Intensity

her, the only perfect doll of all those in the room.
        Mr. Vess sits on a footstool before her.
        He cleans up well. Showered, shampooed, shaved, and combed, he is presentable in any company, and any mother, seeing him on the arm of her daughter, would think that he was a prize. He is wearing loafers without socks, beige cotton Dockers, a braided leather belt, and a pale-green chambray shirt.
        In her schoolgirl uniform, Ariel looks good too. Vess is pleased to see that she has regularly groomed herself in his absence, as she was instructed. It is not easy for her, taking only sponge baths and shampooing her glorious hair in the sink.
        He constructed this room for others, who came before her, none of whom was in residence longer than two months. Until he'd met his Ariel, and learned what an engagingly independent spirit she was, he'd never imagined that he would insist on anyone staying this long. Consequently, a shower had seemed unnecessary.
        He had first seen the girl in a newspaper photograph. Though only a tenth-grader, she had been something of a prodigy and had led her Sacramento high school team to victory in a statewide California academic decathlon. She had looked so tender. The newspaper had trembled in his hands when he had seen her, and he had known at once that he must drive to Sacramento and meet her. He'd shot the father. The mother had owned an enormous collection of dolls and had made dolls of her own as a hobby. Vess had beaten her to death with a ventriloquist dummy that had a large, carved maple head as effective as a baseball bat.
        "You're more beautiful than ever," he tells Ariel, and his voice is muffled by the soundproofing, as if he were speaking from inside a coffin, buried alive.
        She does not reply or even acknowledge his presence. She is in her silent mode, as she has been without interruption for more than six months.
        "I missed you."
        These days, she never looks at him but stares at a point above his head and off to one side. If he were to stand up from the footstool and move into her line of sight, she would still be looking over his head and to one side, though he would never quite be able to see her eyes shift in avoidance.
        "I brought a few things to show you."
        From a shoe box on the floor beside the footstool, he extracts two Polaroid photographs. She will not accept them or turn her eyes to them, but Vess knows that she will examine these mementos after he leaves.
        She is not as lost to this world as she pretends to be. They are engaged in a complicated game with high stakes, and she is a good player.
        "This first is a picture of a lady named Sarah Templeton, the way she looked before I had her. She was in her forties but very attractive. A lovely woman."
        The armchair is so deep that the seat cushion provides a ledge in front of Ariel on which Vess can place the photograph.
        "Lovely," he repeats.
        Ariel doesn't blink. She is capable of staring fixedly without blinking for surprisingly long periods. Now and then Mr. Vess worries that she will damage her striking blue eyes; corneas require frequent lubrication. Of course, if she goes too long without blinking and her eyes become dangerously dry, the irritation will cause tears to spring up involuntarily.
        "This is a second photograph of Sarah, after I was finished with her," Mr. Vess says, and he also places this picture on the chair. "As you can see if you choose to look, the word lovely doesn't apply any more. Beauty never lasts. Things change."
        From the shoe box he takes two more photographs.
        "This is Sarah's daughter, Laura. Before. And after. You can see she was beautiful. Like a butterfly. But there's a worm in every butterfly, you know."
        He places these snapshots on the chair and reaches into the box again.
        "This was Laura's father. Oh, and here's her brother… and the brother's wife. They were incidental."
        Finally he brings out the three Polaroids of the young Asian gentleman and the Slim Jim with the bite missing.
        "His name is Fuji. Like the mountain in Japan."
        Vess puts two of the three photos on the chair. "I'll keep one for myself. To eat. And then I'll be Fuji, with the power of the East and the power of the mountain, and when the time comes for me to do you, you'll feel both the boy and the mountain in me, and so many other