Jeff VanderMeer - Acceptance

“Why do you let Lowry tell you what to do?” Grace says to you one afternoon, after you’ve directed the conversation that way. You deflect/refract. Lowry isn’t your direct boss, is more like slant rhyme, not there at the end of things but still in control. Grace would have to know how Lowry’s gotten his hooks in at Central, and how he got his hooks into you, and you’ve managed to shield her from that.

You remind Grace that there is a part of the kingdom you do control, that Lowry doesn’t get to influence: what comes out of Area X from the expeditions. It’s all processed through the Southern Reach, and so when the latest eleventh expedition came back with nothing to show for it except some blurry photographs left behind at base camp by the prior expedition, or perhaps one even earlier, you took them away and stared at them for hours. A collection of shadows against a black background. But was that a wall? Was that a texture that reminded you of another photograph from another expedition? So you pulled all of the photographs taken inside El Topoff. All thirteen of them, and, yes, these new ones could have been taken in the tunnel, too. That shadow, that faint outline of a face … is that familiar? Would it be wrong of you to believe it means something?

Confessing your simple plan to Grace, showing her some of the evidence, you’re betting that she won’t betray you to Central, but you know she might, out of a respect for the rules. Because behind all of your reasons, your data, you worry that it just boils down to being tired of the feeling in the pit of your stomach every time another expedition doesn’t come back, or only half comes back, or comes back with nothing. Needing to somehow change the paradigm.

“It’s just a quick jaunt over to El Topoff and back. No one will ever find out.” Although Lowry might. What will he do if he finds out you crossed the border without his approval? Would his anger be directed just at you?

After a pause, Grace says, “What do you need from me?” Because she can see it is important, and that you’ll do it whether she helps you or not.

The next thing she says is, “Do you think you can convince Whitby?”

“Yes, I do,” you say, and Grace looks skeptical.

But Whitby’s not a problem. Whitby’s eager, like a yipping terrier wanting to go for a long, long walk. Whitby wants out of the science department for a while. Whitby’s the one reassuring you by citing the survival rate of the last few expeditions. Whitby’s so invigorated by the opportunity that you can almost forget the whole idea is dangerous.

It’s a relief, because you realize that weekend, as you exchange small talk with the Realtor, that you were terrified of going alone. Realize, watching a football game on the bar TV, below that canopy of transfixed and rusting heavens, that if Whitby hadn’t said yes, you might’ve called the whole thing off.

Through the door, on your way to Area X, you feel a kind of pressure that bends you low, see a black horizon full of shooting stars, their trails bleeding so rich and deep across the non-sky that you squint against the brilliance of that celestial welder’s torch. A sense of teetering, of vertigo, but each time you lurch too far to one side or the other, something nudges you back toward the center, as if the edges, closer than they seem, curl up at a more severe angle. Your thoughts dart quick then slow, something stitching between them you cannot identify. The impulse comes to stop walking, to just stand there, in the corridor between the real world and Area X, for an eternity.

While hypnotized Whitby shuffles along, eyes closed, his face a twitching mass of tics as if he’s having an intense dream. Whatever haunts him inside his own head, you’ve made sure he won’t get lost, won’t just come to a halt somewhere in transit. He’s tied to you by the wrists with a nylon rope, and he stumbles along behind.

The molasses feeling Whitby told you to expect comes next, the sense of wading through thigh-high water, the resistance that means you are close to the end, a hint of the deep, spiraling door of light far ahead, and just in time, because stoic as you could be, Whitby’s dream-walking has begun to get to you, makes you think things look in at you. You lose the sense of where you are in relation to anything, even your own body … Are you really walking, or are you standing still and your brain just thinks that your feet are lifting up, falling down, lifting up again?

Until the resistance falls away like a breath held too long and then released, and you both stumble through the door and out into Area X. With Whitby on all fours, hugging the ground, shaking convulsively, and you pulling him free and past, so he won’t accidentally stagger in the wrong direction and disappear forever. He’s gasping like you both are gasping, from the freshness of the air, acclimating to it.

Such a blue, cloudless sky. A trail that should be so familiar, but it has been decades since you saw the forgotten coast. It will take more than a moment to think of it as home. You recognize the trail more from photographs and the accounts of expedition members, know it was here before the first invaders, was used by some of your long-ago ancestors, and has even now survived, overgrown, as part of Area X.

“Can you walk?” you ask Whitby, once you’ve brought him back to his senses.

“Of course I can walk.” Enthusiastic, but a kind of brittle sheen behind it, as if something has already been stripped away underneath.

You don’t ask him what he dreamed, what he saw. You don’t want to know until you’re back across.

You had reviewed those toxic Area X video clips from the doomed first expedition not to seek answers but, with some measure of guilt, to seek a connection with the wilderness you’d known as a child. To reinforce your memories, to recall what you could not recall—pushing past the screams, the disorientation, and the lack of comprehension, past Lowry’s weeping, past the darkness.

There you can see the line of rocks near the lighthouse, the shore already a little different then, as if Whitby’s terroir could be traced through the patterns left by the surf. As if down there, amid the sand-crab holes and the tiny clams digging in every time the water reveals them, some sample might hold all the answers.

The trails, too: a dark stillness of the pine trees and thick underbrush mottled by a strangled light. The memory of being disoriented and lost in a thunderstorm at the age of six, of emerging from that forest not knowing where you were—brought out of you by the cautious quiet way the expedition leader noted looming clouds, as if they presaged something more than a need to find shelter.

After the storm, in the startling revelation of open space and sunlight, you’d encountered a huge alligator blocking the narrow path, with water on both sides. You’d taken a running start and jumped over it. Never told your mother about the exhilaration, the way you had in mid-leap dared a glance down to see that yellow eye, that dark vertical pupil, appraise you, take you in like Area X had taken in the first expedition, and then you were over and past, running for a long time out of sheer joy, sheer adrenaline, like you’d conquered the world.

The running on the screen toward the end is away from something, not toward something, and the screams later not of triumph but of defeat—tired screams, as of weariness at fighting against something that would not properly show itself. In your more cynical moments you thought of them as perfunctory screams: an organism that knows there is no point in fighting back, the body capitulating and the mind letting it. They were not lost as you were lost that day; they had no cottage by the sea to return to, no mother pacing on the deck, worried out of her mind, grateful for your sudden grimy, soaked appearance.