Annihilation (9 page)

Then there was the sample from the anthropologist’s vial. I had left it for last for
the obvious reasons. I had the surveyor take a section, put it on the slide, and write
down what she saw through the microscope.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did you need me to do this?”

I hesitated. “Hypothetically … there could be contamination.”

Such a hard face, jaw tight. “Hypothetically, why would you be any more or less contaminated
than me?”

I shrugged. “No particular reason. I was the first one to find the words on the wall,
though.”

She looked at me as if I had spouted nonsense, laughed harshly. “We’re in so much
deeper than that. Do you really think those masks we wore are going to keep us safe?
From whatever’s going on here?” She was wrong—I thought she was wrong—but I didn’t
correct her. People trivialize or simplify data for so many reasons.

There was nothing else to be said. She went back to her work as I squinted through
the microscope at the sample from whatever had killed the anthropologist. At first
I didn’t know what I was looking at because it was so unexpected. It was brain tissue—and
not just any brain tissue. The cells were remarkably human, with some irregularities.
My thought at the time was that the sample
had
been corrupted, but if so not by my presence: The surveyor’s notes perfectly described
what I saw, and when she looked at the sample again later she confirmed its unchanged
nature.

I kept squinting through the microscope lens, and raising my head, and squinting again,
as if I couldn’t see the sample correctly. Then I settled down and stared at it until
it became just a series of squiggles and circles. Was it really human? Was it
pretending
to be human? As I said, there were irregularities. And how had the anthropologist
taken the sample? Just walked up to the
thing
with an ice-cream scoop and asked, “Can I take a biopsy of your brain?” No, the sample
had to come from the margins, from the exterior. Which meant it couldn’t be brain
tissue, which meant it was definitely not human. I felt unmoored, drifting, once again.

About then, the surveyor strode over and threw the developed photographs down on my
table. “Useless,” she said.

Every photograph of the words on the wall was a riot of luminous, out-of-focus color.
Every photograph of anything other than the words had come out as pure darkness. The
few in-between photos were also out of focus. I knew this was probably because of
the slow, steady breathing of the walls, which might also have been giving off some
kind of heat or other agent of distortion. A thought that made me realize I had not
taken a sample of the walls. I had recognized the words were organisms. I had known
the walls were, too, but my brain had still registered
walls
as inert, part of a structure. Why sample them?

“I know,” the surveyor said, misunderstanding my cursing. “Any luck with the samples?”

“No. No luck at all,” I said, still staring at the photographs. “Anything in the maps
and papers?”

The surveyor snorted. “Not a damn thing. Nothing. Except they all seem fixated on
the lighthouse—watching the lighthouse, going to the lighthouse, living in the goddamn
lighthouse.”

“So we have nothing.”

The surveyor ignored that, said, “What do we do now?” It was clear she hated asking
the question.

“Eat dinner,” I said. “Take a little stroll along the perimeter to make sure the psychologist
isn’t hiding in the bushes. Think about what we’re doing tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell you one thing we’re not doing tomorrow. We’re not going back into the tunnel.”

“Tower.”

She glared at me.

There was no point in arguing with her.

*   *   *

At dusk, the familiar moaning came to us from across the salt-marsh flats as we ate
our dinner around the campfire. I hardly noticed it, intent on my meal. The food tasted
so good, and I did not know why. I gobbled it up, had seconds, while the surveyor,
baffled, just stared at me. We had little or nothing to say to each other. Talking
would have meant planning, and nothing I wanted to plan would please her.

The wind picked up, and it began to rain. I saw each drop fall as a perfect, faceted
liquid diamond, refracting light even in the gloom, and I could smell the sea and
picture the roiling waves. The wind was like something alive; it entered every pore
of me and it, too, had a smell, carrying with it the earthiness of the marsh reeds.
I had tried to ignore the change in the confined space of the tower, but my senses
still seemed too acute, too sharp. I was adapting to it, but at times like this, I
remembered that just a day ago I had been someone else.

We took turns standing watch. Loss of sleep seemed less foolhardy than letting the
psychologist sneak up on us unannounced; she knew the location of every perimeter
trip wire and we had no time to disarm and reset them. I let the surveyor take the
first watch as a gesture of good faith.

In the middle of the night, the surveyor came in to wake me up for the second shift,
but I was already awake because of the thunder. Grumpily, she headed off to bed. I
doubt she trusted me; I just think she couldn’t keep her eyes open a moment longer
after the stresses of the day.

The rain renewed its intensity. I didn’t worry that we’d be blown away—these tents
were army regulation and could withstand anything short of a hurricane—but if I was
going to be awake anyway, I wanted to experience the storm. So I walked outside, into
the welter of the stinging water, the gusting pockets of wind. I already could hear
the surveyor snoring in her tent; she probably had slept through much worse. The dull
emergency lights glowed from the edges of the camp, making the tents into triangles
of shadow. Even the darkness seemed more alive to me, surrounding me like something
physical. I can’t even say it was a sinister presence.

I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream—the training, my former life, the
world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered,
only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip
of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow
spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the
night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border.

Then, through that darkness, I saw it: a flicker of orange light. Just a touch of
illumination, too far up in the sky. This puzzled me, until I realized it must originate
with the lighthouse. As I watched, the flicker moved to the left and up slightly before
being snuffed out, then reappeared a few minutes later much higher, then was snuffed
out for good. I waited for the light to return, but it never did. For some reason,
the longer the light stayed out, the more restless I became, as if in this strange
place a light—any sort of light—was a sign of civilization.

*   *   *

There had been a storm that final full day alone with my husband after he returned
from the eleventh expedition. A day that had the clarity of dream, of something strange
yet familiar—familiar routine but strange calmness, even more than I had become accustomed
to before he left.

In those last weeks before the expedition, we had argued—violently. I had shoved him
up against a wall, thrown things at him. Anything to break through the armor of resolve
that I know now might have been thrust upon him by hypnotic suggestion. “If you go,”
I had told him, “you might not come back, and you can’t be sure I’ll be waiting for
you if you do.” Which had made him laugh, infuriatingly, and say, “Oh, have you been
waiting for me all this time? Have I arrived yet?” He was set in his course by then,
and any obstruction was a source of rough humor for him—and that would have been entirely
natural, hypnosis or not. It was entirely in keeping with his personality to become
set on something and follow it, regardless of the consequences. To let an impulse
become a compulsion, especially if he thought he was contributing to a cause greater
than himself. It was one reason he had stayed in the navy for a second tour.

Our relationship had been thready for a while, in part because he was gregarious and
I preferred solitude. This had once been a source of strength in our relationship,
but no longer. Not only had I found him handsome but I
admired
his confident, outgoing nature, his need to be around people—I recognized this as
a healthy counterbalance to my personality. He had a good sense of humor, too, and
when we first met, at a crowded local park, he snuck past my reticence by pretending
we were both detectives working a case and were there to watch a suspect. Which led
to making up facts about the lives of the busy hive of people buzzing around us, and
then about each other.

At first, I must have seemed mysterious to him, my guardedness, my need to be alone,
even after he thought he’d gotten inside my defenses. Either I was a puzzle to be
solved or he just thought that once he got to know me better, he could still break
through to some other place, some core where another person lived inside of me. During
one of our fights, he admitted as much—tried to make his “volunteering” for the expedition
a sign of how much I had pushed him away, before taking it back later, ashamed. I
told him point-blank, so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know
better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never
change.

Early in our relationship, I had told my husband about the swimming pool as we lay
in bed, something we did a lot of back then. He had been captivated, possibly even
thinking there were more interesting revelations to come. He had pushed aside the
parts that spoke of an isolated childhood, to focus entirely on the pool itself.

“I would have sailed boats on it.”

“Captained by Old Flopper, no doubt,” I replied. “And everything would have been happy
and wonderful.”

“No. Because I would have found you surly and willful and grim. Fairly grim.”

“I would have found you frivolous and wished really hard for the turtles to scuttle
your boat.”

“If they did, I would just have rebuilt it even better and told everyone about the
grim kid who talked to frogs.”

I had never talked to the frogs; I despised anthropomorphizing animals. “So what has
changed if we wouldn’t have liked each other as kids?” I asked.

“Oh, I would have liked you despite that,” he said, grinning. “You would have fascinated
me, and I would have followed you anywhere. Without hesitation.”

So we fit back then, in our odd way. We clicked, by being opposites, and took pride
in the idea that this made us strong. We reveled in this construct so much, for so
long, that it was a wave that did not break until after we were married … and then
it destroyed us over time, in depressingly familiar ways.

But none of this—the good or the bad—mattered when he returned from the expedition.
I asked no questions, did not bring up any of our past arguments. I knew when I woke
up beside him that morning after his return that our time together was already running
out.

I made him breakfast, while outside the rain beat down, lightning cracking nearby.
We sat at the kitchen table, which had a view, through the sliding-glass doors, of
the backyard, and had an excruciatingly polite conversation over eggs and bacon. He
admired the gray shape of the new bird feeder I had put in, and the water feature
that now rippled with raindrops. I asked him if he had gotten enough sleep, and how
he felt. I even asked again questions from the night before, like whether the journey
back had been tough.

“No,” he said, “effortless,” flashing an imitation of his old infuriating smile.

“How long did it take?” I asked.

“No time at all.” I couldn’t read his expression, but in its blankness I sensed something
mournful, something left inside that wanted to communicate but couldn’t. My husband
had never been mournful or melancholy as long as I had known him, and this frightened
me a little.

He asked me how my research was going, and I told him about some of the new developments.
At the time, I worked for a company devoted to the creation of natural products that
broke down plastics and other nonbiodegradable substances. It was boring. Before that,
I had been out in the field, taking advantage of various research grants. Before that,
I had been a radical environmentalist, participating in protests and employed by a
nonprofit to call potential donors on the phone.

“And your work?” I asked, tentative, not sure how much more circling I could do, ready
at a moment’s notice to dart away from the mystery.

“Oh, you know,” he said, as if he’d only been away a few weeks, as if I were a colleague,
not his lover, his wife. “Oh, you know, the same as always. Nothing really new.” He
drank deeply from his orange juice—really drank to savor it so that for a minute or
two nothing existed in the house but his enjoyment. Then he casually asked about other
improvements around the house.

After breakfast, we sat out on the porch, watching the sheets of rain, the puddles
collecting in the herb garden. We read for a while, then went back inside and made
love. It was a kind of repetitive, trancelike fucking, comfortable only because the
weather cocooned us. If I had been pretending up until that point, I couldn’t fool
myself any longer that my husband was entirely present.

Then it was lunch, and then television—I found a rerun of a two-man sailing race for
him—and more banal talk. He asked about some of his friends, but I had no answers.
I never saw them. They’d never really been my friends; I didn’t cultivate friends,
I had just inherited them from my husband.

We tried to play a board game and laughed at some of the sillier questions. Then weird
gaps in his knowledge became apparent and we stopped, a kind of silence settling over
us. He read the paper and caught up on his favorite magazines, watched the news. Or
perhaps he only pretended to do those things.