Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (11 page)

“They can’t come around forever,” Charlie said. “One day they’ll be gone. Little freaks. Freak Brigade.” Testing out words for the fun of it, perhaps because they’d both had some beers already.

“Maybe, but in the meantime they’re giving me the creeps.”

“Could be they’re undercover agents from forestry or environmental protection?”

“Sure, because I’m dumping chemicals all night long.”

Charlie was joking, but the forgotten coast had suffered from a decade or two of lax regulations in what was an “unincorporated area.” The wilderness hid its share of rotting barrels, some of them hidden on old abandoned farmsteads, half sunk into the pine loam.

They took up the conversation later, at Charlie’s two-room cottage just down the street. A couple of photographs of his family, some books, not much in the fridge. Nothing Charlie couldn’t toss in a knapsack if he ever decided to take off, or move in with someone.

“Are you sure they’re not escapees from an insane asylum?”

Which made Saul laugh, because just the summer before two sanitarium residents had escaped from outside of Hedley and made their way down to the forgotten coast, managing to remain free for almost three weeks before being caught by the police.

“If you took away the insane people, no one would be left.”

“Except me,” Charlie said. “Except me and, maybe, you.”

“Except the birds and the deer and the otters.”

“Except the hills and the lakes.”

“Except the snakes and the ladders.”

“What?”

Except by then they had so lit each other up under the sheets that they could have been saying anything, and were.

*   *   *

It was Gloria who changed his mind about seeing a doctor. The next day, with Henry and Suzanne back up in the lighthouse, him down below, she appeared in the early afternoon to shadow him. He was so used to her that if she’d not shown up, he would’ve thought something was wrong.

“You’re different,” Gloria said, and he chewed on that for a bit.

This time she was leaning against the shed, watching him as he resodded part of the lawn. Volunteer Brad had promised to come in and help, but hadn’t shown up. The sun above was a huge gob of runny yellow. The waves were a rushing vibration in his awareness, but muffled. One of his ears had been blocked since he’d woken up, no doubt because he’d slept on it funny. Maybe he was getting too old for this kind of work after all. Maybe there was a reason why lighthouse keepers had to retire at fifty.

“I’m a day older and wiser,” he replied. “Shouldn’t you be in school? Then you’d be wiser, too.”

“Teacher work day.”

“Lighthouse-keeper work day here,” he said, grunting as he broke the soil with a shovel. His skin felt elastic, formless, and a tic under his left eye kept pulsing in and out.

“Then show me how to do your work and I’ll help.”

At that he stopped and, leaning on the shovel, took a good long look at her. If she kept growing, she might make a decent linebacker someday.

“You want to become a lighthouse keeper?”

“No, I want to use a shovel.”

“The shovel is bigger than you.”

“Get another one from the shed.”

Yes. The mighty shed, which held all things … except when it did not. He took a glance up at the lighthouse tower where the Light Brigade was no doubt doing unimaginable things to his beacon.

“Okay,” he said, and he got her a small shovel, more of a glorified spade.

Shaking off his attempt at shovel instruction, she stood beside him and awkwardly scuffed bits of dirt around, while he was careful to keep well away. He’d once been smacked in the head by a shovel handle wielded by a too-close, overenthusiastic helper.

“Why are you different?” she asked, direct as ever.

“I told you, I’m not different.” A little grumpier than he’d meant to be.

“But you are,” she said, ignoring his tone.

“It’s because of the splinter,” he said, finally, to keep it simple.

“Splinters hurt but they just make you bleed.”

“Not this one,” he said, putting his back into his work. “This one was different. I don’t really understand it, but I’m seeing things in the corner of my eye.”

“You should go to the doctor.”

“I will.”

“My mother’s a doctor.”

“So she is.” Her mother was, or had been, a pediatrician. Not quite the same thing. Even if she did give unlicensed advice to residents of the forgotten coast.

“If
I
was different, I’d go see her.” Different. But different in what way?

“You live with her.”

“So?”

“Why are you really here? To interrogate me?”

“You think I don’t know what ‘interrogate’ means, but I do,” she told him, walking away.

*   *   *

When Henry and Suzanne left for the day, Saul climbed to the top of the lighthouse and looked out onto the rich contrast of sea and beach, the deep bronze glint of afternoon sun. From this spot, a light had shone out through storms and human-made disasters, in calms and in crises. Light that cascaded or even interrupted itself. Light that pulsed and trembled, that pulled the darkness toward it and then cast it out.

He’d been standing in the lantern room the first time he’d seen Henry, so many months ago. Henry’s trudging across the sand toward the lighthouse had been a kind of travesty of progress, as he sagged and lurched and fought for purchase. Henry squinting against the glare, the wind half ripping his shirt from him—so big on him that the back of it surged right and left off his shoulders like a sail, as if mad to get free. It obscured the lagging Suzanne, whom Saul hadn’t even noticed at first. The sandpipers had hardly bothered with the usual nervous pitter-patter-glide away from Henry, choosing instead to poke around in the sand until the last moment and then take wing to escape the clumsy monster. Henry had looked in that moment like an awkward supplicant, a pilgrim come to worship.

They’d left their equipment—the metal boxes with the strange dials and readings. Almost like a threat. Squatters’ rights. We will return. He didn’t understand half of what he was looking at, even up close. And he didn’t want to—didn’t want to know what was on the séance side and what was on the science side. Prebiotic particles. Ghost energy. Mirror rooms. The lens was miraculous enough in what it could do without trying to find some further significance in it.

Saul’s knee was acting up, putting too much creak in his step as he went through the Light Brigade’s equipment. As he searched for something he knew he probably wouldn’t recognize, he was reflecting that a man could fall apart from any number of ailments, and a bit of maintenance couldn’t hurt. Especially since Charlie was seven years younger. But that just hid the thought that came now in little surges of panic: that something
was
wrong, that he was more and more a stranger in his own skin, that perhaps something was beginning to look out through his eyes.
Infestation
was a thought that crept in at moments between wakefulness and sleep, sleep and wakefulness, drifting down the passageway between the two.

There was the sense of something sliding more completely into place, and the feeling confused and frightened him.

*   *   *

Thankfully, Gloria’s mother, Trudi Jenkins, agreed to see him on short notice about an hour before nightfall. She lived to the west, in a secluded bungalow, and Saul took his pickup truck. He parked on the dirt driveway, under oak and magnolia trees and a few palmettos. Around the corner, a deck peeked out that was almost as large as her home and had a view of the beach. If she’d wanted to, she could have rented a room to tourists in the summers.

It was rumored Trudi had come to the forgotten coast after plea-bargaining a drug-trafficking charge, this more than a decade ago. But whatever her past, she had a steady hand and a level head, and going to her was better than going to the clinic another fifty miles inland, or to the medical intern who visited the village.

“I had this sliver…” Another thing about Trudi was that he could talk about the sliver. He’d tried with Charlie, but, for reasons he couldn’t quite figure out, the more he talked about it with Charlie, the more he felt like he was somehow putting it on Charlie, and he didn’t yet know how much weight Charlie could take.

Thinking about that depressed him, though, and after a while he trailed off, without having mentioned the sensation of things floating at the edge of his vision.

“You believe something
bit
you?”

“Maybe not a bite so much as stuck me. I had a glove on my hand, but I still shouldn’t have reached down. It might not have anything to do with how I’ve been feeling.” Yet how could he have known? The moment of sensation, non-sensation, he kept returning to.

She nodded, said, “I understand. It’s normal to worry, what with all of the mosquito- and tick-borne illnesses. So I can check your hand and arm, and take your vitals, and maybe put your fears to rest.”

She might have been a pediatrician, but she didn’t speak to him as if he were a child. She just had a way of simplifying things and getting to the point that made him grateful.

“Your kid wanders over the lighthouse quite a bit,” he said, to make conversation as he took off his shirt and she examined him.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I hope she’s not a problem.”

“No—she just climbs on the rocks a lot.”

“She’s a climber, all right. Gets into everything.”

“Could be dangerous.”

She gave him a sharp look. “I’d rather she go to the lighthouse and be around people I know than wander off on some trail or something.”

“Yeah, true,” he said, sorry he’d brought it up. “She’s got a talent for identifying poop.”

Trudi smiled. “She gets that from me. I taught her all about different kinds of poop.”

“If a bear craps in the woods, she knows about it.”

She laughed at that. “I think she might be a scientist when she grows up.”

“Where is she now?” He’d assumed she would have walked home right after leaving the lighthouse.

“Grocery store. That girl likes to walk everywhere. So she might as well walk down to the grocery store and get us milk and some things for dinner.” The grocery store adjacent to the village bar was pretty ad hoc, too.

“She calls me the defender of the light.” He didn’t know where that had come from, but he had liked it when she’d called him that.

“Mmm-hmm.” Back to examining him.

At the end, she said, “I can’t find any indication of anything abnormal on your arm or hand. I can’t even find a mark. But if it’s been a week it could’ve faded.”

“So, nothing?” Relieved, and glad he hadn’t gone into Bleakersville, thinking about how much time off he had coming, and how he’d prefer to spend it with Charlie. Peeling shrimp at some roadside café. Drinking beer and playing darts. Checking into a motel, careful to ask for double beds.

“Your blood pressure’s elevated and you’re running a slight fever, but that’s all. Eat less salt. Have more vegetables. See how you are in a few days.”

He felt better when he left, after having worked out a barter-and-money payment of twenty bucks and a promise to hammer down some loose boards in the deck, maybe a couple of other things.

But as he headed back to the lighthouse, reviewing the checklist for the lens in his mind, the relief that had invigorated him faded away and doubt crept in. Underlying everything was the thought that he had gone to the doctor as a kind of half measure for a larger problem, that he’d only confirmed there would be no easy diagnosis, that this wasn’t as simple as a tick bite or the flu.

Something told him to look back as he drove, toward Failure Island, which was a shadow to the west, appearing at that distance as if it were just a sharp curve to the coastline. A faint pulse of red light blinked on and off, too high to be coming from anything other than a container ship. But too irregular to be anything but handheld or jury-rigged. In the right location on the horizon to be coming from Failure Island, perhaps from the ruined lighthouse.

Blinking out a code he didn’t recognize, a message from Henry that he didn’t want to receive.

*   *   *

After he got back, he called Charlie but there was no answer, then remembered that Charlie’d signed up for a night shift, hunting octopus and squid and flounder—the kind of adventure Charlie liked best. So he made a quick dinner, cleaned up, and then prepped the beacon. No ship traffic was expected during the night and the weather report was for calm seas.

With sunset came a premonition of beauty: The pre-dusk sky already had so many stars in it. Before he activated the lens, he sat there for a few minutes, staring up at them, at the deep blue of the sky that framed them. At such moments, he felt as if he really did live on the edge of the known world. As if he was alone, in the way he wanted to be alone: when he chose to be and not when the world imposed it on him. Yet he could not ignore that tiny dot of pulsing light still coming from Failure Island, even overshadowed as it was by so many distant suns.

Then the beam came on and obliterated it, with Saul retreating to sit on the top step to monitor the functioning of the lens for a few minutes before going back down to attend to other duties.

He wasn’t supposed to sleep on nights when the lighthouse lens was on, but at some point he knew that he had fallen asleep on the top step, and that he was dreaming, too, and that he could not wake up and should not try. So he didn’t.

The stars no longer shone but flew and scuttled across the sky, and the violence of their passage did not bear scrutiny. He had the sense that something distant had come close from far away, that the stars moved in this way because now they were close enough to be seen as more than tiny points of light.

He was walking toward the lighthouse along the trail, but the moon was hemorrhaging blood into its silver circle, and he knew that terrible things must have happened to Earth for the moon to be dying, to be about to fall out of the heavens. The oceans were filled with graveyards of trash and every pollutant that had ever been loosed against the natural world. Wars for scant resources had left entire countries nothing but deserts of death and suffering. Disease had spread in its legions and life had begun to mutate into other forms, moaning and mewling in the filthy, burning remnants of once mighty cities, lit by roaring fires that crackled with the smoldering bones of strange, distorted cadavers.