By the light of the moon

should I focus on? The little picture?'
    'Exactly.'
    She drank some beer. 'And what is the little picture?'
    'Getting through the night alive.'
    'The little picture sounds as depressing as the big
picture.'
    'Not at all. We just have to find a place to hole up and think .'
    The waitress brought Shepherd's dinner.
    Dylan had ordered for his brother based on the kid's taste and
on the ease with which this particular meal could be customized to
conform to Shep's culinary requirements.
    'From Shep's viewpoint,' Dylan said, 'shape is more important
than flavor. He likes squares and rectangles, dislikes
roundness.'
    Two oval slices of meat loaf in gravy formed the centerpiece of
this platter. Using Shep's knife and fork, Dylan trimmed the edges
off each slice, forming rectangles. After setting the trimmings
aside on Shep's bread plate, he cut each slice into bite-size
squares.
    When he first picked up the utensils, he'd felt a psychic buzz
but again he'd been able to dial it below his threshold of
awareness.
    The steak fries featured beveled rather than blunt ends. Dylan
quickly cut the points from each crisp piece of potato, forming
them into simple rectangles.
    'Shep'll eat the points,' he explained, stacking those small
golden nibs beside the altered fries, 'but only if they're
separate.'
    Already cubed, the carrots posed no problem. He had to separate
the peas, however, mash them, and form them into square
forkfuls.
    Dylan had ordered bread in place of a roll. Three sides of each
slice were straight; the fourth was curved. He cut off the arcs of
crust and put them with the meat-loaf trimmings.
    'Fortunately, the butter isn't whipped or formed into a ball.'
He stripped three foil-wrapped pats of butter and stood them on end
beside the bread. 'Ready.'
    Shepherd put aside the book as Dylan slid the plate in front of
him. He accepted the utensils and ate his geometric meal with the
blinkered attention he exhibited when reading Dickens.
    'This happens every time he eats?' Jilly asked.
    'This or something like it. Some foods have different
rules.'
    'What if you don't go through this rigmarole?'
    'This isn't rigmarole to him. It's... bringing order to chaos.
Shep likes things orderly.'
    'But what if you just shove it in front of him the way it comes
and say "Eat"?'
    'He won't touch it,' Dylan assured her.
    'He will when he gets hungry enough.'
    'Nope. Meal after meal, day after day, he'll turn away from it
until he passes out from low blood sugar.'
    Regarding him with what he chose to read as sympathy rather than
pity, she said, 'You don't date much, do you?'
    He answered with a shrug.
    'I need another beer,' Jilly said as the waitress arrived with
Dylan's dinner.
    'I'm driving,' he said, declining a second round.
    'Yeah, but the way you've been driving tonight, another beer
could only help.'
    Maybe she had a point, maybe she didn't, but he decided to live
with uncharacteristic abandon. 'Two,' he told the waitress.
    As Dylan began to eat chicken and waffles in anarchic disregard
for the shape and size of each bite, Jilly said, 'So let's say we
go north a couple hundred miles, find a place to hole up and think.
What exactly do we think about – other than how totally
screwed we are?'
    'Don't be so negative all the time.'
    She bristled better than a wire brush. 'I'm not negative.'
    'You aren't exactly as cheerful as the Dalai Lama.'
    'For your information, I was a nothing once, a
wadded-up-thrown-away-Kleenex of a kid. Shy, shaky shy, rubbed so
thin by life I half believed sunlight passed through me. Could've
given timid lessons to a mouse.'
    'Must've been a long time ago.'
    'You wouldn't have bet a dollar against a million bucks I'd ever
get up on a stage, or join a choir before that. But I had hope,
great hope, had this dream of me as a something, a somebody, this positive dream of me as a performer, for God's sake, and I
dragged myself up out of shaky-shy nothing until I started to live
that dream.'
    As she drained the last of the beer, she glared at Dylan over
the upturned bottle.
    He said, 'No argument – you've got good self-esteem. I
never said different. It's not you that you're negative about. It's
the rest of the world.'
    She looked as if she might hit him with the empty bottle, but
then she put it down, slid it aside, and surprised him: 'That's
fair enough. It's a hard world. And most people are hard, too. If
you call that negative thinking, I call it realism.'
    'Lots of people are hard, but not most. Most are just