Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(63)

The Voice, while Control languished under hypnosis, had a sharpness and focus not as present otherwise, and a kind of casual perversity, telling Control s/he wanted a joke to end their next phone call, “one with a punch line.” As far as he could tell, he also had been serving as a living tape recorder for the Voice. The Voice had pulled out of Control verbatim conversations, which explained why he had been so late getting home Wednesday even though the conversation had seemed short.

He’d been on an expedition sent into the Southern Reach and just like the expeditions into Area X, not told the truth. He had been right to feel that he was getting information coming in with an extra stutter-step. What else had he done that he might never know?

So he’d written on the neon orange sheet that he could not possibly miss:

CONTROL, YOU ARE BEING SUBJECTED TO HYPNOTIC SUGGESTION BY THE VOICE

___ Check this line and scream obscenities. Move down one line.

___ Check this line and scream obscenities. Move down one line.

Rinse, repeat, brought out of it by the bullhorn, pulled back into it. Until, finally, he reached the end: “Check this line and repeat these phrases”—all of the phrases he’d found in the director’s desk. Shout them, actually.

Are you excited, too?… The possibility of significant variation … Paralysis is not a cogent analysis … Consolidation of authority … There’s no reward in the risk … Floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating …

Overload the system as the scientists with the white rabbits had been unable to. Push the Voice into some kind of collapse.

He had been betrayed, would not now have a moment when he would not be looking over his shoulder. Saw the biologist by the holding pond, the two of them looking at the shed. Leading her back into the Southern Reach, as it swallowed them. His mother leading him by the hand up the path to the summer cottage, Grandpa waiting for them, an enigmatic smile making a mystery of his face.

* * *

The cure for his discoveries, for not having to think about them, had been a kind of self-annihilation as he trekked undaunted from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning, through the small but plump underbelly of Hedley—which as far as he could tell had forgotten there was a Southern Reach. He recalled a pool hall—the crack of ball against ball, the thud and thack, the comfort of the felt-lined pockets, the darkness, the smell of chalk and cigarettes. Hitting the cue ball with the eight ball as a joke, and a handprint slapped in chalk on the ass of a woman’s jeans—or as he thought of it later, although she’d placed it there, a hand too far. He had withdrawn soon after, not as interested as he’d thought in the banality of a grainy morning sun seen through the windows of a cheap motel, an imprint of a body on the sheets, a used condom in the wastebasket. These were visions for others, at least in that moment—because it just seemed like too much work. He’d still be in the same place. He’d still be hearing Lowry from the videos. He’d still be seeing, in slow motion no less, Grace offering him the contents of her box of complaints. His mind would still be whirring as it contracted and expanded, grappling with Area X.

He took in a late-night movie at a run-down theater with gum and soaked-in cola on the stained blue carpet. He was the only one there. Against the odds, the theater had survived from his teenage years to now. The movie was terrible, the kind of science-fiction film where the plot holes almost seemed like alien interference imposed from some higher dimension. But the quiet coolness of the place soothed his jangled nerves. Until it was time to get up again and lurch his way to the next bar, his path taking him along the waterfront in an epic pub crawl. Was that Cheney knocking, asking if he was okay?

He had three shots of cheap whiskey in a place so run down it didn’t have a name. He had a gulp of some local moonshine at a party not far from the pier where ages ago he’d looked out across the river. Told himself over and over that the hypnosis was a small thing, not a large thing, and that it meant nothing. Nothing at all. Too big a deal. Too little. He thought about calling his mother. Couldn’t. Wanted to call his father. Impossible.

He went into another bar already drunk, found himself confronted by a ghost. Earlier that night he had glimpsed hints of them—in the curl of a lip that sparked a memory, a flicker of an eyelid, the way someone’s hand lingered on a tabletop. Those shoes. That dress. But when you encountered a real ghost—the Thing Entire—it was a shock … it took your breath. Not away. It didn’t take your breath away—your breath wasn’t going anywhere. Your breath was still in you, locked up, not of use to you. Took your pulse only to mutter dire predictions for the future. So when you came back into the moment, you doubted at first who you were, because the Ghost Entire trapped Control somewhere between the person he had been and the person he had become. And yet it was still just a wraith. Just a woman he had known in high school. Intensely. For the first time. Close enough that Control felt somehow like he was being disrespectful to the biologist, that the overlay of the ghost was disrupting his impression of Ghost Bird. Even if that was ridiculous. And all of it taking him farther and farther from the Southern Reach.

Trying to escape the residue of that, at another point on the carousel compass of his adventures—utterly shitfaced and giddy—he had spun onto a stool in a biker bar, winding up next to the assistant director. The whole place was still raucous and ill-behaved at two in the morning. It stank of piss, as thick as if cats had been marking their territory. Control gave her a leaky lantern of a grin, to go with an emphatic nod. She gave him a look of blank neutrality.