You draw a map, too, of all the landmarks in Area X. There’s the base camp, or as you call it now, the Mirage. There’s the lighthouse, which should be some form of safety but too often isn’t, the place that journals go to die. There’s the topographical anomaly, the hole in the ground into which all initiative and focus descended, only to become hazy and diffuse. There, too, is the island and, finally, the Southern Reach itself, looking either like the last defense against the enemy or its farthestmost outpost.

Lowry, drunk out of his mind at his going-away party, headed for Central, only three years after you had been hired, had said, “How goddamn boring. Fucking boring if they win. If we gotta live in that world.” As if people would be living in “that world” at all, which wasn’t what any of the evidence foretold, or kept foretelling, as if there were nothing worse than being bored and the only point of the world people already lived in was to find ways to combat boredom, to make sure “all the moments,” as Whitby put it when he went on about parallel universes, might be accounted for in some way, so minds wouldn’t fill up with emptiness that they bifurcated simply to have more capacity to be bored.

And Grace, fearless, an opposing voice from years later at some other party where a member of the staff had voiced an equally cynical, depressing opinion, but as if answering Lowry: “I’m still here because of my family. Because of my family and because of the director, and because I don’t want to give up on them or you.” Even if Grace could never share with her family the struggles she faced at the Southern Reach, being your “right-hand gal” as Lowry puts it, sarcastically. The profane voice of reason when yours is perceived as too esoteric, too distant.

Halfway through drawing the map, you feel eyes on you, and there’s Grace, arms folded, giving you the stink eye. She closes the office door behind her, just keeps staring at you.

“Is there something I can help you with?” you ask, paint can in one hand and brush in the other.

“You can reassure me that everything is okay.” For one of the first times, you sense doubt from her. Not disagreement but doubt, and given how much things rely on faith at the late-era Southern Reach, this worries you.

“I’m fine,” you say. “I’m just fine. I just want a reminder.”

“Of what? To the staff? That you’re getting a little eccentric?”

A surge of anger at that, a faint echo of hurt, too. Lowry, for all of his faults, might not think it was strange. He’d understand. But also, if it were Lowry painting a map on the wall of his office, no one would be questioning him. They’d be asking if they could hold the brush, touch up this spot, that spot, get him more paint.

Going for the cumulative effect, to put more pressure on the breaking point, you say to Grace, “After I’m done here, I’m going to order the bodies of the last eleventh exhumed.”