PART 1

HUMMINGBIRD

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.