The Hummingbirds

by Ross McMeekin

  A chill pulsed through her. “How dare you? It’s not as if you fought in any wars. Yet you had no problem making that sentimental trilogy the military helped fund—”

  “—Don’t pretend this is impersonal for you,” he interrupted. “Like it is for me. Of course we as artists take the tragedies of others and with our talent and resources reshape them and profit from them. Sure, maybe we raise awareness and throw a percent or two of the profits in the direction of those afflicted. But the vast majority of the windfall is ours. We all pretend this isn’t the case. Maybe pretending isn’t the right word. More, denial. The inability—or is it unwillingness?—to face the truth. But no matter. Because even if you admitted it, deep down, the profit, the fame, and the fortune isn’t enough for you. It will never be enough. This is the plague on your generation: you value victimhood over accomplishment. All the Oscars in the world couldn’t stop you from examining your past, finding it privileged, and deeming yourself worthless as a result. In politics, we will get no quarter from anyone. There will be no room for victims. You would have to be above all of that. But you’ve shown this week what I’ve known all along: you can’t be trusted not to sabotage our plans. I can’t have any tantrums like what happened this week.”

  “Fuck you.” She was trying to fight his words in her mind. She thought of Helen’s mother, the sound of her voice all those years back when Sybil had first approached her with the idea for the film. They’d both cried together, and her tears had nothing to do with profits, with careers, with fame, or anything remotely connected with business. She’d have to call her and tell her that it was off. She’d have to tell her that it would never happen. And she’d have to explain the reasons why, and these reasons were not reasons, they were abhorrent to a mother whose daughter had gone through such a tragedy.

  Then she felt a heartbreak that had nothing to do with Helen’s mother, or Helen, or the injustice of it all. It didn’t even have to do with the fact that she’d lost Ezra in the process, and that their brief Eden had failed because she’d sacrificed it for the promise of a different dream. No, her sorrow had to do with what would become of her career. This film, which was supposed to be her resurrection, would be her downfall.

  She’d never felt this way before. There had always been something there, on the horizon, if only a glimmer of light. There was no air in the room. Grant was a stranger. She was alone. The curtains had swung closed for good.

  Grant looked at her without pity. “Get dressed. It’s time to go.”

  Her mind felt numb. Her hands shook as she pulled on a T-shirt.

  “I am leaving you with a gift.”

  She stopped, and for a moment, hoped. The film, regardless of what he thought of it. If she had that, this might all still be worth it.

  “I have written an exposé of your life that will appear in the magazine that offers the highest bid. In it I will tell them everything. I will release the surveillance footage of you and Ezra as part of the deal. You will be shown in a terrible light. People will understand my sorrow over what happened and see my desire to leave as not only justified, but noble.”

  A gift? For a moment, she wondered if she was still asleep, dreaming.

  “I am doing this,” he continued, “because you would never do it yourself, yet it might achieve what you want. In the article, I will tell them all your faults and secrets and, at first, everyone will hate you for it. The public enjoys nothing more than burying a pathetic star. But years from now, once you have suffered sufficiently, perhaps you will finally get what you long for. Their sympathy.”

  The room was spinning. She closed her eyes and felt the shame carve her heart.

  “Return to your family. Which is most certainly where you belong.”

  She felt the bed depress. He was sitting next to her.

  “I will leave you to get your things—”

  There was one thing he hadn’t mentioned. One way in which she could feel at least some sort of relief. “What about the film?”

  He stood. “Oh, right. We changed some of the backstory so that the doctor comes from Canada. I’ve spoken to Helen’s family and they are fine with the changes. We begin filming in Vancouver six months from now. Coral Massey will play the lead.”

  She could barely breathe. “What right do you have to do this?”

  He turned and grinned. “Right? You mean the right to do the film without you? The right to drag your name through muck? Do you really wish to discuss something so basic as rights? Sybil, who gave you the right to be beautiful? Who gave you the right to eat while others starve? To live while others die?”

  He walked to the door.

  “You’re a monster,” she said.

  He paused and spoke over his shoulder. “Sure. If it helps you sleep at night.”

  The dizziness continued. She would be nothing. And everyone would believe that she was getting what she deserved. They would applaud.

  EIGHTEEN

  Ezra swam toward shore with his head above water and tried not to think, which was difficult, because it was still a long way to shore, and there was so much to try not to think about beyond the obvious danger that populated his mind through the first half hour of swimming: sharks. Now his thoughts were drawn toward death, what it felt like, and drowning, or more specifically, the moment just before drowning, when your body gives up while your mind is still fighting. When you’re desperate to reach for the surface but your legs and arms don’t respond. When you try to breathe but your lungs fill with water.

  That moment when your eyes grow wide and you go still.

  He needed to stop thinking.

  But it was dark and the sound of the ocean slapping against him as he swam was the ticking of a clock. The top layer of water was a manageable cool, but he feared that the cool was enough to do the job. His fear felt how his mother used to describe God: with him, before him, behind him, in him. He switched between sidestroke and breaststroke to keep his eyes focused on the lights dotting the shoreline and the dull haze of the city to the south—his guides, so long as no mist or fog bank moved in, so long as the ocean currents didn’t conspire to double the length of his trip or make it altogether impossible.

  He had to stop thinking.

  Occasionally, even with his arms growing tight, he would find a mindless rhythm. One stroke, then another, and another. But more, he fought calculations—how far, how long, at what pace—as if running through probabilities could provide a solution apart from just swimming. Meanwhile, his aching body provided its own arguments to stop.

  He just needed to swim. Keep his eyes on the lights onshore, and swim.

  A dull ache began to creep, first into his shoulders, next his legs. Then his left calf seized up. He sank beneath the water in pain. He felt the wash of colder water below. He struggled back to the surface and took a deep breath and went down again. While underwater, he grabbed ahold of his foot and stretched out the cramp. He rose and caught his breath, then did the same again, and again, until slowly his calf stretched out.

  Out of breath, he continued on, favoring his arms, his lips parched and tasting of salt, his tongue pickled.

  The shore was so far away. A shiver ran through his body. He could hear nothing but the sound of lapping water. The ocean, so casual, mocking everything he felt.

  He willed himself not to think. He could make it before hypothermia set in—he had to believe that. Even if it wasn’t true, what good would it do to believe otherwise?

  He swam.

  Soon his other calf threatened to cramp, and he found himself treading water, panting, muscles ready to coil, as much from the cold as exertion. He imagined chalky acid built up in his limbs. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He began floating on his back. Tried to relax. Was this it? The beginning of the end?

  He forced a slow deep breath and opened his eyes. The stars glowed above him in a heavenly puzzle, and what felt like supernatural awareness warmed his senses. He blinked, doubting the sensation, but it stuck—
he’d never felt more awake. He went back to treading water and looked about, anticipating a sign. Perhaps a hummingbird, or a whale, breaching up from the deep, its enormous eye making contact with his.

  He waited.

  But there was only darkness and waves. He sucked in breath and for a moment sank beneath the surface, into the quiet. Maybe this was it, and he just couldn’t recognize it, because no one who had truly experienced it had ever come back to tell the tale—at least no one he could bring himself to trust.

  No. He kicked to the surface again and breathed. The sea was back to its calm indifference, the shore again unreachable. Fuck. This was bullshit. He could have killed Hudson. He could be driving down the highway toward home at this very moment, needing AC instead of the coast guard. There on the boat, he’d had the advantage. But he’d hesitated. It was fucking laughable. A noble pause, and for what? No person—shit, no God in their right mind would have called that murder.

  The result? Hudson could now continue with whatever psycho plans he surely had brewing, while Ezra, friend to all, swam for his life.

  Fucking hilarious.

  As he treaded water, the pleasure of irony faded to the reality of his doom. He needed help. A plank of stray wood, a mass of kelp bulbs, anything to hold on to. Weren’t there countless islands of trash scattered across the ocean, each of them miles long? How was there nothing here, spitting distance from the largest city on the West Coast?

  Again, from nowhere, that strange awareness struck him dizzy, that sense of connection to the world, of being a part of Planet Fucking Earth and the Milky Way and the universe and some mind that thought it all up. Yes, it was true, it was all true, and it suddenly felt so obvious. God existed and was making shit happen and you just had to open your eyes to see it. Finally his eyes were open too. Why hadn’t it felt this way for him until now?

  It occurred to him that it probably had to do with the fact that he was about to die. But he prayed and felt a calm assurance. In his mind, a dolphin appeared, and he felt hope. Perhaps his mother had sent it, from beyond the grave, from heaven. He’d once heard a tale that dolphins were able to save people. Maybe it wasn’t a tale. Anything seemed possible. He willed that he might suddenly hear water gushing from a blowhole, and that he might simply grab a dorsal fin and be carried through the waves to shore.

  He waited. Like he had on the shore of the Atlantic, all those years ago, both hoping and fearing that the Apocalypse might finally come, he waited. But again the feeling of reverence diminished to nothing, and here he was, in the water, nobody special, shivering.

  Then he remembered something he’d learned in a survival camp he’d attended as a kid. He could use his jeans as a flotation device. He struggled to strip them from his body, tied up both pant legs, and flipped their heavy dampness over his head like one might flick a sheet over a mattress. To his surprise, they filled with a decent pocket of air.

  He cried and laughed. What the hell. A few more minutes of life. He lay on his back with the jeans gripped to his chest and floated. His ears sank beneath the water while his eyes, nose, and mouth stayed above. He looked up into the stars and wondered how it might sound in heaven, if heaven was indeed more than a wish. Would it be like the dead quiet of outer space? Or would the air be how his mother insisted: thick with the sound of voices and the smell of nature redeemed from all the sin that humanity had brought about. Humans and birds finally reconciled. People and earth finally one.

  The moment in his past he fought hardest to forget but always remembered visited him once again. That door he could never shut. That light he could never turn off. That sound he could never mute. He was fourteen, horizontal, facing the sky just as he was now in the ocean, only on the solid ground of the mountain forest. Matted needles from the towering red pines overhead dug into his back. His hands crusaded around the naked chest of the teenage lifeguard who was in the process of changing his life. His pants were already stained, but he was still as hard as the pitiless young saplings springing up from the old stumps all around him. She ground her hips into him and shoved her bubble gum tongue deep inside his mouth. He welcomed her search. Boy, did he. A respite from the spiral his mother seemed to be in. A respite from the church camp he still was forced to attend, even though everyone hated him.

  Earlier that day, in the pool, all the boys had been circled around some kid with his eyes closed pretending to be blind. The kid called out Marco and took leaps of faith toward the chorus of voices yelling Polo, all skylarking about, dodging contact, a pack of little trickster gods mocking a blind, earnest believer. Ezra hovered on the outside of the circle, watching. But he wasn’t interested, not anymore, and not just because these people were no longer his friends. Up on the white picket lifeguard tower sat a girl whose amber legs flickered in the mayfly-thick afternoon sun.

  Ezra floated toward the tower and pulled himself onto the side of the pool. Soon there was a switching of the guard, and she was seated next to him, those legs dangling in the cool sapphire. Soon they were on their way to discovering that both of their parents were religious leaders, and that they were tired of the pressure to live up to expectations. They discovered that what both of them wanted was precisely the kind of companionship their elders had warned against. Something to make them feel like more than just a soul. Something that would make them feel human.

  She was awkward. She scratched his shoulder with her fake nails, and when rolling over, elbowed him in the ribs. He accidently pulled her hair while trying to massage her scalp, and squeezed her chest too hard, making her wince. This was not pretty. This was not clean. This was not romantic. But it felt miraculous.

  He’d been told his whole life that the greater world held only suffering and damnation . . . but God, what a world. He snorted for breath and smelled pine sap as she once again buried her face into his like a shovel into sand, while down in camp, outside of view, the kids played dodgeball, made quilts, and held hands to pray.

  She had just taken a tiny nip of his chin when something startled him. The black honey smell of burning wood. He glanced past her thick curls and spotted, to the side, dissipating into the clear hot mountain air, funnels of gray smoke.

  Sirens screamed. They both unwrapped themselves and stumbled to their feet and saw smoke rushing up to the heavens. They dressed. She leaped onto the trail and ran. He followed her to the edge of the hill and saw orange light peeking out below from between midsummer pines. The smoke darkened to slate and the wind shifted, obscuring the sun.

  They hurtled down the trail toward camp, nettles and bushes tearing at their legs. The sirens grew louder with each step. They split off at the huge wooden water tower, her down a trail toward the pool, and Ezra toward the fire. He wove between cabins and passed clusters of kids, keeping his eye on the smoky plume. Soon he was in its perimeter and he coughed at its invisible thickness, from which kids and counselors were scattering in all directions.

  Then the fire. How fascinating the fire. He felt less fear than wonder.

  He pushed his way to the front of a small crowd, full of wringing hands ill-equipped for heroics. Cabin Omega flared a beautiful, picturesque orange. And out of it hurdled a person impossibly ablaze, somehow still on two feet, hurtling toward the crowd.

  Toward him.

  And there the memory stopped. And always his mind went next to the picture she’d shown him of the burning monk the month before. And from there to all of the moments she’d spoken of how no one had ears to hear and eyes to see. That the world needed a symbol. And how he’d done nothing.

  She’d left no letter. She’d said goodbye to him in the same manner that she’d said goodbye to everyone else there at the camp. She’d finally become her message, as she’d always wanted to. Even to him, the one person who knew her best. She’d made him the son of a symbol.

  There in the quiet ocean, he began to sob, at first in fits, then uncontrollably. What would it feel like to want to disappear like that? Not simply to end your life, but to erase y
ourself out of your own story? It was unimaginable. He could never understand it. God, it hurt to not understand. It only proved how far from her he’d become by the end. If he could just could go back and somehow save her from that unspeakable pain and whatever had caused it, or even just to understand it. He would give anything.

  If only there was someone to give it to. Someone to pay.

  He’d lost her, that pain only a rehearsal for what he’d struggled with every day since: missing her. Yes, out here at the end of it, he knew: it wasn’t losing her, it was missing her that had changed his life. Missing her that had brought him here. Missing her that had made him into the person he was, and wasn’t. Those moments he called back, the gymnasium, that night he discovered the nature of his father, that day at summer camp when he’d lost her . . . he’d been treating them as clues to who he was, clues to his destiny, his character, his identity. But those were only distractions from the larger struggle, weren’t they? The most important clue was this: he couldn’t stop playing those scenes over and over in his head. He couldn’t get rid of them, couldn’t let them go—that was their power. They weren’t about who he was. They were about who he missed, and how deeply he ached for her presence.

  When she died, he broke. The leadership of the church deemed it a martyrdom, and the church was invigorated, and once more he was treated with reverence. The elders approached him, recognizing him as a Prophet too.

  You have her gift. You share her pain. We can see it.

  They believed it. They really did. They were all so earnest in their apologies, their confessions, and their humility. He could have hated them for it, maybe even loved them. As it was, he didn’t feel anything at all. He wasn’t ready to face it, nor did he know how.

  So, he’d left. For three years, he roamed west, farther and farther away. He found manual labor on farms throughout the Midwest. Stayed for a season and hitchhiked, then another, and another, until finally he’d found the fertile grounds of the Central Valley. He worked the field and once again moved on, to a vineyard on the coast, and after that, to the city, and this.