Annihilation (5 page)

As for the papers, they proved to be sketches of landscapes within Area X or brief
descriptions. Some were cartoons of animals or caricatures of fellow expedition members.
All of them had, at some point, drawn the lighthouse or written about it. Looking
for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the
natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the
beholder.

At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces,
even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not
mean being dead.

02: INTEGRATION

In the morning, I woke with my senses heightened, so that even the rough brown bark
of the pines or the ordinary lunging swoop of a woodpecker came to me as a kind of
minor revelation. The lingering fatigue from the four-day hike to base camp had left
me. Was this some side effect of the spores or just the result of a good night’s sleep?
I felt so refreshed that I didn’t really care.

But my reverie was soon tempered by disastrous news. The anthropologist was gone,
her tent empty of her personal effects. Worse, in my view, the psychologist seemed
shaken, and as if she hadn’t slept. She was squinting oddly, her hair more windblown
than usual. I noticed dirt caked on the sides of her boots. She was favoring her right
side, as if she had been injured.

“Where is the anthropologist?” the surveyor demanded, while I hung back, trying to
make my own sense of it.
What have you done with the anthropologist?
was my unspoken question, which I knew was unfair. The psychologist was no different
than she had been before; that I knew the secret to her magician’s show did not necessarily
mean she was a threat.

The psychologist stepped into our rising panic with a strange assertion: “I talked
to her late last night. What she saw in that … structure … unnerved her to the point
that she did not want to continue with this expedition. She has started back to the
border to await extraction. She took a partial report with her so that our superiors
will know our progress.” The psychologist’s habit of allowing a slim smile to cross
her face at inappropriate times made me want to slap her.

“But she left her gear—her gun, too,” the surveyor said.

“She took only what she needed so we would have more—including an extra gun.”

“Do you think we need an extra gun?” I asked the psychologist. I was truly curious.
In some ways I found the psychologist as fascinating as the tower. Her motivations,
her reasons. Why not resort to hypnosis now? Perhaps even with our underlying conditioning
some things are not suggestible, or fade with repetition, or she lacked the stamina
for it after the events of the night before.

“I think we don’t know what we need,” the psychologist said. “But we definitely did
not need the anthropologist here if she was unable to do her job.”

The surveyor and I stared at the psychologist. The surveyor’s arms were crossed. We
had been trained to keep a close watch on our colleagues for signs of sudden mental
stress or dysfunction. She was probably thinking what I was thinking: We had a choice
now. We could accept the psychologist’s explanation for the anthropologist’s disappearance
or reject it. If we rejected it, then we were saying the psychologist had lied to
us, and therefore also rejecting her authority at a critical time. And if we tried
to follow the trail back home, hoping to catch up with the anthropologist, to verify
the psychologist’s story … would we have the will to return to base camp afterward?

“We should continue with our plan,” the psychologist said. “We should investigate
the … tower.” The word
tower
in this context felt like a blatant plea for my loyalty.

Still the surveyor wavered, as if fighting the psychologist’s suggestion from the
night before. This alarmed me in another way. I was not going to leave Area X before
investigating the tower. This fact was ingrained in every part of me. And in that
context I could not bear to think of losing another member of the team so soon, leaving
me alone with the psychologist. Not when I was unsure of her and not when I still
had no idea of the effects of my exposure to the spores.

“She’s right,” I said. “We should continue with the mission. We can make do without
the anthropologist.” But my pointed stare to the surveyor made it clear to both of
them that we would revisit the issue of the anthropologist later.

The surveyor gave a surly nod and looked away.

An audible sigh of either relief or exhaustion came from the psychologist. “That’s
settled then,” she said, and brushed past the surveyor to start making breakfast.
The anthropologist had always made breakfast before.

*   *   *

At the tower, the situation changed yet again. The surveyor and I had readied light
packs with enough food and water to spend the full day down there. We both had our
weapons. We both had donned our breathing masks to keep out the spores, even though
it was too late for me. We both wore hard hats with fixed beams on them.

But the psychologist stood on the grass just beyond the circle of the tower, slightly
below us, and said, “I’ll stand guard here.”

“Against what?” I asked, incredulous. I did not want to let the psychologist out of
my sight. I wanted her embedded in the risk of the exploration, not standing at the
top, with all of the power over us implied by that position.

The surveyor wasn’t happy, either. In an almost pleading way that suggested a high
level of suppressed stress, she said, “You’re supposed to come with us. It’s safer
with three.”

“But you need to know that the entrance is secured,” the psychologist said, sliding
a magazine into her handgun. The harsh scraping sound echoed more than I would have
thought.

The surveyor’s grip on her assault rifle tightened until I could see her knuckles
whiten. “You need to come down with us.”

“There’s no
reward in the risk
of all of us going down,” the psychologist said, and from the inflection I recognized
a hypnotic command.

The surveyor’s grip on her rifle loosened. The features of her face became somehow
indistinct for a moment.

“You’re right,” the surveyor said. “Of course, you’re right. It makes perfect sense.”

A twinge of fear traveled down my back. Now it was two against one.

I thought about that for a moment, took in the full measure of the psychologist’s
stare as she focused her attention on me. Nightmarish, paranoid scenarios came to
me. Returning to find the entrance blocked, or the psychologist picking us off as
we reached for the open sky. Except: She could have killed us in our sleep any night
of the week.

“It’s not that important,” I said after a moment. “You’re as valuable to us up here
as down there.”

And so we descended, as before, under the psychologist’s watchful eye.

*   *   *

The first thing I noticed on the staging level before we reached the wider staircase
that spiraled down, before we encountered again the words written on the wall … the
tower was
breathing
. The tower
breathed
, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat … and they
were not made of stone but of
living tissue
. Those walls were still blank, but a kind of silvery-white phosphorescence rose off
of them. The world seemed to lurch, and I sat down heavily next to the wall, and the
surveyor was by my side, trying to help me up. I think I was shaking as I finally
stood. I don’t know if I can convey the enormity of that moment in words. The tower
was a living creature of some sort.
We were descending into an organism.

“What’s wrong?” the surveyor was asking me, voice muffled through her mask. “What
happened?”

I grabbed her hand, forced her palm against the wall.

“Let me go!” She tried to pull away, but I kept her there.

“Do you feel that?” I asked, unrelenting. “Can you feel that?”

“Feel
what
? What are you talking about?” She was scared, of course. To her, I was acting irrationally.

Still, I persisted: “A vibration. A kind of beat.” I removed my hand from hers, stepped
back.

The surveyor took a long, deep breath, and kept her hand on the wall. “No. Maybe.
No. No, nothing.”

“What about the wall. What is it made of?”

“Stone, of course,” she said. In the arc of my helmet flashlight, her shadowed face
was hollowed out, her eyes large and circled by darkness, the mask making it look
like she had no nose or mouth.

I took a deep breath. I wanted it all to spill out: that I had been contaminated,
that the psychologist was hypnotizing us far more than we might have suspected.
That the walls were made of living tissue.
But I didn’t. Instead, I “got my shit together,” as my husband used to say. I got
my shit together because we were going to go forward and the surveyor couldn’t see
what I saw, couldn’t experience what I was experiencing. And I couldn’t make her see
it.

“Forget it,” I said. “I became disoriented for a second.”

“Look, we should go back up now. You’re panicking,” the surveyor said. We had all
been told we might see things that weren’t there while in Area X. I know she was thinking
that this had happened to me.

I held up the black box on my belt. “Nope—it’s not flashing. We’re good.” It was a
joke, a feeble joke, but still.

“You saw something that wasn’t there.” She wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

You can’t see what
is
there
, I thought.

“Maybe,” I admitted, “but isn’t that important, too? Isn’t that part of all of this?
The reporting? And something I see that you don’t might be important.”

The surveyor weighed that for a moment. “How do you feel now?”

“I feel fine,” I lied. “I don’t see anything now,” I lied. My heart felt like an animal
had become trapped in my chest and was trying to crawl out. The surveyor was now surrounded
by a corona of the white phosphorescence from the walls. Nothing was receding. Nothing
was leaving me.

“Then we’ll go on,” the surveyor said. “But only if you promise to tell me if you
see anything unusual again.”

I almost laughed at that, I remember.
Unusual?
Like strange words on a wall? Written among tiny communities of creatures of unknown
origin.

“I promise,” I said. “And you will do the same for me, right?” Turning the tables,
making her realize it might happen to her, too.

She said, “Just don’t touch me again or I’ll hurt you.”

I nodded in agreement. She didn’t like knowing I was physically stronger than her.

Under the terms of that flawed agreement we proceeded to the stairs and into the gullet
of the tower, the depths now revealing themselves in a kind of ongoing horror show
of such beauty and biodiversity that I could not fully take it all in. But I tried,
just as I had always tried, even from the very beginning of my career.

*   *   *

My lodestone, the place I always thought of when people asked me why I became a biologist,
was the overgrown swimming pool in the backyard of the rented house where I grew up.
My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too
fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed
accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing.
Neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length
of time. Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born
into one.

They did not have the will or inclination to clean the kidney-shaped pool, even though
it was fairly small. Soon after we moved in, the grass around its edges grew long.
Sedge weeds and other towering plants became prevalent. The short bushes lining the
fence around the pool lunged up to obscure the chain link. Moss grew in the cracks
in the tile path that circled it. The water level slowly rose, fed by the rain, and
the surface became more and more brackish with algae. Dragonflies continually scouted
the area. Bullfrogs moved in, the wriggling malformed dots of their tadpoles always
present. Water gliders and aquatic beetles began to make the place their own. Rather
than get rid of my thirty-gallon freshwater aquarium, as my parents wanted, I dumped
the fish into the pool, and some survived the shock of that. Local birds, like herons
and egrets, began to appear, drawn by the frogs and fish and insects. By some miracle,
too, small turtles began to live in the pool, although I had no idea how they had
gotten there.

Within months of our arrival, the pool had become a functioning ecosystem. I would
slowly enter through the creaking wooden gate and observe it all from a rusty lawn
chair I had set up in a far corner. Despite a strong and well-founded fear of drowning,
I had always loved being around bodies of water.

Inside the house, my parents did whatever banal, messy things people in the human
world usually did, some of it loudly. But I could easily lose myself in the microworld
of the pool.

Inevitably my focus netted from my parents useless lectures of worry over my chronic
introversion, as if by doing so they could convince me they were still in charge.
I didn’t have enough (or any) friends, they reminded me. I didn’t seem to make the
effort. I could be earning money from a part-time job. But when I told them that several
times, like a reluctant ant lion, I had had to hide from bullies at the bottom of
the gravel pits that lay amid the abandoned fields beyond the school, they had no
answers. Nor when one day for “no reason” I punched a fellow student in the face when
she said hello to me in the lunch line.

So we proceeded, locked into our separate imperatives. They had their lives, and I
had mine. I liked most of all pretending to be a biologist, and pretending often leads
to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance.
I wrote down my pool observations in several journals. I knew each individual frog
from the next, Old Flopper so much different from Ugly Leaper, and during which month
I could expect the grass to teem with hopping juveniles. I knew which species of heron
turned up year-round and which were migrants. The beetles and dragonflies were harder
to identify, their life cycles harder to intuit, but I still diligently tried to understand
them. In all of this, I eschewed books on ecology or biology. I wanted to discover
the information on my own first.