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.