The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  The oldest one backed up, and the mid-aged ones followed. The littlest one, no older than six, kept coming for her bike. The child’s eyes were zombie blank, hungry blank, and she almost handed him the bike. But of course she couldn’t do that, and even if she did, the older kids would take it from him. She was forced to kick him away. It was the first time she’d purposely hurt someone physically, and his sobs of pain nearly broke her heart. But, holding her bloody hand in the air as a threat, she walked away with her bicycle.

  Lily arrived at her campsite as the orange light of sunset washed over the bay and cities. She held some bay laurel leaves tight against her wound to stop the bleeding. Then she squeezed antibiotic ointment from the tube Kalisha and Ron had given her onto the deep cut and wrapped it with fresh gauze and tape.

  Lily was glad for the physical pain in her hand, so acute and focused, the way it kept her cued up to life, her literal life, her biological existence. If it became infected, she could lose her hand. Her arm. Die. She needed the pain.

  Tom, on the other hand, was multiplying his life. Having a baby. With Angelina. Who was a good five years older than she was, nearly beyond her childbearing years, and yet she was indeed bearing a child. The betrayal reached all the way back to that first sled ride, as if all along he’d been cuing up his life, his DNA, his chance at immortality. A baby to carry on his genes.

  Lily held her hand in the air to ease the throbbing and checked her phone with the other one. The battery was almost dead.

  “Hey,” she said when Vicky answered. “I don’t have much juice on the phone.”

  “I’ve been trying to call you!”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “You’ll never guess who visited me.”

  “Sal?” Lily hoped.

  “Nope. Try again.”

  Vicky’s ridiculous cheerfulness was a balm. So Lily put off her own news and played along. “The Sicilian babe.”

  “Ha! Nope. You get one more try.”

  “Bill Gates, offering you a job.”

  “Close, but it’s even better.”

  Vicky always landed on her feet. What a charade Lily had constructed for herself all these decades, pretending that Vicky was the vulnerable one. “I give up.”

  “Travis! Your bonobo guy!”

  It seemed to get dark all at once. The bay was a silky silver now, and the cities were twitching pockets of light. Lily couldn’t even speak.

  “He’s totally cool,” Vicky said. “I can see why you’ve been hepped up all these years.”

  He’d said nothing about this today at the march or yesterday in the field in front of City Hall. Why hadn’t he told her?

  “I’m confused,” Lily stuttered. “Why did he visit you? How did he know how to find you?”

  “He said you told him where I am.”

  That was true. She had, that first night in the Craftsman bungalow, in the candlelit bedroom.

  “He asked me to help him set up an electronics hub for his Cluster. We’re going totally off the grid. Starting a community that’s completely self-sufficient. I’m the electronics czar. Ha!”

  A cool burning, like dry ice, filled her belly.

  “I haven’t been this excited about a project in years. I’ve never had this kind of freedom before. My whole life I’ve been hooking up other people’s electronic dreams. Working for the suits. Following their shortsighted, profit-driven, dim ideas. We’re going to blast open the whole idea of access for all. Besides, the timing is perfect. I had to leave my apartment on Eighty-First.”

  “What do you mean, you had to leave your apartment? Why?”

  “I’m totally psyched.”

  “Are you telling me you’re joining the San Pablo Reservoir Cluster?”

  Lily took the long silence to mean that Vicky was considering her choices, that she heard the caution in Lily’s voice, but after the quick high-pitched beeps, Lily realized that her phone battery had died.

  Foolishly, she persisted in shouting, “Vicky? Vicky!”

  30

  The morning dawned hot and dry, and Lily heard a single buzzing. The coyote brush, which honeybees love, already had tight little buds. At least one bee had arrived early, hoping to work its way into the nascent blossoms.

  Sting me, Lily thought. She bent at the waist, bringing her face just inches from the bee, and had a good look. It was a rich golden color, with black stripes, its head and thorax fuzzy. Even the segmented black legs had a golden fringe of fuzz. It had black alien eyes, translucent fairy wings, and the potent little stinger shooting out its hind end.

  As a child, she’d hated bees. They interfered with the carefreeness of summer, and she associated them with two trips to the emergency room. Tom had often teased her about becoming a gardener. To him, it was pure idiocy. Why would you choose to put yourself in harm’s way?

  She’d tried to tell him how becoming a gardener was her way of befriending her earliest demons. And in the process, she learned that in fact the bees were her tiny coworkers. They pollinated the flowers she nurtured. And now these pollinating colleagues of hers were mysteriously dying off. After all these years of thinking they might kill her, it turned out that her own species was killing them. Maybe she put herself in harm’s way to mend broken alliances.

  Lily grabbed her bicycle and took off, flying all the way down the hill to San Pablo Reservoir, which lay east of the cities, on the other side of the Berkeley Hills, between the Sobrante and San Pablo Ridges. The dam on the north end impounded San Pablo Creek, making a lake nearly three miles long and half a mile wide. The surrounding hills were cut by perpendicular canyons, running down to the edge of the reservoir, creating long, narrow inlets, lots of nooks and crannies where an encampment could hide.

  Lily searched for Travis’s Cluster, riding slowly back and forth on San Pablo Dam Road. She could use the fingers of her injured hand to lightly hold onto one side of the handlebars and to help steer, but it hurt. She stopped often to rest and also to search the wooded shoreline for flashes of color, any evidence of a camp. When she reached the end of the reservoir, she turned around and tried again, this time taking spur roads down to the water. The third turnoff led to a paved parking lot. The only vehicles in the big parking lot were two black Chevy Blazers, parked side by side, facing the reservoir.

  A burly guy with a bulbous nose and black beard manned what used to be the fee kiosk. He shot out of the little booth, holding up a hand to stop her, as if she were barreling through in a Hummer rather than tottering along one-handed on a bicycle.

  “Name your business,” he said after she’d put both feet on the ground. He stood with his arms out to the sides, like there were invisible cushions between them and his body.

  “I’m looking for Travis Grayson.”

  “And you are?”

  “Lily Jones. He invited me.”

  The man went back inside the kiosk and activated an old-fashioned walkie-talkie. “Dirty blonde here to see you. Tall. Skinny. A Lily Jones.” He listened for a moment, and then, “Yeah, okay, sorry. I didn’t know.” Another listen and then, “Gotcha. Over and out.” To Lily he said, “He’ll be here in a moment, Miss Jones.”

  She rolled her eyes, unable to contain her impatience. “My name is Lily.”

  A few minutes later, Travis emerged from the woods and jogged across the parking lot. “Lily! Hey! I’m so glad you’ve come.”

  “Who’s the thug?”

  “Necessary precaution. Whoa. What happened to your hand?”

  “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I lost you yesterday.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I looked for you. I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

  “To Trinity Church, as usual.”

  “I couldn’t get over to Berkeley. We had a lot of fallout from the march. We had to
meet.”

  “Where can we talk?”

  Travis took her bicycle and handed it over to the guard. Then he held her shoulders tightly and said, “You don’t look so good.”

  “Vicky said you went out to her apartment on Eighty-First. She said she’s working for you.”

  “Yeah! Vicky is amazing. I mean, you’ve told me about her for years, but wow, she’s brilliant. Funny, too. Come on. I’ll take you out to the encampment and get you set up. Privacy isn’t exactly one of the privileges we’re offering, at least not yet, but I do have an empty tent at the moment, and I’m going to give it to you.”

  He took her elbow and began leading her across the parking lot. Lily looked over her shoulder at her bicycle, not liking to let it out of her sight. Without it, she would never make it back to Trinity Church. But she was hungry and the sun was hot. She barely had the strength to disengage her elbow from his grip. They took a path to the shore of the reservoir. The heat jiggled the air sitting on the lake. It’d been days since she’d had a full-body wash and she longed to dive in. A flock of Canadian geese honked overhead, flying in a ragged V-shape formation.

  They walked along the beach to a grove of pines, at the back of an inlet, and there was the encampment, set back from the water and tucked deeply into the woods. A rainbow of tarps were strung between the trunks of the trees. Under the tarps was an assortment of tables loaded with plastic basins, cookware, and lanterns. One table was loaded with fresh produce: a mound of carrots, strewn apples, a pile of onions, and more heads of cabbage than she could count.

  Tents of all sizes and shapes sprawled behind the tarps and tables. The morning sun poured its light onto the camp, making it look bright and cheerful despite the absence of people.

  “Hungry?” Travis asked. “Sit.”

  Lily dropped into a camp chair facing the water and resisted the urge to tell Travis about Angelina’s pregnancy. That wasn’t why she was here.

  He handed her a plate bedecked with a fat steak, avocado, and tomato sandwich. The pile of delectables was like a religious visitation. She thought she saw a glow around the entire sandwich. Lily hadn’t had a tomato slice or avocado wedge in weeks. Eating it probably meant that she was agreeing to something, but she didn’t care. She lifted the sandwich to her mouth and didn’t set it down until she’d polished off every morsel. She ate one of the apples, too, and drank the cups of fresh water Travis handed her.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Deployed for the day.”

  “Where’s Vicky?”

  “I’ll explain all that later.”

  “It’s weird you didn’t tell me that you’ve been in touch with my sister.”

  “I know. Sorry about that. But for now we need to be a bit circumspect about our projects. I can only share details with the leadership of the Cluster.”

  “And Vicky is now part of that leadership?”

  Travis squatted a few feet in front of Lily’s chair. The sun backlit his body, leaving his face in shadow. He pulled at a tuft of grass. A light breeze came up, and the reservoir lapped behind him.

  “I need answers,” Lily said. “I need to see Vicky. Where is she?”

  “It’s a little complicated. There’re a lot of shifting alliances right now. I don’t need the world knowing where she is.”

  “I’m not the world. I’m her sister.”

  “No, I get that. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  “Kind of late, though. You didn’t tell me any of this yesterday.”

  “The march took priority.”

  “Why’d you break that window?”

  “People need water, food, and shelter. No one will listen if we say ‘please’ and wait patiently.”

  “But what about your life work? With the bonobos. Their peacefulness. I thought that was the whole point…” Lily wanted to say, “of you.”

  “Listen. The earthquake destroyed the economy. It turns out that that could be a good thing. We can redefine the whole concept of meeting people’s needs. It’s going to be a lot of work, but we need to be ready.”

  “For what?”

  “For the struggle.”

  “You’re sounding kind of extreme. I mean, what about our bonobo nature?”

  “I wish there was time. I wish we could wait for evolution to ferret out these madmen who run our governments. But it’s too late for that. I need something faster than evolution. We have to act now. People are hungry.”

  “But the bonobos!”

  “We’re humans, not bonobos, and the human belief system is driven by ignorance and fear. Yes, you’re right, we do have compassion and altruism in our makeup as well, but we won’t live long enough as a species for those qualities to come to the fore. We’ll never get there. At least not in my lifetime.”

  “But that window you smashed. It didn’t belong to the government.”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re right. I got carried away. But does it really matter? Now. In this moment on earth. We’re pretty much doomed. It’s going to be all over soon enough. We need to position ourselves to be ready for it when it comes.”

  “‘It’ being the apocalypse,” Lily said dryly.

  Travis shrugged. He stood and walked to the edge of the reservoir, looked north, the sun now lighting his blond hair and pink face. “I hear the sarcasm in your voice. You think I’ve crossed some line. But you know, I think the apocalypse—any apocalypse—might just be the best thing for the planet. There’ll be scars, but a few species will survive. Then evolution can head down an entirely different path without us. It might be nice.”

  “You’re not taking into account all the suffering that will occur as we go down.”

  “The suffering is already happening. People are dying worldwide from poverty and drought. From the toxins we’re pouring into the air and water. Not to mention the endless wars. This already is the apocalypse—the slow, painful version. If something comes along to take us all out a little quicker, I’m all for it.”

  Another flock of geese flew overhead, these in a crazy S formation, as if they too had lost their way.

  He wasn’t telling her where Vicky was. She had to decide which course of action would get her to her sister sooner: set out looking on her own or keep engaging with him. Hundreds of square miles of wilderness surrounded the reservoir. Vicky could be anywhere. Worse than the vast geography, Travis’s imagination was as prodigious as Vicky’s. God knew what the two of them could cook up together. She had to keep his trust.

  Lily set her empty plate on the ground and got up. “Can we walk awhile?”

  They followed the shoreline without talking. Lily listened to the rippling of the water, the flapping of bird wings, the soft hush of wind. She tried to figure out the best way to get the information she needed from Travis.

  When they reached another inlet, he said, “Want to swim?”

  More than anything, she wanted to swim. She stripped off her clothes and piled them on a forked willow branch. She also peeled the bandage off the base of her palm. The bleeding had stopped and, thanks to Kalisha’s antibiotic ointment, the cut didn’t look infected.

  She splashed into the reservoir. The pleasure of the cool water sluicing over her entire body, rinsing her hot skin, overwhelmed all her senses, wiped out the possibility of thought. Lily dove under, stretching her arms out in front, the backs of her hands together, and then stroked outward with cupped palms. The nerve endings in her wound zinged with pain, but she continued swimming underwater for another few yards until she needed to breathe. She surfaced into the sunlight and flipped onto her back. Her breasts floated and her toes broke the glossy skin of the lake. She could hear Travis splashing toward her, so she righted herself, dogpaddling as he approached. She let him wrap his arms and legs around her. They both sunk, bubbling underwater, going deeper. It was as if he were taking her down with him, their own apoca
lyptic duet, and it felt sweet, for a moment, as if she wanted that, too. His skin was slick and smooth.

  Then, she wanted to breathe. She pushed him away, panicked that he would not release her, but he did, and she shot to the surface. He followed a moment later, and before he could grab her again, she swam to shore.

  He had almost outwitted her, figured out a way—with the food and the swim—to derail her. She didn’t really think he was that cunning. But then she wouldn’t have thought she was this cunning, either. A person’s degree of cunning may be determined by the level of the stakes.

  She sat on a patch of bright green grass to dry in the sun. Travis sat next to her. She ought to put on her clothes. The water droplets, warm sun, and spring grasses all felt so primal, prehistoric. So before Tom.

  She found herself saying, “Tom and I have been best friends since we were children.”

  “I know.”

  “The word ‘betrayal’ feels inadequate.”

  “You’ve left him, too.”

  “That’s true. I have.”

  “You and me,” he said.

  His response shouldn’t have shocked her, but it did. He’d ridden her words, her truthful disclosure, to his own end. She began shaking her head, searching for a temperate way to say no. He leaned over and kissed her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, pulling away quickly.

  “I need you as a friend.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked as if she’d slapped him.

  “We shouldn’t have. The other day.”

  “Bullshit. I love you.”

  “Oh. No. No, Travis. I don’t think—”

  “You don’t think what?”

  He leapt to his feet and walked to the water’s edge. He scooped a handful of mud and returned, crouching before her. He used two fingers to paint a streak down the middle of her face. He dabbed mud on each of her cheeks as well.

  “What are you doing?”

  He smiled at his work. “You’re looking a bit savage.”

  “Where’s Vicky?” she asked. “Just tell me.”