Hummingbird Salamander(71)

So I had only Silvina’s disciples, nameless, and their bleating regard for her, and nothing at all of her. Even so, grudging respect. Among the things I didn’t get to say to Ronnie before she got away: that I understood why she had followed Silvina. That I didn’t want Silvina to be a fake, either.

Her absence aboard the houseboat rang loud in my ears, made me realize once again how I couldn’t imagine Silvina as a person, her life day to day. What did that look like? I didn’t know what clothes she’d liked to wear. What she liked to eat. A thousand details. I had her as thesis and theorem mostly, as a raw emotion like passion. Almost operatic, not surgical or quiet and mundane. Was that because of the journal or…?

But that wasn’t all that was missing from the journal. No mention of enemies except in the vague sense, not the personal. Which led me to the unsettling question: why do you render something invisible? Maybe you do it so it has no power over you. Or, perversely, maybe you do that to protect it.

Only one other kind of remnant: when some stirring of wind rocked the houseboat, I was back in my fever dream, sunk beneath Unitopia, with no way to get to the surface. With Silvina’s voice in my ear from that long-ago video. “If we could only see the world, really see the world, how radically we would change how we treat it. How different we would become.”

I found the dream relaxing. I could sink into the bed and welcome it, let it come flooding in. My pain didn’t follow me there.

Nothing could find me there, down beneath the reeds, in the deep water.





[75]


The day I met with Nora was the day I learned there was a missing person report on me back home. That was also the day, as I left the breakfast place, that I thought I saw Hillman drive past in a black SUV with out-of-state plates. I almost missed him, distracted by that weird emerald-gray sparkle in the sky that was our new normal.

I was too stunned to get the license number. Backed up against the outside of the restaurant door, to the anger of the old man trying to get out. But the driver was staring in the other direction, and I couldn’t be sure. I’d been paranoid before, wrong before. Too old to be Hillman, I told myself. Too haggard.

For five months, I’d noticed no signs of pursuit, and no one had come for me in the night. Yet I knew they had to be looking for me. I knew they did. For one thing, I had their salamander. Vilcapampa would be paranoid about that, as if I could conjure some magic out of the charred body. That I might find a clue they’d missed.

Or maybe they just thought I’d get so desperate, I’d go to the police. Or maybe I was dead wrong and they didn’t think about me at all. That was the scenario that made me laugh sometimes. Me and all my precautions.

As I released the old man, cursing me, out onto the street and walked fast to my car, I pondered that all over again. It’d been nothing. Couldn’t have been anything.



* * *



But as I made my way back to the houseboat, I knew it wasn’t nothing. Because my pain levels had shot way up. Part of my life: managing the pain. Managing my expectations. I kept myself distracted with useless searches of key words. “Friends of Silvina,” “Unitopia,” “warehouse fire.” The fire hadn’t rated an article, just a police report item about arson and contraband, no one hurt. Didn’t believe it. I just figured Hillman had moved the body, or bodies. Alex, though, showed up in two paragraphs about “CEO of security firm mugged in alley.” That would be good for business, but mostly I felt relief he wasn’t dead. What he would do next felt distant, unimportant. I couldn’t see him going to the police. I couldn’t see him doing anything other than damage control for the company. For the obvious reasons.

Another good way to distract myself, but pretend I was making progress: immerse myself in the obscure slow-burn hell of chat room conspiracy theories about Silvina. In tucked-away corners. Meaningless shit that led nowhere but passed the time. Unitopia came up on messageboards, sometimes perverted to eco-fascist ends. Sometimes held up as some lost holy grail, with myths and stories surrounding it I knew were bullshit.

“Off the grid, remote—that’s how you do it. That’s how you start to build a new society. You become self-sufficient. You have your own money. Your own security.”

But there was nowhere to escape to. Silvina knew that.

“The past was pure. Prior generations had a good work ethic. They respected the land. They knew how to take care of it.”

Yes. The good old days of slavery and peasants and indigenous people slaughtered. Silvina would have hated that, too.

But none of this, damaging as it was, worked this time. Maybe because the salamander stared sightless at me and I felt that gaze, more than before I’d seen the almost-Hillman. The mythic giant version of the road newt that was supposed to just be a story campers told themselves around the fire. I’d already burned through all the intel on the salamander I could find. A dead end. But, also, I couldn’t bear being all-in on that attachment, too. In a strange way, I was loyal to the hummingbird. I’d invested so much emotionally, and where had it left me? And every time I looked at the salamander, I saw Ned. I saw the warehouse, the fire. I saw Hillman’s face as he roughed me up.

I had been brought into mysteries previously unknown to me through contact with a dead woman. I continued because I had lost everything, and the only way I could make sense of life was to investigate the mysteries of others. But beneath every moment of this new existence beat the pulse of the old, and in every detail of the cases I took on I looked for the outline of the intent of Silvina—hoped and needed to see it. Longed to find something beyond the mundane that might plunge me back into that world.