The Chipper’s bar attracts mostly stalwart regulars, because it’s really a dive, with dark felt stapled to the ceiling that’s meant to be sprinkled with stars. But whatever the metal that’s nailed up there, looking more like an endless series of sheriff’s badges from old Westerns, it’s been rusting for a long time, so now it’s become a dull black punctuated by tiny reddish-brown starfish. A sign in the corner advertises the Star Lanes Lounge. The lounge part consists of half a dozen round wooden tables and chairs with black fake-leather upholstery that look like they were stolen long ago from a family-restaurant chain.
Most of your comrades at the bar are heavily invested in the sports leaking out of the silent, closed-caption TV; the old green carpet, which climbs the side walls, soaks up the murmur of conversations. The regulars are harmless and rarely raucous, including a Realtor who thinks she is the knower of all things but makes up for it by being able to tell a good story. Then there’s the silver-bearded seventy-year-old man who’s almost always standing at the end of the bar drinking a light beer. He’s a veteran of some war, veers between laconic and neighborly.
Your psychologist cover story feels wrong here, and you don’t like using it. Instead, you tell anyone who asks that you’re a long-haul trucker between jobs and take a drag on your bottle of beer to end that part of the conversation. People find the idea of that line of work plausible; maybe something about your height and broad frame sells them on it. But most nights you can almost believe you are a trucker, and that these people are your sort-of friends.
The Realtor says the man’s not a veteran, just “an alcoholic looking for sympathy,” but you can tell she’s not without sympathy for that. “I’m just going to opt out” is a favorite phrase of the veteran. So is “the hell there isn’t.” The rest are a cross-section of ER nurses, a couple of mechanics, a hairdresser, a few receptionists and office managers. What your dad would’ve called “people who’re never allowed to see behind the curtain.” You don’t bother investigating them, or the oft-revolving bartenders, because it doesn’t matter. You never say anything seditious or confidential at Chipper’s.
But some nights, when you stay late and the bar crowd thins, you write down on a napkin or coaster a point or two you can’t leave alone—some of the continual puzzle-questions thrown at you by Whitby Allen, a holistic environments expert who reports to Mike Cheney, the overly jovial head of the science division. You never asked for these questions, but that doesn’t stop Whitby, who seems like his head’s on fire and the only way to put the fire out is to douse it with his ideas. “What’s outside the border when you’re inside it?” “What’s the border when you’re inside it?” “What’s the border when someone is outside it?” “Why can’t the person inside see the person outside?”
“My statements aren’t any better than my questions,” Whitby admitted to you once, “but if you want easy, you should check out what they serve up over at Cheney’s Science Shack.”
An impressive document backs up Whitby’s ideas, shining out from underneath the glossy invisible membrane of a piece of clear plastic. In a brand-new three-ring black binder, exquisitely hole-punched, not a typo in the entire twelve-page printout, with its immaculate title page: a masterpiece entitled “Combined Theories: A Complete Approach.”
The report is as shiny, clever, and quick as Whitby. The questions it raises, the recommendations made, insinuate with little subtlety that Whitby thinks the Southern Reach can do better, that he can do better if he is only given the chance. It’s a lot to digest, especially with the science department ambushing it and taking potshots in memos sent to you alone: “Suppositions in search of evidence, head on backward or sideways.” Or, maybe even sprouting from his ass.
But to you it’s deadly serious, especially a list of “conditions required for Area X to exist” that include
• an isolated place
• an inert but volatile trigger
• a catalyst to pull the trigger
• an element of luck or chance in how the trigger was deployed
• a context we do not understand
• an attitude toward energy that we do not understand
• an approach to language that we do not understand
“What’s next?” Cheney says at one status meeting. “A careful study of the miracles of the saints, unexplained occurrences writ large, two-headed calves predicting the apocalypse, to see if anything rings a bell?”