“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.