Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff Vandermeer

The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you’re young. There’s a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don’t know exactly what it is, just that it isn’t there anymore. What opens up to you instead is experience, is cunning, is foreknowledge. Nothing you sought.

All the other usual things. Precious as any amount of money, but worthless until they’re gone. Until you really feel the loss.

All the ways life was better even if the world wasn’t. This stutter-step of disaster after natural disaster was just a blip next to LED lights, driverless cars, a possible end to poverty through gene-edited crops.

“Work toward a better world, but never forget what world you live in.”

Another delay. Well, that was the way of it with miracles like flight. The magic had become tawdry, tattered, excruciating.

Silvina wrote that even through the poisoned landscape, we must love it. We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive. How did I not see the damage for so long?

Best way to live off the grid: in the amnesia zone of large corporations.

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.

The coast saved me, though, while I traveled next to it. The cold. The waves. The isolation. Like home but not like home.

Would sit in a freezing coffee shop watching the surf break against rocks.

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 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.

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.

How could this place coexist with a burning houseboat? With a gunfight in a car lot? With a warehouse full of death? But the trick of the world was to contain all things.

Why had I wanted the farm to be in ruins? Why had I wanted my father to be dead or some pathetic, lonely hoarder, no more lucid than my mother? It struck me that only after our whole family was gone had my father been able to be happy.

I left with Silvina’s letter shoved in my pocket, like it was meaningless. Not that it was the most important thing. Disappoint, horrify, or mean nothing. Even as I was cast out.

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

You could say anything in a letter. Tell the truth. Tell lies. Half-truths. Create whole lives for people that weren’t real.

I felt regret, but that was different. No one was ever going to save us but me. 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.

There are no vernal ponds these days to which the road newts return. Those thousands upon thousands of years of return are gone. They are gone forever.

An urgency possessed me. I had to make up for lost time. Silvina’s salamander had reached me late, which meant the letter had reached me late, too. Now the timing was off. Now my timing was off. If I was right about any of it. If this wasn’t just another game or test.

I said nothing. Didn’t want to help him. Didn’t want to be complicit that way. I felt his gaze would warp the discovery. Irrational, but I’d just found where Silvina had existed in my life, the compass point. I wanted that kept pure.

“Don’t you want to know my real name?” he asked. As if it had been on his mind. As if he’d seen this encounter in his daydreams a hundred times before. I said nothing. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter now.

I heard him arguing with himself. I heard the voice of a man who had only the vestiges of a plan left. And that was fraying. The way the world does that to you.

Hellmouth Jack began to weep. Hunched over, knees drawn up, he wept. Uncontrollably. Like a child. Like a breakdown. Like nothing I’d ever seen or wanted to see since leaving home. “Total fucking waste of time. All of it. Total fucking waste of time.”

Even coming off the mountain in bad shape, I’d seen the course of things. The lines at gas stations. The closures of businesses. The empty shelves in grocery stores. Wandering aimless was a good way to get a reading. To analyze incoming evidence—and the evidence all pointed to a kind of reckoning.

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.

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.

I hesitated once more. I’d been given so many last chances to turn away that I hadn’t recognized. Now was being given another one. To heed the warning that was Ronnie’s corpse. To recognize the limits of what I had left to give. No normal life waited outside. But life of a kind waited.

It was all laid out as perfectly as if a dream and there could be no tension, no suspense, because in a dream you were carried along without a choice.

That as Hellmouth Jack and I searched and searched and searched for this place atop the mountain … that Silvina had been down here, watching us. Observing us through the pebbles at our feet. That she had still been in the world then. That if only I had been smarter, more savvy, more observant, I would have come up those steps into her secret place to find her alive. That if I had been alone, not chained to a sociopath, she would have revealed herself to me.

When I really looked at Silvina’s face. When I looked clear and unflinching. It wasn’t ecstasy I found there. Not like Ronnie. No, not ecstasy and not terror, either. More a sense of … completion. Of coming to rest. Finally.