018: RECOVERY

Cheney came back to prowl around outside the bathroom—concerned, whispering “Do you think you’re all right, man?” as if they’d become best buddies. But eventually Cheney went away, and a little while later Control’s cell phone rang just as he’d propped himself up on the toilet seat. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. The Voice. The bathroom seemed like the perfect place to take this call. Cold porcelain after having slammed the bathroom door shut was a relief. So were the tiny cool blue tiles of the floor. Even the faint whiff of piss. All of it. Any of it.

Why were there no mirrors in the men’s room?

“Next time, take my call when I call,” the Voice warned, with the implication that s/he was a busy wo/man, just as Control noticed the flashing light that meant he had a message.

“I was in a meeting.” I was watching videotape. I was talking to the biologist. I was getting my ass handed to me by the assistant director because of you.

“Is your house in order?” the Voice asked. “Is it in order?”

Two thousand white rabbits herded toward an invisible door. A plant that didn’t want to die. Impossible video footage. More theories than there were fish in the sea. Was his house in order? An odd way for the Voice to phrase it, as if they spoke using a code to which Control did not have the key. Yet it made him feel secure even though that was counterintuitive.

“Are you there?” the Voice asked brusquely.

“Yes. Yes, my house is in order.”

“Then what do you have for me?”

Control gave the Voice a brief summary.

The Voice considered that for a moment, then asked, “So do you have an answer now?”

“To what?”

“To the mystery behind Area X.” The Voice laughed an oddly tinny metallic laugh. Haw haw haw. Haw.

Enough of this. “Stop trying to cut Grace off from her contacts at Central. It isn’t working and it’s making it harder,” Control said. Remembering her care with setting up the videos of the first expedition, too wrung out by lunch to process it yet. Twinned to Control’s disgust at the Voice’s clearly inadequate and extreme tactics was the sudden conviction, admittedly irrational, that somehow the Voice was responsible for sticking him in the middle of the Southern Reach. If the Voice actually was his mother, then he’d be correct about that.

“Listen, John,” the Voice growled, “I don’t report to you. You report to me, and don’t forget that.” Meant to be delivered with conviction, and yet somehow failing.

“Stop trying,” Control repeated. “You’re doing harm to me—she knows you’re trying. Just stop.”

“Again, I don’t report to you, Control. Don’t tell me what to do. You asked me to fix it, and I’m trying to fix it.” Feedback made Control take the phone away from his ear.

“You know I saw the video of the first expedition this morning,” he said. “It threw me.” By way of halfhearted apology. Grandpa had taught him that: Redirect while seeming to address the other party’s grievance. It’d been done enough to him in the past.

But for some reason that set the Voice off. “You think that’s a fucking excuse for not doing your goddamn job. Seeing a video? Get your head out of your asshole and give me a real report next time—and then maybe I’ll be a lot more willing to do your bidding the way you want me to do your bidding. Got it, fuckface?”

The swear words were delivered in a peculiar, halting way, as if the Voice were completing a Mad Lib where the only scripted parts were the words fucking, goddamn, asshole, and fuckface. But Control got it. The Voice was a shithead. He’d had shithead bosses before. Unless the real Voice was taking a break and this was the sub’s attempt at improv. Megalodon mad. Megalodon not happy. Megalodon have tantrum.

So he gave in and made some conciliatory sounds. Then he elaborated and told the tale of his “progress,” the story structured and strung together not as the plaintive, halting start-stop of what-the-hell that it was, but instead as an analytical and nuanced “journey” that could only be interpreted as having a beginning and a middle pushing out toward a satisfying end.

“Enough!” the Voice said at some point.

*   *   *

Later: “That’s better,” the Voice said. Control couldn’t really tell if the severity of that rushed cheese-grater-on-cheese-grater tone had lightened. “For now, continue to collect data and continue to question the biologist, but press her harder.” Had already done that, and it had gone poorly. Uncovering useful intel was often a long-term project, a matter of listening for what didn’t matter to fall away for just a moment.

After another pause, the Voice said, “I have that information you asked for.”

“Which information?” Plant, mouse, or…?

“I can confirm that the director did cross the border.”

Control sat up straight on the toilet seat. Someone was knocking timidly at the door. They’d have to wait.

“When? Right before the last eleventh expedition?”

“Yes. Completely unauthorized and without anyone’s knowledge or permission.”

“And she got away with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wasn’t fired.”

A pause, then the Voice said, “No doubt she should have been terminated. But, no, she got probation. The assistant director took her place for six months.” Impatient, as if it didn’t matter.

What was he supposed to do with that? Probably a question for his mother. Because surely someone higher up must have known the director was going across the border and then someone had protected her when she came back.

“Do you know how long she was gone? Is there a report of what she found?”

“Three weeks. No report.”

Three weeks!

“She must have been debriefed. There must be a record.”

A much longer pause. Was the Voice consulting with another Voice or Voices?

Finally the Voice conceded the point: “There is a debriefing statement. I can have a copy sent to you.”

“Did you know that the director thought the border was advancing?” Control asked.

“I am aware of that theory,” the Voice said. “But it is no concern of yours.”

How was that no concern of his? How did someone go from calling him a fuckface to using a phrase like “no concern of yours”? The Voice was a bad actor, Control concluded, or had a bad script, or it was deliberate.

At the end of their conversation, for no good reason, he told a joke. “What’s brown and sticky?”

“I know that one,” the Voice said. “A stick.”

“A turd.”

Click.

*   *   *

“Go ahead and check the seats for change, John.” Control, back in his office, exhausted, ambushed by odd flashes of memory. A colleague at his last position coming up to him after a presentation and saying in an accusing tone, “You contradicted me.” No, I disagreed with you. A woman in college, a brunette with a broad face and beautiful brown eyes that made him ache, whom he’d fallen for in Fundamentals of Math but when he’d given her a poem had said to him, “Yes, but do you dance?” No, I write poetry. I’m going to be some kind of spy. One of his college professors in political science had made them write poetry to “get your juices flowing.” Most of the time, though, he’d been studying, going to the shooting range, working out, using parties to get in practice for a lifetime of short-term relationships.

“Go ahead and check the seats for change, John,” said Grandpa Jack. Control had been twelve, visiting his mother up north for a rare trip that didn’t include going to the cabin or fishing. They were still getting the balance right; the divorce was still being finalized.

On a weekend afternoon, in the freezing cold, Jack had rolled up in what he called a “muscle car.” He’d taken it out of hibernation because he had hatched a secret plan to drive Control to a lingerie show at a local department store. Control only had a vague idea of what that meant, but it sounded embarrassing. Mostly he didn’t want to go because the next-door neighbor’s daughter was his age and he’d had a crush on her since the summer. But it was hard to say no to Grandpa. Especially when Grandpa had never taken him anywhere without his mother there.

So Control checked the seats for change while Grandpa fired up the bright blue muscle car, which had sat cold for two hours while Grandpa talked to his mother inside. But Control also thought Grandpa was reacquainting himself with the mysteries of its workings, too. The heat was blasting away and Control was sweating in his coat. He checked the seats eagerly, wondering if Grandpa had left some money there on purpose. With money, he could buy the neighbor girl an ice cream. He was still in summer mode.

No money, just lint, paper clips, a scrap of paper or two, and something cold, smooth, sticky, and shaped like a tiny brain from which he recoiled: old bubble gum. Disappointed, he broadened his search from the long backseat to the dark cavern under the front passenger side. He extended his arm awkwardly forward so his hand could curl around to search, came up against something bulky yet soft taped there. No, not soft—whatever it was had been wrapped in cloth. With a bit of coaxing, he managed to pull it free, the awkward weight a muffled thud on the car floor. There was a dull metal-and-oil smell. He picked it up, unwrapped it from the cloth, and sat back, the rough coldness of it cupped in both hands … only to find his grandpa staring at him intently.

“What’ve you got there?” the old man asked. “Where’d you find that?” Which Control thought were dumb questions and then, later, disingenuous questions. The eager look on Grandpa Jack’s face as he turned to stare, one arm still on the steering wheel.

“A gun,” Control said, although Grandpa could see that. He remembered later mostly the darkness of it, the darkness of its shape and the stillness it seemed to bring with it.

“A Colt .45, it looks like. It’s heavy, isn’t it?”

Control nodded, a little afraid now. He was sweating from the heat. He’d already found the gun, but his grandpa’s expression was that of someone waiting for the gift they’d given to be unwrapped and held high—and him too young to sense the danger. But he’d already made the wrong decision: He should never have gotten in the car.

What kind of psycho gave a kid a gun, even unloaded? This was the thought that occurred now. Perhaps the kind of psycho who wouldn’t mind coming out of retirement at his remote cabin to work for Central again as the Voice, to run his own grandson.

*   *   *

Midafternoon. Try. Try again.

Control and the biologist stood together, leaning on the sturdy wooden fence that separated them from the holding pond. The Southern Reach building lay at their backs, a gravel path like a rough black river leading across the lawn. Just the two of them … and the three members of security who had brought her. They had spread out at a distance of about thirty feet and chosen angles that took into account all escape routes.

“Do they think I’ll run away?” Ghost Bird asked him.

“No,” Control said. If she did, Control would put the blame on them.

The holding pond was long and roughly rectangular. Inside the fence, on the far shore, a rotting shed lay on the side nearest the swamp. A scrawny pine tree half-throttled by rusted Christmas lights stood beside the shed. The water was choked with duckweed and hydrangea and water lilies. Dragonflies patrolled ceaselessly over the gray, sometimes black water. The frogs made such raucous forecasts of rain that they drowned out the crickets and, from the fringe of grass and bushes on the opposite side of the pond, came the chatter and bustle of wrens and warblers.

A lone great blue heron stood solemn and silent in the middle of the pond. Thunderclouds continued to gather, its feathers dull in the fading light.

“Should I thank you for this?” Ghost Bird asked. They were leaning on the top of the fence. Her left arm was too close to his right arm; he moved a little farther away.

“Don’t thank anyone for what you should already have,” he said, which brought a half turn of her head toward him and the view of one upraised eyebrow above a thoughtful eye and a noncommittal mouth. It was something his grandfather on his father’s side had said, back when he was selling clothespins door-to-door. “I didn’t make the wood storks disappear,” he added, because he had not meant to say the first thing.

“Raccoons are the worst predators of their nests,” she said. “Did you know that they pre-date the last ice age? Farther south, they roost in colonies, but in this region they’re endangered, so they’re more solitary.”

Control had looked it up and the wood storks should have returned by now if they were going to. They tended to be creatures of habit.

“I can only give you thirty or forty minutes,” he said. Bringing her here felt now like a terrible indulgence, possibly even a kind of danger, although he did not know to whom. But he also knew he couldn’t have left things as they were after the morning session.

“I hate it when they mow it and try to take out the duckweed,” she said, ignoring him.

He wasn’t sure what to say to that. It was just a holding pond, like thousands of others. It wasn’t meant to be a habitat. But, then, they’d found her in an empty lot.

“Look—there are still some tadpoles,” she said, pointing, something approaching contentment on her face. He was beginning to understand that keeping her inside had been cruel. Perhaps now she wouldn’t see the conversation between them solely as an interrogation.

“It is nice out here,” he said, just to say something, but it was nice. It felt even better than he’d thought to get out of the building. He’d had some idea of questioning her, but the strong smell of rain and the way that the distant sky formed dark curtains of downpours fast approaching had defeated that impulse.

“Ask her about the director,” the Voice said. “Ask her if the director mentioned having been across the border before.” Pushed that away. You’re a hologram. You’re a construct. I’m going to throw chum overboard until you’re so blood-enraged you can’t swim properly.

Ghost Bird nudged a large black beetle with her shoe. It was frantic, ceaselessly caroming through the links of the fence and back over. “You know why they do that?”

“No, I don’t,” Control said. Over the past four days, he had realized there were many things he didn’t know.

“They just sprayed insecticide here. I can smell it. You can see the hint of foam on its carapace. It disorients them as it kills them; they can’t breathe because of it. They become what you might call panicked. They keep searching for a way to get away from what’s already inside of them. Toward the end, they settle down, but that’s only because they don’t have enough oxygen to move anymore.”

She waited until the beetle was over a piece of flat ground and then brought her shoe down, hard and fast. There was a crunch. Control looked away. Forgiving a friend who had done something to upset him, his father had once said that she heard a different kind of music.

“Ask her about the empty lot,” the Voice said.

“Why do you think you ended up at the empty lot?” Control asked, mostly to placate the audience. Any one of the three might report back to Grace.

“I ended up here, at the Southern Reach.” A guarded note had entered her voice.

“What does it mean to you, that place?” The same as this place, or more?

“I don’t think it was where I was meant to be,” she said after a pause. “Just a feeling. I remember waking up and not recognizing it for a moment and then when I did, being disappointed.”

“Disappointed how?”

Ghost Bird shrugged.

Lines of lightning created fantastical countries in the sky. Thunder came on like an accusing voice.

Ask her if she left anything in the empty lot. Was it his question or the Voice’s?

“Did you leave anything there?”

“Not that I remember,” she said.

Control said something he had rehearsed beforehand. “Soon you’ll need to be candid about what you remember and what you don’t remember. They’ll take you away from here if I don’t get results. And I’ll have no say in where they send you if that happens. It might be worse than here, a lot worse.”

“Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t the biologist?” She said it quietly, but with bite.

Ask her what she really is.

He couldn’t suppress a wince, even though he had meant it when he had said she didn’t owe him anything for bringing her out to the pond.

“I’m trying to be honest. I’m not her … and there’s something inside of me I don’t understand. There’s a kind of … brightness … inside.”

Nothing in the medical updates, except an elevated temperature.

“That’s called life,” Control said.

She didn’t laugh at that, but said, quietly, “I don’t think so.”

If she had a “brightness” inside of her, there was a corresponding darkness inside of him. The rain approached. The humidity was driven away by a wild breeze. Ripples spread across the pond, and the shed wheezed as the wind pushed against it. The little Christmas pine whipped back and forth.

“You’re all alone out here, aren’t you, John?”

He didn’t have to answer because it had started to rain—hard. He wanted to hurry back in so they wouldn’t get soaked, but Ghost Bird wouldn’t cooperate. She insisted on taking slow, deliberate steps, let the water needle her face, run down her neck, and soak her shirt.

The blue heron moved not at all, intent on some prey beneath the surface.

022: GAMBIT

Late morning. An attempt to regain … control. The old familiar debriefing room whose deficiencies he had become oblivious to, expecting a call from his mother with a report about the director’s house that couldn’t possibly come until hours from now.

He had told Grace he was about to interview the biologist and wanted her there, in the room, this time. A few minutes later, Grace came in wearing a bright yellow dress in a flower pattern, black belt at the waist—some kind of Sunday best—not peering around the doorway, not looking like he might lob a grenade at her. He was immediately suspicious.

“Where’s the biologist?” Grace asked, in a kind of conspiratorial way. Control was sitting by himself.

Control pushed out the chair opposite with his foot by way of reply, pretending to busy himself looking over some notes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You just missed the biologist. But she had some very interesting things to say. Do you want to know what she said about you, for example?”

Somehow Control had expected Grace would see it as a trap, get up and try to leave, and he’d have to convince her to stay. But she remained sitting there, appraising him.

“Before I tell you, you should know that all recording devices have been turned off. This is just between the two of us.”

Grace folded her arms. “That is fine with me. Continue.”

Control felt wrong-footed. He had expected she would go check, make sure he wasn’t lying. Maybe she had checked before coming into the room. Grandpa Jack’s advice had been that for this kind of work you needed “a second guy, always.” Well, he didn’t have a second guy or gal. He plunged on anyway.

“Let me get to the point. Before the final eleventh expedition, the director crossed over the border secretly, by herself. Did you know about this in advance? And did you provide material aid? Did you provide command-and-control decision-making? Were you, in fact, complicit in making sure she got back across the border? Because this is what the biologist says the director told her.” None of this was in the official report on the incident, which the Voice had sent via e-mail before their abrupt leave-taking over the phone. There, in the report, the director had claimed to have acted on her own.

“Interesting. What else did the biologist tell you?” No heat behind the words.

“That the director gave you instructions to wait at the border every night for a week on very specific dates about three weeks after she snuck across. To help her with her return.” According to security records, each of those days Grace had left the Southern Reach early, although there was no record of her at the border checkpoints.

“This is all in the past,” Grace said. “What are you trying to prove? Exactly.”

Control had begun to feel like a chess player who thinks he has a great move, but the opponent is either brilliant or bluffing or has something untouchable four moves ahead.

“Really? That’s your reaction? Because both of those accusations would be enough to file an addendum to the report with Central. That you colluded with the director to violate regulations and security protocols. That you provided material support. She was put on probation. What do you think you’d get for lying?”

Smiling, Grace asked, “What do you want?”

Not exactly an admission, but it allowed him to continue on with the script in his head, muffled the alarm bells. “Not what you think, Grace. I’m not pushing for you to resign, and I don’t want to report this information to Central. I’m not out to get the director. I want to understand her, that’s all. She went over the border. I need to know exactly why and how, and what she found. The report on file is vague.” Wondered now if Grace had written the report, or overseen its writing.

The report had mostly focused on the director’s punishment and the steps taken to once again tighten border security. There was a brief statement from the director that appeared to have been written by a lawyer: “Although I meant to act in the best interests of the Southern Reach and the requirements of my position, I deeply apologize for my actions and recognize that they were reckless, endangering, and not in keeping with the agency’s mission statement. If allowed to return, I will endeavor to adhere to the standard of conduct expected of me, and of this position.” “Measurements and samples” were also mentioned in the report, but Control had as yet been unable to track them down. They had not been placed in the storage cathedral, that much he knew. Unless that boiled down to a plant and a mouse and an old cell phone.

“The director did not share her every thought with me,” Grace said in an irritated tone, as if this fact bothered her, but with a strange half-smile on her face.

“I find it hard to believe that you don’t know more than you’re telling me.”

This did not move Grace to respond, so he prodded her with “I’m not here to destroy the director’s legacy, or yours. I brought you here not just because of what the biologist said but also because I think we could both have autonomy here. That we could run the agency in a way that means your position remains unchanged.” Because as far as he was concerned, the agency was fucked and he was now an undercover agent in the field, entering hostile territory. So use whatever you don’t care about as a bargaining chip. Maybe before he found a way out he’d even give Whitby that transfer he’d once wanted. Maybe he’d return to Central and have a beer with Lowry.

“How gracious of you,” Grace said. “The schoolboy is offering to share the power with the teacher.”

“That’s not the analogy I would have made. I would have—”

“Anything the director did, she did because she believed it was important.”

“Yes, but what did she do? What was she up to?”

“Up to?” Grace said, with a little snort of disbelief.

He chose his words very carefully. “Grace, I am already here. I am already in the middle of this. You should just tell me what’s going on.” What was the look that could convey without the reinforcement of words that he had already seen some very strange shit? “Remember, none of this is on the record.”

Grace considered that for a second with what seemed like amusement. Then she began to talk.

*   *   *

“You have to understand the director’s position,” Grace said. “The first expedition had set the tone within the organization. Even though the original director, by the time Cynthia got here, was trying to change that.” Cynthia? For a moment, Control wondered who Cynthia was because he’d thought of her as “the director” for so long. “The personnel here felt that the first expedition failed because the Southern Reach did not know what it was doing. That we had sent them in, and they had died because we did not know what we were doing, and we could never really make up for that.” The first expedition: a sacrifice to a lack of context. A lament unrecognized as such until it was too late. “And Lowry’s presence here at the agency”—was she reading his mind, did she somehow know?—“from my understanding, only made that worse. He was a living ghost, a reminder held up as a hero when he had just been a survivor. So his advice was given more weight, even when it was wrong. The director only really had a chance to pursue her own agenda after Lowry had been promoted to Central, even though that, too, was a problem. Lowry pushed for more expeditions even though the director wanted fewer, and whereas before she could control Lowry, now he was beyond her control. So we kept sending people in, throwing them up against a complete unknown. This did not sit well with the director, although she followed orders because she had to.”

He found himself being swept along by her narrative. “How did the director get her own agenda through? In what ways?”

“She became obsessed with metrics, with changing the context. If she could have her metrics, then Lowry could, grudgingly, have his expeditions, the conditioning and hypnosis he championed, although over time she came to understand why Lowry pushed the hypnosis.”

Control kept seeing Lowry in the context of the camera flying through the air: Lowry crawling, the camera soaring, and the truth perhaps somewhere in the middle. And then Lowry making Control crawl and soar.

None of this really spoke to the director’s secret mission across the border, though. Was Grace just tossing information at him to avoid talking about it? It was more than she’d ever said to him before.

“What else?” he asked. “What else did she do?”

She spread her hands as if for emphasis and the smile on her face was almost beatific. “She became obsessed with making it react.”

“Area X?”

“Yes. She felt that if she could make Area X react, then she would somehow throw it off course. Even though we didn’t know what course it was on.”

“But it had reacted: It killed a lot of people.”

“She believed that nothing we had done had pushed whatever is behind Area X. That it had handled anything we did too easily. Almost without thought. If thought could be said to be involved.”

“So she went across the border to make Area X react.”

“I will not confirm that I knew about her trip or helped in any way,” Grace said. “I will tell you my belief, based on what she said to me after she came back.”

“It wasn’t the reaction she wanted,” Control said.

“No. No, it was not. And she blamed herself. The director can be very harsh, but never harsher than with herself. When Central decided to go ahead with the last eleventh expedition, I am sure the director hoped that she had made a difference. And maybe she had. Instead of the usual, what came back were cancer-ridden ciphers.”

“Which is why she forced herself onto the twelfth expedition.”

“Yes.”

“Which is why her methods had become suspect.”

“I would not agree with that assessment. But, yes, others would say that.”

“Why did Central let her go on the twelfth expedition?”

“For the same reason they reprimanded her after she went across by herself but did not fire her.”

“Which was?”

Grace smiled, triumphant. At knowing something he should have known? For some other reason?

“Ask your mother. Your mother had a hand in both things, I believe.”

*   *   *

“They had lost confidence in her anyway,” Grace said next, bitterness bleeding into her voice. “What did they care if she never came back? Maybe some of them at Central even thought it solved a problem.” Like Lowry.

But Control was still stuck on Jackie Miranda Severance, Severance for short, Grandpa always “Jack.” His mother had placed him in the Southern Reach, in the middle of it all. She had worked for the Southern Reach briefly, when he was a teenager, to be close to him, she had said. Now, as he questioned Grace, he was trying to make the dates synch up, to get a sense of who had been at the Southern Reach and who had not, who had left by then and who was still incoming. The director—no. Grace—no. Whitby—yes. Lowry—yes, no? Where had his mother gone when she left? Had she kept ties? Clearly she had, if he were to believe Grace. And did her sudden appearance to him with a job offer correspond to knowing she had some kind of emergency on her hands? Or was it part of a more intricate plan? It could make you weary, untangling the lines. At least Grandpa had been more straightforward. Oh, look. There’s a gun. What a surprise. I want you to learn how to use a gun. Make everything do more than one thing. Sometimes you had to take shortcuts after all. Wink wink. But his mother never gave you the wink. Why should she? She didn’t want to be your friend, and if she couldn’t convince you in some more subtle way, she’d find someone she could convince. He might never know how much other residue he’d already encountered from her passage through Southern Reach.

But the idea that the director might have reached out to others in the agency, and at Central, comforted Control. It made the director less an eccentric, less a “single-celled plot” as his mother put it, than someone genuinely trying to solve a problem.

“What happened on her trip across the border?” Control, pressing again.

“She never told me. She said it was for my own protection, in case the investigators subpoenaed me.” He made a note to return to that later.

“Nothing at all?”

“Not a single thing.”

“Did she give you any special instructions before she went on leave or after she came back?” From what Control could intuit from the files he’d read, Grace was more constrained by rules and regulations than the director, and the director might have felt slightly undermined by her assistant director’s adherence to them. Or perhaps that was the point: that Grace had kept her grounded. In which case, Grace would almost certainly have been in charge of operational details.

Grace hesitated, and Control didn’t know if that meant she was debating telling him more or was about to feed him a line of bullshit.

“Cynthia asked me to reopen an investigation into the so-called S&S Brigade, and to assign someone to report in more detail on the lighthouse.”

“And who did the research?”

“Whitby.” Whitby the loon. It figured.

“What happened to this research?” He couldn’t recall seeing this information in the files he had been given before he’d come to the Southern Reach.

“Cynthia held on to it, asked for a hard copy and for the electronic copies not to be entered into the record … Are you planning to go down the same rabbit holes?”

“So you thought it was a waste of time?”

“For us, not necessarily for Cynthia. It seemed irrelevant to me, but nothing we gathered would make much sense without knowing what was in the director’s mind. And we did not always know what was in the director’s mind.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Being bold now that Grace was finally opening up to him.

A sympathetic expression, guided or pushed his way. “Do you smoke?”

“Sometimes.” This past weekend. Banishing demons and voices.

“Then let’s go out to the courtyard and have a smoke.”

It sounded like a good idea. If he was completely honest with himself, it sounded like bliss.

*   *   *

They reconvened out at the edge of the courtyard, nearest the swamp. The short jaunt from room to open air had not been without revelation: He’d finally seen the janitor, a wizened little white guy with huge glasses who wore light green overalls and held a mop. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Control resisted the urge to break ranks with Grace to tell him to switch cleaners.

Grace in the courtyard seemed even more relaxed than inside, despite the humidity and the annoying chorus of insect voices rising from the undergrowth. He was already sweating.

She offered him a cigarette. “Take one.”

Yes, he would take one, had been missing them ever since his weekend binge. The harsh, sharp taste of her unfiltered menthols as he lit up was like a spike through the eyeball to cure a headache.

“Do you like the swamp?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I like the quiet out here, sometimes. It can be peaceful.” She gave him a wry smile. “If I stand with my back to the building, I can pretend it isn’t there.”

He nodded, was silent for a moment, then said, “What would you do if the director came back and she was like the anthropologist or the surveyor?” Just adding to the light conversation. Just a gaffe, he realized as soon as he’d said it.

Grace remained unfazed. “She won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?” He almost broke his promise to his mother then and told Grace about the writing on the wall in the director’s house.

“I have to tell you something,” Grace said, changing direction on him. “It will be a shock, but I don’t mean it to be that way.”

Somehow, even though it was too late, he could see the hit coming before the impact, almost as if it were in slow-motion. It still knocked him off his feet.

“Here’s what you should know: Central took the biologist away late Friday evening. She’s been gone the whole weekend. So you must have been talking to a ghost, because I know you would not lie to me, John. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” Her look was serious, as if there were a bond between them.

*   *   *

Control wondered if the woman in the military jacket was back in front of the liquor store. He wondered if the skateboarder was in the process of dumping another can of dog food on the sidewalk, the plastic-bag man about to pop up to shout at passersby. He wondered if he should go join them. There was within him a generous affection for all of them, matched by a wide and growing sadness. A shed out back. Christmas lights wound around a pine. Wood storks.

No, he had not talked to the biologist that morning. Yes, he had thought she was still at the Southern Reach, had depended on that fact. He had already planned his next session in detail. It would be back in the interrogation room, not outside. She would sit there, maybe in a different mood from the other times but perhaps not, waiting for his now-familiar questions. But he wouldn’t ask any questions. Time to change the paradigm, the hell with procedures.

He would have pushed her file over to her, said, “This is everything we know about you. About your husband. About your past jobs and relationships. Including a transcript of your initial interview sessions with the psychologist.” This wouldn’t be an easy thing for him to do: Afterward, she might become a different person than he knew; he might be letting Area X farther into the world, in some odd way. He might be betraying his mother.

She would make some remark about having outlasted him already, and he would reply that he didn’t want to play games anymore, that Lowry’s games had already made him weary. She would repeat the same line he had said to her out by the holding pond: “Don’t thank people for giving you what you should already have.” “I’m not looking for thanks,” he would reply. “Of course you are,” she would say, without reproach. “It’s the way human beings are built.”

“You had her sent away?” Said so quietly that Grace asked him to repeat it.

“You had formed too much of an attachment. You were losing your perspective.”

“That wasn’t your call!”

“I am not the one who sent her away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ask your supervisor, Control. Ask your cabal at Central.”

“It’s not my cabal,” he said. Cabal versus faction. Which was worse? This was a record for not-fixing. A record for being sent in only to be shut out. He wondered what kind of bloodbath had to be occurring at Central right now.

He took a long drag on the cigarette, stared out at the god-awful swamp, heard from a distance Grace asking him if he was all right, his reply of “Give me a second.”

Was he all right? In the long line of things he could legitimately be not all right about, this ranked right up there. He felt as if something had been severed far too prematurely, that there had been much more to say. He tamped down the impulse to walk back inside and call his mother, because, of course, she must already know and would just give him an amplified echo of what Grace had said, no matter how much this could be seen as Lowry punishing him: “You were getting too close to her in too short a time. You went from an interrogation scenario to having conversations with her in her cell to chewing on sedge weeds while you gave her a guided tour of the outside of the building—in just four days. What would have come next, John? A birthday party? A conga line? Her own private suite at the Hilton? Perhaps a little voice inside starts to say, ‘Give her her files,’ hmm?”

Then he would have lied and said that wasn’t true or fair and she’d have fallen back on Grandpa Jack’s offensive old-school line about fair being “for losers and pussies,” and he wouldn’t be talking about Chorry. Control would claim she was interfering with his ability to do the job she had sent him to do and she’d counter with the idea of getting him transcripts of any subsequent interviews, which would be “just as good.” After which he might say, lamely, that’s not the point. That he needed the support, and then he’d trail off awkwardly because he was on thin ice talking about support, and she wouldn’t help him out, and he’d be stuck. They never spoke about Rachel McCarthy, but it was always there.

“So we should talk about division of duties,” Grace said.

“Yes, we should.” Because they both knew she now had the upper hand.

But his mind was elsewhere the whole time that Grace was massacring his troops, before she left the courtyard. Grace would run most things going forward, with John Rodriguez abdicating responsibility for all but figurehead duties at the most important status meetings. He would resubmit his recommendations through Grace, leaving out the pointless ones, and she would decide which to implement and which not to implement. They would coordinate so that eventually his working hours and Grace’s working hours overlapped as little as possible. Grace would assist him in making sense of the director’s notes, and as he acclimated himself to the new arrangements, that would be his major responsibility, although in no way did Grace acknowledge that the director might be dead or have gone completely off the tracks and hurtled through the underbrush over a cliff in her last days at the Southern Reach. Even as she did acknowledge that mouse-and-plant were eccentric, and also accepted the ex post facto reality that he had already painted over the director’s wall beyond the door.

None of which in this rout—this retreat that had no vanguard or rearguard, but was just a group of desperate men hacking at the muck and mire of a swamp with outdated swords while Cossacks waited for them on the plain—went completely against Control’s true wishes anyway, but this was not how he had seen it coming, with Grace dictating the terms of his surrender. And none of which saved him from a kind of grieving not at the power he was losing but at the person he had lost.

*   *   *

Still out there, smoking, after Grace had left, with a pat on his shoulder that was meant as sympathy but felt like failure. Even as he now counted her a colleague if not quite a friend. Trying to resurrect the idea of the biologist, the image of her, the sound of her voice.

“What should I do now?”

“I’m the prisoner,” the biologist said to him from her cot, facing the wall. “Why should I tell you anything?”

“Because I’m trying to help you.”

“Are you? Or are you just trying to help yourself?”

He had no answer to that.

“A normal person might give up. That would be very normal.”

“Would you?” he asked.

“No. But I’m not normal.”

“Neither am I.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“Where we’ve always been.”

But it didn’t. Something had occurred to him, finally seeing the janitor. Something about a ladder and a lightbulb.

For Ann

ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER

FICTION

Annihilation

Dradin, in Love

The Book of Lost Places (stories)

Veniss Underground

City of Saints and Madmen

Secret Life (stories)

Shriek: An Afterword

The Situation

Finch

The Third Bear (stories)

NONFICTION

Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer

Monstrous Creatures

The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature

Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

000

In his dreams now, the sky is deep blue with just a twinge of light. He stares from the water up at the cliff far above him. He can see the silhouette of someone peering down at him from the top … can see the way the person leans far over the edge to stare—farther than any human could, yet keeps leaning at a more severe angle, pebbles dislodged and peppering the water around him. While he lies in wait, there, at the bottom of the cliff, swimming vast and unknowable among the other monsters. Waiting in the darkness for the soundless fall, without splash or ripple.

005: THE FIRST BREACH

“What is it? Is it on me? Where is it on me? Is it on me? Where on me? Can you see it on me? Can you see it? Where is it on me?”

Morning, after a night filled with dreams from atop the cliff, staring down. Control stood in the parking lot of a diner with his to-go cup of coffee and his breakfast biscuit, staring from two cars away at a thirtysomething white woman in a purple business suit. Even gyrating to find the velvet ant that had crawled onto her, she looked like a real estate agent, with careful makeup and blond hair in a short pageboy cut. But her suit didn’t fit well, and her fingernails were uneven, her red nail polish eroded, and he felt her distress extended well back beyond the ant.

The ant was poised on the back of her neck, unmoving for a moment. If he’d told her, she would have smacked it dead. Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.

“Hold still,” he told her as he set his coffee and biscuit atop the trunk of his car. “It’s harmless, and I’ll get it off you.” Because no one else seemed of any use. Most were ignoring her, while some, as they got into or out of their cars and SUVs, were laughing at her. But Control wasn’t laughing. He didn’t find it amusing. He didn’t know where Area X was on him, either, and all the questions in his head seemed in that moment as frenetic and useless as the woman’s questions.

“Okay, okay,” she said, still upset as he curled around and brought his hand down level with the ant, which, after a bit of gentle prodding, climbed on board. It had been struggling to progress across the field of golden hairs on the woman’s neck. Red-banded and soft yet prickly, it roamed across his hand in an aimless fashion.

The woman shook her head, craned her neck as if trying to see behind her, gave him a hesitant smile, and said, “Thanks.” Then bolted for her car as if late for an appointment, or afraid of him, the strange man who had touched her neck.

Control took the ant into the fringe of vegetation lining the parking lot and let it crawl from his thumb onto the wood chips there. The ant quickly got its bearings and walked off with purpose toward the green strip of trees that lay between the parking lot and the highway, governed by some sense of where it was and where it needed to be that was beyond Control’s understanding.

“So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.” That from his father, not his mother, surprisingly. Or perhaps not. His mother knew so much that maybe she thought she didn’t need to pretend.

Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?

*   *   *

Control spent the first fifteen minutes of his morning searching for the key to the locked desk drawer. He wanted to solve that mystery before his appointment with the greater mystery posed by the biologist. His stale breakfast biscuit, cooling cup of coffee, and satchel lay graceless to the side of his computer. He didn’t feel particularly hungry anyway; the rancid cleaning smell had invaded his office.

When he found the key, he sat there for a moment, staring at it, and then at the locked drawer and the earthy stain across the bottom left corner. As he turned the key in the lock, he suppressed the ridiculous thought that he should have someone else present, Whitby perhaps, when he opened it.

There was something dead inside—and something living.

A plant grew in the drawer, had been growing there in the dark this whole time, crimson roots attached to a nodule of dirt. As if the director had pulled it out of the ground and then, for whatever reason, placed it in the drawer. Eight slender leaves, a deep almost luminous green, protruded from the ridged stem at irregular intervals to form a pleasing circular pattern when viewed from above. From the side, though, the plant had the look of a creature trying to escape, with a couple of limbs, finally freed, reflexively curled over the edge of the drawer.

At the base, half-embedded in the clump of dirt, lay the desiccated corpse of a small brown mouse. Control couldn’t be certain the plant hadn’t been feeding on it somehow. Next to the plant lay an old first-generation cell phone in a battered black leather case, and underneath both plant and phone he found stacked sedimentary layers of water-damaged file folders. Almost as if someone had, bizarrely, come in and watered the plant from time to time. With the director gone, who had been doing that? Who had done that rather than remove the plant, the mouse?

Control stared at the mouse corpse for a moment, and then reluctantly reached beside it to rescue the phone—the case looked a little melted—and, with the tip of a pen, teased open the edges of a file or two. These weren’t official files, from what he could tell, but instead were full of handwritten notes, scraps of newspaper, and other secondary materials. He caught glimpses of words that alarmed him, let the pages fall back into place.

The effect was oddly as if the director had been creating a compost pile for the plant. One full of eccentric intel. Or some ridiculous science project: “mouse-powered irrigation system for data relay and biosphere maintenance.” He’d seen weirder things at high-school science fairs, although his own lack of science acumen meant that when extra credit had been dangled in front of him, he’d stuck to time-honored classics, like miniature volcanoes or growing potatoes from other potatoes.

Perhaps, Control conceded as he rummaged a bit more, the assistant director had been correct. Perhaps he would have been better off taking a different office. Sidling out from behind his desk, he looked for something to put the plant in, found a pot behind a stack of books. Maybe the director had been searching for it, too.

Using a few random pages from the piles stacked around his desk—if they held the secret to Area X, so be it—Control carefully removed the mouse from the dirt and tossed it in the garbage. Then he lifted the plant into the pot and set it on the edge of his desk, as far away from him as possible.

Now what? He’d de-bugged and de-moused the office. All that was left beyond the herculean task of cleaning up the stacks and going through them was the closed second door that led nowhere.

Fortifying himself with a sip of bitter coffee, Control went over to the door. It took a few minutes to clear the books and other detritus from in front of it.

Right. Last mystery about to be revealed. He hesitated for a moment, irritated by the thought that all of these little peculiarities would have to be reported to the Voice.

He opened the door.

He stared for several minutes.

After a while, he closed it again.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Part One: Incantations

000

001: Falling

002: Adjustments

003: Processing

004: Reentry

Part Two: Rites

005: The First Breach

006: Typographical Anomalies

007: Superstition

008: The Terror

009: Evidence

010: Fourth Breach

011: Sixth Breach

012: Sort of Sorting

013: Recommendations

014: Heroic Heroes of the Revolution

015: Seventh Breach

016: Terroirs

017: Perspective

018: Recovery

Part Three: Hauntings

000

020: Second Recovery

021: Repeating

022: Gambit

023: Break Down

00X

Part Four: Afterlife

Acknowledgments

Also by Jeff VanderMeer

A Note About the Author

Copyright

013: RECOMMENDATIONS

Control had wanted to impose himself on Grace’s territory, to show her he was comfortable there, but that meant when he arrived she was in the middle of a ridiculously cheerful conversation with her administrative assistant.

While he waited, Control reviewed the basics, the basics being all that had been given to him, for whatever reason. Grace Stevenson. Homo sapiens. Female. Family originally from the West Indies. She was third-generation in this country and the eldest of three daughters. The parents had worked hard to put all three through college, and Grace had graduated valedictorian of her class with dual degrees in political science and history, followed by training at Central. Then, during a special op, she’d injured her leg—no details on how—and washed up on the shores of the Southern Reach. No, that wasn’t right. The director had picked her name out of a hat? Cheney had made some noises to that effect at one point on their border trip.

But she had to have harbored larger ambitions at some point, so what had kept her here—just the director? For from the start of her stint at the Southern Reach, Grace Stevenson had entered a kind of holding pattern, if not a slow slide into stagnation—the personal depths of that pit probably her messy, drawn-out divorce almost eight years ago, that event timed almost to the month of the college graduation of her twin boys. A year later she had informed Central about her relationship with a Panamanian national—a woman—so that she could again be fully vetted and deemed no security risk, which she wasn’t. A planned mess, then, but still traumatic. Her boys were doctors now, and also immortalized in a desk photo of them at a soccer game. Another photo showed her arm in arm with the director. The director was a big woman, with the kind of frame where you couldn’t tell if she ran to fat or was muscular. They were at some Southern Reach company picnic, a barbecue station jutting into the frame from the left and people in flowery beach shirts in the backgrouund. The idea of agency social events struck Control as absurd for some reason. Both photos were already familiar to him.

After the divorce, the assistant director’s fate had been ever more joined to that of the director, whom she’d had to cover for several times, if he was reading between the lines correctly. The story ended with the director’s disappearance and Grace landing the booby prize: getting to be the Assistant Director for Life.

Oh, yes, and as a result of all of this, and more, Grace Stevenson fostered an overwhelming sense of hostility toward him. An emotion he sympathized with, although only to a point, which was probably his failing. “Empathy is a losing game,” his father had liked to say, sometimes worn down by the casual racism he encountered. If you had to think about it, then you were doing it wrong.

The assistant finally gone, Control sat down opposite Grace while she held the printout of his initial list of recommendations at arm’s length, not so much because it smelled or was otherwise offensive but because she refused to get progressive lenses.

Would she take the recommendations as a challenge? They were deliberately premature, but he hoped so. Although it certainly didn’t bode well that a mini tape recorder lay whirring in front of him, her response to his presence in her space. But he had practiced his mannerisms in the mirror that morning, just to see how nonverbal he could be.

In truth, most of his admin and managerial recommendations could apply to any organization that had been rudderless—or to be generous, operating with half a rudder—for a few years. The rest were stabs in the dark, but whatever they cut was as likely to flense lard as hamstring anyone. He wanted the flow of information to go in multiple directions, so that, for example, Hsyu the linguist had access to classified information from other agency departments. He also wanted to approve long-forbidden overtime and nighttime working hours, since the electricity in the building had to stay on twenty-four hours a day anyway. He had noticed most of the staff left early.

Some other things were unnecessary, but with any luck Grace would waste time and energy fighting him on them.

“That was fast,” she said finally, tossing the paper-clipped pages of his list back across the desk at him. The pages slid into his lap before he could catch them.

“I did my homework,” Control said. Whatever that meant.

“A conscientious schoolboy. A star pupil.”

“The first part.” Control half agreed, not sure he liked the way she said it.

Grace didn’t bother wasting even an insincere smile in response. “Let me get to the point. Someone has been interfering with my access to Central this week—making inquiries, poking around. But whoever is doing you this favor has no tact—or whatever faction is behind it doesn’t have quite enough pull.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Control said, his nonverbal mannerisms sagging in surprise along with the rest of him, despite his best efforts.

Faction. Despite his daydream about the Voice having a black-ops identity, it had not occurred to him that his mother might be heading up a faction, which led him automatically to the idea of true shadow ops—along with an opposition. It threw him, a little, that Central might be that fragmented. Just how elephantine, how rhinoceroscrutian, had the Voice’s efforts been in following up on Control’s request? And: What did Grace use her contacts for when she wasn’t turning them against him?

Grace’s look of disgust told him what she thought about his answer. “Then, in that case, John Rodriguez, I have no comment on your recommendations, except to say that I will begin to implement them in as excruciatingly slow a fashion as possible. You should begin to see a few of them—like, ‘buy new floor cleaner,’ in place by next quarter. Possibly. Maybe.”

He had a vision, again, of Grace spiriting away the biologist, of multiple mutual attempted destructions, until somewhere up in the clouds, atop two vast and blood-drenched escalators, they continued to do battle years from now.

Control’s stiff nod—gruffly acknowledging defeat—wasn’t the mannerism he’d been hoping to use.

But she wasn’t done. Her eyes glittered as she opened a drawer and pulled out a mother-of-pearl jewelry box.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked him.

“A jewelry box?” he replied, confused, definitely back on his heels now.

“This is a box full of accusations,” Grace said, holding it toward him like an offering. With this jewelry box, I thee despise.

“What is a box of accusations?” Although he didn’t want to know.

With a clink-and-tinkle, the yawning velvet mouth sent a handful of bugs Control recognized all too well rolling and skittering across her blotter at him. Most of them came to a stop before the edge, but a couple followed the list onto his lap. The rotting honey smell had intensified again.

“That is a box of accusations.”

Attempting a comeback, aware it was feeble: “I see only one accusation there, made multiple times.”

“I haven’t emptied it yet.”

“Would you like to empty it now?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. But I will if you continue to interfere with Central. And you can take your spies with you.”

Should he lie? That would defeat the purpose of sending the message.

“Why would I bug you?” With a look that he knew undercut his innocence, even as indignation rose in him as ardently as if he were innocent. Because in a way he thought he was innocent: Action bred reaction. Lose a few expedition members, gain a few bugs. She might even recognize some of them.

But Grace persisted: “You did. You also rifled through my files, looked in all of my drawers.”

“No, I didn’t.” This time his anger was backed by something real. He hadn’t ransacked her office, only placed the bugs there, but now even that act troubled him the more he thought about it. It was out of character, had served no real purpose, had been counterproductive.

Grace continued on patiently. “If you do it again, I’ll file a complaint. I’ve already changed the pass-key combination on my door. Anything you need to know, you can just ask me.”

Easily said, but Control didn’t think it was true, so he tested it: “Did you put the director’s cell phone in my satchel?” Couldn’t bring himself to ask the even more ludicrous question “Did you squash a mosquito in my car?” or anything about the director and the border.

“Now, why would I do that?” she asked, echoing him, but she looked serious, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

“Keep the bugs as souvenirs,” he said. Put them in the Southern Reach Olde Antique Shoppe and sell them to tourists.

“No, I mean it—what are you talking about?”

Rather than respond, Control got up, retreated into the corridor, not sure if he heard laughter from behind him or some distorted echo through the overhead vent.

All three volumes of

Jeff VanderMeer’s

Southern Reach trilogy

will be published in 2014

ANNIHILATION

February 2014

AUTHORITY

May 2014

ACCEPTANCE

September 2014

FSG ORIGINALS

www.fsgoriginals.com