Annihilation (13 page)

When I saw those hundreds of journals, I felt for a long moment that I had become
that old biologist after all. That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize
you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

*   *   *

Reality encroaches in other ways, too. At some point during our relationship, my husband
began to call me the ghost bird, which was his way of teasing me for not being present
enough in his life. It would be said with a kind of creasing at the corner of his
lips that almost formed a thin smile, but in his eyes I could see the reproach. If
we went to bars with his friends, one of his favorite things to do, I would volunteer
only what a prisoner might during an interrogation. They weren’t
my
friends, not really, but also I wasn’t in the habit of engaging in small talk, nor
in broad talk, as I liked to call it. I didn’t care about politics except in how politics
impinged upon the environment. I wasn’t religious. All of my hobbies were bound up
in my work. I lived for the work, and I thrilled with the power of that focus but
it was also deeply personal. I didn’t like to talk about my research. I didn’t wear
makeup or care about new shoes or the latest music. I’m sure my husband’s friends
found me taciturn, or worse. Perhaps they even found me unsophisticated, or “strangely
uneducated” as I heard one of them say, although I don’t know if he was referring
to me.

I enjoyed the bars, but not for the same reasons as my husband. I loved the late-night
slow burn of
being out
, my mind turning over some problem, some piece of data, while able to appear sociable
but still existing apart. He worried too much about me, though, and my need for solitude
ate into his enjoyment of talking to friends, who were mostly from the hospital. I
would see him trail off in mid-sentence, gazing at me for some sign of my own contentment,
as, off to the side, I drank my whiskey neat. “Ghost bird,” he would say later, “did
you have fun?” I’d nod and smile.

But fun for me was sneaking off to peer into a tidal pool, to grasp the intricacies
of the creatures that lived there. Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat,
orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things. Observation
had always meant more to me than interaction. He knew all of this, I think. But I
never could express myself that well to him, although I did try, and he did listen.
And yet, I was
nothing but
expression in other ways. My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places
could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease. Even
a bar was a type of ecosystem, if a crude one, and to someone entering, someone without
my husband’s agenda, that person could have seen me sitting there and had no trouble
imagining that I was happy in my little bubble of silence. Would have had no trouble
believing I fit in.

Yet even as my husband wanted me to be assimilated in a sense, the irony was that
he
wanted to stand out. Seeing that huge pile of journals, this was another thing I
thought of: That he had been wrong for the eleventh expedition because of this quality.
That here were the indiscriminate accounts of so many souls, and that his account
couldn’t possibly stand out
. That, in the end, he’d been reduced to a state that approximated my own.

Those journals, flimsy gravestones, confronted me with my husband’s death all over
again. I dreaded finding his, dreaded knowing his true account, not the featureless,
generic mutterings he had given to our superiors upon his return.

“Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his
expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I
loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to
be. A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the
context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight
into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so
mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the
passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.

*   *   *

The journals and other materials formed a moldering pile about twelve feet high and
sixteen feet wide that in places near the bottom had clearly turned to compost, the
paper rotting away. Beetles and silverfish tended to those archives, and tiny black
cockroaches with always moving antennae. Toward the base, and spilling out at the
edges, I saw the remains of photographs and dozens of ruined cassette tapes mixed
in with the mulch of pages. There, too, I saw evidence of rats. I would have to lower
myself down into the midden by means of the ladder nailed to the lip of the trapdoor
and trudge through a collapsing garbage hill of disintegrating pulp to uncover anything
at all. The scene obliquely embodied the scrap of writing I had encountered on the
Tower wall:
… the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround
the world with the power of their lives …

I overturned the table and laid it across the narrow entrance to the stairwell. I
had no idea where the psychologist had gotten to, but I didn’t want her or anyone
else surprising me. If someone tried to move the table from below, I would hear it
and have time to climb up to greet them with my gun. I also had a sensation I can
in hindsight attribute to the brightness growing within me: of a
presence
pressing up from below, impinging on the edges of my senses. A prickling crept across
my skin at unexpected times, for no good reason.

I didn’t like that the psychologist had stashed all of her gear down with the journals,
including what appeared to be most or all of her weapons. For the moment, though,
I had to put the puzzle of that out of my mind, along with the still-reverberating
tremors from the certain knowledge that most of the training the Southern Reach had
given us had been based on a lie. As I lowered myself into that cool, dark, sheltered
space beneath, I felt the pull of the brightness within me even more acutely. That
was harder to ignore, since I didn’t know what it meant.

My flashlight, along with the natural light from the open trapdoor, revealed that
the walls of the room were rife with striations of mold, some of which formed dull
stripes of red and green. From below, the way the midden spilled out in ripples and
hillocks of paper became more apparent. Torn pages, crushed pages, journal covers
warped and damp. Slowly the history of exploring Area X could be said to be turning
into Area X.

I picked around the edges at first, chose journals at random. Most, at a glance, depicted
quite ordinary events, such as those described by the first expedition … which could
not have been the first expedition. Some were extraordinary only because the dates
did not make sense. How many expeditions had really come across the border? Just how
much information had been doctored and suppressed, and for how long? Did “twelve”
expeditions refer only to the latest iteration of a longer effort, the omission of
the rest necessary to quell the doubts of those approached to be volunteers?

What I would call pre-expedition accounts, documented in a variety of forms, also
existed in that place. This was the underlying archive of audiocassettes, chewed-at
photographs, and decomposing folders full of papers that I had first glimpsed from
above—all of it oppressed by the weight of the journals on top. All of it suffused
by a dull, damp smell that contained within it a masked sharp stench of decay, which
revealed itself in some places and not others. A bewildering confusion of typewritten,
printed, and handwritten words piled up in my head alongside half-seen images like
a mental facsimile of the midden itself. The clutter at times brought me close to
becoming frozen, even without factoring in the contradictions. I became aware of the
weight of the photograph in my pocket.

I made some initial rules, as if that would help. I ignored journals that appeared
to be written in a shorthand and did not try to decipher those that appeared to be
in code. I also started out reading some journals straight through and then decided
to force myself to skim. But sampling was sometimes worse. I came across pages that
described unspeakable acts that I still cannot bring myself to set down in words.
Entries that mentioned periods of “remission” and “cessation” followed by “flare-ups”
and “horrible manifestations.” No matter how long Area X had existed, and how many
expeditions had come here, I could tell from these accounts that for years before
there had ever been a border, strange things had happened along this coast. There
had been a proto–Area X.

Some types of omissions made my mind itch as much as more explicit offerings. One
journal, half-destroyed by the damp, focused solely on the qualities of a kind of
thistle with a lavender blossom that grew in the hinterlands between forest and swamp.
Page after page described encountering first one specimen of this thistle and then
another, along with minute details about the insects and other creatures that occupied
that microhabitat. In no instance did the observer stray more than a foot or two from
a particular plant, and at no point, either, did the observer pull back to provide
a glimpse of base camp or their own life. After a while, a kind of unease came over
me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these
entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond
the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that
horror. An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle,
a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine. When the latter part of the book
dissolved into ruined ink and moist pulp, I was almost relieved to be rid of that
unnerving repetition, for there had been a hypnotic, trancelike quality to the accounts.
If there had been an endless number of pages, I feared that I would have stood there
reading for an eternity, until I fell to the floor and died of thirst or starvation.

I began to wonder if the absence of references to the Tower fit this theory as well,
this writing around the edges of things.

… in the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe …

Then I found, after several banal or incomprehensible samples, a journal that wasn’t
the same type as my own. It dated back to before the first expedition but after the
border had come down and referenced “building the wall,” which clearly meant the fortification
facing the sea. A page later—mixed in with esoteric meteorological readings—three
words leapt out at me: “repelling an attack.” I read the next few entries with care.
The writer at first made no reference to the nature of the attack or the identity
of the attackers, but the assault had come from the sea and “left four of us dead,”
although the wall had held. Later, the sense of desperation grew, and I read:

… the desolation comes from the sea again, along with the strange lights and the marine
life that at high tide batters itself against our wall. At night, now, their outliers
try to creep in through the gaps in our wall defenses. Still, we hold, but our ammunition
is running out. Some of us want to abandon the lighthouse, try for either the island
or inland, but the commander says she has her orders. Morale is low. Not everything
that is happening to us has a rational explanation.

Soon after, the account trailed off. It had a distinctly unreal quality to it, as
if a fictionalized version of a real event. I tried to imagine what Area X might have
looked like so long ago. I couldn’t.

The lighthouse had drawn expedition members like the ships it had once sought to bring
to safety through the narrows and reefs offshore. I could only underscore my previous
speculation that to most of them a lighthouse was a symbol, a reassurance of the old
order, and by its prominence on the horizon it provided an illusion of a safe refuge.
That it had betrayed that trust was manifest in what I had found downstairs. And yet
even though some of them must have known that, still they had come. Out of hope. Out
of faith. Out of stupidity.

But I had begun to realize that you had to wage a guerrilla war against whatever force
had come to inhabit Area X if you wanted to fight at all. You had to fade into the
landscape, or like the writer of the thistle chronicles, you had to pretend it wasn’t
there for as long as possible. To acknowledge it, to try to name it, might be a way
of letting it in. (For the same reason, I suppose, I have continued to refer to the
changes in me as a “brightness,” because to examine this condition too closely—to
quantify it or deal with it empirically when I have little control over it—would make
it too real.)

At some point, I began to panic at the sheer volume of what remained in front of me,
and in my panic I refined my focus further: I would search only for phrases identical
to or similar in tone to the words on the wall of the Tower. I started to assail the
hill of paper more directly, to wade into the middle sections, the rectangle of light
above me a reassurance that this was not the sum of my existence. I rummaged like
the rats and the silverfish, I shoved my arms into the mess and came out holding whatever
my hands could grasp. At times I lost my balance and became buried in the papers,
wrestled with them, my nostrils full of rot, my tongue tasting it. I would have looked
unhinged to anyone watching from above, and I knew it even as I engaged in this frenzied,
futile activity.

But I found what I was looking for in more journals than I would have expected, and
usually it was that beginning phrase:
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring
forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms …
Often it appeared as a scrawled margin note or in other ways disconnected from the
text around it. Once, I discovered it documented as a phrase on the wall of the lighthouse
itself, which “we quickly washed away,” with no reason given. Another time, in a spidery
hand, I found a reference to “text in a logbook that reads as if it came out of the
Old Testament, but is from no psalm I remember.” How could this not refer to the Crawler’s
writing?
… to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with
the power of their lives …
But none of this placed me any closer to understanding
why
or
who
. We were all in the dark, scrabbling at the pile of journals, and if ever I felt
the weight of my predecessors, it was there and then, lost in it all.