Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (15 page)

Sitting on a stool in the bar at Chipper’s—that’s the same, isn’t it, after you come back? Perhaps even more so, given you have more time to spend there. The Realtor’s around a lot, too. She talks all the time—about a trip up north to visit her family, about a movie she saw, about local politics. Sometimes the veteran with the perpetual beer in hand dredges up a long-ago memory of his kids, trying to be part of the conversation.

As the Realtor and the drunk talk past and through you, you’re nodding as if you know what they’re talking about, as if you can relate, when all you can see now are two images of the lighthouse keeper superimposed, saying the same thing at different times, to two different versions of you. One in darkness and one in light.

“You’re thinking of your own children, aren’t you?” says the Realtor. “I can tell.”

Your mind must have wandered. The mask must have slipped.

“Yes, you’re right,” you say. “Sure.”

You have another beer, start to tell the Realtor all about your kids—where they go to school, how you wish you saw them more often, that they’re studying to be doctors. That you hope to see them around the holidays. That they seem to belong to a different world now that they’re all grown up. The veteran, standing at the end of the bar, staring past the Realtor at you, has a strange look on his face. A look of recognition, as if he knows what you’re doing.

Hell, maybe you should play some songs on the jukebox, too. Maybe go take a turn at karaoke later, have a few more beers, make up a few more details of your life. Only, the Realtor left at some point, and it’s just you and the veteran and some people trickling in late who you don’t know, won’t ever know. The floor’s sticky, dark with old stains. The bottles behind the bar have water-cooler cups over them, to keep the fruit flies out. There’s a sheen off the bar top that’s not entirely natural. Behind you, the lanes are dark and the faded heavens have risen again, unimaginable wonders across the ceiling, some of them requiring a moment to recognize.

Because the other world always bleeds into this one. Because no matter how you try to keep what happened at the lighthouse between you and Whitby, you know it will leak out eventually, in some form, will have consequences.

At the lighthouse, Whitby had wandered, and you were still drifting through the downstairs when you realized that you couldn’t hear him moving around in the next room anymore. In the stillness and the dust, the way the light through the broken front door made the darkness murky, you expected to find him standing in a corner, a figure luminous in shadow.

But soon enough you realized he’d gone up the lighthouse stairs, headed for the very top. There came the sounds of fighting and the splintering of wood. One voice rising above the other, both curiously similar, and how could there be a second voice at all? So you followed fast, and as you climbed, there was both a doubling and a dissonance, for in memory, the steps had been much wider, the trek much longer, the space inside the lighthouse conveying a kind of weightlessness, the walls once painted white, the windows open to receive the sky, the scent of cut grass brought by Saul. But in the darkness, worried about Whitby, you had become a giant or the lighthouse had become lost or
diminished
, not just undone by time, but contracting, like the spiraling fossil of a shell, leading you to a place no longer familiar. Erasing, with each step, what you thought you knew.

At the top, you discovered Whitby down in the watch room panting like an animal, his clothes torn and blood on his hands, and the strange impression that the edges of the journals were rippling, enveloping Whitby, trying to drown him. No one else there, just Whitby with an impossible story of encountering his doppelgänger, False Whitby, on the landing, chasing him up to the lantern room, until they had fallen through the open trapdoor onto the mound of journals, off-balance and awkward. The smell of them. The bulk of them. The feel of them around Real Whitby and False Whitby as they toiled in their essential opposition, now in and now out of the light coming through the open trapdoor.

How to verify this story of not one but two Whitbys? Not Whitby punching himself, kicking himself, biting himself, awash in flapping paper, but doing this to another version. His wounds were inconclusive.

But the tableau fascinates you, returns to you during your six months off, even while chopping onions for chili in your kitchen or mowing the lawn.

Sometimes you try to imagine what it would have been like if you had arrived earlier, not in the aftermath, and stopped there, at the top of the steps, peering down into that space, unable to move, watching the two Whitbys struggle. You can almost believe that Whitby birthed Whitby, that in exploring Area X, something in Whitby’s own nature created this paradox, with one version, one collection of impulses, thoughts, and opinions, trying, once and for all, to exterminate the other.

Until two pale hands reach out to choke one pale throat, and two faces stare at each other, inches apart, the face above deformed by a paroxysm of rage while the face below remains calm, so calm, surrounded by the ripped and crumpled journals. The white paper with the red line of the margin, the blue lines to write on. The pages and pages of sometimes incomprehensible handwritten text. All of those journals without names but only functions noted, and sometimes not even that, as if Area X has snuck in its own accounts. Are they shifting and settling as if something huge sleeps beneath them, breathing in and out?

Is that a glow surrounding them, or surrounding Whitby? The Whitbys?

Until there is the crack. Of a neck? Of a spine? And the Whitby pinned against the mound goes slack and his head lolls to the side and the Whitby atop him, frozen, emits a kind of defeated sob and slides off Dead Whitby, awkwardly manages to wriggle and roll his way free … and sits there in the corner, staring at his own corpse.

Then, and only then, are you drawn to wonder whether your Whitby won—and who this other Whitby might have been, who in death would have seemed preternaturally calm, face smooth and unwrinkled, eyes wide and staring, only the angle of the body suggesting that some violence has been perpetrated upon it.

Afterward, you forced Whitby to come out of that space, to take some air by the railing, to look out on that gorgeous unknowable landscape. You pointed out old haunts disguised as your exhaustive encyclopedic knowledge of the forgotten coast. Whitby saying something to you—urgently, but you not really hearing him. You more intent on filling up the space between with your own script, your own interpretation—either to calm Whitby or to negate his experience. To forget about the mound of journals. A thing you don’t want to consider for too long, that you put out of your mind because isn’t that the way of things? To ignore the unreal so it doesn’t become more real.

On the way down, you searched for Dead Whitby, but he still wasn’t anywhere.

You may never know the truth.

But in what Whitby swore was Dead Whitby’s backpack, you found two curious items: a strange plant and a damaged cell phone.

0010: CONTROL

Control woke to a boot and a foot, just six inches from where he lay on his side under some blankets. The black tread of the army-issue boot was worn down in tired ridges like the map of a slope of hills. Dried mud and sand commingled there and in the sporadic black studs meant to provide a better grip. A dragonfly wing had been broken along the axis of that tread, pulverized into rounded panes and an emerald glitter. Smudges of grass, a smear of seaweed that had dried on the side of the boot.

The landscape struck him as evidence of a lack of care not reflected by the tidy stacking of provisions, the regular sweeping out of leaves and debris from the landing. Next to the boot: the pale brown sole of a muscular foot that seemed to belong to a different person, the toenails clipped, the big toe wrapped tight in fresh gauze with a hint of dried blood staining through.

Both boot and foot belonged to Grace Stevenson.

Above the rise of her foot, he could see she held the three weathered, torn pages he’d rescued from Whitby’s report. In her army fatigues, including a short-sleeved shirt, Grace looked thinner, and gray had appeared at her temples. She looked as if she had endured a lot in a short time. A pistol lay in a holster by her side, along with a knapsack.

He twisted onto his back, sat up, and shoved up against the wall catty-corner to her, the window between them. The raucous birds that had briefly woken him at dawn were quiet now, probably out foraging or doing whatever birds did. Could it be as late as noon? Ghost Bird lay curled up in a camo-patterned sleeping bag, had throughout the night made little jerking motions and sounds that reminded Control of his cat in the grip of some vision.

“Why the hell did you go through my pockets?” Somehow the accusatory tone abandoned the words as he said them, relieved to find his dad’s carving still in his jacket.

She ignored him, leafing through Whitby’s last words, lingering between a smile and a frown, intense but uncommitted. “This has not changed since the last time I saw it. It’s even more full of shit now … probably. Except back then the author was a crackpot. Singular. Now we’re all fucking crackpots.”

“Fuck?”

A quizzical look. “What’s wrong with ‘fuck’? Area X doesn’t give a crap if I swear.”

She continued to read and reread the pages, shaking her head at certain parts, while Control stared, still feeling possessive. He was more attached to those pages than he’d thought, afraid she might just ball them up and chuck them out the window.

“Can I have those back?”

A weary amusement, something in her smile that told him he was transparent. “Not yet. Not just yet. Get some breakfast. Then file a formal request.” She went back to reading again.

Frustrated, he looked around the space. Compulsively tidy, as he’d thought on first glance. Lock-action rifles in a precise row against the far wall, next to her sleeping space, which was a mattress covered with a sheet and blanket she had tucked in tight. A creased wallet photo of her girlfriend, propped on a ledge, curling edges smoothed out. Cans of food lined up against the long side wall, and protein bars. Cups and bottles of drinking water that she must have gotten from a stream or well. Knives. A portable stove. Pots, pans. Lugged all the way from the Southern Reach building or scavenged from the ambushed convoy on the shore? How much she had found on the island he wouldn’t want to guess.

Control was just about to get up and pick out a can when she spilled the pages on the floor between them, right on a spot damp from rainwater.

“Dammit.” He scrambled forward on all fours to retrieve them.

The muzzle of Grace’s gun dug into the side of his head near his ear.

He remained extremely still, looking across at where Ghost Bird slept.

“Are you real?” she asked, in a kind of rasp, as if her voice had gone gray along with her hair. Should he have divined something more profound from her boot, her bandaged toe?

“Grace, I—”

She smacked him across the forehead with the muzzle, shoved the mouth of the gun harder into his skin, whispered in his ear, “Don’t use my fucking name. Don’t ever use my name! No names. It may still know names.”

“
What
may know names?” Stifling the word
Grace
.

“Shouldn’t you already know?” Contemptuous.

“Put the gun down.”

“No.”

“Can I sit up?”

“No.
Are you real?
”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said, as calmly as he could. Wondered if he could move fast enough to get out of the line of fire, push the gun from his temple before she blew his brains out.

“I think you do. Tampered with. Spoiled goods. A hallucination. An apparition.”

“I’m as real as you,” he said. But the secret fear behind that, the one he didn’t want to voice. Along with the thought that he didn’t know what Grace had endured since he’d seen her last. That he wasn’t sure he knew her now. Any more than he knew himself now.

“What script are you running off of? Central or the L-word?”

“The L-word?” Absurd thoughts.
Lie? Lighthouse? Lesbian?
Then realized she meant Lowry. “Neither. I cut off hypnotic suggestion. I freed myself.” Not sure he believed that.

“Should we run a test?”

“Don’t try it. I really mean it—
don’t
.”

“I wouldn’t,” Grace said, as if he’d accused her of high crimes. “That’s L’s kink. But I know the signs by now. There is a pinched look you all get, a paleness. The hands curling into claws. His signature, written all over you.”

“Residual. Just residual.”

“Still, you admit it.”

“I admit I don’t know why the living fuck you’re holding a gun to my head!” he shouted. Had Ghost Bird heard
nothing
, or was she pretending to sleep? And there, as if to call him a liar anyway: what Ghost Bird called “the brightness,” curious, interested, questing. It rose now as a tightness in his chest, a spasm in his left thigh as he remained on all fours being interrogated by his assistant director.

A pause, an increased pressure of the muzzle at his head; he flinched. Then the pressure was gone, along with her shadow. He looked over. Grace was back against the wall, gun still in her hand.

He sat up, hands on his thighs, forced a deep breath in, out, and considered his options. It was the kind of field situation his mother would’ve called “an either without the or.” He could either find some way to smooth it over or go for the rifles against the wall. Not a real choice. Not with Ghost Bird out of action.

Slowly, carefully, he picked his three Whitby pages off the floor, willed himself to move past the danger of the moment: “Is that your usual welcome?”

Her face a kind of impassive mask now, daring him to challenge her. “Sometimes it ends with me pulling the trigger. Control, I am not interested in bullshit. You don’t have any idea what I’ve been through. What might be real … and what might not be real.”

He slumped against the wall, holding Whitby’s pages against his chest. Was there something in the corner of his eye?