Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Some things remain mysterious even if you think about them all the time.

  Salamanders. Hiding under logs and river stones. A creature that did not want to be found.

  * * *

  I drank a glass of water, had an apple and then a big bowl of leftover chicken salad, rummaged for gum in my purse after. Tried to shake off whatever had gathered within me, but the hummingbird stared at me defiant. It was what I had to work with.

  I resisted the idea of using my phone for an online search for “Silvina” and for “hummingbird.” A search for “R.S.” yielded nothing useful and, three pages down, “arse.” But adding Silvina’s name to “R.S.” concerned me. A stabbing unease at the thought of exposure. I needed context more than data. Didn’t want to open up a channel that could lead back to me. A client breach around search terms months ago didn’t help rationalize the risk.

  Was the hummingbird code for something? Or just the first of two bookends? That space between them yawned like the abyss, and the space in my head felt deliberate, like Silvina wanted it to be there.

  [6]

  Before the school bus brought my daughter home, I put the hummingbird back in its box and hid it under a couple old blankets in the trunk of my car. I knew enough to act normal and ask my daughter about her day. To close myself off while receiving, in the usual way, the eye roll and shrug as she took off her sneakers.

  “Fine. Swell.” Always “Fine,” along with something terse and sarcastic. “Swell.” The swell of teen angst. The swell of irritation with parents. Her chaotic grades reflected a creative child with an erratic attention span, no patience, and so much talent it hurt to think about.

  Backpack tossed in a corner with the discarded shoes.

  She had no sense of caution, would jump from a tree to our rooftop on a dare from the kid across the street. She’d cost me thirty-two hours of labor, a breach birth through C-section. I didn’t mind the scar; it joined the others. I just wished she’d be easier sometimes. I used to get texts from her, but not lately, except for “Ready for you to pick me up.”

  A grunt. That’s how my daughter acknowledged the mound of gifts we’d snuck under the tree after she’d left for school. She scrambled up the stairs to her cave. I’d barely gotten a glimpse of her wide, open face and the thick dark eyebrows I loved so much.

  Soon enough, my husband would pull up in a late-model tan sedan. A car chosen to be tidy and respectable and solid if seen by his real estate clients. But he was fooling himself. I had married a shambolic mountain in human form. He always made me feel I was a reasonable size.

  No matter how often he shaved, he would always have a shadow of a beard. He smelled fantastic. He had hardly ever raised his voice to me.

  * * *

  Once upon a time, I could still imagine he’d burst through the door at the end of the day and I’d greet him with a smile. He’d bring me close, one mountain to another. Plant a rough kiss on my neck, my cheek, my mouth, pull away to stare at my face. Then, reassured, barrel through the house in search of our daughter, making a production of not knowing where she is, so when he finds her she will be exasperated with his theatrics, his need to track her down for a mighty hug even as her scowl dissolves into a half-grin.

  Then he will make dinner, like he always made dinner. Because I could just about cook an egg. Had taken steps never to get better at cooking, throughout my long, bumpy career as a woman.

  My husband in the kitchen never looked like anything other than a cheerful Kodiak trained in the glories of French cuisine, a glass of Malbec held careless in one hairy paw and a knife in the other. I always felt he would knock over everything that I hadn’t and maybe start a fire and burn the house down. But instead he just used every plate and utensil in the kitchen and made a mess.

  After the mess, I will sit down at the kitchen table to a meal of something delicious—pork chops with asparagus and roasted potatoes? We will talk about our day, me, my husband, our daughter. Or I would and he would. Together we will tease out of my daughter the things that were important to her. Or some version of them. After, I do the dishes and maybe help my daughter with her homework. Before bed, we play a board game or watch something stupid on TV.

  I still remember. When there was a time that was still plausible. The bigness of that.

  The sheer expanse of that.

  * * *

  You’ll never get their names. I can’t bring myself to, not even surrogates. The moment I type their names, they’ll be lost to me, belong to you. I think I know when you’ll read this, but I can’t be sure.

  Even then, there was too much neither of them knew about me. Only the cast-off interference, the things that caused distance or created it. A kind of shadow or smudge. Not a clear view.

  The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you’re young. There’s a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don’t know exactly what it is, just that it isn’t there anymore. What opens up to you instead is experience, is cunning, is foreknowledge. Nothing you sought.

  How much a mind could take in before it began to resort to metaphor or to turn away from the truth. That was how you measured privacy: by how you became lost in the torrent.

  I couldn’t see the future, but it was hard not to bring my work home with me. To anticipate surveillance. To foretell that I might have to confuse the watchers, distract and fool them, to pursue this mystery. I knew what made us visible. But, even careful, I was too naïve to see what spilled out from us into the night.

  I made it through the end of dinner without confessing to a hummingbird, a salamander, or a storage unit. Maybe because Silvina wasn’t the first secret I’d kept from my husband.

  [7]

  I rarely drove myself to work, but some paranoid impulse made me loath to call a service. I left before the family woke up. They were used to it, and I felt I might crack if I had to be home for breakfast. The hummingbird seemed to weigh down the trunk as I drove. The elevator up bucked, complained, but that was probably more about me than the bird.

  Everything in our offices had been designed to project “security” or “secureness.” A lobby as inoffensive as the inside of a drone. Sound-muffling gray carpet with glints of sparkle. Cubicle partitions that gleamed obsidian. Abstract art providing muted color on the white outer walls. Passion? No threat of that. It remained wrapped up in plastic in a closet somewhere. We were purely of the mind. Except when we weren’t.

  I meant to let that seamless place neutralize the box on my desk. Smother it. Or I thought it a lark, a diversion, a way to stave off boredom. Can’t remember—that’s the scary thing. I can’t remember what I thought back then.

  No one commented on the box as I walked to my office. It looked like the size that could house a table lamp. I’d brought lamps in before, to push back against the generic feel of the workplace. That would be reasonable, ordinary. Turn what was in the box into something else. Even if I didn’t know what was in the box yet. Not really.

  My boss stuck his head in the doorway a few minutes later. Let’s call him “Alex” because he resembled an Alex. Reasonable and solid. Flickers of humor a few times a year. A lightbulb that couldn’t quite remember how to turn on. Nothing memorable about his blue suits, white shirts, and red ties, but nothing shabby, either. He should’ve looked like a human flag, but chose faded tones. So instead Alex looked like a flag that had seen better days.

  I knew of his arrival moments beforehand due to strong aftershave. Glasses were an affectation or he left them off most times because he was self-conscious. Before security, Alex had founded a VR company that had gone bankrupt.

  “Feeling better?” he asked/said.

  “Great! Much better!” I knew what slop he wanted shoveled at him and with what energy.

  “Hit the gym this morning?”

  “Still a little under the weather.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. That and “No worri
es” he used to hide a multitude of sins. I forgive you. You are forgiven. Don’t let it happen again.

  “Did you go?” I knew he wanted me to ask.

  “I did,” Alex said. “Benched a shit-ton. Pull-ups and…”

  I zoned out. Ever since he’d found out I’d been a bodybuilder, I’d gone from the going-to-fat creature to the gym-rat anomaly. Maybe he thought I was a freak. Or maybe he just couldn’t let go of one of the only personal things he knew about me.

  “Sounds great!” I said when he’d finished. Months later.

  “All right—see you around. Strategy meeting late Pee Em.”

  Punched the doorway like a jock, I guess, then gone. The doorway always got abuse from him.

  But I wasn’t free yet.

  “What’s in the box?”

  “Larry,” from the office just around a dead-end bend. We had a free-floating hierarchy. Equals, except Alex always invited Larry to go fishing in the spring on his boat. Ruddy Larry. Red-faced Larry, with the mane of brown hair that didn’t fit his face. Larry, who’d stood too close at the Christmas party last year, so I’d had to pull away. Just by accident. A well-calculated collision with my shoulder.

  “What’s in the box?”

  Because I hadn’t replied and Larry was like a crappy can opener.

  “A dead body.”

  Larry laughed. “Looks too small for that.”

  I shrugged. Didn’t offer more. Stared at him. Never once thought the hummingbird was an office prank, and I didn’t now. Not their SOP.

  “Another lamp?” Larry asked.

  I said nothing.

  When Larry got flustered, his face looked like someone had strapped an invisible cage full of rats to his head.

  Gradually, his form receded from my doorway.

  * * *

  I never much understood the point of the world of men. How they fed off each other. How they motivated themselves. I mean, I got the purpose, but I navigated that world the way an astronaut would an alien landscape. Trying not to breathe the same air. Which was impossible, of course.

  When I started out, I had been one of only two women in the company who were not on a secretary track. The idea I’d be a manager seemed absurd, but the money was good. I had no experience.

  For a long time, I thought of myself as a secret agent, embedded there, in the company, except the only handler I reported back to was my other self. In the conversations of my fellow employees, I would gather intel to get a sense of whether I was in the loop or being left out of the loop, and whether it mattered. A new catchphrase from Alex I’d not been in the room to hear. Or perhaps my peers had talked about some new management strategy while on a hunting trip together. I would never know what information they conveyed at the urinal, but had no interest in piss-stained intel.

  Down in the park, far below my window, after Larry left, a lone bird fluttered up against the gray sky. Back then I couldn’t have told you the species or why you should care their numbers had dropped fifty percent in the last three years.

  What did our company do anyway? Here’s a clue: Alex once said that we “sold orchards to apples.” Apples always needed orchards to survive. At least in our business they did. A kind of scam, but also like detective work—figuring out how companies worked instead of how they said they worked. Found the security gaps. Sold the fear of security gaps. There would always be security gaps.

  The internet was a colander. You were the water. The metaphor changed by the week. It didn’t always make sense.

  [8]

  “I want to be lost,” Silvina wrote once. “I want to be so far beyond anything that there is no map, and the compass spins wild. And when I come back, if I come back, you need to know I’ve changed, and with that change it means I carry ‘lost’ with me everywhere, even in the heart of the city. That I am lost forever, and that’s how we need to be. So the systems can’t find us, can’t wreck us. So our heads are clear.” (One of the first things I found later, but you can have it now.)

  The context? At the age of twenty-one, Silvina went upriver, toward Quito, following the path of the famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt more than a century before. Fleeing her aristocratic parents. Silvina, born in Argentina, but exiled to boarding schools in the United States. Silvina returning. Silvina headed to Ecuador, not home. Smart enough to want to have some distance from her family, their influence. Or afraid of her father.

  Spurred on by the light sensitivity and sound sensitivity that plagued her from around age nine. Silvina physically needed to be away from cities, from towns, from people. To be healthy. And so often was not.

  “Those of us who are different know the world better, know it how it truly is. We can’t edit out parts of it. The horror and the beauty most ignore. When your senses are acute, you can’t escape. And you see the disconnect we have from … everything.”

  She had had a vision in her head of that journey to Quito, I’m sure. Of what it might mean. A vision as pristine as what the naturalist had discovered more than a century and a half ago. Perhaps she found part of that. She met with indigenous activists and the more liberal Church leaders. She toured ecological success stories. Islands in the path of a hurricane.

  But, mostly, what she found instead was the future. Oil companies and mining had devoured part of the route. Foreign to her for many reasons. The moment when she realized she couldn’t run. Couldn’t hide. What she hated would always be in front of her.

  “The point of being lost is this dislocation. This point of entry to the real. Some never lose it. But most do. You have to shock it awake. Be in real danger. Create real danger. An unknown.”

  Idealistic? Maybe. But I found it moving.

  Even if I’d never been lost that way, or suffered that disconnect. At best, we plotted sometimes to buy a mountain retreat deep in the forests. Build a house in the wilderness, connected to town by a dirt road. Emergency generator, childhood knowledge of semi-rural life. Woodsy, roll-up-your-sleeves self-sufficiency. Except, we’d have good internet access. Except, on the weekends we’d drive down to a local pub and eat farm-to-table and drink microbrews made from the neighbor’s clean well water. Free of mindless conformity. We’d do it debt-free, pay off the credit card, a burden that had always made me nervous.

  We talked about it, never did anything about it. Deep down, we liked the comfort of our generic house. Experienced amnesia about the cost. It was easy, like sinking into the cushions of a comfortable leather couch. Of which we had two.

  We lived in a generic version of reality. The house we settled on in a suburban neighborhood had few differences from the other houses on the block—and the block after that. Call our neighborhood “Meadow Brook” or “Canopy Trail” or “Lake Shores” or any other name that fucks with your head if you think about it too long. Because there isn’t a meadow or a canopy or a lake. Anymore.

  “It was hard to remember what to forget,” she wrote. As if she could read my mind.

  I think about the Quito part of her life often, even now. That tiny cross section, a matter of two months or fifty-nine days. How it changed her. What it stole from her. What she could never reveal.

  What it helped make her into.

  [9]

  I called my assistant “Allie” into my office. Let’s say she wore a lot of black, had piercings, highlighted her eyes to make them look bigger, and wore purple lipstick. She might’ve been a brunette. Sometimes she wore dark, floral-print dresses with thick socks to fend off the cold outside. I didn’t put her in front of clients.

  Or maybe I did. And maybe she was brash and bold and not a waif at all. Let’s say she was tall. No, short and stocky. She was white. No, she wasn’t. She’s been erased. I erased her. It was the safest thing to do. Make up whatever you want to about her. I did, because I had to.

  “Add the Better Days Storage Palace to your research list,” I told her. “Key word ‘Silvina.’ Anything you can find on a Silvina connected to the storage palace.” I made sure to look he
r in the eyes; my only tell is when I look away. Some people find me impassive. I think it is more that they focus on my body, not my face.

  But even as I said “Silvina,” it felt like overstep. That I wasn’t meant to say the name aloud. Not yet. The name lingered in the space between us. Did I think Allie would be immune because she was young and unimportant? Had I never heard of collateral damage?

  “Priority?” Allie asked. We had deliverables for a million-dollar contract with a client in just a week.

  I hesitated.

  “High-priority.” I did not elaborate, even though Allie didn’t gossip or overshare.

  “That’ll mean overtime,” Allie said.

  “That’s fine.”

  “And it might jeopardize—”

  “I don’t care.” Then reconsidered my tone. I never raised my voice to Allie. Except when I did. “I mean, you can have overtime, and also delegate to someone in the intern pool. I’ll get Alex to authorize.”

  Allie nodded slowly, and I could see she was uncomfortable.

  “What account?” Usually, that’s what I led with. The anchor.

  Forget it, I wanted to say. It can wait. But I couldn’t. “Low-priority” might mean a week to know more. I didn’t think I could wait that long. Somehow felt I needed intel, context, as soon as possible. For threat assessment. At least, that’s how I rationalized it.

  “Potential new client. I can’t talk about it yet.”

  Allie nodded. “Got it.” But did she?

  I didn’t yet see that giving Allie this task might sacrifice her to something. An idea, a cause, she never signed up for.

  Or did I? Wasn’t that why I gave her the task? To put the act at one remove from me?