“Nothing. They don’t measure anything. It’s just a psychological ploy to keep the expedition calm: no red light, no danger.”
“What is the secret behind the Tower?”
“The tunnel? If we knew, do you think we would keep sending in expeditions?”
“They’re scared. The Southern Reach.”
“That is my impression.”
“Then they have no answers.”
“I’ll give you this scrap: The border is advancing. For now, slowly, a little bit more every year. In ways you wouldn’t expect. But maybe soon it’ll eat a mile or two at a time.”
The thought of that silenced me for a long moment. When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire. The black boxes might do nothing but in my mind they were all blinking red.
“How many expeditions have there been?”
“Ah, the journals,” she said. “There are quite a lot of them, aren’t there?”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Maybe I don’t know the answer. Maybe I just don’t want to tell you.”
It was going to continue this way, to the end, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
“What did the ‘first’ expedition really find?”
The psychologist grimaced, and not from her pain this time, but more as if she were remembering something that caused her shame. “There’s video from that expedition … of a sort. The main reason no advanced tech was allowed after that.”
Video. Somehow, after searching through the mound of journals, that information didn’t startle me. I kept moving forward.
“What orders didn’t you reveal to us?”
“You’re beginning to bore me. And I’m beginning to fade a little … Sometimes we tell you more, sometimes less. They have their metrics and their reasons.” Somehow the “they” felt made of cardboard, as if she didn’t quite believe in “them.”
Reluctantly, I returned to the personal. “What do you know about my husband?”
“Nothing more than you’ll find out from reading his journal. Have you found it yet?”
“No,” I lied.
“Very insightful—about you, especially.”
Was that a bluff? She’d certainly had enough time up in the lighthouse to find it, read it, and toss it back onto the pile.
It didn’t matter. The sky was darkening and encroaching, the waves deepening, the surf making the shorebirds scatter on their stilt legs and then regroup as it receded. The sand seemed suddenly more porous around us. The meandering paths of crabs and worms continued to be written into its surface. A whole community lived here, was going about its business, oblivious to our conversation. And where out there lay the seaward border? When I had asked the psychologist during training she had said only that no one had ever crossed it, and I had imagined expeditions that just evaporated into mist and light and distance.
A rattle had entered the psychologist’s breathing, which was now shallow and inconsistent.
“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” Relenting.
“Leave me here when I die,” she said. Now all her fear was visible. “Don’t bury me. Don’t take me anywhere. Leave me here where I belong.”
“Is there anything else you’re willing to tell me?”
“We should never have come here. I should never have come here.” The rawness in her tone hinted at a personal anguish that went beyond her physical condition.
“That’s all?”
“I’ve come to believe it is the one fundamental truth.”
I took her to mean that it was better to let the border advance, to ignore it, let it affect some other, more distant generation. I didn’t agree with her, but I said nothing. Later, I would come to believe she had meant something altogether different.
“Has anyone ever really come back from Area X?”
“Not for a long time now,” the psychologist said in a tired whisper. “Not really.” But I don’t know if she had heard the question.
Her head sagged downward and she lost consciousness, then came to again and stared out at the waves. She muttered a few words, one of which might have been “remote” or “demote” and another that might have been “hatching” or “watching.” But I could not be sure.
Soon dusk would descend. I gave her more water. It was hard to think of her as an adversary the closer she came to death, even though clearly she knew so much more than she had told me. Regardless, it didn’t bear much thought because she wasn’t going to divulge anything else. And maybe I had looked to her like a flame as I came near. Maybe that was the only way she could think of me now.
“Did you know about the pile of journals?” I asked. “Before we came here?”
But she did not answer.