Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Somehow, in the midst of this, I sorted myself out. Lied to myself that I had to find a purpose for my daughter, for whatever in Silvina had been good. All the things she’d striven for, even if, in the end, she couldn’t outstrip delusion or hypocrisy any more than the rest of us.

  I decided to remain true to Silvina’s journey and explore the King Range. Turned most of my remaining cash into goods to barter with. Acquired a military armored jeep, painted civilian colors, from a semi-willing seller. I stashed gold coins near the burnt-out houseboat. Doubted anyone would ever live there again. I had barely lived there.

  Armed with detailed physical maps, I undertook my expedition. As if I had always meant to. As if I wasn’t afraid of Vilcapampa or a new eruption of Hellmouth Jack. Weapons, provisions, the ever-shabbier Shovel Pig by my side along with Fusk. Good old Fusk. Bog, though, was less and less useful.

  I hid the jeep on the edge of old-growth redwoods at the northwest of the King Range, under a tarp and underbrush. Near a stream at the bottom of a steep ravine, I buried Silvina’s miraculous salamander. It might’ve been dead, blind, and burnt, but the longer I had it the more dignity it had accrued. It felt right to bury the road newt near its likely home turf. I did not mark the grave. That would have been a human thing and I knew Silvina would not have approved. Besides, the salamander would always burn true and clear in my mind.

  How had Silvina found it? How had it died? Under what conditions? I would never know the answer, but the beast itself restored something mythic to the King Range, even if it was the only one.

  By sign and symbol, by having once existed, the salamander gave me a kind of hope.

  [102]

  For a handful of years, I lost myself in the King Range, living off the land most of the time, often poorly. An eye out for a huge salamander in a quiet pool. An extinct hummingbird up in the trees. Found neither, but instead waded through unpolluted creeks, encountered black bears, mountain lions, elk, muskrats, and skunks. So many birds of every description.

  The birds still migrated north, and south, despite the changes to climate and the disintegrating political situation. Uncertain, dangerous times. I felt for them and their journey. Did not take them for granted. They had not heard the news about the human world that so impacted theirs. They had no choice but to keep on living, keep on flying to sanctuaries that might no longer exist. But, also, the resistance in that. Some might survive. Some might adapt. Keep adapting.

  By chance, I had removed myself at a critical time from confusion of the world. Because I could. Because I was burnt out, a walking corpse. Because I did not want to end myself but had to end something.

  Even if I kept expecting to die in the wilderness. Even if the wilderness kept surprising me. Or I surprised myself. How was it that I became so attuned to and at peace with the change of seasons, even so corrupted? How did I become so content with silence?

  In time, I got better. On some level, I thrived. My leg healed enough that I didn’t need the cane except when the barometer dropped and my joints ached. My shoulder popped and crackled, and cold days around a too-small campfire made it cry out. But mostly I felt well, almost good. Even if I could never really escape the burning warehouse, or the deep water beneath Unitopia.

  Live in the moment. Funny how if that had been a saying carved into Lorraine’s front door I would’ve sneered at it. But there was such blessed relief, among all the regrets, to put Shot aside, my mother and father aside. They didn’t live within me as they had before. Ned had faded, too, as if he was a problem I’d solved or decided was unsolvable. He was still there, but I’d kept him in my thoughts for so long that I was exhausted by him. No matter who he’d been.

  Memories of the outside world came to me more as glimpses of people I’d never really known. The man who drove me to the storage palace. The woman behind the counter at the storage palace who wanted my ID. The barista who handed me Silvina’s note. But Charlie at the gym most of all. The one I’d seen so often but only ever really exchanged pleasantries with. Perhaps I puzzled over them because they might be alive. Or because they’d existed on the fringes of a mystery so central to my life.

  I came across people rarely, I had struck out so far into the roadless interior. Often, I kept to high elevations, coming down to the same streams as the bears and deer. I learned to travel during moonlit nights and sleep during the day. People unsettled me. Gruff or polite, friendly or wary—didn’t matter to me. Had nothing to say to them—sometimes drew my gun as a precaution. Didn’t want to meet their gaze, know their stories. Just waved them on, or stood aside on the trail, amid moss lumps and thick stands of giant ferns, waiting for them to leave.

  Still a paranoia about Vilcapampa, some lingering doubts that Langer’s death had closed that account. But mostly Vilcapampa. Because even in the midst of crisis, when I came to places where my phone worked, I could tell that the Vilcapampa companies soldiered on. It might be short-term, but in the moment, they had converted over to making vaccines, to making masks, to providing essentials like bottled water. Even fossil fuel extraction, even this late in the game.

  The sting of guilt came less often, unexpected but sharp. Washing my shirt in the stream, wringing it dry, and, in the twisting, the twisting free of anguish at having lost so much in return for so little. All the usual, useless things. Because I couldn’t shake Silvina’s letter. No matter how I tried. Kept the photo, though I felt I was better off without it. Felt that Silvina had broken a contract with me. Even with the relief that there was no “ground zero” event with her fingerprints on it. As if Unitopia had been the actual pinnacle of what she could accomplish.

  I told myself that sometimes powerful forces pass through your life that speak to you but, in the end, keep their own counsel. That they wash over you like an extreme weather event, then are gone.

  No analysis can fill in the rest.

  [103]

  In the spring of the fifth year, things changed for me. The winter was harsher, or felt harsher. A near disaster slipping on some rocks and falling twenty feet down a steep slope made me less sure of my existence in the King Range. The way my body felt for weeks after. How I moved in more tentative ways and how that affected my judgment. In short, I felt old.

  Even as more people were coming into the area, and federal officers had begun a standoff with a nearby Native American reservation over water rights and sovereignty. Twice I also stumbled across what I believed were right-wing militias on training exercises. Came back to my camp one night to find it ransacked, although I’d hidden anything valuable before I’d left.

  I could survive among these new intrusions, but the mental strain became intense. How I blocked the outer world from my thoughts, only for it to intrude. Each time more alien, more different than memory.

  By then I had no evidence Vilcapampa cared about me anymore. No evidence that the police sought me. Where I’d buried Langer, no one would ever find him. I began to think about the old house. That was what really began to draw me back at first. A fixation on what it was like now. It might be in foreclosure, but it might not. My husband had kept up the mortgage and property tax as long as he could. I might have a little while before it was no longer mine. Or, at least, it might be derelict.

  If I could visit just once, bust in a window, I could take more things for barter. Maybe even have a yard sale, if the neighborhood was safe. If no one had already broken in.

  Maybe, though, I just yearned for something other than what I had. Which was nothing. Maybe I believed a purpose waited for me out there. Or some thread I’d lost would come back to me. Because with the way the world kept cracking open I recognized something delusional in words like “yard sale” or “mortgage.” As if, soon, some words would be extinct.

  But I couldn’t shake the memory of the photos of my daughter over the fireplace. Which might still be hung with dusty stockings. In all my repurposing of Shovel Pig, I’d lost my only photos of her. I had begun to find it hard to see her face.
<
br />   [104]

  But I didn’t make it to the house. The jeep ran fine. The world did not. Even stopped short, I would have to become fluent in new languages, discard old ones. Languages of the dead and languages of the new. Curfews and lockdowns took unusual new forms. The National Guard had been called out to deal with an unspecified disaster. There was gridlock and confusion surrounding the city, early that summer. There was, too, old friend, the intensifying green-gray tint to the sky, tinged with gold from the distant glow of uncontrollable fires from a natural gas explosion. Or so they said. A general advisory to use a mask, to avoid breathing unfiltered air. With little explanation.

  Even as the rain kept coming. Ever-present and meaningless, like thought.

  “Landscape isn’t fragile. It’s what we impose upon it that’s fragile. We must be ruthless about the foreground. We must trust the backdrop. Do you know how to do that? Can we trust in that?”

  Funny how even then, as systems failed, flickered out, institutions revealed as paper thin, that so many couldn’t bring themselves to believe in anything. That it helped if you didn’t. Better to observe the rituals, use the catchphrases. Share your concern.

  Express enthusiasm for reliquaries that some still held a mirror to, claiming to see breath form.

  * * *

  On a little-known stretch of state road about a hundred miles from the city, I came to a barricade with slogans on banners that canceled one another out. Didn’t hesitate. Gunned the engine and smashed through the wooden fencing, firing from the open window for maximum discouragement. Some people believe in nothing.

  Some people just want to kill other people, because they can. Maybe it was a joke or some form of performance art, but I didn’t have the temperament to stop and find out.

  I stopped for a deer a mile later, my pulse humming bad in my ears. Too irregular. Almost abandoned the jeep and followed the deer’s silhouette into deep forest.

  Continued on. But I knew I wouldn’t make it to the city.

  So I tried to find a different homecoming.

  [105]

  Noon of a day pretending to be ordinary, the rain a memory that would return transformed, as memory does. A moment like all the other forgotten moments in history. Silvina, did you know I’d keep returning? Did you count on me, relentless to the end? I can’t see how.

  The storage palace had three burnt-out husks of cars, tireless, in front. Not a soul in evidence, living or otherwise. Grass grew thick and tangled at the margins. Smell of tar and chemicals from no visible source.

  The front door had been smashed off its hinges, and the outer walls grafittied with tags in green, orange, and white. It was like the rest of the country, no better, no worse.

  The electricity had gone out, so I took my flashlight with me along with trusty Fusk and Shovel Pig. The cane more out of habit than necessity. Entered that hollowed-out place to the forensic evidence of earlier looting. Any junk had been dropped in the antechamber, a spree of plastic garbage and twisted bicycle wheels, broken glass and torn kiddie pools. Corridors had much the same debris, storage unit doors forced open, a few no doubt more politely opened with keys. The security counter had a firebombed quality to it, stripped of anything valuable, including copper.

  Nothing much surprised me, the farther I went. More burn marks. Even the remains of a campfire with logs. Everything covered in a stillness so utter that my footsteps sounded like sacrilege. The amplified skitter of a mouse or rat in the shadows conjured up monsters.

  I barely remembered the way in that transformed landscape. Pathetic enough. Nostalgic enough.

  Storage Unit 7.

  The door was closed, but unlocked, swung open easily.

  I stared a moment, began to laugh. Unit 7 was empty as ever. Lit by the flickering fluorescent light above.

  Out of habit, or established ritual, I searched the shadowy corners one more time. Tested the walls for hollow sounds. Tapped discolored parts of the floor with my boots. Nothing. Just the sound of dripping water from down the hall.

  The outer areas were warm, but Unit 7 felt cool. I lingered a moment, wrestling with whether I should walk up the mountain for old times’ sake or head back, defeated, to the King Range.

  The mountain, I decided. Once I left, how could I be sure I would ever be able to return?

  I came out into the murk of corridor. Then stopped. Something nagged at me. A ringing in my ears. Some detail I’d missed. When I realized what it was, I felt faint, remote from my body.

  I looked back into Unit 7.

  The ceiling light flickered at me. Taunted me. Told me I was stupid.

  The entire complex was dark. No electricity. Not a single exception. Except for this one light.

  I just stared at it, dumbfounded. Could it be that simple? Had it been that simple the whole time?

  I became frantic, manic. Then frustrated as it took almost half an hour to find a sturdy stepladder amid the wreckage of that warren. Clung awkward to it, finding it difficult to breathe, as I pulled delicately at the light casing.

  Nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual. The world fucking with me again. In frustration, I gave it a swat. Still nothing, but now I saw a tiny button up against the frame on the right side. Cursed trying to get my sausage finger in position to push it.

  But finally I succeeded—and the casing swung open on a hinge, knocking me on the head. I almost fell off the stepladder, cursing, looked up.

  Behind the casing: a blue glow cocooning a sophisticated pass code keypad.

  Always here. Never on top of the mountain. Always here.

  I didn’t want to exhale. Didn’t want to make a single sound, as if it might all disappear in an unwary instant. Crept back up on the stepladder, examined the keypad more closely.

  An eight-digit code.

  Could the ghosts of a hummingbird, a salamander solve this puzzle? Game-playing Silvina, but most games had a reason. A way to win. An endpoint.

  It felt almost as if it was a matter of faith as much as numbers. What if nothing happened? What if I was wrong about what those numbers were and the system locked me out? Panic then, as I couldn’t remember the address of Silvina’s apartment. Before it came back to me.

  I entered the numbers, in their random original order, from behind the eyes.

  Nothing, for a horrifying moment. That stretched and stretched.

  The blue light turned green. A rumble and crack from the left corner of the far wall. The left panel of stone—waterstained, moldy—pulled inward and slid to the side. Revealing a rough-hewn, square tunnel lit by soft blue emergency lights that lined old-fashioned stone stairs.

  A slow ascent into an unknowable darkness. A secret world under the mountain.

  No time to absorb this miracle, this ultimate message from Silvina. No time at all.

  Because a body was sprawled on the stairs at the edge of the light above me.

  [106]

  Ronnie Simpson, Unitopia’s last guardian, lay across the steps as if she’d had a heart attack. One arm pinned beneath her. Legs entangled, the left at a right angle at the knee. The laces of the boot had come loose. The back of her head was soaked in blackness. Her face, half turned toward me, had a pinched, mummified quality. She had no eyes, no soft tissue, all the flesh pulled tight. Even under generic gray army fatigues. The way the fabric drew in because there was so little underneath.

  I was struck by the way Ronnie’s mouth gaped open. The way the lines of that sunken face radiated out from a soundless and surprising ecstasy. A pale green powder on the dry lips contained evidence of vomit, in how it continued down the chin. Yet she had died in the throes of an overwhelming joy. That unnerved me more than agony.

  Poison? Taken internally or carried by the air? If in the air, I was already compromised. Contaminated. Dead.

  I felt fine. No different than when I had entered the tunnel. But I distrusted her condition. Something about the way salamanders received damage, through their skin. Rates of decay. I tried to do
the math. Dead yesterday or dead five years ago while Hellmouth Jack and I wasted time on top of the mountain? Some date uncertain in-between. But nothing about the contrast in mummification and freshness made sense no matter the timing.

  Didn’t much like the idea of walking around the body and ignoring it. Put on latex gloves from Shovel Pig, did a search as fast as I could without missing something. Nothing much in her pockets besides ID. No weapons.

  So light. Her body was so light, like a canvas frame. Tiny veins had ruptured all over her hands and arms. The smell I couldn’t place. As if dust motes had sparked and burned while afloat. So the air around her had a char of pinpricks. A whispering, charred scent. Couldn’t describe it any other way.

  A shadow of my original fears swallowed me. Biological weapons. Ronnie following Silvina into something she didn’t understand, any more than I understood it.

  Well, I would know soon enough if I was sick.

  I found the hummingbird pinned under her. As if it’d come loose from a pocket or Ronnie had been holding it when she succumbed and fell. Twisted wire. One tiny wing bent. But still glossy black. Stirring a fatal sense of beauty. Old friend. Comrade come back to me.

  I saw now that the darkness of the steps beneath Ronnie meant she’d bled out, though I could find no wound. I knelt in her dried blood and took the hummingbird away from her. I could not leave it behind.

  That Ronnie had gotten the hummingbird from her brother seemed certain. Whether Ronnie had come here because she remained part of Silvina’s inner circle seemed less certain. Thought of “Hillman” and his bible of numbers. Of how it didn’t matter which Vilcapampa they’d served. Both had wound up dead.