Authority (11 page)

“Are you sure?” Of course she was sure.

“I think I would remember forgetting that.”

When Control met her gaze now, it was always to the slightly upraised corners of her
mouth, eyes that had a light in them so different from the last session. For reasons
he couldn’t fathom, that frustrated him. This was not the same person. Was it?

“This isn’t a joke,” he said, deciding to see how she would react if he seemed irritated.
Except he really was irritated.

“I do not remember. What else can I say?” Each word said as if he were a bit slow
and hadn’t understood her the first time.

A vision of his couch in his new home, of Chorry curled up on his lap, of music playing,
of a book in hand. A better place than here.

“That you do remember. That you are holding something back.” Pushing. Some people
wanted to please their questioners. Others didn’t care or deliberately wanted to obstruct.
The thought had occurred, from the first session and the transcripts of three other
sessions before he’d arrived, that the biologist might float back and forth between
these extremes, not know her own mind or be severely conflicted. What could he do
to convince her? A potted mouse had not moved her. A change of topic hadn’t, either.

The biologist said nothing.

“Improbable,” he said, as if she had denied it again. “So many other expeditions have
encountered this topographical anomaly.” A mouthful, topographical anomaly.

“Even so,” she said, “I don’t remember a tower.”

Tower. Not tunnel or pit or cave or hole in the ground.

“Why do you call it a tower?” he asked, pouncing. Too eager, he realized a moment
later.

A grin appeared on Ghost Bird’s face, and a kind of remote affection. For him? Because
of some thought that his words had triggered?

“Did you know,” she replied, “that the phorus snail attaches the empty shells of other
snails onto its own shell. As a result, the saltwater phorus snail is very clumsy.
It staggers and tumbles about because of these empty shells, which offer camouflage,
but at a price.”

The deep well of secret mirth behind the answer stung him.

*   *   *

Perhaps, too, he had wanted her to share his disdain for the term
topographical anomaly
. It had come up during his initial briefing with Grace and other members of the staff.
As some “topographical anomaly” expert had droned on about its non-aspects, basically
creating an outline for what they didn’t know, Control had felt a heat rising. A whole
monologue rising with it. Channeling Grandpa Jack, who could work himself into a mighty
rage when he wanted to, especially when confronted by the stupidities of the world.
His grandpa would have stood and said something like, “Topological anomaly? Topological
anomaly? Don’t you mean
witchcraft
? Don’t you mean the end of civilization? Don’t you mean some kind of spooky thing
that we know nothing, absolutely fucking nothing about, to go with everything else
we don’t know?” Just a shadow on a blurred photo, a curling nightmare expressed by
the notes of a few unreliable witnesses—made more unreliable through hypnosis, perhaps,
no matter Central’s protestations. A spiraling thread gone astray that might or might
not be made of something else entirely—not even as scrutable in its eccentricity as
a house-squatter of a snail that stumbled around like a drunk. No hope of knowing
what it was, or even just blasting it to hell because that’s what intelligent apes
do. Just some thing in the ground, mentioned as casually, as matter-of-factly, as
manhole
cover
or
water faucet
or
steak knives
.
Topographical anomaly
.

But he had said most of this to the bookshelves in his office on Tuesday—to the ghost
of the director while at a snail’s pace beginning to sort through her notes. To Grace
and the rest of them, he had said, in a calm voice, “Is there anything else you can
tell me about it?” But they couldn’t.

Any more, apparently, than could the biologist.

*   *   *

Control just stared at her for a moment, the interrogator’s creepy prerogative, usually
meant to intimidate. But Ghost Bird met his stare with those sharp green eyes until
he looked away. It continued to nag at him that she was different today. What had
changed in the past twenty-four hours? Her routine was the same, and surveillance
hadn’t revealed anything different about her mental state. They’d offered her a carefully
monitored phone call with her parents, but she’d had nothing to say to them. Boredom
from being cooped up with nothing but a DVD player and a censored selection of movies
and novels could not account for it. The food she ate was from the cafeteria, so Control
could commiserate with her there, but this still did not provide a reason.

“Perhaps this will jog your memory.” Or stop you lying. He began to read summaries
of accounts from prior expeditions.

“An endless pit burrowing into the ground. We could never get to the bottom of it.
We could never stop falling.”

“A tower that had fallen into the earth that gave off a feeling of intense unease.
None of us wanted to go inside, but we did. Some of us. Some of us came back.”

“There was no entrance. Just a circle of pulsing stone. Just a sense of great depth.”

Only two members of that expedition had returned, but they had brought their colleagues’
journals. Which were filled with drawings of a tower, a tunnel, a pit, a cyclone,
a series of stairs. Where they were not filled with images of more mundane things.
No two journals the same.

Control did not continue for long. He had begun the recitations aware that the selected
readings might contaminate the edges of her amnesia … if she actually suffered from
memory loss … and that feeling had quickly intensified. But it was mostly his own
sense of unease that made him pause, and then stop. His feeling that in making the
tower-pit more real in his imagination, he was also making it more real in fact.

But Ghost Bird either had not or had picked up on his tiny moment of distress, because
she said, “Why did you stop?”

He ignored her, switched one tower for another. “What about the lighthouse?”

“What about the lighthouse?” First thought: She’s mimicking me. Which brought back
a middle school memory of humiliation from bullies before the transformation in high
school as he’d put his efforts into football and tried to think of himself as a spy
in the world of jocks. Realized that the words on the wall had thrown him off. Not
by much, but just enough.

“Do you remember it?”

“I do,” she said, surprising him.

Still, he had to pull it out of her: “What do you remember?”

“Approaching it from the trail through the reeds. Looking in the doorway.”

“And what did you see?”

“The inside.”

It went that way for a while, with Control beginning to lose track of her answers.
Moving on to the next thing she said she couldn’t remember, letting the conversation
fall into a rhythm, one that she might find comfortable. He told himself he was trying
to get a sense of her nervous tics, of anything that might give away her real state
of mind or her real agenda. It wasn’t actually dangerous to stare at her. It wasn’t
dangerous at all. He was Control, and he was in control.

*   *   *

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring
forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and
surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other
places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never
seen or been seen. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit
shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal
the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like
the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the
mind beyond what any man can bear
 … And on and on it went, so that Control had the impression that if the director
hadn’t run out of space, hadn’t added a map of Area X, she wouldn’t have run out of
words, either.

At first he had thought the wall beyond the door was covered in a dark design. But
no, someone had obliterated it with a series of odd sentences written with a remarkably
thick black pen. Some words had been underlined in red and others boxed in by green.
The weight of them had made him take a step back, then just stand there, frowning.

Initial theory, abandoned as ridiculous: The words were the director’s psychotic ode
to the plant in her desk drawer. Then he was drawn to the slight similarities between
the cadence of the words and some of the more religious anti-government militias he
had monitored during his career. Then he thought he detected a faint murmur of the
tone of the kinds of sloth-like yet finicky lunatics who stuck newspaper articles
and Internet printouts to the walls of their mothers’ basements. Creating—glue stick
by glue stick and thumbtack by thumbtack—their own single-use universes. But such
tracts, such philosophies, rarely seemed as melancholy or as earthy yet ethereal as
these sentences.

What had burned brightest within Control as he stared at the wall was not confusion
or fear but the irritation he had brought into his session with the biologist. An
emotion that manifested as surprise: cold water dumped into an unsuspecting empty
glass.

Inconsequential things could lead to failure, one small breach creating another. Then
they grew larger, and soon you were in free fall. It could be anything. Forgetting
to enter field notes one afternoon. Getting too close to a surveillance subject. Skimming
a file you should have read with your full attention.

Control had not been briefed on the words on the director’s wall, and he had seen
nothing about them in any of the files he had so meticulously read and reread. It
was the first indication of a flaw in his process.

*   *   *

When Control thought the biologist was truly comfortable and feeling pleased with
herself and perhaps even very clever, he said, “You say your last memory of Area X
was of drowning in the lake. What do you remember specifically?”

The biologist was supposed to blanch, gaze turning inward, and give him a sad smile
that would make him sad, too, as if she had become disappointed in him for some reason.
That somehow he’d been doing so well and now he’d fucked up. Then she would protest,
would say, “It wasn’t the lake. It was in the ocean,” and all of the rest would come
spilling out.

But none of that happened. He received no smile of any kind. Instead, she locked everything
away from him, and even her gaze withdrew to some far-off height—a lighthouse, perhaps—from
which she looked down at him from a safe distance.

“I was confused yesterday,” she said. “It wasn’t in Area X. It was my memory from
when I was five, of almost drowning in a public fountain. I hit my head. I had stitches.
I don’t know why, but that’s what came back to me, in pieces, when you asked that
question.”

He almost wanted to clap. He almost wanted to stand up, clap, and hand over her file.

She had sat in her room last night, bored out of her mind from lack of stimuli, and
she had anticipated this question. Not only had she anticipated it, Ghost Bird had
decided to turn it into an egg laid by Control. Give away a less personal detail to
protect something more important. The fountain incident was a well-documented part
of her file, since she’d had to go to the hospital for stitches. It might confirm
for him that she remembered something of her childhood, but nothing more.

It occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t entitled to her memories. Perhaps no one
was. But he pushed himself away from that thought, like an astronaut pushing off from
the side of a space capsule. Where he’d end up was anyone’s guess.

“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.

“I don’t care,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “When do I get out of here?”

“Oh, you know the drill—you’ve got to take one for the team,” he said, using clichés
to breeze past her question, trying to sound ignorant or dumb. Not so much a strategy
as to punish himself for not bringing his A game. “You signed the agreement; you knew
the debriefing might take a while.” You knew, too, that you might come back with cancer
or not come back at all.

“I don’t have a computer,” she said. “I don’t have any of the books I requested. I’m
being kept in a cell that has a tiny window high up on the wall. It only shows the
sky. If I’m lucky, I see a hawk wheel by every few hours.”

“It’s a room, not a cell.” It was both.

“I can’t leave, so it’s a cell. Give me books at least.”

But he couldn’t give her the books she wanted on memory loss. Not until he knew more
about the nature of her memory loss. She had also asked for all kinds of texts about
mimicry and camouflage—he’d have to question her about that at some point.

“Does this mean anything to you?” he asked to deflect her attention, pushing the potted
plant–mouse across the table to her.

She sat straight in her chair, seemed to become not just taller but wider, more imposing,
as she leaned in toward him.

“A plant and a dead mouse? It’s a sign you should give me my fucking books and a computer.”
Perhaps it wasn’t amusement that made her different today. Maybe it was a sense of
recklessness.

“I can’t.”

“Then you know what you can do with your plant and your mouse.”

“All right then.”

Her contemptuous laughter followed him out into the hall. She had a nice laugh, even
when she was using it as a weapon against him.

007: SUPERSTITION

Twenty minutes later, Control had contrived to cram Whitby, Grace, and the staff linguist,
Jessica Hsyu, into cramped quarters in front of the revealed section of wall with
the director’s peculiar handwritten words scrawled across it. Control hadn’t bothered
to move books or much of anything else. He wanted them to have to sit in close, uncomfortable
proximity—let us bond in this phone booth, with our knees shoved up against one another’s.
Little fabric sounds, mouth-breathing, shoe-squeaks, unexpected smells, all would
be magnified. He thought of it as a bonding experience. Perhaps.