“There’s a lot of everything between here and there.”
“Control,” Ghost Bird said, and he didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see those eyes that now reminded him of the creature the biologist had become. “Control, there’s no reset. There’s never going to be a reset. That’s a suicide mission.” Unspoken, that she thought it was a suicide mission for them. Who knew what it might be for her?
“But the director thought you could change its direction,” he said. “That you could change it, if you tried hard enough.” A halting kind of hope. A childish thrashing against the dictates of the real. If you wished upon a star. He was thinking of the light at the bottom of the tower, this new thing he hadn’t known about before entering Area X. He was thinking about being sick, and now sicker, and what that meant. At least they were all out in the open now, clear to him. The brightness, Lowry, all of it. Everything in the mix, including the core he still thought of as John Rodriguez. The Rodriguez who didn’t belong to anyone. Who clasped his father’s carving tight in his pocket. Who remembered something beyond the wreck and ruin of all this.
“It’s true we have one thing no one else had,” Grace said.
“What?” Ghost Bird asked in a skeptical, doubting tone.
“You,” Grace said. “The only photocopy of the director’s last plan.”
0014: THE DIRECTOR
When, eventually, you return to the Southern Reach, you find a gift waiting for you: a framed black-and-white photograph of the lighthouse keeper, his assistant, and a little girl playing on the rocks—head down, jacket hood disguising her features. The blood rushes to your head, and you almost black out, seeing that this photo you didn’t know still existed.
“It’s for your office,” reads the pointed note that comes with it. “You should hang it on the wall there. In fact, you must keep it on the wall. As a reminder of how far you’ve come. For your years of service and for your loyalty. Love and Kisses, Jimmy Boy.”
That’s when you realize there is something very much more wrong with Lowry than you’d ever thought before. That he creates ever more spectacular and grandiose dysfunctions to test what the system might bear before it finds him out. He seems, year after year, to revel in his clandestine operations not because they are secret but for those tantalizing moments when, either by his own hand or by fate, the edges of them almost become known.
But where had the photograph come from?
“Pull everything we have on Jackie Severance,” you tell Grace. “Pull every file that mentions Jack Severance. And the son—John Rodriguez. Even if it takes a year. We’re looking for something that connects Severance—any Severance—to Lowry.” You’ve got a sense of an unholy alliance, a devilish foundation. An inkling of bad faith. Something hidden in the grout between the stones.
Meanwhile, you have a plant and a cell phone, very early model, to deal with—all you have to show for your journey. Other than a new sense of being separate, remote, set apart from the staff.
When you see Whitby in the hallway now, sometimes you meet his gaze and nod and there is a sense of a secret shared. Other times, you must look away, stare at that worn green carpet that meanders through everything. Make some polite comment in the cafeteria, try to immerse yourself in meetings as they prep another expedition. Try to pretend everything is normal. Is Whitby broken? His smile flickers back into place at times. His old confident stance, the wit in Whitby, will reappear but not for long, and then a light winks out in his eyes and darkness comes back in.
There’s nothing you could say to Whitby except “I’m sorry,” but you can’t even say that. You can’t change the moments that changed him except in your memory, and even in memory that attempt is obscured by the fast-rising thing from below, the thing that terrified you so much you abandoned Saul there, on the tunnel steps. Said to yourself afterward that Saul wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, so you hadn’t abandoned anyone. “Don’t forget about me,” he’d said, so long ago, and you won’t ever forget him, but you might have to leave him behind. That apparition. The hallucination that, as you sit at the bar in Chipper’s Star Lanes or debate policy with Grace on the Southern Reach rooftop, you still try to rationalize as not a hallucination at all.
In part because you came back with the plant. For a time, obsessed with each dark green leaf, the way looking at it from above it forms a kind of fanlike circle, but from the side the effect fades completely. If you focus on the plant, maybe you can forget Lowry, waiting out there, for a while. Maybe Saul won’t matter. Maybe you can salvage something out of … nothing.