Annihilation
Jeff Vandermeer
02: Integration
- We were exploring an organism that might contain a mysterious second organism, which was itself using yet other organisms to write words on the wall.
03: Immolation
- Human lives had poured into this place over time, volunteered to become party to exile and worse. Under everything lay the ghastly presence of countless desperate struggles . Why did they keep sending us? Why did we keep going ? So many lies, so little ability to face the truth. Area X broke minds, I felt, even though it hadn’t yet broken mine . A line from a song kept coming back to me: All this useless knowledge.
05: Dissolution
- Seeing all of this, experiencing all of it, even when it’s bad, I wish you were here. I wish we had volunteered together. I would have understood you better here, on the trek north. We wouldn’t have needed to say anything if you didn’t want to. It wouldn’t have bothered me. Not at all. And we wouldn’t have turned back. We would have kept going until we couldn’t go farther.
- Slowly, painfully, I realized what I had been reading from the very first words of his journal. My husband had had an inner life that went beyond his gregarious exterior, and if I had known enough to let him inside my guard, I might have understood this fact. Except I hadn’t, of course. I had let tidal pools and fungi that could devour plastic inside my guard, but not him. Of all the aspects of the journal, this ate at me the most.