Authority

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Even now she hesitated, didn’t want to divulge a secret classified in a country that might not exist in a week. Then said in a flat voice, “The contamination at the sites from which we extracted the surveyor and the anthropologist has broken through quarantine and continued to grow, despite our best efforts.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow.

  “What kind of contamination?” Although he thought he knew.

  “The kind that cleanses everything. The kind you can’t see until it’s too late.”

  “There’s nothing you can do?”

  A rasping laugh escaped her, like she was trying to cough something up. “What are we going to do, John? Are we going to combat it by starting a mining operation there? Pollute those places to hell and back? Put traces of heavy metals in the water supply?”

  He just stared at her, unbelieving. “Why the fuck did you station me at the Southern Reach if you knew this could happen?”

  “I wanted you close to it. I wanted you to know, because that protects you.”

  “That protects me? Against the end of the world?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it does. And we needed fresh eyes,” she said, leaning beside him against the kitchen counter. He always forgot how slight she was, how thin. “I needed your fresh eyes. I couldn’t know that things would change this fast.”

  “But you had a clue it might.”

  She kept letting drop bits of information. Was he meant to pick them up, like the gun under the seat, just because she was unraveling?

  “Yes, I had a clue, John. It’s why we sent you. Why a few of us thought we needed to do something.”

  “Like Lowry.”

  “Yes, like Lowry.” Lowry, hiding back at Central, unable to face what had happened, as if the videos were now spilling into real life.

  “You let him hypnotize me. You let them condition me.” Unable to suppress his resentment at that, even now. He might never know the extent of it.

  “I’m sorry, but that was the trade-off, John,” she said, resolute, sticking to her story. “That was the trade-off. I got the person I want for the job, Lowry got some kind of … control. And you got protection, in a way.”

  Derisive, thinking he knew the answer: “How many others are there at Central, Mother? In this faction?”

  “Mostly just us, John—Lowry and me—but Lowry has allies, many,” she said in a small voice.

  Just them. A cabal of two against a cabal of one, the director. And none of them seeming to have it right. And now all of it in ruins.

  “What else?” Pushing to punish her, because he didn’t want to think about the idea of localized Area Xs.

  A bitter laugh. “We back-checked the extraction locations of the members of the last eleventh expedition to see if they exhibit a similar effect. We found nothing. So now we think they probably had a different purpose. And that purpose was to contaminate the Southern Reach itself. We had clues before. We just didn’t interpret them the right way, couldn’t agree on what it all meant. We just needed a little more time, a little more data.” Bodies that had decomposed “a little faster” as Grace had put it, when the director had ordered them exhumed.

  There was in his mother’s fragmentation the admission that Central’s was a soul-crushing failure. That they had been unable to conceive of a scenario in which Area X was smarter, more insidious, more resourceful.

  None of this could obliterate the look on Grace’s face, in the rain, as the director approached—the elation, the vindication, the abstract idea, viscerally expressed across her features, that sacrifice, that loyalty, that diligence would now be rewarded. As if the physical manifestation of a friend and colleague long thought dead could erase the recent past. The director, followed by that unnatural silence. Were her eyes closed, or did she not have eyes anymore? The emerald dust splashed off her into the air, onto the ground, with each step. This person who should not have been there, this shell of a soul of whom he had uncovered only fragments.

  * * *

  His mother started over, and he let her because he had no choice, needed time to acclimate, to adjust. “Imagine a situation, John, in which you are trying to contain something dangerous. But you suspect that containment is a losing game. That what you want to contain is escaping slowly, inexorably. That what seems impermeable is, in fact, over time becoming very permeable. That the divide is more perforated than unperforated. And that whatever this thing is seems to want to destroy you but has no leader to negotiate with, no stated goals of any kind.” It was almost a speech he could imagine the director giving.

  “You mean the Southern Reach, the place you sent me into. With the wrong tools.”

  “I mean that the group I’ve been part of has believed for a while now that the Southern Reach might be compromised, but the majority have believed, until today, that this wasn’t just wrong but laughably ridiculous.”

  “How did you get involved?”

  “Because of you, John. Long ago. Because of needing an assignment to a place near where you and your father lived.” Volunteered: “It was a side project. Something to watch, to keep an eye on. That became the main course.”

  “But why did it have to be me?”

  “I told you.” Pleading for him to understand: “I know you, John. I know who you are. I’d know if you … changed.”

  “Like the biologist changed.” Burning now, that she’d put him in harm’s way without telling him, without giving him the choice. Except, he’d had a choice: He could have stayed where he was, continued to believe he lived beyond the border when that was a lie.

  “Something like that.”

  “Or just changed as in became more cynical, jaded, paranoid, or burned-out.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Why should I?”

  “I did the best I could.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Growing up, I mean, John. I did the best I could, considering. But you’re still angry. Even now, you’re still angry. It’s too much. It’s too much.” Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn’t that what people did, if you were still alive?

  He put his coffee down. There was a knot in his shoulders that might never come out. “I’m not thinking about that. That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters most of all now,” she said, “because I may never see you again.” Her voice, for the only time he could remember, breaking up.

  The weight of that hit him hard, and he knew it was true, and he felt for a moment as if he were falling. The enormity, the impossibility of it, was too much. How it had come to this point, he barely knew, even though he had been there every step of the way.

  He brought her close, held her, as she whispered in his ear: “I took my eye off things. I thought the director agreed with us. I thought I could handle Lowry. I thought we would work through it. I thought we had more time.” That the problem was smaller. That somehow it was containable. That somehow she wouldn’t be hurting him.

  His mother. His handler. But after a moment he had to let her go. No way to fully cross that divide, to heal everything that needed to be healed. Not now.

  She told him one more thing, then, delivered to him like a penance.

  “John, you should know that the biologist escaped our custody over the weekend. She’s been AWOL for the past three days.”

  An elation, a surge of an unwarranted, selfish euphoria that came in part from having banished her from his thoughts as the nightmare at the Southern Reach played out—and now his reward, that she had, in a way, been returned to him.

  * * *

  All of the rest of the answers to his questions rose up later, long after his mother had left in his car, after he had packed, reluctantly abandoned the cat, took her car, as she had suggested. But he stopped on a quiet
street a few blocks away and hot-wired another car because he didn’t trust Central. Soon he was outside of Hedley, in the middle of nowhere. He felt the absence of his father terribly as he passed where they had lived. Because his father might have been a comfort now. Because now it didn’t matter what secrets he told or didn’t tell.

  At the airport about ninety miles away, in a city big enough to have international connections, he left his vehicle in the parking lot along with his guns and booked two tickets. One was to Honduras, with a layover on the west coast. The other had two layovers and wound up about two hundred miles from the coast. The second he bought under an alias. He checked in for Honduras, then sat in the airport bar, nursing a whiskey, waiting for the puddle jumper. Apocalyptic visions of what Area X would absorb if it moved forward came to him. Buildings, roads, lakes, valleys, airports. Everything. He scanned the closed-caption televisions for any news, trying to outthink the people from Central who might be on her trail, might already have picked up her trail. If he was the biologist, he would have train-hopped to start, which meant he might easily catch up with her. From where she’d escaped, she had just as far to travel as he did.

  A blond woman at the bar asked him what he did and he said, recklessly, without thought, “A marine biologist.” “Oh, with the government.” “No, freelance,” which sounded absurd after he’d said it. Then spent long minutes putting distance between himself and the subject. Because he wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.

  “How’d she escape?” he’d asked his mother.

  “Let’s just say she’s stronger than she looks, and very resourceful.” Had his mother given her the resources? The time? The opportunity? He hadn’t wanted to ask. “Central suspects she will return to the empty lot because of the lack of contamination at that site.”

  But he knew that wasn’t where she would go.

  “Is that what you think?” his mother asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  No, she would go north, she would go to the wilderness above the town of Rock Bay, even if she didn’t believe she was the biologist. She would go somewhere personal to her. Because she felt the urge, not because Area X wanted her to. If she had been right, if she’d been their true soldier, she would have been as mind-wiped as the others.

  At least, that’s what he chose to believe. To have a reason for his packing, and a place to think of as a sanctuary. Or a hiding place.

  * * *

  They announced boarding for his flight. He was headed west, yes, but he’d step out at the first connecting flight, rent a car from there, take that rental to another, then perhaps steal a car, always the arc going south, south, suggesting a slow descent. But then he’d go dark completely and head north.

  He’d actually pulled at Grace to get her away, had taken her hand and pulled her off-balance, would have dragged her if he’d been able. Shouted at her. Given her all the reasons, the primal, visceral reasons. But Grace couldn’t see any of it, wrenched away from him with a stare that made him give up. Because it was self-aware. Because she was going to see it through to the end, and he couldn’t do that. Because he really wasn’t the director. So he let Grace fade away into the rain as the director came up toward the door and he retreated in mindless panic to the cafeteria and then out to his car. And he didn’t feel guilty about any of it.

  A beep from his phone told him that, coming in over some unimaginable distance, he had received the last, useless videos from the Southern Reach, from the chicken and the goat.

  The footage told him nothing, gave him no closure, no sense of what might have happened to Grace. The quality was grainy, indistinct. Each clip was about six seconds in duration and each cut off at the same time. In the first, his chair sat empty until the very end, when something blurred appeared to sit down. It might have been the director but the outline was ill-defined. The other video showed a slumped Whitby in the chair opposite, doing something peculiar with his hands that made his fingers look like soft coral swaying in a sea current. A wordless droning in the background. Was Whitby now in the world of the first expedition? And if so, did he know it?

  Control watched both video clips twice, thrice, and then deleted them. This act did not delete the subjects, but it made him more distant from them, and that would have to be good enough.

  * * *

  The usual influx of heat and then frigid cold on the airplane. The grappling with frayed seat belts. As they rose, Control kept waiting for something to swat the plane out of the sky, wondered if Central would be there to greet him when he touched down, or something odder still. He wondered why the stewardesses were looking at him funny by mid-flight, and realized he’d been responding to their rote kindness with the intensity of someone who has never experienced courtesy, or never expects to experience it again.

  The couple in the seats next to him were of the annoying yet ordinary type who said almost everything for their audience, or to affirm their own couple-hood. Yet even them he wanted to warn, in a sudden, unexpected outpouring of raw and almost uncontainable emotion. To somehow articulate what was happening, what was going to happen, without sounding crazy, without scaring them or him. But, ultimately, he popped another calm pill and leaned back in his seat and tried to banish the world.

  “How do I know that going after the biologist isn’t an idea you’ve put in my head?”

  “The biologist was the director’s weapon, I believe. You said in your reports she doesn’t act like the others. Whatever she knows, she represents a kind of chance. Some kind of chance.” Control hadn’t shared with his mother the full experience of his last moments at the Southern Reach. Not everything he had seen, or that whatever the director was now or wherever she’d grown up, she was less herself than at any point in the past. That whatever plan she’d had was probably irrelevant.

  “And you are my weapon, John. You’re the one I chose to know everything.”

  The comfort of the scratched metal armrests with the fat, torn padding on top. The compartmentalized scoops of sky captured by the oval windows. The captain’s unnecessary progress reports, interspersed with the stupid but comforting jokes over the intercom. He wondered where the Voice was, if Lowry was having flashbacks or freaking out in a more general way. Lowry, his buddy. Lowry, the pathetic megalodon. This is your last chance, Control. But it wasn’t. It was, instead, an immolation. If he was remembered at all, it would be as the harbinger of disaster.

  He ordered a whiskey with ice, to see it gleam, to keep the ice in his mouth and experience the smooth cold with the hint of bite. It helped him fall into a lull, a trough of self-induced tiredness, trying to slow the wheels of his mind. Trying to wreck those wheels.

  “What will Central do now?” he’d asked his mother.

  “They’ll come after you because of your association with me.” Would have come after him anyway, for not reporting in and for going after the biologist.

  “What else will they do?”

  “Try to send in a thirteenth expedition, if a door still exists.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’ll keep making the case for the course I think is right,” she said, which she had to know was a huge risk. Did that mean she’d go back, or keep some distance from Central until the situation stabilized? Because Control knew that she would keep fighting until the world disappeared around her. Or Central got rid of her. Or Lowry used her as a scapegoat. Did she think Central wouldn’t try to blame the messenger? He could have asked why she didn’t just liquidate her savings and head for the most remote place possible … and wait. But if he had, she would have asked him the same thing.

  At the end of the flight, a woman in the aisle seat opposite told him and his two seatmates to open their window for landing. “You gotta open the window for landing. You gotta open it. For landing.”

  Or what? Or what? He just ignored her, did not pass the message on, closed his eyes.

  When he opened them, the plane had landed. No one wa
ited for him as he disembarked. No one called out his name. He rented a car without incident.

  It was as if a different person put the key in the ignition and drove away from everything that was familiar. There was no going back now. There was no going forward, either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill of excitement, too. You couldn’t feel dead this way, or as if you were just waiting for the next thing to happen to you.

  Rock Bay. The end of the world. If she wasn’t there, it was a better place than most to wait for whatever happened next.

  * * *

  Dusk of the next day. In a crappy motel on the coast with the word Beach in its name, Control obsessively stripped and cleaned his Glock, bought off a dealer using a fake name not thirty minutes after he’d cleared the airport, in the back lot of a car dealership. Then reassembled it. Having to focus on a repetitive and detailed task kept his mind off the void looming outside.

  The television was on, but nothing made sense. The television, except for the vaguest of footnotes about a possible problem at the “Southern Reach environmental recovery site,” did not tell the truth about what was going on. But it hadn’t made sense for a very long time, even if no one knew that, and he knew his contempt would mirror that of the biologist, if she had been sitting where he was sitting. And the light from the curtains was just a stray truck barreling by in the dark. And the smell was of rot, but he thought perhaps he’d brought that with him. Even though he was far away from it now, the invisible border was close—the checkpoints, the swirling light of the door. The way that light seemed almost beveled, almost formed an image in that space between the curtains, and then fell away again into nothing.

  On the bed: Whitby’s terroir manuscript, which he hadn’t looked at since leaving Hedley. All he’d done was put it in a sturdy waterproof plastic case. He kept realizing, with a kind of resigned surprise, a kind of slow registering or reimagining meant to cushion the blow, that the invasion had been under way for quite some time, had been manifesting for much longer than anyone could have guessed, even his mother. And that perhaps Whitby had figured something out, even if no one had believed him, even if figuring it out had exposed him to something that had then figured him out.