Authority (9 page)

“What would I have to do?” If he had to pull it out of her, he knew it might not be
something he wanted. But he was already tired of the repetitive nature of his current
position, which had turned out to be less about fixing and more about repainting facades.
He was tired of the office politics, too. Maybe that had always been his problem,
at heart.

“You’ve heard of the Southern Reach?”

He had, mostly through a couple of colleagues who had worked there at one time. Vague
allusions, keeping to the cover story about environmental catastrophe. Rumors of a
chain of command that was eccentric at best. Rumors of significant variation, of there
being more to the story. But, then, there always was. He didn’t know, on hearing his
mother say those words, whether he was excited or not.

“And why me?”

The smile that prefaced her response was tinged with a bit of sadness or regret or
something else that made Control look away. When she’d been on assignment, before
she’d left for good, she’d had a short period when she’d been good at writing long,
handwritten letters to him—almost as good as he had been at not finding the time or
need to read them. But now he almost wished she was writing to him about the Southern
Reach in a letter, not telling him about it in person.

“Because they’re downsizing this department, although you might not know that, and
you’ll be on the chopping block. And this is the right fit for you.”

That lurch in the pit of his stomach. Another change. Another city. Never any chance
to catch his balance. The truth was that after Control had joined up, he had rarely
felt like a flash of light. He had often felt heavy, and realized his mother probably
felt heavy, too. That she had been feigning a kind of aloofness and lightness, hiding
from him the weight of information, of history and context. All of the things that
wore you down, even as that was balanced by the electric feeling of being on the side
of a border where you knew things no one else knew.

“Is it the only option?” Of course it was, since she hadn’t mentioned any other options.
Of course it was, since she hadn’t traveled all this way just to say hello. He knew
that he was the black sheep, that his lack of advancement reflected poorly on her.
Had no idea what internecine battles she fought at the higher levels of clandestine
departments so far removed from his security clearance that they might as well exist
in the clouds, among the angels.

“It might not be fair, John, I know that. But this might be your last chance,” she
said, and now she wasn’t smiling. Not smiling at all. “At least, it’s the last chance
I can get for you.” For a permanent posting, an end to his nomadic lifestyle, or in
general? For keeping a foothold in the agency?

He didn’t dare ask—the cold roiling fear she’d put into him was too deep. He hadn’t
known he needed a last chance. The fear ran so deep that it pushed most other questions
out of his head. He hadn’t had a moment then to wonder if, perhaps, she wasn’t just
there to do her son a favor. That perhaps she
needed
him to say yes.

The teasing hook, to balance his fear, delivered lightheartedly and at the perfect
moment: “Don’t you want to know more than I know? You will if you take this position.”

And nothing he could do about his response. It was true. He did.

She hugged him when he said yes to the Southern Reach, which surprised him. “The closer
you are, the safer you are,” she whispered in his ear. Closer to what?

She smelled vaguely of an expensive perfume, the scent a bit like the plum trees in
the backyard of the house they’d all shared up north. The little orchard he’d forgotten
about until just this moment. The swing set. The neighbor’s malamute that always halfheartedly
chased him up the sidewalk.

By the time the questions arose within him, it was too late. She had put on the overcoat
and was gone as if she’d never been there.

Certainly there was no record of her ever signing in or signing out.

*   *   *

Dusk, the start of the nightly reprieve from the heat, had settled over Hedley by
the time he pulled into the driveway. The place he’d rented sat about a mile up a
gentle slope of the hills that eventually ended below at the banks of the river. A
small, 1,300-square-foot cedar house painted light blue, with the white shutters on
the windows slightly heat-warped. It had two bathrooms, a master bedroom, a living
room, a galley kitchen, and an office, with a screened-in patio in back. The interior
decoration was all in a cloying yet comfortable “heirloom chic.” In front, a garden
of herbs and petunias that transitioned to a short stretch of lawn next to the driveway.

As he walked up the steps to the front door, El Chorizo jumped out from the bushes
to the side and got underfoot. El Chorizo was a huge black-and-white cat, a draft
horse of a cat, named by his father. The family had had a pig named El Gato growing
up, so this was his father’s way of making a joke. Control had taken him as a pet
about three years ago, when the cancer had gotten bad enough that El Chorizo had become
a burden. He’d always been an indoor-outdoor cat, and Control had decided to let him
be that in his new surroundings, too. Apparently it had been the right decision; El
Chorizo, or “Chorry” as Control called him, looked alert and confident, even if his
long hair was already tangled and dirty.

Together they went inside, and Control put out some wet food in the kitchen, petted
him for a few minutes, then listened to his messages, the landline just for “civilians.”
There was only one message: from Mary Phillips, his girlfriend until they’d broken
up about six months ago, checking in to make sure the move had gone okay. She had
threatened to come visit, although he hadn’t told her his precise location and had
just gotten used to sleeping alone again. “No hard feelings,” and he couldn’t even
really remember if he had broken up with her or she with him. There rarely were hard
feelings—which felt odd to him and wrong. Shouldn’t there be? There had been almost
as many girlfriends as postings; they usually didn’t survive the moves, or his circumspection,
or his odd hours, or maybe he just hadn’t found the right person. He couldn’t be sure,
tried as the cycle kept repeating to wring as much intensity and intimacy out of the
early months, having a sense of how it would end. “You’re a strange kind of player,”
the one-night stand before Mary had said to him as he was going down on her, but he
wasn’t really a player. He didn’t know what he was.

Instead of returning the call, he slipped into the living room and sat on the couch.
Chorry promptly curled up next to him, and he absentmindedly rubbed the cat’s head.
A wren or some such rooted around outside the window. There came, too, the call of
a mockingbird and a welcome chitter of bats, which weren’t as common anymore.

It was so close to everything he knew from his teenage years that he decided to let
that be a comfort, along with the house, which helped him believe that this job was
going to last. But “always have an exit strategy” was something his mother had repeated
ad nauseam from his first day of training, so he had the standard packet hidden in
a false bottom to a suitcase. He’d brought more than just his standard sidearm, one
of the guns stored with the passports and money.

Control had already unpacked, the idea of leaving his things in storage painful. On
the mantel over a brick fireplace that was mostly for show, he had placed a chessboard
with the little brightly colored wooden figurines that had been his father’s last
redoubt. His father had sold them in local crafts shops and worked in a community
center after his career had stalled. Occasionally during the last decade of his father’s
life, an art collector would buy one of the huge art installations rusting under tarps
in the backyard, but that was more like receiving a ghost, a time traveler, than anything
like a revival of interest. The chessboard, frozen in time, reflected the progress
of their last game together.

He pulled himself off the couch, went into the bedroom, and changed into his shorts
and T-shirt and running shoes. Chorry looked up at him as if he wanted to come along.

“I know, I know. I just got home. But I’ll be back.”

He slipped out the front door, deciding to leave Chorry inside, put on his headphones,
turned on some of the classical music he loved, and lit out along the street and its
dim streetlamps. By now full dusk had arrived and there was just a haze of dark blue
remaining over the river below and the lights of homes and businesses, while above
the reflected glow of the city pushed the first stars farther into the heavens. The
heat had dropped away, but the insistent low chiseling noise of crickets and other
insects brought back its specter.

Something immediately felt tight in his left quad, but he knew it would work itself
out. He started slowly, letting himself take in the neighborhood, which was mostly
small houses like his, with rows of high bushes instead of fences and streets that
ran parallel to the ridge of the hill, with some connector streets running straight
down. He didn’t mind the winding nature of it—he wanted a good three to five miles.
The thick smell of honeysuckle came at him in waves as he ran by certain homes. Few
people were still out except for some swing-sitters and dog-walkers, a couple of skateboarders.
Most nodded at him as he passed.

As he sped up and established a rhythm, headed ever downward toward the river, Control
found himself in a space where he could think about the day. He kept reliving the
meetings and in particular the questioning of the biologist. He kept circling back
to all of the information that had flooded into him, that he had let keep flooding
into him. There would be more of it tomorrow, and the day after that, and no doubt
new information would keep entering him for a while before any conclusions came back
out.

He could try to not get involved at this level. He could try to exist only on some
abstract level of management and administration, but he didn’t believe that’s really
what the Voice wanted him to do—or what the assistant director would
let
him do. How could he be the director of the Southern Reach if he didn’t understand
in his gut what the personnel there faced? He had already scheduled at least three
more interviews with the biologist for the week, as well as a tour of the entry point
into Area X at the border. He knew his mother would expect him to prioritize based
on the situation on the ground.

The border in particular stuck with him as he jogged. The absurdity of it coexisting
in the same world as the town he was running through, the music he was listening to.
The crescendo of strings and wind instruments.

The border was invisible.

It did not allow half measures: Once you touched it, it pulled you in (or across?).

It had discrete boundaries, including to about one mile out to sea. The military had
put up floating berms and patrolled the area ceaselessly.

He wondered, as he jumped over a low wall overgrown with kudzu and took a shortcut
between streets across a crumbling stone bridge. He wondered for a moment about those
ceaseless patrols, if they ever saw anything out there in the waves, or if their lives
were just an excruciation of the same gray-blue details day after day.

The border extended about seventy miles inland from the lighthouse and approximately
forty miles east and forty miles west along the coast. It ended just below the stratosphere
and, underground, just above the asthenosphere.

It had a door or passageway through it into Area X.

The door might not have been created by whatever had created Area X.

He passed a corner grocery store, a pharmacy, a neighborhood bar. He crossed the street
and narrowly missed running into a woman on a bicycle. Abandoned the sidewalk for
the side of the road when he had to, wanting now to get to the river soon, not looking
forward to the run back up the hill.

You could not get under the border by any means on the seaward side. You could not
tunnel under it on the landward side. You could not penetrate it with advanced instrumentation
or radar or sonar. From satellites peering down from above, you would see only wilderness
in apparent real time, nothing out of the ordinary. Even though this was an optical
lie.

The night the border had come down, it had taken ships and planes and trucks with
it, anything that happened to be on or approaching that imaginary but too-real line
at the moment of its creation, and for many hours after, before anyone knew what was
going on, knew enough to keep distant. Before the army moved in. The plaintive groan
of metal and the vibration of engines that continued running as they disappeared …
into something, somewhere. A smoldering, apocalyptic vision, the con towers of a destroyer,
sent to investigate with the wrong intel, “sliding into nothing” as one observer put
it. The last shocked transmissions from the men and women on board, via video and
radio, while most ran to the back in a churning, surging wave that, on the grainy
helicopter video, looked like some enormous creature leaping off into the water. Because
they were about to disappear and could do nothing about it, all of it complicated
by the fog. Some, though, just stood there, watching as their ship disintegrated,
and then they crossed over or died or went somewhere else or … Control couldn’t fathom
it.

The hill leveled out and he was back on sidewalks, this time passing generic strip
malls and chain stores and people crossing at stoplights and people getting into cars
in parking lots … until he reached the main drag before the river—a blur of bright
lights and more pedestrians, some of them drunk—crossed it, and came into a quiet
neighborhood of mobile homes and tiny cinder-block houses. He was sweating a lot by
now, despite the coolness. Someone was having a barbecue and they all stopped to watch
him as he ran by.