VACANCY & ARIEL

On returning to my motel I opened the file holder. Resting atop the pile within was a neatly folded dress. Not the same dress the Willowy Woman had worn on the night I saw her, but of the same quality. Torn and faded. A relic. I assumed it to be the one she had worn on her arrival in Moundsville. Beneath the dress was a wooden box containing a necklace of squirrel bones and slightly more than fourteen dollars in bills and change. Lying beneath the box was a photograph of three men—Ravinda among them—and two young women in orange robes. Only one of the women had hair. Long black hair falling to her waist.

Ariel.

The face was no longer so perfect in its symmetry, so uncomplicated in its beauty—it bore marks of usage, marks of character—but it was the same face I had seen in among the leaves of the water oak. I estimated her to be no more than five feet five—she was shorter than Ravinda, who was no giant. She was diminished, made human, but she retained her intensity. Standing with the others, she was an Arabian among Shetland ponies, a star with her supporting cast.

The photograph had been resting atop a pile of manila folders. Several contained drawings, mostly nature studies; but there were a few at variance with the rest, all renderings of a grotesque male face, extremely narrow and long, with a flattened nose similar to a baboon’s and striations on the cheeks like ritual scarifications. Though I had no evidence as to when each of these drawings had been done, I suspected that the most fully realized had been drawn early in her stay at the colony, and that she had gradually become less sure of her memory. I believed, you see, this might be a face from her life prior to the destruction of the project—I had not seen her face in Capuano’s video, but her head had been similar in shape to the one depicted in the drawings.

Three folders held samples of her writing. Some of it appeared to be notes for a story concerning…well, I wasn’t sure what it concerned, as the notes were not only incoherent and fragmentary, but written in a mixture of English and ideographs that an uninformed observer might have taken for a personal shorthand, but that I assumed were elements of an alien alphabet. From what I could determine the plot involved a man and a woman who had a rather tempestuous relationship that came to compromise their duties—what those duties entailed was unclear.

Despite having established that Ariel was the Willowy Woman, I was disappointed that the contents of the box had not revealed more. I sat up all that night reviewing the folders, hoping to discover some further hint as to her past or present, but to no avail. The following morning, drinking coffee in the Mountain Dew’s restaurant, I thought of a question I had not asked. The fourteen dollars and change bothered me. Ariel could not have had much money—fourteen dollars would have been significant to her. How could she have afforded to leave the Krishnas? I assumed that she had not returned to the wild, that her progress in this universe would continue to be upwardly mobile. Certainly she was brave enough to have set out with no money, but according to Ravinda she had left suddenly, motivated by no inciting incident, and didn’t this speak to the likelihood of a windfall?

As a private investigator I was a competent history professor. Had my instincts been more professionally acute, I might have taken certain actions that would have cut years off my search. But as it happened I felt myself at a dead end. The only clue to Ariel’s whereabouts was Shivananda’s assertion that she had gone to California and I could not be sure that she had been forthcoming with him. Even if she were there, what chance did I have of finding her among the millions of women in California? I had wasted five years in this pursuit and the realization that I might waste years more suddenly seemed irreconcilable with my need to have a life. Over the next few days, as I explored the logistics of moving to California, the allure of doing so began to dim. My best hope of finding Ariel had been to track her down before she left the state. Now she was gone, she might be anywhere. For more than a week I put my plans on hold and deliberated about my future. I had no family, no friends, nothing approaching a love life. All I had to build on was my publishing contract…but did I truly want to be a writer? I began fiddling with the second book and to my surprise, over the span of another week I wrote sixty pages. Without admitting to myself that I wasn’t going to move, I worked from early morning until dinnertime each day. Two months along in the process I decided to stay in West Virginia until the book was finished.