Authority(22)

And Hedley was familiar to him. This was the city to which he and his friends had come for fun on weekends once some of them could drive, even knowing it was kind of a shithole, too, just not as small a shithole as where they lived. Landlocked and forlorn. His mother had even alluded to it the last time he’d seen her. She’d flown in at his old job up north, which had been gradually reduced from analysis and management to a more reactive and administrative role. Due to his own baggage, he guessed. Due to the fact it always started out well, but then, if he stayed too long … sometimes something happened, something he couldn’t quite define. He became too invested. He became too empathic, or less so. It confused him when it all went to shit because he couldn’t remember the point at which it had started to go bad—was still convinced he could get the formula right.

But his mother had come from Central and they’d met in a conference room he knew was probably bugged. Had the Voice traveled with her, been set up in a saltwater tank in the adjoining room?

It was cold outside and she wore a coat, an overcoat, and a scarf over a professional business suit and black high heels. She took off the overcoat and held it in her lap. But she didn’t take off the scarf. She looked as if she could surge from her chair at any moment and be out the door before he could snap his fingers. It had been five years since he’d seen her—predictably unreachable when he’d tried to get a message to her about her ex-husband’s funeral—but she had aged only a little bit, her brown hair just as fashion-model huge as ever and eyes a kind of calculating blue peering out from a face on which wrinkles had encroached only around the corners of the eyes and, hidden by the hair, across her forehead.

She said, “It will be like coming home, John, won’t it?” Nudging him, wanting him to say it, as if he were a barnacle clinging to a rock and she were a seagull trying to convince him to release his grip. “You’ll be comfortable with the setting. You’ll be comfortable with the people.”

He’d had to suppress anger mixed with ambivalence. How would she know whether she was right or wrong? She’d rarely been there, even though she’d had visitation rights. Just him and his father, Dad beginning to fall apart by then, to eat too much, to drink a little too much, during a succession of flings once the divorce was final … then redirecting himself to art no one wanted. Getting his house in order and going off to college had been a guilty relief, to not live in that atmosphere anymore.

“And, comfortably situated in this world I know so well, what would I do?”

She smiled at him. A genuine smile. He could tell the difference, having suffered so many times under the dull yellow glow of a fake one that tried to reheat his love for her. When she really smiled, when she meant it, his mother’s face took on a kind of beauty that surprised anyone who saw it, as if she’d been hiding her true self behind a mask. While people who were always sincere rarely got credit for that quality.

“It’s a chance to do better,” she said. “It’s a chance to erase the past.”

The past. Which part of the past? The job up north had been his tenth posting in about fifteen years, which made the Southern Reach his eleventh. There were a number of reasons, there were always reasons. Or one reason, in his case.

“What would I have to do?” If he had to pull it out of her, he knew it might not be something he wanted. But he was already tired of the repetitive nature of his current position, which had turned out to be less about fixing and more about repainting facades. He was tired of the office politics, too. Maybe that had always been his problem, at heart.

“You’ve heard of the Southern Reach?”

He had, mostly through a couple of colleagues who had worked there at one time. Vague allusions, keeping to the cover story about environmental catastrophe. Rumors of a chain of command that was eccentric at best. Rumors of significant variation, of there being more to the story. But, then, there always was. He didn’t know, on hearing his mother say those words, whether he was excited or not.

“And why me?”

The smile that prefaced her response was tinged with a bit of sadness or regret or something else that made Control look away. When she’d been on assignment, before she’d left for good, she’d had a short period when she’d been good at writing long, handwritten letters to him—almost as good as he had been at not finding the time or need to read them. But now he almost wished she was writing to him about the Southern Reach in a letter, not telling him about it in person.

“Because they’re downsizing this department, although you might not know that, and you’ll be on the chopping block. And this is the right fit for you.”