A Trip to the Stars

I saw a child carrying a light
.

I asked him where he had brought it from
.

He put it out, and said:

“
Now you tell me where it is gone
.“

—
HASAN OF BASRA

We had voyaged far into space and now we were returning. Before leaving the solar system, we orbited the moon and several planets—skating along Saturn’s rings, probing Jupiter’s red spot, and skimming the icy mountain ranges of Uranus. We trailed a comet and threaded a swarm of meteors. And after Pluto, we were out among the stars: glittering clusters, bracelets, and crescents that swirled around us. We followed the long curve of the Milky Way, past Alpha Centauri, the first star beyond the sun, and witnessed the explosion of a supernova and the collapse of a neutron star into a black hole. Traveling two hundred light-years to the red star Antares, we took a long look at the next nearest galaxy, Andromeda, and then reversed course.

In the darkness, to the jagged strains of electronic synthesizers and the roll of timpanis, the crowd was hushed, padded seats tilted back, necks craning, as we made our return journey at the speed of light. I clutched the armrests of my seat and blew away the motes of dust tumbling around my head. Against the spectral glow from the overhead projectors, my aunt’s silhouette shone black. Her hair smelled fresh, even in the stale metallic air of that windowless place. It was cold there too. I had my coat buttoned up to my throat and inside my boots was curling my toes to keep them warm.

Finally the blue and white sphere of the earth reappeared before us, suspended in the void, and the godlike voice of the announcer thanked us for taking “A Trip to the Stars,” which was what they had called this show, running from Thanksgiving to Christmas. There was a burst of applause and a clatter of seats snapping into place as everyone stood and the houselights came up and the great domed ceiling went black.
The electronic music faded away, replaced by a slow ragtime waltz as the ushers opened the doors in the back.

Pulling on my cap, I preceded my aunt to the nearest aisle and felt her hand lightly on my shoulder, guiding me. We had come to this old planetarium at the northern tip of Manhattan to celebrate my tenth birthday. The show had been sold out and the large crowd, closely packed, buzzing with conversation, poured up the narrow aisles of the circular room. We slid into the stream of bodies and were carried along with it. I could see nothing but people’s backs and hands. Scents of perfume and sweat filled my nostrils and then the smoke of cigarettes as people began lighting up.

When we reached the back, my aunt took my hand and picked up her pace. Her grip was gentle, but firm, her suede glove soft against my palm. It was only when we had stepped out into the pale winter light—the wind on the sidewalk swirling dry snow, ticket stubs, and programs alike—that the crowd dispersed enough for me to look up at her in order to speak.

And then I could not say a word.

The woman, who was pulling me hard now to a blue sedan idling at the curb, was not my aunt. Until she opened the rear door and pushed me in, I thought she must have mistaken me for another child. Then, before stepping in after me, she looked me full in the face and betrayed no surprise.

A man was behind the wheel wearing a brown coat and a brown homburg tilted low. Even before the woman had pulled the door shut, he threw the car into gear and sped away.

“Hey!” I cried. But as I coiled up to dive for the left-hand door, the woman flipped open her handbag, fished out a black atomizer, and hurriedly squirted a cloud of perfume into my face. My eyes stung and I started coughing. A scent like Easter lilies caught sharply in my throat. I felt woozy, and my heart slowed to the point that I could hear its beats in my ear, broadly spaced, like a distant drum. Everything blurred, as if a gauzy filter, woven of shifting colors, had been placed over my eyes.

“Stop crying!” the woman snapped, not at me, but at the man behind the wheel, as she removed her gloves. They were black suede, like my aunt’s.

My hands and feet tingled, then felt heavy, as if my bones had turned to iron. My tongue was thick. When my eyes cleared a short time later, I stared out the window trying to read the street signs. Even if I could have, it wouldn’t have mattered: our route, filled with twists and turns, was impossible to follow. We had entered a factory district of narrow streets, rusted loading ports, and broken sidewalks. Pigeons lined the eaves of the warehouses. In the vacant lots bums rubbed their hands over the jagged flames in oil drums. I still felt light-headed, but my vision was less blurred. And already my heart was speeding up and the heaviness was draining from my limbs.

The woman beside me was a complete stranger. She was young—older than my aunt, but still in her twenties. And she was pretty like my aunt, tall and slim with long, light brown hair; but my aunt’s eyes were bright blue, and this woman had brown, nearly black, eyes that were darkly made up. I thought again of diving for the far door at a red light or when we slowed for traffic, but we ran every light and there was no traffic on those streets.

We pulled up abruptly at a white brick building beside a vacant lot. The building occupied half the block. Caged windows sealed and dirty, it looked like another factory that had closed down a long time ago. The large doors at its loading zone were chained and padlocked. Its paint was peeling, but the whiteness of the building’s facade stood out among the dark gray buildings that lined the rest of the street. The sign over its entrance had been corroded by the elements: only the letters
CHINE
—the fragment of a word—remained legible. A man wearing a white coat and oversized gloves was crisscrossing the vacant lot with a metal detector, stepping gingerly over the shattered glass and strewn twisted rubble. He peered back at us over his upturned collar, then turned his eyes back to the ground.

Our driver, frozen behind the wheel, lit a cigarette. His smoke filled the car. He had never turned his head, and I had failed to glimpse his reflection in the rearview mirror.

The woman opened the door and gripped my hand again. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, her first and only words to me. But her face, rigid and severe, did nothing to allay my fears. My heart was racing now, and the moment I was on my feet, stiff and weak-kneed, I had trouble catching my breath. I wanted to bolt, but managed only token resistance,
yanking my arm briefly from the woman’s grip and feeling utterly helpless as she led me me into the building through an unlocked metal door that slammed shut behind us.

My first sensation was the smell of burning tar. The air was just as chilly as it had been outside. I felt the small clouds of my breath condense on my cheeks. But I could see nothing. As the woman led me by the hand, I stumbled every so often and she pulled me that much harder. We made successive ninety-degree turns along a dank, narrow corridor, with fine cold dust swirling by us. I heard wind howling faintly in a distant shaftway.

Suddenly we stopped and a door slid shut behind us. We were still in pitch-darkness, standing in a large room that was descending through space. Its floor hummed beneath my feet, cables whined overhead, a distant generator whirred. I started shivering. Where was this woman taking me? And where was my aunt now, I asked myself as the elevator carried me deep beneath the abandoned factory, little knowing that it would be fifteen years before I saw her again.

I had a gift for dead languages. Latin, Greek, a smattering of Phoenician. Every night the first year he was gone, I dreamed of Loren. And in the dreams with a piece of charcoal he was writing letters to me in Latin on a long white wall.
Cara Alma
, he began each one, in his rounded script, trying to tell me where he was. But I could never translate fast enough to make sense of the contents, and what I did remember when I woke up made no sense at all.

Though I am not the kind of person who ever cried herself to sleep—not when my closest relatives died, not when people hurt or left me—on some of those nights, when I woke suddenly, I drenched my pillow thinking of Loren, whom I had hardly known.

The police were of little help. From the start, they told me that a determined kidnapper, professional or otherwise, was among the most difficult criminals to thwart. And that I was a victim too—a ripe target since I was young and unaccustomed to having children in my care. The wariest adult, they said, when properly distracted—I had merely been tapped on the shoulder, only to find no one behind me and Loren gone when I looked down again—could have a child plucked away from under her nose. None of this assuaged me. On my own I kept looking for him. I dropped out of school, though I was in my last year. I had some money—about four thousand dollars—that I had inherited from my mother. It was she who had raised Loren after my sister Luna and her husband Milo Haris were killed nearly three years earlier. Luna and Milo had been itinerants, living in over a dozen different cities in the seven years after they adopted Loren in Reno, Nevada. The next city would have been Pittsburgh, but they died on
its outskirts. As a baby, Loren had known only the road. They had adopted him, and now, somehow, I was his only surviving relative.

I used most of my inheritance to hire a private investigator after Loren disappeared. In two months he came up with only one thing: a woman fitting my description exactly had been seen getting into a car with a boy fitting Loren’s description—navy pea coat, black watch cap, plaid scarf. After that, nothing. It had been very cold that day, and he and the woman had vanished like the vapor of my breath. The fact that the woman so closely fit my description did not make things easier with the police. Especially when no ransom note, phone call, or message of any sort arrived from this look-alike kidnapper. The police had begun to look at me askance, with a mistrust bordering on suspicion—of, at the very least, my sanity.