A Trip to the Stars (23 page)

I always used the tunnel to get to the greenhouse—I liked the mystery of it. To enter the tunnel, you descended a stairwell off the elevator bank and went through a green steel door one flight down.
Semicylindrical, its floor and ceiling completely brick, the tunnel was illuminated by green overhead bulbs. The moment you entered it, you were flooded with the sweet, tropical scents of the greenhouse. The sudden downdraft of humidity always felt, at first, as if it were lifting me several inches off the ground.

Two hundred feet long, the tunnel was a straight line broken by a single wide loop at its halfway point, where it circumvented one end of the swimming pool. When you traversed the loop, you could not see the half of the tunnel behind you. That night, emerging from the loop and making my way to the spiral stairway that led to the greenhouse, I thought I heard someone behind me. Just a rustle, and an intake of breath. Tired from our outing, Sirius had stretched out on the cool marble in the lobby, so I knew it wasn’t him. I strained my ears for several seconds, and hearing nothing more, continued on.

The greenhouse was deserted. In the ultraviolet light, I saw that someone had been working at one of the tables, where the lamp was still hot, but if it was Calzas, he had left by the door to the garden, which had been locked from the outside. The greenhouse was half the size of a football field, with a forty-foot-high ceiling to accommodate the taller trees. Great humidifiers lined one wall, streaming out clouds of mist. Vents that cooled or heated the air, depending on the sharp fluctuations of the desert climate, purred on all sides. There were large, slow-bladed fans in the corners. The density of foliage—greens and blues that swayed and flickered subtly in the artificial breezes—was always a shock to me visually, especially if I had just come in from the shimmering flats of the desert. Seedlings sprouted in glassed-in cases. Grafts were planted in boxed beds that were themselves miniature quincunxes. All the trees were labeled as to their ages, origins, and special needs. Recent arrivals from around the world awaited repotting in an even more closely monitored chamber—a glass room within the greenhouse.

I picked a handful of white cherries from a gnarled Japanese hybrid and returned to the tunnel. My palm was still tingling, and my eyes burned from staring at the moon, but the other, immediate effects of the spider bite seemed to have receded. Munching the cherries, circling the loop, I was even growing sleepy finally after all that stimulation. Then I heard someone behind me again: this time I was sure of it.
Another rustle, and a shoe scraping on the brick on the other side of the loop.

“Calzas?” I called out.

Calzas
, my voice came back to me.

I stopped short and spat a cherry pit into my hand. I had never heard an echo in that tunnel before; maybe, I thought, the effects of the bite were even trickier than I suspected.

“Calzas!” I called again, and again the name came back to me. On an impulse, I shouted the first words of Marco Polo’s
Travels:
“ ‘Emperors and kings, dukes and marquises …’ ” Again the words seemed to echo.

But I realized with a chill that it wasn’t my voice I was hearing. “Marquises” had been inflected differently—too much so to be an echo.

“Calzas, this isn’t funny.”

Calzas, this isn’t funny
, the voice repeated.

“Who are you?”

Who are you?

That was it. I ran back into the loop, circled it, and was astounded to find on the other side, about fifty feet down the tunnel, a boy about my own age. He was standing alone, his head cocked sharply. Shorter and slighter than me, he held his arms stiffly down his sides, his wrists locked awkwardly and his fingers splayed outward. His thin white hands reminded me of a frog’s. He had a small triangular face and black hair, slicked down with hair tonic, beneath a slanted black beret. The style of his clothes was completely alien to me: a long-sleeved white shirt with a plaid bow tie, black vest, plaid shorts, and buckle shoes with black knee socks.

He betrayed no surprise at seeing me, which at first was more frightening to me than reassuring. I took several tentative steps toward him, and he followed suit. His face came clearer. Brown eyes, a small hooked nose, and a straight unhappy mouth that seemed to have been penciled onto his pale skin. Over his left eye half the eyebrow was gone, replaced by a welt of scar tissue.

And it struck me all at once who he was.

“Auro?” I said.

“Auro,” he echoed me, nodding assent.

It was Ivy’s son. I had never met him, and had only seen a single
picture of him, taken five years earlier when he was nine, but even in that time he had changed. His eyes were more hollowed, his mouth even thinner, his chest more concave. One thing that obviously had not changed: the doctors in Geneva had had only slightly more success than their Chicago counterparts in curing Auro of his echolalia. He could still only echo what was said to him, though now, as I discovered, he was able to bite off the ends of sentences—single words, phrases—rather than repeat everything he heard verbatim. This was progress, but the Swiss specialists also felt it might be as far as Auro would ever go.

I extended my hand to him. “I’m Enzo.”

“Enzo,” he said.

“Glad to meet you,” I said.

“Glad to meet you,” he replied.

Already, I realized, I was arranging the words I spoke to him, however simple, with the knowledge that they would be echoed. I was instinctively attempting to shape the coherence of that echo, and as we grew older, and the words became more complicated, this reflex was to become a strange facet of my life. For despite Ivy’s hatred of me, from the first I felt sympathetic toward Auro.

“You must have just arrived,” I said.

“Just arrived,” he nodded.

By then I had also recovered enough to know that if Auro was there, then Ivy was back, too. Just the thought of her put a cold knot into my stomach. I had learned a few things in the previous three years, and I reminded myself that physically I was bigger and stronger, but I still dreaded her. The fact she had once been able, literally, to carry me off against my will was not something I could wipe out so easily. Nor was the paradoxical fact that of all those concerned, she was the one who had least wanted me to be carried off into my new life at the hotel.

“We’d better go in,” I said, indicating the direction of the hotel.

“Go in,” Auro agreed, and we started walking side by side.

He had been studying my face. Though his speech disability made it sound as if he had a constricted thought process, that was anything but the case; in fact, as often happens, his limitations in this one area had made him precocious in others. His sensitivities were unusual, as was the intelligence that was as evident in his face as his considerable
pain. In taking my measure in those few minutes—I felt he was looking right into me—he obviously decided he trusted me enough to unburden himself. For no sooner had we emerged from the loop than he turned to me suddenly, his lips trembling and tears welling up in his eyes.

“What is it?” I said.

He shook his head violently, and raising his hand to his face, clamped it over his mouth.

“Tell me.”

With enormous effort, he pulled his hand away finger by finger and in a high-pitched voice—completely unlike his echoing voice—blurted, “My father’s dead.”

“Oh no.” I reached for his shoulder, but he backed away. I felt awful, though my own contact with his father had been so bizarre; what I remembered most clearly about Nestor that day was his bursting into tears, to Ivy’s chagrin, behind the wheel of the car. I knew now that his death was the reason Auro and Ivy were back in Las Vegas.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Auro, just as he himself burst into tears.

He cried openly, his thin chest heaving and his nose running. “So sorry,” he echoed through his sobs.

Seeing how forcefully he rubbed his knuckles into his eyes, I was afraid he would hurt himself, but I let him have his cry. Then I said, “Auro, let me help you. We’re cousins, you know.”

This time he hesitated. “Cousins, you know,” he said finally.

And I had learned something else: that in moments of severe crisis, Auro could and did speak words that were not echoes, but only with the greatest anguish—first sealing his lips, so he wouldn’t echo, and then drawing the words out slowly, as if from his guts—in that voice which seemed to be purely his own.

He dried his eyes with a plaid handkerchief, blew his nose, and together we went through the green door at the end of the tunnel and climbed the stairs to the hotel lobby. There in the elevator bank, hands on hips, was Ivy, whose Easter lily perfume wafted over me even before we were off the stairs.

She was imposing as ever, in a long black dress, her brown hair drawn back severely in a bun, her eyes locking on mine. Her taut face
was more sharply angled; what edgy beauty it had possessed seemed gone. Only thirty-two at that time, she had come to look much older. Any hopes I might have harbored that Nestor’s death would chasten her were quickly dashed.

“I’ve been looking everywhere.” she said, still glaring at me. “I should have known he was with you.”

“I should have known …” Auro said, casting his eyes to the polished floor.

“I’m sorry about Nestor,” I said to her.

“… Nestor,” Auro shook his head, stifling another sob.

“Honey, have you been crying?” Ivy said, ignoring my words and leading Auro away from me. She dabbed his eyes with a tissue. “It was such a long trip, now you need to sleep.”

“Sleep,” he nodded, walking off.

Then she stepped up to me, her high heels clicking. Up close, she did not seem so tall; in fact, at around five seven, she was only a couple of inches taller than me now—far different from when I was ten years old. “Don’t ever take him off somewhere like that again,” she said.

“I didn’t. He found
me
.”

“Just leave him alone and keep out of my way. We’re back now, to stay. Do you understand?” Her breath, with each word, was like a dry blast on my face.

Almost as dry as my throat. “I live here, too,” I said. “And, you know what, I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

With no change of expression, so fast I didn’t see it coming, she slapped me across the cheek. Then turned away abruptly.

I was stunned. Face stinging, fists clenched, I froze. Maybe because she was in mourning Ivy thought she could get away with this. But a moment later, it hit me, harder than her slap, that I had to deal with this myself then and there—had to put an end to it.

Hurrying after her, I tapped her shoulder, and she wheeled around.

“Don’t ever touch me again,” I said, biting off each word. “I don’t have to go running to Uncle Junius anymore. Do
you
understand?”

My voice was quavering, but so were Ivy’s lips and right hand, which she had begun to raise again. For an interminable moment, we stood like that, eye to eye. I didn’t flinch, and she didn’t strike me.

Finally she hissed through her teeth, “Shit-for-brains. You’ll be sorry.” Then spun around on her heel.

Auro, who had witnessed this scene with horror, picked up her last three words. “You’ll be sorry,” he echoed plaintively, as the elevator door slid open and they disappeared, the scent of Easter lilies lingering in my nostrils.

Later, lying in bed with Sirius stretched out by my feet, my palm throbbing where the spider had bitten me, I stared out the window at the vast array of stars in the sky. I had a lot to think about that night. But I began and ended with the two astronauts in their module still sleeping on the moon, a pocket of oxygen in the enormous vacuum of space, the green and blue lights on their control console twinkling and through the small thick window the earth sinking below the horizon—the first men ever to sleep and dream on another heavenly body. I recalled the amulet Samax’s cellmate Rochel left him in Ironwater Prison. Whoever etched the earth on that blue stone had seen it from the same perspective as the Apollo astronauts. Even with all I heard, and often believed, from the dreamers and explorers at the Hotel Canopus—the theories, fantastical yarns, and grand obsessions that came at me on a daily basis—I could scarcely believe what this amulet, passed on to my uncle by a Sufi-trained Zuni Indian, must mean if its dating was accurate. And I wondered if in the years to come I would feel different about it, as with so many other things I had learned since arriving in Las Vegas.

Whenever I blinked, I saw green and blue lights flashing on my eyelids. Like the ones on the astronauts’ console. Or the bright pinpoints in ocean water. Or finally, when I closed my eyes for good, like millions of stars swarming at me. As if in drifting slowly, inwardly, into sleep I were at the same time hurtling at great velocity away from the earth, the moon, the other planets, with only interstellar space before me, and Sirius, stirring slightly, still at my feet.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of my father’s death I watched the moon landing on a television set in a bar in Tamuning, the largest town on Guam. He had fallen in fierce fighting on the morning of July 21, 1944, near a beach in Tumon Bay less than a mile from where I sat.

At dawn I had visited that beach. A small granite obelisk marked the point where the first wave of marines landed. Wading in from their landing craft, half were cut down by machine gun fire from Japanese pillboxes on the cliff and another quarter were shot or mortared on the beach. My father was among the remaining hundred men in that group to reach the cliffs and plunge into the jungle in hand-to-hand combat. As near as I could ascertain, consulting the rolls in the memorial chapel, that was where he was killed a few hours after hitting the beach. Alongside his name was the citation for the Silver Star which I carried in my handbag, informing me that before his death he had pulled a wounded comrade out of heavy gunfire and helped to destroy a pillbox.

The military cemetery, at the northern tip of the island, was just as Cassiel had described it. A series of rolling, treeless lawns, it could as easily have been in Ohio or Georgia as in a tropic zone 13° north of the equator. Fighter jets, cargo transports, and Vietnam-bound B-52s taking off from Andersen Air Force Base passed directly overhead, so close I could make out the numerals on their tails and even the treads in their tires as their landing gear retracted. How many times, I wondered, had Cassiel flown over my father’s grave, in planes whose gliding shadows like ghosts momentarily, coolly, darkened the grass in the blinding sunlight?