Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)(29)

I could easily lose hours there, observing the hidden life of tidal pools, and sometimes I marveled at the fact that I had been given such a gift: not just to lose myself in the present moment so utterly but also to have such solitude, which was all I had ever craved during my studies, my practice to reach this point.

Even then, though, during the drives back, I was grieving the anticipated end of this happiness. Because I knew it had to end eventually. The research grant was only for two years, and who really would care about mussels longer than that, and it’s true my research methods could be eccentric. These were the kinds of thoughts I’d have as the expiration date came nearer and the prospects looked dimmer and dimmer for renewal. Against my better judgment, I began to spend more and more time in the pub. I’d wake in the morning, my head fuzzy, sometimes with someone I knew but who was a stranger just leaving, and realize I was one day closer to the end of it all. Running through it, too, was a sense of relief, not as strong as the sadness, but the thought, counter to everything else I felt, that this way I would not become that person the locals saw out on the rocks and still thought of as an outsider. Oh, that’s just the old biologist. She’s been here for ages, going crazy studying those mussels. She talks to herself, mutters to herself at the bar, and if you say a kind word …

When I saw those hundreds of journals, I felt for a long moment that I had become that old biologist after all. That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

* * *

Reality encroaches in other ways, too. At some point during our relationship, my husband began to call me the ghost bird, which was his way of teasing me for not being present enough in his life. It would be said with a kind of creasing at the corner of his lips that almost formed a thin smile, but in his eyes I could see the reproach. If we went to bars with his friends, one of his favorite things to do, I would volunteer only what a prisoner might during an interrogation. They weren’t my friends, not really, but also I wasn’t in the habit of engaging in small talk, nor in broad talk, as I liked to call it. I didn’t care about politics except in how politics impinged upon the environment. I wasn’t religious. All of my hobbies were bound up in my work. I lived for the work, and I thrilled with the power of that focus but it was also deeply personal. I didn’t like to talk about my research. I didn’t wear makeup or care about new shoes or the latest music. I’m sure my husband’s friends found me taciturn, or worse. Perhaps they even found me unsophisticated, or “strangely uneducated” as I heard one of them say, although I don’t know if he was referring to me.

I enjoyed the bars, but not for the same reasons as my husband. I loved the late-night slow burn of being out, my mind turning over some problem, some piece of data, while able to appear sociable but still existing apart. He worried too much about me, though, and my need for solitude ate into his enjoyment of talking to friends, who were mostly from the hospital. I would see him trail off in mid-sentence, gazing at me for some sign of my own contentment, as, off to the side, I drank my whiskey neat. “Ghost bird,” he would say later, “did you have fun?” I’d nod and smile.

But fun for me was sneaking off to peer into a tidal pool, to grasp the intricacies of the creatures that lived there. Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat, orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things. Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. He knew all of this, I think. But I never could express myself that well to him, although I did try, and he did listen. And yet, I was nothing but expression in other ways. My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease. Even a bar was a type of ecosystem, if a crude one, and to someone entering, someone without my husband’s agenda, that person could have seen me sitting there and had no trouble imagining that I was happy in my little bubble of silence. Would have had no trouble believing I fit in.

Yet even as my husband wanted me to be assimilated in a sense, the irony was that he wanted to stand out. Seeing that huge pile of journals, this was another thing I thought of: That he had been wrong for the eleventh expedition because of this quality. That here were the indiscriminate accounts of so many souls, and that his account couldn’t possibly stand out. That, in the end, he’d been reduced to a state that approximated my own.

Those journals, flimsy gravestones, confronted me with my husband’s death all over again. I dreaded finding his, dreaded knowing his true account, not the featureless, generic mutterings he had given to our superiors upon his return.

“Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.

* * *

The journals and other materials formed a moldering pile about twelve feet high and sixteen feet wide that in places near the bottom had clearly turned to compost, the paper rotting away. Beetles and silverfish tended to those archives, and tiny black cockroaches with always moving antennae. Toward the base, and spilling out at the edges, I saw the remains of photographs and dozens of ruined cassette tapes mixed in with the mulch of pages. There, too, I saw evidence of rats. I would have to lower myself down into the midden by means of the ladder nailed to the lip of the trapdoor and trudge through a collapsing garbage hill of disintegrating pulp to uncover anything at all. The scene obliquely embodied the scrap of writing I had encountered on the Tower wall:… the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives …