Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

“Not like you’re better than everyone else, just that you’re different in a good way, like it makes a difference that you’re on the planet? You ever feel that way?”

“I don’t know. No, not really.”

“I had that for a while. Even though they were cheesy B movies and even though I had to do some humiliating things to get into them, I felt special, Theo. Then it went away. Well, now I feel that way again. That’s why.”

“Why what?”

“You asked me why before. That’s why I’m going back to Steve.”

“Steve? You call him Steve?”

“He looked like a Steve,” Molly said. “I have to go. I’ll leave your guns in the bed of that red truck you stole. Don’t try to follow, okay?”

Theo nodded. “Molly, don’t let it kill anybody else. Promise me that.”

“Promise to leave us alone?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Okay. Take care of yourself.” She grabbed the assault rifle, kicked open the door, and stepped out.

Theo heard her go down the steps, pause, then come back up. She popped her head in the door. “I’m sorry you never felt special, Theo,” she said.

Theo forced a smile. “Thanks, Molly.”

Gabe stood in the foyer of Valerie Riordan’s home, looking at his hiking boots, then the white carpet, then his boots again. Val had gone into the kitchen to get some wine. Skinner was wandering around outside.

Gabe sat down on the marble floor, unlaced his boots, then slipped them off. He’d once been into a level-nine clean room at a biotech facility in San Jose, a place where the air was scrubbed and filtered down to the micron and you had to wear a plastic bunny suit with its own air umbilical to avoid contaminating the specimens. Strangely, he’d had a similar feeling to the one he was feeling now, which was: I am the harbinger of filth. Thank God Theo had made him shower and change before his date.

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 created 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 survived 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 mastodon 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 depression 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.