By the light of the moon

thing, maybe they could keep him from hurting
himself.'
    'He won't hurt himself.'
    'He just did,' she noted.
    'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'
    'That was a first and a fluke,' Dylan said with what sounded
more like hope than like conviction. 'It won't happen again.'
    'You never imagined it would happen the first time.'
    Although they were already exceeding the legal limit and though
traffic conditions were not conducive to even greater speed, Dylan
accelerated steadily.
    Jilly sensed that he was trying to outrun more than just the men
in the black Suburbans. 'No matter how fast you drive, Shep's still
in the backseat.'
    'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'
    Dylan said, 'The lunatic doctor gives you an injection, and an
hour later, or whatever, you experience an altered state
of—'
    'I said I want a time-out from that.'
    'And I don't want to talk about this ,' he declared
emphatically, 'about institutions, sanitariums, care homes, places
where people might as well be canned meat, where they're put on a
shelf and dusted from time to time.'
    'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'
    'All right,' Jilly relented. 'Sorry. I understand. It's really
none of my business anyway.'
    'That's right,' Dylan concurred. 'Shep isn't our business. He's my business.'
    'All right.'
    'Okay.'
    'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'
    'Twenty,' Jilly counted.
    Dylan said, 'But your altered state of consciousness is our business, not just yours, but yours and mine, because it's
related to the injection—'
    'We don't know that for sure.'
    Certain expressions took exaggerated form on his broad rubbery
face, as if he were in fact a cartoon bear who had stepped out of
an animated realm into the real world, had shaved his furry mug,
and had set himself the tricky task of passing for human. In this
instance, his disbelief pulled his features into a configuration
worthy of Sylvester the cat on those occasions when the scheming
feline had been tricked by Tweety bird into walking off the edge of
a cliff. 'Oh, but we do know that for sure.'
    '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