From the author of Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things
Security consultant “Jane Smith” receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control.
Soon, Jane and her family are in danger, with few allies to help her make sense of the true scope of the peril. Is the only way to safety to follow in Silvina’s footsteps? Is it too late to stop? As she desperately seeks answers about why Silvina contacted her, time is running out—for her and possibly for the world.
Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his brilliant, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions about climate change, identity, and the world we live in into a tightly plotted thriller full of unexpected twists and elaborate conspiracy.
Release date:
April 6, 2021
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
368
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Assume I’m dead by the time you read this. Assume you’re being told all of this by a flicker, a wisp, a thing you can’t quite get out of your head now that you’ve found me. And in the beginning, it’s you, not me, being handed an envelope with a key inside … on a street, in a city, on a winter day so cold that breathing hurts and your lungs creak.
A barista leans out onto the sidewalk from your local coffee shop to say, “I almost forgot.”
The before of those words and the after, and you stuck in the middle. “I almost forgot.” Except the barista didn’t forget, was instructed to make it happen that way. “Time sensitive.”
You turn in surprise to receive what someone has left for you, but you don’t refuse it. Bodies don’t work that way—a person hands you something, you take it. A reflex. You worry about what it is later.
Or who wants you to have it. Because the barista doesn’t know. No one in the coffee shop knows. From the night before. A different shift. No chain of evidence. The barista retreating into the coffee shop sudden, like a monster grabbed him in its jaws and pulled him back inside. As if he never wanted to talk to you in the first place, except someone paid him. Who? How much? No answer.
You’re left holding an envelope, breath like a chain-smoker’s, trees all around stripped of leaves and imprisoned in concrete. Your hand is all that burns, attacked by the cold, the sound of your nail ripping the envelope flap almost urgent.
Do you have a secret admirer? That feels both new and old, like the snooze button you hit three times that morning as your husband mumbled on the bed next to you. Your usual routine has been dull and kind of fucked up for too long.
Inside the envelope, along with the key, is an address and a number. The number is 7. The key is a trap, but you don’t know that yet.
On the back of the envelope, someone has scrawled “If you received this, I am already gone. You’re on your own. But not alone.”
Maybe it’s the heat in your body giving itself over to the cold in a rush, something to do with absolutes, but you can’t withhold a surge of raw, rough emotion. Not alone.
The idea of going on to work feels ever more muffled, distant, under all your layers. Yet you crumple the envelope in that cold hand, a smolder at the presumption in those words.
Standing there on the sidewalk. Black slush of snow pushed to the sides of the street. A dead robin in the gutter, one torn wing spread toward the drain like an invitation to the underworld.
* * *
Another winter morning in a city in the Pacific Northwest.
Where, exactly? I won’t tell you.
Who am I? I won’t tell you. Exactly.
But you can call me Jane.
Jane Smith. If that helps.
I’m here to show you how the world ends.
DIORAMA
[1]
I went to the address in the note because I didn’t want to go to work. The car came for me, dark and chrome and sleek, its shadow leaking across the windows of fast-food places, gas stations, and tanning salons. The radio whispered panic about the elections, and my driver, unsolicited, had already imagined, in a soft voice, black drones congregating at night to listen in on our conversations. Yet I knew from my job that this was old news.
I had no reason to remember the driver. Back then, I thought I was smart, for all the details I caught, but there was so much I never saw. He had a beard. He might have had an accent. I remember I feared he came from some place we were bombing. We didn’t talk about anything important. Why would we?
The driver might have believed I was a reasonable person, a normal person. Just a little larger than most. I dressed, in those days, in custom-made gray business suits because nothing store-bought fit right. I had an expensive black down coat. I didn’t think much about where the softness came from, at what cost. My faux heels were decoys: comfortable, just worn to preserve some ritual about what women should wear.
My main indulgence was a huge purse that doubled as a satchel. Behind my back, my boss called it “Shovel Pig,” which was another way of calling me shovel pig. Because I frightened him.
“So, what do you do?” the driver asked.
“Manager at a tech company,” I said, because that was simple and the details were not.
I stared out the window as he began to tell me everything he knew about computers. I could tell his greatest need, or mine, was to sit alone in a park for an hour and be as silent as a stone.
The downtown fell away and, with it, skyscrapers and gentrified loft apartments, and then, after streets of counterculture, zoned haphazard and garish, the suburbs took over. The driver stopped talking. So many one-story houses with slanted roofs and flat lawns, gravel driveways glinting through thin snow. The mountain range like a premonition twisted free of gray mist, distant but gathering.
I hadn’t done a search on the address. That felt too much like being at work. Didn’t make my pulse quicken.
* * *
When we reached the gates with flaking gold paint, I knew why I had a key in addition to an address. Emblazoned over the gates, the legend “Imperial Storage Palace.” Because I have to give you a name. It had seen better days, so call it “Better Days Storage Palace,” if you like. I’m sure, by the time you found it, the sign was gone anyway.
We glided down a well-paved road lined with firs and free of holiday decoration, while the base of steep, pine-strewn foothills came close. The light darkened in that almost-tunnel. I could smell the fresh air, even through the stale cigarette smoke of the backseat. Anything could exist in the thick mist that covered the mountainside. A vast forest. A tech bro campus. But most likely a sad logged slope, a hell of old-growth stumps and gravel the farther up you went.
The lampposts in front of the entrance lent the road only a distracted sort of light. The vastness of the storage palace, that faux marble façade, collected weight and silence. The murk felt like a distracting trick. What was it covering up? The pretentious nature of the Doric columns? The black mold on the plastic grass that lined the stairs?
Nothing could disguise the exhaustion of the red carpet smothering the patio. The threadbare edges, the ways in which pine cone debris and squirrel passage had been smashed into the design.
Beyond the shadow of the two-story complex lay a wall of deep green, merging with ever-higher elevations. The pressure of that pressed against the car, quickened my pulse.
This was the middle of nowhere, and I almost didn’t get out of the car. But it was too late. Like the ritual of accepting what is offered, once you reach your destination, you get out of the car.
Too late as well because the world was flypaper: you couldn’t avoid getting stuck. Someone was already watching. Somewhere.
“Should I wait for you?” the driver asked.
I ignored that, lurched out of the backseat. I am six feet tall and two-thirty, never mistaken for a small woman any more than a mountain for a valley, a heavyweight boxer for a gymnast. I need time to get up and depart.
“Are you sure I can’t wait?” he asked across the passenger seat out the half-opened window.
I leaned down, took his measure.
“Do you not understand the nature of your own business?”
The driver left me there, a little extra “pedal to the metal,” as my grandfather would’ve said.
Sometimes I am just like him.
[2]
Inside, gold wallpaper had turned urine yellow. The red carpet perked up as it ran past two ornate antique chairs with lion paws for feet. Beyond that lay a fortress outpost in the cramped antechamber: a barred cage jutting out and a counter painted black, from behind which a woman watched me. Beyond that lay the storage units, through an archway. A legend on a sad banner overhead read “Protecting your valuable since 1972.”
“What do you want?” the woman asked, no preamble. As if I might want almost anything at all.
“What do you think?” I said.
Showed her the key, as I wiped my shoes on the crappy welcome mat.
“Which one?”
“Seven.”
“Got ID?”
“I’ve got the key.”
“Got ID to go with that key?”
“I’ve got the key.”
She held out her hand. “Identification, please, and I’ll check the list.”
I considered pushing a twenty across the counter. That idea felt strange. But it felt strange to let her know who I was, too.
I handed her my driver’s license.
She was much younger than me. She had on a lot of black, had piercings, highlighted her eyes to make them look bigger, and wore purple lipstick. Practically a uniform in some parts of town.
She might’ve been a brunette. I remember her expression. Bored. Bottled up here. Doing nothing—and I wasn’t making her life less boring.
“I’ve come a long way,” I said. Which would be true soon enough. I would’ve come a long way.
“If you’re on the list, great,” she said, finger scrolling down a single sheet of paper with names printed impossibly small.
“Yes. That’d be great,” I said. Struck by how meaningless language can be. Yet I remember the conversation but not her face.
The woman found a line on the page with a ballpoint pen, gave me back my ID.
“So go in, then,” she said.
Like I was loitering.
“Where?”
“Over there.”
She pointed to the right, where another door waited, half disguised by the same piss-pattern wallpaper.
I stared at her for a moment before I walked through, as she picked up a magazine and ignored me. Somehow, I needed a list of life choices that had led this woman to be in this place at this time. To take my ID. To ignore me. To be sullen. To be anonymous.
I wouldn’t see her on my way out. The cage would be empty, as if no one had ever been there.
As if I had emerged years later and the whole place had been abandoned.
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
