“I can see!” I called out to Wind in the other room. “I can see again.”
She did not reply. I thought I heard the screen door shut softly, but I could not be sure. When I went into the living room, the fold-up cot had already been neatly stowed in the closet, the table was set for my breakfast, and the dogs were eating theirs on the lanai. But there was no sign of Wind, except in the simple fact, now visible to me for the first time, that she had kept my house immaculate during my convalescence, and had even weeded my vegetable garden and flower beds. I gazed into the mirror at my face, which was taut and wan despite all the rest I’d gotten; it was the first time I had looked at it since standing, swaying, before the bathroom mirror at the party. I began examining my various injuries, but seeing the spider plants drip with overnight rain and then watching Castor and Pollux, white petals stuck to their fur, run in to me excitedly, I fell to my knees and, hugging the dogs, with a flush of joy burst into tears.
That afternoon I called Estes. Wind had still not returned to my house, and I inquired after her. He surprised me, saying she had already informed him of the good news before asking for the day off.
“I’m so glad you’re better,” Estes said. “Better than ever, it sounds like.”
“How can I thank you, Estes, for everything?”
“You don’t have to thank me, Mala. Just watch out for yourself.”
The following morning, Wind phoned me from Waimea to say how happy she was, too, but she seemed uncomfortable with my expressions of gratitude. When the doctors gave me the green light to drive again later that week, I called Estes’s house to tell Wind I was coming by, but again she seemed uncomfortable, and rather vaguely replied, “There has been so much for me to do here after being away so long. But of course you should come by.…”
I had hoped to see Estes, too, at the observatory, but he had flown to the Big Island that morning for a meeting with his colleagues there. I had brought gifts of thanks: for him, a basket of papayas from my trees, and for Wind a well-worn figurine of the Melanesian moon goddess that I had bought on the docks in Rarotonga, which she had once admired in my bedroom.
Around noon, as I came up the path to his house under the tall, sun-dappled trees, I heard the faucet running in the kitchen and a kettle whistling on the stove. But when I knocked on the door and called out, “It’s me, Mala,” the house fell silent.
I knocked again, then let myself in. “Wind,” I called out, again and again, looking into all the rooms. But she was nowhere to be found, not in the house or on the lanai or in the garden beyond. I had only visited there that one night when I dined and went to bed with Estes, but everything was just as I remembered it. The teak floors highly polished, a whiff of strong incense in the meditation cell, and the glass sparkling clean over the photographs of Einstein, Hubble, and Clyde Tombaugh in the kitchen, where the kettle was still hot. Pausing in the bedroom, I thought back to that night in May as the beginning of my seven months of lurching around in one kind of darkness before being flung into another. I had often tortured myself with the notion that I might have avoided a lot of grief had I headed straight home after visiting the observatory with Estes, at the same time knowing it would have made no difference at all. As I had intuited then, it was not my fleeting disappointment with Estes, but my deep-seated grief over Cassiel that had propelled me into the arms of Francis. And I had no doubt it would have propelled me, inevitably, from some other angle, even if I had not stripped off my clothes and lay down on Estes’s futon that night, stoned out of my mind.
I never did see Wind on that visit, and I realized that I never would. This had been a long outing for me after being bedridden so many weeks; before making the drive home, I sat on Estes’s lanai for nearly an hour gazing into the trees. When I returned to the living room, the basket of papayas was sitting where I had left it on the table, but the figurine of the moon goddess, which I had set down beside it, was gone. And suddenly, in a great rush, the wind, powerful there in the mountains, blew right through the house—entering by the windows and screen doors on the lanai side and leaving by the windows and door in front. Along with the curtains and tablecloth, my hair billowed up, my dress fluttered, and cool air poured into my lungs, making me light-headed until, seconds later, as everything settled back into place, I walked out of the house and down the path, through the thick dark ferns, without looking back.
For the next few weeks, I slept fitfully, plagued by chaotic dreams that began with Francis embracing me and ended with my finding Cassiel’s body washed up on some beach fitting the description of Francis’s corpse on Niihau: bloated, his eyes gone, and barnacles writhing on his skin. This was one of my oldest nightmares about Cassiel, and circumstances had played right into it. Invariably I awoke in a sweat and stumbled out of bed, terrified that I was still blind until I realized it was the middle of the night.
In my waking life, things were not going much better. Despite the strenuous efforts of Dr. Prion and Seth, I did lose my job at the hospital. And though there was plenty of blame to lay at my own feet, I was much more angry and ashamed about my dismissal when it actually occurred. Too much so even to attend the advisory board hearing at which I might have defended myself. Francis had been a longtime member of that board, and it was his colleagues and friends who drew up my dismissal report, which boiled down (by omission) to a whitewash of him and an indictment of me as ethically unfit for duty—making me feel like I was back in the Navy. That I had several times, at Francis’s side, smoked ganja and chewed peyote with two of the signatories on this report—and well knew of their own extracurricular sexual activities—made it especially bitter for me to swallow. Even so, in my heart I knew I couldn’t have gone back to the hospital anyway: there were just too many bad memories and foul associations. But my friends kept petitioning in my behalf, the end result of which was that I was given a bigger severance package than anyone expected, just so they could be rid of me: five months’ full pay. Since it was already mid-April by that time, I figured this money, if I stretched it out, would last me to the end of the year. And then I’d be back to square one, hoping I wouldn’t have to wait tables to survive.
Gradually, though, other parts of my life fell into place. I began swimming again, and kayaking, and tending my garden. I cooked for myself every night and spent as much time as I could alone, flanked by my dogs, sipping hibiscus tea on my lanai from twilight until the stars appeared. One thing I did not do was pick up another drink. No more White Goddesses or Eclipse rum, and no more Thai stick laced with THC. Instead I went to the weekly A.A. meeting on Friday nights in the rec room of the Methodist church, never talking much, just listening to other people’s stories, which made me feel like I hadn’t been the only person on the island to undertake my own destruction so systematically.
Still, though I didn’t drink, I eventually drifted away from the meeting. The last time I attended, I met a man in the parking lot who seemed vaguely familiar to me. Very tall and thin, he was clean-shaven, with long flyaway hair and friendly brown eyes. He smiled when he saw me, but with no flicker of recognition. He was dressed simply, in jeans, a white shirt, and sandals, and it was only when I spotted a medallion hanging from a gold chain on his chest that I was able to place him. The medallion depicted a lion’s face with the sun for one eye and the moon for the other. I was about to turn away when he walked up and extended his hand.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Olan.”
He looked so little like the bearded man in the net loincloth I had met at the New Year’s Eve party in Kilauea that I doubt I would have believed him had he not been wearing the medallion. The medallion, it turned out, was about the only thing from that time—just six months earlier—which remained in his life.
He didn’t remember meeting me at the party—in fact, he didn’t remember the party at all, nor much of anything else that happened to him in the months between November and March when he was dropping large doses of acid or mescaline every other day. He had sta
rted out living in a farming commune outside Lawai and ended up in a tent on the beach near Anahola. His sole source of income became the drugs he sold. To get around, he hitchhiked, and that was still his primary means of transportation.
That evening he had a dinner invitation in Haena, so I offered him a ride. On the way, he told me some of the story which he had shared at another meeting, earlier in the day, in Lihue, where he had been the speaker.
“I’m from Phoenix originally,” he said, in his quiet, hoarse voice. “I studied mathematics at the university there. Later I lived in Santa Fe. That’s where I got into acid. I heard that weed, Grade-A stuff, grew so wild here on Kauai that you could just pick it by the roadside. And that some cats from Berkeley had set up a little LSD factory: ‘pure Sunshine from the rain forest,’ that’s what I heard. So I came out on the next plane.” He shook his head. “The rest—I don’t know if I can get through it twice in one day, so I’ll just skip to my bottom, seventeen months later. I was down to one hundred ten pounds. I had uncontrollable trots. Nothing stayed in me longer than ten minutes—and all I was putting in were the rolls I fished from the trash at the burger stand. And green bananas that I stole. The park rangers found me shivering like a skeleton in my tent one afternoon when it was eighty-five degrees. Tripping. Shitting in the sand. I was in detox for a month. Now I’m on food stamps. Working at beach cleanup for the state—two-fifty an hour. But I’m clean. I have a room in Kapaa. A bicycle. In a coupla months I’ll be able to buy a used motor scooter. Day at a time.”
We had crossed the last of the twelve wooden bridges into Haena. It was a misty night. Long gray clouds streamed out of the mountains like plumes and poured down torrents of rain when they slid to sea. Just above the horizon the sliver of a moon was barely visible.
“So we’re here,” I said. “Where can I drop you?”
“A place called Four Crosses. Just up a ways.”
“I know where it is.” I looked at him. “Alvin Dixon’s house.”
“Yeah, the rock-and-roll guy. A sweet cat.”
“You’ve been there before?”
“Once.”
“Since you were sober?”
He was offended. “Why yeah. I don’t go to the places where I wasn’t sober. When I can remember, that is.”
“Sorry.”
But now he was looking at me. “Ever met Alvin?”
“Briefly. At the same party where I met you.”
“Oh.” He brushed his hair from his eyes. “Well, he’s not like you think. Not like that party. Alvin’s cool. Nobody does dope at his place. Hardly anyone drinks.”
“He’s straight?”
“As a ruler. Listen, the cat who invited me out the first time is one of his best friends. Used to be his bass player. I met him at the meeting in Kapaa, okay? Alvin’s cool.”
The big houses on Tunnels Beach all had long dirt driveways off the main road. At one of these, with a chain across it and an unmarked mailbox, Olan said, “This is it.”
After he got out, I said, “You know, that night in Kilauea he invited me out here. He said to come anytime.”
Olan shrugged, opening his palms. “You should do it,” he said, slipping under the chain. “Thanks for the ride.”
A week went by, and another, and then I did go up to Four Crosses. I was restless for change, and I thought, why not. It was only about a mile and half from my place, so instead of driving, I simply walked west along the shore, around the deep horseshoe of Tunnels Beach, where wind-gliders were riding the swells, and through a cypress grove. A sandy path led to a weather-beaten gate with a NO TRESPASSING sign. Beyond the gate, nearly concealed by a line of palms, was the rear of a sprawling white house. It was a modern two-story design, with harmonious Mediterranean lines. There were several canopied balconies, a widow’s walk, and wide picture windows. Looming behind the blue roof were the greenest and most imposing mountain peaks of all, at Ke’e Beach.
A black Labrador burst from the tall grass when I opened the gate and, sniffing the thongs I carried, escorted me up to the terrace that wrapped around the house. At the far end, two men were playing cards at a glass table. Near the steps I ascended, a woman in a yellow bikini was looking out to sea through binoculars from a beach chair. She was about my height, with long, bright blond hair and an athletic figure. I was wearing a two-piece black bathing suit—not quite as skimpy as hers—under an open white shirt, a baseball cap, and the black wraparound sunglasses I had to wear constantly since recovering my sight. This was what I would typically wear for a walk on the beach. The light makeup I had applied, and the coral nail and toe polish, were not so typical.
When she lowered the binoculars, I saw that the woman was a few years older than me, pretty, with widely spaced eyes. I recognized her as one of Alvin Dixon’s companions at the party.
She came up to me, and after I introduced myself, extended her hand. “My name is Claudia. Come, sit.”
Claudia was Alvin’s girlfriend. She was Italian, but she had met Alvin in Kyoto just after his retirement from music. A ceramicist, she had studied in Japan, and now she also imported ceramic pieces from there and sold them in Italy, where they were much in demand. She and Alvin spent two months of every year in Tokyo and Kyoto, and she made regular trips to Milan. The rest of the time they lived at Four Crosses. I learned all this in our first half hour together, sitting beside her on another beach chair. I also learned that Claudia had a pretty good memory herself: not only did she recall running into me at the foot of the stairs at the party, but she informed me gently that I looked a lot healthier now.
“Your eyes are clear as the sky,” she smiled.
I flushed, wondering if like so many other people I ran into she had followed the lurid newspaper accounts of the car accident. Somehow I didn’t think so.
“Thank you,” I replied. “That was not a happy time for me.”
The other two men, who I thought were playing cards, had just stood up to go for a swim. In fact, the one—a houseguest—had been giving a tarot reading to the other, who was a neighbor.
“He’s very good with the tarot,” Claudia said to me of the house-guest, a short, bald, powerfully built man about fifty, “though he doesn’t use it professionally.”
“And what is his profession?”
“Jorge is a mind reader. He’s performed all over the world, in nightclubs and theaters. Once, even at the Royal Albert Hall, for the Queen.”
“Really.”
“Yes. And he can read your mind. You’ll see. In the meantime, here,” she handed me the binoculars, “you can have a look at Alvin while I get you—what?—juice, soda …”
“Juice is fine. But where is he?”
She pointed to the sea, fully extending her arm. “Far out. With those you can make out the sail, just to the left of the point.”
The deep water was indigo and the waves were high. At first I couldn’t see a sail among so many whitecaps. Then I spotted it: like a white saw going up and down through blue wood, the spray flying like shavings. The hull flashed into view for an instant, then disappeared.
“It’s very rough today,” Claudia said simply, returning with a pitcher of grapefruit juice and two glasses.
An hour later, the man who had been at the wheel of that ketch was sitting with us at the glass table, pouring himself the last of the juice. His eyes were still intense, his face a strong V framed by wavy brown hair, and his thin wiry frame was as dark as a desert wanderer’s, but Alvin Dixon no longer looked to me like Jesus. For which I was grateful. However, my instincts about him had been correct during the brief encounter at the party—and I was pleased that something good might come of that ill-fated night. He was an exceptionally kind and private man. A good listener. I hadn’t met anyone quite like Alvin, in disposition, since Cassiel.
Like Claudia, Alvin too remembered where we had first met. “I’m so glad you accepted my invitation,” he smiled.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m only sorry it took me seve
n months.”
“You’re here now. You’ll stay for dinner?”
I stayed that night, then returned the following night, and one night that weekend. Other guests also came and went: some were people I knew in passing, others were islanders I had never met before, and a good many were visitors touching down briefly before returning to Honolulu, en route to Asia, Oceania, or the mainland. Some were people like me, others were individuals of great notoriety. Artists, musicians, explorers, global wheeler-dealers, aesthetes, even a taciturn man en route to Australia who was a meteorite hunter—Alvin and Claudia knew all kinds of people, the sort of people with whom I had little contact previously. But, then, I had never been around anyone as wealthy and famous as Alvin Dixon. And Olan had been right: I saw none of these guests, including the most sophisticated, break the unspoken house rule prohibiting drug use—which was saying a lot in 1972, on Kauai, when things were so free and easy.
Yet despite all this activity, Four Crosses mirrored its two principal residents in that it seemed a calm and unhurried household. This was what impressed me most about the place. Alvin and Claudia were Buddhists: they had met in Kyoto at a retreat. Not the sort of Buddhist-one-month, Hindu-the-next faddists who were so common in those days, Alvin and Claudia were serious adherents, and many of their guests, for all their glitzy trappings, were fellow adherents they had met at temples, shrines, and secluded inns during their travels in Asia.
There was a beautiful Steinway concert grand in the living room which Alvin evidently played on occasion, but seldom when anyone was around, and an elaborate, rarely used, stereo system, but otherwise very little around the house that had to do with music. And nothing at all—no framed gold records, photographs, or mementoes—related to his musical career. It seemed to be an off-limits topic in his home—banned as strictly as drugs. But I couldn’t help bringing it up one day later that summer after I had been a frequent visitor. We had all just come in from a long sail and Alvin and I were sitting alone on the terrace, relaxed and tired. Having heard one of his songs that morning on the car radio, I remarked to him that I had been a great fan of his band, T-Zero. In fact, I went on, warming to the subject, their take-no-prisoners LPs had been favored even over the Stones and the Dead in our rec room on the Repose.
A Trip to the Stars Page 31
