018: RECOVERY
Cheney came back to prowl around outside the bathroom—concerned, whispering “Do you think you’re all right, man?” as if they’d become best buddies. But eventually Cheney went away, and a little while later Control’s cell phone rang just as he’d propped himself up on the toilet seat. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. The Voice. The bathroom seemed like the perfect place to take this call. Cold porcelain after having slammed the bathroom door shut was a relief. So were the tiny cool blue tiles of the floor. Even the faint whiff of piss. All of it. Any of it.
Why were there no mirrors in the men’s room?
“Next time, take my call when I call,” the Voice warned, with the implication that s/he was a busy wo/man, just as Control noticed the flashing light that meant he had a message.
“I was in a meeting.” I was watching videotape. I was talking to the biologist. I was getting my ass handed to me by the assistant director because of you.
“Is your house in order?” the Voice asked. “Is it in order?”
Two thousand white rabbits herded toward an invisible door. A plant that didn’t want to die. Impossible video footage. More theories than there were fish in the sea. Was his house in order? An odd way for the Voice to phrase it, as if they spoke using a code to which Control did not have the key. Yet it made him feel secure even though that was counterintuitive.
“Are you there?” the Voice asked brusquely.
“Yes. Yes, my house is in order.”
“Then what do you have for me?”
Control gave the Voice a brief summary.
The Voice considered that for a moment, then asked, “So do you have an answer now?”
“To what?”
“To the mystery behind Area X.” The Voice laughed an oddly tinny metallic laugh. Haw haw haw. Haw.
Enough of this. “Stop trying to cut Grace off from her contacts at Central. It isn’t working and it’s making it harder,” Control said. Remembering her care with setting up the videos of the first expedition, too wrung out by lunch to process it yet. Twinned to Control’s disgust at the Voice’s clearly inadequate and extreme tactics was the sudden conviction, admittedly irrational, that somehow the Voice was responsible for sticking him in the middle of the Southern Reach. If the Voice actually was his mother, then he’d be correct about that.
“Listen, John,” the Voice growled, “I don’t report to you. You report to me, and don’t forget that.” Meant to be delivered with conviction, and yet somehow failing.
“Stop trying,” Control repeated. “You’re doing harm to me—she knows you’re trying. Just stop.”
“Again, I don’t report to you, Control. Don’t tell me what to do. You asked me to fix it, and I’m trying to fix it.” Feedback made Control take the phone away from his ear.
“You know I saw the video of the first expedition this morning,” he said. “It threw me.” By way of halfhearted apology. Grandpa had taught him that: Redirect while seeming to address the other party’s grievance. It’d been done enough to him in the past.
But for some reason that set the Voice off. “You think that’s a fucking excuse for not doing your goddamn job. Seeing a video? Get your head out of your asshole and give me a real report next time—and then maybe I’ll be a lot more willing to do your bidding the way you want me to do your bidding. Got it, fuckface?”
The swear words were delivered in a peculiar, halting way, as if the Voice were completing a Mad Lib where the only scripted parts were the words fucking, goddamn, asshole, and fuckface. But Control got it. The Voice was a shithead. He’d had shithead bosses before. Unless the real Voice was taking a break and this was the sub’s attempt at improv. Megalodon mad. Megalodon not happy. Megalodon have tantrum.
So he gave in and made some conciliatory sounds. Then he elaborated and told the tale of his “progress,” the story structured and strung together not as the plaintive, halting start-stop of what-the-hell that it was, but instead as an analytical and nuanced “journey” that could only be interpreted as having a beginning and a middle pushing out toward a satisfying end.
“Enough!” the Voice said at some point.
* * *
Later: “That’s better,” the Voice said. Control couldn’t really tell if the severity of that rushed cheese-grater-on-cheese-grater tone had lightened. “For now, continue to collect data and continue to question the biologist, but press her harder.” Had already done that, and it had gone poorly. Uncovering useful intel was often a long-term project, a matter of listening for what didn’t matter to fall away for just a moment.
After another pause, the Voice said, “I have that information you asked for.”
“Which information?” Plant, mouse, or…?
“I can confirm that the director did cross the border.”
Control sat up straight on the toilet seat. Someone was knocking timidly at the door. They’d have to wait.
“When? Right before the last eleventh expedition?”
“Yes. Completely unauthorized and without anyone’s knowledge or permission.”
“And she got away with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wasn’t fired.”
A pause, then the Voice said, “No doubt she should have been terminated. But, no, she got probation. The assistant director took her place for six months.” Impatient, as if it didn’t matter.
What was he supposed to do with that? Probably a question for his mother. Because surely someone higher up must have known the director was going across the border and then someone had protected her when she came back.
“Do you know how long she was gone? Is there a report of what she found?”
“Three weeks. No report.”
Three weeks!
“She must have been debriefed. There must be a record.”
A much longer pause. Was the Voice consulting with another Voice or Voices?
Finally the Voice conceded the point: “There is a debriefing statement. I can have a copy sent to you.”
“Did you know that the director thought the border was advancing?” Control asked.
“I am aware of that theory,” the Voice said. “But it is no concern of yours.”
How was that no concern of his? How did someone go from calling him a fuckface to using a phrase like “no concern of yours”? The Voice was a bad actor, Control concluded, or had a bad script, or it was deliberate.
At the end of their conversation, for no good reason, he told a joke. “What’s brown and sticky?”
“I know that one,” the Voice said. “A stick.”
“A turd.”
Click.
* * *
“Go ahead and check the seats for change, John.” Control, back in his office, exhausted, ambushed by odd flashes of memory. A colleague at his last position coming up to him after a presentation and saying in an accusing tone, “You contradicted me.” No, I disagreed with you. A woman in college, a brunette with a broad face and beautiful brown eyes that made him ache, whom he’d fallen for in Fundamentals of Math but when he’d given her a poem had said to him, “Yes, but do you dance?” No, I write poetry. I’m going to be some kind of spy. One of his college professors in political science had made them write poetry to “get your juices flowing.” Most of the time, though, he’d been studying, going to the shooting range, working out, using parties to get in practice for a lifetime of short-term relationships.
“Go ahead and check the seats for change, John,” said Grandpa Jack. Control had been twelve, visiting his mother up north for a rare trip that didn’t include going to the cabin or fishing. They were still getting the balance right; the divorce was still being finalized.
On a weekend afternoon, in the freezing cold, Jack had rolled up in what he called a “muscle car.” He’d taken it out of hibernation because he had hatched a secret plan to drive Control to a lingerie show at a local department store. Control only had a vague idea of what that meant, but it sounded embarrassing. Mostly he didn’t want to go because the next-door neighbor’s daughter was his age and he’d had a crush on her since the summer. But it was hard to say no to Grandpa. Especially when Grandpa had never taken him anywhere without his mother there.
So Control checked the seats for change while Grandpa fired up the bright blue muscle car, which had sat cold for two hours while Grandpa talked to his mother inside. But Control also thought Grandpa was reacquainting himself with the mysteries of its workings, too. The heat was blasting away and Control was sweating in his coat. He checked the seats eagerly, wondering if Grandpa had left some money there on purpose. With money, he could buy the neighbor girl an ice cream. He was still in summer mode.
No money, just lint, paper clips, a scrap of paper or two, and something cold, smooth, sticky, and shaped like a tiny brain from which he recoiled: old bubble gum. Disappointed, he broadened his search from the long backseat to the dark cavern under the front passenger side. He extended his arm awkwardly forward so his hand could curl around to search, came up against something bulky yet soft taped there. No, not soft—whatever it was had been wrapped in cloth. With a bit of coaxing, he managed to pull it free, the awkward weight a muffled thud on the car floor. There was a dull metal-and-oil smell. He picked it up, unwrapped it from the cloth, and sat back, the rough coldness of it cupped in both hands … only to find his grandpa staring at him intently.
“What’ve you got there?” the old man asked. “Where’d you find that?” Which Control thought were dumb questions and then, later, disingenuous questions. The eager look on Grandpa Jack’s face as he turned to stare, one arm still on the steering wheel.
“A gun,” Control said, although Grandpa could see that. He remembered later mostly the darkness of it, the darkness of its shape and the stillness it seemed to bring with it.
“A Colt .45, it looks like. It’s heavy, isn’t it?”
Control nodded, a little afraid now. He was sweating from the heat. He’d already found the gun, but his grandpa’s expression was that of someone waiting for the gift they’d given to be unwrapped and held high—and him too young to sense the danger. But he’d already made the wrong decision: He should never have gotten in the car.
What kind of psycho gave a kid a gun, even unloaded? This was the thought that occurred now. Perhaps the kind of psycho who wouldn’t mind coming out of retirement at his remote cabin to work for Central again as the Voice, to run his own grandson.