Annihilation (15 page)

“I’m not changing!” I shouted it, an unexpected rage rising inside of me.

A wet chuckle, a mocking tone. “Of course you’re not. You’re just becoming more of
what you’ve always been. And I’m not changing, either. None of us are changing. Everything
is fine. Let’s have a picnic.”

“Shut up. Why did you abandon us?”

“The expedition had been compromised.”

“That isn’t an explanation.”

“Did you ever give
me
a proper explanation, during training?”

“We hadn’t been compromised, not enough to abandon the mission.”

“Sixth day after reaching base camp and one person is dead, two already
changing
, the fourth wavering? I would call that a disaster.”

“If it was a disaster, you helped create it.” I realized that as much as I mistrusted
the psychologist personally, I had come to rely on her to lead the expedition. On
some level, I was furious that she had betrayed us, furious that she might be leaving
me now. “You just panicked, and you gave up.”

The psychologist nodded. “That, too. I did. I did. I should have recognized earlier
that you had changed. I should have sent you back to the border. I shouldn’t have
gone down there with the anthropologist. But here we are.” She grimaced, coughed out
a thick wetness.

I ignored the jab, changed the line of questioning. “What does the border look like?”

That smile again. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“What really happens when we cross over?”

“Not what you might expect.”

“Tell me! What do we cross through?” I felt as if I were getting lost. Again.

There was a gleam in her eye now that I did not like, that promised damage. “I want
you to think about something. You might be immune to hypnosis—you might—but what about
the veil already in place? What if I removed that veil so you could access your own
memories of crossing the border?” the psychologist asked. “Would you like that, Little
Flame? Would you like it or would you go mad?”

“If you try to do anything to me, I’ll kill you,” I said—and meant it. The thought
of hypnosis in general, and the conditioning behind it, had been difficult for me,
an invasive price to be paid in return for access to Area X. The thought of further
tampering was intolerable.

“How many of your memories do you think are implanted?” the psychologist asked. “How
many of your memories of the world beyond the border are verifiable?”

“That won’t work on me,” I told her. “I am sure of the here and now, this moment,
and the next. I am sure of my past.” That was ghost bird’s castle keep, and it was
inviolate. It might have been punctured by the hypnosis during training, but it had
not been breached. Of this I was certain, and would continue to be certain, because
I had no choice.

I sat back on my haunches, staring at her. I wanted to leave her before she poisoned
me, but I couldn’t.

“Let’s stick to your own hallucinations,” I said. “Describe the Crawler to me.”

“There are things you must see with your own eyes. You might get closer. You might
be more familiar to it.” Her lack of regard for the anthropologist’s fate was hideous,
but so was mine.

“What did you hide from us about Area X?”

“Too general a question.” I think it amused the psychologist, even dying, for me to
so desperately need answers from her.

“Okay, then: What do the black boxes measure?”

“Nothing. They don’t measure anything. It’s just a psychological ploy to keep the
expedition calm: no red light, no danger.”

“What is the secret behind the Tower?”

“The tunnel? If we knew, do you think we would keep sending in expeditions?”

“They’re scared. The Southern Reach.”

“That is my impression.”

“Then they have no answers.”

“I’ll give you this scrap: The border is advancing. For now, slowly, a little bit
more every year. In ways you wouldn’t expect. But maybe soon it’ll eat a mile or two
at a time.”

The thought of that silenced me for a long moment. When you are too close to the center
of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire. The black
boxes might do nothing but in my mind they were all blinking red.

“How many expeditions have there been?”

“Ah, the journals,” she said. “There are quite a lot of them, aren’t there?”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Maybe I don’t know the answer. Maybe I just don’t want to tell you.”

It was going to continue this way, to the end, and there wasn’t anything I could do
about it.

“What did the ‘first’ expedition really find?”

The psychologist grimaced, and not from her pain this time, but more as if she were
remembering something that caused her shame. “There’s video from that expedition …
of a sort. The main reason no advanced tech was allowed after that.”

Video. Somehow, after searching through the mound of journals, that information didn’t
startle me. I kept moving forward.

“What orders didn’t you reveal to us?”

“You’re beginning to bore me. And I’m beginning to fade a little … Sometimes we tell
you more, sometimes less. They have their metrics and their reasons.” Somehow the
“they” felt made of cardboard, as if she didn’t quite believe in “them.”

Reluctantly, I returned to the personal. “What do you know about my husband?”

“Nothing more than you’ll find out from reading his journal. Have you found it yet?”

“No,” I lied.

“Very insightful—about you, especially.”

Was that a bluff? She’d certainly had enough time up in the lighthouse to find it,
read it, and toss it back onto the pile.

It didn’t matter. The sky was darkening and encroaching, the waves deepening, the
surf making the shorebirds scatter on their stilt legs and then regroup as it receded.
The sand seemed suddenly more porous around us. The meandering paths of crabs and
worms continued to be written into its surface. A whole community lived here, was
going about its business, oblivious to our conversation. And where out there lay the
seaward border? When I had asked the psychologist during training she had said only
that no one had ever crossed it, and I had imagined expeditions that just evaporated
into mist and light and distance.

A rattle had entered the psychologist’s breathing, which was now shallow and inconsistent.

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” Relenting.

“Leave me here when I die,” she said. Now all her fear was visible. “Don’t bury me.
Don’t take me anywhere. Leave me here where I belong.”

“Is there anything else you’re willing to tell me?”

“We should never have come here. I should never have come here.” The rawness in her
tone hinted at a personal anguish that went beyond her physical condition.

“That’s all?”

“I’ve come to believe it is the one fundamental truth.”

I took her to mean that it was better to let the border advance, to ignore it, let
it affect some other, more distant generation. I didn’t agree with her, but I said
nothing. Later, I would come to believe she had meant something altogether different.

“Has anyone ever really come back from Area X?”

“Not for a long time now,” the psychologist said in a tired whisper. “Not really.”
But I don’t know if she had heard the question.

Her head sagged downward and she lost consciousness, then came to again and stared
out at the waves. She muttered a few words, one of which might have been “remote”
or “demote” and another that might have been “hatching” or “watching.” But I could
not be sure.

Soon dusk would descend. I gave her more water. It was hard to think of her as an
adversary the closer she came to death, even though clearly she knew so much more
than she had told me. Regardless, it didn’t bear much thought because she wasn’t going
to divulge anything else. And maybe I
had
looked to her like a flame as I came near. Maybe that was the only way she could
think of me now.

“Did you know about the pile of journals?” I asked. “Before we came here?”

But she did not answer.

*   *   *

There were things I had to do after she died, even though I was running short of daylight,
even though I did not like doing them. If she wouldn’t answer my questions while alive,
then she would have to answer some of them now. I took off the psychologist’s jacket
and laid it to the side, discovering in the process that she had hidden her own journal
in a zippered inside pocket, folded up. I put that to the side, too, under a stone,
the pages flapping in the gusts of wind.

Then I took out my penknife and, with great care, cut away the left sleeve of her
shirt. The sponginess of her shoulder had bothered me, and I saw I’d had good reason
to be concerned. From her collarbone down to her elbow, her arm had been colonized
by a fibrous green-gold fuzziness, which gave off a faint glow. From the indentations
and long rift running down her triceps, it appeared to have spread from an initial
wound—the wound she said she had received from the Crawler. Whatever had contaminated
me, this different and more direct contact had spread faster and had more disastrous
consequences. Certain parasites and fruiting bodies could cause not just paranoia
but schizophrenia, all-too-realistic hallucinations, and thus promote delusional behavior.
I had no doubt now that she had seen me as a flame approaching, that she had attributed
her inability to shoot me to some exterior force, that she had been assailed by the
fear of some approaching presence. If nothing else, the memory of the encounter with
the Crawler would, I imagined, have unhinged her to some degree.

I cut a skin sample from her arm, along with some of the flesh beneath, and prodded
it into a collection vial. Then I took another sample from her other arm. Once I got
back to base camp, I would examine both.

I was shaking a little by then, so I took a break, turned my attention to the journal.
It was devoted to transcribing the words on the wall of the Tower, was filled with
so many new passages:

… but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or
in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the
strangling fruit and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in
shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive …

There were a few notes scribbled in the margins. One read “lighthouse keeper,” which
made me wonder if she’d circled the man in the photograph. Another read “North?” and
a third “island.” I had no clue what these notes meant—or what it said about the psychologist’s
state of mind that her journal was devoted to this text. I felt only a simple, uncomplicated
relief that someone had completed a task for me that would have been laborious and
difficult otherwise. My only question was whether she had gotten the text from the
walls of the Tower, from journals within the lighthouse, or from some other source
entirely. I still don’t know.

Careful to avoid contact with her shoulder and arm, I then searched the psychologist’s
body. I patted down her shirt, her pants, searching for anything hidden. I found a
tiny handgun strapped to her left calf and a letter in a small envelope folded up
in her right boot. The psychologist had written a name on the envelope; at least,
it looked like her handwriting. The name started with an
S
. Was it her child’s name? A friend? A lover? I had not seen a name or heard a name
spoken aloud for months, and seeing one now bothered me deeply. It seemed wrong, as
if it did not belong in Area X. A name was a dangerous luxury here. Sacrifices didn’t
need names. People who served a function didn’t need to be named. In all ways, the
name was a further and unwanted confusion to me, a dark space that kept growing and
growing in my mind.

I tossed the gun far across the sand, balled up the envelope, sent it after the gun.
I was thinking of having discovered my husband’s journal, and how in some ways that
discovery was worse than its absence. And, on some level, I was still angry at the
psychologist.

Finally I searched her pants pockets. I found some change, a smooth worry stone, and
a slip of paper. On the paper I found a list of hypnotic suggestions that included
“induce paralysis,” “induce acceptance,” and “compel obedience,” each corresponding
to an activation word or phrase. She must have been intensely afraid of forgetting
which words gave her control over us, to have written them down. Her cheat sheet included
other reminders, like: “Surveyor needs reinforcement” and “Anthropologist’s mind is
porous.” About me she had only this cryptic phrase: “Silence creates its own violence.”
How insightful.

The word “Annihilation” was followed by “help induce immediate suicide.”

We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them
was dead.

*   *   *

Part of my husband’s life had been defined by nightmares he’d had as a child. These
debilitating experiences had sent him to a psychiatrist. They involved a house and
a basement and the awful crimes that had occurred there. But the psychiatrist had
ruled out suppressed memory, and he was left at the end with just trying to draw the
poison by keeping a diary about them. Then, as an adult at university, a few months
before he’d joined the navy, he had gone to a classic film festival … and there, up
on the big screen, my future husband had seen his nightmares acted out. It was only
then that he realized the television set must have been left on at some point when
he was only a couple of years old, with that horror movie playing. The splinter in
his mind, never fully dislodged, disintegrated into nothing. He said that was the
moment he knew he was free, that it was from then on that he left behind the shadows
of his childhood … because it had all been an illusion, a fake, a forgery, a scrawling
across his mind that had falsely made him go in one direction when he had been meant
to go in another.