Vacancy & Ariel

by Lucius Shepard

  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, hu
h?”

  “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 wi
ld, 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.