Annihilation (14 page)

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 confess. 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?

“How do you feel about being part of a team?”

“Just fine. I’ve often been part of teams.”
And by “part of,” I mean off to the side.

“You were let go from a number of your field jobs. Do you want to tell me why?”

She knew why, so, again, I shrugged and said nothing.

“Are you only agreeing to join this expedition because of your husband?”

“How close were you and your husband?”

“How often did you fight? Why did you fight?”

“Why didn’t you call the authorities the moment he returned to your house?”

These sessions clearly frustrated the psychologist on a professional level, on the
level of her ingrained training, which was predicated on drawing personal information
out of patients in order to establish trust and then delve into deeper issues. But
on another level I could never quite grasp, she seemed to approve of my answers. “You’re
very self-contained,” she said once, but not as a pejorative. It was only as we walked
for a second day from the border toward base camp that it struck me that perhaps the
very qualities she might disapprove of from a psychiatric point of view made me suitable
for the expedition.

Now she sat propped up against a mound of sand, sheltered by the shadow of the wall,
in a kind of broken pile, one leg straight out, the other trapped beneath her. She
was alone. I could see from her condition and the shape of the impact that she had
jumped or been pushed from the top of the lighthouse. She probably hadn’t quite cleared
the wall, been hurt by it on the way down. While I, in my methodical way, had spent
hours going through the journals, she had been lying here the whole time. What I couldn’t
understand was why she was still alive.

Her jacket and shirt were covered in blood, but she was breathing and her eyes were
open, looking out toward the ocean as I knelt beside her. She had a gun in her left
hand, left arm outstretched, and I gently took the weapon from her, tossed it to the
side, just in case.

The psychologist did not seem to register my presence. I touched her gently on one
broad shoulder, and then she screamed, lunged away, falling over as I recoiled.

“Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “
Annihilation! Annihilation!
” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird
with a broken wing.

“It’s just me, the biologist,” I said in a calm voice, even though she had rattled
me.

“
Just you
,” she said with a wheezing chuckle, as if I’d said something funny. “Just you.”

As I propped her up again, I heard a kind of creaking groan and realized she had probably
broken most of her ribs. Her left arm and shoulder felt spongy under her jacket. Dark
blood was seeping out around her stomach, beneath the hand she had instinctively pressed
down on that spot. I could smell that she had pissed herself.

“You’re still here,” she said, surprise in her voice. “But I killed you, didn’t I?”
The voice of someone waking from dream or falling into dream.

“Not even a little bit.”

A rough wheeze again, and the film of confusion leaving her eyes. “Did you bring water?
I’m thirsty.”

“I did,” and I pressed my canteen to her mouth so she could swallow a few gulps. Drops
of blood glistened on her chin.

“Where is the surveyor?” the psychologist asked in a gasp.

“Back at the base camp.”

“Wouldn’t come with you?”

“No.” The wind was blowing back the curls of her hair, revealing a slashing wound
on her forehead, possibly from impact with the wall above.

“Didn’t like your company?” the psychologist asked. “Didn’t like what you’ve become?”

A chill came over me. “I’m the same as always.”

The psychologist’s gaze drifted out to sea again. “I saw you, you know, coming down
the trail toward the lighthouse. That’s how I knew for sure you had changed.”

“What did you see?” I asked, to humor her.

A cough, accompanied by red spittle. “You were a
flame
,” she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness, made manifest. “You were a
flame, scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats, through the ruined
village. A slow-burning flame, a will-o’-the-wisp, floating across the marsh and the
dunes, floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating…”

From the shift in her tone, I recognized that even now she was trying to hypnotize
me.

“It won’t work,” I said. “I’m immune to hypnosis now.”

Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Of course you are. You were always
difficult,” she said, as if talking to a child. Was that an odd sense of pride in
her voice?

Perhaps I should have left the psychologist alone, let her die without providing any
answers, but I could not find that level of grace within me.

A thought occurred, if I had looked so inhuman: “Why didn’t you shoot me dead as I
approached?”

An unintentional leer as she swiveled her head to stare at me, unable to control all
of the muscles in her face. “My arm, my hand, wouldn’t let me pull the trigger.”

That sounded delusional to me, and I had seen no sign of an abandoned rifle beside
the beacon. I tried again. “And your fall? Pushed or an accident or on purpose?”

A frown appeared, a true perplexity expressed through the network of wrinkles at the
corners of her eyes, as if the memory were only coming through in fragments. “I thought …
I thought something was after me. I tried to shoot you, and couldn’t and then you
were inside. Then I thought I saw something behind me, coming toward me from the stairs,
and I felt such an overwhelming fear I had to get away from it. So I jumped out over
the railing. I jumped.” As if she couldn’t believe she had done such a thing.

“What did the thing coming after you look like?”

A coughing fit, words dribbling out around the edges: “I never saw it. It was never
there. Or I saw it too many times. It was inside me. Inside you. I was trying to get
away. From what’s inside me.”

I didn’t believe any part of that fragmented explanation at the time, which seemed
to imply something had followed her from the Tower. I interpreted the frenzy of her
disassociation as part of a need for control. She had lost control of the expedition,
and so she had to find someone or something to blame her failure on, no matter how
improbable.

I tried a different approach: “Why did you take the anthropologist down into the ‘tunnel’
in the middle of the night? What happened there?”

She hesitated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from caution or because something inside
her body was breaking down. Then she said, “A miscalculation. Impatience. I needed
intel before we risked the whole mission. I needed to know where we stood.”

“You mean, the progress of the Crawler?”

She smiled wickedly. “Is that what you call it? The Crawler?”

“What happened?” I asked.

“What do you think happened? It all went wrong. The anthropologist got too close.”
Translation: The psychologist had forced her to get close. “The thing
reacted
. It killed her, wounded me.”

“Which is why you looked so shaken the next morning.”

“Yes. And because I could tell that you were already changing.”