Annihilation(24)

The rain renewed its intensity. I didn’t worry that we’d be blown away—these tents were army regulation and could withstand anything short of a hurricane—but if I was going to be awake anyway, I wanted to experience the storm. So I walked outside, into the welter of the stinging water, the gusting pockets of wind. I already could hear the surveyor snoring in her tent; she probably had slept through much worse. The dull emergency lights glowed from the edges of the camp, making the tents into triangles of shadow. Even the darkness seemed more alive to me, surrounding me like something physical. I can’t even say it was a sinister presence.

I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream—the training, my former life, the world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered, only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border.

Then, through that darkness, I saw it: a flicker of orange light. Just a touch of illumination, too far up in the sky. This puzzled me, until I realized it must originate with the lighthouse. As I watched, the flicker moved to the left and up slightly before being snuffed out, then reappeared a few minutes later much higher, then was snuffed out for good. I waited for the light to return, but it never did. For some reason, the longer the light stayed out, the more restless I became, as if in this strange place a light—any sort of light—was a sign of civilization.

* * *

There had been a storm that final full day alone with my husband after he returned from the eleventh expedition. A day that had the clarity of dream, of something strange yet familiar—familiar routine but strange calmness, even more than I had become accustomed to before he left.

In those last weeks before the expedition, we had argued—violently. I had shoved him up against a wall, thrown things at him. Anything to break through the armor of resolve that I know now might have been thrust upon him by hypnotic suggestion. “If you go,” I had told him, “you might not come back, and you can’t be sure I’ll be waiting for you if you do.” Which had made him laugh, infuriatingly, and say, “Oh, have you been waiting for me all this time? Have I arrived yet?” He was set in his course by then, and any obstruction was a source of rough humor for him—and that would have been entirely natural, hypnosis or not. It was entirely in keeping with his personality to become set on something and follow it, regardless of the consequences. To let an impulse become a compulsion, especially if he thought he was contributing to a cause greater than himself. It was one reason he had stayed in the navy for a second tour.

Our relationship had been thready for a while, in part because he was gregarious and I preferred solitude. This had once been a source of strength in our relationship, but no longer. Not only had I found him handsome but I admired his confident, outgoing nature, his need to be around people—I recognized this as a healthy counterbalance to my personality. He had a good sense of humor, too, and when we first met, at a crowded local park, he snuck past my reticence by pretending we were both detectives working a case and were there to watch a suspect. Which led to making up facts about the lives of the busy hive of people buzzing around us, and then about each other.

At first, I must have seemed mysterious to him, my guardedness, my need to be alone, even after he thought he’d gotten inside my defenses. Either I was a puzzle to be solved or he just thought that once he got to know me better, he could still break through to some other place, some core where another person lived inside of me. During one of our fights, he admitted as much—tried to make his “volunteering” for the expedition a sign of how much I had pushed him away, before taking it back later, ashamed. I told him point-blank, so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.

Early in our relationship, I had told my husband about the swimming pool as we lay in bed, something we did a lot of back then. He had been captivated, possibly even thinking there were more interesting revelations to come. He had pushed aside the parts that spoke of an isolated childhood, to focus entirely on the pool itself.

“I would have sailed boats on it.”

“Captained by Old Flopper, no doubt,” I replied. “And everything would have been happy and wonderful.”

“No. Because I would have found you surly and willful and grim. Fairly grim.”