Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Was his house in order?

  Control hadn’t changed his clothes or showered in two days. He could smell his own rich stink like the musk rising off some animal prized by trappers. The sweat was being drawn through his pores onto his forehead again, reaching out in supplication to the ever-hotter Hedley sun through the window, the fans inside the coffee shop not strong enough. It had rained from the previous afternoon until the middle of the night, left large puddles full of tiny brown shrimp-like things that curled up and died in rust-colored agonies as the water evaporated.

  Control had come to a halt there at the end of Empire Street, where it crossed the far end of Main Street. When he was a teenager, the coffee shop had been a retro soda joint, which he missed. He’d sit at the air-conditioned window counter with a couple of friends and be grateful for ice cream and root beer, while they talked a lot of crap about girls and sports. It had been nice then, a kind of refuge. But over time the straightlaced bohemian leanings of the so-called railroad district had been usurped by hustlers, con artists, drug addicts, and homeless people with nowhere else to go.

  Through the window, waiting for the phone call he knew would come, Control dissected the daily terroir playing out across the street, in front of the discount liquor store. Two skateboarders, so preternaturally lean they reminded him of malnourished greyhounds, stood on that opposite corner in T-shirts and ragged jeans with five-year-old sneakers on their feet but no socks. One of them had a brown mutt on a hemp leash meant for a much larger dog. He’d seen two skateboarders while out jogging Tuesday night, hadn’t he? It had been dark, couldn’t be sure this was them. But possibly.

  Within minutes of Control watching, they’d been joined by a woman he definitely hadn’t seen before. Tall, she wore a blue military cap over dyed-red short hair, and a long-sleeved blue jacket with gold fringe at the shoulders and cuffs. The white tank top under the jacket didn’t cover her bare midriff. The blue dress pants with a more muted gold stripe on the side ended halfway down her calves and then in bare, dirty feet, with the bright red dots of nail polish visible. It reminded Control of something a rock star might have worn in the late 1980s. Or, idle strange thought: She was some decommissioned officer of the S&S Brigade, missing, forgotten, memory shot, doomed to play out the endgame far from anywhere conducive to either science or superstition.

  She had a flushed, ruddy aspect to her face, and talked in an animated way to the skateboarders, a bit too manic, and at the same time pointing down the street, but then breaking off to approach any pedestrian who walked by, hands expressive as she delivered some complex tale of hardship or the logic behind a need. Or perhaps even suggesting more. She shrugged off the first two who ignored her, but the skateboarders got on her about it and the third she yelled after, as if he’d been rude. Roused to action by this, a fat black man in a gray plastic-bag trench coat too hot for Hedley in any season popped up like a stage prop from behind a large garbage can at the far end of the liquor store’s frontage. He harangued the man who had shunned the redheaded woman; Control could hear the obscenities through the glass. Then the fat man collapsed back into his former post, evaporating as fast as he’d been conjured up.

  The woman could be wearing a wig. The man in the trench coat might have nothing to do with their little charade. He could be utterly out of practice in surveillance, too.

  The redheaded woman, shrugging off the affront, walked around the corner to stand facing the traffic on Empire in the shade of the liquor store’s side wall. She was joined by one of the skateboarders, who offered her a cigarette, both of them leaning against the brick and continuing to talk in an animated fashion. The second skateboarder now came out of the liquor store with an opened can of wet dog food—Control had missed something vital about that store—and banged it with a scrap and clatter out of the can and into a left-leaning can-shaped pile on the sidewalk right in front of the store. He then pushed the tower into pieces using the can, and for some reason threw the empty can at the fat black man half-hidden from Control’s view by the garbage. There was no response to that, nor did the mutt seem enthusiastic about the food.

  Although they’d accosted a few customers from the coffee shop, even come up close to the glass on his side of the street, they seemed oblivious to his presence. Which made Control wonder if he had become a wraith or if they were enacting a ritual, meant for an audience of one. Which implied a deeper significance to it all, even though Control knew that might be a false thought, and a dangerous one. Central rarely employed amateurs, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Nothing much seemed impossible now. “Is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out?” Another thing the Voice had said to him, which he had taken as a kind of oblique taunt.

  If the scene in front of him was innocent, could he disappear into it, transition from one side of the glass to the other? Or were there conspiracies even in buying dog food, begging money for a drink? Intricacies that might escape him.

  First thing Saturday morning, Control had called the Voice, from his house. He had placed an electronic bullhorn rigged with a timer on one side of his desk, set the timer. He had placed a neon orange sheet of paper with his reminders on it to the right, along with a pen. He drank a shot of whiskey. He smashed his fists down on the desk, once, twice, three times. He took a deep breath. Then he made the call, putting the Voice on speakerphone.

  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 abou
t 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 trapped 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 brok
e 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?”