Acceptance(36)

“So you saunter across and have yourselves a great little holiday. Relax on the beach, right? Once you were across, got a little kinky thinking about being in that place with your boy toy, Whitby? Wanted a bit of lighthouse on the lighthouse steps?”

Silence is the best response. Central sees the sophisticated version of Lowry. You see the dregs, whatever he can get away with.

“You’ve got nothing to say to me, then. Nothing? No annotation? No further explanation?”

“I turned in my report.”

He’s half up out of his seat at that, but you don’t move at all. Even at the age of nine on the forgotten coast you knew better than to run from a bear or wild dog. You stand your ground, face them down. Maybe even growl. Would you have done the same when the rules changed, when it became Area X? You don’t know. You’re sweating under all those ridiculous lights.

“I’m trying to get inside your head without getting inside your head, if you know what I mean,” Lowry says. “I’m trying to understand how we got here. Trying to see if there’s a good fucking reason I shouldn’t just let Central fire you.”

The Central egg opening up like a mouth to issue an order to make you spontaneously combust or, more likely, evaporate like mist. But this means Lowry’s the main reason you haven’t been fired yet, which gives you back a sense of hope.

“I couldn’t keep sending in expeditions under my orders without going myself.” You couldn’t let them be the only ones to have the experience.

“Your orders? My orders, not your orders. You get that straight.” He slams his glass down on the table between you. An ice cube escapes, slides across the surface onto the floor. You resist the urge to pick it up, put it back in his glass.

“And Whitby—you just had to recruit him for your sad little expedition, too?”

You could reveal that Whitby wanted to go, but you can’t predict how Lowry would react. Whitby’s always been beyond Lowry, a fundamental misunderstanding between tragically different life-forms.

“I didn’t want to go alone. I needed backup.”

“I’m your backup. And involving the assistant director in all of this—that was a good idea, too?”

Grace might hate Lowry, but for some reason Lowry half liked Grace. Which, if she ever found out, would disgust her.

“None of it was a good idea. It was a lapse in judgment … But it’s hard to send men into battle without going into battle yourself.” Grace’s idea for a defense. Keep it simple. Keep it old school.

“Cut the bullshit. Did Grace suggest you say that? I bet she did.”

Have you missed a bug this time around, or is this just a guess?

Again: “You’ve got our reports.”

Lowry is the only one who does have them. The army’s border command knows this but Grace has concealed it from the Southern Reach, at Lowry’s request—“for reasons of morale and security clearance”—pending a final decision. Officially you’re still taking a very long vacation, and Whitby’s on administrative leave.

“Fuck your reports. You’re trying to hide Whitby from me”—not strictly true—“and your findings seem flimsy, incomplete. You were in there almost three weeks and your report is four pages long?”

“Nothing that unusual happened. Considering.”

“Considering bullshit. What did Whitby see? Something real or just another fucking hallucination? Do you understand what could’ve happened by going there? Do you understand what you could’ve stirred up?” The words coming out of his mouth slur together so it sounds like stirrups.

“I understand.” A toy lighthouse suddenly come to life.

Lowry, leaning in then, lurching in, to whisper, in a miasma of that sweet rotting breath, “You want to know what’s funny. What’s so fucking funny?”

“No.” Here it comes. As if he’s somebody’s gramps at a holiday gathering. The same story almost every time.

“Back in the day. Back then, you got it all wrong. If you’d ‘fessed up’ to the old Ess Arr during the interview, the kicker is they might’ve taken you anyway. You might’ve gotten hired. They might have done it, knowing the old director. True, maybe a sick kind of fascination attached, like with some special, intelligent lab animal—a special, particularly magnificent white rabbit, say. True, you’d never have made director, but, fuck, that job sucks, right? As you’re finding out. As you’re going to keep finding out. Problem now, though, is the deception’s gone on too long. So what the hell do we do.”

The problem, from your point of view, is less the past than the present. The time when you could somehow have tried to contain Lowry or influence him is long gone. As soon as he’d ascended to Central, been canonized, you couldn’t touch him.