Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Sit down and I’ll get you a drink.”

  Very Lowry, but you don’t sit and you politely decline the drink, staring out at the shore, the sea. It’s a gray, crappy day and the weather reports say it may even snow. The water has an oily quality from offshore pollution, the dull light creating rainbows across its still surface.

  “No? Well, I’ll make you one anyway.” Also very Lowry, and you’re tenser than you were a moment ago.

  The room is narrow, and you’re standing at the window, behind you a long, low lime-green couch with a steel frame covered by psychedelic orange pillows. Shaped like crude downward-diving breasts, porcelain light fixtures hang in rows of twenty from a ceiling slanted to the curve of the hill. Their glow melts across the couches, tables, and wooden floor in soft overlapping circles. The whole back plate of glass sealing off the room from behind is a mirror, projecting your images and protecting you from the truth that this isn’t really a lounge and you’re here not by invitation but by order. That this is an interrogation room of sorts.

  The refined Lowry, so unlike the uncouth Lowry—leaning forward from a chair catty-corner to the couch—has been spending a deliberate eternity prying ice cubes from a bowl on the glass table in front of you into the glasses, one by one, clink by clink. He opens a bottle of scotch with care, and, with a tap of the bottle neck against glass, pours out two fingers.

  Lowry, bent over his task, letting the moment elongate further. The mane of golden hair now silver, grown long. The determined, solid head on a thick neck, the landmarks of features upon a face that had served him well: craggy good looks, people say, like an astronaut or old-fashioned movie star. People who have never seen the photographs of Lowry after the first expedition into Area X, that dehydrated unshaven face still imprinted with an encounter with the horrific unknown, Lowry gone somewhere no one else had ever gone. “An honorable guy” back then, charismatic and direct. Even gone to fat a little, a thickness around the stomach, he retains some charm. Even with a left eye prone to wandering as if a tiny planet is straining out of alignment, being pulled to the side by the attraction of something just out of the frame. Those bright, piercing blue eyes. One scintilla more brilliant and all of his charisma would be wasted—the determined nose, the resolute jaw almost a parody, like the coastline of a confident country—undermined by a stare too glacial. But there is just enough warmth in that gaze to preserve the rest of the illusion.

  “There, done,” he says, and you’re nervous to the inverse of his calm and reverential care for the drinks.

  Lowry’s replaced the bunkers hidden in the adjacent hills with secret labs. Full of higher-order animals, is the ridiculous rumor, brought here to bear the brunt of Lowry’s imagination, as if to punish nature for having punished him. Experiments on neurons, neural linkage, synapse control. Boring, impossible things like that. You doubt he ever brings his fourth wife here, or his children, even though the family’s summer house is conveniently nearby. No tours of Daddy’s workplace.

  You wonder what Lowry does for fun. Or maybe he’s doing it now.

  He turns, a drink in each hand, dressed in his expensive dark blue suit, his gold-tipped dress shoes. He smiles, holds both the drinks outstretched, the motion doubled, tripled, by the mirror at his back. The gleam of perfect teeth. The wide politician’s smile. A dangerous smile.

  It’s hardly even a flick of the wrist, there’s such economy of motion. So compact a movement of elbow and arm that for a moment you don’t realize that your drink is being thrown at you.

  The glass that was in his left hand smashes against the window near your head, shatters. As you recoil, sidestep, gaze never leaving Lowry, liquid splashes your shoes and splinters of glass needle your ankles. The window’s bulletproof glass, reinforced. It doesn’t even reverberate. The drink in Lowry’s right hand isn’t even trembling. But, then, neither are you.

  Lowry’s still smiling.

  He says, “Now that you’ve had your drink, maybe we can get the fuck down to it.”

  You recline, uncomfortable against the pillows, looking out at the sea, the lighthouse, the remains of the glass of scotch on the floor. You wonder if he has them specially made so they break easier. Lowry sits in his chair, leaning forward like a predator. You remain very still. Your heart is beating out some secret code you can’t decrypt. Lowry’s broad face up close, the ruddiness caused by alcohol, the abrupt lowering of the thick shoulders, the way the stomach spills onto his lap as he leans forward, his own drink still in hand. You haven’t seen any sign of his staff, but you know security waits right outside the door.

  “So you thought you’d take a closer look, huh, Cynthia? Thought you’d use my own security codes and bypass your superiors and take a quick peek. Couldn’t resist seeing what’s beyond the curtain.”

  It was a good plan; it should have worked. You should have been invisible coming back across. But Lowry had spies among the border command, had been alerted, and the best Grace could do was confiscate the materials they brought back, put them in the Southern Reach storage cathedral, mislabeled as from a prior expedition. Lowry’d had you held at the military base, top secret, before flying you up here. Whitby had been debriefed and then placed under a kind of house arrest.

  “I already knew what was there.”

  A gigantic snort—of contempt, of disbelief. “Typical desk jockey. Thinks just because they’ve read the reports, just because they’re in charge, they know something.” Said without irony.

  His breath is sweet, too sweet, as if something’s on the verge of rotting inside him. The eyes are unstable, hostile, but otherwise his expression is unreadable. He looks like a man who, with just one more drink, is capable of almost anything.

  “So you saunter across and have yourselves a great little holiday. Relax on the beach, right? Once you were across, got a little kinky thinking about being in that place with your boy toy, Whitby? Wanted a bit of lighthouse on the lighthouse steps?”

  Silence is the best response. Central sees the sophisticated version of Lowry. You see the dregs, whatever he can get away with.

  “You’ve got nothing to say to me, then. Nothing? No annotation? No further explanation?”

  “I turned in my report.”

  He’s half up out of his seat at that, but you don’t move at all. Even at the age of nine on the forgotten coast you knew better than to run from a bear or wild dog. You stand your ground, face them down. Maybe even growl. Would you have done the same when the rules changed, when it became Area X? You don’t know. You’re sweating under all those ridiculous lights.

  “I’m trying to get inside your head without getting inside your head, if you know what I mean,” Lowry says. “I’m trying to understand how we got here. Trying to see if there’s a good fucking reason I shouldn’t just let Central fire you.”

  The Central egg opening up like a mouth to issue an order to make you spontaneously combust or, more likely, evaporate like mist. But this means Lowry’s the main reason you haven’t been fired yet, which gives you back a sense of hope.

  “I couldn’t keep sending in expeditions under my orders without going myself.” You couldn’t let them be the only ones to have the experience.

  “Your orders? My orders, not your orders. You get that straight.” He slams his glass down on the table between you. An ice cube escapes, slides across the surface onto the floor. You resist the urge to pick it up, put it back in his glass.

  “And Whitby—you just had to recruit him for your sad little expedition, too?”

  You could reveal that Whitby wanted to go, but you can’t predict how Lowry would react. Whitby’s always been beyond Lowry, a fundamental misunderstanding between tragically different life-forms.

  “I didn’t want to go alone. I needed backup.”

  “I’m your backup. And involving the assistant director in all of this—that was a good idea, too?”

  Grace might hate Lowry, but for some reason Lowry half liked Grace. Which, if she ever found
out, would disgust her.

  “None of it was a good idea. It was a lapse in judgment … But it’s hard to send men into battle without going into battle yourself.” Grace’s idea for a defense. Keep it simple. Keep it old school.

  “Cut the bullshit. Did Grace suggest you say that? I bet she did.”

  Have you missed a bug this time around, or is this just a guess?

  Again: “You’ve got our reports.”

  Lowry is the only one who does have them. The army’s border command knows this but Grace has concealed it from the Southern Reach, at Lowry’s request—“for reasons of morale and security clearance”—pending a final decision. Officially you’re still taking a very long vacation, and Whitby’s on administrative leave.

  “Fuck your reports. You’re trying to hide Whitby from me”—not strictly true—“and your findings seem flimsy, incomplete. You were in there almost three weeks and your report is four pages long?”

  “Nothing that unusual happened. Considering.”

  “Considering bullshit. What did Whitby see? Something real or just another fucking hallucination? Do you understand what could’ve happened by going there? Do you understand what you could’ve stirred up?” The words coming out of his mouth slur together so it sounds like stirrups.

  “I understand.” A toy lighthouse suddenly come to life.

  Lowry, leaning in then, lurching in, to whisper, in a miasma of that sweet rotting breath, “You want to know what’s funny. What’s so fucking funny?”

  “No.” Here it comes. As if he’s somebody’s gramps at a holiday gathering. The same story almost every time.

  “Back in the day. Back then, you got it all wrong. If you’d ‘fessed up’ to the old Ess Arr during the interview, the kicker is they might’ve taken you anyway. You might’ve gotten hired. They might have done it, knowing the old director. True, maybe a sick kind of fascination attached, like with some special, intelligent lab animal—a special, particularly magnificent white rabbit, say. True, you’d never have made director, but, fuck, that job sucks, right? As you’re finding out. As you’re going to keep finding out. Problem now, though, is the deception’s gone on too long. So what the hell do we do.”

  The problem, from your point of view, is less the past than the present. The time when you could somehow have tried to contain Lowry or influence him is long gone. As soon as he’d ascended to Central, been canonized, you couldn’t touch him.

  That person, the person you’d been back before Ess Arr, had been careful—so careful trying to get to the point where you could do something reckless like cross the border into Area X.

  Your father had been paranoid about the government, every once in a while took on something shady to supplement the day job as a part-time bartender—a low-level grifter. He didn’t want any involvement. He didn’t want any trouble. So he kept the government out of it, didn’t tell you your mother was probably dead and that you weren’t going back to the forgotten coast ever again until he absolutely had to. Told you to give vague answers to the men who came to interview you about your mother—it would be better for your mother that way. Anything to avoid a light shining on his “business ventures.”

  “You don’t know this, ‘cause you’re too young,” came the usual lecture, “but politicians run all the big scams. Government’s the thief of all time. That’s why it tries so hard to catch thieves—it doesn’t like the competition. You don’t want that on your back your whole life just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  When he did tell you that she was gone, you cried for a month, even as that look on your father’s face, the gruff warning, the way everything in your constantly moving household operated on caution, indoctrinated you in the merits of silence.

  Over time your memory of your mother faded, in the way of not knowing if an image or moment was something you’d experienced or seen going through the photographs your dad kept in a shoe box in the closet. Not in the way of keeping something close rather than pushing it away. You would stare at pictures of your mother—on the deck with friends, a drink in her hand or on the beach with your dad—and imagine that she was the one saying, “Don’t forget me,” feel ashamed when it was the lighthouse keeper’s face that kept coming back to you.

  Tentative and then with more determination, you started your own investigation. You learned there was something called the Southern Reach, devoted to cleaning up the “environmental devastation” in what had been the forgotten coast and was now Area X. Your scrapbook grew so fat it was hard to open, filled with clippings from books, newspapers, magazines, and, later, websites. Conspiracy theories dominated, or speculative recastings of the government’s official story. The truth always something vague and out of focus that had nothing to do with what you’d seen, with the sense you’d had of the lighthouse keeper becoming different.

  In your first year of college, you realized that you wanted to work for the Southern Reach, no matter what their role, and, with your grifter’s sense of the truth, that your past would be a liability. So you changed your name, hired a private investigator to help you hide the rest, and went on to pursue a degree. Cognitive psychology, focused on perceptual psychology, with a minor in organizational psychology as well. You married a man you never really loved, for a variety of reasons, divorced him fifteen months later, and spent close to five years working as a consultant, applying and reapplying to Central with application-form answers tailor-made to give you a shot at the Southern Reach.

  The director at the time, a navy man, loved by all but not hard enough by far, hadn’t interviewed you. Lowry had—still at the Southern Reach back then and with his own agenda. He liked to acquire his power sideways. There had been the formal meeting in his office, and then you’d gone out to the edge of the courtyard and had a different kind of interview.

  “We can’t be overheard out here,” he’d said, and alarm bells had gone off. Irrational thought that he was going to proposition you, like some of Dad’s friends. Something beyond his polite demeanor, his well-made clothes, his air of authority, must have warned you.

  But Lowry had something more long-term in mind.

  “I had my own people check you out. It was a good effort there, all that work to disguise yourself. A solid B for effort, all of that, sure. Not bad at all, considering. But I still found out, and that means Central would have, too, if I hadn’t covered up your tracks. What was left of them.” A broad smile, a genial manner. You could have been talking about sports or the swamp sweltering there in front of you, seeming to simmer in its own thick broth.

  You cut to the important bit: “Are you going to turn me in?” Throat dry, it seeming hotter than it had a moment before. Memories of your father being taken off to jail for petty fraud, always with the bravado of a smile and a blown kiss, as if the point after all was to get caught, to have an audience, to be noticed.

  A chuckle from Lowry, and you intimidated by what struck you back then as his sophistication despite his failings. His verve. The way he filled out the suit, and the way his face reflected experience, like he’d seen what you wanted to see, been where you wanted to be.

  “Turn you in, Gloria … I mean, Cynthia. Turn you in? To whom? The guys in charge of keeping track of fake names and false identities? The forgotten coast truthers? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m going to turn you in to anyone.” The unspoken thought: I’m going to keep you all for myself.

  “What do you want?” you asked. Thankful, for once, that being your father’s daughter meant sometimes you could cut right through the bullshit.

  “Want?” Disingenuous to the core. “Nothing. Nothing yet, anyway. In fact, it’s all about you … Cynthia. I’m going to walk back in there with you and recommend you for the job. And if you pass training at Central, then we’ll see. As for all the rest of it … that’ll just be our secret. Not really a little secret, but a secret.”

  “Why would you do that?” Incredulous, not sure you had heard right.

/>   With a wink: “Oh, I only really trust people who’ve been to Area X. Even pre–Area X.”

  At first, the price wasn’t so bad. All he wanted, off the record, told to him and him alone, was an account of your last days on the forgotten coast. The lighthouse keeper, the Séance & Science Brigade. “Describe the man and the woman,” he said, meaning Henry and Suzanne, and all of his questions about the S&SB sounded as if you were filling in pieces of some story he’d already heard part of before.

  Within months, the favors asked for and reluctantly given multiplied—support for this or that initiative or recommendation, and when you had more influence, to push against certain things, to be less than enthusiastic, to stall. Mostly, you realize, on certain committees connected to the science division, to undermine or curtail Central’s influence within the Southern Reach. All of it clever and by degrees so that you didn’t really notice the escalation until you were so mired in it that it was just part of your job.

  Eventually, Lowry supported your bid to become director. Coming to the Southern Reach had been like being allowed to listen to the heartbeat of a mysterious beast. But as director you came even closer—terrifyingly closer, trapped within the chamber walls, needing time to adjust. Time exploited by Lowry, of course.

  Tossed onto the table: the latest satellite footage from above Area X, images from on high reduced to 8½×11 glossies. Glamour shots of an inexhaustible resource. This blank mimicry of the normal, marred only by the blurs you might expect to find on photos taken by ghost hunters. Definitive proof of a change, this blurring. As if somehow the Southern Reach is losing the ability to see even the lie.

  “Evil advances with good. But these terms have no meaning in Area X. Or to Area X. So why should they always apply to us in pursuit of an enemy to whom they go unrecognized? An indifferent context deserves equal indifference from us—if we want to survive.”