“If you say so.” Then, as if playing on his discomfort, she turned again so she was on her side facing him, still clutching the pillow. She peered up at him and said with a kind of sleepy cheekiness, “What if we share information?”
“What do you mean?” He knew exactly what she meant.
“You answer a question and I’ll answer a question.”
He said nothing, weighing the threat of that versus the reward. He could lie to her. He could lie to her all day long, and she’d never know.
“Okay,” he said.
“Good. I’ll start. Are you married or ever been married?”
“No and no.”
“Zero for two. Are you gay?”
“That’s another question—and no.”
“Fair enough. Now ask away.”
“What happened at the lighthouse?”
“Too general. Be more specific.”
“When you went inside the lighthouse, did you climb to the top? What did you find?”
She sat up, back to the wall. “That’s two questions. Why are you looking at me that way?”
“I’m not looking at you in any particular way.” He’d just become aware of her breasts, which hadn’t happened during prior sessions, and now was trying to become unaware of them again.
“But that’s two questions.” Apparently, he’d given the correct response.
“Yes, you’re right about that.”
“Which one do you want answered?”
“What did you find?”
“Who says I remember any of it?”
“You just did. So tell me.”
“Journals. Lots of journals. Dried blood on the steps. A photograph of the lighthouse keeper.”
“A photograph?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Two middle-aged men, in front of the lighthouse, a girl out to the side. The lighthouse keeper in the middle. Do you know his name?”
“Saul Evans,” he said without thinking. But couldn’t see the harm, was already mulling over the significance of a photograph that hung in the director’s office also existing in the lighthouse. “That’s your question.”
He could tell she was disappointed. She frowned, shoulders slumped. Could tell as readily that the name “Saul Evans” meant nothing to her.
“What else can you tell me about the photo?”
“It was framed, hanging on the wall at the middle landing, and the lighthouse keeper’s face was circled.”
“Circled?” Who had circled it, and why?
“That’s another question.”
“Yes.”
“Now tell me what your hobbies are.”
“What? Why?” It seemed like a question for the wider world, not the Southern Reach.
“What do you do when you’re not here?”
Control considered that. “I feed my cat.”
She laughed—chortled, actually, ending in a short coughing fit. “That’s not a hobby.”
“More like a vocation,” he admitted. “No, but—I jog. I like classical music. I play chess sometimes. I watch TV sometimes. I read books—novels.”
“Nothing very distinctive there,” she said.
“I never claimed to be unique. What else do you remember from the expedition?”
She squinted, eyebrows applying pressure to the rest of her face as if that might help her memory. “That’s a very broad question, Mr. Director. Very broad.”
“You can answer it however you like.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“I just mean that—”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I almost always know what you mean.”
“Then answer the question.”
“It’s a voluntary game,” she explained. “We can stop at any time. Maybe I want to stop now.” That recklessness again, or something else? She sighed, crossed her arms. “Something bad happened at the top. I saw something bad. But I’m not quite sure what. A green flame. A shoe. It’s confused, like it’s in a kaleidoscope. It comes and it goes. It feels as if I’m receiving someone else’s memories. From the bottom of a well. In a dream.”
“Someone else’s memories?”
“It’s my turn. What does your mother do?”
“That’s classified.”
“I bet it is,” she said, giving him an appraising look.
* * *
He ended the session soon thereafter. What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone? Tired and in her room, she had become not so much less sharp as almost too relaxed.
She was confusing him. He kept seeing sides of her that he had not known existed, that had not existed in the biologist he had known from the files and transcripts. He felt as if he’d been talking to someone younger today, someone more glib and also more vulnerable, if he’d chosen to exploit that. Perhaps it was because he had invaded her territory, while she was sick—or perhaps she was, for some reason, trying out personalities. Some part of him missed the more confrontational Ghost Bird.