VACANCY & ARIEL

I’m not sure if Ariel firmly believed that Isha would appear. The story, after all, had for her the reality of a dream and talking about it often made her uncomfortable. Though determined to uncover her past, at the same time she yearned to set it aside, to think of herself as an ordinary woman. The idea that she had once been a creature such as I described undermined the stability she had contrived. But I believed Isha would come for her and I became fanatical about our security. I had so many floodlights installed, I could turn night into day, and I went hunting with a tranquilizer rifle, potshotting and overdosing a number of small animals, starting up birds and dropping them from the air, until I felt confident I would be able to knock Isha down, however high he leaped. It was a thoroughly paranoid existence. We worked behind locked doors; I patrolled but otherwise rarely left Ariel alone; and I would drag her away from the cabin whenever possible. Still, it was a better life than I had ever had before. It seemed something had been out of balance, some delicate mechanism in my brain aligned out of true, and I had gone through life with a slight mental list, not quite attuned to the right frequency, a confused static impairing my progress. Everything was in balance now. Standing guard over Ariel satisfied a need that had lain dormant in me, and being with her was a deeper satisfaction yet. For all our pettinesses and tempers, we had our perfect days, our golden weeks, and when days were less than perfect, we took refuge in our work; but though we grew close as coins in a purse, there were moments when I watched her with a clinician’s eye, wondering what part of her was hidden from me, what eerie comprehensions lay beyond the perimeters of her memory, a black exotic garden flourishing in her skull, and wondered, too, if those elements of her personality that allowed her to love me were merely a thin surface of learned behaviors that one day might dissolve and so release a fierce stranger into the world. Studying too much on these matters occasionally made me suspect that I had lost touch with reality. When given voice, the scenario into which I had bought sounded preposterous. Then Ariel would come into the room and my doubts would evaporate and I would know that however absurd the constituencies of my belief, I was in the presence of my fate.

In October of the year, Ariel’s publisher called to let her know that they were sending her on tour in support of the second book. Though the start of the tour was months off, she brooded and grew distant. She said the thought of being away from the cabin depressed her, but the profundity of her depression persuaded me that some less discernable inner turmoil was its root cause. I doubt she completely understood it herself. When I asked what was wrong, she would fly into a rage—familiarity had taught me that this was her customary reaction to important questions for which she had no good answer. Left to my own devices, I tinkered with our security system, worked fitfully, and killed more small animals, including a toy poodle named Fidgets belonging to our nearest neighbors, an accident that encouraged me to break off my shooting spree. After burying Fidgets in the woods I returned to the cabin and began reading Ariel’s book. I had previously skimmed it in draft, searching for clues to her history, but since much of the novel involved a speculative future, not a merely dubious past, I found it less illuminating than her first. I did, however, come across one instructive passage that either I had missed or had been added after my initial reading.

Ariel’s strengths as a writer were pacing and plotting. Her handling of setting was a definite weakness, but early in the book there was a scene whose setting was remarkably well evoked and located, so much so that I wondered why her editor had let it stand, it was at such variance with the rest of the writing. In the scene Ah’raelle, her memory in tatters, is hurrying along through the West Virginia woods, carrying equipment she has brought from her vehicle, and because she can no longer recall what the equipment is or how to use it, wishing to lighten her burden, she buries it at the foot of an immense boulder close by the confluence of two streams. The boulder is covered with graffiti, heavily spray-painted, and overspread by an enormous tree, a water oak judging by the description; in among the roots of the tree are a number of ritual objects: candles, hand-sewn sachets, crude homemade dolls, and so forth. On reading this, I recalled the pack that the woman who leaped from the pit had carried. Could it be buried in the West Virginia hills? If I were to accept the chronology of the novel, if that timeline reflected reality, the burial had taken place more than a year after the crash and thus the pack was probably buried somewhere in the vicinity of Durbin.