Hummingbird Salamander(101)

Slumped in a chair, in front of the medical station. Even at a distance, I could tell it had been there longer than Ronnie on the stairs.

I hesitated. Came closer. Lingered on details to avoid the larger question.

Clothed in a green jumpsuit, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes were black, open, blood vessels exploded. Her hands gripped the chair like claws. There was to her aspect a kind of convulsion of purpose. A motion interrupted that encoded motion into the stillness.

Oh, Silvina, even so long dead, you had the aspect of someone who might return to life.

I approached her as if she were delicate and made of something breakable, that she would shatter at the slightest touch. But she’d never been fragile.

“To be a weakness that is a strength. To let the world breathe into you and out of you. To find a path through.”

Had no place to put this revelation. So casual, in its way. So terrible and casual. This dead body in an office chair, in a cavern with monitors. Under a mountain.

I tried to be coldhearted. To focus on the details. To make some sense of the incomprehensible.

But a horror had come over me, the more I examined the body. Never touching it, but circling it. A drowning, buried feeling crawling over my skin.

A sound left my mouth that was a keening. A sound I bit my tongue to stop. If it went on much longer, it would never end.

The terrible thought. The unthinkable.

That as Hellmouth Jack and I searched and searched and searched for this place atop the mountain … that Silvina had been down here, watching us. Observing us through the pebbles at our feet.

That she had still been in the world then. That if only I had been smarter, more savvy, more observant, I would have come up those steps into her secret place to find her alive.

That if I had been alone, not chained to a sociopath, she would have revealed herself to me.

Physically ill at the thought. So ill, I bent over and would have retched, but suppressed the impulse. Blasphemous. To do it in that space. I took a breath instead. Another. Stood up straight and let the cavern air, withered but pure, fill my lungs. Felt better. Felt clear. Did not want to be empty.

When I really looked at Silvina’s face. When I looked clear and unflinching. It wasn’t ecstasy I found there. Not like Ronnie. No, not ecstasy and not terror, either. More a sense of … completion.

Of coming to rest. Finally.



* * *



I was conditioned to look for clues from Silvina. To look for messages. It took long moments before I realized she had left no message. That the letter was the last of it. That her body was the last of it.

A huge, black three-ring binder sat on a desk nearby. Inside, a two-thousand-page manuscript in Spanish. Titled “Unitopia.” My college Spanish was rusty, but even a glance, a skim, told me that this was her real manifesto. Not the one meant for me and people like me. Not the middle-class, watered-down version. In English. But the unadulterated vision. It would be harsh, uncompromising. It would not budge on how the physical laws of the universe worked. Of how the laws of cause and effect worked. It would not try to give false hope, but give the hope of a real way forward. No matter how uncomfortable.

I wept, reading what I could of it. I wept because I knew that she had not believed anyone would implement her ideas. That was why it existed here and not out in the world. Delusional. Na?ve. Unworkable. Dangerous. That is what the enemy called the necessities for survival. For flourishing.

So she’d left it here and found another way.

And it had killed her. Hadn’t worked.

Clear to me there, in that moment.

In front of her like an altar, that odd medical station, which had three tubes for syringes held within a clear polymer container, radiated the cool hum of climate-control. Two were missing. One of the two lay cracked on the floor beneath Silvina’s dangling hand. It took no imagination to guess that Ronnie had taken the second.

Whatever it was, Silvina had thought it would change the world. Each was a different “approach,” according to the documentation. Each promised radical transformation. Each promised contamination until you would see the world so differently. And as you walked out into the world, what had captured you would capture others and they, too, would be transformed. “We must change to see the world change.”

Or was it transform the world? Would the recipient change the world? The science in front of me, the documentation, was not meant for a layperson. A change to the genetic code? Or changes. Radical changes. Not to become superhuman or erase difference or erase anything. References to the salamander’s unique defensive toxin, and the alkaloids in the flowers preferred by the hummingbird, which could be hallucinogenic to humans. Some evidence of a quest to harness their power without the toxicity. Chemical biomimicry.

Could it mean a kind of healing? A kind of healing, an ebb and flow. A restoration of the health of the world? Is that what the diagrams meant? Incoming and outgoing. A contamination that meant the ecstatic.

I was irradiated by my belief. Riddled through. But was I ready to follow?

One last magic potion.

One last chance. One last terrible, awful choice.

I spent some time frozen, arguing with my own thoughts.

Derangement or genius? Was it even possible? If I was right, to create not a deadly pandemic or a biological bomb but a new, true seeing? Let the world in through your pores like a salamander, see all the colors of the flowers only a hummingbird could see.