After a while, I couldn’t take it—the sheer directionless anonymity of his distress, his silence. I led him back inside. He didn’t stop me. He didn’t protest. He didn’t try to look back over his shoulder at the boat. I think that’s when I made my decision. If he had only looked back. If he had just resisted me, even for a moment, it might have been different.
At dinner, as he was finishing, they came for him in four or five unmarked cars and a surveillance van. They did not come in rough or shouting, with handcuffs and weapons on display. Instead, they approached him with respect, one might almost say fear: the kind of watchful gentleness you might display if about to handle an unexploded bomb. He went without protest, and I let them take this stranger from my house.
I couldn’t have stopped them, but I also didn’t want to. The last few hours I had coexisted with him in a kind of rising panic, more and more convinced that whatever had happened to him in Area X had turned him into a shell, an automaton going through the motions. Someone I had never known. With every atypical act or word, he was driving me further from the memory of the person I had known, and despite everything that had happened, preserving that idea of him was important. That is why I called the special number he had left me for emergencies: I didn’t know what to do with him, couldn’t coexist with him any longer in this altered state. Seeing him leave I felt mostly a sense of relief, to be honest, not guilt at betrayal. What else could I have done?
As I have said, I visited him in the observation facility right up until the end. Even under hypnosis in those taped interviews, he had nothing new to say, really, unless it was kept from me. I remember mostly the repetitious sadness in his words. “I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time…”
This was really the only thing I discovered in him after his return: a deep and unending solitude, as if he had been granted a gift that he didn’t know what to do with. A gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me? That was the question that crept into my mind even as I stared into his eyes those last few times, willing myself to know his thoughts and failing.
As I labored at my increasingly repetitive job, in a sterile lab, I kept thinking about Area X, and how I would never know what it was like without going there. No one could really tell me, and no account could possibly be a substitute. So several months after my husband died, I volunteered for an Area X expedition. A spouse of a former expedition member had never signed up before. I think they accepted me in part because they wanted to see if that connection might make a difference. I think they accepted me as an experiment. But then again, maybe from the start they expected me to sign up.
* * *
By morning, it had stopped raining and the sky was a searing blue, almost devoid of clouds. Only the pine needles strewn across the top of our tents and the dirty puddles and fallen tree limbs on the ground told of the storm the night before. The brightness infecting my senses had spread to my chest; I can describe it no other way. Internally, there was a brightness in me, a kind of prickling energy and anticipation that pushed hard against my lack of sleep. Was this part of the change? But even so, it didn’t matter—I had no way to combat what might be happening to me.
I also had a decision to make, finding myself torn between the lighthouse and the tower. Some part of the brightness wanted to return to darkness at once, and the logic of this related to nerve, or lack of it. To plunge right back into the tower, without thought, without planning, would be an act of faith, of sheer resolve or recklessness with nothing else behind it. But now I also knew that someone had been in the lighthouse the night before. If the psychologist had sought refuge there, and I could track her down, then I might gain more insight into the tower before exploring it further. This seemed of increasing importance, more so than the night before, because the number of unknowns the tower represented had multiplied tenfold. So by the time I talked to the surveyor, I had decided on the lighthouse.
The morning had the scent and feel of a fresh start, but it was not to be. If the surveyor had wanted no part of a return to the tower, then she equally had no interest in the lighthouse.
“You don’t want to find out if the psychologist is there?”
The surveyor gave me a look as if I had said something idiotic. “Holed up in a high position with clear lines of sight in every direction? In a place they’ve told us has a weapons cache? I’ll take my chances here. If you were smart, you’d do the same. You might ‘find out’ that you don’t like a bullet hole in the head. Besides, she might be somewhere else.”