A Trip to the Stars (69 page)

Through the windows I could see the stars clearly now, twinkling into place, and I wondered how Scorpio, and red Antares, would look
from out beyond Pluto. “Considering how important it is, how do they expect to keep your mission secret?”

He shook his head. “They’ve done it before. They can keep a very tight lid on things when they want to.”

“Still, there must be a lot of people directly involved.”

“Fewer than you’d think. And, let’s face it, the press lost interest in the Apollo program after Apollo 12. By the time of 16 and 17, NASA could barely scare up TV coverage of the launchings.”

“I think it’s thrilling. Especially after all you went through in the Air Force. But you still haven’t told me why it’s a secret. Is the military involved?”

“There are some military imperatives. And technological reasons. But that’s not why.” He was choosing his words carefully. “The fact is, the NASA engineers think this mission has a lot of risks.”

“Don’t they always?”

“They think this one has more than usual.”

“I see. And what do you think?”

“That there are a lot more variables than on any previous spaceflight. That’s what it comes down to.”

What it came down to was that NASA was going to keep the mission secret until the crew returned. Only a limited number of people in the government would know about it. There was a seventy-thirty chance the crew would come back. That doesn’t sound so bad, but according to Cassiel, those were very tough odds in the space program. Acceptable in the Air Force, in test flying, but unprecedented in NASA. If the crew made it back, they would be heroes. If they didn’t, it would be treated like a covert military operation and a discreet report would be filed.

This brought me up short. Though I was excited for him, and happy to be a part of it with him, I was also afraid that I might lose him now, forever, just when I had found him again.

“How long will you be gone?” I said, trying to keep that fear out of my voice.

“Twenty-two days.”

“Geza, I have to say this up front: you know I’ll be with you all the way, but if something does happen, I don’t want to go through that MIA stuff again. No matter what.”

“I know,” he said, taking my hand. “I’ve taken care of that—just in case—both officially and otherwise.”

I knew that those seventy-thirty odds would grow tougher by the day right up until I joined him in Houston three weeks before his scheduled launch date, in Florida, in mid-December. Those last weeks would be the most exciting and also the hardest of all, especially after I left him again, but they would also bring me even closer to him than I was before, closer even than that very moment in the small jet, over the western coast of Kauai, just the two of us, circling under the stars, feeling removed from everything and everyone in the world, feeling safer than I had in years.

“We’re going farther into space than anyone’s ever gone,” he said. “Closer to the stars than anyone’s ever been. In a way, I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.”

“God, I wish I could go with you,” I said, letting out my breath and gazing at the moon.

“You will be with me,” he said, as we began the descent into Barking Sands. “Mala, it won’t be like Manila. I’ll be back.”

I focused on the lights of the runway, the parallel strips of blue lights glittering. And the nose of the jet bisecting them as Cassiel brought us down with barely a jolt, the tires hissing on the cement, the flaps dropping silently, and the lights flying past us now.

“Just like that,” he said.

The day Samax died, I woke from a dream I could not remember. Bells were ringing far down the corridor. Drowsily I thought it must be So Li, the bell expert, but then I remembered that she had left the Hotel Canopus months before. As had Professor Zianor, frustrated in his search for paintings depicting Adam with a navel. In fact, nearly every guest had left. If a couple of years earlier the hotel population had been skeletal, it now felt positively barren. In fact, at eighty, in the last year of his life, Samax perhaps realized his worst fear, for he was practically living at the hotel alone.

Deneb had settled in Reno, where the Basque-American Society had underwritten him a chair in Atlantean studies at the university. Zaren Eboli, having moved from El Paso to Houston, never returned to the hotel now, even for weekends; as he wrote me in a postcard featuring a pair of tarantulas, he had finally made it back to the Gulf of Mexico and was gradually edging his way to New Orleans. Of the longtime residents, only Hadar and Labusi remained, but it was as if they had exchanged routines: now it was Hadar, a virtual recluse in his laboratory, who seldom traveled anywhere, and Labusi, with a sheaf of invitations to billiard tournaments, who had uprooted himself from his niche in the garden and taken to the road with a vengeance in a super van specially modified to carry both a billiard table and a wheelchair. Harahel the archivist continued his deadly compilation of every document Samax had ever handled and was only glimpsed on occasion, around four
A.M
., the tassels of his fez bobbing as he paced the hotel corridors in order to stimulate the circulation of blood in his legs. Lastly, the old gangster Forcas continued
to visit, but with far less frequency than before. As Samax closed down or liquidated his various business interests, Forcas served as his negotiator, really his emissary to the outside world, fulfilling some of Calzas’s old functions.

Desirée, too, was around the hotel much less now, coming and going as she pleased, traveling abroad much of the time, living in hotels in out-of-the-way places, often acquiring works of art on commission for collectors she had met through Samax. Long gone was the ritual of her daily breakfast with him. When I did see her at the hotel, she was doing what she had always done, filling up those yellow sheets of paper with the Elite type of her silent Olivetti. She had just turned thirty-five, and if anything she had gotten even more beautiful over the years. Ten years her junior, I was as attracted to her as I had ever been—maybe even more so now that I had had a good number of lovers myself. Of late I had pondered my relationship with Desirée—what was it exactly? Having lived under the same roof with her all those years, I thought of her as much more than just a friend. But that did not mean she was anything like a sister, or even an aunt—which had always been a problematic relationship for me one way or the other. If I tried to pin it down, we seemed like not-so-distant cousins who are nevertheless strangers to each other underneath. Because Desirée, from the very first, had carried—even cultivated—the aura of a stranger, I had never felt impelled to resist my attraction for her. Not as a boy, a teenager, or a man. She had to be aware of this. Whether she liked it or didn’t, she was never coy and she didn’t tease—but, then, she never had to tease anyone to get attention. With me, she maintained both a sense of intimacy and a detachment that never wavered. I knew I would always be a little in love with her, and I hoped that maybe one day she would share with me the contents of those yellow pages, maybe even read some of them aloud to me as once upon a time, when I thought she was Scheherazade herself, she had read me the
Arabian Nights
.

Like me, Desirée was visiting the hotel that weekend when Samax died. I had come up from Santa Fe, where I had taken a studio apartment while working in Calzas’s office. Knowing that my uncle’s health was failing, I tried to fly to Las Vegas at least every other weekend. What with his vegetarian diet, the myriad fruit juices, and his exercise regimen, I had always assumed Samax would be one of those people
who literally lived to be one hundred, expiring finally of that most wonderful of euphemisms, “natural causes,” words which had for me always conjured a mechanistic image of the internal organs silently, painlessly shutting down—like a power generator, or a complex clock that can no longer be rewound. Samax’s stroke years before had been a shock to me, but I had convinced myself it was an aberration in an otherwise healthy continuum. I may have been lulled into this conviction by his remarkable recovery. More likely, it was my need, because of our history together, to think of Samax as immortal. He knew better, even before the smaller deteriorations that followed the stroke—bronchitis, gallstones, bladder infections, an enlarged prostate—began to mount at an alarming rate, each malady making the next more difficult to deal with. And always hovering was the specter of another stroke—one that would finish him off, Samax declared matter-of-factly, because he was that much weaker.

“Dolores is one hundred and five,” he remarked to me in the fall of 1980, two months before his death, “and she got there by doing everything I stopped doing: glued to her rocker, eating lots of eggs and red meat, salting her food heavily. The closest she ever came to a health food was those quarts of chamomile tea she used to put away. She hasn’t seen the inside of a hospital in seventy years—since Delia was born—while at eighty I’m in and out constantly, being jabbed and prodded.”

Indeed, Dolores, who kept to her routine of sitting in the garden, with or without Labusi, continued to oversee the management of the hotel under Mrs. Resh and the far-reduced staff. With so few guests, there simply was no need for an army of employees, and of the oldest of these, only Azu the doorman remained—balding now, with gout in his knees, but still wide as the door he manned. Sofiel the gardener continued to maintain the quincunx orchard, and Alif and Aym were still on the payroll. Though they too were operating at diminished strength ever since Aym had lost his vision overnight—not, according to him, in an accident, but during a dream in which he had found himself flying into the sun, unable to stop. The doctor who examined him confirmed (and could not explain) the fact that Aym’s optical nerve had been singed like a piece of straw. Yet though Aym was now blind and mute, Samax kept him on, convinced that with his acute sense of hearing and still-crackling martial skills, he continued to be a formidable
force. Maybe this was true. Or maybe Samax had come to realize what I had intuited long before: his bodyguards were intended to deflect not assassins dispatched by Vitale Cassiel, but the Angel of Death himself, whom my uncle continued to glimpse in visions of his own. Perhaps he was hearing him now too, closing in, and so thought Aym’s sharp ears would be valuable in the end.

In November, just a week before Samax’s death, a new guest did arrive at the hotel who was more unusual than any of his predecessors. Which was saying a lot. He would turn out to be the final guest to check into the Hotel Canopus, someone I knew at first only as “the Man of Smoke.” For a simple reason. When you entered his room on the fifth floor, it was always filled with smoke—not wood or incense smoke, but a scentless variety—and the man himself was never visible. Once you were inside the room, his voice remained equidistant from you. He took all his meals—milk, fish broth, and sauerkraut juice twice daily—in his room, as well as a tumbler of ouzo mixed with water (which turned smoky in the glass) in the evening. As far as anyone knew, he never left the room. No one ever saw him. When I asked Samax about him, he was even more secretive than usual.

“He’s someone I was looking for for a long time,” he said cagily, though it was not like him to be mysterious for the sake of mystery.

Immediately I thought of Rochel, his cellmate half a century earlier. “When did you find him?” I asked.

“Just last month. You’ll find out soon enough who he is. It’s a surprise—for you and Calzas. In the meantime, go by his room and introduce yourself.”

I did just that. And was met with a low, somewhat singsong voice that floated from the depths of the smoke, inquiring about my recent work for Calzas. I had not expected that he should be so interested in my activities as an architect (was he just trying to please Samax, or was the surprise that he himself was an architect?), for I saw immediately that he conversed on the subject like a professional.

“I know the Hotel Rigel,” he said. “I once stayed there.”

“You did? When was that?”

“Oh, a long time ago. Before you were born. And what is your next assignment—demolition again?”

I shook my head. “No.”

In fact, the Hotel Rigel was my first and last demolition job. For
Calzas, I had begun designing a hotel to be built on a seaside cliff in the Baja; in my free time, with my truest mental energy, I had completed work on the blueprints for a planetarium. Months earlier, I had heard that the city of Phoenix intended to build a planetarium and was announcing an open competition for a plan. I had pulled out all the stops, creating a design that owed as much to my youthful immersion in fantastic architecture and star lore as to the conventional needs of a public place. The story Calzas had once told me, about the British using Piranesi’s
Carceri
, the drawings of an imaginary infernal prison, to lay out the very real Newgate Prison, had always inspired me. I had found it exhilarating, despite the grimness of his subject matter, that Piranesi could create such a dynamic—of life not just imitating, but being determined by, art.

But in the weeks after I had helped to demolish the Hotel Rigel, I was so distracted by the contents of the letter I had found in the defunct mailbox that I nearly missed the deadline for the Phoenix competition. Instead, I directed my energies into trying to locate the man I now knew to be my father, Geza Cassiel. Suffice to say that reading that letter had been like poring over a very different sort of blueprint, tantalizing, dangerous, and incomplete—destined, perhaps, never to be completed. Finding the letter marked the second great fateful crossroads of my life—standing out amid many detours and byways—as significant in its way as my abduction by Samax when I was a boy.

Among the most powerful shocks were the fact that Vitale Cassiel was my grandfather, and thus a closer relative than Samax, and—even more incredible—that Ivy turned out to be my closest relative of all, the half-sister of both my father and my mother. If the letter was a blueprint, it was for a particularly tortuous labyrinth—filled with dead ends and trapdoors. When I first reviewed its revelations—Ivy my aunt twice over, Stella my grandmother, Stella’s son and Bel’s lover one and the same person—I felt as if I had plunged through a trapdoor and were falling through space. From the tumult created forty-three years earlier by my grandfathers, Nilus Samax and Vitale Cassiel, had come both my mother, whom I would never know, and Ivy, whom I knew only too well. And now, it turned out, my father as well, who might still be alive with as little knowledge of me as I had
had of him before finding the dead letter. No, less—for he wasn’t sure I even existed.