Hummingbird Salamander(9)

I hit print and leaned back in Larry’s chair, yawning.

There was Larry, in the doorway, staring at me.

I jumped. Sat up with an awkward sproing of springs.

“Oh, shit, Larry! Gave me a fucking heart attack.”

His face was a stern anvil. But the swearing confused him. I didn’t swear in the office. Whatever he’d been about to say he put on pause, turned his head a bit, like now I was a stranger. Reappraisal. I didn’t like the light that had turned on behind his eyes.

“So this is what happens when I’m out,” he said. Flat, dead tone.

“Sorry—my printer died,” I said.

Not good that Larry could check if that was true. I clicked on delete and the hummingbird page disappeared from the screen. No time for search history, but what was Larry going to do? Complain to management that I’d read about a hummingbird on his laptop?

“Your printer died.”

Larry now blocked the doorway. When expressive men become still, emotionless, I start thinking about takedowns and choke holds.

“I’ve gotta ask … how’d you get on my computer? In the first place.”

“I was in a hurry, and you’d left it unlocked.” Saying sorry felt like it would be an admission of intent.

“Did I? Did I really? Is that even an option?”

“Why, you worried about that porn you watch?” I smiled like it was a joke. It wasn’t.

He blanched. Off-balance.

I snatched the pages off the printer, stood towering over him in the doorway. I could’ve picked him up and set him back down and gotten out. But he moved.

“Maybe tell me next time you want to use my computer,” he said. “And I’ll be sure to say no.”

I brushed by him without a word, making sure to knock into his shoulder. Went back to my office feeling exposed, embarrassed, locked myself in. Got an important piece of the pipeline thing done and off to Alex for his approval. He liked to weigh in on the important stuff, even though it wasn’t his level of detail.

Waited past five, when I could be sure Larry had left.

This was the day they all went down to the bar two blocks away and got shitfaced early. No way was Larry going to miss that.





[13]


Were companies units or loose, ever-shifting alliances of individuals? Still didn’t know. But I’d learned on the farm that animals were not individuals, not persons, but groups. Categories. Mother, father, grandfather told me this, every day, growing up. It was the most constant, repetitive lesson learned from the grown-ups in my family. In both word and action.

This was the way of the world at large, perhaps with more callousness. On the farm—or, at least, on our farm—you respected animals, but they also gave you eggs or milk or meat. Your goats had names, but one day you would slaughter them. You scratched the pigs on the coarse hair of their backs until they grunted with pleasure, you knew their personalities and habits, but then one morning your father would be helping put them in the back of a stranger’s truck and they’d be gone forever.

On top of that, I had a decade of what Silvina called “in doctrination.” From raising a daughter who we encouraged to love YouTube videos with cute animals without once thinking about the context or source. Animated movies where birds talked and smiled like people, and maybe the animal was the villain, or maybe not, but it, too, talked and made faces and in every way tried to be part of the human world. That had distanced me from anything useful I might’ve known about animals. Something not tested or something foundational where you should seek the exception. Something toxic from the monoculture.

“Using ‘us’ when thinking about the environment erases all the different versions of ‘us,’” Silvina once said. “Many indigenous peoples don’t think this way. Counterculture doesn’t always think this way. Philosophy, knowledge, policy exist that could solve our problems already.”

So maybe at first the frisson of mystery and intrigue came from reading what I’d printed out while idling in the parking garage, doors locked, before heading home. Alert for every possible Larry approaching.



* * *



“Hummingbirds are aesthetic and aerobic extremists,” read one site. “Their tiny bodies hover akin to flying carpets; did one just zip by? Hummers evolved high in the Andes Mountains with progressive colonization of lower altitudes and expanded latitudes, especially to the north, and eventually to the far reaches of Canada and Alaska. They remain restricted to the Americas, with the vast majority of the 300+ species residents of South America.”

“Information isn’t story,” Silvina wrote. “No animal should be condensed to a summary in an encyclopedia.” But all I had was information at first. And a dead bird’s body. Because that’s all she’d given me.

“The naiad hummingbird (Selastrephes griffin) is of moderate size (less than 12 cm body length) with an especially long migration that delights the most diligent of birders across its range. Although difficult to find and observe by humans, the brilliant colors and patterns of the males are adaptations to catch the eye of their mates.”

I had a large female specimen, then. Pitch-black. No-nonsense.

“They are fine athletes whose stunt repertoire includes backward flight, treading air, and maneuvering precisely in gusty wind. And whose migration between the Pacific Northwest and Argentina equates to several back-to-back ultramarathons.”