Better Angels. Howard V. Hendrix

moved to California from the East Coast in the first place. He’d wanted to pursue his ambitions as a folk-punk musician and she had been his overweight and insecure “biggest fan.” Not long after their arrival, she and Tarik had survived and bonded more deeply together amid the devastation wrought by the Great Los Angeles Earthquake, the so-called Niner Quake.

      Both of them had seen the madness of bright-shining angels and UFOs at that time—and had been deeply relieved to learn that, the statements of UFO or angel believers notwithstanding, those sightings were most likely not supernatural but natural, side-effects of the earthquake’s sudden tectonic stress relief. The slippage of all those miles and depths of granite, with its embedded quartz, had piezoelectrically generated high-amplitude electromagnetic disturbances. The concomitant electromagnetic energy bursts had affected the interpretative cortex in the temporal lobes of hundreds of thousands of individuals—Lydia and Tarik among them—causing them to see lights and angels in the sky.

      Even that strange bonding had worn off eventually, however. Living through the Great Quake and its aftermath had changed her. Her own dormant ambitions had reawakened. Within weeks of the quake, she took up running. She lost forty pounds in six months. She kept running and kept the weight off. She enrolled in a joint graduate program in biochemistry and paleontology, working toward a doctoral specialization in paleogenetics. Her presentations and articles on her work with DNA samples, taken from the Harlan’s ground sloth remains at Rancho La Brea, had made a big splash at Page Museum conferences and in the online journals. Her future seemed assured.

      Tarik’s career, meanwhile, had gone absolutely nowhere. His folk-punk ethic made both the idea of working a day job and the idea of achieving financial success as a performer equally distasteful to him. The fact that Lydia’s own brother, Todd, was a success in the music industry only made things worse. To Tarik, Todd Fabro was “that pop sellout” and he bristled at any offer of help from that quarter. Tarik was determined to be an artiste endlessly perfecting his art for his art’s sake—while Lydia supported both of them.

      Once she’d finally decided that living with him was worse than being alone, Lydia made up her mind that they should dissolve their household and—over Tarik’s truculent and petulant objections—they had. Freed of Tarik, however, she found that she did not much like being alone. She didn’t like it at all.

      Temporarily homeless, Lydia found herself living on her friend Kathryn’s living room futon. Above and beyond that, her research was threatened. The recently elected “New Commonweal” majority in Congress, along with the NC governor in Sacramento, had begun to shut off funding for any further research at Rancho La Brea, on the grounds that the tar pits research was “Darwinian” and therefore inherently “anti-Biblical.”

      As far as Lydia could tell, the New Commonweal interpretation of the separation of church and state held that, if government moneys could not be used to promote religion, neither could they be used to attack religion. On coming to power, the new churchstaters slashed funding for any research they interpreted as supporting an evolutionary viewpoint. Lydia only hoped she could finish up the last of her doctoral research before the New Commonweal people took over the government altogether and prohibited outright any and all further research at the tar pits.

      In the midst of all this personal and political turmoil, she had met Marty, tall and muscular and handsome, as well as charmingly innocent and naive in ways Tarik had never been. Marty was Kathryn’s office mate in Comp Lit, which was how Lydia had met him. He was single, quite unattached, a big happy overgrown boy. She had gathered him to her with astonishing swiftness and ease, and he had served as an anodyne to her loneliness—at least for a time.

      Now, however, she sat hugging and rocking the big (and, at the moment, unhappy) young man in her arms on the edge of the bed, wondering how she could have stayed involved with him as long as she had. True, for a while he had been a good hedge against Tarik, who had kept showing up at odd times for odd reasons. Lydia had fantasized more than once that they would fight over her, but it had never happened. Now that Tarik had at last moved back east, it was less likely to occur than ever.

      Even as she attempted to soften the blow of her dumping him, Lydia knew that she did not need Marty any longer. He was in fact turning into something of a burden and embarassment. Tomorrow she was scheduled to move in with two of her fellow female doctoral candidates, so she would no longer need to be living with Marty in order to have a place to stay. Her soon-to-be-roommates, too, had already let Lydia know that in the mate-selection races they thought she could do much better for herself than her current boytoy.

      Now, with the recent slight thawing in attitudes from Washington and Sacramento, the tar pits and the Page Museum did not seem quite so likely to close down before she finished her doctoral research, either. Things had begun looking up for her. Gazing at the mirror opposite the bed, Lydia Fabro saw the gray that had already begun to shimmer in her dark curls, here, too soon after her thirtieth birthday. Time to start tinting and highlighting that right out, she thought. That would take care of that. She didn’t need to sleep with a young master’s candidate to boost her self-confidence any longer—and she’d be damned if she were going to support Marty through graduate school the way she’d already supported Tarik for years.

      One more night, she thought. Maybe a farewell fuck for the sake of friendship and old times, but come morning she’d be done and Marty would no longer be a shadow on her present—only a memory from a quickly receding past, a fantasy of secret recklessness for that foreseeable future in which she had begun to grow a bit bored with the stable and responsible Mister Right she fully believed she would eventually marry.

      Before Lydia had even finished comforting Marty, she was already living in that future, he was already in the past.