That would probably be his fate: to catalogue the notes of others and create his own, ceaselessly and without effect. He would develop a paunch and marry some local woman who had already been married once. They would raise a family in Hedley, a son and a daughter, and on weekends he would be fully present with his family, work a distant memory that lay across the border known as Monday. They would grow old in Hedley, while he worked at the Southern Reach, putting in his hours and counting the years, the months, the days until retirement. They would give him a gold watch and a few pats on the back and by then his knees would be shot from all the jogging so he would be sitting down, and he’d be balding a little.
And he still wouldn’t know what to do about Whitby. And he would still miss the biologist. And he might still not know what was going on in Area X.
The drunk man came up and shook him out of his thoughts with a slap on his back. “You look like I know you. You look kinda familiar. What’s your name, pardner?”
“Rat Poison,” Control said.
The truth was, if the man who looked like the high school quarterback had responded by turning into something monstrous and torn him out into the night, part of Control wouldn’t have minded because he would have been closer to the truth about Area X, and even if the truth was a fucking maw, a fanged maw that stank like a cave full of putrefying corpses, that was still closer than he was now.
00X
When Control left the house on Tuesday morning, the director’s beetle-phone lay on his welcome mat. It had returned to him. Looking down at it, hand on the half-open front door, he could not help seeing it as a sign … but a sign of what?
Chorry jumped past him and into the bushes while Control squatted down to get a closer look. Days and nights out in the yard hadn’t helped it much. The grotesquery of the thing … some animal had gnawed at the casing and it was smeared with dirt and grass stains. Now it looked more like something alive than it had before. It looked like something that had gone exploring or burrowing and come back to report in.
Under the phone, thankfully, was a note from the landlord. In a quivering scrawl she had written, “The lawn man found this yesterday. Please dispose of phones in the garbage if you are done with them.”
He tossed it into the bushes.
* * *
In the morning light, during that ever-longer walk through the doors and down the corridor to his office, Control’s recollection of Whitby on the rack, stuffed into a shelf, the disturbing art on the wall, took on a slightly changed, more forgivable texture: a long-term disintegration whose discovery had urgency to him personally but for the Southern Reach was just one symptom of many seeking ways to take Whitby out of the “sinister” file and place him under “needs our help.”
Still, in his office, he wrestled with what to do about Whitby—did the man fall under his jurisdiction or Grace’s? Would she be resistant, slough it off, say something like “Oh, that Whitby”? Maybe together, he and Grace would go up into Whitby’s secret room and have a good laugh about the grotesqueries to be found there, and then jointly paint it all white again. Then they’d go have lunch with Cheney and Hsyu and play board games and share their mutual love of water polo. Hsyu would say, as if he’d already disagreed with her, “We shouldn’t take the meaning of words for granted!” and he would shout back, “You mean a word like border?” and she would reply, “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean! You get it! You understand!” Followed by an impromptu square dance, dissolving into a chaos of thousands of glowing green ferns and black glittering mayflies gusting across their path.
Or not.
* * *
With a snarl of frustration, Control put aside the question of Whitby and buried himself again in the director’s notes, kept Grace’s intel about the director’s focus in mind while trying to divine from those dried entrails more than they might actually contain. From Whitby, he wanted for the moment only distance and time so that there would be no hand reaching out to him.
He returned to the lighthouse, based on what Grace had told him. What was the purpose of a lighthouse? To warn of danger, to guide coastal vessels, and to provide landfall for ships. What did it mean to the Southern Reach, to the director?
Among the layers in the locked drawer, the most prominent concerned the lighthouse, and that included pages he had confirmed with Grace came from an investigation that was inextricably tied to the history of the island to the north. That island had had numerous names, as if none would stick, until now it was simply known as Island X at the Southern Reach, although some called it “Island Y,” as in “Why are we bothering to research this?”