Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(40)



Control reached into his satchel for some of his notes from the border trip, and in doing so was shocked to find three cell phones there instead of two—the sleek one used for communication with the Voice, the other one for regular use, and another, bulkier. Frowning, Control pulled them out. The third was the old, nonfunctioning phone from the director’s desk. He stared at it. How had it gotten in there? Had Grace put it in there? An old black beetle of a phone, the rippled, pitted burn across the leather cover a bit like a carapace. Grace couldn’t have done it. She must have left it in his office after all and he must have absentmindedly picked it up. But then why hadn’t he noticed it in the parking lot, after he finished talking to the Voice?

He set the phone on the kitchen counter, giving it a wary stare or two before he settled into the living room. What was he missing?

After a few sets of halfhearted push-ups, he turned on the television. Soon he was being bombarded by a montage of reality shows, news of another school massacre, a report on another garbage zone in the ocean, and some announcer screaming out the prelims of an MMA match. He dithered between a cooking show and a mystery, two of his favorites, because they didn’t require him to think, before deciding on the mystery, the cat purring on his lap like a revving engine.

As he watched the TV, he remembered a lecture in his second year of college by a professor of environmental science. The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as “immigrants need to learn English or they’re not really citizens” or “all mental patients deserve our respect.” That in the workings of, for example, an agency, you could, with effort, discover not just the abstract thought behind it but the concrete emotions. The Southern Reach had been set up to investigate (and contain) Area X, and yet despite all the signs and symbols of that mission—all of the talk and files and briefs and analysis—some other emotion or attitude also existed within the agency. It frustrated him that he could not quite put his finger on it, as if he needed another sense, or a sensitivity, that he lacked. And yet as Grace had said, once he became too comfortable within the Southern Reach, once he was cocooned by its embrace, he would be too indoctrinated to perceive it.

That night, he did not dream. He did remember being woken well before dawn by something small crawling across the roof in fits and starts, but soon enough it stopped moving. It hadn’t been enough to wake the cat.





012: SORT OF SORTING

In the morning, back at work, he discovered that a fluorescent rod had burned out in his office, dulling the light. Control’s chair and desk in particular lay under a kind of gloom. He moved a lamp from the bookcases and set it up on a shelf jutting out toward the desk on his left. The better to see that Whitby had followed through on his threat and left a thick, somewhat worn-looking document on his desk entitled “Terroir and Area X: A Complete Approach.” Something about the rust on the massive paper clip biting into the title page, the yellowing nature of the typed pages, the handwritten annotations in different-color pens, or maybe the torn-out taped-in images, made him reluctant to go down that particular rabbit hole. It would have to wait its turn, which might at this point mean next week or even next month. He had another session with the biologist, as well as a meeting with Grace about his agency recommendations, and then, on Friday, an appointment to view the videos from the first expedition. Among other pressing things on his mind … like a little redecorating. Control opened the door with the words hidden behind it. He took some photographs. Then, using a can of white paint and a brush requisitioned from maintenance, he meticulously painted over all of it: every last word, every detail of the map. Grace and the others would have to get by without a memorial because he couldn’t live with the pressure of those words pulsing out from behind the door. Also the height measurements, if that’s what they were. Two coats, three, until only a shadow remained, although the height marks, written using a different kind of pen, continued to shine through. If they were height marks, then the director had grown by a quarter inch between measurements, unless she’d been wearing higher heels the second time.

After painting, Control set out two of his father’s carvings from the chessboard at home, meaning for them to replace the missing talismans of plant and mouse. A tiny red rooster and a moon-blue goat, they came from a series entitled simply Mi Familia. The rooster had the name of one of his uncles, the goat an aunt. His dad had photographs from his youth of playing in the backyard with his friends and cousins, surrounded by chickens and goats, a garden stretching out of sight along a wooden fence. But Control only remembered his father’s chickens—generously put, tradition or legacy chickens, named and never slaughtered. “Homage chickens” as Control had teased his father.

Chess was a hobby he had developed that could be shared during his father’s chemo treatments and that his father could ponder and worry at when Control wasn’t there in the room. Their shared affliction before the cancer had been pool, at which they were both mediocre, even though they enjoyed it. But his dad’s physical ailments had outstripped the mental deterioration, so that hadn’t been an option. Books as a salve to the boredom of TV? No, because the bookmark just began to separate one sea of unread words from another. But with a reminder of whose turn it was, chess left some evidence of its past even when his dad got confused toward the end.

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