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?”