Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
So he was left with trying to build a true terroir vision of the director—her motivations
and knowledge base—from everything he was sorting through and by creating a whole
layering of other, non-DMP categories in his mind. She had a subscription to a table
television guide, as well as a selection of culture and art magazines, judging not
just from torn pages but from subscription renewal forms. She had owed the dentist
$72.12 at one point for a cleaning not covered by her insurance and didn’t care who
knew it. A bowling alley outside of town was a frequent haunt. She got birthday cards
from an aunt, but either wasn’t sentimental about cards or wasn’t that close to the
woman. She liked pork chops and shrimp with grits. She liked to dine alone, but one
receipt from the barbecue place had two dinner orders on it. Company? Perhaps, like
him, she sometimes ordered food to go so she’d have a lunch for the next day.
There was not much about the border in her notes, but that white spiral, that enormous
space, did not leave him completely. There was an odd synchronicity as he worked that
linked the spiral to his mother’s flash of light across the sky, the literal and the
metaphoric joined together across an expanse of time and context so vast that only
thoughts could bridge the gap.
* * *
The sedimentary layers that had existed under the plant and mouse proved the most
difficult to separate out. Some pages were brittle and thin, and the scraps of paper
and ragged collages of leaves had a tendency to stick together, while being infiltrated
and bound more tightly by the remains of translucent roots touched by lines of crimson
left behind by the plant. As Control painstakingly separated one page from another,
a musty smell that had lain dormant rose up, became strong and pungent. He tried not
to compare it to the stench of dirty socks.
The layers continued to support that the director liked both nature and a cold breakfast.
As he liberated the proof of purchase cut out of a box of bran flakes from an oak
leaf stained blue by words thickened into almost unreadable ink blots, he knew that
the cardboard had never before been unwedded from its brittle bride. “Review transcripts
from X.10.C, esp. anthro on LH landing” read the cardboard. “Recommend discontinuing
use of black boxes for conditioning purposes” read the leaf. He placed the oak leaf
on the unknown pile, as in “unknown value.”
Other intriguing fragments revealed themselves, too, some peeking out between books
on the stacks or just shoved roughly between pages, less like bookmarks and more as
if she had become irritated with them and was punishing the very words she had scribbled
down. It was between the pages of a basic college biology textbook that looked worn
enough to have been the director’s own that Control found, on real paper, bizarrely
printed on a dot matrix printer despite a date of only eighteen months ago, a note
on the twelfth expedition.
In the note, which hadn’t made it into Grace’s DMP file, the director called the surveyor
“someone with a strong sense of reality, a good, bracing foil to the others.” The
linguist discarded in the border prep area she called “useful but not essential; possibly
a dangerous addition, a sympathetic but narrow character who might deflect attention.”
Sympathetic to whom? Deflect attention from what? And was this deflection desirable
or…? The anthropologist was referred to by her first name, which confused Control
until he suddenly recognized it. “Hildi will be on board, will understand.” He stared
at that note for a while. On board with what? Understand what?
Beyond a frustrating lack of context, the notes conveyed a sense that the director
had been casting a play or movie. Notes for actors. Teams needed cohesion, but the
director didn’t seem as concerned with morale and the group dynamic as with … some
other quality.
The note on the biologist was the most extensive and caused Control to vibrate with
additional questions.
Not a very good biologist. In a traditional sense. Empathic more toward environments
than people. Forgets the reasons she went, who is paying her salary. But becomes embedded
to an extraordinary extent. Would know Area X better than I do from almost the first
moment sets foot there. Experience with similar settings. Self-sufficient. Unburdened.
Connection through her husband. What would she be in Area X? A signal? A flare? Or
invisible? Exploit.
Another note, found nearby in volume 2 of a slim three-pamphlet set on xenobiology,
came to mind: “bio: expo to TA contam?” Biologist exposure to topographical anomaly
contamination was his best guess—an easy guess. But without a date, he could not even
be sure it pertained to the same expedition. Similarly, when had “Keep from L” and
“L said no—no surprise” been written on two separate scraps, and did “L” stand for
Lowry or in some esoteric and less likely way mean “lighthouse keeper”?
He let all of this settle in, knew he had to be patient. There were a lot of notes,
and a lot of pages to Grace’s DMP file, nothing yet on a prior trip by the director
across the border. But already he was getting the sense of undercurrents, was finding
now in Whitby’s terroir theory something that might apply more to the Southern Reach
than to Area X, perhaps framed by a single mind. The idea that a dysfunctional thought
could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because,
especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more
and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus
or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from
on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death
until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did. The government could
not investigate every farmer’s purchase of fertilizer and fireworks—could not self-police
every deviant brain within its own ranks.
The thought had occurred while sorting through the scraps that if you ran an agency
devoted to understanding and combating a force that constituted an insurgency, and
you believed the border was, in some sense at least, advancing, then you might deviate
from official protocols. That if your supervisors and colleagues did not agree with
your assessment, you might come up with an alternative plan and begin to enact it
on your own. That, wary and careful, you might then and only then reach out to recruit
the help of others who did believe you, or at least weren’t hostile, to implement
that plan. Whether you let them in on the details or not. Just possibly, you might
begin to work out this plan on the back of receipts from your favorite restaurants,
while watching TV or reading a magazine.
When it came time to leave for his appointment with Grace, Control looked up to realize
he had boxed himself in with piles of paper and stacked folders. Once past that, the
doorway full of chairs and a small collapsible table required so much effort to navigate
that he wondered if he’d subconsciously been trying to keep something out.
013: RECOMMENDATIONS
Control had wanted to impose himself on Grace’s territory, to show her he was comfortable
there, but that meant when he arrived she was in the middle of a ridiculously cheerful
conversation with her administrative assistant.
While he waited, Control reviewed the basics, the basics being all that had been given
to him, for whatever reason. Grace Stevenson.
Homo sapiens
. Female. Family originally from the West Indies. She was third-generation in this
country and the eldest of three daughters. The parents had worked hard to put all
three through college, and Grace had graduated valedictorian of her class with dual
degrees in political science and history, followed by training at Central. Then, during
a special op, she’d injured her leg—no details on how—and washed up on the shores
of the Southern Reach. No, that wasn’t right. The director had picked her name out
of a hat? Cheney had made some noises to that effect at one point on their border
trip.
But she had to have harbored larger ambitions at some point, so what had kept her
here—just the director? For from the start of her stint at the Southern Reach, Grace
Stevenson had entered a kind of holding pattern, if not a slow slide into stagnation—the
personal depths of that pit probably her messy, drawn-out divorce almost eight years
ago, that event timed almost to the month of the college graduation of her twin boys.
A year later she had informed Central about her relationship with a Panamanian national—a
woman—so that she could again be fully vetted and deemed no security risk, which she
wasn’t. A planned mess, then, but still traumatic. Her boys were doctors now, and
also immortalized in a desk photo of them at a soccer game. Another photo showed her
arm in arm with the director. The director was a big woman, with the kind of frame
where you couldn’t tell if she ran to fat or was muscular. They were at some Southern
Reach company picnic, a barbecue station jutting into the frame from the left and
people in flowery beach shirts in the backgrouund. The idea of agency social events
struck Control as absurd for some reason. Both photos were already familiar to him.
After the divorce, the assistant director’s fate had been ever more joined to that
of the director, whom she’d had to cover for several times, if he was reading between
the lines correctly. The story ended with the director’s disappearance and Grace landing
the booby prize: getting to be the Assistant Director for Life.
Oh, yes, and as a result of all of this, and more, Grace Stevenson fostered an overwhelming
sense of hostility toward him. An emotion he sympathized with, although only to a
point, which was probably his failing. “Empathy is a losing game,” his father had
liked to say, sometimes worn down by the casual racism he encountered. If you had
to think about it, then you were doing it wrong.
The assistant finally gone, Control sat down opposite Grace while she held the printout
of his initial list of recommendations at arm’s length, not so much because it smelled
or was otherwise offensive but because she refused to get progressive lenses.
Would she take the recommendations as a challenge? They were deliberately premature,
but he hoped so. Although it certainly didn’t bode well that a mini tape recorder
lay whirring in front of him, her response to his presence in her space. But he had
practiced his mannerisms in the mirror that morning, just to see how nonverbal he
could be.
In truth, most of his admin and managerial recommendations could apply to any organization
that had been rudderless—or to be generous, operating with half a rudder—for a few
years. The rest were stabs in the dark, but whatever they cut was as likely to flense
lard as hamstring anyone. He wanted the flow of information to go in multiple directions,
so that, for example, Hsyu the linguist had access to classified information from
other agency departments. He also wanted to approve long-forbidden overtime and nighttime
working hours, since the electricity in the building had to stay on twenty-four hours
a day anyway. He had noticed most of the staff left early.
Some other things were unnecessary, but with any luck Grace would waste time and energy
fighting him on them.
“That was fast,” she said finally, tossing the paper-clipped pages of his list back
across the desk at him. The pages slid into his lap before he could catch them.
“I did my homework,” Control said. Whatever that meant.
“A conscientious schoolboy. A star pupil.”
“The first part.” Control half agreed, not sure he liked the way she said it.
Grace didn’t bother wasting even an insincere smile in response. “Let me get to the
point. Someone has been interfering with my access to Central this week—making inquiries,
poking around. But whoever is doing you this favor has no tact—or whatever faction
is behind it doesn’t have quite enough pull.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Control said, his nonverbal mannerisms sagging
in surprise along with the rest of him, despite his best efforts.
Faction. Despite his daydream about the Voice having a black-ops identity, it had
not occurred to him that his mother might be heading up a faction, which led him automatically
to the idea of true shadow ops—along with an opposition. It threw him, a little, that
Central might be that fragmented. Just how elephantine, how rhinoceroscrutian, had
the Voice’s efforts been in following up on Control’s request? And: What did Grace
use her contacts for when she wasn’t turning them against him?
Grace’s look of disgust told him what she thought about his answer. “Then, in that
case, John Rodriguez, I have no comment on your recommendations, except to say that
I will begin to implement them in as excruciatingly slow a fashion as possible. You
should begin to see a few of them—like, ‘buy new floor cleaner,’ in place by next
quarter. Possibly. Maybe.”
He had a vision, again, of Grace spiriting away the biologist, of multiple mutual
attempted destructions, until somewhere up in the clouds, atop two vast and blood-drenched
escalators, they continued to do battle years from now.
Control’s stiff nod—gruffly acknowledging defeat—wasn’t the mannerism he’d been hoping
to use.
But she wasn’t done. Her eyes glittered as she opened a drawer and pulled out a mother-of-pearl
jewelry box.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked him.
“A jewelry box?” he replied, confused, definitely back on his heels now.
“This is a box full of accusations,” Grace said, holding it toward him like an offering.
With this jewelry box, I thee despise.
“What is a box of accusations?” Although he didn’t want to know.
With a clink-and-tinkle, the yawning velvet mouth sent a handful of bugs Control recognized
all too well rolling and skittering across her blotter at him. Most of them came to
a stop before the edge, but a couple followed the list onto his lap. The rotting honey
smell had intensified again.