By the Light of the Moon

'The little picture sounds as depressing as the big picture.'

'Not at all. We just have to find a place to hole up and think.'

The waitress brought Shepherd's dinner.

Dylan had ordered for his brother based on the kid's taste and on the ease with which this particular meal could be customized to conform to Shep's culinary requirements.

'From Shep's viewpoint,' Dylan said, 'shape is more important than flavor. He likes squares and rectangles, dislikes roundness.'

Two oval slices of meat loaf in gravy formed the centerpiece of this platter. Using Shep's knife and fork, Dylan trimmed the edges off each slice, forming rectangles. After setting the trimmings aside on Shep's bread plate, he cut each slice into bite-size squares.

When he first picked up the utensils, he'd felt a psychic buzz but again he'd been able to dial it below his threshold of awareness.

The steak fries featured beveled rather than blunt ends. Dylan quickly cut the points from each crisp piece of potato, forming them into simple rectangles.

'Shep'll eat the points,' he explained, stacking those small golden nibs beside the altered fries, 'but only if they're separate.'

Already cubed, the carrots posed no problem. He had to separate the peas, however, mash them, and form them into square forkfuls.

Dylan had ordered bread in place of a roll. Three sides of each slice were straight; the fourth was curved. He cut off the arcs of crust and put them with the meat-loaf trimmings.

'Fortunately, the butter isn't whipped or formed into a ball.' He stripped three foil-wrapped pats of butter and stood them on end beside the bread. 'Ready.'

Shepherd put aside the book as Dylan slid the plate in front of him. He accepted the utensils and ate his geometric meal with the blinkered attention he exhibited when reading Dickens.

'This happens every time he eats?' Jilly asked.

'This or something like it. Some foods have different rules.'

'What if you don't go through this rigmarole?'

'This isn't rigmarole to him. It's… bringing order to chaos. Shep likes things orderly.'

'But what if you just shove it in front of him the way it comes and say 'Eat'?'

'He won't touch it,' Dylan assured her.

'He will when he gets hungry enough.'

'Nope. Meal after meal, day after day, he'll turn away from it until he passes out from low blood sugar.'

Regarding him with what he chose to read as sympathy rather than pity, she said, 'You don't date much, do you?'

He answered with a shrug.

'I need another beer,' Jilly said as the waitress arrived with Dylan's dinner.

'I'm driving,' he said, declining a second round.

'Yeah, but the way you've been driving tonight, another beer could only help.'

Maybe she had a point, maybe she didn't, but he decided to live with uncharacteristic abandon. 'Two,' he told the waitress.

As Dylan began to eat chicken and waffles in anarchic disregard for the shape and size of each bite, Jilly said, 'So let's say we go north a couple hundred miles, find a place to hole up and think. What exactly do we think about – other than how totally screwed we are?'

'Don't be so negative all the time.'

She bristled better than a wire brush. 'I'm not negative.'

'You aren't exactly as cheerful as the Dalai Lama.'

'For your information, I was a nothing once, a wadded-up-thrown-away-Kleenex of a kid. Shy, shaky shy, rubbed so thin by life I half believed sunlight passed through me. Could've given timid lessons to a mouse.'

'Must've been a long time ago.'

'You wouldn't have bet a dollar against a million bucks I'd ever get up on a stage, or join a choir before that. But I had hope, great hope, had this dream of me as a something, a somebody, this positive dream of me as a performer, for God's sake, and I dragged myself up out of shaky-shy nothing until I started to live that dream.'

As she drained the last of the beer, she glared at Dylan over the upturned bottle.

He said, 'No argument – you've got good self-esteem. I never said different. It's not you that you're negative about. It's the rest of the world.'

She looked as if she might hit him with the empty bottle, but then she put it down, slid it aside, and surprised him: 'That's fair enough. It's a hard world. And most people are hard, too. If you call that negative thinking, I call it realism.'

'Lots of people are hard, but not most. Most are just scared or lonely, or lost. They don't know why they're here or what's the purpose, the reason, so they wind up half dead inside.'

'I suppose you know the purpose, the reason,' she said.

'You make me sound smug.'

'Don't mean to. Just curious what you think it is.'

'Everyone has to figure it out for himself,' he said, which was in truth how he felt. 'And you're one who will because you want to.'

'Now you sound smug.' She looked as if she might whack him with the bottle, after all.

Shepherd picked up one of the three pats of unwrapped butter and popped it in his mouth.

When Jilly grimaced, Dylan said, 'Shep likes bread and butter, but not in the same bite. You don't want to see him eat a mayonnaise-and-bologna sandwich.'

'We're doomed,' she said.

Dylan sighed, shook his head, said nothing.

'Get real, okay? They start shooting at us, what rules will Shep have about how we're allowed to dodge the bullets? Always dodge left, never right. You can weave but you can't duck – unless it's a day of the week that has the letter u in it, in which case you can duck, but you can't weave. How fast can he run while reading, and what happens when you try to take the book away from him?'

'It won't be that way,' Dylan said, but he knew she was right.

Jilly leaned toward him, her voice lowering, but gaining in intensity what it lost in volume: 'Why won't it? Listen, you've got to admit, even if it were just you and me in this mess together, we'd be on a greased slope in glass shoes. So then hang a hundred-sixty-pound, butter-munching millstone around our necks, and what chance do we have?'

'He's not a millstone,' Dylan said stubbornly.

To Shep, she said, 'Sweetie, no offense, but if we have any hope of getting through this, the three of us, we've got to face facts, speak the truth. We lie to ourselves, we're dead. Maybe you can't help being a millstone, but maybe you can, and if you can, then you've got to work with us.'

Dylan said, 'We've always been a great team, me and Shep.'

'Team? Some team. You two couldn't run a three-legged sack race without the sack ending up on somebody's head.'

'He ain't heavy-'

'Oh, don't say it,' she interrupted. 'Don't you dare say it, O'Conner. don't you dare, you hope-drunk lunatic, you power-of-positive-thinking nutball.'

'He ain't heavy, he's my-'

'-idiot-savant brother,' she finished for him.

Patiently, quietly, Dylan explained: 'No. An idiot savant is mentally defective with a low IQ, but with an exceptional talent in one special field, such as the ability to solve complex mathematical problems at lightning speed or to play any musical instrument upon first picking it up. Shep's got a high IQ, and he's exceptional in more ways than one. He's just… some kind of autistic.'

'We're doomed,' she repeated.