Acceptance

  “Because I’m alive,” she’d replied. “Because I’m walking through wilderness on a beautiful day.” This with a sideways glance he took to mean that she wondered if he was holding up. One that made him realize that her goals might not be his, that they might converge only to diverge, and he had to be ready for that. Echoes of field assignments gone wrong. Of his mother saying, “The operational damage from an event can linger in the mind like a ghost.” While he wondered if even the more banal things she had said had a hidden meaning or agenda.

  Freedom could take you farther from what you sought, not closer. Something he was learning out here, beyond any standard intel, in a wilderness he didn’t understand. About as prepared for Area X, he realized, as for Ghost Bird, and perhaps that was, in the end, the same thing. Because they existed alone together, walked a trail that threaded its way between reed-choked lakes that could be tar-black or as green as the reflected trees that congregated in islands among the reeds … and he was finally free to ask her anything he wanted to, but he didn’t. Because it didn’t really matter.

  So, instead, he shoved his hand into his jacket pocket from time to time, clenched his fist around his father’s carving, taken from the mantel in the little house on the hill in Hedley. The smooth lines of it, the way the grain of the wood under the paint threatened a splinter, soothed him. A carving of a cat, chosen to remind him of long-lost Chorry, no doubt blissfully hunting rats among the bushes.

  So, instead, he dove, resentful at their pull, into reexamining over and over his rescued Whitby pages, the “terroir pages,” although they were more personal than that. An anchor, a bridge to his memory of the rest of the manuscript, lost at sea. If he used those pages to talk to Ghost Bird, it was in part to bring relief or distraction from the closeness of her and the way that the endless reeds, the fresh air, the blue sky, all conspired to make the real world remote, unimportant, a dream. When it was the most important thing.

  Somewhere back there his mother was fighting for her career at Central, that act synonymous with fighting against the encroachment of Area X. Somewhere, too, new fronts had opened up, Area X expanding in ways that might not even match its prior characteristics. How could he know? Planes might be falling from the skies, this non-mission, this following of his, already a failure.

  Quoting Whitby’s report as he remembered it, paraphrasing: “Had they, in fact, passed judgment without a trial? Decided there could be no treaty or negotiation?”

  “That might be closer to the truth, to a kind of truth,” Ghost Bird replied. It was now early afternoon and the sky had become a deeper blue with long narrow clouds sliding across it. The marsh was alive with rustlings and birdsong.

  “Condemned by an alien jury,” Control said.

  “Not likely. Indifference.”

  “He covers that, too: ‘Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer … reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.’” Another half-remembered phrasing, the real becoming half real. But his father had never valued authenticity so much as boldness of expression.

  “See that deer over there, beyond the canal? She’s definitely noticing us.”

  “Is she noticing us or is she noticing us?”

  Either scenario might have horrified his mother the spy, who had never gotten along with nature. No one in his family had, not really. He couldn’t remember any real outings into the woods, just fishing around lakes and sitting by fireplaces in cabins during the winter. Had he ever even been lost before?

  “Pretend the former since we can’t do anything about the latter.”

  “Or this,” Control said. “Or this: ‘Or are we back in time, some creature or impulse from the past replenishing us as we grind to a halt.’”

  “A stupid thing to say,” Ghost Bird said, unable to resist the bait. “Natural places are no different than human cities. The old exists next to the new. Invasive species integrate with or push out native species. The landscape you see around you is the same as seeing an old cathedral next to a skyscraper. You don’t believe this crap, do you?”

  He gave her what he hoped was a defiant expression, one that didn’t hint at how he had begun to doubt Whitby even as he continued to recite the gospel of Whitby. He had held back the quotes that might lead to something more substantial so he could think on them a little longer, contaminate them with his own opinions.

  “I’m trying to separate out the pointless from the useful. I’m trying to make some progress as we trudge on over to the island.” Unable to avoid infusing the word island with venom. Grandpa Jack would’ve felt the same about the island, would be restless and pushing, for all the good it would’ve done against Ghost Bird.

  “Did any expedition ever make it to the island?” she asked, Control recognizing her attempt at deflection.

  “If they did, nothing came back to the Southern Reach about it,” he said. “It wasn’t a priority.” Perhaps too much else to wonder about.

  “Why all the focus on the lighthouse, the topographical anomaly, and not the island?”

  “You’d have to ask the former director about that. Or you’d have to ask Lowry.”

  “I never met Lowry,” she said, as if this disproved his existence.

  Truth was, Lowry sounded unreal to Control when he said the name in this place. But Lowry also resisted being cast aside, disregarded, kept floating there at the edges of his vision like some majestic, demonic dust mote. Manifesting every time he worried he might still be on a mission that had lodged so deep inside his skull he couldn’t draw it out. Unknown commands, messages, imperatives, impulses that were not his own, that could be activated by others.

  “We think in terms of machines, not animals. The enemy doesn’t acknowledge machines.” He liked the word enemy—it crystallized and focused his attention more than “Area X.” Area X was just a phenomenon visited upon humanity, like a weather event, but an enemy created intent and focus.

  She laughed at machines, not animals. “It definitely understands and acknowledges machines. It understands them better than we do.” She stopped to face him, to lend emphasis, and something like anger pulsed out from her. “Have you not understood yet that whatever’s causing this can manipulate the genome, works miracles of mimicry and biology? Knows what to do with molecules and membranes, can peer through things, can surveil, and then withdraw. That, to it, a smartphone, say, is as basic as a flint arrowhead, that it’s operating off of such refined and intricate senses that the tools we’ve bound ourselves with, the ways we record the universe, are probably evidence of our own primitive nature. Perhaps it doesn’t even think that we have consciousness or free will—not in the ways it measures such things.”

  “If that’s true, why does it pay us any attention at all?”

  “It probably extends to us the least attention possible.”

  Is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out?

  “So we give up. We live on the island, make ourselves hats out of leaves, take bounty from the sea.” Build a house from the ribs of one of the leviathans from his dreams. Listen to homemade dance music while drinking moonshine distilled from poisonous weeds. Turn away from the real world because it doesn’t exist anymore.

  Ignoring him, she said: “A whale can injure another whale with its sonar. A whale can speak to another whale across sixty miles of ocean. A whale is as intelligent as we are, just in a way we can’t quite measure or understand. Because we’re these incredibly blunt instruments.” That idea again. “Or at least, you are.” Maybe she hadn’t muttered that under her breath, he’d only imagined it.

  “You sympathize with It,” he said. “You like It.” A cheap shot that he couldn’t help.

  Too often over the past four days, he had felt like he was crossing one of the dioramas from the natural history museum he had loved so much—intriguing, fascinating, but not quite real, or not quite real to him.
Even if the effects had not yet manifested, he was being invaded, infected, remade. Was it his fate to become a moaning creature in the reeds and then food for worms?

  “There was a lot about fakes in Whitby’s notes,” he said a little later, slyly, to test her. Especially as her attention seemed elsewhere, always glued to the sky. To perhaps see just how dispassionate she could be about her own condition. With, he knew, just a sliver of payback in there, too, which he couldn’t help. Because it made no sense to go to the island.

  When she said nothing, he made up a quote, feeling guilty even as the words left his mouth: “‘The sense in which the perfect fake becomes the thing it mimics, and this through some strange yet static process reveals some truth about the world. Even as it can’t, by definition, be original.’”

  Still no response. “No? How about ‘When you meet yourself and see a double that is you, would you feel sympathy, or would the impulse be to destroy the copy? To judge it unreal and to tear it down like any cardboard construct?’” Another fake, because Whitby hadn’t discussed doubles—not once in the whole damn document.

  She stopped walking, faced him. As ever, he had trouble not looking away.

  “Is that what you’re afraid of, Control?” She said it with no particular cruelty or passion. “Because I could use hypnosis on you.”

  “You might be susceptible, too,” he said, wanting to warn her off, even as he knew there might come a time when he would need her to use hypnosis just as she had in the tunnel leading into Area X. Take my hand. Close your eyes. It had felt as if he were continually crawling out of the mouth of a vast inky-black snake, that he could “see” a rasping sound from deep in its throat, and from all sides, through the infinite dark bruise that encircled him, leviathans stared in at him.

  “I’m not.”

  “But you’re the double—the copy,” he said, pressing. “Maybe the copy doesn’t have the same defenses. And you still don’t know why.” This much she had told him.

  “Test me,” she said, a snarl from deep in her throat. She stopped, faced him, threw down her pack. “Go ahead and test me. Say it. Say the words you think will destroy me.”

  “I don’t want to destroy you,” he said quietly, looking away.

  “Are you sure?” she said, coming very close. He could smell her sweat, see the rise of her shoulders, the half-curled left hand. “Are you sure?” she repeated. “Why not inoculate me, if you’re unsure? You’re already caught between wanting me and not being sure I’m all human, is that it? Made by the enemy. Must be the enemy. But can’t help yourself anyway.”

  “I helped you back at the Southern Reach,” he said.

  “Don’t thank people for doing what they’re supposed to. You told me that.”

  He took a stumbling step back. “I’m out here, Ghost Bird, traveling to a place I didn’t want to go. Having followed someone I’m not sure I know.” A beacon to him still, and he resented that, didn’t want it. Couldn’t help it.

  “That’s bullshit. You know exactly who I am—or you should have. You’re afraid, just like me,” she said, and he knew that he was. Had no defenses out here, for anything.

  “I don’t think you’re with the enemy,” he said, enemy sounding harsh and unreasonable now. “And I don’t think of you as a copy. Not really.”

  Exasperation, even as she was relenting, or he thought she was: “I am a copy, John. But not a perfect one. I’m not her. She’s not me. Do you know what I’d say if I came face-to-face with her?”

  “What?”

  “I’d tell her, ‘You made a lot of fucking mistakes. You made a lot of mistakes, and yet I love you. You’re a mess and a revelation, but I can’t be any of that. All I can do is work out things myself.’ And then, knowing her, she’d probably look at me funny and take a tissue sample from me.”

  A roaring laughter came out of him at that. He banged his hand on his knee. “You’re right. You’re probably right. She’d do exactly that.” He sat on the ground, while she remained where she was, stiff as a sentinel. “I’m beyond my skill set out here. I’m totally fucked. Even if we’d gone to the lighthouse.”

  “Totally fucked,” she said, smiling.

  “Strange, isn’t it? A strange place to be.” Being drawn out of himself, even though he didn’t want to be. Suddenly calmer than he’d been since he’d gotten here, all of his failures muffled and indistinct behind another kind of border.

  She stared at him, appraising him.

  “We should keep going,” she said. “But you can keep reading.”

  She offered him a hand up, the strength of her grip as he got to his feet a greater reassurance than any words.

  “But it’s a fucking disaster,” he said. “I’m reading you the last will and testament of a fool.”

  “What other entertainment do we have out here?”

  “True.”

  Control hadn’t told her about Whitby’s strange room or his suspicions about Whitby as a conduit for Area X. He hadn’t told her about those last desperate moments at the Southern Reach as the border shifted. And in not telling Ghost Bird these things, he had come to understand his mother’s lies better. She had wanted to cover up the core of her decisions by hiding facts or watering them down. But she must have been wise enough to realize, no matter her motivations, no matter the labyrinth, every omission left some sign of its presence.

  “‘How does It renew Itself if not through our actions? Our lives?’” Whitby asked, living on through Control when the man himself was probably dead or worse.

  But she wasn’t listening; something in the sky had caught her attention again, something he knew couldn’t be storks, and he had the binoculars this time, scrambled to find what she was staring at. When he found it, he adjusted the focus a few times, not sure he’d seen correctly.

  But he had.

  Across the deepening blue, high up, something drifted that resembled ripped and tattered streamers. Long and wide and alien. Its progress so far up, so far away … Control thought of an invisible shredded plastic bag, eviscerated to elongate and drift through the sky … except it was thicker than that and part of the sky, too. The texture of it, the way it existed and didn’t exist, made him recoil, made his hand twitch, become numb, skin cold, remembering a wall that was not a wall. A wall that had been breathing under his touch.

  “Get down!” Ghost Bird said, and forced him to his knees beside her in a stand of reeds. He could feel the brightness in him now—tight, taut, pulling like it was his skin being pulled, drawn toward the sky that wasn’t just the sky anymore. Drawn to it so much that he would have gotten up if Ghost Bird hadn’t forced him down again. He lay there grateful for her weight beside him, grateful he wasn’t out here alone.

  Stitching through the sky, in a terrifying way—rippling, diving, rising again, and there came a terrible whispering that pierced not his ears but all of him, as if small particles of something physical had shot through him. He cursed, frozen there, watching, afraid. “The wavery lines that are there and not there.” A line from Whitby’s report he hadn’t shared because he hadn’t understood it. Images from the video of the first expedition coming back to him.

  “Stay still,” Ghost Bird whispered in his ear. “Stay still.” She was sheltering his body with hers, she was trying to make it seem as if he wasn’t there.

  He tried not even to breathe, to become so motionless that he was no longer alive. As it curled in and through the sky, he could hear it rippling, diving, rising again, like traces of a sail until, as he risked a look, he saw some impact in the air freeze it in place, and for a moment it was stretched as taut as skin, almost brittle, unyielding.

  Then, with a final plunge and ascent, coming far too close, the presence winked out of existence, or slipped out of the air, and the sky was the same as before.

  He had no words for it, Whitby’s or his own. This was no dead diorama. This was no beastly skeleton of a man he’d never known. Anything now seemed possible. Anything could happen. He clutch
ed the carving of Chorry tight. So tight he almost punctured his skin.

  They remained that way until a storm slipped across a sky Control now thought of as treacherous, and through the dark gray light there came lightning, thunder, and in amongst the raindrops that drenched them, dark, slippery tadpole-like things hurtled down and disappeared into the soil all around them while they tried to take shelter as best they could, soaked under a gnarled, blackened copse of trees with leaves like daggers. The tadpole things were more like living rivulets, about the size of his little finger. He could not help thinking of them as coming from the stitching in the sky, that somehow it had disintegrated into a million tiny pieces, and this, too, was somehow part of the ecosystem of Area X.

  “What do you think that will become?” he asked her.

  “Whatever everything else is becoming here,” she said, and that was no answer at all.

  When the storm passed, the marsh came alive with birdsong and the gurgle of water in the canals, nothing at all amiss. Perhaps the reeds seemed more vibrant, the trees greener, but this was just the quality of the light, from a sun that seemed as distant as the rest of the world.

  After a time, they stood. After a time, in silence, they continued on, walking closer together than before.

  0006: THE DIRECTOR

  There’s a place that as a kid you called the farthestmost point—the most distant you could get, the place that when you stood there you could pretend you were the only person in the world. Being there made you wary, but it also put a kind of peace into you, a sense of security. Beyond that point, in either direction, you were always returning, and are returning still. But for that moment, even now with Whitby by your side, you’re so remote that there’s nothing for miles—and you feel that. You feel it strongly. You’ve gone from being a little on edge to being a little tired, and you’ve come out on this perfectly still scene where the scrublands turn to wetlands, with a freshwater canal serving as a buffer to the salt marsh and, ultimately, the sea. Where once you saw otters, heard the call of curlews. You take a deep breath and relax into the landscape, walk along the shore of this lower heaven rejuvenated by its perfect stillness. Your legs are for a time no longer tired and you are afraid of nothing, not even Area X, and you have no room for memory or thought or anything except this moment, and this one, and the next.