Area X Three Book Bundle
Page 72
You watch them all on the monitors. All but the linguist seem calm, movements relaxed and without evidence of jitters. The linguist is trembling and shivering. The linguist blinks at a rapid rate. Her lips move but no words come out.
The tech looks over at you for direction.
“Let me go in there,” you say.
“We’ll need to restart the process for her if you do.”
“It’s all right.” And it is all right. You have enough resolve for both of you. For the moment.
Carefully, you sit down across from the linguist. You are trying to banish thoughts of your first trip across the border, of how it affected Whitby, but it’s Whitby’s face you see right now, not Saul’s, not your mother’s. The human cost across the years, the lives lost and broken, the long grift. The contortions and the subterfuge. All of the lies, and for what? Lowry, back at his headquarters, unable to see the irony, lecturing you: “Only by identifying the dysfunction and disease within a system can we begin to marshal a response whose logic would be to abolish the problems themselves.”
The linguist has been placed on a regimen of psychotropic drugs. She has been operated on, reconditioned, broken down, brainwashed, fed false information that runs counter to her own safety, built back up again, and all of this she has on some level known about, volunteered for—Lowry finding in her story of lost family members on the forgotten coast the closest thing to a Gloria surrogate. It’s a kind of taunt to you, a kind of petulant message, and, Lowry believes, the ultimate expression of his art. His coiled weapon—so tense that she’s unraveling right here in front of you. The last eleventh’s psychologist all over again, just from a different direction.
Her face reflects a confusion of impulses, the mouth ticking open, wanting to speak but not knowing what to say. The eyes are squinting as if expecting some kind of blow, and she will not meet your gaze. She’s scared and she feels alone and she’s been betrayed before she’s ever even set foot in Area X.
You could still use her on the mission, could find a dozen ways to deploy her, even damaged. Fodder for whatever is waiting in the topographical anomaly. Fodder for Area X, a bit of misdirection for the other expedition members. But you want no distractions, not this way. It’s just you. It’s just the biologist. A plan that’s really a guess in the dark, finding your way by feel.
You lean close and you take the linguist’s hand in both of yours. You’re not going to ask her if she still wants to go, if she can do that. You’re not going to order her to go. And by the time Lowry finds out what you’ve done, it will be too late.
She stares at you with an eviscerated smile.
“You can stand down,” you tell her. “You can go home. And it’s going to be okay, it will all be okay.”
With those words, the linguist recedes from you, gliding back into darkness, her and the chair and the room, as if they were merely props, and you’re above Area X again, floating over the reeds, down toward the beach, the surf beyond. The wind and the sun, the warmth of the air.
The questioning is over. Area X is done with you, has taken every last little thing out of you, and there’s a strange kind of peace in that. A backpack. The remains of a body. Your gun, tossed into the surf, your letter to Saul, crumpled and tumbling across the dried seaweed and the sand.
You are still there for a moment, looking out over the sea toward the lighthouse and the beautiful awful brightness of the world.
Before you are nowhere.
Before you are everywhere.
Dear Saul:
I doubt you will ever read this letter. I don’t know by what means it might get to you or if you could even understand it now. But I wanted to write it. To make things clear, and so that you might know what you meant to me, even in such a short time.
That you might know that I appreciated your gruffness and your consistency and your concern. That I understood what those things meant, and it was important to me. That it would have been important even if all the rest of this had not occurred.
That you might know that it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anything you did. It wasn’t anything other than bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time—the same way it always happens, according to my dad. And I know this is true because it happened to me, too, even though I chose a lot of what’s happened to me since.
Whatever occurred back then, I know you tried your best, because you always did try your best. And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don’t always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that’s beyond you, and never understand why.
The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.
I remember you, Saul. I remember the keeper of the light. I never did forget about you; I just took a long time coming back.
Love,
Gloria
(who lived dangerous on the rocks and pestered you true)
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my patient and brilliant editor, Sean McDonald, who made it possible for me to write these books knowing someone really truly had my back. Thanks to everyone at FSG for making the experience of publishing this trilogy so wonderful, including Taylor Sperry, Charlotte Strick, Devon Mazzone, Amber Hoover, Izabela Wojciechowska, Abby Kagan, Debra Helfand, and Lenni Wolff. Thanks to Karla Eoff, Chandra Wohleber, and Justine Gardner. Thanks as well to Alyson Sinclair for her excellent work on the publicity side and to Eric Nyquist for great cover art. Thanks again to my stalwart agent, Sally Harding, and the Cooke Agency. I’m also indebted to my publishers in Canada, the U.K., and in other countries for showing such imagination and energy in publishing the Southern Reach trilogy. Blackstone Audio has also been a delight to work with, and in particular Ryan Bradley. Many thanks to the brilliant Bronson Pinchot and Carolyn McCormick for great audiobook performances. Additional thanks to Clubber Ace, Greg Bossert, Eric Schaller, Matthew Cheney, Tessa Kum, Berit Ellingsen, Alistair Rennie, Brian Evenson, Karin Tidbeck, Ashley Davis, Craig L. Gitney, Kati Schardl, Mark Mustian, Diane Roberts, and the Fermentation Lounge. Appreciation for owl observations to Amal El-Mohtar and to Dave Davis for many kindnesses.
In thinking about and writing these books I’ve been grateful for ideas encountered in the Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, and in particular The Coming Insurrection, which had a tremendous influence on Ghost Bird’s thinking throughout the novel and is quoted or paraphrased on pages 241, 242, and 336. I’m also grateful for the works of Rachel Carson and Jean Baudrillard; Taschen’s The Book of Miracles; Philip Hoare’s The Sea Inside; David Toomey’s Weird Life; Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea; the works of Tove Jansson (especially The Summer Book and Moominland Midwinter); Tainaron, by Leena Krohn; the nature poetry of Pattiann Rogers; The Derrick Jensen Reader, edited by Lierre Keith; Richard Jefferies’s After London; and Elinor De Wire’s Guardians of the Light. Finally, The Seasons of Apalachicola Bay, by John B. Spohrer, Jr., was like a revelation to me while writing Acceptance—a heartfelt, gorgeous, and wise book that kept me grounded in the places that made the Southern Reach trilogy personal.
Other research meant visiting, revisiting, or remembering landscapes that spoke to me in a way useful for the fiction: St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Apalachicola, rural Florida and Georgia, Botanical Beach Provincial Park and the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island, the coast of Northern California, and the Fiji Islands, which gave me a certain starfish.
I should also like to thank the many wonderful and creative booksellers I’ve met while on tour this year—you’ve been inspiring and energizing—as well as the enthusiastic readers willing to follow me on this somewhat strange journey. I really appreciate it.
Finally, I’m humbled and my heart made glad by my wife, Ann, who was my partner in all of this. She encouraged me, listened to me, helped me work out knots in d
rafts in progress, took other work off of my desk, went well beyond the call of duty or anything in the marriage vows to allow me the time and space to write these novels. It wouldn’t have been possible without her.
Credits
COVER DESIGN BASED ON AN ORIGINAL BY CHARLOTTE STRICK
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC NYQUIST
Copyright
Acceptance
Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
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EPUB Edition August 2014 ISBN 9781443428446
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
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About the Author
JEFF VANDERMEER is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and multiple year’s-best anthologies. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.
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