Authority (32 page)

And then there was Lowry. He’d asked Cheney about Lowry in the parking lot, too, Cheney
giving Control a rare frown. “Lowry? Come back here? Not now. Not ever, I would think.”
Why? A pause, like questing static on the line. “Well, he’s damaged. Saw things that
none of us will hopefully ever see. Can’t get close to it, can’t escape it. He’s found
his appropriate distance, you could say.” Lowry, creating a web of incantations, spells,
whatever, could create more of a shield between himself and Area X, because he couldn’t
ever forget, either. Needing to see, but too afraid to look, passing his fear on to
others. Whitby’s distance much closer, his spells of a more visceral nature.

By contrast, all of the ceaseless, restless notes from the director were staid, practical,
stolid, and yet in the end—ordering a boilermaker after his shot, to make his next
shot go down easy—they were probably meaningless, as useless as Whitby’s terroir that
would never explain a goddamn thing, that amounted to a kind of religion, because
even with all of her additional context, the director still had not found the answer
as far as he could tell.

He rasped out a request for another drink.

That would probably be his fate: to catalogue the notes of others and create his own,
ceaselessly and without effect. He would develop a paunch and marry some local woman
who had already been married once. They would raise a family in Hedley, a son and
a daughter, and on weekends he would be fully present with his family, work a distant
memory that lay across the border known as Monday. They would grow old in Hedley,
while he worked at the Southern Reach, putting in his hours and counting the years,
the months, the days until retirement. They would give him a gold watch and a few
pats on the back and by then his knees would be shot from all the jogging so he would
be sitting down, and he’d be balding a little.

And he still wouldn’t know what to do about Whitby. And he would still miss the biologist.
And he might still not know what was going on in Area X.

The drunk man came up and shook him out of his thoughts with a slap on his back. “You
look like I know you. You look kinda familiar. What’s your name, pardner?”

“Rat Poison,” Control said.

The truth was, if the man who looked like the high school quarterback had responded
by turning into something monstrous and torn him out into the night, part of Control
wouldn’t have minded because he would have been closer to the truth about Area X,
and even if the truth was a fucking maw, a fanged maw that stank like a cave full
of putrefying corpses, that was still closer than he was now.

00X

When Control left the house on Tuesday morning, the director’s beetle-phone lay on
his welcome mat. It had returned to him. Looking down at it, hand on the half-open
front door, he could not help seeing it as a sign … but a sign of what?

Chorry jumped past him and into the bushes while Control squatted down to get a closer
look. Days and nights out in the yard hadn’t helped it much. The grotesquery of the
thing … some animal had gnawed at the casing and it was smeared with dirt and grass
stains. Now it looked more like something alive than it had before. It looked like
something that had gone exploring or burrowing and come back to report in.

Under the phone, thankfully, was a note from the landlord. In a quivering scrawl she
had written, “The lawn man found this yesterday. Please dispose of phones in the garbage
if you are done with them.”

He tossed it into the bushes.

*   *   *

In the morning light, during that ever-longer walk through the doors and down the
corridor to his office, Control’s recollection of Whitby on the rack, stuffed into
a shelf, the disturbing art on the wall, took on a slightly changed, more forgivable
texture: a long-term disintegration whose discovery had urgency to him personally
but for the Southern Reach was just one symptom of many seeking ways to take Whitby
out of the “sinister” file and place him under “needs our help.”

Still, in his office, he wrestled with what to do about Whitby—did the man fall under
his jurisdiction or Grace’s? Would she be resistant, slough it off, say something
like “Oh, that Whitby”? Maybe together, he and Grace would go up into Whitby’s secret
room and have a good laugh about the grotesqueries to be found there, and then jointly
paint it all white again. Then they’d go have lunch with Cheney and Hsyu and play
board games and share their mutual love of water polo. Hsyu would say, as if he’d
already disagreed with her, “We shouldn’t take the meaning of words for granted!”
and he would shout back, “You mean a word like
border
?” and she would reply, “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean! You get it! You understand!”
Followed by an impromptu square dance, dissolving into a chaos of thousands of glowing
green ferns and black glittering mayflies gusting across their path.

Or not.

*   *   *

With a snarl of frustration, Control put aside the question of Whitby and buried himself
again in the director’s notes, kept Grace’s intel about the director’s focus in mind
while trying to divine from those dried entrails more than they might actually contain.
From Whitby, he wanted for the moment only distance and time so that there would be
no hand reaching out to him.

He returned to the lighthouse, based on what Grace had told him. What was the purpose
of a lighthouse? To warn of danger, to guide coastal vessels, and to provide landfall
for ships. What did it mean to the Southern Reach, to the director?

Among the layers in the locked drawer, the most prominent concerned the lighthouse,
and that included pages he had confirmed with Grace came from an investigation that
was inextricably tied to the history of the island to the north. That island had had
numerous names, as if none would stick, until now it was simply known as Island X
at the Southern Reach, although some called it “Island Y,” as in “Why are we bothering
to research this?”

What did fascinate—even resonate—was the fact that the beacon in the lighthouse on
the coast had originally been placed in a lighthouse built on Island X. But shipping
lanes had shifted and no one needed a lighthouse that helped ships navigate the shallows.
The old lighthouse fell into ruin, but its eye had been removed long before.

As Grace had noted, the beacon interested the director the most: a first-order lens
that constituted not just a remarkable engineering feat but also a work of art. More
than two thousand separate lenses and prisms had been mounted inside a brass framework.
The light from at first a lamp and then a lightbulb was reflected and refracted by
the lenses and prisms to be cast seaward.

The entire apparatus could be disassembled and shipped in sections. The “light characteristics”
could be manipulated in almost every conceivable way. Bent, straightened, sent bouncing
off surfaces in a recursive loop so that it never reached the outside. Sent sideways.
Sent down onto the spiraling steps leading up to the top. Beamed into outer space.
Slanted past the open trapdoor, where lay so many journal accounts from so many expeditions.

An alarming note that Control dismissed because he had no room left in his brain for
harmful speculation, x-ed out and crumpled on the back of a ticket for a local Bleakersville
production of some atrocity called
Hamlet Unbound
: “More journals exist than accounted for by expedition members.” He hadn’t seen anywhere
a report on the number of journals, no count on that.

The Séance & Science Brigade, which had operated along that coast since the fifties,
had been obsessed with the twin lighthouses. And as if the S&SB had shared something
personally with her, the director had zeroed in on the beacon’s history, even though
the Southern Reach as an institution had already ruled it out as “evidence pertaining
to the creation of Area X.” The number of ripped-out pages and circled passages in
a book entitled
Famous Lighthouses
noted that the beacon had been shipped over just prior to the states dissolving into
civil war, from a manufacturer whose name had been lost along the way. The “mysterious
history” included the beacon being buried in the sand to keep it away from one side
or another, then sent up north, then appearing down south, and eventually popping
up at Island X on the forgotten coast. Control didn’t find the history mysterious
so much as hectic, overbusy, thinking of the amount of effort that had gone into carting
and dragging this beacon, even in its constituent pieces, all over the country. The
number of miles the beacon had traveled before finding a permanent home—that was really
the only mystery, along with why anyone had thought to describe the fog signal as
sounding like “two large bulls hung up by their tails.”

Yet this had captivated the director, or seemed to have, roughly around the time of
the planning for the twelfth expedition, if he could trust the dates on the article
excerpts. Which did not interest Control as much as the fact that the director kept
annotating, amending, adding data and fragments of accounts from sources she did not
accredit—these sources maddeningly not in Grace’s DMP archive and not alluded to in
any of the notes he had looked through. This frustrated him. The banality of it, too,
as if ceaselessly reviewing what she already knew for something she felt she had missed.
Was the message coming down to Control from the director that he should resurrect
old lines of inquiry, or that the Southern Reach had run out of ideas, had begun to
endlessly recycle, feeding on itself?

How Control hated his own imagination, wished it would just shrivel up and turn brown
and fall out of him. He was more willing to believe that something was staring out
at him from the notes, something hidden looking at him, than to accept that the director
had been pursuing dead ends. And yet he couldn’t see it; he could still only see her
searching, and wonder why she was searching so hard.

On impulse, he took down all of the framed images on the far wall and searched them
for anything hidden—took off the back mats, disassembled them entirely. But he found
nothing. Just the reeds, the lighthouse, the lighthouse keeper, his assistant, and
the girl staring out at him from more than thirty years ago.

*   *   *

In the afternoon, he turned to Grace’s DMP file, cross-checking it against the piles
of notes. Which, because it was a proprietary program, meant that he was clicking
Ctrl to go from page to page. Ctrl was beginning to seem the only control he actually
had. Ctrl only had one role, and it performed that role stoically and without complaint.
He hit Ctrl with ever more malice and force, even though every hour that he looked
at the notes rather than dealt with Whitby seemed a kind of blessing. Every hour that
Whitby didn’t show his face, even though his car remained in the parking lot. Did
Whitby want help? Did he know he needed help? Someone needed to tell Whitby what he
had become. Could Grace tell him? Could Cheney? No. They had not told him yet.

Ctrl Ctrl Ctrl. Always too many pages. Ctrl this. Ctrl that. Ctrl crescendos and arias.
Ctrl always clicking past information, because the information he found on the screen
seemed to lead nowhere anyway, while the vast expanse of clutter that spread out in
waves from his desk to the far wall contained too much.

His office began to close in on him. Listless pushing around of files and pretend
efforts to straighten bookshelves had given way to further Internet searches on the
places the biologist had worked before joining the twelfth expedition. This activity
had proven more calming, each vista of wilderness more beautiful than the last. But
eventually the parallels to the pristine landscape of Area X had begun to encroach
and the bird’s-eye view of some of the photographs reminded him of that final video
clip.

He took a break around five, then went back to his office for a while, after short,
friendly conversations with Hsyu and Cheney in the corridor. Although Hsyu seemed
flushed, talking a bit too fast for some reason, her aspect ratio skewed. Cheney’s
big catcher’s mitt of a hand had rested on Control’s shoulder for an uncomfortable
second or two, as the man said, “A second week! Which is a good sign, surely? We hope
you find it all to your liking. We’re open to change. We’re open to changes, if you
know what I mean, once you’ve heard what we have to say. And how we say it.” The words
almost made sense, but somehow Cheney was off today, too. Control had had days like
that.

That left only the problem of Whitby; he hadn’t seen him the whole afternoon, and
Whitby hadn’t responded to e-mails, either. It felt important to get it over with,
not to let it slide into Wednesday. The
how
had become clear to him, along with what was fair and what wasn’t fair. He would
do it in front of Cheney in the science division, and leave Grace out of it. This
had become his responsibility, his mess, and Cheney would just have to go along with
his decision. Whitby would be forced to accept a leave of absence and psychiatric
counseling, and with any luck the strange little man would never return.

It was late, already after six. He had lost track of time, or it had lost track of
him. The office was still a mess corresponding to the contours of the director’s brain,
Grace’s DMP files not changing those contours in any useful way.

He took Whitby’s terroir manuscript with him, feeling that perhaps selective readings
from it would convince Whitby of the problem. He again crossed the wide expanse of
the cafeteria. The huge cafeteria windows gathered up the gray of the sky and pushed
it down onto the tables, the chairs; it would rain again before long. The tables were
empty. The little dark bird or bat had stopped flying and sat perched high up on a
steel beam near the windows. “There’s something on the floor.” “Have you ever seen
anything like that?” Fragments of conversation as he passed by the door to the kitchen,
and then a kind of sharp but faint weeping sound. For a moment, it puzzled Control.
Then he realized it must come from some machine being operated by the cafeteria staff.