Vacancy & Ariel

by Lucius Shepard

  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 ann
oyances. 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.”