It came in sometime after the lamp went off, which is exactly the kind of cowardice I would expect from something with no bones. I heard it before I saw it — that specific dry, papery tick against the lampshade, once, twice, then nothing, which is worse than the sound itself because it means the thing has decided to be strategic.
I was on the end of the bed at the time, in what I consider a fully justified rest position, and I want it on record that I did not panic. I simply became alert in the way that a very large and capable animal becomes alert when something small and erratic enters his territory uninvited. My ears did the work first. Then my whole body turned to face the lamp, which by then had gone quiet again, which meant it had landed somewhere and was regrouping.
I gave it a moment. I am not reckless. Then it moved — a fast, stupid zigzag across the ceiling, no plan to it at all, just noise translated into flight — and I was up.
The trouble with the ceiling is that I have made several serious attempts over the years to reach it and none of them have gone the way I pictured beforehand. This did not stop me. I got a running start off the foot of the bed, achieved what I felt was a genuinely impressive amount of air, and came down approximately eleven inches short of the wall, directly onto the little table where she keeps her water glass. The glass did not survive the landing. Neither, structurally speaking, did the table’s dignity, though it stayed upright, mostly, wobbling like it had feelings about the whole thing.
She sat up fast. I heard the specific gasp she makes when she thinks something has actually broken versus the gasp she makes when it’s just me being large in a small space at speed. This was the first kind. The lamp came on.
“Oliver,” she said, in the tone that means she already knows I am not going to explain myself in a way that helps.
I did not explain myself. I was busy. The moth, thrilled by the sudden light like it had been waiting for an audience, launched itself off the ceiling and did a slow, taunting loop near the curtain rod, and I understood immediately that this was no longer about water glasses. This was the actual confrontation.
I want to be clear that my body is built for power, not altitude. I have accepted this about myself. I carry a great deal of substance and I carry it proudly, and substance is not, generally speaking, aerodynamic. But there comes a moment in every campaign where a commander must use the tools available to him, and my tools that night were momentum and a willingness to knock things over.
I tried the dresser next. I got up onto it in one motion that felt majestic from the inside and probably looked, from the outside, like a large soft bag falling upward, and from there I had a much better angle on the curtain rod. She had by this point gotten out of bed, presumably to supervise, though I noticed she was laughing in the particular way she does when she’s trying not to, which I chose not to take personally.
The moth made a mistake. It came down low, near the lamp again, close enough that I could see it properly for the first time — small, gray-brown, wings going in that frantic blur — and it was, up close, a deeply unimpressive creature to have caused this much disruption. I swatted. I connected with nothing but air and the lampshade, which tipped, and she caught it before it hit the floor, which I would like acknowledged as a team effort even though she has since described it only as “catching the lamp Oliver knocked over.”
At this point she did the thing that always slightly wounds my pride, which is that she solved the actual problem herself. She got a glass from the kitchen — a fresh one, since mine was in pieces on the carpet — and a piece of paper, and within about forty seconds had the moth trapped against the window, and within about ten more had it out onto the sill and the window shut again behind it, into whatever dark business moths have out there that isn’t my house.
She turned around and I was sitting very upright on the dresser, doing my best impression of an animal who had orchestrated this outcome from the beginning.
“You’re welcome,” I believe I communicated, mostly through posture.
She swept up the glass — a small, quiet sound in the dark, tink, tink, into a little dustpan she found under the sink, which struck me as a surprisingly practical thing to have on hand — and righted the table, and got back into bed, and did not, notably, ask me to get down from the dresser, which I took as tacit approval of my continued high ground.
I stayed up there a while after the light went off again, just to be sure. There is always the possibility of a second one. Moths, in my limited but now firsthand experience, do not travel with the courtesy of announcing whether they’ve brought friends. She fell back asleep with one arm hanging off the side of the bed in that way that makes me nervous for reasons I can’t fully explain, and I watched the ceiling and the curtain rod and the dark rectangle of the window for longer than was probably necessary.
Eventually I came down. I did not go back to my spot at the foot of the bed, which felt too exposed after the night I’d had. I got in against her side instead, under her hanging arm, where I could feel her breathing and where, if anything else came in through some crack I don’t know about, it would have to go through me first.
In the morning there was a small chip in the water glass’s replacement, a slight list to the little table that I don’t think will ever fully correct itself, and no mention from her of moths at all, like it had been a completely ordinary night. I let that go. Some victories don’t need to be discussed. I know what I did. The house knows what I did. The moth, wherever it went, certainly knows.