Annihilation (10 page)

When the rain stopped, I woke from a brief nap on the couch to find him gone from
beside me. I tried not to panic when I checked every room and couldn’t find him anywhere.
I went outside and eventually found him around the side of the house. He was standing
in front of the boat he had bought a few years back, which we could never fit in the
garage. It was just a cruiser, about twenty feet long, but he loved it.

As I came and curled my arm around his, he had a puzzled, almost forlorn look on his
face, as if he could remember that the boat was important to him but not why. He didn’t
acknowledge my presence, kept staring at the boat with a growing blank intensity.
I could feel him trying to recall something important; I just didn’t realize until
much later that it had to do with me. That he could have told me something vital,
then, there, if he could only have recalled what. So we just stood there, and although
I could feel the heat and weight of him beside me, the steady sound of his breathing,
we were living apart.

After a while, I couldn’t take it—the sheer directionless anonymity of his distress,
his silence. I led him back inside. He didn’t stop me. He didn’t protest. He didn’t
try to look back over his shoulder at the boat. I think that’s when I made my decision.
If he had only looked back. If he had just resisted me, even for a moment, it might
have been different.

At dinner, as he was finishing, they came for him in four or five unmarked cars and
a surveillance van. They did not come in rough or shouting, with handcuffs and weapons
on display. Instead, they approached him with respect, one might almost say fear:
the kind of watchful gentleness you might display if about to handle an unexploded
bomb. He went without protest, and I let them take this stranger from my house.

I couldn’t have stopped them, but I also didn’t want to. The last few hours I had
coexisted with him in a kind of rising panic, more and more convinced that whatever
had happened to him in Area X had turned him into a shell, an automaton going through
the motions. Someone I had never known. With every atypical act or word, he was driving
me further from the memory of the person I had known, and despite everything that
had happened, preserving that idea of him was important. That is why I called the
special number he had left me for emergencies: I didn’t know what to do with him,
couldn’t coexist with him any longer in this altered state. Seeing him leave I felt
mostly a sense of relief, to be honest, not guilt at betrayal. What else could I have
done?

As I have said, I visited him in the observation facility right up until the end.
Even under hypnosis in those taped interviews, he had nothing new to say, really,
unless it was kept from me. I remember mostly the repetitious sadness in his words.
“I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long
time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I
am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me
but just something that has been walking for a very long time…”

This was really the only thing I discovered in him after his return: a deep and unending
solitude, as if he had been granted a gift that he didn’t know what to do with. A
gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me?
That was the question that crept into my mind even as I stared into his eyes those
last few times, willing myself to know his thoughts and failing.

As I labored at my increasingly repetitive job, in a sterile lab, I kept thinking
about Area X, and how I would never know what it was like without going there. No
one could really tell me, and no account could possibly be a substitute. So several
months after my husband died, I volunteered for an Area X expedition. A spouse of
a former expedition member had never signed up before. I think they accepted me in
part because they wanted to see if that connection might make a difference. I think
they accepted me as an experiment. But then again, maybe from the start they expected
me to sign up.

*   *   *

By morning, it had stopped raining and the sky was a searing blue, almost devoid of
clouds. Only the pine needles strewn across the top of our tents and the dirty puddles
and fallen tree limbs on the ground told of the storm the night before. The brightness
infecting my senses had spread to my chest; I can describe it no other way. Internally,
there was a
brightness
in me, a kind of prickling energy and anticipation that pushed hard against my lack
of sleep. Was this part of the change? But even so, it didn’t matter—I had no way
to combat what might be happening to me.

I also had a decision to make, finding myself torn between the lighthouse and the
tower. Some part of the brightness wanted to return to darkness at once, and the logic
of this related to nerve, or lack of it. To plunge right back into the tower, without
thought, without planning, would be an act of faith, of sheer resolve or recklessness
with nothing else behind it. But now I also knew that
someone
had been in the lighthouse the night before. If the psychologist had sought refuge
there, and I could track her down, then I might gain more insight into the tower before
exploring it further. This seemed of increasing importance, more so than the night
before, because the number of unknowns the tower represented had multiplied tenfold.
So by the time I talked to the surveyor, I had decided on the lighthouse.

The morning had the scent and feel of a fresh start, but it was not to be. If the
surveyor had wanted no part of a return to the tower, then she equally had no interest
in the lighthouse.

“You don’t want to find out if the psychologist is there?”

The surveyor gave me a look as if I had said something idiotic. “Holed up in a high
position with clear lines of sight in every direction? In a place they’ve told us
has a weapons cache? I’ll take my chances here. If you were smart, you’d do the same.
You might ‘find out’ that you don’t like a bullet hole in the head. Besides, she might
be somewhere else.”

Her stubbornness tore at me. I didn’t want to split up for purely practical reasons—it
was true we had been told prior expeditions had stored weapons at the lighthouse—and
because I believed it more likely that the surveyor would try to go home without me
there.

“It’s the lighthouse or the tower,” I said, trying to sidestep the issue. “And it
would be better for us if we found the psychologist before we went back down into
the tower. She saw whatever killed the anthropologist. She knows more than she’s told
us.” The unspoken thought: That perhaps if a day passed, or two, whatever lived in
the tower, slowly making words on the wall, would have disappeared or gotten so far
ahead of us we would never catch up. But that brought to mind a disturbing image of
the tower as endless, with infinite levels descending into the earth.

The surveyor folded her arms. “You really don’t get it, do you? This mission is over.”

Was she afraid? Did she just not like me enough to say yes? Whatever the reason, her
opposition angered me, as did the smug look on her face.

In the moment, I did something that I regret now. I said, “There’s no
reward in the risk
of going back to the tower right now.”

I thought I had been subtle in my intonation of one of the psychologist’s hypnotic
cues, but a shudder passed over the surveyor’s face, a kind of temporary disorientation.
When it cleared, the look that remained told me she understood what I had tried to
do. It wasn’t even a look of surprise; more that in her mind I had confirmed an impression
of me that had been slowly forming but was now set. Now, too, I had learned that hypnotic
cues only worked for the psychologist.

“You’d do anything, wouldn’t you, to get your way,” the surveyor said, but the fact
was: She held the rifle. What weapon did I really have? And I told myself it was because
I didn’t want the anthropologist’s death to be meaningless that I had suggested this
course of action.

When I did not reply, she sighed, then said, with weariness in her voice, “You know,
I finally figured it out while I was developing those useless photographs. What bothered
me the most. It’s not the thing in the tunnel or the way you conduct yourself or anything
the psychologist did. It’s this rifle I’m holding. This damn rifle. I stripped it
down to clean it and found it was made of thirty-year-old parts, cobbled together.
Nothing
we brought with us is from the present. Not our clothes, not our shoes. It’s all
old junk. Restored crap. We’ve been living in the past this whole time. In some sort
of
reenactment
. And why?” She made a derisive sound. “You don’t even know why.”

It was as much as she’d ever said to me at one time. I wanted to say that this information
registered as little more than the mildest of surprises in the hierarchy of what we
had thus far discovered. But I didn’t. All I had left was to be succinct.

“Will you remain here until I return?” I asked.

This was now the essential question, and I didn’t like the speed of her reply, or
its tone.

“Whatever you want.”

“Don’t say anything you can’t back up,” I said. I had long ago stopped believing in
promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

“Fuck off,” she said.

So that’s how we left it—her leaning back in that rickety chair, holding her assault
rifle, as I went off to discover the source of the light I had seen the night before.
I had with me a knapsack full of food and water, along with two of the guns, equipment
to take samples, and one of the microscopes. Somehow I felt safer taking a microscope
with me. Some part of me, too, no matter how I had tried to convince the surveyor
to come with me, welcomed the chance to explore alone, to not be dependent on, or
worried about, anyone else.

I looked back a couple of times before the trail twisted away, and the surveyor was
still sitting there, staring at me like a distorted reflection of who I’d been just
days before.

03: IMMOLATION

Now a strange mood took hold of me, as I walked silent and alone through the last
of the pines and the cypress knees that seemed to float in the black water, the gray
moss that coated everything. It was as if I traveled through the landscape with the
sound of an expressive and intense aria playing in my ears. Everything was imbued
with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of
a wave building and building but never crashing to shore. I saw with such new eyes
the subtleties of the transition to the marsh, the salt flats. As the trail became
a raised berm, dull, algae-choked lakes spread out to the right and a canal flanked
it to the left. Rough channels of water meandered out in a maze through a forest of
reeds on the canal side, and islands, oases of wind-contorted trees, appeared in the
distance like sudden revelations. The stooped and blackened appearance of these trees
was shocking against the vast and shimmering gold-brown of the reeds. The strange
quality of the light upon this habitat, the stillness of it all, the sense of
waiting
, brought me halfway to a kind of ecstasy.

Beyond, the lighthouse stood, and before that, I knew, the remains of a village, also
marked on the map. But in front of me was the trail, strewn at times with oddly tortured-looking
pieces of heavy white driftwood flung far inland from past hurricanes. Tiny red grasshoppers
inhabited the long grass in legions, with only a few frogs present to feast on them,
and flattened grass tunnels marked where the huge reptiles had, after bathing in the
sun, slid back into the water. Above, raptors searched the ground below for prey,
circling as if in geometric patterns so controlled was their flight.

In that cocoon of timelessness, with the lighthouse seeming to remain distant no matter
how long I walked, I had more time to think about the tower and our expedition. I
felt that I had abdicated my responsibility to that point, which was to consider those
elements found inside of the tower as part of a vast biological entity that might
or might not be terrestrial. But contemplating the sheer enormity of that idea on
a macro level would have broken my mood like an avalanche crashing into my body.

So … what did I know? What were the specific details? An … organism … was writing
living words along the interior walls of the tower, and may have been doing so for
a very long time. Whole ecosystems had been born and now flourished among the words,
dependent on them, before dying off as the words faded. But this was a side effect
of creating the right conditions, a viable habitat. It was important only in that
the adaptations of the creatures living in the words could tell me something about
the tower. For example, the spores I had inhaled, which pointed to a
truthful seeing
.

I was brought up short by this idea, the wind-lashed marsh reeds a wide, blurred ripple
all around me. I had assumed the psychologist had hypnotized me into seeing the tower
as a physical construction not a biological entity, and that an effect of the spores
had made me resistant to this hypnotic suggestion. But what if the process had been
more complex? What if, by whatever means, the
tower
emanated an effect, too—one that constituted a kind of defensive mimicry, and the
spores had made me immune to that illusion?

Telescoping out from this context, I had several questions and few answers. What role
did the
Crawler
serve? (I had decided it was important to assign a name to the maker-of-words.) What
was the purpose of the physical “recitation” of the words? Did the actual words matter,
or would any words do? Where had the words come from? What was the interplay between
the words and the tower-creature? Put another way: Were the words a form of symbiotic
or parasitic communication between the Crawler and the Tower? Either the Crawler was
an
emissary
of the Tower or the Crawler had originally existed independent from it and come into
its orbit later. But without the damned missing sample of the Tower wall, I couldn’t
really begin to guess.