By the light of the moon

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.
    In the final hour of his program, Parish Lantern and call-ins
from his nationwide radio audience discussed the likelihood of a
pole-shift striking within the next fifty years. Because Dylan and
Jilly were for the moment still too busy digesting their recent
experiences to talk anymore about them, they listened to Lantern as
they drove north on this lonely desert highway, where it was
possible to believe simultaneously that civilization had already
vanished in a planetary cataclysm and that the earth was timeless,
unchanging.
    'You listen to this guy all the time?' he asked Jilly.
    'Not every night, but a lot.'
    'It's a miracle you're not suicidal.'
    'His show isn't usually about doom. Mostly it's time travel,
alternate realities, whether we have souls, life after
death....'
    In the backseat, Shep continued reading Dickens, granting the
novelist a form of life after death. On the radio, the planet
crushed