“Who are those people?” Lizette asked quietly after she and Mike left them behind.
“Ectomorphic exotherms,” Mike said grumpily.
“What?”
“Skinny lizard people,” Mike explained. “Spikers. Blue Spike users. What they’re doing is ‘chasing the blue dragon.’ They inhale that blue-gray smoke. It’s supposed to keep them from being ‘blue and draggin’, as they put it.”
Lizette glanced narrowly at him.
“I take it you don’t approve?”
“It’s not for me to approve or disapprove,” he said with a shrug. “I’m just not a speeder. Not a go-fast kind of guy, that’s all. My bet is, once they’re all hot-wired, they’ll go through that World’s Fair thing again—only they’ll run through it. For a faster flash. As if it weren’t infodense enough already.”
They passed among the professor and students Mike had seen on video feed earlier, then stepped around the language-gaming Chrysantha and several of her friends. Hooked into the infosphere through their boards, they were generally oblivious to the physical world around them. A few of that group, mostly younger guys, had split out of Chrysantha’s circle and were idly bauudysurfing, checking out v-porn in the infosphere.
Mike saw several of his acquaintances sprawled on a constellation of couches round a table, not far from the sliding door that opened onto the balcony. On the table in their midst, near the veggies and chips and breads and dips, was a dropper bottle of KL 235. Mike said hi and introduced Lizette. As he sat down it irked him, somewhere at the edges of his consciousness, that almost the only friends he had made here on the coast were KL users, gateheads. He didn’t let it bother him too much, however.
Lizette bent down and whispered in his ear that she was going to talk to their host, if Mike didn’t mind. Mike didn’t mind, and Lizette stepped out onto the balcony beside the sharply (if anachronistically) dressed old Sakler, still within earshot. Part of Mike’s focus went with her.
“—the great revenge tragedy that is American politics,” Sakler was saying, “I can’t tell whether the politicians are narrow-mindedly shrewd, or shrewdly narrow-minded.”
Lizette introduced herself and the conversation spun off in another direction. Mike’s focus shifted back and forth from the balcony to the couches, so that he only caught bits of the conversation in both places.
“—spend my days now working and playing on this twenty-acre spread,” he heard Sakler say. “Learning the ways of the gentleman farmer—though I’m neither a gentleman nor a farmer. ‘Yup, September tells the plants October’s coming soon,’ so the trees know they better fruit up, in the orchard out back.”
“Do I make reality,” asked an armchair philosopher in the KL group, “or does reality make me, you know?”
“—a shaman cleverly disguised as a college professor!” Becky Starr said with a loud laugh from over in the group around Professor Paulson.
“—big old party house,” Sakler said. “It’s modeled after the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite Park. I built it with my own hands, out of wood from my own land’s trees—not redwoods, but the pines on my inland property.”
“Free the Heart of the World!” someone shouted from the far end of the room, apropos of nothing and everything.
“Most of the busy people I know,” the armchair KL supplier-philosopher continued, “if they ever relaxed long enough to take a good look at their lives, they’d probably kill themselves.”
“—expensive?” Sakler said. “Sure. Money hasn’t been a problem for me for the last dozen years. Sued the Army, the Department of Defense and the U.S. government for addicting me to cigarettes and nicotine while I was in the service. I came from a smoking household but I was a health nut.”
Someone else on the balcony asked something Mike couldn’t quite make out.
“—no, never smoked at all before I went into the military. Lasted six years in the Army before I gave in. For years I was living right across the street from the Surgeon General, yet every time I requested a non-smoking billet the higher-ups just laughed in my face. Six years in barracks full of smokers, six years of dirt cheap cigarettes in the BX, six years of breaks where we were always told, ‘Smoke if you’ve got ‘em.’ Six years before I broke down and started smoking. When I got out six years after that, I was a full-blown nicotine fiend and Viet vet. Eventually the jury saw it my way, to the tune of twenty million bucks, after the lawyer fees were paid—a very pleasant tune indeed.”
The bottle and dropper of KL came around to Mike at last, and he ritually partook of a few drops. Not long afterward, Lizette came in and sat down on the couch beside him. He and a couple others in the group talked her into—“No pressure, no pressure”—a very small dose.
After that, time smeared and blurred for them both. Mike remembered the KL group (most of them bent quite a bit beyond trapezoid by the chemical) eruditely arguing the nature of Santa Claus. For what seemed like hours.
Was the jolly man in red and white—
A) a single magical master elf and judge/accountant/keeper of lists who in a single night sequentially visited all homes in Christendom to dole out gifts on the basis of the potential recipients’ having “passed” or “failed” according to the simplistic criteria of certain ethical tests?
B) millions of parents acting in parallel, who independently bought gifts, hid gifts, dispensed gifts under trees, all on the basis of household income, gift affordability, and sense of familial obligation, while falsely attributing all this covert multiple parallel activity to an open singular sequential fiction with eight tiny reindeer?
C) a singular Catholic saint noted for his gift-giving?
D) the time-eroded remnant of circumpolar shamanic ritual practice, in which myriad shamans, over thousands of years, claimed to climb from this world via a tree, then to “fly” between the worlds through the ingestion of hallucinogens present in circumpolar strains of the red and white (Santa’s colors) mushroom, Amanita muscaria, helped along the way by tryptamine “elves”—said mushroom often being located as a result of the shaman’s noting the “flying” (i.e., Amanita-affected) behavior of reindeer which had consumed the mushroom, the deer then often being killed and the urine in their bladders drunk off because it concentrated the hallucinogenic properties from the mushrooms the deer had eaten, so that the shaman might experience a swifter and stronger “flight”?
From shamanic healers to toys under the trees—what a long strange trip, Mike remembered thinking. He didn’t know if he fully believed any of the explanations, or even a combination of all of them.
After all the smeared hours, he at last found himself alone on the roof of Sakler’s party house with Lizette, looking up at the stars, while the holojections of the 1939 World’s Fair continued to glow softly in the meadow to the south of them. Lizette was using a planisphere Art Sakler had loaned her to pick out summer constellations and stars—the Big and Little Dippers, Polaris, Scorpius, Cygnus, Hercules, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Vega in Lyra, several more. Earlier, in the first hour or so after sunset, they might have seen the satellites, Lizette explained. Even now they could still catch an occasional faint glimmer of the orbital habitat, steadily abuilding in cislunar space.
“The heaven of faith is disappearing into the night sky of commerce,” Mike said, finally starting to come down off the KL. “Nature is disappearing into Culture. Reality is disappearing into Simulation. Response is disappearing into Stimulation. Time is disappearing into Space. Death is disappearing into Life. Neanderthals like me are disappearing into Homo sapiens sapiens—”
Lizette whacked him on the head with her little borrowed planisphere.
“It’s not that bad,” she said, staring out at the stars and pushing him back down on his back. “You just haven’t looked at it in the right way.”
“Oh?” Mike asked, rubbing his head. “And what might the ‘right way’ be?”
“On what’s going to be a moonless, cloudless night,” she began, laying her head down on h
is chest, “drive out of the city, any and all cities, to where it will be dark enough to see the Milky Way clearly. Mountains and deserts are best. Go there before the sun goes down. Watch the sunset and you can see the sun isn’t setting—the Earth you thought was so unmoving is rotating on its axis. Watch the stars come out, and realize they never left, they’ve been there all the time—it’s just that you’ve been blinded by nearer lights.”
“I thought you were just an engineering major,” Mike said, lifting himself up on his hands so that Lizette’s head was cradled against his stomach, her eyes looking up at his. “Not a poet and a philosopher.”
“Give me a chance,” she said in a husky voice, “and I’ll surprise you.”
They found themselves moving inexorably toward a kiss, like a pair of stars swinging into binary partnership, spiraling more tightly into each other’s gravity. Just as their lips were about to touch, however, a horrendous clatter and cracking and shouting sounded from the nearest balcony. Startled, they slid down to the edge of the roof.
“What happened?” Mike asked of a small crowd of party-fatigued young people on the balcony.
“Two hazardously wasted guys just got into a fight,” said a man with a shaved head and a Van Dyke beard. “They broke through the railing and fell.”
“Who were they?” Lizette asked.
Someone down on the second floor balconies called up an answer, but Mike couldn’t make out whether that person had said “Bikers” or “Spikers.”
“Are they okay?” the bald man with the little beard called down.
“They must be,” said someone down on the first floor. “They’re still fighting.”
* * * * * * *
Holocaust of Dreams
“I’m too old to be pulling an all-nighter like this,” Dr. Lydia Fabro muttered to herself as she watched the pre-dawn light creep over the buildings of Miracle Mile, onto Museum Row, across Hancock Park, into the sago palm and fern universe of the Page Museum’s atrium.
Couldn’t be helped, she supposed. Just as the (hopefully temporary) closure of the Page Museum and the shutting down of research at Rancho La Brea generally couldn’t be helped, either.
She had only been a post-doc at the Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries for a year and a half, but already her work was being foreshortened. She had testified passionately on behalf of Rancho La Brea’s scientific importance—before the Museum Board, the County Board of Supervisors, the City Council, the Park Service, corporations, anyone who would listen. In her testimony, however, she had been excessively careful not to spotlight the tar pits’ value to evolutionary biology. Mention of “extinct genomic diversity” would only have inflamed the inerrantists and churchstaters. Instead, she had steadily avoided the religio-political minefield of theory, emphasizing instead the potential medical value of the discoveries to be derived from the asphalt-preserved DNA found in the tar pits—a politically astute maneuver, she had thought.
In the end, however, no one had listened. The New Commonweal had gained majorities everywhere in the political world. The corporations willing to risk fundagelical boycotts in Stadium Revival America were few and far between. Funding shrank to a trickle.
The Museum’s last Director, Ellie Kornbluth, had appreciated Lydia’s politically shrewd efforts nonetheless. She had shown that appreciation by putting Lydia in charge of the shutdown. Running the “Skeleton Crew” disassembling the fossil exhibits, a bittersweet task: taking down the murals, taking apart the dioramas. Cataloging, boxing, transferring. Fencing off, sealing shut, and abandoning in place the pits and excavations and the museum itself.
Standing in the atrium garden, Lydia was glad that at least they’d been able to fight for enough funding to keep the irrigation system on, so that the garden wouldn’t die. The koi that had swum in the atrium’s artificial stream were gone now, though, as was the stream itself. With the funding stream dried up, the stream of water had dried up too. She tried not to think too much about that analogy
Leaving the atrium, Lydia walked through the building, thinking of Noah, alone, animals and family all long since disembarked and gone into the world, the shipwright making one last circuit of his handiwork before mothballing the ark where it had grounded on Ararat. A strangely Biblical resonance, Lydia thought, especially since it was the Bible bangers who were forcing the shutdown here.
This place too had been an ark, however. An ark of time rather than space. An ark preserving the bones of the extinct against total disappearance, rather than the flesh of the living against extinction by drowning. Reconstructed skeletons of the lost—which, the fundamentalists still claimed, were always and only creatures drowned in the Great Flood that Noah and company had survived.
An empty ark of time, now, Lydia realized as she walked through the empty halls. The “fish bowl” lab, where she and other researchers had labored with fine brushes and dental picks and ultrasonics to clean and categorize macro and micro fossils of myriad types, while museum-goers watched them through the tall glass—now all eerily tidy, as empty as if decades of work had never taken place there. Gone too was the artwork, the visioned and revisioned murals taken down from the walls, the dioramas removed from the display cases, the display cases themselves removed. No more of Hallett’s 1988 Treasures of the Tar Pits. Or of the Connollys’ Early Man in North America and Extinct Animals in Southern California. Or of the WPA mural of ancient La Brea painted in 1937 under the direction of Dr. James Z. Gilbert. Or of Knight’s mural-scene of the ancient Los Angeles basin’s flora and fauna, painted under the direction of fossil-hunter Chester Stock in 1925.
Most evident in their absence from the time-ark were the great skeletons of asphalt-permeated bones, the bone assemblages transmuted to a color Lydia had never quite been able to describe except as a mixture of bronze and mahogany. Gone were the Harlan’s Giant Ground Sloth, Antique Bison, American Mastodon, Western Camel, Shasta Ground Sloth, Imperial Mammoth, Merriam’s Giant Condor, Dire Wolf, American Lion, California Saber Tooth Cat, Western Horse, and Short-Faced Bear. A second extinction had come upon the place—a disappearance in death of species that had already long since disappeared from the world of life.
As Lydia walked through the emptied museum, she felt it was still filled with ghosts: of the greats, like Page and Harlan and Stock and Merriam and Gilbert, and the millions of more ordinary folks who had visited the museum in its nearly four decades of operation since its opening in 1977. Leaving the building and locking it behind her, she felt a strange empathy with La Brea Woman, the only human fossil that had ever been unearthed there. Discovered one hundred and one years earlier, near the end of the main 1906-1915 excavation period, the skeleton had been that of a woman in her twenties, apparently ritually murdered then buried in the asphalt seeps, 9,000 years in the past.
Walking up the ramp of the main entrance, Lydia stepped off the ark at last. Or rather the raft, she thought, because that was, structurally, what the Page Museum in fact was: a thousand ton concrete raft afloat on a lake of asphalt matrix. Up at ground level, on the “main deck”, the old busker with his guitar was at his usual station. At his work early today beyond any reasonable hope of profit, the busker stood on the plaza between the museum and the viewing station which looked out over the asphalt quarry lake with its replica mammoths in the grip of tarry tragedy—and which, once, had drawn the best crowds. The busker had been at his station regaling the park passers-by with folk songs and his own compositions and parodies nearly every day for longer than anyone could remember, even though interest in Rancho La Brea—and the Museum’s hours of opening—had fallen steadily over the past half-dozen years.
“Captain Hancock had a ranch, ee-yi ee-yi oh,” the busker sang, to the tune of “Old MacDonald,” when he saw Lydia approaching, “and on that ranch he had some mammoths, ee-yi, ee-yi oh. With a chomp branch here and a chomp branch there, here a chomp, there a chomp, everywhere a chomp branch, Captain Hancock had some mammoths, ee-yi ee-yi-oh....”
&nb
sp; Lydia smiled and tossed a couple bucks into the old busker’s money box.
“Thanks, Doc,” the old man said, tipping his hat, then launched into a verse about Hancock’s saber tooths. Lydia was taken aback: that “Thanks, Doc” was as much conversation as the old street musician had afforded her since she started work here. She would have liked to know more about him, but he seemed intent on his playing and singing. Those two words were probably all the sign she was going to get from him that both their jobs here had come to an end.
Sad, really, Lydia thought as she walked up onto the viewing station overlooking the Lake Pit. So much still to be learned from this place. Looking down at the replica mammoth tragedy, she thought again how inaccurate that crowd-pleasing scene was, when compared to their current understanding of what had actually happened here.
Ceaselessly bubbling with methane from the fissures in the earth deep below it, the lake itself was actually a result of asphalt quarrying done primarily during the nineteenth century. Most of the animals that had died and been preserved here had not died in deep tarry lakes. They had met their fates in shallow seeps and pondings of asphalt on hot summer days, the asphalt that entrapped them often camouflaged by dust and leaves.
In the fall and winter, when the rains came, streams and their sediments re-buried the seeps, which in turn trapped still more animals and plants in their sticky grasp with the return of the warm weather. So it had continued, summer entrapments and winter burials, season after season for forty thousand years—and would still have continued, trapping household pets and unfortunate homeless people, were it not for the fences put up around each new seep as it surfaced.
Lydia turned her back on the bubbling lake and walked back down to ground level from the viewing station. She headed northwest across the park, past the Los Angeles County Museum of Art buildings, past the trees and urban green space, past the remains of many of the hundred and more rusty-girdered and board-walled pits that had been dug into the matrix during the great excavations of the first two decades of the twentieth century. She walked past Pit 91, reopened in 1969, with its Viewing Station for the tourists who wanted to see the paleontologists, biologists, and geologists going about their dirty sticky work. She strode past the big Observation Pit, then into the Northwest Corner, near Ogden and Sixth Street, where several large, cone-shaped asphalt pools, the so-called Sycamore Pits, had opened up soon after the Great Quake hit L.A.
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