017: PERSPECTIVE
Steps had begun to go missing. Steps had begun to occur out of step. Lunch followed a status meeting that, the moment it was done, Control barely remembered no matter how hard he tried. He was here to solve a puzzle in some ways, but he felt as if it were beginning to solve him instead.
Control had talked for a while, he knew that, about how he wanted to know more about the lighthouse and its relationship to the topographical anomaly. After which Hsyu said something about the patterns in the lighthouse keeper’s sermon, while the sole member of the props department, a hunched-over elderly man named Darcy with a crinkly tinfoil voice, added commentary throughout her talk, referring to the “crucial role, now and in the future, of the historical accuracy division.”
Trees framed the campfire, the members of the expedition around the campfire. Something so large you couldn’t see its outline, crawling or lumbering through the background, obscenely threaded between the trees and the campfire. He didn’t like to think about what could be so huge and yet so lithe as to thread like that, to conjure up the idea of a fluid wall of ribbony flesh.
Perhaps he could have continued to nod and ask questions, but he had become more and more repulsed by the way Hsyu’s assistant, Amy-something, chewed on her lip. Slowly. Methodically. Without thought. As she scribbled notes or whispered some piece of information in Hsyu’s ear. The off-white of her upper left cuspid and incisors would appear, the pink gum exposed as the upper lip receded, and then with almost rhythmic precision, she would nip and pincer, nip and pincer, the left side of her lower lip, which over time became somewhat redder than her lipstick.
Something had brushed through or interceded across the screen for a moment in the background, while in the middle a man with a beard squatted—not Lowry but a man named O’Connell. At first, Control had thought O’Connell was mumbling, was saying something in a language he didn’t understand. And, trying to find logic, trying to grasp, Control had almost buzzed Grace right then to tell her about his discovery. But by another few frames, Control could tell that the man was actually chewing on his lip, and continued chewing until the blood came, the whole time resolutely staring into the camera because there was, Control slowly realized, no other place safe enough to look. O’Connell was speaking as he chewed, but the words weren’t anything unique now that Control had read the wall. It was the most primal and thus most banal message imaginable.
* * *
Predictable lunch to follow, in the cafeteria. Stabilizing lunch, he’d thought, but lunch repeated too many times became a meaningless word that morphed into lunge that became lunged that became a leaping white rabbit that became the biologist at the depressing table that became an expedition around a campfire, unaware of what they were about to endure.
Control followed a version of Whitby he was both wary of and concerned about, and who muddled his way through the tables, with Cheney, Hsyu, and Grace trailing behind him. Whitby hadn’t been in the status meeting, but Grace had seen him ducking into a side corridor as they’d walked downstairs and roped him into their lunch. Then it had just been a case of everyone deferring to Whitby in his natural habitat. Whitby couldn’t like the cafeteria for the food. It had to be the open-air quality of the space, the clear lines of sight. Perhaps it was simply that you could escape in any direction.
Whitby led them to a round faux-wooden table with low plastic seats—all of it jammed up against the corner farthest from the courtyard, which abutted stairs that led to the largely empty space known as the third level that they had just vacated, really a glorified landing with a few conference rooms. Control realized Whitby had chosen the table so he could cram his slight frame into the semicircle closest to the wall—a wary if improbable gunslinger with his back to the stairs, looking out across the cafeteria to the courtyard and the fuzzy green of a swamp dissolving in humid bubbles of condensation against the glass.
Control sat facing Grace, with Whitby and Hsyu flanking Grace to right and left. Cheney plopped into the seat next to Control, opposite Whitby. Control began to suspect some of them weren’t there by chance, or voluntarily, the way Grace seemed to be commandeering the space. The huffing X of Cheney’s face leaned in, solicitous as he said, “I’ll hold down the fort while you get your food and go after.”
“Just get me a pear or an apple and some water, and I’ll stay here instead,” Control said. He felt vaguely nauseated.
Cheney nodded, withdrew his thick hands from the table with a slap, and left along with the others, while Control contemplated the large framed photo hanging on the wall. Old and dusty, it showed the core of the Southern Reach team at the time. Control recognized some faces from his various briefings, zeroing in on Lowry, come back for a visit from Central, still looking haggard. Whitby was there, too, grinning near the center. The photo suggested that at one time Whitby had been inquisitive, quick, optimistic—perhaps even impishly proactive. The missing director was just a hulking shadow off at the left edge. She loomed, committed to neither a smile nor a frown.
At that time, she would have been a relatively new hire, an apprentice to the staff psychologist. Grace would have joined about five years later. It could not have been easy for either of them to make their way up the hierarchy and hold on to their power. That had taken toughness and perseverance. Perhaps too much. But at least they had both missed the crazier manifestations of the early days, of which the hypnosis was the only surviving remnant. Cryptozoologists, an almost séance, the bringing in of psychics, given the bare facts and asked to produce … what? Information? No information could be extracted from their divinations.
The others returned from the buffet, Cheney with a pear on a plate and the asked-for water. Control reflected that if something terrible happened later that day and forensics tried to reconstruct events from the contents of their stomachs, Cheney would look like a fussy bird, Whitby like a pig, Hsyu a health nut, and Grace a mere nibbler. She sat back in her seat, glaring at him now, with her two packets of crackers and coffee arranged in front of her as if she planned to use it as evidence against him. He braced himself, trying to clear his head with a sip of water.
“Status meetings every Thursday or every other Thursday?” he asked, just to test the waters and make conversation. He clamped down on an automatic impulse to use the question to begin a sly exploration of department morale.
But Grace didn’t want to make conversation.
“Do you want to hear a story,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. She looked as if she had made up her mind about something.
“Sure,” Control said. “Why not?” While Cheney fidgeted next to him, and Whitby and Hsyu simultaneously seemed to flatten and become smaller, looking away from Grace, as if she’d become a repelling magnet.
Her stare bore down on him and he lost the urge to gnaw on his pear. “It concerns a domestic terrorism operative.” Here it comes, there it goes.
“How interesting,” Control said. “I was in domestic terrorism for a while.”
Continuing on as if Control hadn’t said a word: “The story is about a blown field assignment, this operative’s third out of training. Not his first or his second, but his third, so no real excuses. What was his job? He was to observe and report on separatist militia members on the northwest coast—based in the mountains but coming down into two key port cities to recruit.” Central had believed that the radical cells in this militia had the will and resources to disrupt shipping, blow up a building, many things. “No coherent political views or vision. Just ignorant white men mostly, college age but not in college. A few radicalized women, and then the usual others unaware of what their ignorant men were up to. None of them as stupid as the operative.”
Control sat very still. He began to feel as if his face were cracking. He was getting warmer and warmer, a tingling flame spreading slowly throughout his body. Was she trying to tear him down, stone by stone? In front of the few people at the Southern Reach with whom he already had some kind of rapport?
Cheney had gotten in some huffing sounds to express his disapproval of where this might be going. Whitby looked as if a stranger walking toward him from very far away was trying to give him the details of an interesting conversation, but he wasn’t quite close enough to hear about it yet—so sorry, not his fault.
“Sounds familiar,” Control said, because it did, and he even knew what came next.
“The operative infiltrates the group, or the edges of the group,” Grace said. “He gets to know some of the friends of the people at the core of it.”
Hsyu, frowning, focused on something of interest on the carpet as she got up with her tray, managed a cheerful if abrupt goodbye, and left the table.
“Not fair, Grace, you know that,” Cheney whispered, leaning forward, as if somehow he could direct his words solely to her. “An ambush.” But by Control’s own reckoning, it was fair. Very fair. Given that they hadn’t agreed to ground rules ahead of time.
“This operative starts following the friends and, eventually, they lead him to a bar. The girlfriend of the second-in-command likes to have a drink at this bar. She is on the list; he has memorized her photograph. But instead of just observing her and reporting back, this clever, clever operative ignores his orders and starts to talk to her, there in the bar—”
“Do you want me to tell the rest of the story?” Control interrupted. Because he could. He could tell it—wanted to tell it, had a fierce desire to tell it—and felt a perverse gratitude toward Grace, because this was such a human problem, such a banal, human problem compared to all the rest.
“Grace…” Cheney, imploring.
But Grace waved them both off, faced Whitby so that Whitby had no choice but to look at her. “Not only does he have a conversation with this woman, Whitby”—Whitby as startled by the complicity of his name as if she had put her arm around him—“but he seduces her, telling himself that he is doing it to help the cause. Because he is an arrogant man. Because he is too far off his leash.” Mother had typified that as hearsay, as she had typified a lot of things, but in this case she had been right.
“We used to have forks and spoons in the cafeteria,” Whitby said, mournfully. “Now we just have sporks.” He turned to the left, then the right, looking either for alternative cutlery or for a quick way to exit.
“Next time you tell this story, you should leave out the seduction, which didn’t happen,” Control said, a spiral of ash in his head and a faint ringing in his ears. “You could also add that the operative didn’t have clear orders from his superior.”
“You heard the man. You heard him.” The Cheney murmur, as subtle as a donkey burp.
Grace kept speaking directly to Whitby, with Whitby now swiveling toward Cheney, the expression asking Cheney what he should do, and Cheney unable or unwilling to give him guidance. Let it play out to the bitter end. Draw the poison. This was trench warfare. This was always going to continue.
“So the operative beds the girlfriend”—no triumph in her voice at least—“although he knows it is dangerous, knows that the members of the militia might find out. His supervisor does not know what he is doing. Yet. And then one day—”
“One day,” Control interrupted, because if she was going to tell this story she should get the rest of it right, godfucking dammit. “One day he goes to the bar—this is only the third time—and gets made by surveillance cameras put in overnight by the boyfriend.” Control hadn’t spoken to her the second time in the bar. That third and final time, yes. How he wished he hadn’t. He couldn’t even remember what he’d said to her, or her to him.
“Correct,” Grace said, a momentary confused expression adding weight to her face. “Correct.”
* * *
It was an old scar by now for Control, even if it seemed like a fresh wound to every scavenger that tried to dip their beak or snout into it, to tear away some spoiled meat. The routine of telling the story transformed Control from a person into an actor dramatizing an ancient event from his own life. Every time he had to reenact it, the monologue became smoother, the details less complex and more easily fitted together, the words like stuffing puzzle pieces into his mouth and spewing them out in the perfect order to form a picture. He disliked the performance more each time. But the only other choice was to be blackmailed by a part of his past now more than seventeen years and five months gone by. Even though it followed him around to each new job because his supervisor at the time had decided Control deserved, forever, more punishment than he’d received at the point of impact.
In the worst versions, like the one Grace had started to tell, he’d slept with the girlfriend, Rachel McCarthy, and had compromised operations beyond repair. But the truth had been bad enough. He had come out of private college as his mother’s protégé; excellent grades, a kind of unthinking swagger, and completion of training at Central with high marks. He’d had great success in the field the first two times out, tracking good ole boys across flat plains and gentle hills in the middle of the country—pickups and chewing tobacco and lonely little town squares, snacking on fried okra while he watched guys in baseball caps load suspicious boxes into the backs of vans.
“I made a terrible mistake. I think about it every day. It guides me in my job now. It makes me humble and keeps me focused.” But he didn’t think about it every day. You didn’t think about it every day or it would rise up and consume you. It just remained there, nameless: a sad, dark thing that weighed you down only some of the time. When the memory became too faint, too abstract, it would transform itself into an old rotator cuff injury, a pain so thin yet so sharp that he could trace the line of it all the way across his shoulder blade and down his back.
“So then,” Control said, Whitby beginning to be crushed by their tandem attention and Cheney gone, having orchestrated a subtle jailbreak right under Control’s nose. “So then, the boyfriend has it on tape that some stranger was talking to his girlfriend, which would probably be enough for a beating. But then he has a comrade follow this stranger to a café about twenty minutes away by car. The operative doesn’t notice—he’s forgotten to take the steps to see if he was being tailed, because he’s so thrilled with himself and so confident in his abilities.” Because he was part of a dynasty. Because he knew so much. “And guess who the operative is talking to? His supervisor. Only, members of this militia had a run-in with the supervisor a few years back, which, it turns out, is why it’s me in the field rather than him in the first place. So now they know the person talking to his girlfriend is comparing notes with a known government agent.”
Here he deviated from the script long enough to remind Grace of what he had endured just that morning: “It was like I was floating above it all, above everyone, looking down, gliding through the air. Able to do anything I wanted to.” Saw the connection register with her, but not the guilt.
“Now they know that a member of their militia has had contact with the government—and on top of that, the boyfriend, as noted, is the possessive, controlling, jealous type. And that boyfriend works himself into a rage, watching the operative come back the next day, not doing much more than nodding at McCarthy, but for all he knows they’ve got a secret method of communication. It’s enough that the operative has come back. The boyfriend gets it into his head that his girlfriend might be part of it, that maybe McCarthy is spying on them. So what do you think they do?”
Whitby took the opportunity to give an answer to a different question: He slid out from behind the table and ran away down the curve of the wall, headed for the science division without even a hurried goodbye.
Leaving Control with Grace.