Authority (27 page)

The woman in the uniform was probably a drug addict and definitely homeless or a squatter.
You used amateurs for surveillance when the target was “in the family,” when you wanted
to use the natural landscape—the natural terroir—to its best advantage or when your
faction was dead broke or incompetent. It occurred to him that she didn’t notice him
because she’d been paid to pretend not to notice him.

The skateboarder with the dog had clearly staked out the corner as his territory,
sharing it with the fat drunk man. There was something about both of them that seemed
more natural, perhaps because an element of theater—smashing out dog food on the curb—didn’t
fit with the idea of not drawing attention. The other skateboarder had left and come
back several times, but Control hadn’t seen him pass drugs or money or food to the
other two. Maybe he was slumming it for a day, or served as a lookout for some larger
con, or he was Mother’s watcher, part of the tableau but not. Or perhaps there was
nothing going on except three people who knew one another and helped one another out,
and just happened to be down on their luck.

The thing about staying in one place for so long was that you began to get a sense,
while watching, of being watched, so it didn’t startle him when the cell phone rang.
It was the call he’d been expecting.

“I understand you’ve been behaving badly,” she said.

“Hello to you, too, Mother.”

“Are you rough right now? You sound rough.”

“I’m fine. I have complete control of my faculties.”

“Then why do you seem to have lost your mind.” This said in the brisk, professional
tone she used to disguise emotional tells. A sense that she was as “on” with him as
with any other agent she ran.

“I’ve already thrown the phone away, Mother. So don’t think about reinstating the
Voice.” If she had called yesterday, he would have been yelling at her by now.

“We can always get you another one.”

“Quick question, Ma.” She hated
ma
or
mom
, barely tolerated
mother
, would have preferred the severe Severance even though he was her precious only child.
That he knew of. “If you were to send someone on an expedition into somewhere dangerous—let’s
say, into the Southern Reach—how would you keep them calm and on track? What kinds
of tools might you use?”

“The usual things, really, John. Although I’m not sure I like your tone.”

“The usual things? Like hypnosis, maybe, backed up by conditioning beforehand at Central.”
He was keeping his voice low, much as he wanted to lash out. He liked the coffee shop
counter. He didn’t want to be asked to leave.

A pause. “It might have come into play, yes, but only with strict rules and safeguards—and
only in the subject’s absolute best interests.”

“The subject might have preferred to have had the choice. The subject might’ve preferred
not to be a drone.” The subject might prefer to know that his hopes and desires and
impulses were all definitely his
own
hopes, desires, impulses.

“The subject might not have had the intel or perspective to be involved in that decision.
The subject might have needed an inoculation, a vaccine.”

“Against what?”

“Against any number of things. Although at the first sign of something serious happening,
we would pull you out and send a team in.”

“Like what? What would you consider serious?”

“Whatever might happen.”

Infuriatingly opaque, as always. Making decisions for him, as always. He was channeling
his father’s irritation now as much as his own, the specters of so many arguments
at the dinner table or in the living room. He decided to take the conversation onto
the street after all, stood in the mouth of the alley just to the left of the coffee
shop. Not many people were out walking around—most of them were probably still in
church, or scoring drugs.

“Jack used to say that if you don’t give an operative all the information they need,
you might as well cut your own leg off,” he said. “Your operation is screwed.”

“But your operation isn’t screwed, John,” she said, with some force. “You’re still
there. You’re still in touch with us. Me. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Good point, except I don’t think that ‘we’ means Central. I think you mean some faction
within Central, and not an effective one. Your Voice made a mess trying to take the
assistant director out of the mix. Give her another week and I’ll be Grace’s administrative
assistant.” Or was the point to waste a lot of Grace’s time and attention?

“There are no factions, just Central. The Voice is under a lot of stress, John. Even
more now. We all are.”

“The hell there aren’t factions.” Now he was Jack, hard to throw off topic. “The hell
there aren’t.” “The hell there isn’t.” “The hell you say.”

“You won’t believe me, John, but I’ve done you a favor placing you at the Southern
Reach.”

Everyone had forgotten the definition of
favor
. First Whitby, then Grace, now his mother. He didn’t trust himself to respond, so
he didn’t.

“A lot of people would’ve killed for that position,” she said.

He had no answer for that, either. While they’d been talking, the woman had disappeared,
and the storefront was deserted. Back in the day the liquor store had been a department
store. Long before Hedley was built, there had been an indigenous settlement here,
along the river—something his father had told him—and the remains of that, too, lay
beneath the facade of the liquor store.

Down below the store, too, a labyrinth of limestone cradling the aquifer, narrow caves
and blind albino crawfish and luminescent freshwater fish. Surrounded by the crushed
remains of so many creatures, loamed into the soil, pushed down by the foundations
of the buildings. Would that be the biologist’s understanding of the street—what she
would see? Perhaps she would see, too, one possible future of that space, the liquor
store crumbling under an onslaught of vines and weather damage, becoming akin to the
sunken, moss-covered hills near Area X. A loss she might not mourn. Or would she?

“Are you there, John?”

Where else would he be?

*   *   *

For a long time now, Control had suspected his mother had taken someone else under
her wing as a protégé—it seemed almost inevitable. Someone sculpted, trained, and
deployed to correct the kinds of mistakes made by Control. The thought reoccurred
whenever he was feeling particularly insecure or vulnerable, or sometimes just because
it could be a useful mental exercise. Now he was trying to visualize the perfectly
groomed protégé walking in and taking over the Southern Reach from him. What would
this person have done differently? What would this person do
right now
?

While his mother continued to talk, plunging ahead with what seemed like a lie.

“But I was mostly calling for an update, to see if you think you’re making progress”—this
his mother’s attempt to subvert his silence with an apology. Slight emphasis on
progress
.

“You know exactly how it’s going.” The Voice would have told her everything It knew
up to the point he had derailed It.

“True, but I haven’t heard your side.”

“My side? My side is that I’ve been dropped into a pit of snakes with a blindfold
on and my hands tied behind my back.”

“That’s just a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” said the streak of light.

“Not as dramatic as whatever you did to me at Central. I’ve got missing hours, maybe
a missing day.”

“Nothing much,” she said in a bland tone that let him know she was bored with the
topic. “Nothing much. Prepared you, stiffened your resolve, that’s all. Made you see
some things more clearly and others less so.”

“Like introduce fake memories or—”

“No. That kind of thing would make you such an expensive model that no one here could
afford
you. Or afford to send you to the Southern Reach.”

Because everyone would kill for this position.

“Are you lying to me?”

“You’d better hope not,” she said with an in-rushing verve, “because I’m all you’ve
got now—by your own actions. Besides, you’ll never really know for sure. You’ve always
been the kind of person who peels away the layers, even when there are no layers left.
So just take it at face value, from your poor long-suffering mother.”

“I can see you, Mother. I can see your reflection in the glass. You’re right around
the corner, watching, aren’t you? It’s not just your proxies. You’re in town, too.”

“Yes, John. That’s why there’s that kind of tinny echo. That’s why my words seem to
be falling on deaf ears, because you’re hearing them twice. I’m interrupting myself,
apparently.”

A kind of rippling effect spread through him. He felt elongated and stretched, and
his throat was dry. “Can I trust you?” he asked, sick of the sparring.

Something sincere and open in his voice must have reached her, because she dropped
the distant tone and said, “Of course you can, John. You can’t trust
how
I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where
I’m going.”

That didn’t help him at all. “You want me to trust you? Then tell me, Mother. Tell
me who the Voice was.” If she wouldn’t, the impulse in him to just disappear into
the underbelly of Hedley, to fade into that landscape and not come back, might return.
Might be too strong to suppress.

She hesitated, and her hesitation scared him. It felt real, not staged.

Then: “Lowry. God’s honest truth, John. Lowry was the Voice.”

Not thirty years distant at all. But breathing in Control’s ear.

“Son of a bitch.”

Banished and yet returned via the videos that would play forever in his head. Haunting
him still.

Lowry.

*   *   *

“Go ahead and check the seats for change, John.” Grandpa Jack staring at him as he
held the gun.

There had come a sharp rapping at the window. It was his mother, leaning over to look
in the window. Even through the condensation, Control could tell when she saw the
gun on his lap. The door was wrenched open. The gun suddenly vanished, and Jack, on
the other side, was out on his ear, Mother standing over him while he sat on the curb
in front of the car. Control took the risk of lowering the left rear window a bit,
then leaned forward so he could observe them better through the front windshield.
She was talking quietly to Grandpa while she stood in front of him, arms folded and
her gaze straight ahead, as if he stood at eye level. Control couldn’t see where the
gun had gone.

A sense of menace radiated out from his mother that he had never seen in such a concentrated
form before. Her voice might be low, and he couldn’t hear most of what she was saying,
but the tone and quickness of it was like a sharpened butcher knife slicing, effortless,
through raw meat. His grandpa gave a peculiar nod in response, one that was almost
more like he was being pushed back by some invisible force or like she was shoving
him.

She unfolded her arms and lowered her head to look at Grandpa, and Control heard,
“Not this way! Not this way. You can’t force him into it.” For some reason, he wondered
if she was talking about the gun or Grandpa’s secret plan to take him to the lingerie
show.

Then she walked back to the car to collect him, and Grandpa got in and drove off slowly.
Relief swept over Control as they went back inside the house. He didn’t have to go
to the lingerie show. He might be able to go next door later.

Mother only talked about the incident once, when they got back in the house. They
took off their coats, went into the living room. She took out a pack of cigarettes
and lit one. With her big, wavy hair and her slight features and her white blouse,
red scarf, crisp black pants, and high heels she looked like a magazine model, smoking.
An agitated model. Now he had experienced another unknown thing beyond the fact that
she could fight fiercely for him: He hadn’t known she was a smoker.

Except, she’d turned it back on him, as if he had been responsible. “What the hell
were you thinking, John? What the hell were you thinking?”

But he hadn’t been. He’d seen his grandpa’s wink when he mentioned the department-store
show, had liked that the man who could be stern or even disapproving was confiding
in him, trusting him to keep a secret from his mother.

“Don’t touch guns, John,” she said, pacing back and forth. “And don’t do every stupid
thing your grandpa tells you to do.” Later he decided to abide by the second commandment
but to ignore the first, which he doubted she had meant—even nicknamed his various
guns “Gramps” or “Grandpa.” He used guns, but he didn’t like them and didn’t like
relying on them. They smelled like their perspective.

Control never told his father about the incident, for fear it would be used against
his mother. Nor did he recognize until later that the whole trip had actually been
about the gun, or about finding the gun. That, perhaps, it had been evolving into
a kind of test.

Sitting there in the coffee shop after his mother hung up the thought crept in that
perhaps his mother’s anger about the gun had itself been a tableau, a terroir, with
Jack and Jackie complicit, actors in a scene meant already, at that young age, to
somehow influence him or correct his course. To begin a kind of indoctrination in
the family empire.

He wasn’t sure he knew the difference anymore between what he was meant to find and
what he’d dug up on his own. A tower could become a pit. Questioning a biologist could
become a trap. An expedition member might even return thirty years later in the form
of a voice whispering strange nothings in his ear.

*   *   *

When he got home Sunday night, he checked his recording of the conversation with his
mother, felt an overload of relief when there were no gaps, no evidence that his mother,
too, was deceiving him.