“We could do this ‘the hard way,’ as they say. But I like you, Jill. I like especially how tough you are. Maybe I did shield you a bit, but you took chances. You made your own luck. And you have been a tremendous help to me. It’s not hard to guess now, anyhow: Silvina used the cover of the mining operation to complete her project up here. And we’re going to find it—the rebel angels.”
“This is what you were after all along,” I said. “Just chance it’s me, not Langer.”
“Three birds with one stone is better than one, better than two. Whatever Silvina planned, neither you nor Langer should be the ones to decide what to do with it.”
“‘It.’”
“A biological weapon, of course.”
But that could mean so many things. Weapon. Biological. It could mean a living mask that helped you breathe or it could mean a poison that wiped out a million people.
“What will you do with it?”
“Inform the agency. Contain it. Dismantle it.”
But his expression had a hunger to it that told me he was lying. If Hellmouth Jack still worked for an agency, the place would have been crawling with agents and military. Which meant he had nothing behind him. No one backing him up. Which meant he planned to use this moment for himself.
As the light got brighter and you could almost sense the sun, I could see the rumpled contours of his tattered gray suit. The left sleeve of the jacket had a tear. A fresh cut along the side of his face. His fancy shoes were caked in drying mud. A line of blood had dried on his white dress shirt.
“How many people have you killed?” I asked.
“Enough. Langer did some of it, at my urging, before he got wise. But I ran over Larry—botched that. I killed quite a few of Vilcapampa’s people. Never cared for Vilcapampa. I would’ve killed Allie if I’d had to, but, in the end, it was clear you hadn’t told her anything.”
“But you left my husband alone.”
He laughed. “Jill, it was clear you never confided in him. About much of anything. Now, get up. We’re going to find Silvina’s secret, you and me together. I owe you that much.”
I think he meant to murder me, in the end. After we’d found the promised land. I do believe that.
Starving, dehydrated, I got to my feet. Rough canvas with nothing much inside. I stumbled, caught my balance. Hellmouth Jack let me get my water out of my pack.
I threw the empty bottle at him and he ducked.
A big grin then.
“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.
[97]
We searched for three days. All along the gravel slope, the plateaus above that greeted us like strange moonscapes. We labored at our task with at first the serious formality of captive and captor. Then, as we found nothing, more like coequals. Because I had begun to become frantic, too. The site of the main mining excavation had been filled in. A brief elation at the discovery of a kind of silo dissolved when it became clear it was empty. Some sort of nascent septic system.
By the second day, I knew in my gut that we wouldn’t find it. If it had ever been there. Jack was surly, snapped often, smoked more. Urged me on as if I was the problem. As if he would have found it if I hadn’t been there. As if I put out some invisible field or aura obscuring the truth. When he accused me of knowing more than I’d told him, I shrugged. And he could see in the resignation that I had given up.
The weather got worse. We shared Jack’s tent on the wet gravel, me tied up, hands in front. He had a couple bottles of rum. He offered me a cup. I took it. I didn’t know rum from Adam, but it tasted good.
The lantern made his face crooked, febrile. Took away the redness. I could almost imagine he was the attractive man from the bar.
“Senseless anyway. I should’ve known better. How big a hole can you put in the world to kill it dead? You can’t. Whatever Silvina wanted to do—virus, bomb, whatever. It’s already done. We did it to ourselves. We’re always doing it to ourselves. And first rule of dealing with wildlife traffickers: they do not give a fuck about anything. Except money. Except Langer. Who thought he had a soul. What love does to you. What love deforms.”
“Sociopaths have souls?”
“Don’t be cute,” he said. “Shut up and drink your rum…”
Don’t be cute.
Langer, being interrogated by someone at a federal agency. The pages Allie had given me of the transcript. Mr. Redacted had used that wording, more than once. “Don’t be cute, Langer.”
“You ran Langer,” I said. “But why? What was Contila?”
“Eh? Says who. Who says I ran Langer?”
I ignored that.
“Agency-wide or just you solo?”
Hellmouth Jack gave me a look of respect that made me shudder inside.
“Jilly! You are a detective. Sort of. Okay, let’s do this. If you can answer this riddle. Tell me: what’s bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a breadbox?”
“So not agency-wide, but not just you.”
He looked at me sideways like a crow. “You’re not supposed to solve that riddle.”
“Maybe I just understand you.”
He’d picked up his gun, like I’d insulted him. No one was supposed to understand the great Hellmouth. Then he put it down, took a swig of rum.
“Langer worked with Vilcapampa on all sorts of import-export ventures. Through Contila. I was ambitious, wanted to make my mark. I thought, ‘Why create some fake company? Why not just use Contila?’ So we did. We got dirt on the CFO and took it over and tried to embroil Vilcapampa in shadier and shadier shit, some of which involved wildlife trafficking. Wasn’t like they hadn’t done it before.”
“A sting.”
Flash of anger. “More elaborate than a sting. Less contrived. Would’ve had political consequences. I would have had quite the career.”
“Silvina met Langer because you were going after Vilcapampa Senior.”
“More that I thought Silvina could give up Vilcapampa Senior. But by the time I knew Senior kept her at arm’s length … it was too late. She’d forged her own alliances, used Contila her own way, and blew everything up. Figuratively. I had to clean house.”
“What happened on the beach, before that? That week on the beach. Langer was hurt by you. Damaged.”
The smirk to avoid anything real. “Oh, we had a fun time that week. Maybe by the end, they thought they were going to change the world. Maybe they thought we were fast friends. But it’s not my fault I’m a good actor.”
“Better for Langer if he hadn’t truly been an idealist.” In his way.
Silver tongue. The smooth exchange. Made them laugh, maybe. Some kin to grudging respect. The things they said to each other. Langer against the system. Silvina convinced she could strike a blow against her family. Hellmouth the one who could make it happen, as if his presence made it easier for Silvina to be with Langer. Or see Langer’s point of view. Like I was trying to glean Silvina from Langer, from Hellmouth.
“And sometime later Silvina needed money and went to Langer.”
Hellmouth Jack leered. “Awkward conversation, right? Since their fling had fizzled out. I was still running Langer in the ruins of Contila and covering up what I could because by then what was left of Contila was, ironically, a real criminal enterprise—the networks and all the rest. Exactly what we’d tried to stop. And, then, in time, I lost control of Langer, too.”
I could imagine why. A cascading series of failures had sidelined Hellmouth. And the interest and energy went elsewhere. Maybe Vilcapampa Enterprises had even found a way to nudge that along.
“What about the warehouse?”
“A Frankenstein monster. A nightmare. Mostly stuff we planned to sell through Contila and Langer to get to the big players, like Vilcapampa. Wound up under Vilcapampa control. It wasn’t Silvina
’s. But they didn’t know what to do with it. She just knew about it, and then when she needed money, she and Ronnie disappeared it in that clever way of moving it from one abandoned Vilcapampa property to another. Thought they could use it. But it was just another albatross.”
“How did Silvina get hold of the salamander?”
“I don’t know.” Irritated. Just like that his mood shifted. The salamander bothered him.
“Take a guess?” I prodded.
But Hellmouth Jack wasn’t interested in answering any more questions. He drank more rum, stared out toward the horizon.
“Nothing like fresh mountain air! Invigorating.” He turned to look at me, much as a crow would a mouse. “So, what would you have done if you found it. Silvina’s secret? If you were up here alone?”
“I have explosives in the car.” I’d booby-trapped the trunk. Maybe Hellmouth Jack would find out the hard way.
His face lit up, eyebrows raised. “A bomb to destroy a bomb. Smart.”
“It might make more sense than you know.”
Hellmouth Jack considered me with a kind of regret. “We would’ve made a good team.”
“You mean we’re not a good team now?”
“When I find it. When we find it…” But he trailed off, and he looked lost, confused. Lost some vital thread.
If only his head had dipped lower. If only he had fallen into drunk sleep.
But instead he went into a rage and took my bottle of rum away and stormed out into the rain.
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.
[98]
At the end of the third day, Jack sat down heavily on the gravel. We were both utterly exhausted. My leg and shoulder burned and ached, and in all ways I wanted the weight of my self lifted from me. The sky above, as I collapsed, had a blue-tinged gray that mocked with that hint of normal. Soon enough, the hail. Soon enough, snow and sleet. It stiffened you. It brought you to a stop. Hands abraded from scrabbling in rubble. Chasing ghosts.
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.”
“Maybe not. What if you just like to kill people?” Because it had worked so well last time. So he’d stop fucking crying. It got his attention.
“Fuck you.”
“What if you just like playing games? Like some kind of child.”
“Silvina played games, not me,” Hellmouth Jack said. “Silvina was twisted in so many ways.”
His tone had gone flat, his face emotionless. How quickly it happened should have frightened me.
“At least she had a reason,” I said.
“You mean a ‘greater good’?” Lip all twisted up with contempt. “I’m a greater good. I’m a greater good. Me.”
I began to laugh. Laughed like it was the happiest day of my life.
Maybe because Hellmouth Jack was pathetic. Maybe because it was over. I was free, in a way. I had lost everything. Bet it all on nothing. I had nothing. But that was okay.
He didn’t like my laugh. He beat me for it. He beat me hard and said not a word while doing it. But I kept laughing. I’d been through it all before with Shot. What did I care from beatings.
As he beat me senseless, at least one of us had begun to understand that history would wash over us indiscriminate, like the gray-green, the green-gray dawns and dusks. That so little would matter. That my laughter was, unknown to me, for the future.
In the early morning, I regained consciousness. Hellmouth Jack was gone from the mountainside, as if he had never existed. The rope on my wrists magically gone, too. As if I’d made him up to goad me forward.
Except he’d left me a pack of cigarettes. For which I was thankful, in the end. Sitting there waiting for the rain. Waiting for the next thing.
I never saw him again.
[99]
I wrote letters back to my mother for a few years. This was before I had the job as a security analyst. My college years were hit or miss academically. I drank a lot and thought it didn’t matter because I’d built up so much muscle mass. If I’m honest, I dropped out of bodybuilding competitions later because I wasn’t disciplined enough. As much as anything else.
The dread of those envelopes from her. How they smelled of her hand lotion. A soft, gentle lilac. While the contents were a kind of violence. I’d be in the dorm, on my bed, just staring at the latest one, while my roommate chattered on about how much she hated classes. But I’d always open the letter. Receive whatever lurked there. Whatever beast. Along with news of Ned.
Such detailed storytelling: that I was a cocaine addict in a specific neighborhood or a failure as a fisherman or had jumped off a cliff on an island she’d always wanted to visit. Kidnapped or murdered or worked as a custodian in a shopping mall. Lived at home, on the streets, in a halfway home, in the basement we didn’t have.
Most of the time, I was older in these scenarios. Sometimes as old as Mom. Sometimes I had the same symptoms she did and was ancient. It frayed my nerves. But I had to read them to find Ned again and to push back, to provide the antidote particular to her delusion. It helped me sleep.
When I replied, I made up my own stories. About how I had straight A’s. Or, for a while, about how I knew I wanted to become a doctor, because Mom thought doctors were highest in the hierarchy of life. Then I began to roam into the future. Sent her letters about my life as a doctor. The illnesses I cured. The day-to-day of the practice. Or maybe I wasn’t a doctor, but a lawyer. Sometimes I played the stock market. Professional gambler. Professional bodybuilder.
In one letter, I was old and gray and I had grandchildren. Many, many grandchildren. And I was writing to my mother after her death, to thank her for raising me right. For always supporting me. For having my back. For knowing what was good for me. For not inflicting harm.
I never sent that one. I wish I had. Don’t know if she got even one of my letters. Or if she’d have read them if she did.
As I fled the mountain, I thought about our wounded correspondence. Wondered what my mother might have thought of my letters. If she would have understood why she should be proud, no matter what was true. And I wished, in such a desperate way, that she was there to tell me what to do next.
A moment of weakness. But I was weak. I am weak.
PART 4
HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER
[100]
Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair … even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways.
“So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out.”
Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn’t figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average.
Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same?
Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future. If you lived in the past, you disbelieved the conflagration reflected in the eyes of those already looking back at you. You mistook the pity and anger, how they despised you. How, rightly, they despised you
.
So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher.
The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing.
[101]
But the world didn’t really end. I’ll give it that. One year passed. Then two. Then three, four. My husband died in the pandemic, one of the pandemics, at the lake house in which he’d sought refuge. Not an easy thing to absorb or put aside. But I had to.
Things found out in the wrong order. At a remove, so my grief was late, distant from the event. The way information became intermittent due to circumstance or location. How this became the disconnect.
My father and Lorraine passed away under circumstances the police could never unravel, amid a torrent of religious ecstasy and violence. Random or a disciple? It didn’t matter. The family farm became what I’d always thought it had been: ramshackle, falling apart at the edges from neglect. Empty. Hard to give my father a final eulogy when, for me, he’d been dead so long and only briefly resurrected.
I clung to the thought that maybe I would see my daughter one day and we would grieve together, even if she had gone to stay with a distant relative in a gated community in Canada. But the truth was: I would never see her again. I did not, even when I had Wi-Fi, check the obscure game inbox where I’d left my message for her. I couldn’t bear to see no reply. And if there had been a reply, how terrible. How unthinkable. What else could I say to her? What could I be to her now?
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. In that sense, Silvina hadn’t been wrong.
Fires, floods, disease, nuclear contamination, foreign wars, civil unrest, police brutality, drought, massive electrical outages, famine. Always somewhere else. Until the garbage piled up and the buses stopped running and security forces patrolled streets instead of cops. Some places, militias conducted roadblocks, and no one tried to stop them. Military tribunals popping up. A federal government in crisis. Cell towers destroyed by conspiracy theorists. At the very least, we had become a failed state. Was the world a failed state, too?
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