A Trip to the Stars (35 page)

If that advisory board at Wilcox Memorial had asked me what I thought about the war, what would I have replied? Maybe that I never regretted serving as a nurse and helping the men I had encountered in that capacity. Whether those men were oppressors or victims or both was a question I had put aside when I arrived in Vietnam. I had wanted to be a nurse, and to me that meant I wasn’t going to be a judge. Certainly after leaving the service I had no desire to judge those men. But for their superiors, the politicians and military brass who began and mismanaged that war, manipulating its effects for their own ends, I had only contempt. Whatever repulsion I had felt for the war as a student had been intensified a thousand times by the suffering I had witnessed as a nurse. I too realized that the deeper I tucked away my love for Cassiel, trying to keep it whole against the erosion of time, the more my loathing for the war grew.

Meanwhile, I started working for Dr. Prion in the small but up-to-date radiology department on the second floor of the hospital: two X-ray rooms, a developing room, and his office. The patients were what I had expected: standard preoperative types, fractures and cancers, and a surprising number of children who swallowed all sorts of objects like marbles or tacks. But no keys. Once again I experienced the
simultaneous detachment and intimacy of taking and reading an X ray, the wave of cool solitariness that washed over me when I was gazing into a person’s inner workings. Once again hearts, lungs, kidneys, spleens were like familiar islands in a dark vaporous sea, places in which I could discern any irregularities and intrusions. Once again I became acquainted with the geography and physics of the bones, the names of all 206 of which I had now memorized.

Yet the daily reality of a hospital was quite different from that of a hospital ship. I had never held a straight job of this sort before. A ship was hermetic; soldiers were the patients, and sailors, doctors, and nurses were the crew, everyone governed by strict military codes, even, especially, in the chaos of combat. What occurred outside the codes—dope-smoking, casual sex—was seldom a surprise and was always overwhelmed by the inexorable universe of the war. In that universe, Cassiel and I had been the exception, not the rule. In the hospital, I suddenly found myself in a microcosm of a society that as a whole still felt alien to me. Working solo—odd hours, odd tasks—for Zaren Eboli or toiling with moth-eaten books in the morgue of an obscure branch of the New Orleans library had been more my speed. It was no accident that in college my refuge had been the ancient world, which I studied in classes of ten students or less.

All of which is to say that, despite my wartime experiences and unusual travels, I was still on unsure footing when it came to dealing with other people. Maybe it was those very things that had left me ill-prepared for the emotional transactions others found much simpler. I was not comfortable with large populations; on the
Repose
, it had been easy to carve out a niche as a loner. In one way or another, even the most gregarious of my shipmates—like Sharline—became loners. In Wilcox Memorial, being a loner only drew more attention to me, and increased my allure for those who already found me atttractive, mysterious, and even exotic on account of my history.

I couldn’t keep the men at the hospital away from me. I knew I was pretty, and I knew that on an island, especially one of moderate size, the men were on the lookout for new pretty women. Maybe a part of me was flattered and didn’t mind it so much. There was one man, especially, who had his eye on me from day one. He was privy to more of my history than other people at the hospital because he had sat on that
advisory board which approved my hiring. But he bided his time while I routinely turned down requests for dates from other doctors. Comparing them to Cassiel, as I did every time, I found—predictably—that none of them measured up. After a couple of months, completely alone, I thought I couldn’t keep it up much longer. I felt the need for private companionship as well as solitary privacy, and most of all I needed to have sex. But I decided not to look for it at the hospital.

On Rarotonga I had learned to handle a sea kayak. During those first months on Kauai, I often rented a kayak in Hanalei on a Sunday morning. I slid down the river into the bay and then up the coast to Ke’e Beach, passing my own beach on the way, where two beach dogs who had taken to sleeping on my porch followed me along the shore barking. So when I received my paycheck the first day of my third month at my job, I decided to blow it all on my own kayak.

It was a real beauty, all Plexiglas, purple with an orange cockpit and storage holds fore and aft for food and supplies. It was built not just for hugging the coast but crossing the open sea. If you had the stamina, and the stomach for the waves, it could carry you the ninety miles to Oahu, and beyond. I bought it at the place where I had been renting, from the manager, Val, a tall, towheaded young water-skier and rower with a terrific build who had given me the eye, but in a nicer way than any doctor I’d yet encountered. He offered to deliver the kayak personally in his pickup, following me in my VW to Haena.

Afterward I made sandwiches and we drank beer on the beach. Val was wearing his typical business attire: a red swimsuit and a T-shirt. It was late afternoon, but he was in no rush to get back to town. Business was slow, he said. So we drank more beer and went for a swim. Val had grown up on the island and he swam effortlessly, powerfully, like a dolphin. I brought a portable radio down from the house. The dogs, whom I had named Castor and Pollux, fell asleep on either side of the new kayak. The sun set. We took another swim and this time he glided up and rose before me silently, through the clear, shallow water. He put his arms around me and kissed me. He unsnapped my top. And I shuddered as he kissed me again, running his hands over my breasts, cupping them, and then peeling off my bathing suit and running his hand between my legs. No one had touched me there since Cassiel, but I didn’t hold back from him. After he slipped out of his own
suit, we lay on a blanket on the sand. He spread my legs and was very gentle, first with his tongue, and then pushing into me. I came almost at once, and tightening my embrace, waited for him to follow.

Afterward, I rested my head on his chest and for the first time noticed a small tattoo on his left shoulder, a pair of crossed swords over a numeral 7. I had seen it many times on members of the 7th Air Cavalry in Vietnam. So he was a vet. But I said nothing about this, or the fact I had been in the war.

Val came out to see me a few more times, but we both knew it wasn’t going to turn into anything serious. He had told me that first time together that he had a girlfriend, and after I found out who she was—a young redhead who worked at the bakery whom I liked very much—we agreed to stop. But we stayed friends, too, and later, after I’d surprised him with the fact I had been a Navy nurse, we would talk about the war, but not too much. Mostly we went kayaking along Na Pali coast, alone or with other friends of his, and he taught me everything I knew about the North Shore’s peculiar currents and reefs. One day, after I had built up my stamina, he took me on my most ambitious excursion, to the island of Niihau, seventeen miles across the Kaulakahi Channel from Kauai.

Niihau was known as the “Forbidden Island.” It was privately owned by a single family who bought it in the nineteenth century from a Hawaiian monarch in need of funds. No visitors were allowed. Its population was under three hundred, all pure-blooded Hawaiians who raised cattle and sold rare shells gathered on its beaches. It had been known as the Forbidden Island long before it became private property. The ancient Hawaiians had shunned it as a haven of ghosts and demons, elusive lizard-men reputed to be capable of sucking the blood from a man in less than minute. On nights when the west wind blew, it sometimes carried the howls of the demons—and the moans of their victims. It was said that on such nights, if you were trying to escape the currents around the Forbidden Island, the harder you rowed the more you were drawn back to shore, and certain death. After Val and I had paddled most of the way across the channel, we turned around, the wind whipping up whitecaps, and rowed back to Kauai without meeting any resistance. But that was because we had not actually reached Niihau, Val told me, where the demons could pick up our scent. That would have been a different story.

In May, after nine months on the island, I attended a surprise birthday party for one of my few friends at the hospital, a young urologist from San Diego named Seth Vinson. His lover Marvin threw the party at their house in Hanalei, and I was the decoy who had taken Seth for a drink to get him out of the house. Seth was a slight, bearded man with an easy wit and a passion for sailing. We had dinner together every week, and I always felt I could let my hair down with him. From the start, he was generous, sharing his other friends with me.

Among the most interesting of these was Estes Shaula, whom Seth introduced me to that night. Estes didn’t go to many parties. He was an astronomer at the NASA Observatory, high in the mountains of Kokee Park near Waimea Canyon. Twice I had driven up through the canyon to the Kalalau Lookout, from which I had seen the stark white dome of the NASA Observatory down a gated road with a sentry box; like Niihau, it was a forbidden place.

Built in 1960, the observatory had a small permanent staff with frequent visitors from the main U.S. observatory, at Mauna Kea on the Big Island, which housed the largest telescope in the world. In my time on Kauai, stargazing every night, I had found a density of stars in the sky to match the Cook Islands’. I had promised myself a telescope when I could afford one, but even with field binoculars I had seen dizzying concentrations of secondary and tertiary stars that were invisible to the naked eye. I had glimpsed Europa, the brightest of Jupiter’s moons, one night, and Triton, a moon of Saturn. Until I crossed paths with Estes Shaula, however, I had heard only vague rumors of what the NASA scientists on the island were undertaking. He confirmed that, in addition to tracking conventional satellites, manned space shots, and planetary probes, they were part of a secret project picking up signals from interstellar space with a radio telescope.

“And, more importantly,” Estes confided to me in his soft drawl, twirling the ice cubes in his Eclipse rum as we stepped onto Seth’s lanai, “we’re searching for galaxies beyond this one where stars are born. To me, that dwarfs all the other stuff we do. You yourself work with X rays. You know that, unlike visible light waves or radio waves, they can’t penetrate the atmosphere. That’s why X-ray telescopes don’t work on earth. I’m helping to lay the groundwork for setting them up in space within the next twenty years.”

Gazing out over the bright crescent of Hanalei Bay, I thought it strange that, despite my obsession with the stars over the previous four years, I had never met an astronomer. And now that I had, it turned out he was one who happened to be more than happy to talk astronomy to me all the time, the way other men might talk baseball or politics or sex.

Estes Shaula was a native Texan, a very handsome man just under forty who looked far older. Part of this was the premature graying of his long hair, and the compressed seriousness of his face—his brow was deeply furrowed over his wire-rimmed glasses, crow’s-feet, blue eyes, and nervous smile—but much was due to the quantities of speed and ganja he consumed daily. In thumbnail fashion, Seth had told me that Dr. Shaula was both a scientist with a brilliant future and a dope smoker with a prodigious habit. Even before I met Estes, I knew it was the downward of those two trajectories he was following that would prevail. Initially he had used marijuana to come down off the methedrine with which he fueled his fourteen-hour workdays. I had learned in the Navy, where so many of the doctors and nurses operated on the speed-and-smoke monorail, that it was only a matter of time before its riders were derailed—or worse—denying all the while that they had a problem.

In his own denial about Estes, Seth, a very sober person, had surprised me. “He works hard and he parties hard,” he said as blithely as any of the medicos aboard the
Repose
.

But after spending time with Estes, I understood how Seth could rationalize that way: speeding or stoned, Estes was a charming and interesting companion. While his appetite for stimulants seemed boundless, his control rarely faltered. He was well-spoken when he chose to converse and politely silent at all other times. His silences could be monumental, but never felt hostile. Whether at their center he was reeling and inchoate, utterly serene, or icily walled-off, I couldn’t tell. But I never heard him say an unkind thing. And to me, at that first dinner, he said a number of kind ones. “Most people who come here,” Estes said, as I munched on Seth’s birthday cake and he rolled a joint, “don’t appreciate the place with any depth because they haven’t really suffered. So it’s always nice,” he nodded, “to meet exceptions to the rule.” Not surprisingly, he wasn’t a good listener, but then, he was the kind of person I preferred listening to. At first, I
wished I could have stolen some time with him when he was sober—there must have been such hiatuses—but as time passed I was soon smoking more ganja myself and drinking more steadily.

At that time, good grass was cheap and easy to find all over the island. Since the mid-sixties, there had been a hippie influx from California. Small communes had cropped up in the northern half of the island. The public campsite in Haena had become a tent city, overflowing into the forest. A couple of babies had been born there. A Hindu cult was meeting in one of the caves near Ke’e Beach, chanting by torchlight. There were squatters in the state forest; a self-proclaimed trio of dryads who lived on berries and roots in the Valley of the Lost Tribe; and nomads, barefoot, with backpacks, who hitchhiked, picked fruit for two dollars an hour, and slept out in the open. Many of these people were growing and smoking amazingly powerful dope all around Hanalei. I found that a few puffs off the local Thai stick had as strong an effect as some synthetic hallucinogens.