A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  I had listened to this speech with astonishment, though soon enough such speeches would not seem so out of the ordinary to me. Out of all the questions that popped into my head, I even asked one—one which Samax seemed to approve of.

  “How exactly will he get there?”

  He further opened the map so that several more panels appeared. “First he’ll land in Madrid,” he said, then ran his finger across the pale green of Spain, over the rich turquoise of the Mediterranean, into the yellow of North Africa, “and make a connecting flight to Algiers. From there he flies south to El Oued, an oil town with a small airport. Then he’ll set out overland by Land Rover with a guide and two bodyguards, first to Bir Beressof, a village, and then here, to a former oasis east of Bir Lahrache. That is where the erg ends and the hammada begins. Over the hammada he will have to travel on foot for several hours until he reaches the temple. Here.” Samax lifted his finger and placed my own on the spot. In doing so, he ran his thumb over my index finger, the one I had broken that never healed properly. And, peering closely at me, he said aloud what had already crossed my mind. “Yes, it is this same finger that is broken on the statuette of Meno.” Then, slowly, he folded up the map.

  By the time we were descending over the Mojave Desert into Las Vegas, dusk was falling. It seemed to me that I had traveled across, not just time zones, but whole worlds since Alma and I walked out of the house in Brooklyn and set out for the planetarium. My head was heavy, and had we remained in the air much longer I would surely have rested it against my seat and fallen into a deep sleep.

  Two blue sedans—identical to the one in which I had ridden earlier—awaited us on the apron at the private air terminal. My first gulps of desert air, taken on the tarmac with the wind whipping my hair, surprised me: for all its dryness, it felt as if I were swallowing, not air, but a cool dark liquid, and I was suddenly wide awake again. Samax and I got into the back of the first sedan, Desirée sat in the front with the driver, and we sped off. My first close impression of Desirée was the smell of her leather jacket mingled with a subtle jasmine scent emanating from her long hair, which was so lush and glossy, silver highlights twinkling in the black, that I wanted to lean over the seat and touch it. Instead, she turned around to me.

  “Enjoy the flight?” she said pleasantly. She had a low, musical voice.

  She smiled at me, and though her eyes, large and brown, were on my face, they seemed to be looking far away—so much so that she could have been smiling, too, at whatever she was seeing there.

  Through the car windows, the lights of the airport had no sooner faded behind us than the glow of the city proper, a great golden cloud of light beneath the royal blue sky, appeared through the windshield. From a distance the garish flashing neon of the Strip was like an electric rainbow that had shattered and was sputtering on the ground. But we left the interstate highway for a narrower, less traveled road and gradually veered left, away from the city, into a network of dark, quiet streets. We passed ranch houses with sleek lawns and ironwood trees, Spanish villas with terra-cotta roofs, Tudor mansions with serpentine driveways, and even a mock-Roman temple flanked by a pair of brightly lit horseshoe swimming pools. Then we entered a long road paved with silvery asphalt on which there were no houses. Eventually it tapered into a single broad driveway through an iron gate that ended in a cul-de-sac. There, at the very edge of the desert, a startlingly large, white building with many lighted windows loomed before us. In a courtyard in front of the building, there was a marble fountain, adorned with a statue, from which a plume of water rose high in the air, glittering under spotlights.

  “Welcome,” Samax said, smiling, holding the car door open for me.

  Carrying her typewriter in its black case, swinging her hips, Desirée again wore an abstracted look as she smiled at me and walked up the marble steps to the building’s entrance. A doorman in a white jacket opened one of the darkly tinted glass doors for her, and then I heard her heels clicking rapidly away.

  “This is my home,” Samax said simply. “The Hotel Canopus. Now it is your home, as well.”

  My first look at that building, which was to figure so prominently in my life, has always remained sharply etched. Though I had traveled through many American cities, and lived in New York, where there were hundreds of far larger buildings, the Hotel Canopus, framed by a vast desert expanse, backdropped by the forbidding silhouette of the Spring Mountains, seemed enormous looming there under the starlit sky. In fact, it was ten stories high, and about one hundred feet across. (Eventually I would come to learn all its specifications intimately, including the 290 windows, 110 doors, thirty bathrooms, three basement levels, and the tunnel that ran from one subbasement to a large greenhouse.) Purely rectangular, the building was constructed of limestone and white brick and had a slightly sloping, tiled gray roof. The design was straightforward but elegant, with baroque touches. It was detailed, for example, with fine masonry work, such as the figures of wild (and extinct) animals below window ledges and elaborate Islamic decorations—labyrinths, mandalas, and geometrical designs on brightly colored tiles set into the eaves and cornices. The entrance-way was flanked by imposing, plainly fluted marble columns and there was a small arcade to the left, leading to a large circular terrace ringed with shade trees. The building’s foundation was rimmed by yucca shrubs like thick fans and concentric circles of mesquite trees flowing away from the courtyard, beyond which were some outbuildings. I could also faintly make out the maze of a large garden, heavily shadowed, the equally large greenhouse, and a swimming pool. But, even as I took all this in, what most caught my eye was that fountain at the center of the cul-de-sac, which was more complicated than it had appeared as we came up the driveway.

  I stood not ten feet from it now and saw that the plume of water was actually six jets of water from the mouths of six bronze dolphins that conjoined in midair. The dolphins were arrayed below a marble statue so supplely carved it appeared to be alive, in motion, beneath the umbrella of spray. The statue was of a woman wearing a necklace of stars who was sitting on a starfish throne. That is, it had five arms like a starfish, four of which were the legs of the throne while the fifth served as its back. She was young, with wavy hair cascading over her shoulders. A light robe clung to her body and her slender feet were sandaled. I thought I saw a smile glimmer through the veils of water, on an open, beautifully balanced face which was fixed on the heavens. In her hand she held a small bowl, from which water, rainbow-tinged, was overflowing in a steady stream.

  As we ascended the steps, Samax saw me staring at the fountain. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” he murmured.

  I nodded, mesmerized by the complicated play of water amid all that marble and bronze—like a ballet in which everything was in motion except the dancer herself.

  “It was commissioned by the original owner of the hotel,” Samax said, “a Frenchman named Canopus from whom I bought this place. The design was by a Swede named Spica, who was also the hotel’s architect. He oversaw the actual sculptors, and returned to the hotel to install the fountain when I became owner. I approved what he’d done, and after a couple of months Spica finished and left without a word. Just a note saying his design was based on a fable, though no one has been able to find its source. I hired both an art historian and a historian of religion to trace its origins, and they came up empty-handed. And I was never able to find Spica again.”

  The doorman wore a white jacket with yellow epaulets and a black fez. The fez made me think of Egypt, and indeed he was Egyptian. Rectangularly shaped as the building of which he was the guardian, he had an impassive face, a thick nose, and unflickering brown eyes. Had he wanted to block the doorway, I thought, he needed only to step into it and he would have filled the frame as neatly as the twin doors themselves.

  “Good evening, Azu,” Samax greeted him, and he responded with a respectful nod, politely looking me over as he held the door open.

  Entering the lobby, I stopped in my tracks and whistled sof
tly. It, too, was enormous, a long black desk along the right-hand wall, a pair of black leather couches on the left, and at the far end a bank of elevators. Samax merely smiled and stood aside as I stepped farther into the room, gaping.

  The walls were great slabs of black marble, veined red, that ran unbroken to the ceiling about fifty feet above. The marble was inlaid with bronze and silver astronomical objects—comets, planets, and clusters of stars—and figures from the zodiac like Cancer, Pisces, and Scorpio. Polished stones, like lapis and onyx, highlighted their eyes, teeth, and scales. The white ceiling was unadorned, but the floor, a chessboard of white and black marble tiles, was centered by an enormous zodiacal wheel of polished brass set into the marble. I stopped in the segment representing Sagittarius, the Archer, who was poised intently with drawn bow.

  “Of course, that’s your sign, isn’t it,” Samax observed, for, as I would learn, he was not someone who missed very much. “Canopus was obsessed with the zodiac,” he continued. “He put zodiacs all over the place. The basin of that fountain outside is an enormous zodiacal wheel. And there was another huge wheel in the garden, which I had removed. He consulted astrologers whenever he made a decision, but I’m afraid it didn’t do him much good.” Samax caught and held my eye. “No one can tell you how to make good decisions,” he said, “they can only suggest where your decisions may lead you. Canopus was a bad businessman, and a worse hotelier, and no amount of astrology could save him from that. He ran this place into the ground. When he went bankrupt, I bought it for a song—for less money than a house would have cost me—and then I spent a fortune fixing it up, but it was worth it. I kept the name because I like it. Good evening, Della,” he called out to a woman who had appeared through a leather-padded door behind the desk.

  She was slight and straight-backed, with slate-colored hair, a woman whose age, from a distance, was difficult to determine. She was wearing a red jacket, red hair band, and bright coral lipstick. “This is Enzo,” Samax said loudly. “He’ll be with us now. Would you make sure that his room is ready.”

  “Welcome, Enzo,” she said in a smooth, easy drawl as she crossed the lobby to the elevator bank. “It’s good to have you with us.”

  “Thanks,” I said hoarsely.

  “Come, let me show you something,” Samax said, and I followed him over to the desk. As soon as Della stepped into an elevator, and he and I were alone again, Samax took out a key which he turned in a keyhole beneath the desk; immediately a small hinged panel on the marble wall swung open, just beside the padded door, revealing an even smaller steel door with a combination lock.

  It was a very public place to keep a safe, I thought, as Samax began spinning the wheel of the lock. The tumblers clicked into place, and when he opened the door I saw not the interior of a safe, but a pair of simple switches, one of which he flicked upward. Overhead there was a pneumatic hiss and a rumble and the next thing I knew the white ceiling was sliding into the wall, from right to left, revealing a dark hollow space. When the rumbling stopped and the ceiling was gone, Samax flicked the other switch and lights around its perimeter brilliantly illuminated a second ceiling, which could not have been more different.

  It was a vaulted ceiling, entirely covered by a richly detailed mural depicting a celestial landscape. Around a moon rimmed with white fire hundreds of angels were gathered in concentric circles. They were youthful, with golden skin. Stars glittered around them as they played flutes and bells, scooped up water in crystal goblets, combed one another’s hair, and preened their wings. The twelve animals and symbols of the zodiac adorned the circle farthest from the moon. At that point in my life I had only once visited a museum, and the church to which my grandmother took me possessed only standard-issue ecclesiastical artwork, so I was amazed at all these luminous faces gazing downward. For a moment they began to spin on me, circle upon circle, until I was so dizzy I had to close my eyes.

  Samax came up beside me on silent feet. “This mural was executed in the sixteenth century,” he said, “by a painter named Francesco Gozzoli, who was commissioned by the Doge of Venice. It took Gozzoli and his apprentices four years to complete it, on the ceiling of the Church of St. Antony on the Greek island of Naxos, at that time a Venetian duchy. The church was bombed in the war when the Nazis attacked the island, and so badly damaged that later the authorities erected a new church on the site, keeping only the foundation and a single wall. I salvaged the ceiling from the rubble before they carted it off. I paid them for it—the local archdiocese and the government—with more than the usual quota of bribes thrown in.” He chuckled. “The Greeks thought I was crazy—even the guys I hired to do the work. I like to look at it alone, usually, and I’m the only one who has the key to uncover it. Do you like it, Enzo?”

  He could already see that I did. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Some say it’s impossible to determine exactly how many angels there are in the mural.”

  I was reminded of a game Milo used to play with me in the car, in which we would guess the number of people in a passing bus or the population of a town which we were about to reach. And so I said to Samax, “Do you want me to guess now?”

  “No, not at all,” he said. “You see, they claim it’s impossible because the mural is so lifelike that the number must always be changing. As if the angels can come and go.”

  “Do you believe that?” I said, staring openmouthed at the mural.

  “I’ve never been able to count them,” he smiled. “Soon you’ll be able to try. But you’ve had a long journey, let’s go upstairs.”

  He flicked the two switches and spun the lock on the steel door, and in about twenty seconds the vaulted ceiling was covered over again.

  There were three elevators. The first two had green doors, and the numerals above them ran to the second through ninth floors. It was the third elevator, with a red door, into which Samax led me.

  “This is my private elevator,” he said. “It goes to my living quarters on the tenth floor and the penthouse, as well as to the ninth floor, where you can connect with the other elevators. This is the elevator you will use. The green elevators go to the quarters of other family members and guests.”

  The elevator was paneled in walnut and softly lit by a grid of ceiling lights. Beneath my feet there was a carpet with an Indian design—a red sun ringed with golden eagles.

  “You’ll meet most of the extended family tomorrow,” Samax went on as we hurtled upward. “My guests you’ll discover in your own time. Some are always out and around, others keep to themselves, often for long periods. They are not hotel guests, of course, in the conventional sense. Except for people who are here to do business with me, or people whom I employ, everyone is my houseguest. They may visit for a few days, or linger for months, and there are a number of long-term residents. Some guests are old friends of mine, others are interesting people I’ve met in my travels.” He paused. “I can’t imagine now living in a static environment, without new people coming and going.” He smiled. “That’s why when I truly settled down, I bought a hotel.”

  I had taken a long journey, and as we rode up to the tenth floor, I was trying not only to absorb what Samax was saying, but also to grasp the incredible notion that I was about to start living in this place among a bunch of people of whose existence I had known nothing just that afternoon. I closed my eyes tightly, thinking for a moment that when I blinked them open again I might find myself back in bed in my grandmother’s house, with Alma leaning over me, telling me that all of it—the planetarium, the abandoned factory, my first airplane ride, the mural of angels—had been no more than an elaborate, at times terrifying, dream.

  If so, it was continuing, for when I did open my eyes, the elevator door slid open and Samax said softly, “My rooms are in the penthouse. You are free to come up there at any time. Your room is E, at the end of this corridor.”

  Standing by the open door to Room E, her hands folded at her waist, Della ushered me in with a small smile. She had
brown eyes with the longest lashes I had ever seen, eyebrows plucked to a pair of thin lines, and a deep tan. Up close, she appeared to be in her fifties.

  Room E was a large corner room that had obviously been prepared for me while I was still nominally a resident of Brooklyn. It had been freshly painted, the walls eggshell blue, the moldings and doors yellow to match the curtains and carpet. The room was shaped like a capital E—for Enzo?—without the middle bar, a rectangle which at either end, at right angles, gave onto another rectangle. The top rectangle was a sleeping alcove with a single bed and a night table opposite a tall window facing south, toward that aura of light over the city proper. The bottom rectangle was a bathroom.

  In the main part of the room, another window overlooked the desert to the west. Against the same wall there was a rolltop desk, a swivel chair, and a set of oak bookshelves. Sketchpads, notebooks, and pencils were arranged on a stool beside the desk. And dozens of books lined the shelves, picture books of great art and famous buildings, adventure stories and desert tales, and an extensive set of travel books bound in green morocco, including The Travels of Marco Polo, the Voyage of Magellan by Antonio Pigafetta, Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, and The Journals of Captain James Cook, as well as a complete set of the Arabian Nights. On the near wall there was a long closet and a chest of drawers, and in the center of the room an easy chair upholstered in red beside a reading lamp with an amber shade. Before the western window, on a tripod, there was a white telescope, which I saw at once was not a toy, but a professional instrument.

  I looked at Samax in disbelief. All of this was daunting, if not intimidating, not just because of its opulence, but because there did not seem to be a single frivolous item—such as a toy—in sight. This was a room, I would realize later, that had been set up with the person whom I might become—and not who I was—in mind. Which is to say it presented the seeds of how I would be molded by Samax.