Annihilation (18 page)

Out back, I saw what the surveyor had added to the old graveyard: an empty, newly
dug grave with a mound of dirt out to the side—and stabbed into the ground, a simple
cross made from fallen branches. Had the grave been meant to hold me or the anthropologist?
Or both? I did not like the idea of lying next to the anthropologist for all eternity.

Cleaning up a little later, a fit of laughter came out of nowhere and made me double
up in pain. I had suddenly remembered doing the dishes after dinner the night my husband
had come back from across the border. I could distinctly recall wiping the spaghetti
and chicken scraps from a plate and wondering with a kind of bewilderment how such
a mundane act could coexist with the mystery of his reappearance.

05: DISSOLUTION

I have never done well in cities, even though I lived in one by necessity—because
my husband needed to be there, because the best jobs for me were there, because I
had self-destructed when I’d had opportunities in the field. But I was not a domesticated
animal. The dirt and grit of a city, the unending
wakefulness
of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline
fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction … none of these things appealed
to me.

“Where do you go so late at night?” my husband had asked several times, about nine
months before he left as part of the eleventh expedition. There was an unspoken “really”
before the “go”—I could hear it, loud and insistent.

“Nowhere,” I said.
Everywhere.

“No, really—where do you go?” It was to his credit that he had never tried to follow
me.

“I’m not cheating on you if that’s what you mean.”

The directness of that usually stopped him, even if it didn’t reassure him.

I had told him a late-night walk alone relaxed me, allowed me to sleep when the stress
or boredom of my job became too much. But in truth I didn’t walk except the distance
to an empty lot overgrown with grass. The empty lot appealed to me because it wasn’t
truly empty. Two species of snail called it home and three species of lizard, along
with butterflies and dragonflies. From lowly origins—a muddy rut from truck tires—a
puddle had over time collected rainwater to become a pond. Fish eggs had found their
way to that place, and minnows and tadpoles could be seen there, and aquatic insects.
Weeds had grown up around it, making the soil less likely to erode into the water.
Songbirds on migration used it as a refueling station.

As habitats went, the lot wasn’t complex, but its proximity dulled the impulse in
me to just get in a car and start driving for the nearest wild place. I liked to visit
late at night because I might see a wary fox passing through or catch a sugar glider
resting on a telephone pole. Nighthawks gathered nearby to feast off the insects bombarding
the streetlamps. Mice and owls played out ancient rituals of predator and prey. They
all had a watchfulness about them that was different from animals in true wilderness;
this was a jaded watchfulness, the result of a long and weary history. Tales of bad-faith
encounters in human-occupied territory, tragic past events.

I didn’t tell my husband my walk had a destination because I wanted to keep the lot
for myself. There are so many things couples do from habit and because they are expected
to, and I didn’t mind those rituals. Sometimes I even enjoyed them. But I needed to
be selfish about that patch of urban wilderness. It expanded in my mind while I was
at work, calmed me, gave me a series of miniature dramas to look forward to. I didn’t
know that while I was applying this Band-Aid to my need to be unconfined, my husband
was dreaming of Area X and much greater open spaces. But, later, the parallel helped
assuage my anger at his leaving, and then my confusion when he came back in such a
changed form … even if the stark truth is that I still did not truly understand what
I had missed about him.

The psychologist had said, “The border is advancing … a little bit more every year.”

But I found that statement too limiting, too ignorant. There were thousands of “dead”
spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no
one saw, that had been rendered invisible because they were not “of use.” Anything
could inhabit them for a time without anyone noticing. We had come to think of the
border as this monolithic invisible wall, but if members of the eleventh expedition
had been able to return without our noticing, couldn’t other things have already gotten
through?

*   *   *

In this new phase of my brightness, recovering from my wounds, the Tower called incessantly
to me; I could feel its physical presence under the earth with a clarity that mimicked
that first flush of attraction, when you knew without looking exactly where the object
of desire stood in the room. Part of this was my own need to return, but part might
be due to the effect of the spores, and so I fought it because I had work to do first.
This work might also, if I was left to it without any strange intercession, put everything
in perspective.

To start with, I had to quarantine the lies and obfuscation of my superiors from data
that pertained to the actual eccentricities of Area X. For example, the secret knowledge
that there had been a proto–Area X, a kind of
preamble
and beachhead established first. As much as seeing the mound of journals had radically
altered my view of Area X, I did not think that the higher number of expeditions told
me much more about the Tower and its effects. It told me primarily that even if the
border was expanding, the progress of assimilation by Area X could still be considered
conservative. The recurring data points found in the journals that related to repeating
cycles and fluctuations of seasons of the strange and the ordinary were useful in
establishing trends. But this information, too, my superiors probably knew and therefore
it could be considered something already reported by others. The myth that only a
few early expeditions, the start date artificially
suggested
by the Southern Reach, had come to grief reinforced the idea of cycles existing within
the overall framework of an
advance
.

The individual details chronicled by the journals might tell stories of heroism or
cowardice, of good decisions and bad decisions, but ultimately they spoke to a kind
of
inevitability
. No one had as yet plumbed the depths of
intent
or
purpose
in a way that had obstructed that intent or purpose. Everyone had died or been killed,
returned changed or returned unchanged, but Area X had continued on as it always had …
while our superiors seemed to fear any radical reimagining of this situation so much
that they had continued to send in knowledge-strapped expeditions as if this was the
only option.
Feed Area X but do not antagonize it, and perhaps someone will, through luck or mere
repetition, hit upon some explanation, some solution, before the world
becomes
Area X.

There was no way I could corroborate any of these theories, but I took a grim comfort
in coming up with them anyway.

I left my husband’s journal until last, even though its pull was as strong as the
allure of the Tower. Instead, I focused on what I had brought back: the samples from
the ruined village and from the psychologist, along with samples of my own skin. I
set up my microscope on the rickety table, which I suppose the surveyor had found
already so damaged it did not require her further attention. The cells of the psychologist,
both from her unaffected shoulder and her wound, appeared to be normal human cells.
So did the cells I examined from my own sample. This was impossible. I checked the
samples over and over, even childishly pretending I had no interest in looking at
them before swooping down with an eagle eye.

I was convinced that when I wasn’t looking at them, these cells became something else,
that the very act of observation changed everything. I knew this was madness and yet
still I thought it. I felt as if Area X were laughing at me then—every blade of grass,
every stray insect, every drop of water. What would happen when the Crawler reached
the bottom of the Tower? What would happen when it came back up?

Then I examined the samples from the village: moss from the “forehead” of one of the
eruptions, splinters of wood, a dead fox, a rat. The wood was indeed wood. The rat
was indeed a rat. The moss and the fox … were composed of modified human cells.
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring
forth the seeds of the dead …

I suppose I should have reared back from the microscope in shock, but I was beyond
such reactions to anything that instrument might show me. Instead, I contented myself
with quiet cursing. The boar on the way to base camp, the strange dolphins, the tormented
beast in the reeds. Even the idea that replicas of members of the eleventh expedition
had crossed back over. All supported the evidence of my microscope. Transformations
were taking place here, and as much as I had felt part of a “natural” landscape on
my trek to the lighthouse, I could not deny that these habitats were transitional
in a deeply
unnatural
way. A perverse sense of relief overtook me; at least now I had proof of something
strange happening, along with the brain tissue the anthropologist had taken from the
skin of the Crawler.

By then, though, I’d had enough of samples. I ate lunch and decided against putting
more effort into cleaning up the camp; most of that task would have to fall to the
next expedition. It was another brilliant, blinding afternoon of stunning blue sky
allied with a comfortable heat. I sat for a time, watched the dragonflies skimming
the long grass, the dipping, looping flight of a redheaded woodpecker. I was just
putting off the inevitable, my return to the Tower, and yet still I wasted time.

When I finally picked up my husband’s journal and started to read, the brightness
washed over me in unending waves and connected me to the earth, the water, the trees,
the air, as I opened up and kept on opening.

*   *   *

Nothing about my husband’s journal was expected. Except for some terse, hastily scribbled
exceptions, he had addressed most of the entries to me. I did not want this, and as
soon as it became apparent I had to resist the need to throw the journal away from
me as if it were poison. My reaction had nothing to do with love or lack of love but
was more out of a sense of guilt. He had meant to share this journal with me, and
now he was either truly dead or existed in a state beyond any possible way for me
to communicate with him, to reciprocate.

The eleventh expedition had consisted of eight members, all male: a psychologist,
two medics (including my husband), a linguist, a surveyor, a biologist, an anthropologist,
and an archaeologist. They had come to Area X in the winter, when the trees had lost
most of their leaves and the reeds had turned darker and thicker. The flowering bushes
“became sullen” and seemed to “huddle” along the path, as he put it. “Fewer birds
than indicated in reports,” he wrote. “But where do they go? Only the ghost bird knows.”
The sky frequently clouded over, and the water level in the cypress swamps was low.
“No rain the entire time we’ve been here,” he wrote at the end of the first week.

They, too, discovered what only I call the Tower on their fifth or sixth day—I was
ever more certain that the location of the base camp had been chosen to trigger that
discovery—but their surveyor’s opinion that they must continue mapping the wider area
meant they followed a different course than ours. “None of us were eager to climb
down in there,” my husband wrote. “Me least of all.” My husband had claustrophobia,
sometimes even had to leave our bed in the middle of the night to go sleep on the
deck.

For whatever reason, the psychologist did not in this case coerce the expedition to
go down into the Tower. They explored farther, past the ruined village, to the lighthouse
and beyond. Of the lighthouse, my husband noted their horror at discovering the signs
of carnage, but of being “too respectful of the dead to put things right,” by which
I suppose he meant the overturned tables on the ground level. He did not mention the
photograph of the lighthouse keeper on the wall of the landing, which disappointed
me.

Like me, they had discovered the pile of journals at the top of the lighthouse, been
shaken by it. “We had an intense argument about what to do. I wanted to abort the
mission and return home because clearly we had been lied to.” But it was at this point
that the psychologist apparently reestablished control, if of a tenuous sort. One
of the directives for Area X was for each expedition to remain a unit. But in the
very next entry the expedition had decided to split up, as if to salvage the mission
by catering solely to each person’s will, and thus ensuring that no one would try
to return to the border. The other medic, the anthropologist, the archaeologist, and
the psychologist stayed in the lighthouse to read the journals and investigate the
area around the lighthouse. The linguist and the biologist went back to explore the
Tower. My husband and the surveyor continued on past the lighthouse.

“You would love it here,” he wrote in a particularly manic entry that suggested to
me not so much optimism as an unsettling euphoria. “You would love the light on the
dunes. You would love the sheer expansive wildness of it.”

They wandered up the coast for an entire week, mapping the landscape and fully expecting
at some point to encounter the border, whatever form it might take—some obstacle that
barred their progress.

But they never did.

Instead, the same habitat confronted them day after day. “We’re heading north, I believe,”
he wrote, “but even though we cover a good fifteen to twenty miles by nightfall, nothing
has changed. It is all the same,” although he also was quite emphatic that he did
not mean they were somehow “caught in a strange recurring loop.” Yet he knew that
“by all rights, we should have encountered the border by now.” Indeed, they were well
into an expanse of what he called the Southern Reach that had
not yet been charted
, “that we had been encouraged by the vagueness of our superiors to assume existed
back beyond the border.”