Acceptance(40)

Lowry’s still standing over you and ranting about what will happen and how it’s going to happen. Of course he wants more control. Of course he is going to get it.

But now you know, too, what you’ve only guessed at before: Beneath Lowry’s bluster, he feels that your fates are intertwined. That he’s more bound to you than ever.

* * *

After six months, you will be able to return to the Southern Reach. No one there will know why you were gone so long, and Grace won’t tell them, promises she’ll have pushed them so hard in the interim that “they won’t have time to think about it.”

While you wait out your suspension at home, you have this image in your head of Grace as a tall, stern black woman in a white lab coat and the tricornered hat of a general, holding a saber at arm’s length, for some reason standing in the prow of a rowboat, crossing a strategically important river. When it’s time for her to drop the hat, get rid of the boat, cede control back to you, how will she feel about that?

Single dim thought most nights, after a doctor’s appointment or buying groceries for dinner: Which world am I really living in? The one in which you can hear Whitby’s screams in the lighthouse intermingling with the screams from the first expedition, or the one in which you’re putting cans of soup in the cupboard. Can you exist in both? Do you want to? When Grace calls to ask how your day is going, should you say “Same as usual” or “Awful, like conducting autopsies over and over again for no reason”?

Sitting on a stool in the bar at Chipper’s—that’s the same, isn’t it, after you come back? Perhaps even more so, given you have more time to spend there. The Realtor’s around a lot, too. She talks all the time—about a trip up north to visit her family, about a movie she saw, about local politics. Sometimes the veteran with the perpetual beer in hand dredges up a long-ago memory of his kids, trying to be part of the conversation.

As the Realtor and the drunk talk past and through you, you’re nodding as if you know what they’re talking about, as if you can relate, when all you can see now are two images of the lighthouse keeper superimposed, saying the same thing at different times, to two different versions of you. One in darkness and one in light.

“You’re thinking of your own children, aren’t you?” says the Realtor. “I can tell.”

Your mind must have wandered. The mask must have slipped.

“Yes, you’re right,” you say. “Sure.”

You have another beer, start to tell the Realtor all about your kids—where they go to school, how you wish you saw them more often, that they’re studying to be doctors. That you hope to see them around the holidays. That they seem to belong to a different world now that they’re all grown up. The veteran, standing at the end of the bar, staring past the Realtor at you, has a strange look on his face. A look of recognition, as if he knows what you’re doing.

Hell, maybe you should play some songs on the jukebox, too. Maybe go take a turn at karaoke later, have a few more beers, make up a few more details of your life. Only, the Realtor left at some point, and it’s just you and the veteran and some people trickling in late who you don’t know, won’t ever know. The floor’s sticky, dark with old stains. The bottles behind the bar have water-cooler cups over them, to keep the fruit flies out. There’s a sheen off the bar top that’s not entirely natural. Behind you, the lanes are dark and the faded heavens have risen again, unimaginable wonders across the ceiling, some of them requiring a moment to recognize.

Because the other world always bleeds into this one. Because no matter how you try to keep what happened at the lighthouse between you and Whitby, you know it will leak out eventually, in some form, will have consequences.

At the lighthouse, Whitby had wandered, and you were still drifting through the downstairs when you realized that you couldn’t hear him moving around in the next room anymore. In the stillness and the dust, the way the light through the broken front door made the darkness murky, you expected to find him standing in a corner, a figure luminous in shadow.

But soon enough you realized he’d gone up the lighthouse stairs, headed for the very top. There came the sounds of fighting and the splintering of wood. One voice rising above the other, both curiously similar, and how could there be a second voice at all? So you followed fast, and as you climbed, there was both a doubling and a dissonance, for in memory, the steps had been much wider, the trek much longer, the space inside the lighthouse conveying a kind of weightlessness, the walls once painted white, the windows open to receive the sky, the scent of cut grass brought by Saul. But in the darkness, worried about Whitby, you had become a giant or the lighthouse had become lost or diminished, not just undone by time, but contracting, like the spiraling fossil of a shell, leading you to a place no longer familiar. Erasing, with each step, what you thought you knew.