Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  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.

  What would Silvina think if she could see me now, in light of all that? An unanswerable question.

  The grease on my breakfast plate brought a singe of warehouse to my nostrils. The snout of a badger with only one glass eye, shoved up against my face. On fire. The stench.

  To cover my distress, I shoveled the last of my eggs and hash browns into my face. Eat the smell, eat the memory. Didn’t quite work.

  “You might start by watching his office at the car dealership. It’s a separate building. He’s supposed to come home for lunch but hasn’t been.”

  “Sounds like a good lead,” I said, cheery. “That’s where I’ll start. Then Turtle’s tomorrow.” A lie. Turtle’s today, to scope it out.

  I’d learned clients didn’t like my smile, but “amiable” and “suggestible” were traits I could at least play-pretend.

  “Oh, yes—so how long did you say you’ve been doing this?” she asked, in a way that made me feel like she’d forgotten the first line in a script.

  Three months?

  “Six years.”

  Nora smiled, and I felt a sense of responsibility. But, then, I liked solving these cases. I wanted to solve them. At least it meant I’d solved something.

  “Is that enough to go on? Especially his office? That’s important.”

  “Yes. But, if possible, I need his Social Security number, driver’s license number—to check if he has any secret credit cards. Things like that.”

  She blanched, then nodded. “Sure.”

  By the date I was supposed to report back to her, I might have taken a case somewhere else, never come back to this town. If all went well, I would’ve performed some subtle surgery on her husband’s credit cards. Not enough for someone sleeping around to bother reporting. Along with letting the man know someone knew his secret. That would count for some sort of revenge.

  Strange, how it felt like Nora needed the structure of hiring a detective to do what she might have done herself. Strange, how I needed the structure of a client. But those were strange times all the way around.

  [74]

  Some days I had the self-important or selfish or totally appropriate thought that I had broken something with my fall. That all over the world people were jumping off balconies and breaking the planet. But the truth was what Silvina had seen: we were already ghosts. We just kept haunting each other for no reason. Even as we kept awaiting the mortal blow. But there would be no mortal blow, just endless depths.

  Yet there I was … on the houseboat Silvina had used so many years ago, back when it hadn’t been a rotting shithole.

  A useless task, I’d found. A floating derelict, not even a reliquary. No note to me stuck down the side of the molding plastic cushions on the weird, low yellow couch. No secret compartment under the floorboards. No remnant of any kind.

  All I found was a creased map of Unitopia on the coffee table. Too jaded to think it meant anything. To hope that Silvina’s hands had actually touched it. I wondered if she had ever gone back, what she would’ve thought of the overgrown, half-abandoned version? How ironic if the kind of place Silvina had imagined could only begin to truly exist once the construct called “Unitopia” became derelict.

  Obscuring her presence further: all the others who had visited the houseboat since she’d left. This gave me evidence of Silvina’s cult, but that was no kind of evidence at all. First of all, it was ancient. No one had been there for a year at least. A little, spiderwebbed shrine with candles and letters. People who had lost touch with her but knew the houseboat story. People cast out from her inner circle until there had been no circle, nor even a parallel line. The curled-up edges of handwritten pages a rushed, breathless tribute to Silvina’s waning soft power. The pathetic fallacy of a plate of brownies left for Silvina, as if she were Santa Claus. Moldy, and ossified into oblivion, recognizable only through forensic investigation.

  I’d been puzzled by the pink sticky remains of some soft insulation applied to the bedroom walls. Only to realize Silvina had put up crude soundproofing and her devotees had pulled off most of it as mementos.

  So I had only Silvina’s disciples, nameless, and their bleating regard for her, and nothing at all of her. Even so, grudging respect. Among the things I didn’t get to say to Ronnie before she got away: that I understood why she had followed Silvina. That I didn’t want Silvina to be a fake, either.

  Her absence aboard the houseboat rang loud in my ears, made me realize once again how I couldn’t imagine Silvina as a person, her life day to day. What did that look like? I didn’t know what clothes she’d liked to wear. What she liked to eat. A thousand details. I had her as thesis and theorem mostly, as a raw emotion like passion. Almost operatic, not surgical or quiet and mundane. Was that because of the journal or…?

  But that wasn’t all that was missing from the journal. No mention of enemies except in the vague sense, not the personal. Which led me to the unsettling question: why do you render something invisible? Maybe you do it so it has no power over you. Or, perversely, maybe you do that to protect it.

  Only one other kind of remnant: when some stirring of wind rocked the houseboat, I was back in my fever dream, sunk beneath Unitopia, with no way to get to the surface. With Silvina’s voice in my ear from that long-ago video. “If we could only see the world, really see the world, how radically we would change how we treat it. How different we would become.”

  I found the dream relaxing. I could sink into the bed and welcome it, let it come flooding in. My pain didn’t follow me there.

  Nothing could find me there, down beneath the reeds, in the deep water.

  [75]

  The day I met with Nora was the day I learned there was a missing person report on me back home. That was also the day, as I left the breakfast place, that I thought I saw Hillman drive past in a black SUV with out-of-state plates. I almost missed him, distracted by that weird emerald-gray sparkle in the sky that was our new normal.

  I was too stunned to get the license number. Backed up against the outside of the restaurant door, to the anger of the old man trying to get out. But the driver was staring in the other direction, and I couldn’t be sure. I’d been paranoid before, wrong before. Too old to be Hillman, I told myself. Too haggard.

  For five months, I’d noticed no signs of pursuit, and no one had come for me in the night. Yet I knew they had to be looking for me. I knew they did. For one thing, I had their salamander. Vilcapampa would be paranoid about that, as if I could conjure some magic out of the charred body. That I might find a clue they’d missed.

  Or maybe they just thought I’d get so desperate, I’d go to the police. Or maybe I was dead wrong and they didn’t think about me at all. That was the scenario that made me laugh sometimes. Me and all my precautions.

  As I released the old man, cursing me, out onto the street and walked fast to my car, I pondered that all over again. It’d been nothing. Couldn’t have been anything.

  * * *

  But as I made my way back to the houseboat, I knew it wasn’t nothing. Because my pain levels had shot way up. Part of my life: managing the pain. Managing my expectations. I kept myself distracted with useless searches of key words. “Friends of Silvina,” “Unitopia,” “warehouse fire.” The fire hadn’t rated an article, just a police report item about arson and contraband, no one hurt. Didn’t believe it. I just figured Hillman had moved the body, or bodies. Alex, though, showed up in two paragraphs about “CEO of security firm mugged in a
lley.” That would be good for business, but mostly I felt relief he wasn’t dead. What he would do next felt distant, unimportant. I couldn’t see him going to the police. I couldn’t see him doing anything other than damage control for the company. For the obvious reasons.

  Another good way to distract myself, but pretend I was making progress: immerse myself in the obscure slow-burn hell of chat room conspiracy theories about Silvina. In tucked-away corners. Meaningless shit that led nowhere but passed the time. Unitopia came up on messageboards, sometimes perverted to eco-fascist ends. Sometimes held up as some lost holy grail, with myths and stories surrounding it I knew were bullshit.

  “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.

  But none of this, damaging as it was, worked this time. Maybe because the salamander stared sightless at me and I felt that gaze, more than before I’d seen the almost-Hillman. The mythic giant version of the road newt that was supposed to just be a story campers told themselves around the fire. I’d already burned through all the intel on the salamander I could find. A dead end. But, also, I couldn’t bear being all-in on that attachment, too. In a strange way, I was loyal to the hummingbird. I’d invested so much emotionally, and where had it left me? And every time I looked at the salamander, I saw Ned. I saw the warehouse, the fire. I saw Hillman’s face as he roughed me up.

  I had been brought into mysteries previously unknown to me through contact with a dead woman. I continued because I had lost everything, and the only way I could make sense of life was to investigate the mysteries of others. But beneath every moment of this new existence beat the pulse of the old, and in every detail of the cases I took on I looked for the outline of the intent of Silvina—hoped and needed to see it. Longed to find something beyond the mundane that might plunge me back into that world.

  But no sign appeared, nothing was revealed to me, and I feared it would not happen, that I would become lost in this purgatory, or, worse, become comfortable within it.

  * * *

  At some point, I turned off the pathetic, entombed space heater embedded in the wall and let the room freeze. It made my bones ache, but it numbed the rest. Along with a couple shots of bourbon. The go-bag money would be good for another couple of years if I made it stretch, along with what I’d gotten early on from maxed-out credit cards. Then what?

  Increasing desperation made me go over Silvina’s journal again, like I always did when I began to panic, only to find nothing new. Just iterations of the same. Was it smoke in search of a fire or was it something that would change the world? I didn’t know anymore.

  “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.”

  Furtown, like the poison to the antidote, lingered because Shovel Pig was so big, I’d shoved the book in there like it belonged. Unlike my passport.

  “We are flattered when the mixtures of your advanced chemistry dye us in every shade of nature’s picturesque rainbow, thereby harmonizing with the color schemes of the apparel of milady. We are convinced that these operations must be completed if we are to be your colorful fur gems of trading. So be it, Mr. Fur Man!”

  I was happy the author was dead (1985, stroke), even happier it was his only book. I wondered sometimes where Fusk had found it, whether Fusk was even alive or had been crushed underfoot by greater powers.

  In my weaker moments, when I felt like I’d made no progress—and I was never making any progress—I almost called Fusk. One day I would, when I had the perfect question. But that question eluded me.

  I kept the half-burnt salamander on the floor beside my nightstand, too. It was the first thing I set out in each new motel room, before I’d had the anchor of the houseboat. No numbers behind the eyes. Nothing hidden inside it.

  But I’d discovered the type almost immediately due to the two yellow stripes. “Road newt,” the common name. Plethowen omena. Family: Caudate. Genus: Plethowen. Species: omena. Extinct. Formerly found in mature forests of the Pacific Northwest. Only thirteen to fifteen centimeters in length. A fragile membrane covering the tail. An expandable tongue to probe for prey along the forest floor.

  But there was a complication. The obvious.

  The one I had was a giant subspecies, never before recorded. By anyone.

  Had Silvina really discovered one in the King Range? Perhaps Fusk had fudged the truth and she’d bought the taxidermy. Perhaps she had found it in a shop like Fusk’s: dusty and worn. A curiosity no one else had known the significance of. Perhaps it was a fake.

  Burnt, mangled, it could not argue for its own reality.

  * * *

  I guess I went a little off then. Maybe it was the pain. The salamander made me think of Fusk, and looking at Furtown again, I devolved into a paranoid loop. The alcohol didn’t help. Nor the isolation.

  Why did Fusk switch copies of Furtown on me?

  He could’ve charged me five hundred dollars for the thirty-dollar copy. But he’d switched them. Then I was cursing myself, throwing things. A cup. A plate. A knife, which surprised me by embedding itself in the wall. Realized I was screaming.

  Shut up. Put my hands over my mouth. Like I was two different people. But, in reality, I was a lot of different people, like everybody. And a few of them were really fucked up.

  I spent a good long, silent time tearing up Furtown looking for something hidden in it. I removed the clear plastic protective cover, held it to the light looking for etch marks on it. Microfiche. Anything. Nothing.

  I tore the hardcover boards off like the stiff wings of a bird, pried up the endpapers. Nothing. Then took a pocketknife to the spine, cut the cloth binding. A good spot to hide a piece of paper with a message. Nothing. No page where I’d missed a soft pencil mark or circled letters.

  Until finally the whole flayed copy lay in ruins on the floor. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

  Fusk was just fucking with me. I was fucking with myself. The only reason he hadn’t made me pay five hundred bucks for a thirty-dollar edition was a kind of rough honesty. By his standards.

  I should’ve put Furtown back together best I could. Until it looked like a bad attempt at taxidermy. Or the state of my mind.

  Instead, I just stabbed the knife through the broken boards and affixed it to the floor. Left it there.

  An evil book. An evil mood.

  I needed to remember not to do anything this crazy again. So there the book would stay as long as I lived in the houseboat.

  I didn’t know anymore if Silvina was a false beacon. The kind that wrecked you on the rocks. But s
he shone so darkly in my imagination. The only light I had to guide me.

  [76]

  Even after I turned the space heater back on, the cold was like a slap in the face as I came to my senses. Warming my hands while my ass froze. The cold I couldn’t shake helped me think. Made me concentrate, restless, on where I put my feet, how to position the cane, so I wouldn’t slip.

  I alternated shivering on the walkway, staring out at a sullen brown-gray river marsh of dead reeds, and sitting propped up against the headboard of the bed, staring down the length of the floating mobile home at the kitchen. Trying to ignore the dead, pinned Furtown. Pondering as I drank a beer from the mini fridge. The pillow at that angle helped the shoulder. The loud pain had muted itself a little, by some alchemy.

  I still hadn’t responded to a single text from Jack. I’d let him stew in the silence. I’d let him wax ever less and more eloquent, unsure I would ever respond.

  But sighting that almost-Hillman made me feel even more alone. I took the phone out and I texted Hellmouth. The reply was immediate, like he’d been waiting to pounce. I felt like that needed to be punished.

  >>Jill!

  Me: No.

  >>No?

  Me: You’re talking to Silvina. I’m Silvina.

  >>Very funny.

  Me: I killed “Jill.” She was getting too close. Now I’m coming for you.

  >>Stop.

  Had I caused genuine distress?

  Me: I might let you live if you tell me why.

  >>Silvina is dead.

  Me: Then you have nothing to worry about. But tell me why anyway.

  >>OK, will play along. Why what?

  Me: Why did you decide to stalk Jill? Didn’t you know that could be dangerous?

  >>Because it killed two birds with one stone. To use a cliché.

  Me: I’m a porch light.

  >>OK. You’re a porch light.

  Me: Moths. You’re after the moths.