Acceptance. Jeff VanderMeer
through those thousand silvery reflections. Even as his lungs flooded with water. Even as he struggled to lose the treacherous knapsack but still hold on to Whitby’s document inside it, grappling, flailing for the pages, some of which exploded out into the water, the rest plummeting into the murk below with the knapsack: a slab of pulp, a soggy tombstone.
Ghost Bird, he recognized dimly, had already shot up and past him, toward a kind of glistening yellow egg of a reflected halo that might, or might not, be the sun. While he was still sucking water among the converging circles of the many swirling knives that stared at him with flat judgmental eyes. Confused by the swirl of pages that floated above or below, that stuck to his clothes, that came apart in miniature whirlpools to join the vortex. For a fading second, he was peering at a line of text and suffocating while blunt snouts bumped up against his chest.
Only when a true leviathan appeared did his oxygen-starved brain understand that they had emerged into a roiling school of some kind of barracuda-like fish now being disrupted by a larger predator. There came an awful free-falling emptiness … the quickly closing space where the enormous shark had sped through the vortex, annihilating fish in a crimson cloud. A megalodon of a kind. Lowry in yet another form … the air trickling out of his mouth like a series of tiny lies about the world that had decided to extinguish him.
“Lowry” left offal in its wake, so close to Control as he rose and it descended that the side of his face slid half raw against its gills. The frill and flutter sharper and harder than he could have imagined as it sculpted him, the expulsion of water a roaring, gushing piston in his ear, and the huge yet strangely delicate eye away to his left staring into him. Then his stomach was banging into its body, his bruised waist smacked by a swipe of the tail, and his head was ringing and he was drifting and he couldn’t keep his mouth from beginning to open, the dot of the sun smaller and smaller above him. “Pick up the gun, Control,” said his grandfather. “Pick it up from under the seat. Then jump.”
Did Lowry, or anyone, have a phrase that could save him?
Consolidation of authority.
There’s no reward in the risk.
Floating and floating.
Paralysis is not a cogent analysis.
Except it was. And from the wash and churn, the thrashing around him, a familiar hand grasped his drifting wrist and yanked him upward. So that he was not just a swirl of confused memory, a bruised body, a cipher, but apparently something worth saving, someone in the process of being saved.
His feet had kicked out against nothing, like a hanging victim, while the fish again converged, his body buffeted by a hundred smooth-rough snouts as he rose, as he blacked out amid the torrent of upward-plunging bodies, the rough rebuke of continuous flesh that formed one wide maw from which he might or might not escape.
Then they were on the shore and Ghost Bird was kissing him for some reason. Kissing him with great, gulping kisses that bruised his lips, and touching his chest and, when he opened his eyes and looked up into her face, making him turn onto his side. Water gushed, then dribbled, from him, and he had propped himself up with both arms, staring down into the wet sand, the tiny bubbles of worm tunnels as the edge of the surf brushed against his hands and receded.
Lying there on his side, he could see the lighthouse in the distance. But as if she could tell his intent, Ghost Bird said, “We’re not going there. We’re going to the island.”
And just like that, he’d lost control.
Now, on their fourth day in Area X, Control followed Ghost Bird through the long grass, puzzled, confused, sick, tired—the nights so alive with insects it was hard to sleep against their roar and chitter. While in his thoughts, a vast, invisible blot had begun to form across the world outside of Area X, like water seeping from the bottom of a leaky glass.
Worse still, the gravitational pull Ghost Bird exerted over him, even as she was indifferent to him, even as they sometimes huddled together for warmth at night. The unexpected delicacy and delirium of that accidental touch. Yet her message to him, the moment he had crossed a kind of border and she’d moved away from him, had been unmistakable and absolute. So he’d retreated to thinking of himself as Control, from necessity, to try to regain some distance, some measure of the objective. To reimagine her in the interrogation room at the Southern Reach, and him watching her from behind the one-way glass.
“How can you be so cheerful?” he’d asked her, after she had noted their depleted food, water, in an energetic way, then pointed out a kind of sparrow she said was extinct in the wider world, an almost religious ecstasy animating her voice.
“Because I’m alive,” she’d replied. “Because I’m walking through wilderness on a beautiful day.” This with a sideways glance he took to mean that she wondered if he was holding up. One that made him realize that her goals might not be his, that they might converge only to diverge, and he had to be ready for that. Echoes of field assignments gone wrong. Of his mother saying, “The operational damage from an event can linger in the mind like a ghost.” While he wondered if even the more banal things she had said had a hidden meaning or agenda.
Freedom could take you farther from what you sought, not closer. Something he was learning out here, beyond any standard intel, in a wilderness he didn’t understand. About as prepared for Area X, he realized, as for Ghost Bird, and perhaps that was, in the end, the same thing. Because they existed alone together, walked a trail that threaded its way between reed-choked lakes that could be tar-black or as green as the reflected trees that congregated in islands among the reeds … and he was finally free to ask her anything he wanted to, but he didn’t. Because it didn’t really matter.
So, instead, he shoved his hand into his jacket pocket from time to time, clenched his fist around his father’s carving, taken from the mantel in the little house on the hill in Hedley. The smooth lines of it, the way the grain of the wood under the paint threatened a splinter, soothed him. A carving of a cat, chosen to remind him of long-lost Chorry, no doubt blissfully hunting rats among the bushes.
So, instead, he dove, resentful at their pull, into reexamining over and over his rescued Whitby pages, the “terroir pages,” although they were more personal than that. An anchor, a bridge to his memory of the rest of the manuscript, lost at sea. If he used those pages to talk to Ghost Bird, it was in part to bring relief or distraction from the closeness of her and the way that the endless reeds, the fresh air, the blue sky, all conspired to make the real world remote, unimportant, a dream. When it was the most important thing.
Somewhere back there his mother was fighting for her career at Central, that act synonymous with fighting against the encroachment of Area X. Somewhere, too, new fronts had opened up, Area X expanding in ways that might not even match its prior characteristics. How could he know? Planes might be falling from the skies, this non-mission, this following of his, already a failure.
Quoting Whitby’s report as he remembered it, paraphrasing: “Had they, in fact, passed judgment without a trial? Decided there could be no treaty or negotiation?”
“That might be closer to the truth, to a kind of truth,” Ghost Bird replied. It was now early afternoon and the sky had become a deeper blue with long narrow clouds sliding across it. The marsh was alive with rustlings and birdsong.
“Condemned by an alien jury,” Control said.
“Not likely. Indifference.”
“He covers that, too: ‘Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer … reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.’” Another half-remembered phrasing, the real becoming half real. But his father had never valued authenticity so much as boldness of expression.
“See that deer over there, beyond the canal? She’s definitely noticing us.”
“Is she