By the Light of the Moon (9 page)

“Frankenstein?”

“We can’t keep calling him a lunatic doctor, psycho scientist, crazy son-of-a-bitch salesman. We need a name for him until we can find out his real name.”

“But Frankenstein…”

“What about it?”

Dylan grimaced. He took one hand off the steering wheel to make a gesture of equivocation. “It feels so…”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“Feels so what?”

“Melodramatic,” he decided.

“Everyone’s a critic,” she said impatiently. “And why’s this word
melodramatic
being flung at me all the time?”

“I never flung it before,” he objected, “and I wasn’t referring to you personally.”

“Not you. I didn’t say it was you. But it might as well have been you. You’re a man.”

“I don’t follow that at all.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re a man. With all your common sense, you can’t follow anything that isn’t as perfectly linear as a line of dominoes.”

“Do you have
issues
with men?” he asked, and the self-satisfied, back-at-you look on his face made her want to smack him.

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

Simultaneously and with equal relief, Jilly and Dylan said,
“Twenty-eight!”

In the backseat, all teeth tested and found secure, Shep put on his shoes, tied them, and then settled into silence.

The speedometer needle dropped, and gradually so did Jilly’s tension, although she figured she wouldn’t again achieve a state of serenity for another decade.

Cruising at seventy miles an hour, though he probably would have claimed that he was only doing sixty-eight, Dylan said, “I’m sorry.”

The apology surprised Jilly. “Sorry for what?”

“For my tone. My attitude. Things I said. I mean, normally you couldn’t
drag
me into an argument.”

“I didn’t drag you into anything.”

“No, no,” he quickly amended. “That’s not what I meant. You didn’t drag. You didn’t. I’m just saying normally I don’t get angry. I hold it in. I manage it. I convert it into creative energy. That’s part of my philosophy as an artist.”

She couldn’t repress her cynicism as skillfully as he claimed to manage his anger; she heard it in her voice, felt it twist her features and harden them as effectively as if thick plaster had been applied to her face to cast a life mask titled
Scorn.
“Artists don’t get angry, huh?”

“We just don’t have much negative energy left after all the raping and killing.”

She had to like him for that comeback. “Sorry. My excrement detector always goes off when people start talking about their philosophy.”

“You’re right, actually. It’s nothing so grand as a philosophy. I should have said it’s my modus operandi. I’m not one of those angry young artists who turns out paintings full of rage, angst, and bitter nihilism.”

“What
do
you paint?”

“The world as it is.”

“Yeah? And how’s the world look to you these days?”

“Exquisite. Beautiful. Deeply, strangely layered. Mysterious.” Word by word, as though this were an oft-repeated prayer from which he drew the comfort that only profound faith can provide, his voice softened both in tone and volume, and into his face came a radiant quality, after which Jilly was no longer able to see the cartoon bear that heretofore he had resembled. “Full of meaning that eludes complete understanding. Full of a truth that, if both felt and also logically deduced, calms the roughest sea with hope. More beauty than I have the talent or the time to capture on canvas.”

His simple eloquence stood so at odds with the man whom he had seemed to be that Jilly didn’t know what to say, though she realized she must not give voice to any of the many acerbic put-downs, laced with venomous sarcasm, that made her tongue tremble as that of any serpent might flutter in anticipation of a bared-fang strike. Those were easy replies, facile humor, both inadequate and inappropriate in the face of what seemed to be his sincerity. In fact, her usual self-confidence and her wiseass attitude drained from her, because the depth of thought and the modesty revealed by his answer unsettled her. To her surprise, a needle of inadequacy punctured her as she’d rarely been punctured before, leaving her feeling…empty. Her quick wit, always a juggernaut with sails full of wind, had morphed into a small skiff and had come aground in shallow water.

She didn’t like this feeling. He hadn’t meant to humble her, but here she was, reduced. Having been a choirgirl, having been churched more of her life than not, Jilly understood the theory that humility was a virtue and also a blessing that ensured a happier life than the lives of those who lived without it. On those occasions when the priest had raised this issue in his homily, however, she had tuned him out. To young Jilly, living with full humility, rather than with the absolute minimum of it that might win God’s approval, had seemed to be giving up on life before you started. Grown-up Jilly felt pretty much the same way. The world was full of people who were eager to diminish you, to shame you, to put you in your place and to keep you down. If you embraced humility too fully, you were doing the bastards’ work for them.

Gazing forward at the raveling or unraveling highway, whichever it might be, Dylan O’Conner appeared serene, as Jilly had not before seen him, as she had never expected to see him in these dire circumstances. Apparently the very thought of his art, contemplating the challenge of adequately celebrating the world’s beauty on a two-dimensional canvas, had the power to keep his dread at bay, at least for a short time.

She admired the apparent confidence with which he had embraced his calling, and she knew without asking that he’d never entertained a backup plan if he failed as an artist, not as she had fantasized about a fallback career as a best-selling novelist. She envied his evident certainty, but instead of being able to use that envy to stoke a little fire of healthy anger that might chase off the chill of inadequacy, she settled deeper into a cold bath of humility.

In her self-imposed silence, Jilly heard once more the faint silvery laughter of children, or heard only the memory of it; she could not be sure which. As ephemeral as a cool draft against her arms and throat and face, whether felt or imagined, feathery wings flicked, flicked, and trembled.

Closing her eyes, determined not to succumb to another mirage if one might be pending, she succeeded in deafening herself to the children’s laughter.

The wings withdrew, as well, but an even more disturbing and astonishing sensation overcame her: She grew intimately, acutely aware of every nerve pathway in her body, could feel—as heat, as a tingle of current—the exact location and the complex course of all twelve pairs of cranial nerves, all thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves. If she’d been an artist, she could have drawn an exquisitely accurate map of the thousands upon thousands of axons in her body, and could have rendered each axon to the precise number of neurons that comprised its filamentous length. She was aware of millions of electrical impulses carrying information along sensory fibers from far points of her body to her spinal cord and brain, and of an equally high traffic of impulses conveying instructions from the brain to muscles and organs and glands. Into her mind came the three-dimensional cartography of the central nervous system: the billions of interconnected nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, seen as points of light in numerous colors, alive in shimmering and vibrant function.

She became conscious of a universe within herself, galaxy after galaxy of scintillant neurons, and suddenly she felt as though she were spiraling into a cold vastness of stars, as though she were an astronaut who, on an extravehicular walk, had snapped the tether that linked her safely to her spacecraft. Eternity yawned before her, a great swallowing maw, and she drifted fast, faster, faster still, into this internal immensity, toward oblivion.

Her eyes snapped open. The unnatural self-awareness of neurons, axons, and nerve pathways faded as abruptly as it had seized her.

Now the only thing that felt peculiar was the point at which she had received the injection. An itch. A throbbing. Under the bunny Band-Aid.

Paralyzed by dread, she could not peel off the bandage. Shaken by shudders, she could only stare at the tiny spot of blood that had darkened the gauze from the underside.

When this paralytic fear began to subside, she looked up from the crook of her arm and saw a river of white doves flowing directly toward the Expedition. Silently they came out of the night, flying westward in these eastbound lanes, came by the hundreds, by the thousands, great winged multitudes, dividing into parallel currents that flowed around the flanks of the vehicle, forming a third current that swept across the hood, up and over the windshield, following the slipstream away into the night, as hushed as birds in a dream without sound.

Although these uncountable legions rushed toward the truck with all the blinding density of any blizzard, allowing not one glimpse of the highway ahead, Dylan neither spoke of them nor reduced his speed in respect of them. He gazed forward into these white onrushing shoals and seemed to see not one wing or gimlet eye.

Jilly knew this must be an apparition only she could perceive, a flood of doves where none existed. She fisted her hands in her lap and chewed on her lower lip, and while her pounding heart provided the drumming not furnished by the soundless wings of the birds, she prayed for these feathered phantoms to pass, even though she feared what might come after them.

Chapter Thirteen

P
HANTASM SOON GAVE WAY TO REALITY, AND THE
highway clarified out of the last seething shoals of doves gone now to boughs and belfries.

Gradually Jilly’s heart rate subsided from its frantic pace, but each slower beat seemed as hard struck as when her fear had been more tightly wound.

Moon behind them, wheel of stars turning overhead, they traveled in the hum of tires, in the whoosh-and-swish of passing cars, in the grind-and-grumble of behemoth trucks for a mile or two before Dylan’s voice added melody to the rhythm: “What’s
your
modus operandi? As a comedian.”

Her mouth was dry, her tongue thick, but she sounded normal when she spoke. “My material, I guess you mean. Human stupidity. I make fun of it as best I can. Stupidity, envy, betrayal, faithlessness, greed, self-importance, lust, vanity, hatred, senseless violence…There’s never a shortage of targets for a comedian.” Listening to herself, she cringed at the difference between the inspirations he claimed for his art and those she acknowledged for her stage work. “But that’s how all comedians operate,” she elaborated, dismayed by this impulse to justify herself, yet unable to repress it. “Comedy is dirty work, but someone has to do it.”

“People need to laugh,” he said inanely, reaching for this trite bit of reassurance as though he sensed what she’d been thinking.

“I want to make them laugh till they cry,” Jilly said, and at once wondered where
that
had come from. “I want to make them feel…”

“Feel what?”

The word that she had almost spoken was so inappropriate, so out of phase with what everyone expected a comedian’s motivations to be, that she was confused and disturbed to hear it in the echo chamber of her mind.
Pain.
She’d almost said,
I want to make them feel pain.
She swallowed the word unspoken and grimaced as if it had a bitter taste.

“Jilly?”

The dark charm of self-examination abruptly had less appeal than the threat-filled night from which they’d both taken a brief holiday and to which she preferred to return. Frowning at the highway, she said, “We’re headed east.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Black Suburbans, explosions, gorillas in golf clothes,” he reminded her.

“But I was headed west before all this…all this excrement happened. I’ve got a three-night gig in Phoenix next week.”

In the backseat, Shepherd broke his silence: “Feces. Feculence. Defecation.”

“You can’t go to Phoenix now,” Dylan objected. “Not after all this, after your mirage—”

“Hey, end of the world or not, I need the money. Besides, you don’t book a date, then back out at the last minute. Not if you want to work again.”

“Movement. Stool. Droppings,” said Shep.

“Did you forget about your Cadillac?” Dylan asked.

“How could I forget? The bastards blew it up. My beautiful Coupe DeVille.” She sighed. “Wasn’t it beautiful?”

“A jewel,” he agreed.

“I loved those tastefully subdued tail fins.”

“Elegant.”

“Its howitzer-shell front bumper.”

“Very howitzery.”

“They put the name,
Coupe DeVille,
in gold script on the sides. That was such a sweet detail. Now it’s all blown up, burned, and stinking of one toasted Frankenstein. Who forgets such a thing?”

Shep said, “Manure. Ordure.”

Jilly asked, “What’s he doing now?”

“A while ago,” Dylan reminded her, “you told me I was crude. You suggested I find polite synonyms for a certain word that offended you. Shep accepted your challenge.”

“Crap. Coprolite.”

“But that was back before we left the motel,” she said.

“Shep’s sense of time isn’t like yours and mine. Past, present, and future aren’t easily differentiated for him, and sometimes he acts as if they’re all the same thing and happening simultaneously.”

“Poopoo,” said Shep. “Kaka.”

“My point about the Caddy,” Dylan continued, “is that when those thugs in polo shirts discover it doesn’t belong to Frankenstein, that it’s registered to one Jillian Jackson, then they’re going to come looking for you. They’ll want to know
how
he got your car, whether you gave it to him willingly.”

“I knew I should’ve gone to the cops. Should’ve filed a stolen-vehicle report like a good citizen would. Now I look suspicious.”

“Doodoo. Diaper dump.”

“If Frankenstein was right,” Dylan warned, “maybe the cops can’t protect you. Maybe these people can pull rank on the cops.”

“Then I guess we’d have to go to—who? The FBI?”

“Maybe you can’t escape these guys. Maybe they can pull rank on the FBI, too.”

“Who in God’s name are they—the Secret Service, the CIA, Santa Claus’s elf gestapo out making their who’s-been-naughty list?”

“Cow pie. Waste.”

“Frankenstein didn’t say who they were,” Dylan reported. “He just said if they find the stuff in our blood, we’ll be as dead as dinosaurs and buried where our bones won’t ever be found.”

“Yeah, maybe that’s what he said, but why should we believe him anyway? He was a mad scientist.”

“Evacuation. Voidance. Toilet treasure.”

“He wasn’t mad,” Dylan averred.

“You called him a lunatic.”

“And you called him a salesman. We’ve called him a lot of things in the heat of the moment—”

“Potty packing. Outhouse input. Excreta.”

“—but given his options,” Dylan continued, “considering that he
knew
those guys were on his tail and were going to kill him, he took the most logical, rational action available to him.”

Her mouth opened as wide as if she were assuming the cooperative position for a root canal.
“Logical? Rational?”
She reminded herself that she didn’t really know Mr. Dylan O’Conner. In the end, he might prove to be more peculiar than his brother. “Okay, let me get this straight. The smiley creep chloroforms me, shoots Dr. Jekyll juice or something into my veins, steals my fabulous car, gets himself blown up—and in your enlightened view, that behavior qualifies him to coach the university debating team?”

“Obviously, they’d pushed him into a corner, time was running out, and he did the only thing he
could
do to save his life’s work. I’m sure he didn’t intend to get himself blown up.”

“You’re as insane as he was,” Jilly decided.

“Dejecta. Bulldoody.”

“I’m not saying that what he did was
right,
” Dylan clarified. “Only that it was logical. If we operate under the assumption that he was just nuttier than a one-pound jar of Jif, we’re making a mistake that could get us killed. Think about it: If we die, he loses. So he wants us to stay alive, if only because we’re his…I don’t know…because we’re his living experiments or something. Consequently, I have to assume that everything he told me was meant to
help
us stay alive.”

“Filth. Dung. A withdrawal from the bowel bank.”

Immediately to the north and south of the interstate lay plains as black as ancient hearthstones stained by the char of ten thousand fires, with isolated mottlings as gray as ashes where moonlight and starlight glimmered off the reflective surfaces of desert vegetation and mica-flecked rock formations. Directly east, but also curving toward the highway with viselike relentlessness from the northeast and the southeast, the Peloncillo Mountains presented a barren and forbidding silhouette: hard, black, jagged slabs darker than the night sky into which they thrust.

This wasteland offered no comfort to the mind, no consolation to the heart, and except for the interstate, it provided no evidence that it existed on a populated planet. Even along these paved lanes, the lights of the oncoming and receding traffic made no conclusive argument for a living population. The scene possessed an eerie quality that suggested the science-fiction scenario of a world on which all species had perished centuries before, leaving their domain as morbidly still as a glass-encased diorama through which the only movement was the periodic bustle of perpetual-motion machines engaged in ancient programmed tasks that no longer held any meaning.

To Jilly, this bleak vastness began to look like the landscape of Hell with all the fires put out. “We’re not going to get out of this alive, are we?” she asked in a tone entirely rhetorical.

“What? Of course we will.”

“Of course?”
she said with a rich measure of disbelief. “No doubt at all?”

“Of course,” he insisted. “The worst is already behind us.”

“It’s not behind us.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“The worst is behind us,” he repeated stubbornly.

“How can you say the worst is behind us when we have no idea what’s coming next?”

“Creation is an act of will,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Before I create a painting, I conceive it in my mind. It exists from the instant it’s conceived, and all that’s needed to transform the conception into a tangible work of art are time and effort, paint and canvas.”

“Are we in the same conversation?” she wondered.

In the backseat, Shepherd sat in silence again, but now his brother spewed a prattle more disturbing than Shep’s. “Positive thinking. Mind over matter. If God created the heavens and the earth merely by
thinking
them into existence, the ultimate power in the universe is willpower.”

“Evidently not, or otherwise I’d have my own hit sitcom and be partying in my Malibu mansion right now.”

“Our creativity reflects divine creativity because we think new things into existence every day—new inventions, new architectures, new chemical compounds, new manufacturing processes, new works of art, new recipes for bread and pie and pot roast.”

“I’m not going to risk eternal damnation by claiming I make a pot roast as good as God’s. I’m sure His would be tastier.”

Ignoring her interruption, Dylan said, “We don’t have godlike power, so we aren’t able to transform our thought energy directly into matter—”

“God would whip up better side dishes than me, too, and I’m sure He’s a whiz at beautiful table settings.”

“—but
guided
by thought and reason,” Dylan continued patiently, “we can use other kinds of energy to transform existing matter into virtually anything we conceive. I mean, we spin thread to make cloth to sew into clothes. And we cut down trees to make lumber to build shelter. Our process of creation is a lot slower, clumsier, but it’s fundamentally just one step removed from God’s. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“If I ever do, I absolutely insist you have me committed.”

Gradually accelerating once more, he said, “Work with me here, okay? Can you make an effort?”

Jilly was irritated by his childlike earnestness and by his Pollyanna optimism in the shadow of the mortal danger that confronted them. Nevertheless, recalling how his eloquence had earlier humbled her, she felt a flush of warmth rise in her face, and for the moment she managed to put a lid on the sarcasm that a fire of frustration had set boiling. “Okay, all right, whatever. Go ahead.”

“Assume we were made in God’s image.”

“All right. Yeah? So?”

“Then it’s also reasonable to assume that although we aren’t able to create matter out of nothing and although we can’t change existing matter solely by the application of thought, nevertheless even our less than godlike willpower might be able to influence the shape of things to come.”

“The shape of things to come,” she repeated.

“That’s right.”

“The shape of things to come.”

“Exactly,” he confirmed, nodding happily, glancing away from the interstate to smile at her.

“The shape of things to come,” she repeated yet again, and then she realized that in her frustration and bewilderment, she sounded disturbingly like Shepherd. “What
things
?”

“Future events,” he explained. “If we’re in God’s image, then maybe we possess a small measure—a tiny but still useful fraction—of the divine power to shape things. Not matter, in our case, but
the future.
Maybe with the exercise of willpower, maybe we can shape our destiny, in part if not entirely.”

“What—I just imagine a future in which I’m a millionaire, then I’ll become one?”

“You still have to make the right decisions and work hard…but, yeah, I believe all of us can shape our futures if we apply enough willpower.”

Still suppressing her frustration, keeping her tone light, she said, “Then why aren’t you a famous billionaire artist?”

“I don’t want to be famous or rich.”

“Everyone wants to be famous and rich.”

“Not me. Life is complicated enough.”

“Money simplifies.”

“Money complicates,” he disagreed, “and fame. I just want to paint well, and to paint better every day.”

“So,” she said, as the lid flew off her boiling pot of sarcasm, “you’re gonna imagine yourself a future where you’re the next Vincent van Gogh, and just by wishing on a star, you’ll one day see your work hanging in museums.”

“I’m sure going to try, anyway. Vincent van Gogh—except I’m imagining a future in which I keep both ears.”

Dylan’s persistent good humor in the face of dire adversity had an effect on Jilly no less distressing than the damage that would be wrought with sandpaper vigorously applied to the tongue. “And to make you get real about our situation,
I’m
imagining a future where I have to kick your
cojones
into your esophagus.”

“You’re a very angry person, aren’t you?”

“I’m a
scared
person.”

“Scared right now, sure, but
always
angry.”

“Not always. Fred and I were having a lovely relaxed evening before all
this
started.”

“You must have some pretty heavy unresolved conflicts from your childhood.”

“Oh, wow, you get more impressive by the minute, don’t you? Now you’re licensed to provide psychoanalysis when you’re not painting circles around van Gogh.”

“Pump up your blood pressure any further,” Dylan warned, “and you’ll pop a carotid artery.”

Jilly strained a shriek of vexation through clenched teeth, because by swallowing it unexpressed, she might have imploded.