Jeff VanderMeer - Acceptance

You chart the progress of Area X’s reclamation of the environment, begin to get some small sense of its parameters, and even create expedition cycles with shared metrics. You may not always control those criteria, but, for a while, the consensus is that the situation has stabilized, that the news is improving. The gleaming silver egg you imagine when you think of Central—those seamless, high-level thoughts so imperfectly expressed through your superiors there—hums and purrs and pulses out approval over all of you … even if it also emanates the sense that the Southern Reach is some kind of meat-brain corruption of a beautiful elegant algorithm Central has hidden deep inside itself.

But as the years pass, with Lowry’s influence more and more corrosive, there’s no solution forthcoming. Data pulled out of Area X duplicates itself and declines, or “declines to be interpreted,” as Whitby puts it, and theories proliferate but nothing can be proven. “We lack the analogies,” the linguists keep saying.

Grace starts to call them the “languists” as they falter, can’t keep up, and as the grim joke goes, “fell by the side of a road that was like a mixed metaphor of a tongue that curled up and took them with it,” Area X muddying the waters. Except it wasn’t muddying waters or a tongue by the side of the road or anything else, muddled or not, that they could understand. “We lack the analogies” was itself somehow deficient as a diagnosis, linguists burning up during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere after encountering Area X. Making you think of all the dead and dying satellites sent hurtling down into the coordinates that comprised Area X, because it was easy, because space debris winking out of existence made a perverse kind of sense, even as turning Area X into a garbage can seemed like the kind of disrespect that might piss off an insecure deity. Except Area X never responded, even to that indignity.

The linguists aren’t really the problem, nor even Central. Lowry’s the problem because Lowry keeps your secret—that you grew up in what became Area X—and in return you have to try to give him what he wants, within reason. Lowry has invested other people’s blood and sweat in the idea of the expeditions, and implied by that the idea of the border as an impenetrable barrier, which means he’s safe on the right side of the divide. While Whitby keeps pushing against the traditional: “Whatever we think of the border, it’s important to recognize it as a limitation of Area X.” Was that important?

What seemed more important to you: The truth to rumors about Lowry’s ruthlessness once he reached Central, that he’s carved out his own soundproof shop. The whispers that came back to you distant but clear over the years, like hiking in a dark, still forest and hearing the faint sound of wind chimes. Something that beckons, promising all the comforts of civilization, but once the seeker reaches the end of that particular path, all she finds is a slaughterhouse piled high with corpses. The proof of it in the way he so easily overrules Pitman, your nominal boss at Central, and presses you harder for results.

By the time you’re on the eleventh cycle of expeditions, you’re more and more drained, and Central’s plan has begun to change. The flow of new personnel, money, and equipment has been reduced to a trickle as Central spends most of its time crushing domestic terrorism and suppressing evidence of impending ecological destruction.

You return after long days to the house in Bleakersville, which is no refuge. The ghosts follow, sit on the couch or peer in through the windows. Thoughts you don’t want creep in at odd moments—in the middle of status meetings, sitting down for lunch with Grace in the cafeteria, searching idly for Central’s latest bugs in your office—that maybe none of this is worth it, that you’re not getting anywhere. The weight of each expedition leaning in on you.

“I could’ve been director,” Lowry boasted once, “but a warning light came on in the cockpit and I took the hint.” The warning light is a fear that you know lives inside of him, but Lowry will never admit to it. The cruel jocularity to his goading, as if he knows he keeps asking you for the impossible.

Always worried, in a continual low-grade-fever sort of way, that someone at the Southern Reach or Central will discover your secret, that Lowry won’t be able to bury the information forever—or he’ll divulge it himself, having decided you’re disposable. Security risk. A liar. Too emotionally invested. And yet compassion is what you most distrust, what you thrust away from you, preferring to project with everyone but Grace that you’re cold, distant, even harsh, so that you can be clearheaded and objective … even if acting the part has made you a little cold, distant, and harsh.

In some unquantifiable way, too, you believe Lowry’s approach is pushing the Southern Reach farther away from the answers. Like an astronaut headed into the oblivion of vast and empty space who, in flailing about, only speeds up the moment when he is beyond rescue. And worse, to your way of thinking, reliving without nostalgia the thrust of your days as a psychologist, Lowry has doomed himself to finding countless ways to relive his own horrifying experience in Area X, so he can never be entirely free, the seeming attempt to cast it away turned into an endless embrace.

Your other sanctuary is the roof of the Southern Reach building—protected from view from below by the weird baffling, the wandering ridge, that circles the roof. Beyond Reach, BR for short, “Brr” in the winter and “Burr” or sometimes “Bee-arr!” or “Bear!” in the summer. Always “Bar” when you sneak up for drinks after work.

You share this sacred space with only one person: Grace. You bat around the ideas that pop up at Star Lanes, “shoot the shit,” protected by the fact that only you, Grace, and the janitor have the key. Many times people will try to track you down, only to find you have evaporated, reappearing, unbeknownst to them, in Beyond Reach.

It’s there, staring out at the prehistoric swamp, the miles of dark pine forest, that you and Grace come up with all the nicknames. The border you call “the moat” and the way in is “the front door,” although both of you are always hoping you’ll find a “side door” or a “trapdoor.” The tunnel or topographical anomaly in Area X you refer to as “El Topoff,” riffing on a strange film Grace once saw with her girlfriend.

A lot of it is stupid, but funny in the moment, especially if you’ve got a bottle of brandy, or if she brings cherry-flavored cigarettes, and you pull up a couple of lawn chairs and brainstorm or talk about the weekend to come. Grace knows about Chipper’s, like you know about her canoe trips with her friends, “your addiction to paddles.” You don’t need to tell her not to show up at Chipper’s, and you never invite yourself downriver. The circumference of your friendship is the length and breadth of the Southern Reach.

It’s on the roof that you first mention to Grace your idea of sneaking across the border into Area X. Over time it has become more than a thought tingling at the edge of things—metastasizing as code, as “a road trip with Whitby,” since the expeditions during the tenth and eleventh cycles have fared much better, even if there aren’t any answers, either.

You can’t take Grace, although you need her counsel. Because that would be like cutting off two heads at once if anything went wrong, and you’ve never thought Grace had the temperament for it; too many connections to the world. Children. Sisters. An ex-husband. A girlfriend. It’s Grace who you joke is your “external moral compass” and knows better than you where the boundaries are. “Too normal,” you wrote on a napkin once.