VACANCY & ARIEL

She gave me a hard stare. I couldn’t decide if she was judging me or trying to figure me out. When she spoke there was no trace of the seductive in her voice, but rather a steely perfunctoriness. “We’ll have to see what develops, won’t we?” she said.

I WAS, AS I’ve stated, in love with the moment when I came up with the propositions that inspired Rahul, and I had been obsessed with the Willowy Woman. Therefore it did not come as a shock when I recognized that obsession had turned to love. In the space of three days my feelings for Ariel intensified dramatically, but even during the initial rush of desire and longing, I worried about her. If I were to accept that The Atonement was a record of her life before her arrival in West Virginia; if she had been hunting a deranged ex-lover across the multiverse and he was still hunting her; if the resemblance of her drawing to nineteenth-century newspaper sketches of Springheel Jack was not merely a coincidence; then I had to accept as well that she was in danger. The novel answered my old questions. Where had she been heading when the project scooped her up? What was her directive? I believed now that she was on her way to a rendezvous with the man she called Isha, perhaps intending to kill him, and that the original Springheel Jack had been another Isha. It was the differences between the drawings, the distinctions between the features, that most persuaded me of this. If the original Jack had launched himself from Universe A and wound up in nineteenth-century England on our earth (Earth X), then it was not difficult to imagine that other Jacks had set forth from other universes (the buckshot effect in action) and that one of them was due to end up on Earth X nearly two centuries later, and that this second Jack, because of his variant origins, would resemble but not be identical to his analogue. I assumed that Ah’raelle had been headed for California, to a point in a time when Isha was destined to appear. Now, her memory obliterated, driven by instinct, she had traveled to the rendezvous point and was waiting for him, incapable either of anticipating his advent or of defending herself.

Ariel’s character, too, helped convince me that the situation was as I perceived it. Though she was sweet, gentle, affectionate, there was in her a core of harsher attitudes. In an instant she could become sharply focused or impatient or demanding, and these moods seemed not casual expressions of her personality, but purely utilitarian, brought into play when she needed them. In her hotel room were dozens of notebooks filled with tiny, cramped printing. A new novel, I supposed. But she told me it was the outline for book two of her trilogy, which she had just completed—nearly every moment of the narrative laid out with scrupulous precision. The woman was unnaturally organized. I began to think that her sweetness might be a product of this world, an overlay that masked the strict behaviors she had learned in another. She approached being in love—and she obviously was coming to love me—with a pragmatic single-mindedness, as if it were a discipline to be mastered. Nothing that impeded this mastery was gladly tolerated. A case in point: on our fourth evening together we were on her bed, partially clothed, when I realized I could not go forward until I told her everything. Though worried she might react badly, I was more concerned about what might happen if I withheld the information—the fate of Isha in her book stood as a cautionary parable. When I said I needed to talk to her before things went further, she grew angry.

“Isn’t this what you want?” she asked. “You can leave if you’re having second thoughts.”

“Of course it’s what I want. But…”

“You don’t have some sort of disease, do you? If not, I don’t understand what could be so important.”

“I saw you once before you came to Moundsville.”

She was a silent for a beat, then said, “That can wait.”

“No, I need to tell you about it now.”

“I’m telling you it’s not important!”

“I want you to trust me. I have your novel as evidence of what trust means to you in a relationship.”

“What’s my novel have to do with anything?”

“If you’ll listen I’ll explain.”

She disengaged from me, sat up cross-legged, but did not rebutton her blouse. “Go ahead.”

“It may be difficult for you to hear this. I…”

“Just tell me! It’s not necessary to qualify what you say.”

And so I told her. Everything. From my stoner moment at Cal Tech to our meeting in the hills outside of Durbin to my latest thoughts concerning Springheel Jack and my hypothesis that she might soon be receiving a visitor who resembled him. She neither moved nor commented while I spoke. Once I had finished she asked why I hadn’t told her previously.

“I wasn’t sure you’d believe me. I didn’t want to trip you out.” A few seconds ran off the clock and I asked, “Do you believe me?”

“I believe you believe it.”

“But I might be crazy, huh?”