The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove(35)
Val came into the sunken living room carrying a tray with a bottle of wine and two glasses. She looked up at Gabe, who was standing at the edge of the stairs as if ready to wade into molten lava.
“Well, come on in and have a seat,” Val said.
Gabe took a tentative step. “Nice place,” he said.
“Thanks, I still have a lot to do on it. I suppose I should just hire a decorator and have done with it, but I like finding pieces myself.”
“Right,” Gabe said, taking another step. You could play handball in this room if you didn’t mind destroying a lot of antiques.
“It’s a cabernet from Wild Horse Vineyard over the hill. I hope you like it.” Val poured the wine into stemmed bubble glasses. She took hers and sat down on the velvet couch, then raised her eyebrows as if to say, “Well?”
Gabe joined her at the other end of the couch, then took a tentative sip of the wine. “It’s nice.”
“For a local cheapie,” Val said.
An awkward silence passed between them. Val made a show of tasting the wine again, then said, “You don’t really believe this stuff about a sea monster, do you, Gabe?”
Gabe was relieved. She wanted to talk about work. He’d been afraid that she would want to talk about something else—anything else—and he didn’t really know how. “Well, there are the tracks, which look very authentic, so if they are fake, whoever did them studied fossil tracks and replicated them perfectly. Then there’s the timing of the rat migration, plus Theo and your patient. Estelle, was it?”
Val set down her wine. “Gabe, I know you’re a scientist, and a discovery like this could make you rich and famous, but I just don’t believe there’s a dinosaur in town.”
“Rich and famous? I hadn’t thought about it. I guess there would be some recognition, wouldn’t there?”
“Look, Gabe, you deal in hard facts, but every day I deal with the delusions and constructions of people’s minds. They are just tracks on the ground, probably like that Bigfoot hoax in Washington a few years ago. Theo is a chronic drug user, and Estelle and her boyfriend Catfish are artist types. They all have overactive imaginations.”
Gabe was put off by her judgment of Theo and the others. He thought for a second, then said, “As a biologist, I have a theory about imagination. I think it’s pretty obvious that fear—fear of loud noises, fear of heights, the capacity to learn fear—is something that we’ve adapted over the years as a survival mechanism, and so is imagination. Everyone thinks that it was the big strong caveman who got the girl, and for the most part, that may have been true, but physical strength doesn’t explain how our species cre-ated civilization. I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at the edge of the firelight, who had the ability to imagine dangers, to look into the future in his imagination and see possibilities, and therefore sur-vived to pass his genes on to the next generation. When the big ape men ended up running off the cliff or getting killed while trying to beat a mas-todon into submission with a stick, the dreamer was standing back thinking, ‘Hey, that might work, but you need to run the mastodon off the cliff.’ And, then he’d mate with the women left over after the go-getters got killed.”
“So nerds rule,” Val said with a smile. “But if fear and imagination make you more highly evolved, then someone with paranoid delusions would be ruling the world.” Val was getting into the theory of it now. How strange to talk to a man who talked about ideas, not property and personal agendas. Val liked it. A lot.
Gabe said, “Well, we didn’t miss that by far with Hitler, did we? Evolution takes some missteps sometimes.
Big teeth worked pretty well for a while, then they got too big. Mastodons’ tusks got so large they would snap the animal’s neck. And you’ve probably noticed that there are no saber-toothed cats around anymore.“
“Okay, I’ll buy that imagination is an evolutionary leap. But what about depression?” Talking about mental conditions, she couldn’t help thinking about what she’d done to her patients. Her crimes circled in her mind, trying to get out. “Psychiatry is looking more and more at mental conditions from a physical point of view, so that fits. That’s why we’re treating depres-sion with drugs like Prozac. But what evolutionary purpose is there for depression?”
“I’ve been thinking about that since you mentioned it at dinner,” Gabe said. He drained his wineglass and moved closer to her on the couch, as if by being closer, she would share in his excitement. He was in his element now. “A lot of animals besides humans get depressed. Higher mammals like dolphins and whales can die from it, but even rats seem to get the Blues. I can’t figure out what purpose it serves. But in humans it might be like nearsightedness: civilization has protected a biological weakness that would have been weeded out by natural dangers or predators.”
“Predators? How?”
“I don’t know. Depression might slow the prey down, make it react less quickly to danger. Who knows?”
“So a predator might actually evolve that preyed on depressed animals?” Right and it’s me, Val thought. If I haven’t been preying on depressed people, what have I been doing? She suddenly felt ashamed of her home, of the pure materialism of it. Here was an incredibly bright man who was concerned with the pure pursuit of knowledge, and she had sold her integrity for some antiques and a Mercedes.
Gabe poured himself another glass of wine and sat back now, thinking as he spoke. “Interesting idea. I suppose there could be some sort of chemical or behavioral stimulus that would trigger preying on the depressed. Low serotonin levels tend to raise libido, right? At least temporarily?”
“Yes,” Val said. That’s why the entire town has turned into horndogs, she thought.
“Therefore,” Gabe continued, “you’d have more animals mating and passing on the depression gene. Nature tends to evolve mechanisms to remain in balance. A predator or a disease would naturally evolve to keep the depressed population down. Interesting, I’ve been feeling especially horny lately, I wonder if I’m depressed.” Gabe’s eyes snapped open wide and he looked at Val with the full-blown terror of what he had just said. He gulped his wine, then said, “I’m sorry, I…”
Val couldn’t stand it anymore. Gabe’s faux pas opened the gate, and she stepped through it. “Gabe, we have to talk.”
“I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
She grabbed his arm to stop him. “No, I have to tell you something.”
Gabe braced himself for the worst. He’d fallen out of the lofty world of theory into the awkward, gritty world of first dates, and she was going to drop the “Don’t get the wrong idea” bomb on him.
She gripped his arm and her nails dug into his bicep hard enough to make him wince.
She said, “A little over a month ago, I took almost a third of the people in Pine Cove off antidepressants.”
“Huh?” That wasn’t at all what he’d expected. “My God, why?”
“Because of Bess Leander’s suicide. Or what I thought was her suicide. I was just going through the motions in my practice. Writing prescriptions and collecting fees.” She explained about her arrangement with Winston Krauss and how the pharmacist had refused to put everyone back on the drugs. When she finished, to wait for his judgment, there were tears welling up in her eyes.
He put his arms around her tentatively, hoping it was the right thing to do. “Why tell me this?”
She melted against his chest. “Because I trust you and because I have to tell someone and because I need to figure out what to do. I don’t want to go to jail, Gabe. Maybe all my patients didn’t need to be on antidepressants, but a lot of them did.” She sobbed on his shoulder and he began to stroke her hair, then pushed up her chin and kissed her tears.
“It’ll be okay. It will.”
She looked up into his eyes, as if looking for a hint of disdain, then not finding it, she kissed him hard and pulled him on top of her on the couch.
A Higher Power
And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast?
— Revelation 13:4
Twenty-three
Steve
What horrors can a dragon dream? A creature who has, in his own way, ruled the planet for millions of years, a creature for whom the mingy man mammals have built temples, a creature who has known no predator but time—what could he possibly dream that would frighten him? Call it the knowing?
Under a stand of oak trees, sexually satisfied and with a bellyful of drug dealers, the dragon dreamed a vision of time past. The eternal now that he had always known suddenly had history. In the dream he saw himself as a larva, tucked into the protective pouch under his mother’s tongue until it was safe to venture out under her watchful eye. He saw the hunting and the mating, the forms he had learned to mimic as his mercurial DNA evolved not through generations, but through regeneration of cells. He saw the mates he had eaten, the three young he had borne as a female, the last killed by a warmblood who sang the Blues. He remembered the chan-ging, not so long ago, from female to male, and he remembered all of it in pictures, not in mere instinctual patterns and conditioned responses.