Acceptance(9)

Somehow that created an uncomfortable doubling effect, too, one that she argued about in her own head. Because she did not agree with her own decisions at times—the biologist’s decisions. Why had her other self been so careless with the words on the wall? For example. Why hadn’t she confronted the psychologist/director as soon as she knew about the hypnosis? What had been gained by going down to find the Crawler? Some things Ghost Bird could forgive, but others grated and drove her into spirals of might-have-beens that infuriated her.

The biologist’s husband she rejected entirely, without ambivalence, for there came with the husband the desolation of living in the city. The biologist had been married but Ghost Bird wasn’t, released from responsibility for any of that. She didn’t really understand why her double had put up with it. Among the misunderstandings between her and Control: having to make clear that her need for lived-in experience to supplant memories not her own did not extend to their relationship, whatever image of her he carried in his head. She could not just plunge into something physical with him and overlay the unreal with the ordinary, the mechanical, not when her memories were of a husband who had come home stripped of memories. Any compromise would just hurt them both, was somehow beside the point.

Standing there in front of the skeleton of the moaning creature, Control said: “Then I might end up like this? Some version of me?”

“We all end up like this, Control. Eventually.”

But not quite like this, because from those eye sockets, from the moldering bones, came a sense of a brightness still, a kind of life—a questing toward her that she rebuffed and that Control could not sense. Area X was looking at her through dead eyes. Area X was analyzing her from all sides. It made her feel like an outline created by the regard bearing down on her, one that moved only because the regard moved with her, held her constituent atoms together in a coherent shape. And yet, the eyes upon her felt familiar.

“The director might have been wrong about the biologist, but perhaps you’re the answer.” Said only half sarcastically, as if he almost knew what she was receiving.

“I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.” She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.

She was thinking, too, about what she had seen on the journey into Area X, how it had seemed as if to both sides there lay nothing around them but the terrible blackened ruins of vast cities and enormous beached ships, lit by the roaring red and orange of fires that did nothing but cast shadow and obscure the distant view of mewling things that crawled and hopped through the ash. How she had tried to block out Control’s rambling confessions, the shocking things he said without knowing, so that she did not think he had a secret she did not now know. Pick up the gun … Tell me a joke … I killed her, it was my fault … Had whispered hypnotic incantations in his ear to shut out not only his words but also the horror show around them.

The skeleton before them had been picked clean. The discolored bones were rotting, the tips of the ribs already turned soft with moisture, most of them broken off, lost in the mud.

Above, the storks still banked and wheeled this way and that in an intricate, synchronized aerial dance more beautiful than anything ever created by human minds.





0003: THE DIRECTOR

On the weekends, your refuge is Chipper’s Star Lanes, where you’re not the director of the Southern Reach but just another customer at the bar. Chipper’s lies off the highway well out of Bleakersville, one step up from being at the end of a dirt road. Jim Lowry’s people back at Central might know the place, might be watching and listening, but you’ve never met anyone from the Southern Reach there. Even Grace Stevenson, your second-in-command, doesn’t know about it. For a disguise, you wear a T-shirt for a local construction company or a charity event like a chili cook-off and an old pair of jeans from the last time you were fat, sometimes topped off with a baseball cap advertising your favorite barbecue joint.

You go bowling there, like you used to with your dad as a kid, but you usually start out front, solo, on Chipper’s rotting but still functional Safari Adventure miniature golf course. The lions at the ninth hole are a sleeping huddle of dreamy plastic melted and blackened at the edges from some long-ago disaster. The huge hippo bestride the course-ending eighteenth has dainty ankles, and flaked-off splotches reveal blood-red paint beneath, as if its makers had been too obsessed with making it real.

Afterward you’ll go inside and bowl a few pickup games with anyone who needs a fourth, under the fading universe painted on the ceiling—there’s Earth, there’s Jupiter, there’s a purpling nebula with a red center, all of it lit up at night with a cheesy laser show. You’re good for four or five games, rarely top two hundred. When done, you sit at the dark, comfortable bar. It’s been shoved into a back corner as far from the room of stinking shoes as possible, and somehow the acoustics muffle the squeak, bump, and rumble of the bowling. Everything here is still too close to Area X, but as long as no one knows, that information can keep on killing the customers as slowly as it has over the past decades.