Annihilation

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But fun for me was sneaking off to peer into a tidal pool, to grasp the intricacies of the creatures that lived there. Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat, orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things. Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. He knew all of this, I think. But I never could express myself that well to him, although I did try, and he did listen. And yet, I was nothing but expression in other ways. My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease. Even a bar was a type of ecosystem, if a crude one, and to someone entering, someone without my husband’s agenda, that person could have seen me sitting there and had no trouble imagining that I was happy in my little bubble of silence. Would have had no trouble believing I fit in.

  Yet even as my husband wanted me to be assimilated in a sense, the irony was that he wanted to stand out. Seeing that huge pile of journals, this was another thing I thought of: That he had been wrong for the eleventh expedition because of this quality. That here were the indiscriminate accounts of so many souls, and that his account couldn’t possibly stand out. That, in the end, he’d been reduced to a state that approximated my own.

  Those journals, flimsy gravestones, confronted me with my husband’s death all over again. I dreaded finding his, dreaded knowing his true account, not the featureless, generic mutterings he had given to our superiors upon his return.

  “Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.

  * * *

  The journals and other materials formed a moldering pile about twelve feet high and sixteen feet wide that in places near the bottom had clearly turned to compost, the paper rotting away. Beetles and silverfish tended to those archives, and tiny black cockroaches with always moving antennae. Toward the base, and spilling out at the edges, I saw the remains of photographs and dozens of ruined cassette tapes mixed in with the mulch of pages. There, too, I saw evidence of rats. I would have to lower myself down into the midden by means of the ladder nailed to the lip of the trapdoor and trudge through a collapsing garbage hill of disintegrating pulp to uncover anything at all. The scene obliquely embodied the scrap of writing I had encountered on the Tower wall:… the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives …

  I overturned the table and laid it across the narrow entrance to the stairwell. I had no idea where the psychologist had gotten to, but I didn’t want her or anyone else surprising me. If someone tried to move the table from below, I would hear it and have time to climb up to greet them with my gun. I also had a sensation I can in hindsight attribute to the brightness growing within me: of a presence pressing up from below, impinging on the edges of my senses. A prickling crept across my skin at unexpected times, for no good reason.

  I didn’t like that the psychologist had stashed all of her gear down with the journals, including what appeared to be most or all of her weapons. For the moment, though, I had to put the puzzle of that out of my mind, along with the still-reverberating tremors from the certain knowledge that most of the training the Southern Reach had given us had been based on a lie. As I lowered myself into that cool, dark, sheltered space beneath, I felt the pull of the brightness within me even more acutely. That was harder to ignore, since I didn’t know what it meant.

  My flashlight, along with the natural light from the open trapdoor, revealed that the walls of the room were rife with striations of mold, some of which formed dull stripes of red and green. From below, the way the midden spilled out in ripples and hillocks of paper became more apparent. Torn pages, crushed pages, journal covers warped and damp. Slowly the history of exploring Area X could be said to be turning into Area X.

  I picked around the edges at first, chose journals at random. Most, at a glance, depicted quite ordinary events, such as those described by the first expedition … which could not have been the first expedition. Some were extraordinary only because the dates did not make sense. How many expeditions had really come across the border? Just how much information had been doctored and suppressed, and for how long? Did “twelve” expeditions refer only to the latest iteration of a longer effort, the omission of the rest necessary to quell the doubts of those approached to be volunteers?

  What I would call pre-expedition accounts, documented in a variety of forms, also existed in that place. This was the underlying archive of audiocassettes, chewed-at photographs, and decomposing folders full of papers that I had first glimpsed from above—all of it oppressed by the weight of the journals on top. All of it suffused by a dull, damp smell that contained within it a masked sharp stench of decay, which revealed itself in some places and not others. A bewildering confusion of typewritten, printed, and handwritten words piled up in my head alongside half-seen images like a mental facsimile of the midden itself. The clutter at times brought me close to becoming frozen, even without factoring in the contradictions. I became aware of the weight of the photograph in my pocket.

  I made some initial rules, as if that would help. I ignored journals that appeared to be written in a shorthand and did not try to decipher those that appeared to be in code. I also started out reading some journals straight through and then decided to force myself to skim. But sampling was sometimes worse. I came across pages that described unspeakable acts that I still cannot bring myself to set down in words. Entries that mentioned periods of “remission” and “cessation” followed by “flare-ups” and “horrible manifestations.” No matter how long Area X had existed, and how many expeditions had come here, I could tell from these accounts that for years before there had ever been a border, strange things had happened along this coast. There had been a proto–Area X.

  Some types of omissions made my mind itch as much as more explicit offerings. One journal, half-destroyed by the damp, focused solely on the qualities of a kind of thistle with a lavender blossom that grew in the hinterlands between forest and swamp. Page after page described encountering first one specimen of this thistle and then another, along with minute details about the insects and other creatures that occupied that microhabitat. In no instance did the observer stray more than a foot or two from a particular plant, and at no point, either, did the observer pull back to provide a glimpse of base camp or their own life. After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror. An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle, a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine. When the latter part of the book dissolved into ruined ink and moist pulp, I was almost relieved to be rid of that unnerving repetition, for there had been a hypnotic, trancelike quality to the accounts. If there had been an endless number of pages, I feared that I would have stood there reading for an eternity, until I fell to the floor and died of thirst or starvation.

  I began to wonder if the absence of references to the Tower fit this theory as well, this writing around the edges of things.

  … in the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe …

  Then I found, after several banal or incomprehensible samples, a journal that wasn’t the same type as my own. It dated back to before the first expedition but after the border had come
down and referenced “building the wall,” which clearly meant the fortification facing the sea. A page later—mixed in with esoteric meteorological readings—three words leapt out at me: “repelling an attack.” I read the next few entries with care. The writer at first made no reference to the nature of the attack or the identity of the attackers, but the assault had come from the sea and “left four of us dead,” although the wall had held. Later, the sense of desperation grew, and I read:

  … the desolation comes from the sea again, along with the strange lights and the marine life that at high tide batters itself against our wall. At night, now, their outliers try to creep in through the gaps in our wall defenses. Still, we hold, but our ammunition is running out. Some of us want to abandon the lighthouse, try for either the island or inland, but the commander says she has her orders. Morale is low. Not everything that is happening to us has a rational explanation.

  Soon after, the account trailed off. It had a distinctly unreal quality to it, as if a fictionalized version of a real event. I tried to imagine what Area X might have looked like so long ago. I couldn’t.

  The lighthouse had drawn expedition members like the ships it had once sought to bring to safety through the narrows and reefs offshore. I could only underscore my previous speculation that to most of them a lighthouse was a symbol, a reassurance of the old order, and by its prominence on the horizon it provided an illusion of a safe refuge. That it had betrayed that trust was manifest in what I had found downstairs. And yet even though some of them must have known that, still they had come. Out of hope. Out of faith. Out of stupidity.

  But I had begun to realize that you had to wage a guerrilla war against whatever force had come to inhabit Area X if you wanted to fight at all. You had to fade into the landscape, or like the writer of the thistle chronicles, you had to pretend it wasn’t there for as long as possible. To acknowledge it, to try to name it, might be a way of letting it in. (For the same reason, I suppose, I have continued to refer to the changes in me as a “brightness,” because to examine this condition too closely—to quantify it or deal with it empirically when I have little control over it—would make it too real.)

  At some point, I began to panic at the sheer volume of what remained in front of me, and in my panic I refined my focus further: I would search only for phrases identical to or similar in tone to the words on the wall of the Tower. I started to assail the hill of paper more directly, to wade into the middle sections, the rectangle of light above me a reassurance that this was not the sum of my existence. I rummaged like the rats and the silverfish, I shoved my arms into the mess and came out holding whatever my hands could grasp. At times I lost my balance and became buried in the papers, wrestled with them, my nostrils full of rot, my tongue tasting it. I would have looked unhinged to anyone watching from above, and I knew it even as I engaged in this frenzied, futile activity.

  But I found what I was looking for in more journals than I would have expected, and usually it was that beginning phrase: Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms … Often it appeared as a scrawled margin note or in other ways disconnected from the text around it. Once, I discovered it documented as a phrase on the wall of the lighthouse itself, which “we quickly washed away,” with no reason given. Another time, in a spidery hand, I found a reference to “text in a logbook that reads as if it came out of the Old Testament, but is from no psalm I remember.” How could this not refer to the Crawler’s writing?… to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives … But none of this placed me any closer to understanding why or who. We were all in the dark, scrabbling at the pile of journals, and if ever I felt the weight of my predecessors, it was there and then, lost in it all.

  At a certain point, I discovered I was so overwhelmed I could not continue, could not even go through the motions. It was too much data, served up in too anecdotal a form. I could search those pages for years and perhaps never uncover the right secrets, while caught in a loop of wondering how long this place had existed, who had first left their journals here, why others had followed suit until it had become as inexorable as a long-ingrained ritual. By what impulse, what shared fatalism? All I really thought I knew was that the journals from certain expeditions and certain individual expedition members were missing, that the record was incomplete.

  I was also aware that I would have to go back to base camp before nightfall or remain at the lighthouse. I didn’t like the idea of traveling in the dark, and if I didn’t return, I had no guarantee the surveyor wouldn’t abandon me and try to recross the border.

  For now, I decided on one last effort. With great difficulty, I climbed to the top of the midden, trying hard not to dislodge journals as I did so. It was a kind of roiling, moving monster beneath my boots, unwilling, like the sand of the dunes outside, to allow my tread without an equal and opposite reaction. But I made it up there anyway.

  As I’d imagined, the journals on the top of that mass were more recent, and I immediately found the ones written by members of my husband’s expedition. With a kind of lurch in my stomach, I kept rummaging, knowing that it was inevitable what I would stumble upon, and I was right. Stuck to the back of another journal by dried blood or some other substance, I found it more easily than I’d imagined: my husband’s journal, written in the confident, bold handwriting I knew from birthday cards, notes on the refrigerator, and shopping lists. The ghost bird had found his ghost, on an inexplicable pile of other ghosts. But rather than looking forward to reading that account, I felt as if I were stealing a private diary that had been locked by his death. A stupid feeling, I know. All he’d ever wanted was for me to open up to him, and as a result he had always been there for the taking. Now, though, I would have to take him as I found him, and it would probably be forever, and I found the truth of that intolerable.

  I could not bring myself to read it yet, but fought the urge to throw my husband’s journal back on the pile and put it instead with the handful of other journals I planned to take back to base camp with me. I also retrieved two of the psychologist’s guns as I climbed up out of that wretched space. I left her other supplies there for now. It might be useful to have a cache in the lighthouse.

  It was later than I had thought when I emerged from below, the sky taking on the deep amber hue that marked the beginning of late afternoon. The sea was ablaze with light, but nothing beautiful here fooled me anymore. Human lives had poured into this place over time, volunteered to become party to exile and worse. Under everything lay the ghastly presence of countless desperate struggles. Why did they keep sending us? Why did we keep going? So many lies, so little ability to face the truth. Area X broke minds, I felt, even though it hadn’t yet broken mine. A line from a song kept coming back to me: All this useless knowledge.

  After being in that space for so long, I needed fresh air and the feel of the wind. I dropped what I’d taken into a chair and opened the sliding door to walk out onto the circular ledge bounded by a railing. The wind tore at my clothes and slapped against my face. The sudden chill was cleansing, and the view even better. I could see forever from there. But after a moment, some instinct or premonition made me look straight down, past the remains of the defensive wall, to the beach, part of which was half-hidden by the curve of the dune, the height of the wall, even from that angle.

  Emerging from that space was a foot and the end of a leg, amid a flurry of disrupted sand. I trained my binoculars on the foot. It lay unmoving. A familiar pant leg, a familiar boot, with the laces double-tied and even. I gripped the railing tight to counter a feeling of vertigo. I knew the owner of that boot.

  It was the psychologist.

  04: IMMERSION

  Everything I knew about the psychologist came from my observations during training. She had served both as a kind of distant overseer and in a more personal role as our confessor. Except, I had nothing to confe
ss. Perhaps I confessed more under hypnosis, but during our regular sessions, which I had agreed to as a condition of being accepted for the expedition, I volunteered little.

  “Tell me about your parents. What are they like?” she would ask, a classic opening gambit.

  “Normal,” I replied, trying to smile while thinking distant, impractical, irrelevant, moody, useless.

  “Your mother is an alcoholic, correct? And your father is a kind of … con man?”

  I almost exhibited a lack of control at what seemed like an insult, not an insight. I almost protested, defiantly, “My mother is an artist and my father is an entrepreneur.”

  “What are your earliest memories?”

  “Breakfast.” A stuffed puppy toy I still have today. Putting a magnifying glass up to an ant lion’s sinkhole. Kissing a boy and making him strip for me because I didn’t know any better. Falling into a fountain and banging my head; the result, five stitches in the emergency room and an abiding fear of drowning. In the emergency room again when Mom drank too much, followed by the relief of almost a year of sobriety.

  Of all of my answers, “Breakfast” annoyed her the most. I could see it in the corners of her mouth fighting a downward turn, her rigid stance, the coldness in her eyes. But she kept her control.

  “Did you have a happy childhood?”

  “Normal,” I replied. My mom once so out of it that she poured orange juice into my cereal instead of milk. My dad’s incessant, nervous chatter, which made him seem perpetually guilty of something. Cheap motels for vacations by the beach where Mom would cry at the end because we had to go back to the normal strapped-for-cash life, even though we’d never really left it. That sense of impending doom occupying the car.

  “How close were you to your extended family?”

  “Close enough.” Birthday cards suitable for a five-year-old even when I was twenty. Visits once every couple of years. A kindly grandfather with long yellow fingernails and the voice of a bear. A grandmother who lectured on the value of religion and saving your pennies. What were their names?