Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (33 page)

Down the slant of your backyard, the windows are lit up and a television is on. A man, a woman, and a boy and a girl on a couch seem sublimely calm, just sitting there, watching sports. Not talking. Not doing anything but watching. Definitely not wanting to look in your direction, as the raindrops thicken, proliferate, and your burning papers sizzle.

What if you go back in, open that box, and the cell phone isn’t a cell phone? What if containment is a joke? You can hardly contain yourself. What if you bring the cell phone back in and have it tested and nothing is out of the ordinary, again? What if you go back in, the cell phone isn’t ordinary, and you report that to Lowry and he laughs and calls you crazy—or you tell Severance instead, and the cell phone is just sitting there, inert, and you’re the compromised director of an agency that hasn’t yet solved the central mystery around which its existence revolves? What if your cancer rises up and devours you before you get a chance to cross the border? Before you can escort the biologist across.

You with your cigar and your glass of wine and the music on the phonograph you turn up real loud, something you don’t even remember buying, and the idea that somehow any of that will keep out the darkness, keep out the thoughts that churn through your head—the cold regard that holds you as if God herself had through some electrified beatific gaze pinned you like a butterfly in a collector’s display case of mediocrity.

The storm comes on and you toss your cigar, stand there thinking about the invisible border and all the ceaseless hypotheses that amount to some psychotic religion … and you drink your wine, hell, get the whole bottle, and it’s still not doing it, and you still don’t want to go inside to face … anything.

“Tell me something I don’t know! Tell me something I don’t fucking know!” you scream at the darkness, and throw your glass into the night, and without meaning to you’re on your knees in the rain and the lightning and the mud, and you don’t know if this is an act of defiance or an act of pain or just some selfish reflexive grace note. You truly don’t know, any more than you know if that cell phone in there had actually moved, been alive.

The burned notes are sopping now, falling in wet, stuck-together ash clumps off the edge of the overflowing grill. A few last sparks float in the air, winking out one by one.

That’s when you rise, finally. You rise out of the mud, in the rain, and you go back inside and suddenly everything gets really cold and calm. The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore.

You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.

*   *   *

You stop investigating the S&SB. You stop investigating the lighthouse. You leave the notes that remain in your office, which you’re well aware are legion, many more than what you burned at home in your pointless effort at catharsis.

“Ever had anyone try to burn a house down?” you ask the Realtor later that night, ducking in for a quick drink, a couple of cocktails that’ll put you to sleep and then wake you up again, restless and turning endlessly in your bed in the middle of the night.

The lights are dim, the TV a silent glow, a distant hum, the stars in the ceiling glinting on and off from the roving flash of spotlights on the bowling lanes. Someone’s playing a dark country-western song on the jukebox, but it sounds distant, so far away:
Something’s moving through my heart. Sometimes I just have to play the part.

“Oh, sure,” the Realtor says, “warming to her task” as the veteran, suddenly a wit, puts it. “The usual kind of thing, with arson for the insurance. Sometimes it’s an ex trying to burn down the wife’s house once her new boyfriend has moved in. But more times than you might think, you don’t find any reason for it at all. I had one guy who got the urge to start a fire one day, and he let it all go up in smoke, and just stood there watching. Afterward he was crying and wondering why he’d done it. He didn’t know. There must have been a reason why he did it, though, I’ve always thought. Something he couldn’t admit to himself, or something that he just didn’t know.”

Anger tries to thrash its way free of you, manifests as a suspicion you’ve had for a while.

“You’re not a Realtor,” you tell the woman. “You’re not really a Realtor at all.” She’s a touch on some notes, she’s a cell phone that won’t sit still.

You need some air, walk outside, stand there in the gravel parking lot, under the uncertain illumination of a cracked streetlamp. You can still hear the music blaring from inside. The streetlamp’s shining down on you and the solid bulk of the hippo on the edge of the miniature golf course, its enormous shape casting a wide, oblong shadow. The hippo’s eyes are blank glass, its gaping mouth a fathomless space you wouldn’t put your hand into for all the free games Chipper’s could give you.

The veteran comes outside.

“You’re right—she’s not a Realtor,” he tells you. “She got fired. She hasn’t had a job for more than a year.”

“That’s okay,” you say. “I’m not a long-haul trucker, either.”

Tragically, he asks if you want to go back inside and dance. No, you don’t want to dance. But it’s okay if he leans against the hippo with you to talk for a while. About nothing in particular. About the ordinary, everyday things that elude you.

The plant remains in the storage cathedral. Whitby’s mouse remains in his attic for the most part. The last few days before the twelfth expedition, the phone migrates to your desk as a secret memento. You don’t know whether you’re more concerned when it is with you or when it is out of your sight.

0027: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

Saul woke on his back beneath the lighthouse, covered in sand, Henry crumpled beside him. It was still night, the sky a deep, rich blue bleeding into black, but full of stars against that vast expanse. He must be dying, he knew, must be broken in a hundred places, but he didn’t feel broken. Instead, all he felt was a kind of restlessness, growing a hundredfold now and nothing else behind it. No agony from the fall, from the searing pain of what must be several broken bones. None of that. Was he in shock?

But still there was the rising brightness and the night staring down with thousands of glistening eyes, the comforting husk and hush of the surf, and as he turned on his side to face the sea, the faint dark shadows of night herons, with their distinctive raised crests, stabbing at the tiny silver fish writhing in the wet sand.

With a groan, anticipating a collapse that never came, Saul rose without a stagger or a swoon, a dreadful strength coursing through him. Even his shoulder felt fine. Uninjured, or so badly injured and disoriented that he was nearing the end. Whatever was coming into his head was being translated into words, his distress expressed as language, and he clamped down on it again, because he knew somehow that to let it out was to give in, and that he might not have much time left.

He looked up at the lantern room of the lighthouse, imagining again that fall. Something inside had saved him, protected him. By the time he’d hit the ground, he hadn’t been himself—the plummet become a descent so gentle, so light, that it’d been like a cocoon tenderly plummeting, kissing the sand. Come to rest as if locking into a position preordained for him.

When he looked over at Henry, Saul could see even in the dull darkness that the man was still alive, that distant stare as locked and fixed on him as the stars above. That stare coming to Saul from across the centuries, across vast, unconquerable distances. Beatific and yet deadly. A scruffy assassin. A fallen angel ravaged by time.

Saul didn’t want that gaze upon him, walked a short distance away from Henry, down the beach, closer to the water. Charlie was somewhere out there in the sea, night fishing. He wanted Charlie close now but also wanted him thrust far away, cast out, so that whatever had possessed him might not possess Charlie.

He made his way to the ridge of rocks that Gloria liked to explore, to the tidal pools, and sat there, silent, recovering his sense of self.

Out in the sea, he thought he could see the rippling backs of leviathans as they breached and then returned to the depths. There came the stench of oil and gasoline and chemicals, the sea coming almost up to his feet now. He could see that the beach was strewn with plastic and garbage and tarred bits of metal, barrels and culverts clotted with seaweed and barnacles. The remains of ships rising, too. Detritus that had never touched this coast but was here now.

Above, the stars seemed to be moving at a tremendous rate, through a moonless sky, and he could hear the thunderous screams of their passage—streaking faster and faster until the dark was dissolving into ribbons and streamers of light.

Henry, like an awkward shadow, appeared at his side. But Saul wasn’t frightened of Henry.

“Am I dead?” he asked Henry.

Henry said nothing.

Then, after a moment, “You’re not really Henry anymore, are you?”

No answer.

“Who are you?”

Henry looked over at Saul, looked away again.

Charlie, in a boat, offshore, night fishing, far away from whatever this was, this sensation pushing out of him like a live thing. Pushing harder and harder and harder.

“Will I ever see Charlie again?”

Henry turned away from Saul, began to walk down the beach, broken and stumbling. After a couple of steps, something further broke inside of him and he fell to the sand, crawling for a few feet before he lay still.
And the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive.

Something was about to crest like a wave. Something was about to come out of him. He felt weak and invincible all at once. Was this how it happened? Was this one of the ways God came for you?

He did not want to leave the world, and yet he knew now that he was leaving it, or that it was leaving him.

*   *   *

Saul managed to get into his pickup truck, could feel the sickness overflowing, knew that whatever was about to happen he would be unable to control, was beyond anyone’s ability to control. He did not want it to happen there, on the coast, next to his lighthouse. Didn’t want it to happen at all, but knew the choice was not up to him. There were comets erupting in his head and a vision of a terrible door and what had come out of it. So he drove—down the rutted path, careening wildly at times, trying to escape himself even though that was impossible. Through the sleeping village. Past dirt road after dirt road. Charlie out at sea. Thankfully not here. Head pounding. The shadows begetting shadows, and the words trying to erupt from his mouth now, urgent to come out of his mouth, a code he couldn’t decipher. Feeling as if something had its attention upon him. Unable to escape the sensation of interference and transmittal, a communication pressing in on the edges of his brain.

Until he couldn’t drive anymore, there in the most remote part of the forgotten coast—the parts of the pine forest no one claimed or wanted or lived in. Stopped, stumbled out, the shapes of the dark trees, the sound of owls, innumerable rustlings, a fox pausing to stare at him, unafraid, the stars above still swirling and streaking.

Stumbling in the dark, scraping up against palmettos and tough scrub, pushing past the uprising of this undergrowth, a foot into black water and out again. The sharp scent of fox piss, the suggestion of an animal or animals watching him. Trying now to hold his balance. Trying to hold on to his wits. But a universe was opening up in his head, filled with images he didn’t, couldn’t understand.

A flowering plant that could never die.

A rain of white rabbits, cut off in mid-leap.

A woman reaching down to touch a starfish in a tidal pool.

Green dust from a corpse blowing away in the wind.

Henry, standing atop the lighthouse, jerking and twitching, receiving a signal from very, very far away.

A man stumbling through the forgotten coast in army fatigues, all of his comrades dead.

And a light that found him from above, pinning him there, some vital transaction complete.

The feel of wet dead leaves. The smell of a bonfire burning. The sound of a dog, distant, barking. The taste of dirt. And overhead, the interlocking branches of the pines.

There were strange ruined cities rising from his head, and with them a sliver that promised salvation. And God said it was good. And God said, “Don’t fight it.” Except that all he wanted to do was fight it. Holding on to Charlie, to Gloria, even to his father. His father, preaching, that inner glow, as of being taken up by something greater than himself, which language could not express.

Finally, in that wilderness, Saul could go no farther, he was done, and he knew it, and he wept as he fell, as he felt the thing within anchor him to the ground, as alien as any sensation he’d ever felt and yet as familiar as if it had happened a hundred times before. It was just a tiny thing. A splinter. And yet it was as large as entire worlds, and he was never going to understand it, even as it took him over. His last thoughts before the thoughts that were not his, that were never going to be his: Perhaps there is no shame in this, perhaps I can bear this, fight this. To give in but not give up. And projected back out behind him, toward the sea, Saul unable to say the name, just three simple words that seemed so inadequate, and yet they were all he had left to use.

*   *   *

Some time later, he woke up. That winter morning, the wind was cold against the collar of his coat as he trudged down the trail toward the lighthouse. There had been a storm the night before, and down and to his left, the ocean lay gray and roiling against the dull blue of the sky, seen through the rustle and sway of the sea oats. Driftwood and bottles and faded white buoys and a dead hammerhead shark had washed up in the aftermath, tangled among snarls of seaweed, but no real damage either here or in the village.

At his feet lay bramble and the thick gray of thistles that would bloom purple in the spring and summer. To his right, the ponds were dark with the muttering complaints of grebes and buffleheads. Blackbirds plunged the thin branches of trees down, exploded upward in panic at his passage, settled back into garrulous communities.
The brisk, fresh salt smell to the air had an edge of flame: a burning smell from some nearby house or still-smoldering bonfire.