Authority(61)

Control didn’t know where to start because he didn’t want to start at all. What he wanted to talk about was the video footage, but that was impossible. The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will. He couldn’t tell any human being, ever. If he let it out, contaminated someone else’s mind, he would not forgive himself. A girlfriend who had gleaned some sense of his job had once asked, “Why do you do it?”—meaning why serve such a clandestine purpose, a purpose that could not be shared, could not be revealed. He’d given his standard response, in a portentous manner, to poke fun at himself. To disguise the seriousness. “To know. To go beyond the veil.” Across the border. Even as Control said it, he had known that he was also telling her he didn’t mind leaving her there, alone, on the other side.

“What would you like to talk about?” he asked Ghost Bird, not because he was out of questions but because he wanted her to take the lead.

“Nothing,” she said, listless. The word came out at a muttering slant.

“There must be something.” Pleading. Let there be something, to distract from the carnage in my head.

“I am not the biologist.”

That brought Control out of himself, forced him to consider what she meant.

“You are not the biologist,” he echoed.

“You want the biologist. I’m not the biologist. Go talk to her, not me.”

Was this some kind of identity crisis or just metaphorical?

Either way, he realized that this session had been a mistake.

“We can try again in the afternoon,” he said.

“Try what?” she snapped. “Do you think this is therapy? Who for?”

He started to respond, but in one violent motion she swept his files and water off the table and grabbed his left hand with both of hers and wouldn’t let go. Defiance and fear in her eyes. “What do you want from me? What do you really want?”

With his free hand, Control waved off the guards plunging into the room. From the corner of his eye, their retreat had a peculiar suddenness, as if they’d been sucked back into the doorway by something invisible and monstrous.

“Nothing,” he said, to see how she’d respond. Her hand was clammy and warm, not entirely pleasant; something was definitely going on beneath her skin. Had her fever gotten worse?

“I won’t assist in charting my own pathology,” she hissed, breathing hard, shouting: “I am not the biologist!”

He pulled himself loose, pushed away from the table, stood, and watched as she fell back into her seat. She stared down at the table, wouldn’t look up at him. He hated to see her distress, hated worse that he seemed to have caused it.

“Whoever you are, we’ll pick this up later,” he said.

“Humoring me,” she muttered, arms folded.

But by the time he’d picked up the bottle of water and his scattered files and made it to the door, something had changed in her again.

Her voice trembled on the cusp of some new emotion. “There was a mating pair of wood storks in the holding pond out back when I left. Are they still there?”

It took a moment to realize she meant when she’d left on the expedition. Another moment to realize that this was almost an apology.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll find out.”

What had happened to her out there? What had happened to him in here?

The last fragment of video remained in its own category: “Unassigned.” Everyone was dead by then, except for an injured Lowry, already halfway back to the border.

Yet for a good twenty seconds the camera flew above the glimmering marsh reeds, the deep blue lakes, the ragged white cusp of the sea, toward the lighthouse.

Dipped and rose, fell again and soared again.

With what seemed like a horrifying enthusiasm.

An all-consuming joy.





017: PERSPECTIVE

Steps had begun to go missing. Steps had begun to occur out of step. Lunch followed a status meeting that, the moment it was done, Control barely remembered no matter how hard he tried. He was here to solve a puzzle in some ways, but he felt as if it were beginning to solve him instead.

Control had talked for a while, he knew that, about how he wanted to know more about the lighthouse and its relationship to the topographical anomaly. After which Hsyu said something about the patterns in the lighthouse keeper’s sermon, while the sole member of the props department, a hunched-over elderly man named Darcy with a crinkly tinfoil voice, added commentary throughout her talk, referring to the “crucial role, now and in the future, of the historical accuracy division.”

Trees framed the campfire, the members of the expedition around the campfire. Something so large you couldn’t see its outline, crawling or lumbering through the background, obscenely threaded between the trees and the campfire. He didn’t like to think about what could be so huge and yet so lithe as to thread like that, to conjure up the idea of a fluid wall of ribbony flesh.