A Trip to the Stars (12 page)

While swimming, I discovered two things: like the circles on my palm during lovemaking, my pendant grew hot the moment it touched the seawater. In Honolulu during my training I had swum in a pool, but this was the first time the pendant had been immersed in
the Pacific, where after all it had come into being in the form of volcanic lava. Suspended beneath my breasts as I swam, it trailed a stream of bubbles, but cooled again the moment I surfaced. The other thing was that I seemed able to hold my breath underwater for an inordinate amount of time. Much longer than I could while on land.

Cassiel had first asked me about the red dot and the circles when we were on the
Repose
. He had spotted them when he was feverish and I was cooling his throat and temples with alcohol. But I was able to put him off and he forgot about them. Only when he was on his feet again, his arm around me at the deck railing the night before we reached Subic Bay, did he see the dot and circles again, with a start of recognition.

“I thought I had dreamed them,” he murmured.

It was after midnight, and we were breaking the fraternization regulations—though not carnally as yet—kissing there under the black sky and the stars, he in his patient’s robe and I in my white uniform unbuttoned to my breasts, barely able to keep our hands off one another in anticipation of our stay in Manila. Despite his being a hero, we both could have been severely disciplined. I surely would have been busted out of the Navy. Still, I preferred taking that chance to borrowing the cabin for an hour from Sharline and Evelyn. Previously, because of his wounds, Cassiel couldn’t have done much in the cabin, and now that we knew we would be sharing leave, we were excited at the mere thought of a hotel room of our own.

Cassiel had been kissing my wrist when suddenly he held my palm up close to his eyes. “Is this a tattoo?” he whispered.

I pulled my hand away gently.

“If so, I want one too,” he smiled.

“You don’t want one of these,” I said, only half-jokingly.

I told him about working for Zaren Eboli, and about the
Ummidia Stellarum
. But I did not tell him that I had purposely stuck my hand into its terrarium. Nor did I get into the side effects of the bite.

“And it’s been growing all this time?” he said with some alarm. “Have any of the doctors looked at it?”

“Of course. It’s nothing, and it’ll be gone soon.” This was the only time I lied to him in our time together. Then I kissed him again.

“You know,” he said, “you told me the other day that you were opposed to the war, but you never told me why you enlisted.”

For an instant I wondered if he could possibly have intuited the role the spider bite had played in my decision.

“It seems a strange jump from classical languages,” he went on.

“I wanted to start stripping away all that is false, illusory, and fearful in me,” I said slowly. “Those are not my words, but they’ll do.”

He wasn’t expecting this, and I decided that, no, he hadn’t intuited anything about the spider bite. “Whose words are they?” he asked.

“A man in New Orleans passed them on to me.”

“Well, you picked a hell of a place to do it: everything over here is false or illusory, and everyone is fearful.”

“That’s exactly why it was the right place,” I said calmly. “Anyway, everything here isn’t like that. I met you here.”

“Yeah, courtesy of a SAM missile,” he said, pulling me close.

As we sunned ourselves on the snow-white sand near Orion, black-tailed terns circling the palms, I pushed myself up onto one elbow. “You know the name of our hotel?” I said to him. “It occurred to me that Alnilam is an anagram for Manila, with an extra L.”

“I hadn’t caught that,” he grinned, squinting up at me. “Are anagrams another of your hidden skills—like speaking Latin?”

“So you think it is an anagram?”

“I don’t know.” He sat up and took a swig from our thermos of iced tea. “But I do know that Alnilam is also a star, named after the Arab astronomer who discovered it. It’s the twenty-ninth brightest star in the sky, an epsilon, 900 light-years from earth, and it forms the center of Orion’s belt.”

“Did you know about the stars before you became a navigator?”

He shook his head. “But in navigation you learn about them right away. With just a few stars, you can navigate anywhere.”

“If you had to, you could use this star Alnilam to navigate?”

“So long as I had a sextant and a watch. On a navigational chart for this time of year you’d find Alnilam in the east at exactly zero degrees.”

“That’s really all you need—a sextant and a watch?”

“The Polynesians didn’t even have that,” he said, slipping on his sunglasses as he warmed to the subject, “and they roamed the entire Pacific, between the tiniest islands. Magellan, maybe the greatest navigator of all, worked with little more than a compass. In his official portrait, he’s pictured against the sea, seven stars above his head, with a
compass in one hand and a map in the other. He named this ocean the Pacific because it happened to be calm through his entire voyage. Then he was killed here in the Philippines, in a senseless incident, hacked up by a swarm of islanders on Mactan soon after discovering his famous strait at Tierra del Fuego, and soon after discovering Guam. There’s a statue of him near my base.” Cassiel took my pendant between his thumb and forefinger. “If there was a greater navigator, it was your friend Cook here. Both of them circumnavigated the globe, but Cook sailed two hundred fifty years after Magellan, so he had two great advantages: a precision sextant and one of the first chronometers, to determine longitude. Oddly, Cook died the same way as Magellan, in a mix-up, speared and then dismembered in Hawaii, which he was the first European to vist. But that was on his third voyage. See, the purpose of his first voyage was not geographical, but astronomical. The Royal Society sent him to the South Pacific two hundred years ago, in 1768, to observe an eclipse of the sun by Venus. There have only been five transits of Venus in history, never in the twentieth century. By timing the passage of Venus across the solar disk, astronomers—and Cook had two aboard his ship—hoped to calculate the distance of the earth from the sun. Though Cook sailed across every ocean, his real mission extended far out into the solar system.”

“And what about you? If I gave you a sextant, a watch, and some charts.”

“I’m afraid the Air Force beat you to it.”

“You know what I mean.”

He lay back down on the blanket, and I could see the passing clouds reflected on the lenses of his sunglasses. “Right now I’m only looking to get out of the war,” he said finally, “alive, if possible.”

There was a long silence, punctuated only by the soft breaking of the waves. “Did you set out to become a navigator as soon as you enlisted?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. I went into an officer training program especially for navigation. That was in 1957. There was no war then, except the Cold War. I cut my teeth flying redundant reconnaissance missions around Japan and Scandinavia, watching Russian submarines come and go. After that, I volunteered for polar and desert overflights for purposes of charting remote territory. I liked that. There are places like the Arctic and the Sahara where the topography is fluid and maps and
charts need to be updated regularly. Then the war started and every navigator was told he’d do a tour here. It was a question of numbers.” He shook his head. “I never expected to end up in this kind of war. A few years ago I had a chance to work in the space program, which I passed up because I would have been forced to resign my commission. I was not prepared to do that then. Anyway, it was a desk job.” He reached out for me. “Now, come lie beside me again—I’m getting lonely down here listening to the sound of my own voice.”

My boyfriends in Boston had been nothing like Cassiel. Though I’d always gotten a lot of attention from men, I only had a couple of serious boyfriends—and even they were short-lived—before I embraced my studies with a vengeance. One was a bass guitarist with a band that had a following around Boston; the other was a field biologist with whom I drove around New England in a VW van, preparing him macrobiotic meals and rolling myself joints. Each time I told myself that I was in love, but looking back I realized I had only the vaguest notion of what that was supposed to mean. And I say that taking my youth into account. My history, after all, didn’t help me much in matters of the heart. I had never seen my mother—a martyr unwavering in her widowhood—in any kind of intimate relationship with a man. And then there was Luna, who had been drawn to Milo as surely—and hopelessly—as a leaf is drawn to a whirlpool. And of course my grandmother, whose great love was the bottle. My old girlfriends in Brooklyn, the crowd I hung out with, didn’t help much either. Their motto might have been that it was better to be screwing, and screwing up, than to be idle. Anything was better than idleness. And recklessness was best of all. So when I became something of a loner with my books, it was a step up for me. Beneath the surface I had become that much hungrier for love—not the kind of love I’d known, but the kind that would nourish me—even as I stopped looking for it in the usual ways.

Now that I thought I’d found it, I saw it wasn’t just the external circumstances which made things so different with Cassiel. At thirty-one—seven years older than me—he was older than my previous lovers, and there was no escaping the fact we had come together in the overwhelming context of the war; but, far more significantly, I had never before encountered a man like him. Unique yet unassuming, intelligent, physically powerful but reserved—someone, in short, who was attractive to me in every way. Drawn to him with a pull I could neither
explain nor control, I realized this was the real thing, which I had never known before. There was one other quality about him, crucial to me, to which I became particularly sensitive because of the war. Cassiel was a warrior and a man of action, and though I had known hundreds of such men in Vietnam, I sensed something in him that few of the others possessed. Cassiel had been seasoned and scarred by experience long before he arrived in Southeast Asia, but somewhere along the way he had learned the rare and difficult skill of allowing himself to be gentle—with himself and with others—when caught up in the brutal machinery of this world. Even at twenty-four, I knew that this can only happen with those who suffer much and do not absent themselves when witnessing the suffering of others. But I certainly had never expected to find such gentleness in a member of that elite group who guided the B-52s and their fearsome cargo of destruction to their targets.

On the
Repose
a pilot I had to x-ray several times, who was stationed with Cassiel on Guam, gave me the only facts about him that I would have from an outside source. He told me that Cassiel was well-liked by the other fliers, but was a loner. Given to poring over celestial charts in his free time and listening to the keyboard music of Orlando Gibbons and William Byrd. An expert parachutist, to the astonishment of his comrades Cassiel liked to unwind by going up on training runs to jump with the paratroopers. He preferred free-falling until the last possible second before pulling the cord.

My cabinmate Sharline noticed at once that there was no telltale band of pale skin on Cassiel’s ring finger. And she let me know that she very much admired his rugged good looks. “But since he’s the first guy over here you’ve shown any interest in,” she had added with a sigh, “he’s all yours, honey.” Indeed, just entering his prime and in top physical condition, Cassiel was a very handsome man. When I asked him during one of our bedside chats if he’d ever been married, he replied no. A girl back home? Again, no. “Anyway,” he had added as I adjusted the pillows propping him up, “there is no ‘back home’ for me anymore in the States. And I don’t just mean Nevada. Except for brief stays in Washington and Honolulu, I was posted abroad for six straight years. When I went on leave from Iceland or Germany, I traveled around the rest of Europe. I’ve been to Tokyo, Bangkok, and Djakarta. Guam is the first piece of U.S. territory I’ve lived on for so long.”

So there was no sweetheart. But I would also come to know firsthand
that he was highly sexed, and while he might be a loner in the barracks, he didn’t seem to be the celibate type. Nor did I think, after living on a ship with three hundred men myself, that Cassiel was the sort that came on to every woman who crossed his path. In Tokyo and Bangkok—and certainly in Guam—I imagined him seeing to his sexual needs in the countless brothels he could choose from. As for love, I was sure there were plenty of women who were attracted to him to whom he didn’t give a second look. Maybe I was just flattering myself. But when, the first time we slept together, he pulled me close to say that he loved me, I believed him and was deeply moved. I could tell he had been in love before, seriously so, but my instincts told me it had been a long time ago.

Cassiel told me he loved me again at the end of that long lazy afternoon at the beach near Orion as we embraced in the water. Then he picked a leaf from a bush he called a “playing-card tree.” He said sailors used to illustrate the leaves and play cards with them in lieu of a conventional deck. With a ballpoint pen we each drew on the leaf: he a pair of stars, and as the #1 song of 1968, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” blared from our transistor radio for the third time, I inscribed our names,
GEZA
&
MALA
. Cassiel rolled the leaf up carefully, promising me that he would save it. As we left the beach, he lifted a starfish wriggling from the surf and held it up to me, flashing in the sun.

Needing so little sleep myself, I had found out on our first night at the Hôtel Alnilam that Cassiel was an insomniac. At first I thought his wounds might still be causing him pain, but it wasn’t that. Earlier, running my fingertips over the line of shrapnel scars, I felt as if I were gazing beneath them, studying one of my own X rays, and I could see that he had healed well. It was four o’clock when he turned to me, his eyes gleaming, wide open in the darkness.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“You’ve been awake too,” Cassiel said. “What were you thinking about?”