“What made Area X spit it back up?” you ask Grace, safe on the roof in Beyond Reach.
“What made Whitby the one to find it?”
“A good question.” A gift from Dead Whitby.
“Why did it allow itself to be found?”
That sounds like the right question, and some days you want to tell Grace … everything. But most days you want to shield her from information that will make no difference to her job, her life. Somehow Dead Whitby and the Saul apparition fall on the same side as telling her that your name is not your name. That all of the unimportant things about you are a lie.
Eventually, into the middle of all this comes the call you’ve been dreading: Lowry, with a purpose. While you’re staring at the incriminating photograph on the wall: you on the rocks, shouting either before or after the shot was taken, “I’m a monster! I’m a monster!”
“Another eleventh expedition is a go.”
“Already.”
“Three months. We’re almost there.”
You want to say, but don’t say, “It’s time to stop tampering, not time to intensify the tampering.” The fiddling. All the ways Lowry tries to control what cannot really be controlled.
“That’s too soon,” you say. Too soon by far. Nothing has changed, except that you interfered and went over the border and brought back two objects you can’t explain.
“Maybe it’s time for you to stop being a fucking coward,” Lowry says. “Three months. Get ready, Cynthia.” He bangs the phone down, and you imagine him banging it down into a housing that’s a polished human skull.
They implant into the brain of the psychologist—on what will turn out to be the last eleventh—what Lowry calls “a pearl of surveillance and recall.” Some tiny subset of the silver egg that is Central, passing first through Lowry’s deforming grip. They make a man not himself, and you go along with it to keep your job, to stay close to what is important to you.
Twelve months later, the last eleventh expedition comes back, acting almost like zombies, memories cloudier than the drunk veteran’s at the Star Lanes Lounge. Eighteen months later, they’re all dead of cancer, and Lowry’s back on the phone talking about the “next eleventh” and “making refinements to our process” and you realize something has to change. Again. And short of putting a gun to Lowry’s head and pulling the trigger, it’s going to come down to influencing the composition of the expeditions, how they are deployed, and a host of lesser factors. None of which may make a difference, but you have to try. Because you never want to see such lost, vacant faces ever again, never again want to see people who have been stripped of something so vital that it can’t be expressed through words.
Morale at the Southern Reach becomes worse after the last eleventh returns and then, so quickly, passes on to the next place, wherever that might be. Numbness? A sense of having gone through so many crises that emotion must be hoarded, that it might not run out.
From the transcripts: “It was a beautiful day.” “The expedition was uneventful.” “We had no problems in completing the mission.”
What was the mission, in their eyes? But they’d never answer that question. Grace spoke of them in reverential tones, almost as if they’d become saints. Down in the science division, Cheney became more muted and subdued for a long time, as if the color TV of his commentary had been replaced by a black-and-white model with a single channel of pixelated fuzz. Ephemeral, ethereal Pitman called from Central with oblique condolences and a kind of calculated indifference to his tone that suggested misdirection.
But you were the one who had seen the curling worm of Lowry’s corruption at work—that what he’d done, the bargain you had made that had allowed him to be so invasive and controlling, hadn’t been worth it.
Even worse, Jackie Severance visits regularly afterward, as if maybe Central is concerned about something, takes to pacing around your office and gesticulating as she talks, rather than just sitting still. This emissary of Central you have to deal with in the flesh rather than just Lowry.
“She’s my parole officer,” you tell Grace.
“Then who is Lowry?”
“Lowry’s the parole officer’s partner? Boss? Employee?” Because you don’t know.
“A riddle wrapped in a puzzle,” Grace says. “Do you know what her father, Jack Severance, is up to?”
“No, what?”
“Everything.” So much everything that Grace is still wading through all of it.
When Severance comes calling, there’s a sense she’s checking up on her investment, her shared risk.
“Does it ever get to you?” Severance asks you more than once, and you’re fairly sure she’s just making conversation.
“No,” you lie, shoot back your own cliché: “We all have our jobs to do.”
Back when she worked for the Southern Reach, you’d liked her—sharp, charming, and she’d done a good job of fine-tuning logistics, of diving in and getting work done. But since she’s chained to Lowry, you can’t risk that her presence isn’t his presence. Sharing a swig of brandy with Grace: “A living bug—can’t exactly just pull her out of the ceiling tiles.” And the glamour has begun to fade: At times, Severance looks to you like a tired, faded clerk at a makeup counter in a department store.
Severance sits with you, observing the returnees through closed-circuit cameras for long minutes, coffee in hand, checking her phone every few minutes, often drawn off into some side conversation about some other project altogether, then coming back into focus to ask questions.
“You’re sure they’re not contaminated with something?”
“When do you send in the next expedition?”
“What do you think of Lowry’s metrics?”
“If you had a bigger budget, what would you spend it on?”
“Do you know what you’re looking for?”
No, you don’t know. She knows you don’t know. You don’t even know what you’re looking at, these people who became ever more gaunt until they were living skeletons, and then not even that. The psychologist perhaps even blanker than the rest, like a kind of warning to you, as if it were a side effect of his profession, encountering Area X. But a closer look at his history reveals Lowry probably leaned on him the most, thought, maybe, that his profession made him stronger than the rest. The bindings, the reconditioning sessions, the psychological tricks—surely a psychologist could absorb them, armed with foreknowledge. Except the man hadn’t, and as far as they knew this “coiled sting” inside his brain had made no difference at all to Area X.
“There must be things you would have done differently,” Severance says.
You make some noncommittal sound and pretend you’re scribbling something on your notepad. A grocery list, maybe. A blank circle that’s either a representation of the border or of Central. A plant rising out of a cell phone. Or maybe you should just write Fuck you and be done with it. Gnaw your way out of Lowry’s trap.
At some point after the last of the last eleventh passes away, you get black paint from maintenance, along with thick black markers, and you open the useless door that gives you access to the blank wall—casualty of a clumsy corridor redesign. You write out the words collected from the topographical anomaly, the words that you know must have been written by the lighthouse keeper (this flash of intuition, unveiled at a status meeting, allowing you to order a deeper investigation into Saul’s background than ever before).
You draw a map, too, of all the landmarks in Area X. There’s the base camp, or as you call it now, the Mirage. There’s the lighthouse, which should be some form of safety but too often isn’t, the place that journals go to die. There’s the topographical anomaly, the hole in the ground into which all initiative and focus descended, only to become hazy and diffuse. There, too, is the island and, finally, the Southern Reach itself, looking either like the last defense against the enemy or its farthestmost outpost.
Lowry, drunk out of his mind at his going-away party, headed for Central, only three ye
ars after you had been hired, had said, “How goddamn boring. Fucking boring if they win. If we gotta live in that world.” As if people would be living in “that world” at all, which wasn’t what any of the evidence foretold, or kept foretelling, as if there were nothing worse than being bored and the only point of the world people already lived in was to find ways to combat boredom, to make sure “all the moments,” as Whitby put it when he went on about parallel universes, might be accounted for in some way, so minds wouldn’t fill up with emptiness that they bifurcated simply to have more capacity to be bored.
And Grace, fearless, an opposing voice from years later at some other party where a member of the staff had voiced an equally cynical, depressing opinion, but as if answering Lowry: “I’m still here because of my family. Because of my family and because of the director, and because I don’t want to give up on them or you.” Even if Grace could never share with her family the struggles she faced at the Southern Reach, being your “right-hand gal” as Lowry puts it, sarcastically. The profane voice of reason when yours is perceived as too esoteric, too distant.
Halfway through drawing the map, you feel eyes on you, and there’s Grace, arms folded, giving you the stink eye. She closes the office door behind her, just keeps staring at you.
“Is there something I can help you with?” you ask, paint can in one hand and brush in the other.
“You can reassure me that everything is okay.” For one of the first times, you sense doubt from her. Not disagreement but doubt, and given how much things rely on faith at the late-era Southern Reach, this worries you.
“I’m fine,” you say. “I’m just fine. I just want a reminder.”
“Of what? To the staff? That you’re getting a little eccentric?”
A surge of anger at that, a faint echo of hurt, too. Lowry, for all of his faults, might not think it was strange. He’d understand. But also, if it were Lowry painting a map on the wall of his office, no one would be questioning him. They’d be asking if they could hold the brush, touch up this spot, that spot, get him more paint.
Going for the cumulative effect, to put more pressure on the breaking point, you say to Grace, “After I’m done here, I’m going to order the bodies of the last eleventh exhumed.”
“Why?” Aghast, something in her background averse to such desecrations.
“Because I think it’s necessary. Which is enough of a reason.” Having what Grace will call “your Lowry moment,” and it’s not even that volcanic, just stubbornness.
“Cynthia,” Grace says. “Cynthia, what I think or don’t think doesn’t matter, but the rest of the staff has to want to follow you.”
More stubborn thought still: that all you really need is Lowry to follow you and Severance, and you could hold on here forever. Hideous thought, though, the image of another thirty-six expeditions being sent out, only some coming back, of you and Grace and Whitby, progressively more jaded and cynical, becoming ancient, going through motions that wouldn’t help anyone, not even yourselves.
“I’m going to finish this up,” you tell her in a conciliatory way. “Because I started it.”
“Because it will look fucking stupid if you don’t finish it now,” she says, relenting as well.
“Yes, exactly. It will look fucking stupider if I don’t finish.”
“So let me help,” she says, and something in the emphasis she puts on the words gets to you. Will always get to you.
Let me help.
“All right, then,” you say gruffly, and hand her the extra brush.
But you’re still going to dig up the dead, and you’re still wondering how to change the paradigm like Lowry keeps trying to change the paradigm. Lost in the thought of that the next weekend at Chipper’s while bowling, while home clipping coupons for the grocery store, while taking a bath, while going out for a ballroom dancing lesson because it’s the kind of thing you would never do. So you do it, aware that if Severance has eyes on you, she’ll find it evidence of being “erratic,” but not caring. You put yourself here, set this trap for yourself, so if you feel trapped by it now, it’s your own fault.
The day after painting the door, Grace follows up, as she always does, unable to leave it alone, but privately, on the rooftop, which by now you’re pretty sure Cheney suspects exists, just as he suspects the involvement of “dark energy” in the maintenance of the invisible border … Grace saying, “You have a plan, right? This is all part of a plan. I’m relying on you to have a plan.”
So you nod, smile, say, “Yes, Grace, I have a plan,” because you don’t want to betray that trust, because what’s the good of saying, “All I have is a feeling, an intuition, and a brief conversation with a man who should be dead. I have a plant and a phone.”
In your dreams you stand on the sidelines, holding the plant in one hand and the cell phone in the other, watching a war between Central and Area X. In some fundamental way, you feel, they have been in conflict for far longer than thirty years—for ages and ages, centuries in secret. Central the ultimate void to counteract Area X: impersonal, antiseptic, labyrinthine, and unknowable. Against the facade, you cannot help but express a kind of terrible betrayal: Sometimes you admire Lowry’s fatal liveliness next to that, a silhouette writhing against a dull white screen.
0015: The Lighthouse Keeper
Western siren finally fixed; touched up the white part of the daymark, seaward side; fixed the ladder, too, but still feels rickety, unsafe. Something knocked down a foot of fence and got into the garden, but couldn’t tell what. No deer tracks, but likely culprit. S&SB? The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn’t feel up to a hike, but seen from lighthouse grounds, of note: flycatcher (not sure what kind), frigate birds, least terns, cormorants, black-throated stilt (!), a couple of yellow-throats. On the beach, found a large pipefish had washed up, a few sail jellyfish rotting in the sand.
There came an incandescent light. There came a star in motion, the sun plummeting to Earth. There fell from the heavens a huge burning torch, thick flames dripping out behind it. And this light, this star, shook the sky and the beach where he had walked a second ago under a clear blue sky. The scorched intensity of the sudden object hurtling down toward him battered his senses, sent him sprawling to his knees as he tried to run, and then dove face-first into the sand. He screamed as the rays, the sparks, sprayed out all around, and the core of the light hit somewhere in front of him, his teeth smashed in his mouth, his bones turned to powder. The reverberation lived within him as he tried to regain his footing, even as the impact conjured up an enormous tidal wave like a living creature, aimed at the beach. When it fell upon him the weight, the immensity, destroyed him once more and washed away anything he could have recognized, could have known. He gasped and thrashed and hurt, dug his tortured hands into the shocking cold sand. The sand had a different texture, and the tiny creatures living there were different. He didn’t want to look up, take in his surroundings, frightened that the landscape, too, might have changed, might be so different he would not recognize it.
The tidal waves faded. The burning lights receded.
Saul managed to get to his feet, to stagger a step or two, and as he did, he realized that everything around him had been restored. The world he knew, the world he loved: tranquil, unchanged, the lighthouse up the shore undamaged by the wave. Seagulls flew by, and far in the distance someone walked, looking for shells. He brushed the sand from his shirt, his shorts, stood there for a long moment bent over with his hands on his thighs. The impact was still affecting his hearing, still making him shake with the memory of its power. Yet it had left no evidence behind except melancholy, as if he held within him the only memory of some lost world.
He could not stop trembling in the aftermath, wondered if he were going insane. That took less hubris than thinking this was a message from on high. For in the center of the light that had come storming down, an image had appeared, a pattern that he recognized: the eight leaves of the strange plant,
each one like another spiraling step down into oblivion.
Midmorning. The rocks were slippery and sharp, encrusted with limpets and barnacles. Sea lice, ancient of days, traveled across those rocks on quests to scavenge whatever they could, and the seaweed that gathered there, in strands thin and thick and sometimes gelatinous, brought a tangy, moldy smell.
It was a relief to sit there, trying to recover—peering into the tidal pool that lay at his feet as the rock dug into his posterior. As he tried to control his shaking. There had been other visions, but none as powerful as this one. He had a perverse urge for Henry to appear, to confess all of his symptoms to a man who, once revealed as a passionate, delusional ghost-hunter, he recalled almost with fondness. But Saul hadn’t seen Henry or Suzanne since the incident in the night, nor the strange woman. Sometimes he thought he was being watched, but that was probably nothing more than a reflection of believing Henry when he said he would “find it,” implying a return.
The tidal pool directly in front of him became frustratingly occluded when a cloud passed overhead and changed the quality of the light, or when the wind picked up and created ripples. But when the sun broke through again and it wasn’t just the reflection of his face and knees he saw, the pool became a kind of living cabinet of curiosities. He might prefer to hike, to bird-watch, but he could understand a fascination with tidal pools, too.
Fat orange starfish, either lumbering or slumbering, lay half in, half out of the water. Some bottom-dwelling fish contemplated him with a kind of bulging, jaded regard—a boxy, pursed-lipped creature whose body was the same color as the sand, except for bejeweled sapphire-and-gold eyes. A tiny red crab sidled across that expanse toward what to it must be a gaping chasm of a dark hole leading down, perhaps into an endless network of tiny caverns carved into the rocks over the years. If he stared long enough into the comforting oblivion of that microcosm, it washed away everything else, even the shadow of his reflection.
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