So he sat on a stool, his favorite neoclassical composer playing on his laptop, and let the music fill the room and create a kind of order out of chaos. Skipping no step, Grandpa, even if there was a skip to his step. He already had received files that morning from Grace—conveyed via a third-party administrative assistant so they could avoid talking to each other. These files detailed all of the director’s official memos and reports—against which he would have to check every doodle and fragment. An “inventory list” as Control thought of it. He had considered asking Whitby to sort through the notes, but with each item the security clearance fluctuated from secret to top secret to what-the-fuck-is-this-secret like some volatile stock market dealing in futures.
Grace’s title for the list was too functional: DIRECTOR FILES—DMP OF MAJOR AND MINOR MEMOS AND REPORTS. DMP, or Data Management Program, referred to the proprietary imaging and viewing system the Southern Reach had paid for and implemented in the nineties. Control would have gone with something pithier than Grace had, like THE DIRECTOR DOCUMENTS, or more dramatic, like TALES FROM A FORGOTTEN AGENCY or THE AREA X DOSSIER.
The piles had to be organized by topic so that they would at least loosely match up to Grace’s DMP: border, lighthouse, tower, island, base camp, natural history, unnatural history, general history, unknown. He also decided to make a pile for “irrelevant,” even though what might seem irrelevant to him might to someone else be the Rosetta stone—if such a stone, or the pebble version, even existed among all the debris.
This was a comfortable place for him, a comfortable task, familiar as penance during a period of shame and demotion, and he could lose himself in it almost as thoughtlessly as doing the dishes after dinner or making the bed in the morning—emerge in some ways refreshed.
But with the crucial difference that these piles looked in part as if he had tracked in dirt on his shoes from outside. The former director was making him into a new kind of urban farmer, building compost piles with classified material that had originated out in the world, bringing with it a rich backstory. Oak and magnolia trees had provided some of the raw material in the form of leaves, to which the director had added napkins, receipts, even sometimes toilet paper, creating a thick mulch.
The diner where Control ate breakfast had yielded several noteworthy receipts, as did a corner grocery store, where the former director had at various times shopped as a convenient last resort. The receipts indicated straggler items, not quite a formal outing for groceries. A roll of paper towels and beef jerky one time, fruit juice and breakfast cereal another time, hot dogs, a quart of skim milk, nail scissors, and a greeting card the next. The napkins, receipts, and advertising brochures from a barbecue place in her hometown of Bleakersville figured prominently, and induced in Control a hunger for ribs. Bleakersville was only about fifteen minutes from the Southern Reach, right off the highway that led to Hedley. According to Grace, the house there had been swept clean of anything related to the Southern Reach, the results catalogued in a special DIRECTOR’S HOUSE section of the DMP file.
Panicked thought after about an hour: What if the seemingly random surfaces on which the director had written her notes had significance? What if the words were not the whole message, just as the lighthouse keeper’s deranged sermon wasn’t the whole story? The storage cathedral came to mind, and although it seemed improbable he wondered, paranoid, if some of the leaves came from Area X, then dismissed the thought as speculative and counterproductive.
No, the director’s vast array of textures revealed “only” that she had been absorbed in her task, as if she had been desperate to write down her observations in the moment, had wanted neither to forget nor to have an internal editor interrupt her search for understanding. Or no hacker to peer into the inner workings of her mind, distilled down to a DMP or otherwise.
He had, as a result, to sort through not just piles of primary “documents” but also a haphazard record of the director’s life and her wanderings through the world outside of the Southern Reach buildings. This helped, because he had only dribs and drabs from the official file—either due to Grace’s interference or because the director herself had managed to winnow it terse. She had no siblings and had grown up with her father in the Midwest. She had studied psychology at a state college, been a consultant for about five years. She had then applied for the Southern Reach through Central, where she had endured a grueling schedule designed to force her to prove herself over and over—and thus make up for her undistinguished career to date. The Southern Reach must have seemed a more attractive posting back then—and where the sparse information turned into the roiling mass of notes in her office. His request for further intel had been offered up to the labyrinthine and terse maw of Central, which had clamped shut on it. Someday a file might be spat out in his direction.