Then he would have lied and said that wasn’t true or fair and she’d have fallen back on Grandpa Jack’s offensive old-school line about fair being “for losers and pussies,” and he wouldn’t be talking about Chorry. Control would claim she was interfering with his ability to do the job she had sent him to do and she’d counter with the idea of getting him transcripts of any subsequent interviews, which would be “just as good.” After which he might say, lamely, that’s not the point. That he needed the support, and then he’d trail off awkwardly because he was on thin ice talking about support, and she wouldn’t help him out, and he’d be stuck. They never spoke about Rachel McCarthy, but it was always there.
“So we should talk about division of duties,” Grace said.
“Yes, we should.” Because they both knew she now had the upper hand.
But his mind was elsewhere the whole time that Grace was massacring his troops, before she left the courtyard. Grace would run most things going forward, with John Rodriguez abdicating responsibility for all but figurehead duties at the most important status meetings. He would resubmit his recommendations through Grace, leaving out the pointless ones, and she would decide which to implement and which not to implement. They would coordinate so that eventually his working hours and Grace’s working hours overlapped as little as possible. Grace would assist him in making sense of the director’s notes, and as he acclimated himself to the new arrangements, that would be his major responsibility, although in no way did Grace acknowledge that the director might be dead or have gone completely off the tracks and hurtled through the underbrush over a cliff in her last days at the Southern Reach. Even as she did acknowledge that mouse-and-plant were eccentric, and also accepted the ex post facto reality that he had already painted over the director’s wall beyond the door.
None of which in this rout—this retreat that had no vanguard or rearguard, but was just a group of desperate men hacking at the muck and mire of a swamp with outdated swords while Cossacks waited for them on the plain—went completely against Control’s true wishes anyway, but this was not how he had seen it coming, with Grace dictating the terms of his surrender. And none of which saved him from a kind of grieving not at the power he was losing but at the person he had lost.
* * *
Still out there, smoking, after Grace had left, with a pat on his shoulder that was meant as sympathy but felt like failure. Even as he now counted her a colleague if not quite a friend. Trying to resurrect the idea of the biologist, the image of her, the sound of her voice.
“What should I do now?”
“I’m the prisoner,” the biologist said to him from her cot, facing the wall. “Why should I tell you anything?”
“Because I’m trying to help you.”
“Are you? Or are you just trying to help yourself?”
He had no answer to that.
“A normal person might give up. That would be very normal.”
“Would you?” he asked.
“No. But I’m not normal.”
“Neither am I.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“Where we’ve always been.”
But it didn’t. Something had occurred to him, finally seeing the janitor. Something about a ladder and a lightbulb.
023: BREAK DOWN
Control found a flashlight, tested it out. Then he walked past the cafeteria that had by now become an irritating repetition, as if he had navigated across the same airport terminal for several days while chewing the same piece of gum. At the door to the storage room, he made sure the corridor was clear then quickly ducked inside.
It was dark. He fumbled for the lightbulb cord, pulled it. The light came on but didn’t help much. As he’d remembered, the metal shade above the bulb and its low position, just an inch or so above his head, meant all you could see were the lower shelves. The only shelves the janitor could reach anyway. The only shelves that weren’t empty, as the shadows revealed as his eyes adjusted.
He had a feeling that Whitby had been lying. That this was the special room Whitby had offered to show him. If he could solve no other mystery, he would solve this one. A puzzle. A diversion. Had Lowry’s magical interference hastened this moment or postponed it?
Slowly the beam of his flashlight panned across the top of the shelves, then onto the ceiling, maybe nine feet above him. It had an unfinished feeling, that ceiling. Irregular and exposed, of different shades, the wooden planks were crossed by an X of two beams, and appeared to have been built around the shelves. The shelves continued to rise, empty, all the way up to the ceiling and then beyond. He could just see the gap where the next row of shelves continued, beyond the ceiling. After a moment more of inspection, Control noticed a thin, nearly invisible cut along the two beams that formed a square. A trapdoor? In the ceiling.