Area X Three Book Bundle Page 29

  But she had relented, too, during the conversation, for a moment.

  A: I woke in the empty lot and I thought I was dead. I thought I was in purgatory, maybe, even though I don’t believe in an afterlife. But it was quiet and so empty … so I waited there, afraid to leave, afraid there might be some reason I was meant to be there. Not sure I wanted to know anything else. Then the police came for me, and then the Southern Reach after that. But I still believed I wasn’t really alive.

  What if the biologist had just that morning decided she was alive, not dead? Perhaps that accounted for the change in her mood.

  When he had finished reading, he could feel Ghost Bird still staring at him, and she would not let his gaze drop, held him there, or he let her do it. For whatever reason.

  On the way back from the border, a silence had come over Control, Whitby, and Cheney, perhaps overloaded by the contrast between sun/heat and rain/cold. But it had seemed to Control like the companionable silence of shared experience, as if he had been initiated into membership in an exclusive club without having been asked first. He was wary of that feeling; it was a space where shadows crept in that shouldn’t creep in, where people agreed to things that they did not actually agree with, believing that they were of one purpose and intent. Once, in such a space, a fellow agent had called him “homey” and made an offhand comment about him “not being your usual kind of spic.”

  When they were about a mile from the Southern Reach, Cheney said, too casually, “You know, there’s a rumor about the former director and the border.”

  “Yes?” Here it came. There it was. How comfort led to overreach or to some half reveal of what should be hidden.

  “That she went over the border by herself once,” Cheney said, staring off into the distance. Even Whitby seemed to want to distance himself from that statement, leaning forward in his seat as he drove. “Just a rumor,” Cheney added. “No idea if it’s true.”

  But Control didn’t care about that, despite the addition being disingenuous. The truth clearly didn’t worry Cheney, or he already knew it was true and wanted Control on the scent.

  “Does this rumor include when this might have happened?” Control asked.

  “Before the final eleventh expedition.”

  Part of him had wanted to take that to the assistant director and see what she might or might not know. Another part decided that was a premature idea. So he’d chewed on the information, wondering why Cheney had fed it to him, especially in front of Whitby. Did that mean Whitby had the spine, despite the evidence, to withhold even when Grace wanted him to share?

  “Have you ever been over the border, Cheney?”

  An explosive snort. “No. Are you crazy? No.”

  In the parking lot at day’s end, Control sat behind the wheel, keys in the ignition, and decompressed for a moment. The rain had passed, leaving oily puddles and a kind of verdant sheen on the grass and trees. Only Whitby’s purple electric car remained, at an angle across two spaces, as if it had washed up there.

  Time to call the Voice and file his report. Getting it over with was better than letting work bleed into his evening.

  The phone rang and rang.

  The Voice finally answered with a “Yes—what?” as if Control had called at a bad time.

  He had meant to ask about the director’s clandestine border trip, but the Voice’s tone threw him off. Instead, he started off with the plant and the mouse: “I found something odd in the director’s desk …”

  Control blinked once, twice, three times. As they were talking, he had noticed something. It was the smallest thing, and yet it rattled him. There was a squashed mosquito on the inside of his windshield, and Control had no idea how it had gotten there. He knew it hadn’t been there in the morning, and he had no memory of swatting one anyway. Paranoid thought: Carelessness on the part of someone searching his car … or did someone want him to know he was being watched?

  Attention divided, Control became aware of wobbles in his conversation with the Voice. Almost like air pockets that pushed an airplane up and forward, while the passenger inside, him, sat there strapped in and alarmed. Or as if he were watching a TV show where the cable hiccupped and brought him five seconds forward every few minutes. Yet the conversation picked up where it had left off.

  The Voice was saying, with more than usual gruffness, “I’ll get you more information—and don’t you worry, I’m still working on the goddamn assistant director situation. Call me tomorrow.”

  A ridiculous image snuck into his head of the assistant director walking into the parking lot while he was at the border, forcing the lock, rummaging through his glove box, sadistically squashing the mosquito.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea at this point, about Grace,” Control said. “It might be better to …”

  But the Voice had already hung up, leaving Control to wonder how it had gotten dark so quickly.

  Control contemplated the tangled geometry of blood and delicate limbs. He couldn’t stop staring at the mosquito. He had meant to say something else to the Voice, but he’d forgotten it because of the mosquito and now it would have to wait until tomorrow.

  Was it possible he had squashed the mosquito reflexively and didn’t remember? He found that unlikely. Well, just in case he hadn’t, he’d leave the damn thing there, along with its splotch of blood. That might send some kind of message back. Eventually.

  011: Sixth Breach

  At home, Chorry waited on the step. Control let him inside, put out some cat food he’d bought at the store along with a chicken sandwich, ate in the kitchen, even though Chorry’s meal made the space stink of greasy salmon. He watched the cat chow down but his thoughts were elsewhere, on what he considered the failures of his day. He felt as if most of his passes had been behind his receivers and his high school coach was yelling at him. The wall behind the door had thrown him off. The wall and the meetings had taken up too much of his time. Even the border trip hadn’t put things right, just stabilized them while opening new lines of inquiry. The idea that the director had been across the border before the final eleventh expedition had returned to worry at him. Cheney, during their border trip: “I never had the idea that the director agreed with us much, you know? Or, she kept her own counsel, or had some other council, along with Grace. Or I don’t know much about people. Which is possible, I guess.”

  Control reached into his satchel for some of his notes from the border trip, and in doing so was shocked to find three cell phones there instead of two—the sleek one used for communication with the Voice, the other one for regular use, and another, bulkier. Frowning, Control pulled them out. The third was the old, nonfunctioning phone from the director’s desk. He stared at it. How had it gotten in there? Had Grace put it in there? An old black beetle of a phone, the rippled, pitted burn across the leather cover a bit like a carapace. Grace couldn’t have done it. She must have left it in his office after all and he must have absentmindedly picked it up. But then why hadn’t he noticed it in the parking lot, after he finished talking to the Voice?

  He set the phone on the kitchen counter, giving it a wary stare or two before he settled into the living room. What was he missing?

  After a few sets of halfhearted push-ups, he turned on the television. Soon he was being bombarded by a montage of reality shows, news of another school massacre, a report on another garbage zone in the ocean, and some announcer screaming out the prelims of an MMA match. He dithered between a cooking show and a mystery, two of his favorites, because they didn’t require him to think, before deciding on the mystery, the cat purring on his lap like a revving engine.

  As he watched the TV, he remembered a lecture in his second year of college by a professor of environmental science. The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as “immigrants need to learn English or they’re not re
ally citizens” or “all mental patients deserve our respect.” That in the workings of, for example, an agency, you could, with effort, discover not just the abstract thought behind it but the concrete emotions. The Southern Reach had been set up to investigate (and contain) Area X, and yet despite all the signs and symbols of that mission—all of the talk and files and briefs and analysis—some other emotion or attitude also existed within the agency. It frustrated him that he could not quite put his finger on it, as if he needed another sense, or a sensitivity, that he lacked. And yet as Grace had said, once he became too comfortable within the Southern Reach, once he was cocooned by its embrace, he would be too indoctrinated to perceive it.

  That night, he did not dream. He did remember being woken well before dawn by something small crawling across the roof in fits and starts, but soon enough it stopped moving. It hadn’t been enough to wake the cat.

  012: Sort Of Sorting

  In the morning, back at work, he discovered that a fluorescent rod had burned out in his office, dulling the light. Control’s chair and desk in particular lay under a kind of gloom. He moved a lamp from the bookcases and set it up on a shelf jutting out toward the desk on his left. The better to see that Whitby had followed through on his threat and left a thick, somewhat worn-looking document on his desk entitled “Terroir and Area X: A Complete Approach.” Something about the rust on the massive paper clip biting into the title page, the yellowing nature of the typed pages, the handwritten annotations in different-color pens, or maybe the torn-out taped-in images, made him reluctant to go down that particular rabbit hole. It would have to wait its turn, which might at this point mean next week or even next month. He had another session with the biologist, as well as a meeting with Grace about his agency recommendations, and then, on Friday, an appointment to view the videos from the first expedition. Among other pressing things on his mind … like a little redecorating. Control opened the door with the words hidden behind it. He took some photographs. Then, using a can of white paint and a brush requisitioned from maintenance, he meticulously painted over all of it: every last word, every detail of the map. Grace and the others would have to get by without a memorial because he couldn’t live with the pressure of those words pulsing out from behind the door. Also the height measurements, if that’s what they were. Two coats, three, until only a shadow remained, although the height marks, written using a different kind of pen, continued to shine through. If they were height marks, then the director had grown by a quarter inch between measurements, unless she’d been wearing higher heels the second time.

  After painting, Control set out two of his father’s carvings from the chessboard at home, meaning for them to replace the missing talismans of plant and mouse. A tiny red rooster and a moon-blue goat, they came from a series entitled simply Mi Familia. The rooster had the name of one of his uncles, the goat an aunt. His dad had photographs from his youth of playing in the backyard with his friends and cousins, surrounded by chickens and goats, a garden stretching out of sight along a wooden fence. But Control only remembered his father’s chickens—generously put, tradition or legacy chickens, named and never slaughtered. “Homage chickens” as Control had teased his father.

  Chess was a hobby he had developed that could be shared during his father’s chemo treatments and that his father could ponder and worry at when Control wasn’t there in the room. Their shared affliction before the cancer had been pool, at which they were both mediocre, even though they enjoyed it. But his dad’s physical ailments had outstripped the mental deterioration, so that hadn’t been an option. Books as a salve to the boredom of TV? No, because the bookmark just began to separate one sea of unread words from another. But with a reminder of whose turn it was, chess left some evidence of its past even when his dad got confused toward the end.

  Control had press-ganged his dad’s carvings into being pieces; they were a motley bunch that didn’t much correlate to their function, since they were being twice reinterpreted—first as people into animals and then into chess pieces. But he became a better player, his interest raised because abstraction had been turned into something real, and the results, although comical to them, seemed to matter more. “Abuela to bishop” as a move had set them both to giggling. “Cousin Humberto to La Sobrina Mercedez.”

  Now these carvings were going to help him. Control set the rooster on the far left corner of his desk and the goat on the right, with the rooster facing out and the goat staring back at him. He had glued to each a nearly invisible nano-camera that would transmit wirelessly to his phone and laptop. If nothing else, he meant for his office to be secure, to make of it a bastion, to take from it all unknowns, and to substitute only that which might be a comfort to him. Who knew what he might discover?

  He was then free to consider the director’s notes.

  The preamble to reading the director’s notes had much of the ritual of a spring cleaning. He cleared all of the chairs except his own from the office, setting them up in the hallway. Then he started to make piles in the middle of the floor. He tried to ignore the ambivalent stains revealed on the carpet. Coffee? Blood? Gravy? Cat vomit? Clearly the janitor and any cohorts had been banned from the director’s office for quite some time. He had a vision of Grace ordering that the office be kept as is, in much the same way that on cop shows the parents of slain children allowed not a single new dust mote to enter the hallowed ground of their lost ones’ bedrooms. Grace had kept it locked until his arrival, had held on to the spare key, and yet he didn’t think she’d be showing up on his surveillance video.

  So he sat on a stool, his favorite neoclassical composer playing on his laptop, and let the music fill the room and create a kind of order out of chaos. Skipping no step, Grandpa, even if there was a skip to his step. He already had received files that morning from Grace—conveyed via a third-party administrative assistant so they could avoid talking to each other. These files detailed all of the director’s official memos and reports—against which he would have to check every doodle and fragment. An “inventory list” as Control thought of it. He had considered asking Whitby to sort through the notes, but with each item the security clearance fluctuated from secret to top secret to what-the-fuck-is-this-secret like some volatile stock market dealing in futures.

  Grace’s title for the list was too functional: DIRECTOR FILES—DMP OF MAJOR AND MINOR MEMOS AND REPORTS. DMP, or Data Management Program, referred to the proprietary imaging and viewing system the Southern Reach had paid for and implemented in the nineties. Control would have gone with something pithier than Grace had, like THE DIRECTOR DOCUMENTS, or more dramatic, like TALES FROM A FORGOTTEN AGENCY or THE AREA X DOSSIER.

  The piles had to be organized by topic so that they would at least loosely match up to Grace’s DMP: border, lighthouse, tower, island, base camp, natural history, unnatural history, general history, unknown. He also decided to make a pile for “irrelevant,” even though what might seem irrelevant to him might to someone else be the Rosetta stone—if such a stone, or the pebble version, even existed among all the debris.

  This was a comfortable place for him, a comfortable task, familiar as penance during a period of shame and demotion, and he could lose himself in it almost as thoughtlessly as doing the dishes after dinner or making the bed in the morning—emerge in some ways refreshed.

  But with the crucial difference that these piles looked in part as if he had tracked in dirt on his shoes from outside. The former director was making him into a new kind of urban farmer, building compost piles with classified material that had originated out in the world, bringing with it a rich backstory. Oak and magnolia trees had provided some of the raw material in the form of leaves, to which the director had added napkins, receipts, even sometimes toilet paper, creating a thick mulch.

  The diner where Control ate breakfast had yielded several noteworthy receipts, as did a corner grocery store, where the former director had at various times shopped as a convenient last resort. The receipts indicated
straggler items, not quite a formal outing for groceries. A roll of paper towels and beef jerky one time, fruit juice and breakfast cereal another time, hot dogs, a quart of skim milk, nail scissors, and a greeting card the next. The napkins, receipts, and advertising brochures from a barbecue place in her hometown of Bleakersville figured prominently, and induced in Control a hunger for ribs. Bleakersville was only about fifteen minutes from the Southern Reach, right off the highway that led to Hedley. According to Grace, the house there had been swept clean of anything related to the Southern Reach, the results catalogued in a special DIRECTOR’S HOUSE section of the DMP file.

  Panicked thought after about an hour: What if the seemingly random surfaces on which the director had written her notes had significance? What if the words were not the whole message, just as the lighthouse keeper’s deranged sermon wasn’t the whole story? The storage cathedral came to mind, and although it seemed improbable he wondered, paranoid, if some of the leaves came from Area X, then dismissed the thought as speculative and counterproductive.

  No, the director’s vast array of textures revealed “only” that she had been absorbed in her task, as if she had been desperate to write down her observations in the moment, had wanted neither to forget nor to have an internal editor interrupt her search for understanding. Or no hacker to peer into the inner workings of her mind, distilled down to a DMP or otherwise.

  He had, as a result, to sort through not just piles of primary “documents” but also a haphazard record of the director’s life and her wanderings through the world outside of the Southern Reach buildings. This helped, because he had only dribs and drabs from the official file—either due to Grace’s interference or because the director herself had managed to winnow it terse. She had no siblings and had grown up with her father in the Midwest. She had studied psychology at a state college, been a consultant for about five years. She had then applied for the Southern Reach through Central, where she had endured a grueling schedule designed to force her to prove herself over and over—and thus make up for her undistinguished career to date. The Southern Reach must have seemed a more attractive posting back then—and where the sparse information turned into the roiling mass of notes in her office. His request for further intel had been offered up to the labyrinthine and terse maw of Central, which had clamped shut on it. Someday a file might be spat out in his direction.