More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The surveyor had been found at her house, sitting in a chair on the back patio. The anthropologist had been found by her husband, knocking on the back door of his medical practice. The biologist had been found in an overgrown lot several blocks from her house, staring at a crumbling brick wall.
The former director, in her role as psychologist, had conducted them.
“Never do something for just one reason,” his grandpa had told him more than once, and that, at least, Control had taken to heart.
“Call me Ghost Bird,” she said. Was there a twinge of defiance in her flat voice?
“Ghost Bird?” “Or nothing at all.”
If anything, Ghost Bird was healthier now than before she’d left; the toxins present in most people today existed in her and the others at much lower levels than normal.
“What’s the last thing you remember doing in Area X?” The answer, unexpected, surged up toward him like a kind of attack as the light met the darkness: “Drowning. I was drowning.”
About thirty-two years ago, along a remote southern stretch known by some as the “forgotten coast,” an Event had occurred that began to transform the landscape and simultaneously caused a border or wall to appear. A kind of ghost or “permeable pre-border manifestation” as the files put it—light as fog, almost invisible except for a flickering quality—had quickly emanated out in all directions from an unknown epicenter and then suddenly stopped at its current impenetrable limits.
The first expedition alone had, according to the files, experienced such horrors, almost beyond imagining, that it was a wonder that they had sent anyone after that.
Which gave Control an uncomfortable image of someone or something in Area X entering the lighthouse and sitting atop a pile of journals and reading them for the Southern Reach. Or writing them.
“The closer you are, the safer you are,” she whispered in his ear. Closer to what?
“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
...more
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 always started well. It might not end well. But he knew that when morning came, he would rise as Control and that he would go back to the Southern Reach.
Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.
In actual fact, most of those who encountered it called it a tower or a tunnel or even a pit, but he stuck with “topographical anomaly” in hopes she would give it a more specific name on her own.
“So many other expeditions have encountered this topographical anomaly.” A mouthful, topographical anomaly. “Even so,” she said, “I don’t remember a tower.” Tower. Not tunnel or pit or cave or hole in the ground. “Why do you call it a tower?”
But it was mostly his own sense of unease that made him pause, and then stop. His feeling that in making the tower-pit more real in his imagination, he was also making it more real in fact.
Further”—and here Control recognized that Hsyu had slipped into the rote routine of a lecture given many times before, possibly accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation—“if someone or something is trying to jam information inside your head using words you understand but a meaning you don’t, it’s not even that it’s not on a bandwidth you can receive, it’s much worse.
Whereas ‘biologist’—that’s a function, a subset of a full identity.” Not if you did it right, like Ghost Bird, and you were totally and wholly your job to begin with. “If you can be your function, then the theory is that these associations narrow or close down, and that closes down the pathways into personality. Perhaps.”
Because our minds process information almost solely through analogy and categorization, we are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category and lies outside of the realm of our analogies.”
If you quacked like a scientist and waddled like a scientist, soon, to nonscientists, you became the subject under discussion and not a person at all. Some scientists lived within this role, almost embraced it, transformed into walking theses or textbooks.
A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.” “As a physicist, what do you do when you’re faced by something that doesn’t care what you do and isn’t affected by your actions? Then you start thinking about dark energy and you go a little nuts.”
“The few white-and-brown ones are the offspring of white rabbits mating with the native marsh rabbits. We call them Border Specials, and the soldiers shoot and eat them. But not the pure white ones, which I don’t think makes sense. Why shoot any of them?” Why not shoot all of them? Why eat any of them?
The gist of these comments was that when they looked away from the microscope, the samples changed; and when they stared again, what they looked at had reconstituted itself to appear normal.
“Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake? On a farm? At slots in a casino?
“Terroir’s direct translation is ‘a sense of place,’ and what it means is the sum of the effects of a localized environment, inasmuch as they impact the qualities of a particular product. Yes, that can mean wine, but what if you applied these criteria to thinking about Area X?”
Would terroir really be more useful than another approach? If something far beyond the experience of human beings had decided to embark upon a purpose that it did not intend to allow humans to recognize or understand, then terroir would simply be a kind of autopsy, a kind of admission of the limitations of human systems. You could map the entirety of a process—or, say, a beachhead or an invasion—only after it had happened, and still not know the who or the why. He wanted to say to Whitby, “Growing grapes is simpler than Area X,” but refrained.
Not a very good biologist. In a traditional sense. Empathic more toward environments than people. Forgets the reasons she went, who is paying her salary. But becomes embedded to an extraordinary extent. Would know Area X better than I do from almost the first moment sets foot there. Experience with similar settings. Self-sufficient. Unburdened. Connection through her husband. What would she be in Area X? A signal? A flare? Or invisible? Exploit.
What did it mean? Nothing. Had the biologist believed it all? Perhaps. The tale wanted to be believed, begged to be believed: a story of good old national can-do pride. Roll up your sleeves and get down to work, and if you try hard enough you’ll come back alive and not a broken-down zombie with a distant gaze and cancer in place of a personality and an intact short-term memory.
A pale creature was crouched in front of shelves of supplies, revealed under the sharp light of a single low-swinging lightbulb. An unbearable yet beatific agony deformed its features. Whitby.
HUH
“You have seen the video, haven’t you? From the first expedition?” “Not yet,” as if he were admitting to being a virgin. That was scheduled for tomorrow.
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.
“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.”
Then he had been given an administrative desk job, from which he’d worked his way up through the ranks again, to the exalted non-position of “fixer,” with the clear understanding that he’d never be deployed in the field again. So that one day he could be called upon to run a peculiar backwater agency. So that what he couldn’t bring himself to confess to any of his girlfriends he could shout out loudly in a cafeteria, in front of a woman who appeared to hate him.
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?
“Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t the biologist?” She said it soft, 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.
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.
He wasn’t sure he knew the difference anymore between what he was meant to find and what he’d dug up on his own. A tower could become a pit. Questioning a biologist could become a trap. An expedition member might even return thirty years later in the form of a voice whispering strange nothings in his ear.
“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.”
The face Control recognized from the files: the psychologist from the final eleventh expedition, a man who, before his death from cancer, had said in the transcripts, “It was quite beautiful, quite peaceful in Area X.” And smiled in a vague way.
He had been standing there without realizing that it wasn’t a draft. Someone was breathing, behind him.
oh my god im sick to my stomach
Then there was a slight movement and Whitby’s hand came to rest on the back of his head. Just resting there, palm flat against Control’s hair. The fingers spread like a starfish and slowly moved back and forth. Two strokes. Three. Petting Control’s head. Caressing it in a gentle, tentative way. Control remained still. It took an effort.
A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. But could it?
“Thank you for your service, for your many years. Now take your weird art and get the fuck out.”
The truth was, if the man who looked like the high school quarterback had responded by turning into something monstrous and torn him out into the night, part of Control wouldn’t have minded because he would have been closer to the truth about Area X, and even if the truth was a fucking maw, a fanged maw that stank like a cave full of putrefying corpses, that was still closer than he was now.
That island had had numerous names, as if none would stick, until now it was simply known as Island X at the Southern Reach, although some called it “Island Y,” as in “Why are we bothering to research this?”
The old lighthouse fell into ruin, but its eye had been removed long before.
Ctrl was beginning to seem the only control he actually had. Ctrl only had one role, and it performed that role stoically and without complaint.
Control reached out for the large double doors. Reached for the handle, missed it, tried again. But there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall. And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand. He was screaming, he thought, but from somewhere deep beneath the sea.
