The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  In their second year, they dropped acid together. Most students of the mind do so at some point in their studies. It was fascinating to consider the frontiers of brain chemistry. And oh my, the universe they viewed. They believed they actually saw the colors and shapes of justice. Seeing that ideas could take on physical attributes moved both of them so deeply that they took a course in art history as a result.

  Moving on to trying heroin—they always called it that back in the beginning, not dope, not smack; they were PhD candidates at a prestigious university—was not so common among their peers. It was a dangerous drug. She and Michael knew that. But it never, not once, occurred to her that there was something she couldn’t do, that she would lose control. They experimented together twice. Making love while high was like swimming in the purest form of joy. Afterward, she experienced a quality of peace like none other.

  Michael never used again. For him, the experience had been clinical research. He knew any further use could be deadly. Of course Kalisha knew that, too, yet she sought out and used the drug a couple more times without him finding out. It was impossible to hide the needle marks for long.

  Kalisha used to be very angry at how quickly he jumped ship. He suggested she get help. He gave her the contacts for a couple of programs. Then he distanced himself from her in every imaginable way possible. He slammed the door shut hard.

  By the time she was busted, she’d already dropped out of the graduate program. You couldn’t exactly teach undergraduates, read hundreds of pages a week, and write a PhD thesis while high. She went to jail for two years. Of course any white girl in a PhD graduate program at the University of California would not have gone to prison, but her family in Chicago had no money to pay for lawyers, and anyway, she’d been too ashamed to ask them for help.

  Her doctoral advisor, Professor Vernadsky, did everything he could. He made phone calls. He hired a lawyer. He testified on her behalf in court. It’s possible that his involvement did more harm than good, given his eccentricity—and that was before the dementia—but Kalisha loved him for trying.

  Professor Vernadsky wrote to her the entire time she was in prison, every single week. He wrote about what he was reading and how his philosophical views were changing. He’d quote Aristotle, the bits about the first condition for the highest form of love being that a person loves himself; how without an egoistic basis, a person can’t extend sympathy and affection to others; how self-love is not about glorifying oneself or indulging pleasure; how it’s about reflecting on what is noble and virtuous; how the reflective life is the highest form of self-love—and also the first step toward loving others. Professor Vernadsky managed to convince Kalisha that prison afforded her a small glimmer of opportunity because there she could reflect to her heart’s content. His letters saved her life.

  When she got out, Kalisha came back to Berkeley because she didn’t know where else to go. Her grandmother had died, her father didn’t want her in Chicago embarrassing him with her felony, and her mother reluctantly supported him. Professor Vernadsky, a longtime friend of Trinity Church’s Pastor Riley, got her the job running the meals program. Living in the church hadn’t been part of the deal, but getting an apartment in Berkeley as a felon was next to impossible, never mind making rent on her salary.

  By then, Michael had earned his doctorate. She didn’t know if he even tried to get a teaching job. He worked in insurance now and made lots of money. He was married with three kids and lived on La Loma Street. Just a few miles away. She could walk there now.

  But even if he’d stayed after the earthquake—and he wouldn’t have, no one with means had stayed—he’d need all his resources for his family. It was a stupid idea to walk to his house.

  Kalisha sat reading in Pastor Riley’s office until early afternoon when it was time to join Ron in the kitchen. Four o’clock came and went. The tall white girl was a no-show, as Kalisha knew she would be. At four thirty, she opened the door for the clients and served out the trays herself.

  Someone always pounded on the door just after she locked up, and she never let them in. She knew some of the clients considered her hard-hearted, as if her strict adherence to rules were a sign of severe misanthropy. In truth, it was just the opposite. Keeping this program going kept her alive, kept lots of other people alive, too, and to do the job, she needed structure and boundaries. Maybe someone else could be looser, but she was the one running the meals program. Sometimes those rules and boundaries, that structure, felt like the only things holding her together.

  So why she cracked open the door a quarter past six tonight, she didn’t know. Maybe because she happened to be standing right there, next to the door, when the knocking occurred. Or maybe she sensed a significant presence. In fact, only Lily stood on the other side of the door, saliva frothing at the corners of her mouth and sweat running down her temples. Blood slathered her hands and a reddened cut messed up her left cheekbone.

  “Please let me in.”

  “Food’s already been put away.”

  “I didn’t come for dinner.”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “I tripped over a piece of rebar and fell onto another one. I’m so sorry I didn’t get here on time tonight. I—”

  “Excuse me?” A young dark-skinned man bounded up the cement stairs behind Lily.

  “Closed,” Kalisha told him. Then to Lily, “Listen, lady, I’m—”

  “Lily. My name is Lily.”

  “Excuse me!” the young man called out again.

  “We’re closed,” Kalisha told him.

  “I’m looking for Kalisha Wilkerson.”

  “For what?”

  “A delivery.”

  “A delivery of what?”

  “I’m only supposed to speak to Kalisha Wilkerson. You’re her, right?”

  Kalisha nodded.

  As the man handed her an envelope, a loud crash came from the community room, followed by shouting. Kalisha ran back inside as the two fighting men tumbled onto another folding table, knocking it down and scattering the diners. Plastic plates clattered to the floor. Four men helped Kalisha break up the fight and push the offenders out the door.

  Lily used the distraction to slip inside. She put on latex gloves, wetted down a mop, and began wiping blood off the floor. Kalisha pretended not to notice. She dropped into a chair next to Professor Vernadsky, who smiled at her through peanut butter cookie crumbs. He said, “Whoops,” presumably referring to the fight. When Lily finished mopping up the blood and rinsing out the mop, she sat down across from Kalisha and the professor.

  “I’m sorry I was so late,” Lily said.

  “Two hours late is not late, it’s a no-show.”

  “I went to my sister’s house, and she wasn’t there, and then I got completely lost on the way back down the hill.”

  Lily looked like she was in shock. She stumbled through her words and Kalisha guessed that the news wasn’t good. Plus, she was a bloody mess from the rebar fall. “You need some Band-Aids.”

  “Where do they take bodies?” she asked.

  Kalisha heard about newly confirmed deaths every single day. Survival meant not letting herself feel the emotional wreckage barreling through this room. Her job was to put food on the table. Keep people acting civilly. Occasionally dispense information.

  “They don’t. They bury them where they are.”

  Lily just stared, two vacant eyes.

  Kalisha reached into her back pocket and retrieved the envelope. She looked at it for a long time, wondering who in the world it could be from. She didn’t like mysteries. She tore open the seal. “Oh my god.”

  “What?” Professor Vernadsky asked.

  Michael. As if she’d summoned him with her thoughts. She passed the check to the professor.

  “Aristotle would be proud,” he said tapping a finger on the dollar amount.

&nb
sp; “A miracle,” Kalisha said, her heart uncomfortably full. He still loved the part of her he could. It was a miracle.

  “I doubt it,” said the professor. “Just one good man doing right.”

  10

  Rain fell all that night and continued to fall the next morning. Lily stood at the kitchen window of Joyce’s flat and looked out at the downpour beating the weedy soil. Everything hurt. The trek yesterday from Vicky’s house to the church had been hell. She’d staggered for what felt like hours from broken street to broken street, tears blinding her, as if the hilly neighborhoods were a maze designed to trap her in exhausted grief.

  This morning, the word gone migrained through her skull. She needed to get to the word body. That was her next task, what she had to find. But her mind was a thicket; she couldn’t see through the brambles.

  Lily found a black plastic garbage bag under the kitchen sink and punched three holes in it, one for her head and two for her arms. She left Joyce’s flat and slogged over to Kittredge Street where the public library was slated to reopen today. The crowd waiting for it was in high spirits. The wet survivors stomped their feet rhythmically, as if they were at a baseball game, and good-naturedly shouted for admittance. Street vendors spread cloths on the puddled sidewalk and laid out their wares, ignoring the sheeting rain and taking advantage of the gathered potential customers. One sold homegrown lettuces and zucchinis, another hand-dipped candles. One woman held a sign, the ink running, that claimed she could, for five dollars, find a missing person.

  “How?” Lily asked her.

  The woman tapped her temple and said, “Psychic.”

  Lily peeled off a five-dollar bill. She could just hear what Tom would say. But even in Nebraska, police departments used psychics. It wasn’t that crazy, was it? The woman told Lily to concentrate as hard as she could, to imagine her sister in full detail. Lily squeezed her eyes shut and conjured Vicky’s oblivious cheerfulness, deep intelligence, warm brown eyes, pelt of short, glossy hair, scattered presence.

  After a few moments, the psychic started laughing.

  “What? What are you laughing at?”

  “What a goof!”

  “Who?”

  “Vicky! She’s a real character, isn’t she?” The psychic spoke with her eyes closed, her chin tipped up, and a beatific expression on her face.

  “But where is she?”

  “At home!” the woman cried out, and then chuckled again.

  Lily felt an intense stab of anger. The woman preyed on grief-stricken survivors. She was worse than the marauders, in a way. At least the marauders acted out of animal honesty rather than calculated emotional exploitation.

  She was about to tell the woman that she was a fraud, a scam artist, a swindler, when a spiky-haired librarian opened the front door and shouted, “We’re open! Come on in!” A loud cheer went up and the crowd pushed into the library. Lily turned her back on the psychic and followed the stampeding library patrons in.

  The elegance of the library interior was disconcerting. The massive slabs of marble and the dark oak molding harkened back to a time when opulence and books went together. The building had fared well in the quake, although lots of books had been thrown from the shelves. They lay splayed open and piled, in total disarray all over the floors, but still seemed to hum with hopeful knowledge. Volunteers had salvaged generators from abandoned schools and homes and installed them in the library to run computers and charging stations. Librarians had posted signs announcing meeting locations: Volunteer Road Repair in the Children’s Room; Solar Panel Salvage and Installation in the Art & Music Room; Missing Persons Forum in the 600s, on the first floor. Librarians and volunteers shouted directions and library patrons clamored for help.

  The line for the computers already stretched dozens of people long, so Lily found the phone books. Sal Wieczorek lived on Sea Breeze Court. Lily consulted her map; the address was most of the way back up the ridge. Yesterday Professor Vernadsky had shown her a direct route that used paths and avoided the National Guard posts. He’d marked it on her map with a canary yellow highlighter he carried in his shirt pocket, as if always on the ready to markup hefty philosophical tracts.

  Clearly Vicky and Sal had been on pretty bad terms when the earthquake happened. But wouldn’t she have looked for Vicky anyway? Wouldn’t the earthquake have subverted her anger?

  Lily slumped into a chair and stared at a wall. She didn’t want to leave the warmth of the library. Anyway, she needed to call Tom and her phone was still dead.

  The librarian whose job it was to guard the phone-charging station handed Lily a numbered tag matching the one she taped to Lily’s phone. As Lily knelt down to plug her phone and charger into the last available outlet, a familiar voice said, “I want that phone. Give it here.”

  Lily stood and faced Annie. Binky hovered a few yards behind her, squirming uncomfortably at his friend’s aggressiveness.

  “Hi, Annie. How are you?”

  The fat girl reached out and touched the scar under Lily’s chin. “Someone try to slit your throat?” As she pulled her hand away, she left her middle finger extended.

  “Come to the church for dinner tonight,” Lily said.

  She wandered into the reading room where volunteers were picking up books and reshelving them. Lily joined the effort, smoothing out bent pages, reading call numbers, and brushing off covers before setting them in their places. The spiky-haired librarian placed a boom box on one of the long tables and popped in a CD. Patti Smith’s voice, like the soaring Art Deco windows, filled the room. Some volunteers danced the books to the shelves. Others read passages out loud, shouting to be heard over the music. It was pouring rain outside, but the library patrons were warm and drying out, happy to be working. Happy to be together. How Vicky would have loved these raucous strangers.

  The phone-charging librarian fetched her after a while, when her phone was fully charged, so that the outlet could be used by someone else. Lily thanked her and, since she still had two hours before she was due at the church, got in line for the computers. That way she could save the charge on her phone; but more, she liked standing in the line, talking to other information-seekers, immersed in the warm, lively mayhem of the library.

  First she wrote Vicky. It was macabre—and yet she couldn’t not do it. As if cyberspace were some in-between place where the dead could still receive messages. “I love you,” she wrote. “I hope you didn’t suffer. I miss you. You’re like a phantom limb: an intense presence and absence, simultaneously.”

  It did help, a little bit. Maybe that’s what prayer was like. Speaking into the mystical void.

  The fact of the matter was she had a friend, a real friend, nearby. She typed in Travis’s email address. Even after the sanctuary got wired, he’d continued writing to her on paper and by hand. They’d only very occasionally emailed each other. Travis said he was a tactile person, that he needed pen and ink and paper, a physical connection to his friends. He proudly resisted technology, which struck her as unusual for a scientist, but then he had lived and worked in the Congo for so long. The bonobos, after all, did not have email, and his job, in a way, was to channel our intimate ancestors.

  “I’m in Berkeley,” she wrote. “I came to find Vicky. I’ve learned that she didn’t survive the earthquake. I still need to find her—”

  How do you type that word when it’s your sister?

  “—body. I serve dinner at Trinity Church on Bancroft Way every evening. I get there by four and leave about seven. If you’re in Berkeley, please come by. I’d like to meet you in person! Your friend, Lily.”

  Tapping Send felt good. Urgently good. Her whole life Travis had been a private fable, a story attached to her by a filament of infrequent letters. Now she’d turned her entire life inside out. Her sister was gone, her husband hundreds of miles away, but Travis was right here. His message of hope pulsed neon. To think he wa
s an actual person. One she could actually meet.

  The church that evening smelled like wet dog, and the meals program clients weren’t as cheerful as the library patrons. As she came through the service line, Annie gave Lily the finger again, and Lily gave Annie two cartons of milk. The girl’s extended middle finger wilted and her hostile glare withered.

  Lily dug out spoonfuls of hash and clanked the metal spoon on the plastic trays to release the food, over and over again, letting the rhythm of the movement hold her. She didn’t need to tell any of the clients taking the trays that her sister was gone; everyone here hurt, too, had their own missing loved ones. Sharing that without having to talk about it, meeting other eyes soft with sadness, comforted Lily. At the end of her shift, Kalisha put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently, a thank you.

  By seven o’clock, the rain had stopped. Lily climbed the hill as a full moon rose over the ridge. The air was cold, tangy, urgent.

  Before the earthquake, Sea Breeze Court had been a short dead-end street. Now it was a dark hole. Sal Wieczorek’s entire street had washed away in a mudslide. Roofs and stucco and window frames were crumpled along the route of the slide. Reminders of daily life—a mangled stand-up lamp, a toilet, a sodden bed—were stuck like fossils in the hardened mud. Lily picked her way across the slick surface. When she fell, she slid ten yards before hitting the trunk of a downed eucalyptus, leaving most of her body covered with earthy red slime. She lay in the mud and listened for a moan, a squeak, a breath. For anything human.