Driving through the night now, he came back to the coast again and again, his headlights reflecting orange dashes and white reflectors and, sometimes, the silver-gray of a railing. He had stopped listening to the news on the radio. He didn’t know if the subtle hints of impending catastrophe he gleaned existed only in his imagination. He wanted more and more to pretend that he existed in a bubble without context. That the drive would last forever. That the journey was the point.
When he grew too tired, he stopped in a town whose name he forgot as soon as he left, having coffee and eggs at a twenty-four-hour diner. The waitress asked him where he was headed, and he just said, “North.” She nodded, didn’t ask him anything else, must have seen something in his face that discouraged it.
He didn’t linger, cut his meal short, nervous about the black sedan with the tinted windows in the parking lot, the battered old Volvo with the rain forest stickers on it whose owner had been slouched out there smoking a cigarette for a little too long.
The rain from off the sea thickened into fog, brought him to a twenty-mile-an-hour crawl in the dark never sure what would come out of the haze at him. Once a truck rattled his frame to the core, once a deer danced briefly past the headlights like a moving canvas, then was gone.
He came to the conclusion in the early dawn that it didn’t matter if his mother had lied to him. It was a tactical detail, not strategic. He was always going to pursue this course, convinced himself that once he had gone to the Southern Reach that he was always going to be on this road in the middle of nowhere, headed north. The gnarled, wind-torn trees became a dark haphazard smoke in the mist, self-immolating into ash, as if he were seeing some version of the future.
* * *
The night before he would reach the town of Rock Bay, John let himself have a last meal. He pulled into a fancy restaurant in a town that lay in the shadow of the coastal mountains, cupped by the curve of a river that looked anemic next to the waves and striations of different-colored sand radiating out from the water. Scattered piles of driftwood and dead trees looked as if they’d been placed there to hold it all down.
He sat at the bar, ordered a bottle of good red wine, a petite filet with garlic mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy. He listened to the humble-brag of Jan, the experienced bartender, with a deliberately naïve enthusiasm—entertaining stories from stints working overseas in cities John had never visited. The man stared furtively at John at times, from a craggy Nordic face bordered by long yellow hair. Wondering, perhaps, if John would ask him what he was doing among the driftwood here at the butt end of the world.
A family came in—rich, white, in Polo shirts and sweaters and khaki pants as if from a clothing catalogue. Oblivious of him. Oblivious of the bartender, ordering burgers and fries, the father sitting directly to John’s left, shielding his kids from the stranger. Exactly how strange, they could not know. They existed in their own bubble: They had just about everything and knew almost nothing. Their conversation was all about sitting up straight and chewing what they ate and a football game they’d watched and some tourist shop down in the village. He didn’t envy them. He didn’t hate them. He felt a curious nothing about them. All of the history here, everything encoded, rendered meaningless. None of it could mean anything next to the secret knowledge he carried with him.
The bartender shot John a roll of the eyes as he patiently put up with the kids’ changing orders and the subtle condescension in the way the father talked to him. While the woman in the military uniform and her two skateboarder friends from Empire Street gathered ethereal to either side of John, staring at the family’s meal with unabashed hunger. How many operatives went unremarked upon, never registered, were never heard from, never sustained. Snuffed out in darkness and crappy safe houses and dank motels. Made invisible. Made irrelevant. And how many could have been him. Were still him, laboring here, unbeknownst to this family or even the bartender, still trying, even though it wasn’t just the border to Area X that negated people but everyone in the world beyond.
When the family had left, and along with them his companions, he asked the bartender, “Where can I get a boat?” in an agreeably conspiratorial way. A fellow world-weary traveler, his tone implied. A fellow adventurer who sometimes ignored legality in the same way as the bartender did in his stories. You’re the man. You can hook me up.
“You know boats?” Jan asked.
“Yes.” On lakes. Close to shore. Anything more and he’d be the punch line of one of Jack’s jokes.
“Maybe I can help,” the bartender said, with a grin. “Maybe I could arrange that.” The fractured light from a chandelier composed of glass globes lit up his face as he leaned in to whisper, “How soon do you need it?”