Hummingbird Salamander(47)
My office swelled with darkness, but I only turned the desk lamp on. I hadn’t slept much. I’d ordered my daughter to check in via text every few hours. To keep an eye on her. To believe I had some control over any threat.
And, I had no hope of catching up on the pipeline project. My contribution was due in two days, but I needed seven. It felt almost a relief, that I couldn’t do it. That other kinds of dread took precedence. What would I do when I missed the deadline? Alex would reprimand me, but I didn’t think he’d fire me.
I hadn’t been to see Larry. I would never go to see Larry.
Instead, I lurked in my office for the first hour, taking another, longer look at Silvina’s journal and its spidery, hard-to-read handwriting. Even though I needed much more time than that.
I decided it felt more like a memoir, with all the thought that goes into what you reveal and what you don’t. I also began to think about the journal in terms of chapters, even though Silvina hadn’t divided it into chapters, and some sections would have to be moved around to fit my structure. But, otherwise, it could be mapped.
Chapter 1: The Moment
Chapter 2: Early Life
Chapter 3: Trapped
Chapter 4: Rebellion
Chapter 5: Awakening
Chapter 6: Potential
A classic journey, if you were a cult leader, if you had followers who called themselves “Friends of.” If, maybe, you had planned something that would outlive your death. Despite wide gaps in the chronology of her life. As an analyst, that raised a red flag. Something was being hidden, but what?
“The Moment” was her alienation from the human world through how her body itself rejected that world. This was the anchor, the foundation. She wrote movingly of how her condition worsened with time. How as an adult she had to be so careful in sunlight. How her hearing had become so acute or fine-tuned that ordinary sounds felt like shards of glass breaking inside her skull, without earplugs. That in so many ways she kept receiving the world even when she didn’t want to.
“Early Life” gave a baseline for what her life had been: privileged, all things provided, a future as a billionaire’s daughter, meaning she could be anything or do nothing.
“Trapped” covered the phase when she tried to make it work with her family, overseeing properties in the U.S., but also covered her expedition to Quito, which was part of the trap.
“Rebellion” was her expedition down the West Coast, while “Awakening” was more abstract. “Awakening” tracked to Silvina holding her cards close and expanding her journal by way of ideas and hypotheticals and data about the environmental destruction in the world.
Finally, “Potential” gave a view of the future should this destruction be reversed, if we only had the political will and wisdom to do so. And it was in “Potential” that she returned to her early life—and, in fact, all phases of her life—to give examples that she then tried to fit to her philosophy. So that, in effect, the memoir transformed into a guide for living. A way of trying to use her life to get others to where she had ended up much faster.
Except, in the margins: all the sketches of bombs. Except also, the banality of much of it.
“The steps in place to make an impact” … “How a pattern can be more than a sum of parts” … “The cause that leads to effect that cannot be seen but is felt” … “A volcano that seems forever to erupt but never erupts. Then one day it does. And the surprise is not the explosion but the aftershock.”
Many of our clients engaged in “greenwashing”: co-opting environmental causes to project an image of being sustainable. Too much of Silvina’s language in the journal approximated that corporate takeover of the liminal. Not in how she spoke about her personal experience. But definitely in how that translated to anything approaching “revolution.”
I tried to see me as Silvina might have seen me. Middle-aged mother, centrist politics, suburban life. Was the journal just another form of game playing? Of manipulation? Was I seeing things that weren’t there?
A lack that nagged at me: never mention of any pets. No dog, cat, or even hamster. I don’t know why that bothered me most of all. Didn’t know what it said about her, or me.
I kept trying to imagine Silvina having lunch or playing a board game and I couldn’t. And nothing in the journal made her any more real on that level. Not a single mention of a lover, a boyfriend, a girlfriend.
How much of Silvina didn’t exist because she didn’t want it to … and how much just wasn’t part of her life?
* * *
Not sure if I’d made progress or just gotten lost again. I actually welcomed another text from Hellbender, the Wig Man, to put the journal down for a time.
I’d decided to keep the phone and not change the SIM card. Measures taken meant I thought he couldn’t track me with it, but at the same time I must have felt the risk was worth the contact.
Me: What do you really want?
>>Help you. I helped on the hill, or don’t you remember.
I shuddered. The sound of a body hitting the ground. I’d read the paper, looking for a mention of a murder in that area, found nothing. Didn’t know what that meant.
Me: By spying on my family.
>>Just getting the lay of the land. Protecting you.
Me: Who did you kill?
>>There are a lot of dangerous people after you. Now one less.