Authority (22 page)

Another evening, the dawn of another day, and Control felt as if he were moving along
at a rapid clip, almost able to relax into the closed vessel formed by each innocuous
moment and to live there in blissful ignorance of the rest. Even though by now the
disruption had spread, so that queries via walkie-talkie had become verbal miscues
and misunderstandings. Listener and listened-to had begun to be colonized by some
outside force but had not yet realized it. Or, at least, not voiced concerns for the
camera. Control chose not to rewind these instances. They sent a prickling shiver
across the back of his neck, gave him a faint sensation of nausea, increased the destabilizing
sense of vertigo and claustrophobia.

Finally, though, Control could no longer fool himself. The famous twenty-second clip
had come up, which the file indicated had been shot by Lowry, who had served as both
the team’s anthropologist and its military expert. Dusk of the second day, with a
lisp of sunset. Dull dark tower of the lighthouse in the middle distance. In their
innocence, they had not seen the harm in splitting up, and Lowry’s group had decided
to bivouac on the trail, among the remains of an abandoned series of houses about
halfway to the lighthouse. It had hardly been enough to constitute a village, with
no name on the maps, but had been the largest population center in the area.

A rustling sound Control associated with sea oats and the wind off the beach, but
faint. The wreckage of the old walls formed deeper shadows against the sky, and he
could just see the wide line that was the stone path running through. In the clip,
Lowry shook a bit holding the camera. In the foreground, a woman, the expedition leader,
was shouting, “Get her to stop!” Her face was made a mask by the light from the recorder
and the way it formed such severe shadows around her eyes and mouth. Opposite, across
a kind of crude picnic table that appeared fire-burned, a woman, the expedition leader,
shouted, “Get her to stop! Please stop! Please stop!” A lurk and spin of the camera
and then the camera steadied, presumably with Lowry still holding it. Lowry began
to hyperventilate, and Control recognized that the sound he had heard before was a
kind of whispered breathing with a shallow rattle threading through it. Not the wind
at all. He could also just hear urgent, sharp voices from off-camera, but he couldn’t
make out what they were saying. The woman on the left of the screen then stopped shouting
and stared into the camera. The woman on the right also stopped shouting, stared into
the camera. An identical fear and pleading and confusion radiated from the masks of
their faces toward him, from so far away, from so many years away. He could not distinguish
between the two manifestations, not in that murky light.

Then, sitting bolt upright, even knowing what was to come, Control realized it was
not dusk that had robbed the setting behind them of any hint of color. It was more
as if something had interceded on the landscape, something so incredibly large that
its edges were well beyond the camera’s lens. In the last second of the videotape,
the two women still frozen and staring, the background seemed to shift and keep shifting …
followed by a clip even more chilling to Control: Lowry in front of the camera this
time, goofing off on the beach the next morning, and whoever was behind the camera
laughing. No mention of the expedition leader. No sign of her on any of the subsequent
video footage, he knew. No explanation from Lowry. It was as if she had been erased
from their memories, or as if they had all suffered some vast, unimaginable trauma
while off-camera that night.

But the dissolution continued despite their seeming happiness and ease. For Lowry
was saying words that had no meaning and the person holding the camera responded as
if she could understand him, her own speech not yet deformed.

*   *   *

Carnage followed him from the video screening, when he finally left, escorted by Grace
back into the light, or a different kind of light. Carnage might follow him for a
while. He wasn’t sure, was having difficulty putting things into words, had done little
more than mumble and nod to Grace when she asked him if he was okay, while she held
his arm as if she were holding him up. Yet he knew that her compassion came with a
price, that he might pay for it later. So he extricated himself, insisted on leaving
her behind and walking the rest of the way back in solitude.

He had a full day ahead of him still. He had to recover. Next was his scheduled time
with the biologist, and then status meetings, and then … he forgot what was next.
Stumbled, tripped, leaned on one knee, realized he was in the cafeteria area and its
familiar green carpet with the arrow pattern pointing in from the courtyard. Caught
by the light streaming from those broad, almost cathedral-like windows. It was sunny
outside, but he could already see the angry gray in the middle of white clouds that
signaled more afternoon showers.

In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and
in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation
of the fatal softness in the earth.

A lighthouse. A tower. An island. A lighthouse keeper. A border with a huge shimmering
door. A director who might have gone AWOL across that border, through that door. A
squashed mosquito on his windshield. Whitby’s anguished face. The swirling light of
the border. The director’s phone in his satchel. Demonic videos housed in a memorial
catafalque. Details were beginning to overwhelm him. Details were beginning to swallow
him up. No chance yet to let them settle or to know which were significant, which
trivial. He’d “hit the ground running” as his mother had wanted, and it wasn’t getting
him very far. He was in danger of incoming information outstripping his prep work,
the knowledge he’d brought with him. He’d exhausted so many memorized files, burned
through tactics. And he’d have to dig into the director’s notes in earnest soon, and
that would bring with it more mysteries, he was sure.

The screaming had gone on and on toward the end. The one holding the camera hadn’t
seemed human. Wake up, he had pleaded with the members of the first expedition as
he watched. Wake up and understand what is happening to you. But they never did. They
couldn’t. They were miles away, and he was more than thirty years too late to warn
them.

Control put his hand on the carpet, the green arrows up close composed of threads
of a curling intertwined fabric almost like moss. He felt its roughness, how threadbare
it had become over the years. Was it the original carpet, from thirty years ago? If
so, every major player in those videos, in the files, had strode across it, had crisscrossed
it hundreds and hundreds of times. Perhaps even Lowry, holding his camcorder, joking
around before their expedition. It was as worn down as the Southern Reach, as the
agency moved along its appointed grooves on this fun-house ride that was called Area
X.

People were staring at him, too, as they crisscrossed the cafeteria. He had to get
up.

From the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe.

*   *   *

Control went from bended knee to the interrogation room with the biologist—after a
brief interlude in his office. He had needed some form of relief, some way to cleanse.
He’d called up the information on Rock Bay, the biologist’s longest assignment before
she’d joined the twelfth expedition. From her field notes and sketches, he could tell
it was her favorite place. A rich, northern rain forest with a verdant ecosystem.
She’d rented a cottage there, and in addition to photographs of the tidal pools she’d
studied, he had shots of her living quarters—Central’s routine thorough follow-up.
The cot-like bed, the comfortable kitchen, and the black stove in the corner that
doubled as a fireplace, the long spout going up into a chimney. There were aspects
of the wilderness that appealed to him, that calmed him, but so too did the simple
domesticity of the cottage.

Once seated in the room, Control placed a bottle of water and her files between them.
A gambit he was bored with, but nevertheless … His mother had always said the repetition
of ritual made pointing to the thing that had been rendered invisible all the more
dramatic. Someday soon he might point to the files and make an offer.

The fluorescent lights pulsed and flickered, something beginning to devolve in them.
He didn’t care if Grace watched from behind the glass or not. Ghost Bird looked terrible
today, not so much sick but like she had been crying, which was how he felt. There
was a darkness around her eyes and a slump to her posture. Any recklessness or amusement
had been burned away or gone into hiding.

Control didn’t know where to start because he didn’t want to start at all. What he
wanted to talk about was the video footage, but that was impossible. The words would
linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his
will. He couldn’t tell any human being, ever. If he let it out, contaminated someone
else’s mind, he would not forgive himself. A girlfriend who had gleaned some sense
of his job had once asked, “Why do you do it?”—meaning why serve such a clandestine
purpose, a purpose that could not be shared, could not be revealed. He’d given his
standard response, in a portentous manner, to poke fun at himself. To disguise the
seriousness. “To know. To go beyond the veil.” Across the border. Even as Control
said it, he had known that he was also telling her he didn’t mind leaving her there,
alone, on the other side.

“What would you like to talk about?” he asked Ghost Bird, not because he was out of
questions but because he wanted her to take the lead.

“Nothing,” she said, listless. The word came out at a muttering slant.

“There must be something.” Pleading. Let there be something, to distract from the
carnage in my head.

“I am not the biologist.”

That brought Control out of himself, forced him to consider what she meant.

“You are not the biologist,” he echoed.

“You want the biologist. I’m not the biologist. Go talk to her, not me.”

Was this some kind of identity crisis or just metaphorical?

Either way, he realized that this session had been a mistake.

“We can try again in the afternoon,” he said.

“Try what?” she snapped. “Do you think this is
therapy
? Who for?”

He started to respond, but in one violent motion she swept his files and water off
the table and grabbed his left hand with both of hers and wouldn’t let go. Defiance
and fear in her eyes. “What do you want from me? What do you
really
want?”

With his free hand, Control waved off the guards plunging into the room. From the
corner of his eye, their retreat had a peculiar suddenness, as if they’d been sucked
back into the doorway by something invisible and monstrous.

“Nothing,” he said, to see how she’d respond. Her hand was clammy and warm, not entirely
pleasant; something was definitely going on beneath her skin. Had her fever gotten
worse?

“I won’t assist in charting my own pathology,” she hissed, breathing hard, shouting:
“I am not the biologist!”

He pulled himself loose, pushed away from the table, stood, and watched as she fell
back into her seat. She stared down at the table, wouldn’t look up at him. He hated
to see her distress, hated worse that he seemed to have caused it.

“Whoever you are, we’ll pick this up later,” he said.

“Humoring me,” she muttered, arms folded.

But by the time he’d picked up the bottle of water and his scattered files and made
it to the door, something had changed in her again.

Her voice trembled on the cusp of some new emotion. “There was a mating pair of wood
storks in the holding pond out back when I left. Are they still there?”

It took a moment to realize she meant when she’d left on the expedition. Another moment
to realize that this was almost an apology.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll find out.”

What had happened to her out there? What had happened to him in here?

The last fragment of video remained in its own category: “Unassigned.” Everyone was
dead by then, except for an injured Lowry, already halfway back to the border.

Yet for a good twenty seconds the camera flew above the glimmering marsh reeds, the
deep blue lakes, the ragged white cusp of the sea, toward the lighthouse.

Dipped and rose, fell again and soared again.

With what seemed like a horrifying enthusiasm.

An all-consuming joy.

017: PERSPECTIVE

Steps had begun to go missing. Steps had begun to occur out of step. Lunch followed
a status meeting that, the moment it was done, Control barely remembered no matter
how hard he tried. He was here to solve a puzzle in some ways, but he felt as if it
were beginning to solve him instead.

Control had talked for a while, he knew that, about how he wanted to know more about
the lighthouse and its relationship to the topographical anomaly. After which Hsyu
said something about the patterns in the lighthouse keeper’s sermon, while the sole
member of the props department, a hunched-over elderly man named Darcy with a crinkly
tinfoil voice, added commentary throughout her talk, referring to the “crucial role,
now and in the future, of the historical accuracy division.”

Trees framed the campfire, the members of the expedition around the campfire. Something
so large you couldn’t see its outline, crawling or lumbering through the background,
obscenely threaded between the trees and the campfire. He didn’t like to think about
what could be so huge and yet so lithe as to thread like that, to conjure up the idea
of a fluid wall of ribbony flesh.

Perhaps he could have continued to nod and ask questions, but he had become more and
more repulsed by the way Hsyu’s assistant, Amy-something, chewed on her lip. Slowly.
Methodically. Without thought. As she scribbled notes or whispered some piece of information
in Hsyu’s ear. The off-white of her upper left cuspid and incisors would appear, the
pink gum exposed as the upper lip receded, and then with almost rhythmic precision,
she would nip and pincer, nip and pincer, the left side of her lower lip, which over
time became somewhat redder than her lipstick.