Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (23 page)

There’s nothing you could say to Whitby except “I’m sorry,” but you can’t even say that. You can’t change the moments that changed him except in your memory, and even in memory that attempt is obscured by the fast-rising
thing
from below, the thing that terrified you so much you abandoned Saul there, on the tunnel steps. Said to yourself afterward that Saul wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, so you hadn’t abandoned anyone. “Don’t forget about me,” he’d said, so long ago, and you won’t ever forget him, but you might have to leave him behind. That apparition. The hallucination that, as you sit at the bar in Chipper’s Star Lanes or debate policy with Grace on the Southern Reach rooftop, you still try to rationalize as not a hallucination at all.

In part because you came back with the plant. For a time, obsessed with each dark green leaf, the way looking at it from above it forms a kind of fanlike circle, but from the side the effect fades completely. If you focus on the plant, maybe you can forget Lowry, waiting out there, for a while. Maybe Saul won’t matter. Maybe you can salvage something out of … nothing.

The plant will not die.

No parasites will touch the plant.

The plant will not die.

No extremes of temperature will affect it. Freeze it, it will thaw. Burn it, it will regenerate.

The plant will not die.

No matter what you try, no matter the experiments performed on it in the sterile, the blinding white environs of the storage cathedral … the plant won’t die. It’s not that you mean to order its execution, but that in the course of the samples taken, the researchers inform you that the plant refuses to die. That cutting—you could chop it up into five dozen tiny pieces, put those in a measuring cup, sprinkle it on a steak for seasoning … and in theory it would grow inside of you, eventually burst forth seeking sunlight.

So, relenting, you let samples be whisked away to Central, so that experts can solve the mystery of this simple, ordinary plant that looks like any number of temperate-climate perennials. Samples, too, to Lowry’s secret headquarters, perhaps to reside next to cages in experimental bunkers, although none of their findings ever come back to you. All of this in the midst of a frenzied slicing and dicing of other specimens in the storage cathedral, just to make sure there hasn’t been some domino effect, or something’s been missed. But nothing has been missed.

“I don’t think we’re looking at a plant,” Whitby says, tentative, at one status meeting, risking his new relationship with the science division, which he has embraced as a kind of sanctuary.

“Then why are we
seeing
a plant, Whitby?” Cheney, managing to convey an all-consuming exasperation. “Why are we seeing a plant that
looks like
a plant being a plant. Doing plant things, like photosynthesis and drawing water up through its roots. Why? That’s not a tough question, is it, really? Or is it? Maybe it is a tough question, I don’t know, for reasons beyond me. But that’s going to be a problem, don’t you think? Having to reassert that things we think are the things they are actually are in fact the things they are and not
some other thing entirely
. Just think of all the fucking things we will have to reevaluate if you’re right, Whitby—starting with you!” Cheney’s blistered, reddening expression bears down on Whitby as if he were the receptacle of every evil thing that has ever afflicted Cheney since the day he was born. “Because,” Cheney says, lowering his voice, “if that’s a tough question, don’t we have to reclassify all the
really
tough questions?”

Later Whitby will regale you with information on how quantum mechanics impacts photosynthesis, which is all about “antenna receiving light and antenna can be hacked,” about how “one organism might
peer out
from another organism but not live there,” of how plants “talk” to one another, how communication can occur in chemical form and through processes so invisible to human beings that the sudden visibility of it would be “an irreparable shock to the system.”

For the Southern Reach? For humanity?

But Whitby’s close-lipped about that, changes the subject. Abruptly.

*   *   *

You’re less obsessed with the cell phone, which has been living with the techs down in the hardware department, the ones who have the right security clearance. But the techs can’t make it work, are confused by it, perhaps even unnnerved. Nothing about it indicates a malfunction. It should work. It just doesn’t. It should reveal who owned it. It just doesn’t.

“As if it’s not really made of the parts it should be made of. But it looks exactly that way—like a normal phone. Really old, though.”

A bulky veteran of a phone, scarred and scraped and worn. It looks like you feel sometimes.

You offer it to Lowry during one of your calls, as a kind of sacrifice of a pawn. Give Lowry an exclusive, let him worry at it like a dog with a new bone, so the old bone can get some rest. But he doesn’t want it—insists you keep it.

Something an expedition member had snuck in with them or inadvertently brought along? Something perhaps from a recent expedition that someone had thought was old enough not to disturb Area X’s slumber? During the cycles that predated Lowry’s intervention, your stewardship, techniques primitive and untested.

Recalling the very earliest photographs and video—of Lowry and the others in what amounted to deep-sea diving outfits to traverse the border, before they realized it was unnecessary. Lowry, returned, disoriented, babbling on videotape, words he would later recant, about how nothing would ever come out of the passage in the border, nothing, because they were waiting for ghosts, for something long dead, Area X a memorial, a gravestone.

“What made Area X spit it back up?” you ask Grace, safe on the roof in Beyond Reach.

“What made Whitby the one to find it?”

“A good question.” A gift from Dead Whitby.

“Why did it allow itself to be found?”

That sounds like the right question, and some days you want to tell Grace … everything. But most days you want to shield her from information that will make no difference to her job, her life. Somehow Dead Whitby and the Saul apparition fall on the same side as telling her that your name is not your name. That all of the unimportant things about you are a lie.

Eventually, into the middle of all this comes the call you’ve been dreading: Lowry, with a purpose. While you’re staring at the incriminating photograph on the wall: you on the rocks, shouting either before or after the shot was taken, “I’m a monster! I’m a monster!”

“Another eleventh expedition is a go.”

“Already.”

“Three months. We’re almost there.”

You want to say, but don’t say, “It’s time to stop tampering, not time to intensify the tampering.” The fiddling. All the ways Lowry tries to control what cannot really be controlled.

“That’s too soon,” you say. Too soon by far. Nothing has changed, except that you interfered and went over the border and brought back two objects you can’t explain.

“Maybe it’s time for you to stop being a fucking coward,” Lowry says. “Three months. Get ready,
Cynthia
.” He bangs the phone down, and you imagine him banging it down into a housing that’s a polished human skull.

They implant into the brain of the psychologist—on what will turn out to be the last eleventh—what Lowry calls “a pearl of surveillance and recall.” Some tiny subset of the silver egg that is Central, passing first through Lowry’s deforming grip. They make a man
not himself
, and you go along with it to keep your job, to stay close to what is important to you.

Twelve months later, the last eleventh expedition comes back, acting almost like zombies, memories cloudier than the drunk veteran’s at the Star Lanes Lounge. Eighteen months later, they’re all dead of cancer, and Lowry’s back on the phone talking about the “next eleventh” and “making refinements to our process” and you realize something has to change. Again. And short of putting a gun to Lowry’s head and pulling the trigger, it’s going to come down to influencing the composition of the expeditions, how they are deployed, and a host of lesser factors. None of which may make a difference, but you have to try. Because you never want to see such lost, vacant faces ever again, never again want to see people who have been stripped of something so vital that it can’t be expressed through words.

*   *   *

Morale at the Southern Reach becomes worse after the last eleventh returns and then, so quickly, passes on to the next place, wherever that might be. Numbness? A sense of having gone through so many crises that emotion must be hoarded, that it might not run out.

From the transcripts: “It was a beautiful day.” “The expedition was uneventful.” “We had no problems in completing the mission.”

What was the mission, in their eyes? But they’d never answer that question. Grace spoke of them in reverential tones, almost as if they’d become saints. Down in the science division, Cheney became more muted and subdued for a long time, as if the color TV of his commentary had been replaced by a black-and-white model with a single channel of pixelated fuzz. Ephemeral, ethereal Pitman called from Central with oblique condolences and a kind of calculated indifference to his tone that suggested misdirection.

But you were the one who had seen the curling worm of Lowry’s corruption at work—that what he’d done, the bargain you had made that had allowed him to be so invasive and controlling, hadn’t been worth it.

Even worse, Jackie Severance visits regularly afterward, as if maybe Central is concerned about something, takes to pacing around your office and gesticulating as she talks, rather than just sitting still. This emissary of Central you have to deal with in the flesh rather than just Lowry.

“She’s my parole officer,” you tell Grace.

“Then who is Lowry?”

“Lowry’s the parole officer’s partner? Boss? Employee?” Because you don’t know.

“A riddle wrapped in a puzzle,” Grace says. “Do you know what her father, Jack Severance, is up to?”

“No, what?”

“Everything.” So much everything that Grace is still wading through all of it.

When Severance comes calling, there’s a sense she’s checking up on her investment, her shared risk.

“Does it ever get to you?” Severance asks you more than once, and you’re fairly sure she’s just making conversation.

“No,” you lie, shoot back your own cliché: “We all have our jobs to do.”

Back when she worked for the Southern Reach, you’d liked her—sharp, charming, and she’d done a good job of fine-tuning logistics, of diving in and getting work done. But since she’s chained to Lowry, you can’t risk that her presence isn’t his presence. Sharing a swig of brandy with Grace: “A living bug—can’t exactly just pull her out of the ceiling tiles.” And the glamour has begun to fade: At times, Severance looks to you like a tired, faded clerk at a makeup counter in a department store.

Severance sits with you, observing the returnees through closed-circuit cameras for long minutes, coffee in hand, checking her phone every few minutes, often drawn off into some side conversation about some other project altogether, then coming back into focus to ask questions.

“You’re sure they’re not contaminated with something?”

“When do you send in the next expedition?”

“What do you think of Lowry’s metrics?”

“If you had a bigger budget, what would you spend it on?”

“Do you know what you’re looking for?”

No, you don’t know. She knows you don’t know. You don’t even know what you’re looking at, these people who became ever more gaunt until they were living skeletons, and then not even that. The psychologist perhaps even blanker than the rest, like a kind of warning to you, as if it were a side effect of his profession, encountering Area X. But a closer look at his history reveals Lowry probably leaned on him the most, thought, maybe, that his profession made him stronger than the rest. The bindings, the reconditioning sessions, the psychological tricks—surely a psychologist could absorb them, armed with foreknowledge. Except the man hadn’t, and as far as they knew this “coiled sting” inside his brain had made no difference at all to Area X.

“There must be things you would have done differently,” Severance says.

You make some noncommittal sound and pretend you’re scribbling something on your notepad. A grocery list, maybe. A blank circle that’s either a representation of the border or of Central. A plant rising out of a cell phone. Or maybe you should just write
Fuck you
and be done with it. Gnaw your way out of Lowry’s trap.

*   *   *

At some point after the last of the last eleventh passes away, you get black paint from maintenance, along with thick black markers, and you open the useless door that gives you access to the blank wall—casualty of a clumsy corridor redesign. You write out the words collected from the topographical anomaly, the words that you know must have been written by the lighthouse keeper (this flash of intuition, unveiled at a status meeting, allowing you to order a deeper investigation into Saul’s background than ever before).

You draw a map, too, of all the landmarks in Area X. There’s the base camp, or as you call it now, the Mirage. There’s the lighthouse, which should be some form of safety but too often isn’t, the place that journals go to die. There’s the topographical anomaly, the hole in the ground into which all initiative and focus descended, only to become hazy and diffuse. There, too, is the island and, finally, the Southern Reach itself, looking either like the last defense against the enemy or its farthestmost outpost.

Lowry, drunk out of his mind at his going-away party, headed for Central, only three years after you had been hired, had said, “How goddamn boring. Fucking boring if they win. If we gotta live in that world.” As if people would be living in “that world” at all, which wasn’t what any of the evidence foretold, or kept foretelling, as if there were nothing worse than being bored and the only point of the world people already lived in was to find ways to combat boredom, to make sure “all the moments,” as Whitby put it when he went on about parallel universes, might be accounted for in some way, so minds wouldn’t fill up with emptiness that they bifurcated simply to have more capacity to be bored.