Authority (26 page)

She had a flushed, ruddy aspect to her face, and talked in an animated way to the
skateboarders, a bit too manic, and at the same time pointing down the street, but
then breaking off to approach any pedestrian who walked by, hands expressive as she
delivered some complex tale of hardship or the logic behind a need. Or perhaps even
suggesting more. She shrugged off the first two who ignored her, but the skateboarders
got on her about it and the third she yelled after, as if he’d been rude. Roused to
action by this, a fat black man in a gray plastic-bag trench coat too hot for Hedley
in any season popped up like a stage prop from behind a large garbage can at the far
end of the liquor store’s frontage. He harangued the man who had shunned the redheaded
woman; Control could hear the obscenities through the glass. Then the fat man collapsed
back into his former post, evaporating as fast as he’d been conjured up.

The woman could be wearing a wig. The man in the trench coat might have nothing to
do with their little charade. He could be utterly out of practice in surveillance,
too.

The redheaded woman, shrugging off the affront, walked around the corner to stand
facing the traffic on Empire in the shade of the liquor store’s side wall. She was
joined by one of the skateboarders, who offered her a cigarette, both of them leaning
against the brick and continuing to talk in an animated fashion. The second skateboarder
now came out of the liquor store with an opened can of wet dog food—Control had missed
something vital about that store—and banged it with a scrap and clatter out of the
can and into a left-leaning can-shaped pile on the sidewalk right in front of the
store. He then pushed the tower into pieces using the can, and for some reason threw
the empty can at the fat black man half-hidden from Control’s view by the garbage.
There was no response to that, nor did the mutt seem enthusiastic about the food.

Although they’d accosted a few customers from the coffee shop, even come up close
to the glass on his side of the street, they seemed oblivious to his presence. Which
made Control wonder if he had become a wraith or if they were enacting a ritual, meant
for an audience of one. Which implied a deeper significance to it all, even though
Control knew that might be a false thought, and a dangerous one. Central rarely employed
amateurs, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Nothing much seemed impossible
now. “Is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out?” Another
thing the Voice had said to him, which he had taken as a kind of oblique taunt.

If the scene in front of him was innocent, could he disappear into it, transition
from one side of the glass to the other? Or were there conspiracies even in buying
dog food, begging money for a drink? Intricacies that might escape him.

*   *   *

First thing Saturday morning, Control had called the Voice, from his house. He had
placed an electronic bullhorn rigged with a timer on one side of his desk, set the
timer. He had placed a neon orange sheet of paper with his reminders on it to the
right, along with a pen. He drank a shot of whiskey. He smashed his fists down on
the desk, once, twice, three times. He took a deep breath. Then he made the call,
putting the Voice on speakerphone.

Sounds of creaking and shuffling before the Voice debuted. No doubt downstairs in
the study of his/her mansion. Or in the basement of a flophouse. Or the barn of a
farm, undercover with the chickens.

“Is your house in order?” the Voice asked. A sluggish quality to the Voice, as if
the megalodon had been roused from slumber in icy waters. The Voice’s tone felt like
an insult; it made Control even colder, began to leach away the trepidation in favor
of a form of disgust shot through with stubbornness.

Deep breath. Then, preempting anything the Voice might say, Control launched into
a shouted string of obscenities of the most vile kind, contorting his throat, hurting
it. After a surprised pause, the Voice shouted “Enough!” then muttered something long
and quivery and curling. Control lost the thread. The bullhorn went off. Control shook
himself out of it, read the words on the orange sheet of paper. Checked off the first
line. Launched again into a string of obscenities. “Enough!” Again, persistent, stubborn,
the Voice muttered something, this time moist and short and darting. Control floated
and floated and forgot. The bullhorn went off. Control saw the words on the orange
sheet of paper. Checked off the second line. Obscenities. Mutters. Floating. Bullhorn
ripping through. Control saw the words on the orange sheet of paper. Check mark. Repeat.
Rinse. Repeat. Fifth time. Sixth time. The seventh time the script changed. He fed
back to the Voice all the muttering glottal, moist, soft words he’d gleaned from the
director’s cheat sheet. Heard the wet gasp and shriek of hitting the target, then
an awkward lunge of words toward him, but feeble, disconnected, unintelligible.

That had left a scar. He doubted his incantation had had the full effect, but the
point was that the Voice knew and had had a very unpleasant experience.

The bullhorn went off. Control saw the words on the orange sheet of paper. He was
done. The Voice was done. They’d have to get another handler, one not quite so manipulative.

“Here’s a joke for you,” Control said. “What’s the difference between a magician and
a spy?” Then he hung up.

*   *   *

He had reviewed the surveillance of his Wednesday and Thursday conversations with
the Voice on Friday night after a vigorous jog. He’d been suspicious, hadn’t trusted
the way he seemed to fade in and out during those conversations, or how the Voice
had infiltrated his thoughts. With Chorizo on his lap, and the feed piped in from
his phone to the television, Control had seen the Voice execute hypnotic commands,
seen himself become unfocused, head floating a bit on his neck, eyelids fluttering,
while the Voice, never dropping the metallic, guttural disguise, gave him orders and
suggestions. The Voice told him not to worry about Whitby, to put his concern aside,
minimize it, because “Whitby’s never mattered.” But then later backtracked and expressed
interest in him finding Whitby’s strange room. Had he been drawn to that hidey-hole
because of some subliminal intel? A reference to Grace, along with an order to go
back to her office, then some dithering about “too risky” when the Voice learned about
the new locks. A lot of exasperation about the director’s notes and the slow progress
in sorting through them. That this was mostly due to the director’s disorganized process
made him wonder if that had been the point of the chaos. Had the Voice even
told
Control to go by “Control” at the agency? Resisted the madness of such thoughts.

The Voice, while Control languished under hypnosis, had a sharpness and focus not
as present otherwise, and a kind of casual perversity, telling Control s/he wanted
a joke to end their next phone call, “one with a punch line.” As far as he could tell,
he also had been serving as a living tape recorder for the Voice. The Voice had pulled
out of Control verbatim conversations, which explained why he had been so late getting
home Wednesday even though the conversation had seemed short.

He’d been on an expedition sent into the Southern Reach and just like the expeditions
into Area X, not told the truth. He had been right to feel that he was getting information
coming in with an extra stutter-step. What else had he done that he might never know?

So he’d written on the neon orange sheet that he could not possibly miss:

CONTROL, YOU ARE BEING SUBJECTED TO HYPNOTIC SUGGESTION BY THE VOICE

___ Check this line and scream obscenities. Move down one line.

___ Check this line and scream obscenities. Move down one line.

Rinse, repeat, brought out of it by the bullhorn, pulled back into it. Until, finally,
he reached the end: “Check this line and repeat these phrases”—all of the phrases
he’d found in the director’s desk. Shout them, actually.

Are you excited, too?… The possibility of significant variation … Paralysis is not
a cogent analysis … Consolidation of authority … There’s no reward in the risk … Floating
and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating …

Overload the system as the scientists with the white rabbits had been unable to. Push
the Voice into some kind of collapse.

He had been betrayed, would not now have a moment when he would not be looking over
his shoulder. Saw the biologist by the holding pond, the two of them looking at the
shed. Leading her back into the Southern Reach, as it swallowed them. His mother leading
him by the hand up the path to the summer cottage, Grandpa waiting for them, an enigmatic
smile making a mystery of his face.

*   *   *

The cure for his discoveries, for not having to think about them, had been a kind
of self-annihilation as he trekked undaunted from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning,
through the small but plump underbelly of Hedley—which as far as he could tell had
forgotten there was a Southern Reach. He recalled a pool hall—the crack of ball against
ball, the
thud
and
thack
, the comfort of the felt-lined pockets, the darkness, the smell of chalk and cigarettes.
Hitting the cue ball with the eight ball as a joke, and a handprint slapped in chalk
on the ass of a woman’s jeans—or as he thought of it later, although she’d placed
it there, a hand too far. He had withdrawn soon after, not as interested as he’d thought
in the banality of a grainy morning sun seen through the windows of a cheap motel,
an imprint of a body on the sheets, a used condom in the wastebasket. These were visions
for others, at least in that moment—because it just seemed like too much work. He’d
still be in the same place. He’d still be hearing Lowry from the videos. He’d still
be seeing, in slow motion no less, Grace offering him the contents of her box of complaints.
His mind would still be whirring as it contracted and expanded, grappling with Area
X.

He took in a late-night movie at a run-down theater with gum and soaked-in cola on
the stained blue carpet. He was the only one there. Against the odds, the theater
had survived from his teenage years to now. The movie was terrible, the kind of science-fiction
film where the plot holes almost seemed like alien interference imposed from some
higher dimension. But the quiet coolness of the place soothed his jangled nerves.
Until it was time to get up again and lurch his way to the next bar, his path taking
him along the waterfront in an epic pub crawl. Was that Cheney knocking, asking if
he was okay?

He had three shots of cheap whiskey in a place so run down it didn’t have a name.
He had a gulp of some local moonshine at a party not far from the pier where ages
ago he’d looked out across the river. Told himself over and over that the hypnosis
was a small thing, not a large thing, and that it meant nothing. Nothing at all. Too
big a deal. Too little. He thought about calling his mother. Couldn’t. Wanted to call
his father. Impossible.

He went into another bar already drunk, found himself confronted by a ghost. Earlier
that night he had glimpsed hints of them—in the curl of a lip that sparked a memory,
a flicker of an eyelid, the way someone’s hand lingered on a tabletop. Those shoes.
That dress. But when you encountered a real ghost—the Thing Entire—it was a shock …
it took your breath. Not away. It didn’t take your breath away—your breath wasn’t
going
anywhere. Your breath was still in you, locked up, not of use to you. Took your pulse
only to mutter dire predictions for the future. So when you came back into the moment,
you doubted at first who you were, because the Ghost Entire trapped Control somewhere
between the person he had been and the person he had become. And yet it was still
just a wraith. Just a woman he had known in high school. Intensely. For the first
time. Close enough that Control felt somehow like he was being disrespectful to the
biologist, that the overlay of the ghost was disrupting his impression of Ghost Bird.
Even if that was ridiculous. And all of it taking him farther and farther from the
Southern Reach.

Trying to escape the residue of that, at another point on the carousel compass of
his adventures—utterly shitfaced and giddy—he had spun onto a stool in a biker bar,
winding up next to the assistant director. The whole place was still raucous and ill-behaved
at two in the morning. It stank of piss, as thick as if cats had been marking their
territory. Control gave her a leaky lantern of a grin, to go with an emphatic nod.
She gave him a look of blank neutrality.

“The file is empty. There’s nothing on her.” On who? Who was he talking about? “If
you could put me in your own special hell, it’d be working at the old S.R. anyway—for
a lifetime, right?”

Halfway through, he realized that it couldn’t really be Grace and that the words might
not even be coming out of his mouth.

She unnerved him with the candor of her unblinking gaze.

“You don’t have to look like that,” he added. Must’ve said it this time.

“Like what?” she said, her head turned a little to the side. “Like a man’s fucked
up outta his mind and in my bar? Go to hell.”

He’d reared back on his stool at that suggestion, trying to assemble his wits like
pieces on a game board. A weight on his chest, in the dark and the light. He’d thought
he was smarter. He’d thought she’d gotten mired in old ways of thinking. But it turned
out new ways of thinking didn’t help, either. Time for another drink, somewhere else.
A kind of oblivion. Then regroup.

Control met her doubtful stare as he left with a bleary smile. He was making progress.
She receded from him, pushed back by a waft of wind from the bar door opening and
the judgmental stare of the streetlamps.

*   *   *

Control rubbed his face, didn’t like the feel of stubble. He tried to wipe the fuzziness
from his mind, the sourness from his tongue, the soreness from his joints. He was
convinced the Voice had said to him, at one point, “Is there something in the corner
of your eye that you cannot get out? I can help you get it out.” Easy, if you’d put
it there in the first place.