Authority

by Jeff VanderMeer

  He let all of this settle in, knew he had to be patient. There were a lot of notes, and a lot of pages to Grace’s DMP file, nothing yet on a prior trip by the director across the border. But already he was getting the sense of undercurrents, was finding now in Whitby’s terroir theory something that might apply more to the Southern Reach than to Area X, perhaps framed by a single mind. The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did. The government could not investigate every farmer’s purchase of fertilizer and fireworks—could not self-police every deviant brain within its own ranks.

  The thought had occurred while sorting through the scraps that if you ran an agency devoted to understanding and combating a force that constituted an insurgency, and you believed the border was, in some sense at least, advancing, then you might deviate from official protocols. That if your supervisors and colleagues did not agree with your assessment, you might come up with an alternative plan and begin to enact it on your own. That, wary and careful, you might then and only then reach out to recruit the help of others who did believe you, or at least weren’t hostile, to implement that plan. Whether you let them in on the details or not. Just possibly, you might begin to work out this plan on the back of receipts from your favorite restaurants, while watching TV or reading a magazine.

  When it came time to leave for his appointment with Grace, Control looked up to realize he had boxed himself in with piles of paper and stacked folders. Once past that, the doorway full of chairs and a small collapsible table required so much effort to navigate that he wondered if he’d subconsciously been trying to keep something out.

  013: RECOMMENDATIONS

  Control had wanted to impose himself on Grace’s territory, to show her he was comfortable there, but that meant when he arrived she was in the middle of a ridiculously cheerful conversation with her administrative assistant.

  While he waited, Control reviewed the basics, the basics being all that had been given to him, for whatever reason. Grace Stevenson. Homo sapiens. Female. Family originally from the West Indies. She was third-generation in this country and the eldest of three daughters. The parents had worked hard to put all three through college, and Grace had graduated valedictorian of her class with dual degrees in political science and history, followed by training at Central. Then, during a special op, she’d injured her leg—no details on how—and washed up on the shores of the Southern Reach. No, that wasn’t right. The director had picked her name out of a hat? Cheney had made some noises to that effect at one point on their border trip.

  But she had to have harbored larger ambitions at some point, so what had kept her here—just the director? For from the start of her stint at the Southern Reach, Grace Stevenson had entered a kind of holding pattern, if not a slow slide into stagnation—the personal depths of that pit probably her messy, drawn-out divorce almost eight years ago, that event timed almost to the month of the college graduation of her twin boys. A year later she had informed Central about her relationship with a Panamanian national—a woman—so that she could again be fully vetted and deemed no security risk, which she wasn’t. A planned mess, then, but still traumatic. Her boys were doctors now, and also immortalized in a desk photo of them at a soccer game. Another photo showed her arm in arm with the director. The director was a big woman, with the kind of frame where you couldn’t tell if she ran to fat or was muscular. They were at some Southern Reach company picnic, a barbecue station jutting into the frame from the left and people in flowery beach shirts in the backgrouund. The idea of agency social events struck Control as absurd for some reason. Both photos were already familiar to him.

  After the divorce, the assistant director’s fate had been ever more joined to that of the director, whom she’d had to cover for several times, if he was reading between the lines correctly. The story ended with the director’s disappearance and Grace landing the booby prize: getting to be the Assistant Director for Life.

  Oh, yes, and as a result of all of this, and more, Grace Stevenson fostered an overwhelming sense of hostility toward him. An emotion he sympathized with, although only to a point, which was probably his failing. “Empathy is a losing game,” his father had liked to say, sometimes worn down by the casual racism he encountered. If you had to think about it, then you were doing it wrong.

  The assistant finally gone, Control sat down opposite Grace while she held the printout of his initial list of recommendations at arm’s length, not so much because it smelled or was otherwise offensive but because she refused to get progressive lenses.

  Would she take the recommendations as a challenge? They were deliberately premature, but he hoped so. Although it certainly didn’t bode well that a mini tape recorder lay whirring in front of him, her response to his presence in her space. But he had practiced his mannerisms in the mirror that morning, just to see how nonverbal he could be.

  In truth, most of his admin and managerial recommendations could apply to any organization that had been rudderless—or to be generous, operating with half a rudder—for a few years. The rest were stabs in the dark, but whatever they cut was as likely to flense lard as hamstring anyone. He wanted the flow of information to go in multiple directions, so that, for example, Hsyu the linguist had access to classified information from other agency departments. He also wanted to approve long-forbidden overtime and nighttime working hours, since the electricity in the building had to stay on twenty-four hours a day anyway. He had noticed most of the staff left early.

  Some other things were unnecessary, but with any luck Grace would waste time and energy fighting him on them.

  “That was fast,” she said finally, tossing the paper-clipped pages of his list back across the desk at him. The pages slid into his lap before he could catch them.

  “I did my homework,” Control said. Whatever that meant.

  “A conscientious schoolboy. A star pupil.”

  “The first part.” Control half agreed, not sure he liked the way she said it.

  Grace didn’t bother wasting even an insincere smile in response. “Let me get to the point. Someone has been interfering with my access to Central this week—making inquiries, poking around. But whoever is doing you this favor has no tact—or whatever faction is behind it doesn’t have quite enough pull.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Control said, his nonverbal mannerisms sagging in surprise along with the rest of him, despite his best efforts.

  Faction. Despite his daydream about the Voice having a black-ops identity, it had not occurred to him that his mother might be heading up a faction, which led him automatically to the idea of true shadow ops—along with an opposition. It threw him, a little, that Central might be that fragmented. Just how elephantine, how rhinoceroscrutian, had the Voice’s efforts been in following up on Control’s request? And: What did Grace use her contacts for when she wasn’t turning them against him?

  Grace’s look of disgust told him what she thought about his answer. “Then, in that case, John Rodriguez, I have no comment on your recommendations, except to say that I will begin to implement them in as excruciatingly slow a fashion as possible. You should begin to see a few of them—like, ‘buy new floor cleaner,’ in place by next quarter. Possibly. Maybe.”

  He had a vision, again, of Grace spiriting away the biologist, of multiple mutual attempted destructions, until somewhere up in the clouds, atop two vast and blood-drenched escalators, they continued to do battle years from now.

  Control’s stiff nod—gruffly acknowledging defeat—wasn’t the mannerism he’d been hoping to use.

 
; But she wasn’t done. Her eyes glittered as she opened a drawer and pulled out a mother-of-pearl jewelry box.

  “Do you know what this is?” she asked him.

  “A jewelry box?” he replied, confused, definitely back on his heels now.

  “This is a box full of accusations,” Grace said, holding it toward him like an offering. With this jewelry box, I thee despise.

  “What is a box of accusations?” Although he didn’t want to know.

  With a clink-and-tinkle, the yawning velvet mouth sent a handful of bugs Control recognized all too well rolling and skittering across her blotter at him. Most of them came to a stop before the edge, but a couple followed the list onto his lap. The rotting honey smell had intensified again.

  “That is a box of accusations.”

  Attempting a comeback, aware it was feeble: “I see only one accusation there, made multiple times.”

  “I haven’t emptied it yet.”

  “Would you like to empty it now?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. But I will if you continue to interfere with Central. And you can take your spies with you.”

  Should he lie? That would defeat the purpose of sending the message.

  “Why would I bug you?” With a look that he knew undercut his innocence, even as indignation rose in him as ardently as if he were innocent. Because in a way he thought he was innocent: Action bred reaction. Lose a few expedition members, gain a few bugs. She might even recognize some of them.

  But Grace persisted: “You did. You also rifled through my files, looked in all of my drawers.”

  “No, I didn’t.” This time his anger was backed by something real. He hadn’t ransacked her office, only placed the bugs there, but now even that act troubled him the more he thought about it. It was out of character, had served no real purpose, had been counterproductive.

  Grace continued on patiently. “If you do it again, I’ll file a complaint. I’ve already changed the pass-key combination on my door. Anything you need to know, you can just ask me.”

  Easily said, but Control didn’t think it was true, so he tested it: “Did you put the director’s cell phone in my satchel?” Couldn’t bring himself to ask the even more ludicrous question “Did you squash a mosquito in my car?” or anything about the director and the border.

  “Now, why would I do that?” she asked, echoing him, but she looked serious, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  “Keep the bugs as souvenirs,” he said. Put them in the Southern Reach Olde Antique Shoppe and sell them to tourists.

  “No, I mean it—what are you talking about?”

  Rather than respond, Control got up, retreated into the corridor, not sure if he heard laughter from behind him or some distorted echo through the overhead vent.

  014: HEROIC HEROES OF THE REVOLUTION

  Later, as he was wallowing in the notes, plugging his ears and eyes with them, to forget about Grace—if he hadn’t ransacked Grace’s office who had?—the expedition wing buzzed him and an excitable-sounding male voice told Control that the biologist was “not feeling good at all—she says she’s not up for an interview today.” When he asked what was wrong, the man told him, “She’s been complaining of cramps and fever. The doctor says it’s a cold.” A cold? A cold was nothing.

  “Hit the ground running.” The notes and these sessions were still firmly within his domain. He didn’t want to postpone, so he’d go to her. With any luck, he wouldn’t bump into Grace. Whitby he could’ve used help from, but even though he’d buzzed him, the man was making himself scarce.

  As he said that he’d stop by soon, Control realized that it might be some ploy—the obvious one of not playing along, but also that by going he might be giving up some advantage or confirming that she held some power over him. But his head was full of scraps of notes and the puzzle of a possible clandestine trip by the director across the border and the deadly echo of muffled interiors of jewelry boxes. He wanted to clear it out, or fill it up with something else for a while.

  He left his office, headed down the corridor. Of the smattering of personnel in the hall beyond some were actually in lab coats for once. For his benefit? “Bored?” a pale gaunt man who looked vaguely familiar murmured to the black woman walking beside him as they passed. “Eager to get on with it,” came the reply. “You prefer this place, you really do, don’t you?” Should he be playing it by the book more? Perhaps. He couldn’t deny that the biologist had gotten lodged inside of his head: A faint pressure that made the path leading to the expedition wing narrower, the ceilings lower, the continuous seeking tongue of rough green carpet curling up around him. They were beginning to exist in some transitional space between interrogation and conversation, something for which he could not quite find a name.

  “Good afternoon, Director,” said Hsyu, head rising unexpected from a water fountain to his left so that it was as if a large puppet or art installation had come to life. “Is everything okay?”

  Everything had been fine just a second before. Why would anything be different now? “You just looked very serious.” Perhaps you’re not very serious today; couldn’t that be it? But he didn’t say it, just smiled and continued on down the hall, already leaving the Lilliputian domain of the linguistics subdepartment.

  Every time the biologist spoke something changed in his world, which he found suspicious on some level, resented it for the distraction. But not a flirtation, no, nor even the ordinary emotional bond. He knew with absolute certainty that he would not become overly fixated or obsessional, enter into some downward spiral, if they continued to talk, to share the same space. That had no place in his plans, didn’t fit his profile.

  The expedition wing featured four layers of obvious security, with the debriefing room they usually used perched on the edge of the outer layer—right after you passed through a decontamination zone that scanned you for everything from bacteria to the ghost of that rusty nail that had risen up through your foot on the rocky beach when you were ten. Considering the biologist had stood in a festering empty lot full of weeds, rusted metal, cracked concrete, and dog shit for hours before arriving, this seemed pointless. But still they did it, with an unsmiling and calm efficiency. Beyond that, all was rendered in an almost blinding white that contrasted with the washed-out teal-and-copper textures of the rooms off the corridor. Three more locked doors lay between the rest of the Southern Reach and the “suites,” aka the holding areas. A texture and tone that might once have been futurist but now felt retro-futurist clung to white-and-black furniture that had an abstract modernist quality. This is a version of a chair. This is an approximation of a table, a counter. The “bedeviled” glass partitions, as his dad would have joked, had been etched and frosted into simplistic wilderness scenes, including a row of reeds with an approximation of a marsh hawk hovering above. Like most such efforts, all of this could have come from the set of a low-budget 1970s sci-fi movie. It had none of the fluidity and sense of frozen motion, either, that his father had tried to put into his abstract sculptures.

  In the minimalist foyer and rec rooms that served as preamble to the suites you could also find a novel’s worth of photographs and portraits that had no relationship to reality. The photographs had been carefully chosen to suggest post-mission success, complete with grins and cheers, when they actually depicted pre-mission prep, often for expeditions gone disastrously wrong, or actors from photoshoots. The portraits, a long procession of them ending at the suites, were worse, in Control’s estimation. They depicted all twenty-five “returning” members of the first expedition, the triumphant pioneers who had encountered the “pristine wilderness” that in fact had killed all but Lowry. This was the alternative reality any staff that came into contact with expedition members had to support. This was the fiction that came with its own made-up or tailored stories of bravery and endurance meant to evoke these same qualities in the current expedition. Like some socialist dictatorship’s glorious heroes of the revolution.

 
What did it mean? Nothing. Had the biologist believed it all? Perhaps. The tale wanted to be believed, begged to be believed: a story of good old national can-do pride. Roll up your sleeves and get down to work, and if you try hard enough you’ll come back alive and not a broken-down zombie with a distant gaze and cancer in place of a personality and an intact short-term memory.

  * * *

  He found Ghost Bird in her room, on her cot—or, someone other than him might have reported back, her bed. The place combined the ambiance of a whitewashed barracks, a summer camp, and a failing hotel. The same pale walls—although here you could see painted-over graffiti, the same as in a prison cell. The high ceiling included a skylight, and on the side wall a narrow window, too high for the biologist to peer out of it. The bed had been built into the far wall, and opposite it a TV with DVD player: approved movies only and a couple of approved channels. Nothing too realistic. Nothing that might fill in the amnesia. It was mostly ancient science-fiction and fantasy movies or melodramas. Documentaries and news programs were on the No list. Animal shows could go either way.

  “I thought I would visit you this time, since you don’t feel well,” he said, through his surgical mask. The attendant had already said she had given her permission.

  “You thought you’d crash my sickness party and take advantage of me not being at full strength,” she said. Her eyes were bloodshot and hooded with shadow, her face drawn. She was still wearing the same odd janitorial-military outfit, this time with red socks. Even sick, she looked strong. She must do push-ups and pull-ups at a ferocious rate, was all he could think.

  “No,” he said, spinning an ovoid plastic chair so, before he’d thought through the visual, he could lean against the back, legs awkwardly splayed to either side. Did they not allow real chairs for the same reason airports only had plastic knives? “No, I was concerned. I didn’t want to drag you to the debriefing room.” He wondered if the medication for her sickness had made her fuzzy, if he should come back later. Or not at all. He had become uncomfortably aware of the power imbalance between them in this setting.