Hummingbird Salamander(5)

How much a mind could take in before it began to resort to metaphor or to turn away from the truth. That was how you measured privacy: by how you became lost in the torrent.

I couldn’t see the future, but it was hard not to bring my work home with me. To anticipate surveillance. To foretell that I might have to confuse the watchers, distract and fool them, to pursue this mystery. I knew what made us visible. But, even careful, I was too na?ve to see what spilled out from us into the night.

I made it through the end of dinner without confessing to a hummingbird, a salamander, or a storage unit. Maybe because Silvina wasn’t the first secret I’d kept from my husband.





[7]


I rarely drove myself to work, but some paranoid impulse made me loath to call a service. I left before the family woke up. They were used to it, and I felt I might crack if I had to be home for breakfast. The hummingbird seemed to weigh down the trunk as I drove. The elevator up bucked, complained, but that was probably more about me than the bird.

Everything in our offices had been designed to project “security” or “secureness.” A lobby as inoffensive as the inside of a drone. Sound-muffling gray carpet with glints of sparkle. Cubicle partitions that gleamed obsidian. Abstract art providing muted color on the white outer walls. Passion? No threat of that. It remained wrapped up in plastic in a closet somewhere. We were purely of the mind. Except when we weren’t.

I meant to let that seamless place neutralize the box on my desk. Smother it. Or I thought it a lark, a diversion, a way to stave off boredom. Can’t remember—that’s the scary thing. I can’t remember what I thought back then.

No one commented on the box as I walked to my office. It looked like the size that could house a table lamp. I’d brought lamps in before, to push back against the generic feel of the workplace. That would be reasonable, ordinary. Turn what was in the box into something else. Even if I didn’t know what was in the box yet. Not really.

My boss stuck his head in the doorway a few minutes later. Let’s call him “Alex” because he resembled an Alex. Reasonable and solid. Flickers of humor a few times a year. A lightbulb that couldn’t quite remember how to turn on. Nothing memorable about his blue suits, white shirts, and red ties, but nothing shabby, either. He should’ve looked like a human flag, but chose faded tones. So instead Alex looked like a flag that had seen better days.

I knew of his arrival moments beforehand due to strong aftershave. Glasses were an affectation or he left them off most times because he was self-conscious. Before security, Alex had founded a VR company that had gone bankrupt.

“Feeling better?” he asked/said.

“Great! Much better!” I knew what slop he wanted shoveled at him and with what energy.

“Hit the gym this morning?”

“Still a little under the weather.”

“Fair enough,” he said. That and “No worries” he used to hide a multitude of sins. I forgive you. You are forgiven. Don’t let it happen again.

“Did you go?” I knew he wanted me to ask.

“I did,” Alex said. “Benched a shit-ton. Pull-ups and…”

I zoned out. Ever since he’d found out I’d been a bodybuilder, I’d gone from the going-to-fat creature to the gym-rat anomaly. Maybe he thought I was a freak. Or maybe he just couldn’t let go of one of the only personal things he knew about me.

“Sounds great!” I said when he’d finished. Months later.

“All right—see you around. Strategy meeting late Pee Em.”

Punched the doorway like a jock, I guess, then gone. The doorway always got abuse from him.

But I wasn’t free yet.

“What’s in the box?”

“Larry,” from the office just around a dead-end bend. We had a free-floating hierarchy. Equals, except Alex always invited Larry to go fishing in the spring on his boat. Ruddy Larry. Red-faced Larry, with the mane of brown hair that didn’t fit his face. Larry, who’d stood too close at the Christmas party last year, so I’d had to pull away. Just by accident. A well-calculated collision with my shoulder.

“What’s in the box?”

Because I hadn’t replied and Larry was like a crappy can opener.

“A dead body.”

Larry laughed. “Looks too small for that.”

I shrugged. Didn’t offer more. Stared at him. Never once thought the hummingbird was an office prank, and I didn’t now. Not their SOP.

“Another lamp?” Larry asked.

I said nothing.

When Larry got flustered, his face looked like someone had strapped an invisible cage full of rats to his head.

Gradually, his form receded from my doorway.



* * *



I never much understood the point of the world of men. How they fed off each other. How they motivated themselves. I mean, I got the purpose, but I navigated that world the way an astronaut would an alien landscape. Trying not to breathe the same air. Which was impossible, of course.

When I started out, I had been one of only two women in the company who were not on a secretary track. The idea I’d be a manager seemed absurd, but the money was good. I had no experience.

For a long time, I thought of myself as a secret agent, embedded there, in the company, except the only handler I reported back to was my other self. In the conversations of my fellow employees, I would gather intel to get a sense of whether I was in the loop or being left out of the loop, and whether it mattered. A new catchphrase from Alex I’d not been in the room to hear. Or perhaps my peers had talked about some new management strategy while on a hunting trip together. I would never know what information they conveyed at the urinal, but had no interest in piss-stained intel.