Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
“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 really 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.