Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “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 postmission 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.

  “Of course. Phorus snails are known for their courtesy.”

  “If you’d read further in your biology text, you would have discovered this is true.”

  That earned him half a laugh, but also her turning away from him on the bed-cot as she hugged an extra yellow pillow. Her V of a back faced him, the fabric of her shirt pulled tight, the delicate hairs on the smooth skin of her neck revealed to him with an almost microscopic precision.

  “We could go into the common area if you would prefer?”

  “No, you should see me in my unnatural environment.”

  “It seems nice enough,” he said, then wished he hadn’t.

  “The Ghost Bird has a usual daily range of ten to twenty square miles, not a cramped space for pacing of, say, forty feet.”

  He winced, nodded in recognition, changed the subject. “I thought maybe today we’d talk about your husband and also the director.”

  “We won’t talk about my husband. And you’re the director.”

  “Sorry. I meant the psychologist. I misspoke.” Cursing and forgiving himself at the same time.

  She swiveled enough to give him a raised eyebrow, right eye hidden by the pillow, then fell back into contemplating the wall. “Misspoke?”

  “I meant the psychologist.”

  “No, I think you meant director.”

  “Psychologist,” he said stubbornly. Perhaps with too much irritation. There was something about the casualness of the situation that alarmed him. He should not have come anywhere near her private quarters.

  “If you say so.” Then, as if playing on his discomfort, she turned again so she was on her side facing him, still clutching the pillow. She peered up at him and said with a kind of sleepy cheekiness, “What if we share information?”

  “What do you mean?” He knew exactly what she meant.

  “You answer a question and I’ll answer a question.”

  He said nothing, weighing the threat of that versus the reward. He could lie to her. He could lie to her all day long, and she’d never know.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Good. I’ll start. Are you married or ever been married?”

  “No and no.”

  “Zero for two. Are you gay?”

  “That’s another question—and no.”

  “Fair enough. Now ask away.”

  “What happened at the lighthouse?”

  “Too general. Be more specific.”

  “When you went inside the lighthouse, did you climb to the top? What did you find?”

  She sat up, back to the wall. “That’s two questions. Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “I’m not looking at you in any particular
way.” He’d just become aware of her breasts, which hadn’t happened during prior sessions, and now was trying to become unaware of them again.

  “But that’s two questions.” Apparently, he’d given the correct response.

  “Yes, you’re right about that.”

  “Which one do you want answered?”

  “What did you find?”

  “Who says I remember any of it?”

  “You just did. So tell me.”

  “Journals. Lots of journals. Dried blood on the steps. A photograph of the lighthouse keeper.”

  “A photograph?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “Two middle-aged men, in front of the lighthouse, a girl out to the side. The lighthouse keeper in the middle. Do you know his name?”

  “Saul Evans,” he said without thinking. But couldn’t see the harm, was already mulling over the significance of a photograph that hung in the director’s office also existing in the lighthouse. “That’s your question.”

  He could tell she was disappointed. She frowned, shoulders slumped. Could tell as readily that the name “Saul Evans” meant nothing to her.

  “What else can you tell me about the photo?”

  “It was framed, hanging on the wall at the middle landing, and the lighthouse keeper’s face was circled.”

  “Circled?” Who had circled it, and why?

  “That’s another question.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now tell me what your hobbies are.”

  “What? Why?” It seemed like a question for the wider world, not the Southern Reach.

  “What do you do when you’re not here?”

  Control considered that. “I feed my cat.”

  She laughed—chortled, actually, ending in a short coughing fit. “That’s not a hobby.”

  “More like a vocation,” he admitted. “No, but—I jog. I like classical music. I play chess sometimes. I watch TV sometimes. I read books—novels.”

  “Nothing very distinctive there,” she said.

  “I never claimed to be unique. What else do you remember from the expedition?”

  She squinted, eyebrows applying pressure to the rest of her face as if that might help her memory. “That’s a very broad question, Mr. Director. Very broad.”

  “You can answer it however you like.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “I just mean that—”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “I almost always know what you mean.”

  “Then answer the question.”

  “It’s a voluntary game,” she explained. “We can stop at any time. Maybe I want to stop now.” That recklessness again, or something else? She sighed, crossed her arms. “Something bad happened at the top. I saw something bad. But I’m not quite sure what. A green flame. A shoe. It’s confused, like it’s in a kaleidoscope. It comes and it goes. It feels as if I’m receiving someone else’s memories. From the bottom of a well. In a dream.”

  “Someone else’s memories?”

  “It’s my turn. What does your mother do?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “I bet it is,” she said, giving him an appraising look.

  _______

  He ended the session soon thereafter. What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone? Tired and in her room, she had become not so much less sharp as almost too relaxed.

  She was confusing him. He kept seeing sides of her that he had not known existed, that had not existed in the biologist he had known from the files and transcripts. He felt as if he’d been talking to someone younger today, someone more glib and also more vulnerable, if he’d chosen to exploit that. Perhaps it was because he had invaded her territory, while she was sick—or perhaps she was, for some reason, trying out personalities. Some part of him missed the more confrontational Ghost Bird.

  As he went back through the layers of security, passing the faked portraits and photos, he acknowledged that at least she had admitted some of her memories of the expedition were intact. That was a kind of progress. Although it still felt too slow, felt every now and then as if everything was happening too slow, and that he was taking too long to understand. A ticking clock he couldn’t see, that was beyond his power to truly see.

  One day her portrait would be up on the wall. When the subject was still alive, did they have to sit for those, or were they created from existing photographs? Would she have to recount some fiction about her experiences in Area X, without ever having a complete memory of what had actually happened?

  015: Seventh Breach

  Photographs had also been buried in the sedimentary layers of the director’s desk. Many were of the lighthouse from different angles, a few from various expeditions but also reproductions of ancient daguerreotypes taken soon after the lighthouse had first been built, along with etchings and maps. The topographical anomaly as well, although fewer of these. Among them was a second copy of one of the photographs that hung on the wall opposite his desk—almost certainly the photograph the biologist had seen. That black-and-white photograph of the last lighthouse keeper, Saul Evans, with one of his assistants to his left, and on the right, hunched over as she clambered up some rocks in the background, a girl whose face was half-obscured by the hood of her jacket. Was her hair black, brown, or blond? Impossible to tell from the few strands visible. She was dressed in a practical flannel shirt and jeans. The photo had a wintry feel to it, the grass in the background faded and sparse, the waves visible beyond the sand and rocks cresting in a cold kind of way. A local girl? As with so many others, they might never know who she had been. The forgotten coast had not been the best place to live if you cared about anyone finding you from census records.

  The lighthouse keeper was in his late forties or early fifties, except Control knew you could only serve until fifty, so he must have been in his forties. A weathered face, bearded as you might expect. A sea captain’s hat, even though the man had never been any kind of sailor. Control couldn’t intuit much from looking at Saul Evans. He looked like a walking, talking cliché, as if he’d tried hard for years to mimic first an eccentric lay preacher whose sermons referenced hellfire and then whatever one might expect from a lighthouse keeper. You could become invisible that way, as Control knew from his few operations in the field. Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?

  The photo had been taken by a member of the Séance & Science Brigade about a week or two before the Event that had created Area X. The photographer had gone missing when the border came down. It remained the only photo of Saul Evans they had, except for some shots from twenty years earlier, well before he’d come to the coast.

  By the late afternoon, Control felt as if he hadn’t gotten much further—just given himself a respite from governance of the Southern Reach—although even that was interrupted (again) by the sound of his reconstituted chair barricade being encountered by an apparition who turned out to be Cheney ambitiously leaning forward across the clattery chairs so he could peer around the corner.

  “… Hello, Cheney.”

  “Hello … Control.”

  Perhaps because of his precarious position, Cheney seemed at a loss, even though he was the intruder. Or as if he had thought the office might be empty, the chairs foreshadowing some shift in hierarchy?

  “Yes?” Control said, not wanting to invite Cheney all the way in.

  The X of his face tightened, the lines unsuccessfully trying to break free and become either parallel or one line. “Oh, yes, well, I guess I just wondered if you’d followed up about, you know, the director’s trip.” This last bit delivered in a low voice backed up by a quick glance away down the hall. Did Cheney have a faction, too? That would be tiresome. But no doubt he did: He was the one true hope of the nervous scientists huddled in the basement, waiting to be downsized, plucked one by one from their offices and cubicles by the giant, invisible hand of Central and the
n tossed into a smoldering pit of indifference and joblessness.

  “Since I’ve got you here, Cheney, here’s a question for you: Anything out of the ordinary about the second-to-last eleventh expedition?” Another thing Control hated about the iterations: a metric mouthful to enunciate, harder still to remember the actual number. “X.11.H, it was, right?”

  Cheney, stabilized by some crude chair rearrangement, appeared in full, motorcycle jacket and all, in the doorway. “X.11.J. I don’t think so. You have the files.”

  But that was just it. Control had a fairly crude report, including the intel that the director had conducted the exit interviews … which were astonishingly vague in their happy-happy nothing-bad-happened message. “Well, it was the expedition before the director’s special trip. I thought you might have some insight.”

  Cheney shook his head, seemed now to very much regret his intrusion. “No, nothing much. Nothing that comes to mind.” Did the director’s office somehow make him uncomfortable? His gaze couldn’t seem to fix on one thing, ricocheted from the far wall to the ceiling and then, ever so briefly, like the brush of a moth’s wings, touched upon the mounds of unprofessional evidence circling Control. Did Cheney think of them as piles of gold Control would steal or piles of shit sandwiches he was being forced to eat?

  “Let me ask you about Lowry, then,” Control said, thinking about the ambiguous “L.” notes he’d found and the video he’d be watching all too soon. “How did Lowry and the director get along?”

  Cheney seemed just as uncomfortable with this question but more willing to answer. “How does anyone get along, when you think about it, really? Lowry didn’t like me personally but we got along fine professionally. He had an appreciation for our role. He knew the value of having good equipment.” Which probably meant Lowry had approved every purchase order Cheney ever wrote.