Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (16 page)

“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 difference. 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.

Grace had felt the border move through and past her. “It was like being
seen
. Being naked. Being reduced. Down to nothing.” As she stared with a fierce devotion at the fragile photo, so carefully repaired, of the woman she loved back in the world.

She had retreated in good order with a number of Southern Reach personnel, security and otherwise, to the lighthouse, per the director’s prior directive, an order unknown to him and somehow reaching out of the past to be given validity. At the lighthouse, some of the soldiers had begun to change and could not handle that change. Some had struck out for the tunnel and never been seen again. A few had spoken of vast shadows approaching from the seaward side. A schism between factions, including an argument with the border commander, had made their position worse. “None of them survived, I don’t think. None of them knew how to survive.”

But she remained vague about her actions in the lighthouse, her retreat to the island. “I did what I had to do.” “That’s all in the past. I have made my peace with it.” “I don’t sleep much.” All of that a jumbled mess.
In the past?
It had just happened.

He had held on to some hope or delusion of last redoubts, of hardened siege mentality, of making common cause to fight the enemy. But that had been a sick fantasy, a kind of abject denial. The Southern Reach was done even if they hunkered down in the science division for the next century, became the subterranean seeds for pale cave-dwelling people who lived in fear and whose children’s children heard cautionary tales of the fucked-up surface world waiting for them above.

“You had expedition training?” A guess, but an educated one based on her supplies.

“The basic protection package, we called it,” Grace said. “The director came up with it for department heads, management.” Because she’d valued their safety so much, had hoped the head of their props department would survive the apocalypse. He was willing to bet “the basic protection package” had applied only to Cynthia and Grace. She’d never shared it with him.

“If you planned for this, that means there’s a mission?”

“Does it look like there’s a mission?” A terse, ironic grin. Her tone of voice different, as if aware Ghost Bird, who had begun to stir, might be listening. “The mission is survival, John. The mission is to take it day by day. I keep to myself. I follow certain protocols. I am careful and quiet.” Grace was prepared to live out her days here. She had already resigned herself to that paradigm.

Ghost Bird propped herself up on one arm. She didn’t look groggy. Her stare seemed like a weapon, as if she had no need of a gun or knife. Ghost Bird didn’t look like someone who would appreciate being told she had been drugged, so Control didn’t. A respectful, fearful look Grace gave her, now that she wasn’t a sleeping lump on the floor.

“What attacked the convoy?” Ghost Bird asked.

No
Good morning
or even an interest in what they’d been discussing. How much had she overheard, lying there? What had seeped into her half-conscious mind about fakes and the director’s doppelgänger?

A grim chuckle from Grace, followed by a shrug, but no other answer.

Ghost Bird shrugged, fell upon a protein bar, gutted it with her knife, wolfed down the contents. Between bites: “This is horrible and stale. Have you encountered anything unusual on the island?”

“It’s all unusual here,” Grace said, with a kind of exhaustion, as if the question had been asked too often before.

“Have you seen the biologist?” Direct speaking to direct, and Control tense, waiting for that answer.

“Have I seen the biologist?” Turning that question over and over, examining it from all angles. “Have I seen the biologist?” Grace’s clicking of the holster strap came quicker now, the pattern in the dust drawn at knife point more complex. Was that a helix? Was that two intertwining spirals? A starfish or just a star?

“Well, answer me, Grace,” Ghost Bird said, rising now, standing in front of them with her hands at her sides, in the kind of relaxed yet perfectly balanced stance someone took if they expected trouble. If they’d had combat training.

The light through the landing window faded into shadow as a cloud crossed over. A bird outside was muttering or whispering in time to the circling of the knife blade. Far distant came the suggestion of something sonorous, mournful, perhaps an echo off the lighthouse stones. A gecko scuttled up the wall. Control didn’t know if he should be worried about the foreground or something in the background. This was the only question that mattered to Ghost Bird, and Control didn’t know what she would do if Grace wouldn’t answer.

Grace stared over at Control, said, “If I sat here and told this copy”—pointing at Ghost Bird—“everything I’ve found, we would still be sitting here when hell froze over.”

“Just
answer
the question,” Ghost Bird muttered.

“Are we just passing through?” Control asked. “Should we be moving on?” That’s what this came down to, in a way. Not Ghost Bird’s question but Grace’s attitude, the constant suspicion that wore on him.

“Do you know how long I’ve been on this island? Did you ever ask me that?”

“Have you seen the biologist?” Ghost Bird demanded in a kind of staccato growl.

“Ask me.” The knife stabbed, vibrating, into the wooden floor of the landing. The hand on the holster had gone still, resting on the gun.

Control gave Ghost Bird a quick look. Had he misread something vital?

“How long have you been on the island?” he asked.

“Three years. I’ve been here
three
years.”

*   *   *

Outside, all seemed still, so impossibly still. The gecko frozen on the wall. Control frozen in his thoughts. Satisfaction, that Grace could not quite suppress, etched into her worn face. To have told them something they couldn’t have known, couldn’t have seen coming.

“Three
years
,” Control said, a plea for her to recant.

“I don’t believe you,” Ghost Bird said.

A generous laugh. “I don’t blame you much. I don’t blame you at all. You’re right. I must just be some crazy bitch who went mad out here all on her own. I must be unable to cope with my situation. I must be fucking nuts. Sure. Must be. Except for this…”

Grace pulled a sheaf of pages out of her knapsack. Brittle, yellowing, they had handwriting on them. A rusting clasp in the corner.

She flung the pages at Ghost Bird’s feet. “Read it. Read it before I waste time telling you anything else. Just read it.”

Ghost Bird picked it up, looked at the first page in confusion.

“What is it?” Control asked. Some part of him not wanting to know. Not wanting another dislocation.

“The biologist’s last will and testament,” Grace said.

PART II

FIXED LIGHT

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot—choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before; I use my actual voice rarely enough.

A great deal of time has passed since I placed words on paper, and for so long I felt no urge to do so again. I have felt more acutely than ever that here on the island I should
never be taken out of the moment
. To be taken out of the moment is dangerous—that is when things sneak their way in and then there is no present moment to return to. Only very recently have I begun to feel something like a
lack
, or anything beyond the thought that I would in this place simply exist and live out whatever span was allotted to me. Neither have I had any interest in
recounting
, in
setting down
, in
communicating
in what has come to seem such a mundane way. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that I have started to write this several times, and that I abandoned three or four drafts of this … this document? This letter? This … whatever
this
is.