Grace hesitated, and Control didn’t know if that meant she was debating telling him more or was about to feed him a line of bullshit.
“Cynthia asked me to reopen an investigation into the so-called S&S Brigade, and to assign someone to report in more detail on the lighthouse.”
“And who did the research?”
“Whitby.” Whitby the loon. It figured.
“What happened to this research?” He couldn’t recall seeing this information in the files he had been given before he’d come to the Southern Reach.
“Cynthia held on to it, asked for a hard copy and for the electronic copies not to be entered into the record … Are you planning to go down the same rabbit holes?”
“So you thought it was a waste of time?”
“For us, not necessarily for Cynthia. It seemed irrelevant to me, but nothing we gathered would make much sense without knowing what was in the director’s mind. And we did not always know what was in the director’s mind.”
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Being bold now that Grace was finally opening up to him.
A sympathetic expression, guided or pushed his way. “Do you smoke?”
“Sometimes.” This past weekend. Banishing demons and voices.
“Then let’s go out to the courtyard and have a smoke.”
It sounded like a good idea. If he was completely honest with himself, it sounded like bliss.
* * *
They reconvened out at the edge of the courtyard, nearest the swamp. The short jaunt from room to open air had not been without revelation: He’d finally seen the janitor, a wizened little white guy with huge glasses who wore light green overalls and held a mop. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Control resisted the urge to break ranks with Grace to tell him to switch cleaners.
Grace in the courtyard seemed even more relaxed than inside, despite the humidity and the annoying chorus of insect voices rising from the undergrowth. He was already sweating.
She offered him a cigarette. “Take one.”
Yes, he would take one, had been missing them ever since his weekend binge. The harsh, sharp taste of her unfiltered menthols as he lit up was like a spike through the eyeball to cure a headache.
“Do you like the swamp?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I like the quiet out here, sometimes. It can be peaceful.” She gave him a wry smile. “If I stand with my back to the building, I can pretend it isn’t there.”
He nodded, was silent for a moment, then said, “What would you do if the director came back and she was like the anthropologist or the surveyor?” Just adding to the light conversation. Just a gaffe, he realized as soon as he’d said it.
Grace remained unfazed. “She won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?” He almost broke his promise to his mother then and told Grace about the writing on the wall in the director’s house.
“I have to tell you something,” Grace said, changing direction on him. “It will be a shock, but I don’t mean it to be that way.”
Somehow, even though it was too late, he could see the hit coming before the impact, almost as if it were in slow-motion. It still knocked him off his feet.
“Here’s what you should know: Central took the biologist away late Friday evening. She’s been gone the whole weekend. So you must have been talking to a ghost, because I know you would not lie to me, John. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” Her look was serious, as if there were a bond between them.
* * *
Control wondered if the woman in the military jacket was back in front of the liquor store. He wondered if the skateboarder was in the process of dumping another can of dog food on the sidewalk, the plastic-bag man about to pop up to shout at passersby. He wondered if he should go join them. There was within him a generous affection for all of them, matched by a wide and growing sadness. A shed out back. Christmas lights wound around a pine. Wood storks.
No, he had not talked to the biologist that morning. Yes, he had thought she was still at the Southern Reach, had depended on that fact. He had already planned his next session in detail. It would be back in the interrogation room, not outside. She would sit there, maybe in a different mood from the other times but perhaps not, waiting for his now-familiar questions. But he wouldn’t ask any questions. Time to change the paradigm, the hell with procedures.
He would have pushed her file over to her, said, “This is everything we know about you. About your husband. About your past jobs and relationships. Including a transcript of your initial interview sessions with the psychologist.” This wouldn’t be an easy thing for him to do: Afterward, she might become a different person than he knew; he might be letting Area X farther into the world, in some odd way. He might be betraying his mother.
She would make some remark about having outlasted him already, and he would reply that he didn’t want to play games anymore, that Lowry’s games had already made him weary. She would repeat the same line he had said to her out by the holding pond: “Don’t thank people for giving you what you should already have.” “I’m not looking for thanks,” he would reply. “Of course you are,” she would say, without reproach. “It’s the way human beings are built.”
“You had her sent away?” Said so quietly that Grace asked him to repeat it.
“You had formed too much of an attachment. You were losing your perspective.”
“That wasn’t your call!”
“I am not the one who sent her away.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ask your supervisor, Control. Ask your cabal at Central.”
“It’s not my cabal,” he said. Cabal versus faction. Which was worse? This was a record for not-fixing. A record for being sent in only to be shut out. He wondered what kind of bloodbath had to be occurring at Central right now.
He took a long drag on the cigarette, stared out at the god-awful swamp, heard from a distance Grace asking him if he was all right, his reply of “Give me a second.”
Was he all right? In the long line of things he could legitimately be not all right about, this ranked right up there. He felt as if something had been severed far too prematurely, that there had been much more to say. He tamped down the impulse to walk back inside and call his mother, because, of course, she must already know and would just give him an amplified echo of what Grace had said, no matter how much this could be seen as Lowry punishing him: “You were getting too close to her in too short a time. You went from an interrogation scenario to having conversations with her in her cell to chewing on sedge weeds while you gave her a guided tour of the outside of the building—in just four days. What would have come next, John? A birthday party? A conga line? Her own private suite at the Hilton? Perhaps a little voice inside starts to say, ‘Give her her files,’ hmm?”
Then he would have lied and said that wasn’t true or fair and she’d have fallen back on Grandpa Jack’s offensive old-school line about fair being “for losers and pussies,” and he wouldn’t be talking about Chorry. Control would claim she was interfering with his ability to do the job she had sent him to do and she’d counter with the idea of getting him transcripts of any subsequent interviews, which would be “just as good.” After which he might say, lamely, that’s not the point. That he needed the support, and then he’d trail off awkwardly because he was on thin ice talking about support, and she wouldn’t help him out, and he’d be stuck. They never spoke about Rachel McCarthy, but it was always there.
“So we should talk about division of duties,” Grace said.
“Yes, we should.” Because they both knew she now had the upper hand.
But his mind was elsewhere the whole time that Grace was massacring his troops, before she left the courtyard. Grace would run most things going forward, with John Rodriguez abdicating responsibility for all but figurehead duties at the most important status meetings. He would resubmit his recommendations through Grace, leaving out the pointless ones, and she would decide whic
h to implement and which not to implement. They would coordinate so that eventually his working hours and Grace’s working hours overlapped as little as possible. Grace would assist him in making sense of the director’s notes, and as he acclimated himself to the new arrangements, that would be his major responsibility, although in no way did Grace acknowledge that the director might be dead or have gone completely off the tracks and hurtled through the underbrush over a cliff in her last days at the Southern Reach. Even as she did acknowledge that mouse-and-plant were eccentric, and also accepted the ex post facto reality that he had already painted over the director’s wall beyond the door.
None of which in this rout—this retreat that had no vanguard or rearguard, but was just a group of desperate men hacking at the muck and mire of a swamp with outdated swords while Cossacks waited for them on the plain—went completely against Control’s true wishes anyway, but this was not how he had seen it coming, with Grace dictating the terms of his surrender. And none of which saved him from a kind of grieving not at the power he was losing but at the person he had lost.
* * *
Still out there, smoking, after Grace had left, with a pat on his shoulder that was meant as sympathy but felt like failure. Even as he now counted her a colleague if not quite a friend. Trying to resurrect the idea of the biologist, the image of her, the sound of her voice.
“What should I do now?”
“I’m the prisoner,” the biologist said to him from her cot, facing the wall. “Why should I tell you anything?”
“Because I’m trying to help you.”
“Are you? Or are you just trying to help yourself?”
He had no answer to that.
“A normal person might give up. That would be very normal.”
“Would you?” he asked.
“No. But I’m not normal.”
“Neither am I.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“Where we’ve always been.”
But it didn’t. Something had occurred to him, finally seeing the janitor. Something about a ladder and a lightbulb.
023: BREAK DOWN
Control found a flashlight, tested it out. Then he walked past the cafeteria that had by now become an irritating repetition, as if he had navigated across the same airport terminal for several days while chewing the same piece of gum. At the door to the storage room, he made sure the corridor was clear then quickly ducked inside.
It was dark. He fumbled for the lightbulb cord, pulled it. The light came on but didn’t help much. As he’d remembered, the metal shade above the bulb and its low position, just an inch or so above his head, meant all you could see were the lower shelves. The only shelves the janitor could reach anyway. The only shelves that weren’t empty, as the shadows revealed as his eyes adjusted.
He had a feeling that Whitby had been lying. That this was the special room Whitby had offered to show him. If he could solve no other mystery, he would solve this one. A puzzle. A diversion. Had Lowry’s magical interference hastened this moment or postponed it?
Slowly the beam of his flashlight panned across the top of the shelves, then onto the ceiling, maybe nine feet above him. It had an unfinished feeling, that ceiling. Irregular and exposed, of different shades, the wooden planks were crossed by an X of two beams, and appeared to have been built around the shelves. The shelves continued to rise, empty, all the way up to the ceiling and then beyond. He could just see the gap where the next row of shelves continued, beyond the ceiling. After a moment more of inspection, Control noticed a thin, nearly invisible cut along the two beams that formed a square. A trapdoor? In the ceiling.
Control considered that. It could just lead to an air duct or more storage space, but in trying to imagine where this room existed in the layout of the building, he had to take into account that it lay just opposite Whitby’s favorite spot in the cafeteria, and that this meant, if the stairs to the third level lay between them, that there could be considerable space up above, tucked in under the stairs.
He went to work looking for the ladder, found it, retractable, hidden in a back corner, under a tarp. He hit the bulb as he moved the ladder into position, dislodging dust, and the space came alive with a wild and flickering light.
At the top of the ladder, he turned on his flashlight again and, awkwardly, with his other hand, pushed against the ceiling at the center of the half-hidden square. This high, he could see that the “ceiling” was clearly a platform fitted around the shelves.
The door gave with a creak. He exhaled deeply, felt apprehensive, the ladder rungs a little slippery. He opened the door. It fell back on its coil hinges smoothly, without a sound, as if just oiled. Control shone his flashlight across the floor, then up to the shelves that rose another eight feet to either side. No one was there. He returned to the central space: the far wall and then the slant of a true ceiling.
Faces stared back at him, along with the impression of vast shapes and some kind of writing.
Control almost dropped the flashlight.
He looked again.
Along the wall and part of the ceiling, someone had painted a vast phantasmagoria of grotesque monsters with human faces. More specifically, oils splotched and splashed in a primitive style, in rich, deep reds and blues and greens and yellows, to form approximations of bodies. The pixelated faces were blown-up security head shots of Southern Reach staff.
One image dominated, extending up the wall and with the head peering down with a peculiar three-dimensional quality from the slanted ceiling. The others formed constellations around this image, and then much-worried sentences and phrases existing in a rich patina of cross-outs and paint-overs and other markings, as if someone had been creating a compost of words. There was a border, too: a ring of red fire that transformed at the ends into a two-headed monster, and Area X in its belly.
Reluctantly Control pulled himself up into the space, keeping low to distribute his weight until he was sure the platform could hold him. But it seemed sturdy. He stood next to the shelves on the left side of the room and considered the art in front of him.
The body that dominated the murals or paintings or whatever word applied depicted a creature that had the form of a giant hog and a slug commingled, pale painted skin mottled with what was meant to be a kind of mangy light green moss. The swift, broad strokes of arms and legs suggested the limbs of a pig, but with three thick fingers at their ends. More appendages were positioned along the midsection.
The head, atop a too-small neck rendered in a kind of gauzy pink-white, was misshapen but anchored by the face pasted onto it, the glue glistening in the flashlight beam. The face Control recognized from the files: the psychologist from the final eleventh expedition, a man who, before his death from cancer, had said in the transcripts, “It was quite beautiful, quite peaceful in Area X.” And smiled in a vague way.
But here he had been portrayed as anything but peaceful. Using a pen, someone—Whitby? Whitby—had given the man a mask of utter, uncomprehending anguish, the mouth open in a perpetual O.
Arrayed to the right and left were more creatures—some private pantheon, some private significance—with more faces he recognized. The director had been rendered as a full-on boar, stuffed with vegetation; the assistant director as a kind of stout or ferret; Cheney as a jellyfish.
Then he found himself. Incomplete. His face taken from his recent serious-looking mug shot, and the vague body of not a white rabbit but a wild hare, the fur matted, curling, half penciled in. Around which Whitby had created the outlines of a gray-blue sea monster, a whalelike leviathan, with purple waves pushing out from it, and a huge circle of an eye that tunneled out from his face, making of him a cyclops. Radiating from the monster-body were not just the waves but also flurries of unreadable words in a cramped, crabby scrawl. As surprising and disturbing walls went, it beat the director’s office by quite a lot. It made his skin prickle with sudden chills. It made him realize that he still had been half relying on Whitby’s analys
is to provide him with answers. But there were no answers here. Only proof that in Whitby’s head was something akin to a sedimentary layer of papers bound by a plant, a dead mouse, and an ancient cell phone.
On the floor opposite him, near the right-hand shelves, a trowel, a selection of paints, a stand that allowed Whitby to reach the ceiling. A few books. A portable stove. A sleeping bag, bundled up. Had Whitby been living here? Without anyone knowing about it? Or guessing but not wanting to really know? Instead, just foist off Whitby on the new director. Disinformation and obfuscation. Whitby had put this together over a fairly long period of time. He had patiently been working at it, adding to it, subtracting from it. Terroir.
Control had been standing there with his back to the shelves for only about a minute.
He had been standing there recognizing that there was a draft in the loft. He had been standing there without realizing that it wasn’t a draft.
Someone was breathing, behind him.
Someone was breathing on his neck. The knowledge froze him, froze the cry of “Jesus fuck!” in his throat.
He turned with incredible slowness, wishing he could seem like a statue in his turning. Then saw with alarm a large, pale, watery-blue eye that existed against a backdrop of darkness or dark rags shot through with pale flesh, and which resolved into Whitby.
Whitby, who had been there the entire time, crammed into the shelf right behind Control, at eye level, bent at the knees, on his side.
Breathing in shallow sharp bursts. Staring out.
Like something incubating. There, on the shelf.
* * *
At first, Control thought that Whitby must be sleeping with his eyes open. A waxwork corpse. A tailor’s dummy. Then he realized that Whitby was wide awake and staring at him, Whitby’s body shaking ever so slightly like a pile of leaves with something underneath it. Looking like something boneless, shoved into a too-small space.
So close that Control could have leaned over and bit his nose or kissed it.
Whitby continued to say nothing, and Control, terrified, somehow knew that there was a danger in speaking. That if he said anything that Whitby might lunge out of his hiding place, that the stiff shifting of the man’s jaw hid something more premeditated and deadly.
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