This was where her field work had taken place, during that few months each summer when the ground water had dried up or could be pumped out of the pits economically enough so that excavations could continue. Summers that had once entrapped mammoths had, for the past century, snared only scientists. Yet there were countless discoveries still to be made in the post-Quake pits—proof of which was the fossil find she had made only two days previously, while shutting down Pit 129.
She had spotted part of a skull, sticking up out of the tarry matrix—human, but not quite. And part of a shoulder blade, a scapula, but strangely elongated and reinforced. Probably the most important discovery at the tar pits in more than one hundred years, it had been overlooked throughout the rest of the shutdown because of the last-minute nature of the find and the fact that the La Brea fossils were almost always found in a highly compacted jumble or conglomeration. No clean strata here; the tar moved, and the remains of victims were often trampled by others victims as those victims were themselves dying.
For reasons too that ran solidly contrary to all her scientific training, Lydia was telling no one about the discovery. She sensed almost instinctively that any media hype now about strange, not-quite-human remains being discovered at Rancho La Brea would only infuriate the increasingly powerful and anti-Darwinian churchstaters. Who knew what they might do if such news got them riled? Have La Brea declared a hazardous waste zone? Burned off, or pumped out for cheap fuel oil? Mine the asphalt again, as it had been mined in the nineteenth century, when the fossil bones were thought to be the remains of unfortunate cattle that had strayed into the pits—and the road commissioners in San Francisco had sent down letters of complaint about all the bones they were finding in the asphalt shipped north from La Brea?
No, Lydia thought. Best to let the paleontological work go quietly into dormancy, for now. She had personally sealed the top of Pit 129 along with the rest of the excavations. 129 would begin filling with ground water soon enough, a dank and dark cistern that would hopefully survive undisturbed through the dank, dark and disturbing times now come upon intellectual and scientific culture in the United States of America.
She walked back through the park, saying good-bye to the few members of the Skeleton Crew still on the job and bidding Security farewell. Leaving the park and crossing Wilshire Boulevard in the morning light, Lydia kept thinking she had forgotten to do something—rather like the feeling she sometimes got, usually just after she left home on vacation, that she had left a light burning or the oven switched on. Other than filing the closing reports with the proper authorities, however, there was nothing more for her to do. She had done everything that could be done.
Once in her car in the parking lot, she turned on the ignition, then sat for a moment in her car, crying and sobbing quietly over the low whir of the electric motor. Brushing away the tears and driving out of the lot, she realized that this wasn’t just about the shutdown of research at La Brea—devastating as that was—but also about the prospect of meeting her mother Marie at the pier in San Pedro, then together taking a ferry out to see her brother Todd, in drug rehab aboard the “ship of hope against dope,” the S.S. Libre de Drogas.
After her sleepless night, a very long day had just begun. The busker in the park, she thought, was somehow a sign for the transition from her museum world to Todd’s world as a musician. She did not like the thought, when it came to her, that the busker had been standing halfway between museum and mammoth family tragedy.
Driving toward San Pedro, Lydia thought about the arc of her brother’s career as a musician. He had started very early on piano and keyboards, showing such great facility with them that he was playing Rachmaninoff before he hit puberty. In his teens and twenties, however, he had moved steadily from Rachmaninoff to Rock Monomyth: The forming of his band, Himalayan Blue Poppies, and the surprising popular success of their first album, Yeti’s Berg Address. The touring. The initial heavy drug and booze experiences. The co-founding of Intravenous Entertainment and the Nu Akashic Records label with Poppies guitarist Johnny Vance. The Poppies break-up. The critical success but lukewarm sales of the three Fabro-Vance albums. The acrimonious split with Vance and the ensuing court battles. Todd’s slide into deep dependence on hard drugs and, most recently, his hitting bottom, doing jail time, and finally going into rehab aboard the ark o’ narcotico, the Libre.
Six months back, since they were both in the L.A. area and Todd wasn’t touring, Lydia had gone out to visit him and his entourage at his place in Montecito, above Santa Barbara. She had left the tar pits and the museum and driven out there, but the scene in Todd’s big party house had seemed another, more contemporary version of Rancho La Brea’s Quaternary entrapment scenarios. Her brother, increasingly mired in drug addiction, had seemed then like some once-fleet grazer—a part-striped Western Horse, perhaps—hobbled and brought low in an asphalt seep. Todd’s groupies had struck Lydia as being like carnivores—saber-toothed cats, dire wolves—ripping into the carcass, dragging away all they could from it.
Fed up with Todd’s downward spiral, Lydia had nearly screamed the entrapment analogy at her brother and his household entourage. When the groupies had tried to ignore her, she had forcefully pointed out to them that, for every herbivore that had become fatally mired at La Brea, an average of seven carnivores had gone down too—this despite a food chain where the herbivores probably had outnumbered the carnivores by as much as 200 to one.
She must have cut a ridiculous figure then, yelling paleo-ecology population stats at a bunch of drugged-out urban hipsters, but they’d gotten the message. Todd and a couple of his people had ushered her none too politely from the house. She hadn’t spoken with her brother since.
Until today. Her mother’s idea. Marie had come out from Boston to see her son and daughter and attempt to bring about some rapprochement between them. Despite the horrible timing, Lydia had reluctantly agreed.
After she had pulled her car into the port authority parking lot, Lydia went to the pre-arranged pier. Her mother was already waiting, looking trim and healthy in a short pastel sundress, shades, and a broad boater hat. Something was different about her, though. It took Lydia a moment to pin down exactly what it was.
“Mom!” she said suddenly. “You got your tats removed!”
“What?”
“Your tattoos,” Lydia said. “The Nike swoosh, the MacDonald’s arches, the pie-cut Mercedes-Benz circle—”
“Oh, those,” her mother said, smiling behind her sunglasses. “I had that done about nine months ago. Removed them all, after your father died.”
“Why?” Lydia asked. “When I asked you about them when I was a girl, you said they were ‘intended to be a protest against corporate ownership of our bodies’. I’ve always remembered that.”
“Yes, well,” her mother said, a bit awkwardly. “Your father liked them. Unfortunately, they eventually became just another form of advertisement for the corporations. I got tired of my body serving as a billboard, so once your father was gone, off they went.”
The ferry—actually a hydrofoil shuttle boat—arrived and took Lydia and her mother aboard, along with the eight or ten other people headed out to the Libre this morning. They were a quiet bunch, not making much eye contact. They sat in silence or talked quietly to those whom they’d come aboard with at the pier.
The hydrofoil moved out of port under a blue sky punctuated by an occasional fair weather cloud. Coming into the slight chop of the ocean waves, Lydia felt her stomach unsettle a tad and turned to her mother.
“Do you know how far off the coast this rehab liner is?” she asked.
“In international waters,” her mother replied, squinting against the sun. “I gather it’s about a forty-five minute trip.”
“I don’t see why they just can’t park it in the harbor,” Lydia said, shaking her head. “I mean, it’s not as if they’re cruising anywhere right now.”
“It’s because of the nature of the treatment,” her mother exp
lained, looking out over the bow. “I read up on it. Their treatment of addiction has two main thrusts—physical and psychosocial. To break the physical part of the addiction cycle they use MediTox, which is a pretty standard receptor-site blocker and scrubber, a souped-up version of Narcan and other older, prescription detox agents. The big difference aboard the Libre, I gather, is that they also use Ibogara. That’s a designer ibogaine derivative, used to treat the psychological aspects of addiction. It’s sort of a ‘drug against drugs’.”
Lydia looked at her mother narrowly.
“Do you mean to say that this anti-drug drug has something to do with why they can’t do the treatment in-harbor?”
“Right,” her mother said, nodding. “That’s why they have to use a ship of Panamanian registry and do the treatment in international waters. Ibogara is a hallucinogen in its own right, like ibogaine and most of the other psychoactive extracts of the iboga plant. In most countries ibogaine and iboga derivatives are controlled substances—illegal—but not in Panama. It has recognized therapeutic uses there. As long as they do the treatments in international waters aboard a ship of Panamanian registry, no one can touch them.”
Lydia nodded, thoughtful.
“You seem to know a lot about it, Mom,” she said. At least, Lydia thought, it distracted her—kept her from obsessing on Dad’s death, still only a year in the past.
“I do my research,” her mother said with a shrug. “Just a mother’s concern for the health and well-being of her son. Oh, and they do cruise, eight months out of the year. They just leave their Ibogara supplies in a picket boat in international waters when the Libre sails into a port. Four months a year, they park off the Southern California coast.”
“An addict-rich environment,” Lydia said with a cynical grin, “with lots of rich addicts, too.”
“According to their brochures,” her mother continued, “one-third of the treatments are pro bono, reserved for ‘financial need’ people.”
Lydia looked down at the water.
“I guess they have to fill those third-class cabins somehow,” she said archly.
A moment later, their attention and that of their fellow passengers was distracted by dolphins racing along in the bow wave of the hydrofoil, leaping and surfing the wake in ways that humans could only dream of doing. Fascinated, they watched the dolphins pace and race them, until the shuttle hydrofoil slowed and dropped more fully into the water, the dolphins disappeared, and the shuttle boat rendezvoused with the Libre de Drogas.
Stepping from the shuttle onto a floating platform, then into a wire-cage elevator that ran up the side of the Libre, Lydia and her mother eventually made their way to a nurse-receptionist’s desk on the promenade deck. Checking an electronic “client locater” screen, the young male nurse was able to direct them to Todd Fabro’s location. Following the directions, they made their way unerringly to where Lydia’s pajama-clad brother, lounging in a deck chair and fiddling with the keyboard of a portable orchestra, was holding court for a small swarm of music- and even a couple of financial-press people.
“—but it got a lot of laughs in jail,” Todd said over the chuckles of the more eager media sycophants.
He fielded a question that Lydia, at the back of the small crowd, didn’t quite hear. Fame: Todd’s other addiction. Here he was again, the horse going down in the seep, surrounded by the flesh—or was it soul?—eaters. Yet he was obviously enjoying being consumed by them.
“No, not at all,” Todd said in answer to the unheard question. “In a lot of ways, people on the ‘inside’ are more real. More authentic. People on the ‘outside’ all seem fake—caricatures of themselves.”
What bullshit, Lydia thought. At just that moment Todd noticed them.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to end this interview, my good friends and pixel-stained wretches,” Todd said, “for I see my sister and mother have arrived to comfort me. Please, no pictures or interviews. They’re private people with good lawyers, so don’t even try.”
The media people said their goodbyes and tried to set up further interview dates, but Todd waved them off. When the members of the press were gone, Todd and Lydia’s mother bent to hug and kiss her son. Lydia stood somewhat aloof, arms crossed.
“Lot of attention for a dope dealer,” Lydia said. “That was the charge, wasn’t it?”
“Now, sister dear,” Todd said, still hugging their mother, “you know I’m not a dealer. Never have been. The jury agreed. First offense and all that. When I sell at all I just sell to my friends. Dealers are in it for big profits. I never was in it for profits—just a share of the product for my own use. A gentleman’s way to make being a junkie pay. One must have a sense of personal ethics.”
Lydia scowled but held her tongue.
“I just don’t understand what you ever saw in these drugs,” their mother said, frowning. “And needles—that I don’t understand at all.”
For once, Todd seemed to actually think before he answered.
“It’s not easy to explain, Mom,” he said. “There are really no words for it. Shooting up with supercaine was like stepping right into a blue sky out the door of a plane flying at three hundred miles per hour. Low-altitude, low-impact skydiving. Doing tauroin was like a total body orgasm. Left me feeling warm, sated, full—and absolutely disconnected from the ordinary world. Put the two together and it was like being a big happy rocket in slow-motion blastoff for deep space.”
Lydia shook her head.
“You still sound entirely too enamored of your vices,” she said. “Don’t they do any aversion therapy with you people?”
Todd laughed and played a quick run of notes on the keys of his portable orchestra.
“Old-style aversion therapy doesn’t work,” he said with a shrug. “Ibogara’s the big fixer-upper now. It’s supposed to allow you to deep-dive inside your head for a while. Then you develop your own aversions to addicted or habituated behaviors—at least that’s what the therapists say. They haven’t put me under Ibogara yet, but we’ll see. It just might work.”
Lydia walked to the ship’s rail. Looking at the Pacific Ocean several stories below them and surrounding them on all sides, she spoke to her brother without looking at him.
“You better hope it works,” she said. “You’re going to end up dead or human trash on the street if it doesn’t—despite all your money.”
When Todd spoke, Lydia could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Everyone ends up dead,” he said. “It takes a society and a lifetime to turn a newborn baby into ‘human trash’.”
“Don’t blame society!” Lydia said, making a sound of disgust.
“No—I don’t blame it, alone,” he said, walking to the rail and standing beside his sister. Their mother joined them, looking at the sea. A small group of dolphins played not far from the ship. “That’s why I included ‘lifetime.’ I’ve made a lifetime of choices, some good, some not so good. I accept responsibility for those. How about you, sis? You’ve always been so rational, so analytical. All you want is to understand the world. Problem is, the world keeps insisting that you live in it.”
Lydia stared into the sunlit surface of the sea watching the dark flashes of the dolphins some distance away.
“Doesn’t seem to me that you’ve come up with a better way than mine,” she said, sounding frustrated despite herself.
“I don’t claim to have,” Todd said. “I’ve made mistakes. Find me a beauty and I’ll act like a beast. I know. But there was this writer—Henry Besson, Beston, something like that. He said that both dolphins and humans are ‘prisoners of splendor and travail.’ Maybe there is no genuine splendor without travail.”
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” Lydia muttered grumpily. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. What a load—”
Todd pretended not to have heard her.
“I look at those dolphins out there in the ocean,” he continued, “and I remember this documentary I once saw, ab
out dolphins and porpoises in captivity. The director interviewed a spokesman for Sea World or Marine Land or something like that. The spokesman said the captive dolphins must be happy—they’re comfortable, they’re well-fed, they have offspring, they probably live longer lives than they would in the wild. And I wondered: Is that all there is to happiness? Being comfortable? Well-fed? Having kids? Living a long time?”
“That doesn’t sound so bad, you know,” their mother said.
“What about freedom?” Todd asked. “Maybe we’re too quick at learning how to love our prisons. Look at Jesus. He didn’t live a long time, or have kids. He probably wasn’t too comfortable or well-fed, either. But he dreamed the big dream. It’s your dreams that make you real.”
Lydia made a disgusted sound again.
“He accepted the pain of the world and was nailed by others to a cross,” she said forcefully. “He didn’t shoot himself up to escape the pain of the world. You’re not Him. He wasn’t a dolphin and neither are you. The comparison just doesn’t hold, Todd.”
Todd, Lydia, and their mother looked from one to the other. The thought seemed to occur to all of them simultaneously that this was going to be a very long afternoon if they continued in this vein. Todd shrugged and abruptly changed the subject, offering to give them a tour around the ship. With an inward sigh of relief, Lydia readily agreed, as did her mother.
Still, as they walked down the promenade deck, Todd banged a few notes on his keyboard and sang an irksome little ditty about dolphins and scientists that only seemed apropos of nothing.
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