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v.
You drive to the countryside together. You have vague memories, fragments that you pick at like lint dotting a well-loved coverlet, that they had had plans to do this, before Kane left. Lena’s eyes go wonderful when you suggest it, soft and bright and doe-like with affection.
Then she looks confused, like her reaction is alien to her. Unknown.
There isn’t much time to consider it. You’re both still quarantined, under observation, but the Southern Reach’s new director treats this excursion like an experiment, a chance to observe you in a new habitat. Or maybe he only acquiesces because he thinks it will piss off Lomax and the others. The director hands Lena the keys to the van that you all will be occupying, which surprises you. He also slides into the backseat with your security detail, which doesn’t. All things considered, he doesn’t seem like the type of man who finds it easy to relinquish control.
Lena drives, and you sit up front with her, one hand reaching across to touch hers on the gear stick. It is a phantom ache of a feeling, a canyon of remembrance, vast miles between you and it, save for the echo that bounces back. It no longer distresses you, to feel like this. You cannot recall ever having driven down long stretches of country roads with Lena, the wind playing the devil with your slicked-back hair, leaves getting caught in the windshield-wiper, the corner of your mouth perpetually curved up in half a smile, as if your lips can't help but reach for her when she is near, like your hand. You cannot recall these things, but you have those memories. They are yours now.
Birdsong tickles at your ear, drowned out by the wind. Lena drives too fast, as is her wont. You can barely recognise the trees that you pass as the van flies by. Tall and scarred, lithe and springy, needles raining, flowers dancing, leaves in a continuous descent. All their detritus covers the road like tears, and you cannot put a finger on a single one of their names, these trees. You are at peace with that. Ancient is a moniker as much as a quality, and some things live too long to need names.
You picnic in a field, surrounded by flowers. Little sandwiches, (crusts off for you, on for her) fruit, juice boxes. You squirt some into her face with the straw and she laughs, slapping you on the shoulder. You smile. You think you might have made love here, if the director wasn’t stood nearby, leaning against a nameless tree, waiting to begin another line of questioning. You are somewhat relieved that you won’t have the chance to, not yet.
Lena stretches across the blanket to pick at a flower stem. Something in your mind tells you that it is more weed than flower, but it is startlingly pretty, with off-shoots of red and purple and yellow, long stems that rain pollen, buds that open up like hearts. Lena observes it, features gone strange. You don’t know if the look on her face means that she wants to cut a sample from it, or eat it.
You touch her wrist. “What’s wrong?”
Her fingers pull apart, and the multi-coloured flower drops to the grass.
“Nothing,” she says. Her smile, in that moment, is more beautiful than anything you can ever remember seeing. Blinding, in a good way.
*
iv.
“You aren’t Kane, are you?” Lena says, breathless. Asking answers. Still, it’s a relief to part your lips, voice sandy and rough after days (weeks? months?) of little use, and give your reply.
“I don’t think so.”
They call it the Shimmer. You’ve never seen it, but it’s in your head all the same; shifting, shining, taking and giving back. You must have crossed through it, had to have done so, both in going and in coming back. The fact that you have no memory of doing this seems fitting. The Shimmer isn’t something that one can grasp, or understand. It ghosts, passes through you, changes you so that you can change the world without you in turn, like a stone sending ripples through a lake, or a deer leaving tracks as it traverses the forest. You wonder if you should feel hunted, but it doesn’t matter. No one can carry the Shimmer; it is heavy.
But is it gone? Not really, you don’t think. You, after all, are still here.
It’s been a long day, more doctors and scientists than ever coming in to your plastic haven to prod at you, take blood, ask questions that you can only grunt at, or honestly say “I don’t know” to. This frustrates them, which is easy enough to see. They think this should be simpler and bigger all at once; a cosmic unveiling, a grand finale to match the lighthouse going up in flames. Perhaps you are made different than they are. There are already so many things that you don’t know. It would make your head hurt, to let any of these other things trouble you more.
You’ve been wondering what Kane would make of all this. Wondering if he would have broken out upon waking with a clear mind, demanded to be set free, to have answers, to see his wife. Wondering if having these thoughts in the first place defeats the purpose, marks you down as a failure.
(You wonder too, at your own use of that word, as soon as it pops into your mind. Failure suggests purpose, and if you were ever given one, beyond “find Lena”, then you have forgotten it.)
You hug Lena for a long time. She never does answer your question, the one that you ask after you tell her that you aren’t, exactly, her husband. You find that you’re okay with that.
“What should I call you?” she asks after she pulls away, and you blink, stumbling, missing an inner stair. You can’t recall being asked a question like this, one that doesn’t require a “yes” or a “no” or a statement of fact. Not since all of this began, white rooms and plastic walls.
“I don’t know,” you say, knee-jerk, and the truth. But you see her brow begin to wrinkle, so you add, encouragingly, “I’ll think of something.”
*
iii.
It’s strange, but you don’t feel pain. You’re very sure that you should, even with everything that you’ve been dosed with. The most you’re able to self-diagnose, through the haemorrhaging, the head pounding, tubes being inserted, is a vague sense of discomfort and unease. Something not quite right. Something… off.
Lena is dead now, you imagine. In moments where you’re awake, eyes closed against the too-bright lights, you can hear your caretakers talking about it. You know so little about the woman, and yet everything, and it doesn’t surprise you to learn that she’d volunteered to go on the next expedition into Area X. Maybe she has an idea of what she’ll find there, and what she won’t. Lena had had so many questions when you met her. Does she know that she’ll only come back with more, or not at all?
But then again, Kane came back, in a sense. So could she.
It saddens you, through the drugs and the dull discomfort, to think of her as dead, so you decide not to. You have some familiarity with the concept of death, and it is not pleasant. Mayer is dead. Shelley, grief-stricken, followed not long after. Peyton, Okada, Alenko: dead, dead, dead. Kane’s brother is dead, car accident in his twenties. He remembered it as the worst day of his life, and the body-wracking, stomach-clenching, absolutely agonising pain of it, even in memory, is worse than anything you’re experiencing now. Here, and suddenly not, body gone to the worms, all thoughts and consciousness and experiences simply no longer in this world. A loss so complete seems criminal.
You can die, you’re pretty sure. It wouldn’t take anything more to kill you than it had for Kane or Peyton, or any of the other soldiers. Just a little more intent, perhaps. Whatever your origins, permanency was not part of the plan.
Thinking of it does no good, but you do it anyway. Your death, how it will happen. (Blood loss from whatever complications your physical form is experiencing, is your current best guess.) What will happen to you after, and all the thoughts and memories that now inhabit your head? Will they simply be gone from the world, or will they pass on as they have been passed to you? Perhaps it will happen at random: dandelion stalks in a current of air.
Thinking if it does no good.
Your mind turns back to Lena. Perhaps because she is the only person in a hundred miles whose name you know. Perhaps because it is what Kane would be doing, if he were here. Perhaps the thinking of her is more important than the why.
Perhaps you think of her so she will not disappear.
*
ii.
It is the song, more than anything, that brings tears to your eyes. You feel a tingle near your nose and your temple, then your nose wrinkles, and liquid seeps forward from behind your lids, welling in your eyes. It is the closest you have ever felt to Kane, even after standing behind the camera and watching him explode with exquisite light.
Crosby, Movement and Nash. No, that isn’t quite right. It’ll come to you.
You’re outside the door, and your tears have dried. This must be Lena of course, you think as she rushes to you and hugs you. Her face, her scent, her wiry arms right around your waist… it is all blessedly familiar. Eventually, your hands come up and rest on her waist. You’re struck with a powerful memory, of rolling over her in bed, pinning her arms playfully, rubbing your noses together, murmuring “we are for each other” in time with the lyrics of the song. Lena had smiled so wide and Kane’s heart had gone turgid with love and emotion.
What follows is a disappointment for you both. She sits you in a chair and asks questions that you either don’t understand or have no answers for. You try to say what you think she’ll want to hear, but you soon realise that this is exactly the wrong approach to take with her. Kane had been frustratingly imprecise about what to do now, after finding Lena. Somehow you had thought that that in itself would be enough.
What comes next, you wonder. You suppose the likelihood of this having happened to anyone else is slim. There is no template to follow, no mould to fit. What would it be like, to encounter someone like you in the street? Would you recognise them for who and what they were? The words ‘imposter’ and ‘mimicry’ occur to you, but they do not feel right, applied to your person. Between you and Kane there was a temporary bond, an understanding. Tacit approval.
You imagine telling any of this to Lena, with her pretty face and hard body, arms folded across her chest, all the love that she feels for Kane nonetheless seeping out of her pores. You can’t imagine she’d take it very well.
Here is the thing: there’s not a part of you that doesn’t feel like Kane. You know that you fell from the tree house as a child, and that your brother had used about a hundred Transformers band-aids and fifteen stories to make you feel better. You know that you lost your virginity to a girl in college, blushing with chagrin and sheepishness when she learnt that it was your first time, and teased you sweetly. You have vivid memories of your wedding in a park in spring, Lena all in white, stooping to let a stick insect climb onto her hand so she could show it to you. A soldier bleeding from the shoulder in Pakistan, a laughing groomsman at Mayer and Shelley’s wedding, a nervous teenager shirtless in a tattooist’s parlour, fired up with liquid courage: all of these men are you.
But there is a gaping hole in you, shaped like the place you don’t remember leaving, the beginning you don’t remember having, the Shimmer you don’t remember traversing.
This, you think, feeling the blood come up and taking a drink of water to push it down, will be the harder valley to cross. Lena’s hand has only been gone from yours for a second, but already, you feel cold.
*
i.
Kane is weeping. Sat there in the sand, head buried in his hands, emitting big, gasping, shoulder-shaking sobs. Your heart hurts for him, distantly. He’s been crying like this ever since you came up behind him and touched him on the shoulder.
You don’t know where you came from. Out of the forest, past the treeline, somewhere over there, you imagine. Perhaps you came from the lighthouse, and the deep pulses echoing from it. Or maybe not. You look at the disturbed sand, just past the skulls and rib-cages, kicked up like a storm, like a cage-fight between ocean and land and air. Perhaps you came from right there. From Kane.
You know that this man is Kane because, well. You don’t suppose there’s anyone else he could be, you being who you are. What you are.
“I thought I was a man, I thought I was a man,” he keeps crying as he shakes, rocking back and forth. You know that he isn’t, not as he understands it, not as he once was. You had no idea that it would distress a person this much, to be not as they thought they were. And what are you, exactly? You know almost everything that he does (and just a touch more) and if he still has all his memories, then that doesn’t make you a thief. It makes you… something beyond.
Sitting next to him as he cries, you wonder if you should do something to comfort him. Hug him, pat his arm, cradle his head. He likes having his hair played with, you know, but nothing you can recall suggests that would be welcome in this moment. Still, it feels terrible to just sit here, doing nothing, listening to him sob.
You had mimicked him at first, crying alongside him in the damp sand. But a few minutes of that had been enough and now you’re waiting for him to do something else. Besides, he seems calmer when you’re not doing as he does. You catch him taking a few peeks at you, and each look seems to bring on a fresh crop of tears, but he also seems to become more acclimated each time. You should hope so. He has more first-hand experience with mirrors than you do.
This place is gorgeous. The sea is calm in a way that speaks of pending rage, and though the sky is overcast there is light coming from somewhere that reflects all over the myriad towers of glass. It’s like the air is filled with diamonds. And there’s something, something else about this place; a hunger, a yearning, an eagerness so extant it’s like you can feel it in every grain of sand, every blade of grass.
It wants, but not you. You already know that you won’t be staying here.
Eventually, Kane lifts his head, dries his eyes, blows his nose on his sleeve. He sits up straighter, pulls his knees up to his chest, and wraps his arms around them. Reflexively, you do the same. For a few minutes, you both stare out at the sea and the gently crashing waves.
“I think,” Kane says at last, “that I have to go.” He says it so softly at first that you’re unsure of his words. You tilt your head at him, saying nothing, and he clears his throat. Says it again. “I really think that I have to go.”
Turning away, you nod, because you don’t know what else to say or do. It seems to be the right response, because he smiles and nods along with you.
“What should I call you?” he asks without preamble.
It is on the tip of your tongue to say “Kane”, but you stop yourself just in time. You don’t want him to start crying again. Instead, you say:
“I don’t know.”
Kane nods again, this time looking sad.
“It’s okay. You’ll think of something.”
You suppose you will.
Foamy waves creep further up the shore, and that hunger is still in the air, licking and ravenous. Kane squeezes his knees, says, “okay, okay, okay” several times under his breath. Then he stands, picks up his pack, and starts walking away. He’s headed back into the lighthouse.
Curious, you stand up and go after him. You want to see what he does.