They stood, soaked and cold, near the end of a path that wound from the barracks across the ridge above the giant sinkhole and then on to more stable land. They were looking at the right side of a tall, sturdy, red wooden frame that delineated the location, the width and height, of the entrance beyond. The path ran parallel to a paint line perpetually refreshed to let you know the border lay fifteen feet beyond. If you went ten feet beyond the line, the lasers from a hidden security system would activate and turn you into cooked meat. But otherwise, the army had left as small a footprint as possible; no one knew what might change the terroir. Here the toxicity levels almost matched those inside of Area X, which was to say: nil, nada, nothing.
As for terror, his personal level had been intensified by deltas of lightning that cracked open the sky and thunder that sounded like a giant in a bad mood ripping apart trees. Yet they had persevered, Cheney holding the blue-and-white-striped umbrella aloft, arm fully extended toward the sky, and Control and Whitby huddled around him, trying to shuffle in a synchronized way along the narrow path without tripping. All of it useless against the slanted rain.
“The entrance isn’t visible from the side,” Cheney said in a loud voice, his forehead flecked with bits of leaf and dirt. “But you’ll see it soon. The path circles around to meet it head-on.”
“Doesn’t it project light?” Control smacked away something red with six legs that had been crawling up his pants.
“Yes, but you can’t see it from the side. From the side it doesn’t appear to be there at all.”
“It is twenty feet high and twelve feet wide,” Whitby added.
“Or, as I say, sixty rabbits high and thirty-six rabbits wide,” Cheney said.
Control, struck by a sudden generosity, laughed at that one, which he imagined brought a flush of happiness to Cheney’s features although they could barely recognize each other in the slop and mire.
The area had the aspect of a shrine, even with the downpour. Especially because the downpour cut off abruptly at the border even though the landscape continued uninterrupted. Somehow Control had expected the equivalent of the disconnect when a two-page spread didn’t quite line up in a coffee-table book. But instead it just looked like they were slogging through a huge terrarium or greenhouse with invisible glass revealing a sunny day on the grounds beyond.
They continued to the end amid a profusion of lush plant life and an alarmingly crowded landscape of birdlife and insects, with deer visible in the middle distance through the veil of rain. Hsyu had said something during their meeting about making assumptions about terminology, and he had replied, to a roaring silence, “You mean like calling something a ‘border’?” Tracking back from stripping names from expedition members: What if when you accreted personality and other details around mere function, a different picture emerged?
After a few minutes of sloshing through mud, they curved around to come to a halt in front of the wooden structure.
He had not expected any of it to be beautiful, but it was beautiful.
* * *
Beyond the red wooden frame, Control could see a roughly rectangular space forming an arch at the top, through which swirled a scintillating, questing white light, a light that fizzed and flickered and seemed always on the point of being snuffed out but never was … there was a kind of spiraling effect to it, as it continually circled back in on itself. If you blinked quickly it almost looked as if the light consisted of eight or ten swiftly rotating spokes, but this was an illusion.
The light was like nothing he had ever seen. It was neither harsh nor soft. It was not twee, like faery lite from bad movies. It was not the darkish light of hucksters and magicians or anyone else looking to define light by use of shadows. It lacked the clarity of the all-revealing light of the storage cathedral, but it wasn’t murky or buttery or any other descriptor he could think of right then. He imagined trying to tell his father about it, but, really, it was his father who could have described the quality of that light to him.
“Even though it’s such a tall corridor and so wide, you have to crawl with your pack as close to the middle as possible. As far away from the sides as possible.” Cheney, confirming what Control had already read in summaries. Like cats with duct tape on their backs, slinking forward on their bellies. “No matter how you feel about enclosed or open spaces, it’ll be strange in there, because you will feel simultaneously as if you are progressing across a wide open field and as if you’re on a narrow precipice without guardrails and could fall off at any moment. So you exist in a confined and limitless space all at once. One reason we put the expedition members under hypnosis.”
Not to mention—and Cheney never did—that the expedition leader in each case had to endure the experience without benefit of hypnosis, and that some experienced strange visions while inside. “It was like being in one of those aquariums with the water overhead, but murkier, so that I could not really tell what was swimming there. Or it wasn’t the water that was murky but instead the creatures.” “I saw constellations and everything was near and far all at once.” “There was a vast plain like where I grew up, and it just kept expanding and expanding, until I had to look at the ground because I was getting the sense of being filled up until I would have burst.” All of which could just as easily have occurred inside the subjects’ minds.
Nor did the length of the passageway correspond to the width of the invisible border. Some reports from returning expeditions indicated that the passageway meandered, while others described it as straight. The point was, it varied and the time to travel through it into Area X could not be estimated except within a rough parameter of a “norm” of three hours to ten hours. Indeed, because of this, one of the earliest fears of Central had been that the entry point might disappear entirely, even if other opinions differed. Among the files on the border, Control had found a relevant quote from James Lowry: “… the door when I saw it looked like it had always been there, and would always be there even if there was no Area X.”
The director had apparently thought the border was advancing, but there was no evidence to support that view. An interceding note in the files from far up the chain of command had offered the comment that perhaps the director was just trying to get attention and money for a “dying agency.” Now that he saw the entrance, Control wondered how anyone would know what an “advance” meant.
“Don’t stare at it directly for too long,” Whitby offered. “It tends to draw you in.”
“I’ll try not to,” Control said. But it was too late, his only solace that surely if he started walking toward it, Whitby or Cheney would stop him. Or the lasers would.
The swirling light defeated his attempts to conjure up the biologist. He could not get her to stand beside him, to follow the other three members of the twelfth expedition into that light. By then, by the time she had arrived at this spot, she would already have been under hypnotic influence. The linguist would already have left the expedition. There would have been just the four of them, with their packs, about to crawl through that impossible light. Only the director would have been seeing it all with clear eyes. If Control went through her scribbled notes, if he excavated the sedimentary layers and got to the core of her … could he come back here and reconstruct her thoughts, her feelings, at that moment?
“How did the members of the last eleventh and the twelfth get out of Area X without being seen?” Control asked Cheney.
“There must be another exit point we haven’t been able to find.” The object, observed, still not cooperating with him. A vision of his father in the kitchen when he was fourteen, shoving rotting strawberries into the bottom of a glass and then adding a cone of curled-up paper over the top, to trap the fruit flies that had gotten into the house.
“Why can we see the corridor?” Control asked.
“Not sure what you mean,” Cheney said.
“If it’s visible, then we were meant to see it.” Maybe. Who really knew? Every off-the-cuff comment Control made came,
or so he thought, with a built-in echo, as if the past banal observations of visitors and new employees lingered in the air, seeking to merge, same with same, and finding an exact match far too often.
Cheney sucked on his cheek a second, grudgingly admitted, “That’s a theory. That’s definitely a theory, all right. I can’t say it isn’t.”
Staggering thought: What might come out into the world down a corridor twenty feet tall by twelve feet wide?
They stood there for long moments, bleeding time but not acknowledging it, heedless of the rain. Whitby stood apart, letting the rain soak him, contemptuous of the umbrella. Behind them, through the thunder, the hard trickle of water from the creeks gurgling back down into the sinkhole beyond the ridge. Ahead, the clarity of a cloudless summer day.
While Control tried to stare down that sparkling, that dancing light.
010: FOURTH BREACH
“The terroir” infiltrated his thoughts again, when, late in the day, drying off, Control received the transcripts from his morning session with the biologist, the trip to the border kaleidoscoping through his head. He had just reluctantly re-tossed the mouse into the trash and repatriated the plant with the storage cathedral. It had taken an effort of will to do that and to close the door on the weird sermon scrawled on his wall. He hated to engage in superstition, but the doubt remained—that he had made a mistake, that the director had left both mouse and plant in her desk drawer for a reason, as a kind of odd protection against … what?
He still didn’t know as he performed an Internet search on Ghost Bird’s reference to the phorus snail, which revealed she was quoting almost word for word from an old book by an obscure amateur “parson-naturalist.” Something she would have encountered in college, with whatever associated memories that, too, might bring. He didn’t believe it had significance, except for the obvious one: The biologist had been comparing him to an awkward snail.
Then he thumbed through the transcript, which he found comforting. At one point during the session, fishing, Control had pivoted away from both tower and lighthouse, back to where she had been picked up.
Q: What did you leave at the empty lot?
What if, he speculated there at his desk—still ignoring the water-stained pages in the drawer next to him—the empty lot was a terroir related to the terroir that was Area X? What if some confluence of person and place meant something more than just a return home? Did he need to order a complete historical excavation of the empty lot? And what about the other two, the anthropologist and the surveyor? Mired in the arcana of the Southern Reach, he wouldn’t have time to check on them for another few days. Grudging gratitude to Grace for simplifying his job by sending them away.
Meanwhile, the biologist was answering his question on the page.
A: Leave? Like, what? A necklace with a crucifix? A confession?
Q: No.
A: Well, why don’t you tell me what you thought I might’ve left there?
Q: Your manners?
That had earned him a chuckle, if a caustic one, followed by a long, tired sigh that seemed to expel all the air from her lungs.
A: I’ve told you that nothing happened there. I woke up as if from an endless dream. And then they picked me up.
Q:Do you ever dream? Now, I mean.
A: What would be the point?
Q: What do you mean?
A: I’d just dream of being out of this place.
Q: Do you want to hear about my dreams?
He didn’t know why he had said this to her. He didn’t know what he’d tell her. Would he tell her about the endless falling into the bay, into the maw of leviathans?
To his surprise, she said:
A: What do you dream of, John? Tell me.
It was the first time she’d used his name, and he tried to hate how it had sent a kind of spark through him. John. She had brought her feet up onto the chair so she was hugging her knees and peering at him almost impishly.
Sometimes you had to adjust your strategy, give up something to get something. So he did tell her his dream, even though he felt self-conscious and hoped Grace wouldn’t see it in the official record, use it against him somehow. But if he’d lied, if he’d made something up, Control believed that Ghost Bird would know, that even as he’d been trying to interpret her tells, she had been processing him the whole time. Even when he asked the questions he was hemorrhaging data. He had a sudden image of information floating out the side of his head in a pixelated blood-red mist. These are my relatives. This is my ex-girlfriend. My father was a sculptor. My mother is a spy.
But she had relented, too, during the conversation, for a moment.
A: I woke in the empty lot and I thought I was dead. I thought I was in purgatory, maybe, even though I don’t believe in an afterlife. But it was quiet and so empty … so I waited there, afraid to leave, afraid there might be some reason I was meant to be there. Not sure I wanted to know anything else. Then the police came for me, and then the Southern Reach after that. But I still believed I wasn’t really alive.
What if the biologist had just that morning decided she was alive, not dead? Perhaps that accounted for the change in her mood.
When he had finished reading, he could feel Ghost Bird still staring at him, and she would not let his gaze drop, held him there, or he let her do it. For whatever reason.
* * *
On the way back from the border, a silence had come over Control, Whitby, and Cheney, perhaps overloaded by the contrast between sun/heat and rain/cold. But it had seemed to Control like the companionable silence of shared experience, as if he had been initiated into membership in an exclusive club without having been asked first. He was wary of that feeling; it was a space where shadows crept in that shouldn’t creep in, where people agreed to things that they did not actually agree with, believing that they were of one purpose and intent. Once, in such a space, a fellow agent had called him “homey” and made an offhand comment about him “not being your usual kind of spic.”
When they were about a mile from the Southern Reach, Cheney said, too casually, “You know, there’s a rumor about the former director and the border.”
“Yes?” Here it came. There it was. How comfort led to overreach or to some half reveal of what should be hidden.
“That she went over the border by herself once,” Cheney said, staring off into the distance. Even Whitby seemed to want to distance himself from that statement, leaning forward in his seat as he drove. “Just a rumor,” Cheney added. “No idea if it’s true.”
But Control didn’t care about that, despite the addition being disingenuous. The truth clearly didn’t worry Cheney, or he already knew it was true and wanted Control on the scent.
“Does this rumor include when this might have happened?” Control asked.
“Before the final eleventh expedition.”
Part of him had wanted to take that to the assistant director and see what she might or might not know. Another part decided that was a premature idea. So he’d chewed on the information, wondering why Cheney had fed it to him, especially in front of Whitby. Did that mean Whitby had the spine, despite the evidence, to withhold even when Grace wanted him to share?
“Have you ever been over the border, Cheney?”
An explosive snort. “No. Are you crazy? No.”
In the parking lot at day’s end, Control sat behind the wheel, keys in the ignition, and decompressed for a moment. The rain had passed, leaving oily puddles and a kind of verdant sheen on the grass and trees. Only Whitby’s purple electric car remained, at an angle across two spaces, as if it had washed up there.
Time to call the Voice and file his report. Getting it over with was better than letting work bleed into his evening.
The phone rang and rang.
The Voice finally answered with a “Yes—what?” as if Control had called at a bad time.
He had meant to ask about the director’s clandestine border trip, but the Voice’s tone threw him off. Instead, he started
off with the plant and the mouse: “I found something odd in the director’s desk…”
* * *
Control blinked once, twice, three times. As they were talking, he had noticed something. It was the smallest thing, and yet it rattled him. There was a squashed mosquito on the inside of his windshield, and Control had no idea how it had gotten there. He knew it hadn’t been there in the morning, and he had no memory of swatting one anyway. Paranoid thought: Carelessness on the part of someone searching his car … or did someone want him to know he was being watched?
Attention divided, Control became aware of wobbles in his conversation with the Voice. Almost like air pockets that pushed an airplane up and forward, while the passenger inside, him, sat there strapped in and alarmed. Or as if he were watching a TV show where the cable hiccupped and brought him five seconds forward every few minutes. Yet the conversation picked up where it had left off.
The Voice was saying, with more than usual gruffness, “I’ll get you more information—and don’t you worry, I’m still working on the goddamn assistant director situation. Call me tomorrow.”
A ridiculous image snuck into his head of the assistant director walking into the parking lot while he was at the border, forcing the lock, rummaging through his glove box, sadistically squashing the mosquito.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea at this point, about Grace,” Control said. “It might be better to…”
But the Voice had already hung up, leaving Control to wonder how it had gotten dark so quickly.
Control contemplated the tangled geometry of blood and delicate limbs. He couldn’t stop staring at the mosquito. He had meant to say something else to the Voice, but he’d forgotten it because of the mosquito and now it would have to wait until tomorrow.
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