VACANCY & ARIEL

Only later did I consider that he might not have been asking for his life, but was making a more general statement, commenting upon our mutual futility or all futilities. The throbbing evolved into a hum and though there was no visible discharge, a fluid tremor passed through the metal and Isha, stretching out his hands, perhaps in entreaty, disintegrated. It was not an instantaneous event and bore some similarity to the process that had concentrated his vehicle into a speck, but was much quicker and less organized in its development. He flattened out against the backdrop of the cabin wall, curved inward as if an invisible ball had rolled into him, and then was ripped apart, a piecemeal dismembering, bits of flesh spraying, gouts of blood erupting, all borne backward against the wall, which itself began to disintegrate in the exact same fashion, blood and bone and wood and insulation blending into a flurry of pinkish dissolution. Horrified, I laid down the gun, but the process continued soundlessly for a grisly inch of time, devouring the living room, eroding the ground beneath it, carving a pit where what passed for our front yard had been, leaving me standing in the wreckage of my life, gazing out at darkness and the forest, less now by a few evergreens that also had been taken to wherever Isha had flown.

The storm of those last minutes in the cabin blotted out every feeling other than fear, but as I sat on the edge of the pit afterward, numb and unreasoning, Ariel came back to me in the shape of a fiery absence, and the obsession from which love had sprung returned to stalk my brain, picking up the trail it had forsaken months before. Even in hopelessness, in the depths of loss, I clung to the fact that she was alive, and before long, before the sky paled and an actual light shone down to disperse the glowing too-real phantoms I created of the dark, my guilts and errors given nightmare form…from that fact I constructed a scheme to win her once again. I did not believe in it at first. It seemed a desperate fantasy whose sole product was false confidence; but in my derelict state, false confidence was my best resource, my one alternative to collapse.

Toward eight o’clock a drizzle interrupted my mental struggle, driving me inside the ruin of the cabin. For ten or fifteen minutes I wandered about, touching Ariel’s things. A pen, a dress, a pill bottle, a lipstick. Touching them opened me to the exigencies of grief. I rejected grief, refused to let it own me, and turned to making lists, plotting strategies, testing theories against the newly acquired logics of my experience. And when I had exhausted this process, I went into the bedroom, opened Ariel’s case, removed a cylinder and began to complete my education.

IF ONE ADOPTS a Buddhist platform, and lately this has seemed to me a reasonable stance, it becomes evident that life is compounded of mistakes, errors of omission and commission, that every worldly goal leads one deeper into the entanglements of illusion. Perhaps this was what Isha meant when he said that what we did was all for nothing. As the event of his death receded and grew more subject to analysis, I came to believe that he had not wanted to kill me and was motivated by our natural affinity to confront me, and that I, in judging his actions, had made a mistake. Being aware of this and of the general truth underlying it was, of course, no guarantee that I would not continue to make mistakes, and so it was that ten days after Ariel fled into the multiverse, running from me, from Isha, from—I suspect—all Ishas everywhere, I set out walking toward Tuttle’s Hollow from a point on the highway southeast of Durbin, accompanied once again by Whirlie Henley. I had paid Henley an exorbitant amount for his services. He was not eager to go near the hollow, but had agreed to guide me to within six miles of it, to a streambed that would lead me to a point less than a hundred yards away.

“There’s soldiers back in there, y’know,” he’d said as we sat over beer and whiskey at Mickey’s. “They always running people off. ‘Pears like they got ’bout a three, four mile perimeter. Get any closer and they know you there.”

I said I was aware of the soldiers.

“How you gon’ deal with ’em?” Henley asked.

I told him it would be better for him if he remained ignorant of my business, and though he was disgruntled by this, after a brief bargaining session we agreed on a fee.