Fear was sharp in me and I would have gone through the window, but the window was electronically locked and the punch code wouldn’t work. Maybe the circuitry, I thought, had undergone a change. The tranquilizer rifle was in the living room, where Ariel had left it. I searched about for a weapon and recalled the case, stored in the closet wall safe. I opened the closet, fumbled with the combination, hauled out the case, listening all the while to Isha wrecking the cabin on his way along the corridor. I removed Ariel’s gun from the case. Fifteen pounds of dull red metal. We had never tried to fire it and I had no confidence it could be fired, but I hoped it would discourage him.
Either Isha was unfamiliar with doorknobs or else he considered them inappropriate—the door flew off its hinges with a splintering crash and toppled across the bed. He ducked his head in, spotted me and entered with a sinuous twisting movement that made my heart leap. I trained the gun at him, holding it in both hands, and squeezed the grip; but to no result. I squeezed a second time, exerting greater pressure, and when again nothing happened, Isha gave forth with a seething, spit-filled sound that I, in my fear, took for gloating laughter. He could have reached me in a single stride, but he remained standing inside the door. Though I had the thought that he might not want to kill me, it was swept aside by the menace of his physicality. The bloody maw and those cracked yellow eyes and his fingers—I imagined them ripping the cartilage of my throat. As I readjusted my hold on the gun in order to exert more pressure, my forefinger touched a soft depression in the metal and the weapon came alive with a throbbing. Perhaps Isha was blessed with extraordinarily acute senses and felt it, too, for he spoke then the only words I allowed him to speak, and though as I’ve said my comprehension of his language was imperfect, the gist of his message came through:
“Brother,” he said. “This is all for nothing.”
Only later did I consider that he might not have been asking for his life, but was making a more general statement, commenting upon our mutual futility or all futilities. The throbbing evolved into a hum and though there was no visible discharge, a fluid tremor passed through the metal and Isha, stretching out his hands, perhaps in entreaty, disintegrated. It was not an instantaneous event and bore some similarity to the process that had concentrated his vehicle into a speck, but was much quicker and less organized in its development. He flattened out against the backdrop of the cabin wall, curved inward as if an invisible ball had rolled into him, and then was ripped apart, a piecemeal dismembering, bits of flesh spraying, gouts of blood erupting, all borne backward against the wall, which itself began to disintegrate in the exact same fashion, blood and bone and wood and insulation blending into a flurry of pinkish dissolution. Horrified, I laid down the gun, but the process continued soundlessly for a grisly inch of time, devouring the living room, eroding the ground beneath it, carving a pit where what passed for our front yard had been, leaving me standing in the wreckage of my life, gazing out at darkness and the forest, less now by a few evergreens that also had been taken to wherever Isha had flown.
The storm of those last minutes in the cabin blotted out every feeling other than fear, but as I sat on the edge of the pit afterward, numb and unreasoning, Ariel came back to me in the shape of a fiery absence, and the obsession from which love had sprung returned to stalk my brain, picking up the trail it had forsaken months before. Even in hopelessness, in the depths of loss, I clung to the fact that she was alive, and before long, before the sky paled and an actual light shone down to disperse the glowing too-real phantoms I created of the dark, my guilts and errors given nightmare form…from that fact I constructed a scheme to win her once again. I did not believe in it at first. It seemed a desperate fantasy whose sole product was false confidence; but in my derelict state, false confidence was my best resource, my one alternative to collapse.
Toward eight o’clock a drizzle interrupted my mental struggle, driving me inside the ruin of the cabin. For ten or fifteen minutes I wandered about, touching Ariel’s things. A pen, a dress, a pill bottle, a lipstick. Touching them opened me to the exigencies of grief. I rejected grief, refused to let it own me, and turned to making lists, plotting strategies, testing theories against the newly acquired logics of my experience. And when I had exhausted this process, I went into the bedroom, opened Ariel’s case, removed a cylinder and began to complete my education.
IF ONE ADOPTS a Buddhist platform, and lately this has seemed to me a reasonable stance, it becomes evident that life is compounded of mistakes, errors of omission and commission, that every worldly goal leads one deeper into the entanglements of illusion. Perhaps this was what Isha meant when he said that what we did was all for nothing. As the event of his death receded and grew more subject to analysis, I came to believe that he had not wanted to kill me and was motivated by our natural affinity to confront me, and that I, in judging his actions, had made a mistake. Being aware of this and of the general truth underlying it was, of course, no guarantee that I would not continue to make mistakes, and so it was that ten days after Ariel fled into the multiverse, running from me, from Isha, from—I suspect—all Ishas everywhere, I set out walking toward Tuttle’s Hollow from a point on the highway southeast of Durbin, accompanied once again by Whirlie Henley. I had paid Henley an exorbitant amount for his services. He was not eager to go near the hollow, but had agreed to guide me to within six miles of it, to a streambed that would lead me to a point less than a hundred yards away.
“There’s soldiers back in there, y’know,” he’d said as we sat over beer and whiskey at Mickey’s. “They always running people off. ‘Pears like they got ’bout a three, four mile perimeter. Get any closer and they know you there.”
I said I was aware of the soldiers.
“How you gon’ deal with ’em?” Henley asked.
I told him it would be better for him if he remained ignorant of my business, and though he was disgruntled by this, after a brief bargaining session we agreed on a fee.
I had spent much of the previous week in Los Angeles, hiding from Siskin—I assumed he had discovered the ruin of the cabin and would want to talk with me—and working with a hacker who, using the 1-212-AKHITAI phone number as a starting point, put together a detailed picture of the project in Tuttle’s Hollow. He had discovered that the project did not receive government funding—there were connections to the military, but these seemed unofficial, and the hacker’s opinion was that we were dealing with a private organization with friends in the military. Twenty-one personnel were on-site, twelve of them high-priced private security. Twelve was not sufficient to patrol such a large perimeter, but I assumed they could rapidly deploy whenever an intruder registered on their monitors.