Annihilation (22 page)

Authors: Jeff Vandermeer

BOOK: Annihilation

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“Then you’re failing spectacularly,” I said as I made my way into the kitchen for
a glass of water. He was already on a second glass of wine.

“Or succeeding spectacularly because you want me to fail,” he said, but he was smiling.

He came up behind me then to hug me. He had thick forearms and a wide chest. His hands
were hopeless man-hands, like something that should live in a cave, ridiculously strong,
and an asset when he went sailing. The antiseptic rubber smell of Band-Aids suffused
him like a particularly unctuous cologne. He was one big Band-Aid, placed directly
on the wound.

“Ghost bird, where would you be if we weren’t together?” he asked.

I had no answer for that.
Not here. Not
there
, either. Maybe nowhere.

Then: “Ghost bird?”

“Yes,” I said, resigned to my nickname.

“Ghost bird, I’m afraid now,” he said. “I’m afraid and I have a selfish thing to ask.
A thing I have no right to ask.”

“Ask it anyway.” I was still angry, but in those last days I had become reconciled
to my loss, had compartmentalized it so I would not withhold my affection from him.
There was a part of me, too, that raged against the systematic loss of my field assignments,
was envious of his opportunity. That gloated about the empty lot because it was mine
alone.

“Will you come after me if I don’t come back? If you can?”

“You’re coming back,” I told him. To sit right here, like a golem, with all the things
I knew about you drained out.

How I wish, beyond reason, that I had answered him, even to tell him no. And how I
wish now—even though it was always impossible—that, in the end, I
had
gone to Area X for him.

* * *

A swimming pool. A rocky bay. An empty lot. A tower.
A lighthouse.
These things are real and not real. They exist and they do not exist. I remake them
in my mind with every new thought, every remembered detail, and each time they are
slightly different. Sometimes they are camouflage or disguises. Sometimes they are
something more truthful.

When I finally reached the surface, I lay on my back atop the Tower, too exhausted
to move, smiling for the simple, unexpected pleasure of the heat on my eyelids from
the morning sun. I was continually reimagining the world even then, the lighthouse
keeper colonizing my thoughts. I kept pulling out the photograph from my pocket, staring
at his face, as if he held some further answer I could not yet grasp.

I wanted—I needed—to know that I had indeed seen him, not some apparition conjured
up by the Crawler, and I clutched at anything that would help me believe that. What
convinced me the most wasn’t the photograph—it was the sample the anthropologist had
taken from the edge of the Crawler, the sample that had proven to be human brain tissue.

So with that as my anchor, I began to form a narrative for the lighthouse keeper,
as best I could, even as I stood and once again made my way back to the base camp.
It was difficult because I knew nothing at all about his life, had none of those indicators
that might have allowed me to imagine him. I had just a photograph and that terrible
glimpse of him inside the Tower. All I could think was that this was a man who had
had a normal life once, perhaps, but not one of those familiar rituals that defined
normal had had any permanence—or helped him. He had been caught up in a storm that
hadn’t yet abated. Perhaps he had even seen it coming from the top of the lighthouse,
the Event arriving like a kind of wave.

And what had manifested? What do I believe manifested? Think of it as a thorn, perhaps,
a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting
itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic,
need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the
catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps
it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps
it is “merely” a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence
is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose
processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring,
and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations
of its
otherness
as it becomes what it encounters.

I do not know how this thorn got here or from how far away it came, but by luck or
fate or design at some point it found the lighthouse keeper and did not let him go.
How long he had as it remade him, repurposed him, is a mystery. There was no one to
observe, to bear witness—until thirty years later a biologist catches a glimpse of
him and speculates on what he might have become. Catalyst. Spark. Engine. The grit
that made the pearl? Or merely an unwilling passenger?

And after his fate was determined … imagine the expeditions—twelve or fifty or a hundred,
it doesn’t matter—that keep coming into contact with that entity or entities, that
keep becoming fodder and becoming remade. These expeditions that come here at a hidden
entry point along a mysterious border, an entry point that (perhaps) is mirrored within
the deepest depths of the Tower. Imagine these expeditions, and then recognize that
they all still exist
in Area X in some form, even the ones that came back, especially the ones that came
back: layered over one another, communicating in whatever way is left to them. Imagine
that this communication sometimes lends a sense of the uncanny to the landscape because
of the narcissism of our human gaze, but that it is just part of the natural world
here. I may never know what triggered the creation of the doppelgängers, but it may
not matter.

Imagine, too, that while the Tower makes and remakes the world inside the border,
it also slowly sends its emissaries across that border in ever greater numbers, so
that in tangled gardens and fallow fields its envoys begin their work.
How does it travel and how far? What strange matter mixes and mingles?
In some future moment, perhaps the infiltration will reach even a certain remote
sheet of coastal rock, quietly germinate in those tidal pools I know so well. Unless,
of course, I am wrong that Area X is rousing itself from slumber, changing, becoming
different
than it was before.

The terrible thing, the thought I cannot dislodge after all I have seen, is that I
can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not when looking at the
pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much.
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.

I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless.
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.

* * *

There is nothing much left to tell you, though I haven’t quite told it right. But
I am done trying anyway. After I left the Tower, I returned to base camp briefly,
and then I came here, to the top of the lighthouse. I have spent four long days perfecting
this account you are reading, for all its faults, and it is supplemented by a second
journal that records all of my findings from the various samples taken by myself and
other members of the expedition. I have even written a note for my parents.

I have bound these materials together with my husband’s journal and will leave them
here, atop the pile beneath the trapdoor. The table and the rug have been moved so
that anyone can find what once was hidden. I also have replaced the lighthouse keeper’s
photograph in its frame and put it back on the wall of the landing. I have added a
second circle around his face because I could not help myself.

If the hints in the journals are accurate, then when the Crawler reaches the end of
its latest cycle within the Tower, Area X will enter a convulsive season of barricades
and blood, a kind of cataclysmic molting, if you want to think of it that way. Perhaps
even sparked by the spread of activated spores erupting from the words written by
the Crawler. The past two nights, I have seen a growing cone of energy rising above
the Tower and spilling out into the surrounding wilderness. Although nothing has yet
come out of the sea, from the ruined village figures have emerged and headed for the
Tower. From base camp, no sign of life. From the beach below, there is not even a
boot left of the psychologist, as if she has melted into the sand. Every night, the
moaning creature has let me know that it retains dominion over its kingdom of reeds.

Observing all of this has quelled the last ashes of the burning compulsion I had to
know everything
… anything … and in its place remains the knowledge that the brightness is not done
with me. It is just beginning, and the thought of continually doing harm to myself
to remain human seems somehow pathetic. I will not be here when the thirteenth expedition
reaches base camp. (Have they seen me yet, or are they about to? Will I melt into
this landscape, or look up from a stand of reeds or the waters of the canal to see
some other explorer staring down in disbelief? Will I be aware that anything is wrong
or out of place?)

I plan to continue on into Area X, to go as far as I can before it is too late. I
will follow my husband up the coast, up past the island, even. I don’t believe I’ll
find him—I don’t need to find him—but I want to see what he saw. I want to feel him
close, as if he is in the room. And, if I’m honest, I can’t shake the sense that he
is
still here
, somewhere, even if utterly transformed—in the eye of a dolphin, in the touch of
an uprising of moss, anywhere and everywhere. Perhaps I’ll even find a boat abandoned
on a deserted beach, if I’m lucky, and some sign of what happened next. I could be
content with
just that
, even knowing what I know.

This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now,
and traveling very fast.

Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry
on after everyone else was dead?

I am the last casualty of both the eleventh and the twelfth expeditions.

I am not returning home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my editor, Sean McDonald, for many kindnesses and for his wonderful edits
to the novel. Thanks also to the great, dedicated crew at FSG who worked on the book—I
really appreciate your efforts. Thanks to my agent, Sally Harding, and to all of the
good people at the Cooke Agency. Much love to my wife, Ann, the only person with whom
I can discuss works in progress, for her thoughts on the characters and situations.
Thanks to my first readers—most of you know who you are—and in particular, Gregory
Bossert, Tessa Kum, and Adam Mills for their extensive comments. Finally, thanks to
the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge: the people who work there and the people who
care about it.

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NONFICTION