“The biologist’s last will and testament,” Grace said.
PART II
FIXED LIGHT
Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot—choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before; I use my actual voice rarely enough.
A great deal of time has passed since I placed words on paper, and for so long I felt no urge to do so again. I have felt more acutely than ever that here on the island I should never be taken out of the moment. To be taken out of the moment is dangerous—that is when things sneak their way in and then there is no present moment to return to. Only very recently have I begun to feel something like a lack, or anything beyond the thought that I would in this place simply exist and live out whatever span was allotted to me. Neither have I had any interest in recounting, in setting down, in communicating in what has come to seem such a mundane way. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that I have started to write this several times, and that I abandoned three or four drafts of this … this document? This letter? This … whatever this is.
Perhaps, too, hesitance overtakes me because when I think of writing I glimpse the world I left behind. The world beyond, that when my thoughts drift toward it at all, is a hazy, indistinct sphere radiating a weak light, riddled through with discordant voices and images that cut across eyes and minds like a razor blade, and none of us able to even blink. It seems a myth, a kind of mythic tragedy, a lie, that I once lived there or that anyone lives there still. Someday the fish and the falcon, the fox and the owl, will tell tales, in their way, of this disembodied globe of light and what it contained, all the poison and all the grief that leaked out of it. If human language meant anything, I might even recount it to the waves or to the sky, but what’s the point?
Still, having decided to finally let the brightness take me, after holding out against it for so many years, I am giving it one more try. Who will read this? I don’t know, nor do I really care. Perhaps I am just writing for myself, that some further record exist of this journey, even if I can only tell the first part of a much longer story. But if someone does read it, know that I didn’t live here waiting for rescue, hoping for a thirteenth expedition. If the world beyond appears to have abandoned the entire idea of expeditions, perhaps that’s evidence of the sudden appearance of sanity. But the world beyond, or even the dangers of this one I live in, will be even less of a concern in a few days.
01: THE BRIGHTNESS
At first, there was always the island ahead of me, somewhere, along the coast, and my husband’s presence in the bread-crumb notes I thought I found along the way, that I hoped came from him. Under rocks, stabbed on branches, curling dead on the ground. They were all important to me, no matter which might be real and which nothing more than chance or coincidence. Making it to the island meant something to me then. I was still holding on to the idea of causality, of purpose as that word might be recognizable to the Southern Reach. But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
According to his journal, it took my husband six days to reach the island the first time. It took me somewhat longer. Because the rules had changed. Because the ground I found purchase on one day became the next uncertain, and at times seemed to fall away beneath me. Behind me at the lighthouse, a luminescence was growing in strength and a burnt haze had begun to dominate the sky, and through my binoculars for more days than should have been possible, there came the suggestion of something enormous rising from the sea in a continuous, slow-motion wave. Something I was not yet ready to see.
Ahead, the birds that shot through the sky trailed blurs of color that resembled other versions of themselves, that might have been hallucinations. The air seemed malleable, or like it could be convinced or coerced. I felt stuck in between, forever traveling, never arriving, so that soon I wanted a place to pretend was “base camp” for a while—a place that might quell the constant frustration of feeling that I couldn’t trust the landscape I traveled through, my only anchor the trail itself, which, although it became ever more overgrown and twisty, never faltered, never petered out into nothing.
If it had led me to a cliff, would I have stood there or would I have followed it over the edge? Or would that lack have been enough that I might have turned back and tried to find the door in the border? It’s difficult to predict what I might have done. The trajectories of my thoughts were scattered on that journey, twisted this way and that, like the swallows in the clear blue sky that, banking and circling back for a split second, would then return to their previous course, their fleeting digression a simple hunt for a speck of insect protein.