Hummingbird Salamander
Jeff Vandermeer
FOR ANN
[0]
Assume I’m dead by the time you read this. Assume you’re being told all of this by a flicker, a wisp, a thing you can’t quite get out of your head now that you’ve found me. And in the beginning, it’s you, not me, being handed an envelope with a key inside … on a street, in a city, on a winter day so cold that breathing hurts and your lungs creak.
A barista leans out onto the sidewalk from your local coffee shop to say, “I almost forgot.”
The before of those words and the after, and you stuck in the middle. “I almost forgot.” Except the barista didn’t forget, was instructed to make it happen that way. “Time sensitive.”
You turn in surprise to receive what someone has left for you, but you don’t refuse it. Bodies don’t work that way—a person hands you something, you take it. A reflex. You worry about what it is later.
Or who wants you to have it. Because the barista doesn’t know. No one in the coffee shop knows. From the night before. A different shift. No chain of evidence. The barista retreating into the coffee shop sudden, like a monster grabbed him in its jaws and pulled him back inside. As if he never wanted to talk to you in the first place, except someone paid him. Who? How much? No answer.
You’re left holding an envelope, breath like a chain-smoker’s, trees all around stripped of leaves and imprisoned in concrete. Your hand is all that burns, attacked by the cold, the sound of your nail ripping the envelope flap almost urgent.
Do you have a secret admirer? That feels both new and old, like the snooze button you hit three times that morning as your husband mumbled on the bed next to you. Your usual routine has been dull and kind of fucked up for too long.
Inside the envelope, along with the key, is an address and a number. The number is 7. The key is a trap, but you don’t know that yet.
On the back of the envelope, someone has scrawled “If you received this, I am already gone. You’re on your own. But not alone.”
Maybe it’s the heat in your body giving itself over to the cold in a rush, something to do with absolutes, but you can’t withhold a surge of raw, rough emotion. Not alone.
The idea of going on to work feels ever more muffled, distant, under all your layers. Yet you crumple the envelope in that cold hand, a smolder at the presumption in those words.
Standing there on the sidewalk. Black slush of snow pushed to the sides of the street. A dead robin in the gutter, one torn wing spread toward the drain like an invitation to the underworld.
* * *
Another winter morning in a city in the Pacific Northwest.
Where, exactly? I won’t tell you.
Who am I? I won’t tell you. Exactly.
But you can call me Jane.
Jane Smith. If that helps.
I’m here to show you how the world ends.
PART 1
HUMMINGBIRD
DIORAMA
[1]
I went to the address in the note because I didn’t want to go to work. The car came for me, dark and chrome and sleek, its shadow leaking across the windows of fast-food places, gas stations, and tanning salons. The radio whispered panic about the elections, and my driver, unsolicited, had already imagined, in a soft voice, black drones congregating at night to listen in on our conversations. Yet I knew from my job that this was old news.
I had no reason to remember the driver. Back then, I thought I was smart, for all the details I caught, but there was so much I never saw. He had a beard. He might have had an accent. I remember I feared he came from some place we were bombing. We didn’t talk about anything important. Why would we?
The driver might have believed I was a reasonable person, a normal person. Just a little larger than most. I dressed, in those days, in custom-made gray business suits because nothing store-bought fit right. I had an expensive black down coat. I didn’t think much about where the softness came from, at what cost. My faux heels were decoys: comfortable, just worn to preserve some ritual about what women should wear.
My main indulgence was a huge purse that doubled as a satchel. Behind my back, my boss called it “Shovel Pig,” which was another way of calling me shovel pig. Because I frightened him.
“So, what do you do?” the driver asked.
“Manager at a tech company,” I said, because that was simple and the details were not.
I stared out the window as he began to tell me everything he knew about computers. I could tell his greatest need, or mine, was to sit alone in a park for an hour and be as silent as a stone.
The downtown fell away and, with it, skyscrapers and gentrified loft apartments, and then, after streets of counterculture, zoned haphazard and garish, the suburbs took over. The driver stopped talking. So many one-story houses with slanted roofs and flat lawns, gravel driveways glinting through thin snow. The mountain range like a premonition twisted free of gray mist, distant but gathering.
I hadn’t done a search on the address. That felt too much like being at work. Didn’t make my pulse quicken.
* * *
When we reached the gates with flaking gold paint, I knew why I had a key in addition to an address. Emblazoned over the gates, the legend “Imperial Storage Palace.” Because I have to give you a name. It had seen better days, so call it “Better Days Storage Palace,” if you like. I’m sure, by the time you found it, the sign was gone anyway.