By the Light of the Moon

26

Shepherd returned from his private moonlit place to the realization that he still needed to shower.

Although Jilly retreated to the bedroom, Dylan remained in the bathroom with his brother. He didn't intend to leave Shepherd alone anytime soon, not with this latest herethere complication to worry about.

As Shep pulled off his T-shirt, Dylan said, 'Kiddo, I want you to promise me something.'

Shucking off his jeans, Shep made no reply.

'I want you to promise me that you won't fold here to there, won't go anywhere again like that, unless you clear it with me.'

Shep skinned out of his briefs. 'Nine minutes.'

'Can you make me that promise, Shep?'

Sliding the shower curtain aside, Shep said, 'Nine minutes.'

'This is serious, buddy. None of this folding until we have a better understanding of what's happening to us, to all of us.'

Shep turned on the shower, gingerly slipped one hand in the spray, adjusted the controls, and tested the temperature again.

Often people made the mistake of assuming that Shepherd must be severely retarded and that he required far more assistance to take care of himself than was in fact the case. He could groom himself, dress himself, and deal successfully with many simple tasks of daily life other than food preparation. You should never ask Shep to make a flaming dessert or even to toast a Pop-Tart. You didn't want to hand him the keys to your Porsche. But he was intelligent, and perhaps even smarter than Dylan.

Unfortunately, in his case intelligence remained isolated from performance. He had come into this world with some bad wiring. He was like a Mercedes sports car with a powerful engine that had not been connected to the drive train; you could race that engine all day, and it would sound as pretty as any engine ever built, but you wouldn't go anywhere.

'Nine minutes,' Shep said.

Dylan handed the Minute Minder to him: a mechanical timer made for use in the kitchen. The round white face featured sixty black checks, a number at every fifth check.

Shep brought the device close to his face, scrutinizing it as though he had never seen it before, and carefully set the dial at nine minutes. He picked up a bar of Neutrogena, the only soap he would use in the shower, and he stepped into the tub, holding the Minute Minder by the dial to prevent the timer from engaging.

To avoid an attack of claustrophobia, Shep always showered with the curtain open.

Once he was under the spray, he stood the Minute Minder on the edge of the tub, releasing the dial. The ticking proved audible above the hiss and splash of water.

The timer always got wet. In a couple months, rust would have made it useless. Dylan bought the gadgets by the dozen.

Immediately Shep began to soap his left arm, directly applying the Neutrogena. Although he wouldn't look at the Minute Minder again, he would allot precisely the desired amount of time to each area of his body. Two or three seconds before the timer went off, he would anticipate it by loudly announcing Ding! with a note of satisfaction.

Perhaps he kept track of the elapsing time by counting the ticks of the Minute Minder – one per second. Or maybe after all these years of precisely timed baths, Shep had developed a reliable inner clock.

For the past decade, Dylan had been chronically aware of his own clock relentlessly counting off his life, but he had refused to think too much about time, about where he would be either in nine minutes or in six months, a year, two years. He would be painting the world, of course, traveling to art festivals, making a circuit of galleries across the West. And looking after Shep.

Now his inner watchworks ticked not faster but more insistently, and he couldn't stop contemplating the suddenly fluid nature of his future. He no longer knew where he might be tomorrow or in what situation he would find himself by sunset this very day, let alone where twelve months might take him. To one who'd lived a singularly predictable life for ten years, these new circumstances should have been frightening, and they were, scary as hell, but they were also undeniably exciting, almost exhilarating.

He was surprised that the prospect of novelty had so much appeal for him. He had long conceived himself to be a man of constancy, who respected tradition, who loved what was immemorial and did not share the interest in newness for the sake of newness that had made this society so rootless and so in love with flash.

Guilt brought a blush to his face as he remembered his tirade on the hilltop, when he had railed at Shepherd about 'maddening routine' and 'stupid repetition,' as though the poor kid had any choice to be other than what he was.

Being exhilarated by the possibility of revolutionary change in his life, while having no clue whether the coming changes would be for good or ill, at first struck him as reckless. Then in light of the recognition that those changes held more peril for Shepherd than for anyone, this excitement had to be judged worse than recklessness: It seemed selfish, shallow.

Face to face with himself in the mirror, he argued silently that his rush to embrace change, any change, was nothing more and nothing worse than a reflection of his eternal optimism. Even if it had been made aloud, that argument would not have resonated with the ring of truth. Dismayed by the man he saw, he turned away from the mirror, but even though he counseled himself to face this newly fluid future with more caution, even with alarm, his excitement had not been in the least diminished.

No one would ever accuse Holbrook, Arizona, of being a noisy hub of commerce. Except perhaps during the Old West Celebration in June, the Gathering of Eagles show of Native American art in July, and the Navajo County Fair in September, an armadillo could cross any local street or highway at a pace of its own choosing with little risk of death by motor vehicle.

Nevertheless, Jilly discovered that this two-star motel provided an in-room modem link separate from the phone line. In this regard, at least, they might as well have been holed up in the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills.

Ensconced at the small desk, she opened her laptop, jacked in, and cruised onto the Internet. She had begun to search for sites concerned with scientific research into enhanced brain function by the time that Shepherd, in the bathroom, cried out 'Ding!' and the Minute Minder rang off the final second of his nine-minute shower.

She ruled out sites related to improving mental acuity through vitamin therapy and diet. Frankenstein had not seemed to be the kind of guy who'd been devoted to natural foods and homeopathic medicine.

In addition, she had no interest in sites related to yoga and to other forms of meditation. Even the most brilliant scientist couldn't take the principles of a meditative discipline, liquify them, and inject them as though they were flu vaccine.

Showered, hair still damp, wearing a fresh pair of jeans and a clean Wile E. Coyote T-shirt, Shepherd returned from the bathroom.

Dylan followed him for a couple steps and said, 'Jilly, can you keep an eye on Shep? Be sure he doesn't… go anywhere.'

'Sure.'

Two additional straight-backed chairs faced each other across a small table near the window. She brought one of them to the desk, intending for Shep to sit beside her.

Instead, he ignored her invitation and went to a corner of the bedroom near the desk, where he stood with his back to the room.

'Shep, are you all right?'

He didn't reply. The wallpaper – beige, yellow, and pale-green stripes – had been sloppily joined where the walls met. Shepherd moved his head slowly up, slowly down, as though studying the error in the pattern match.

'Sweetie, is something wrong?'

Having twice surveyed the paperhanger's shoddy work from floor to ceiling, Shep stared straight ahead at the juncture of walls. His arms had hung slack at his sides. Now he raised his right arm as if he were swearing an oath: bent at the elbow, hand beside his face, palm flat and facing forward. After a moment, he began to wave as though he were not staring into a corner but through a window at someone he knew.

Dylan came out of the bathroom again, this time to get a change of clothes from his suitcase, and Jilly said, 'Who's he waving at?'

'He's not really waving,' Dylan explained. 'It's spasmodic, the equivalent of a facial tic. He can sometimes do it for hours.'

On further consideration, Jilly realized that Shepherd's wrist had gone limp and that his hand actually flopped loosely, not in the calculated wave of a good-bye or a greeting.

'Does he think he's done something wrong?' she asked.

'Wrong? Oh, because he's standing in the corner? No. He's just feeling overwhelmed at the moment. Too much input recently. He can't cope with all of it.'

'Who can?'

'By facing into a corner,' Dylan said, 'he's limiting sensory input. Reducing his world to that narrow space. It helps to calm him. He feels safer.'

'Maybe I need a corner of my own,' Jilly said.

'Just keep an eye on him. He knows I don't want him to… go anywhere. He's a good kid. Most of the time he does what he should. But I'm just afraid that this folding thing… maybe he won't be able to control it any more than he can control that hand right now.'

Shep waved at the wall, waved, waved.

Adjusting the position of her laptop, turning her chair at an angle to the desk in order to keep Shep in view while she worked, Jilly said to Dylan, 'You can count on me.'

'Yeah. I know I can.'

A tenderness in his voice compelled her attention.

His forthright stare had the same quality of assessment and speculation that had characterized the surreptitious glances with which he had studied her after they had refueled at that service station in Globe, the previous night.

When Dylan smiled, Jilly realized that she had been smiling first, that his smile was in answer to hers.

'You can count on me,' Shep said.

They looked at the kid. He still faced the corner, still waved.

'We know we can count on you, buddy,' Dylan told his brother. 'You never let me down. So you stay here, okay? Only here, no there. No folding.'

For the time being, Shep had said all that he had to say.

'I better get showered,' Dylan said.

'Nine minutes,' Jilly reminded him.

Smiling again, he returned to the bathroom with a change of clothes.

With Shepherd always in her peripheral vision, glancing up at him more directly from time to time, Jilly traveled the Net in search of sites related to the enhancement of brain function, mental acuity, memory… anything that might lead her to Frankenstein.

By the time that Dylan returned, shaved and showered, in a fresh pair of khaki pants, in a red-and-brown checkered shirt cut Hawaiian style and worn over his belt, Jilly had found some direction in their quest. She was primarily interested in several articles regarding the possibility of microchip augmentation of human memory.

As Dylan settled onto the chair beside her, Jilly said, 'They claim that eventually we'll be able to surgically install data ports in our brains and then, anytime we want, plug in memory cards to augment our knowledge.'

'Memory cards.'

'Like if you want to design your own house, you can plug in a memory card – which is really a chip densely packed with data – and instantly you'll know all the architecture and engineering required to produce a set of buildable plans. I'm talking everything from the aesthetic considerations to how you calculate the load-bearing requirements of foundation footings, even how you route plumbing and lay out an adequate heating-and-cooling system.'

Dylan looked dubious. 'That's what they say, huh?'

'Yeah. If you want to know everything there possibly is to know about French history and art when you take your first trip to Paris, you'll just plug in a memory card. They say it's inevitable.'

'They who?'

'A lot of big-brain techies, Silicon Valley research types out there on the cutting edge.'

'The same folks who brought us ten thousand bankrupt dot-com companies?'

'Those were mostly con men, power-mad nerds, and sixteen-year-old entrepreneurs, not research types.'

'I'm still not impressed. What do the brain surgeons say about all this?'

'Surprisingly, a lot of them also think eventually it'll be possible.'

'Supposing they haven't been smoking too much weed, what do they mean by "eventually"?'

'Some say thirty years, some say fifty.'

'But how does any of this relate to us?' he wondered. 'Nobody installed a data port in my skull yet. I just washed my hair, I would have noticed.'

'I don't know,' she admitted. 'But this feels like even if it isn't the right track, if I just follow it a little farther, it'll cross over the right one, and bring me to whatever area of research Frankenstein was actually involved in.'

He nodded. 'I don't know why, but I have the same feeling.'

'Intuition.'

'We're back to that.'

Getting up from the desk, she said, 'You want to take over the chase while I clean up my act?'

'Nine minutes,' he said.

'Not possible. My hair has some style to it.'

Risking scalp burn from a too-relentless application of her hair dryer, Jilly returned to the motel bedroom, cleaned and fluffed, in forty-five minutes. She had dressed in a banana-yellow, short-sleeve, lightweight, stretchy-clingy knit sweater, white jeans tailored to prove that the big-ass curse plaguing her family had not yet resized her buttocks from cantaloupes to prize-winning pumpkins, and white athletic shoes with yellow laces to match the sweater.

She felt pretty. She hadn't cared about being pretty in weeks, even months, and she was surprised to care now, in the middle of an ongoing catastrophe, with her life in ruins and perhaps worse trials to come; yet she'd spent several minutes examining herself in the bathroom mirror, making carefully calculated adjustments to further prettify herself. She felt shameless, she felt shallow, she felt silly, but she also felt fine.

In his calming corner, Shepherd remained unaware that Jilly had returned prettier than she'd left. He no longer waved. His arms hung at his sides. He leaned forward, head bowed, the top of his skull actually pressed into the corner, in full contact with the striped wallpaper, as though to stand at any distance whatsoever from this sheltering juncture would make him vulnerable to an intolerably rich influx of sensory stimulation.

She hoped for considerably more reaction from Dylan than from Shepherd, but when he looked up from the laptop, he didn't compliment her on her appearance, didn't even smile. 'I found the bastard.'

Jilly was so invested in the expectation of a compliment that for a moment she couldn't compute the meaning of his words. 'What bastard?'

'The smiley, peanut-eating, needle-poking, car-stealing bastard, that's what bastard.'

Dylan pointed, and Jilly looked at the laptop screen, where a photograph showed their Dr. Frankenstein looking respectable and far less like a lunatic than he had appeared the previous night.