Hummingbird Salamander(96)

A moment of weakness. But I was weak. I am weak.





PART 4



HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER





[100]


Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair … even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways.

“So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out.”

Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn’t figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average.

Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same?

Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future. If you lived in the past, you disbelieved the conflagration reflected in the eyes of those already looking back at you. You mistook the pity and anger, how they despised you. How, rightly, they despised you.

So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher.

The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing.





[101]


But the world didn’t really end. I’ll give it that. One year passed. Then two. Then three, four. My husband died in the pandemic, one of the pandemics, at the lake house in which he’d sought refuge. Not an easy thing to absorb or put aside. But I had to.

Things found out in the wrong order. At a remove, so my grief was late, distant from the event. The way information became intermittent due to circumstance or location. How this became the disconnect.

My father and Lorraine passed away under circumstances the police could never unravel, amid a torrent of religious ecstasy and violence. Random or a disciple? It didn’t matter. The family farm became what I’d always thought it had been: ramshackle, falling apart at the edges from neglect. Empty. Hard to give my father a final eulogy when, for me, he’d been dead so long and only briefly resurrected.

I clung to the thought that maybe I would see my daughter one day and we would grieve together, even if she had gone to stay with a distant relative in a gated community in Canada. But the truth was: I would never see her again. I did not, even when I had Wi-Fi, check the obscure game inbox where I’d left my message for her. I couldn’t bear to see no reply. And if there had been a reply, how terrible. How unthinkable. What else could I say to her? What could I be to her now?

Even coming off the mountain in bad shape, I’d seen the course of things. The lines at gas stations. The closures of busi nesses. The empty shelves in grocery stores. Wandering aimless was a good way to get a reading. To analyze incoming evidence—and the evidence all pointed to a kind of reckoning. In that sense, Silvina hadn’t been wrong.

Fires, floods, disease, nuclear contamination, foreign wars, civil unrest, police brutality, drought, massive electrical outages, famine. Always somewhere else. Until the garbage piled up and the buses stopped running and security forces patrolled streets instead of cops. Some places, militias conducted roadblocks, and no one tried to stop them. Military tribunals popping up. A federal government in crisis. Cell towers destroyed by conspiracy theorists. At the very least, we had become a failed state. Was the world a failed state, too?

Somehow, in the midst of this, I sorted myself out. Lied to myself that I had to find a purpose for my daughter, for whatever in Silvina had been good. All the things she’d striven for, even if, in the end, she couldn’t outstrip delusion or hypocrisy any more than the rest of us.

I decided to remain true to Silvina’s journey and explore the King Range. Turned most of my remaining cash into goods to barter with. Acquired a military armored jeep, painted civilian colors, from a semi-willing seller. I stashed gold coins near the burnt-out houseboat. Doubted anyone would ever live there again. I had barely lived there.

Armed with detailed physical maps, I undertook my expedition. As if I had always meant to. As if I wasn’t afraid of Vilcapampa or a new eruption of Hellmouth Jack. Weapons, provisions, the ever-shabbier Shovel Pig by my side along with Fusk. Good old Fusk. Bog, though, was less and less useful.

I hid the jeep on the edge of old-growth redwoods at the northwest of the King Range, under a tarp and underbrush. Near a stream at the bottom of a steep ravine, I buried Silvina’s miraculous salamander. It might’ve been dead, blind, and burnt, but the longer I had it the more dignity it had accrued. It felt right to bury the road newt near its likely home turf. I did not mark the grave. That would have been a human thing and I knew Silvina would not have approved. Besides, the salamander would always burn true and clear in my mind.

How had Silvina found it? How had it died? Under what conditions? I would never know the answer, but the beast itself restored something mythic to the King Range, even if it was the only one.