Authority (35 page)

A beep from his phone told him that, coming in over some unimaginable distance, he
had received the last, useless videos from the Southern Reach, from the chicken and
the goat.

The footage told him nothing, gave him no closure, no sense of what might have happened
to Grace. The quality was grainy, indistinct. Each clip was about six seconds in duration
and each cut off at the same time. In the first, his chair sat empty until the very
end, when something blurred appeared to sit down. It might have been the director
but the outline was ill-defined. The other video showed a slumped Whitby in the chair
opposite, doing something peculiar with his hands that made his fingers look like
soft coral swaying in a sea current. A wordless droning in the background. Was Whitby
now in the world of the first expedition? And if so, did he know it?

Control watched both video clips twice, thrice, and then deleted them. This act did
not delete the subjects, but it made him more distant from them, and that would have
to be good enough.

*   *   *

The usual influx of heat and then frigid cold on the airplane. The grappling with
frayed seat belts. As they rose, Control kept waiting for something to swat the plane
out of the sky, wondered if Central would be there to greet him when he touched down,
or something odder still. He wondered why the stewardesses were looking at him funny
by mid-flight, and realized he’d been responding to their rote kindness with the intensity
of someone who has never experienced courtesy, or never expects to experience it again.

The couple in the seats next to him were of the annoying yet ordinary type who said
almost everything for their audience, or to affirm their own couple-hood. Yet even
them he wanted to warn, in a sudden, unexpected outpouring of raw and almost uncontainable
emotion. To somehow articulate what was happening, what was going to happen, without
sounding crazy, without scaring them or him. But, ultimately, he popped another calm
pill and leaned back in his seat and tried to banish the world.

“How do I know that going after the biologist isn’t an idea you’ve put in my head?”

“The biologist was the director’s weapon, I believe. You said in your reports she
doesn’t act like the others. Whatever she knows, she represents a kind of chance.
Some kind of chance.” Control hadn’t shared with his mother the full experience of
his last moments at the Southern Reach. Not everything he had seen, or that whatever
the director was now or wherever she’d grown up, she was less herself than at any
point in the past. That whatever plan she’d had was probably irrelevant.

“And you are my weapon, John. You’re the one I chose to
know everything
.”

The comfort of the scratched metal armrests with the fat, torn padding on top. The
compartmentalized scoops of sky captured by the oval windows. The captain’s unnecessary
progress reports, interspersed with the stupid but comforting jokes over the intercom.
He wondered where the Voice was, if Lowry was having flashbacks or freaking out in
a more general way. Lowry, his buddy. Lowry, the pathetic megalodon. This is your
last chance, Control. But it wasn’t. It was, instead, an immolation. If he was remembered
at all, it would be as the harbinger of disaster.

He ordered a whiskey with ice, to see it gleam, to keep the ice in his mouth and experience
the smooth cold with the hint of bite. It helped him fall into a lull, a trough of
self-induced tiredness, trying to slow the wheels of his mind. Trying to wreck those
wheels.

“What will Central do now?” he’d asked his mother.

“They’ll come after you because of your association with me.” Would have come after
him anyway, for not reporting in and for going after the biologist.

“What else will they do?”

“Try to send in a thirteenth expedition, if a door still exists.”

“And what about you?”

“I’ll keep making the case for the course I think is right,” she said, which she had
to know was a huge risk. Did that mean she’d go back, or keep some distance from Central
until the situation stabilized? Because Control knew that she would keep fighting
until the world disappeared around her. Or Central got rid of her. Or Lowry used her
as a scapegoat. Did she think Central wouldn’t try to blame the messenger? He could
have asked why she didn’t just liquidate her savings and head for the most remote
place possible … and wait. But if he had, she would have asked him the same thing.

At the end of the flight, a woman in the aisle seat opposite told him and his two
seatmates to open their window for landing. “You gotta open the window for landing.
You gotta open it. For landing.”

Or what? Or what? He just ignored her, did not pass the message on, closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the plane had landed. No one waited for him as he disembarked.
No one called out his name. He rented a car without incident.

It was as if a different person put the key in the ignition and drove away from everything
that was familiar. There was no going back now. There was no going forward, either.
He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill
of excitement, too. You couldn’t feel dead this way, or as if you were just waiting
for the next thing to happen to you.

Rock Bay. The end of the world. If she wasn’t there, it was a better place than most
to wait for whatever happened next.

*   *   *

Dusk of the next day. In a crappy motel on the coast with the word
Beach
in its name, Control obsessively stripped and cleaned his Glock, bought off a dealer
using a fake name not thirty minutes after he’d cleared the airport, in the back lot
of a car dealership. Then reassembled it. Having to focus on a repetitive and detailed
task kept his mind off the void looming outside.

The television was on, but nothing made sense. The television, except for the vaguest
of footnotes about a possible problem at the “Southern Reach environmental recovery
site,” did not tell the truth about what was going on. But it hadn’t made sense for
a very long time, even if no one knew that, and he knew his contempt would mirror
that of the biologist, if she had been sitting where he was sitting. And the light
from the curtains was just a stray truck barreling by in the dark. And the smell was
of rot, but he thought perhaps he’d brought that with him. Even though he was far
away from it now, the invisible border was close—the checkpoints, the swirling light
of the door. The way that light seemed almost beveled, almost formed an image in that
space between the curtains, and then fell away again into nothing.

On the bed: Whitby’s terroir manuscript, which he hadn’t looked at since leaving Hedley.
All he’d done was put it in a sturdy waterproof plastic case. He kept realizing, with
a kind of resigned surprise, a kind of slow registering or reimagining meant to cushion
the blow, that the invasion had been under way for quite some time, had been manifesting
for much longer than anyone could have guessed, even his mother. And that perhaps
Whitby had figured something out, even if no one had believed him, even if figuring
it out had exposed him to something that had then figured
him
out.

When he was finished with the Glock, he sat in a chair facing the door, clenching
the grip tight even though it made his fingers throb. It was another way to keep from
being overwhelmed by it. Pain as distraction. All of his familiar guides had gone
silent. His mother, his grandparents, his father—none of them had anything to say
to him. Even the carving in his pocket seemed inert, useless now.

And the whole time, sitting in the chair then lying in the bed with its worn blanket
and yellowing sheets with cigarette burns in them, Control could not get the image
of the biologist out of his head. The look on her face in the empty lot—that blankness—and
then, later, in the sessions, the warring of contempt, wildness, casual vulnerability,
and vehemence, strength. That had laid him low. That had expanded until it hooked
into the whole of him, no part of him not committed. Even though she might never know,
could give two shits about him. Even though he would be content should he never meet
her again, just so long as he could believe she was still out there, alive and on
her own. The yearnings in him now went in all directions and no direction at all.
It was an odd kind of affection that needed no subject, that emanated from him like
invisible rays meant for everyone and everything. He supposed they were normal feelings
once you’d pushed on past a certain point.

North is where the biologist had fled, and he knew where she would end up: It was
right there in her field notes. A precipice she knew better than almost anyone, where
the land fell away into the sea, and the sea rushed up onto the rocks. He just had
to be prepared. Central might catch up to him before he got there. But lurking behind
them might be something even darker and more vast, and that was the killing joke.
That the thing catching up with all of them would be even less merciful—and would
question them until, like a towel wrung dry and then left out in the sun, they were
nothing but brittle husks and hollows.

Unless he made it north in time. If she was there. If she knew anything.

*   *   *

He left the motel early, just as the sun appeared, grabbed breakfast at a café, and
continued north. Here it was all cliffs and sharp curves and the sense that you might
dive off into the sky around each upward bend. That the little thought you always
overrode—to stop turning the wheel to match the road—might not be stifled this time
and you’d gun the engine and push on into the air, and snuff out every secret thing
you knew and didn’t want to know. The temperature rarely rose above seventy-five,
and the landscape soon became lush—the greens more intense than in the south, the
rain when it came a kind of mist so unlike the hellish downpours he’d become used
to.

At a general store in a tiny town called Selk that had a gas station whose antiquated
pumps didn’t take credit cards, he bought a large knapsack, filled it with about thirty
pounds of supplies. He bought a hunting knife, plenty of batteries, an ax, lighters,
and a lot more. He didn’t know what he’d need or how much she’d need, how long he
might be out there in the wilderness, searching for her. Would her reaction be what
he wanted it to be—and what reaction was that? Assuming she was even there. He imagined
himself years from now, bearded, living off the land, making carvings like his father,
alone, slowly fading into the backdrop from the weight of solitude.

The cashier asked him his name, as part of a sales pitch for a local charity, and
he said “John,” and from that point on, he used his real name again. Not Control,
not any of the aliases that had gotten him this far. It was a common name. It didn’t
stand out. It didn’t mean anything.

He continued the tactics he’d been using, though. Domestic terrorism had made him
familiar with a lot of rural areas. For his second assignment out of training, he
had spent time in the Midwest on the road between county health departments, under
the guise of helping update immunization software. But he’d really been tracking down
data on members of a militia. He knew back roads from that other life and took to
them as if he’d never left, used all the tricks with no effort although it had been
a long time since he’d used them. There was even a kind of stressful freedom to it,
an exhilaration and simplicity he hadn’t known for a long time. Then, like now, he’d
doubted every pickup truck, especially if it had a mud-obscured license plate, every
slow driver, every hitchhiker. Then, as now, he’d picked local roads with dirt side
roads that allowed him to double back. He used detailed printed maps, no GPS. He had
almost wavered on his cell phone, but had thrown it into the ocean, hadn’t bought
a temporary to replace it. He knew he could have bought something that couldn’t be
traced, but anyone he called would no doubt be bugged by now. The urge to call any
of his relatives, to try his mother one last time, had faded with the miles. If he’d
had something to say, he should have picked up the phone a long time ago.

*   *   *

Sometimes he thought of the director as he drove. Along the banks of a glistening,
shallow lake in a valley surrounded by mountains, ripping off pieces of sausage bought
at a farmers’ market. The color of the sky so light a blue yet so untroubled by clouds
that it didn’t seem real. The girl in the old black-and-white photo. The way she had
fixated on the lighthouse but never referred to the lighthouse keeper. Because she
had been there. Because she had been there until almost the end. What had she seen?
What had she known? Who had known about her? Had Grace known? The hard work to find
the levers and means to eventually be hired by the Southern Reach. Had anyone along
the way known her secret and thought it was a good idea, as opposed to a compromising
of the agency? Why was she hiding what she knew about the lighthouse keeper? These
questions worried at him—missed opportunities, being behind, too much focus on plant-and-mouse,
on the Voice, on Whitby, or maybe he would have seen it earlier. The files he still
had with him didn’t help, having the photograph there in the passenger seat didn’t
help.

*   *   *

Driving through the night now, he came back to the coast again and again, his headlights
reflecting orange dashes and white reflectors and, sometimes, the silver-gray of a
railing. He had stopped listening to the news on the radio. He didn’t know if the
subtle hints of impending catastrophe he gleaned existed only in his imagination.
He wanted more and more to pretend that he existed in a bubble without context. That
the drive would last forever. That the journey was the point.

When he grew too tired, he stopped in a town whose name he forgot as soon as he left,
having coffee and eggs at a twenty-four-hour diner. The waitress asked him where he
was headed, and he just said, “North.” She nodded, didn’t ask him anything else, must
have seen something in his face that discouraged it.