Hummingbird Salamander(35)

I owed Alex and the other managers a conference report, but I was too on edge. I loaded up on coffee, as if I thought that would help. I kept typing the same sentence over and over again. “The conference focus on new protocols designed to thwart third-party service attacks…”

Silvina’s diary burned a hole in Shovel Pig. In my mind.

“The conference focus on new protocols designed to thwart third-party service attacks revealed a flaw in overall security thinking…” Trying to find ways to shove references to Vilcapampa companies in there. As much to forestall Allie as Alex.

I wanted to quit, go home, have time to think.

“Opportunities for business partnerships include a shift toward examining the changed psychology of human security risks due to personal isolation and working from remote locations. The conference’s partial focus on new protocols designed to accommodate concerns about zoonotic viruses reveals a flaw in overall security thinking due to the assumption that…”

But I couldn’t. Couldn’t go home. Couldn’t stay in the office. Uncomfortable and itchy in my own skin. Allie kept coming in to talk about Larry, which made me twitch and wince, until I point-blank told her I had to concentrate on my report. Only to watch her face go cold. “I understand.” No, she didn’t understand. But I didn’t understand her, either.

Alex came by to share new office protocols, in light of the approaching pandemic. I listened with half an ear. When he asked me if I was okay, I said sure, even got to the gym. Everything’s fine. Be calm, Alex. Be still, Alex. Be gone, Alex.

I closed my door. I closed the blinds. Like a flag at half-mast, for Larry. Even then, I put Silvina’s journal in a folder to disguise it as a client file. Began to skim and sample it. But I was too shaken to even do that right. I got bits, pieces, kept missing things and starting over. Allie, undaunted, would knock and bring me documents piecemeal to sign for expense reimbursements. A coordinated attack to punish me for not caring more about Larry?

But some things came clear to me, even then. One was the full extent to which Silvina experienced the human world as a torment and a kind of siege upon her senses. Right there in the journal, head-on, she addressed that moment of change as a child. That fundamental shift.

“I woke up one night to the sounds of traffic on the street below. I woke to the light through my window. And the sound never turned off. The light never turned off. They just intensified. Ever after. No matter where I was. And if I sought sanctuary in wild places, it was selfish at first. Because I couldn’t tolerate life elsewhere.”

How she said her father’s friends tormented her for her “weaknesses.” In how they talked. How they looked at her. The way they would go out trophy hunting at one of her father’s lodges, in whatever country, and bring back the heads. How the heads piled up in their palatial homes in Miami, in Buenos Aires, and, finally, on the West Coast.

“I remember as a child walking down a hallway from my bedroom to get a glass of water and all those faces were looking down at me. A gauntlet of death in the shadows. If I’m dramatic, it’s because I had nightmares from that. I didn’t want to forget what that meant. Who it meant something to and who it didn’t. In the daylight, everyone walked past these tombstones as if it was nothing.”

How her father had the idea that she would grow up to be a model U.S. citizen, almost as if he planned to use her to legalize the less savory of his operations. How he would tell her that she, as the eldest, would be his heir, and then he would undermine that idea because she wasn’t a son. How his favor fell to a younger son, and then also to Silvina’s younger sisters. And no way to tell exactly what came first: Silvina’s radicalization or that repudiation. How she had reported her father’s “collector” friends to the police. At age thirteen. And as she entered adolescence, her father sent her on a tour of the places where he owned property, always absent himself. So that she went to school the way an army brat does: knowing she would be somewhere else the next month or semester.

“The first thing to realize is that you are all alone and you can rely only on yourself,” she wrote. “And if you can realize this is a good thing, not a frightening thing … that is a miracle.”

I couldn’t imagine it, that state of being. Not without curing yourself of a fear of death first.

“There’s no one they won’t kill in time because you don’t matter to them,” Silvina had written in the margin, and I began to realize I was reading a composite, a hybrid: a journal, or diary, that had begun to be transformed into a memoir.

Also in the margins: hastily drawn diagrams. That resembled homemade bombs. What she’d been accused of. What she’d escaped going to jail for.

I stopped reading when I reached the diagrams.

Here was a woman who had idly drawn bombs in the margins of her notebook. Absentmindedly. Daydreaming. Accompanying an account of traveling in disguise by train at the age of twenty-one. The expedition to Quito. Her repatriation to her home continent. A state of mind.

As she tried to acclimate herself to a country where she’d never lived. As she set her compass by Humboldt, the European naturalist who had done so much good, but also had electrocuted four thousand frogs in the name of science.

I stared at those sketches a long time. Trying to imagine the reality or fantasy of them. But I saw nothing real there. Just a terrible sense of dread, such stress, that I could not live beneath the weight of it. The weight of her journal.