By the Light of the Moon

He stepped behind the chair, out of sight. Judging by the sounds he made, Doc was gathering up his mad- scientist gear, shrugging into his suit coat, getting ready to split.

So you're driving to an arts festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where in previous years you've sold enough paintings to pay expenses and to bank a profit, and you stop for the night at a clean and respectable motel, subsequent to which you purchase a bagged dinner of such high caloric content that it will knock you into sleep as effectively as an overdose of Nembutal, because all you want is to spend a quiet evening putting your brain cells at risk watching the usual idiotic TV programs in the company of your puzzle-working brother, and then spend a restful night disturbed by as little cheeseburger-induced flatulence as possible, but the modern world has fallen apart to such an extent that you wind up taped to a chair, gagged, injected with God knows what hideous disease, targeted by unknown assassins… And yet your friends wonder why you're becoming a young curmudgeon.

From behind Dylan, as though he were as telepathic as he was crazy, Doc said, 'You're not infected. Not in the sense you think. No bacteria, no virus. What I've given to you… it can't be passed along to other people. Son, I assure you, if I weren't such a coward, I'd inject myself.'

That qualified assurance didn't improve Dylan's mood.

'I'm ashamed to say cowardice is another of my character flaws. I'm a genius, certainly, but I'm not a fit role model for anyone.'

The man's self-justification through self-deprecation had lost what little fizz it might at first have possessed.

'As I explained, the stuff produces a different effect in each subject. If it doesn't obliterate your personality or totally disrupt your capacity for linear thinking, or reduce your IQ by sixty points, there's a chance it'll do something to greatly enhance your life.'

On further consideration, this guy didn't have the bedside manner of Dr. Frankenstein. He had the bedside manner of Dr. Satan.

'If it enhances your life, then I'll have paid some reparations for what I've done. Hell's got a bed waiting for me, sure enough, but a successful result here would compensate at least a little for the worst crimes I've committed.'

On the motel-room door, the security chain rattled and the dead-bolt lock scraped steel against steel as Doc disengaged them.

'My life's work depends on you. It now is you. So stay alive if you can.'

The door opened. The door closed.

With less violence than on arrival, the maniac had departed.

At the desk, Shep no longer waved. He worked the jigsaw puzzle with both hands. Like a blind man before a Braille book, he seemed to read each piece of pasteboard with his sensitive fingertips, never glancing at any scrap of the picture for longer than a second or two, occasionally not even bothering to use his eyes, and with uncanny speed, he either placed each fragment of the image in the rapidly infilling mosaic or discarded it as not yet being of use.

Foolishly hoping that recognition of the desperate danger would transmit by some miraculous psychic bond between brothers, Dylan tried to shout 'Shepherd.' The soggy gag filtered the cry, soaked up most of the sound, and let through only a stifled bleat that didn't resemble his brother's name. Nevertheless, he shouted again, and a third time, a fourth, a fifth, counting on repetition to gain the kid's attention.

When Shep was in a communicative mood – which was less often than the frequency of sunrise but not as rare as the periodic visitation of Halley's comet – he could be so hyperverbal that you felt as if you were being hosed down with words, and just listening to him could be exhausting. More reliably, Shep would pass most of any day without seeming to be aware of Dylan. Like today. Like here and now. In a puzzle-working passion, all but oblivious of the motel room, living instead in the shadow of the Shinto temple half formed on the desk before him, breathing the freshness of the blossoming cherry trees under a cornflower-blue Japanese sky, he was half a world removed in just ten feet, too far away to hear his brother or to see Dylan's red-faced frustration, his clenched neck muscles, his throbbing temples, his beseeching eyes.

They were here together, but each alone.

The pocketknife waited, point buried in the arm of the chair, posing as formidable a challenge as the magic sword Excalibur locked in its sheath of stone. Unfortunately, King Arthur was not likely to be resurrected and dispatched to Arizona to assist Dylan with this extraction.

Unknown stuff currently circulated through his body, and at any moment sixty points might drop off his IQ, and faceless killers were coming.

His travel clock was digital and therefore silent, but he could hear ticking nonetheless. A treacherous clock, from the sound of it: counting off the precious seconds in double time.

Accelerating the pace of resolution, Shep worked the jigsaw ambidextrously, keeping two pieces in play at all times. His right hand and his left swooped over and under each other, fluttered across the pile of loose pieces in the box, flew sparrow-quick to blue sky or cherry trees, or to unfinished corners of the temple roof, and back again to the box, as if in a frenzy of nest-building.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle,' Shep said.

Dylan groaned.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

If past experience was a reliable guide, Shep would repeat this bit of nonsense hundreds or even thousands of times, for at least the next half-hour and perhaps until he fell asleep nearer to dawn than to midnight.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

In less dangerous times – which fortunately included virtually all of his life to date, until he'd encountered the lunatic with the syringe – Dylan had occasionally endured these fits of repetition by playing a rhyming game with whatever concatenation of meaningless syllables currently obsessed his brother.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

I'd like to eat a noodle, Dylan thought.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

And not just one lonely noodle-

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

But the whole kit and caboodle.

Bound to a chair, full of stuff, sought by assassins: This was not the time for rhyme. This was a time for clear thinking. This was a time for an ingenious plan and effective action. The moment had come to seize the pocketknife somehow, some way, and to do amazing, wonderfully clever, knock-your-socks-off things with it.

'Doodle-deedle-doodle.'

Let's bake a noodle strudel.

4

In his inimitable green and silent way, Fred thanked Jillian for the plant food that she gave him and for the carefully measured drink with which she slaked his thirsty roots.

Secure in his handsome pot, the little guy spread his branches in the soft glow of the desk lamp. He brought a measure of grace to a motel room furnished in violently clashing colors that might have been interpreted as a furious interior designer's loud statement of rebellion against nature's harmonious palette. In the morning, she would move him into the bathroom while she showered; he reveled in the steam.

'I'm thinking of using a lot more of you in the act,' Jilly informed him. 'I've cooked up some new bits we can do together.'

During her performance, she usually brought Fred onstage for her final eight minutes, set him on a tall stool, and introduced him to the audience as her latest beau and as the only one she had ever dated who neither embarrassed her in public nor tried to make her feel inadequate about one aspect or another of her anatomy. Perching on a stool beside him, she discussed modern romance, and Fred made the perfect straight man. He gave new meaning to the term deadpan reaction, and the audience loved him.

'Don't worry,' Jilly said. 'I won't put you in goofy-looking pots or insult your dignity in any way.'