Sometime before morning, I woke again to find that my brightness had become literal: My skin gave off a faint phosphorescence against the darkness, and I tried to hide my hands in my sleeves, draw my collar up high, so I would be less visible, then drifted off again. Part of me just wanted to sleep forever, through the rest of anything that might occur.
But I did remember one thing, now: where I had seen the molted mask before—the psychologist from the eleventh expedition, a man I had seen interviewed after his return across the border. A man who had said, in a calm and even tone, “It was quite beautiful, quite peaceful in Area X. We saw nothing unusual. Nothing at all.” And then had smiled in a vague way.
Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border.
* * *
The next morning my head was still full of the moans of the creature as I reentered the part of Area X where the trail rose to a steep incline, and on either side the swampy black water was littered with the deceptively dead-seeming cypress knees. The water stole all sound, and its unmoving surface reflected back only gray moss and tree limbs. I loved this part of the trail as I loved no other. Here the world had a watchfulness matched only by a sense of peaceful solitude. The stillness was simultaneously an invitation to let down your guard and a rebuke against letting down your guard. Base camp was a mile away, and I was lazy with the light and the hum of insects in the tall grass. I was already rehearsing what I would say to the surveyor, what I would tell her and what I would withhold.
The brightness within me flared up. I had time to take a half step to the right.
The first shot took me in the left shoulder instead of the heart, and the impact twisted me as it pushed me back. The second shot ripped through my left side, not so much lifting me off my feet as making me spin and trip myself. Into the profound silence as I hit the incline and jounced down the hill there came a roaring in my ears. I lay at the bottom of the hill, breath knocked out of me, one outstretched hand plunged into the black water and the other arm trapped beneath me. The pain in my left side seemed at first as if someone kept opening me up with a butcher knife and sewing me back together. But it quickly subsided to a kind of roiling ache, the bullet wounds reduced through some cellular conspiracy to a sensation like the slow squirming inside me of tiny animals.
Only seconds had passed. I knew I had to move. Luckily, my gun had been holstered or it would have gone flying. I took it out now. I had seen the scope, a tiny circle in the tall grass, recognized who had set the ambush. The surveyor was ex-military, and good, but she couldn’t know that the brightness had protected me, that shock wasn’t overtaking me, that the wound hadn’t transfixed me with paralyzing pain.
I rolled onto my belly, intending to crawl along the water’s edge.
Then I heard the surveyor’s voice, calling out to me from the other side of the embankment: “Where is the psychologist? What did you do with her?”
I made the mistake of telling the truth.
“She’s dead,” I called back, trying to make my voice sound shaky and weak.
The surveyor’s only reply was to fire a round over my head, perhaps hoping I’d break cover.
“I didn’t kill the psychologist,” I shouted. “She jumped from the top of the lighthouse.”
“Risk for reward!” the surveyor responded, throwing it back at me like a grenade. She must have thought about that moment the whole time I’d been gone. It had no more effect on me than had my attempt to use it on her.
“Listen to me! You’ve hurt me—badly. You can leave me out here. I’m not your enemy.”
Pathetic words, placating words. I waited, but the surveyor didn’t reply. There was just the buzzing of the bees around the wildflowers, a gurgling of water somewhere in the black swamp beyond the embankment. I looked up at the stunning blue of the sky and wondered if it was time to start moving.
“Go back to base camp, take the supplies,” I shouted, trying again. “Return to the border. I don’t care. I won’t stop you.”
“I don’t believe you about any of it!” she shouted, the voice a little closer, advancing along the other side. Then: “You’ve come back and you’re not human anymore. You should kill yourself so I don’t have to.” I didn’t like her casual tone.
“I’m as human as you,” I replied. “This is a natural thing,” and realized she wouldn’t understand that I was referring to the brightness. I wanted to say that I was a natural thing, too, but I didn’t know the truth of that—and none of this was helping plead my case anyway.