“Is there something I can help you with?” you ask, paint can in one hand and brush in the other.
“You can reassure me that everything is okay.” For one of the first times, you sense doubt from her. Not disagreement but doubt, and given how much things rely on faith at the late-era Southern Reach, this worries you.
“I’m fine,” you say. “I’m just fine. I just want a reminder.”
“Of what? To the staff? That you’re getting a little eccentric?”
A surge of anger at that, a faint echo of hurt, too. Lowry, for all of his faults, might not think it was strange. He’d understand. But also, if it were Lowry painting a map on the wall of his office, no one would be questioning him. They’d be asking if they could hold the brush, touch up this spot, that spot, get him more paint.
Going for the cumulative effect, to put more pressure on the breaking point, you say to Grace, “After I’m done here, I’m going to order the bodies of the last eleventh exhumed.”
“Why?” Aghast, something in her background averse to such desecrations.
“Because I think it’s necessary. Which is enough of a reason.” Having what Grace will call “your Lowry moment,” and it’s not even that volcanic, just stubbornness.
“Cynthia,” Grace says. “Cynthia, what I think or don’t think doesn’t matter, but the rest of the staff has to want to follow you.”
More stubborn thought still: that all you really need is Lowry to follow you and Severance, and you could hold on here forever. Hideous thought, though, the image of another thirty-six expeditions being sent out, only some coming back, of you and Grace and Whitby, progressively more jaded and cynical, becoming ancient, going through motions that wouldn’t help anyone, not even yourselves.
“I’m going to finish this up,” you tell her in a conciliatory way. “Because I started it.”
“Because it will look fucking stupid if you don’t finish it now,” she says, relenting as well.
“Yes, exactly. It will look fucking stupider if I don’t finish.”
“So let me help,” she says, and something in the emphasis she puts on the words gets to you. Will always get to you.
Let me help.
“All right, then,” you say gruffly, and hand her the extra brush.
* * *
But you’re still going to dig up the dead, and you’re still wondering how to change the paradigm like Lowry keeps trying to change the paradigm. Lost in the thought of that the next weekend at Chipper’s while bowling, while home clipping coupons for the grocery store, while taking a bath, while going out for a ballroom dancing lesson because it’s the kind of thing you would never do. So you do it, aware that if Severance has eyes on you, she’ll find it evidence of being “erratic,” but not caring. You put yourself here, set this trap for yourself, so if you feel trapped by it now, it’s your own fault.
The day after painting the door, Grace follows up, as she always does, unable to leave it alone, but privately, on the rooftop, which by now you’re pretty sure Cheney suspects exists, just as he suspects the involvement of “dark energy” in the maintenance of the invisible border … Grace saying, “You have a plan, right? This is all part of a plan. I’m relying on you to have a plan.”
So you nod, smile, say, “Yes, Grace, I have a plan,” because you don’t want to betray that trust, because what’s the good of saying “All I have is a feeling, an intuition, and a brief conversation with a man who should be dead. I have a plant and a phone.”
In your dreams you stand on the sidelines, holding the plant in one hand and the cell phone in the other, watching a war between Central and Area X. In some fundamental way, you feel, they have been in conflict for far longer than thirty years—for ages and ages, centuries in secret. Central the ultimate void to counteract Area X: impersonal, antiseptic, labyrinthine, and unknowable. Against the facade, you cannot help but express a kind of terrible betrayal: Sometimes you admire Lowry’s fatal liveliness next to that, a silhouette writhing against a dull white screen.
0015: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER
Western siren finally fixed; touched up the white part of the daymark, seaward side; fixed the ladder, too, but still feels rickety, unsafe. Something knocked down a foot of fence and got into the garden, but couldn’t tell what. No deer tracks, but likely culprit. S&SB? The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn’t feel up to a hike, but seen from lighthouse grounds, of note: flycatcher (not sure what kind), frigate birds, least terns, cormorants, black-throated stilt (!), a couple of yellowthroats. On the beach, found a large pipefish had washed up, a few sail jellyfish rotting in the sand.