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.”