A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  As she returned from the bedroom, I saw a desk in there on which her typewriter was perched. Beside it was a stack of those yellow pages, maybe two feet high. More than ever now, I wondered what it was she was writing.

  “Sorry I took so long,” she said.

  She had changed into black pants, lizard boots, and a leather jacket. She had changed her earrings, too, from teardrop pearls to silver rings. In her left hand she carried a handbag and a set of keys, in her right a rolled-up sheet of thick paper.

  “Going out?” I said, disappointed that my visit was to be so short.

  “After one last turn at the party,” she replied. “Here’s the map. Dalia is in Room 512 and she’s expecting you.”

  “Desirée, I didn’t know you played the piano.”

  “I only play when I’m alone.”

  “You’ve never played for Uncle Junius?”

  She shook her head.

  “Or for your friends?” I said, indicating the photographs.

  “Not even for them.”

  When I got off the elevator on the fifth floor, she held the door and said, “See you at breakfast.”

  “I won’t be having breakfast with Uncle Junius. I’m flying to Acoma with Calzas at dawn.”

  “Ah. Then I’ll catch you after dinner.” She waved. “And by the way, you’re a wonderful dancer.”

  Room 512 was at the end of the corridor. I heard flute music from within, and I had to knock twice before the door was thrown open onto a room bathed in red light. It was like looking into a photographic dark room, or a furnace, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust.

  “You must be Enzo,” the girl before me said. “Come in.” She had a strong Spanish accent.

  She was tall and fair and very pale, as I could see even in that light. And very pretty. She had wide slanting eyes, a small nose with flaring nostrils, and thinly curving lips. Her platinum-blond hair, pulled back off her broad forehead, was long and curly, and she had thick eyelashes and pencil-thin eyebrows. Her long fingernails were painted bloodred. She wore a sleeveless shift of white silk and a pair of red silk slippers. On her left shoulder she sported a tattoo of an iceberg among whitecaps radiating fire.

  She saw my eyes were drawn to the tattoo. “Where I come from, the icebergs look like that, at sunrise and sunset.”

  So I knew she didn’t come from Spain or Mexico—but where, then?

  “I’m Dalia,” she said, rolling the l hard, just as she lisped her s’s. “I heard so many nice things about you.”

  “Here’s the map Desirée said you wanted.”

  “Oh yes. Thank you.” Without opening it, she tossed the map onto an end table stacked with old and battered books. “Like some tea?” she asked, arching one eyebrow. “It’s maté with hibiscus buds. Very stimulating.”

  I didn’t need much more stimulation, I thought, watching her cross the room to a hot plate on the dresser. She snapped her small hips rhythmically from side to side, the white silk gently riding her buttocks with every step; from the back, at least, she seemed to be wearing nothing under the shift.

  I had met all kinds of people in my nearly six years at the hotel, but never anyone like Dalia. Eighteen going on thirty, she seemed light-years older than me, though I considered myself someone who had been around a bit in my short life.

  “Honey?” she called over her shoulder, drawing out the word on her tongue, so that for a moment I thought she was addressing me. Well aware of this, she laughed. “In your tea.”

  “Sure.”

  I had never been in that particular room before. Aside from the lighting—red bulbs in all the lamps, red candles burning on the desk and dresser—it was no different from the typical room Samax kept for the shorter term guests: a bed, divan, the dresser, some chairs, and an alcove with a well-stocked writing desk and shelves. For someone who had just arrived, Dalia seemed to have settled in rapidly: two of the shelves filled with more old books; a reel-to-reel tape recorder on the bedside table; discarded clothes draped over the chairs; a red attaché case filled with makeup spilled out on the dresser; and several pairs of shoes strewn over the divan. Bringing me my tea, she knocked the shoes to the floor with a deft sweep of her foot.

  “Please, sit.”

  The tea was also bloodred. “It’s delicious,” I said, sipping while the steam ran up my nose.

  Dalia sat beside me, crossing her legs so that the shift hiked up well above her knee. Like everything else about her, her legs were long and streamlined. Her stomach was flat, and she had full, prominent breasts. She cradled her teacup delicately within her palms.

  “So,” she said, “did Desirée tell you what I was doing?”

  “No.” I was still trying to discern the color of her eyes. In that light, it was difficult to say if they were brown or blue.

  “I am translating a lost book,” she went on, and the way she said “book,” it rhymed with spook. “That is, it was lost until very recently. Originally, it was written in Catalan, with some Latin thrown in, though the author was a Spanish speaker. Later he translated it into pure Spanish.”

  “And you’re translating it into English.”

  “Yes. What’s tricky is that he left a number of, how would you say it, Catalanismos—Catalanisms—in the text that I’m constantly untangling.” She paused. “I know it must sound confusing.”

  “Not at all.” It sounded, I thought, like a perfectly appropriate project to undertake at the Hotel Canopus.

  “The author was a Spanish missionary named Varcas, lapsed in his Catholicism. He stayed or traveled with other Spaniards, and he wrote in this mix of Catalan and Latin so they wouldn’t know his subject. If they did, he could have suffered terrible punishment.”

  “He was a revolutionary?”

  “Nothing like that.” She leaned closer to me, wetting her lips. “He was writing about vampiria—vampires—here in your Old West in the 1840s.”

  My eyebrows must have gone up.

  “Oh, there certainly were such creatures,” she went on. “Of that there can be no doubt. Let me read you something.” She hurried over to the desk and returned with a wad of pages. “I just finished this section. I’ve been working on it since I left Santiago.”

  “Oh, is that where you’re from?” I interrupted her.

  “I am a student at the University of Chile. With this project, I will receive my degree, and maybe even publication. Who knows?”

  “And the icebergs?” I was good with maps, and I knew that Santiago was a landlocked city.

  “What about them?”

  “You said you have them in the place you come from.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I come from Tierra del Fuego. I was born on Los Estrechos de Magellanes—the Strait of Magellan. Do you know where that is?”

  Of course. I had read about the Land of Fire, and the Strait, in Captain Cook’s Journals.

  “I see you do. We have tremendous icebergs in the Strait,” she said, raising her arms over her head and joining her fingertips, “as tall as the mountains that overlook them. I grew up traveling with my father among the islands of the Strait: Gilbert, Dawson, Lennox, Nuñez, Navarino—they got their names from Spanish and English navigators. This music you hear I recorded on the Isla Cook. It’s a shaman who played on the winter solstice.” She took a deep breath. “Any more questions?”

  I shook my head.

  “Bien. At the time Varcas wrote his book, after wandering all over this country, he was forty-two years old and all his hair had turned white because of what he had seen. I’ll read you a passage from the second chapter, where he is traveling north to Albuquerque, which was then called San Felipe de Albuquerque.”

  In a solemn, measured voice she began to read:

  On the night of July 21, 1843, I had traveled northeast for four days from the Gallo Mountains where I encountered all variety of wild beasts. Following the Río Puerco, I hoped to reach Los Lunas the next day and was searching for a place to pitch camp. The night was
hot and windy. I led my burro over a dry riverbed, and moonlight illuminated a plain dotted with small trees. Suddenly I heard a woman’s screams, and the burro stopped and would go no farther. So I proceeded alone with a heavy heart. When I reached the first of those trees, I came on a terrible sight: a young woman crucified with glowing spikes. Her dress was torn and her chin rested life-lessly on her chest. I lifted it with a trembling hand. She was cold as stone, yet suddenly her eyes flipped open, completely white, and blood poured from her mouth. Taking to my heels, I saw among the trees a wolf standing on his hind legs, laughing, then spinning into the air. Surely this was the Evil One, I thought, running as I never had before. Thus began my odyssey, and I have witnessed such horrors as the Church Fathers ascribed to the place they called Hell, which I know now is on this earth, nowhere else.…

  “More tea?” Dalia murmured, dropping the pages onto the divan.

  I had grown up in that hotel having women read me fantastical stories, but I hadn’t been quite prepared for this.

  “That’s amazing,” I said, as she took my cup. “And you’re treating it as history?”

  “It is history. Real history which, large or small, must always be—what—un viaje por el infierno: a journey through hell. Varcas then visited mission towns and settlements and you begin to see that this incident is nothing compared to what he found later. And he documents everything: dates, descriptions of victims, witnesses who give sworn statements. The Indians encountered these creatures, as did the Spanish conquistadors. The Spanish suppressed this information—obviously. They were colonizers—why would they want to frighten away immigrants from the old country? To the Indians, the vampires, like ghosts and other potent spirits, had always been a natural part of the nocturnal landscape.”

  “So what did Varcas find later?”

  She smiled. “I’ll read you some more tomorrow, if you like. But you know what’s really exciting—and terrible to contemplate?” she said, narrowing her eyes. “These creatures never die. To them, the decades since Friar Varcas perished are like this”—she snapped her fingers—“which means they are still roaming this country. That is why I came here: to see the places Varcas wrote about, and also to breathe the air these creatures inhabit.”

  “You’re going to retrace his steps?”

  “Of course. As much as I can by automobile—Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, all over.” She raised her hands. “This is what I am working on, but there is more to me than that. And there are other things to discuss.” She fixed her eyes on mine. They were pale blue, I saw now. “I understand you’ve had a wanderer’s life—un vagabundo—like me,” she said, lowering her voice to just above a whisper. “Tell me about yourself, Enzo.”

  I have little recollection of what I related to her, outside a superficial outline of my recent history. Maybe it was the maté tea. Or the fact that it took me a while to put the tale of Friar Varcas and the vampire out of my mind. Or, more likely, that I simply found it difficult to concentrate on the particulars of my own life when my eye kept gravitating to Dalia’s dangling leg or her lovely breasts, the dark disks of her nipples pressing against her silken shift, when she locked her fingers behind her head and leaned back on the divan. Soon enough the shaman playing his flute on the Isla Cook gave way to some reggae, and Dalia took a plastic bag and a blunt pipe out of a velvet pouch. I had smoked marijuana a number of times and lost interest: alongside the effects of the spider bite—however subtle their evolution—it didn’t do much for me. But this wasn’t ganja Dalia was tamping down into the pipe.

  “It is the ground-up buds from a tree we have in the mountains of Chile,” she said.

  “Coca?”

  “No, nothing so strong, but much rarer. These buds when they blossom are called flores de luna—flowers of the moon. They are silvery white circles with black dots, like the moon’s craters. A couple of puffs, it just makes you feel kind of dreamy,” she said, passing me the pipe and putting a match to the bowl.

  The smoke was bittersweet, tinged with a lilac scent. Expanding in my lungs, it constricted my throat, but I held it in for a long time.

  “The fruit of this tree,” Dalia went on, “is white, the size of an olive, and if you rub it in your palm, and say some magic words, it glows in the dark.”

  “What are the words?” I said, taking a second puff off the pipe.

  Dalia ran her fingertip along my eyebrow and then down my cheek. “Enzo, you’ve got very nice eyes.” Her fingertip traced my mouth. “And lips.”

  My mouth went dry as she slid closer to me. “Those are the words?” I laughed nervously, exhaling the smoke.

  “No,” she said softly, her eyelids at half mast.

  I felt a lightness to my body, but my mind remained clear. At least, I thought it did.

  “The words,” Dalia whispered, “are, ‘Let’s dance.’ ” And, taking my one hand, she placed the other lightly on her breast, which felt hard, and the nipple even harder, through the silk.

  The next thing I knew we were dancing cheek to cheek, our bodies pressed together tightly and the throb of the reggae pulsing the air so that gradually I felt like I was underwater in a bright red sea. I had never been that close to any girl, feeling every ripple of her body against mine. I closed my eyes and we moved in slow circles around the room, much slower than the tempo of the music, and didn’t exchange another word. But we did kiss, on the eyes, cheeks, and lips, and then for the first time I had a girl’s tongue in my mouth when she licked my upper lip and slid her tongue in, revolving it slowly. The more we danced, the longer and harder we kissed until finally one of our slow lazy circles ended abruptly at the bed, onto which we tumbled as if it had been awaiting us all along. As of course it had.

  “Enzo, I feel famished,” Dalia whispered, running her hand up my thigh and unzipping my pants.

  I had a hard-on like a rock as she sat astride it and threw off her shift. Then she got on all fours, her breasts inches from my face, and I slid out of my pants and kicked them away. I took her breasts in my hands while she unbuttoned my shirt and then put her mouth over mine. She didn’t have on underwear, just an inverted triangle of silk beneath which was a nearly identical triangle of soft light hair that emerged when she unsnapped the elastic band that circled her waist. I put my mouth greedily over one breast, then the other, and rolled over on top of her.

  My instincts took over—with some help from Dalia. The platinum spirals of her hair fanned out over the pillow as she wrapped her arms around my shoulders, her fingernails poised sharply on my skin. Then she spread her legs into a wide V, opening up to my fingers even as she caressed me, gently pulling me into her. My whole body felt on fire, from my skull to my toes. Behind the roaring blood in my ears I heard a clear, high-pitched ringing, as if a small silver bell were being struck at regular intervals. Intervals that shortened with every passing moment as I buried myself deep inside her, thrusting, too hard and fast at first in my ardor, even as she thrust back more deliberately, drawing me into a slower surer rhythm. I closed my eyes and felt her lips slide across mine and flutter down to my throat. And then quickly, almost too quickly, every force in my body seemed to be coming apart at incredible velocity and merging into one at my burning center. We moved faster and faster, and then slower and more conclusively, our bodies pounding together, the sweat pouring off my back and the air tight in my lungs, as in one long burst all that fire at my center streamed into Dalia.

  As I lay beside her, catching my breath, everything in the room falling away from me, the names of those asteroids began lighting up in my mind suddenly, in sequence as always—such was the staying power of Labusi’s method!—but a fractured sequence now, like my breathing—Pia, Renata, Palma—and I thought of all the girls I might meet in my life, and all the women in the world—Chloë, Olivia, Jena—and I realized how much pleasure it had given me holding all those names in my head, until finally, at the end of that sequence—Esther, Violetta, Philippina—bringing a smile to my lips, I arrived at #643
, Scheherazade, the weaver of tales, of desire.

  At that instant I saw on my closed eyelids a perfect sphere, pale green with red streaks, rotating slowly, backdropped by stars. It was a planet. A year after memorizing the names of the asteroids, I had succeeded in reconstructing mentally Hadar’s lost planet between Mars and Jupiter. It had come whole suddenly—all those names cohering and transmuting in my head—just as the rest of me had burst apart. After several seconds, the image disappeared, spinning away through space until it was just another tiny light among so many others.

  Like the stars in the sky over Acoma the following night when I concluded my second visit there with Calzas and Sirius. Sirius had not been back since Calzas found him as a pup. We had flown into Albuquerque and rented a jeep. Four hundred miles east of Las Vegas, Acoma was fifty miles southwest of Albuquerque. About 150 miles to the north on Route 666 was Four Corners, which I had visited with Calzas on my first trip to Acoma three years earlier. I had wanted to see Four Corners ever since Samax pointed it out to me from the air on that first plane ride from New York to Las Vegas. And just as he told me he had done, I walked around the monument with the four state seals, following a small tight circle from New Mexico to Colorado to Utah to Arizona. The dirt was orange there, a slow wind blew hard, and it was 110°.

  On this trip we drove straight to Acoma. We arrived at noon and left just after nightfall, and as eagerly as I had anticipated my return to the sky-city, my mind was elsewhere that day. From the moment we left the Hotel Canopus at dawn until our return at midnight, Dalia—her scent, her touch, the coolness of her white skin—was never far from my thoughts. In everything I did that day, from climbing the mesa and hiking over a field of boulders to feeling the sun pounding my bare back, my body felt different. Though still fifteen, legally, officially, a minor, it was as if overnight much more than a night had passed; though no stranger to the company and ministrations of women, from Luna and my grandmother to the two sisters and Desirée at the hotel, it seemed to me now that I had truly entered their world, which was also the world of the heart.