That night, he did not dream. He did remember being woken well before dawn by something small crawling across the roof in fits and starts, but soon enough it stopped moving. It hadn’t been enough to wake the cat.
012: SORT OF SORTING
In the morning, back at work, he discovered that a fluorescent rod had burned out in his office, dulling the light. Control’s chair and desk in particular lay under a kind of gloom. He moved a lamp from the bookcases and set it up on a shelf jutting out toward the desk on his left. The better to see that Whitby had followed through on his threat and left a thick, somewhat worn-looking document on his desk entitled “Terroir and Area X: A Complete Approach.” Something about the rust on the massive paper clip biting into the title page, the yellowing nature of the typed pages, the handwritten annotations in different-color pens, or maybe the torn-out taped-in images, made him reluctant to go down that particular rabbit hole. It would have to wait its turn, which might at this point mean next week or even next month. He had another session with the biologist, as well as a meeting with Grace about his agency recommendations, and then, on Friday, an appointment to view the videos from the first expedition. Among other pressing things on his mind … like a little redecorating. Control opened the door with the words hidden behind it. He took some photographs. Then, using a can of white paint and a brush requisitioned from maintenance, he meticulously painted over all of it: every last word, every detail of the map. Grace and the others would have to get by without a memorial because he couldn’t live with the pressure of those words pulsing out from behind the door. Also the height measurements, if that’s what they were. Two coats, three, until only a shadow remained, although the height marks, written using a different kind of pen, continued to shine through. If they were height marks, then the director had grown by a quarter inch between measurements, unless she’d been wearing higher heels the second time.
After painting, Control set out two of his father’s carvings from the chessboard at home, meaning for them to replace the missing talismans of plant and mouse. A tiny red rooster and a moon-blue goat, they came from a series entitled simply Mi Familia. The rooster had the name of one of his uncles, the goat an aunt. His dad had photographs from his youth of playing in the backyard with his friends and cousins, surrounded by chickens and goats, a garden stretching out of sight along a wooden fence. But Control only remembered his father’s chickens—generously put, tradition or legacy chickens, named and never slaughtered. “Homage chickens” as Control had teased his father.
Chess was a hobby he had developed that could be shared during his father’s chemo treatments and that his father could ponder and worry at when Control wasn’t there in the room. Their shared affliction before the cancer had been pool, at which they were both mediocre, even though they enjoyed it. But his dad’s physical ailments had outstripped the mental deterioration, so that hadn’t been an option. Books as a salve to the boredom of TV? No, because the bookmark just began to separate one sea of unread words from another. But with a reminder of whose turn it was, chess left some evidence of its past even when his dad got confused toward the end.
Control had press-ganged his dad’s carvings into being pieces; they were a motley bunch that didn’t much correlate to their function, since they were being twice reinterpreted—first as people into animals and then into chess pieces. But he became a better player, his interest raised because abstraction had been turned into something real, and the results, although comical to them, seemed to matter more. “Abuela to bishop” as a move had set them both to giggling. “Cousin Humberto to La Sobrina Mercedez.”
Now these carvings were going to help him. Control set the rooster on the far left corner of his desk and the goat on the right, with the rooster facing out and the goat staring back at him. He had glued to each a nearly invisible nano-camera that would transmit wirelessly to his phone and laptop. If nothing else, he meant for his office to be secure, to make of it a bastion, to take from it all unknowns, and to substitute only that which might be a comfort to him. Who knew what he might discover?
He was then free to consider the director’s notes.
* * *
The preamble to reading the director’s notes had much of the ritual of a spring cleaning. He cleared all of the chairs except his own from the office, setting them up in the hallway. Then he started to make piles in the middle of the floor. He tried to ignore the ambivalent stains revealed on the carpet. Coffee? Blood? Gravy? Cat vomit? Clearly the janitor and any cohorts had been banned from the director’s office for quite some time. He had a vision of Grace ordering that the office be kept as is, in much the same way that on cop shows the parents of slain children allowed not a single new dust mote to enter the hallowed ground of their lost ones’ bedrooms. Grace had kept it locked until his arrival, had held on to the spare key, and yet he didn’t think she’d be showing up on his surveillance video.