A Trip to the Stars (27 page)

“What could have happened?” Samax asked.

“Oh, with a full dose of the venom, many things, good and bad. Your people have used it for centuries in purification rituals, Mr. Calzas.”

Calzas nodded. “When I saw the circle, I knew. The shamans call it the Star Spider. They say some who use its venom often become obsessed with the heavens, stargazing endlessly, and others become master architects—like the spider. That is because the Zuni believe the universe was created by a spider god, and that the stars are her eggs. From each of them springs a warrior who will eventually drop to earth. If you are receptive, the Star Spider’s venom can fortify and accelerate your true proclivities, helping them to bear fruit.”

Trying to read his face, I wondered if Calzas, a gifted architect, had ever been bitten.

“It’s true, whatever his interests, Enzo may find them spurred on,” Eboli agreed. “And what are your interests, Enzo?”

“Architecture,” Samax smiled, “and astronomy. Both long-standing.”

Screwing up his right eye, Eboli looked at me with new interest. “Is that a fact.”

I nodded.

“And you’re sure the boy’s in no medical danger?” Samax said.

“None. He obviously had a fever the night he was bitten, which then broke: the greatest danger comes when that fever keeps climbing.
And, later, chronic insomnia sets in. I would hazard that two more circles will appear—with a full dose you can get twelve—but that should be it. His appetite and other functions have remained normal. He’s sleeping regularly. At first, he felt the full power of the venom in a rush, but for him the true aftereffects of the bite will not be symptoms, but influences—often too subtle to distinguish for years—manifesting themselves in his personality, habits, choices. In short, they will become woven into the fabric of his life.” He pulled at his beard. “And he will always look to the stars more than the rest of us.”

“Of course, if there were an antidote, you would have mentioned it,” Samax said.

“Of course. But even if there were, it would be ineffective after this much time.” Eboli turned to me. “Did you notice anything else unusual that first night?”

“Time passed very quickly,” I replied, “while I felt completely still.”

He nodded.

“And I could see the craters on the moon where the Apollo astronauts would walk.”

“You mean, on television?”

“No, I was out in the desert. The sky was so clear, and I could make out the moon up close, in detail—even closer than with my telescope.”

“I see,” Eboli murmured.

“Later, from my bed, I could even see lights blinking like the ones inside their module.”

“Enzo has always had a powerful imagination,” Samax said, relighting his cigar. “When he told me all this the next day, I attributed it to the excitement of the moment.”

“Assisted mightily by that rush I mentioned.” Eboli sat back slowly. “Enzo will bear careful observation, so that I can confirm my suppositions.”

And that was what Eboli’s treatment consisted of: observing me, twice daily repeating his initial examination in addition to taking my blood pressure and listening to my heart and lungs. My system remained entirely stable. The only change that I myself noted, of which Eboli could have known nothing, I hadn’t mentioned to any of them—even Calzas.

The very first time I had met Calzas, at the abandoned factory, he was clutching a blueprint, and for as long as I had lived at the hotel I had been fascinated by his architectural drawings. When I was thirteen, he gave me some large drawing pads and taught me draftsmanship, as well as elementary architectural principles. These included the books of Vitruvius, whose three essential components of architecture were:
venustas
(beauty),
firmitas
(stability), and
utilitas
(utility). This became a basic part of my in-house education. Following Calzas’s instructions, I had designed small houses, a Roman bath, and a gas station, all in primitive form.

What I was drawing now, after the spider bite, were fantastical buildings, with a skillfulness that startled me at first. My drawings were of enormously complex structures, filled with tortuous networks of stairwells, corridors, mezzanines, balconies, and rooms that dominoed endlessly into other rooms. Fountains cascaded on terraces jutting out from the upper tiers of skyscrapers; titanium caryatids supported a natatorium atop the tallest of these; an opera house boasted a dozen revolving stages; open walkways lined with telescopes crisscrossed thousands of feet above the multiple playing fields of a gigantic stadium. On a mile-high lighthouse a searchlight scanned the horizon. Automated warehouses shaped like beehives moved cargo on and off monorail freight cars with elaborate pulleys and derricks.

All of these structures were part of a concentric city that occupied thousands of square miles; a city that soared far into the sky and spread vast labyrinths underground. Many of its buildings, I soon realized, could only have been erected by aerial workers of phenomenal nimbleness and dexterity, unhindered by the laws of gravity; for example, a construction crew of spiders.

Over the following months, I did dozens of these sketches—all details from the same gargantuan city. For a long time I didn’t show them to Calzas, Eboli, or anyone else, but kept them hidden in a panel behind my rolltop desk. All the effects of the spider bite were closely monitored, except these sketches, which remained my secret; the longer I kept them hidden, the more pleasure they gave me.

I had another, quite different, secret, which gave me a corresponding amount of pain. I shared it with Auro, and soon enough it came out, blowing up in my face when Samax became aware of it.

Auro and I got on surprisingly well in light of his mother’s unconcealed hostility toward me. That first night we met in the tunnel had begun better than either of us might have expected until Auro witnessed my confrontation with Ivy. After that, she carried through with a vengeance on her pledge to keep Auro and me apart. Though she sometimes dined with the rest of us at Samax’s table, Auro never did: not only was he shy, but it would have been torture for him (and everyone else) if he were placed in a position where, despite himself, he would constantly have been disrupting the incessant conversation. Ivy knew that this would have been as upsetting to Auro as to anyone else, but she resented his absence nearly as much as she resented my presence.

Because of Samax’s strong attachment to me and his own rocky relationship with Ivy, bad-mouthing me to him was not one of Ivy’s options in the psychological warfare she conducted against me. She had to resort to subtler—and, for me, in the end, more distressing—ruses. Soon after she returned to the hotel, for example, she began spreading invidious stories about me to others—like Denise, who had less and less use for me as time went by—and hoping that they got back to Samax third- or fourth-hand in garbled, but still damaging, form. Or she would slander me outright to the chef, telling him how much I complained about his cooking, and in a fit of pique he would refuse Sirius the scraps he enjoyed. Ivy’s malevolence ran so deep that I feared she would attempt to do the dog harm, poisoning his food or water, as a way to get at me. And so gradually I trained Sirius, despite all temptations, to refuse any meal or treat unless it came directly from my hand.

But most of her cruelty came at me more obliquely. One typical example occurred about a year after the moon landing. Zaren Eboli was playing the piano in the lounge late one afternoon while Auro and I listened. He was telling us that the hummingbird, rarely more than four inches long, had no song, but produced its high-pitched music with the rapid beating of its narrow wings.

“But what is most interesting to me about the hummingbird, fellas,” he said, pausing at the keyboard, the light flashing off his spectacles, “is that she constructs her nest with spider’s silk pilfered from the orb webs strung in foliage. No other bird does that. The short-billed hummingbird does it here in the desert and her cousin the red-striped
starthroat does it down in the Amazon jungle. Different spiders, same kind of nests.”

“I have a pendant with a desert hummingbird on it,” I piped in. “It was my mother’s. Would you like to see it?”

“Yes, I would,” Eboli replied, knitting his fingers together in his lap.

“I would,” Auro repeated, though I had shown him the pendant before, along with my mother’s pen, and he knew how precious they were to me.

For a long time I had kept the pendant hanging by its chain from a small hook on the wall across from my desk, but lately I had taken to wearing it during the day and hanging it up at night. Unbuttoning my shirt, I pulled it out to show Eboli.

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” he said. “Sterling silver. Delicate workmanship.”

“Uncle Junius told me it was made at the Zuni pueblo.”

Ivy, who had come to fetch Auro, overheard this conversation—and must have been lingering to hear the whole of it—before she entered the room. She was annoyed, as always, to see Auro and me sharing any kind of intimacy, and with only a perfunctory nod to Eboli and a hard glare at me, she took Auro by the hand and led him away.

“We have to go to the city,” she said preemptorily.

Auro protested as best he could, the first time I had ever heard him speak back to her. “
Go
to the city!” he repeated, converting the infinitive to the imperative. Then, as they left the room, he yanked his hand from hers—another first—and rushed off, leaving her to stare after him, slack-jawed.

The next morning, as I came in from a swim in the pool, I found Sirius waiting outside my room. The moment he saw me, he put his paws up on the door and started barking. The only time he did that was when we were inside the room and Ivy walked by on the outside, which wasn’t very often since I was the only resident at that end of the corridor. I couldn’t imagine Ivy was in my room, and indeed when I opened the door, there was no one there. Still, Sirius kept barking when I was in the shower. And afterward he seemed even more agitated, whining and circling me while I dressed. I had grown my hair long at that time and took great care in combing it. When I was through, I reached for my pendant suspended on its hook and made a
terrible discovery. Someone had pounded the silver disk out of shape, flattening it until the hummingbird was obliterated. At first I couldn’t believe it was really my pendant on the chain; squeezing my eyes shut, I turned the pendant over and over in my hand, praying it would be restored to its proper state when I looked at it again. But it wasn’t. Someone had hammered it beyond recognition. And I had no doubt as to who would have done such a thing. This was what Sirius had been trying to tell me.

My head spinning, I flattened myself against the wall and for a long time tried to catch my breath and figure out what I would do next.

Samax was away that week, as was Calzas, and I could never have taken a problem involving Ivy to Desirée. Ivy answered to no one but Samax. As had been the case when Ivy slapped me, I decided right away that this was a matter I had to take care of myself. Still, what could I do? Ivy made herself scarce that day, and the angrier I got, the more helpless I felt. When I crossed paths with her, was I going to pull out the pendant and confront her with it? Maybe the wisest course would have been to show the pendant to Samax when he returned, but I was too angry to wait a whole week. After what had been done to it, looking at it now—just having it in my possession—was unbearable. As was the notion of remaining inside the hotel when Ivy was there, knowing I wanted to break her neck.

I had to get out, I told myself, had to get some air. After putting Sirius in my room and pulling on my sneakers, I ran across the garden—swearing aloud and feeling the eyes of Azu the doorman on my back—threw open the garage door, and rolled out the dirt bike Samax had bought me the previous year.

It was a 50cc minibike, with extra-wide tires, heavy-duty springs, and chrome fenders, and I loved taking it out into the desert. Samax had imposed three rules when he gave me the bike: no passengers on the back, no riding on public roads, and no outings after dark. That day, I broke all three rules. Just for starters.

In low gear I had lolled the bike through the garden, in and out of the fruit trees, to the lip of the desert when suddenly Auro dashed out of the oleander bushes that bordered the quincunx. Waving his arms violently, he blocked my way, then threw his leg over the rear seat and climbed up behind me. He had never done anything like this before.

He looked even grimmer than usual, his eyes narrowed to slits, and it struck me that he was still furious with Ivy for hauling him out of the lounge the previous day when Eboli was playing for us. Auro, as I came to realize, would put up with plenty from his mother, but not when it came to music. His talking back to her and pulling free of her grip had been no flash in the pan: it had been the true beginning of his overt rebellion toward her.

“Auro, you know this isn’t allowed,” I said.

“
Allowed!
” he bellowed in my ear over the idling engine.

And that was that.

I gave him my goggles to wear, put on some sunglasses, and an hour later we reached the edge of the area on which a recreational vehicle was allowed. There was an old gravel road at that point, in the shadow of the mountains, which was almost never used. To the left, it led eventually to the network of roads that wound into Las Vegas; to the right, it came to a dead end in the remains of a ghost town. Not one of those colorful reconstructions for tourists, this ghost town was the real thing, a broken-down mining outpost in which the only structure still standing was an old ramshackle hotel and its water tower. Sometimes the high school kids drove out there to drink or make out or shoot their guns. But there were better places to do all of those things. I had hiked out there once with Sirius, and turned around nearly at once, hot, bored, and coated with bauxite dust. And I had never had any desire to return.

Not until that day, with Auro. The ride over scorching sand with him panting in my ear had not assuaged my anger; if anything, the heat had only fanned it further. And an idea, a means of venting that anger, had entered my head like a spark off the friction between two of those planes of light, paper-thin and metallically bright, that are forever shifting and sliding in the desert air.