‘D-d-d-damn,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m not W-w-wonder Woman,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘For one thing, I don’t have big enough hooters for the job.’
He said, ‘Me neither.’
‘Oh, man, those knives.’
‘They were honking big knives,’ he agreed.
‘You with your baseball bat. What – were you out of your mind, O’Conner?’
‘Must’ve been out of my mind. You with your ant spray – that didn’t strike me as the epitome of rationality, Jackson.’
‘Worked, didn’t it?’
‘Nice shot.’
‘Thanks. Where we lived when I was a kid, I got lots of practice with roaches. They move faster than Miss Becky. You must’ve been good at baseball.’
‘Not bad for an effete artist. Listen, Jackson, it took guts to come upstairs after you knew about the knives.’
‘It took stupidity, is what it took. We could’ve been killed.’
‘We could’ve been,’ he acknowledged, ‘but we weren’t.’
‘But we could’ve been. No more of that run-jump-chase-fight crap. No more, O’Conner.’
‘I hope not,’ he said.
‘I mean it. I’m serious. I’m tellin’ you, no more.’
‘I don’t think that’s our choice to make.’
‘It’s sure my choice.’
‘I mean, I don’t think we control the situation.’
‘I always control my situation,’ she insisted.
‘Not this situation.’
‘You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scaring me, too,’ he said.
These admissions led to a contemplative silence.
The high moon, lustrous silver at its pinnacle, grew tarnished as it became a low moon in the west, and the romantic desert table it once brightened became a somber setting suitable for a last supper.
Brown bristling balls of tumbleweed trembled at the verge of the road, dead yet eager to roam, but the night breeze didn’t have enough power to send them traveling.
Moths traveled, however, small white ghost moths and larger gray specimens like scraps of soiled shroud cloth, eerily illumined by the headlights, swooping over and around the SUV but seldom striking the windshield.
In classic painting, butterflies were symbols of life, joy, and hope. Moths – of the same order as butterflies, Lepidoptera – were in all cases symbols of despair, deterioration, destruction, and death. Entomologists estimate the world is home to thirty thousand species of butterflies, and four times that many moths.
In part, a mothy mood gripped Dylan. He remained edgy, twitchy, as if the insulation on every nerve in his body were as eaten away as the fibers of a wool sweater infested with larvae. As he relived what had happened on Eucalyptus Avenue and as he wondered what might be coming next, spectral moths fluttered the length of his spine.
Yet anxiety didn’t own him entirely. Contemplation of their uncertain future flooded Dylan with a choking disquiet, but each time the disquiet ebbed, exhilaration flowed in to take its place, and a wild joy that nearly made him laugh out loud. He was simultaneously sobered by anxiety that threatened to become apprehension – and also intoxicated with the possibilities of this glorious new power that he understood only imperfectly.
This singular state of mind was so fresh to his experience that he wasn’t capable of crafting the words – or the images, for that matter – to explain it adequately to Jilly. Then he glanced away from the empty highway, from trembling tumbleweeds and kiting moths, and knew at once, by her expression, that her state of mind precisely matched his.
Not only weren’t they in Kansas anymore, Toto, they weren’t in predictable Oz, either, but adrift in a land where there were sure to be greater wonders than yellow-brick roads and emerald cities, more to fear than wicked witches and flying monkeys.
A moth snapped hard against the windshield, leaving a gray dusty substance on the glass, a little kiss of Death.
18
Earth’s magnetic pole might shift in a twink, as some scientists theorized it had done in the past, resulting in an entirely new angle of rotation, causing catastrophic changes in the surface of the planet. Current tropical zones could in an instant be plunged into an arctic freeze, leaving startled soft-body Miami retirees clawing for survival in 100-degree-below-zero cold, in blizzards so bitter that the snow came not in the form of flakes, but as spicules, needlelike crystals as hard as glass. Colossal tectonic pressures would cause continents to buckle, fracture, fold. Rising up in massive tides, oceans would slop over coastlines, crash across the Rockies and the Andes and the Alps alike. New inland oceans would form, new mountain ranges. Volcanoes would vomit forth great burning seas of Earth’s essence. With civilization gone and billions dead, small scattered bands of survivors would face the daunting task of forming tribes of hunters and gatherers.