Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing could touch us. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.

I was searching for entirely rational biological theories. Then, after a time, the boar faded into the backdrop like all else that we had passed on our way from the border, and I was staring into the future again.

The psychologist might recite the measurements of the “top” of the tower, but those numbers meant nothing, had no wider context. Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…”

It was entirely in keeping with his personality to become set on something and follow it, regardless of the consequences. To let an impulse become a compulsion, especially if he thought he was contributing to a cause greater than himself. It was one reason he had stayed in the navy for a second tour.

So many needing so much to communicate what amounted to so little.

Yet even as my husband wanted me to be assimilated in a sense, the irony was that he wanted to stand out.

There are so many things couples do from habit and because they are expected to, and I didn’t mind those rituals.

Slowly, painfully, I realized what I had been reading from the very first words of his journal. My husband had had an inner life that went beyond his gregarious exterior, and if I had known enough to let him inside my guard, I might have understood this fact.

His personal observations included many grace notes. A description in the margin of a tidal pool in the rocks down the coast just beyond the lighthouse. A lengthy observation of the atypical use of an outcropping of oysters at low tide by a skimmer seeking to kill a large fish. Photographs of the tidal pool had been stuck in a sleeve in the back. Placed carefully in the sleeve, too, were pressed wildflowers, a slender seedpod, a few unusual leaves. My husband would have cared little for any of this; even the focus to observe the skimmer and write a page of notes would have required great concentration from him. I knew these elements were intended for me and me alone. There were no endearments, but I understood in part because of this restraint. He knew how much I hated words like love.

That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing …

People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.

The things she had done and said that society labeled antisocial or selfish.

Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.

Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead? I am the last casualty of both the eleventh and the twelfth expeditions. I am not returning home.