Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer Page 0,59
the trees, the air, as I opened up and kept on opening.
* * *
Nothing about my husband’s journal was expected. Except for some terse, hastily scribbled exceptions, he had addressed most of the entries to me. I did not want this, and as soon as it became apparent I had to resist the need to throw the journal away from me as if it were poison. My reaction had nothing to do with love or lack of love but was more out of a sense of guilt. He had meant to share this journal with me, and now he was either truly dead or existed in a state beyond any possible way for me to communicate with him, to reciprocate.
The eleventh expedition had consisted of eight members, all male: a psychologist, two medics (including my husband), a linguist, a surveyor, a biologist, an anthropologist, and an archaeologist. They had come to Area X in the winter, when the trees had lost most of their leaves and the reeds had turned darker and thicker. The flowering bushes “became sullen” and seemed to “huddle” along the path, as he put it. “Fewer birds than indicated in reports,” he wrote. “But where do they go? Only the ghost bird knows.” The sky frequently clouded over, and the water level in the cypress swamps was low. “No rain the entire time we’ve been here,” he wrote at the end of the first week.
They, too, discovered what only I call the Tower on their fifth or sixth day—I was ever more certain that the location of the base camp had been chosen to trigger that discovery—but their surveyor’s opinion that they must continue mapping the wider area meant they followed a different course than ours. “None of us were eager to climb down in there,” my husband wrote. “Me least of all.” My husband had claustrophobia, sometimes even had to leave our bed in the middle of the night to go sleep on the deck.
For whatever reason, the psychologist did not in this case coerce the expedition to go down into the Tower. They explored farther, past the ruined village, to the lighthouse and beyond. Of the lighthouse, my husband noted their horror at discovering the signs of carnage, but of being “too respectful of the dead to put things right,” by which I suppose he meant the overturned tables on the ground level. He did not mention the photograph of the lighthouse keeper on the wall of the landing, which disappointed me.
Like me, they had discovered the pile of journals at the top of the lighthouse, been shaken by it. “We had an intense argument about what to do. I wanted to abort the mission and return home because clearly we had been lied to.” But it was at this point that the psychologist apparently reestablished control, if of a tenuous sort. One of the directives for Area X was for each expedition to remain a unit. But in the very next entry the expedition had decided to split up, as if to salvage the mission by catering solely to each person’s will, and thus ensuring that no one would try to return to the border. The other medic, the anthropologist, the archaeologist, and the psychologist stayed in the lighthouse to read the journals and investigate the area around the lighthouse. The linguist and the biologist went back to explore the Tower. My husband and the surveyor continued on past the lighthouse.
“You would love it here,” he wrote in a particularly manic entry that suggested to me not so much optimism as an unsettling euphoria. “You would love the light on the dunes. You would love the sheer expansive wildness of it.”
They wandered up the coast for an entire week, mapping the landscape and fully expecting at some point to encounter the border, whatever form it might take—some obstacle that barred their progress.
But they never did.
Instead, the same habitat confronted them day after day. “We’re heading north, I believe,” he wrote, “but even though we cover a good fifteen to twenty miles by nightfall, nothing has changed. It is all the same,” although he also was quite emphatic that he did not mean they were somehow “caught in a strange recurring loop.” Yet he knew that “by all rights, we should have encountered the border by now.” Indeed, they were well into an expanse of what he called the Southern Reach that had not yet been charted, “that we had been encouraged by the