VACANCY & ARIEL

Baffled, I fumbled in my jacket pocket. “Who’re you gonna call?”

“Just give it to me!”

She held the phone so I could see her punch the buttons and dialed the number written on the card, omitting the area code. “Two,” she said. “That’s A. Five. That’s K. Four. That’s H. Four again. That’s I. Do you see it? Eight. That’s T. Two. Another A. Four. I.”

I had spelled the word out before she finished.

Akhitai.

“Maybe it’s just…” I let the sentence trail off.

“What? A coincidence?” She snatched the card from me and pointed at the tiny symbol printed in the corner. “What did you think this was?”

“The ‘at’ sign,” I told her. “Maybe I wasn’t thinking at all. I…Jesus! I couldn’t…You were so happy, I didn’t want to alarm you.”

“Well, I’m alarmed, okay? I’m extremely alarmed.” She crumpled the card and tossed it. “I don’t believe you. No one could be that stupid.” She put her hands to her head and said, “God! It’s always the same…” She fell back a step and glared at me bitterly. “You asshole!”

“Ariel…” I reached out to her and she swung the cell phone, striking me hard on my temple. I stumbled sideways a step or two.

“Keep away from me!” She shouted this with such force, it bent her nearly double, then threw the phone at me, hitting me in the chest. “Go away! Get out of here! Go!”

I tried to explain myself again, but she wouldn’t hear me. She ran into the cabin, slammed the door. I heard the bolt slide shut. Dazed, I went to the door and called to her, but she refused to answer. I began to explain what had happened with Siskin. Loud music issued from behind the door, drowning me out. I pounded on the door, shouting her name. One of the windows was flung open; the barrel of our tranquilizer rifle protruded. She screamed at me, telling me to leave. I was so thoroughly stunned, unable to process what was going on, the rifle seemed like a joke. A bad one, but funny nonetheless. Why would she shoot? She knew she had nothing to fear from me. I moved toward the window, telling her to turn down the music so we could talk. The dart struck my right chest below my collarbone. I reeled backward, already feeling the effects. The dose each dart contained was designed to drop someone much bigger and stronger than myself, and as I staggered away from the cabin, trying for the car, I wondered if Ariel had killed me. My eyelids drooped. I felt nauseated and weak. I sank to my knees. There was a roaring in my ears that drowned out the music. A hot pressure on my skin. My field of vision shrank to a tunnel rimmed by fluttering black edges, a dwindling telescopic view, and I had a sense of slippage, as if I were sliding away inside myself, unable to grab hold of my thoughts, but trying to grab onto something. I remembered a phrase in an old blues song: “feeling funny in my mind…” For no reason I could fathom, it sparked a confidence that I would be all right and I lapsed into unconsciousness with a feeling of relief.

IT WAS DARK when I waked. The first thing I noticed was a beetle crawling across the carpet of pine needles beside me—it was moving away from my face, a circumstance for which I was grateful, because I was too weak to brush it aside. The next thing that impinged on my consciousness was a reedy yet resonant voice speaking in a sibilant language, calling out to Ariel, begging her to listen. This confused me on several levels. Though my understanding was imperfect, I didn’t understand how it was I understood it at all, nor did I know who was speaking. It was essentially repeating what I had been saying to Ariel, and I thought I might be having a disassociative reaction and that I was the one speaking. But as my head cleared I realized the voice was coming from behind me. I managed to turn onto my back. Though the beetle had been in relatively sharp focus, this larger view of the world took a moment to align. Trees, cabin, sky…they whirled a few spins, settling into a tremulous stability. I saw no one else in the vicinity. Then the voice called out again and a pale spindly figure stepped around the corner of the cabin.

At that distance, some thirty feet, I could not make out his face, but the extreme elongation of his limbs and his tight-fitting grayish-white suit—almost indistinguishable from the color of his skin—told me all I needed to know. The top of his head was level with the edge of the cabin roof. He paused by the door and hailed Ariel again. She answered in that same liquid, hissing language, telling him, as she had told me, to leave. And also, as with me, she called him “Isha.” He flung his left arm up in a gesture that, despite its inhumanly hinged articulation, I recognized as an emblem of frustration, and went pacing back and forth in front of the cabin, each stride carrying him almost a third of its width. Soon he broke off his pacing, returned to the door and after calling out to Ariel again, he kicked it in, an apparently minimal effort that blew it off its supports.