Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

I recalled the deserted village, the strange eyes of the dolphins. A question existed there that I might in time answer in too personal a way.

The moaning grew still louder, but I could not determine its direction.

The smell became a special kind of stench.

The ground began to sag a little under my weight, and I knew ...

Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? If so, it was a very small part.

I could feel the thudding vibration of its passage, the rasping clack of the reeds beneath its tread, and there was a kind of expectant tone to its moaning now that sickened me with the urgency of its seeking.

From out of the darkness there came an impression of a great weight, aimed at me from my left. A suggestion of the side of a tortured, pale visage and a great, ponderous bulk behind it.

past it and free.

Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border.

The water stole all sound,

The pain in my left side seemed at first as if someone kept opening me up with a butcher knife and sewing me back together.

“You’ve come back and you’re not human anymore. You should kill yourself so I don’t have to.”

I felt as if I were stuck between two futures, even though I had already made the decision to live in one of them.

I had never killed anyone before. I was not sure, given the logic of this place, that I had truly killed someone now.

circle of indecision.

Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand that action be taken.

I said a few words about how I hoped she would forgive me, and how I forgave her for shooting at me. I don’t know if my words made much sense to either of us at that point. It all sounded absurd to me as I said it. If she had suddenly been resurrected we would probably both admit we forgave nothing.

Carrying her in my arms, I waded into the black water. I let her go when I was knee-deep and watched her sink. When I could no longer see even the outstretched pale anemone of her left hand, I waded back to shore. I did not know if she was religious, expected to be resurrected in heaven or become food for the worms. But regardless, the cypress trees formed a kind of cathedral over her as she went deeper and deeper.

There should have been an awareness of comfort at being spared the pain of my wounds, but I was being haunted in my delirium.

feel the absence of their regard like a kind of terrible bereavement.

When I shot her, it was with these enhanced senses still at work, and that was the only reason she was vulnerable to me.

A floating sensation and a heaviness had run through my body at intervals, never with any balance, so that I was either buoyant or dragging.

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.

interregnum

prosaic

In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.

Had the grave been meant to hold me or the anthropologist? Or both? I did not like the idea of lying next to the anthropologist for all eternity.

border. I could distinctly recall wiping the spaghetti and chicken scraps from a plate and wondering with a kind of bewilderment how such a mundane act could coexist with the mystery of his reappearance.

I had self-destructed when I’d had opportunities in the field.

I was not a domesticated animal. The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction … none of these things appealed to me.

“I’m not cheating on you if that’s what you mean.” The directness of that usually stopped him, even if it didn’t reassure him.

Weeds had grown up around it, making the soil less likely to erode into the water.

Songbirds on migration used it as a refueling station.

Mice and owls played out ancient rituals of predator and prey.

They all had a watchfulness about them that was different from animals in true wilderness; this was a jaded watchfulness, the result of a long and weary history. Tales of bad-faith encounters in human-occupied territory, tragic past events.

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

even if the stark truth is that I still did not truly understand what I had missed about him.

The psychologist had said, “The border is advancing … a little bit more every year.” But I found that statement too limiting, too ignorant. There were thousands of “dead” spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw, that had been rendered invisible because they were not “of use.” Anything could inhabit them for a time without anyone noticing. We had come to think of the border as this monolithic invisible wall, but if members of the eleventh expedition had been able to return without our noticing, couldn’t other things have already gotten through?

the Tower called incessantly to me; I could feel its physical presence under the earth with a clarity that mimicked that first flush of attraction, when you knew without looking exactly where the object of desire stood in the room.

intercession,

obfuscation

No one had as yet plumbed the depths of intent or purpose in a way that had obstructed that intent or purpose.

Everyone had died or been killed, returned changed or returned unchanged, but Area X had continued on as it always had

There was no way I could corroborate any of these theories, but I took a grim comfort in coming up with them anyway.

I set up my microscope on the rickety table, which I suppose the surveyor had found already so damaged it did not require her further attention.

I checked the samples over and over, even childishly pretending I had no interest in looking at them before swooping down with an eagle eye. I was convinced that when I wasn’t looking at them, these cells became something else, that the very act of observation changed everything.

Then I examined the samples from the village: moss from the “forehead” of one of the eruptions, splinters of wood, a dead fox, a rat. The wood was indeed wood. The rat was indeed a rat. The moss and the fox … were composed of modified human cells. Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead …

The boar on the way to base camp, the strange dolphins, the tormented beast in the reeds. Even the idea that replicas of members of the eleventh expedition had crossed back over. All supported the evidence of my microscope. Transformations were taking place here, and as much as I had felt part of a “natural” landscape on my trek to the lighthouse, I could not deny that these habitats were transitional in a deeply unnatural way.

It was another brilliant, blinding afternoon of stunning blue sky allied with a comfortable heat.

Nothing about my husband’s journal was expected. Except for some terse, hastily scribbled exceptions, he had addressed most of the entries to me. I did not want this, and as soon as it became apparent I had to resist the need to throw the journal away from me as if it were poison. My reaction had nothing to do with love or lack of love but was more out of a sense of guilt. He had meant to share this journal with me, and now he was either truly dead or existed in a state beyond any possible way for me to communicate with him, to reciprocate.