Ctrl Ctrl Ctrl. Always too many pages. Ctrl this. Ctrl that. Ctrl crescendos and arias. Ctrl always clicking past information, because the information he found on the screen seemed to lead nowhere anyway, while the vast expanse of clutter that spread out in waves from his desk to the far wall contained too much.
His office began to close in on him. Listless pushing around of files and pretend efforts to straighten bookshelves had given way to further Internet searches on the places the biologist had worked before joining the twelfth expedition. This activity had proven more calming, each vista of wilderness more beautiful than the last. But eventually the parallels to the pristine landscape of Area X had begun to encroach and the bird’s-eye view of some of the photographs reminded him of that final video clip.
He took a break around five, then went back to his office for a while, after short, friendly conversations with Hsyu and Cheney in the corridor. Although Hsyu seemed flushed, talking a bit too fast for some reason, her aspect ratio skewed. Cheney’s big catcher’s mitt of a hand had rested on Control’s shoulder for an uncomfortable second or two, as the man said, “A second week! Which is a good sign, surely? We hope you find it all to your liking. We’re open to change. We’re open to changes, if you know what I mean, once you’ve heard what we have to say. And how we say it.” The words almost made sense, but somehow Cheney was off today, too. Control had had days like that.
That left only the problem of Whitby; he hadn’t seen him the whole afternoon, and Whitby hadn’t responded to e-mails, either. It felt important to get it over with, not to let it slide into Wednesday. The how had become clear to him, along with what was fair and what wasn’t fair. He would do it in front of Cheney in the science division, and leave Grace out of it. This had become his responsibility, his mess, and Cheney would just have to go along with his decision. Whitby would be forced to accept a leave of absence and psychiatric counseling, and with any luck the strange little man would never return.
It was late, already after six. He had lost track of time, or it had lost track of him. The office was still a mess corresponding to the contours of the director’s brain, Grace’s DMP files not changing those contours in any useful way.
He took Whitby’s terroir manuscript with him, feeling that perhaps selective readings from it would convince Whitby of the problem. He again crossed the wide expanse of the cafeteria. The huge cafeteria windows gathered up the gray of the sky and pushed it down onto the tables, the chairs; it would rain again before long. The tables were empty. The little dark bird or bat had stopped flying and sat perched high up on a steel beam near the windows. “There’s something on the floor.” “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Fragments of conversation as he passed by the door to the kitchen, and then a kind of sharp but faint weeping sound. For a moment, it puzzled Control. Then he realized it must come from some machine being operated by the cafeteria staff.
Something else had been gnawing at Control for much longer, as if he’d forgotten his wallet or other essential item when he’d left the house. But it now resolved, the weeping sound pushing it into his conscious mind. An absence. The rotting honey smell was gone. In fact, he realized he hadn’t smelled rotting honey the entire day, no matter where he had been. Had Grace at least passed on that recommendation?
He turned the corner into the corridor leading to the science division, kept walking under the fluorescent lights, immersed in a rehearsal of what he would say to Whitby, anticipating what Whitby might say back, or not say, feeling the weight of the man’s insane manuscript.
Control reached out for the large double doors. Reached for the handle, missed it, tried again.
But there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall.
And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand.
He was screaming, he thought, but from somewhere deep beneath the sea.
AFTERLIFE
Control, at the heart of a different tragedy, could see nothing but Rachel McCarthy with a bullet in her head, falling endlessly into the quarry. The sense of nothing being real during that time. That the room they had put him in, and the investigator assigned to him, were both constructs, and if he just kept holding on to that thought eventually the investigator would dissolve into nothing and the walls of his cell would fall away, and he would walk out into a world that was real. Then and only then would he wake up to continue with his life, which would follow the path it had followed to that point.
Even though the chair for the long hours of questioning cut into the back of his thigh and left a mark. Even though he smelled the bitter cigarette smoke on the investigator’s jacket, and heard the hiccupping whir of the tape in the recorder the man had brought in as a backup for the room’s video recording.