The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “Sometime,” Lily said to Annie, “ask me to tell you about Travis.”

  “Okay.” She saw Annie memorize the request.

  Was it too harsh a story for a thirteen-year-old? She’d been exactly Annie’s age when she began her correspondence with him.

  As the man in front of them paid for his lighter fluid and bag of briquettes, Lily flipped the paper over and looked at the headline below the fold. “Hyena” Virus Threatens Computers. In smaller type, a subheading announced, Hospital Worker Cracks Security Code. The dateline: San Francisco, CA.

  According to The Trinity Journal, the fast-spreading virus already had infected millions of computers. The purpose, severity, and malevolence of the infection had yet to be determined, but it was believed to be highly dangerous with possibly devastating effects. So far, however, the only consequence of the virus was that it placed a large-font message on people’s desktops that read, “Long live hyenas!”

  The article explained that the source of the virus had been traced to San Francisco General Hospital, and that employees there were being scrutinized for possible authorship. Someone, according to the article, had used the confusion resulting from an overpopulation of patients, due to the recent earthquakes across the bay, to take advantage. The hospital administration promised criminal prosecution.

  Federal agents were already involved, and they asked for the public’s help in deciphering the covert meaning of the word “hyenas.” They advised people whose computers had contracted the virus to leave them powered down until more information became available.

  Lily knew the virus would prove to be benign. She also knew that Vicky’s delight in devising and implementing the project would be the drug that healed her.

  45

  Kalisha built an even bigger campfire tonight. She and Sal had bought a large tin pot in town, and they simmered a stew of artichokes, Vidalia onions, tomatoes, and farro over a bed of coals. Sal carved sharp points on long sturdy sticks so they could roast chunks of pork. It was well past midnight when Lily, Wesley, and Annie arrived back at camp, but Kalisha and Sal had waited, worrying and now intensely relieved. As they took places around the campfire, they passed a flask of cold lake water.

  Despite the late hour and wilderness darkness, Annie bathed and changed into her new outfit before joining the others at the fire. As soon as she sat down, even before eating, she told the whole story of how she’d hitched into town and knocked on doors in residential Weaverville asking for work, and then in great animated detail she told them about the yellow jacket attack and how she’d been the one to get the EpiPen from Lily’s pack and administer the shot.

  “You saved my life,” Lily said.

  “Duh.”

  “I don’t ever want you hitchhiking again. Ever.”

  “You always got something to say.” But Annie smiled, pleased at the maternal rebuke, noting the word “ever” used twice.

  “Next time,” Kalisha said, “give us a heads up when you decide to disappear.”

  “You know what?” Annie shot back at Kalisha.

  “You look really pretty in your new clothes,” Sal interrupted.

  Annie squinted suspiciously and looked around the fire at everyone’s faces. She bunched her mouth.

  “Say ‘thank you,’” Lily said.

  Annie swatted the air in front of her face, even though the smoke swirled straight up into the sky.

  “So listen,” Kalisha said quietly. “I need to go back. I need to get the kitchen at Trinity going again. There’re plenty of hungry people still there.”

  The fire popped. The stars shone steady. The black lake, just beyond, lapped.

  “Ha!” Wesley held up his speared chunk of pork and turned it in the light. “Roasted perfection.”

  “I got us plums from a client’s tree. For dessert.” Annie reached for her knapsack and pulled out a fistful. “Ripe ones.”

  “’Client,’” Kalisha quoted, shaking her head.

  “Yeah,” Annie said. “Client.”

  “I have a surprise.” Lily retrieved her own backpack from behind her log and pulled out The Trinity Journal. She held up the paper and pointed at the headline below the fold. “Vicky,” she said. “It’s Vicky.”

  “Let me see!” Sal grabbed for the paper, but Lily held it out of reach.

  “I’ll read the article out loud.”

  Annie gasped at nearly every sentence, and Sal started laughing halfway through the report. When Lily finished reading, she and Sal entertained everyone with Vicky stories. Lily told about her doing square roots in her head, the SCUM Manifesto paper, her chair collection, the wheeled kayak that happened to save her life, and how that was always how things worked for Vicky.

  “She has a quirky—” Lily started.

  “Understatement,” Sal said.

  “—kind of prescience,” Lily finished.

  Sal told about other inventions and, with promptings from everyone, but mostly Annie, a full and detailed accounting of their love affair. They ate the plums and tossed the pits into the forest.

  When the fire was just a bed of embers, Annie yawned and said, “I guess we better go get her.”

  46

  Annie, Sal, and Kalisha lay down in the usual spot under the pines. Wesley and Lily walked deeper into the woods. As they tripped on small logs and clumped undergrowth, Lily thought, rash, impulsive. She didn’t know this man.

  But this time she knew she didn’t know him. Didn’t that make it different?

  They came to a flat bed of pine needles and lay down on their backs, looking up into the meshed ceiling of evergreen boughs. He hooked his ankle with hers. She found his hand.

  “I want us to all stay together,” she said.

  “Kalisha wants to go back.”

  “We could go with her. We could help her get the kitchen going again.”

  “You think?”

  “She can’t do it alone. We’d need to scavenge equipment. Find food sources.”

  Wesley turned onto his side and propped his head in his hand, elbow in the duff. “We could fetch Vicky, too.”

  “Really? You want to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  Lily laughed. “Really? That easy?”

  “It won’t be easy. But yes. Yes. Kalisha will need help.”

  “I want to feed people.”

  Wesley made a sound of assent.

  “Food,” Lily said. “Stories, too.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Tribes need stories.”

  “What’s our creation myth?”

  The canopy of pines blocked out most of the starlight. She could hardly see his face. She reached carefully and found his chin, moved her fingers up to touch his philtrum. He seemed to stop breathing. She slid her fingertips to the right, following the contour of his mouth.

  “I haven’t in so long,” he said.

  Lily kissed his cheek, held his ear in her cupped hand. She waited a beat and, when he didn’t speak again, kissed his mouth. He shifted, awkward. She reached her hand under his T-shirt and felt the hard ridge of that long scar. He put a hand on the side of her head and pulled her against him.

  She didn’t know this man. She was going on so little: a cowboy nose and skin like piano keys, a writer of stories, a broken heart and scarred chest, a tendency toward reticence and yet the ability to say yes. As for the future, if there were one, they would likely hurt each other, maybe even betray or enrage.

  Her own body was a mess of bee sting welts and receding hives, lots of heat and itch, not to mention a very recent memory of death averted.

  None of the above stopped them. Lily wanted everything now, and why not? They made love, and then told stories, and then made more love. At one point they laughed so loudly that someone—they couldn’t tell if it was Annie, Kalisha, or Sal—shouted a response.
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br />   Sometime in the very early morning, rain began to fall, soon penetrating the forest canopy and dripping onto their two sleeping bodies. They were soaked by daybreak.

  47

  Annie awoke at dawn. As the rain wetted her face, she listened for the voices of Wesley and Lily somewhere back there in the trees.

  I saved her life. Annie hugged herself hard to calm the crazy beating in her chest. I saved her life.

  Acknowledgments

  For especially helpful interviews about earthquakes, I thank Richard Allen, Director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as Greg Fenves, former chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, international expert in structural engineering, and currently president of the University of Texas at Austin.

  A lengthy and detailed report, “Scenario for a Magnitude 7.0 Earthquake on the Hayward Fault,” produced by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute with support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and published in Oakland, California, by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute in September 1996, was very useful.

  A clan of hyenas did truly live on university land in the Berkeley hills as part of the Berkeley Field Station for the Study of Behavior, Ecology, and Reproduction, from 1985 until 2014. Their calls could be heard on quiet mornings and evenings. When the researchers lost their funding, the hyenas were relocated.

  I thank Trinity Church of downtown Berkeley, where I volunteered for two years serving dinners in their free meals program, for their continued service. I’ve fictionalized the church and the program in this novel. Thank you to Curtiss Mays who provided me with all of my motorcycle expertise, and to Debra Slone for her insightful paper on post-disaster library services. Phillipa Caldeira, another extraordinary research librarian, found answers to several questions and offered important reading suggestions.

  The smart and hardworking people at Rare Bird Books have been a joy to work with, and I am grateful to them for finding merit in my story. Special thank yous to Julia Callahan, Tyson Cornell, Gregory Henry, Hailie Johnson, Jake Levens, and Guy Intoci. My agent, Reiko Davis, connected me to Rare Bird Books, and in other ways too many to count has greatly enhanced my writing life. Thank you, Reiko.

  For reading drafts, research, discussion, and offering ideas, I also want to thank Sherman Alexie, Alison Bechdel, Dorothy Hearst, Barb Johnson, Frans de Waal, Martha Garcia, Jane McDermott, Patricia Mullan, Kim Stanley Robinson, Carol Seajay, and Elizabeth Stark.

  I am particularly indebted to Frans de Waal and Adrienne Zihlman, whose work in understanding the roots of compassion and altruism, as well as women’s roles in human evolution, inspire me. They and other scientists are working long and hard to present the fullest possible picture of our capabilities, countering the long-held models of our forbears as “man the hunter” and the “killer ape.”

  I also want to acknowledge the group of scientists who in 1986 met and wrote the Seville Statement on Violence. The statement begins:

  Believing that it is our responsibility to address from our particular disciplines the most dangerous and destructive activities of our species, violence and war; recognizing that science is a human cultural product which cannot be definitive or all-encompassing; and gratefully acknowledging the support of the authorities of Seville and representatives of the Spanish UNESCO;

  We, the undersigned scholars from around the world and from relevant sciences, have met and arrived at the following Statement on Violence. In it, we challenge a number of alleged biological findings that have been used, even by some in our disciplines, to justify violence and war. Because the alleged findings have contributed to an atmosphere of pessimism in our time, we submit that the open, considered rejection of these mis-statements can contribute significantly to the International Year of Peace.

  Misuse of scientific theories and data to justify violence and war is not new but has been made since the advent of modern science. For example, the theory of evolution has been used to justify not only war, but also genocide, colonialism, and suppression of the weak.

  While no one disputes the human propensity toward violence, too little attention is given to our equal (perhaps greater?) cooperative and compassionate abilities. Thank you to the small group of researchers in many fields of study who are asking the question, Why is there peace? rather than, Why is there war?

  ◆◆◆

  For further information about what it means to be human, I offer the following bibliography:

  Dahlberg, Frances, ed. Woman the Gatherer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

  De Waal, Frans. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

  De Waal, Frans. My Family Album. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

  De Waal, Frans. Peacemaking Among Primates. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

  De Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

  De Waal, Frans. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

  De Waal, Frans. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.

  De Waal, Frans and Lanting, Frans (photographs). Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

  De Waal, Frans and Tyack, Peter L. Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

  Drea, C.M. and Frank, L.G. The Social Complexity of Spotted Hyenas. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003.

  Hager, Lori D., ed. Women in Human Evolution. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

  Hart, Donna and Sussman, Robert W. Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press (Persea), 2005.

  Keltner, Dacher, Marsh, Jason, and Smith, Jeremy Adam, eds. The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

  Klein, Richard G. and Edgar, Blake. The Dawn of Human Culture: A Bold New Theory on What Sparked the ‘Big Bang’ of Human Consciousness. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

  Kruuk, Hans. The Spotted Hyena: A Study of Predation and Social Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

  Leakey, Richard and Lewin, Roger. Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human. New York: Little, Brown, 1992.

  Leakey, Richard. The Origin of Humankind. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

  Marks, Jonathan. What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

  Rice, Stanley. Encyclopedia of Evolution. New York: Checkmark Books, 2007.

  Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue and Lewin, Roger. Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994.

  Sawyer, G.J. and Deak, Viktor. The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

  Scott, Eugenie C. Evolution Vs. Creationism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

  Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin, 2009.

  Stringer, Chris and Andrews, Peter. The Complete World of Human Evolution. New York: The Natural History Museum, 2005.

  Watson, Peter. Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.

  Winston, Robert and Wilson, Dr. Don. Human: The Definitive Visual Guide. New York: Smithsonian, 2004.

  Wood, Bernard. Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Woods, Vanessa. Bonobo Handshake: A Mem
oir of Love and Adventure in the Congo. New York: Gotham Books, 2010.

  Wrangham, Richard and Peterson, Dale. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

  Zihlman, Adrienne L. The Human Evolution Coloring Book. New York: HarperCollins, 1982.

  Zihlman, Adrienne L. and Tanner, Nancy. “Women in Evolution. Part I: Innovation and Selection in Human Origins.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: Vol. 1, No. 3, 1976.

  Zihlman, Adrienne L. “Women in Evolution, Part II: Subsistence and Social Organization Among Early Hominids.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: Vol. 4, No. 1, 1978.

  Zimmer, Carl. Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins. Toronto: Madison Press Books, 2005.