Authority

by Jeff VanderMeer

  He had a full day ahead of him still. He had to recover. Next was his scheduled time with the biologist, and then status meetings, and then … he forgot what was next. Stumbled, tripped, leaned on one knee, realized he was in the cafeteria area and its familiar green carpet with the arrow pattern pointing in from the courtyard. Caught by the light streaming from those broad, almost cathedral-like windows. It was sunny outside, but he could already see the angry gray in the middle of white clouds that signaled more afternoon showers.

  In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth.

  A lighthouse. A tower. An island. A lighthouse keeper. A border with a huge shimmering door. A director who might have gone AWOL across that border, through that door. A squashed mosquito on his windshield. Whitby’s anguished face. The swirling light of the border. The director’s phone in his satchel. Demonic videos housed in a memorial catafalque. Details were beginning to overwhelm him. Details were beginning to swallow him up. No chance yet to let them settle or to know which were significant, which trivial. He’d “hit the ground running” as his mother had wanted, and it wasn’t getting him very far. He was in danger of incoming information outstripping his prep work, the knowledge he’d brought with him. He’d exhausted so many memorized files, burned through tactics. And he’d have to dig into the director’s notes in earnest soon, and that would bring with it more mysteries, he was sure.

  The screaming had gone on and on toward the end. The one holding the camera hadn’t seemed human. Wake up, he had pleaded with the members of the first expedition as he watched. Wake up and understand what is happening to you. But they never did. They couldn’t. They were miles away, and he was more than thirty years too late to warn them.

  Control put his hand on the carpet, the green arrows up close composed of threads of a curling intertwined fabric almost like moss. He felt its roughness, how threadbare it had become over the years. Was it the original carpet, from thirty years ago? If so, every major player in those videos, in the files, had strode across it, had crisscrossed it hundreds and hundreds of times. Perhaps even Lowry, holding his camcorder, joking around before their expedition. It was as worn down as the Southern Reach, as the agency moved along its appointed grooves on this fun-house ride that was called Area X.

  People were staring at him, too, as they crisscrossed the cafeteria. He had to get up.

  From the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe.

  * * *

  Control went from bended knee to the interrogation room with the biologist—after a brief interlude in his office. He had needed some form of relief, some way to cleanse. He’d called up the information on Rock Bay, the biologist’s longest assignment before she’d joined the twelfth expedition. From her field notes and sketches, he could tell it was her favorite place. A rich, northern rain forest with a verdant ecosystem. She’d rented a cottage there, and in addition to photographs of the tidal pools she’d studied, he had shots of her living quarters—Central’s routine thorough follow-up. The cot-like bed, the comfortable kitchen, and the black stove in the corner that doubled as a fireplace, the long spout going up into a chimney. There were aspects of the wilderness that appealed to him, that calmed him, but so too did the simple domesticity of the cottage.

  Once seated in the room, Control placed a bottle of water and her files between them. A gambit he was bored with, but nevertheless … His mother had always said the repetition of ritual made pointing to the thing that had been rendered invisible all the more dramatic. Someday soon he might point to the files and make an offer.

  The fluorescent lights pulsed and flickered, something beginning to devolve in them. He didn’t care if Grace watched from behind the glass or not. Ghost Bird looked terrible today, not so much sick but like she had been crying, which was how he felt. There was a darkness around her eyes and a slump to her posture. Any recklessness or amusement had been burned away or gone into hiding.

  Control didn’t know where to start because he didn’t want to start at all. What he wanted to talk about was the video footage, but that was impossible. The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will. He couldn’t tell any human being, ever. If he let it out, contaminated someone else’s mind, he would not forgive himself. A girlfriend who had gleaned some sense of his job had once asked, “Why do you do it?”—meaning why serve such a clandestine purpose, a purpose that could not be shared, could not be revealed. He’d given his standard response, in a portentous manner, to poke fun at himself. To disguise the seriousness. “To know. To go beyond the veil.” Across the border. Even as Control said it, he had known that he was also telling her he didn’t mind leaving her there, alone, on the other side.

  “What would you like to talk about?” he asked Ghost Bird, not because he was out of questions but because he wanted her to take the lead.

  “Nothing,” she said, listless. The word came out at a muttering slant.

  “There must be something.” Pleading. Let there be something, to distract from the carnage in my head.

  “I am not the biologist.”

  That brought Control out of himself, forced him to consider what she meant.

  “You are not the biologist,” he echoed.

  “You want the biologist. I’m not the biologist. Go talk to her, not me.”

  Was this some kind of identity crisis or just metaphorical?

  Either way, he realized that this session had been a mistake.

  “We can try again in the afternoon,” he said.

  “Try what?” she snapped. “Do you think this is therapy? Who for?”

  He started to respond, but in one violent motion she swept his files and water off the table and grabbed his left hand with both of hers and wouldn’t let go. Defiance and fear in her eyes. “What do you want from me? What do you really want?”

  With his free hand, Control waved off the guards plunging into the room. From the corner of his eye, their retreat had a peculiar suddenness, as if they’d been sucked back into the doorway by something invisible and monstrous.

  “Nothing,” he said, to see how she’d respond. Her hand was clammy and warm, not entirely pleasant; something was definitely going on beneath her skin. Had her fever gotten worse?

  “I won’t assist in charting my own pathology,” she hissed, breathing hard, shouting: “I am not the biologist!”

  He pulled himself loose, pushed away from the table, stood, and watched as she fell back into her seat. She stared down at the table, wouldn’t look up at him. He hated to see her distress, hated worse that he seemed to have caused it.

  “Whoever you are, we’ll pick this up later,” he said.

  “Humoring me,” she muttered, arms folded.

  But by the time he’d picked up the bottle of water and his scattered files and made it to the door, something had changed in her again.

  Her voice trembled on the cusp of some new emotion. “There was a mating pair of wood storks in the holding pond out back when I left. Are they still there?”

  It took a moment to realize she meant when she’d left on the expedition. Another moment to realize that this was almost an apology.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll find out.”

  What had happened to her out there? What had happened to him in here?

  The last fragment of video remained in its own category: “Unassigned.” Everyone was dead by then, except for an injured Lowry, already halfway back to the border.

  Yet for a good twenty seconds the camera flew above the glimmering marsh reeds, the deep blue lakes, the ragged white cusp of the sea, toward the lighthouse.

  Dipped and rose, fell again and soared again.

  With what seemed like a horrifying enthusiasm.

  An all-consuming joy.

  017: PERSPECTIVE

 
; Steps had begun to go missing. Steps had begun to occur out of step. Lunch followed a status meeting that, the moment it was done, Control barely remembered no matter how hard he tried. He was here to solve a puzzle in some ways, but he felt as if it were beginning to solve him instead.

  Control had talked for a while, he knew that, about how he wanted to know more about the lighthouse and its relationship to the topographical anomaly. After which Hsyu said something about the patterns in the lighthouse keeper’s sermon, while the sole member of the props department, a hunched-over elderly man named Darcy with a crinkly tinfoil voice, added commentary throughout her talk, referring to the “crucial role, now and in the future, of the historical accuracy division.”

  Trees framed the campfire, the members of the expedition around the campfire. Something so large you couldn’t see its outline, crawling or lumbering through the background, obscenely threaded between the trees and the campfire. He didn’t like to think about what could be so huge and yet so lithe as to thread like that, to conjure up the idea of a fluid wall of ribbony flesh.

  Perhaps he could have continued to nod and ask questions, but he had become more and more repulsed by the way Hsyu’s assistant, Amy-something, chewed on her lip. Slowly. Methodically. Without thought. As she scribbled notes or whispered some piece of information in Hsyu’s ear. The off-white of her upper left cuspid and incisors would appear, the pink gum exposed as the upper lip receded, and then with almost rhythmic precision, she would nip and pincer, nip and pincer, the left side of her lower lip, which over time became somewhat redder than her lipstick.

  Something had brushed through or interceded across the screen for a moment in the background, while in the middle a man with a beard squatted—not Lowry but a man named O’Connell. At first, Control had thought O’Connell was mumbling, was saying something in a language he didn’t understand. And, trying to find logic, trying to grasp, Control had almost buzzed Grace right then to tell her about his discovery. But by another few frames, Control could tell that the man was actually chewing on his lip, and continued chewing until the blood came, the whole time resolutely staring into the camera because there was, Control slowly realized, no other place safe enough to look. O’Connell was speaking as he chewed, but the words weren’t anything unique now that Control had read the wall. It was the most primal and thus most banal message imaginable.

  * * *

  Predictable lunch to follow, in the cafeteria. Stabilizing lunch, he’d thought, but lunch repeated too many times became a meaningless word that morphed into lunge that became lunged that became a leaping white rabbit that became the biologist at the depressing table that became an expedition around a campfire, unaware of what they were about to endure.

  Control followed a version of Whitby he was both wary of and concerned about, and who muddled his way through the tables, with Cheney, Hsyu, and Grace trailing behind him. Whitby hadn’t been in the status meeting, but Grace had seen him ducking into a side corridor as they’d walked downstairs and roped him into their lunch. Then it had just been a case of everyone deferring to Whitby in his natural habitat. Whitby couldn’t like the cafeteria for the food. It had to be the open-air quality of the space, the clear lines of sight. Perhaps it was simply that you could escape in any direction.

  Whitby led them to a round faux-wooden table with low plastic seats—all of it jammed up against the corner farthest from the courtyard, which abutted stairs that led to the largely empty space known as the third level that they had just vacated, really a glorified landing with a few conference rooms. Control realized Whitby had chosen the table so he could cram his slight frame into the semicircle closest to the wall—a wary if improbable gunslinger with his back to the stairs, looking out across the cafeteria to the courtyard and the fuzzy green of a swamp dissolving in humid bubbles of condensation against the glass.

  Control sat facing Grace, with Whitby and Hsyu flanking Grace to right and left. Cheney plopped into the seat next to Control, opposite Whitby. Control began to suspect some of them weren’t there by chance, or voluntarily, the way Grace seemed to be commandeering the space. The huffing X of Cheney’s face leaned in, solicitous as he said, “I’ll hold down the fort while you get your food and go after.”

  “Just get me a pear or an apple and some water, and I’ll stay here instead,” Control said. He felt vaguely nauseated.

  Cheney nodded, withdrew his thick hands from the table with a slap, and left along with the others, while Control contemplated the large framed photo hanging on the wall. Old and dusty, it showed the core of the Southern Reach team at the time. Control recognized some faces from his various briefings, zeroing in on Lowry, come back for a visit from Central, still looking haggard. Whitby was there, too, grinning near the center. The photo suggested that at one time Whitby had been inquisitive, quick, optimistic—perhaps even impishly proactive. The missing director was just a hulking shadow off at the left edge. She loomed, committed to neither a smile nor a frown.

  At that time, she would have been a relatively new hire, an apprentice to the staff psychologist. Grace would have joined about five years later. It could not have been easy for either of them to make their way up the hierarchy and hold on to their power. That had taken toughness and perseverance. Perhaps too much. But at least they had both missed the crazier manifestations of the early days, of which the hypnosis was the only surviving remnant. Cryptozoologists, an almost séance, the bringing in of psychics, given the bare facts and asked to produce … what? Information? No information could be extracted from their divinations.

  The others returned from the buffet, Cheney with a pear on a plate and the asked-for water. Control reflected that if something terrible happened later that day and forensics tried to reconstruct events from the contents of their stomachs, Cheney would look like a fussy bird, Whitby like a pig, Hsyu a health nut, and Grace a mere nibbler. She sat back in her seat, glaring at him now, with her two packets of crackers and coffee arranged in front of her as if she planned to use it as evidence against him. He braced himself, trying to clear his head with a sip of water.

  “Status meetings every Thursday or every other Thursday?” he asked, just to test the waters and make conversation. He clamped down on an automatic impulse to use the question to begin a sly exploration of department morale.

  But Grace didn’t want to make conversation.

  “Do you want to hear a story,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. She looked as if she had made up her mind about something.

  “Sure,” Control said. “Why not?” While Cheney fidgeted next to him, and Whitby and Hsyu simultaneously seemed to flatten and become smaller, looking away from Grace, as if she’d become a repelling magnet.

  Her stare bore down on him and he lost the urge to gnaw on his pear. “It concerns a domestic terrorism operative.” Here it comes, there it goes.

  “How interesting,” Control said. “I was in domestic terrorism for a while.”

  Continuing on as if Control hadn’t said a word: “The story is about a blown field assignment, this operative’s third out of training. Not his first or his second, but his third, so no real excuses. What was his job? He was to observe and report on separatist militia members on the northwest coast—based in the mountains but coming down into two key port cities to recruit.” Central had believed that the radical cells in this militia had the will and resources to disrupt shipping, blow up a building, many things. “No coherent political views or vision. Just ignorant white men mostly, college age but not in college. A few radicalized women, and then the usual others unaware of what their ignorant men were up to. None of them as stupid as the operative.”

  Control sat very still. He began to feel as if his face were cracking. He was getting warmer and warmer, a tingling flame spreading slowly throughout his body. Was she trying to tear him down, stone by stone? In front of the few people at the Southern Reach with whom he already had some kind of rapport?

  Cheney had gotten in some huffing s
ounds to express his disapproval of where this might be going. Whitby looked as if a stranger walking toward him from very far away was trying to give him the details of an interesting conversation, but he wasn’t quite close enough to hear about it yet—so sorry, not his fault.

  “Sounds familiar,” Control said, because it did, and he even knew what came next.

  “The operative infiltrates the group, or the edges of the group,” Grace said. “He gets to know some of the friends of the people at the core of it.”

  Hsyu, frowning, focused on something of interest on the carpet as she got up with her tray, managed a cheerful if abrupt goodbye, and left the table.

  “Not fair, Grace, you know that,” Cheney whispered, leaning forward, as if somehow he could direct his words solely to her. “An ambush.” But by Control’s own reckoning, it was fair. Very fair. Given that they hadn’t agreed to ground rules ahead of time.

  “This operative starts following the friends and, eventually, they lead him to a bar. The girlfriend of the second-in-command likes to have a drink at this bar. She is on the list; he has memorized her photograph. But instead of just observing her and reporting back, this clever, clever operative ignores his orders and starts to talk to her, there in the bar—”

  “Do you want me to tell the rest of the story?” Control interrupted. Because he could. He could tell it—wanted to tell it, had a fierce desire to tell it—and felt a perverse gratitude toward Grace, because this was such a human problem, such a banal, human problem compared to all the rest.

  “Grace…” Cheney, imploring.

  But Grace waved them both off, faced Whitby so that Whitby had no choice but to look at her. “Not only does he have a conversation with this woman, Whitby”—Whitby as startled by the complicity of his name as if she had put her arm around him—“but he seduces her, telling himself that he is doing it to help the cause. Because he is an arrogant man. Because he is too far off his leash.” Mother had typified that as hearsay, as she had typified a lot of things, but in this case she had been right.