Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The office was a graveyard of abandoned cubicles, most employees off-site working on the pipeline project. The overhead lights in that emptiness shone hard but oddly dim. The smell of cleaners gave a lemon twinge to the corridors that felt off. A casual onlooker would’ve thought we were going out of business.

  On the constant TV in the break room as I made coffee: the ongoing crisis of a cruise ship commandeered by climate refugees rejected by yet another port. A threat to security, but, then, wasn’t everything? Europe was cocooned uncomfortable in a massive snowstorm that had killed three thousand people so far. The garbage in the Atlantic had slowed the Gulf Stream to a near-critical level. Some kind of contamination from the Far East would soon turn our skies green-gray, we were told. But none of this made us even blink anymore.

  My office swelled with darkness, but I only turned the desk lamp on. I hadn’t slept much. I’d ordered my daughter to check in via text every few hours. To keep an eye on her. To believe I had some control over any threat.

  And, I had no hope of catching up on the pipeline project. My contribution was due in two days, but I needed seven. It felt almost a relief, that I couldn’t do it. That other kinds of dread took precedence. What would I do when I missed the deadline? Alex would reprimand me, but I didn’t think he’d fire me.

  I hadn’t been to see Larry. I would never go to see Larry.

  Instead, I lurked in my office for the first hour, taking another, longer look at Silvina’s journal and its spidery, hard-to-read handwriting. Even though I needed much more time than that.

  I decided it felt more like a memoir, with all the thought that goes into what you reveal and what you don’t. I also began to think about the journal in terms of chapters, even though Silvina hadn’t divided it into chapters, and some sections would have to be moved around to fit my structure. But, otherwise, it could be mapped.

  Chapter 1: The Moment

  Chapter 2: Early Life

  Chapter 3: Trapped

  Chapter 4: Rebellion

  Chapter 5: Awakening

  Chapter 6: Potential

  A classic journey, if you were a cult leader, if you had followers who called themselves “Friends of.” If, maybe, you had planned something that would outlive your death. Despite wide gaps in the chronology of her life. As an analyst, that raised a red flag. Something was being hidden, but what?

  “The Moment” was her alienation from the human world through how her body itself rejected that world. This was the anchor, the foundation. She wrote movingly of how her condition worsened with time. How as an adult she had to be so careful in sunlight. How her hearing had become so acute or fine-tuned that ordinary sounds felt like shards of glass breaking inside her skull, without earplugs. That in so many ways she kept receiving the world even when she didn’t want to.

  “Early Life” gave a baseline for what her life had been: privileged, all things provided, a future as a billionaire’s daughter, meaning she could be anything or do nothing.

  “Trapped” covered the phase when she tried to make it work with her family, overseeing properties in the U.S., but also covered her expedition to Quito, which was part of the trap.

  “Rebellion” was her expedition down the West Coast, while “Awakening” was more abstract. “Awakening” tracked to Silvina holding her cards close and expanding her journal by way of ideas and hypotheticals and data about the environmental destruction in the world.

  Finally, “Potential” gave a view of the future should this destruction be reversed, if we only had the political will and wisdom to do so. And it was in “Potential” that she returned to her early life—and, in fact, all phases of her life—to give examples that she then tried to fit to her philosophy. So that, in effect, the memoir transformed into a guide for living. A way of trying to use her life to get others to where she had ended up much faster.

  Except, in the margins: all the sketches of bombs. Except also, the banality of much of it.

  “The steps in place to make an impact” … “How a pattern can be more than a sum of parts” … “The cause that leads to effect that cannot be seen but is felt” … “A volcano that seems forever to erupt but never erupts. Then one day it does. And the surprise is not the explosion but the aftershock.”

  Many of our clients engaged in “greenwashing”: co-opting environmental causes to project an image of being sustainable. Too much of Silvina’s language in the journal approximated that corporate takeover of the liminal. Not in how she spoke about her personal experience. But definitely in how that translated to anything approaching “revolution.”

  I tried to see me as Silvina might have seen me. Middle-aged mother, centrist politics, suburban life. Was the journal just another form of game playing? Of manipulation? Was I seeing things that weren’t there?

  A lack that nagged at me: never mention of any pets. No dog, cat, or even hamster. I don’t know why that bothered me most of all. Didn’t know what it said about her, or me.

  I kept trying to imagine Silvina having lunch or playing a board game and I couldn’t. And nothing in the journal made her any more real on that level. Not a single mention of a lover, a boyfriend, a girlfriend.

  How much of Silvina didn’t exist because she didn’t want it to … and how much just wasn’t part of her life?

  * * *

  Not sure if I’d made progress or just gotten lost again. I actually welcomed another text from Hellbender, the Wig Man, to put the journal down for a time.

  I’d decided to keep the phone and not change the SIM card. Measures taken meant I thought he couldn’t track me with it, but at the same time I must have felt the risk was worth the contact.

  Me: What do you really want?

  >>Help you. I helped on the hill, or don’t you remember.

  I shuddered. The sound of a body hitting the ground. I’d read the paper, looking for a mention of a murder in that area, found nothing. Didn’t know what that meant.

  Me: By spying on my family.

  >>Just getting the lay of the land. Protecting you.

  Me: Who did you kill?

  >>There are a lot of dangerous people after you. Now one less.

  Me: Do you know Langer?

  >>Who doesn’t know Langer?

  Cute. What if this was Langer?

  Me: Who do you work for?

  >>I work for no man, but every man.

  Me: So your boss is a woman? And you don’t like it.

  >>Nice try.

  Me: Did you kill her?

  A pause, then:

  >>LOL! Silvina? No.

  I found “LOL” and a smiley face emoticon disturbing. So ordinary. I didn’t want to normalize this “voice” on my phone.

  Me: Who are you?

  >>Now, why spoil the surprise?

  Me: I should destroy this phone card.

  >>But you won’t. You might need to contact me. In the event.

  Me: In the event?

  >>They find you before I find them.

  Me: Them?

  >>Don’t be afraid to use the gun. It’s not a trap. It’s untraceable.

  Me: Who’s been killed with it before?

  No answer.

  Me: What do you really want from me?

  No answer.

  Imagine a voice in your head you hate, but it’s worse to get rid of it. Imagine you get used to it over time so you miss it if it isn’t there.

  When you find the world you live in unfamiliar, alien, it’s nothing to slip into another.

  [54]

  Shot didn’t just teach me how to handle a shotgun. Shot was a wrestler in one of his prior lives, after the navy. The kind of wrestler who became part of traveling roadshows, more spectacle than sport. He’d been an opponent on the semi-pro boxing circuit, too, and he’d sold clothespins and other house supplies door-to-door. Before he came back to farming. I always wondered what had qualified him at farming other than that our family owned a farm. A last-ditch thing—the last ditch he found himself in he rais
ed himself out of for a time.

  That great round, flat head with the broad features, atop an ever-dwindling body. My father said I looked like him, which felt like a curse more than an insult. In the barn, on the good days, Shot would show me exotic wrestling moves that mostly wouldn’t work unless your opponent was complicit.

  “You got to pretend you’re a bigger bastard than them,” he’d say. “Bullethead, you got to pretend you’re” a this or a that. A neither or a nor. Different. No problem there.

  Problem was my brother wouldn’t pretend; he was just different. Or go along with the wrestling lessons. He had no interest, the kind of teenager elated by a library card. But that’s why I bore the brunt of wrestling lessons. Late in a day, before Mother, or, in later years, Father, called us in for dinner.

  There was a great lowing and mooing in the barn near dusk. An audience, of sorts. As he dumped me on my ass, made me enraged as he intended, so anger would be a friend to me.

  “What’s the point if you don’t feel it,” he’d say, and half beat his chest. “What’s the point if it just gets away?”

  But I never felt safer with him than in those moments. He genuinely wanted to teach me, and he became a different person for an hour or two. Something of his past that meant a standard close to honor or regret or triumph meant he never hurt me then. Even if I did something wrong.

  I could tell from my father’s reactions that Shot had never tried to teach him to wrestle, understood on some level that my own father resented me for what I could not control. Maybe why he sided with the rest when my brother died.

  We never knew Shot’s wife, our grandmother. She’d died before we were born. No one ever talked about her.

  But, then, it’s not like we ever talked about much. Only me and my brother. Until we couldn’t.

  [55]

  I went for a walk around the circuit that was the derelict, empty office. My mistake.

  Another ghost lingered there, caught up with me.

  Allie. She looked hollowed out to me. A sag to her shoulders I didn’t like.

  “Have you gone to see Larry?” she asked, clutching too many file folders as if for security.

  Her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Her hand on the folders trembled. Almost imperceptibly. But I noticed.

  “No. I haven’t gone to see Larry.” I was tired of the question. It felt frivolous, almost laughable. I must have sounded cold.

  “Well, I did.”

  “Is he better, I hope?”

  “Not really. I don’t think he’s going to be ‘better’ anytime soon.”

  “Well, I’ll send him some flowers.” That must have sounded cold, too.

  I turned to go.

  She reached out and grabbed my arm. Like a child. I could barely feel her grip. But I stopped, faced her.

  “What’s wrong?” But I knew. By then, I knew.

  “Larry says he was attacked. That it was planned.”

  “That’s terrible.” My family was being attacked; I didn’t have much left over for Larry.

  “They asked him about Silvina. They asked about taxidermy.”

  “That’s strange,” I said.

  But maybe it was normal, because I didn’t feel shock or panic or any of the usual emotions. Maybe by then I realized I was too far in to quit.

  “Is it?” Allie snapped. “You had a bird in your desk drawer.”

  Everybody knew things they shouldn’t.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She’d come close, defiant, like I was the cause and not another victim.

  “And when Larry couldn’t give them any information, they ran him over.”

  “Allie—”

  “No. No. Don’t.”

  “Allie…” But I didn’t have much to say. I was in a different place, or the same place, a different room in the maze, and no time or patience.

  But here it came.

  “You asked me to look up Silvina’s information knowing it might be dangerous. Not client-takes-you-to-dinner dangerous. Worse than that. And it’s not for a potential account, no matter what you say. You haven’t even reported a lead to sales. And I’m going to tell Alex, and Larry is going to tell the police what I told him.”

  I knew Larry hadn’t told the police, calculating how much time must’ve gone by since Allie’s visit. They would have dropped by my house or the office by now.

  But Allie would tell Alex. I already knew he frowned on employees having “hobbies,” by which he meant he was paranoid about employees doing a little business on the side. Would he think I was cheating on the company? Would he believe her?

  “I’ll fire you if you tell Alex,” I said.

  She drew herself up at that, gave me an appraising look, as if seeing me for the first time.

  “I mean it,” I said.

  “No, you don’t understand,” Allie said, shoving a finger at me. “I quit. I am quitting and I am never coming back to this fucking place again.”

  Quivering with anger and fear. If only she could see how I was doing the same, deep inside.

  “Allie.”

  “I left one last report on your desk. You’re putting the whole company at risk.”

  She stormed away from me. Receding down the corridor until she was just a wraith, a trick of the light.

  I think I made a motion as if to stop her, but only after it was too late. Too late in so many ways. I wanted—needed—to say something else, but she was gone.

  Because I’ve lied to you about Allie. Just a little. I did care about her. I just hid it from her like something I needed to hide from myself. Because I couldn’t be seen to care. If she faltered. If she failed. If I failed her.

  Alex didn’t know I felt a connection, a sympathy. Larry didn’t. If they had, it might have gone poorly for her, was my reasoning. I tried to teach her what could be taught. Found excuses to give her the kind of work that would help her. So she would have it easier than I had in the business.

  Irrational. Irrational that Allie leaving felt like my daughter rejecting me.

  So I went back to my office with a different kind of doom in my mind.

  What would Alex do? If she talked to him?

  How quaint. How useless. How irrelevant. But it mattered at the time.

  * * *

  The report was on my desk, as promised. A photo of Silvina, like a mug shot, confronted me, and the signs and symbols of a declassified top secret report. With the stamp across the top, the agency unclear. Allie had dug deep for this, risked something to find it. Called in a favor I didn’t know anyone owed her.

  The gist, even at a glance, was clear. Bioterrorism. It was a report on Silvina’s activities since she’d gone dark, since the trial. Names, places. Known communications. Known associates. Substances and supplies acquired with wealth stolen from her father, funneled through third parties and ever more shell companies.

  Warehouses involved and trucking companies. Every last “associate” was rogue in some way. Rogue biotech. Rogue bioweapons. Rogues who liked to play with viruses. A list of names. I couldn’t tell if Contila had branched out or imploded and these were all the nasty fragments.

  Also, a mostly unredacted page or two from a federal agency interrogation of Langer, undated.

  Did you facilitate the sale of genetic contraband including to one Silvina Vilcapampa on in the township of in ?

  Langer: No. I’m purely an export-import business.

  Don’t be cute, Langer. We can detain you indefinitely if we want to.

  Langer: I wish I knew what you were talking about. I buy and sell things. Legally. Illegal sounds like it would be a headache.

  What if it aligned with your political views?

  Langer: I have no politics. That I am aware of. Not a nice thing to accuse someone of. Politics.

  Will you be so cute, I wonder, when you’re languishing in a black site with a hood over your head?

  Langer: Sounds relaxing.

  Let’s make a deal. I’ll st
op threatening you if you stop cracking wise.

  Langer: It’s just how I talk. I can’t help it.

  Did you post this rant from an extreme “socialist-anarchist” position in which you advocate the violent overthrow of government?

  [Detainee provided with relevant documents.]

  Langer: Got hacked.

  Did you get hacked when you browsed this website devoted to biological weapons?

  Langer: Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Buying illegal shit did. Did I buy anything, ? Did I?

  It went on like that, proving nothing except guilt by association. Langer came across as a special kind of head case. Some weird strain of altruism an overlay on his sociopathy. And I didn’t like the part where he called by his name. Felt too familiar. The whole conversation, the more I thought about it, felt overly familiar.

  And I knew, as an analyst, that you could sometimes make the data show more than one outcome or intent. But there was a clarity—a damning clarity—to the supporting documents. Showing how Silvina’s purpose shifted from habitat stewardship and land purchases to recruitment of underground biotech experts and geneticists. From acquiring wildflower seed and funding research into experimental wetlands restoration into the kinds of things that kill people.

  “Execution of mass-elimination plan as clear end-game, given the scope of the knowledge base and the amount of matériel,” someone had written in the analysis part of the report. Parts of which were also heavily redacted.

  Conclusion: she’d been trying to amass or even build biological weapons, with the goal of broad use against civilians. But no solid evidence that she was able to make the contacts and acquire everything needed. No direct links. Ghosts and more ghosts. Hauntings.

  Still, I would have bet the government had been about to black-site her anyway. Except she’d died in a car crash. Was it my delusion that I didn’t believe it at first or was the report the delusion?

  You could fake a death. I knew you could. If Hellbender wasn’t Langer, then what if Hellbender worked for Silvina? I didn’t know how paranoid to be. Had not been paranoid enough as an analyst sometimes, but also too willing to go down rabbit holes. The truth? Almost anything was possible when you dealt with humans, not systems.