* * *
Perhaps, too, he had wanted her to share his disdain for the term topographical anomaly. It had come up during his initial briefing with Grace and other members of the staff. As some “topographical anomaly” expert had droned on about its non-aspects, basically creating an outline for what they didn’t know, Control had felt a heat rising. A whole monologue rising with it. Channeling Grandpa Jack, who could work himself into a mighty rage when he wanted to, especially when confronted by the stupidities of the world. His grandpa would have stood and said something like, “Topological anomaly? Topological anomaly? Don’t you mean witchcraft? Don’t you mean the end of civilization? Don’t you mean some kind of spooky thing that we know nothing, absolutely fucking nothing about, to go with everything else we don’t know?” Just a shadow on a blurred photo, a curling nightmare expressed by the notes of a few unreliable witnesses—made more unreliable through hypnosis, perhaps, no matter Central’s protestations. A spiraling thread gone astray that might or might not be made of something else entirely—not even as scrutable in its eccentricity as a house-squatter of a snail that stumbled around like a drunk. No hope of knowing what it was, or even just blasting it to hell because that’s what intelligent apes do. Just some thing in the ground, mentioned as casually, as matter-of-factly, as manhole cover or water faucet or steak knives. Topographical anomaly.
But he had said most of this to the bookshelves in his office on Tuesday—to the ghost of the director while at a snail’s pace beginning to sort through her notes. To Grace and the rest of them, he had said, in a calm voice, “Is there anything else you can tell me about it?” But they couldn’t.
Any more, apparently, than could the biologist.
* * *
Control just stared at her for a moment, the interrogator’s creepy prerogative, usually meant to intimidate. But Ghost Bird met his stare with those sharp green eyes until he looked away. It continued to nag at him that she was different today. What had changed in the past twenty-four hours? Her routine was the same, and surveillance hadn’t revealed anything different about her mental state. They’d offered her a carefully monitored phone call with her parents, but she’d had nothing to say to them. Boredom from being cooped up with nothing but a DVD player and a censored selection of movies and novels could not account for it. The food she ate was from the cafeteria, so Control could commiserate with her there, but this still did not provide a reason.
“Perhaps this will jog your memory.” Or stop you lying. He began to read summaries of accounts from prior expeditions.
“An endless pit burrowing into the ground. We could never get to the bottom of it. We could never stop falling.”
“A tower that had fallen into the earth that gave off a feeling of intense unease. None of us wanted to go inside, but we did. Some of us. Some of us came back.”
“There was no entrance. Just a circle of pulsing stone. Just a sense of great depth.”
Only two members of that expedition had returned, but they had brought their colleagues’ journals. Which were filled with drawings of a tower, a tunnel, a pit, a cyclone, a series of stairs. Where they were not filled with images of more mundane things. No two journals the same.
Control did not continue for long. He had begun the recitations aware that the selected readings might contaminate the edges of her amnesia … if she actually suffered from memory loss … and that feeling had quickly intensified. But it was mostly his own sense of unease that made him pause, and then stop. His feeling that in making the tower-pit more real in his imagination, he was also making it more real in fact.
But Ghost Bird either had not or had picked up on his tiny moment of distress, because she said, “Why did you stop?”
He ignored her, switched one tower for another. “What about the lighthouse?”
“What about the lighthouse?” First thought: She’s mimicking me. Which brought back a middle school memory of humiliation from bullies before the transformation in high school as he’d put his efforts into football and tried to think of himself as a spy in the world of jocks. Realized that the words on the wall had thrown him off. Not by much, but just enough.
“Do you remember it?”
“I do,” she said, surprising him.
Still, he had to pull it out of her: “What do you remember?”
“Approaching it from the trail through the reeds. Looking in the doorway.”
“And what did you see?”
“The inside.”
It went that way for a while, with Control beginning to lose track of her answers. Moving on to the next thing she said she couldn’t remember, letting the conversation fall into a rhythm, one that she might find comfortable. He told himself he was trying to get a sense of her nervous tics, of anything that might give away her real state of mind or her real agenda. It wasn’t actually dangerous to stare at her. It wasn’t dangerous at all. He was Control, and he was in control.
* * *
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear … And on and on it went, so that Control had the impression that if the director hadn’t run out of space, hadn’t added a map of Area X, she wouldn’t have run out of words, either.
At first he had thought the wall beyond the door was covered in a dark design. But no, someone had obliterated it with a series of odd sentences written with a remarkably thick black pen. Some words had been underlined in red and others boxed in by green. The weight of them had made him take a step back, then just stand there, frowning.
Initial theory, abandoned as ridiculous: The words were the director’s psychotic ode to the plant in her desk drawer. Then he was drawn to the slight similarities between the cadence of the words and some of the more religious anti-government militias he had monitored during his career. Then he thought he detected a faint murmur of the tone of the kinds of sloth-like yet finicky lunatics who stuck newspaper articles and Internet printouts to the walls of their mothers’ basements. Creating—glue stick by glue stick and thumbtack by thumbtack—their own single-use universes. But such tracts, such philosophies, rarely seemed as melancholy or as earthy yet ethereal as these sentences.
What had burned brightest within Control as he stared at the wall was not confusion or fear but the irritation he had brought into his session with the biologist. An emotion that manifested as surprise: cold water dumped into an unsuspecting empty glass.
Inconsequential things could lead to failure, one small breach creating another. Then they grew larger, and soon you were in free fall. It could be anything. Forgetting to enter field notes one afternoon. Getting too close to a surveillance subject. Skimming a file you should have read with your full attention.
Control had not been briefed on the words on the director’s wall, and he had seen nothing about them in any of the files he had so meticulously read and reread. It was the first indication of a flaw in his process.
* * *
When Control thought the biologist was truly comfortable and feeling pleased with herself and perhaps even very clever, he said, “You say your last memory of Area X was of drowning in the lake. What do you remember specifically?”
The biologist was supposed to blanch, gaze turning inward, and give him a sad smile that would make him sad, too, as if she had become disappointed in him for some reason. That somehow he’d been doing so well and now he’d fucked up. Then she would protest, would say, “It wasn’t the lake. It was in the ocean,” and all of the rest would come spilling out.
But none of that happened. He received no smile of any kind. Instead, she locked everything away from him, and even her gaze withdrew to some far-off height—a lighthouse, perhaps—from which she looked down at him from a safe distance.
“I was confused yesterday,” she said. “It wasn’t in Area X. It was my memory from when I was five, of almost drowning in a public fountain. I hit my head. I had stitches. I don’t know why, but that’s what came back to me, in pieces, when you asked that question.”
He almost wanted to clap. He almost wanted to stand up, clap, and hand over her file.
She had sat in her room last night, bored out of her mind from lack of stimuli, and she had anticipated this question. Not only had she anticipated it, Ghost Bird had decided to turn it into an egg laid by Control. Give away a less personal detail to protect something more important. The fountain incident was a well-documented part of her file, since she’d had to go to the hospital for stitches. It might confirm for him that she remembered something of her childhood, but nothing more.
It occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t entitled to her memories. Perhaps no one was. But he pushed himself away from that thought, like an astronaut pushing off from the side of a space capsule. Where he’d end up was anyone’s guess.
“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.
“I don’t care,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “When do I get out of here?”
“Oh, you know the drill—you’ve got to take one for the team,” he said, using clichés to breeze past her question, trying to sound ignorant or dumb. Not so much a strategy as to punish himself for not bringing his A game. “You signed the agreement; you knew the debriefing might take a while.” You knew, too, that you might come back with cancer or not come back at all.
“I don’t have a computer,” she said. “I don’t have any of the books I requested. I’m being kept in a cell that has a tiny window high up on the wall. It only shows the sky. If I’m lucky, I see a hawk wheel by every few hours.”
“It’s a room, not a cell.” It was both.
“I can’t leave, so it’s a cell. Give me books at least.”
But he couldn’t give her the books she wanted on memory loss. Not until he knew more about the nature of her memory loss. She had also asked for all kinds of texts about mimicry and camouflage—he’d have to question her about that at some point.
“Does this mean anything to you?” he asked to deflect her attention, pushing the potted plant–mouse across the table to her.
She sat straight in her chair, seemed to become not just taller but wider, more imposing, as she leaned in toward him.
“A plant and a dead mouse? It’s a sign you should give me my fucking books and a computer.” Perhaps it wasn’t amusement that made her different today. Maybe it was a sense of recklessness.
“I can’t.”
“Then you know what you can do with your plant and your mouse.”
“All right then.”
Her contemptuous laughter followed him out into the hall. She had a nice laugh, even when she was using it as a weapon against him.