Annihilation (2 page)

“She had second thoughts,” the psychologist told us, meeting our questions with a
firm gaze. “She decided to stay behind.” This came as a small shock, but there was
also relief that it had not been someone else. Of all of our skill sets, linguist
seemed at the time most expendable.

After a moment, the psychologist said, “Now, clear your minds.” This meant she would
begin the process of hypnotizing us so we could cross the border. She would then put
herself under a kind of self-hypnosis. It had been explained that we would need to
cross the border with precautions to protect against our minds tricking us. Apparently
hallucinations were common. At least, this was what they told us. I no longer can
be sure it was the truth. The actual nature of the border had been withheld from us
for security reasons; we knew only that it was invisible to the naked eye.

So when I “woke up” with the others, it was in full gear, including heavy hiking boots,
with the weight of forty-pound backpacks and a multitude of additional supplies hanging
from our belts. All three of us lurched, and the anthropologist fell to one knee,
while the psychologist patiently waited for us to recover. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“That was the least startling reentry I could manage.”

The surveyor cursed, and glared at her. She had a temper that must have been deemed
an asset. The anthropologist, as was her way, got to her feet, uncomplaining. And
I, as was my way, was too busy observing to take this rude awakening personally. For
example, I noticed the cruelty of the almost imperceptible smile on the psychologist’s
lips as she watched us struggle to adjust, the anthropologist still floundering and
apologizing for floundering. Later I realized I might have misread her expression;
it might have been pained or self-pitying.

We were on a dirt trail strewn with pebbles, dead leaves, and pine needles damp to
the touch. Velvet ants and tiny emerald beetles crawled over them. The tall pines,
with their scaly ridges of bark, rose on both sides, and the shadows of flying birds
conjured lines between them. The air was so fresh it buffeted the lungs and we strained
to breathe for a few seconds, mostly from surprise. Then, after marking our location
with a piece of red cloth tied to a tree, we began to walk forward, into the unknown.
If the psychologist somehow became incapacitated and could not lead us across at the
end of our mission, we had been told to return to await “extraction.” No one ever
explained what form “extraction” might take, but the implication was that our superiors
could observe the extraction point from afar, even though it was inside the border.

We had been told not to look back upon arrival, but I snuck a glance anyway, while
the psychologist’s attention was elsewhere. I don’t know quite what I saw. It was
hazy, indistinct, and already far behind us—perhaps a gate, perhaps a trick of the
eye. Just a sudden impression of a fizzing block of light, fast fading.

*   *   *

The reasons I had volunteered were very separate from my qualifications for the expedition.
I believe I qualified because I specialized in transitional environments, and this
particular location transitioned several times, meaning that it was home to a complexity
of ecosystems. In few other places could you still find habitat where, within the
space of walking only six or seven miles, you went from forest to swamp to salt marsh
to beach. In Area X, I had been told, I would find marine life that had adjusted to
the brackish freshwater and which at low tide swam far up the natural canals formed
by the reeds, sharing the same environment with otters and deer. If you walked along
the beach, riddled through with the holes of fiddler crabs, you would sometimes look
out to see one of the giant reptiles, for they, too, had adapted to their habitat.

I understood why no one lived in Area X now, that it was pristine because of that
reason, but I kept un-remembering it. I had decided instead to make believe that it
was simply a protected wildlife refuge, and we were hikers who happened to be scientists.
This made sense on another level: We did not know what had happened here, what was
still happening here, and any preformed theories would affect my analysis of the evidence
as we encountered it. Besides, for my part it hardly mattered what lies I told myself
because my existence back in the world had become at least as empty as Area X. With
nothing left to anchor me, I
needed
to be here. As for the others, I don’t know what they told themselves, and I didn’t
want to know, but I believe they all at least pretended to some level of curiosity.
Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.

That night we talked about the tower, although the other three insisted on calling
it a tunnel. The responsibility for the thrust of our investigations resided with
each individual, the psychologist’s authority describing a wider circle around these
decisions. Part of the current rationale for sending the expeditions lay in giving
each member some autonomy to decide, which helped to increase “the possibility of
significant variation.”

This vague protocol existed in the context of our separate skill sets. For example,
although we had all received basic weapons and survival training, the surveyor had
far more medical and firearms experience than the rest of us. The anthropologist had
once been an architect; indeed, she had years ago survived a fire in a building she
had designed, the only really personal thing I had found out about her. As for the
psychologist, we knew the least about her, but I think we all believed she came from
some kind of management background.

The discussion of the tower was, in a way, our first opportunity to test the limits
of disagreement and of compromise.

“I don’t think we should focus on the tunnel,” the anthropologist said. “We should
explore farther first, and we should come back to it with whatever data we gather
from our other investigations—including of the lighthouse.”

How predictable, and yet perhaps prescient, for the anthropologist to try to substitute
a safer, more comfortable option. Although the idea of mapping seemed perfunctory
or repetitive to me, I could not deny the existence of the tower, of which there was
no suggestion on any map.

Then the surveyor spoke. “In this case I feel that we should rule out the tunnel as
something invasive or threatening. Before we explore farther. It’s like an enemy at
our backs otherwise, if we press forward.” She had come to us from the military, and
I could see already the value of that experience. I had thought a surveyor would always
side with the idea of further exploration, so this opinion carried weight.

“I’m impatient to explore the habitats here,” I said. “But in a sense, given that
it is not noted on any map, the ‘tunnel’ … or tower … seems important. It is either
a deliberate exclusion from our maps and thus known … and that is a message of sorts …
or it is something new that wasn’t here when the last expedition arrived.”

The surveyor gave me a look of thanks for the support, but my position had nothing
to do with helping her. Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down
played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure. I could
not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus
shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a
cliff into the unknown.

The psychologist nodded, appeared to consider these opinions, and asked, “Does anyone
yet have even an inkling of a sensation of wanting to leave?” It was a legitimate
question, but jarring nonetheless.

All three of us shook our heads.

“What about you?” the surveyor asked the psychologist. “What is your opinion?”

The psychologist grinned, which seemed odd. But she must have known any one of us
might have been tasked with observing her own reactions to stimuli. Perhaps the idea
that a surveyor, an expert in the surface of things, might have been chosen, rather
than a biologist or anthropologist, amused her. “I must admit to feeling a great deal
of unease at the moment. But I am unsure whether it is because of the effect of the
overall environment or the presence of the tunnel. Personally, I would like to rule
out the tunnel.”

Tower.

“Three to one, then,” the anthropologist said, clearly relieved that the decision
had been made for her.

The surveyor just shrugged.

Perhaps I’d been wrong about curiosity. The surveyor didn’t seem curious about anything.

“Bored?” I asked.

“Eager to get on with it,” she said, to the group, as if I’d asked the question for
all of us.

We were in the communal tent for our talk. It had become dark by then and there came
soon after the strange mournful call in the night that we knew must have natural causes
but created a little shiver regardless. As if that was the signal to disband, we went
back to our own quarters to be alone with our thoughts. I lay awake in my tent for
a while trying to turn the tower into a tunnel, or even a shaft, but with no success.
Instead, my mind kept returning to a question:
What lies hidden at its base?

*   *   *

During our hike from the border to the base camp near the coast, we had experienced
almost nothing out of the ordinary. The birds sang as they should; the deer took flight,
their white tails exclamation points against the green and brown of the underbrush;
the raccoons, bowlegged, swayed about their business, ignoring us. As a group, we
felt almost giddy, I think, to be free after so many confining months of training
and preparation. While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing
could touch us. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we
reached our destination.

The day before we arrived at the camp, this mood was briefly shattered by the appearance
of an enormous wild boar some distance ahead of us on the trail. It was so far from
us that even with our binoculars we could barely identify it at first. But despite
poor eyesight, wild pigs have prodigious powers of smell, and it began charging us
from one hundred yards away. Thundering down the trail toward us … yet we still had
time to think about what we might do, had drawn our long knives, and in the surveyor’s
case her assault rifle. Bullets would probably stop a seven-hundred-pound pig, or
perhaps not. We did not feel confident taking our attention from the boar to untie
the container of handguns from our gear and open its triple locks.

There was no time for the psychologist to prepare any hypnotic suggestion designed
to keep us focused and in control; in fact, all she could offer was “Don’t get close
to it! Don’t let it touch you!” while the boar continued to charge. The anthropologist
was giggling a bit out of nervousness and the absurdity of experiencing an emergency
situation that was taking so long to develop. Only the surveyor had taken direct action:
She had dropped to one knee to get a better shot; our orders included the helpful
directive to “kill only if you are under threat of being killed.”

I was continuing to watch through the binoculars, and as the boar came closer, its
face became stranger and stranger. Its features were somehow contorted, as if the
beast was dealing with an extreme of inner torment. Nothing about its muzzle or broad,
long face looked at all extraordinary, and yet I had the startling impression of some
presence
in the way its gaze seemed turned inward and its head willfully pulled to the left
as if there were an invisible bridle. A kind of electricity sparked in its eyes that
I could not credit as real. I thought instead it must be a by-product of my now slightly
shaky hand on the binoculars.

Whatever was consuming the boar also soon consumed its desire to charge. It veered
abruptly leftward, with what I can only describe as a great cry of anguish, into the
underbrush. By the time we reached that spot, the boar was gone, leaving behind a
thoroughly thrashed trail.

For several hours, my thoughts turned inward toward explanations for what I had seen:
parasites and other hitchhikers of a neurological nature. I was searching for entirely
rational biological theories. Then, after a time, the boar faded into the backdrop
like all else that we had passed on our way from the border, and I was staring into
the future again.

*   *   *

The morning after we discovered the tower we rose early, ate our breakfast, and doused
our fire. There was a crisp chill to the air common for the season. The surveyor broke
open the weapons stash and gave us each a handgun. She herself continued to hold on
to the assault rifle; it had the added benefit of a flashlight under the barrel. We
had not expected to have to open that particular container so soon, and although none
of us protested, I felt a new tension between us. We knew that members of the second
expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had
shot each other. Not until several subsequent expeditions had suffered zero casualties
had our superiors issued firearms again. We were the twelfth expedition.

So we returned to the tower, all four of us. Sunlight came down dappled through the
moss and leaves, created archipelagos of light on the flat surface of the entrance.
It remained unremarkable, inert, in no way ominous … and yet it took an act of will
to stand there, staring at the entry point. I noticed the anthropologist checking
her black box, was relieved to see it did not display a glowing red light. If it had,
we would have had to abort our exploration, move on to other things. I did not want
that, despite the touch of fear.

“How deep do you think it goes down?” the anthropologist asked.

“Remember that we are to put our faith in your measurements,” the psychologist answered,
with a slight frown. “The measurements do not lie. This structure is 61.4 feet in
diameter. It is raised 7.9 inches from the ground. The stairwell appears to have been
positioned at or close to due north, which may tell us something about its creation,
eventually. It is made of stone and coquina, not of metal or of bricks. These are
facts. That it wasn’t on the maps means only that a storm may have uncovered the entrance.”