Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

“No!” I shouted.

  “No? What’ve you got in your pocket?” he shouted.

  “We’ll talk like this and then you’ll leave,” I shouted.

  “How do you know I want to talk?” he shouted.

  “How do you think?”

  I saw him consider that a moment. Run-down, shadow embellishing his cheekbones.

  “All right. I’ll play along for now.”

  Then it was like he didn’t know what to ask me. Before something clicked. A flushed quality to his face, as if he’d taken drugs.

  “You’re not easy to kill.”

  “You almost did.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s something I’m good at.”

  “I have no quarrel with the truth of that.”

  Langer smiled. “What are you? Out of an old book?”

  “Some days.”

  “Rope-a-dope, huh? Well, I’m no dope.”

  A fire ate at Langer from long before the warehouse. A kind of disease had taken him, but he was still alive and walking among us. That’s what I decided the longer we shouted at each other.

  I was still figuring out what to reply when he shouted across the void again.

  “Why did she give you things?” Instead of giving them to me. Genuine. A genuine hurt behind it. “Why’d she take the time? Why’d she bother with you?”

  I hated Langer on principle. But I also hated him for presuming to make me small in Silvina’s estimation. Even as I tried to do the same to him. How had she ever loved this?

  “What about you? What did you give Silvina? Biotoxins? People who wouldn’t think twice about—”

  “Shut the fuck up! You don’t know! You have no idea.”

  Then he began to kind of argue with himself. And that’s how I knew he’d been having a lot of conversations with me in his head. And this other Jane didn’t understand … anything.

  “The truth is, the only way we save ourselves is to get to the end faster. Silvina knew that. Somewhere, what she set in motion knows that. And no one—no one!—has the right to stop that.”

  “I don’t believe that. I don’t think Silvina believed in that.” Didn’t know that’s how I deep down felt until I said it.

  Langer considered that, nodded, came back at me from another direction.

  “You got a voice in your head, too? One you can’t shake?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “He calls you ‘Lucky Jill,’ you know.”

  Unexpected/expected, but I was too busy watching his hands to give him the satisfaction of reacting.

  “Who? What’s his name? His real name?”

  “The madman who wants to destroy Silvina.” So, no real name forthcoming.

  “She’s dead. Somebody already destroyed her.”

  He considered that in a way I found unsettling. Like Silvina was a giant stone statue in the wilderness.

  Then he said, “He’s killed almost everyone I know. Or ever cared about. Destroyed it all. Even the things we created.”

  We created. I chewed on that. “Maybe everyone you ever knew was a fucking asshole.”

  The gun fluttered briefly upward, then pointed down again. He couldn’t know what was in my pocket. The hard, cool shape that gave me confidence.

  “You want Silvina to succeed,” he said. “So why couldn’t you just step away, go away, leave it alone? I only need you dead because you won’t stop.”

  “Is that what ‘Jack’ says? That I want Silvina to succeed?”

  He laughed, bitter. “He’s a ghost of the old world. Doesn’t understand the new world. The one that’s coming.”

  “Who does he work for?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Works for himself now, and he wants every part of Silvina gone.”

  Did Jack want that? Or did Jack just want to mess with Langer’s head? And how had he gotten into Langer’s head so thoroughly?

  “Maybe he just hates you, Langer. Maybe he thought Silvina had already killed some people.”

  “A lot of people need killing. Ask him—ask him about what he did to us. That week on the beach. Have him tell you about that.”

  The way his face crumpled at his own words, I knew he meant him and Silvina, not what Hellmouth had done to his men.

  “What week on the beach?” The most ludicrous, sentimental thing. But it still tore at him.

  “We were going to change the world. But he broke his word.”

  The way Langer said it made me jealous in some formless way. Langer radiating such emotion about Silvina and Hellmouth. Like in trying to glean Silvina from Hellmouth I was opening myself up to more disappointment.

  “So why go after Roger Simpson and not Jack? Kind of a failure, isn’t it?” Wanting to drive in a knife.

  “Vilcapampa’s evil. Jack’s a phantom. No one knows how to get to him.” All in good time.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “You’d have liked to talk to Roger again, wouldn’t you? Good old Roger. Family protector. Him, Ronnie—that’d be rich. What they might tell you.”

  It struck me Langer had gone rogue, too. It struck me that he was supremely unreliable. That it didn’t really matter what I said to him or he said to me.

  Apparently, Langer’d had the same thought, because he raised the rifle. A tough shot in the rain, but he might catch me in the spray.

  “Anyway, it ends here. Take your hand out of your pocket. Put the gun down.”

  “It’s not a gun,” I whispered. “It’s a message from Silvina.”

  I saw the look on his face as I pushed the button on the device. Saw him understand I didn’t much like my neighbor. And I realized he could read lips.

  He was already diving into the river as the deck exploded around him. He was already being carried downriver, surrounded by hot embers and burning shards of wood. I saw his head bob to the surface, go under, as he tried to right himself. But the river was too swift. He went under again.

  By the time he washed up somewhere, alive or dead, I’d be long gone.

  THE FARM

  [86]

  What folly, by a different name. The blaze. The way I saw it entire because I had created it. How it enclosed the world. No light upon the water not forced there. No sound not inflicted. No heat. Oh, the heat. The light. Everything Silvina hated. I was sure of that. The way the edges of the water winced away from the aftershocks. The way holes appeared symptomatic, like reverse miracles, in the tree trunks lining the riverbank.

  A haze to the sky that took over, that overtook me. What better way to give away my location to the world? I’d never thought it would work. But the instructions online had been simple and clear.

  I loaded up the car with my supplies. By then it was dusk, and the neighbor’s place was a smoldering, damp wreck. It didn’t take much imagination to realize my neighbor’s blackened body lay somewhere in the wreckage. Langer would’ve had to strangle him to make him quiet. Which told me more about what he, or his ghost, was capable of. And what I was capable of. Maybe even capable of whatever Silvina might want from me. I had plenty of explosives left.

  I felt more at peace than in a long time. So much I didn’t know, and the stress of my destination, but at least I knew where to go. No doubt about that.

  Idly, without much interest: wondered whether my father was still alive. I assumed not, but I hadn’t bothered to check, the past twenty years.

  When I’d finished packing, I drove fifty feet down the driveway, stopped, got out to take one last look at my sanctuary. The place where I’d hidden from the world. The place I’d tried to use to cast off my destiny.

  I’d left Silvina’s journal on the kitchen table and Furtown stabbed to the floor. I didn’t need them anymore, for different reasons.

  I pushed another button and blew the place to hell.

  [87]

  Things I could never know. The list kept adding up, as I drove down dirt roads, down roads with no names, heavily rutted. As I let Nora’s car take pu
nishment normally meted out to pickup trucks. The rain wouldn’t stop, and turned to sleet or snow as bands of cold and warmer air battled. I had protein bars and bottled water. I could go to the bathroom roadside; I wasn’t shy. Anymore. Stopped for gas and directions, and that was all. Cut the engine, along a grassy embankment, a graffiti-lined concrete berm, along a deep forest road, when I was tired and couldn’t keep my eyes open.

  The air often smelled electric, almost chemical, and maybe the green-gray would never go away. Maybe we wouldn’t even notice it, after a while. Maybe we wouldn’t remember it had been different, until the next thing that happened to us. Until it killed us.

  Something fundamental had shifted in the world. Or maybe just in my perception of it. I had to keep the radio on to stay awake, but only to music, because the news seemed like fiction. Sermons and apocalyptic threats from talk shows were no better than news. The thought that maybe even Vilcapampa Senior, from some golden mansion, might one day hide in fear from the future.

  As water lashed the car windows, as the wipers struggled to keep up, as more than once I went slow and almost floated off half-flooded bridges, I tried to make sense in my head of what I did know.

  Fusk loomed like some sort of original sin. The fact that Ronnie had commissioned the taxidermy. Ronnie and Hillman (I balked at Roger) as siblings, divided in their intent and purpose. That Langer, existing for me in a purgatory, dead alive, had such a fixation on Silvina, after their affair. That he had felt risking the remnants of Contila and killing people meant he was protecting her. He didn’t need answers. He had them already. All of them lost in a maze, or web, of Silvina’s making, or just in the idea of a cause greater than themselves.

  A moment, I was convinced. There had been a moment when Langer, Hellmouth, and Silvina had been aligned in a very personal way. Not just one run by the other. Not just one sleeping with the other. Maybe it had been on a Miami beach somewhere, summoned by Hellmouth. Or in Argentina. But it had been the kind of experience that made you bond. Or made you think you were part of something greater. I couldn’t see the anger and the passion in him now as just betrayal. I couldn’t imagine Silvina with him without seeing some sort of understanding with Hellmouth. And then it was gone and they fell out of each other’s orbits and yet they remained … entangled. Couldn’t quite ever become unstuck again.

  What I couldn’t tell for certain was Hellmouth’s position within that maze. Or did he exist outside of it entire somehow? The magician. The fool. Who had miscalculated in this sense: that Langer’s entanglement, his engagement, was absolute. That Langer could have been emotionally hurt by Hellmouth’s betrayal. Wide and deep yet claustrophobic and small.

  All of them had been involved, in some sense, in wildlife trafficking, even Silvina. Vilcapampa Senior lured back into that or jumping in headfirst? Langer had said it plain, that Contila hardly existed anymore. Almost as if Contila had always been part ghost, and not because of Hellmouth’s localized predations.

  What was Hellmouth protecting or obscuring? What did he want? Or did he want nothing, but, like some windup automaton on a track, kept completing the same loop?

  Feverish with these thoughts. Going back and forth, round and round, until I realized if I didn’t set it aside, I would descend into a kind of mania.

  I almost ran into a herd of elk around a corner, with a steep rock cliff to my left and old-growth redwoods to my right. Came to a gasping, skidding halt on the gravelly emergency lane. I’d been navigating a series of extreme switchbacks, taking a shortcut through mountains. The elk stared placid and yet unyielding at me. They had no panic or indecision to them. In that strange light, that moment of encountering life that didn’t care about my journey, their large, calm eyes seemed like those of all-knowing deities.

  I took it as a sign. I called Hellmouth/Jack. Sick of texts. Sick of foreplay.

  * * *

  Hellmouth Jack’s voice was as I remembered from the bar. Sexy. Voice of the Devil.

  “Nice to hear your voice, Jill,” he said.

  “Not nice to hear yours.” But it was. Why should I be so comfortable with it?

  “I understand your complaint.”

  “I think I killed Langer,” I said.

  “Think?”

  “I tried to blow him up.”

  Hellmouth Jack guffawed at that. A kind of admiring laugh. Like he admired the audacity.

  “Hard to kill, as I’ve said.”

  “What am I not seeing about him?” I asked. “What haven’t you told me?”

  “Just continue on your course. Just keep on keeping on.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Just don’t be surprised if he’s not dead.”

  That wasn’t an answer, either.

  “Who do you work for?”

  “At this point, I think I’m doing the lord’s work. Don’t you feel you’re doing the lord’s work?”

  “Rebel angels,” I said.

  “No one gets to decide who god is anymore. I think we both know that by now.”

  Was that true? Silvina was dead and still playing God.

  “What do you think Silvina was up to?”

  A pause, but he answered. “Something radical. Barely controllable. The things you don’t know, about the people Langer helped her meet. You know when they say someone grew human brains inside some fucked-up animal because they don’t have the ethics god gave a pig? That kind of person. People who think that’s exciting.”

  “Roger Simpson is dead,” I said, hoping for a reaction, but it just felt like anticlimax. Deflection.

  “Is that a fact.” Flat. Too flat. Some equation changing.

  “Do you want to know who killed him?”

  “He didn’t die tripping on a banana peel?”

  “I guess you don’t want to know,” I said, and cut the connection. A mistake. Calling him. Stupid.

  But after I hung up and continued on, I was calmer. Colder. Another hour and I’d be back at the farm.

  Silvina had known my address. My rational mind said that was just dedicated research. My irrational mind wanted to feast on something more than that.

  What would I find? Hellmouth on the stoop? Or just a disembodied series of stairs into nothing and nowhere, each step composed of the latest numbers.

  Years from now, I could imagine myself still following the ever-staler bread crumbs, convinced that just one more clue would bring me the solution.

  [88]

  It wasn’t all terrible on the farm. Just most of the time. Even something like my mother’s mania could be funny, joyous, uplifting. It could draw my father out of his shell, place a light in his eyes as surely as Shot could put dull nickels over those same eyes. She liked to dance when manic and would put on her grandmother’s ancient white lace dress and hand silly notes to us. Little stories about the animals around the farm. The adventures of cows or chickens or raccoons. She memorized them so she could tell them to us even after she’d handed them out.

  This cheerfulness made us happier because good humor soured Shot, but also drove him away. He wanted no part of it. While our mother wore those clothes, he could put up no meaningful or just plain mean protest.

  “Oh, c’mon,” she’d say as he got up to leave. “C’mon, dance with me.”

  But he’d scowl and spit and leave and as soon as he was gone, she’d sit down heavily on the floor and giggle. A sound as infectious as hysterical.

  Sometimes she’d get up again. Sometimes she couldn’t stop. One time she looked right at me, a troubled expression on her face, and asked, “What is happening to me?” As if some outside force possessed her. Perhaps it did.

  No point asking our father. He would just become empty again. Of opinions. Of an inner life.

  In the end, laughter led to tears, and we knew the signs. We always made sure to be absent by then. Because we couldn’t fix that, either. The stories turned morose and sullen. The talking animals murderous. The moral obscure.

  And also in the e
nd, just like my mother, I had no idea what had been going on back at the farm. I just knew she wasn’t there anymore.

  But as I drove, I thought of her funny stories. I tried to conjure her up whole and like a mother should be. Like a shield against what I knew I was going to find back on the farm.

  Hold on to that. Discard the rest. Even though it didn’t really work that way.

  [89]

  “Family exists to betray” Silvina had written in her journal. “Family doesn’t know another way.”

  Still raining when I reached the little side road in the valley leading to the farm. Sometime in the past twenty years it had been paved. I didn’t like that. Didn’t like the erasure of memory. I’d already wound down through change, from the heights. Ghastly, modernist cubes, almost all glass. Trying to pretend they were part of the landscape.

  Large lots. Rich people’s summer homes. They’d been rare, back in the day. Now the entire ridgeline looked like a tech bro campus. If oddly still. Silent. I could already tell they’d cut off the creek water to put in wastewater ponds and other “improvements.” All that was left was a beautiful waterfall down a rock face that dribbled off into nothing.

  My sense of being remote faded. The farm was in commute territory. I felt defeated. But maybe it was just because I’d driven for twelve hours.

  The next surprise: the family name still on the mailbox. Where the side road split off from the paved main road. Except the side road, too, had been paved, and a low white wooden fence ran alongside. Cheery.

  I drove slow, and not because of the rain. A mounting dread. Landmark after landmark came into view. The weird weathervane stuck in the ground, now rich with green lichen. The huge rock formation jutting out of nowhere that we’d imaginatively called “Comet.” But new things, too. A meadow where I could’ve sworn there had been woods. A new forest that looked like a tree farm where my father had once planted crops. The whole time the sense of the rich looking down on us, because if I craned my neck, I could see the LED lights from glass boxes on stilts. A kind of odd, alien judgment.