Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff Vandermeer

A small object lay in the bottom of the box. A curio? Like the horse figurines my mother used to collect. Which is when it struck me this might all be an elaborate joke. A tiny bird perched down there. Sitting dead. Taxidermy. A hummingbird in midflight, attached by thick wire from below to a small pedestal. Frozen wings. Frozen eyes. Iridescent feathers. Beside the hummingbird, I found a single piece of paper, with two words written on it and a signature. Hummingbird .. .. .. Salamander —Silvina

my long, bumpy career as a woman.

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.

“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.)

I should have destroyed the hummingbird. Could have tried to find a way to save myself. Remained frozen instead. Not because of the mystery of the word “salamander,” but because of the blank spaces between hummingbird and salamander. The more I stared at the piece of paper, the more those lines of.…. . ate at me. Something watched me from those coordinates, and if something watched me, I was already involved. Code or symbol, distress signal or warning?

Hidden behind, etched, delicate and tiny, into the sockets, still hard to make out even with the magnifying glass. Two numbers: 23 and 51. Combination or code?

“Who’s this?” “Ben Langer.” “Am I supposed to know who he is?” “You always talk about ‘the credible threat.’ About ‘collateral circles.’ Well, this name kept coming up. Ben Langer. Works for an import-export company that Silvina tied to wildlife trafficking. Also has a hand in illicit biotech and drugs. Langer might be doing the dirty work for that organization.” “Good point,” I said. “Langer is an opportunist of the worst kind. A sociopath at best.”

I kept having a dream. Every night. The hummingbird flew down like a tiny god, to the back deck of our house. Some fairyland version, glowing phosphorescent in a cascade of emerald, sapphire, and hot pink. As if revealing a true self as it descended steep from on high. Looking the whole time as if being moved seamlessly by an invisible hand from an invisible point in the sky to a hovering position above me. The hummingbird gave me what I can only describe as an imperious or even contemptuous look, hovering there weightless. It pierced me. Found me wanting. Then, with a slight leftward tack, the hummingbird veered off, disappeared, and I woke with a start. Sweating. The ticking of the bedroom clock, too loud.

I did and didn’t enjoy air travel back then. The quiet, cool cocoon, the ice in the glass just so, the smooth camaraderie of seasoned travelers broken only on occasion by the person to whom it was all too new. The freedom to be alone, to think alone. The spotlight from above that pearled the scented air. Pointing at only the important things. The sense of being motionless once at altitude. Outside of time, outside of history. Even with weather delays, in first class you could almost forget the world was fucked.

“My name is Jack,” he said. “I’m Jill,” I said. That surprised Jack into a half-smile, and he turned to take me in. I didn’t look away. A nice nose and mouth and jaw, the hair long enough to be thick but not an unruly mane. Eyes that wanted to be more direct than that mouth, and a hawk-like inquiry there that should’ve gone with narrow features. A sharpness. I had a glimpse, in that gaze, of sudden acceleration, of a plunge from on high. A velocity bearing down on an uncanny valley. The cry of some creature caught unawares. I don’t know how else to describe it. I knew that he, like me, was playing a role. That Jack wasn’t here for the drywall conference.

Soon, my illness would get worse. I would notice what Silvina had noticed as a young person: how many dead things haunt us in our daily lives. “As purses, handbags, shoes—even as heads on walls. Or as roadkill, unless it’s a fox or something we haven’t seen a hundred times before. The mind renders them as setting. But now I saw them everywhere—an ongoing, everyday exhibit of dead animals and their parts. A horror show. A vast extermination of lives and minds.”

Something nagged at me. Something I’d forgotten to check in the apartment, but it eluded me. As if I’d failed. That there had been something else I was supposed to find.

But some things came clear to me, even then. One was the full extent to which Silvina experienced the human world as a torment and a kind of siege upon her senses. Right there in the journal, head-on, she addressed that moment of change as a child. That fundamental shift.

“Silvina’s dead. Why do they care?” Said as I squatted beside the bottle and drone. “Well, there you go. Your first clue.” Contemptuous.

Weak men know they’re poor in virtue and take their self-knowledge as evidence others will plot against them. So they want to be the only ones who know things.

Could this be as far as I was meant to go? From Silvina’s perspective? What if the salamander was metaphorical or symbolic in some way? Then the journal was the last thing—the endpoint. Salamander was my business. But had become her business, because she’d done her homework on me. Something in that thought trembled on the edge of comprehension, of clicking into place, then faded.

Her resistance stiffened. “How about we back up a step. How did you find me? And who do you work for?” Like I didn’t have a gun aimed at her. “I found you through a taxidermist named Carlton … Oh fuck—”

My work phone beeped. A text. >>I don’t have eyes on you. You just disappeared. Where did you go? Hellbender. Such a swell of satisfaction that he couldn’t find me. That my precautions worked. That I had no need to answer. But maybe I shouldn’t have had the double drink. Because I didn’t put the phone down. You just disappeared. The niggling thing in the back of my head. Something about the exact moment Ronnie had jumped me and fled, what I’d been saying. I hadn’t put it together before, it hadn’t registered. I could berate myself a lifetime, all the things I missed. All the stupid things I did notice. Stared at my work phone for a moment. Tried to think through the potential risk. But everything was nearly over, right?

Any satisfaction I’d felt at leaving Hellbender blind left me. >>Jill, you need to tell me where you are. I couldn’t move. Felt like I was suffocating, realized I was holding my breath. Jill. Only one person had gotten “Jill” as my name the past three years. The man who had stood me up at the conference. The one who had given me a false hotel room number. So that was Hellbender. Not Langer but some third party.

“Jill.” Langer. The man on the hill. All the weight of that came crashing down on me, and it was like I woke up. Finally and forever woke up. I called the house. My husband answered on the fifth ring. “Where the hell are you? It’s the middle of the night, and you just—” “Listen to me,” I whispered, as calmly as I could. “What is going on?” “There’s no time. Get out of the house. Take whatever you can gather in the next half hour. Get out and go up in the mountains or some property a friend is selling that’s remote. Don’t tell anyone. Someplace secure. And stay there. Just for a while.” “Are you crazy? That’s just—” I said his name. I said his name, and then I said, “The man in the woods was watching us because of me. Both of you are in danger. I’m sorry. There’s no time. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”

Except, later, I understood Ned better—after he was gone. It wasn’t just escape, all those mysterious details, that amazing mythical salamander. By telling me the giant salamander could be near where we lived, he was changing the landscape around me. He was changing what we dreaded, and what stifled him, into something exciting and positive and new. Getting rid of the residue of Shot that contaminated everything.

No, it was more that all the things I thought I’d enjoyed … I hadn’t. Not really. Stripped down, I saw I’d enjoyed almost nothing and, in the end, needed so much less than I’d had.

The thing that made me chuckle cleaning the Fusk or just staring at the half-burnt salamander: even as dysfunctional as it had been, I’d thought I’d needed some semblance of office camaraderie. I thought I’d needed small talk by the watercooler. The drunken Christmas party with the splayed-out table of miniature, perfectly plated appetizers.

Here a woman could worry about her husband cheating on her while just two hundred miles inland there was a mass exodus of disaster refugees headed north to a Canada that might not take them in. A “sanctuary” where aquifers and other water sources were drying up. In the Midwest, privatized security forces were brawling with protesters in the streets of small towns. Disease outbreaks had led to mass slaughter of affected livestock. While stocks remained bullish about the future even as the window for reversing climate change had shrunk to an unreachable dot.

“Off the grid, remote—that’s how you do it. That’s how you start to build a new society. You become self-sufficient. You have your own money. Your own security.” But there was nowhere to escape to. Silvina knew that. “The past was pure. Prior generations had a good work ethic. They respected the land. They knew how to take care of it.” Yes. The good old days of slavery and peasants and indigenous people slaughtered. Silvina would have hated that, too.

“I want to abandon words for action. I want to blow up a dam. I want the world without us in it, but to be invisible eyes and ears and breath gliding over that world. To demolish all of it. But not even that—to be rid of this illusion of consciousness, to be a tree or bush or algae on the surface of a pond. Not even a fish’s quick nip of a water glider. Not even that level of intent, but some other intent altogether. And by the time you read this, I will be, my body will be … in the ground, eaten by beetles, eaten by maggots, distributed in a hundred ways, laid low and made mighty … while you remain behind and have to deal with all of this. I’m sorry for that, but it had to be.” And: “Democracy is not enough because it is never really Democracy. The -ism that will fix this has not been written down because it exists in what remains of the world beyond us and we cannot read that language. So we are left with flawed ways of thinking, mechanical ways, that work against the very organic nature of our brains. We have built so many toxic constructs, we cannot see through the latticework. We have built so many mirrors, there are no windows to shatter. But still we must try.”

Except I hadn’t been able to ask Hellmouth the deadly question. The question I didn’t want to know the answer to. What was the extent of the connection between Langer and Silvina?

Me: Langer and Vilcapampa: how did that work? Before it went sour? The evidence circumstantial, perhaps coincidental, but … >>The usual way. Part of it worked. They both saw themselves as humanitarians. As people who understand the way the world worked.

>You don’t understand Langer. He began to see himself as an anarchist. Someone changing the world order. Me: By killing animals? >>Just the means. One set of means. Allowed him access to a forbidden world, rogue scientists, rogue players. The ones he thought would actually make a difference. Me: Vilcapampa? >>Vilcapampa made his early money off drugs and smuggling live animals for the exotics trade. Never totally got free of that, really.

These needs and wants, these paranoid fears that half the time were actually something. But usually not worth the victim knowing the truth. What I really owed them was to put the truth in the widest possible context. To spread Silvina’s gospel, to overturn the comfort of the everyday with the knowledge of what would come tomorrow.

5712. I don’t remember dropping the Bible, just the slap-thud as it hit the wooden floor. 5712 Orchard Road. Like a bomb had gone off. The place I’d lived for so long. The family farm. I looked over at the eyeless salamander on the kitchen counter, as if it could help me. 17 52. The only explanation I could think of: when Hillman had found the salamander and pried out its eyes, he’d found the address of the place I’d left behind so long ago. He’d known it was important. He just didn’t know what it meant. Didn’t know it was about my past. But knew enough to hide it. For Ronnie’s sake?

“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.

Imagine you brace your will against that door opening. And when it’s all different. When it’s different, it’s like the weight you were fighting against dissolves into mist and you fall because there’s nothing left to lean against. And you wonder about all the other things that prop you up. Silvina, is that part of what you wanted me to know?

I pulled out a slightly damp photo of Silvina. “Do you know her?” “Yes. Of course.” No doubt. No hesitation. I sat back in my seat, chest tight. “Of course?” He still wouldn’t look at me. “She lived up on the ridge for a time when you and Ned were teenagers.” “What?” “Yes—in that new development. New back then. They kept to themselves. Never came down to the farm.”

“You hid this from me. You hid it.” Worse, Ned had hid it. All those expeditions to places that weren’t safe for me. “It was illegal, what Ned was doing. We needed the money. I didn’t tell anyone. Your mother didn’t know. Grandpa didn’t know. I wished I didn’t know.” “What kinds of things?” “Poaching. Courier for … what they were growing the other side of the ridge.” I tried to absorb that. “And I never knew any of this.” Searching my memory for any hint, any clue, other than Ned’s disappearances. “Ned specialized in salamanders.” “What?” “A big demand in China for salamanders. Other places, too.” I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

We try so hard to escape. But we cannot escape the world. That is the point. Salamander.…. . Hummingbird

A bitter vindication. That I wasn’t random. That I wasn’t just bait or distraction. That maybe that was also true, but there had been a connection between me and Silvina. That I had known her, in a sense. If only through Ned.

What else did I feel? I don’t want to tell you. You might not understand. The dominant thing I felt. What I felt was relief. While all the world was in motion, colliding, nonsensical. Imagine what it feels like to have an answer. To come to rest. Because I knew what she wanted me to do. Go back to the beginning.

When the moon is right, the road newts creep in great numbers to their natal forest ponds. Always the same pond, returning to the place where they were born. They know. They just know. That home may be changed beyond recognition. It may no longer be a safe place, or never was a safe place. But the newt has no choice but to return.

I heard a weird sound. Langer. “Don’t destroy it,” Langer was mumbling through the gash in his mouth. “Don’t destroy it.”

Whatever Silvina planned, neither you nor Langer should be the ones to decide what to do with it.” “‘It.’” “A biological weapon, of course.” But that could mean so many things. Weapon. Biological. It could mean a living mask that helped you breathe or it could mean a poison that wiped out a million people. “What will you do with it?” “Inform the agency. Contain it. Dismantle it.” But his expression had a hunger to it that told me he was lying. If Hellmouth Jack still worked for an agency, the place would have been crawling with agents and military. Which meant he had nothing behind him. No one backing him up. Which meant he planned to use this moment for himself.

“Senseless anyway. I should’ve known better. How big a hole can you put in the world to kill it dead? You can’t. Whatever Silvina wanted to do—virus, bomb, whatever. It’s already done. We did it to ourselves. We’re always doing it to ourselves. And first rule of dealing with wildlife traffickers: they do not give a fuck about anything. Except money. Except Langer. Who thought he had a soul. What love does to you. What love deforms.” “Sociopaths have souls?” “Don’t be cute,” he said. “Shut up and drink your rum…”

Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn’t figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average. Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster.

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.

A huge, black three-ring binder sat on a desk nearby. Inside, a two-thousand-page manuscript in Spanish. Titled “Unitopia.” My college Spanish was rusty, but even a glance, a skim, told me that this was her real manifesto. Not the one meant for me and people like me. Not the middle-class, watered-down version. In English. But the unadulterated vision. It would be harsh, uncompromising. It would not budge on how the physical laws of the universe worked. Of how the laws of cause and effect worked. It would not try to give false hope, but give the hope of a real way forward. No matter how uncomfortable. I wept, reading what I could of it. I wept because I knew that she had not believed anyone would implement her ideas. That was why it existed here and not out in the world.

So she’d left it here and found another way. And it had killed her. Hadn’t worked. Clear to me there, in that moment.

Whatever it was, Silvina had thought it would change the world. Each was a different “approach,” according to the documentation. Each promised radical transformation. Each promised contamination until you would see the world so differently. And as you walked out into the world, what had captured you would capture others and they, too, would be transformed. “We must change to see the world change.”

But if I were to rise, and if I were to rise as my own ark. Shedding light and matter. Generating the renewal beneath my skin. If I were to survive the fury and wonder of that, then I would come back into the world, my body the gospel of Silvina. Where shall I wander if I am not left insensate here? What will spill forth from me and into the world? Spreading a message wherever I go, to whoever I meet. As long as I am able. As some new thing. I’ve been stared at my whole life. What is a little more of that? The beating of my heart. For now. The pity of it: that I may not know what happens next. Or even recognize it. And that, perhaps, after all that has happened, I don’t deserve to. But you might.