But there was also security, trust in the biologists’ stories as a remedy to dispel suspicions. Because Sergeant Rocker also took to the waters and disappeared, biologists used their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators into their new lives.
La Tirana remained reserved, while the others remained very close, for a time. None, at least during the night, seemed willing to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 tasked the youngest member of his group with monitoring moments that could include a full day sunbathing in the same stretch of mud. .
On the sixth day they found Firestorm’s front paw, wrapped in cork wire, all visibly exposed on a mud bank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathed or pathetic quality to the pallor of the leg, enraptured by the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from home. “I cried for an hour, but I don’t know if it was an appropriate response.”
(No, old Jim didn’t think that was an appropriate response, even when he himself cried at odd hours, for his own reasons, in the Central archives.)
Battlebee was found dead, swollen and white, with a piece torn off post-mortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, and it was speculated that the stress and anesthesia had been too hard for him. The post-mortem examination revealed stomach contents including fish, a turtle, mud and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.
She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” the Team 2 leader wrote, “given that her credentials identified her as a man,” amid general confusion: “To be honest, I now can’t remember when we started. this project for the first time. when we first came across these issues. The heat here is abysmal.”
Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by ditching his harness in the water near the Team 1 leader’s tent, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “a courtesy on Sergeant Rocker’s part consistent with his personality when she knew him.” better. “I felt this loss much more deeply than I expected.”
This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just a few days before weighed on Old Jim, although he didn’t know why. Nor did I understand why the alligator experiment was recorded by the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they even referred to it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to deteriorate. Perhaps the myth of competition. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.
Perhaps he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had become an escape artist, since the harness was intact and still closed, with no tears anywhere. So how could the alligator have gotten free? Old Jim continued to watch the biologists through a faulty video trick fleeing the release site, only to rejoin their drinking circle.
He played the video so often that it became a bewildering confusion of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs, and shapes that jumped and sharpened, only to be subsumed into the past.
“Every possible measure was taken but nothing could be done.”
Or had the result been exactly as expected?
Extracted from Absolution: a novel of southern scope by Jeff VanderMeer. Published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. All rights reserved.