“What will Central do now?” he’d asked his mother.
“They’ll come after you because of your association with me.” Would have come after him anyway, for not reporting in and for going after the biologist.
“What else will they do?”
“Try to send in a thirteenth expedition, if a door still exists.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll keep making the case for the course I think is right,” she said, which she had to know was a huge risk. Did that mean she’d go back, or keep some distance from Central until the situation stabilized? Because Control knew that she would keep fighting until the world disappeared around her. Or Central got rid of her. Or Lowry used her as a scapegoat. Did she think Central wouldn’t try to blame the messenger? He could have asked why she didn’t just liquidate her savings and head for the most remote place possible … and wait. But if he had, she would have asked him the same thing.
At the end of the flight, a woman in the aisle seat opposite told him and his two seatmates to open their window for landing. “You gotta open the window for landing. You gotta open it. For landing.”
Or what? Or what? He just ignored her, did not pass the message on, closed his eyes.
When he opened them, the plane had landed. No one waited for him as he disembarked. No one called out his name. He rented a car without incident.
It was as if a different person put the key in the ignition and drove away from everything that was familiar. There was no going back now. There was no going forward, either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill of excitement, too. You couldn’t feel dead this way, or as if you were just waiting for the next thing to happen to you.
Rock Bay. The end of the world. If she wasn’t there, it was a better place than most to wait for whatever happened next.
* * *
Dusk of the next day. In a crappy motel on the coast with the word Beach in its name, Control obsessively stripped and cleaned his Glock, bought off a dealer using a fake name not thirty minutes after he’d cleared the airport, in the back lot of a car dealership. Then reassembled it. Having to focus on a repetitive and detailed task kept his mind off the void looming outside.
The television was on, but nothing made sense. The television, except for the vaguest of footnotes about a possible problem at the “Southern Reach environmental recovery site,” did not tell the truth about what was going on. But it hadn’t made sense for a very long time, even if no one knew that, and he knew his contempt would mirror that of the biologist, if she had been sitting where he was sitting. And the light from the curtains was just a stray truck barreling by in the dark. And the smell was of rot, but he thought perhaps he’d brought that with him. Even though he was far away from it now, the invisible border was close—the checkpoints, the swirling light of the door. The way that light seemed almost beveled, almost formed an image in that space between the curtains, and then fell away again into nothing.
On the bed: Whitby’s terroir manuscript, which he hadn’t looked at since leaving Hedley. All he’d done was put it in a sturdy waterproof plastic case. He kept realizing, with a kind of resigned surprise, a kind of slow registering or reimagining meant to cushion the blow, that the invasion had been under way for quite some time, had been manifesting for much longer than anyone could have guessed, even his mother. And that perhaps Whitby had figured something out, even if no one had believed him, even if figuring it out had exposed him to something that had then figured him out.
When he was finished with the Glock, he sat in a chair facing the door, clenching the grip tight even though it made his fingers throb. It was another way to keep from being overwhelmed by it. Pain as distraction. All of his familiar guides had gone silent. His mother, his grandparents, his father—none of them had anything to say to him. Even the carving in his pocket seemed inert, useless now.
And the whole time, sitting in the chair then lying in the bed with its worn blanket and yellowing sheets with cigarette burns in them, Control could not get the image of the biologist out of his head. The look on her face in the empty lot—that blankness—and then, later, in the sessions, the warring of contempt, wildness, casual vulnerability, and vehemence, strength. That had laid him low. That had expanded until it hooked into the whole of him, no part of him not committed. Even though she might never know, could give two shits about him. Even though he would be content should he never meet her again, just so long as he could believe she was still out there, alive and on her own. The yearnings in him now went in all directions and no direction at all. It was an odd kind of affection that needed no subject, that emanated from him like invisible rays meant for everyone and everything. He supposed they were normal feelings once you’d pushed on past a certain point.