A Trip to the Stars (39 page)

Through her diligence and care, Wind helped to draw me out of myself while I regained my strength. Every night she put the radio telescope tape on my tape recorder, looped so it would play throughout the night. I found it soothing. She herself slept on a fold-up bed in the living room. She prepared my meals, walked me to the bathroom, helped me dress, and attended to my bandages and medication. Twice a day she applied a balm of nectar and herbs to my eyelids that she assured me would hasten the return of my sight.

As my other injuries healed, I sat on my lanai during the day listening
to the surf slide in beyond the trees. I came to know my garden, and the surrounding land, in an entirely different way. I heard the birds, insects, and foliage so clearly that, imposing the grid of their sounds on my visual memories—which were more precise than ever—I was able soon enough to imagine the living scene before me: a fruit fly on the railing, bees hovering over the hibiscus blossoms, the shadows of fluttering palm fronds on the lawn, a flock of myna birds swooping as one from the ohi’a tree to pick at the fallen papayas by the shed. It was even easier for me to identify the cars of my visitors, or to hear Lon the fisherman in his thongs pad by on the dirt road, or to follow the buzz of small airplanes over the beach.

To my astonishment, I discovered one day that I could visualize other—completely intangible—things as well. Like Wind’s mental activities, incredible as that seemed. To be exact, every so often I seemed able to glimpse one of her memories from the inside out. That particular day, a week before I regained my sight, she was sweeping the lanai and I was sitting cross-legged on the lawn, performing one of the few chores of which I was capable: picking the ticks off Castor and Pollux. My legs were healed by this time, and my shoulder, where the stitches had been removed, ached only when I tried to raise my arm too high. The dogs sat patiently while I probed their fur, removing the ticks with a single turn counterclockwise. Suddenly my concentration was broken when a sharply etched image leapt into my mind’s eye—and came to life.

My vision unsteady, as if I were running, I was staring down a steep, rough mountain trail that led to a circle of turquoise sea. I had hiked several times on Na Pali coast with Val, but I didn’t remember descending a trail like this—and certainly not so fast, the foliage around me blurring, that circle drawing me toward it like a vortex.…

Then, just as suddenly, the scene disappeared. Pollux licked my cheek, Castor barked, and I was catching my breath, my heart pounding—as if I had just stopped running.

When this happened again the next afternoon as I sat on the lanai drinking tea—the same sequence but even longer—it frightened me much more. Wind was in the kitchen, and I called to her.

“Wind?” I said, as soon as I heard her come out.

“What is it, Mala?” she said, coming through the screen door.

“Please do me a favor. Would you tell me what you were just thinking?”

She paused. “I was fixing dinner.”

“But thinking about something else?”

“Yes. I was remembering a place near Pueo Point where I used to swim.”

“On Niihau?”

“That’s right.”

“A cove at the foot of a mountain trail?”

“How did you know?” It was the only time I ever heard her sound surprised.

I had known because, while I couldn’t run down a trail like that, I sensed that as a runner she would live up to her name.

Val drove out to visit later that day, and the moment I heard his pickup pull into the driveway, my mind filled first with an ocean vista—from a swaying vantage point, like a kayak—and in the foreground, just before me, a well-tanned, topless, long-haired woman was paddling vigorously in her own kayak; and then—far more startling—an image of my own face appeared, gazing up, laughing, my hair spread out on white sand. I knew at once that I was observing a memory (of me!) from our first days together which was running through Val’s head at that moment. I didn’t have to ask him about it.

This happened again, with Seth once, and with Wind many times. It recalled to me the one other time I had experienced this ability in myself: in Manila, in bed with Cassiel, when I had witnessed the woman in the red dress running through the desert, and the burning car on the edge of the ravine, and then the horrific interior of the B-52 as it was shot down. I was sure those had been Cassiel’s memories, and that, with the spider venom in my blood, I had been privy to them because he and I were lovers. So all I could deduce was that the concussion I had incurred, in tandem with the acute memory powers I retained—the one vestige of the venom remaining in my bloodstream—had heightened my psychic capabilities to the point where I could now glimpse other people’s memories even as they experienced them, and without making love.

Even after regaining my sight, I retained this ability, but only one week of each month. It took me some time to figure out what characterized that particular week, thinking it might be related to my menstrual
cycle or sleep patterns or some subtle form of synchronicity until I realized it was always the week of the waning moon. After a couple of months, no longer fearful, I learned how to employ this ability at will, and from then on it never occurred involuntarily. Soon it would change the course of my life.

When I regained my sight, it happened as abruptly as the doctors had predicted. I had been asleep, and thought I was dreaming when I found myself looking out my bedroom window into the dawn light, where snow was falling into the bougainvillea vines. They were large snowflakes spinning down against the backdrop of the jagged green mountains. I had to be dreaming, I thought, for while there were many natural wonders on the North Shore of Kauai, no snowfall had ever been recorded. Only after I saw the bruises on my arm atop the rumpled sheet did I realize that I was indeed awake. Slipping out of bed, I put my nose to the window screen and saw that the snow was actually a cascade of white petals the wind was blowing out of the rain forest.

“I can see!” I called out to Wind in the other room. “I can see again.”

She did not reply. I thought I heard the screen door shut softly, but I could not be sure. When I went into the living room, the fold-up cot had already been neatly stowed in the closet, the table was set for my breakfast, and the dogs were eating theirs on the lanai. But there was no sign of Wind, except in the simple fact, now visible to me for the first time, that she had kept my house immaculate during my convalescence, and had even weeded my vegetable garden and flower beds. I gazed into the mirror at my face, which was taut and wan despite all the rest I’d gotten; it was the first time I had looked at it since standing, swaying, before the bathroom mirror at the party. I began examining my various injuries, but seeing the spider plants drip with overnight rain and then watching Castor and Pollux, white petals stuck to their fur, run in to me excitedly, I fell to my knees and, hugging the dogs, with a flush of joy burst into tears.

That afternoon I called Estes. Wind had still not returned to my house, and I inquired after her. He surprised me, saying she had already informed him of the good news before asking for the day off.

“I’m so glad you’re better,” Estes said. “Better than ever, it sounds like.”

“How can I thank you, Estes, for everything?”

“You don’t have to thank me, Mala. Just watch out for yourself.”

The following morning, Wind phoned me from Waimea to say how happy she was, too, but she seemed uncomfortable with my expressions of gratitude. When the doctors gave me the green light to drive again later that week, I called Estes’s house to tell Wind I was coming by, but again she seemed uncomfortable, and rather vaguely replied, “There has been so much for me to do here after being away so long. But of course you should come by.…”

I had hoped to see Estes, too, at the observatory, but he had flown to the Big Island that morning for a meeting with his colleagues there. I had brought gifts of thanks: for him, a basket of papayas from my trees, and for Wind a well-worn figurine of the Melanesian moon goddess that I had bought on the docks in Rarotonga, which she had once admired in my bedroom.

Around noon, as I came up the path to his house under the tall, sun-dappled trees, I heard the faucet running in the kitchen and a kettle whistling on the stove. But when I knocked on the door and called out, “It’s me, Mala,” the house fell silent.

I knocked again, then let myself in. “Wind,” I called out, again and again, looking into all the rooms. But she was nowhere to be found, not in the house or on the lanai or in the garden beyond. I had only visited there that one night when I dined and went to bed with Estes, but everything was just as I remembered it. The teak floors highly polished, a whiff of strong incense in the meditation cell, and the glass sparkling clean over the photographs of Einstein, Hubble, and Clyde Tombaugh in the kitchen, where the kettle was still hot. Pausing in the bedroom, I thought back to that night in May as the beginning of my seven months of lurching around in one kind of darkness before being flung into another. I had often tortured myself with the notion that I might have avoided a lot of grief had I headed straight home after visiting the observatory with Estes, at the same time knowing it would have made no difference at all. As I had intuited then, it was not my fleeting disappointment with Estes, but my deep-seated grief over Cassiel that had propelled me into the arms of Francis. And I had no doubt it would have propelled me, inevitably, from some other angle, even if I had not stripped off my clothes and lay down on Estes’s futon that night, stoned out of my mind.

I never did see Wind on that visit, and I realized that I never would. This had been a long outing for me after being bedridden so many weeks; before making the drive home, I sat on Estes’s lanai for nearly an hour gazing into the trees. When I returned to the living room, the basket of papayas was sitting where I had left it on the table, but the figurine of the moon goddess, which I had set down beside it, was gone. And suddenly, in a great rush, the wind, powerful there in the mountains, blew right through the house—entering by the windows and screen doors on the lanai side and leaving by the windows and door in front. Along with the curtains and tablecloth, my hair billowed up, my dress fluttered, and cool air poured into my lungs, making me light-headed until, seconds later, as everything settled back into place, I walked out of the house and down the path, through the thick dark ferns, without looking back.

For the next few weeks, I slept fitfully, plagued by chaotic dreams that began with Francis embracing me and ended with my finding Cassiel’s body washed up on some beach fitting the description of Francis’s corpse on Niihau: bloated, his eyes gone, and barnacles writhing on his skin. This was one of my oldest nightmares about Cassiel, and circumstances had played right into it. Invariably I awoke in a sweat and stumbled out of bed, terrified that I was still blind until I realized it was the middle of the night.

In my waking life, things were not going much better. Despite the strenuous efforts of Dr. Prion and Seth, I did lose my job at the hospital. And though there was plenty of blame to lay at my own feet, I was much more angry and ashamed about my dismissal when it actually occurred. Too much so even to attend the advisory board hearing at which I might have defended myself. Francis had been a longtime member of that board, and it was his colleagues and friends who drew up my dismissal report, which boiled down (by omission) to a whitewash of him and an indictment of me as
ethically unfit for duty
—making me feel like I was back in the Navy. That I had several times, at Francis’s side, smoked ganja and chewed peyote with two of the signatories on this report—and well knew of their own extracurricular sexual activities—made it especially bitter for me to swallow. Even so, in my heart I knew I couldn’t have gone back to the hospital anyway: there were just too many bad memories and foul associations. But my friends kept petitioning in my behalf, the end result of which was that
I was given a bigger severance package than anyone expected, just so they could be rid of me: five months’ full pay. Since it was already mid-April by that time, I figured this money, if I stretched it out, would last me to the end of the year. And then I’d be back to square one, hoping I wouldn’t have to wait tables to survive.

Gradually, though, other parts of my life fell into place. I began swimming again, and kayaking, and tending my garden. I cooked for myself every night and spent as much time as I could alone, flanked by my dogs, sipping hibiscus tea on my lanai from twilight until the stars appeared. One thing I did not do was pick up another drink. No more White Goddesses or Eclipse rum, and no more Thai stick laced with THC. Instead I went to the weekly A.A. meeting on Friday nights in the rec room of the Methodist church, never talking much, just listening to other people’s stories, which made me feel like I hadn’t been the only person on the island to undertake my own destruction so systematically.

Still, though I didn’t drink, I eventually drifted away from the meeting. The last time I attended, I met a man in the parking lot who seemed vaguely familiar to me. Very tall and thin, he was clean-shaven, with long flyaway hair and friendly brown eyes. He smiled when he saw me, but with no flicker of recognition. He was dressed simply, in jeans, a white shirt, and sandals, and it was only when I spotted a medallion hanging from a gold chain on his chest that I was able to place him. The medallion depicted a lion’s face with the sun for one eye and the moon for the other. I was about to turn away when he walked up and extended his hand.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Olan.”

He looked so little like the bearded man in the net loincloth I had met at the New Year’s Eve party in Kilauea that I doubt I would have believed him had he not been wearing the medallion. The medallion, it turned out, was about the only thing from that time—just six months earlier—which remained in his life.

He didn’t remember meeting me at the party—in fact, he didn’t remember the party at all, nor much of anything else that happened to him in the months between November and March when he was dropping large doses of acid or mescaline every other day. He had started out living in a farming commune outside Lawai and ended up in a tent on the beach near Anahola. His sole source of income became
the drugs he sold. To get around, he hitchhiked, and that was still his primary means of transportation.