The Moth’s Opinion of Up

The sign on the garden gate said MOTH NIGHT in green pencil and, underneath, BISCUITS PROVIDED in a different hand.

I had no particular business with moths. The biscuits made the evening feel more negotiable.

Beyond the gate, a white sheet hung between a lemon tree and a washing line. A lamp shone against it. Three folding chairs faced the sheet with the solemnity of a very small theatre. The audience consisted of an elderly man holding a clipboard, a girl arranging specimen pots and a woman on a stepladder trying to stop the sheet sagging in the middle.

“Peg,” the woman said.

I looked at the girl.

“She means the wooden thing beside your boot,” the girl said.

I handed it up. The woman clipped the sheet, climbed down and introduced herself as Leena. The clipboard belonged to Bernard, who had brought a thermos, two pencils and no spectacles. The girl was Sana, his granddaughter, who had brought the spectacles and was declining to surrender them until he admitted they were his.

“I can see perfectly well,” Bernard said.

“What’s on the sheet?”

He leaned forward. “A stain.”

“That’s a beetle.”

He put on the spectacles.

I removed my jacket and helped Leena shift the chairs back from the lamp. The evening was warm enough for my T-shirt. My pendant tapped against the chair frame as I lifted it.

“You’re not local,” Leena said.

“I’m locally present.”

“That’s what the last man said. He was selling roof insulation.”

Raven arrived through the gate carrying a paper bag. She had found the bakery before she found me, which was a sensible ordering of priorities. She looked from the illuminated sheet to my neatly arranged chairs.

“Have you joined a cult?”

“There are biscuits.”

“Then yes.”

We sat. At first the sheet displayed only the beetle, which marched towards the brightest patch and stopped as if disappointed by the décor. Then the air above the lawn began to move in small, soft collisions. A lacewing settled near a seam. Two tiny moths appeared, their wings folded like narrow tents. Sana photographed each visitor beside a ruler and entered the time.

“They use the moon to navigate,” I said, watching one circle the lamp. “Keeping it at a constant angle—”

“Maybe at long distance,” Sana said. “That isn’t the best explanation for this.”

I had delivered my sentence in the comfortable tone of a man unpacking a fact. She had replied without looking up from her camera.

“Go on.”

She turned the screen towards me. It showed three-dimensional flight tracks from a recent experiment: loops, stalls and sudden dives around artificial lights. High-speed field video and laboratory motion capture had found that insects often did not steer straight at a lamp. They rolled so the upper surface of the body faced the light. Beneath a natural night sky, the brightest hemisphere is usually above, so that response helps a flying insect hold itself upright. Put a bright lamp beside it and “up” becomes a disastrous local opinion.

“They can orbit it, climb until they stall, or flip over,” Sana said. “The light scrambles attitude control.”

“Not a moon compass.”

“Not at this range.”

I crossed the first explanation out in my notebook.

Bernard peered over. “Do you always write down being wrong?”

“Only when witnesses have spectacles.”

A larger moth struck the sheet, recovered and landed beside Leena’s shoulder. It was pale brown, with a dark line across each wing. Everyone leaned closer without touching it. Raven’s knee rested against mine. The moth trembled once, then became so still that its wing markings looked drawn on.

Leena read from a field guide while Sana compared photographs. They disagreed between two species. I suggested a third. Both rejected it. Bernard wrote “brown, handsome, unresolved” on the list.

“That describes most men before coffee,” Raven said.

“After coffee we become overconfident and unresolved.”

The moth lifted before anyone settled its identity. It made one circuit of the lamp, veered past the sheet and flew through the open kitchen door.

Leena swore and ran after it. The rest of us followed, creating considerably more danger to the crockery than the moth did.

It was circling the ceiling light above the table. Sana told us to switch it off. Bernard switched off the hall. I found the kitchen switch and accidentally started the extractor fan.

“Excellent,” Raven said in the dark. “Now it has weather.”

I turned the fan off. We closed the other internal doors, opened the garden door wide and left only the sheet lamp glowing outside. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then the moth passed low over my head, brushed Raven’s hair and vanished into the garden.

We went out more quietly than we had entered.

Leena moved the lamp farther from the house. Bernard amended the list to “brown, handsome, indoors briefly.” Sana removed “handsome” on methodological grounds. Raven ate the last chocolate biscuit while I was still considering it.

More insects arrived as the night deepened. We kept the porch and kitchen dark. Artificial light can interrupt nocturnal insects’ feeding, movement and breeding; turning off an unnecessary outdoor light is a small practical kindness, although the moths did not gather to acknowledge the policy.

Near eleven, Leena packed away the lamp. We shook the sheet gently and watched its remaining visitors leave. Sana emailed the photographs to herself from Bernard’s telephone because his version of saving them involved trusting the device indefinitely.

Raven and I carried the chairs into the shed. In the darkness outside, she hooked one finger behind my pendant and drew me close enough to kiss the corner of my mouth.

“Locally present?” she asked.

“For the foreseeable minute.”

Something landed on the back of my shirt. I felt six light feet and held very still.

Raven examined it over my shoulder. “Small. Grey. Unresolved.”

“Handsome?”

“Let’s not contaminate the record.”

She cupped her hand near the moth without touching it. It stepped onto her finger, opened its wings and went up into the dark—the proper dark this time, with the whole sky available to tell it which way was up.