Hummingbird Salamander(8)

Imagine how as I do the pulldown or squats I can’t stop thinking about a box with a hummingbird in it. Even as I try so hard not to think about it.

Because I’ve brought it with me. Because I plan on hiding it in a locker. Even bought a special lock to make it safer. I can’t keep it in the office. I can’t keep it at home. I can’t bring myself to open a bank safe box for it—that feels like a tell. It might not be safe in the gym, either, but I haven’t figured out yet that it isn’t safe anywhere.

Imagine me trying for a few new gym records while Charlie watches over all, impassive. Because it doesn’t make a difference to anyone but me. Exerting myself until I’m so sore, I don’t even feel the soreness.

But after, at least, I feel a lot better. Always do, before it gets worse again.





[11]


The first time I saw Silvina wasn’t in the photographs in a file. Not really. Not in a true sense. In all the photographs, Silvina looked stiff, uncomfortable. Resembled a corpse, propped up in a chair or leaning against a balcony railing. Back problems plagued her, and she didn’t like her photo taken, or she didn’t like the photographers. Or she’d told them not to and they did it anyway.

First time was a grainy video, twenty seconds, in an old nature documentary uploaded to the internet. The lighting was bad on purpose, in deference to her sensitivity. I can’t remember how many days after I found the hummingbird I found the video. The shock of wild black hair I noticed first. How she didn’t like to tame it, or pulled it back in a ponytail rather than deal with it. Then, that she didn’t know where to put her arms—on the chair, crossed in her lap. Silvina had large hands, strong, rough, calloused.

She kept looking down, away from the camera lens, so I almost couldn’t see her face. But right at the end, she raised her head, and I saw the tight cheekbones, the firm set of the strong jaw. Determined, dangerous.

Her eyes were so dark, they registered as black. Set across a face a little too narrow in a charming way. Slightly sad, distant expression, even when she smiled. But the smile broadened her face, too, and then she was kind of beautiful.

In her practical clothes just one level better than army fatigues. If not for the floral pattern of the shirt, she could have been the spokesperson for some people’s army. When she crossed her legs, you could see she’d tucked her khaki pants into hiking boots. A silver bracelet on her right wrist, but no other adornment. Reading glasses on a chain hung down over the shirt, as if she was an old lady in a rocking chair.

Later, I would learn the bracelet was from her mother. The one thing she wouldn’t give up from her past.

Silvina didn’t smile in any photograph. Just at the end of the video clip. That was right after the thing they accused her of, that followed her around from then on. Whether she’d done it or not. Before the trial.

For a moment. I froze that moment—in that other moment we haven’t caught up to yet. Replayed the clip. I watched her smile. It kept breaking my heart. To know I’d never see her as she really was, underneath. That maybe the smile came the closest.

Except, that was a lie of the heart, of the head. She was who she was all the time. I should have known that already.





[12]


Back at the office, I was supposed to start reviewing workflow and organization of a natural gas pipeline company. Clients knew me as a “vulnerability assessor” or “vulnerability analyst.” If I could figure out how to compromise their security systems or flaws in the human element, I could learn how to save them, too. Analysis, and then an actual hacker would do the force work. That’s what Alex called it, “force work,” as in “blunt force trauma,” as in “use the force.” You had to make the client feel insecure to force him to be secure. Reflexive security, most of it. A twitching lizard’s tail. Except the hackers preferred to be called “penetration testers.”

But, instead of working, I decided to use Larry’s office. I’d ghosted a spy onto his machine for a while that helped me unlock it. Because it wasn’t just how they shut me out. Maybe that was most of it, but I liked to mark Larry’s office as my territory. Honed my security skills. But, also, it felt good, and I liked to feel good sometimes.

Larry was out with a client for the afternoon. Safe, because his office was around a dead-end corner, out of sight, and few ever willingly went to his office. Once there, you’d spend a half hour getting unstuck. He was a talker who rarely said anything.

A useful experiment to search for the hummingbird on Larry’s computer. I couldn’t put that on Allie. That might be the kind of random that would wind up lunchroom talk. “And then she made me waste an afternoon clicking on this bird.” Later, I could check Larry’s computer remotely to see if the search had triggered any attention. In the past, my meddling had died the death of any seemingly idle, innocent search. Lost in a wash of other data, protected behind our firewall.

I found the hummingbird so quickly, it surprised me. A half hour down all the hellholes of the internet, into obscure ornithology and eccentric research. But, no: an image search, adding the word “endangered” on a hunch, and there it was.

No mention of a “Silvina” associated with the hummingbird, but a few names of scientists and an article on poaching in its South American range. Along with a vague mention of wildlife contraband seizures in Miami.