Authority(83)

She offered him a cigarette. “Take one.”

Yes, he would take one, had been missing them ever since his weekend binge. The harsh, sharp taste of her unfiltered menthols as he lit up was like a spike through the eyeball to cure a headache.

“Do you like the swamp?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I like the quiet out here, sometimes. It can be peaceful.” She gave him a wry smile. “If I stand with my back to the building, I can pretend it isn’t there.”

He nodded, was silent for a moment, then said, “What would you do if the director came back and she was like the anthropologist or the surveyor?” Just adding to the light conversation. Just a gaffe, he realized as soon as he’d said it.

Grace remained unfazed. “She won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?” He almost broke his promise to his mother then and told Grace about the writing on the wall in the director’s house.

“I have to tell you something,” Grace said, changing direction on him. “It will be a shock, but I don’t mean it to be that way.”

Somehow, even though it was too late, he could see the hit coming before the impact, almost as if it were in slow-motion. It still knocked him off his feet.

“Here’s what you should know: Central took the biologist away late Friday evening. She’s been gone the whole weekend. So you must have been talking to a ghost, because I know you would not lie to me, John. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” Her look was serious, as if there were a bond between them.

* * *

Control wondered if the woman in the military jacket was back in front of the liquor store. He wondered if the skateboarder was in the process of dumping another can of dog food on the sidewalk, the plastic-bag man about to pop up to shout at passersby. He wondered if he should go join them. There was within him a generous affection for all of them, matched by a wide and growing sadness. A shed out back. Christmas lights wound around a pine. Wood storks.

No, he had not talked to the biologist that morning. Yes, he had thought she was still at the Southern Reach, had depended on that fact. He had already planned his next session in detail. It would be back in the interrogation room, not outside. She would sit there, maybe in a different mood from the other times but perhaps not, waiting for his now-familiar questions. But he wouldn’t ask any questions. Time to change the paradigm, the hell with procedures.

He would have pushed her file over to her, said, “This is everything we know about you. About your husband. About your past jobs and relationships. Including a transcript of your initial interview sessions with the psychologist.” This wouldn’t be an easy thing for him to do: Afterward, she might become a different person than he knew; he might be letting Area X farther into the world, in some odd way. He might be betraying his mother.

She would make some remark about having outlasted him already, and he would reply that he didn’t want to play games anymore, that Lowry’s games had already made him weary. She would repeat the same line he had said to her out by the holding pond: “Don’t thank people for giving you what you should already have.” “I’m not looking for thanks,” he would reply. “Of course you are,” she would say, without reproach. “It’s the way human beings are built.”

“You had her sent away?” Said so quietly that Grace asked him to repeat it.

“You had formed too much of an attachment. You were losing your perspective.”

“That wasn’t your call!”

“I am not the one who sent her away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ask your supervisor, Control. Ask your cabal at Central.”

“It’s not my cabal,” he said. Cabal versus faction. Which was worse? This was a record for not-fixing. A record for being sent in only to be shut out. He wondered what kind of bloodbath had to be occurring at Central right now.

He took a long drag on the cigarette, stared out at the god-awful swamp, heard from a distance Grace asking him if he was all right, his reply of “Give me a second.”

Was he all right? In the long line of things he could legitimately be not all right about, this ranked right up there. He felt as if something had been severed far too prematurely, that there had been much more to say. He tamped down the impulse to walk back inside and call his mother, because, of course, she must already know and would just give him an amplified echo of what Grace had said, no matter how much this could be seen as Lowry punishing him: “You were getting too close to her in too short a time. You went from an interrogation scenario to having conversations with her in her cell to chewing on sedge weeds while you gave her a guided tour of the outside of the building—in just four days. What would have come next, John? A birthday party? A conga line? Her own private suite at the Hilton? Perhaps a little voice inside starts to say, ‘Give her her files,’ hmm?”