* * *
The psychologist/director would have been given any number of hypnotic cues to use—words that, in certain combinations, would induce certain effects. Passing thought as the door shut behind Control: Had the director had anything to do with muddying their memories, while they were still in Area X?
Control slid into a chair across from the biologist, aware that Grace, at the very least, watched them through the one-way glass. Experts had questioned the biologist, but Control was also a kind of expert, and he needed to have the direct contact. There was something in the texture of a face-to-face interview that transcripts and videotape lacked.
The floor beneath his shoes was grimy, almost sticky. The fluorescent lights above flickered at irregular intervals, and the table and chairs seemed like something out of a high-school cafeteria. He could smell the sour metallic tang of a low-quality cleaning agent, almost like rotting honey. The room did not inspire confidence in the Southern Reach. A room meant as a debriefing space—or meant to seem like a debriefing space—should be more comfortable than one meant always and forever for interrogation, for a presumption of possible resistance.
Now that Control sat across from the biologist, she had the kind of presence that made him reluctant to stare into her eyes. But he always felt nervous right before he questioned someone, always felt as if that bright flash of light across the sky had frozen in its progress and come down to stand at his shoulder, mother in the flesh, observing him. The truth of it was, his mother did check up on him sometimes. She could get hold of the footage. So it wasn’t paranoia or just a feeling. It was part of his possible reality.
Sometimes it helped to play up his nervousness, to make the person across from him relax. So he cleared his throat, took a hesitant sip of water from the glass he’d brought in with him, fiddled with the file on her he’d placed on the table between them, along with a remote control for the TV to his left. To preserve the conditions under which she’d been found, to basically ensure she didn’t gain memories artificially, the assistant director had ordered that she not be given any of the information from her personnel file. Control found this cruel but agreed with Grace. He wanted the file between them to seem like a possible reward during some later session, even if he didn’t yet know if he would give it to her.
Control introduced himself by his real name, informed her that their “interview” was being recorded, and asked her to state her name for the record.
“Call me Ghost Bird,” she said. Was there a twinge of defiance in her flat voice?
He looked up at her, and instantly was at sea, looked away again. Was she using hypnotic suggestion on him somehow? It was his first thought, quickly dismissed.
“Ghost Bird?”
“Or nothing at all.”
He nodded, knew when to let something go, would research the term later. Vaguely remembered something in the file. Perhaps.
“Ghost Bird,” he said, testing it out. The words tasted chalky, unnatural in his mouth. “You remember nothing about the expedition?”
“I told the others. It was a pristine wilderness.” He thought he detected a note of irony in her tone, but couldn’t be sure.
“How well did you get to know the linguist—during training?” he asked.
“Not well. She was very vocal. She wouldn’t shut up. She was…” The biologist trailed off as Control stifled elation. A question she hadn’t expected. Not at all.
“She was what?” he prompted. The prior interrogator had used the standard technique: develop rapport, present the facts, grow the relationship from there. With nothing really to show for it.
“I don’t remember.”
“I think you do remember.” And if you remember that, then …
“No.”
He made a show of opening the file and consulting the existing transcripts, letting the edge of the paper-clipped pages that gave her most vital statistics come clear.
“Okay, then. Tell me about the thistles.”
“The thistles?” Her expressive eyebrows told him what she thought of the question.
“Yes. You were quite specific about the thistles. Why?” It still perplexed him, the amount of detail there about thistles, in an interview from the prior week, when she’d arrived at the Southern Reach. It made him think again of hypnotic cues. It made him think of words being used as a protective thicket.
The biologist shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He read from the transcript: “‘The thistles there have a lavender bloom and grow in the transitional space between the forest and the swamp. You cannot avoid them. They attract a variety of insects and the buzzing and the brightness that surrounds them suffuses Area X with a sense of industry, almost like a human city.’ And it goes on, although I won’t.”
She shrugged again.
Control didn’t intend to hover, this first time, but instead to glide over the terrain, to map out the extent of the territory he wanted to cover with her. So he moved on.
“What do you remember about your husband?”
“How is that relevant?”
“Relevant to what?” Pouncing.
No response, so he prompted her again: “What do you remember about your husband?”
“That I had one. Some memories before I went over, like I had about the linguist.” Clever, to tie that in, to try to make it seem part and parcel. A vagueness, not a sharpness.
“Did you know that he came back, like you?” he asked. “That he was disoriented, like you?”
“I’m not disoriented,” she snapped, leaning forward, and Control leaned back. He wasn’t afraid, but for a moment he’d thought he should be. Brain scans had been normal. All measures had been taken to check for anything remotely like an invasive species. Or “an intruder” as Grace put it, still unable to say anything to him remotely like the word alien. If anything, Ghost Bird was healthier now than before she’d left; the toxins present in most people today existed in her and the others at much lower levels than normal.
“I didn’t mean to offend,” he said. And yet she was disoriented, Control knew. No matter what she remembered or didn’t remember, the biologist he’d come to know from the pre-expedition transcripts would not have so quickly shown irritation. Why had he gotten to her?
He picked up the remote control from beside the file, clicked twice. The flat-screen TV on the wall to their left fizzled to life, showing the pixelated, fuzzy image of the biologist standing in the empty lot, almost as still as the pavement or the bricks in the building in front of her. The whole scene was awash in the sickly green of surveillance-camera noir.
“Why that empty lot? Why did we find you there?”
A look of indifference and no answer. He let the video continue to play. The repetition in the background sometimes got to the interviewee. But usually video footage showed a suspect putting down a bag or shoving something into a trash bin.
“First day in Area X,” Control said. “Hiking to base camp. What happened?”
“Nothing much.”
Control had no children, but he imagined that this was more or less what he’d get from a teenager asked about her day at school. Perhaps he would circle back for a moment.
“But you remember the thistles very, very well,” he said.
“I don’t know why you keep talking about thistles.”
“Because what you said about them suggests you remember some of your observations from the expedition.”
A pause, and Control knew the biologist was staring at him. He wanted to return fire, but something warned him against it. Something made him feel that the dream of falling into the depths might take him.
“Why am I a prisoner here?” she asked, and he felt it was safe to meet her gaze again, as if some moment of danger had come and gone.
“You aren’t. This is part of your debriefing.”
“But I can’t leave.”
“Not yet,” he admitted. “But you will.” If only to another facility; it might be another two or three years, if all went well, before they allowed any of the returnees back out in the world. Their legal status was in that gray area often arbitrarily defined by the threat to national security.
“I find that unlikely,” she said.
He decided to try again. “If not thistles, what would be relevant?” he asked. “What should I ask you?”
“Isn’t that your job?”
“What is my job?” Although he knew perfectly well what she meant.
“You’re in charge of the Southern Reach.”
“Do you know what the Southern Reach is?”
“Yesss.” Like a hiss.
“What about the second day at base camp? When did things begin to get strange?” Had they? He had to assume they had.
“I don’t remember.”
Control leaned forward. “I can put you under hypnosis. I have the right to. I can do that.”
“Hypnosis doesn’t work on me,” she said, disgust at his threat clear from her tone.
“How do you know?” A moment of disorientation. Had she given up something she didn’t want to give up, or had she remembered something lost to her before? Did she know the difference?
“I just know.”
“For clarity on that, we could recondition you and then put you under hypnosis.” All of this a bluff, in that it was more complicated logistically. To do so, Control would have to send her to Central, and she’d disappear into that maw forever. He might get to see the reports, but he’d never have direct contact again. Nor did he particularly want to recondition her.
“Do that and I’ll—” She managed to stop herself on the cusp of what sounded like the beginning of the word kill.
Control decided to ignore that. He’d been on the other end of enough threats to know which to take seriously.
“What made you resistant to hypnosis?” he asked.
“Are you resistant to hypnosis?” Defiant.
“Why were you at the empty lot? The other two were found looking for their loved ones.”
No reply.
Maybe enough had been said for now. Maybe this was enough.
Control turned off the television, picked up his file, nodded at her, and walked to the door.
Once there, the door open and letting in what seemed like more shadows than it should, he turned, aware of the assistant director staring at him from down the hall as he looked back at the biologist.
He asked, as he had always planned to, the postscript to an opening act: “What’s the last thing you remember doing in Area X?”
The answer, unexpected, surged up toward him like a kind of attack as the light met the darkness: “Drowning. I was drowning.”