Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Grace had felt the border move through and past her. “It was like being seen. Being naked. Being reduced. Down to nothing.” As she stared with a fierce devotion at the fragile photo, so carefully repaired, of the woman she loved back in the world.

  She had retreated in good order with a number of Southern Reach personnel, security and otherwise, to the lighthouse, per the director’s prior directive, an order unknown to him and somehow reaching out of the past to be given validity. At the lighthouse, some of the soldiers had begun to change and could not handle that change. Some had struck out for the tunnel and never been seen again. A few had spoken of vast shadows approaching from the seaward side. A schism between factions, including an argument with the border commander, had made their position worse. “None of them survived, I don’t think. None of them knew how to survive.”

  But she remained vague about her actions in the lighthouse, her retreat to the island. “I did what I had to do.” “That’s all in the past. I have made my peace with it.” “I don’t sleep much.” All of that a jumbled mess. In the past? It had just happened.

  He had held on to some hope or delusion of last redoubts, of hardened siege mentality, of making common cause to fight the enemy. But that had been a sick fantasy, a kind of abject denial. The Southern Reach was done even if they hunkered down in the science division for the next century, became the subterranean seeds for pale cave-dwelling people who lived in fear and whose children’s children heard cautionary tales of the fucked-up surface world waiting for them above.

  “You had expedition training?” A guess, but an educated one based on her supplies.

  “The basic protection package, we called it,” Grace said. “The director came up with it for department heads, management.” Because she’d valued their safety so much, had hoped the head of their props department would survive the apocalypse. He was willing to bet “the basic protection package” had applied only to Cynthia and Grace. She’d never shared it with him.

  “If you planned for this, that means there’s a mission?”

  “Does it look like there’s a mission?” A terse, ironic grin. Her tone of voice different, as if aware Ghost Bird, who had begun to stir, might be listening. “The mission is survival, John. The mission is to take it day by day. I keep to myself. I follow certain protocols. I am careful and quiet.” Grace was prepared to live out her days here. She had already resigned herself to that paradigm.

  Ghost Bird propped herself up on one arm. She didn’t look groggy. Her stare seemed like a weapon, as if she had no need of a gun or knife. Ghost Bird didn’t look like someone who would appreciate being told she had been drugged, so Control didn’t. A respectful, fearful look Grace gave her, now that she wasn’t a sleeping lump on the floor.

  “What attacked the convoy?” Ghost Bird asked.

  No Good morning or even an interest in what they’d been discussing. How much had she overheard, lying there? What had seeped into her half-conscious mind about fakes and the director’s doppelgänger?

  A grim chuckle from Grace, followed by a shrug, but no other answer.

  Ghost Bird shrugged, fell upon a protein bar, gutted it with her knife, wolfed down the contents. Between bites: “This is horrible and stale. Have you encountered anything unusual on the island?”

  “It’s all unusual here,” Grace said, with a kind of exhaustion, as if the question had been asked too often before.

  “Have you seen the biologist?” Direct speaking to direct, and Control tense, waiting for that answer.

  “Have I seen the biologist?” Turning that question over and over, examining it from all angles. “Have I seen the biologist?” Grace’s clicking of the holster strap came quicker now, the pattern in the dust drawn at knife point more complex. Was that a helix? Was that two intertwining spirals? A starfish or just a star?

  “Well, answer me, Grace,” Ghost Bird said, rising now, standing in front of them with her hands at her sides, in the kind of relaxed yet perfectly balanced stance someone took if they expected trouble. If they’d had combat training.

  The light through the landing window faded into shadow as a cloud crossed over. A bird outside was muttering or whispering in time to the circling of the knife blade. Far distant came the suggestion of something sonorous, mournful, perhaps an echo off the lighthouse stones. A gecko scuttled up the wall. Control didn’t know if he should be worried about the foreground or something in the background. This was the only question that mattered to Ghost Bird, and Control didn’t know what she would do if Grace wouldn’t answer.

  Grace stared over at Control, said, “If I sat here and told this copy”—pointing at Ghost Bird—“everything I’ve found, we would still be sitting here when hell froze over.”

  “Just answer the question,” Ghost Bird muttered.

  “Are we just passing through?” Control asked. “Should we be moving on?” That’s what this came down to, in a way. Not Ghost Bird’s question but Grace’s attitude, the constant suspicion that wore on him.

  “Do you know how long I’ve been on this island? Did you ever ask me that?”

  “Have you seen the biologist?” Ghost Bird demanded in a kind of staccato growl.

  “Ask me.” The knife stabbed, vibrating, into the wooden floor of the landing. The hand on the holster had gone still, resting on the gun.

  Control gave Ghost Bird a quick look. Had he misread something vital?

  “How long have you been on the island?” he asked.

  “Three years. I’ve been here three years.”

  * * *

  Outside, all seemed still, so impossibly still. The gecko frozen on the wall. Control frozen in his thoughts. Satisfaction, that Grace could not quite suppress, etched into her worn face. To have told them something they couldn’t have known, couldn’t have seen coming.

  “Three years,” Control said, a plea for her to recant.

  “I don’t believe you,” Ghost Bird said.

  A generous laugh. “I don’t blame you much. I don’t blame you at all. You’re right. I must just be some crazy bitch who went mad out here all on her own. I must be unable to cope with my situation. I must be fucking nuts. Sure. Must be. Except for this…”

  Grace pulled a sheaf of pages out of her knapsack. Brittle, yellowing, they had handwriting on them. A rusting clasp in the corner.

  She flung the pages at Ghost Bird’s feet. “Read it. Read it before I waste time telling you anything else. Just read it.”

  Ghost Bird picked it up, looked at the first page in confusion.

  “What is it?” Control asked. Some part of him not wanting to know. Not wanting another dislocation.

  “The biologist’s last will and testament,” Grace said.

  PART II

  FIXED LIGHT

  Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot—choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before; I use my actual voice rarely enough.

  A great deal of time has passed since I placed words on paper, and for so long I felt no urge to do so again. I have felt more acutely than ever that here on the island I should never be taken out of the moment. To be taken out of the moment is dangerous—that is when things sneak their way in and then there is no present moment to return to. Only very recently have I begun to feel something like a lack, or anything beyond the thought that I would in this place simply exist and live out whatever span was allotted to me. Neither have I had any interest in recounting, in setting down, in communicating in what has come to seem such a mundane way. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that I have started to write this several times, and that I abandoned three or four drafts of this … this document? This letter? This … whatever this is.

  Perhaps, too, hesitance overtakes me because when
I think of writing I glimpse the world I left behind. The world beyond, that when my thoughts drift toward it at all, is a hazy, indistinct sphere radiating a weak light, riddled through with discordant voices and images that cut across eyes and minds like a razor blade, and none of us able to even blink. It seems a myth, a kind of mythic tragedy, a lie, that I once lived there or that anyone lives there still. Someday the fish and the falcon, the fox and the owl, will tell tales, in their way, of this disembodied globe of light and what it contained, all the poison and all the grief that leaked out of it. If human language meant anything, I might even recount it to the waves or to the sky, but what’s the point?

  Still, having decided to finally let the brightness take me, after holding out against it for so many years, I am giving it one more try. Who will read this? I don’t know, nor do I really care. Perhaps I am just writing for myself, that some further record exist of this journey, even if I can only tell the first part of a much longer story. But if someone does read it, know that I didn’t live here waiting for rescue, hoping for a thirteenth expedition. If the world beyond appears to have abandoned the entire idea of expeditions, perhaps that’s evidence of the sudden appearance of sanity. But the world beyond, or even the dangers of this one I live in, will be even less of a concern in a few days.

  01: THE BRIGHTNESS

  At first, there was always the island ahead of me, somewhere, along the coast, and my husband’s presence in the bread-crumb notes I thought I found along the way, that I hoped came from him. Under rocks, stabbed on branches, curling dead on the ground. They were all important to me, no matter which might be real and which nothing more than chance or coincidence. Making it to the island meant something to me then. I was still holding on to the idea of causality, of purpose as that word might be recognizable to the Southern Reach. But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?

  According to his journal, it took my husband six days to reach the island the first time. It took me somewhat longer. Because the rules had changed. Because the ground I found purchase on one day became the next uncertain, and at times seemed to fall away beneath me. Behind me at the lighthouse, a luminescence was growing in strength and a burnt haze had begun to dominate the sky, and through my binoculars for more days than should have been possible, there came the suggestion of something enormous rising from the sea in a continuous, slow-motion wave. Something I was not yet ready to see.

  Ahead, the birds that shot through the sky trailed blurs of color that resembled other versions of themselves, that might have been hallucinations. The air seemed malleable, or like it could be convinced or coerced. I felt stuck in between, forever traveling, never arriving, so that soon I wanted a place to pretend was “base camp” for a while—a place that might quell the constant frustration of feeling that I couldn’t trust the landscape I traveled through, my only anchor the trail itself, which, although it became ever more overgrown and twisty, never faltered, never petered out into nothing.

  If it had led me to a cliff, would I have stood there or would I have followed it over the edge? Or would that lack have been enough that I might have turned back and tried to find the door in the border? It’s difficult to predict what I might have done. The trajectories of my thoughts were scattered on that journey, twisted this way and that, like the swallows in the clear blue sky that, banking and circling back for a split second, would then return to their previous course, their fleeting digression a simple hunt for a speck of insect protein.

  Nor do I know how much of these phenomena, these thoughts, I should attribute to the brightness within me. Some, but not all, based on everything that happened later, that is still happening. Just when I thought the brightness was one thing, it would become another. The fifth morning I rose from the grass and dirt and sand, the brightness had gathered to form a hushed second skin over me, that skin cracking from my opening eyes like the slightest, the briefest, touch of an impossibly thin layer of ice. I could hear the fracturing of its melting as if it came from miles and years away.

  As the day progressed, the brightness manifested in my chest like a hot, red stone that pulsed next to my heart, unwelcome company. The scientist in me wanted to self-anesthetize and operate, remove the obstruction, even though I wasn’t a surgeon and the brightness no tumor. I remember thinking that I might be talking to the animals by the next morning. I might be rolling in the dirt, laughing hysterically under that merciless blue sky. Or I might find the brightness rising curious out of the top of my head, like a periscope—independent and lively, with nothing left beneath it but a husk.

  By dusk of that day, having ignored the biting flies and the huge reptiles that stared from the water, grinning up at me like the mindless carnivores they were … by then the brightness had come up to my head and lay behind all of my thoughts like a cooling piece of coal covered in icy ash. And I no longer could be sure that the brightness was a feeling, an impulse, an infection. Was I headed toward an island that might or might not give me answers because I meant to go there or because I was being directed somewhere by an invisible stranger? A companion. Was the brightness more separate than I knew? And why did the psychologist’s words appear in my mind so often, and why could I not pry them out?

  These were not speculative questions, a matter for idle debate, but concrete worries. At times, I felt as if those words, my final conversation with the psychologist, lay like a shield or wall between me and aspects of the brightness, that an intended peculiarity of those words had activated something in me. But no matter how I turned that exchange over and over in my thoughts, I came no closer to a conclusion. Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.

  That night, I made camp, started a fire, because I didn’t care who saw me. If the brightness existed separate, and if every part of Area X saw me anyway, what did it matter? A kind of giddy recklessness was coming back to me again—and I welcomed it. The lighthouse had long since faded, but I found I looked for it still, that great anchor, that great trap. Here, too, grew the purple thistles, in a greater abundance, which I could not help thinking of as spies for Area X. Even if everything here spied and was spied upon.

  The wind came up strong from the shore, I remember, and it was cold. I held on to such details back then as a way of warding off the brightness—as superstitious as anyone else. Soon, too, a moaning came out of and through the dusk, along with a familiar thrashing, as something ponderous fought against the reeds. I shuddered, but I also laughed, and said aloud, “It’s just an old friend!” Not so old, and not really a friend. Hideous presence. Simple beast. In that fearless moment, or maybe just in this one, I felt a deep affection for and kinship with it. I went out to meet it, my brightness muttering the whole way in a surly, almost petulant fashion. A monster? Yes, but after the monster that was the Crawler, I embraced this simpler source of mystery.

  02: THE MOANING CREATURE

  I’ll spare you the search for this creature I had once fled; it was absurd trying to differentiate wind-blown reeds from those rattled by some force more specific, of sloshing through the muck and mire without breaking an ankle or getting stuck.

  Eventually I came out into a kind of clearing, an island of dirt covered in anemic grass and bounded by yet more reeds. At the far end, something pale and grub-like and monstrous flailed and moaned, its limbs pummeling the reed floor, the speed I had witnessed in the past seemingly now unavailable to it. I realized soon enough that it was sleeping.

  The head was small compared to the body, but faced away from me, so all I could see was a thick wrinkled neck morphing into the skull. I still had a chance to leave. I had every reason to leave. I felt shaky, the resolve that had made me veer off the main trail evaporating. But something in its obliviousness made me stay.

  I advanced, keeping my gun trained on the beast. This close, the moaning was deafening, the strange guttural tolling of a living cathedral bell. There was no way to be stealthy—the ground
was strewn with dried reeds over the dirt and grass that crackled with my steps—and yet still it slept. I trained my flashlight on its bulk. The body had the consistency and form of a giant hog and a slug commingled, the pale skin mottled with mangy patches of light green moss. The arms and legs suggested the limbs of a pig but with three thick fingers at their ends. Positioned along the midsection near what I supposed was the stomach were two more appendages, which resembled fleshy pseudopods. The creature used them to help lurch its bulk along, but they often writhed pathetically and beat at the ground as if not entirely under its control.

  I shone the flashlight on the creature’s head, that small pink oval backed by the too-thick neck. As the molting mask I’d found during my prior encounter suggested, it had the face of the psychologist from my husband’s expedition. And this face in its slumber formed a mask of utter uncomprehending anguish, the mouth open in a perpetual O as it moaned out its distress, as its limbs gouged at the ground, as it made its wounded, halting progress in what amounted to circles. Its eyes had a white film over them that told me it was blind.

  I should have felt something. I should have been moved or disgusted by this encounter. Yet after my descent into the tower, my annihilation by the Crawler, I felt nothing. No emotion at all, not even simple, common pity, despite this raw expression of trauma, some agony beyond comprehension.

  This beast should have been a dolphin with an uncanny eye, a wild boar that acted as if it were new to its body. And perhaps it was part of an intentional pattern, and I just could not see those outlines. But it looked like a mistake, a misfire by an Area X that had assimilated so much so beautifully and so seamlessly. Which made me wonder if my brightness was a harbinger of some form of this. To disappear into the coastline, into the anonymous reaches of the beach and the wind, or the marshes, did not really disturb me, perhaps never had. But this did—this blind, relentless questing. Had I tricked myself into believing that letting the brightness overtake me would be a painless, even beautiful, process? There was nothing beautiful about the moaning creature, nothing that didn’t seem a ghastly intervention.