Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I’d describe the hotel bar, except it was the usual. What I preferred. Dark-lit, not stools but high seats with backs. Some of the security conference attendees, gleaned from their lanyards, sat in the surrounding gloom at tables like murky islands with little flickering butter-white candles. Nothing much droned on, music-wise, beneath it. Like something flat moving around under the sparkly blue bad idea that was the carpet.

  Even from the bar, I could hear their murmurs spiked with drunken exultations. The usual banter, among mostly men, with what I called “an appreciative audience.” They could swing their dicks around as much as they wanted back there. I wasn’t going to enter that fray.

  I guess as I sat there, nursing a water after that drab day, I kept thinking about the significance of taxidermy. Of numbers found under a dead hummingbird’s eyes. Of Silvina and the video. It still felt like distraction or adventure. How exciting that she’d been an ecoterrorist. How exciting that she’d been tried for murder. How exciting that she’d had to fight extradition. How exciting that she came from a rich, important, fucked-up family … instead of just a fucked-up family.

  I am not a pretty woman, the way people think of beauty. I had a kind of jock-like, horsey charm when younger, I guess. But a man approached me soon enough. They always do. It takes a particular type not to be intimidated, but it’s more common than you might think. All it really takes is ego.

  He pointed at the seat next to me. Which I liked. Sometimes they put a space between me and them.

  I didn’t say no, so he didn’t go away. Sat down, and his shoulder touched mine for a moment. He had some muscle behind him. About my height, a little shorter maybe, dark hair, strange blue eyes I couldn’t quite get used to. Almost like he wore special contacts.

  He motioned toward the bartender, made a joke about the “boats of Brooklyn” because of the flooding. But some instinct told me he wasn’t from New York. Too much melody to the voice. Smell of a rich, clove-infused beer had confused me, until I realized it was aftershave.

  The man ordered us both a Rusty Nail without asking. But it was a drink I liked. My father had adored it, to oblivion, in the rural way stations that served as bars, but his sins didn’t pollute the taste for me.

  I expected the man’s hand to be clammy, but it was firm, warm, dry.

  “Here for the conference,” he said.

  Telling me, not asking. Generic enough. Didn’t care about specifics.

  I nodded. “You?”

  “Yes.” Not “Yeah.” Not another nod. A very precise and almost formal yes that made me realize his approach had also been precise. No wasted movement. Not a lot of motion with his hands. He was like the opposite of a hummingbird. But neither was he a salamander.

  “Worth it?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I find panel discussions boring.”

  “Like watching drywall harden,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yes, like that.”

  I put his age at somewhere between late thirties and mid-forties. Something about the wear and tear that registers right away even if you can’t tell how you see it.

  He had a wide but not unpleasant face. I remember thinking, with envy, that if he were an actor, he could be anyone he liked.

  “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.

  Fine by me. I liked that. Hawks, even in disguise, are so unlike bears.

  Our drinks arrived.

  “To extreme weather, experienced from the inside,” Jack said, and we clinked glasses.

  How much nicer, Jack continued, to watch the raindrops run down the windowpane. I can’t remember how he said it, but so skillful, or the way he said it, conjuring a picture of the two of us already in aftermath, in bed, looking out a gray window. The undertow of his voice. A way you could get drawn into it, or caught in it. A rich, layered voice, and the more I imagined him beneath the suit, it was athletic, in shape. At odds with how fast Jack drank the first Rusty Nail. But he didn’t order another right away, or put any pressure on me to finish mine.

  “Do you like magic?” he asked.

  That made me laugh, it was so unexpected.

  “Depends on the magician,” I said.

  The kind of upturn to his mouth that said, Fair, but I have some new tricks.

  “Do you have hobbies?” he asked.

  “I wanted to be a homicide detective,” I confessed.

  “Really?” Eyebrow raised, faux surprise. Like this was part of me coming on to him.

  I nodded. “Oh, yes. Studied psychology, sociology, criminology. But then I discovered statistics.”

  He considered that a moment, with clear disbelief.

  But it was true: I’d found criminology duller than I’d thought and the required statistics classes more interesting than I’d imagined possible. This aggregate data. The ways in which eccentricities of human behavior persisted through software and how you could, with your own bias, skew surveys and studies to suit your interpretation. Maybe I liked the illusion of constraint. The restraint.

  “But … even if I believe you … ‘homicide detective’ isn’t a hobby,” he said, with that smile I liked too much. “Not really. You can’t come home from work and say, ‘Now for my hobby.’”

  Laughed outright at that one.

  “True,” I said. “Real hobbies?” I pretended to think, then said, recklessly, “Taxidermy.”

  “Is that right, Jill?” he said, and the way he drew himself up put a tiny bit of distance between us physically, made me think I’d made a mistake.

  “What about your hobbies?” I asked.

  Jack shrugged. “I get bored easily. Move on to the next thing.”

  Message received.

  “What do you sell?” I asked.

  “How do you know I sell anything?”

  Well, Jack was selling himself, at the moment.

  “I sell security,” I said. “Now that I’m not a detective.”

  I don’t know why I told the truth, except “security” could be so many things.

  “That’s my business, too,” Jack said. “In a way. Not the way you mean, though.”

  “How do you know what I mean?” A little irritated. He’d sounded dismissive. And the more I looked at Jack, the more I saw the imperfections. A hint of a belly. The way his features resembled those of a local weatherman. How he might be a bit older than me, but had worked carefully to conceal that.

  “No offense,” Jack said. “I guess I think everyone sells security in some way. You’re selling this idea that you’re dependable, honest. Trustworthy. But most of us aren’t. It’s just a matter of whether it manifests in the job or not.”

  Manifests. Trustworthy. A strange kind of hitting on. In that moment, Jack didn’t look like he much cared for the task at hand. He was sitting sideways—the better to see me, I’d thought. But also that way he could survey the entire length of the bar. Some other women had come in, were sitting at the far end.

  Then the moment passed, and Jack said something witty about bars and bartenders, and I laughed and I described my frustration with conferences in general and I had my second drink, which was my limit. And we both kept the conversation going, as if it was necessary for whatever might come after. But we didn’t particularly care about the conversation. It existed there, in the air, between us. All those words. A cloud of them. Maybe I sounded risky or exotic or eccentric. Maybe I didn’
t care what I sounded like.

  At some point, conference-goers kept bursting into the bar in groups that made it hard to hear yourself talk. The music rose in volume until it wasn’t just a mumble under the carpet. Someone spilled a drink, broke a glass.

  At some point, Jack leaned over and whispered a room number in my ear, his arm around my shoulders. And then he was gone, as if a ghost torn apart. Too delicate, under the gaze of all those people. As if he’d never had a thing to do with them.

  I didn’t usually go up to a man’s room. I was happy enough with my bar ritual. How it got me out of myself. How playing a role helped me somehow. I didn’t want to. I wanted to. The drug of the unknown. That was simple. Aftermath wasn’t simple. I’d been good for three years. Why now?

  I made Jack wait. I had a third drink, downed some bar snacks, ravenous. I went to the elevator, to the seventh floor. Wandered, confused, down dim-lit corridors, lost in the maze of a dark fairy tale. I didn’t mind—that was part of the story. This difficulty, this disruption. Which heightened the intensity and the risk.

  But I never found his room.

  I never found the room because the room number he’d given me didn’t exist.

  In the moment, you tell yourself he got it wrong because he was drunker than he looked, or he’d gotten confused and come from a different, adjacent hotel. You don’t want to think that he blew you off, but that’s what comes next.

  Relief, disappointment. How you wander back down to window-shop the closed avenue of tacky stores on the street level.

  How you look at the stiff mannequins in a clothing store and will them to move, to become something other than what they are.

  How you’re drawn back into your own shit no matter what the distraction.

  [32]

  What went on between my parents when I was at school or out, I don’t know. Can’t imagine. I want to think there was an affection there, an intimacy, they could not display when I was around. I want to believe that both could be more present.

  My father went around with a perpetual frown, as if he thought the world was making fun of him. As if, in living, he’d stolen something from God, and every breath was a kind of trickery. He could be known to smile at the right joke or something absurd that had happened on the farm, but that was it. That was when I liked him best, if I liked him at all.

  In those days, growing up, the farm might be tolerable and even “something special,” as he called it. But the frown became over time a kind of cynical wince. The look of a man who thinks he understands the world and how much it wants to fuck with him. A sourness that creeps in when you have no more hope of being successful. My dad had degrees in animal husbandry and agriculture; knowledge, smarts, were not his problem.

  Toward the end, as we hurtled toward bankruptcy, that’s when Grandfather became an anchor. The “indispensable weight,” as Dad’s neighbor, another struggling farmer, called him. To us, he was just the agony of bursts of temper and bursts of static. I hate that one of my enduring memories is Grandpa, before he lost his mind, taking us to a Sears lingerie show and leering at the models. I was twelve, my brother three years older.

  The cutaway of that, two years later. Cut away to: seeing my brother’s lifeless face framed by mud. Framed by the riverbank.

  My father’s failure with the farm is one thing. My mother was another: easy to diagnose, hard to talk about. It had started with a forgetfulness I might understand. Because you saw it in others. A slack gaze, a misunderstanding of relatives. A need to be taken care of. These might be things that came premature, but fell into familiar categories.

  But as if familiar wasn’t her forte, the tiny, spiteful woman who had come from a strict religious upbringing into the evils of my father’s agnosticism found ways to express whatever was going on in her mind that ventured into strange places.

  As she became someone else, my mother wrote herself another history. Maybe she wanted her altered state to roam as far from us as possible. To stray and linger, in unequal proportions, to her illness.

  Maybe it just happened because it was always going to happen. But that didn’t make it any less catastrophic. I lost my brother, then I lost my mother, more or less, even as my father turned bitter and my grandfather, before the end, was no better than a thin, flailing beast. Sometimes my father summoned the nerve to lock him in a shed during his rages. Calmed into “thin milk,” as Father put it. Calmed so he could be let out, but muttering and sharp and surly and nothing like a person. Not what I wanted a person to be. Sure to make Father suffer for what he’d done. So Father shut him up less frequently.

  Sometimes I felt his flailing, his rage, was Mother’s made manifest, in the body, in the world.

  Mother’s rants were worse for being written down, for being quiet until read, because, when read, they seemed intent on burning up the world, on tearing it down with inchoate rage. The sharp marks, ripping the paper, so violent. That her vacant gaze made it seem as if something had been summoned into her. I never knew what she was going to hand me. “Con-flagration,” Dad would say, when they argued, and list the words around that, defining her—or that he would cast a spell, bind her, understand her.

  Most of what she wrote was about my dead brother. But also about me, as if I had died, too.

  I missed my brother, and here, in the letters, our mother had created this further life for him. Had written to him as if he were in college. As if he had gone on to get a job with his degree, begun to raise a family. As if he had been corresponding with her, telling her all the details of his days. Time became a miracle in these letters, so he might age a year in a month or not age a day in eighteen months.

  While I, in these letters, these accounts of some parallel world, remained single. I remained single and always had a new boyfriend. I would appear at family reunions and be disruptive. I drank too much. I did unforgivable things. The Devil himself could not have come up with some of the accounts my mother did; at the end, she had more imagination than during the whole rest of her life.

  It hurt, but it always hurt more that my brother was gone, so I read whatever she sent me. The delicate, curving handwriting in meticulous blue ballpoint pen on onionskin paper. Tucked crisp into sturdy envelopes. Sometimes trinkets fell out with the letters. Pressed flowers. Charms to add to bracelets I didn’t wear. Once or twice, money. I received it all, all that damage, just so I could hear about my brother, alive, in some other place and time.

  I kept reading them until my mother died. And then I felt the lack, but still felt the hurt. Maybe that was my cue to live another life than the one I’d chosen. I don’t know. Except I had the example: you could be whoever you wanted to be.

  When we moved from an apartment to the house, I didn’t give my dad the address. Made it clear we were done.

  But I kept my mother’s letters.

  [33]

  I blew off the conference the next day. I luxuriated and wallowed in a huge room service breakfast of scrambled eggs, waffles, bacon, toast, hash browns. After a workout in a gym so small my ferocious intensity to wreck every machine drove out the one flabby, middle-aged man using the rower. The hunger and the fear in his eyes as he drank me in repulsed me and yet perversely made me push myself harder.

  Then I went to find Carlton Fusk.

  The way I’d always planned to.

  Brooklyn was flooded from recent rain, but, oddly, not near the water. I had decided to check out a few other taxidermy stores before pouncing on Fusk. Maybe out of caution, but also to get a sense of what the average taxidermy store was like. Establish a kind of baseline to judge Fusk against, I guess.

  But most of the stores had converted to selling other things. People didn’t buy dead animals as much anymore. At least, not in Brooklyn. One place had become a kind of sad “man store,” devoted to hair-care products and aggressive-looking outdoor gear for the faux tough who never went camping. They had a dead ostrich chick taxidermied, along with a lion cub. Every animal in there was a dead baby of
some kind, even the owner behind the counter. The door near the back drenched in cologne. I crossed two other stores off after that, without visiting. Knew what they’d be and why.

  “Roadkill is fine,” proclaimed one storefront. “Roadkill is just fine.” Another advertised “intricate detail,” including “smaller birds,” and I went in because a goldfinch or similar on a pedestal got my attention. But it meant nothing in the end. Why should it? Typical taxidermy store wasn’t a thing, I concluded. It was more like used-book stores: the spaces and what they contained gave insight into the owner’s mind more than some “industry standard.”

  I could only take so much of this kind of exploration before I was ready for Fusk.

  * * *

  As soon as I walked into Fusk’s (let’s call it) “The Low-Budget Bordering on Shithole Taxidermy & Antiques Shoppe”—the low-grade stench of mold hit me. That and some kind of furniture varnish. But also, I realize now, the smell of death, which meant Fusk must perform his “art” on-premises. Maybe in a basement, so a hint of reek rose from the floorboards.

  The clutter was of the hoarder level only respectable in an antiques store. Someone I assumed was Carlton Fusk coalesced as a smudge of shadow in the back, seen behind the far counter through stacks of boxes, overflowing shelves, and floating dust motes.

  The place made me sad. My hangover made me sad. How “Jack” had ditched me colored my mood, too. I kept telling myself I shouldn’t care because I’d never intended to sleep with him. Yet sad manifested as reckless, I guess. I could cover my tracks leading to the shop all I wanted. But I didn’t have a set plan for what to say or do once there.

  I lingered in the front area, staring at window displays so covered in dust, you could tell they hadn’t been changed out in years. I felt clammy. My hands sweated. Velvet-upholstered chairs. Porcelain dolls slumped over small tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It struck me so palpably that this could’ve been a scene out of the living room at the farm in the last years I was there that I felt sick. I had to look away. As if my mother had lived in the window display since her death.