02: INTEGRATION
In the morning, I woke with my senses heightened, so that even the rough brown bark of the pines or the ordinary lunging swoop of a woodpecker came to me as a kind of minor revelation. The lingering fatigue from the four-day hike to base camp had left me. Was this some side effect of the spores or just the result of a good night’s sleep? I felt so refreshed that I didn’t really care.
But my reverie was soon tempered by disastrous news. The anthropologist was gone, her tent empty of her personal effects. Worse, in my view, the psychologist seemed shaken, and as if she hadn’t slept. She was squinting oddly, her hair more windblown than usual. I noticed dirt caked on the sides of her boots. She was favoring her right side, as if she had been injured.
“Where is the anthropologist?” the surveyor demanded, while I hung back, trying to make my own sense of it. What have you done with the anthropologist? was my unspoken question, which I knew was unfair. The psychologist was no different than she had been before; that I knew the secret to her magician’s show did not necessarily mean she was a threat.
The psychologist stepped into our rising panic with a strange assertion: “I talked to her late last night. What she saw in that … structure … unnerved her to the point that she did not want to continue with this expedition. She has started back to the border to await extraction. She took a partial report with her so that our superiors will know our progress.” The psychologist’s habit of allowing a slim smile to cross her face at inappropriate times made me want to slap her.
“But she left her gear—her gun, too,” the surveyor said.
“She took only what she needed so we would have more—including an extra gun.”
“Do you think we need an extra gun?” I asked the psychologist. I was truly curious. In some ways I found the psychologist as fascinating as the tower. Her motivations, her reasons. Why not resort to hypnosis now? Perhaps even with our underlying conditioning some things are not suggestible, or fade with repetition, or she lacked the stamina for it after the events of the night before.
“I think we don’t know what we need,” the psychologist said. “But we definitely did not need the anthropologist here if she was unable to do her job.”
The surveyor and I stared at the psychologist. The surveyor’s arms were crossed. We had been trained to keep a close watch on our colleagues for signs of sudden mental stress or dysfunction. She was probably thinking what I was thinking: We had a choice now. We could accept the psychologist’s explanation for the anthropologist’s disappearance or reject it. If we rejected it, then we were saying the psychologist had lied to us, and therefore also rejecting her authority at a critical time. And if we tried to follow the trail back home, hoping to catch up with the anthropologist, to verify the psychologist’s story … would we have the will to return to base camp afterward?
“We should continue with our plan,” the psychologist said. “We should investigate the … tower.” The word tower in this context felt like a blatant plea for my loyalty.
Still the surveyor wavered, as if fighting the psychologist’s suggestion from the night before. This alarmed me in another way. I was not going to leave Area X before investigating the tower. This fact was ingrained in every part of me. And in that context I could not bear to think of losing another member of the team so soon, leaving me alone with the psychologist. Not when I was unsure of her and not when I still had no idea of the effects of my exposure to the spores.
“She’s right,” I said. “We should continue with the mission. We can make do without the anthropologist.” But my pointed stare to the surveyor made it clear to both of them that we would revisit the issue of the anthropologist later.
The surveyor gave a surly nod and looked away.
An audible sigh of either relief or exhaustion came from the psychologist. “That’s settled then,” she said, and brushed past the surveyor to start making breakfast. The anthropologist had always made breakfast before.
* * *
At the tower, the situation changed yet again. The surveyor and I had readied light packs with enough food and water to spend the full day down there. We both had our weapons. We both had donned our breathing masks to keep out the spores, even though it was too late for me. We both wore hard hats with fixed beams on them.
But the psychologist stood on the grass just beyond the circle of the tower, slightly below us, and said, “I’ll stand guard here.”
“Against what?” I asked, incredulous. I did not want to let the psychologist out of my sight. I wanted her embedded in the risk of the exploration, not standing at the top, with all of the power over us implied by that position.
The surveyor wasn’t happy, either. In an almost pleading way that suggested a high level of suppressed stress, she said, “You’re supposed to come with us. It’s safer with three.”
“But you need to know that the entrance is secured,” the psychologist said, sliding a magazine into her handgun. The harsh scraping sound echoed more than I would have thought.
The surveyor’s grip on her assault rifle tightened until I could see her knuckles whiten. “You need to come down with us.”
“There’s no reward in the risk of all of us going down,” the psychologist said, and from the inflection I recognized a hypnotic command.
The surveyor’s grip on her rifle loosened. The features of her face became somehow indistinct for a moment.
“You’re right,” the surveyor said. “Of course, you’re right. It makes perfect sense.”
A twinge of fear traveled down my back. Now it was two against one.
I thought about that for a moment, took in the full measure of the psychologist’s stare as she focused her attention on me. Nightmarish, paranoid scenarios came to me. Returning to find the entrance blocked, or the psychologist picking us off as we reached for the open sky. Except: She could have killed us in our sleep any night of the week.
“It’s not that important,” I said after a moment. “You’re as valuable to us up here as down there.”
And so we descended, as before, under the psychologist’s watchful eye.
* * *
The first thing I noticed on the staging level before we reached the wider staircase that spiraled down, before we encountered again the words written on the wall … the tower was breathing. The tower breathed, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat … and they were not made of stone but of living tissue. Those walls were still blank, but a kind of silvery-white phosphorescence rose off of them. The world seemed to lurch, and I sat down heavily next to the wall, and the surveyor was by my side, trying to help me up. I think I was shaking as I finally stood. I don’t know if I can convey the enormity of that moment in words. The tower was a living creature of some sort. We were descending into an organism.
“What’s wrong?” the surveyor was asking me, voice muffled through her mask. “What happened?”
I grabbed her hand, forced her palm against the wall.
“Let me go!” She tried to pull away, but I kept her there.
“Do you feel that?” I asked, unrelenting. “Can you feel that?”
“Feel what? What are you talking about?” She was scared, of course. To her, I was acting irrationally.
Still, I persisted: “A vibration. A kind of beat.” I removed my hand from hers, stepped back.
The surveyor took a long, deep breath, and kept her hand on the wall. “No. Maybe. No. No, nothing.”
“What about the wall. What is it made of?”
“Stone, of course,” she said. In the arc of my helmet flashlight, her shadowed face was hollowed out, her eyes large and circled by darkness, the mask making it look like she had no nose or mouth.
I took a deep breath. I wanted it all to spill out: that I had been contaminated, that the psychologist was hypnotizing us far more than we might have suspected. That the walls were made of living tissue. But I didn’t. Instead, I “got my shit together,” as my husband used to say. I got my shit together because we were going to go forward and the surveyor couldn’t see what I saw, couldn’t experience what I was experiencing. And I couldn’t make her see it.
“Forget it,” I said. “I became disoriented for a second.”
“Look, we should go back up now. You’re panicking,” the surveyor said. We had all been told we might see things that weren’t there while in Area X. I know she was thinking that this had happened to me.
I held up the black box on my belt. “Nope—it’s not flashing. We’re good.” It was a joke, a feeble joke, but still.
“You saw something that wasn’t there.” She wasn’t going to let me off the hook.
You can’t see what is there, I thought.
“Maybe,” I admitted, “but isn’t that important, too? Isn’t that part of all of this? The reporting? And something I see that you don’t might be important.”
The surveyor weighed that for a moment. “How do you feel now?”
“I feel fine,” I lied. “I don’t see anything now,” I lied. My heart felt like an animal had become trapped in my chest and was trying to crawl out. The surveyor was now surrounded by a corona of the white phosphorescence from the walls. Nothing was receding. Nothing was leaving me.
“Then we’ll go on,” the surveyor said. “But only if you promise to tell me if you see anything unusual again.”
I almost laughed at that, I remember. Unusual? Like strange words on a wall? Written among tiny communities of creatures of unknown origin.
“I promise,” I said. “And you will do the same for me, right?” Turning the tables, making her realize it might happen to her, too.
She said, “Just don’t touch me again or I’ll hurt you.”
I nodded in agreement. She didn’t like knowing I was physically stronger than her.
Under the terms of that flawed agreement we proceeded to the stairs and into the gullet of the tower, the depths now revealing themselves in a kind of ongoing horror show of such beauty and biodiversity that I could not fully take it all in. But I tried, just as I had always tried, even from the very beginning of my career.