Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Imagine you analyze security protocols for a living. You help minimize breaches. You actually think you might be good at it. But something comes at you from an unexpected direction. It takes you a while to understand what this thing is, what it means, how it could change everything.

  In the gap, you’re lost.

  [10]

  I was a wrestler in high school, a weight lifter in college, a semi-pro bodybuilder for a handful of years after that. Wrestling saved my life, in a way, even though it was just three of us folded into the men’s team. All the away trips. All the bus rides in the dark. Traveling far from that farm. The number of times I had to stay late for practice that reduced the hours in my room at home. The way we bonded. Even if I don’t even know where they live now.

  I became a wrestler because I loved a certain kind of aggression born, in part, of joy. My body was made for the task: the training and the matches both. Competition was the only thing that put my body to the test, kept it in the state it was meant to be in, and back then if sports could be perpetual, always 24/7, I would have loved that.

  Except I couldn’t. Like bears are always injured, exist in that state, I was always injured. Shoulders or ankles or something. But to me back then … that was a state of being. To be joyful was to have the signs of having stretched myself, and injury told me who I was supposed to be, just as soreness told the older me now.

  What wasn’t born into me was the anger I channeled into physical activity. How I snuffed it out, even if it smoldered deep. Never quite gone. Waiting.

  But trying to be a bodybuilder missed the point: I’d gotten away. I was gone. Whatever I needed wasn’t performative. Couldn’t be fixed posing on a stage. Needed to stay grounded, personal.

  Now I go to fat, then come back again. I don’t care.

  So I went to the gym at lunch, to work out the tension. Lunch hour traffic, along with overcast skies and sludge, made me wish I lived somewhere warmer and more remote. Except, heat is not my friend.

  I came to rest at the bottom of the hill in the potholed strip mall parking lot. Took my hands off a steering wheel I’d been holding on to too tightly. The parking lot smelled of gasoline or motor oil. I favored a parking spot in the middle, under a streetlamp.

  I’d found the place ages ago after becoming disillusioned with the antiseptic gym near our house. I liked that it was a little out of my way. A dive gym, and across the street a dive bar I might, daring, frequent once or twice a month when I came here after work. Oldsters and shady types in this gym, abutting a neighborhood once middle class, now a crucible for meth busts. Pure intentions, but maybe I was slumming.

  The trudge to the smudged glass doors tattooed with dust and the logos of extinct energy drinks. Inside, the thin, sharp line of some cleaning product, punctuated by years of accumulated sweat and the pungent ache of WD-40 lingering on some of the machines. Free weights rusting through their silver paint like something ancient becoming visible. Old-style Nautilus equipment the owners kept fixing with off-brand parts. Benches with split upholstery. Hardly a mirror in the place. No TV.

  An old black man named Charlie was there most days, custodian and security both. He had a flag from Antigua on the wall behind his favorite chair. I thought he owned the place, but we didn’t talk much. Usually, Charlie was working out when I got there. A nod of recognition was enough.

  Most everyone left me alone. When they saw me on the bench press with numbers of like 360 or, once, 420, the men faded away. When they saw me deadlift. That’s when I became more visible and invisible to them. But all I really cared about was no one saying anything stupid to me.

  Imagine me at the gym every other day, locked into my thoughts. Putting on my armor, if it was the morning. Taking it off if evening.

  Imagine how as I do the pulldown or squats I can’t stop thinking about a box with a hummingbird in it. Even as I try so hard not to think about it.

  Because I’ve brought it with me. Because I plan on hiding it in a locker. Even bought a special lock to make it safer. I can’t keep it in the office. I can’t keep it at home. I can’t bring myself to open a bank safe box for it—that feels like a tell. It might not be safe in the gym, either, but I haven’t figured out yet that it isn’t safe anywhere.

  Imagine me trying for a few new gym records while Charlie watches over all, impassive. Because it doesn’t make a difference to anyone but me. Exerting myself until I’m so sore, I don’t even feel the soreness.

  But after, at least, I feel a lot better. Always do, before it gets worse again.

  [11]

  The first time I saw Silvina wasn’t in the photographs in a file. Not really. Not in a true sense. In all the photographs, Silvina looked stiff, uncomfortable. Resembled a corpse, propped up in a chair or leaning against a balcony railing. Back problems plagued her, and she didn’t like her photo taken, or she didn’t like the photographers. Or she’d told them not to and they did it anyway.

  First time was a grainy video, twenty seconds, in an old nature documentary uploaded to the internet. The lighting was bad on purpose, in deference to her sensitivity. I can’t remember how many days after I found the hummingbird I found the video. The shock of wild black hair I noticed first. How she didn’t like to tame it, or pulled it back in a ponytail rather than deal with it. Then, that she didn’t know where to put her arms—on the chair, crossed in her lap. Silvina had large hands, strong, rough, calloused.

  She kept looking down, away from the camera lens, so I almost couldn’t see her face. But right at the end, she raised her head, and I saw the tight cheekbones, the firm set of the strong jaw. Determined, dangerous.

  Her eyes were so dark, they registered as black. Set across a face a little too narrow in a charming way. Slightly sad, distant expression, even when she smiled. But the smile broadened her face, too, and then she was kind of beautiful.

  In her practical clothes just one level better than army fatigues. If not for the floral pattern of the shirt, she could have been the spokesperson for some people’s army. When she crossed her legs, you could see she’d tucked her khaki pants into hiking boots. A silver bracelet on her right wrist, but no other adornment. Reading glasses on a chain hung down over the shirt, as if she was an old lady in a rocking chair.

  Later, I would learn the bracelet was from her mother. The one thing she wouldn’t give up from her past.

  Silvina didn’t smile in any photograph. Just at the end of the video clip. That was right after the thing they accused her of, that followed her around from then on. Whether she’d done it or not. Before the trial.

  For a moment. I froze that moment—in that other moment we haven’t caught up to yet. Replayed the clip. I watched her smile. It kept breaking my heart. To know I’d never see her as she really was, underneath. That maybe the smile came the closest.

  Except, that was a lie of the heart, of the head. She was who she was all the time. I should have known that already.

  [12]

  Back at the office, I was supposed to start reviewing workflow and organization of a natural gas pipeline company. Clients knew me as a “vulnerability assessor” or “vulnerability analyst.” If I could figure out how to compromise their security systems or flaws in the human element, I could learn how to save them, too. Analysis, and then an actual hacker would do the force work. That’s what Alex called it, “force work,” as in “blunt force trauma,” as in “use the force.” You had to make the client feel insecure to force him to be secure. Reflexive security, most of it. A twitching lizard’s tail. Except the hackers preferred to be called “penetration testers.”

  But, instead of working, I decided to use Larry’s office. I’d ghosted a spy onto his machine for a while that helped me unlock it. Because it wasn’t just how they shut me out. Maybe that was most of it, but I liked to mark Larry’s office as my territory. Honed my security skills. But, also, it felt good, and I liked to feel good sometimes.

  Larry was out with a client for the afternoon. Safe, beca
use his office was around a dead-end corner, out of sight, and few ever willingly went to his office. Once there, you’d spend a half hour getting unstuck. He was a talker who rarely said anything.

  A useful experiment to search for the hummingbird on Larry’s computer. I couldn’t put that on Allie. That might be the kind of random that would wind up lunchroom talk. “And then she made me waste an afternoon clicking on this bird.” Later, I could check Larry’s computer remotely to see if the search had triggered any attention. In the past, my meddling had died the death of any seemingly idle, innocent search. Lost in a wash of other data, protected behind our firewall.

  I found the hummingbird so quickly, it surprised me. A half hour down all the hellholes of the internet, into obscure ornithology and eccentric research. But, no: an image search, adding the word “endangered” on a hunch, and there it was.

  No mention of a “Silvina” associated with the hummingbird, but a few names of scientists and an article on poaching in its South American range. Along with a vague mention of wildlife contraband seizures in Miami.

  I hit print and leaned back in Larry’s chair, yawning.

  There was Larry, in the doorway, staring at me.

  I jumped. Sat up with an awkward sproing of springs.

  “Oh, shit, Larry! Gave me a fucking heart attack.”

  His face was a stern anvil. But the swearing confused him. I didn’t swear in the office. Whatever he’d been about to say he put on pause, turned his head a bit, like now I was a stranger. Reappraisal. I didn’t like the light that had turned on behind his eyes.

  “So this is what happens when I’m out,” he said. Flat, dead tone.

  “Sorry—my printer died,” I said.

  Not good that Larry could check if that was true. I clicked on delete and the hummingbird page disappeared from the screen. No time for search history, but what was Larry going to do? Complain to management that I’d read about a hummingbird on his laptop?

  “Your printer died.”

  Larry now blocked the doorway. When expressive men become still, emotionless, I start thinking about takedowns and choke holds.

  “I’ve gotta ask … how’d you get on my computer? In the first place.”

  “I was in a hurry, and you’d left it unlocked.” Saying sorry felt like it would be an admission of intent.

  “Did I? Did I really? Is that even an option?”

  “Why, you worried about that porn you watch?” I smiled like it was a joke. It wasn’t.

  He blanched. Off-balance.

  I snatched the pages off the printer, stood towering over him in the doorway. I could’ve picked him up and set him back down and gotten out. But he moved.

  “Maybe tell me next time you want to use my computer,” he said. “And I’ll be sure to say no.”

  I brushed by him without a word, making sure to knock into his shoulder. Went back to my office feeling exposed, embarrassed, locked myself in. Got an important piece of the pipeline thing done and off to Alex for his approval. He liked to weigh in on the important stuff, even though it wasn’t his level of detail.

  Waited past five, when I could be sure Larry had left.

  This was the day they all went down to the bar two blocks away and got shitfaced early. No way was Larry going to miss that.

  [13]

  Were companies units or loose, ever-shifting alliances of individuals? Still didn’t know. But I’d learned on the farm that animals were not individuals, not persons, but groups. Categories. Mother, father, grandfather told me this, every day, growing up. It was the most constant, repetitive lesson learned from the grown-ups in my family. In both word and action.

  This was the way of the world at large, perhaps with more callousness. On the farm—or, at least, on our farm—you respected animals, but they also gave you eggs or milk or meat. Your goats had names, but one day you would slaughter them. You scratched the pigs on the coarse hair of their backs until they grunted with pleasure, you knew their personalities and habits, but then one morning your father would be helping put them in the back of a stranger’s truck and they’d be gone forever.

  On top of that, I had a decade of what Silvina called “indoctrination.” From raising a daughter who we encouraged to love YouTube videos with cute animals without once thinking about the context or source. Animated movies where birds talked and smiled like people, and maybe the animal was the villain, or maybe not, but it, too, talked and made faces and in every way tried to be part of the human world. That had distanced me from anything useful I might’ve known about animals. Something not tested or something foundational where you should seek the exception. Something toxic from the monoculture.

  “Using ‘us’ when thinking about the environment erases all the different versions of ‘us,’” Silvina once said. “Many indigenous peoples don’t think this way. Counterculture doesn’t always think this way. Philosophy, knowledge, policy exist that could solve our problems already.”

  So maybe at first the frisson of mystery and intrigue came from reading what I’d printed out while idling in the parking garage, doors locked, before heading home. Alert for every possible Larry approaching.

  * * *

  “Hummingbirds are aesthetic and aerobic extremists,” read one site. “Their tiny bodies hover akin to flying carpets; did one just zip by? Hummers evolved high in the Andes Mountains with progressive colonization of lower altitudes and expanded latitudes, especially to the north, and eventually to the far reaches of Canada and Alaska. They remain restricted to the Americas, with the vast majority of the 300+ species residents of South America.”

  “Information isn’t story,” Silvina wrote. “No animal should be condensed to a summary in an encyclopedia.” But all I had was information at first. And a dead bird’s body. Because that’s all she’d given me.

  “The naiad hummingbird (Selastrephes griffin) is of moderate size (less than 12 cm body length) with an especially long migration that delights the most diligent of birders across its range. Although difficult to find and observe by humans, the brilliant colors and patterns of the males are adaptations to catch the eye of their mates.”

  I had a large female specimen, then. Pitch-black. No-nonsense.

  “They are fine athletes whose stunt repertoire includes backward flight, treading air, and maneuvering precisely in gusty wind. And whose migration between the Pacific Northwest and Argentina equates to several back-to-back ultramarathons.”

  I tried to imagine traveling that far as an adaptation, through so many different kinds of terrain. This was an epic journey—and one only allowed due to incredible specializations. The changes a human being would have to undergo to inhabit such places without equipment. Wouldn’t they change your point of view, too? Wouldn’t you become someone else?

  Like many species that have northern-skewed ranges for breeding, S. griffin is a snowbird and migrates closer to the phylogenetic nexus of hummingbirds in South America. S. griffin winters (December–March) in the Andes (where, of course, it is actually summer). Oxygen is limited at these altitudes (> 2,000 meters) as well as during the bird’s migration; nonetheless, S. griffin maintains extraordinary metabolic rates that are enabled by adaptations in the hemoglobin protein that binds oxygen to iron. These changes to the heme group are inducible during their migration and winter in the Andes but are not present during their summers at lower elevations in North America.

  But it wasn’t just the journey. The flowers. The nests. All of it, once I had time to really immerse myself. Caught up in a way I hadn’t expected, not just because of the mystery. But the data, after all. Who wouldn’t be moved by the details? Maybe it was just me, or maybe it was the flush of the first real intel.

  Status: Unknown. The last documented observation was in the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park, British Columbia. Ornithological groups are seeking information, photographic sightings, or recorded calls.

  Not just rare, then, but presumed extinct. Last seen in 2007. I felt a pang o
f emotion, as if this was a twist. But a twist that you could have seen coming. And after the pang—it took no time at all—that emotion began to recede from me. Couldn’t hold on to it. Self-inoculation.

  That month the southern white rhino and a species of pangolin had gone extinct. Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were poisoning vultures and shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it “the fatal adaptation.”

  Alone with my thoughts, this was all unsettling, destabilizing. Excitement, joy, sadness, unease, in the briefest period. Even now, I can’t truly explain the nexus of that, and how it rippled through me.

  So I focused on the why.

  Why would a person named Silvina leave me this particular taxidermied animal? I saw the route the hummingbird took as evidence. Northwest. Local during part of the year. They might even have flown right through our neighborhood. In the middle of the night—headed somewhere that cared enough to put out sugar water or plant wildflowers.

  What sort of person would send this kind of message? Sometimes a founder’s psyche became reflected in their company and, thus, in how they handled security. But this wasn’t about what happened subconsciously. This was a person who couldn’t afford to be direct. Or who didn’t trust me but, for some reason, had to tell me something. Bound by the rules of a game I couldn’t see clear yet.

  Usually, a message wasn’t passive. Usually, on some level, a message so dramatic called out for action. But Silvina hadn’t asked for anything. Except, I thought, to follow the clues.

  There, in the parking lot, I loved that hummingbird, with a fierce and protective love. But resentment flared up, too. I could neither get rid of nor keep the hummingbird. Silvina had made some essential decision for me and it came with baggage.