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mimetic
Said reader will soon become acutely aware that they are immersed in the terrain of someone else’s imagination. If, as John Gardner famously said, good writing is “a vivid and continuous dream,” Annihilation soon feels more like a hallucination.
The tower, which was not supposed to be there,
All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there.
The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise.
Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
The entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it. This presence manifested like a low-grade fever, pressing down on all of us.
The tall pines, with their scaly ridges of bark, rose on both sides, and the shadows of flying birds conjured lines between them.
The reasons I had volunteered were very separate from my qualifications for the expedition.
The discussion of the tower was, in a way, our first opportunity to test the limits of disagreement and of compromise.
prescient,
She had come to us from the military, and I could see already the value of that experience.
Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure.
It was a legitimate question, but jarring nonetheless.
It had become dark by then and there came soon after the strange mournful call in the night that we knew must have natural causes but created a little shiver regardless.
the deer took flight, their white tails exclamation points against the green and brown of the underbrush; the raccoons, bowlegged, swayed about their business, ignoring us.
The anthropologist was giggling a bit out of nervousness and the absurdity of experiencing an emergency situation that was taking so long to develop.
parasites and other hitchhikers of a neurological nature.
coquina,
Her position, to lead and possibly to know more than us, must have been difficult and lonely.
a darkness that suggested downward steps.
I tried to imagine the builder of this place but could not.
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.
Even though no threat had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence. As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful. Had I expressed this anxiety to the psychologist, she would have been worried, I know. But I was more attuned to solitude than any of us, and I would have characterized that place in that moment of our exploration as watchful.
I couldn’t tell you what impulse drove me, except that I was the biologist and this looked oddly organic.
“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…”
Where lies the strangling fruit became bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its meaning.
Already those initial phrases were infiltrating my mind in unexpected ways, finding fertile ground.
Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read.
A calm had settled over me. A competing sensation, as if I couldn’t breathe, or didn’t want to, was clearly psychological not physiological.
Of all of us, I think she had best grasped the implications of what we had seen: that we might now be living in a kind of nightmare.
I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.
I imagined it might be another wild pig, as they could be good swimmers and were just as omnivorous in their choice of habitats as in their diets.
It is one thing to think you might be receiving hypnotic suggestion and quite another to experience it as an observer.
Estrangement, in all of its many forms,
I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.
I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.
In the morning, I woke with my senses heightened, so that even the rough brown bark of the pines or the ordinary lunging swoop of a woodpecker came to me as a kind of minor revelation.
that I knew the secret to her magician’s show did not necessarily mean she was a threat.
The psychologist’s habit of allowing a slim smile to cross her face at inappropriate times made me want to slap her.
“That’s settled then,” she said, and brushed past the surveyor to start making breakfast. The anthropologist had always made breakfast before.
She was scared, of course. To her, I was acting irrationally.
“You saw something that wasn’t there.” She wasn’t going to let me off the hook. You can’t see what is there, I thought.
My heart felt like an animal had become trapped in my chest and was trying to crawl out.
Nothing was receding. Nothing was leaving me.
Under the terms of that flawed agreement
lodestone,
My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing.
Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one.
