Authority

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Sounds of creaking and shuffling before the Voice debuted. No doubt downstairs in the study of his/her mansion. Or in the basement of a flophouse. Or the barn of a farm, undercover with the chickens.

  “Is your house in order?” the Voice asked. A sluggish quality to the Voice, as if the megalodon had been roused from slumber in icy waters. The Voice’s tone felt like an insult; it made Control even colder, began to leach away the trepidation in favor of a form of disgust shot through with stubbornness.

  Deep breath. Then, preempting anything the Voice might say, Control launched into a shouted string of obscenities of the most vile kind, contorting his throat, hurting it. After a surprised pause, the Voice shouted “Enough!” then muttered something long and quivery and curling. Control lost the thread. The bullhorn went off. Control shook himself out of it, read the words on the orange sheet of paper. Checked off the first line. Launched again into a string of obscenities. “Enough!” Again, persistent, stubborn, the Voice muttered something, this time moist and short and darting. Control floated and floated and forgot. The bullhorn went off. Control saw the words on the orange sheet of paper. Checked off the second line. Obscenities. Mutters. Floating. Bullhorn ripping through. Control saw the words on the orange sheet of paper. Check mark. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Fifth time. Sixth time. The seventh time the script changed. He fed back to the Voice all the muttering glottal, moist, soft words he’d gleaned from the director’s cheat sheet. Heard the wet gasp and shriek of hitting the target, then an awkward lunge of words toward him, but feeble, disconnected, unintelligible.

  That had left a scar. He doubted his incantation had had the full effect, but the point was that the Voice knew and had had a very unpleasant experience.

  The bullhorn went off. Control saw the words on the orange sheet of paper. He was done. The Voice was done. They’d have to get another handler, one not quite so manipulative.

  “Here’s a joke for you,” Control said. “What’s the difference between a magician and a spy?” Then he hung up.

  * * *

  He had reviewed the surveillance of his Wednesday and Thursday conversations with the Voice on Friday night after a vigorous jog. He’d been suspicious, hadn’t trusted the way he seemed to fade in and out during those conversations, or how the Voice had infiltrated his thoughts. With Chorizo on his lap, and the feed piped in from his phone to the television, Control had seen the Voice execute hypnotic commands, seen himself become unfocused, head floating a bit on his neck, eyelids fluttering, while the Voice, never dropping the metallic, guttural disguise, gave him orders and suggestions. The Voice told him not to worry about Whitby, to put his concern aside, minimize it, because “Whitby’s never mattered.” But then later backtracked and expressed interest in him finding Whitby’s strange room. Had he been drawn to that hidey-hole because of some subliminal intel? A reference to Grace, along with an order to go back to her office, then some dithering about “too risky” when the Voice learned about the new locks. A lot of exasperation about the director’s notes and the slow progress in sorting through them. That this was mostly due to the director’s disorganized process made him wonder if that had been the point of the chaos. Had the Voice even told Control to go by “Control” at the agency? Resisted the madness of such thoughts.

  The Voice, while Control languished under hypnosis, had a sharpness and focus not as present otherwise, and a kind of casual perversity, telling Control s/he wanted a joke to end their next phone call, “one with a punch line.” As far as he could tell, he also had been serving as a living tape recorder for the Voice. The Voice had pulled out of Control verbatim conversations, which explained why he had been so late getting home Wednesday even though the conversation had seemed short.

  He’d been on an expedition sent into the Southern Reach and just like the expeditions into Area X, not told the truth. He had been right to feel that he was getting information coming in with an extra stutter-step. What else had he done that he might never know?

  So he’d written on the neon orange sheet that he could not possibly miss:

  CONTROL, YOU ARE BEING SUBJECTED TO HYPNOTIC SUGGESTION BY THE VOICE

  ___ Check this line and scream obscenities. Move down one line.

  ___ Check this line and scream obscenities. Move down one line.

  Rinse, repeat, brought out of it by the bullhorn, pulled back into it. Until, finally, he reached the end: “Check this line and repeat these phrases”—all of the phrases he’d found in the director’s desk. Shout them, actually.

  Are you excited, too?… The possibility of significant variation … Paralysis is not a cogent analysis … Consolidation of authority … There’s no reward in the risk … Floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating …

  Overload the system as the scientists with the white rabbits had been unable to. Push the Voice into some kind of collapse.

  He had been betrayed, would not now have a moment when he would not be looking over his shoulder. Saw the biologist by the holding pond, the two of them looking at the shed. Leading her back into the Southern Reach, as it swallowed them. His mother leading him by the hand up the path to the summer cottage, Grandpa waiting for them, an enigmatic smile making a mystery of his face.

  * * *

  The cure for his discoveries, for not having to think about them, had been a kind of self-annihilation as he trekked undaunted from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning, through the small but plump underbelly of Hedley—which as far as he could tell had forgotten there was a Southern Reach. He recalled a pool hall—the crack of ball against ball, the thud and thack, the comfort of the felt-lined pockets, the darkness, the smell of chalk and cigarettes. Hitting the cue ball with the eight ball as a joke, and a handprint slapped in chalk on the ass of a woman’s jeans—or as he thought of it later, although she’d placed it there, a hand too far. He had withdrawn soon after, not as interested as he’d thought in the banality of a grainy morning sun seen through the windows of a cheap motel, an imprint of a body on the sheets, a used condom in the wastebasket. These were visions for others, at least in that moment—because it just seemed like too much work. He’d still be in the same place. He’d still be hearing Lowry from the videos. He’d still be seeing, in slow motion no less, Grace offering him the contents of her box of complaints. His mind would still be whirring as it contracted and expanded, grappling with Area X.

  He took in a late-night movie at a run-down theater with gum and soaked-in cola on the stained blue carpet. He was the only one there. Against the odds, the theater had survived from his teenage years to now. The movie was terrible, the kind of science-fiction film where the plot holes almost seemed like alien interference imposed from some higher dimension. But the quiet coolness of the place soothed his jangled nerves. Until it was time to get up again and lurch his way to the next bar, his path taking him along the waterfront in an epic pub crawl. Was that Cheney knocking, asking if he was okay?

  He had three shots of cheap whiskey in a place so run down it didn’t have a name. He had a gulp of some local moonshine at a party not far from the pier where ages ago he’d looked out across the river. Told himself over and over that the hypnosis was a small thing, not a large thing, and that it meant nothing. Nothing at all. Too big a deal. Too little. He thought about calling his mother. Couldn’t. Wanted to call his father. Impossible.

  He went into another bar already drunk, found himself confronted by a ghost. Earlier that night he had glimpsed hints of them—in the curl of a lip that sparked a memory, a flicker of an eyelid, the way someone’s hand lingered on a tabletop. Those shoes. That dress. But when you encountered a real ghost—the Thing Entire—it was a shock … it took your breath. Not away. It didn’t take your breath away—your breath wasn’t going anywhere. Your breath was still in you, locked up, not of use to you. Took your pulse only to mutter dire predictions for the future. So when you came back into the moment, you doubted at first who you were, because the Ghost Entire trappe
d Control somewhere between the person he had been and the person he had become. And yet it was still just a wraith. Just a woman he had known in high school. Intensely. For the first time. Close enough that Control felt somehow like he was being disrespectful to the biologist, that the overlay of the ghost was disrupting his impression of Ghost Bird. Even if that was ridiculous. And all of it taking him farther and farther from the Southern Reach.

  Trying to escape the residue of that, at another point on the carousel compass of his adventures—utterly shitfaced and giddy—he had spun onto a stool in a biker bar, winding up next to the assistant director. The whole place was still raucous and ill-behaved at two in the morning. It stank of piss, as thick as if cats had been marking their territory. Control gave her a leaky lantern of a grin, to go with an emphatic nod. She gave him a look of blank neutrality.

  “The file is empty. There’s nothing on her.” On who? Who was he talking about? “If you could put me in your own special hell, it’d be working at the old S.R. anyway—for a lifetime, right?”

  Halfway through, he realized that it couldn’t really be Grace and that the words might not even be coming out of his mouth.

  She unnerved him with the candor of her unblinking gaze.

  “You don’t have to look like that,” he added. Must’ve said it this time.

  “Like what?” she said, her head turned a little to the side. “Like a man’s fucked up outta his mind and in my bar? Go to hell.”

  He’d reared back on his stool at that suggestion, trying to assemble his wits like pieces on a game board. A weight on his chest, in the dark and the light. He’d thought he was smarter. He’d thought she’d gotten mired in old ways of thinking. But it turned out new ways of thinking didn’t help, either. Time for another drink, somewhere else. A kind of oblivion. Then regroup.

  Control met her doubtful stare as he left with a bleary smile. He was making progress. She receded from him, pushed back by a waft of wind from the bar door opening and the judgmental stare of the streetlamps.

  * * *

  Control rubbed his face, didn’t like the feel of stubble. He tried to wipe the fuzziness from his mind, the sourness from his tongue, the soreness from his joints. He was convinced the Voice had said to him, at one point, “Is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out? I can help you get it out.” Easy, if you’d put it there in the first place.

  The woman in the uniform was probably a drug addict and definitely homeless or a squatter. You used amateurs for surveillance when the target was “in the family,” when you wanted to use the natural landscape—the natural terroir—to its best advantage or when your faction was dead broke or incompetent. It occurred to him that she didn’t notice him because she’d been paid to pretend not to notice him.

  The skateboarder with the dog had clearly staked out the corner as his territory, sharing it with the fat drunk man. There was something about both of them that seemed more natural, perhaps because an element of theater—smashing out dog food on the curb—didn’t fit with the idea of not drawing attention. The other skateboarder had left and come back several times, but Control hadn’t seen him pass drugs or money or food to the other two. Maybe he was slumming it for a day, or served as a lookout for some larger con, or he was Mother’s watcher, part of the tableau but not. Or perhaps there was nothing going on except three people who knew one another and helped one another out, and just happened to be down on their luck.

  The thing about staying in one place for so long was that you began to get a sense, while watching, of being watched, so it didn’t startle him when the cell phone rang. It was the call he’d been expecting.

  “I understand you’ve been behaving badly,” she said.

  “Hello to you, too, Mother.”

  “Are you rough right now? You sound rough.”

  “I’m fine. I have complete control of my faculties.”

  “Then why do you seem to have lost your mind.” This said in the brisk, professional tone she used to disguise emotional tells. A sense that she was as “on” with him as with any other agent she ran.

  “I’ve already thrown the phone away, Mother. So don’t think about reinstating the Voice.” If she had called yesterday, he would have been yelling at her by now.

  “We can always get you another one.”

  “Quick question, Ma.” She hated ma or mom, barely tolerated mother, would have preferred the severe Severance even though he was her precious only child. That he knew of. “If you were to send someone on an expedition into somewhere dangerous—let’s say, into the Southern Reach—how would you keep them calm and on track? What kinds of tools might you use?”

  “The usual things, really, John. Although I’m not sure I like your tone.”

  “The usual things? Like hypnosis, maybe, backed up by conditioning beforehand at Central.” He was keeping his voice low, much as he wanted to lash out. He liked the coffee shop counter. He didn’t want to be asked to leave.

  A pause. “It might have come into play, yes, but only with strict rules and safeguards—and only in the subject’s absolute best interests.”

  “The subject might have preferred to have had the choice. The subject might’ve preferred not to be a drone.” The subject might prefer to know that his hopes and desires and impulses were all definitely his own hopes, desires, impulses.

  “The subject might not have had the intel or perspective to be involved in that decision. The subject might have needed an inoculation, a vaccine.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against any number of things. Although at the first sign of something serious happening, we would pull you out and send a team in.”

  “Like what? What would you consider serious?”

  “Whatever might happen.”

  Infuriatingly opaque, as always. Making decisions for him, as always. He was channeling his father’s irritation now as much as his own, the specters of so many arguments at the dinner table or in the living room. He decided to take the conversation onto the street after all, stood in the mouth of the alley just to the left of the coffee shop. Not many people were out walking around—most of them were probably still in church, or scoring drugs.

  “Jack used to say that if you don’t give an operative all the information they need, you might as well cut your own leg off,” he said. “Your operation is screwed.”

  “But your operation isn’t screwed, John,” she said, with some force. “You’re still there. You’re still in touch with us. Me. We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Good point, except I don’t think that ‘we’ means Central. I think you mean some faction within Central, and not an effective one. Your Voice made a mess trying to take the assistant director out of the mix. Give her another week and I’ll be Grace’s administrative assistant.” Or was the point to waste a lot of Grace’s time and attention?

  “There are no factions, just Central. The Voice is under a lot of stress, John. Even more now. We all are.”

  “The hell there aren’t factions.” Now he was Jack, hard to throw off topic. “The hell there aren’t.” “The hell there isn’t.” “The hell you say.”

  “You won’t believe me, John, but I’ve done you a favor placing you at the Southern Reach.”

  Everyone had forgotten the definition of favor. First Whitby, then Grace, now his mother. He didn’t trust himself to respond, so he didn’t.

  “A lot of people would’ve killed for that position,” she said.

  He had no answer for that, either. While they’d been talking, the woman had disappeared, and the storefront was deserted. Back in the day the liquor store had been a department store. Long before Hedley was built, there had been an indigenous settlement here, along the river—something his father had told him—and the remains of that, too, lay beneath the facade of the liquor store.

  Down below the store, too, a labyrinth of limestone cradling the aquifer, narrow caves and blind albino crawfish and luminescent freshwater fish. Sur
rounded by the crushed remains of so many creatures, loamed into the soil, pushed down by the foundations of the buildings. Would that be the biologist’s understanding of the street—what she would see? Perhaps she would see, too, one possible future of that space, the liquor store crumbling under an onslaught of vines and weather damage, becoming akin to the sunken, moss-covered hills near Area X. A loss she might not mourn. Or would she?

  “Are you there, John?”

  Where else would he be?

  * * *

  For a long time now, Control had suspected his mother had taken someone else under her wing as a protégé—it seemed almost inevitable. Someone sculpted, trained, and deployed to correct the kinds of mistakes made by Control. The thought reoccurred whenever he was feeling particularly insecure or vulnerable, or sometimes just because it could be a useful mental exercise. Now he was trying to visualize the perfectly groomed protégé walking in and taking over the Southern Reach from him. What would this person have done differently? What would this person do right now?

  While his mother continued to talk, plunging ahead with what seemed like a lie.

  “But I was mostly calling for an update, to see if you think you’re making progress”—this his mother’s attempt to subvert his silence with an apology. Slight emphasis on progress.

  “You know exactly how it’s going.” The Voice would have told her everything It knew up to the point he had derailed It.

  “True, but I haven’t heard your side.”

  “My side? My side is that I’ve been dropped into a pit of snakes with a blindfold on and my hands tied behind my back.”

  “That’s just a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” said the streak of light.