Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Going for the cumulative effect, to put more pressure on the breaking point, you say to Grace, “After I’m done here, I’m going to order the bodies of the last eleventh exhumed.”

  “Why?” Aghast, something in her background averse to such desecrations.

  “Because I think it’s necessary. Which is enough of a reason.” Having what Grace will call “your Lowry moment,” and it’s not even that volcanic, just stubbornness.

  “Cynthia,” Grace says. “Cynthia, what I think or don’t think doesn’t matter, but the rest of the staff has to want to follow you.”

  More stubborn thought still: that all you really need is Lowry to follow you and Severance, and you could hold on here forever. Hideous thought, though, the image of another thirty-six expeditions being sent out, only some coming back, of you and Grace and Whitby, progressively more jaded and cynical, becoming ancient, going through motions that wouldn’t help anyone, not even yourselves.

  “I’m going to finish this up,” you tell her in a conciliatory way. “Because I started it.”

  “Because it will look fucking stupid if you don’t finish it now,” she says, relenting as well.

  “Yes, exactly. It will look fucking stupider if I don’t finish.”

  “So let me help,” she says, and something in the emphasis she puts on the words gets to you. Will always get to you.

  Let me help.

  “All right, then,” you say gruffly, and hand her the extra brush.

  * * *

  But you’re still going to dig up the dead, and you’re still wondering how to change the paradigm like Lowry keeps trying to change the paradigm. Lost in the thought of that the next weekend at Chipper’s while bowling, while home clipping coupons for the grocery store, while taking a bath, while going out for a ballroom dancing lesson because it’s the kind of thing you would never do. So you do it, aware that if Severance has eyes on you, she’ll find it evidence of being “erratic,” but not caring. You put yourself here, set this trap for yourself, so if you feel trapped by it now, it’s your own fault.

  The day after painting the door, Grace follows up, as she always does, unable to leave it alone, but privately, on the rooftop, which by now you’re pretty sure Cheney suspects exists, just as he suspects the involvement of “dark energy” in the maintenance of the invisible border … Grace saying, “You have a plan, right? This is all part of a plan. I’m relying on you to have a plan.”

  So you nod, smile, say, “Yes, Grace, I have a plan,” because you don’t want to betray that trust, because what’s the good of saying “All I have is a feeling, an intuition, and a brief conversation with a man who should be dead. I have a plant and a phone.”

  In your dreams you stand on the sidelines, holding the plant in one hand and the cell phone in the other, watching a war between Central and Area X. In some fundamental way, you feel, they have been in conflict for far longer than thirty years—for ages and ages, centuries in secret. Central the ultimate void to counteract Area X: impersonal, antiseptic, labyrinthine, and unknowable. Against the facade, you cannot help but express a kind of terrible betrayal: Sometimes you admire Lowry’s fatal liveliness next to that, a silhouette writhing against a dull white screen.

  0015: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

  Western siren finally fixed; touched up the white part of the daymark, seaward side; fixed the ladder, too, but still feels rickety, unsafe. Something knocked down a foot of fence and got into the garden, but couldn’t tell what. No deer tracks, but likely culprit. S&SB? The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn’t feel up to a hike, but seen from lighthouse grounds, of note: flycatcher (not sure what kind), frigate birds, least terns, cormorants, black-throated stilt (!), a couple of yellowthroats. On the beach, found a large pipefish had washed up, a few sail jellyfish rotting in the sand.

  There came an incandescent light. There came a star in motion, the sun plummeting to Earth. There fell from the heavens a huge burning torch, thick flames dripping out behind it. And this light, this star, shook the sky and the beach where he had walked a second ago under a clear blue sky. The scorched intensity of the sudden object hurtling down toward him battered his senses, sent him sprawling to his knees as he tried to run, and then dove face-first into the sand. He screamed as the rays, the sparks, sprayed out all around, and the core of the light hit somewhere in front of him, his teeth smashed in his mouth, his bones turned to powder. The reverberation lived within him as he tried to regain his footing, even as the impact conjured up an enormous tidal wave like a living creature, aimed at the beach. When it fell upon him the weight, the immensity, destroyed him once more and washed away anything he could have recognized, could have known. He gasped and thrashed and hurt, dug his tortured hands into the shocking cold sand. The sand had a different texture, and the tiny creatures living there were different. He didn’t want to look up, take in his surroundings, frightened that the landscape, too, might have changed, might be so different he would not recognize it.

  The tidal waves faded. The burning lights receded.

  Saul managed to get to his feet, to stagger a step or two, and as he did, he realized that everything around him had been restored. The world he knew, the world he loved: tranquil, unchanged, the lighthouse up the shore undamaged by the wave. Seagulls flew by, and far in the distance someone walked, looking for shells. He brushed the sand from his shirt, his shorts, stood there for a long moment bent over with his hands on his thighs. The impact was still affecting his hearing, still making him shake with the memory of its power. Yet it had left no evidence behind except melancholy, as if he held within him the only memory of some lost world.

  He could not stop trembling in the aftermath, wondered if he were going insane. That took less hubris than thinking this was a message from on high. For in the center of the light that had come storming down, an image had appeared, a pattern that he recognized: the eight leaves of the strange plant, each one like another spiraling step down into oblivion.

  * * *

  Midmorning. The rocks were slippery and sharp, encrusted with limpets and barnacles. Sea lice, ancient of days, traveled across those rocks on quests to scavenge whatever they could, and the seaweed that gathered there, in strands thin and thick and sometimes gelatinous, brought a tangy, moldy smell.

  It was a relief to sit there, trying to recover—peering into the tidal pool that lay at his feet as the rock dug into his posterior. As he tried to control his shaking. There had been other visions, but none as powerful as this one. He had a perverse urge for Henry to appear, to confess all of his symptoms to a man who, once revealed as a passionate, delusional ghost-hunter, he recalled almost with fondness. But Saul hadn’t seen Henry or Suzanne since the incident in the night, nor the strange woman. Sometimes he thought he was being watched, but that was probably nothing more than a reflection of believing Henry when he said he would “find it,” implying a return.

  The tidal pool directly in front of him became frustratingly occluded when a cloud passed overhead and changed the quality of the light, or when the wind picked up and created ripples. But when the sun broke through again and it wasn’t just the reflection of his face and knees he saw, the pool became a kind of living cabinet of curiosities. He might prefer to hike, to bird-watch, but he could understand a fascination with tidal pools, too.

  Fat orange starfish, either lumbering or slumbering, lay half in, half out of the water. Some bottom-dwelling fish contemplated him with a kind of bulging, jaded regard—a boxy, pursed-lipped creature whose body was the same color as the sand, except for bejeweled sapphire-and-gold eyes. A tiny red crab sidled across that expanse toward what to it must be a gaping chasm of a dark hole leading down, perhaps into an endless network of tiny caverns carved into the rocks over the years. If he stared long enough into the comforting oblivion of that microcosm, it washed away everything else, even the shadow of his reflection.

  It was there, some minutes later, that Gloria found him, as Saul
perhaps had known she would, the rocks to her what the lighthouse had become to him.

  She dropped down beside him as if indestructible, corduroy-clad rump sliding hardly at all on the hard surface. Not so much perched as a rock atop another rock. The solid weight of her forced him a little to the side. She was breathing hard from clambering fast over the rocks, managed a kind of “uh-huh” of approval at his choice of entertainment and he gave her a brief smile and a nod in return.

  For a long while, they just sat together, watching. He had decided he could not talk to her about what he had seen, that pushing that onto her was wrong. The only one he could tell was Charlie. Maybe.

  The crab sifted through something in the sand. The camouflaged fish risked a slow walk on stickery fins like drab half-opened fans, making for the shadow-shelter of a tiny ledge of rock. One of the starfish, as if captured via time-lapse photography, withdrew at a hypnotically slow speed into the water, until only the tips of two arms lay exposed and glistening.

  Finally Gloria said, “Why are you down here and not working by the shed or in the tower?”

  “I don’t feel like working today.” Images from old illuminated manuscripts, of comets hurtling through the sky, from the books in his father’s house. The reverberation and recoil of the beach exploding under his feet. The strange creatures in the sand. What message should he take from that?

  “Yeah, I don’t always want to go to school,” she said. “But at least you get money.”

  “I do get money, that’s true,” he said. “And they’re never going to give you money to go to school.”

  “They should give me money. I have to put up with a lot.” He wondered just how much. It might well be a lot.

  “School’s important,” he said, because he felt he should say it, as if Gloria’s mother stood right behind them, tapping her foot.

  Gloria considered that a moment, nudged him in the ribs in a way as familiar as if they were drinking buddies down at the village bar.

  “I told my mom this is a school, too, but that didn’t work.”

  “What’s ‘this’?”

  “The tidal pools. The forest. The trails. All of it. Most of the time it’s true I’m just goofing off, but I’m learning things, too.”

  Saul could imagine how that conversation had gone. “You’re not going to get any grades here.” Warming to the idea: “Although I guess the bears might give you grades for watching out for them.”

  She kind of leaned back to get a better look at him, as if reappraising him. “That’s stupid. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yeah, this whole conversation is stupid.”

  “Are you still feeling different?”

  “What? No. No, I’m fine, Gloria.”

  They watched the fish for a bit after that. Something about their conversation, the way they’d moved too fast or been too loud, had made the fish retreat into the sand so now only its eyes looked up at them.

  “There are things the lighthouse teaches me, though,” Gloria said, wrenching Saul out of his thoughts.

  “To stand up straight and tall and project light out of your head toward the sea?”

  She giggled at that, giving him too much credit for an answer he’d meant at least half ironically.

  “No. Here’s what the lighthouse teaches me. Be quiet and let me tell you. The lighthouse teaches me to work hard, to keep my room clean, to be honest, and to be nice to people.” Then, reflecting, looking down at her feet. “My room is a mess and I lie sometimes and I’m not always nice to people, but that’s the idea.”

  A little embarrassed, he said, “That fish down there sure is frightened of you.”

  “Huh? It just doesn’t know me. If it knew me, that fish would shake my hand.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything you could say to convince it of that. And there are all kinds of ways you could hurt it without meaning to.” Watching those unblinking blue eyes with the gold streaks—the dark vertical pupil—that seemed like a fundamental truth.

  Ignoring him: “You like being a lighthouse keeper, don’t you, Saul?” Saul. That was a new thing. When had they become Saul and Gloria rather than Mr. Evans and Gloria?

  “Why, do you want my job when you grow up?”

  “No. I never want to be a lighthouse keeper. Shoveling and making tomatoes and climbing all the time.” Was that how it seemed he spent his time? He guessed it did.

  “At least you’re honest.”

  “Yep. Mom says I should be less honest.”

  “There’s that, too.” His father could have been less honest, because honesty was often just a way of being cruel.

  “Anyway, I can’t stay long.” There was real regret in her voice.

  “A shame, given how honest you’re being.”

  “I know, right? But I gotta go. Mom’s going to come by in the car soon. We’re driving into town to meet my dad.”

  “Oh, he’s picking you up for the holidays?” So this was the day.

  A shadow had passed over the tidal pool again and all he could see were their two faces, peering down. He could’ve passed for her father, couldn’t he? Or was he too old? But such thoughts were a form of weakness.

  “It’s longer this time,” she said, clearly not happy about it. “Mom wants me up there for a couple of months at least. Because she’s lost her second job and needs to look for another one. But that’s only eight weeks. Or maybe sixty days.”

  He looked over at her, saw the serious expression on her face. Two months. That was an impossibly long time.

  “You’ll have fun. When you get back, you’ll appreciate this place even more.”

  “I appreciate it now. And it won’t be fun. Dad’s girlfriend is a bitch.”

  “Don’t use that word.”

  “Sorry. But she is.”

  “Did your mom say that?”

  “No. I made it up myself. It wasn’t hard.”

  “Well, try to get along,” Saul said, having reached the end of any advice a lighthouse could convey. “It’s just for a little while.”

  “Sure. And then I’ll be back. Help me up, I think my mom’s here.” He couldn’t hear a car, but that didn’t mean anything.

  He took her hand, braced himself so she could lean on him and get to her feet. She stood there, balanced against him, hand on his shoulder, and said, “Goodbye, Saul. Save this tidal pool for me.”

  “I’ll put up a sign.” He tried to smile.

  She nodded, and then she was gone, scampering across the rocks like some kind of deranged daredevil—showing off.

  On impulse he turned and shouted “Hey, Gloria!” at her before she was out of earshot.

  She turned, balanced with both arms outstretched, waiting.

  “Don’t forget about me! Take care of yourself!” He tried to make it sound without weight, sentences that could float away into the air. Nothing that mattered.

  She nodded and waved, and said something he couldn’t hear, and then she was running up the lighthouse lawn and around the curve of the lighthouse wall, out of sight.

  Below, the fish had its mouth around the small red crab, which was struggling in a slow, meditative way, almost like it didn’t want to get free.

  0016: GHOST BIRD

  The lighthouse rose from fog and reflections like a mirror of itself, the beach gray and cold, the sand rasping against the hull of the boat as they abandoned it in the shallows. The waves came in small and half curling like the froth of malformed questions. The lighthouse did not resemble Ghost Bird’s memory of it, for its sides had been scoured by fire. Discoloration extended all the way to the top, where the lens, the light within, lay extinguished. The fire had erupted from the landing windows as well, and in combination with the bits of broken glass, and all of the other talismans human beings had rendered up to it over the years, gave the lighthouse the appearance of something shamanistic. Reduced now to a daymark for their boat, the simplest of its functions, the one task that, unperformed, made a lighthouse no longer of use t
o anyone. Made it into a narrow, haunted redoubt.

  “Burned by the border commander,” Grace had told them. “Burned because they didn’t understand it—and the journals with it.”

  But Ghost Bird caught the hesitation in Grace’s voice, how she still would not tell them exactly what had happened within the lighthouse, what slaughter and deception consisted of, any detailed accounting of what had come at them from the seaward side.

  All Grace could offer in its place was a localized pathology—the origin of the orange flags. The doing of the border commander, a cataloging of all that was unknowable to her. Perhaps the commander had been trying to keep separate the real from the imagined. If so, she had failed. Even common thistles had been so marked. Given more time, the commander might have marked the entire world.

  Ghost Bird had a vision of the journals impervious, still up there, reconstituted, were they now to enter, walk up into the lantern room, undo the trapdoor, stare down as had the biologist, as had she, so many years ago. Would the reflected light from those frozen accounts irradiate their thoughts, contaminate their dreams, forever trap them? Or was there just a mountain of ashes in there now? Ghost Bird did not want to find out.

  It was late afternoon already. They had left the island in the early morning, in a bigger boat Grace had hidden out of sight of the pier. The biologist had not reappeared, although Control had searched those waters with a kind of nervous anxiety. Ghost Bird would have sensed her presence long before there was any danger. She could not tell him, for his own sake, that the oceans through which the biologist now traveled were wider and deeper than the one that led them to the lighthouse.

  * * *

  They trudged up the beach toward the lighthouse, taking a path that minimized the possibility of sniper fire from above. Grace believed everyone was dead, or long since had moved on, but there was always the chance. Nothing arose from the seaward side, ghostlike or otherwise. Things came out of the sea, things like the biologist, but less kind.