been like being allowed to listen to the heartbeat of a mysterious beast. But as director you came even closer—terrifyingly closer, trapped within the chamber walls, needing time to adjust. Time exploited by Lowry, of course.

  * * *

  Tossed onto the table: the latest satellite footage from above Area X, images from on high reduced to 8½ × 11 glossies. Glamour shots of an inexhaustible resource. This blank mimicry of the normal, marred only by the blurs you might expect to find on photos taken by ghost hunters. Definitive proof of a change, this blurring. As if somehow the Southern Reach is losing the ability to see even the lie.

  “Evil advances with good. But these terms have no meaning in Area X. Or to Area X. So why should they always apply to us in pursuit of an enemy to whom they go unrecognized? An indifferent context deserves equal indifference from us—if we want to survive.”

  You’re not expected to answer, Lowry taking a break to philosophize as he fills up his drink for a second time. Nor would you know what to answer, for you would never characterize Lowry as indifferent, or as expressing indifference through his actions. As ever, this is part of the deception: the ability to convey authority by instilling in others his own confidence.

  Lowry’s already threatened to put you under hypnosis, but the one thing you have resolved, having lived on the outskirts of L
owry’s experiments, is that you will never allow him that. Always hoping that Lowry must have limits, can’t be untouchable, can’t operate without some constraint from above. Surely every action he takes reveals something about his motives to someone somewhere with the power to intervene?

  So you’re at what appears to be an impasse.

  Then he surprises you.

  “I want you to meet someone else who has a stake in this. Someone you know already. Jackie Severance.”

  Not a name you expected to hear. But there she is—escorted in by Mary Phillips, one of Lowry’s assistants, through the mirror door to your side of the glass, Severance oblivious to the way her heels are crunching broken glass. Dressed as impeccably as always, still addicted to scarves.

  Has she been listening the whole time? The dynastic successor to the legendary Jack Severance. Jackie, about fifteen years removed from her last stint with the Southern Reach—a bright star still shining in the firmament of Central’s personal cosmology, despite a dark star of a son in the service that she’s had to rescue more than once. Lowry the outlaw and Severance the insider seem unlikely allies. One’s holding the silver egg in her hand and petting it. The other is trying to smash it with an invisible hammer.

  What’s the play, here? Does Lowry hold something over her, or does she hold something over Lowry?

  “Jackie is going to be my adviser on this situation. She’s going to be involved from now on. And before we make a final decision on what to do with you, I want you to repeat for her everything that’s in the report—everything that happened to you across the border. One last time.”

  Severance smiles the way a crocodile smiles and sits on the couch next to you while Lowry shuffles off to make her a drink. “Nothing too formal, Cynthia. Nothing you need to prep. And in no particular order. You can tell it in whatever order you like.”

  “That’s kind of you, Jackie.” It’s not kind—it’s just an attempt to get a different version. Which makes this a ritual of sorts, with a preordained outcome.

  So you go back over it all again with Severance, who stops you from time to time with questions blunter than you expected, coming from someone you’ve always thought of as a political animal.

  “You didn’t go anywhere else? No shortcuts or other excursions?”

  “Excursions?”

  “It’s easy to omit what doesn’t seem relevant.”

  The same flat smile.

  You don’t bother to answer.

  “Did you bring anything back with you?”

  “Just the usual recovery along the way, of past expedition equipment, as happens with many expeditions.” The story you and Whitby have decided on, because you want to hold on to the plant and phone, test them at the Southern Reach, not have them taken by Central. You’re the experts, not Central.

  “What sense did you get of the journals in the lighthouse? Was there an impression or idea you had about them, seeing them all like that? If that’s not too vague.”

  No particular sense or impression or idea, you tell her. They were just journals. Because you don’t want to go there, don’t yet want to relive the end of your trip, the things that happened in the lighthouse.

  “And nothing there seemed unusual or out of order?”

  “No.” You’re selling the simpler story of danger in the tunnel.

  Later, leaning in, conspiratorial, just you girls: “Gloria. Cynthia. Why’d you do it? Really?” As if Lowry’s not in the room.

  You shrug, give a pained smile.

  At the end of your account, Severance smiles and says, “It’s possible that we’ll file this under ‘never happened’ and move on. And if so, you have Lowry to thank.” A hand on your arm, though, as if to say, “Don’t forget I helped.” You get to keep Whitby, too, she says, if Whitby passes a psych eval you personally help conduct at Central, off the books. But. “You are vouching for him. You are responsible for him.” Like you’re a child asking to keep a pet.

  The new border commander will be handpicked by Lowry and report to both Lowry and Severance, and they will institute procedures so that, as Lowry puts it, “You and Whitby and any other son of a bitch stupid enough to try another jailbreak thinks twice.”

  A few useless pleasantries and Jackie’s left the room as fast as she got there, the encounter so brief you wonder why else she’s here, what other business she has with Lowry. Has she walked into a trap, or has Lowry? Trying to remember the exact date when Severance came to the Southern Reach. Going through a list of her tasks, her duties, and where she was when. Thinking that there is some part of the puzzle you can’t see, that you need to see.

  * * *

  Lowry, there at the center of his secret headquarters, overlooking the sea as snow in thick flakes begins to cover the grass, the sea mines, the little paths. With the geese and seagulls that will never care about Lowry’s plans or your own huddled by the fake lighthouse, as deceived by it as the expeditions have been by the real one. But Severance is out there now, walking by the rocks, staring across the water. She’s on her phone, but Lowry doesn’t see her—just his own reflection, and she’s trapped there, within his outline.

  Lowry, pumping himself up, pacing in front of the glass, smacking his chest with one hand. “And what I want is this: The next expedition, they don’t go to Central. They come here. They receive their training here. You want Area X to react? You want something to change? I’ll change it. I’ll coil things so far up inside Area X’s brain, things that’ll have a sting in the tail. That’ll draw blood. That’ll fucking make the enemy know we’re the resistance. That we’re on to them.”

  Some trails go cold fast; some trails take a long time to pick up and follow. Seeing Severance walking along the ridge of black rocks near the lighthouse, even a fake lighthouse, raises your hackles, makes you want to say, “That is mine, not yours.”

  Lowry’s still standing over you and ranting about what will happen and how it’s going to happen. Of course he wants more control. Of course he is going to get it.

  But now you know, too, what you’ve only guessed at before: Beneath Lowry’s bluster, he feels that your fates are intertwined. That he’s more bound to you than ever.

  * * *

  After six months, you will be able to return to the Southern Reach. No one there will know why you were gone so long, and Grace won’t tell them, promises she’ll have pushed them so hard in the interim that “they won’t have time to think about it.”

  While you wait out your suspension at home, you have this image in your head of Grace as a tall, stern black woman in a white lab coat and the tricornered hat of a general, holding a saber at arm’s length, for some reason standing in the prow of a rowboat, crossing a strategically important river. When it’s time for her to drop the hat, get rid of the boat, cede control back to you, how will she feel about that?

  Single dim thought most nights, after a doctor’s appointment or buying groceries for dinner: Which world am I really living in? The one in which you can hear Whitby’s screams in the lighthouse intermingling with the screams from the first expedition, or the one in which you’re putting cans of soup in the cupboard. Can you exist in both? Do you want to? When Grace calls to ask how your day is going, should you say “Same as usual” or “Awful, like conducting autopsies over and over again for no reason”?

  Sitting on a stool in the bar at Chipper’s—that’s the same, isn’t it, after you come back? Perhaps even more so, given you have more time to spend there. The Realtor’s around a lot, too. She talks all the time—about a trip up north to visit her family, about a movie she saw, about local politics. Sometimes the veteran with the perpetual beer in hand dredges up a long-ago memory of his kids, trying to be part of the conversation.

  As the Realtor and the drunk talk past and through you, you’re nodding as if you know what they’re talking about, as if you can relate, when all you can see now are two images of the lighthouse keeper superimposed, saying the same thing at different times, to two differen
t versions of you. One in darkness and one in light.

  “You’re thinking of your own children, aren’t you?” says the Realtor. “I can tell.”

  Your mind must have wandered. The mask must have slipped.

  “Yes, you’re right,” you say. “Sure.”

  You have another beer, start to tell the Realtor all about your kids—where they go to school, how you wish you saw them more often, that they’re studying to be doctors. That you hope to see them around the holidays. That they seem to belong to a different world now that they’re all grown up. The veteran, standing at the end of the bar, staring past the Realtor at you, has a strange look on his face. A look of recognition, as if he knows what you’re doing.

  Hell, maybe you should play some songs on the jukebox, too. Maybe go take a turn at karaoke later, have a few more beers, make up a few more details of your life. Only, the Realtor left at some point, and it’s just you and the veteran and some people trickling in late who you don’t know, won’t ever know. The floor’s sticky, dark with old stains. The bottles behind the bar have water-cooler cups over them, to keep the fruit flies out. There’s a sheen off the bar top that’s not entirely natural. Behind you, the lanes are dark and the faded heavens have risen again, unimaginable wonders across the ceiling, some of them requiring a moment to recognize.

  Because the other world always bleeds into this one. Because no matter how you try to keep what happened at the lighthouse between you and Whitby, you know it will leak out eventually, in some form, will have consequences.

  At the lighthouse, Whitby had wandered, and you were still drifting through the downstairs when you realized that you couldn’t hear him moving around in the next room anymore. In the stillness and the dust, the way the light through the broken front door made the darkness murky, you expected to find him standing in a corner, a figure luminous in shadow.

  But soon enough you realized he’d gone up the lighthouse stairs, headed for the very top. There came the sounds of fighting and the splintering of wood. One voice rising above the other, both curiously similar, and how could there be a second voice at all? So you followed fast, and as you climbed, there was both a doubling and a dissonance, for in memory, the steps had been much wider, the trek much longer, the space inside the lighthouse conveying a kind of weightlessness, the walls once painted white, the windows open to receive the sky, the scent of cut grass brought by Saul. But in the darkness, worried about Whitby, you had become a giant or the lighthouse had become lost or diminished, not just undone by time, but contracting, like the spiraling fossil of a shell, leading you to a place no longer familiar. Erasing, with each step, what you thought you knew.