Annihilation(13)

“What’s wrong?” the surveyor was asking me, voice muffled through her mask. “What happened?”

I grabbed her hand, forced her palm against the wall.

“Let me go!” She tried to pull away, but I kept her there.

“Do you feel that?” I asked, unrelenting. “Can you feel that?”

“Feel what? What are you talking about?” She was scared, of course. To her, I was acting irrationally.

Still, I persisted: “A vibration. A kind of beat.” I removed my hand from hers, stepped back.

The surveyor took a long, deep breath, and kept her hand on the wall. “No. Maybe. No. No, nothing.”

“What about the wall. What is it made of?”

“Stone, of course,” she said. In the arc of my helmet flashlight, her shadowed face was hollowed out, her eyes large and circled by darkness, the mask making it look like she had no nose or mouth.

I took a deep breath. I wanted it all to spill out: that I had been contaminated, that the psychologist was hypnotizing us far more than we might have suspected. That the walls were made of living tissue. But I didn’t. Instead, I “got my shit together,” as my husband used to say. I got my shit together because we were going to go forward and the surveyor couldn’t see what I saw, couldn’t experience what I was experiencing. And I couldn’t make her see it.

“Forget it,” I said. “I became disoriented for a second.”

“Look, we should go back up now. You’re panicking,” the surveyor said. We had all been told we might see things that weren’t there while in Area X. I know she was thinking that this had happened to me.

I held up the black box on my belt. “Nope—it’s not flashing. We’re good.” It was a joke, a feeble joke, but still.

“You saw something that wasn’t there.” She wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

You can’t see what is there, I thought.

“Maybe,” I admitted, “but isn’t that important, too? Isn’t that part of all of this? The reporting? And something I see that you don’t might be important.”

The surveyor weighed that for a moment. “How do you feel now?”

“I feel fine,” I lied. “I don’t see anything now,” I lied. My heart felt like an animal had become trapped in my chest and was trying to crawl out. The surveyor was now surrounded by a corona of the white phosphorescence from the walls. Nothing was receding. Nothing was leaving me.

“Then we’ll go on,” the surveyor said. “But only if you promise to tell me if you see anything unusual again.”

I almost laughed at that, I remember. Unusual? Like strange words on a wall? Written among tiny communities of creatures of unknown origin.

“I promise,” I said. “And you will do the same for me, right?” Turning the tables, making her realize it might happen to her, too.

She said, “Just don’t touch me again or I’ll hurt you.”

I nodded in agreement. She didn’t like knowing I was physically stronger than her.

Under the terms of that flawed agreement we proceeded to the stairs and into the gullet of the tower, the depths now revealing themselves in a kind of ongoing horror show of such beauty and biodiversity that I could not fully take it all in. But I tried, just as I had always tried, even from the very beginning of my career.

* * *

My lodestone, the place I always thought of when people asked me why I became a biologist, was the overgrown swimming pool in the backyard of the rented house where I grew up. My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing. Neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length of time. Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one.

They did not have the will or inclination to clean the kidney-shaped pool, even though it was fairly small. Soon after we moved in, the grass around its edges grew long. Sedge weeds and other towering plants became prevalent. The short bushes lining the fence around the pool lunged up to obscure the chain link. Moss grew in the cracks in the tile path that circled it. The water level slowly rose, fed by the rain, and the surface became more and more brackish with algae. Dragonflies continually scouted the area. Bullfrogs moved in, the wriggling malformed dots of their tadpoles always present. Water gliders and aquatic beetles began to make the place their own. Rather than get rid of my thirty-gallon freshwater aquarium, as my parents wanted, I dumped the fish into the pool, and some survived the shock of that. Local birds, like herons and egrets, began to appear, drawn by the frogs and fish and insects. By some miracle, too, small turtles began to live in the pool, although I had no idea how they had gotten there.