By the light of the moon

a fresh
pair of khaki pants, in a red-and-brown checkered shirt cut
Hawaiian style and worn over his belt, Jilly had found some
direction in their quest. She was primarily interested in several
articles regarding the possibility of microchip augmentation of
human memory.
    As Dylan settled onto the chair beside her, Jilly said, 'They
claim that eventually we'll be able to surgically install data
ports in our brains and then, anytime we want, plug in memory cards
to augment our knowledge.'
    'Memory cards.'
    'Like if you want to design your own house, you can plug in a
memory card – which is really a chip densely packed with data
– and instantly you'll know all the architecture and
engineering required to produce a set of buildable plans. I'm
talking everything from the aesthetic considerations to how you
calculate the load-bearing requirements of foundation footings,
even how you route plumbing and lay out an adequate
heating-and-cooling system.'
    Dylan looked dubious. 'That's what they say, huh?'
    'Yeah. If you want to know everything there possibly is to know
about French history and art when you take your first trip to
Paris, you'll just plug in a memory card. They say it's
inevitable.'
    'They who?'
    'A lot of big-brain techies, Silicon Valley research types out
there on the cutting edge.'
    'The same folks who brought us ten thousand bankrupt dot-com
companies?'
    'Those were mostly con men, power-mad nerds, and
sixteen-year-old entrepreneurs, not research types.'
    'I'm still not impressed. What do the brain surgeons say about
all this?'
    'Surprisingly, a lot of them also think eventually it'll be
possible.'
    'Supposing they haven't been smoking too much weed, what do they
mean by "eventually"?'
    'Some say thirty years, some say fifty.'
    'But how does any of this relate to us?' he wondered. 'Nobody
installed a data port in my skull yet. I just washed my hair, I
would have noticed.'
    'I don't know,' she admitted. 'But this feels like even if it
isn't the right track, if I just follow it a little farther, it'll
cross over the right one, and bring me to whatever area of research
Frankenstein was actually involved in.'
    He nodded. 'I don't know why, but I have the same feeling.'
    'Intuition.'
    'We're back to that.'
    Getting up from the desk, she said, 'You want to take over the
chase while I clean up my act?'
    'Nine minutes,' he said.
    'Not possible. My hair has some style to it.'
    * * *
    Risking scalp burn from a too-relentless application of her hair
dryer, Jilly returned to the motel bedroom, cleaned and fluffed, in
forty-five minutes. She had dressed in a banana-yellow,
short-sleeve, lightweight, stretchy-clingy knit sweater, white
jeans tailored to prove that the big-ass curse plaguing her family
had not yet resized her buttocks from cantaloupes to prize-winning
pumpkins, and white athletic shoes with yellow laces to match the
sweater.
    She felt pretty. She hadn't cared about being pretty in weeks,
even months, and she was surprised to care now, in the middle of an
ongoing catastrophe, with her life in ruins and perhaps worse
trials to come; yet she'd spent several minutes examining herself
in the bathroom mirror, making carefully calculated adjustments to
further prettify herself. She felt shameless, she felt shallow, she
felt silly, but she also felt fine .
    In his calming corner, Shepherd remained unaware that Jilly had
returned prettier than she'd left. He no longer waved. His arms
hung at his sides. He leaned forward, head bowed, the top of his
skull actually pressed into the corner, in full contact with the
striped wallpaper, as though to stand at any distance whatsoever
from this sheltering juncture would make him vulnerable to an
intolerably rich influx of sensory stimulation.
    She hoped for considerably more reaction from Dylan than from
Shepherd, but when he looked up from the laptop, he didn't
compliment her on her appearance, didn't even smile. 'I found the
bastard.'
    Jilly was so invested in the expectation of a compliment that
for a moment she couldn't compute the meaning of his words. 'What
bastard?'
    'The smiley, peanut-eating, needle-poking, car-stealing bastard, that's what bastard.'
    Dylan pointed, and Jilly looked at the laptop screen, where a
photograph showed their Dr. Frankenstein looking respectable and
far less like a lunatic than he had appeared the previous
night.

27
    Lincoln Merriweather Proctor was, in this case, a
name deceptive in every regard. Lincoln made you think of
Abe,