When I replied, I made up my own stories. About how I had straight A’s. Or, for a while, about how I knew I wanted to become a doctor, because Mom thought doctors were highest in the hierarchy of life. Then I began to roam into the future. Sent her letters about my life as a doctor. The illnesses I cured. The day-to-day of the practice. Or maybe I wasn’t a doctor, but a lawyer. Sometimes I played the stock market. Professional gambler. Professional bodybuilder.

In one letter, I was old and gray and I had grandchildren. Many, many grandchildren. And I was writing to my mother after her death, to thank her for raising me right. For always supporting me. For having my back. For knowing what was good for me. For not inflicting harm.

I never sent that one. I wish I had. Don’t know if she got even one of my letters. Or if she’d have read them if she did.

As I fled the mountain, I thought about our wounded correspondence. Wondered what my mother might have thought of my letters. If she would have understood why she should be proud, no matter what was true. And I wished, in such a desperate way, that she was there to tell me what to do next.

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.