Hummingbird Salamander(6)
Down in the park, far below my window, after Larry left, a lone bird fluttered up against the gray sky. Back then I couldn’t have told you the species or why you should care their numbers had dropped fifty percent in the last three years.
What did our company do anyway? Here’s a clue: Alex once said that we “sold orchards to apples.” Apples always needed orchards to survive. At least in our business they did. A kind of scam, but also like detective work—figuring out how companies worked instead of how they said they worked. Found the security gaps. Sold the fear of security gaps. There would always be security gaps.
The internet was a colander. You were the water. The metaphor changed by the week. It didn’t always make sense.
[8]
“I want to be lost,” Silvina wrote once. “I want to be so far beyond anything that there is no map, and the compass spins wild. And when I come back, if I come back, you need to know I’ve changed, and with that change it means I carry ‘lost’ with me everywhere, even in the heart of the city. That I am lost forever, and that’s how we need to be. So the systems can’t find us, can’t wreck us. So our heads are clear.” (One of the first things I found later, but you can have it now.)
The context? At the age of twenty-one, Silvina went upriver, toward Quito, following the path of the famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt more than a century before. Fleeing her aristocratic parents. Silvina, born in Argentina, but exiled to boarding schools in the United States. Silvina returning. Silvina headed to Ecuador, not home. Smart enough to want to have some distance from her family, their influence. Or afraid of her father.
Spurred on by the light sensitivity and sound sensitivity that plagued her from around age nine. Silvina physically needed to be away from cities, from towns, from people. To be healthy. And so often was not.
“Those of us who are different know the world better, know it how it truly is. We can’t edit out parts of it. The horror and the beauty most ignore. When your senses are acute, you can’t escape. And you see the disconnect we have from … everything.”
She had had a vision in her head of that journey to Quito, I’m sure. Of what it might mean. A vision as pristine as what the naturalist had discovered more than a century and a half ago. Perhaps she found part of that. She met with indigenous activists and the more liberal Church leaders. She toured ecological success stories. Islands in the path of a hurricane.
But, mostly, what she found instead was the future. Oil companies and mining had devoured part of the route. Foreign to her for many reasons. The moment when she realized she couldn’t run. Couldn’t hide. What she hated would always be in front of her.
“The point of being lost is this dislocation. This point of entry to the real. Some never lose it. But most do. You have to shock it awake. Be in real danger. Create real danger. An unknown.”
Idealistic? Maybe. But I found it moving.
Even if I’d never been lost that way, or suffered that disconnect. At best, we plotted sometimes to buy a mountain retreat deep in the forests. Build a house in the wilderness, connected to town by a dirt road. Emergency generator, childhood knowledge of semi-rural life. Woodsy, roll-up-your-sleeves self-sufficiency. Except, we’d have good internet access. Except, on the weekends we’d drive down to a local pub and eat farm-to-table and drink microbrews made from the neighbor’s clean well water. Free of mindless conformity. We’d do it debt-free, pay off the credit card, a burden that had always made me nervous.
We talked about it, never did anything about it. Deep down, we liked the comfort of our generic house. Experienced amnesia about the cost. It was easy, like sinking into the cushions of a comfortable leather couch. Of which we had two.
We lived in a generic version of reality. The house we settled on in a suburban neighborhood had few differences from the other houses on the block—and the block after that. Call our neighborhood “Meadow Brook” or “Canopy Trail” or “Lake Shores” or any other name that fucks with your head if you think about it too long. Because there isn’t a meadow or a canopy or a lake. Anymore.
“It was hard to remember what to forget,” she wrote. As if she could read my mind.
I think about the Quito part of her life often, even now. That tiny cross section, a matter of two months or fifty-nine days. How it changed her. What it stole from her. What she could never reveal.
What it helped make her into.
[9]
I called my assistant “Allie” into my office. Let’s say she wore a lot of black, had piercings, highlighted her eyes to make them look bigger, and wore purple lipstick. She might’ve been a brunette. Sometimes she wore dark, floral-print dresses with thick socks to fend off the cold outside. I didn’t put her in front of clients.
Or maybe I did. And maybe she was brash and bold and not a waif at all. Let’s say she was tall. No, short and stocky. She was white. No, she wasn’t. She’s been erased. I erased her. It was the safest thing to do. Make up whatever you want to about her. I did, because I had to.
“Add the Better Days Storage Palace to your research list,” I told her. “Key word ‘Silvina.’ Anything you can find on a Silvina connected to the storage palace.” I made sure to look her in the eyes; my only tell is when I look away. Some people find me impassive. I think it is more that they focus on my body, not my face.