Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(21)
Together they went inside, and Control put out some wet food in the kitchen, petted him for a few minutes, then listened to his messages, the landline just for “civilians.” There was only one message: from Mary Phillips, his girlfriend until they’d broken up about six months ago, checking in to make sure the move had gone okay. She had threatened to come visit, although he hadn’t told her his precise location and had just gotten used to sleeping alone again. “No hard feelings,” and he couldn’t even really remember if he had broken up with her or she with him. There rarely were hard feelings—which felt odd to him and wrong. Shouldn’t there be? There had been almost as many girlfriends as postings; they usually didn’t survive the moves, or his circumspection, or his odd hours, or maybe he just hadn’t found the right person. He couldn’t be sure, tried as the cycle kept repeating to wring as much intensity and intimacy out of the early months, having a sense of how it would end. “You’re a strange kind of player,” the one-night stand before Mary had said to him as he was going down on her, but he wasn’t really a player. He didn’t know what he was.
Instead of returning the call, he slipped into the living room and sat on the couch. Chorry promptly curled up next to him, and he absentmindedly rubbed the cat’s head. A wren or some such rooted around outside the window. There came, too, the call of a mockingbird and a welcome chitter of bats, which weren’t as common anymore.
It was so close to everything he knew from his teenage years that he decided to let that be a comfort, along with the house, which helped him believe that this job was going to last. But “always have an exit strategy” was something his mother had repeated ad nauseam from his first day of training, so he had the standard packet hidden in a false bottom to a suitcase. He’d brought more than just his standard sidearm, one of the guns stored with the passports and money.
Control had already unpacked, the idea of leaving his things in storage painful. On the mantel over a brick fireplace that was mostly for show, he had placed a chessboard with the little brightly colored wooden figurines that had been his father’s last redoubt. His father had sold them in local crafts shops and worked in a community center after his career had stalled. Occasionally during the last decade of his father’s life, an art collector would buy one of the huge art installations rusting under tarps in the backyard, but that was more like receiving a ghost, a time traveler, than anything like a revival of interest. The chessboard, frozen in time, reflected the progress of their last game together.
He pulled himself off the couch, went into the bedroom, and changed into his shorts and T-shirt and running shoes. Chorry looked up at him as if he wanted to come along.
“I know, I know. I just got home. But I’ll be back.”
He slipped out the front door, deciding to leave Chorry inside, put on his headphones, turned on some of the classical music he loved, and lit out along the street and its dim streetlamps. By now full dusk had arrived and there was just a haze of dark blue remaining over the river below and the lights of homes and businesses, while above the reflected glow of the city pushed the first stars farther into the heavens. The heat had dropped away, but the insistent low chiseling noise of crickets and other insects brought back its specter.
Something immediately felt tight in his left quad, but he knew it would work itself out. He started slowly, letting himself take in the neighborhood, which was mostly small houses like his, with rows of high bushes instead of fences and streets that ran parallel to the ridge of the hill, with some connector streets running straight down. He didn’t mind the winding nature of it—he wanted a good three to five miles. The thick smell of honeysuckle came at him in waves as he ran by certain homes. Few people were still out except for some swing-sitters and dog-walkers, a couple of skateboarders. Most nodded at him as he passed.
As he sped up and established a rhythm, headed ever downward toward the river, Control found himself in a space where he could think about the day. He kept reliving the meetings and in particular the questioning of the biologist. He kept circling back to all of the information that had flooded into him, that he had let keep flooding into him. There would be more of it tomorrow, and the day after that, and no doubt new information would keep entering him for a while before any conclusions came back out.
He could try to not get involved at this level. He could try to exist only on some abstract level of management and administration, but he didn’t believe that’s really what the Voice wanted him to do—or what the assistant director would let him do. How could he be the director of the Southern Reach if he didn’t understand in his gut what the personnel there faced? He had already scheduled at least three more interviews with the biologist for the week, as well as a tour of the entry point into Area X at the border. He knew his mother would expect him to prioritize based on the situation on the ground.
The border in particular stuck with him as he jogged. The absurdity of it coexisting in the same world as the town he was running through, the music he was listening to. The crescendo of strings and wind instruments.
The border was invisible.
It did not allow half measures: Once you touched it, it pulled you in (or across?).
It had discrete boundaries, including to about one mile out to sea. The military had put up floating berms and patrolled the area ceaselessly.
He wondered, as he jumped over a low wall overgrown with kudzu and took a shortcut between streets across a crumbling stone bridge. He wondered for a moment about those ceaseless patrols, if they ever saw anything out there in the waves, or if their lives were just an excruciation of the same gray-blue details day after day.