Authority (33 page)

Something else had been gnawing at Control for much longer, as if he’d forgotten his
wallet or other essential item when he’d left the house. But it now resolved, the
weeping sound pushing it into his conscious mind. An absence. The rotting honey smell
was gone. In fact, he realized he hadn’t smelled rotting honey the entire day, no
matter where he had been. Had Grace at least passed on that recommendation?

He turned the corner into the corridor leading to the science division, kept walking
under the fluorescent lights, immersed in a rehearsal of what he would say to Whitby,
anticipating what Whitby might say back, or not say, feeling the weight of the man’s
insane manuscript.

Control reached out for the large double doors. Reached for the handle, missed it,
tried again.

But there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall.

And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand.

He was screaming, he thought, but from somewhere deep beneath the sea.

AFTERLIFE

Control, at the heart of a different tragedy, could see nothing but Rachel McCarthy
with a bullet in her head, falling endlessly into the quarry. The sense of nothing
being real during that time. That the room they had put him in, and the investigator
assigned to him, were both constructs, and if he just kept holding on to that thought
eventually the investigator would dissolve into nothing and the walls of his cell
would fall away, and he would walk out into a world that was real. Then and only then
would he wake up to continue with his life, which would follow the path it had followed
to that point.

Even though the chair for the long hours of questioning cut into the back of his thigh
and left a mark. Even though he smelled the bitter cigarette smoke on the investigator’s
jacket, and heard the hiccupping whir of the tape in the recorder the man had brought
in as a backup for the room’s video recording.

Even though the texture of the wall felt like a manta ray from the aquarium: firm
and smooth, with a serrated roughness but with more give, and behind it the sense
of something vast, breathing in and out. A rupture into the world of the rotted honey
smell, fading fast but hard to forget. Like the swirling flourish of a line of balsamic
on a chef’s plate. The line of dark blood leading to a corpse on a cop show.

His parents had read “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright” to him as a child. They had collaborated
on a social studies project with him, his mother on research and his father on cut-and-paste.
They had taught him how to ride a bike. The pathetic little Christmas tree next to
the shed linked forever now to the first holiday season he could remember. Standing
on the pier in Hedley, looking across the river led to the lake by the cottage where
he would fish with his grandpa. Naming the sculptures in his father’s backyard became
a chess set on the mantel. The wall was still breathing, though, no matter what he
did. The impact of a long-ago linebacker’s helmet to the chest during a scrimmage,
surfacing only now so that he had trouble breathing, all the air knocked out of his
lungs.

*   *   *

Control didn’t remember leaving the corridor but had recovered himself in mid-sprint
toward the cafeteria. Whitby’s terroir manuscript clenched in a viselike grip. He
meant to retrieve some other things from his office. He meant to go into his office
and retrieve some other things. His office. His other things.

He was pulling every fire alarm he passed. He was shouting over the klaxon at people
who weren’t there to leave. Disbelief. Shock. Trapped inside his head the way some
were trapped in the science division.

But in the cafeteria he was running so fast he slipped and fell. When he got up, he
saw Grace, holding open the door leading to the courtyard. Someone to tell. Someone
to tell. There was only wall. There was only wall.

He shouted her name, but Grace did not turn, and as he came up on her, he saw that
she stared at someone slowly walking up from the edge of the courtyard through a thick
rain, against the burnt umber of the singed edges of the swamp beyond. A tall, dark
outline lit by the late-afternoon sun, shining through the downpour. He would recognize
her anywhere by now. Still in her expedition clothes. So close to a gnarled tree behind
her that at first she had merged with it in the gray of the rain. And she was still
making her way to Grace. And Grace, in three-quarter profile there in front of her,
smiling, body taut with anticipation. This false return, this corrupted reunion. This
end of everything.

For the director trailed plumes of emerald dust and behind her the nature of the world
was changing, filling with a brightness, the rain losing its depth, its darkness.
The thickness of the layers of the rain getting lost, taken away, no longer there.

The border was coming to the Southern Reach.

*   *   *

In the parking lot, shoving the key into the ignition, office forgotten, not wanting
to look back. Not wanting to see if an invisible wave was about to overtake him. Still
cars in the parking lot, still people inside, but he didn’t care. He was leaving.
He was done. A scrabbling, broken-nail panic at the thought of being trapped there.
Forever. Shouting at the car to start after it had already started.

He raced for the gates—open, no security, no sound from behind him at all. Just a
vast silence, snuffing out thought. His hands were curled, clawlike, fingernails dragging
into his palms as he clutched the wheel.

Speeding, not caring about anything but making it to Hedley, even though he knew that
might not be any kind of choice at all. Pulling out his phone, dropping it, but not
stopping, groping for it as he reached the highway, screeched onto the on-ramp, relieved
to see normal traffic. He stifled a dozen impulses—to stop the car and use it to block
off the exit, to roll down his window in the rain and shout out a warning to the other
motorists. Stifled any impulse that impeded the deep and impervious instinct to get
away.

Two fighter jets roared overhead, but he couldn’t see them.

*   *   *

He kept changing the radio channels to current news reports. Not sure what would be
reported, but wanting something to be reported even though it was still happening,
hadn’t finished yet. Nothing. No one. Kept trying to get the feel of the wall off
his hand, wiping it against the seats, the steering wheel, his pants. Would have plunged
it into dog shit to get the feeling off.

When he’d turned away from Grace, he’d seen that Whitby occupied his usual seat in
the back of the cafeteria, under the photograph of the old days. But Whitby came in
only intermittently now, the transmission garbled. Some of the words in tone and texture
still recalled human speech. Others recalled the video from the first expedition.
Whitby had failed some fundamental test, had crossed some Rubicon and now sat there,
jaw oddly elongated as he tried to get words out, alone, beyond Control’s help. He
realized then, or at some point later, that maybe Whitby wasn’t just crazy. That Whitby
had become a breach, a leak, a door into Area X, expressed as an elongated equation
over time … and if the director had now come back to the Southern Reach, it wasn’t
because of or for Grace, it was because Whitby had been calling out to her like a
human beacon. This version of her that had returned.

*   *   *

Trapped by his thoughts. That the Southern Reach hadn’t been a redoubt but instead
some kind of slow incubator. That finding Whitby’s shrine might have triggered something.
That placing trust in a word like
border
had been a mistake, a trap. A slow unraveling of terms unrecognized until too late.

Whitby’s gaze had followed him in his flight toward the front entrance, and Control
had run almost sideways to make sure Whitby never left his view until the corner took
him. He could see the leviathans from his dream clearly now, staring at him, seeing
him with an awful clarity. He had not escaped their attention.

Calling his mother. Hypnotize me. Hypnotize this out of me. Unable to reach her. Leaving
messages shouted out, half-coherent.

The corridor leading into Hedley in the banality of rush-hour traffic. The mundane
quality of the rain coming down, feeling the pressure behind him. Tried to control
his breathing. Every bit of advice his mother had ever given him had gotten knocked
out of his head.

Had it stopped? Had the director stopped? Or was it still onrushing?

Was an invisible blot now seeping out across the world?

Already reviewing in his mind, as he began to recover, began to function, what he
could have done differently. What, if anything, might have made a difference, or if
it was always going to happen like this. In this universe. On this day.

“I’m sorry,” he said inside the car—to no one, to Grace, to Cheney, even to Whitby.
“I’m sorry.” But for what? What was his role in this?

As he reached the bottom of the hill, leading up to his house, the radio reports began
to reflect his reality in slivers and glints of light. Something had occurred at the
military base, perhaps related to the “continuing environmental clean-up efforts.”
There had been an odd glow and odd sounds and gunfire. But no one knew anything. Not
for sure.

Except that Control now knew the thing that had been eluding him, hiding in the deeper
waters for him to recognize it. Revealed now, too late to do any good. For, in the
stooped shoulders and the tilt of the director’s head—there, approaching, in the flesh—Control
had finally realized that the girl in the photograph with the lighthouse keeper was
the director as a child. There was a kind of slouch or lurch to the shoulders that,
despite the different perspectives and the difference in years, was unmistakable if
you were looking for it. Now that he could see it, he couldn’t unsee it. There, hiding
in plain sight in the photograph from the director’s wall, was a photograph of the
director as a child, taken by the S&S Brigade, standing side by side with Saul Evans,
whose words decorated the wall of the topographical anomaly in living tissue. She
had looked at that photo every day in her office. She had chosen to place that photograph
there. She had chosen to live in Bleakersville, in a house full of heirlooms probably
owned by someone on her mother’s side of the family. Who at the Southern Reach had
known? Or had this been another conspiracy of one, and the director had hidden that
connection all on her own?

Assuming he was right, she had been at the lighthouse right before the Event. She
had gotten out before the border came down. She knew the forgotten coast like she
knew herself. There were things that she’d never had to put down on paper, just because
of who she was, where she came from.

For all Control knew, the director had been one of the last people to see Saul Evans
alive.

*   *   *

He pulled up in front of the house, sat there a moment, feeling beat-up, drained,
unable to process what was happening. Sweat dripped off him, his shirt drenched, his
blazer lost, back at the Southern Reach. He got out of the car, searched the hidden
horizon beyond the river. Was that a faint flare-up of light? Was that the muffled
echo of explosions, or his imagination?

When he turned to the porch, a woman was standing on the steps next to the cat. He
felt relief more than surprise.

“Hello, Mother.”

She looked almost the same as always, but the high fashion had a slight bulk to it,
which meant under the chic dark red jacket she probably had on some sort of light
body armor. She’d also be carrying. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, which
made the lines of her face more severe. Her features bore the stress of an ongoing
puzzlement and pain of some kind.

“Hello, Son,” she said, as he brushed by her.

Control let her talk at him as he opened the front door, then went into the bedroom
and began to pack. Most of his clothes were still clean and folded in the drawers.
It was easy to fit some of them quickly and neatly into his suitcase. To pack his
toiletries from the adjoining bathroom, to get out the briefcase full of money, passports,
guns, and credit cards. Wondering what to bring with him from the living room, in
terms of personal effects. Definitely a piece from the chessboard. He wasn’t hearing
much of what his mother was saying, stayed focused on the task in front of him. In
doing it perfectly.

Grace had stood there waiting to receive the director and he had pleaded with her
to leave, pleaded with her to turn from the door and to run like hell for some kind
of safety. But she wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t let him pull her away, had summoned a
reserve of strength that was too much against his panic. But let him see the gun concealed
in a shoulder holster, as if that might be a comfort.
“
I
have my orders and they are no concern of yours.
”
As he fell out of her orbit, fell free of everything at the Southern Reach.

His mother forced him to stop packing, closed the suitcase, which he had piled too
high anyway, and took his hand, put something in it.

“Take this,” she said.

A pill. A little white pill.

“What is it?”

“Just take it.”

“Why not just hypnotize me?”

She ignored him, guided him to a chair in the corner. He sat there, heavy and cold
in his own sweat. “We will talk after you take the pill. After you take a shower.”
Said in a sharp tone, the one she used with him to cut off discussion or debate.

“I don’t have time for a shower,” he said. Staring at the wallpaper, which began to
blur. Now he would inhabit the very center of corridors. He would put no hand to any
surface. He would behave like a ghost that knew if it made contact with anyone or
anything its touch would slide through and that creature would then know that it existed
in a state of purgatory.