Acceptance

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 be entirely free, the seeming attempt to cast it away turned into an endless embrace.

Your other sanctuary is the roof of the Southern Reach building—protected from view from below by the weird baffling, the wandering ridge, that circles the roof. Beyond Reach, BR for short, “Brr” in the winter and “Burr” or sometimes “Bee-arr!” or “Bear!” in the summer. Always “Bar” when you sneak up for drinks after work.

You share this sacred space with only one person: Grace. You bat around the ideas that pop up at Star Lanes, “shoot the shit,” protected by the fact that only you, Grace, and the janitor have the key. Many times people will try to track you down, only to find you have evaporated, reappearing, unbeknownst to them, in Beyond Reach.

It’s there, staring out at the prehistoric swamp, the miles of dark pine forest, that you and Grace come up with all the nicknames. The border you call “the moat” and the way in is “the front door,” although both of you are always hoping you’ll find a “side door” or a “trapdoor.” The tunnel or topographical anomaly in Area X you refer to as “El Topoff,” riffing on a strange film Grace once saw with her girlfriend.

A lot of it is stupid, but funny in the moment, especially if you’ve got a bottle of brandy, or if she brings cherry-flavored cigarettes, and you pull up a couple of lawn chairs and brainstorm or talk about the weekend to come. Grace knows about Chipper’s, like you know about her canoe trips with her friends, “your addiction to paddles.” You don’t need to tell her not to show up at Chipper’s, and you never invite yourself downriver. The circumference of your friendship is the length and breadth of the Southern Reach.

It’s on the roof that you first mention to Grace your idea of sneaking across the border into Area X. Over time it has become more than a thought tingling at the edge of things—metastasizing as code, as “a road trip with Whitby,” since the expeditions during the tenth and eleventh cycles have fared much better, even if there aren’t any answers, either.

You can’t take Grace, although you need her counsel. Because that would be like cutting off two heads at once if anything went wrong, and you’ve never thought Grace had the temperament for it; too many connections to the world. Children. Sisters. An ex-husband. A girlfriend. It’s Grace who you joke is your “external moral compass” and knows better than you where the boundaries are. “Too normal,” you wrote on a napkin once.

“Why do you let Lowry tell you what to do?” Grace says to you one afternoon, after you’ve directed the conversation that way. You deflect/refract. Lowry isn’t your direct boss, is more like slant rhyme, not there at the end of things but still in control. Grace would have to know how Lowry’s gotten his hooks in at Central, and how he got his hooks into you, and you’ve managed to shield her from that.

You remind Grace that there is a part of the kingdom you do control, that Lowry doesn’t get to influence: what comes out of Area X from the expeditions. It’s all processed through the Southern Reach, and so when the latest eleventh expedition came back with nothing to show for it except some blurry photographs left behind at base camp by the prior expedition, or perhaps one even earlier, you took them away and stared at them for hours. A collection of shadows against a black background. But was that a wall? Was that a texture that reminded you of another photograph from another expedition? So you pulled all of the photographs taken inside El Topoff. All thirteen of them, and, yes, these new ones could have been taken in the tunnel, too. That shadow, that faint outline of a face … is that familiar? Would it be wrong of you to believe it means something?

Confessing your simple plan to Grace, showing her some of the evidence, you’re betting that she won’t betray you to Central, but you know she might, out of a respect for the rules. Because behind all of your reasons, your data, you worry that it just boils down to being tired of the feeling in the pit of your stomach every time another expedition doesn’t come back, or only half comes back, or comes back with nothing. Needing to somehow change the paradigm.

“It’s just a quick jaunt over to El Topoff and back. No one will ever find out.” Although Lowry might. What will he do if he finds out you crossed the border without his approval? Would his anger be directed just at you?

After a pause, Grace says, “What do you need from me?” Because she can see it is important, and that you’ll do it whether she helps you or not.

The next thing she says is, “Do you think you can convince Whitby?”

“Yes, I do,” you say, and Grace looks skeptical.

But Whitby’s not a problem. Whitby’s eager, like a yipping terrier wanting to go for a long, long walk. Whitby wants out of the science department for a while. Whitby’s the one reassuring you by citing the survival rate of the last few expeditions. Whitby’s so invigorated by the opportunity that you can almost forget the whole idea is dangerous.

It’s a relief, because you realize that weekend, as you exchange small talk with the Realtor, that you were terrified of going alone. Realize, watching a football game on the bar TV, below that canopy of transfixed and rusting heavens, that if Whitby hadn’t said yes, you might’ve called the whole thing off.

Through the door, on your way to Area X, you feel a kind of pressure that bends you low, see a black horizon full of shooting stars, their trails bleeding so rich and deep across the non-sky that you squint against the brilliance of that celestial welder’s torch. A sense of teetering, of vertigo, but each time you lurch too far to one side or the other, something nudges you back toward the center, as if the edges, closer than they seem, curl up at a more severe angle. Your thoughts dart quick then slow, something stitching between them you cannot identify. The impulse comes to stop walking, to just stand there, in the corridor between the real world and Area X, for an eternity.

While hypnotized Whitby shuffles along, eyes closed, his face a twitching mass of tics as if he’s having an intense dream. Whatever haunts him inside his own head, you’ve made sure he won’t get lost, won’t just come to a halt somewhere in transit. He’s tied to you by the wrists with a nylon rope, and he stumbles along behind.

The molasses feeling Whitby told you to expect comes next, the sense of wading through thigh-high water, the resistance that means you are close to the end, a hint of the deep, spiraling door of light far ahead, and just in time, because stoic as you could be, Whitby’s dream-walking has begun to get to you, makes you think things look in at you. You lose the sense of where you are in relation to anything, even your own body … Are you really walking, or are you standing still and your brain just thinks that your feet are lifting up, falling down, lifting up again?

Until the resistance falls away like a breath held too long and then released, and you both stumble through the door and out into Area X. With Whitby on all fours, hugging the ground, shaking convulsively, and you pulling him free and past, so he won’t accidentally stagger in the wrong direction and disappear forever. He’s gasping like you both are gasping, from the freshness of the air, acclimating to it.

Such a blue, cloudless sky. A trail that should be so familiar, but it has been decades since you saw the forgotten coast. It will take more than a moment to think of it as home. You recognize the trail more from photographs and the accounts of expedition members, know it was here before the first invaders, was used by some of your long-ago ancestors, and has even now survived, overgrown, as part of Area X.

“Can you walk?” you ask Whitby, once you’ve brought him back to his senses.

“Of course I can walk.” Enthusiastic, but a kind of brittle sheen behind it, as if something has already been stripped away underneath.

You don’t ask him what he dreamed, what he saw. You don’t want to know until you’re back across.

You had reviewed those toxic Area X video clips from the doomed first expedition not to seek answers but, with some measure of guilt, to seek a connection with the wilderness you’d known as a child. To reinforce your memories, to recall what you could not recall—pushing past the screams, the disorientation, and the lack of comprehension, past Lowry’s weeping, past the darkness.

There you can see the line of rocks near the lighthouse, the shore already a little different then, as if Whitby’s terroir could be traced through the patterns left by the surf. As if down there, amid the sand-crab holes and the tiny clams digging in every time the water reveals them, some sample might hold all the answers.

The trails, too: a dark stillness of the pine trees and thick underbrush mottled by a strangled light. The memory of being disoriented and lost in a thunderstorm at the age of six, of emerging from that forest not knowing where you were—brought out of you by the cautious quiet way the expedition leader noted looming clouds, as if they presaged something more than a need to find shelter.

After the storm, in the startling revelation of open space and sunlight, you’d encountered a huge alligator blocking the narrow path, with water on both sides. You’d taken a running start and jumped over it. Never told your mother about the exhilaration, the way you had in mid-leap dared a glance down to see that yellow eye, that dark vertical pupil, appraise you, take you in like Area X had taken in the first expedition, and then you were over and past, running for a long time out of sheer joy, sheer adrenaline, like you’d conquered the world.

The running on the screen toward the end is away from something, not toward something, and the screams later not of triumph but of defeat—tired screams, as of weariness at fighting against something that would not properly show itself. In your more cynical moments you thought of them as perfunctory screams: an organism that knows there is no point in fighting back, the body capitulating and the mind letting it. They were not lost as you were lost that day; they had no cottage by the sea to return to, no mother pacing on the deck, worried out of her mind, grateful for your sudden grimy, soaked appearance.

Something on your face must have retained the memory of your joy because she didn’t punish you, just got you in dry clothes and fed you, and asked no questions.

Bypassing the route to base camp, you head for the topographical anomaly with the urgency of a ticking clock driving you. The knowledge—never discussed with Whitby—that the longer you stay, the longer you seem to linger, the greater the opportunity for disaster. That alligator eye staring up at you, with more awareness behind its piercing gaze than you remember. Someone off-camera on the second day of the first expedition saying, “I want to go home,” and Lowry, goofing around, so confident, saying, “What do ya mean? This is our home now. We’ve got everything here. Everything we need. Right?”

Nowhere is this sense of urgency more intense than while passing through the swampy forest that lies a mile or two from the border, where the woods meet a dank black-water gutter. The place where you most often saw evidence of bears and heard things rustling in the darkness of the tree cover.

Whitby’s often silent, and when he speaks his questions and concerns do nothing to alleviate the pressure of that gloom, the sense of intent eternal and everlasting that occupies this stretch of land, that predates Area X. The still, standing water, the oppressive blackness of a sky in which the blue peers down through the trees at startling intervals, only to be taken away again, and only ever seeming to come to you from a thousand miles off anyway. Is this the clearing where three men died during the fifth expedition? Does that pond hold the bodies of men and women from the first eighth? Sometimes, immersed in these overlays, Whitby’s pale whispering form is a jolting shock to you, inseparable from these echoes of prior last days.

Eventually, though, you cross into a more optimistic landscape, one in which you can adapt, reconcile past and present into one vision. Here, a wider path separates the continuing dank swamp forest from open ground, allows you a horizon of a few tall pines scattered among the wild grass and palmetto circles. The lean of that forest means that the darkness ends at an angle casting half the trail in a slanted shade.

There are other borders within Area X, other gauntlets, and you have passed through one to get to the topographical anomaly.

Once there, you know immediately the tower isn’t made of stone—and so does Whitby. Does he wish now, his expression unreadable, that you had put him through conditioning, that he’d been given all the training Central could bestow, not your half measures, your shoddy hypnotism?

The tower is breathing. There is no ambiguity about it: The flesh of the circular top of the anomaly rises and falls with the regular rhythm of a person deep in sleep. No one mentioned this aspect in the reports; you aren’t prepared for it, but how easily you acclimate, give yourself up to it, can already imagine descending even as a part of you is floating, ascending to look down on the foolishness of this decision.

Will it wake up while you’re inside it?