Acceptance

0003: THE DIRECTOR

On the weekends, your refuge is Chipper’s Star Lanes, where you’re not the director of the Southern Reach but just another customer at the bar. Chipper’s lies off the highway well out of Bleakersville, one step up from being at the end of a dirt road. Jim Lowry’s people back at Central might know the place, might be watching and listening, but you’ve never met anyone from the Southern Reach there. Even Grace Stevenson, your second-in-command, doesn’t know about it. For a disguise, you wear a T-shirt for a local construction company or a charity event like a chili cook-off and an old pair of jeans from the last time you were fat, sometimes topped off with a baseball cap advertising your favorite barbecue joint.

You go bowling there, like you used to with your dad as a kid, but you usually start out front, solo, on Chipper’s rotting but still functional Safari Adventure miniature golf course. The lions at the ninth hole are a sleeping huddle of dreamy plastic melted and blackened at the edges from some long-ago disaster. The huge hippo bestride the course-ending eighteenth has dainty ankles, and flaked-off splotches reveal blood-red paint beneath, as if its makers had been too obsessed with making it real.

Afterward you’ll go inside and bowl a few pickup games with anyone who needs a fourth, under the fading universe painted on the ceiling—there’s Earth, there’s Jupiter, there’s a purpling nebula with a red center, all of it lit up at night with a cheesy laser show. You’re good for four or five games, rarely top two hundred. When done, you sit at the dark, comfortable bar. It’s been shoved into a back corner as far from the room of stinking shoes as possible, and somehow the acoustics muffle the squeak, bump, and rumble of the bowling. Everything here is still too close to Area X, but as long as no one knows, that information can keep on killing the customers as slowly as it has over the past decades.

The Chipper’s bar attracts mostly stalwart regulars, because it’s really a dive, with dark felt stapled to the ceiling that’s meant to be sprinkled with stars. But whatever the metal that’s nailed up there, looking more like an endless series of sheriff’s badges from old Westerns, it’s been rusting for a long time, so now it’s become a dull black punctuated by tiny reddish-brown starfish. A sign in the corner advertises the Star Lanes Lounge. The lounge part consists of half a dozen round wooden tables and chairs with black fake-leather upholstery that look like they were stolen long ago from a family-restaurant chain.

Most of your comrades at the bar are heavily invested in the sports leaking out of the silent, closed-caption TV; the old green carpet, which climbs the side walls, soaks up the murmur of conversations. The regulars are harmless and rarely raucous, including a Realtor who thinks she is the knower of all things but makes up for it by being able to tell a good story. Then there’s the silver-bearded seventy-year-old man who’s almost always standing at the end of the bar drinking a light beer. He’s a veteran of some war, veers between laconic and neighborly.

Your psychologist cover story feels wrong here, and you don’t like using it. Instead, you tell anyone who asks that you’re a long-haul trucker between jobs and take a drag on your bottle of beer to end that part of the conversation. People find the idea of that line of work plausible; maybe something about your height and broad frame sells them on it. But most nights you can almost believe you are a trucker, and that these people are your sort-of friends.

The Realtor says the man’s not a veteran, just “an alcoholic looking for sympathy,” but you can tell she’s not without sympathy for that. “I’m just going to opt out” is a favorite phrase of the veteran. So is “the hell there isn’t.” The rest are a cross-section of ER nurses, a couple of mechanics, a hairdresser, a few receptionists and office managers. What your dad would’ve called “people who’re never allowed to see behind the curtain.” You don’t bother investigating them, or the oft-revolving bartenders, because it doesn’t matter. You never say anything seditious or confidential at Chipper’s.

But some nights, when you stay late and the bar crowd thins, you write down on a napkin or coaster a point or two you can’t leave alone—some of the continual puzzle-questions thrown at you by Whitby Allen, a holistic environments expert who reports to Mike Cheney, the overly jovial head of the science division. You never asked for these questions, but that doesn’t stop Whitby, who seems like his head’s on fire and the only way to put the fire out is to douse it with his ideas. “What’s outside the border when you’re inside it?” “What’s the border when you’re inside it?” “What’s the border when someone is outside it?” “Why can’t the person inside see the person outside?”

“My statements aren’t any better than my questions,” Whitby admitted to you once, “but if you want easy, you should check out what they serve up over at Cheney’s Science Shack.”

An impressive document backs up Whitby’s ideas, shining out from underneath the glossy invisible membrane of a piece of clear plastic. In a brand-new three-ring black binder, exquisitely hole-punched, not a typo in the entire twelve-page printout, with its immaculate title page: a masterpiece entitled “Combined Theories: A Complete Approach.”

The report is as shiny, clever, and quick as Whitby. The questions it raises, the recommendations made, insinuate with little subtlety that Whitby thinks the Southern Reach can do better, that he can do better if he is only given the chance. It’s a lot to digest, especially with the science department ambushing it and taking potshots in memos sent to you alone: “Suppositions in search of evidence, head on backward or sideways.” Or, maybe even sprouting from his ass.

But to you it’s deadly serious, especially a list of “conditions required for Area X to exist” that include

 an isolated place

 an inert but volatile trigger

 a catalyst to pull the trigger

 an element of luck or chance in how the trigger was deployed

 a context we do not understand

 an attitude toward energy that we do not understand

 an approach to language that we do not understand

“What’s next?” Cheney says at one status meeting. “A careful study of the miracles of the saints, unexplained occurrences writ large, two-headed calves predicting the apocalypse, to see if anything rings a bell?”

Whitby at the time is a feisty debater, one who likes hot water, who leaps in with a rejoinder that he knows will not just get Cheney’s goat but pen it up, butcher it, and roast it: “It acts a bit like an organism, like skin with a million greedy mouths instead of cells or pores. And the question isn’t what it is but is the motive. Think of Area X as a murderer we’re trying to catch.”

“Oh great, that’s just great, now we’ve got a detective on staff, too.” Cheney muttering while you give him the hush-hand and Grace helps out with her best pained smile. Because the truth is, you told Whitby to act like a detective, in an attempt to “think outside the Southern Reach.”

For a while, too, with Whitby’s help, you are arrows shot straight at a target. Because it’s not as if you don’t have successes at first. Under your watch, there are breakthroughs in expedition equipment, like enhanced field microscopes and weaponry that doesn’t trigger Area X’s defenses. More expeditions begin to come back intact, and the refinements in making people into their functions—the tricks you’ve learned from living in your own disguise—seem to help.

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.

“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.