“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”
“Am I a pinprick then, disturbing the edges of your reality, ghost bird?” he asked, and this time I caught the desperation of his mood.
“Oh, is it bait-the-ghost-bird time again?” I said, arching an eyebrow. I didn’t feel that relaxed. I felt sick to my stomach, but it seemed important to be normal for him. When he later came back and I saw what normal could be, I wished I’d been abnormal, that I’d shouted, that I’d done anything but be banal.
“Perhaps I’m a figment of your reality,” he said. “Perhaps I don’t exist except to do your bidding.”
“Then you’re failing spectacularly,” I said as I made my way into the kitchen for a glass of water. He was already on a second glass of wine.
“Or succeeding spectacularly because you want me to fail,” he said, but he was smiling.
He came up behind me then to hug me. He had thick forearms and a wide chest. His hands were hopeless man-hands, like something that should live in a cave, ridiculously strong, and an asset when he went sailing. The antiseptic rubber smell of Band-Aids suffused him like a particularly unctuous cologne. He was one big Band-Aid, placed directly on the wound.
“Ghost bird, where would you be if we weren’t together?” he asked.
I had no answer for that. Not here. Not there, either. Maybe nowhere.
Then: “Ghost bird?”
“Yes,” I said, resigned to my nickname.
“Ghost bird, I’m afraid now,” he said. “I’m afraid and I have a selfish thing to ask. A thing I have no right to ask.”
“Ask it anyway.” I was still angry, but in those last days I had become reconciled to my loss, had compartmentalized it so I would not withhold my affection from him. There was a part of me, too, that raged against the systematic loss of my field assignments, was envious of his opportunity. That gloated about the empty lot because it was mine alone.
“Will you come after me if I don’t come back? If you can?”
“You’re coming back,” I told him. To sit right here, like a golem, with all the things I knew about you drained out.
How I wish, beyond reason, that I had answered him, even to tell him no. And how I wish now—even though it was always impossible—that, in the end, I had gone to Area X for him.
* * *
A swimming pool. A rocky bay. An empty lot. A tower. A lighthouse. These things are real and not real. They exist and they do not exist. I remake them in my mind with every new thought, every remembered detail, and each time they are slightly different. Sometimes they are camouflage or disguises. Sometimes they are something more truthful.
When I finally reached the surface, I lay on my back atop the Tower, too exhausted to move, smiling for the simple, unexpected pleasure of the heat on my eyelids from the morning sun. I was continually reimagining the world even then, the lighthouse keeper colonizing my thoughts. I kept pulling out the photograph from my pocket, staring at his face, as if he held some further answer I could not yet grasp.
I wanted—I needed—to know that I had indeed seen him, not some apparition conjured up by the Crawler, and I clutched at anything that would help me believe that. What convinced me the most wasn’t the photograph—it was the sample the anthropologist had taken from the edge of the Crawler, the sample that had proven to be human brain tissue.
So with that as my anchor, I began to form a narrative for the lighthouse keeper, as best I could, even as I stood and once again made my way back to the base camp. It was difficult because I knew nothing at all about his life, had none of those indicators that might have allowed me to imagine him. I had just a photograph and that terrible glimpse of him inside the Tower. All I could think was that this was a man who had had a normal life once, perhaps, but not one of those familiar rituals that defined normal had had any permanence—or helped him. He had been caught up in a storm that hadn’t yet abated. Perhaps he had even seen it coming from the top of the lighthouse, the Event arriving like a kind of wave.
And what had manifested? What do I believe manifested? Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.