Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  At the top, you discovered Whitby down in the watch room panting like an animal, his clothes torn and blood on his hands, and the strange impression that the edges of the journals were rippling, enveloping Whitby, trying to drown him. No one else there, just Whitby with an impossible story of encountering his doppelgänger, False Whitby, on the landing, chasing him up to the lantern room, until they had fallen through the open trapdoor onto the mound of journals, off-balance and awkward. The smell of them. The bulk of them. The feel of them around Real Whitby and False Whitby as they toiled in their essential opposition, now in and now out of the light coming through the open trapdoor.

  How to verify this story of not one but two Whitbys? Not Whitby punching himself, kicking himself, biting himself, awash in flapping paper, but doing this to another version. His wounds were inconclusive.

  But the tableau fascinates you, returns to you during your six months off, even while chopping onions for chili in your kitchen or mowing the lawn.

  Sometimes you try to imagine what it would have been like if you had arrived earlier, not in the aftermath, and stopped there, at the top of the steps, peering down into that space, unable to move, watching the two Whitbys struggle. You can almost believe that Whitby birthed Whitby, that in exploring Area X, something in Whitby’s own nature created this paradox, with one version, one collection of impulses, thoughts, and opinions, trying, once and for all, to exterminate the other.

  Until two pale hands reach out to choke one pale throat, and two faces stare at each other, inches apart, the face above deformed by a paroxysm of rage while the face below remains calm, so calm, surrounded by the ripped and crumpled journals. The white paper with the red line of the margin, the blue lines to write on. The pages and pages of sometimes incomprehensible handwritten text. All of those journals without names but only functions noted, and sometimes not even that, as if Area X has snuck in its own accounts. Are they shifting and settling as if something huge sleeps beneath them, breathing in and out?

  Is that a glow surrounding them, or surrounding Whitby? The Whitbys?

  Until there is the crack. Of a neck? Of a spine? And the Whitby pinned against the mound goes slack and his head lolls to the side and the Whitby atop him, frozen, emits a kind of defeated sob and slides off Dead Whitby, awkwardly manages to wriggle and roll his way free … and sits there in the corner, staring at his own corpse.

  Then, and only then, are you drawn to wonder whether your Whitby won—and who this other Whitby might have been, who in death would have seemed preternaturally calm, face smooth and unwrinkled, eyes wide and staring, only the angle of the body suggesting that some violence has been perpetrated upon it.

  Afterward, you forced Whitby to come out of that space, to take some air by the railing, to look out on that gorgeous unknowable landscape. You pointed out old haunts disguised as your exhaustive encyclopedic knowledge of the forgotten coast. Whitby saying something to you—urgently, but you not really hearing him. You more intent on filling up the space between with your own script, your own interpretation—either to calm Whitby or to negate his experience. To forget about the mound of journals. A thing you don’t want to consider for too long, that you put out of your mind because isn’t that the way of things? To ignore the unreal so it doesn’t become more real.

  On the way down, you searched for Dead Whitby, but he still wasn’t anywhere.

  You may never know the truth.

  But in what Whitby swore was Dead Whitby’s backpack, you found two curious items: a strange plant and a damaged cell phone.

  0010: CONTROL

  Control woke to a boot and a foot, just six inches from where he lay on his side under some blankets. The black tread of the army-issue boot was worn down in tired ridges like the map of a slope of hills. Dried mud and sand commingled there and in the sporadic black studs meant to provide a better grip. A dragonfly wing had been broken along the axis of that tread, pulverized into rounded panes and an emerald glitter. Smudges of grass, a smear of seaweed that had dried on the side of the boot.

  The landscape struck him as evidence of a lack of care not reflected by the tidy stacking of provisions, the regular sweeping out of leaves and debris from the landing. Next to the boot: the pale brown sole of a muscular foot that seemed to belong to a different person, the toenails clipped, the big toe wrapped tight in fresh gauze with a hint of dried blood staining through.

  Both boot and foot belonged to Grace Stevenson.

  Above the rise of her foot, he could see she held the three weathered, torn pages he’d rescued from Whitby’s report. In her army fatigues, including a short-sleeved shirt, Grace looked thinner, and gray had appeared at her temples. She looked as if she had endured a lot in a short time. A pistol lay in a holster by her side, along with a knapsack.

  He twisted onto his back, sat up, and shoved up against the wall catty-corner to her, the window between them. The raucous birds that had briefly woken him at dawn were quiet now, probably out foraging or doing whatever birds did. Could it be as late as noon? Ghost Bird lay curled up in a camo-patterned sleeping bag, had throughout the night made little jerking motions and sounds that reminded Control of his cat in the grip of some vision.

  “Why the hell did you go through my pockets?” Somehow the accusatory tone abandoned the words as he said them, relieved to find his dad’s carving still in his jacket.

  She ignored him, leafing through Whitby’s last words, lingering between a smile and a frown, intense but uncommitted. “This has not changed since the last time I saw it. It’s even more full of shit now … probably. Except back then the author was a crackpot. Singular. Now we’re all fucking crackpots.”

  “Fuck?”

  A quizzical look. “What’s wrong with ‘fuck’? Area X doesn’t give a crap if I swear.”

  She continued to read and reread the pages, shaking her head at certain parts, while Control stared, still feeling possessive. He was more attached to those pages than he’d thought, afraid she might just ball them up and chuck them out the window.

  “Can I have those back?”

  A weary amusement, something in her smile that told him he was transparent. “Not yet. Not just yet. Get some breakfast. Then file a formal request.” She went back to reading again.

  Frustrated, he looked around the space. Compulsively tidy, as he’d thought on first glance. Lock-action rifles in a precise row against the far wall, next to her sleeping space, which was a mattress covered with a sheet and blanket she had tucked in tight. A creased wallet photo of her girlfriend, propped on a ledge, curling edges smoothed out. Cans of food lined up against the long side wall, and protein bars. Cups and bottles of drinking water that she must have gotten from a stream or well. Knives. A portable stove. Pots, pans. Lugged all the way from the Southern Reach building or scavenged from the ambushed convoy on the shore? How much she had found on the island he wouldn’t want to guess.

  Control was just about to get up and pick out a can when she spilled the pages on the floor between them, right on a spot damp from rainwater.

  “Dammit.” He scrambled forward on all fours to retrieve them.

  The muzzle of Grace’s gun dug into the side of his head near his ear.

  He remained extremely still, looking across at where Ghost Bird slept.

  “Are you real?” she asked, in a kind of rasp, as if her voice had gone gray along with her hair. Should he have divined something more profound from her boot, her bandaged toe?

  “Grace, I—”

  She smacked him across the forehead with the muzzle, shoved the mouth of the gun harder into his skin, whispered in his ear, “Don’t use my fucking name. Don’t ever use my name! No names. It may still know names.”

  “What may know names?” Stifling the word Grace.

  “Shouldn’t you already know?” Contemptuous.

  “Put the gun down.”

  “No.”

  “Can I sit up?”

  “No. Are you real?”

  �
�I don’t know what that means,” he said, as calmly as he could. Wondered if he could move fast enough to get out of the line of fire, push the gun from his temple before she blew his brains out.

  “I think you do. Tampered with. Spoiled goods. A hallucination. An apparition.”

  “I’m as real as you,” he said. But the secret fear behind that, the one he didn’t want to voice. Along with the thought that he didn’t know what Grace had endured since he’d seen her last. That he wasn’t sure he knew her now. Any more than he knew himself now.

  “What script are you running off of? Central or the L-word?”

  “The L-word?” Absurd thoughts. Lie? Lighthouse? Lesbian? Then realized she meant Lowry. “Neither. I cut off hypnotic suggestion. I freed myself.” Not sure he believed that.

  “Should we run a test?”

  “Don’t try it. I really mean it—don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Grace said, as if he’d accused her of high crimes. “That’s L’s kink. But I know the signs by now. There is a pinched look you all get, a paleness. The hands curling into claws. His signature, written all over you.”

  “Residual. Just residual.”

  “Still, you admit it.”

  “I admit I don’t know why the living fuck you’re holding a gun to my head!” he shouted. Had Ghost Bird heard nothing, or was she pretending to sleep? And there, as if to call him a liar anyway: what Ghost Bird called “the brightness,” curious, interested, questing. It rose now as a tightness in his chest, a spasm in his left thigh as he remained on all fours being interrogated by his assistant director.

  A pause, an increased pressure of the muzzle at his head; he flinched. Then the pressure was gone, along with her shadow. He looked over. Grace was back against the wall, gun still in her hand.

  He sat up, hands on his thighs, forced a deep breath in, out, and considered his options. It was the kind of field situation his mother would’ve called “an either without the or.” He could either find some way to smooth it over or go for the rifles against the wall. Not a real choice. Not with Ghost Bird out of action.

  Slowly, carefully, he picked his three Whitby pages off the floor, willed himself to move past the danger of the moment: “Is that your usual welcome?”

  Her face a kind of impassive mask now, daring him to challenge her. “Sometimes it ends with me pulling the trigger. Control, I am not interested in bullshit. You don’t have any idea what I’ve been through. What might be real … and what might not be real.”

  He slumped against the wall, holding Whitby’s pages against his chest. Was there something in the corner of his eye?

  “There’s nothing to this world,” he said, “but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can based on that information.” Even though he didn’t trust the world anymore.

  “There was a time I would have shot first, before you even left the boat.”

  “Thank you?” Putting as much punch into that as possible.

  A curt nod, like he was serious, and Grace shoved the gun back in its holster on her right side, away from him. “I always have to be careful.” He noted the tension in her upper arm and heard the sharp click as she toyed with the clasp on the holster. Opening it. Closing it.

  “Sure,” he said. “I see someone got to your big toe. That kind of thing could make a person paranoid.”

  She ignored that, said, “When did you get here?”

  “Five days ago.”

  “How long since the border shifted?”

  Had Grace lost track of the days out here, by herself? “No more than two weeks.”

  “How did you get across?”

  He told her, omitting any detail about where the door under the sea might lie. Omitting, too, that Ghost Bird had created it.

  Grace considered all of that for a long moment, nursing a bitter smile that rejected interpretation. But he was on high alert again; she’d taken out her gutting knife with her left hand and was creating circles in the dust beside her. This wasn’t just a paranoid debriefing. There were higher stakes and his own analysis to undertake: Had Grace just been rattled by something here on the island, or suffered the kind of shock that rearranged your thought processes, forever impaired your judgment?

  With as much gentleness as he could muster: “Do you mind if I wake up Ghost Bird now?”

  “I gave her a sedative with her water last night.”

  “You what?” Echoes of a dozen domestic terrorism interrogations, all the symbols and signs.

  “Are you her new best friend now? Do you trust her? And do you even know what I mean?”

  Trusted her not to be the enemy. Trusted her to be human. Wanted to say, I trust her as much as I trust myself, but that wouldn’t satisfy Grace. Not this version of Grace.

  “What has happened here?” He felt betrayed, sad. To have come so far, but that old dynamic—sharing a smoke in the courtyard of the Southern Reach—had turned to ash.

  A shudder passed through Grace, some hidden stressor coming to the surface, moving through and past, as if waking only now from a nightmare.

  “It takes getting used to,” she said, staring down at the patterns she’d made in the dust. “It takes getting used to, knowing that everything we did meant nothing. That Central abandoned us. That our new director abandoned us.”

  “I tried to—” I tried to stay; you told me to go. But that clearly wasn’t how she saw it. And now they were at the very edge of the world, and she was taking it out on him.

  “I tried to blame you, at first, when I was getting things straight in my head. I did blame you. But what could you have done? Nothing. Central probably programmed you to do what they wanted.”

  Going over those horrific moments again, jammed together in his memory, wedged in there at odd angles. The look on Grace’s face in that moment of extremes, as the border advanced on the Southern Reach, weighing the possibility that he’d said nothing to her at all. Hadn’t been as close to her and hadn’t put his hand on her arm. Just thought he had.

  “Your face, Control. If you could have seen the expression on your face,” she said, as if they were talking about his reaction to a surprise party. The wall of the building becoming flesh. The director returned in a wave of green light. The weight of that. The fingers of his left hand had curled around the carving of Chorry in his jacket pocket. He released his grip, pulled his hand out, let his fingers open up. Examined the white curved indentations, fringed with pink.

  “What happened to the people in the science division?”

  “They decided to barricade the basement. But that place was changing very fast. I didn’t stay long.” Said so casually, too casually, talking about the disappearance of the world they had both known. I didn’t stay long. One sentence disguising a multitude of horrors. Control doubted the staff had had a choice about what happened to them, sealed off by that sudden wall.

  And Whitby? But, remembering the last transmission from his spy cameras, he didn’t want to know about the W-word yet, or perhaps ever.

  “What about … the director?”

  That level gaze, even in this new context, even with her on edge, twitchy, tired, and underfed. That unbreakable ability to take responsibility, for anything and everything, and to keep pressing forward.

  “I put a bullet in its head. As per prior orders. Once I determined that what had returned was an intruder, a copy, a fake.”

  She could not continue or had thought of something that had distracted her from the narrative, or was just trying to hold it together. What it had cost her to kill even a version of the person she had been so devoted to, could be said to have loved, Control couldn’t guess.

  After a while, he asked the inevitable question: “And what then?”

  A shrug, as she stared at the ground. “I did what I had to. I scavenged what I could, took along those who were willing, and, per orders, I headed for the lighthouse. I went where she said. I did exactly what she said and we accomplished nothing. We made no differen
ce. So she was wrong, just wrong, and she had no plan. No plan at all.”

  Raw hurt, an intensity to all of it, everything she had told him in such a calm voice. He focused on the bottom of her boot. The disembodied thorax of a velvet ant lay somewhere south of five o’clock.

  “Is that why you didn’t go back across the border?” he asked. Because of the guilt?

  “There is no way back across the border!” Shouting it at him. “There is no door anymore.”

  Choking on seawater, buffeted by fish. A vision of drowning all over again.

  No door. Not anymore.

  Just whatever lay at the bottom of the sea. Maybe.

  Lost in the thought of that, while Grace continued to talk about grotesque and impossible things.

  * * *

  From the windows of the landing of the ruined lighthouse, the world looked different, and not just because Grace had reentered it. A thin wall of fog had crept in from the sea to obscure the view, and the temperature had plummeted. They would need a fire by nightfall if that didn’t change. Vague through both fog and tree cover: the ghostlike remains of houses, walls like warped slabs of flesh sagging into other, even more rotted, flesh. Running parallel to the sea, a road, then hills covered in a dense pine-and-oak forest.

  There was no door in the border, leading home.

  Grace had terminated the director’s doppelgänger.