00X
When Control left the house on Tuesday morning, the director’s beetle-phone lay on his welcome mat. It had returned to him. Looking down at it, hand on the half-open front door, he could not help seeing it as a sign … but a sign of what?
Chorry jumped past him and into the bushes while Control squatted down to get a closer look. Days and nights out in the yard hadn’t helped it much. The grotesquery of the thing … some animal had gnawed at the casing and it was smeared with dirt and grass stains. Now it looked more like something alive than it had before. It looked like something that had gone exploring or burrowing and come back to report in.
Under the phone, thankfully, was a note from the landlord. In a quivering scrawl she had written, “The lawn man found this yesterday. Please dispose of phones in the garbage if you are done with them.”
He tossed it into the bushes.
* * *
In the morning light, during that ever-longer walk through the doors and down the corridor to his office, Control’s recollection of Whitby on the rack, stuffed into a shelf, the disturbing art on the wall, took on a slightly changed, more forgivable texture: a long-term disintegration whose discovery had urgency to him personally but for the Southern Reach was just one symptom of many seeking ways to take Whitby out of the “sinister” file and place him under “needs our help.”
Still, in his office, he wrestled with what to do about Whitby—did the man fall under his jurisdiction or Grace’s? Would she be resistant, slough it off, say something like “Oh, that Whitby”? Maybe together, he and Grace would go up into Whitby’s secret room and have a good laugh about the grotesqueries to be found there, and then jointly paint it all white again. Then they’d go have lunch with Cheney and Hsyu and play board games and share their mutual love of water polo. Hsyu would say, as if he’d already disagreed with her, “We shouldn’t take the meaning of words for granted!” and he would shout back, “You mean a word like border?” and she would reply, “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean! You get it! You understand!” Followed by an impromptu square dance, dissolving into a chaos of thousands of glowing green ferns and black glittering mayflies gusting across their path.
Or not.
* * *
With a snarl of frustration, Control put aside the question of Whitby and buried himself again in the director’s notes, kept Grace’s intel about the director’s focus in mind while trying to divine from those dried entrails more than they might actually contain. From Whitby, he wanted for the moment only distance and time so that there would be no hand reaching out to him.
He returned to the lighthouse, based on what Grace had told him. What was the purpose of a lighthouse? To warn of danger, to guide coastal vessels, and to provide landfall for ships. What did it mean to the Southern Reach, to the director?
Among the layers in the locked drawer, the most prominent concerned the lighthouse, and that included pages he had confirmed with Grace came from an investigation that was inextricably tied to the history of the island to the north. That island had had numerous names, as if none would stick, until now it was simply known as Island X at the Southern Reach, although some called it “Island Y,” as in “Why are we bothering to research this?”
What did fascinate—even resonate—was the fact that the beacon in the lighthouse on the coast had originally been placed in a lighthouse built on Island X. But shipping lanes had shifted and no one needed a lighthouse that helped ships navigate the shallows. The old lighthouse fell into ruin, but its eye had been removed long before.
As Grace had noted, the beacon interested the director the most: a first-order lens that constituted not just a remarkable engineering feat but also a work of art. More than two thousand separate lenses and prisms had been mounted inside a brass framework. The light from at first a lamp and then a lightbulb was reflected and refracted by the lenses and prisms to be cast seaward.
The entire apparatus could be disassembled and shipped in sections. The “light characteristics” could be manipulated in almost every conceivable way. Bent, straightened, sent bouncing off surfaces in a recursive loop so that it never reached the outside. Sent sideways. Sent down onto the spiraling steps leading up to the top. Beamed into outer space. Slanted past the open trapdoor, where lay so many journal accounts from so many expeditions.
An alarming note that Control dismissed because he had no room left in his brain for harmful speculation, x-ed out and crumpled on the back of a ticket for a local Bleakersville production of some atrocity called Hamlet Unbound: “More journals exist than accounted for by expedition members.” He hadn’t seen anywhere a report on the number of journals, no count on that.
The Séance & Science Brigade, which had operated along that coast since the fifties, had been obsessed with the twin lighthouses. And as if the S&SB had shared something personally with her, the director had zeroed in on the beacon’s history, even though the Southern Reach as an institution had already ruled it out as “evidence pertaining to the creation of Area X.” The number of ripped-out pages and circled passages in a book entitled Famous Lighthouses noted that the beacon had been shipped over just prior to the states dissolving into civil war, from a manufacturer whose name had been lost along the way. The “mysterious history” included the beacon being buried in the sand to keep it away from one side or another, then sent up north, then appearing down south, and eventually popping up at Island X on the forgotten coast. Control didn’t find the history mysterious so much as hectic, overbusy, thinking of the amount of effort that had gone into carting and dragging this beacon, even in its constituent pieces, all over the country. The number of miles the beacon had traveled before finding a permanent home—that was really the only mystery, along with why anyone had thought to describe the fog signal as sounding like “two large bulls hung up by their tails.”
Yet this had captivated the director, or seemed to have, roughly around the time of the planning for the twelfth expedition, if he could trust the dates on the article excerpts. Which did not interest Control as much as the fact that the director kept annotating, amending, adding data and fragments of accounts from sources she did not accredit—these sources maddeningly not in Grace’s DMP archive and not alluded to in any of the notes he had looked through. This frustrated him. The banality of it, too, as if ceaselessly reviewing what she already knew for something she felt she had missed. Was the message coming down to Control from the director that he should resurrect old lines of inquiry, or that the Southern Reach had run out of ideas, had begun to endlessly recycle, feeding on itself?
How Control hated his own imagination, wished it would just shrivel up and turn brown and fall out of him. He was more willing to believe that something was staring out at him from the notes, something hidden looking at him, than to accept that the director had been pursuing dead ends. And yet he couldn’t see it; he could still only see her searching, and wonder why she was searching so hard.
On impulse, he took down all of the framed images on the far wall and searched them for anything hidden—took off the back mats, disassembled them entirely. But he found nothing. Just the reeds, the lighthouse, the lighthouse keeper, his assistant, and the girl staring out at him from more than thirty years ago.
* * *
In the afternoon, he turned to Grace’s DMP file, cross-checking it against the piles of notes. Which, because it was a proprietary program, meant that he was clicking Ctrl to go from page to page. Ctrl was beginning to seem the only control he actually had. Ctrl only had one role, and it performed that role stoically and without complaint. He hit Ctrl with ever more malice and force, even though every hour that he looked at the notes rather than dealt with Whitby seemed a kind of blessing. Every hour that Whitby didn’t show his face, even though his car remained in the parking lot. Did Whitby want help? Did he know he needed help? Someone needed to tell Whitby what he had become. Could Grace tell him? Could Cheney? No. They had not told him yet.
Ctrl Ctrl Ctrl. Always too many pages. Ctrl this. Ctrl that. Ctrl crescendos and arias. Ctrl always clicking past information, because the information he found on the screen seemed to lead nowhere anyway, while the vast expanse of clutter that spread out in waves from his desk to the far wall contained too much.
His office began to close in on him. Listless pushing around of files and pretend efforts to straighten bookshelves had given way to further Internet searches on the places the biologist had worked before joining the twelfth expedition. This activity had proven more calming, each vista of wilderness more beautiful than the last. But eventually the parallels to the pristine landscape of Area X had begun to encroach and the bird’s-eye view of some of the photographs reminded him of that final video clip.
He took a break around five, then went back to his office for a while, after short, friendly conversations with Hsyu and Cheney in the corridor. Although Hsyu seemed flushed, talking a bit too fast for some reason, her aspect ratio skewed. Cheney’s big catcher’s mitt of a hand had rested on Control’s shoulder for an uncomfortable second or two, as the man said, “A second week! Which is a good sign, surely? We hope you find it all to your liking. We’re open to change. We’re open to changes, if you know what I mean, once you’ve heard what we have to say. And how we say it.” The words almost made sense, but somehow Cheney was off today, too. Control had had days like that.
That left only the problem of Whitby; he hadn’t seen him the whole afternoon, and Whitby hadn’t responded to e-mails, either. It felt important to get it over with, not to let it slide into Wednesday. The how had become clear to him, along with what was fair and what wasn’t fair. He would do it in front of Cheney in the science division, and leave Grace out of it. This had become his responsibility, his mess, and Cheney would just have to go along with his decision. Whitby would be forced to accept a leave of absence and psychiatric counseling, and with any luck the strange little man would never return.
It was late, already after six. He had lost track of time, or it had lost track of him. The office was still a mess corresponding to the contours of the director’s brain, Grace’s DMP files not changing those contours in any useful way.
He took Whitby’s terroir manuscript with him, feeling that perhaps selective readings from it would convince Whitby of the problem. He again crossed the wide expanse of the cafeteria. The huge cafeteria windows gathered up the gray of the sky and pushed it down onto the tables, the chairs; it would rain again before long. The tables were empty. The little dark bird or bat had stopped flying and sat perched high up on a steel beam near the windows. “There’s something on the floor.” “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Fragments of conversation as he passed by the door to the kitchen, and then a kind of sharp but faint weeping sound. For a moment, it puzzled Control. Then he realized it must come from some machine being operated by the cafeteria staff.
Something else had been gnawing at Control for much longer, as if he’d forgotten his wallet or other essential item when he’d left the house. But it now resolved, the weeping sound pushing it into his conscious mind. An absence. The rotting honey smell was gone. In fact, he realized he hadn’t smelled rotting honey the entire day, no matter where he had been. Had Grace at least passed on that recommendation?
He turned the corner into the corridor leading to the science division, kept walking under the fluorescent lights, immersed in a rehearsal of what he would say to Whitby, anticipating what Whitby might say back, or not say, feeling the weight of the man’s insane manuscript.
Control reached out for the large double doors. Reached for the handle, missed it, tried again.
But there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall.
And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand.
He was screaming, he thought, but from somewhere deep beneath the sea.