VACANCY & ARIEL

ARIEL

WHEN I WAS a younger and more impulsive man, I took a nihilistic delight in the denial of God and the virtues of family, of social and religious virtues of any kind. I believed them to be lies told the ignorant in order to pacify them, and to a great degree I still believe this. I held to the conviction that all life was at heart the expression of an infantile natural fury, that any meaning attributed to it was imposed and not implicit, and that any striving was in essence a refusal to accept the fact of hopelessness. I waved the banner of these views despite exulting in the joys of my young life and seeking to disprove on a personal level the dry, negative philosophies that I publicly espoused. Now, less certain of the world, I have set down that banner and am content with a quiet cynicism, an attitude forced upon me by an event whose nature—though I pretend to understand it—has complicated the world beyond my capacity to absorb. My conception of reality has been enlarged to incorporate an element of predestination, to accept that there is if not a force that controls our lives, then at least a grand design, a template into which all our actions are contrived to fit. Perhaps it is a nihilistic force, perhaps it has a different end. One way or another, we are creatures made of fate.

At the age of nineteen, while a student at Cal Tech, stoned on a quantity of excellent post-Taliban Afghani hash, I jotted down a series of mathematical propositions—fantasies, really—that soon thereafter was turned into breakthrough work by my best friend, Rahul Osauri. Those few minutes of inspired scribbling comprise the sum of my experience of the world of genius, but Rahul, born in India on the Malabar Coast, was a genius every waking moment of his life. He understood what I had merely glimpsed and with my permission, for I perceived no great value in what I had done, he set to work investigating the potentials of my crude conception and not only crafted of it a new model of the universe, but devised engineering applications that enabled the exploration of territories whose existence until that point had been purely speculative. Seven years later he died when the classified project informed by my moment of inspiration was destroyed in an explosion. I was at the time an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan (I had dropped my physics major and transferred to UCLA during my junior year in order to pursue a brunette coed with beautiful legs) and ten days after Rahul’s death, in early December, I was summoned to a meeting with Patrick Karlan, the head of the department. On entering his office I found two men waiting, neither of them Professor Karlan and both radiating a police vibe, causing me to speculate that the sophomore with whom I’d had an affair the previous semester had spilled the beans. The older of the two, a gray-haired patrician sort wearing pinstripes and a foulard tie, surveyed me with an expression of undisguised distaste, taking in my long hair and jeans and patched car coat. He asked if I was the Richard Cyrus who had attended Cal Tech with Rahul Osauri.

“Dick Cyrus,” I said. “Nobody’s called me Richard since grammar school.”

The gray-haired man stared at me incuriously.

“I hate the name Richard,” I went on, growing more nervous by the second and talking in order to conceal it. “It’s a kid thing, y’know. There was this quarterback at Georgia. Richard Wycliff. He killed the University of Florida four straight years. I hated the bastard.”

“Very well. Dick.”

“I asked my dad if I could change my name to Frank,” I said, trying to be disingenuously friendly. “Didn’t go over too well, so I settled on Dick.”

“Excellent choice,” said the second man with more than a little sarcasm.

The gray-haired man introduced himself as Paul Capuano and offered credentials that established him as an official with the NSC. He did not bother to introduce the second and younger man, who stood attentive at his shoulder throughout the interview—less an aide, it appeared, than a slim blue-suited accessory—and he cautioned me that everything said would be privy to the Official Secrets Act, briefed me on the penalties I risked should I breach security, and began to question me about my relationship with Rahul and my involvement with his work.

“You’ve made quite a lot of money as a result of your youthful indiscretions,” Capuano said after we had done with the preliminaries.

“I don’t consider smoking a bowl of hash that much of an indiscretion,” I said. “As for the money, I came up with the basic concept—Rahul thought I should share in any profits resulting from his patents. I never expected there would be any practical applications.”

Sitting in Professor Karlan’s chair, Capuano studied me coldly from across the desk and I felt a twinge of paranoia. “Something wrong with my having profited?” I asked.

“There’s a question as to whether the patents were modified after Osauri began working for the government. Though the devices themselves have nothing to do with the project, it’s possible there may be some technical problem with legality.”

I understood from this that nothing was wrong with the patents—I was being threatened, and none too subtly.

“What do you want?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about your project.”

“That’s not altogether true.” Capuano removed a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and read from it: “‘I bet I know what you’re doing. I imagine the project to be something like an arcade machine. You know, the ones with the toy crane mounted in a plastic cube that you manipulate with a joystick, trying to snag a wristwatch from a heap of cheap pins and rings and combs.’” He glanced up at me. “Recognize it?”

“Yeah. It’s an email I sent Rahul. But he never responded. He certainly never said I was right.”

“We know that.” Capuano’s haughty tone suggested that there was little that “we” did not know. “Nevertheless, it demonstrates that you understood what he was up to.”

“I was Rahul’s friend,” I said. “I know what excited him about the idea. It wasn’t tough to figure out what he’d try to do. But understand his work? I don’t think so. Rahul was on another plane, man. I couldn’t even follow his first equations. They might have been magic spells for all I knew.”

“We’re having the same difficulty. Dr. Osauri left coded notes. But”—his smile was thin as a paper cut—“we’ll get it eventually.”

“The other scientists on the project…”

“All dead. Computer files obliterated. It was a very large explosion.” Another smile, as if he found the idea of very large explosions heart-warming.

He picked up a remote from the desktop and switched on Professor Karlan’s television, a flat panel screen mounted on a side wall. “We’ve prepared something for you to watch. I remind you, things will go badly if you reveal one detail of what you’re about to see.”

An instant later the screen flickered, then displayed a low altitude aerial shot of what looked to be an old bomb crater, its sides scoured clean of vegetation, with a concrete bunker set at the bottom. Atop the bunker was a microwave array. Surrounding this depression was a dense growth of brush and young trees, all lightly dusted with snow.

“This is Tuttle’s Hollow in the Alleghenies,” said Capuano, pausing the disc. “The lack of vegetation in the hollow is due to a heavy use of microwave radiation. Your friend was using a sophisticated version of your toy crane, a scoop made of bonded particles, to pluck objects from other dimensions.”

“Other universes,” I said. “At least that was the gist of my idea. That there are an infinite number of universes diverging on the quantum level. Constantly separating and combining.”

“Fine…universes,” Capuano said. “Most of what Osauri brought back were small bits of flora and fauna. They were photographed and then microwaved out of existence to prevent contagion. But to continue your metaphor, one day they snagged the wristwatch.”

He fast-forwarded, and the image of a monitor screen appeared; the picture displayed on the screen was a shifting map of fiery many-colored dots, but within them I made out a shape described in faint tracer lines of reddish-orange light. A winged shape with a rounded section atop it.

“We think it’s a vehicle,” Capuano said.

“Why would you think that? It could be anything.”

He fast-forwarded again. “This is post-explosion. Keep your eye on the bottom of the hollow.”

The hollow looked even more like a crater, wisps of smoke rising from every surface. The bunker had vanished. I could see nothing worth notice—then I spotted movement beneath the smoke. Seconds later, a figure leaped from the smoke, landing atop a boulder that projected from the side of the hollow about halfway up. A leap, I’d estimate, of some fifty feet. The figure crouched there a moment. A tall biped, perhaps eight feet and a little more. Anthropomorphic, but incredibly thin. Spidery arms and legs. And, judging by its swelling chest and flaring hips, a female. Either it wore a form-fitting garment of grayish-white material or else that was the color of its skin. Its face was indistinguishable, its hair black and trimmed close to the scalp. In one of its hands was a red pack or case. As I watched it made a second leap that carried it to the rim of the hollow, where it crouched for several seconds more before striding into the brush.

“All right!” I said. “ET!”

“Exactly,” said Capuano. “We’ve combed the area and haven’t found a trace of her.”

I had a thought. “She might not look the same when you find her.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s only a hypothesis. But since so much of the idea has proved out, maybe it’s worth mentioning.”

“Please,” Capuano said. “Mention it.”

“Ever hear of Springheel Jack?”

He shook his head.

“Springheel Jack was the inspiration for my idea. I can’t recall the date when he initially appeared, but it was in Victorian England. People reported seeing an unnaturally tall, thin, deformed figure who could leap over rooftops. Over the years he continued to appear, and the interesting thing is that the reports, instead of getting wilder…you know how people exaggerate. Like when somebody sees a UFO? The next day someone else sees ten. Bigger ones. And the next person sees fifty. Well, in Jack’s case each subsequent sighting described him as being more and more human and increasingly less capable of superhuman feats. So when Rahul and I were refining my idea, we decided it was likely that all the universes would be strongly anthropic. In other words, the observer creates reality.”

“I know what ‘anthropic’ means,” said Capuano with a touch of defensiveness.

“My idea was, these infinite universes…the ones closest to us would be almost indistinguishable from our own. Only minor differences. For instance, when you lose something—keys, glasses—you remember putting them on the dresser, but they’re not there. It’s possible you simply forgot where you put them. What may have happened, because of the endless shuffling of the universes, you may have slipped over into a universe where you left your glasses on the arm of the sofa. You might stay there forever or you might slip back. You’d never know. The universes farther from us, though—they’d start getting strange. One that’s very far away would be completely alien.”

Capuano was beginning to look bored. “What’s this got to do with Springheel Jack?”

“Let’s say Springheel Jack came from a universe pretty far from ours. When he arrived, because of the strongly anthropic nature of reality, our perceptions caused his particulate structure to begin decaying, changing toward something approximating our own, and he grew more and more human. More what we expect. The bubble of reality he generated was being eroded by the strongly anthropic process. That would account for the gradual normalization of his appearance and physical abilities. If he was from a universe too far away, the change he’d have to undergo in order to adapt would be so drastic, he’d die. That would explain a lot of unexplained phenomena. Like the chupacabra. Those mutated goat-things down in Puerto Rico? Rahul and I figured they’re from such a far-off universe, they disintegrate. They don’t leave a trace. All through history there are reports suggesting this happens frequently. Like in pre-Christian England, there were these two green-skinned children found wandering on the edge of a village. A boy and a girl. The boy died. He couldn’t eat the food. The girl was able to eat. She survived. Springheel Jack didn’t die…at least not right away. Could be he finally normalized. He seemed to be looking for a woman. At least he kept accosting them.”

“So,” said Capuano. “How long do we have?”

“Before she changes beyond recognition? Years, maybe. But you want to find her quickly. It’s not just her shape that’s changing, it’s her mind. Long before she adapts to our reality—if she does—she’ll forget who she is and why she came here. Particle change in the brain. She’ll probably regress to the level of a child. She may retain some memories, but they’ll seem like dreams.”

Capuano punched the remote and brought up the image of the woman crouched on the rim of the hollow.

“Look at her,” I said. “Extremely tall and thin. Capable of leaping forty, fifty feet in the air. You might just have Springheel Jill on your hands.”

Capuano’s aide shifted behind him—his eyes grazed mine and I had the impression that he viewed me in a poor light.

“If you’re still hunting for her,” I went on, “tell your guys to take particular notice of intense bad smells and feelings of nausea. Those effects would be produced by electron decay when the bubbles of two different realities overlap.”

“Okay,” Capuano said, drawing out the word.

“Rahul and I really geeked out behind the idea. We figured out all kinds of stuff that synched with it. Like with ghosts. We decided hauntings might be resonance waves from nearby universes.”

Capuano made an amused noise. “That must have been some hellacious hash.”

“Yeah, it was! Outstanding!”

He continued to question me, but I could tell by his diffident attitude that he had written off his trip to Ann Arbor as a waste of time. He said he would be checking back with me and to give him a call if I thought of anything else. But I never called and he never checked back.

After the interview I headed home to the brunette whom I’d followed to UCLA and ultimately married. Her legs were still beautiful, but she had developed an eating disorder, then exchanged this problem for alcoholism, an addiction I was beginning to acquire. We were most of the way down the path to divorce. I decided I should steel myself for a confrontation with her and stopped for a drink at a bar a few blocks from our apartment. The place was decorated for the season with wreaths and merry red and green stickers affixed to the mirror above the liquor bottles. I swilled down a vodka martini, ordered a second, and sat studying the reflections of the other holiday drinkers, their glum expressions similar to my own. My thoughts shifted back and forth between the brunette and the woman in the pit. Seeing her had excited me in a way I had not known since I was a sophomore—her appearance validated the obsessions Rahul and I had shared, our belief that the universe contained miraculous presences unanticipated by mainstream science. I polished off the second martini, signaled the bartender, and was overcome by nostalgia. The good old days at Cal Tech. If I had stayed, what a life I might have had! I was almost to the bottom of a third martini when I realized I was staring at a sticker on the mirror whose outline resembled the image on the monitor screen that Capuano had shown me. The tapering wings partly spread, halo obscuring the shape of the head, making it round. “Some type of vehicle,” he had said.

It was a Christmas angel.

IT SEEMS I may be both the villain and the hero of this piece, though I am scarcely the stuff from which such figures are traditionally made. My current wife, a smallish woman, has been known to describe me as imposing, but I recognize this for an example of bias on her part. I am an ordinary man of early middle age with a professorial mien who could stand to lose a few pounds. Yet I suppose if my story can be said to have a hero, there is no better candidate for the part, and my actions must be considered villainous to a degree, if for no other reason than that I provided the materials from which everything else derived. When I set foot upon the path that has led to these conclusions, however, I had no stake in the matter whatsoever.

The female figure I saw in Professor Karlan’s office never left my mind, though over time it receded, cropping up in my thoughts only intermittently. Then four years after my meeting with Capuano, two years after my divorce became final, I took the fall semester off to research a book. My chief interest as an academic was the cultural usage of myths, their reflection of opposing forces in society. I wanted to particularize Levi-Strauss’s work in the area, concentrating on Louisiana, a locale resplendent with myth; but one afternoon in late September a colleague at Tulane told me a story he’d heard from a student, a folktale of recent vintage concerning a dweller in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia known as the Willowy Woman. A beautiful woman said to be seven feet tall, a nocturnal creature who lived in the wild and was possessed of immense physical strength and magical powers. I thought of the even taller woman I had seen leap from the hollow and asked my colleague in which part of the Alleghenies the Willowy Woman was purported to live. He consulted his notes—she had been seen initially near the town of Valley Head, but thereafter had been sighted by hunters in various other areas. I copied the notes and accessed a map of the state. Valley Head was about twenty miles from Tuttle’s Hollow. I referenced a topological map and found that one could follow a system of creeks and streams to Valley Head from a point adjoining the hollow. An excellent escape route for someone fleeing pursuit. The last recorded sighting was south of the town of Durbin, and Durbin was only fifteen miles north of the SETI array at Green Bank.

ET, phone home?

If that had been her original intent, I assumed that she had forgotten it and kept heading for the array on automatic pilot.

I thought about getting in touch with Capuano, but gave it no serious consideration. He had not taken me seriously, and further, if the Willowy Woman proved to be the same woman who had materialized from the project’s smoke, I had no desire to turn her over to the bald eagles at the NSC. The notion of meeting the central element of a real-life folktale evoked visions of awards banquets in my head. A book. Books, perhaps. Appearances on national television. Then, too, the notion that this female nightmare who had climbed from the fuming pit might in four years have morphed into a beautiful larger-than-life child-woman living in the deep green mystery of the legend-haunted West Virginia hills, it appealed to my romantic side. I envisioned years spent in study of the woman. Visiting her regularly, gentling her, winning her trust. We would speak to one another in a hybrid language of grunts and whistles and eventually I would emerge from the wood with her on my arm and an incredible story. Even after the toll taken by divorce, I had enough money to chuck my job and live comfortably. To hell with academia! It had been a stopgap, something to do until something better happened along.

And now something had.

The following Saturday afternoon I found myself on a stool in one of Durbin’s armpit bars, Mickey’s Clubhouse, a place that sported placards in the window advertising HBO, a turkey raffle, and the availability of punchcards, and was full of brownish air and a brimstone smell compounded of industrial-strength cleaner and staleness. Gray light streamed through the dirty front window, but did not penetrate far; the darkness of the clouded mirror was picked out by digital beer ads. I was trying to negotiate with a scrawny, middle-aged man improbably named Whirlie Henley who had been recommended as a guide. Henley was only half-listening. The insignia on his baseball cap and blue windbreaker attested to his allegiance to the West Virginia Mountaineers, and his eyes were pinned to the television set mounted behind the bar which was showing his beloved Mountaineers getting their asses handed them by the University of Miami. It was only after the score reached 38-7 that he turned to me and asked why I wanted to explore the hills south of Durbin.

“Nothin’ there ’cept critters and nettles,” he said. “A whole big buncha nothin’.”

“Humor me,” I said.

“I don’t know, Professor.” He glanced sourly at the TV. “Gets cold out there this time a’year.”

I increased my offer, but Miami was threatening to score again and Henley became even more truculent. His bony face tightened, his watery blue eyes narrowed. “Shit!” he said as a Miami wide receiver danced into the end zone holding the football aloft. He whipped off his Mountaineer cap and eyed it as if it were a thing offensive to God. His drab brown hair was home-cut, trimmed high on the neck, and he had a tonsure-like bald spot.

“Two hundred a day,” I said. “Two weeks minimum.”

He cocked an eye toward me. “Why you want to pay that much to take a nature walk?”

“The Willowy Woman,” I said.

His face emptied. After a moment he called for another beer. The bartender, a huge apple-cheeked man with a bushy beard and black hair falling to his mid-back, wearing a plaid wool shirt and jeans, heaved up from his stool and shambled forward like a hillbilly wrestler cautiously coming out of his corner to confront some masked menace.

“You’ve seen her,” I said after the bartender had mosied back to his perch.

“I seen somethin’ mighta been her,” Henley took a pull from his beer. “I seen her peepin’ at me from a purpleheart tree. Scared the shit outta me.”

“What did she look like?”

“Wicked pretty. Long hair. Couldn’t see much but her face.”

“What happened?”

He had another drink. “I like to fell over. Next I know she shinnied up higher in the tree and I heard her goin’ off through the tops of the other trees like she’s a monkey.” He sucked on his teeth till they squeaked, set the bottle down precisely in the wet circle from which he had lifted it. “Three hunnerd per day and I’ll find her for ya.”

This surprised me. Going by his expression when I mentioned her, I figured he was still afraid. I said as much and he said, “Oh, yeah. I admit it.”

“But three hundred a day will settle your nerves.”

“That ain’t it.” He tipped the bottle to his lips and drank until it was empty, then waved the empty at the bartender, who appeared to have fallen asleep. “Hey, Mickey! Wake your ass up and get me ’nother beer.”

The giant lumbered up and lurched toward the cooler. “Goddamn, Whirlie. You be pissin’ for a week.” He plunked a beer down on the counter. “How ’bout you, friend?” he asked me, his bewhiskered baby face set in earnest lines.

“Well whiskey,” I told him. “A double.”

“Damn straight!” Mickey said. “I’ll join ya.”

He poured, we clinked glasses and drank. The whiskey was raw, but Mickey sighed as if in rapture and poured me another on the house before returning to his seat. I fondled the glass but did not drink. I had a presentiment of danger, a sunbreak of rationality in my romantic fog. Immense strength. Magical powers. The capacity to elude an army of searchers. Even four years down the road from the peak of her powers, I had no doubt that the Willowy Woman would be formidable.

“If you’re afraid,” I said to Henley, “and if it isn’t the money that motivates you, how come you want to make the trip?”

“It’s personal,” he said. “Once’t you seen that face, it’s kinda like you gotta see it agin.”

THE HILLS SOUTH of Durbin were thickly forested with medleys of butternut, black walnut, tupelos, oaks, tulip trees, and here and there a chestnut stump. The skies were overcast and even at noon it was dark under the trees. Whenever the sun peeked through, the twisted trunks cast devious shadows. The forest floor was carpeted with rotting leaves and ground apple, ginseng and goldenseal. Mica-flecked boulders poked out from the slopes. We backpacked for three days before Henley detected signs that the Willowy Woman might be in the area: rabbit bones that bore the marks of human teeth and human waste less than a day old. Another two days of reconnoitering and he claimed to have established the perimeters of her hunting ground.

“She’ll been comin’ through the treetops,” he said. “She prob’ly lives in ’em. I ain’t seen one footprint…though I know she’s bound to come down once’t in a while. We gonna sight ’er, we gotta get in the trees ourselves.” He spat and adjusted his Mountaineer cap. “We gon’ hafta be damn lucky any way you cut it. I figger she’s got night eyes.”

So it was that we spent the next three nights high in the crown of a water oak, keeping watch in nearly total darkness, staring down through the wends of branches and masses of leaves, alert for any glimmer of movement. On the fourth day I told Henley I thought we should change our position. I was giddy with lack of sleep, sore from bracing in the fork of a limb, and I was looking to gain an advantage over weariness and boredom—I hoped a new vantage might help to keep me awake and give us a better shot at encountering the Willowy Woman. Henley was lukewarm to the idea.

“Well, we could,” he said, scratching his neck. “But way I figger, she’s a mover. She hunts an area one night, then moves on. We might be due for a visit, we stick it out here.”

“How do you know she’s a mover?” I asked, irritated—Henley’s woods lore had gotten us nowhere and I thought my voice deserved to be heeded.

“I don’t know nothin’. I jus’ figger that’s how it is. I got a good feelin’ we hang around here, she’ll come to us. But it’s your dollar.”

I was, I discovered, not up to shouldering the burden of decision. Or maybe I just wanted Henley to be the one who was wrong—I was losing hope that we would find her. The sky cleared that evening; the stars shone bright and there was a three-quarter moon. Aloft in the water oak, wired on caffeine pills, I felt afloat, grounded in silvery light. The points of the leaves were tipped with illusory glitters—they seemed to hiss when they touched my skin. I wished I had a joint to smooth things out, though I doubted Henley would approve. I made him out below to the right, half-hidden among the shadowy foliage. Still as an Indian. Likely replaying old Mountaineer games in his head, or boning up on his botanical knowledge. Every time we passed a plant he’d say its name, as if I cared. “That there’s black kohosh,” he’d say. “And that’s cardinal flower…that little ’un next to the crust of fungus.” I told myself to lighten up on Whirlie.

He’d proved to be a good traveling companion. He put up with my bullshit, after all, and he told amusing stories about his life in the redneck paradise. Turned out he had a sister by the name of Girlie. Whirlie and Girlie Henley.

“She come out a few months premature,” he’d said. “Daddy was gonna call her Early, but mama wouldn’t have it.”

I zoned out for a while, lost in the stars. Tiny sparkles against the black. A cold breeze made me shiver, bringing a bitter scent. I began to feel queasy and wondered if the game I’d eaten was backing up on me. I was too self-absorbed to recognize these for signs of the Willowy Woman’s presence and the first I knew she was nearby was when I heard Henley squawk, this followed by a thud from below. I peered down, trying to see him.

“Hey…What’s going on?” I asked shakily.

Then I spotted her peeking from among the leaves to my left. Henley had been right about her face. Milk-pale, long and narrow, it had an exotic angularity and simplicity such as might be depicted in a comic book artist’s vision of beauty, too streamlined to be real, and it was more compelling than the face of any human woman I had known. Her eyes were dark, almost no whites showing around enormous pupils, and the eyebrows were black upswept streaks. Sharp cheekbones mimicked the angle of her eyebrows; her mouth was wide and full, predatory yet sensual. The face of an avenging angel such as might have been drawn by Neal Adams or Jim Steranko. But real, vibrant, almost hallucinatorily intense. She emerged further from the leaves, snarled black hair waterfalling to her waist, and stared at me as if I were the one thing in the world that mattered.

Nausea roiled the contents of my stomach and a fierce rotting stench clotted my nostrils, but I remained transfixed by her. The descriptions given in my colleague’s notes all spoke of her as naked, but she wore a faded oversized dress and a down jacket patched with strips of duct tape—castaways she must have scavenged from a dump. She seized hold of my shirt and lifted me…but not easily. Her arm trembled with the effort. Nonetheless, she lifted me and I was certain she was going to drop me from the tree, just as I assumed she had done with Henley. But then her intense expression was washed away by one of confusion. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, and she let out a gasp. She wrapped an arm about my waist and began to descend through the tree, carrying me like a sack of flour. Disoriented, the leaves slapping me in the face, shots of moonlight splashing into my eyes, I struggled against her grip, but she held me fast. Once we reached the ground she deposited me at the base of the trunk and stalked off several paces, moving with a gliding step. I realized that she was nowhere near seven feet tall. Closer to six, I’d say. Then I recalled that it had been some time since the last sighting. She had dwindled and grown weaker since that night.

She paced back and forth, making a humming noise. I had no reason to believe I would survive the encounter, but I was not as frightened as I might have expected and thus was able to appreciate the sight of this lovely woman half-cloaked in black hair, the statuesque lines of her body visible through the thin material of her dress, gliding with an oddly smooth gait over the moon-dappled forest floor. Not even the funky clothes detracted from her air of otherworldliness. I had the notion she had forgotten about me and was lost in some mental labyrinth, trying to come to terms with a terrible frustration—I recalled hiding in the brush, watching a wolf drink from a stream in the Alaskan wilderness, watching a drunken old woman on the fringes of Carnival in Bahia, lifting her arms to the moon as if pleading for one last grand frivolity, and other glimpses of the kind, those sudden, small observances that hold in our minds and seem to sustain the rest of life, as if life were a tapestry; mostly dark and dingy, and they were the bright pins it was stretched between. It was like that watching the Willowy Woman, sitting dazed beneath the water oak that night, lost in the witchy West Virginia woods.

I heard a moan from the shadows on the opposite side of the trunk: Henley. The woman broke off her pacing and turned toward the sound; then, apparently not caring that Henley was alive, she came over to me, dropped to a knee, and leaned close, her face inches away. She said something. A name, I thought, for she tapped her chest before she spoke. “Ahhh-ell,” she said, and waited for a response; but I was incapable of speech, not—as I’ve said—afraid, but transfixed, overpowered by the intensity that streamed from her like rippling heat. She repeated the word, breathing it harshly, a windy growl, and when again I failed to respond, she whirled up to her feet and strode away, her hands clasped behind her neck. Her fingers, I saw, were disproportionate in length to the rest of her hand, less affected by the transformation. Each finger had an extra joint.

Henley groaned a second time and when the woman did not react, I crawled over to where he lay, crumpled in a slant of moonlight, his Mountaineer cap lying on the ground by his hand. I asked if he was all right. His eyelids fluttered and he said, “Hell no!” His breath caught; he winced. “My left leg…I think it’s broke.”

Using the hunting knife strapped to his belt, I ripped his trouser leg. His knee was swollen, but not discolored. “Might be a sprain,” I said.

“It’s a bad ’un if it is,” he said.

He winced again, clamped his hands to his ears, and at the same instant I felt a vibration inside my skull and heard a thin keening, as from an electronic whistle. The pain that followed pitched me onto my side. Through slitted eyes I saw the woman standing about fifteen feet away, her mouth wide open, neck corded, gazing into the forest. From off in the dark there came an agonized squealing; a second or two later a wild boar, a bristly little black tank, trotted into view, shaking its head wildly. It made a staggering charge toward the woman, then toppled over onto its side, its legs trembling, and soon lay still. The keening stopped, the woman stepped to the boar, squatted and began wrenching at one of the hind legs. It took her a great deal of effort, but finally she managed to rip off the entire haunch. She shouldered the remainder of the boar, picked up the bloody haunch in her right hand. She walked over to where I was sitting and dropped the fresh meat on the ground in front of me. Sadness came into her face. She put her hand, fingers spread, on her chest and, nailing me with those huge dark eyes, said again, “Ahhh-ell.”

I was certain now that she was telling me her name, but I was too frightened to answer.

She stood looking at me another ten, fifteen seconds. It was if she had turned up her intensity—I could have sworn I felt the specific values of her feelings. Sadness. Frustration. But these were merely elements of a more intricate emotion I could not put a name to. I wanted to say something to bind her there, but I remained afraid of her strength, her killing voice. She leaped up onto the trunk of the water oak, clung one-handed, then scooted out of sight among the leaves. I heard the crown thrashing and thought I heard a rustling thereafter in an adjoining tree.

“She’s gone from here,” said Henley, sitting up. He’d donned his Mountaineers cap and looked more together than he had. I asked what reason he had for believing she was gone and he said, “Just a feelin’ I got. She gonna be findin’ herself a new home.”

I’d received no such impression, though it was possible it had been buried in among all the other impressions I had received.

“Gone suits me fine,” Henley said. “I seen her twice’t now and twice’t is all I need.”

An owl hooted twice, a hollow trill that seemed to cause a general stirring of the leaves, and the moon hovered in the crotch of a forked branch, like a misshapen silver stone held in the thong of a slingshot, aimed at my face.

“I doubt twice will do it for me,” I said.

I SHEPHERDED HENLEY to the highway, where we hitched a ride back to Durbin, and then I returned to the water oak, where I waited almost a week. The woman did not reappear and I realized Henley had been correct in his impression—she was gone and would not return to the area. I hired a sketch artist and worked with him until he produced an accurate likeness of the woman, and had the sketch made into posters and distributed them throughout the western part of the state, offering a reward for information regarding her whereabouts and listing a phone number in Green Bank, where I’d rented a house. I received a number of responses, none helpful, and I expanded my search area to include other parts of the state. I resigned my teaching position and moved full-time into a larger house, spending most of my time tracking down leads.

I could not have explained the grounds for my obsession, except to say that Rahul and I were fascinated by the possibility of the miraculous, committed to unearthing some spectacular truth from beneath the common soil of what appeared a masterless universe in which randomness and order were equally blended, holding one another in perfect yet accidental suspension. That fascination had been the glue of our friendship and I had abandoned it, while Rahul never strayed. Perhaps guilt relating to this abandonment spurred me on. That, at least, is what I would have told you. I understand now there was another reason underlying it, one I would have considered insane at the time; and I am certain that the nature of obsession itself was in play. We are all of us obsessed by things that magnify the facet of our capabilities we are least certain of and that allow us to fully inhabit a persona we wish to assume. I had fallen in love with the moment during which I scribbled down the idea that Rahul’s genius had fleshed out. Confronted with the Willowy Woman, the byproduct of that moment, I’d felt the same rush and I wanted it to continue. Searching for her was my only means of effecting this.

Obsession, however, offers no guarantees. For nearly five years I had no real news of her. I spent some of that time qualifying myself to be licensed as a private investigator—I presumed I was in for a long search and I believed that the training and perks attaching to the license might come in handy. I also managed to write a novel about the Willowy Woman, omitting all mention of Rahul’s project. I had no wish to incur the wrath of the NSC. The novel achieved a modest success, enough to demand a second book, and I was in the midst of researching it when I received a phone call from a devotee at the Hare Krishna center in Moundsvillle, West Virginia. The caller, one Ravinda, informed me that a woman who resembled the sketch on my posters had come to the temple fifteen months previously. She had been unable to read or write, barely able to speak, but had exhibited a remarkable ability to learn. Within a year she had acquired the skills necessary to enable her to leave. Ravinda had not had much conversation with her, but said he would be happy to introduce me to her mentor.

“How tall was she?” I asked.

“About average.” Ravinda paused. “She was very beautiful. Some of the women accused her of being wanton. Of course, they only accused her because Shivananda told them to.” He said this last in a conspiratorial tone, as if indulging in gossip.

“Wow,” I said. “Wanton, huh?”

“She angered many devotees…especially when she refused to accept her new name. She preferred her own.”

“What was it?”

“Guruja.”

“I mean the name she liked.”

“Ariel,” Ravinda said.

DRIVING FROM THE Mountain Dew Motel in Moundsville to meet Ravinda, my thoughts resonated with the similarity between the names: Ariel and Ahhh-ell. The Willowy Woman might be having trouble with her Rs, or perhaps Ahhh-ell was her universe’s equivalent of Ariel. If nothing else this ratified my belief that she had been telling me her name and I tried, as I had many times over the years, to understand why she had not treated me like she had Henley. The conclusion I previously had reached was that she mistook me for someone, but I could never buy this explanation. Looking as she did, where would she have met anyone who resembled me?

The Hare Krishnas are the Southern Baptists of Hinduism and like their American counterparts, they delight in opulent temples. The centerpiece of the Moundsville Krishna colony was Prahubada’s Palace of Gold, purportedly an example of the architecture of classical India. If this was, indeed, the case, classical India must have looked a lot like Las Vegas. The palace was gaudy, covered with gold leaf, and seemed very much a place where you could lose all your money. As I ascended the winding road toward the temple, the golden dome rising above a green hill had a surreal aspect—it might have been an art construction by Christo or some other conceptualist, a shiny yellow ball of immense proportions dropped in the middle of nowhere. Seen straight on, the building possessed a certain rococo delicacy, but its good qualities were diminished by the orange-robed lotus eaters flocking the grounds, all sporting Krishna-conscious smiles and offering repulsively cheerful greetings as I passed by.

Ravinda turned out to be a Jewish kid from Brooklyn Heights whose shaved head and monkish attire did little to disguise his heritage. He led me across the lawn to a shade tree beneath which a paunchy fiftyish man, also clad in orange robes, a smudge of red powder centering his brow, sat cross-legged on a prayer rug. His flesh was pasty, soft, and his brow was creased by the Three Sacred Wrinkles. His heavy-lidded eyes looked like walnut halves stuck in an unbaked cookie. His demeanor conveyed an oafish tranquility. This, Ravinda said, was Shivananda.

“What’s up?” I asked Shivananda, just on the chance he might know the answer.

With a forlorn look I attributed to his having been summoned back to the world from Fifth Dimension Avenue, he inclined his head and said, “You are welcome here.”

Ravinda withdrew to a discreet distance and Shivananda asked why I was interested in Guruja. I was fully prepared for the question. I offered my P.I. credentials and handed him a forged letter from imaginary parents asking one and all to cooperate with their agent, myself, in discovering what had happened to their little sweetheart, Ariel, missing now for lo these many years.

“She left us two months ago,” Shivananda said. “I advised against it, but she refused to listen.”

“Know where she went?”

“California. But where exactly…” He spread his hands in a helpless gesture, head tilted, eyebrows raised. “We have a box of her possessions. You are welcome to take them…for the parents. Ravinda will fetch them for you.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

“She was of God,” Shivananda said. “She came to us empty and we sought to fill her with blessings.”

There was an oiliness in his voice that led me to suspect the metaphor, to wonder what sort of blessing he had sought to fill her with. He shook his head ruefully and went on: “But her nature…she was not suitable. Not a seeker.”

“She was wanton?” I suggested.

He glanced sharply at me.

“She had some trouble along those lines before she ran away,” I said. “You know…boy-crazy.”

“She was a very sexual being.” Shivananda gave the word “sexual” a dainty presentation. “But I believe she has a special purpose in the world. One day she will return to us.”

In your dreams, Lardboy, I said to myself. I agreed with Henley—Ariel was a mover. I believed she was still trying to head toward the destination from which the project had diverted her, unaware of why she was going there.

I talked to Shivananda for half an hour. He had little salient to tell me; everything he said bore a taint of petulant regret. I had a sense that he had been more than a mentor, that he had been smitten by Ariel, hauled back into the world of illusion and desire. I pictured the novice Krishnas giggling and singing, “Shivananda and Guruja sittin’ in a tree…” The one bit of information that intrigued me was that Ariel had done some writing while she was at the center. I asked what sort of writing.

“Frivolous,” he said. “Worthless fantasies.” He pursed his lips as if able to taste their worthlessness.

I wished him happy dharma and went with Ravinda to collect Ariel’s possessions, which had been loaded into a cardboard file holder. This afforded me a quick tour of the palace. Peacock vanes in brass urns. Sandalwood incense. Sumptuous rooms with silk pillows for reclining. Every surface inlaid and filigreed. I’ll say this for the Krishnas—as interior decorators they wallowed in style.

On returning to my motel I opened the file holder. Resting atop the pile within was a neatly folded dress. Not the same dress the Willowy Woman had worn on the night I saw her, but of the same quality. Torn and faded. A relic. I assumed it to be the one she had worn on her arrival in Moundsville. Beneath the dress was a wooden box containing a necklace of squirrel bones and slightly more than fourteen dollars in bills and change. Lying beneath the box was a photograph of three men—Ravinda among them—and two young women in orange robes. Only one of the women had hair. Long black hair falling to her waist.

Ariel.

The face was no longer so perfect in its symmetry, so uncomplicated in its beauty—it bore marks of usage, marks of character—but it was the same face I had seen in among the leaves of the water oak. I estimated her to be no more than five feet five—she was shorter than Ravinda, who was no giant. She was diminished, made human, but she retained her intensity. Standing with the others, she was an Arabian among Shetland ponies, a star with her supporting cast.

The photograph had been resting atop a pile of manila folders. Several contained drawings, mostly nature studies; but there were a few at variance with the rest, all renderings of a grotesque male face, extremely narrow and long, with a flattened nose similar to a baboon’s and striations on the cheeks like ritual scarifications. Though I had no evidence as to when each of these drawings had been done, I suspected that the most fully realized had been drawn early in her stay at the colony, and that she had gradually become less sure of her memory. I believed, you see, this might be a face from her life prior to the destruction of the project—I had not seen her face in Capuano’s video, but her head had been similar in shape to the one depicted in the drawings.

Three folders held samples of her writing. Some of it appeared to be notes for a story concerning…well, I wasn’t sure what it concerned, as the notes were not only incoherent and fragmentary, but written in a mixture of English and ideographs that an uninformed observer might have taken for a personal shorthand, but that I assumed were elements of an alien alphabet. From what I could determine the plot involved a man and a woman who had a rather tempestuous relationship that came to compromise their duties—what those duties entailed was unclear.

Despite having established that Ariel was the Willowy Woman, I was disappointed that the contents of the box had not revealed more. I sat up all that night reviewing the folders, hoping to discover some further hint as to her past or present, but to no avail. The following morning, drinking coffee in the Mountain Dew’s restaurant, I thought of a question I had not asked. The fourteen dollars and change bothered me. Ariel could not have had much money—fourteen dollars would have been significant to her. How could she have afforded to leave the Krishnas? I assumed that she had not returned to the wild, that her progress in this universe would continue to be upwardly mobile. Certainly she was brave enough to have set out with no money, but according to Ravinda she had left suddenly, motivated by no inciting incident, and didn’t this speak to the likelihood of a windfall?

As a private investigator I was a competent history professor. Had my instincts been more professionally acute, I might have taken certain actions that would have cut years off my search. But as it happened I felt myself at a dead end. The only clue to Ariel’s whereabouts was Shivananda’s assertion that she had gone to California and I could not be sure that she had been forthcoming with him. Even if she were there, what chance did I have of finding her among the millions of women in California? I had wasted five years in this pursuit and the realization that I might waste years more suddenly seemed irreconcilable with my need to have a life. Over the next few days, as I explored the logistics of moving to California, the allure of doing so began to dim. My best hope of finding Ariel had been to track her down before she left the state. Now she was gone, she might be anywhere. For more than a week I put my plans on hold and deliberated about my future. I had no family, no friends, nothing approaching a love life. All I had to build on was my publishing contract…but did I truly want to be a writer? I began fiddling with the second book and to my surprise, over the span of another week I wrote sixty pages. Without admitting to myself that I wasn’t going to move, I worked from early morning until dinnertime each day. Two months along in the process I decided to stay in West Virginia until the book was finished.

I came to dwell less and less on Ariel, immersed both in a new career and a relationship with a local high school teacher. I came to think of West Virginia as my home. But two and a half years later, while doing research on the net for my fourth book, I pulled up a web page that—though it didn’t shatter the comfortable niche I had carved for myself—caused me to understand that my obsession had been dormant, not dead. In conceptualizing the book I had decided to put my first three books in historical context and do a fictional treatment of Springheel Jack, tying him in with the story of the Willowy Woman. I’d been inspired in this by my long-ago suggestion that Ariel might be Springheel Jill, and my plot was to involve a bond between Ariel and Jack, a shared purpose that ultimately cast the two characters adrift in the multiverse. I had not expected to find anything to support this fanciful proposition, but the website I accessed contained several sketches of Jack done by nineteenth-century newspaper artists and one bore an amazing similarity to the elongated face that Ariel had sketched at the Krishna temple. Though the face in Ariel’s sketch was considerably more deviant from the human than those in the newspapers, I had little doubt they were all attempts at depicting the same creature. This discovery, while shocking, did not entirely rekindle my obsession. Ariel was still lost in California and the evidence of a possible link between her and Springheel Jack did not make the task of finding her any easier. But if only in terms of the book, I began to think about her again, to wonder what she might be doing and what the strange creature she once was had intended.

In November of the following year, after I had finished the book, my agent, Jannine Firpo, persuaded me to travel to New York City. There was to be a party at the Algonquin Hotel, an annual affair attended by large numbers of writers and editors. Jannine thought it might be beneficial to my career if I were to mingle with my peers. I was not thrilled by the prospect. On the other hand I was tempted by the thought of eating in decent restaurants and listening to music more sophisticated than roadhouse country and western.

The party proved to be a cattle call. Hundreds of people, most of them middle-aged men, jammed into a conference room outfitted with a bar. Abandoned by Jannine, I found myself pinned against a wall, trapped in a conversation dominated by a strident, adipose woman with a fruity voice and wearing what appeared to be a maroon pup tent. Eventually I escaped to the bar, where I threw down a couple of vodkas. I was considering seeking a more convivial atmosphere in which to do my drinking, when—feeling someone brush my elbow—I glanced down and saw Ariel beside me.

Dressed in a blue silk blouse and tight cream-colored skirt; black hair loose about her shoulders; the fine shape of her mouth redrawn in crimson; she was a foot shorter than when I had last seen her, her figure far more voluptuous. Her beauty had a concentrated quality, as if her vitality, too, had been compressed and was now barely contained within her body. Like a star grown more radiant as it collapsed. She asked the bartender for a glass of port, pronouncing the word “pawt,” then noticed me staring and, with a puzzled look, asked, “Do I know you?”

Hearing her speak startled me as much as it had when she had spoken in the woods years before, but I managed to get out, “I was wondering the same thing. I’m Dick Cyrus.”

“Ariel.”

Again she glossed over the R. Back in West Virginia I had not been able to determine the color of her eyes—now I saw they were dark brown, the irises almost indistinguishable from the pupils. Curiosity neutralized my sense of tact and I asked what her surname was.

She made a sad mouth. “I’m using Lang, but actually I don’t remember my name. I’m an amnesiac.”

She went on to tell me that over a period of days she had gradually wakened to the world and realized that she was lost in the woods. Disoriented, unable to speak coherently, she had wandered out to a highway, where she was given a ride by a man who shortly thereafter tried to rape her. After dealing with him, she made her way to Moundsville and there had been attracted to the golden dome of the Krishna center.

“I’m from West Virginia myself,” I said.

“That explains why you look so familiar. I must have seen you down there.”

“It’s possible.”

“I don’t suppose you remember seeing me?”

I understood that she hoped I might have knowledge about her past, but I had no intention of telling her anything—I was afraid she would think me insane. I said I was sorry, but I couldn’t recall having met her before, and asked what she was doing at the party.

“My agent thought I should be here,” she said. “My first novel’s just come out.”

I offered congratulations and, remembering the fragments of writing that I’d read in Moundsville, I asked if she had written anything previously.

“I supported myself for a while doing short stories, but the science fiction magazines don’t pay much.”

Enough, I supposed, to allow her to leave the Krishna center. I castigated myself for not having thought of this possibility.

We had been talking for no more than a few minutes when Jannine materialized from the crowd and said, “There you two are! I was hoping I’d have a chance to introduce you, and here you’ve done it on your own!” A trim and manically energetic woman in her early fifties, she beamed at us with maternal approval. “You have to read Ariel’s novel,” she said to me, digging in her voluminous tote bag. “It has amazing similarities to your new book.” She pressed a book wrapped in a garish dust jacket into my hand, then took Ariel’s arm and guided her away, saying there was someone who wanted to meet her.

The novel was entitled The Atonement and was the first volume of a trilogy. The cover illustration was of a metal sarcophagus cut away to reveal a black-haired woman within, eyes closed, arms crossed upon her breast. A white radiance streamed from the sarcophagus, almost obscuring it, but I could see enough to tell that it was similar in shape to that of the fiery image I had seen in Professor Karlan’s office, the image that appeared on the monitor prior to the explosion that had destroyed Rahul’s project. This further validation of what I knew did not thrill me as I might have thought. I was taken with her on a personal level, reacting like a man in the grip of an attraction. I did not want her to have a connection with the creature who leaped from the crater where my best friend had died.

Two hours later, sitting in the dim seclusion of the Algonquin bar, having read a hundred and some pages of The Atonement, it had become clear that what Ariel had written was her story. Doubtless certain details of the novel, its terminology, names, and so forth, were inexact, but I was convinced that the characters and core events were at least reflections of the real and that though she could not recall her past, the past was streaming up from her subconscious. The most astonishing thing was that her conception of the cosmos was basically the same as the one I had sketched out back at Cal Tech, an infinite number of anthropic universes shuffling and reshuffling, combining on a quantum level. The heroine, Ah’raelle, and her lover, Isha, were soldiers, respectively commander and subordinate, in what was less a war than a trans-universal game of chess. Encased in metal pods designed to shield them from the deleterious stresses of other realities, they traveled on missions to various universes in an effort to maintain the structure of the continuum, which they called the Weave, protecting it against another army of equally advanced soldiers who sought to subvert the grand design and so reconfigure the essential purpose of creation. The pods shed a blinding white radiance and were frequently mistaken for heavenly creatures by the indigenes of the universes they visited. The force in which Ah’raelle and Isha served was referred to as the Akashel, and the force against whom they contended was called the Akhitai. Both forces were led by groups of enlightened men and women who combined the qualities of scientists and mystics, and were in touch with the entities who presided over the cosmos. Not gods, but warlords who dwelled on some incomprehensible plane. Complicating the game played by the Akashel and the Akhitai was the fact that whenever a soldier set forth on a mission from, let’s say, Universe A, there was a buckshot effect and similar missions would be launched from neighboring universes, involving analogues of the soldiers who had been sent from Universe A. Thus there were vast numbers of missions always in progress, and the pods were in essence shuttles weaving back and forth across an infinite loom, one side seeking to repair the damage the other had wrought. If I had come to the book as a casual reader I would have quickly discarded it. Ariel was not a brilliant stylist and her plot exploited one of the most overused of literary tropes, that of men employed in the service of either gods or some cosmic purpose; but though my critical instincts declared that her book was a tedious fantasy with a treacly dose of New Age mysticism, a kind of softcore religious screed leavened with lengthy passages of sex and violence, I was convinced that it embodied a record of her life and I read on.

A conflict arose between Isha and Ah’raelle, one having to do with trust. Isha, in an attempt to protect her, kept information from her relating to a mission. She believed he was trying to manipulate her and that he had gone over to the Akhitai. Nothing Isha said or did could persuade her that he was loyal. Unable to repair the relationship, he became distraught, distracted, and—eventually—deranged. The love he had felt for Ah’raelle changed to bitterness and hatred, and he became a rogue, traveling across the multiverse, seeking out her analogues in other realities. The reasons for his actions were left unclear—but whether vengeful or trying to establish a relationship with another Ah’raelle, he succeeded in wreaking havoc with the Weave, and Ah’raelle was punished by being sent on to kill Isha.

Thus ended the first volume of the Akashel Trilogy.

My mind thronged by suppositions, I returned to my room and saw the message light blinking on the phone. I had two messages, both from Ariel. The first went as follows:

“This is Ariel…from the party. Sorry to call so late, but I wonder if you’re free for lunch tomorrow. I’ve been reading The Willowy Woman and I have some questions. About the book. Uhm…I…If we miss each other for lunch, I’ll be in the city a few more days. I’m in the hotel, too.” A pause. “Room Five Twenty-Three.” Another, longer pause. “I’ll talk to you later, I hope.”

Then the second message:

“If we don’t connect, I’ll be in the coffee shop tomorrow at noon. Good night.”

I fell asleep the second I hit the bed and waked thinking about Ariel in a less than clinical way. After showering, though it was only eleven, too anxious to sit in the room, I went down to the coffee shop and ordered a diet Pepsi. I had been there nearly three-quarters of an hour when a slight gray-haired man with a hunted look stopped by my booth and said in what seemed an accusatory tone, “Dick Cyrus.” Without bothering to introduce himself, he went on, “Your work is interesting, but I find your use of flashbacks annoying.”

After discarding several more aggressive replies, I said, “Bite me.”

He gave me a bitter stare and scurried off, doubtless seeking someone else to reprimand. Shortly thereafter Ariel entered the restaurant, wearing jeans and a white turtleneck sweater. She slid into the seat across from me and said, “I’m glad you could make it.” She appeared to be as nervous as I was. Ducking her eyes, fidgeting with her silverware. Her fingers were disproportionately long, but there was no extra joint.

A waitress came to hover. Ariel ordered eggs, bacon, and an extra side of bacon. Did her metabolism run higher than the norm?

“That’s eight pieces of bacon, ma’am,” the waitress warned.

Ariel thought it over. “I’d like a stack of pancakes, too.” We made small talk while waiting for the food, telling stories about Jannine, discussing our lives—she rented a cabin in the hills near Arcata in northern California—and holding a post-mortem on the party, a topic upon which we were of one mind. Once we had eaten I asked what questions she had about The Willowy Woman.

“This is going to sound strange,” she said. “But I have dreams about a woman who resembles the one in your book. The jacket notes said you believe the legend is true.”

“I saw her,” I said. “I know it’s true.”

“In West Virginia? Where exactly?”

“Over near Durbin, the northwestern part of the state.”

“Oh,” she said glumly.

“It was a long time ago and she hasn’t been spotted in the area since. She may have moved closer to Moundsville, if that’s what you were thinking.”

She nodded. “I was thinking that.”

I fielded her questions as best I could, hampered in this by not wanting to reveal what I knew. We exhausted the topic and she turned the conversation to my new book. Our mutual agent had given her to understand that our fictive conceptions of the universe were almost identical. I told her about my moment of inspiration, about Rahul, but not about the project.

“I feel almost no connection with most people,” she said after a considerable silence. “I’m not sure why. Maybe a lack of trust due to my memory. But I feel a strong connection with you. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen you before, but…” She drew a breath, as if summoning strength. “I don’t know what your plans are, but I’m going to be in New York five more days. If you’re agreeable, I’d enjoy spending some time with you.”

I tried not to appear overeager. “I’d like that, too.”

“Why? I mean…I wonder what you’re feeling.”

“I’d characterize it as an attraction,” I said.

A kid in a Fangoria T-shirt chose the moment to approach and ask me for an autograph. Ariel snapped at him, “Wait till we’re done!” The kid slunk away. I looked at her in surprise. Her outburst had embodied an off-handed imperiousness that enlarged my appreciation of her character. This one, I told myself, was accustomed to giving orders.

“I hate being interrupted.” She turned back to me, still in command mode. “Go on.”

“I was finished.”

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?”

“That’s not a judgment I can make so quickly. But I’m of a mind to think you’re sane.” Her eyes drifted toward the stack of notebooks on the nightstand. “What you said about the project and the crash. Ah’raelle’s transformation. Her memory loss and Isha tracking her down to California. It’s the plot of my second book. I thought I’d dreamed it.” She relaxed from her rigorous pose and settled beside me, laid a hand on my cheek, suddenly ultra-feminine, holding me with her eyes. “Let’s not think about it. I’ll deal with it later.”

“How can you not think about it? Jesus! If somebody told me what I just told you, I’d…”

“The future can wait, but the present cannot wait.” A smile came slowly to her lips. “If I’m the woman you believe I am, how can you deny me?”

I MUST NEGLECT the story of how we were with one another, of the accommodations we reached, the mutualities we achieved, and the unmemorable civil wedding that followed. I would like to show you, to demonstrate with scene and line the exact proportions of the contentment we enclosed in our arms; but that is a common tale whose minutiae would distract from the less common one I am compelled to relate. Suffice it to say that it seemed we did have a connection. We became lovers with none of the usual falterings and tentativeness. It was as if we were lovers who had been apart awhile and needed only to reconnect in order to resurrect the institutions of our relationship. If someone had told me that I could be happy with a woman given to fits of temper and days-long periods during which she became cold and distant, a woman given to barking orders at me, I would have laughed at the prospect and said, “Not my type.” But Ariel was exactly my type. It appeared there were places in me into which the spikes of her behaviors fit perfectly and, conversely, she was tolerant of my shifting moods which—I came to understand—were not dissimilar in their intensity and variety from her own.

I could not persuade Ariel to leave California. She was committed to uncovering her past and if she had to confront mortal danger in the process, that’s what she would do. I moved in with her, bought the cabin in which she lived and a dozen acres around it, and spent a small fortune in having it enlarged and made secure. Electrified windows. Motion detectors in the surrounding trees—the cabin was situated in the midst of an evergreen forest, grand old-growth firs mixed in with pine and spruce. I purchased a small armory of rifles and handguns, but Ariel refused to let me keep any of them, limiting our defenses to a tranquilizer rifle. She did not want to kill Isha. Though he might be unable to communicate with her, to tell her about her old life, dead he would be useless.

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.

That afternoon I called my old traveling companion Whirlie Henley and asked if he was available for a walk in the woods; I would pay the same rate as before.

“You ain’t goin’ after long, tall, and vicious again, are ya?” he asked.

“It’s a related matter,” I told him. “But I can guarantee we won’t be running into her.”

“How the hell you gon’ do that?”

“Trust me. She’s not anywhere near West Virginia.”

“You still chasin’ after her?”

“You might say.”

Grudgingly, Henley accepted my offer and we arranged to meet two weeks from the day at Mickey’s—it would take me that long, I believed, to convince Ariel we should make the trip. As things turned out it took me only ten days. She flatly resisted at first on the grounds she might miss an opportunity to contact Isha. I told her it seemed that Isha was a persistent sort and I cited the plethora of material in her book relating to predestination. “If there’s any truth to it,” I said, “you can’t avoid another encounter.” Acceding to this argument, she tried another tack, saying she had no wish to return to a place where she had been so miserable. I hadn’t informed her of my actual reason for returning; she was in a fragile mental state and I did not want to risk upsetting her to the point that she would blow off her tour. Instead I’d told her I had business in Green Bank and now I suggested that while I was taking care of it, she could visit the Krishna temple in Moundsville. “You’ll make ol’ Shivananda’s day,” I said. Her memories of the temple were not altogether unpleasant, and finally she relented. Six days later, after a thirty-minute drive followed by a ten-minute walk, Henley and I stood beside a massive, richly tagged boulder at the confluence of two streams, shaded by a venerable water oak. Its leaves had turned, but few had fallen. The air was damp and cold, the ground soaked by a recent rain.

“You told me what you’re lookin’ for,” Henley had said when I met him at Mickey’s, “I coulda saved you some worry. Everybody ‘round Durbin knows the Damsel Oak. Witchy women come out here to cast spells. High school kids use it for partyin’. Thing’s damn near a tourist attraction.”

While Henley watched I dug with a short-handled shovel, excavating a trench around the boulder. Ariel’s description stated that Ah’raelle had buried her equipment deep. Given that she had been working with her hands, I had not expected “deep” meant other than the extreme end of shallow. A couple of feet down, maybe. But I had no luck at that depth. Sweaty and irritated, my shoulders aching, I took a break.

Perched atop the boulder, Henley removed his Mountaineers cap, ran a hand through his graying hair and said, “Willowy Woman was pretty damn strong. You might hafta go down a ways.”

“No shit.” I examined my palms. Unblistered for now, but not for long.

“’Course we might have the wrong rock.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then somebody coulda already dug up whatever it is you’re after.”

“So how the Mountaineers doing this season?” I asked, hoping to cut short this litany of woeful possibility.

Henley’s breezy mood soured. “Doin’ all right.”

“Yeah, I caught part of the Syracuse game. That was a Little League game, they would have applied the mercy rule and shut it down.”

“Boys had some injuries was what it was.”

“Sure, that’s it.”

The stream chuckled and slurped along in its banks. Henley appeared to be listening to it.

“Maybe you better get on back to diggin’,” he said. “Ain’t much light left.”

The sun lowered and a starless dark descended. The occasional rustle from the surrounding woods—that was all the sound except for the rush of the water and my grunts. Henley built a fire and cooked. After a meal of beans and franks, though I was fatigued and sore, I jumped down into the trench again, working in bursts, taking frequent rests. Around ten o’clock, at a depth of five feet, I struck something on the stream side of the boulder. I scraped dirt away from it, then fell to my knees and pried it free. A case covered in dark red material. My hands were so cramped I could barely pick it up, and when I managed to get a grip I discovered it weighed in the neighborhood of sixty pounds. I remembered how easily Ariel had leaped from the hollow, holding it in one hand. Like Henley said, she had been pretty damn strong.

I dragged the case to the fire and sat cross-legged in front of it. With the fire leaping, casting the case in a hellish light, and the shadows of flames dancing on the side of the tent, I felt like a shaman staring at a magic box. I’d assumed it would be tricky to open, but was surprised to find that there was only a simple catch. Emergency equipment, I told myself. Designed for those who were losing their memories and might not be able to deal with something more complex. That did not explain, however, why they hadn’t secured it with a lock keyed to DNA. Perhaps they allowed for the possibility that the person stranded might be critically injured and require help in accessing the case. Overcome by fatigue, it was not until that moment I understood the magnitude of what I had found or considered the difficulties that might arise from the discovery. Cold, I grew colder yet.

“You gon’ open it or what?” Henley asked, squatting at my side.

“Maybe you don’t want to see this.”

“I been waitin’ around all day for it!”

“There’s people who might ask you questions about what’s inside. They’re not good people.”

Henley tipped back his cap, rubbed his forehead with a knuckle. “You think it’s drugs or somethin’?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“Hell, I’ll take a peek if you don’t mind,” Henley said, kneeling. “Seein’ how she like to half-kill me, I reckon I got a stake in things.”

Sap popped in the fire; silence seemed to gather itself into something big and black and bulging above the trees.

I lifted the lid.

Inside the case was a gray metal panel indented with several dozen shallow depressions—three dozen to be exact—most occupied by silver cylinders, each slimmer and shorter than a fountain pen. Four held larger items, also silvery in color, but with claw-shaped ends. I had no idea what I was seeing. My initial assumption was that they were tools, but thirty-two tools of the same shape and size…it made no sense. I lifted one from the case. It had to weigh half a pound. The metal was warm, signifying a heat source within.

Henley picked another up and held it to catch the firelight, turning it this way and that. I set my cylinder back in the case and when I glanced at Henley again I saw that he appeared to be frozen in place, staring at the cylinder with a confused expression.

“What is it?” I asked.

He gave no answer and I touched his arm. The muscles were rigid.

“Whirlie?” I said; then, after a pause, “You hear me?”

He remained unmoving, not even a twitch.

For several minutes during which I began to fear for him and wondered how I would explain a catatonic redneck, Henley did not stir; then, expelling a hoarse sigh, he dropped the cylinder and sank onto his side. Greatly relieved, I asked what had happened.

“I can’t sort it out,” he said dazedly. “It was a buncha pictures and things.” He sat up. “They started comin’ when I was studying it up close and pushed in the ends. Go on…give ’er a try. Didn’t hurt or nothin’. It’s just weird.”

Holding a cylinder up to eye level, I did as he had instructed. I felt a weak vibration in the metal. Then the pictures and things started to come. For the duration of the experience I was a receiver, accepting a flow of information relayed as images, and was unable to gain a clear perspective on what I was seeing. If, like Henley, I’d had no knowledge of the situation, I would have been mightily confused, and even given the knowledge I did have, I was somewhat confused, my head so full of strangeness, I too had difficulty sorting it out. But I understood that the cylinders contained what would be essential should one of the Akashel encounter an emergency and be stranded far from home: memories.

Ariel’s memories.

I tried four cylinders in all. One was a collection of images relating to the operation of the sarcophagus-like ships in which the Akashel traveled. The second offered an overview of the current state of the Weave; the third provided language instruction—I assumed it was the language Ariel had once spoken. All three used images to convey concepts and—in the case of the language instructional—to illustrate word sounds and ideographs, and these had been culled from her experience. It was her long-fingered grayish hands operating the controls of the ship, her voice sounding out words in my mind, her memories of missions past that increased my understanding of the Weave.

Why hadn’t she taken advantage of this resource?

I speculated that she might have been injured in the explosion. A head injury that caused her to lose her memory even before electron decay had wiped it out. Or maybe it had been a conscious decision. According to the second volume of the trilogy, she had despaired over having to kill Isha. She might have seen the destruction of the ship as an opportunity to avoid completing her mission. Or maybe the destruction of the ship eliminated any possibility of return and she had decided that memory loss was preferable to the yearning of an exile. But if that were so, why had she headed for the SETI array near Green Bank? Coincidence? From what I had just learned of the Weave, coincidence was a faulty concept. The cylinders with the clawlike ends might, I thought, have some application in this regard, but I was leering of experimenting with them.

The fourth cylinder contained personal memories and made me reluctant to investigate a fifth. The intensity of Ariel’s emotional range, her sexual reactions, her extreme devotion to the man whose grotesque face loomed above her in the act of love, all this left my own emotions in a tangle. Nothing I learned from any of the cylinders fit perfectly in my brain. Receiving her memories was like trying on a hat that was too large—I kept having to prevent it from falling down over my eyes—and all my new knowledge was imperfectly seated, my comprehension full of gaps. Her passions leaped high in me, bright and fertile as flames, sowing patches of inappropriate heat throughout my body. I felt muddled, my identity eroded.

The next morning as I lashed the case to my pack, Henley asked what I was going to do with it. I’d spent much of the night considering that very question, concluding that there was no choice other than to pass the case on to Ariel—here was the past she had been desperately seeking. Not all of it, of course. Her sojourn in the woods was forever lost. But in those cylinders were answers to her most urgent questions. I was fearful of the changes they might provoke. Would they disable her capacity for living in this alien environment? Would she recall a means of returning to the place from which she came? Would old memories create a dissonance with the new, a conflict that would destabilize her damaged core? And more pertinent to my selfish interests, would her love for Isha burn away what she felt for me?

Two nights later at the Mountain Dew Motel, when I told her about the cylinders, she expressed dismay that I had not been forthcoming about the purpose of the trip; but it was dismay tempered by distraction. The case itself commanded most of her attention. I left her with it and retreated to the restaurant adjoining the motel, where I ate a cheeseburger and a slice of chocolate pie. Now and then on the two-lane blacktop that ran past the motel, a pick-up or a fifteen-year-old car would rattle past, and as I stared out the window my thoughts came to reflect a similar intermittency, rising out of a despondent fugue, engaging me for a second, then fading; but as my emotions cooled, I began to think about what I had learned. In particular, what I had learned about the Weave.

From Ariel’s books I had gained an impression of opposing forces who sought to manipulate events throughout the multiverse to their own ends, one creating a circumstance that the other would then modify. But that was a gross simplification. Complicated by the buckshot effect, the operations of the Akashel and Akhitai were essentially infinite in scope. The image I had fashioned of shuttles passing back and forth across an immense loom was about as apt as it would be to describe a galaxy as a few stars and some clumps of dirt—there were so many missions, so many repetitions thereof, it was more appropriate to view the Weave in terms of a cockroach army swarming a kitchen floor. To think of Ariel as part of this, not a soldier but part of an uncontrollable infestation, appalled me and I wanted to deny it; but the information I had gleaned from the old Ariel’s understanding of the Weave rendered this view undeniable. The struggle between the Akashel and the Akhitai was less a war contested by opponents with contrary moral and philosophical imperatives than the desperate attempts of two exterminators with variant methods to prevent an unraveling of the fabric of time and space caused by the bugs they had released. The multiverse was falling apart, a rotting tapestry increasingly enfeebled by the holes the Akashel and Akhitai were punching in it. Ariel, Isha, and all their fellows had become both problem and solution, cancer and cure.

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.”

I let him steer me into the restaurant. After we had taken a table and ordered, he said, “I’ve been reading your books. Interesting stuff.” His smile was thoroughly sincere. “Tell you the truth”—he opened his briefcase—“I just finished your wife’s book. Little too weird for me, but hey”—another smile—“whatever sells, huh?”

“What’s this about?” I asked.

He pulled Ariel’s book from the briefcase and showed me her picture on the dust jacket. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s my wife,” I said carefully.

“Beautiful woman.” Siskin shook his head admiringly, then gave me a steady look. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

“I said it was, didn’t I?”

Siskin chuckled appreciatively. “Nice!”

“Why don’t you show me some ID?” I said.

“Oh, sure. ID.” He extricated a leather badge holder from the briefcase. “I got a bunch.”

The badge stated that Siskin was an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. He dropped two more badge holders beside the first. FBI and NSC.

“We’re not exactly an agency,” he said apologetically. “So we don’t have our own badges. Folks been kind enough to let us use theirs.”

“I’m going to go now,” I said. “Unless you give me a reason not to.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“It’s a stupid fucking question!”

The waiter sidled up with my coffee and Siskin’s tapioca drink.

“These things are absolutely delicious!” Siskin said after taking a sip. “Wanna try? I can ask for another straw.” When I refused he shrugged and sipped again. “We’re not interested in your wife, Mister Cyrus. We understand she’d be no help to us now. Probably wouldn’t have noticed her if it hadn’t been for her book. We’ve got fresh trails to follow.”

I considered what his words implied. “You’ve started it up again.”

“Not so you’d notice.” Siskin’s tapioca drink gurgled in his straw.

“How’d you do it? I thought…”

“We got lucky. One of the hard drives wasn’t totally fucked and we recovered a lot of data. Then we really got lucky. Or maybe there’s no such thing as luck. That’s what some of the science boys tell me.”

He pulled a sheaf of photographic prints from the case and one, an 8 x 11 that depicted a crater with a bunkerlike structure at the bottom of it, slipped from his grasp and fell onto the floor. I thought at first it was an old photo of Rahul’s project in Tuttle’s Hollow, but noticed that the array atop the bunker was much more complex than the array I had seen in Capuano’s video. The location was definitely Tuttle’s Hollow, however—I recognized the trees and the folds of the crater. Whoever Siskin represented, rebuilding the project on the site of the original, after such a violent and observable disaster, demonstrated that they were arrogant to a fault.

Siskin hurriedly picked up the photograph, stowed it away and displayed another—this of a man lying in an open metal sarcophagus. His face was curiously deformed, yet struck me as familiar. Dark gray skin; yellowish membranes over the eyes; striations on his cheeks. He did not appear to be alive. Siskin pointed to the sarcophagus. “Looks kind of like the vehicles your wife talks about in her book. What you think that is? Life imitating art or vice versa?”

“You tell me. Seems like you’ve got it all under control.”

“Yeah, we’re running a regular shuttle these days,” Siskin said expansively. “Bringing back all sorts of intriguing individuals. This fella here now…”

“If you’re not interested in Ariel, why bother me?”

“Perhaps I overstated our lack of interest. We’re mildly interested. Not enough to bring her in, but enough to warrant this conversation.”

“So why am I here?”

“I’d like you to keep on taking care of your wife. If something out of the ordinary happens, let us know. I can be reached through this number.” He slid a business card across the table, blank except for a number with a Manhattan area code and a tiny symbol in one corner that resembled the “at” symbol in a dot.com address. “Something does happen, I’ll find out. And if you haven’t called me, I will bring your wife in.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“Now don’t go getting all angry,” Siskin said.

“You don’t need me to spy for you.”

“Oh, yes we do. I don’t understand it completely, but it relates to that ‘anthropic’ junk you told us about back in Ann Arbor. Seems like if we’re watching what goes on, we might change what can happen. We prefer to let things happen naturally and rely on patriots like yourself to keep us informed. You give us the heads-up, we’ll take over from there.” He had another sip and sighed in satisfaction. “’Course the likelihood is nothing will happen. But I wanted to rope you in just on the off-chance.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I’m not about to sell her out.”

“I’m not asking that. If something happens we’ll investigate and that’ll be it. You really don’t want me in your life, Mister Cyrus. But if I have to be in your life, you want me in and out as quick as possible.” He studied Ariel’s picture and made a noise akin to his sigh of satisfaction. He dropped the book into the briefcase, snapped it shut.

“Aren’t you going to warn me not to tell anyone about this?” I asked as he stood.

“Oh, right. I forgot.” He gave me a cheerful wink. “Don’t you breathe a word now, y’hear?”

WHEN SHE RETURNED to our hotel that night, Ariel was exhilarated by the reception she had received from her fans, and she insisted we do something special on our last night. She washed up, put on a fresh outfit, and we went spiraling off into the city; dinner at a four-star Vietnamese restaurant, Brazilian music at SOBs, cocktails at the Vanguard while listening to the Dave Douglas Quintet, then more drinks at a trendy Dumbo bar which had no name and catered to people uniformly possessed of a disaffected personal style that caused them to seem citizens of a different universe from the one we inhabited. Several times I thought to tell her about Siskin, but I didn’t want to wreck the evening. She was exuberant as never before. Radiating confidence and joy. Back at the hotel, a little drunk but not sleepy, we made love into the small hours and during a lull, as we lay side by side, she kissed my neck and said, “I can’t believe it…I feel so clear!”

I pulled her atop me and entered her. She moved with me for a few seconds, then rested her head on my shoulder and said, “It’s like I’ve escaped and come home!”

“Should I be distressed about you editorializing while we fuck?” I asked. “It suggests a certain distance.”

She ground her hips against me. “You shouldn’t be distressed about anything. You’re most of what I’m feeling.”

Later, as we drifted toward sleep, instead of turning away and tucking up her knees as was her habit, she flung an arm across my chest, pressing herself into me. And on the return flight to California she held my hand and talked about traveling to Europe, to Asia. She mentioned children, a topic we had never discussed. Back at the cabin we took to staying in bed until noon and regularly went into Arcata for dinners and movies. Like a normal couple on a rustic honeymoon. Things were so good they scared me. It was like living inside a crystal sphere, charmed by the delicate musical vibrations that chimed around you, knowing all the while they signaled a terrible fragility. Yet accompanying this was a sense of enchantment, of a precious, magical time that demanded everything of me, and I surrendered to it, foregoing all thoughts of security, yielding up my fears, basking in the light we made together. Those gaps created by our awareness of one another’s differences melted away—we were joined seamlessly, two puzzle pieces that had been interlocked for so long, their substances had merged. I could a write a book about those days that no one except me would want to read, because there would be no conflict, no arc of character or plot, no dramatic pace or thematic consummation. It was peace. It was love. It was a child’s dream in its playfulness and beauty, crisp mornings and cool deep nights fencing golden afternoons. Nothing disrupted it. Phone calls, business, tedious chores, a broken appliance—these things were elements of the dream, opportunities for interaction and not annoyances. I had traveled a long road from obsession to love, and now it seemed I had traveled an even longer road in an instant, a road that led from love to shared exaltation, a state of vital calm that had in it no tinge of boredom or commonality. I was alive in Ariel and she in me.

There came an evening when I drove to the general store some ten minutes away along a winding blacktop to buy some fuses, and when it was time to pay I discovered I had misplaced my wallet. I called Ariel on my cell and asked her if I had left it at home. She did a search and returned to the phone, saying she had found it. Her voice was strained and I asked if anything was wrong.

“Are you coming straight back?” she asked.

“Yeah…what’s the matter?”

“Just get back here,” she said, using a peremptory tone that I had not heard from her for months.

Dusk had fallen by the time I returned. Ariel was waiting outside the door, her arms folded, her face gleaming in the half-light. I parked the car and as I walked toward her she did not change her pose, staring off into the trees, her expression stony. Before I could speak she thrust something at me. A business card, the one Siskin had given me in New York—it had been loose in my wallet.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t…”

“You bastard!” She sailed the card at me. “I can’t trust any of you!”

“What the hell’s going on?” I picked the card up, unsure how to spin things, not knowing how much she knew.

“Don’t play games! I’m…oh, God! You make me sick!”

“Christ, Ariel! I’m sorry! It was just this guy in New York. He was the guy with—”

“Just this guy? Fuck you! Do you think I’m a fool?”

She stalked away and I followed. “The guy who was with Paul Capuano when he showed me the video. I hadn’t seen him since then. I meant to tell you, but that was our last night in New York. You remember how that was.”

“Give me your phone.”

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.

Still groggy, until this point I’d been unable to gather what I was seeing into a frame, but as Isha disappeared inside the cabin, the urgency of the situation hit home. I struggled to my feet and caught a glimpse of a coffin-shaped lozenge of dark red metal standing off among the trees, its lid open to reveal a shallow concavity within. It seemed so out of place against the backdrop of spruce and pine, it stopped me for a moment. I swayed and blotches swam before my eyes. Ariel began to cry out in panic, each shriek stabbing into me, and I started toward the door, but before I had covered half the distance between the patch of ground where I had fallen and the cabin, Isha emerged with Ariel in tow. She screamed, clawed ineffectually at his hand, which engulfed her upper right arm. There was no time to go for a weapon. I threw myself in a shoulder block at his knees, thinking his joints would be a weakness. It was like tackling an iron bar—an iron bar that had the stench of a rotting carcass. I grasped an ankle, locked my other arm about his calf, but he flicked me off as easily as I might have dislodged a leg-humping terrier, sending me tumbling through the air. Blinky and shaken, lying crumpled on my side, I had an unobstructed view of his face. It was even uglier than those Ariel had drawn. Long hollow cheeks marked by vertical ridges—whether they were scars or some sensory apparatus, I cannot say. Eyes close together, almond-shaped surfaces concealed by membranes that appeared to have a yellowish crackling glaze. A scalp twigged with twists of black hair; a broad forehead and a tapered chin forming an inverted triangle that enclosed his features. The seat of his ugliness, however, was the area occupied by the mouth and nose. It appeared that something shaped like the base of a tripod had taken out a chunk of flesh, leaving tattered flaps of skin that only partly concealed a glistening mauve depth. The flaps palpitated as with an erratic gush of breath. The idea of his hands on Ariel sickened and enraged me. She screamed again. I picked myself up and charged Isha, eluded his defensive blow and jammed my fist into that central ugliness, into the glutinous heat of his throat. My fingers caught the flaps surrounding the maw as he jerked back his head. I clutched at them, tore at the loose skin. Letting out a high-pitched gurgling, he swatted me away. I went rolling on the ground and when I glanced up Isha was holding his mouth, blood leaking between nearly foot-long fingers that looked like dirty bones. Ariel had broken free and was running directly toward Isha’s vehicle, running full out, pumping her arms, her hair flying. Isha saw her, too, and I expect my sinking feeling mirrored his, for we both called after her at the same moment, our voices blending in a duet of pleading. It had no appreciable effect. She fitted herself into the vehicle, staring out at us; her hand went to a panel and the door began to swing shut.

I think she looked at me before the door sealed her from view, and I later told myself that in her look was a measure of regret, of longing. But I know her mind was arrowing ahead to some distant landing where she would change and forget not only me, but everything she knew. That was, I believe now, the reason she buried the cylinders after arriving on our shore. She wanted surcease and only forgetfulness would bring it to her. And this time, once she succeeded in forgetting, she would find a safe harbor and there build a new life. Until Isha found her. The Isha of that place, alien in form and speech, doting, obsessed, mad for her. I know this now, but at the time I knew only that she was gone beyond me.

A roaring came to my ears. It seemed to arise from every surface, not the issue of one mouth but the consensus of a trillion. The nausea I was feeling doubled and redoubled in force, cramping me, and through slitted eyes I watched the forest ripple, the entire landscape rippling about the solid dark red object at its midst. Isha, I realized, had distanced himself from the vehicle. Trusting to his instincts, I made for the cabin, glancing back as I passed through the door. The vehicle appeared to be shrinking, receding into instability, still solid itself, but inset into an opaque turbulence that stretched tunnel-like into an unreal distance. Needles lifted from the ground, yet there was no wind to speak of and the motion of that airborne debris did not seem the product of a current, but a vibration I could not feel. Then I felt it. A hot pressure on my face—it was as if the molecules of the air had knitted together, forming a second, too-tight skin. Everything looked to have brightened. Metal glinted, rocks glowed. Even the darkness held a shine. The vehicle continued to dwindle, becoming no bigger than a red splinter at the heart of a vortex. My own heart felt the same size, drained of blood and warmth.

I stopped just inside the cabin door. Isha was nowhere to be seen and this apparent sign of his caution convinced me to retreat deeper into the room; but I refused to turn away. I wanted to see the last of Ariel, to hold onto all of her I could for a while longer. The roaring rose in pitch and gradually thinned into a keening so intense, it kindled a fiery pinprick of pain in my skull. A supernal brightness infused the scene. The spruce trunks gleamed like burnished copper and their boughs had gone a solarized green. The shapes of things were distorted, elongated, like images painted on a fabric that was being stretched, indented by the receding ship, now reduced to a speck of redness at the center of a whirlpool of troubled air.

I had an apprehension that something calamitous was about to happen; I raced into the bedroom and shut the door. As I stood there, thinking I had overreacted, I heard a sound: a snap not unlike the discharge of a static spark, yet somehow organic, almost like the slap of water against a pier and, though no louder than, say, the pop of a faulty speaker on a concert stage, frightening in that it seemed to issue from within my body. A pressure wave must have followed, for I wound up on the floor, my head jammed into the corner. Woozy, my mind curiously blank, but unhurt. Not a single ache or pain, as if instead of being flung into the corner, I had been displaced and set down in that awkward position. I sat up, had a look around and noticed that the bed stood closer to the wall than I remembered. And the framed photograph of sea stacks along the Oregon coast above the bed, I could have sworn it had been hung higher. And the door, the grain of the spruce planks that formed it had, I was certain, been sharper. Lying in bed, I had often contrived pictures of their patterns, Native American shapes, animals and ritual designs; now I could see nothing of the kind. Whether this remarked upon a change in my perceptions or in the room itself, I had no clue, but it made me wonder if my body, too, had changed, perhaps in some deleterious way. Then a clatter from the living room, as of furniture being knocked about, yanked me back into the moment. Isha, cheated of his quarry, was hunting me.

Fear was sharp in me and I would have gone through the window, but the window was electronically locked and the punch code wouldn’t work. Maybe the circuitry, I thought, had undergone a change. The tranquilizer rifle was in the living room, where Ariel had left it. I searched about for a weapon and recalled the case, stored in the closet wall safe. I opened the closet, fumbled with the combination, hauled out the case, listening all the while to Isha wrecking the cabin on his way along the corridor. I removed Ariel’s gun from the case. Fifteen pounds of dull red metal. We had never tried to fire it and I had no confidence it could be fired, but I hoped it would discourage him.

Either Isha was unfamiliar with doorknobs or else he considered them inappropriate—the door flew off its hinges with a splintering crash and toppled across the bed. He ducked his head in, spotted me and entered with a sinuous twisting movement that made my heart leap. I trained the gun at him, holding it in both hands, and squeezed the grip; but to no result. I squeezed a second time, exerting greater pressure, and when again nothing happened, Isha gave forth with a seething, spit-filled sound that I, in my fear, took for gloating laughter. He could have reached me in a single stride, but he remained standing inside the door. Though I had the thought that he might not want to kill me, it was swept aside by the menace of his physicality. The bloody maw and those cracked yellow eyes and his fingers—I imagined them ripping the cartilage of my throat. As I readjusted my hold on the gun in order to exert more pressure, my forefinger touched a soft depression in the metal and the weapon came alive with a throbbing. Perhaps Isha was blessed with extraordinarily acute senses and felt it, too, for he spoke then the only words I allowed him to speak, and though as I’ve said my comprehension of his language was imperfect, the gist of his message came through:

“Brother,” he said. “This is all for nothing.”

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.

I had spent much of the previous week in Los Angeles, hiding from Siskin—I assumed he had discovered the ruin of the cabin and would want to talk with me—and working with a hacker who, using the 1-212-AKHITAI phone number as a starting point, put together a detailed picture of the project in Tuttle’s Hollow. He had discovered that the project did not receive government funding—there were connections to the military, but these seemed unofficial, and the hacker’s opinion was that we were dealing with a private organization with friends in the military. Twenty-one personnel were on-site, twelve of them high-priced private security. Twelve was not sufficient to patrol such a large perimeter, but I assumed they could rapidly deploy whenever an intruder registered on their monitors.

The rest of my time I spent studying the cylinders in Ariel’s case and what I had learned gave me firm hope that I could penetrate their defenses. The four cylinders with clawed ends were key. One was a beacon that, if Ariel had chosen to use it in conjunction with the SETI radio telescope at Green Bank, would have enabled her to send out a distress call to any portion of the multiverse. The other three were weapons, the least destructive of which generated a rolling wave that would extinguish all life within a radius of two hundred yards, exempting a small safety zone at the center of the wave—this should be sufficient to handle the security force. That I was prepared to kill testified to an evolution of purposefulness only peripherally related to my obsessive personality. Ten days of accessing the cylinders, absorbing the memories of a mind not quite human, may have had some physiochemical effect and certainly was responsible for a psychological one. I was prone to strangely configured paranoias—I experienced, for instance, a stretch of several days during which I was convinced that if I were able to turn my head quickly enough, I would be able to catch a glimpse of my own face, and I had panicked moments when I was certain that another Isha was watching me, waiting to exact vengeance for the death of our analogue. My thoughts of Ariel were an environment whose functionary I had become and, thankfully, were less poignant in their impact than inspiriting. Distanced from her, I was distant from all things. Though my enhanced understanding of the multiverse allowed me to recognize the connectivity of all life, it also served to devalue it. Passion was in me, as were the concomitant emotions of longing and desire, but the character of my search was now colored by aggression. I fully intended to track her down. Nothing was going to stand in my way.

When we arrived at the streambed in late afternoon, Henley shook my hand and said, “Take care now, Professor. You too good a customer for me to lose.” He lifted his hat, scratched his head. “’Course maybe you ain’t comin’ back this way.”

“You have one of your feelings?” I asked.

“Just a bitty one. The bitty ones ain’t always on the mark.” He gave me an uncertain look. I thought he wanted to ask a question, but if so he left it unspoken and shouldered on his pack. “You know where to find me.”

The task ahead suddenly seemed daunting and, anxious now that he was leaving, I tried to hold him there a while longer and made a lame joke about his returning to Mickey’s to watch Mountaineer baseball.

“Baseball!” he said. “Shit, I don’t watch no baseball. I just pray for football season to come.” He adjusted the weight of his pack. “Even though it ‘pears God don’t give a damn ’bout what happens to the Mountaineers.”

+WALKING ALONG THE streambed, its banks hedged by buzzing thickets, the air alive with a dusty vegetable freshness, I fell into an emotional rhythm, passing over and over again through a cycle of despondency to fatalism to grim determination, as if a wheel of fortune were turning in my head, offering three choices upon which an arrow of thought might land. Toward dusk, when the birds started a racket in the treetops, I cheered up a notch and conjured images of a happy result, picturing Ariel and me together, bypassing the interval between that possible future and the now; but with the coming of darkness that interval consumed me. As had always been the case since I’d become aware of Ariel, I was chasing flimsy clues and improbabilities. Knowing how to operate an Akashel vehicle would do me little good if there were no vehicles to be had in Tuttle’s Hollow, and all that supported the notion that there were was the photograph of the dead man Siskin had shown me in New York. If a vehicle was to be had, was I then prepared to endure the violent transformation that waited at journey’s end? Could I find Ariel? Would I be satisfied with someone almost her, a sister from a neighboring plane? I answered these questions with another question: What was I to do otherwise? Live? Write my idiot books? Build a tiny fire from the embers of our blaze and pretend to love its heat? The risks of a search were insignificant when compared to the crummy inevitability of accepting loss and moving on with things. I didn’t want anything to be ordinary about Ariel and me, not even our ending.

Four miles out from the project I removed Ariel’s gun and the four claw-ended cylinders from my pack. I had rigged a sling for the gun; I looped this over my shoulder, hid it beneath my jacket, and stuffed the pack beneath a bush, doubtful that I would need it again. I twisted the end of the first cylinder until it clicked twice and taped it to my palm. Holding death in my hand drew a curtain of black intent across my thoughts. I walked a mile or so with only a simple awareness of the world, noting sounds and movement, the suggestions of danger. A moonless dark replaced the dusk. I switched on a flashlight. After I had gone two more miles, well inside the perimeter Henley had described, I began to wonder why my presence hadn’t been detected. They must be watching, I decided. Trying to decide whether I was an accidental or a purposeful intruder. Maybe they wouldn’t approach at all, but would have a sniper take me out. I started shouting as I walked, identifying myself, calling to Paul Siskin, saying I had information for him. About fifty yards farther along, a voice hailed me, ordering me to switch off the flashlight and stand still. I obeyed, wondering how close I had come to eating a bullet. Ahead and behind me, men were filtering out of the thickets. I could barely make them out at first. They were dressed in black and wore night vision goggles, which they soon removed. One shone a light in my face, blinding me as he came up, and said, “Mister Cyrus! Where have you been keeping yourself?”

Siskin.

Whatever reluctance I might have had about using the cylinder taped to my palm vanished when I heard his voice. It was he I blamed for everything—but for his attempted usage of me, I would still have Ariel. I hadn’t really expected to find him there and I felt as if I had hit a trifecta at the racetrack.

“Surprised to see me?” He angled the light away from my eyes. “I’m not surprised to see you. Isha always comes after Ariel. Usually doesn’t take so long. Guess she didn’t set the hook real deep.”

I couldn’t tell how many men surrounded me, but it was close to the full complement. What Siskin had said, however, stayed my hand. I asked what he was talking about and he chuckled. “You haven’t figured it out yet? Well, let’s just say your situation is hardly unique. Don’t you worry. I’ll put you in the picture when we get back to base.”

“Put me in the picture now.”

He made a bemused sound and turned toward a man standing about ten feet away, perhaps to give an order; but as he turned I grabbed him around the neck, drew him close and thumbed the end of the cylinder—it emitted a double click. Siskin struggled, dropping his light, then went limp as the men around us slumped to the ground, into the stream, giving not a single outcry. I couldn’t tell how they had been stricken and was grateful for that. All I felt was a sudden warmth, as if I’d come too close to a furnace; all I heard was a windy whistling—lasting for several seconds—as of someone imitating a ghostly breeze. I shoved Siskin to the ground and he went crawling toward the nearest of the fallen men. I covered him with Ariel’s gun, told him not to get crazy, and picked up his light.

“What’d you do?” he asked shakily. “What in the fuck did you do?”

“Surprised?” I shone the light on him and showed him the cylinder. I caught sight of the dead man’s face—except that the eyes were full of blood, gone to bright red ovals, it seemed unmarked. I felt an uneasy dwindling of spirit, the sense that I had done something so despicable as to attract God’s anger.

Siskin came to his knees and shouted into the darkness, “Kill him! Kill him now!” No one responded to his command. He repeated it with greater desperation.

“Let’s go,” I told him.

As we made our way toward the hollow I interrogated Siskin about the project and what he knew concerning my situation. The hope of getting answers had been at the heart of the impulse that caused me to spare him; but either he was playing soldier or he simply didn’t care. “You killed twelve of my men, you son of a bitch,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t surprised to see me. “Now you want me to chat with you?”

“You shouldn’t have messed with us,” I said.

“I was just speeding you along. Whatever you were gonna do, you woulda done it sooner or later.”

“That’s not true. We…”

“All you fucking trans-multiversals do the same damn thing. You always fuck up.” Anger or frustration, whatever he was feeling, acted to deepen his southern-fried accent. “Ever ask yourself, Cyrus, your Ariel’s so in love with you and all, how come she didn’t even hesitate to shoot you back at the cabin?”

“How do you know about that?”

“We were watching, asshole! You think we wouldn’t?” He slowed his pace and I gave him a nudge with the gun. “You didn’t buy all that bullshit I handed you in New York?”

“You couldn’t have been watching close or you would have known what I was capable of.”

“That was a glitch. We thought the destruction was caused by the other. We didn’t know you had weapons.”

“And here I thought you guys were experts. Cool and efficient professionals.”

“You think a lotta things, Mister Cyrus, but apparently you don’t think any of ’em through.”

That was all he would tell me.

Though the slaughter of twelve men had been relatively sanitized and unaffecting, I couldn’t pull the trigger on Siskin. Too personal, I guess. Or maybe I’d lost the mood. I recalled being agitated at the time I double-clicked the cylinder, a hurry-up-and-get through-this feeling such as you might experience when anticipating a dental injection. Now I was calmer, committed to the course, past the hard part, and I considered Siskin’s question about why Ariel had not hesitated to shoot me. I could find no answer that made me happy and I asked Siskin for clarification. He trudged along without a word.

We climbed to the lip of the hollow and descended to the bunker. At the door Siskin paused and said, “There’s a man just inside. He’s unarmed. You don’t have to kill him.” In his voice was a depth of loathing, one that implied I was an insect whose habits revolted him.

I left the man inside gagged and shackled—Siskin provided the cuffs—and we proceeded to an elevator. Three levels below the surface we exited into a corridor with white plastic walls. On one were displayed thousands of small framed video captures, each depicting a male face, many of them inhuman; the more-or-less human among them were variations on what I once might have thought of as their original: me. On the opposite wall were thousands more, each containing a variation—some unrecognizably alien—on Ariel.

“You getting it yet?” Siskin asked.

I was beginning to think I might not want to know more than I already did and I made no comment. In the upper right corner of some of the screens that showed Ariel, a red digital dot flashed on and off. I asked Siskin the meaning of the dot.

“Terminated,” he said. “The science boys’ll fill you in. That should be fun for you.”

The corridor opened into a circular room about sixty feet across, its walls occupied by computer consoles and banks of monitors. Eight men were gathered at the far end, two sitting, the others leaning over the seated men’s shoulders—they were watching one of the screens. They turned as we approached. They had mahogany skins and high cheekbones and black hair flowing over the collars of their lab coats. Their stares all had the same weight, the same inquisitive alertness. They were identical to one another and identical in every regard to my old friend, Rahul Osauri.

Siskin continued toward the men, engaged them in a muted conversation, but I stopped short, flabbergasted, thinking that I had been lied to about Rahul’s death; but when none of the Rahuls smiled or greeted me, I understood who they were. I motioned to one, told him to come stand beside me. I herded Siskin and the rest into a room we had passed in the corridor and locked them in with Rahul’s keys, and I escorted Rahul back to the circular room and sat with him by the consoles. The resemblance was uncanny. I could find no point of distinction between him and my memories.

“How are you feeling?” he asked; his quiet tenor had Rahul’s East Indian accent.

“Freaked,” I said.

“I mean physically.”

I asked why he wanted to know.

“We think you may have made a crossing.” He bent to the gun, peering at it. “Is this the weapon that caused the destruction at the cabin?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you notice any changes in your environment after using it?”

“Yeah, matter of fact. Just little stuff.”

He nodded. “The weapon must have created a slight backwash effect. I suppose it’s intended as a weapon of last resort.” He cut his eyes toward me. “It’s nothing to worry about. You’ve only gone a step or two away from your home. You probably won’t even notice the adaptation process.”

I decided to postpone consideration of this new cause for alarm and deal with what lay before me. “Is your name Rahul?”

“Yes, of course.”

I actually had the urge to hug him. “Jesus! This is ridiculous…what I’m feeling.”

“Not at all. You and Ariel are lovers no matter where you begin your journey. It’s the same for us. We’re friends. We share pleasant memories.” He smiled. “The strip club you took me to the night I arrived in Palo Alto.”

“Dirty Birds.”

“You see?”

“Remember the blonde you liked? You were so drunk, she gave you a lap dance and you proposed to her.”

“It was a cultural thing, not drunkenness,” Rahul said and smiled again. “As I recall, you were much drunker than I.”

“Different universes,” I said.

“That could explain it.”

Though we were technically strangers, I wanted to sit and reminisce, to pretend our connection was real…and maybe it was real, as real as any connection. But I needed to know where I stood and what might happen. I asked what the mission of the project was.

“We’re attempting to put an end to the proliferation of trans-multiversal travel,” Rahul said. “We haven’t come close to succeeding. Mostly we kill Ariels. Sometimes we kill Ishas, but Ariels are more dangerous. They habitually kill Ishas and then continue to travel across the Weave. We train Ishas to kill them.”

I was almost as startled by his characterization of Ariel as I had been on seeing the Rahuls. I told him I had seen nothing to suggest this sort of essential antagonism in Ariel’s books.

“Your wife’s books are memories imperfectly rendered. Romantically rendered. You can’t trust them.”

“And I should trust you?”

“I admit I have an agenda. All you can do is listen and draw conclusions.” Rahul settled himself more comfortably. “In the universe where you were born, you dropped out of Cal Tech and I died in a project whose instrumentality and direction were based upon your fundamental conceptions. In other universes, however, you finished your physics degree and met a woman named Ariel, whom you married. She was lovely, brilliant. Too domineering for my tastes. All three of us worked on the project and we succeeded in our work. You and Ariel had a violent falling out. The argument started over a project matter, but it seemed to acquire a life of its own. As if you’d been waiting for the chance to argue. In some cases it was your fault; in others it was hers. In almost every case, using the technology we created, Ariel fled and you followed.”

He flipped a switch and all the monitors came alive with the myriad faces of Ariels and Ishas.

“This happened throughout the multiverse. For some reason the Ariels all fled toward…” He paused, reflected. “For simplicity’s sake, let’s say toward the center of the multiverse. Toward one specific region. The Ishas followed. The stress of this concentrated travel broke down the barriers between certain universes. Some were affected catastrophically, thus weakening the underlying structure of all things. What your wife called the Weave. The problem has developed not only because of the millions of initial flights and pursuits. Most Ariels continue to flee, making multiple journeys, and Ishas continue to hunt them. New Ishas and Ariels are wakened to the chase…as with you. The stories of each couple vary to a degree, but they’re basically the same. Both Ariel and Isha are obsessed in their own fashion. Obsessed to the point of insanity in some instances. It’s as if they’re engaged in an archetypal dance. Yin and Yang. Kali and Shiva. The creative and the receptive. The Battle of the Sexes. In every culture there are a thousand metaphors for their conflict.”

I had no idea what my face was showing, but Rahul seemed to derive satisfaction from what he saw there.

“Those of us trying to inhibit the conflict,” he went on, “have taken the names Akhitai and Akashel. Akhitai is the word for ‘man’ in one of the multiversal languages. Akashel means ‘woman.’ The Akashel believe the conflict can best be resolved by the elimination of Ishas. We believe the opposite. Though Ishas are relentless in their pursuit, rarely do they perceive Ariel as a threat. Their attitudes are colored by affection. Though Ariels are generally considered the more gentle and nurturing, fear motivates them to use deadly force far more often than is the case with Ishas. If a deadly weapon had fallen to your wife’s hand during her moment of fear, when she recognized on a subconscious level that you were a mortal enemy, she would have killed you. It’s possible her original mission was to kill you…you specifically. That she was traveling to California to meet you and not the Isha with whom you fought.”

I was incredulous. “You’re saying it’s just her and me? We’re the ones causing all the damage?”

“I’m sorry, but…yes.”

“That’s crazy!”

“It is as it is,” said Rahul.

“If it’s true, why not send operatives to kill us all?”

“How many operatives should we send? Millions? There are at least that number of trans-multiversal Ishas and Ariels. So many more journeys might destroy the Weave. A few of us make journeys by necessity, but it’s safer to train Ishas and Ariels to kill one another. The method’s not terribly efficient, I’m afraid. We’re spread too thin. We don’t have the resources we need and so we make mistakes…like the one we apparently made with you.” He brushed aside a forelock. “There’s another figure in the dance, of course. Me. Every outpost of the Akashel and the Akhitai is manned by at least one of my analogues. I’m in conflict with myself.” He gave a disconsolate laugh. “The three of us make a curious trinity.”

I wanted to reject his words, but everything he said seemed to connect with a truth I carried inside me. Though it was difficult to think of myself and Ariel as a host of sexually deranged termites eating holes in the multiversal equilibrium, once that image had been invoked, it was impossible to erase. Rahul enumerated my choices. I could return to my life and stay away from women named Ariel…but it was probable that an Ariel programmed to kill Ishas would seek me out. I could let them train me and become a predator whose prey was the woman I loved in all her incarnations. Or I could go my own way, take one of the vehicles they had acquired and pursue Ariel for my own reasons. Rahul recommended Number Two. My feelings for him had dwindled—he seemed imbued with the horrifying impersonality of our enfolding circumstance—and I locked him in with Siskin and the others. Thereafter I strolled about the circular room, studying the infinite variety of my lover’s faces, finding no better answers there.

There was a fourth choice, one that Rahul had not mentioned, and during the hours of the night I contemplated self-destruction; but as I have stated, I am a hero in only the structural sense of the term. My life is precious to me and the portrait painted by Rahul of the damage my analogues had wrought—universes destroyed, an unimaginable apocalypse looming—made it no less precious. Hungry, I found a kitchen adjoining the circular room and fixed a chicken sandwich and drank an entire pot of coffee. After eating I stretched out on a stainless steel prep table to rest and remembered something Rahul had said years before. We had been talking about the fragility of the human body, how the slightest chemical imbalance, one milli-fraction less of a compound, could result in death, and he suggested the universe itself was endowed with a similar fragility. “Everything is in balance,” he said. “A nudge from the perfect angle and it would all topple.” It appeared in this he had essentially been correct.

Wired on stress and caffeine, I closed my eyes and was possessed by fragments of thought, fleeting images, memories, all relating to Ariel. Obsessed to the point of insanity. I would not have believed that I could be so described, yet I had snuffed twelve men without much in the way of a reaction and I had been planning without regard for human consequence to destroy the project and all in it with the remaining cylinders. Such indifference surely qualified as insanity. I had a waking dream in which I traveled to a distant place and sought out Ariel, convinced her of my loyalty, and together we spread an evangel of love throughout the multiverse, healing the breach between all Ishas and Ariels. Even in my disturbed state I knew this to be insane. I would never be able to look at Ariel again without feeling wary, mistrustful. I hatched a dozen plans, none of them practical. Of one thing I was certain—I could not return to my life. With suicide off the board, I was left with two choices: search for Ariel with my own interests in mind or come seething out of nowhere, a monstrous anomaly like Springheel Jack, to hunt her and her kind. The choices were much the same. Better said, I really had one choice. And no matter what I intended, I hadn’t the slightest notion of how I might act if I saw Ariel again. I believed more firmly than ever that the Willowy Woman had chosen forgetfulness over duty, because that was what I most desired for myself—to forget everything, to be ignorant and open to hope, unaware of the universe being eaten away beneath my feet and of my role in the process.

I jumped down from the table and went to explore the basements of the project. I told myself I was looking for one of the Akashel vehicles, but what I was truly looking for was a reason to act in some direction. Two levels below the kitchen I came upon a room containing five of the vehicles. Farther along was a room with a window in which a woman sat on the floor, her chin resting on her drawn-up knees. She was facing away from me, clad in a gray jumpsuit, her black hair short and neatly trimmed; but even before she stood and approached the window, I knew she was Ariel. Not my Ariel, but mine all the same. She greatly resembled the Willowy Woman. Tall and slender, with sharply angled eyebrows and that streamlined, too-simple beauty. Judging by her well-kept hair, I might have assumed that she’d been captured recently; but it was as likely that they had been studying her, caring for her, watching her change from a spindly, hissing creature, growing smaller, curvier, emptier. The window must have been a two-way mirror. It was clear she could not see me, but she was aware of me—that, too, was clear. She laid her palm on the glass and tilted her head, trying to find me behind her reflection. All I had felt on meeting the Willowy Woman years before was restored to me. Curiosity. Wonder. But these feelings were pushed to the side by the stronger emotions I had known in New York and California, and despite the bizarre condition that joined us, it seemed natural that I felt this way. I must have tried twenty keys before I hit upon the one that fit the lock. I opened the door and stepped back, uncertain whether she would know me; and if she did know me, how could I trust that her knowledge was not married to homicidal intent?

She slipped from the room and moved off a short ways, walking with that weird gliding step. I had a whiff of an unpleasant odor, but it was less intense than it had been with the Willowy Woman. She stopped, stared at me, and edged nearer. A line of perplexity creased her brow. She lifted a hand as if to point at me, a gesture half-completed. “Isha?” she said. I spoke her name, or its approximation, and the line on her forehead deepened. She apparently wasn’t able to link the name with an identity. Which meant she had been imprisoned long enough to dissolve the memory of her purpose. She glanced in both directions along the corridor and I realized she must not recall the way out. I led her to the elevator. As we ascended she pressed herself into a corner as far away as possible, watching my every shift in posture. I carried the gun barrel-down, but was prepared to use it. Outside the bunker, standing at the bottom of the hollow, she scented the air and scanned the sky, pricked here and there by dim stars. Occasionally her eyes darted toward me, as if she had lost track and was checking to see whether or not I was still there.

The things she had forgotten, a different sky, different tastes, different musics, and the things she could not forget, surviving in her as instinct and dream…I wanted to watch her change, to guide that change, to walk with her in the West Virginia woods and give her the knowledge by which she could overcome her innate fears. I wanted to illuminate the past, demonstrate that its hold on us was breakable, and then we might be able to live. But I didn’t believe we could escape our natures or our fate. She had to go her own path and I had to return to mine. Having seen her again, I thought now I could relinquish her and abandon the world to the Siskins and the Rahuls. I’d find another country in which to forget her…or perhaps that would require another universe.

I waved at the rim of the hollow, telling her with that sign and a harsh shout to go. Reluctantly, she walked away, and then she ran, her supple stride carrying her a hundred feet toward the sky in no more time than it would have taken me to turn and go back inside the bunker. Halfway up the slope, she stopped. She was scarcely more than a shadow at that distance, but I felt her eyes on me. She cried out, “Isha!” in a voice both pleading and demanding. The connection between us was palpable, a tension stretched to the breaking point—intimations of emotion seemed to course along it. She stood awhile longer, then turned and sprinted for the rim. The connection was broken, shocking my heart. After the briefest of hesitations, abandoning all my resolve, compelled by things I knew and things I could never know, I followed.