Authority (4 page)

“Just close your eyes and you will remember me,” Control’s father had told him three
years ago, in a place not far from where he was now, the dying trying to comfort the
living. But when he closed his eyes, everything disappeared except the dream of falling
and the accumulated scars from past assignments. Why had the biologist said that?
Why had she said she was drowning? It had thrown him, but it had also given him an
odd sense of secret sharing between them. As if she had gotten into his head and seen
his dream, and now they were bound together. He resented that, did not want to be
connected to the people he had to question. He had to glide above. He had to choose
when he swooped down, not be brought to earth by the will of another.

When Control opened his eyes, he was standing in the back of the U-shaped building
that served as the Southern Reach’s headquarters. The curve lay in the front, a road
and parking lot preceding it. Built in a style now decades old, the layered, stacked
concrete was a monument or a midden—he couldn’t decide which. The ridges and clefts
were baffling; the way the roof leered slightly over the rest made it seem less functional
than like performance art or abstract sculpture on a grand and yet numbing scale.
Making things worse, the area coveted by the open arms of the U had been made into
a courtyard, looking out on a lake ringed by thick old-growth forest. The edges of
the lake were singed black, as if at one time set ablaze, and a wretched gnarl of
cypress knees waded through the dark, brackish water. The light that suffused the
lake had a claustrophobic gray quality, separate and distinct from the blue sky above.

This, too, had at one time been new, perhaps back during the Cretaceous period, and
the building had probably stood here then in some form, reverse engineered so far
into the past that you could still look out the windows and see dragonflies as big
as vultures.

The U that hugged them close inspired no great confidence; it felt less a symbol of
luck than of the incomplete. Incomplete thoughts. Incomplete conclusions. Incomplete
reports. The doors at the ends of the U, through which many passed as a shortcut to
the other side, confirmed a failure of the imagination. And all the while, the abysmal
swamp did whatever swamps did, as perfect in its way as the Southern Reach was imperfect.

Everything was so still that when a woodpecker swooped across that scene it was as
violent as the sonic boom of an F-16.

To the left of the U and the lake—just visible from where he stood—a road threaded
its way through the trees, toward the invisible border, beyond which lay Area X. Just
thirty-five miles of paved road and then another fifteen unpaved beyond that, with
ten checkpoints in all, and shoot-to-kill orders if you weren’t meant to be there,
and fences and barbed wire and trenches and pits and more swamp, possibly even government-trained
colonies of apex predators and genetically modified poison berries and hammers to
hit yourself on the head with … but in some ways, ever since Control had been briefed,
he had wondered: To what point? Because that’s what you did in such situations? Keep
people out? He’d studied the reports. If you reached the border in an “unauthorized
way” and crossed over anywhere but the door, you would never be seen again. How many
people had done just that, without being spotted? How would the Southern Reach ever
know? Once or twice, an investigative journalist had gotten close enough to photograph
the outside of the Southern Reach’s border facilities, but even then it had just confirmed
in the public imagination the official story of environmental catastrophe, one that
wouldn’t be cleaned up for a century.

There came a tread around the stone tables in the concrete courtyard across which
little white tiles competed with squares of clotted earth into which unlikely tulips
had been shoved at irregular intervals … he knew that tread, with its special extra
little dragging sound. The assistant director had been a field officer once; something
had happened on assignment, and she’d hurt her leg. Inside the building, she could
disguise it, but not on the treacherous grouted tiles. It wasn’t an advantage for
him to know this, because it made him want to empathize with her. “Whenever you say
‘in the field,’ I have this image of all of you spooks running through the wheat,”
his father had said to his mother, once.

Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while
they talked about Area X. Because he’d thought a change of setting—leaving the confines
of the concrete coffin—might help soften her animosity. Before he’d realized just
how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as
well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.

“You interviewed just the biologist. I still do not know why.” She said this before
he could extend even a tendril of an opening gambit … and all of his resolve to play
the diplomat, to somehow become her colleague, not her enemy—even if by misdirection
or a metaphorical jab in the kidneys—dissolved into the humid air.

He explained his thought processes. She seemed impressed, although he couldn’t really
read her yet.

“Did she ever seem, during training, like she was hiding something?” he asked.

“Deflection. You think she is hiding something.”

“I don’t know yet, actually. I could be wrong.”

“We have more expert interrogators than you.”

“Probably true.”

“We should send her to Central.”

The thought made him shudder.

“No,” he said, a little too emphatically, then worried in the next split second that
the assistant director might guess that he cared about the biologist’s fate.

“I have already sent the anthropologist and the surveyor away.”

Now he could smell the decay of all that plant matter slowly rotting beneath the surface
of the swamp, could sense the awkward turtles and stunted fish pushing their way through
matted layers. He didn’t trust himself to turn to face her. Didn’t trust himself to
say anything, stood there suspended by his surprise.

Cheerfully, she continued: “You said they weren’t of any use, so I sent them to Central.”

“By whose authority?”

“Your authority. You clearly indicated to me that this was what you wanted. If you
meant something else, my apologies.”

A tiny seismic shift occurred inside of Control, an imperceptible shudder.

They were gone. He couldn’t have them back. He had to put it out of his mind, would
feed himself the lie that Grace had done him a favor, simplified his job. Just how
much pull did she have at Central, anyway?

“I can always read the transcripts if I change my mind,” he said, attempting an agreeable
tone. They’d still be questioned, and he’d given her the opening by saying he didn’t
want to interview them.

She was scanning his face intently, looking for some sign that she’d come close to
hitting the target.

He tried to smile, doused his anger with the thought that if the assistant director
had meant him real harm, she would have found a way to spirit the biologist away,
too. This was just a warning. Now, though, he was going to have to take something
away from Grace as well. Not to get even but so she wouldn’t be tempted to take yet
more from him. He couldn’t afford to lose the biologist, too. Not yet.

Into the awkward silence, Grace asked, “Why are you just standing out here in the
heat like an idiot?” Breezily, as if nothing had happened at all. “We should go inside.
It’s time for lunch, and you can meet some of the admin.”

Control was already growing accustomed to her disrespect of him, and he hated that,
wanted an opportunity to reverse the trend. As he followed her in, the swamp at his
back had a weight, a presence. Another kind of enemy. He’d had enough of such views,
growing up nearby as a teenager after his parents’ divorce, and, again, while his
father slowly died. He’d hoped to never see a swamp again.

“Just close your eyes and you will remember me.”

I do, Dad. I do remember you, but you’re fading. There’s too much interference, and
all of
this
is becoming much too real.

*   *   *

Control’s father’s side of the family came originally from Central America, Hispanic
and Indian; he had his father’s hands and black hair, his mother’s slight nose and
height, a skin color somewhere in between. His paternal grandfather had died before
Control was old enough to know him, but he had heard the epic stories. The man had
sold clothespins door-to-door as a kid, in certain neighborhoods, and been a boxer
in his twenties, not good enough to be a contender but good enough to be a paid opponent
and take a beating. Afterward, he’d been a construction worker, and then a driving
instructor, before an early death from a heart attack at sixty-five. His wife, who
worked in a bakery, passed on just a year later. His eldest child, Control’s father,
had grown up to be an artist in a family mostly composed of carpenters and mechanics,
and used his heritage to create abstract sculptures. He had humanized the abstractions
by painting over them in the bright palette favored by the Mayans and by affixing
to them bits of tile and glass—bridging some gap between professional and outsider
art. That was his life, and Control never knew a time that his father was not that
person and only that person.

The story of how Control’s father and mother fell in love was also the happy story
of how his father had risen, for a time, as a favorite in high-end art galleries.
They had met at a reception for his work and, as they told it, had been enamored with
each other right from the first glance, although later Control found that difficult
to believe. At the time, she was based in New York and had what amounted to a desk
job, although she was rising fast. His father moved up north to be with her, and they
had Control and then only a year or two later she was reassigned, from a desk job
to active duty in the field, and that was the start of the end of it all, the story
that anchored Control as a kid soon revealed as just a brief moment set against a
landscape of unhappiness. Not unique: the kind of depressingly familiar painting you’d
find in a seaside antique store but never buy.

The silence was punctuated by arguments, a silence created not just by the secrets
she carried with her but by those she could not divulge, and, Control realized as
an adult, by her inner reserve, which after a time could not be bridged. Her absences
tore at his father, and by the time Control was ten, that was the subtext and sometimes
the transcript of their dispute: She was killing his art and that wasn’t fair, even
though the art scene had moved on and what his father did was expensive and required
patrons or grants to sustain.

But still his father would sit there with his schematics, his plans for new work,
spread out around him like evidence when she came back between field assignments.
She bore the recrimination, Control remembered, with calm and a chilly, aloof compassion.
She was the unstoppable force that came blowing in—not there, there—with presents
bought at the last minute in far-off airports and an innocent-sounding cover story
about what she’d been up to, or a less innocent story that Control realized years
later, when faced with a similar dilemma, had been coming to them from a time delay.
Something declassified she could now share but that had happened to her long ago.
The stories, and the aloofness, agitated his father, but the compassion infuriated
him. He could not read it as anything other than condescending. How can you tell if
a streak of light across the sky is sincere?

When they divorced, Control went south to live with his dad, who became embedded in
a community that felt comfortable because it included some of his relatives and fed
his artistic ambitions even as his bank account starved. Control could remember the
shock when he realized how much noise and motion and color could be found in someone’s
house, once they’d moved. How suddenly he was part of a larger family.

Yet during those hot summers in that small town not very far from the Southern Reach,
as a thirteen-year-old with a rusty bike and a few loyal friends, Control kept thinking
about his mother, out in the field, in some far-off city or country: that distant
streak of light that sometimes came down out of the night sky and materialized on
their doorstep as a human being. Exactly in the same way as when they’d been together
as a family.

One day, he believed, she would take him with her, and he would become the streak
of light, have secrets no one else could ever know.

*   *   *

Some rumors about Area X were elaborate and in their complexity seemed to Control
like schools of the most deadly and yet voluminous jellyfish at the aquarium. As you
watched them, in their undulating progress, they seemed both real and unreal framed
against the stark blue of the water.
Invasion site. Secret government experiments.
How could such an organism actually exist? The simple ones that echoed the official
story—variations on a human-made ecological disaster area—were by contrast so commonplace
these days that they hardly registered or elicited curiosity. The petting-zoo versions
that ate out of your hand.

But the truth did have a simple quality to it: About thirty-two years ago, along a
remote southern stretch known by some as as the “forgotten coast,” an Event had occurred
that began to transform the landscape and simultaneously caused an invisible border
or wall to appear. A kind of ghost or “permeable pre-border manifestation” as the
files put it—light as fog, almost invisible except for a flickering quality—had quickly
emanated out in all directions from an unknown epicenter and then suddenly stopped
at its current impenetrable limits.

Since then, the Southern Reach had been established and sought to investigate what
had occurred, with little success and much sacrifice of lives via the expeditions—sent
in through the sole point of egress. Yet that loss of life was trifling compared to
the possibility of some break in containment across a border that the scientists were
still studying and trying to understand. The riddle of why equipment, when recovered,
had been rendered nonfunctional, some of it decomposing at an incredibly fast rate.
The teasing, inconsistent way in which some expeditions came back entirely unharmed
that seemed almost more inexplicable.