A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  Sitting up in bed with his arm and shoulder suspended and an I.V. in his other forearm, he calmly watched me cross the postoperative room from the moment I entered it, wending my way through the myriad beds, as if he knew I was coming to see him and him alone.

  His eyes were gray, with silver highlights, deeply set beneath a flat, imposing brow. His hair had been combed, and bathed completely now, fully conscious, he looked even more striking: not just handsome, with finely shaped, symmetrical features, but intense. His eyes especially so. “You must be Mala,” he said in a low, pleasant voice. “You were asking after me yesterday when I was still out.”

  I was surprised.

  “The other nurse told me,” he said. “She said Mala from X ray had never been in asking about anyone before.” He extended the fingers of his right hand. “Thank you for finding all that shrapnel. Including the piece in my ankle, which I’ve been walking around with for who knows how long.”

  I touched his fingers, and they were cool. He had large hands and his fingers were long and powerful.

  “I asked them to keep it for me,” he went on, indicating a plastic cup on the bedside table that held seven pieces of black iron, each about the size of a nickel.

  “You’re feeling all right, then, Captain?” When I spoke finally, my own voice sounded remote, hoarse in my throat. And my palm was burning more than ever.

  “They gave me so much morphine that my shoulder and arm are numb right through. But I’ll be all right.” He curled his fingers into a fist and compressed his lips. “All the rest of my crew was killed, blown to bits. And they tell me there was nothing left of our plane.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head. “And I found out that the airman I pulled out was already dead.”

  “I know. The crew that brought you in said it was a miracle you survived, Captain.”

  “I used up a few of my nine lives, I know that. Won’t you sit down? And please don’t call me Captain.”

  I hesitated. “I have to get back in a few minutes.”

  “Then sit for a few minutes.”

  There was a metal chair, which I drew closer to the bed.

  “Not enough time to tell me your life story?” he said lightly.

  I smiled, as I hadn’t smiled in months. The tendons of my jaw and the web of muscles around my eyes seemed to relax all at once.

  “Another time, then,” he smiled back, his eyes softening, answering his own question, as he would often do. “Tell me, where did you get that?” He indicated my pendant.

  “Savannah.”

  “Can you tell me about it?” he said, studying the pendant.

  I told him about the volcano, Captain Cook’s crewman, and the woman who had lived to be 105, and I described the little store in Savannah.

  He listened carefully, then said, “It’s probably iron-based, from the earth’s mantle, which shares its composition with the stars. You know, the only pure iron on earth was brought by meteorites. Cook was one of those explorers who navigated by the stars, and when he needed food, he bartered the South Sea islanders iron—in the form of nails and fishhooks—that traced its origins to those same stars.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, fascinated by his words.

  “Would you please get me the X ray you took of my back before surgery? I’d like to show you something.”

  All his X rays were hanging at the foot of the bed beside his chart. While I sifted through them, he lifted a book from the bedside table and opened it to a page marked with a strip of gauze.

  “I borrowed this from the map room,” he said.

  My heart quickened when I saw that it was a star atlas with a Navy insignia—twin anchors composed of stars—on the indigo cover.

  “This is a photograph of the outer rim of the Andromeda galaxy taken with an X-ray telescope,” he went on. “Time-delayed to capture the movements of the stars. Now, hold my X ray next to it.”

  The shrapnel and stars looked the same: clusters of short white streaks against the blackness.

  “Iron,” he said softly, “here, inside my body, and there, in another galaxy, as far away from us as we can imagine.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” I said, leaning closer to him.

  “I think you know why,” he said, tilting his head and turning his eyes back on mine. “I knew I would be telling you from the moment you walked in here.”

  I felt the blood rushing in my head, but he was right: I wasn’t surprised. And we were both aware that whatever forces and impulses had drawn me to him in the first place were just as surely at work in him.

  He reached out and took my pendant gently between his thumb and index finger. “This stone,” he said, examining it closely, “with all its stars—I’ve never seen one like it anywhere.”

  “May I ask you something?” I held up the frontal X ray of his torso and pointed to the shadow of his stomach cavity. “Down here—surely this has nothing to do with the war.”

  He smiled, and for an instant I was sure this was what he had really been waiting to talk about. “The key? No, I put that there myself. Swallowed it a long time ago, for safekeeping, and never told anyone. It never came out and it’s never bothered me,” he added.

  “For safekeeping?”

  He lowered his voice. “It opens something very important.” He touched his stomach. “I’ll keep it down here until I need it.”

  “You know when that will be?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll know when the time comes.”

  Hearing myself paged on the P.A., I stood up and put the X ray back with the others.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said.

  “I was counting on it.” His eyes brightened. “Merry Christmas, Mala.”

  For the first time I focused beyond him, about a dozen feet, on the wreath of blinking lights that had been hung on the wall on Christmas Eve.

  “Yes. Merry Christmas,” I said.

  7

  The Hotel Canopus

  My first glimpse of the desert came from seven miles up, in an airplane. It was like a white mirror that, according to the plane’s movements, tilted every so often in the blazing sunlight and blinded me. Sheer columns of rock, boulders piled upon boulders vertically, cast their shadows straight as compass needles for thousands of feet—shadows that led nowhere. Behind vast thermal currents, rippling faintly, mountains loomed in the distance. Eventually the great expanses of sand were replaced by rocky flats and choppy ridges of sandstone that ran to the horizon, where long red clouds, rough as stone, mirrored them in the sky. And there were ravines, deep blues at their lowest depths, dotted with brush, and canyons of graduated spirals, in the shape of tops. Of all the places I had ever gone with Milo and Luna, the desert was one we seemed to have bypassed, always taking the northern route out west and back. Furtive in their habits, they would have avoided those glaringly open spaces.

  I had never been on a private plane before. In fact, until that day I had never flown. Buses, cars, and vans were the only vehicles I knew before I rode on the New York subways. My only interstate train trip had been from Pittsburgh to New York when my grandmother came to get me, and to make funeral arrangements for Milo and Luna, after the car crash.

  But I knew something about planes, and Samax’s was a twin-engine Learjet that seated eighteen. The fuselage and wings were painted yellow, with red markings. The seats were red leather and the carpeting was yellow, adorned with clusters of darker yellow pomegranates. Pillows and blankets followed the same design. There was a small galley in the front and a bar over which hung an antique mirror, its perimeter etched with balloonists in flight. The bar was stocked with liquor, but also with a vast assortment of fresh fruit juice. Samax was a fruit enthusiast, and he himself squeezed me a mixture of black grape and plum juice and stuck a wedge of kiwi onto the rim of the glass. From the galley I was served a piece of just-baked loganberry pie topped with thin slices of quince.

  I was very impressed with
all of this. Only later did I learn how much Samax disliked flying. He especially disliked commercial air travel because it involved putting his life completely in someone else’s hands, which was anathema to him. So, because flying was a necessity in his business, he had conceded himself the luxury of the private plane—to keep control. But strictly in his own fashion. He hired a first-rate maintenance crew who worked solely on his plane, and the pilots were top-flight Air Force veterans, also on exclusive contract, whom he paid double what they would have received elsewhere. And, of course, as with all his possessions and habitations, he had had the plane modified to his own specifications.

  I would come to see that though he was abundantly wealthy, and by any standard lived luxuriously, Samax in fact chose his personal indulgences with care and then always followed the same pattern: going all the way—and sometimes over the top—with them. One of the many paradoxes about him was that while he demanded utter control over his physical surroundings and treated his material reality as first and foremost a malleable thing, in his most private affairs and daily habits he maintained a rigidly spartan regime, which he kept to his entire life. At the center of the endless flux he himself initiated, he could remain—or retain the illusion of remaining—essentially unchanged. The inherent tension thus created, he would tell me one day, served him in twofold fashion: it kept those around him whom he had reason to distrust off-balance; and it ensured that he was stimulated at times when he might easily—constitutionally—have lapsed into intellectual or emotional torpor.

  The takeoff had knocked the breath out of me, literally. Unlike a 707 or other big plane, the Learjet had taxied fast and then climbed even faster, nearly straight up—or what felt like straight up to me, buckled in tight by Samax, palms glued to the armrests—in a steep arc. As we rose, watching the Manhattan skyline recede in the winter smog, I thought of Alma somewhere in that enormous maze: I worried about her and hoped that when she got that letter she would understand and not be too worried herself. Then we passed over Brooklyn and I tried to figure out which of the sprawling cemeteries below was the one my grandmother was newly buried in, but seconds later the plane leveled off and there we were above the clouds.

  Samax and I sat alone in the front, one seat apart. There were three other passengers, each in a different row far behind us. His niece Ivy sat with her seat turned to one side, her back to everyone. Then there was a beautiful young woman introduced to me as Desirée who had very long black hair and wore a leather jacket with silver studs and matching boots. She sat in the last row, wearing earphones, erect behind a silent portable typewriter at a small oval conference table. And at a window seat on the other aisle there was a man who boarded at the last minute and to whom I was not introduced. After a moment, I recognized him: the man in the white coat and oversized gloves who had been crisscrossing the vacant lot beside the abandoned factory with the metal detector. Now wearing a gray parka, he was a larger man than I’d thought, broad at the shoulders and flat-footed. His face was flat, too, with piercing shiny eyes, deep within corkscrew sockets that were fixed in a permanent squint. He spent most of the flight bent over a pocket calculator, making annotations in a notebook. Occasionally he muttered to himself, but I never heard him exchange a single word with Ivy and Desirée, nor did the two of them speak to each other. To my dismay—for I had felt comfortable with him even in the short time he had been with us—the muscular young man with the crew cut and the blueprint was not onboard. On the way to the airport he told me his name was Calzas and assured me that I would like Las Vegas. And after seeing us off at the terminal, he had sauntered off with a single well-traveled suitcase and a fedora pulled low over his eye.

  I think Samax put a seat between us hoping that this space would take the edge off the fear he had seen grip me anew as we left the abandoned factory. He was close to me, but not too close. And he seemed at ease with himself, which helped put me at ease.

  Soon after we took off, he gave me a deck of cards and suggested I try my hand at solitaire.

  “You know the game?” he said.

  “Yes, I’ve played before.” Milo had taught me when I was five, and said it was nearly impossible to win unless you cheated.

  “Play with this deck.”

  On the backs of the cards, red palm trees were outlined against a yellow sky.

  While keeping one eye out the window at the rapidly changing landscapes below—green mountains and industrial belts easing into farmland and then open prairie—I also stole glances at Samax, who, having slipped on a white cashmere cardigan and a pair of glove-leather slippers, was absorbed in studying a map and making notes on a pad in red ink. Every so often he would look up and smile at me. I felt as if he and I were in our own little world in the front of the plane. Under the circumstances, I was surprised how comfortable this began to feel and—as would often be the case in years to come—how little I cared that the people around us seemed so remote. At first I couldn’t help staring back at them with curiosity, Desirée typing, Ivy rigid with her back to us, but by the time we were halfway across the country my mind was elsewhere. On the playing cards, for one thing, which I was examining much more closely after playing six games of solitaire in a row and winning every one of them. Samax had observed me doing so.

  “Have any luck?” he said, his pen never slowing on the paper.

  “Luck?”

  We were over the desert now, and pointing his free hand toward the window, he said, “Did you know that all of this was once the floor of an ocean?”

  I nodded, and at the same time craned my neck to see the map before him.

  “It’s a map of the desert,” he said. “Not this—another desert. Come, sit next to me.”

  I unbuckled my seat belt. Sitting that much closer to him, I studied his profile and inhaled the scent of his cologne, which was dry and pleasantly citric. Above the neat white moustache he had a large, straight nose, broad across the bridge. Closely shaven, his cheeks were remarkably clear and unblemished for a man his age. His brow was deeply but cleanly lined, as if he had spent much time alone, in contemplation. But considering that he lived in the desert, he had few wrinkles around his eyes. Two simple reasons for this, I would learn, were that he seldom squinted—his eyesight was sharp and he regularly wore dark glasses—and that regardless of his changes of expression, from a smile to a grimace, his pale eyes remained open, level, and slightly inquisitive.

  He turned them on me fully now. “Do you like the plane?”

  I nodded.

  “Like to know the speed at which we’re traveling?”

  “About five hundred miles an hour.”

  “Oh, so you’re an old hand at this.”

  I shook my head. “I never flew on a plane before.”

  He looked surprised.

  “But I’ve read about them,” I went on.

  “What have you read?”

  “Oh, a book about the U-2 spy planes. They don’t fly so fast, but they can cruise fourteen miles up. And they weigh much less than other planes. Without the pilot, they’re not even one ton.”

  He nodded appreciatively, stroking his chin. “I didn’t know that.”

  “And I always liked to read Aviation magazine in the school library. Until they stopped getting it.”

  “I think we can arrange to get it for you now.”

  I shrugged.

  “Well,” he said, and I could see he was measuring his words, “I’m glad to be with you the first time you’re flying. How about if we go up to the cockpit in a while and the pilot can show you some things firsthand?”

  “Okay.”

  “First, though, look out my window.” He tilted his head back so I could gaze past him. “That’s the Painted Desert. Also known as the Colorado Plateau. There’s a point in its northeast corner, which we just passed, called Four Corners, where four states meet: you can walk in a little circle around that point and in about thirty seconds visit Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. I did it once. Most of
the Painted Desert is in Arizona. Calzas’s people, the Zuni Indian tribe, have their roots in the New Mexican part. It’s called ‘painted’ because of all the reds and oranges you see. Those ridges are sandstone, formed from massive sand dunes and clay hills that just baked in place 180 million years ago.” He pulled down the tray in front of my seat and laid the map on it. “Now,” he went on, warming to the subject, “this desert on the map is surprisingly similar to what you see below. It’s a small section of the Sahara that straddles the border between Algeria and Tunisia, called ‘The Hammada of Fiery Stone.’ ”

  I studied it. “The Sahara must be much bigger than this desert.”

  “The Sahara is the largest desert in the world. Over three million square miles. But did you know that one-fifth of the earth’s surface is desert?”

  I shook my head.

  “You see, a desert is simply anyplace that receives less than ten inches of rain a year. Of all the continents, only Europe has no deserts. Most of the Sahara is an ‘erg,’ which is a desert of flat sand and sandy dunes. Much rarer is a ‘hammada,’ ” Samax continued, “which in Arabic means a series of plateaus and ridges of bare stone—like the Painted Desert.” He circled a point on the map with his index finger. “Here on the western edge of the hammada, fifty miles from the nearest village, in a small ruined temple dating to the time of Alexander the Great, there is an underground chamber containing a statuette of Meno, son of the god Ammon. The statuette is a foot high. It is carved from black marble and has inlaid eyes of gold with silver pupils. Except for one broken finger on the right hand, it is in perfect condition.” He paused for a long moment, until I looked up at him. He was smiling, but his eyes were gazing out the window, into the bright sunlight. “In two days,” he said, “I shall be holding it in my hand in Las Vegas. Calzas is on his way to obtain it as we speak.”