Hummingbird Salamander Page 4

  The taxidermy Silvina had given me was illegal, contraband. If caught with it, if I read the law right, I could be prosecuted.

  I should have destroyed the hummingbird. Could have tried to find a way to save myself. Remained frozen instead.

  Not because of the mystery of the word “salamander,” but because of the blank spaces between hummingbird and salamander. The more I stared at the piece of paper, the more those lines of.…. . ate at me. Something watched me from those coordinates, and if something watched me, I was already involved.

  Code or symbol, distress signal or warning?

  [14]

  The week that followed seemed like another country. Perhaps because the country I had lived in didn’t really exist. Or not the way any of us thought it did.

  Things like family dinners. The repetitions that spoke to how much we loved routine.

  Pork chops and asparagus and small golden potatoes with a crisp skin soaked in butter. I had seconds, and then thirds.

  “Long day?” he asked.

  “Yes, and I forgot lunch.”

  That came as such a surprise, he leaned back in his chair. Even my daughter looked up from her devices.

  “Distracted?”

  “Yes.”

  A bird in my locker at the gym. Tiny lie, growing larger and larger. Tiny Larry, growing larger and larger as he feasted on fallout from our encounter.

  “Yeah? Why?” My husband was a bear, but when it came to prying he was more like a burrowing badger. He had his reasons.

  The box pulsed and glowed and shook, wanting so much to open and fly away into words.

  “She has difficult decisions to make,” my daughter said, saving me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, too sharp.

  My daughter shrugged. “You always do.”

  Is that how it seemed to her? I laughed then, but now it makes me sad. The look she gave me. Did she know something I didn’t?

  My husband nodded, as if she had explained my day to him and there was nothing I could add. Eat more asparagus, cut into the crisp skin of a potato. Take another sip of Malbec.

  I made a note to tell my daughter more about my job, not hold back the way she did about school. Let her know things—like how few women did this kind of work when I entered the job market. How few worked in management at my job. I truly meant to.

  I asked my husband about his day because I didn’t want to risk talking about mine. He went off on a story about a stubborn potential client he’d shown six perfect homes to, mugging for our daughter so she’d laugh, and I was safe again.

  I made it through sitting in the living room playing card games and our daughter going upstairs for a shower and then to bed. Through more rituals with the familiar beast I loved, this bear I could hug, cuddle with, bite the ear of.

  The presents under the tree belonged to the future, and still do.

  [15]

  Somewhere along the way, for reasons I misremember, I had bought a go-bag. Maybe a paranoid moment at work. Or at home. Left it stored in my gym locker. A thick lump that lay in the bottom compartment and moldered there. Didn’t think about it much. But I’d bothered to buy it pre-made. With a credit card my husband didn’t notice because I’d never told him about it.

  That didn’t mean I meant to leave without my family. I think I just wanted to protect them—from the thought, the impetus, the raging landscapes of the nightly news. Protect them from the idea that I believed such a future might come to pass.

  So when I pried the hummingbird’s eyes out sometime during that first week, I stashed it all in the go-bag in my gym locker. I worked on the hummingbird in the unisex bathroom, with the door locked. Sitting on the ancient, cracked toilet seat. Using the tip of a nail file and a toothpick. Took an obscene amount of time and I cringed every time I thought I might be crushing the hummingbird.

  Ghoulish, wrong, a violation … but a security situation with a client and a camera situated in the eyes of a teddy bear had made me think of it.

  Scrutiny with a magnifying glass had revealed evidence of a prior excavation. The hint of glue leaking from one bird eye as I’d examined it close, shook it for some dislodged rattle.

  The adrenaline rush at what was revealed, like I’d achieved something. As if I had some sense of why Silvina had chosen me.

  Hidden behind, etched, delicate and tiny, into the sockets, still hard to make out even with the magnifying glass.

  Two numbers: 23 and 51.

  Combination or code?

  I did a visualization, which helped sometimes. Tried to look down on myself, there in the crappy bathroom. Feverishly prying eyes out of the hummingbird. This hulking, bulky shadow doing brutal things to a delicate bird. Everything about that act wrong.

  What were that person’s assumptions? What might this person miss?

  One was this: the number could just be some taxidermy reference. Some manufacturer’s designation. Nothing to do with Silvina.

  Still, I wrote the numbers down on a slip of paper, stuck the paper in my wallet. Stuck the wallet in my purse. The next day, I would glue the eyes back in because I couldn’t bear the thought of the hummingbird without them.

  Left the mystery alone, did not tug on the string of it. But, all the while, the string was tugging at me.

  [16]

  Things I learned, I couldn’t undo or forget. Things that hurt me in the knowing of them.

  The hummingbird had gone extinct because of poaching, habitat loss, and climate change. The wildlife trafficking cartels manufactured need—they told those inclined to buy that this or that animal was good luck or the next hip thing for the rising newly rich. They pried open the coffers of countries that would look the other way. They dealt in volume, so the inconvenience of a shipment or two caught at a border meant little to them.

  They’d played off specific Latin American traditions about love potions, and what had been a few hundred birds, caught and killed for the purpose in Mexico each year, became thousands and thousands, smuggled around the world. Stuffed into little plastic pouches. Sometimes well cleaned enough, not just dried, to wear as the centerpiece of a necklace. A rabbit’s foot. A dead animal. But people wore dead animals all the time.

  Their route became more arduous and terrifying because of unthinking development, their normal rest stops on the way to their summer habitat taken away one by one. They had to fly farther between food and water. More died along the way. While in South America, the warming climate meant their preferred habitat moved higher and higher up the mountainside—and became more degraded. With more competition from other species seeking cooler temperatures. A susceptibility in a smaller population to disease had created micropandemics that didn’t help. Spiked use of pesticides and herbicides everywhere had taken its toll.

  Finally, it was not so much that this fierce bird had given up or given in but that the numbers were too few. Even if some birds could now winter in Southern California due to climate change. It was still too long a migration for too small a group.

  I had a vision of that last small expedition, the last group, setting out. Maybe it was just a dozen, maybe less. Tried to imagine it as Silvina had. Trying their best to overcome those obstacles. Each one of those individuals on an epic journey. One they never came back from.

  But: the joy. Even then, there must have been moments of joy and of contentment on the journey. Sanctuaries and times of plenty. It wasn’t just a winnowing. It was a life. I held fast to that. Even if it was selfish, for myself.

  [17]

  All the other usual things. Precious as any amount of money, but worthless until they’re gone. Until you really feel the loss.

  My husband’s sister, her husband, and her son came over the next evening—they lived three hours away. Just far enough they didn’t visit often. So we were supposed to put them up that week. He knew I could only take a couple days before claustrophobia set in, but I would be gone by weekend.

  The son always brought out the tour guide in ou
r daughter, so they often were outside. The husband talked seldom and his sister talked too much, though I liked her well enough. They just wrong-footed you with their extremes. She was in pharmaceuticals. Kept mistaking what I did for what she did, because we both used “strategy.” Kept asking myself what strategy had led me to mutilate a dead hummingbird.

  The banal inconvenience of not being able to relax in my pajamas in the evening. The “holiday cheer” I loathed from past experience, of pull-out beds and futons and close quarters in the bathrooms. Past slights between siblings that came out between my husband and his sister that made me roll my eyes because my husband didn’t always know how good he’d had it, family-wise. Dinners laced with too much wine and beer because, underneath it all, we were not always comfortable with one another.

  The sister’s husband was a conservation biologist. That could not be easy. At the time, though, the biologist exasperated me. Such a narrow focus. All the wonderful things in the world. All the ways life was better even if the world wasn’t. This stutter-step of disaster after natural disaster was just a blip next to LED lights, driverless cars, a possible end to poverty through gene-edited crops.

  Mulled wine and stockings over the fireplace. Crisp smell of the six-foot fir that had been cut down so it could be adorned with plastic and glass baubles that polluted the house. As the tree died in celebration, there in our family room.

  Maybe I was withdrawn during their visit. Maybe gregarious and lighthearted on the outside. Who knows? My daughter was a dervish, though, I know that. She could not stop moving. When not playing host, she could not stop assisting me with chores or in the kitchen or out shopping for the holidays. Her energy, even now looking back, had a febrile quality, like she was making up for some lack in me.

  The fireplace. Hot cocoa. The warmth that hits you in the face and the hands and the stomach. Surrounded on the U-shaped couch, after a heavy dinner of turkey and sweet potato casserole and stuffing, by people in Xmas sweaters and the TV spouting sports off to the side, sweetly raucous.

  Can it have been true? Can it?

  Every day, off to work I went, gym first. Then my husband, who was on holiday break, would text about something before I had even turned on my computer. I needed to pick up an item for the family on my way home or confirm dinnertime, or whatever was on his mind. Wrapped up in his arms, the clutches of his family, even sitting there at my desk.

  This normalcy should have pushed the hummingbird farther and farther from me. Pushed the idea of Silvina away from me. To have this secret life, but no fear of it swallowing me. Even if Silvina’s world had begun to encroach on mine. Instead, it had the opposite effect. I was thinking about it all the time.

  “Are you happy?” I asked my husband late one night, around the kitchen island, the teenagers asleep, the adults half comatose from leftovers, in front of a television talent show.

  He kissed me, smelling of his sandalwood aftershave, and sweat. Because he knew I meant was I happy. As if he had to monitor that for me.

  But, deep down, I knew I was going to follow the thread. I just didn’t realize how far that would take me.

  [18]

  Oh, the flowers, Silvina. The flowers and all of it. Videos entranced me, watched on a burner phone from the go-bag I didn’t realize would have other uses.

  This creature that was everything I was not. We could not be more dissimilar, and yet, inside, I felt a welling up of sympathy for the toughness. For the miracle of this creature. Was this a gift Silvina gave me, too? How the world opened up? How it kept opening up.

  The hummingbird went into a kind of suspended animation, or “microhibernation,” each night due to the high number of calories it needed. “Torpor” was a word I’d never considered, as in “Torpor decreases their metabolism by 90%, their heart rate by 15 times, and their body temperature from over 100 degrees Fahrenheit to the ambient temperature.”

  Torpor. They ran hot, so very hot, but then got so cold, like icy jewels there in the mountain. Clinging to a branch. Hidden by foliage. Dreaming of what? Did they dream of anything? They died, in a sense, every time, and the sun resurrected them. The nectar was life. Miraculous, and as I learned more and loved them more, I loved Silvina more and more. What I felt must have been what she felt, although how could I know?

  The flowers, too. The flowers. The words connecting hummingbird to blossoms that I hadn’t known, like “nectarivorous.”

  As is the lifestyle of hummers, S. griffin maintains a symbiosis with flowering plants, and particularly those in the family Solanaceae. In the Pacific Northwest, it is often associated with upland larkspur (Delphinium nuttallii), but also utilizes columbines, fireweed, and heaths. Each flower provides a sugary snack that satiates the small tank and the high burn of the hummingbirds, but only enough so that frequent visits, to many flowers, promotes pollination.

  Larkspur! Columbine! Fireweed! The “small tank,” the “high burn.” All of this new information lit tiny fires inside. I took such delight, and delight didn’t come easy to me. But it did here.

  They feasted on a particular kind of flower, “Solanaceae flowers in the Schizanthus genus (commonly called ‘Poor man’s orchid,’ or, in Spanish, ‘maripostia’) that occupy stream valleys at mid-elevations in the Andes.” These flowers contained powerful alkaloids hallucinogenic to humans and had affected so much of the birds’ evolution. Remarkable details. Their very head shape had adapted to “better carry pollen between immobile flowers, and, in turn, the flower cups have adapted to fit the hummingbird’s bill.”

  The forked tongue of S. griffin efficiently laps up flower nectar. The coevolutionary pairing has also impacted the flowers, as their color, size, orientation, and nectar content are adaptations to better seduce birds to visit and then disperse the flower’s gametes to a fertile mate. Schizanthus flowers will release the entire anther (a male reproductive segment) onto the hummingbird’s head to promote successful pollen transfer for these ornithophilous plants.

  The flowers never select or meet their mates, those partnerships are at the whim of the avian matchmaker, but the female S. griffin is most intentional about selecting her mate. Females have complete agency, and mating males must win their affection by being artists of many talents—a singing, dancing, and beauty competition all in one.

  * * *

  Singing, dancing, beauty competitions. How to process this ethereal touch, this intel so at odds with my job, my life?

  Hadn’t the hummingbird been a kind of miracle?

  Hadn’t it diminished us not to see this as a miracle and protect it?

  [19]

  The next day, or the day after that—some of it blurs—my spy on Larry’s computer sent an alert. A malicious attack. Rebuffed by security. A closer look revealed the attack had been a distraction while an unknown entity had rooted around in his files. Masked which files, exactly.

  Evidence of this second thing pulsed on the screen like a dangerous lure. In theory, anyone sophisticated enough to breach our security should also have been able to erase evidence of information extraction. This intruder hadn’t. Instead, the trail stood out in stark relief. A hellmouth. I wouldn’t follow it. This time, it wasn’t the convoluted path back. The answer to the question “Who?” wasn’t worth walking into a trap.

  I sat back in my chair, feeling light-headed. Did I need to inform Larry or Alex of the breach? But I couldn’t, not without admitting I’d bugged Larry’s computer. I went round and round, rationalizing … no action. And, in the end, I decided Larry should be okay. IT did routine checks on employees to make sure their information hadn’t been compromised. If this was truly malicious and weaponized, IT would find out soon.

  In the middle of me thinking this through, Allie walked in with her report on Silvina. As she handed me the folder, I felt a twinge of concern for her.

  “Have IT check your laptop for malware,” I said.

  Allie stopped short at that. “Why?”

  “Just do it. The latest batch of cl
ients makes me think it’s a prudent precaution to check for intruders more regularly.”

  “Okay,” she said, drawn out, slow, staring at me, as if for some secret sign or symbol telling her more. “There wasn’t much, by the way.”

  “Much?”

  “About Silvina. Enough, maybe. But more about her family than her. Her family’s not just rich but influential—the storage palace is just one property they own in the area. Vilcapampa Enterprises. They run it like a family business, but it’s international. Operates in forty countries. Which made me think they wouldn’t blink at having a data scrub done.”

  The kind of task we performed for clients. To protect their reputation. A scrabbling panic that maybe Silvina knew me through the company I worked for. Dim, depressing thought. But, later, when I checked: no. Not true.

  “Possible,” I said, dropping the folder on my desk. Trying in my awkward way to seem casual. “Thanks again.”

  But Allie wasn’t done.

  “I didn’t know you were asking me to research a terrorist.”

  Then I did look up. “What?”

  “Animal rights activist who fought against wildlife trafficking. Murdered people down in Argentina. A bombing. At least, that was the claim. She even had a manifesto.”

  I could understand her confusion. Usually, the moral ambiguity or ethical confusion came from a different impulse. Robber barons and tech bros. Wall Street. The killing a remote sleight of hand. Indirect.

  “Manifesto?”

  “Yeah. Read something like ‘Liberation for the Earth, at any cost. Liberty or death—death to those who oppose.’ I translated it from Spanish. Very uplifting.”

  “A lot of talk, maybe?”

  Allie folded her arms, considered me. “Like I said, she went on trial for murder. For terrorism. Acquitted, but still … And she had followers. May still have followers. Like a cult. Even people, from what I could tell, who might not like someone digging into their private business.”