But Grace persisted: “You did. You also rifled through my files, looked in all of my drawers.”
“No, I didn’t.” This time his anger was backed by something real. He hadn’t ransacked her office, only placed the bugs there, but now even that act troubled him the more he thought about it. It was out of character, had served no real purpose, had been counterproductive.
Grace continued on patiently. “If you do it again, I’ll file a complaint. I’ve already changed the pass-key combination on my door. Anything you need to know, you can just ask me.”
Easily said, but Control didn’t think it was true, so he tested it: “Did you put the director’s cell phone in my satchel?” Couldn’t bring himself to ask the even more ludicrous question “Did you squash a mosquito in my car?” or anything about the director and the border.
“Now, why would I do that?” she asked, echoing him, but she looked serious, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Keep the bugs as souvenirs,” he said. Put them in the Southern Reach Olde Antique Shoppe and sell them to tourists.
“No, I mean it—what are you talking about?”
Rather than respond, Control got up, retreated into the corridor, not sure if he heard laughter from behind him or some distorted echo through the overhead vent.
014: HEROIC HEROES OF THE REVOLUTION
Later, as he was wallowing in the notes, plugging his ears and eyes with them, to forget about Grace—if he hadn’t ransacked Grace’s office who had?—the expedition wing buzzed him and an excitable-sounding male voice told Control that the biologist was “not feeling good at all—she says she’s not up for an interview today.” When he asked what was wrong, the man told him, “She’s been complaining of cramps and fever. The doctor says it’s a cold.” A cold? A cold was nothing.
“Hit the ground running.” The notes and these sessions were still firmly within his domain. He didn’t want to postpone, so he’d go to her. With any luck, he wouldn’t bump into Grace. Whitby he could’ve used help from, but even though he’d buzzed him, the man was making himself scarce.
As he said that he’d stop by soon, Control realized that it might be some ploy—the obvious one of not playing along, but also that by going he might be giving up some advantage or confirming that she held some power over him. But his head was full of scraps of notes and the puzzle of a possible clandestine trip by the director across the border and the deadly echo of muffled interiors of jewelry boxes. He wanted to clear it out, or fill it up with something else for a while.
He left his office, headed down the corridor. Of the smattering of personnel in the hall beyond some were actually in lab coats for once. For his benefit? “Bored?” a pale gaunt man who looked vaguely familiar murmured to the black woman walking beside him as they passed. “Eager to get on with it,” came the reply. “You prefer this place, you really do, don’t you?” Should he be playing it by the book more? Perhaps. He couldn’t deny that the biologist had gotten lodged inside of his head: A faint pressure that made the path leading to the expedition wing narrower, the ceilings lower, the continuous seeking tongue of rough green carpet curling up around him. They were beginning to exist in some transitional space between interrogation and conversation, something for which he could not quite find a name.
“Good afternoon, Director,” said Hsyu, head rising unexpected from a water fountain to his left so that it was as if a large puppet or art installation had come to life. “Is everything okay?”
Everything had been fine just a second before. Why would anything be different now? “You just looked very serious.” Perhaps you’re not very serious today; couldn’t that be it? But he didn’t say it, just smiled and continued on down the hall, already leaving the Lilliputian domain of the linguistics subdepartment.
Every time the biologist spoke something changed in his world, which he found suspicious on some level, resented it for the distraction. But not a flirtation, no, nor even the ordinary emotional bond. He knew with absolute certainty that he would not become overly fixated or obsessional, enter into some downward spiral, if they continued to talk, to share the same space. That had no place in his plans, didn’t fit his profile.
The expedition wing featured four layers of obvious security, with the debriefing room they usually used perched on the edge of the outer layer—right after you passed through a decontamination zone that scanned you for everything from bacteria to the ghost of that rusty nail that had risen up through your foot on the rocky beach when you were ten. Considering the biologist had stood in a festering empty lot full of weeds, rusted metal, cracked concrete, and dog shit for hours before arriving, this seemed pointless. But still they did it, with an unsmiling and calm efficiency. Beyond that, all was rendered in an almost blinding white that contrasted with the washed-out teal-and-copper textures of the rooms off the corridor. Three more locked doors lay between the rest of the Southern Reach and the “suites,” aka the holding areas. A texture and tone that might once have been futurist but now felt retro-futurist clung to white-and-black furniture that had an abstract modernist quality. This is a version of a chair. This is an approximation of a table, a counter. The “bedeviled” glass partitions, as his dad would have joked, had been etched and frosted into simplistic wilderness scenes, including a row of reeds with an approximation of a marsh hawk hovering above. Like most such efforts, all of this could have come from the set of a low-budget 1970s sci-fi movie. It had none of the fluidity and sense of frozen motion, either, that his father had tried to put into his abstract sculptures.