Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

let an impulse become a compulsion,

I knew when I woke up beside him that morning after his return that our time together was already running out.

I didn’t cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.

So we just stood there, and although I could feel the heat and weight of him beside me, the steady sound of his breathing, we were living apart.

“I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time…”

The morning had the scent and feel of a fresh start, but it was not to be.

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

aria

Above, raptors searched the ground below for prey, circling as if in geometric patterns so controlled was their flight.

cocoon of timelessness,

wind-lashed marsh reeds a wide, blurred ripple all around me.

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental.

Their disappearance might have seemed to some a simple intensifying of a process begun generations before.

But when the mind expects a certain range of possibilities, any explanation that falls outside of that expectation can surprise.

I continued toward the lighthouse, which now loomed larger, almost heavy, its black-and-white stripes topped with red making it somehow authoritarian.

crenellations

It appeared that some past defenders of the lighthouse had been at war with the sea. I did not like this wall because it provided evidence of a very specific kind of insanity.

A purple flowering vine had colonized the lighthouse wall and curled itself around the remains of the door on its left side. There was comfort in that, for whatever had happened with such violence must have occurred long ago.

No one stood on those steps to watch me, but I had the impression someone could have been there a moment before.

the dark splotches across the walls and pooled on the floor told of unspeakable and sudden violence.

Maybe you carved your initials when visiting a war monument, if you were insensitive. Here it stank of bravado to drown out fear.

Confessions, too, which I won’t document here but that had the sincerity and weight of having been written immediately before, or during, moments when the individuals must have thought death was upon them.

I stared at him from across the years,

the ceiling grown suddenly close,

midden.

laconic

A species of mussels found nowhere else lived in those tidal pools, in a symbiotic relationship with a fish called a gartner, after its discoverer.

I marveled at the fact that I had been given such a gift: not just to lose myself in the present moment so utterly but also to have such solitude,

sometimes with someone I knew but who was a stranger just leaving,

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

while able to appear sociable but still existing apart.

But fun for me was sneaking off to peer into a tidal pool, to grasp the intricacies of the creatures that lived there. Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat, orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things.

Those journals, flimsy gravestones, confronted me with my husband’s death all over again.

“Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

Beetles and silverfish tended to those archives, and tiny black cockroaches with always moving antennae.

midden

… the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives …

striations

Slowly the history of exploring Area X could be said to be turning into Area X.

shorthand

Some types of omissions made my mind itch as much as more explicit offerings.

hinterlands

After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries.

… in the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe …

Morale is low. Not everything that is happening to us has a rational explanation.

I could only underscore my previous speculation that to most of them a lighthouse was a symbol, a reassurance of the old order, and by its prominence on the horizon it provided an illusion of a safe refuge. That it had betrayed that trust was manifest in what I had found downstairs.

But I had begun to realize that you had to wage a guerrilla war against whatever force had come to inhabit Area X if you wanted to fight at all. You had to fade into the landscape, or like the writer of the thistle chronicles, you had to pretend it wasn’t there for as long as possible.

because to examine this condition too closely—to quantify it or deal with it empirically when I have little control over it—would make it too real.)

the rectangle of light above me a reassurance that this was not the sum of my existence.

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 …