Devin Krukoff
HUMMINGBIRD
a novel
For Raina Jean, the bravest little girl that I know.
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
CHAPTER ONE
When the Connors moved out, I felt like I should have been consulted, or at least warned. I didn’t know them in the traditional sense. We’d never spoken. I’d only gleaned their names from the buzzer outside the front entrance and the occasional piece of stray mail. But we’d been living in adjacent units for three years, and in that time our routines had gradually synchronized. I ate when they ate, slept when they slept, pleasured myself when they pleasured each other, spent so much time with my ear against the wall that my neck had a permanent crick. Our abutting bedrooms gave me intimate access to their lives, and not just their sex lives. From my mattress on the floor, I could hear every word they exchanged in bed—muffled but clear through the flimsy drywall and insulation. Whether they were making weekend plans or squabbling over money or wondering if they’d ever manage to conceive a child, I was listening. When they eventually got pregnant, I was the first to hear the news and raised a glass to the wall. For the first time in my adult life, I was almost happy. I had a book in print. A place of my own. A growing family to vicariously enjoy. From my balcony, I could almost see the ocean. The disorder in the apartment was useful, or familiar at least. I was accustomed to the dishes in the sink and the empty liquor bottles on the counters. I didn’t mind navigating towers of second-hand paperbacks or kicking through piles of old shirts and underwear on my way to the bathroom. It’s true that my place could have been nicer or bigger, but it had the essentials: a sitting room, a galley kitchen, a bedroom, and a four-piece bath. As for all the neighbours, I appreciated the sounds of them going about their lives—a spoon rapping against a pot, a body shifting in a bathtub, a vacuum cleaner grinding. People shouting, laughing, fucking all around me. I might not have spoken to any of them directly, but we communicated in other, more subtle ways, and I took comfort from the notion that we were part of the same community.
Of course, I wouldn’t have wanted to actually live with any of them. In the past, whenever I’d been forced to room with strangers, I’d avoided the common spaces as much as possible. I never had trouble renting, as people sensed I would be a quiet tenant, but they inevitably came to resent how little they saw of me—holed up in my room for days at a time, pissing into empty pop bottles, eating from cans I’d stabbed open with a knife. They might not have known the lurid details, but they knew enough to get nervous. When I could finally afford a place of my own all that pressure to assimilate, to be normal, disappeared. If I wanted to be alone, I could be alone. All I had to do was slip a monthly cheque under the superintendent’s door.
The Connors’ departure changed everything; not all at once, but gradually, through events that hardly seemed connected at the time. They cleared out in the early morning, while I was still sleeping, having made no mention of their plans in earshot of the common wall. By the time I woke around noon—hungover, disoriented—a new tenant was lugging boxes down the hall. He looked old and unwell, with melted features, unkempt hair, and yellow jaundiced eyes. After watching him haul a television past my spyhole, I stepped onto my balcony and sent out a psychic ping but received nothing back, no glimmer of where the Connors had gone, no idea why they’d abandoned me. The day was bright and calm, the neighbourhood quiet. Not even the pale man—a shut-in who lived on the top floor of the low-rise across the way—was stirring. I lit a cigarette and scanned the sky for birds, not noticing that my new neighbour’s balcony door was wide open until it suddenly crashed shut.
“No consideration!” the old man shouted from the opposite side of the glass.
I looked at the cigarette in my hand. I’d been smoking on that balcony for years. The Connors had never complained. I considered shouting this at the old man’s door, or slamming my own door by way of response. Instead, I dropped the barely smoked cigarette into a glass of water and gingerly retreated into my apartment. The ceiling creaked as someone upstairs moved from one room to another. A toilet flushed and human waste rushed down through a pipe in my wall. I sat down with my laptop. An arrow became a hand, the hand became a cursor, and soon I was deep in the machine. I touched icons and windows swelled open. Message boards filled with sympathetic voices. My stress levels gradually diminished as I leapt from website to website, following a familiar winding path through Reddit and YouTube and Twitter to a celebrity news site, where every piece of gossip felt essential. By the time the light started fading in the windows, I’d all but forgotten the new neighbour. Then a hard craving for nicotine pulsed through my body and drove me over to the common wall. The old man was thumping around in his unit, moving furniture from the sound of it. I looked at my cigarettes. Only one thing could trump that compulsion. I went back to the laptop and touched a bookmark in a corner of the screen. A pixelated door appeared. An age verification button shaped like a keyhole. I clicked on the keyhole and was presented with a number of coloured doors. I selected the pink door and found myself in an actual pink room. Onscreen, a girl with red hair lay on a pink bed, looking straight into my eyes. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, wearing a cut off T-shirt and low-slung jeans. Her name, a banner at the top of the screen informed me, was Jasmine.
Jasmine touched her breasts. She touched her face. She popped the button on her jeans and gave the camera a mischievous smile. Her eyes flicked from her webcam to the comments being left by users like myself on a little scrolling window beside the video feed:
Shake it bb
show yr pussy
RU HORNY???
PLZ SHOW YR PUSSY
There were eight of us lurking on the periphery of the pink room, our faceless avatars displayed alongside the comments, my alias—Midsummer Knight—at the top of the list, a little crown beside my name identifying me as a power user. I knew most of the girls on the site, but had never seen Jasmine before. I didn’t contribute to the comments, content for the moment to watch.
After a minute, Jasmine leaned forward and typed: hey midnite, how r u?
My face grew warm. My fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Hello, I typed back.
i’m lonely, she wrote. wanna go priv8?
I composed and deleted several replies without sending them. Someone asked to see Jasmine’s ass and she wagged her behind at the camera, proving that she was a real person sharing this exact moment in time with us, a person who, for a price, would be willing to do real things to her body, show what we asked her to show, touch where we asked her to touch.
Next door, the old man had gone quiet. I went to the bathroom and came back with a roll of toilet paper, checking the drapes to make sure they were shut tight.
Jasmine was still onscreen, the lurkers going on in their usual vein.
PUSSY PLZ!!!
so beautiful
I will come for you now…
She sat back on her haunches and played with her hair, trying not to look bored. My finger stroked the touchpad. I double clicked and my credit card went through automatically. The other lurkers disappeared and the scrolling posts were replaced by a blank chat window with a blinking cursor. Jasmine gave the camera a sly smile and leaned forward.