kid soon revealed as just a brief moment set against a
landscape of unhappiness. Not unique: the kind of depressingly familiar painting you’d
find in a seaside antique store but never buy.
The silence was punctuated by arguments, a silence created not just by the secrets
she carried with her but by those she could not divulge, and, Control realized as
an adult, by her inner reserve, which after a time could not be bridged. Her absences
tore at his father, and by the time Control was ten, that was the subtext and sometimes
the transcript of their dispute: She was killing his art and that wasn’t fair, even
though the art scene had moved on and what his father did was expensive and required
patrons or grants to sustain.
But still his father would sit there with his schematics, his plans for new work,
spread out around him like evidence when she came back between field assignments.
She bore the recrimination, Control remembered, with calm and a chilly, aloof compassion.
She was the unstoppable force that came blowing in—not there, there—with presents
bought at the last minute in far-off airports and an innocent-sounding cover story
about what she’d been up to, or a less innocent story that Control realized years
later, when faced with a similar dilemma, had been coming to them from a time delay.
Something declassified she could now share but that had happened to her long ago.
The stories, and the aloofness, agitated his father, but the compassion infuriated
him. He could not read it as anything other than condescending. How can you tell if
a streak of light across the sky is sincere?
When they divorced, Control went south to live with his dad, who became embedded in
a community that felt comfortable because it included some of his relatives and fed
his artistic ambitions even as his bank account starved. Control could remember the
shock when he realized how much noise and motion and color could be found in someone’s
house, once they’d moved. How suddenly he was part of a larger family.
Yet during those hot summers in that small town not very far from the Southern Reach,
as a thirteen-year-old with a rusty bike and a few loyal friends, Control kept thinking
about his mother, out in the field, in some far-off city or country: that distant
streak of light that sometimes came down out of the night sky and materialized on
their doorstep as a human being. Exactly in the same way as when they’d been together
as a family.
One day, he believed, she would take him with her, and he would become the streak
of light, have secrets no one else could ever know.
* * *
Some rumors about Area X were elaborate and in their complexity seemed to Control
like schools of the most deadly and yet voluminous jellyfish at the aquarium. As you
watched them, in their undulating progress, they seemed both real and unreal framed
against the stark blue of the water. Invasion site. Secret government experiments. How could such an organism actually exist? The simple ones that echoed the official
story—variations on a human-made ecological disaster area—were by contrast so commonplace
these days that they hardly registered or elicited curiosity. The petting-zoo versions
that ate out of your hand.
But the truth did have a simple quality to it: About thirty-two years ago, along a
remote southern stretch known by some as as the “forgotten coast,” an Event had occurred
that began to transform the landscape and simultaneously caused an invisible border
or wall to appear. A kind of ghost or “permeable pre-border manifestation” as the
files put it—light as fog, almost invisible except for a flickering quality—had quickly
emanated out in all directions from an unknown epicenter and then suddenly stopped
at its current impenetrable limits.
Since then, the Southern Reach had been established and sought to investigate what
had occurred, with