“My statements aren’t any better than my questions,” Whitby admitted to you once, “but if you want easy, you should check out what they serve up over at Cheney’s Science Shack.”
An impressive document backs up Whitby’s ideas, shining out from underneath the glossy invisible membrane of a piece of clear plastic. In a brand-new three-ring black binder, exquisitely hole-punched, not a typo in the entire twelve-page printout, with its immaculate title page: a masterpiece entitled “Combined Theories: A Complete Approach.”
The report is as shiny, clever, and quick as Whitby. The questions it raises, the recommendations made, insinuate with little subtlety that Whitby thinks the Southern Reach can do better, that he can do better if he is only given the chance. It’s a lot to digest, especially with the science department ambushing it and taking potshots in memos sent to you alone: “Suppositions in search of evidence, head on backward or sideways.” Or, maybe even sprouting from his ass.
But to you it’s deadly serious, especially a list of “conditions required for Area X to exist” that include
an isolated place
an inert but volatile trigger
a catalyst to pull the trigger
an element of luck or chance in how the trigger was deployed
a context we do not understand
an attitude toward energy that we do not understand
an approach to language that we do not understand
“What’s next?” Cheney says at one status meeting. “A careful study of the miracles of the saints, unexplained occurrences writ large, two-headed calves predicting the apocalypse, to see if anything rings a bell?”
Whitby at the time is a feisty debater, one who likes hot water, who leaps in with a rejoinder that he knows will not just get Cheney’s goat but pen it up, butcher it, and roast it: “It acts a bit like an organism, like skin with a million greedy mouths instead of cells or pores. And the question isn’t what it is but is the motive. Think of Area X as a murderer we’re trying to catch.”
“Oh great, that’s just great, now we’ve got a detective on staff, too.” Cheney muttering while you give him the hush-hand and Grace helps out with her best pained smile. Because the truth is, you told Whitby to act like a detective, in an attempt to “think outside the Southern Reach.”
For a while, too, with Whitby’s help, you are arrows shot straight at a target. Because it’s not as if you don’t have successes at first. Under your watch, there are breakthroughs in expedition equipment, like enhanced field microscopes and weaponry that doesn’t trigger Area X’s defenses. More expeditions begin to come back intact, and the refinements in making people into their functions—the tricks you’ve learned from living in your own disguise—seem to help.
You chart the progress of Area X’s reclamation of the environment, begin to get some small sense of its parameters, and even create expedition cycles with shared metrics. You may not always control those criteria, but, for a while, the consensus is that the situation has stabilized, that the news is improving. The gleaming silver egg you imagine when you think of Central—those seamless, high-level thoughts so imperfectly expressed through your superiors there—hums and purrs and pulses out approval over all of you … even if it also emanates the sense that the Southern Reach is some kind of meat-brain corruption of a beautiful elegant algorithm Central has hidden deep inside itself.
But as the years pass, with Lowry’s influence more and more corrosive, there’s no solution forthcoming. Data pulled out of Area X duplicates itself and declines, or “declines to be interpreted,” as Whitby puts it, and theories proliferate but nothing can be proven. “We lack the analogies,” the linguists keep saying.
Grace starts to call them the “languists” as they falter, can’t keep up, and as the grim joke goes, “fell by the side of a road that was like a mixed metaphor of a tongue that curled up and took them with it,” Area X muddying the waters. Except it wasn’t muddying waters or a tongue by the side of the road or anything else, muddled or not, that they could understand. “We lack the analogies” was itself somehow deficient as a diagnosis, linguists burning up during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere after encountering Area X. Making you think of all the dead and dying satellites sent hurtling down into the coordinates that comprised Area X, because it was easy, because space debris winking out of existence made a perverse kind of sense, even as turning Area X into a garbage can seemed like the kind of disrespect that might piss off an insecure deity. Except Area X never responded, even to that indignity.
The linguists aren’t really the problem, nor even Central. Lowry’s the problem because Lowry keeps your secret—that you grew up in what became Area X—and in return you have to try to give him what he wants, within reason. Lowry has invested other people’s blood and sweat in the idea of the expeditions, and implied by that the idea of the border as an impenetrable barrier, which means he’s safe on the right side of the divide. While Whitby keeps pushing against the traditional: “Whatever we think of the border, it’s important to recognize it as a limitation of Area X.” Was that important?
What seemed more important to you: The truth to rumors about Lowry’s ruthlessness once he reached Central, that he’s carved out his own soundproof shop. The whispers that came back to you distant but clear over the years, like hiking in a dark, still forest and hearing the faint sound of wind chimes. Something that beckons, promising all the comforts of civilization, but once the seeker reaches the end of that particular path, all she finds is a slaughterhouse piled high with corpses. The proof of it in the way he so easily overrules Pitman, your nominal boss at Central, and presses you harder for results.
By the time you’re on the eleventh cycle of expeditions, you’re more and more drained, and Central’s plan has begun to change. The flow of new personnel, money, and equipment has been reduced to a trickle as Central spends most of its time crushing domestic terrorism and suppressing evidence of impending ecological destruction.
You return after long days to the house in Bleakersville, which is no refuge. The ghosts follow, sit on the couch or peer in through the windows. Thoughts you don’t want creep in at odd moments—in the middle of status meetings, sitting down for lunch with Grace in the cafeteria, searching idly for Central’s latest bugs in your office—that maybe none of this is worth it, that you’re not getting anywhere. The weight of each expedition leaning in on you.
“I could’ve been director,” Lowry boasted once, “but a warning light came on in the cockpit and I took the hint.” The warning light is a fear that you know lives inside of him, but Lowry will never admit to it. The cruel jocularity to his goading, as if he knows he keeps asking you for the impossible.
Always worried, in a continual low-grade-fever sort of way, that someone at the Southern Reach or Central will discover your secret, that Lowry won’t be able to bury the information forever—or he’ll divulge it himself, having decided you’re disposable. Security risk. A liar. Too emotionally invested. And yet compassion is what you most distrust, what you thrust away from you, preferring to project with everyone but Grace that you’re cold, distant, even harsh, so that you can be clearheaded and objective … even if acting the part has made you a little cold, distant, and harsh.
In some unquantifiable way, too, you believe Lowry’s approach is pushing the Southern Reach farther away from the answers. Like an astronaut headed into the oblivion of vast and empty space who, in flailing about, only speeds up the moment when he is beyond rescue. And worse, to your way of thinking, reliving without nostalgia the thrust of your days as a psychologist, Lowry has doomed himself to finding countless ways to relive his own horrifying experience in Area X, so he can never