‘We do not,’ she insisted.
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
Jilly continued: ‘And I don’t like the term altered state any more than I like hallucination. It makes me sound like a doper.’
‘I can’t believe we’re arguing over vocabulary.’
‘I’m not arguing. I’m just saying what I don’t like.’
‘If we’re going to talk about it, we have to call it something.’
‘Then let’s not talk about it,’ she suggested.
‘We have to talk about it. What the hell are we supposed to do – drive at random the rest of our lives, here and there and everywhere, keeping on the move, and not talking about it?’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘Speaking of driving,’ Jilly said, ‘you’re going way too fast.’
‘I am not.’
‘You’re doing over ninety.’
‘It only looks that way from your angle.’
‘Oh, yeah? What’s it look like from your angle?’
‘Eighty-eight,’ he admitted, and eased up on the accelerator. ‘Let’s call it a… mirage. That doesn’t imply mental instability, drug use, or religious hysteria.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘I was thinking maybe phantasm,’ Jilly said.
‘I can live with phantasm.’
‘But I think I like mirage better.’
‘Great! Fantastic! And we’re in the desert, so it fits.’
‘But it wasn’t actually a mirage.’
‘I know that,’ he hastened to assure her. ‘It was its own thing, special, unique, impossible to properly name. But if you were hit by this mirage because of the stuff in the damn needle—’ He interrupted himself, sensing her rising objection: ‘Oh, get real! Common sense tells us the two things must be related.’
‘Common sense is overrated.’
‘Not in the O’Conner family.’
‘I’m not a member of the O’Conner family.’
‘Which relieves us of the need to change our name.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
She didn’t want to argue with him, for she knew that they were in this together, but she couldn’t restrain herself: ‘So there’s not room in the O’Conner family for people like me, huh?’
‘There’s that “people like me” business again!’
‘Well, it seems to be an issue with you.’
‘It’s not an issue with me. It’s an issue with you. You’re way too sensitive or something, like a boil just waiting to burst.’
‘Lovely. Now I’m a bursting boil. You’ve sure got a talent for getting under people’s skin.’
‘Me? I’m the easiest guy in the world to get along with. I’ve never gotten under anyone’s skin in my life – until you.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘You’re doing over ninety again,’ she warned him.
‘Eighty-nine,’ he disagreed, and this time he didn’t ease up on the accelerator. ‘If you were hit by that mirage because of the stuff in the injection, then I’ll probably be hit with one, too.’
‘Which is another reason you shouldn’t be doing over ninety.’
‘Eighty-nine,’ he corrected, and reluctantly allowed the speed of the SUV to fall.
‘The crazy son-of-a-bitch salesman jacked the stuff into your arm first,’ Jilly said. ‘So if it always causes mirages, you should have had one before I did.’
‘For maybe the hundredth time – he wasn’t a salesman. He was some lunatic doctor, some psycho scientist or something. And come to think of it, he said the stuff in the needle does lots of different things to different people.’
‘Quite as it should be, m’lord.’
‘Different things? Like what?’
‘He didn’t say. Just different. He also said something like… the effect is always interesting, often astonishing, and sometimes positive.’
She shuddered with the memory of whirling birds and flickering votive candles. ‘That mirage wasn’t a positive effect. So what else did Dr. Frankenstein say?’
‘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.’