Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  This treadmill that kept changing under our feet. Growing fangs and spikes. Even as it paid the bills. Turmoil in national politics, failed nation-states overseas, conspiracy theories that infiltrated facts, and the undercurrent, never expressed directly, about the delicious unpredictability of that. The fact that the repressive tendencies of our leaders helped our profession. Cynically, the subtext spilled out. The seemingly somber debate. The truth we never uttered: that the Republic could become a husk and our borders a quagmire of death and discomfort … but this only strengthened our job security.

  Year thirty in the same once-glamorous hotel in the once-glamorous country now stagnant. The lobby out-of-date and cheerless, modernized with its “unique boutique scent.” Rooms subdivided smaller and smaller until if you lost the room lottery, and you were me, your feet felt the texture of the wall opposite when you lay in bed. Shovel Pig consigned to a mantel too narrow. Both of you teetering. But they had superfast wireless.

  Little in New York felt glamorous anymore. An eruption of the real had overtaken the unreal that week. Everyone felt the depression of that. Wildfires had consumed states in the heartland. Cyclones another. Earthquakes from fracking were omnipresent. Oil spills from pipelines that didn’t bear thinking about. Pandemic, a rumor gathering strength.

  Speculation. Snippets in the corridors as I oriented myself to location. The kind you didn’t want to hear, but heard anyway. Most on a loop from past years. Because we didn’t want to believe. As you pitched your product.

  “Ice caps mean there’s opportunity for resource extraction…”

  “You can’t count on fossil fuels forever, so plastics…”

  “What I would do is invest in waterproof equipment, always…”

  “My boss has a couple bunkers for the end-times…”

  “Time to think about getting out…”

  Stench of gasoline followed us up into the conference rooms. Stitching hum of drones outside delivering packages. The walls of the main ballroom had been fitted with neon catchphrases too depressingly banal to relate. A bird had gotten trapped there, site of the opening remarks, but we all took video, thinking it might be a drone instead. Some kind of stealth marketing by a competitor.

  Most people in New York City had started wearing masks, to keep the pollution out, but also to protect privacy. The keynote was about that, on a technical level, as the trend spread worldwide. What came after facial recognition software? What lay on the horizon for all of us? Wondering idly who here was a spy for a foreign government. Or a local government.

  Incoming: >>Dad wants to know if you miss us.

  I was sitting in on a panel about biotech surveillance that made my skin crawl. As the panelists ignored anything ethical in their pursuit of a better, less detectable spy.

  Me: I miss you especially now, during this boring bit.

  >>Dad wants to know if …

  All the things Dad wanted to know. Sneaky. She’d never have texted me otherwise. Even as he sent me a message and wasn’t above letting our daughter deliver it. I didn’t blame him.

  But what I chased this time didn’t feel like a betrayal.

  * * *

  Later, as I listened to the last speaker of the day, I wondered if we should give up and let the torrent overwhelm us. That in the roar of rush-hour traffic, the sheer numbers, existed a kind of anonymity. We always made security about privacy, and we stressed the impossibility of being “unhackable.” That we were managing quality of life for patients with a long-term, low-fever virus. Everyone boasted about their bulletproof approach, but it was just a construct in their heads.

  I said all of that to someone in the hallway after a panel. They ignored me. I wasn’t on any panels myself because I had registered late. But in this business, it seemed vainglorious anyway. Or unwise.

  “Still working for that piece-of-shit company?” a voice said.

  I turned, and there was a man from a direct rival. Colorful shirts, broad collars. Former tech bro chastened by a bankruptcy. He’d never be a CEO again.

  “Yes, I am still working for that piece-of-shit company,” I said, in a monotone.

  “Well, if you ever want to work for a real company—”

  “I’ll kill you and eat you and use your bones for soup,” I said. Don’t know why. Just felt reckless.

  I gave him my best wrestling snarl and then licked my lips. He looked confused, maybe even frightened, turned away at the same time I turned away.

  Only to fall into another unwanted conversation.

  “Do you fake it to make it?” an older gentleman said to me, staring up from eyes in a bald head that topped out around five foot three. He, like me, could remember the idea of the Commodore 64. Floppy disks. Dial-up. But, unlike me, he might remember punch cards, too.

  “Everything I do is real,” I said, peering down at him.

  “I’ll bet, I’ll bet,” he said. “But does it matter?”

  “Dark web,” I said, as a joke. “Dark web.” Just because I could. Just because we used the term so much to scare “civilians.” Dank web.

  He nodded like he knew what I meant. Like a meaning lay below the “dark” web. Like anything I said would be prophetic.

  But he made me feel like an eclipse. I made an excuse to pivot to the refreshments table.

  Fake it to make it. Email accounts full of emails we had created. Business correspondence. Personal correspondence. The things so false that they might at least confuse the intruder, force them to engage, that they might never peel back that layer to find the “real stuff,” as the keynote speaker put it. Dramatic re-creation and forging. Some even employed movie writers to choreograph the story arc.

  All the faces around me felt so gray and featureless. Scentless bodies, rapt, in the falling-apart banquet chairs, lashed together like life rafts, in row after row.

  How had I become part of this?

  [28]

  With distance, I can see that the problem had a larger scope and that, eventually, I’d bought into systems that despised me. We were assholes and opportunists and sociopaths, a lot of us. We thought we were on the right side of things. But what did it mean that our clients resembled ghouls and grave robbers? I knew their families, or photos of their families. Stock sentiments for what looked almost like stock photos. I knew their habits when we took them out on the town. Their fears and doubts, revealed after martinis or boutique whisky. The altruistic pompous speeches about intent meant as much to reassure themselves as impress us. They shared the familiar things, the timeworn things that make up wanting to be comfortable with one another. While before we met, we knew their criminal records and what porn they were into, had to wipe images from our minds to pretend to be like them. And maybe we were like them, because we served them.

  I couldn’t always see past the seamless smiles, no matter how fixed, to the crimes. But the system was fixed, and I helped to fix it. What I believed was bulwark or siege defense morphed into the predatory. I allowed systems to flourish without consideration of people. Efficiency, and, especially, the word “proactive,” lived in our heads always. Another was “optimization.”

  Most of the rest are fuzzy, or pulled one by one from my mind like hooks from the mouths of a row of fish. Until I’m floating in the dark water, released, but wounded, floating to the bottom, light lost in the murk above.

  But I’d rather live here. It’s more secure, for one thing. For another, I can’t hurt anyone here the way I hurt people before, from afar. Pried into their private lives in the name of “monitoring threat” or “better serving need.” What is need but a perversion in the end? I did receive the damage, too, but mostly it streamed out from me.

  The blessing now is Silvina shining out from my eyes, obliterating the past.

  [29]

  Someone made a joke at the reception, early that evening, that disaster was the greatest security. “Savior of privacy.” The places that Wi-Fi couldn’t cover. If you were underwater, nothing could find you, went his j
oke. You couldn’t interpret that without replacing his smile with a grinning skull. Consumed by the fire, you might rise as a phoenix. Or you might just be a pile of crumbling ashes.

  The organizers had decided to make it a masquerade party. We were all to wear masks, supplied by companies that made designer versions. Various filtration systems. Others mimicked quarantine masks, but were specific to the subindustry devoted to subverting facial recognition software. Peacock iridescent. Some even with feathers. Others black and soulless as VR tech. A few had miniature waterfalls running down the cheekbones. Soon companies would be able to produce masks that were living creatures, had a hologram of what looked like a localized dystopia for your face. I chose a plain, neutral, unassuming mask.

  We were a legion of fools in masks. A rhapsody of masks. A rhapsody of fools. Just added another layer. What got through and what did not. Next year, there would be no conference. A few years later, businesses hawking wares would have changed. The old ones washed away by the shock of realization: the physical laws of the universe didn’t give a fuck about them. Wouldn’t protect them just because they existed and sold things.

  Somehow, I managed to find the person I was looking for in that morass, after she texted me her mask type. Let’s call her “Jill.” I had contacted her well before getting on the plane, to give her enough time.

  “Jill” approached me, wearing a pink-red parrot mask with three eyes for three types of filters. I couldn’t even see her neck, so it was more like a parrot head. I was talking to someone wearing a parrot head.

  The reception was work for her, so we didn’t talk long, promised to catch up after. But the wonderful thing is, we knew we never would. We just had this understanding in the moment. Might do lunch next time, or might not. We didn’t need more.

  Our companies didn’t collaborate on bids, but I’d met her at the conference four years ago and we had liked each other. She also went to the gym a lot.

  “Here they are,” she murmured, coming close to reach up on tiptoe to hug me and placing the objects in Shovel Pig.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s a huge relief.”

  Jill smiled. “Happy to do it. I might need something someday.” But she wouldn’t, and I’d never see her again. I watched her pivot with envy, the seamless transition into the next conversation, across the room. Not my strength.

  Now I had White SIM cards for a powerful crypto phone. More like a stripped-down version of my laptop that couldn’t be traced.

  Meanwhile, my “real” phone kept reminding me of home.

  >>Dad wants to know if the hotel is fab.

  Fab?

  >>Dad should just take my phone and buy me a new one.

  >>Dad is thinking about a fence for the yard.

  My daughter missed me, I think. This was the real message. But there was another message, about my husband, I didn’t quite want to see.

  I wound up calling my new phone “Bunker Hog,” to go with Shovel Pig. “Bog” for short. Lost in the Bog. No one ever got out of the Bog.

  It made sense at the time.

  * * *

  I put on my stoic face. Made the approaches I needed to, spoke to the people I needed to. The ones Alex talked to on a regular basis. To establish a presence, an identity, a sense for Alex of how I had moved through the conference. How I had represented the company in real time.

  Alex, as if reading my mind:

  >>How’s it going? Did you get to the gym? Knock ’em dead!

  Ignored that. So little thought put into his text, why bother?

  I just wanted it over. I can do small talk, but it wears on me. I become clipped, sullen, resentful. Confused technocrats reeling in my wake, the ones who didn’t know me staring, blank-eyed, at the bulky woman in the business suit.

  Drowning in a sea of middle-aged and old men. Looking across the rows of faces for someone like me … and finding no one.

  Imagine how little this helps me forget Silvina. Imagine how I maneuver Shovel Pig so I am even larger crossing to the station where lies in wait the white wine and the red wine.

  Imagine that I am thinking about Silvina’s trial and whether she was really a murderer … while wondering how many people in that room have committed some sort of crime.

  Imagine, too, that I’m trying to figure out how the salamander relates to the hummingbird, across a sea of connect-the-dots.

  The thought of Silvina staring at me in the coffee shop. Observing me in the day-to-day. Recruitment, except she’d died too soon?

  Imagined Langer there, too, in spirit, no matter what the barista said. A ghost after scraps. His presence kept pressing in like a face through a dirty window.

  [30]

  A quiet corner in which to lurk, even if I’m not good at lurking. That’s all I wanted. A cave in which to hang my hat. What Silvina would have liked. Silence. Stillness. A light was out in a mold-smelling corner of the lobby, next to drab drapes. I watched the video of Silvina on my secret, “impenetrable” phone. Rewatched it. While I wondered why Allie hadn’t found it. Or, maybe more accurate, why she hadn’t given me the link. Yes, you had to dig for it. But not too far. Self-preservation, maybe.

  In the video, Silvina railed against something called “Contila.” Which sounded like a new designer drug for a skin condition, but which I knew was Langer’s import-export business linked to wildlife traffickers.

  Contila had members in South American countries, but also ties to organized crime in the U.S., Russia, and China. A man named John Hudgens had run Contila from a shell company in Miami, and then, as things got hot, Canada and then Mexico. Silvina had taken a special dislike to Hudgens, had been the one to provide authorities with the intel that made him have to move operations. Then Hudgens had died in the bombing, along with four others.

  If Silvina was an indistinct smudge on the internet, Contila had only Interpol alerts and not much else. Vague stories about bribes at border crossings and containership checks at ports of call. Hundreds of endangered animal seizures they could have been behind. With Hudgens gone, someone else in management took over, but that name was buried deep in Interpol files or they truly didn’t know who ran it.

  Langer was Hudgens’s “manager,” which to me meant an enforcer, promoted to some position that didn’t have a name after Hudgens exploded. The guy Hudgens turned to and said, “This has to happen,” and Langer did the dirty work or hired someone to. He’d been questioned by the feds, too, but they’d had to release him. Why?

  It was hard to think of Silvina as “terrorist” or “murderer” compared to the people she’d been fighting.

  That gap between the murder trial and being handed a note by a barista. Not just the four or five years of total absence, off the radar. But the rest of those fifteen years, about which such sparse information existed. Except Silvina had managed properties, stolen money from her father, given civic responsibility a go. Unitopia. Which just felt like a bad joke about storage palaces.

  And what was this, from the video?

  “The trees were whispering to me. The trees in the darkness wanted to tell me secrets.” As if there were some truth to my daughter’s cartoons.

  And what was this, later?

  “We have killed so much that perhaps we thought killing a little more wouldn’t matter. If it could save us for another year, another five years. Out of sight so we never saw most of it. Or, if we saw, we disbelieved the extent or it had already happened. Like roadkill. Like an accident. Not purposeful, or the purpose having fled. Not the order of things as we had imposed it.”

  And what was this?

  “‘Progress’: a word to choke on, a word to discard and then pick up again, hurl it in the oven like coal, watch it spurl out its own name in black smoke from the chimney of the hunting lodge. I embrace it, and I repeat it, and yet I know no word I or any other human could use will ever be the right word.”

  And what was the next thing?

  Around every corner something incendiary might lurk. Something
personal. But also something searching for a polemic to leap into. To give it a body, a voice.

  My point is that, in looking at everything I had about the Vilcapampa family, my initial analysis was the usual story of a daughter’s rebellion from a tyrannical father and a weak mother. That Silvina decided to become the opposite of them. To an extreme.

  But even if I had already begun to create a version of Silvina, I still didn’t really have enough data points. This veil. This descent into speculation. As if the systems that I used, and that used me, deformed her. Kept changing her.

  And me.

  [31]

  In the past, I had slept with strangers at conferences. Never knew the last names. As anonymous as I could be, to set the expectations.

  Or, once upon a time, I did those things. I liked the idea of meeting strangers at conferences. I liked the bar, and maybe for the same kind of calm as the flight in, and the soft clunk and crunch of the ice in bronze-brown drinks that fooled me with a sophistication I thought I couldn’t find elsewhere. Sudden flood of mint or basil from the bartender’s stand. Rosemary. A kind of shock, an infiltration. Yet kept the job at bay. That fuzzy golden aura enveloping me. The glow pushing from the inside to the outside until I shone like the sun.

  Most hotels had more than one conference going, so I would hang out near attendees for the other conference. Textiles. Medical. Pharmaceuticals. Entomology. Who would I be this time? A homicide detective? A veterinarian. A flight attendant.

  The other main conference was construction, with an emphasis on innovative use of drywall, textures, and roofing. Perhaps I was in that business instead. This wasn’t me out of control. This was me in control.