Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  After Cheney’s outburst, you went over yet another pointless, nonproductive report from the “water-feature crew,” the agency studying radio waves for signals from extraterrestrial life. Central has suggested more than once that you “team up with” them. They listen for messages from the stars—across a sliver of two microwave regions unencumbered by radio waves from natural sources. These frequencies they call the water hole because they correspond to hydrogen and hydroxyl wavelengths. A fool’s chance, to assume that other intelligent species would automatically gravitate to the “watering hole” as they called it.

  “While what they were looking for snuck in the back door—”

  “Set up the back door and walked through it—”

  “You’re looking up and meanwhile something walks by and steals your wallet,” Grace says, cackling.

  “Water feature built for nothing; they prefer the servants’ entrance, thank you very much,” you say grandly, passing the bourbon. “You don’t just turn on the sprinklers and pump up the Slip ’N Slide.”

  You truly don’t know what you’re saying anymore, but Grace bursts into laughter, and then things are all right again with Grace, for a while, and you can go back to Henry and Suzanne, the talking mannequins, the deathly dull or just deathly twins.

  But at some point that same week, Grace finds you throwing file folders against the far wall, and you’ve no excuse for it except a shrug. Bad day at the doctor’s. Bad day prepping for the expedition. Bad day doing research. Just a bad day in a succession of bad days.

  So you do something about it.

  * * *

  You fly out to Lowry’s headquarters about one month before the twelfth expedition. Even though it’s your idea, you’re unhappy you have to travel, had hoped to lure Lowry to the Southern Reach one last time. Everything around you—your office, the conversation in the corridors, the view from Beyond Reach—has acquired a kind of compelling sheen to it, a clarity that comes from knowing you will soon be gone.

  Lowry’s in the final stages of his pre-expedition performance, has been exporting the less invasive of his techniques to Central. He enjoys impersonating an instructor for the benefit of expedition members, according to Severance. The biologist, she reassures you, has suffered “minimal meddling.” The only thing you want ratcheted up in the biologist is her sense of alienation from other people. All you want is that she become as attuned inward to Area X as possible. You’re not even sure she really needs your push in that regard, from all reports. No one in the history of the program has so willingly given up the use of her name.

  Light hypnotic suggestion, conditioning that’s more about Area X survival than any of Lowry’s dubious “value adds,” his claims to have found a way around the need, on some level, for the subject to want to perform the suggested action—“a kind of trickery and substitution.” The stages you’ve seen described are identification, indoctrination, reinforcement, and deployment, but Grace has seen other documents that borrow the semiotics of the supernatural: “manifestation, infestation, oppression, and possession.”

  Most of Lowry’s attention has accreted around the linguist, a volunteer with radicalized ideas about the value of free will. You wonder if Lowry prefers it when there’s more or less resistance. So you absorb the brunt of his briefing, his report on progress, his teasing taunt about whether you’ve reconsidered his offer of hypnosis, of conditioning, with the hint behind it that you couldn’t stop him if you tried.

  Honestly, you don’t give a shit about his briefing.

  * * *

  At some point, you steer Lowry toward the idea of a walk—down by the fake lighthouse. It’s early summer, the weather still balmy, and there’s no reason to sit there in Lowry’s command-and-control lounge. You cajole him into it by appealing to his pride, asking for the full tour, taking just one thin file folder you’ve brought with you.

  So he gives you the not-so-grand tour, through this miniaturized world of ever-decreasing wonder. There’s the strange kitschy quality of piped-in music through speakers hidden around the grounds. A distant but cheery tune—not pop, not jazz, not classical, but something all the more menacing for being jaunty.

  At the top of the quaint little lighthouse—what would Saul think of it?—he points out that the daymark is accurate, as well as “the fucking glass shards somebody added later.” When he pulls the trapdoor open at the top, what’s revealed in the room below are piles and piles of empty journals and loose, blank pages, as if he’s bought a stationery store as a side business. The lens isn’t functional, either, but as if by way of apology, you get a history lesson: “Back in the day—way back in the day—they used to just shove a big fucking fatty bird onto a stake and light it on fire for a beacon.”

  That “goddamn hole in the ground,” as Lowry puts it, is the least accurate part—an old gunnery position with the gun unit ripped out, leaving the granite-lined dark circle that leads down a ladder to a tunnel that then doubles back to the hill behind you that houses most of Lowry’s installations. You climb down only a little ways, enough to see, framed on the dank walls, Lowry’s art gallery: the blurry, out-of-focus photographs, blown up, brought back by various expeditions. A kind of meta version of the tunnel brought to the faux tunnel, displaying with confidence something unknowable. Thinking of Saul on the steps of the real tunnel, turning toward you, and feeling such an acute contempt for Lowry that you have to remain there, looking down, for long moments, afraid it will show on your face.

  After you’ve made the right noises about how impressive it all is, you suggest continuing along the shore, “fresh air and nature,” and Lowry acquiesces, defeated by your tactic of asking a question about each new thing ahead because he just cannot shut up about his own cleverness. You take a side path that leads north along the water. There are geese nesting on a nearby rocky point that give you both the stink eye, an otter in the sea in the middle distance, shadowing you.

  Eventually, you turn the conversation to the S&SB. You pull out a piece of paper—the line item linked to “Jack Severance.” You point it out to him even though it’s highlighted in hot pink. You present it as this funny thing, this thing Lowry must have known about, too. Given his secret debriefing of your childhood experiences when you first joined the Southern Reach.

  “Is that the reason you and Jackie are working together?” you ask. “That the S&SB had a link to Central—through Jack?”

  Lowry considers that question, a kind of smirk on his craggy face. A smirk, and a look down at the ground and back up at you.

  “Is that all we’re out here for? For that? Jesus, I might’ve given you that in a fucking phone call.”

  “Not much, I guess,” you say. Sheepish smile, offered up to a raging wolf of a narcissist. “But I’d like to know.” Before you cross the border.

  A hesitation, a sideways glance that’s appraising you hard for some hidden motivation or some next move that maybe he can’t see.

  Prodding: “A side project? The S&SB a side project of Central, or…?”

  “Sure, why not,” Lowry says, relaxing. “The usual kind of dependent clause that could be excised at any time, no harm done.”

  But sometimes the ancillary infected the primary. Sometimes the host and the parasite got confused about their roles, as the biologist might have put it.

  “It’s how you got the photograph of me at the lighthouse.” Not a question.

  “Very good!” he says, genuinely delighted. “Too fucking true! I was on a mission to find evidence to make sure you stayed true … and then I wondered how come that was in Central’s files in the first place, and not over at the Southern Reach. Wondered where it originated—and then I found that very same line item.” Except Lowry had a higher security clearance, could access information you and Grace couldn’t get your hands on.

  “That was smart of you. Really smart.”

  Lowry puffs up, chest sticking out, aware he’s being flattered but can’t help the self-parody that’s not real
ly parody at all, because where’s the harm? You’re on the way out. He’s probably already thinking about replacements. You haven’t bothered putting Grace’s name forward, have been working on Jackie Severance in that regard instead.

  “The idea was straightforward, the way Jack told it. The S&SB was kind of bat-shit crazy, low probability, but if there actually was anything uncanny or alien in the world, we should monitor it, should be aware of it. Maybe influence or nudge it a bit, provide the right materials and guidance. And if troublemakers or undesirables joined the group—that’s a good way to monitor potential subversives, too … and also a good cover for getting into places ‘hidden in plain sight’ for surveillance, a methodology Central was keen on back then. A lot of antigovernment types along the forgotten coast.”

  “Did we recruit, or—”

  “Some operatives embedded—and some folks we persuaded to work for us because they liked the idea of playing spy. Some folks who got a thrill out of it. Didn’t need a deeper reason, like God and country. Probably just as well.”

  “Was Jackie involved, too?”

  “Jack wasn’t just protecting himself,” Lowry says. “When Jackie was starting out, she helped him a bit—and then she came to the Southern Reach later and helped Jack again, to make sure none of this came out. Except I found out, as I do, sometimes. As you know.”

  “Ever come across a Henry or Suzanne in the files?”

  “Never any names used in what I saw. Just code names like, I dunno, ‘Big Hawler’ and ‘Spooky Action’ and ‘Damned Porkchop.’ That kind of crap.”

  But none of this is the real question, the first of the real questions.

  “Did the S&SB facilitate, knowingly or unknowingly, the creation of Area X?”

  Lowry looks both stunned and amused beyond reason or good sense. “No, of course not. No no no! That’s why Jack could keep it secret, snuff it out. Strictly in the wrong place at the wrong time—because otherwise I would have … I would have taken measures.” But you think he meant to say would have killed them all. “And it turns out Jack was running it mostly on his own initiative, which is something I think we can both appreciate, right?”

  Above you loom the old barracks, the warrens, gun slits from concrete bunkers.

  Do you believe Lowry? No, you don’t.

  * * *

  The little gravel beach where you both stand is some distance from the fake lighthouse. It has a fringe of anemic grass and, right before the water, a line of rocks covered in white lichen. The brilliant sun for a moment becomes lost in a depression of clouds and shadow, the pale blue surface of the sea a sudden gray. The otter that has been trailing you has come closer. Its constant chattering monologue of clicks and whistles Lowry finds somehow disrespectful, perhaps because of prior encounters. He starts yelling at the otter and the otter keeps “talking” and popping up somewhere unexpected so Lowry can never adjust to throw the pebble he plans on caroming off the otter’s head. You sit down on the rocks, watch the show.

  “Goddamn fucking creature. Goddamn stupid fucking animal.”

  The otter shows off a fish it’s caught, swimming on its back, eyes full of a kind of laughter, if that’s possible.

  The otter skims and zags and disappears and comes back up. Lowry’s pebbles skip and plop without effect, the otter apparently thinking it’s a game.

  But it’s a game that bores the otter after a while, and it submerges for a long time, Lowry standing there with one hand on his hip, the other a fist around a rock, searching for a new ripple in the water, seeming to want to guess how long the otter can hold its breath, what range of options the animal has for where it can come up for air. Except it never reappears, and Lowry’s left standing there, holding a rock.

  Is Lowry a monster? He is monstrous in your eyes, because you know that by the time his hold on Central, the parts of Central he wants to make laugh and dance the way he wants them to laugh and dance … by the time this hold, the doubling and mirroring, has waned as most reigns of terror do, the signs of his hand, his will, will have irrevocably fallen across so many places. His ghost will haunt so much for so many years to come, imprint upon so many minds, that if the details about the man known as Lowry are suddenly purged from all the systems, those systems will still reconstruct his image from the very force and power of his impact.

  You take out a photo of the cell phone, nudge his arm with it, make him take it. Lowry blanches, tries to hand back the photograph, but you’re going to make him keep it. He’s stuck holding it and the rock meant for the otter. He drops the rock, but won’t look at the photograph again.

  “Lowry, I think you lied about this phone. I think this is your phone. From the first expedition.” You’ve a sense as you say the words that you’re going too far, but you’ll be going even farther soon.

  “You don’t know that’s my phone.”

  “It’s got a long history now.”

  Lowry: “No.” Stark. Final. Letting in no light. A kind of self-damnation. No protest. No outrage. None of the usual Lowry drama. “No.” Without any way to pry loose some light between the letters of that word, so you’ll have to try yourself, across the border.

  “Are you working for them? Is that the problem?” You leave the “them” vague on purpose.

  “For ‘them’?” A laugh that burned. “Why, is there a problem with the phone?” Still not an admission.

  “Does Area X have unfinished business with you? Is there something you haven’t told us about the first expedition?”

  “Nothing that would help you.” Bitter now. Directed at you for ambushing him, or at someone else?

  “Lowry, if you don’t tell me whether or not this is your cell phone, I am going to go to Central and tell them all about the S&SB, all about where I came from, how you covered it up. I’m going to scuttle you for good.”

  “You’d be done for yourself then.”

  “I’m done for anyway—you know that.”

  Lowry gives you a look that’s equal parts aggression and some secret hurt coming to the surface.

  “I get it now, Gloria,” he says. “You’re going on a suicide mission and you just want everything out in the open, even if it’s unimportant. Well, you should know that if you share with anyone, I’ll—”

  “You’re corrupted data,” you tell him. “If we used your own techniques on you, Lowry, what would we find in your brain? Coiled up in there?”

  “How the fuck dare you.” He’s trembling with anger, but he’s not moving, he’s not retreating one inch. It’s not a denial, although it probably should be. Guilt? Does Lowry believe in guilt?

  Pushing now, probing now, not certain if what you’re saying is true: “While on the first expedition, did you communicate with them? With Area X?”

  “I wouldn’t call it communication. It’s all in the files you’ve already seen.”

  “What did you see? How did you see it?” Were we doomed when you came back, or before?

  “There will never be a grand unified theory, Gloria. We will never find it. Not in our lifetime, and it’ll be too late.” Lowry trying to confuse things, escape the spotlight. “You know, they’re looking at water on the moons of Jupiter right now, out there, our not-so-secret sister organizations. There might be a secret sea out there. There might be life, right under our noses. But there’s always been life right under our noses—we’re just too blind to see it. These fucking questions—they don’t matter.”

  “Jim, this is evidence of contact. Finding this particular cell phone in Area X.” That it indicates recognition and understanding of some kind.

  “No—random. Random. Random.”

  “It wants to talk to you, Jim. Area X wants to talk to you. It wants to ask you a question, doesn’t it?” You don’t know if this is true, but you’re sure it’ll scare the shit out of Lowry.

  You have the sense of a time delay in Lowry, a gap or distance between the two of you that is very, very wide. Something ancient shines out of his eyes, peers out at
you.

  “I won’t go back,” he says.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Yes, it’s my phone. It’s my fucking phone.”

  Are you seeing Lowry as he was right after coming back from the first expedition? How long could a person hold to a pattern, a process, despite being fundamentally damaged? Whitby telling you, “I think this is an asylum. But so is the rest of the world.”

  “Don’t you get tired after a while?” you ask him. “Of always moving forward but never reaching the end? Of never being able to tell the truth to anyone?”

  “You know, Gloria,” he says, “you’ll never really understand what it was like that first time, going out through that door in the border, coming back. Not if you cross the border a thousand times. We were offered up and we were lost. We were passing through a door of ghosts, into a place of spirits. And asked to deal with that. For the rest of our lives.”

  “And what if Area X comes looking for you?”

  There’s still that remoteness to Lowry’s gaze, as if he’s not really there, standing in front of you, but he’s done, pushed to his limit, stalks off without even a glance back.

  You will never see him again, ever, and that temporary relief puts juice in your step as the sun returns, as the otter returns, and you sit by the shore and watch the animal cavort and frolic for a few minutes that you hope will never end.

  0024: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

  … bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness … Heard during the night: screech owl, nighthawk, a few foxes. A blessing. A relief.

  At the lighthouse, the beacon was dark. The beacon was dark, and something was trying to spill out of him, or course through him on its way to somewhere else. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit.