More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.
All of them had, at some point, drawn the lighthouse or written about it. Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder. At the time, 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.
One of the great traumas of my life was worrying about the pool. Would the new owners see the beauty and the importance of leaving it as is, or would they destroy it, create unthinking slaughter in honor of the pool’s real function? I never found out—I couldn’t bear to go back, even if I also could never forget the richness of that place. All I could do was look forward, apply what I had learned from watching the inhabitants of the pool. And I never did look back, for better or worse. If funding for a project ran out, or the area we studied was suddenly bought for development, I never
...more
All of these tiny remnants I was stuffing into glass tubes with tweezers … what would they tell me? Not much, I felt. Sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things will not be revealed by microscopes.
By the time we were ready to cross the border, we knew everything … and we knew nothing.
I did not trust that feeling. I felt, in so many ways, that I was being lied to.
“I felt as if I could do anything as long as I did not mind being watched.”
I did not like this wall because it provided evidence of a very specific kind of insanity.
I took the photograph out of its frame, shoved it in my pocket. The lighthouse keeper would come with me, although he hardly counted as a good-luck charm. As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again.
I could easily lose hours there, observing the hidden life of tidal pools, and sometimes 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, which was all I had ever craved during my studies, my practice to reach this point.
Oh, that’s just the old biologist. She’s been here for ages, going crazy studying those mussels. She talks to herself, mutters to herself at the bar, and if you say a kind word … When I saw those hundreds of journals, I felt for a long moment that I had become that old biologist after 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. To acknowledge it, to try to name it, might be a way of letting it in. (For the same reason, I suppose, I have continued to refer to the changes in me as a “brightness,” 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 ghost bird had found his ghost, on an inexplicable pile of other ghosts.
“How close were you to your extended family?” “Close enough.” Birthday cards suitable for a five-year-old even when I was twenty. Visits once every couple of years. A kindly grandfather with long yellow fingernails and the voice of a bear. A grandmother who lectured on the value of religion and saving your pennies. What were their names?
“Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.
The black boxes might do nothing but in my mind they were all blinking red.
“Is there anything else you’re willing to tell me?” “We should never have come here. I should never have come here.” The rawness in her tone hinted at a personal anguish that went beyond her physical condition. “That’s all?” “I’ve come to believe it is the one fundamental truth.”
I had not seen a name or heard a name spoken aloud for months, and seeing one now bothered me deeply. It seemed wrong, as if it did not belong in Area X. A name was a dangerous luxury here. Sacrifices didn’t need names. People who served a function didn’t need to be named. In all ways, the name was a further and unwanted confusion to me, a dark space that kept growing and growing in my mind.
The word “Annihilation” was followed by “help induce immediate suicide.” We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.
There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.
Feed Area X but do not antagonize it, and perhaps someone will, through luck or mere repetition, hit upon some explanation, some solution, before the world becomes Area X.
“Fewer birds than indicated in reports,” he wrote. “But where do they go? Only the ghost bird knows.”
They, too, discovered what only I call the Tower
I, too, knew that Area X ended abruptly not far past the lighthouse. How did I know this? Our superiors had told us during training. So, in fact, I knew nothing at all.
For a moment afterward, it all made sense to me, everything that had happened. We were dead. We were ghosts roaming a haunted landscape, and although we didn’t know it, people lived normal lives here, everything was as it should be here … but we couldn’t see it through the veil, the interference.”
Seeing all of this, experiencing all of it, even when it’s bad, I wish you were here. I wish we had volunteered together. I would have understood you better here, on the trek north. We wouldn’t have needed to say anything if you didn’t want to. It wouldn’t have bothered me. Not at all. And we wouldn’t have turned back. We would have kept going until we couldn’t go farther.
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. Except I hadn’t, of course. I had let tidal pools and fungi that could devour plastic inside my guard, but not him. Of all the aspects of the journal, this ate at me the most. He had created his share of our problems—by pushing me too hard, by wanting too much, by trying to see something in me that didn’t exist. But I could have met him partway and retained my sovereignty. And now it was too late.
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 …
You understand, I could no more have turned back than have gone back in time. My free will was compromised, if only by the severe temptation of the unknown. To have quit that place, to have returned to the surface, without rounding that corner … my imagination would have tormented me forever. In that moment, I had convinced myself I would rather die knowing … something, anything.
I really wanted to lose myself. 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.
If anyone had been observing—and who is to say now that they were not?—they would have seen a cursing, half-drunk, reckless biologist who had lost all perspective, who was out in the middle of nowhere for the second straight year and feeling vulnerable and lonely, even though she’d promised herself she would never get lonely.
What can you do when your five senses are not enough? Because I still couldn’t truly see it here, any more than I had seen it under the microscope, and that’s what scared me the most. Why couldn’t I see it? In my mind, I stood over the starfish at Rock Bay, and the starfish grew and grew until it was not just the tidal pool but the world, and I was teetering on its rough, luminous surface, staring up at the night sky again, while the light of it flowed up and through me.
What occurs after revelation and paralysis? Either death or a slow and certain thawing. A returning to the physical world.
might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.
There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.
worried that this sensation was residual hypnotic compulsion, that even from beyond death the psychologist had found a way to manipulate me. Perhaps there had been some encoded order or directive my infection had not been able to circumvent or override. Was I in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation?
I thought about how everything lay above, and nothing now below.
“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.” “Am I a pinprick then, disturbing the edges of your reality, ghost bird?” he asked, and this time I caught the desperation of his mood.
Before she died, the psychologist said I had changed, and I think she meant I had changed sides. It isn’t true—I don’t even know if there are sides, or what that might mean—but it could be true. I see now that I could be persuaded. A religious or superstitious person, someone who believed in angels or in demons, might see it differently. Almost anyone else might see it differently. But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning.
If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.
Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?
