Six thousand miles from North America, on an island six miles wide which felt like a bit of confetti in that dazzling, dizzying expanse of open sea, I might as well have been a million miles away from everything I had ever known. Never in my life had I been so starkly, elementally alone—to such a degree that, paradoxically, I seldom felt lonely. In my isolation, the lack of contact with other people limited my capacity for loneliness. It was as if the basis from which loneliness must spring, the raw social interaction—already drastically diminished in my case—had nearly disappeared. Breaking off my dead-end search for Cassiel, I had implicitly broken off with other people. Letting go of Cassiel in turn jarred loose some of the guilt over Loren that had so long weighed on me. Much of that guilt I never would—and maybe never wanted to—shake off. But to be free of even a fraction of it was a relief. In rushing to that particular edge of the world, a volcanic island which on the map approached invisibility, I had also reached an internal vanishing point, from which I hoped to reconstitute myself.
I swam. I dove for shellfish in the lagoons, wearing my pearldiver goggles from Manila. I bought fish and squid and jellyfish from the fishermen, and learned to fish with a net myself in the shallows when the tide came in. The women on Rarotonga fished with twin nets, one in each hand, which they brought together like cymbals, trapping their prey. The black and red angelfish were edible, but I could not bring myself to catch them. Where I did not find fruit growing wild, blood oranges, guavas, and papayas, I bought it in Matavera along with fresh speckled eggs and taro. I learned to make taro cakes and yam pudding. I fried fish in coconut oil on the small stove, or steamed it in banana leaves, or ate it raw cut into thin strips and dipped in vinegar. There was little meat on the islands, except wild pigs and chicken and the ubiquitous tins of corned beef from Auckland. But that was all right with me because I had stopped eating meat in Vietnam.
The days poured into one another and the weeks slid by. At that latitude, the hours of sunrise and sunset vary little from season to season—seven A.M. and seven P.M. And the two seasons are summer and winter, dry and rainy. Gradually, by necessity and desire, I had stripped away layers of clothes and possessions, even before I reached Rarotonga. I wore either a two-piece bathing suit or shorts and a T-shirt, invariably with a straw hat or a baseball cap. When I wasn’t barefoot, I put on sandals or thongs. In Tarawa, I had discarded my Navy duffel bag for a single medium-sized knapsack. I bought the darkest sunglasses I could find and a Swiss Army pocketknife, and I traded my watch for a Zippo lighter and a tin of lighter fluid. On Rarotonga my body went from tan to brown to bronze. The sun lightened my hair—it was nearly auburn—and I let it grow very long, halfway down my back. After all those months on the ship, I was getting stronger, leaner, and more muscular from swimming daily and hiking everywhere. With my steady diet of fish and fruit, my eyes were clear and my nails harder. The soles of my feet were toughened, and smooth as teak, from walking barefoot in sand.
In the mountains the rains were intense. The sea winds, full of moisture, hit the steep cliffs and billowed up into black clouds which condensed, drenching the lowlands, before drifting out to sea. Every morning it rained hard before first light. And often at that time, when the foliage was slate-colored through the window of my cabin, I felt the room fill up with silent visitors. Pale and weightless, with downcast eyes, they were the shades of all the dead I had known. My grandmother, my mother, Luna and Milo. Never my father, whom I knew only from photographs. But the legions of dead I had seen, smelled, and tended aboard the Repose came in force, overflowing the small room. I had x-rayed every one of them. Looked inside their bodies, occasionally glimpsing in the smoky swirls and deep shadows flickers which I took to be pinpoint windows onto their souls.
To my horror, Cassiel was sometimes among them, emanating dark light. Never for long—I would catch only a fleeting glimpse of him—but I knew it was his handsome features and powerful body. And I despaired when I thought he must be dead. His skin that just ten months before had rippled like water under my fingertips, his lips, the soft hairs on his arms and legs, his powerful fingers—all gone. To ashes or dust, I wondered with a shudder, buried in scorched earth or in the silt of the seafloor. Or perhaps he wasn’t dead at all, just skirting death somewhere in this world in those few seconds while his spirit flashed before me. This was what I told myself with little consolation. My only real consolation was that among all the shades I saw, from the newly dead whom I remembered blood-smeared and torn apart on surgical tables to the distant dead who must now truly be bones and dust, Loren was not among them. In my cabin on that tiny island I dreamed of him still, as he was at ten and as I imagined he might be now at fourteen, but he never came to me in the predawn. Perhaps because he was alive.
One evening near the end of my stay on the island I was reading beneath the banyan tree near my cabin. The moths were ticking around my lantern, hung from a branch, and at the periphery of its light, toads were snapping mosquitoes out of the air. From behind the mountains, a full moon—the last I would see on the island—was rising through a swirl of clouds. After completing Captain Cook’s Journals, I had found a slim, yellowed History of the Cook Islands among a bunch of maps in the tackle shop. Written in dry Victorian prose by a vicar named Ormas, who retired to Penrhyn Island, I didn’t get past the first page because of the tears streaming down my cheeks.
Ormas begins with a myth of the Cook Islanders about a girl and her nephew at the dawn of time. On his way across the great ocean to Hawaii, the god Maui drew the islands we call by Captain Cook’s name up from the depths with his fishhook, carved from an ancestor’s bone. Then he hurled his fishhook into the sky, where it became a constellation on the underbelly of Scorpio, called “the Spider” by the Polynesians. Of the four stars in the Fishhook, two are side by side, wedded at the hip. One is the girl Piriereua, which means “the Inseparable”; the other is her nephew. They have fled from home, into the sky, after being ill-treated by their relatives against whom they must struggle, always.
The inseparable, I thought bitterly, drying my eyes and remembering the moment at the planetarium when someone tapped my shoulder and I let go of Loren’s hand. He and I had been brought together in that place at that moment by the actions of relatives who had failed us, and against whose spirits, apparently, we had lost our struggle. I was sure of that; but I didn’t think I would ever know who had snatched Loren away from me and sent my life spinning like a top.
During that last month on the island, I became restless—not to wander more, but to settle down, however tenuously, and work out my next move. To do this, I still wanted to be alone, but not quite as alone I was on the Cook Islands. Also, my money was running out, and I needed to act before it was gone completely. So I decided to go back to the States. But though I had grown up in New York, and Massachusetts remained my legal state of residence, there was only one state I even considered going back to: Hawaii, the one state in the union comprised completely of islands, 122 of them in all.
On the last morning I was to awake on Rarotonga, after sipping my tea and spooning the flesh out of a papaya, I took a long swim and closed up my cabin. Then at noon, my knapsack on my back and a straw hat pulled low against sun, I set out for the airport at Avarua. I spotted a pair of Cook’s petrels, two black V’s, circling high overhead. At the beginning of the summer, I thought, I would have been able to examine their gray and white plumage in detail; but those moments of visual hyperacuity were gone.
In my seven months on Rarotonga, one by one nearly all symptoms of the spider bite had disappeared. Most obviously, I began getting my period regularly, more punctually in fact than ever before. Mornings I coughed out lots of phlegm, and as had begun to happen during my stay on Ocean Island, I sweated freely. It felt like my body was ridding itself of deeply embedded toxins from the spider’s venom. As the symptoms disappeared, so did the red dot on my palm and the twelve concentric circles that surrounded it. On Rarotonga, a circle disappeared roughly eve
ry seventeen days, and each time one did, the red dot faded a little more. Until finally all that remained was a kind of palimpsest on my palm that shone faintly when my hand was tilted at a certain angle to the light.
At the same time, there were other changes. I couldn’t hold my breath underwater nearly so long anymore, or soak up the hot sun all afternoon. Gradually I began sleeping uninterrupted for seven hours most nights and eating two complete meals a day. And I was no longer able to roam the corridors of my memory at will, though my powers of memory did remain stronger than they had been before the spider bit me. In spurts I could remember long-ago conversations verbatim, or entire landscapes as I had glimpsed them from a train or car, or the faces of people I had met in passing years before. And yet now there were things that seemed to have been erased completely. Everyone’s memory is selective, but mine became relentlessly, and peculiarly, so. For example, while I could not now remember my last telephone conversation with my mother, I recalled in its entirety a college lecture I had attended on the illusion of time in Ovid’s Metamorphoses—including the professor’s quips and asides. And when it came to Loren and Cassiel, and the brief intersections of their lives with mine—I had spent a matter of days with each of them—I had total recall. Every scent and gesture, every word and hesitation. Many times I relived that final hour with Loren at the planetarium and my last night with Cassiel at the Hôtel Alnilam, attempting to excavate clues about the riddles of their disappearances. But I never found answers there—just more pain.
Altogether the venom of the Ummidia Stellarum had affected me in full force for over two and a half years, from December 14, 1967, when I was bitten in New Orleans, to August 2, 1970, when I left the Cook Islands. I was twenty-five years old, and I would remain forever altered by that bite. Not only in the way my memory worked, but also in the magnetic attraction I continued to feel toward the stars—less obsessive, perhaps, but no less powerful—which did not abate. Zaren Eboli had told me that the effects of the venom could last up to three years, during which time much that was false and illusory in me would be stripped away; back in New Orleans I didn’t understand the full implications of this, and on that torrid August day, walking along the coral road to Avarua, I was just beginning to grasp them. I little knew that the bite had affected me in ways of which I was not yet aware.
There was one runway at the airport—a squat shingled building with a corrugated roof—and one scheduled turboprop flight a day in and out of Auckland, where I would connect with a jumbo jet for Honolulu. Only two other passengers were aboard that day, Australians in cowboy hats, as we took off into a blindingly blue sky. On my wrist I wore Cassiel’s bracelet and around my neck my pendant.
The previous morning, I had climbed the rough mountain to the summit of the island’s dormant volcano, intending to hurl my pendant into its brush-filled crater. In traveling with me all the way from Savannah, Georgia, the pendant had, over the course of two hundred years, by way of sloop, schooner, prop plane, and jet transport, circumnavigated the globe, and it seemed fitting I should now return it permanently to its source. But at the last moment I balked. There was an appealing symmetry in returning it (which I thought Cassiel, a student of circumnavigation, would have appreciated), but it had occurred to me suddenly that while one part of my own journey with that pendant might be completed, the pendant still had places to go, with or without me, outside the circle that began and ended with the volcano. Where exactly, and with whom, I didn’t know, but I was sure it would be wrong to leave it in that crater. Had that volcano still been active, had I been tossing the pendant into the molten lava it once was, I might have felt different. But who was to say, after all, that it was preferable for things, or people, to return to their origins rather than to get as far away from them as circumstances and luck—good and bad—allowed? Maybe that was easy for me to say because, even if I wanted to, I had nothing and no one to go back to. But as the plane hummed out over the open sea, I tucked my pendant into my shirt and was glad it was there.
Of one thing I was certain. Over the previous year, first instinctively, unconsciously, and then by design, I had begun a pattern, choosing to live on islands, and only islands, as I knew now I would do, not just for the next few months, but for the rest of my life.
11
The Sky-City
Columbus Day 1971 has always occupied a bright niche in my memory on account of an event unrelated to Christopher Columbus. Columbus had taught all Americans, including me—who as a boy kept his Journals alongside those of Cook and Drake—that the most spectacular discoveries are often stumbled on, rather than planned: in seeking the East Indies, you might well end up inventing the West Indies. I was to learn this lesson again on that particular October 12, in Room 512 at the Hotel Canopus, when making a different sort of discovery, no less exciting for me: sometime around midnight, on a silk-sheeted bed in the blood-warm glow of lamps with red bulbs, I had lost my virginity. It was an event I had avidly awaited, but despite the numerous, increasingly complex erotic scenarios I had spun out in my imagination over the previous two years, I was deeply surprised at the way things actually turned out—not only by the timing, but the identity of my partner, with whom, even an hour earlier, I would never have suspected I would find myself naked, head whirling, being pulled on top of her.
The evening had begun with two other unexpected events. At dinner, to most everyone’s astonishment, Dr. Deneb announced that at long last he was prepared to begin writing his monograph on Atlantis. All research was completed, all sources exhausted, and he had drawn his conclusion, which he claimed—and his immodesty was so devoid of arrogance, so natural, that it seemed almost charming—would be the definitive one.
“Will my monograph be long?” he said, echoing Labusi’s question. “Absolutely not. I need no more than one hundred fifty pages to make my case.”
“And will you tell us on which theory you finally settled?” Samax asked calmly, serving himself pimento salad.
“For that you will all have to wait. Even you, Junius. Just as I will not open another book on the subject while I am composing my monograph, I must not talk out my ideas, deflating them before they come alive on the page.”
“Fair enough,” Samax nodded.
“So when will we be able to read your conclusions?” Labusi asked, tucking his napkin into his collar and smoothing it down the front of his shirt.
“In four years. No more or less.” Deneb inhaled deeply and tapped the frame of his dark glasses. “Which brings me to one sad offshoot of this good news. For the complete solitude this task requires, I must leave the hotel during that time.”
Now even Samax was surprised. “Surely you’ve enjoyed plenty of solitude here.”
“Completely. These ten years could never have been so productive anywhere else. For that I will always be grateful. But now I must carve out a harsher solitude for myself. No convivial meals, no stimulating companions—just a room with a table and simple fare.”
“A monastery?” Labusi said.
“Or a prison,” Samax murmured.
“A little of both,” Deneb chuckled. “I shall secure lodgings on a tiny island off Amorgós in the Aegean Sea. It was a garrison for the Greek Navy after the First World War. Then it became a prison island. Now they rent rooms under conditions so spartan it scares off any misguided tourists. In three years I’ll be back,” he concluded.
“And you’ll be welcome,” Samax said, raising his glass of hibiscus tea.
“Here, here,” drawled the man beside me, one of the hotel’s newest “permanent” guests, raising his own glass with his four-fingered, pinkieless hand.
Zaren Eboli, whose specialty was spiders, had been summoned by Samax two years earlier when the aftereffects of my spider bite began manifesting themselves. For three weeks he treated me, and then, at Samax’s invitation, transported his laboratory from New Orleans to a space adjacent to Hadar’s in the subbasement of the hotel. Samax told him he could pursue his research u
nder the roof of the hotel for as long as he needed; Eboli had never spent any time out west, and he was very excited by this open-ended invitation. “In three years,” he declared, “I should be able to collect specimens representing eighty percent of the species in this region.” And so to the eclectic roster of studies at the Hotel Canopus—Atlantology, meteoritics, pomology, and mnemonics—was added arachnology.
At fifteen, I was already a good six inches taller than Eboli. Stooped, with thick tinted spectacles, he wore a goatee which had gone nearly all white, like his long hair. His crow’s-feet were deep and his brow jaggedly furrowed. He always wore Turkish slippers and a black velvet smoking jacket to dinner, and aside from his daily field trips into the desert, his most frequent excursions from the hotel were to hear jazz bands and quartets on the Strip. Often Auro and I listened to him play the piano in the lounge, which he invariably did after dinner.
I was fascinated by Eboli’s proficiency with only eight fingers, but Auro, increasingly obsessed with music—possessing near perfect pitch, he could imitate any instrument—was enchanted by Eboli on every level. Though excruciatingly shy with the other guests, from whom he fled on sight, Auro took to following Eboli around and assisting him in his lab. The two developed a strong affinity—Eboli, born missing his pinkies, empathetic toward a boy with echolalia as others could never be. And in addition to filling the void left in Auro’s life by the death of Nestor, Eboli’s influence was a tonic to Ivy’s increasingly malignant attitudes. Before Eboli’s arrival, Auro had been a virtual recluse, furtive in the hotel corridors, merging with the shadows of potted palms, or hiding in the greenhouse and echoing the cries of the birds in the darkness. There is no doubt in my mind that, without Eboli, Auro would never have ventured into the desert, where he came to relish their spider expeditions. More importantly, I doubt Auro would have found his calling quite so early as the musician he was to become—a jazz drummer, to Ivy’s consternation, of ferocious dedication. So among the surprising consequences of my spider bite was the fact that, as much as it affected my life, it surely changed the course of Auro’s.
A Trip to the Stars Page 20
