VACANCY & ARIEL

Depressing though this was, the knowledge steadied me. My position was that of a man adrift on the ocean who discovers that the shore toward which he’s been rowing is a mirage. What is there to do except keep rowing? I checked my watch. Two and half hours had passed since I’d left Ariel. Impatient to know her mind, to discover if I had lost her, I paid my bill and returned to our room. She was sitting on the end of the bed with her head down, the case open beside her, cylinders strewn across the blanket, and she was holding a gun. Not an ordinary gun. Made of dull red metal. No trigger guard and no apparent trigger. It had the look and size of a souped-up power drill. The grip was so large she had to use both hands. Lifting it and setting it down on the bed cost her considerable effort.

“You didn’t look underneath the cylinders,” she said when I asked about the gun. She patted the case. “False bottom.”

I dropped onto the bed beside her. “How’s it work?”

“You squeeze the grip to fire. I’m not strong enough anymore. I’m not sure you’re strong enough.”

I made to grab it and she stopped me.

“Don’t,” she said. “You could destroy the motel if it went off.”

“I want to see how heavy it is.”

“Don’t!”

I lay down, propped on an elbow, trying to see inside her head. “You okay?”

She gave a perfunctory nod. “Fine.”

“Real fine? Ordinary fine?”

A flash of exasperation crossed her face, but then she said, “Better than I was. At least I understand some things.”

“Did you try all the cylinders?” I asked.

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to?”

She worried her lower lip, as if contemplating an answer, but kept silent and after a long moment she put her hand on mine. I intertwined my fingers with hers. “Are we okay?” I asked.

“That’s not the easiest question to answer.”

She seemed to be vacillating between the poles of her personality, passing in an instant from sweet uncertainty to stoic, hard, unapproachable. I had a few hundred more questions, but decided to cut to the chase.

“You still love me?”

She lay beside me, pulled my head to her breast and whispered something. I tensed, thinking she had spoken the name of her old lover. Then she spoke again and there was the hint of an R in her pronunciation, just as occurred whenever she tried to say “ridge,” and I realized that she had spoken my given name, Richard—with her impediment, it came out, “Isha.”

DESPITE NOT HAVING used my Christian name since childhood, I should have figured out this part of the puzzle. The way Ariel seemed to recognize me in the woods near Durbin; our instant familiarity when we met in New York; the ease with which we became lovers; those and a thousand other cues should have made me aware that I was Isha’s analogue, his multiversal twin. I had been so immersed in Ariel’s problems, I’d neglected to consider my role in her story and failed to take to heart the hypothesis that coincidence was not the product of chance.

Instead of destroying us, as I’d feared, the knowledge that Ariel and I were two halves of an inevitability came to tighten the bond between us. I accepted that obsession was not an aberrance but the foundation of my character. Her questions about her past resolved, Ariel’s moods grew less volatile and she devoted herself to nurturing the relationship. Our lives continued to be ruled by caution, but if I had graphed the progress of the relationship during the holidays and the first months of the new year, the line would have made a steady ascent.

In March we were back in New York, she going the rounds of bookstores, doing signings, while I played third wheel or wandered about the city. On the last afternoon of our stay I was walking along Canal when a slim graying man carrying a briefcase, wearing jeans and an I Heart NY T-shirt beneath a windbreaker, stepped from the herd of pedestrians and accosted me, saying, “Dick Cyrus! Been a while, huh?”

He had a narrow, bony face that seemed naturally to accommodate a sardonic expression. His accent was Deep South, the edges planed off his drawl by, I imagined, years of urban exile. I assumed he was someone I’d met at a reading or a signing and I adopted a pleasant manner, greeted him and made my excuses.

He caught my arm. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Sorry,” I said, and pulled free.

“It was years ago. Ann Arbor. My name’s Siskin. Peter Siskin. I used to be Paul Capuano’s aide.”

I felt a surge of anxiety. “Oh, yeah. Sure.” I shook his hand. “How’s Capuano doing with his…y’know?”

“Paul’s moved on,” he said smoothly. “But I’m still in the same business. More or less. Can I buy you something to drink?” Siskin gestured at the restaurant we were standing beside. “Cuppa coffee, a soda? You tried those drinks they sell down here? Ones with the little balls of tapioca floating in ’em? Really refreshing!”

I hesitated.

“C’mon,” he said. “Something I’d like to talk to you about.”