Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)(50)

I was almost out of sight above it, rounding the corner, when some stubborn part of me insisted on risking a single glance back. One last ill-advised, defiant glance at something I might never understand.

Staring back at me amid that profusion of selves generated by the Crawler, I saw, barely visible, the face of a man, hooded in shadow and orbited by indescribable things I could think of only as his jailers.

The man’s expression displayed such a complex and naked extremity of emotion that it transfixed me. I saw on those features the endurance of an unending pain and sorrow, yes, but shining through as well a kind of grim satisfaction and ecstasy. I had never seen such an expression before, but I recognized that face. I had seen it in a photograph. A sharp, eagle’s eye gleamed out from a heavy face, the left eye lost to his squint. A thick beard hid all but a hint of a firm chin under it.

Trapped within the Crawler, the last lighthouse keeper stared out at me, so it seemed, not just across a vast, unbridgeable gulf but also out across the years. For, though thinner—his eyes receded in their orbits, his jawline more pronounced—the lighthouse keeper had not aged a day since that photograph was taken more than thirty years ago. This man who now existed in a place none of us could comprehend.

Did he know what he had become or had he gone mad long ago? Could he even really see me?

I do not know how long he had been looking at me, observing me, before I had turned to see him. Or if he had even existed before I saw him. But he was real to me, even though I held his gaze for such a short time, too short a time, and I cannot say anything passed between us. How long would have been enough? There was nothing I could do for him, and I had no room left in me for anything but my own survival.

There might be far worse things than drowning. I could not tell what he had lost, or what he might have gained, over the past thirty years, but I envied him that journey not at all.

* * *

I never dreamed before Area X, or at least I never remembered my dreams. My husband found this strange and told me once that maybe this meant I lived in a continuous dream from which I had never woken up. Perhaps he meant it as a joke, perhaps not. He had, after all, been haunted by a nightmare for years, had been shaped by it, until it had all fallen away from him, revealed as a facade. A house and a basement and the awful crimes that had occurred there.

But I’d had an exhausting day at work and took it seriously. Especially because it was the last week before he left on the expedition.

“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”

“Am I a pinprick then, disturbing the edges of your reality, ghost bird?” he asked, and this time I caught the desperation of his mood.

“Oh, is it bait-the-ghost-bird time again?” I said, arching an eyebrow. I didn’t feel that relaxed. I felt sick to my stomach, but it seemed important to be normal for him. When he later came back and I saw what normal could be, I wished I’d been abnormal, that I’d shouted, that I’d done anything but be banal.

“Perhaps I’m a figment of your reality,” he said. “Perhaps I don’t exist except to do your bidding.”

“Then you’re failing spectacularly,” I said as I made my way into the kitchen for a glass of water. He was already on a second glass of wine.

“Or succeeding spectacularly because you want me to fail,” he said, but he was smiling.

He came up behind me then to hug me. He had thick forearms and a wide chest. His hands were hopeless man-hands, like something that should live in a cave, ridiculously strong, and an asset when he went sailing. The antiseptic rubber smell of Band-Aids suffused him like a particularly unctuous cologne. He was one big Band-Aid, placed directly on the wound.

“Ghost bird, where would you be if we weren’t together?” he asked.

I had no answer for that. Not here. Not there, either. Maybe nowhere.

Then: “Ghost bird?”

“Yes,” I said, resigned to my nickname.

“Ghost bird, I’m afraid now,” he said. “I’m afraid and I have a selfish thing to ask. A thing I have no right to ask.”

“Ask it anyway.” I was still angry, but in those last days I had become reconciled to my loss, had compartmentalized it so I would not withhold my affection from him. There was a part of me, too, that raged against the systematic loss of my field assignments, was envious of his opportunity. That gloated about the empty lot because it was mine alone.

“Will you come after me if I don’t come back? If you can?”

“You’re coming back,” I told him. To sit right here, like a golem, with all the things I knew about you drained out.

How I wish, beyond reason, that I had answered him, even to tell him no. And how I wish now—even though it was always impossible—that, in the end, I had gone to Area X for him.

* * *

A swimming pool. A rocky bay. An empty lot. A tower. A lighthouse. These things are real and not real. They exist and they do not exist. I remake them in my mind with every new thought, every remembered detail, and each time they are slightly different. Sometimes they are camouflage or disguises. Sometimes they are something more truthful.

When I finally reached the surface, I lay on my back atop the Tower, too exhausted to move, smiling for the simple, unexpected pleasure of the heat on my eyelids from the morning sun. I was continually reimagining the world even then, the lighthouse keeper colonizing my thoughts. I kept pulling out the photograph from my pocket, staring at his face, as if he held some further answer I could not yet grasp.