A Trip to the Stars (67 page)

I had navigated a course south-by-southeast toward Quang Tri and followed it to the T, and I had not encountered another human being the entire way. Nor even the trace of a village. I was in country so wild
that no one inhabited it and no one was fighting over it—a small miracle in Vietnam. The air teemed with mosquitoes bigger than moths. In the lowland swamps, water rats proliferated, their yellow eyes shining even by day. And every night I had to pick the leeches from my legs. I saw monkeys in packs and giant lizards that walked on their hind legs. And even a tiger at one point, fording a river, about whom I felt a thrill of fear, thinking
It’s Bok-Klia and because I ran away, offending the Bru, he’s come for me
. If that was the case, I even managed to elude him, for no volley of orange-and-black feathered arrows materialized.

On the seventh day after I left the village, I came on the first signs of the war I had seen since escaping the Pathet Lao: a line of bomb craters along a dirt road, a riverbed red with chemical residue, and a smoldering barren expanse where an entire valley had been napalmed, maybe a week earlier. In a matter of a single mile, the wilderness turned into a wasteland.

Until then I had been wary of wild beasts: now I had to be wary of men, which was far worse. Dressed as I was, in loose Bru clothing and my poncho, I could easily be shot on sight by either side. Certainly, in an active battle zone, the NVA would ask no questions. And no GI would have any reason to think me an American. Not to mention the fact the bombers might return. I knew that they rarely hit a target area just once. Those craters could have been left by payloads from Phantom F-4s, T-28s, Skyraiders. Or even B-52s out of Guam.

As twilight descended that day, I heard gunfire—the first since I had been shot down. At first, sporadic small arms, maybe a mile off. Then a real firefight that made the hair bristle on the back of my neck. I couldn’t tell if I was walking toward, or away from, the firefight. All I knew was that it was growing louder by the minute. Approaching me faster than I was approaching it. I was nearing jungle again, the darkness deepening, when suddenly the gunfire tapered off. Maybe too suddenly. Just a lull.

The good news about the fighting was it meant both sides were in the area. The bad news was that when I did encounter the NVA, they’d see me before I saw them.

The moment I entered the jungle again, all hell broke loose. Flares lit up the treetops and gunfire flashed on either side of me. First I hit the ground. Then, when I heard gunfire behind me as well, I jumped
up and began zigzagging as fast as I could through the trees. I fell twice in the brush. I heard shouts and a scream far to my left and veered in the other direction. Finally the fighting seemed well behind me.

After crouching behind a fallen tree to catch my breath, I sprinted off again and immediately felt a tremendous blow, and then an explosion of blood, in my left leg. I never heard the shots that caught me in quick succession just above the knee. Maybe the sniper was in a tree a thousand yards off, or a foxhole fifty feet away. I know I screamed, but I couldn’t hear that either as my body crumpled and the jungle, upside-down, flew away from me and the wet grass swallowed me up.

When I opened my eyes again, I smelled the iodine that someone was pouring onto my wounds. He was an American medic with a red cross on his helmet. I was on a stretcher. In a clearing. Beside six other stretchers with shot-up GIs in battle gear. It was night and several lanterns lit a circle around us. A tremendous racket started up just outside the circle. A Jolly Green Giant helicopter revving its blades.
The Army’s going to take you home, fly-boy
, the medic said. The first words of English spoken to me in months. And they lifted me into the chopper and we rose straight up over the trees into the black sky.

I must have passed out again, because the next thing I remember is being indoors looking up at a nurse. I was on a cot in the field hospital at Quang Tri, the postsurgical ward. My leg was throbbing and my head felt on fire. A bare lightbulb burned behind her, so I couldn’t see the nurse’s face, just her silhouette. The electric lights hurt my eyes. Everything else ached as well when I lifted my hand toward the nurse. In her palm she was holding the bullets they had taken from my leg, which, as they put me under, I asked the surgeons to save for me.

I thought it was you, Mala, standing there beside me, and my heart leapt. Then the nurse leaned closer and her face came clear. And now, a year later, I still wake up from dreams thinking it was you there with me in Quang Tri. Feeling you take my hand. Feeling your breath on my cheek.

17 October

In Honolulu six months later I looked everywhere for you. Bribed, pleaded, pulled rank, pulled strings. I requisitioned files. Demanded
interviews. Questioned people who had been on the
Repose
with you. And others who encountered you in Honolulu. Yet I learned very little. You had a hospital stay. You received an honorable discharge. After that, nothing. As far as the Navy was concerned, your last known address was the Admiral Perry Hospital. They couldn’t find you, they said; that wasn’t their business. If you contacted them, they would notify me. If I wrote to you, they would hold the letter until they could forward it.

Here in Albuquerque it’s 6
A.M
. I’m checking out of the Hotel Rigel in an hour. They tell me I’m the last guest. I have two more days’ leave. I lay awake last night thinking how close I was to Vegas, and to Reno. I flew into Holloman Air Force Base, near the Mexican border, before driving up here. At nine o’clock I’ll be flying to Chicago for a night, and then on to North Dakota. That’s where I take up my next assignment. I had my pick because of my war record. Never mind that I never completed my surveillance mission: for getting shot down and wounded again, for being captured and escaping, I was awarded that Distinguished Flying Cross the CO in Saigon had dangled. A big-ticket item, he called it.

It was my ticket back to aerial observation. Not high-altitude espionage, but cartography. First I’ll have a desk job until my leg heals completely. Then I’ll be charting remote places from the sky, far from North America and Southeast Asia. Most likely working out of New Zealand. After being in the war, this is the only assignment I would even consider; if I hadn’t gotten it, I would have resigned my commission. And that would have been a shock. The only legitimate employer I’ve ever had is the Air Force. When my life blew up on me, the first time, the military gave me enough structure so that I didn’t lose my mind. Now that my life’s blown up on me again—especially in my losing you—I need that same structure more than ever.

One night in Manila when I was dreaming beside you, I was sure you had entered my dreams. As a kind of observer yourself. Was it the dream of Dupont in the burning car at the ravine that you saw? I dreamed it often back then. I rarely do now. Now I dream of waking up in Manila that last morning when you were still asleep. Of needing every ounce of my strength to leave you in bed and dress and drive to Luzon. Of wanting to run away with you. To Malaysia. Or Indonesia. The thousands of islands where no one would ever have
found us. Or the chaos of some provincial town. To run away as my mother did. I can still see you lying there just before I woke you. And I still go cold with the fear which filled me at that moment. That I would never see you again. That what has happened would happen.

If you ever get this letter, you’ll know what happened to me after I left you that day. Why I disappeared. And I wanted you to know about my life before we met, at least the crucial events before that Christmas Eve when I was shot out of the sky.

In this room the last few days, sitting at this desk, it feels as if time has stopped. The atmosphere could not be more static: the temperature and humidity never vary by a single degree; the food is uniformly bland; the silence, set off by the hum of air conditioners, deep and unwavering. Time had to stop for me to write to you like this. Thinking of how we both disappeared on each other, I sometimes ask myself, as you perhaps do, whether we were ever in Manila at all. I have many memories, but only a single tangible object from that time remains in my possession: the leaf from the playing-card bush on which you wrote our names one afternoon. I’ve kept it in the only large book I own: the Air Force’s
Star Catalogue
.

The Bru have a saying. One of those things that’s so simple you’re sure you heard it before:
Only when you stop looking for something will you find it
.

I can’t imagine not looking for you. If I have to stop looking, I will. But I’ll still find you. Until then, my love,

Geza

There was a ceiling fan revolving slowly over the bed. A garden outside in which the birds were chattering. Hibiscus and jacaranda scents wafting.

We were up high in a hotel called The Altair, out beyond Diamond Head. From our lanai in the early morning, when the mist lifted over the sea, we could see the island of Molokai smoky on the horizon.

For the first time since Manila we were in a room that was not just his or mine, but ours. Neither of us wanting, ever now, to be apart again.

Yet knowing that soon we were going to be as far apart as technology permitted two human beings to be in the year 1980. A separation fraught with risks, technological and human. And after that—what?—maybe we would be together always. Which, as I had learned with considerable pain, could mean a single day or many years.

And so I was holding on to each moment: a skill I thought I had been honing my entire life, not in the way of my Buddhist friends, but as a woman accustomed to losing the people and things she loved—and even those she didn’t. In my twenties, when I lost first Loren, then Cassiel, I would have thought this fatalism hopelessly self-pitying. But I was thirty-five now and I knew that I’d better hold on to the present moment for dear life because it was all I might ever have. I had learned that I could either insulate myself, nursing the illusion I had nothing to lose, or push on, taking risks, with the knowledge that in the end we all lose everything, never on our own terms, and never in the way we would like. All of us come into this world crying, and some of us leave it crying. Those who don’t aren’t necessarily stronger or weaker. Luckier or unluckier. Maybe they’re just cried out.

All the same, the very real possibility that I could lose Geza Cassiel a second time, forever, at that point in my life, was one blow I knew, in my heart, I couldn’t afford to absorb.

My fears would be tested, but not because Cassiel ever wavered in his devotion. He loved me a great deal—maybe more than I had imagined. Maybe as much as I loved him, though I told him that was not possible. His love for me, more enduring and unconditional than any I had received in my life, was what I had hoped for after Manila. I had believed in him so much, after all. But, in the back of my mind, I could not be sure over all the years that he hadn’t forgotten me, fallen in love with someone else, or even married. In fact, those were the easy torments: for a long time I had doubted he was even alive.

Lying in bed together at The Altair, running my fingertip along the stubble on his jaw, I asked him if he had been in love again since Manila.

“I was with other people, here and there. But it wasn’t like with you, Mala. All the time there was only you.”

I had forgotten how direct he could be, though it was one of the very qualities that had attracted me to him. “It was the same for me,” I said. “Why do you think it’s like this? We were together so briefly—how did we know? I mean, I was so young, I didn’t know anything, but I always knew about us.”

“Maybe because it’s not something you can learn. There’s no wisdom involved. You can’t explain it. That’s why some people let it slip through their fingers, though they’re handed all the breaks.” He pulled me closer. “We didn’t allow that to happen, even when it seemed we got no breaks at all.”

For two months we had waited for this long weekend in Hawaii—the rendezvous we never had during the war. After meeting on the beach, we spent one night together in my house on Naxos. Then he had to go back to Crete and I remained on Naxos, two islands separated, not by an unknowable, unbreachable expanse, but a hundred-mile stretch of open sea. It was a shock—finding each other, having to separate so soon, yet at the same time, after the years of separation and silence, being able to communicate and see each other. Communications were limited, for Cassiel was restricted to his base, in training for a mission which he wouldn’t discuss much at first.
Gradually I learned just how highly classified, top-security, his mission was.

In those two months we did have a weekend in Xanía, in eastern Crete, and a night in Iráklion, but otherwise had to rely on the telephone and the mail, either speaking or writing to each other every day. In this way, I learned a great many things about him, and he about me. Before, he had known that my father was buried on Guam, that my mother had died suddenly, and that I could speak a few ancient languages. I tried to fill him in on the rest, beginning with the aftermath of my mother’s death and Loren’s abduction and the twists and turns my life had taken before and after I met him on the
Repose
. It felt good to get this part of my story out to him; he comforted me, and also told me that he understood better now the fear and dread he sensed had been at work in me in Manila, which he had attributed to the war.

“You entered the war looking for refuge,” he said as we walked along the promenade in Xanía one night. “For something that might be bigger and more oppressive than your own grief. I can understand that.”

“Then you know it didn’t make my grief any smaller.”

“But it sounds like you did everything you could to find this boy.”

“He would be twenty-four now, twenty-five in December. I had to let go, Geza. Even more than I let go with you. Or I really would have gone insane. As it was, I took myself to the brink.”

And more difficult than telling him about Loren, I related the entire tale of my first years on Kauai, my job at the hospital, my affair with Francis Beliar, including the accident, and all the drinking and drugging. By the time Jorge Gaspard entered my story, he seemed—in comparison, in retrospect—a welcome figure.