Hummingbird Salamander(103)
And once you’d worked your way “up” to human, or sideways to human, or down to human … whatever that looks like … then and only then would you be allowed to look to the future, to think of a time beyond, only then would you know enough because you’d feel it in your skin, and in your flesh …
I don’t know if that is the change Silvina sought. It feels like just one part of something bigger. Just to see the world better, to be vulnerable to it, is not enough. No one thing can be enough. The ark told me that. The three formulas told me that.
To take the chance is to believe in death as well as life. To believe that, even with the odds against you, you should jump off the balcony. To trust you’ll get through it. Somehow.
I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever loved or cared about. In the end, I didn’t think I could bear to find Silvina again … and lose her. Not really.
* * *
After I have finished this account, I will leave a hard copy next to Silvina’s treatise. I will also use the laptop to allow for dissemination on a rather long delay. Allow the hundred years Silvina wished for. Let my words become visible just as the roof of the ark splits open and brings in the real sun for the first time and all that is down here in the dark and secret is made plain.
It will all be there waiting for you.
It doesn’t matter if Silvina never really thought I would make it this far. If I’m just a fail-safe to a fail-safe, an afterthought to her memory of Ned.
The things you think in what might be your last moments. How you’ve had a lifetime of unhappiness and yet happiness, too, but never recognized it. How you might be searching for salamanders with your brother in one moment of your life or listening to your daughter talk about her day … and at the end of your life wind up in a secret cavern at the beckoning of someone you never met, deciding whether or not to take a chance on dying.
I am going to take the third syringe with me. Close the secret wall. Take a hammer or a baseball bat to the control panel, disguise the fact it was ever there.
I will sit on the hill outside the storage palace among the trees, me and the hummingbird and Shovel Pig and all the ghosts of this place. Inject myself and lie back and watch the clouds go by. The magic elixir. Worth the price, to change the world, because I’ve seen this world and it needs to change. Even with the terrible ache as I type this. Of knowing. That after all of this, I may not be able to reach the true end.
Somewhere it is a gray day, and on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop, a dead robin in the gutter, a hand reaches out holding a note that will change everything.
Langer had believed in Silvina as the bringer of death and destruction, had welcomed that. Hellmouth Jack didn’t care what Silvina had built. Just wanted it, even if it would never have been for him to use. And me? I didn’t know if it was for me to use, either.
Odds are, someone will find me dead on that hillside. Odds are, the ark inside the mountain is most probably doomed, and Silvina, in the end, was just someone desperate and alone and delusional. Those are the odds.
But if she wasn’t. But if it is not doomed. But if I were to rise, and if I were to rise as my own ark. Shedding light and matter. Generating the renewal beneath my skin. If I were to survive the fury and wonder of that, then I would come back into the world, my body the gospel of Silvina.
Where shall I wander if I am not left insensate here? What will spill forth from me and into the world? Spreading a message wherever I go, to whoever I meet. As long as I am able. As some new thing.
I’ve been stared at my whole life. What is a little more of that?
The beating of my heart. For now. The pity of it: that I may not know what happens next. Or even recognize it. And that, perhaps, after all that has happened, I don’t deserve to.
But you might.
* * *
.. .. ..
* * *
One hundred years.
What is the world like now?
What is the world like after the end of the world?
Is there a hummingbird, a salamander?
Is there a you?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As ever, my absolute gratitude and thanks to Sean McDonald and everyone at MCD/FSG: Rodrigo Corral, Madeline Day, Nina Frieman, Carrie Hsieh, Abby Kagan, Olivia Kan-Sperling, and Chloe Texier-Rose. I appreciate you so much. Thanks as well to Sally Harding, my agent, and everyone at CookeMcDermid Literary Management. Thanks to Netflix and Michael Sugar.
Many thanks to Dr. Meghan Brown for creating the naiad hummingbird and road newt for this novel, including all details of their ecologies. I also appreciate the expertise of Jer Thorp and Geoff Manaugh for examples relevant to the layout of Unitopia. Huge thanks to Jeremy Zerfoss for many of the images found in this novel.
Thanks for first reads or subject-matter-expert reads from Meg Gardiner, Kelly Brenner, Damaris Brisco, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Matthew Cheney, Ann VanderMeer, John Platt, and Jonathan Wood. These included reads on subjects like the Pacific Northwest, wildlife trafficking, internet and phone security, and male-dominated workplaces.
Wildlife trafficking often occurs within existing criminal organizations that engage in other illegal activity as well. There is no set business model for wildlife trafficking, but any liberties taken with information on how such organizations operate are my own. Much of the detail of the Pacific Northwest is taken from a research trip in December 2019, as well as extensive trips there in the past. Elements of the Pacific Northwest that are rare but occur include robins that overwinter. Any errors are, of course, my own.