There came a distant shout across the river, and an even-more distant reply. Something small snuffled and quorked its way through the reeds to his right. A deep breath of fresh air was limned by a faint but sharp marsh smell. It was the kind of place where he and his father would have gone canoeing when he was a teenager. It wasn’t true wilderness, was comfortingly close to civilization, but existed just enough apart to create a boundary. This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a “pristine wilderness.” They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either.
Now he was John Rodriguez again, “Control” falling away. John Rodriguez, son of a sculptor whose parents had come to this country looking for a better life. Son of a woman who lived in a byzantine realm of secrets.
By the time he started back up the hill, he was thinking about whether he should just pursue an exit strategy now. Load everything in the car and leave, not have to face the assistant director again, or any of it.
It always started well.
It might not end well.
But he knew that when morning came, he would rise as Control and that he would go back to the Southern Reach.
RITES
005: THE FIRST BREACH
“What is it? Is it on me? Where is it on me? Is it on me? Where on me? Can you see it on me? Can you see it? Where is it on me?”
Morning, after a night filled with dreams from atop the cliff, staring down. Control stood in the parking lot of a diner with his to-go cup of coffee and his breakfast biscuit, staring from two cars away at a thirtysomething white woman in a purple business suit. Even gyrating to find the velvet ant that had crawled onto her, she looked like a real estate agent, with careful makeup and blond hair in a short pageboy cut. But her suit didn’t fit well, and her fingernails were uneven, her red nail polish eroded, and he felt her distress extended well back beyond the ant.
The ant was poised on the back of her neck, unmoving for a moment. If he’d told her, she would have smacked it dead. Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.
“Hold still,” he told her as he set his coffee and biscuit atop the trunk of his car. “It’s harmless, and I’ll get it off you.” Because no one else seemed of any use. Most were ignoring her, while some, as they got into or out of their cars and SUVs, were laughing at her. But Control wasn’t laughing. He didn’t find it amusing. He didn’t know where Area X was on him, either, and all the questions in his head seemed in that moment as frenetic and useless as the woman’s questions.
“Okay, okay,” she said, still upset as he curled around and brought his hand down level with the ant, which, after a bit of gentle prodding, climbed on board. It had been struggling to progress across the field of golden hairs on the woman’s neck. Red-banded and soft yet prickly, it roamed across his hand in an aimless fashion.
The woman shook her head, craned her neck as if trying to see behind her, gave him a hesitant smile, and said, “Thanks.” Then bolted for her car as if late for an appointment, or afraid of him, the strange man who had touched her neck.
Control took the ant into the fringe of vegetation lining the parking lot and let it crawl from his thumb onto the wood chips there. The ant quickly got its bearings and walked off with purpose toward the green strip of trees that lay between the parking lot and the highway, governed by some sense of where it was and where it needed to be that was beyond Control’s understanding.
“So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.” That from his father, not his mother, surprisingly. Or perhaps not. His mother knew so much that maybe she thought she didn’t need to pretend.
Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?
* * *
Control spent the first fifteen minutes of his morning searching for the key to the locked desk drawer. He wanted to solve that mystery before his appointment with the greater mystery posed by the biologist. His stale breakfast biscuit, cooling cup of coffee, and satchel lay graceless to the side of his computer. He didn’t feel particularly hungry anyway; the rancid cleaning smell had invaded his office.
When he found the key, he sat there for a moment, staring at it, and then at the locked drawer and the earthy stain across the bottom left corner. As he turned the key in the lock, he suppressed the ridiculous thought that he should have someone else present, Whitby perhaps, when he opened it.
There was something dead inside—and something living.
A plant grew in the drawer, had been growing there in the dark this whole time, crimson roots attached to a nodule of dirt. As if the director had pulled it out of the ground and then, for whatever reason, placed it in the drawer. Eight slender leaves, a deep almost luminous green, protruded from the ridged stem at irregular intervals to form a pleasing circular pattern when viewed from above. From the side, though, the plant had the look of a creature trying to escape, with a couple of limbs, finally freed, reflexively curled over the edge of the drawer.