Putting Dalia’s book aside, I was drawn to the Hopkins brothers’ report on Mala Revell, which previously I had only skimmed. Neatly typed, it was nineteen pages, and I read them all now. I was probably on a wild-goose chase, but this woman was the only lead I had. If the Hopkins brothers couldn’t find Geza Cassiel, there was a good chance he wasn’t alive. Back in 1971, when he had been searching for this woman, who could say if she in turn had been searching for him. Or was even still in love with him when he wrote that long letter from the Hotel Rigel; maybe by then she was already in love with someone else. If so, there was no indication of such a person in the report. She had never been married, so far as the Hopkins brothers could ascertain, and she had no permanent address before the one on Kauai. The one regular job she’d held after leaving the Navy was at a hospital there. And she had been in a bad car crash years before, in which a man was killed; the circumstances of the crash were described as mysterious, but they didn’t say why. Most of the rest of the report was interviews, legwork, wrong turns the investigators had made in the previous months. There was no photograph of her, just a basic ID description: five seven, brown hair, blue eyes. She drove a white jeep. She had two dogs. And, an odd aside, it said her house, which overlooked the ocean, was painted pale green.
I had never been to Hawaii before, and after Las Vegas and Albuquerque the moist, tropical air, fragrant with flowers, was intoxicating. I was planning to island-hop until I found a place as unlike the desert as it could be and plant myself there for a few weeks. From what I had seen of this island during the hour-long drive from the airport, passing through incredibly lush valleys, over streams that gushed from mountain waterfalls, I might have already arrived at the place I wanted. Aside from clothes, my suitcase in the trunk contained the blueprints for the Phoenix planetarium, Geza Cassiel’s letter, some seeds from the Samax Astrofructus tree which I’d found in the greenhouse, and the only memento of my mother Bel’s that I’d taken before the fire from the Hotel Canopus to my apartment in Santa Fe: the small silver compass with a snap-on cover. I’d also brought the black velvet box which I got from Vitale Cassiel—in case I ran into my father. In case he was living in that pale green house, too.
I saw the white jeep first, in the headlights of my rental car as I parked it off the dirt driveway. Then I heard the dogs, who ran barking out of the darkness, past a wooden post fence, to greet me. The house was just a black outline in a semicircle of tall trees.
The dogs were friendly. Old dogs, with rough fur. I petted them and they kept circling me, but stopped barking. It was just after ten o’clock, and as I crossed the driveway and swung open the low gate in the fence, I saw a single light burning in the rear of the house. To my right, over a row of bushes and through a cluster of swaying palms, I could see the silver and black of breaking waves, could hear their muffled roar as they slid rhythmically in to shore. A strong breeze was blowing and night birds were singing in the trees, and the crickets were buzzing incessantly. Sound seemed magnified in that place, or maybe it was just my nervousness as I walked up the path to the door of the green house listening to my boots crunch on the loose stones.
When I was about halfway up the path, the porch light came on, and the dogs peeled off from me and ran up to the door. I held my breath as it opened onto a woman silhouetted against the lighted interior. She was slender and tall—easily five seven. Her hair broke over her shoulders. She was wearing a white dress. I heard a bracelet jangle on her wrist.
“Who is it?” she called out, remaining in the doorway.
I walked the rest of the way up the path, feeling her eyes following me from within that silhouette.
“Mala Revell?”
There was a moment’s hesitation. “Yes.”
I climbed the three steps to the porch. “My name is Enzo Samax.”
I could tell my name meant nothing to her.
“I’m sorry to intrude. I’ve come from the mainland, looking for someone, and I thought you might be able to help me.”
She stepped from the shadows, not so much because of what I was saying, I realized, but in order to study my face more closely. As the yellow rays of the porch light fell across her own face, brightening her blue eyes, I saw her clearly for the first time. For a few seconds I just stood there blinking, taking her features in, not quite believing what I was seeing, not allowing myself to, even after it had registered clearly. I stepped back and leaned against the porch railing and felt the inside of my head begin to spin even as the night in that place grew still around me, the insects and birds and swaying trees and the rise and fall of the sea, all of it silent suddenly. It was her, I told myself, thinking I had lost my mind.
“Alma?” I said.
She was shaking her head, staring at me. Her lips parted, but no words came out.
“Is that really you?” I said.
“Yes, Loren,” she said hoarsely, “it’s me.”
21
A Trip to the Stars
He had come across an ocean broader than the Pacific, wider than the gulf Cassiel was about to cross to the moon. An ocean fifteen years in the crossing. And he had come to me.
Both of us with different names now. Different faces, older, yet the same. After he embraced me at the door, I didn’t dare touch him again for nearly an hour: I was afraid he would disappear if I did. Dissolve like one of those apparitions when you first wake up. But he was still there an hour later, drinking the green tea I brewed for him, sitting across from me at the small kitchen table, a man now.
He had come looking for someone else. Up the path in the darkness, tall, broad-shouldered, with a swinging gait, his head tilted like Cassiel’s when he walked. Looking like Cassiel. And looking for Cassiel, who was his father. He told me this in the course of that first hour, but I knew it would take days, weeks, maybe longer, for me fully to grasp it.
All I remember saying to him at first was “We don’t have to understand everything—or anything—all at once.”
Many things flew right by me while he talked. Some stuck. Bits and pieces of his history, of what happened that day at the planetarium, going back to that repeatedly, like a compass point to get his bearings—the point where we were lost to each other. And then his life afterward, trying to compress, to explain, it. All of which took him time, for he too was stunned, finding himself alone in a house with me, just the two of us on that remote coastline near the end of the state highway, the last mile of state highway in the United States, in a room that must have felt as if it were at the end of the world.
And what was it he was saying? Las Vegas … the letter you never received … a man named Samax who was my real uncle … his hotel … his niece Bel who was my mother …
Bel. The same Bel who Cassiel had told me about, who ran alongside that ravine in her red dress. Loren’s mother. No, Enzo’s. Loren was the name my sister Luna gave him. Enzo is the name Bel gave him.
I said to him at one point, trying to keep my wits about me as the two names danced in my head, “If you put together your names, you know, you could be called ‘Lorenzo.’ ”
He smiled—the same smile I remembered seeing in Brooklyn, but so much quicker and brighter now. In Brooklyn he hadn’t had much to smile about. He liked this idea about the name. But he said to me, gently, “I know how you must feel about my other name. But I want you to call me Enzo. Is that okay?”
Of course it was okay. And he was to call me Mala. Which once meant “bad,” but now meant many other things to me, all the things I’d done and been for better or worse, over the last fifteen years. That my former name was Alma was the one element of my story I had omitted with Cassiel, who had so often told me how much he loved the name Mala. I would never change it back. I was Mala now. Just as Loren was Enzo.
“It seems right,” I said, “that we should have other names now.”
He thought about this for a long time. “You mean, it’s part of what happened,” he said.
This was the way he was, I realiz
ed. He took things in and turned them over. He was cautious. Like Cassiel. And he kept his own counsel—which was not surprising. At the same time, that smile, and the way he carried himself and spoke to me, told me that somehow he had had a good life with these people he was describing—the very people who, through malevolence or selfishness or sheer negligence, had altered the course of my own life with such breathtaking ease. Whatever pain he had felt and losses he had suffered, it was not like what I had imagined when he was abducted, or later when I was searching hopelessly for him, half out of my mind. Whatever resentment I felt toward those people—most of them, apparently, dead now or near death—I wasn’t going to express it to him at that moment. In the end, he had been well taken care of, he had thrived—but at what ferocious cost to both of us. And it was obvious to me that he was sensitive to these feelings of mine, had been aware of them and thought them through, long before he found me that night.
“But tell me more of what happened to you,” he said. “After that day.”
I tried to tell him, there at my kitchen table with the dogs sleeping at his feet as if they had known him forever. I tried so hard, late into the night, until finally I broke down—though that was the last thing I had wanted to do—sobbing on his shoulder and hugging him to me as if he had come back from the dead. Or as if I had. He had Cassiel’s letter with him, the one that had been mailed to me from New Mexico; explaining how I had come to be the woman to whom that letter was written, and then the woman whose wanderings had brought her to this island, and finally the woman who would soon become not just his foster aunt, but his stepmother, took me the rest of the night.
I had kept up my reading in Latin after Naxos and just that week had been making my way through Plotinus, who wrote long passages on astronomy that were really about fate. It was he who observed that all previous philosophers saw the stars in two ways: as the words that spell out our fates perpetually being inscribed and modified on the chalkboard of the heavens, or inscribed once and for all, like the zodiac. Plotinus argued that to approach fate in either of these ways you have to assume the earth is stationary—which he thought impossible. He held that if you trace the stars’ movements in relation to a revolving earth, the map you get is utterly chaotic. No neatly inscribed words or frozen zodiac, but a jumble of circles, ellipses, crisscrosses, and zigzags—which is what he proposed a cartographic transcription of our lives would truly resemble if we mapped them out.
By sunrise, Enzo and I were exhausted from trying to recreate, and overlay, our own respective maps. There was, as I had always thought, one previous point of intersection after his disappearance. Also on the eve of his birthday. Taken aback that I should know of it, Enzo confirmed that he was indeed in the Star Room of The Stardust Casino in Las Vegas on December 15, 1974, accompanied by a woman in a red dress. When I told him that I was the blindfolded woman onstage in the mind-reading act, it took him a few moments to remember, but when he did, he remembered it all—the sparkles in my hair, my glittery dress, the audience volunteers approaching me. We had come so close that night, the two of us, but we had had to wait another six years before we found ourselves in the same place again.
For it was now the morning of December 16, 1980, Enzo’s twenty-fifth birthday, fifteen years to the day after he had disappeared from the planetarium. It was also the day that Geza Cassiel, at 3:42 P.M. Hawaii time, would be launched to the stars. I had planned to be at the NASA Observatory at Waimea for the liftoff, with Estes as my host. Now Enzo would join me.
First we needed to catch a few hours’ sleep, though for me that proved impossible. I was so excited to have Enzo under my roof at last that, on top of my intense excitement over Cassiel’s mission, I found it almost unbearable to close my eyes. Enzo, on the other hand, having suffered a barrage of shocks recently even before he walked up my front path, was able simply to collapse at that moment. How gratifying it was to me that he felt safe enough to do so in my house. Within minutes of sprawling beneath a single blanket on the pullout sofa, he plunged into a deep sleep—a scene I had rarely permitted myself to imagine over the previous fifteen years. Outside of the day Cassiel and I had found one another on Naxos, I can think of few things in my life that gave me as much pleasure and comfort as the sound of Enzo’s steady breathing over the next five hours.
When he woke, I was sitting on the lanai in my bathrobe watching the heavy clouds stream seaward out of the mountains. There had been a heavy shower, and now the sun’s rays were breaking through again, glittering in the dripping leaves of the trees. I had put a pot of coffee on the stove and sliced up two red papayas, and after Enzo had showered and dressed, I fried some eggs and bacon. However overwhelmed I was, I kept trying to imagine how he must be feeling, first to learn that, of all the women in the world, I should be the one with whom his father had fallen in love, and, second, that his father himself, already an enigma—former delinquent, former airman, war hero—was now an astronaut who on that very day would begin a space mission.
So it made perfect sense to me that, after his deep sleep, Enzo retreated inside himself. I might have felt calmer myself that morning if I had managed some sleep. Over breakfast, he expressed his admiration for my house and for the beauty of the island itself, but said little else. Then, as I reached over for the coffee, I noticed he was staring at my necklace, which had swung free of my robe.
“That key,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“Geza—your father gave it to me.”
“May I see it?” he said.
I took off my necklace and he examined the key, especially the circle of onyx below the key-ring hole. Handing it back to me without a word, he went to his suitcase and brought back a black velvet box with an identical circle inlaid on the lid.
“Do you know what that circle is?” I asked.
“In astronomy it symbolizes the far side of the moon,” he replied. “This box contains an ancient Egyptian amulet depicting the far side only as someone orbiting the moon could have viewed it. It had a twin, depicting the earth itself, which was destroyed in the fire I told you about. For years this box was in the possession of my grandfather, Vitale Cassiel. He gave it to me only last week. Last night when you told me about my father’s mission, I was thinking of it. And now I find that you have the key.”
“Your father asked me to hold it for him while he’s gone. He swallowed it a long time ago—”
“To keep it out of my grandfather’s hands. I know. This key is what he stole when he ran away with my mother. Then he swallowed it. Without it, my grandfather could never open the box.” He passed the box to me. “You open it.”
I thought of Cassiel’s instructions—to make sure I trusted the person with whom I opened it—and without hesitation I inserted the silver key in the lock and turned it. When I lifted the lid, the box began playing music—beautiful high-pitched notes in slow succession. Like the music of the stars recorded by radio telescopes that Estes had once played me at his house. Nestled into a cavity in the black velvet I found the amulet, a highly polished black stone, three inches in diameter. Etched onto one side in white were the craters, seas, and mountains of the moon’s far side, rendered in minute detail, just as Enzo had said they would be. In amazement I held it up to him and he smiled.
As we drove across the island in my jeep, Enzo held that amulet in his closed fist. Behind the wheel, I again experienced the fear that had shot through me the previous night, wondering if he would disappear on me suddenly—this time not if I touched him, but if I took my eyes off him too long while negotiating the road. During the night, he had asked me a lot of questions about myself, but now he wanted to know more about Cassiel, and his mission, which I had barely sketched out for him after pointing out the projected landing site on a lunar map.
Where I left off, Estes picked up an hour later, greeting us at the door of the NASA Observatory. He ushered us out of the blinding sunlight into the twilit coolness, where Enzo’s cowboy boots clicked sharply on the marble
floor. Estes was wearing what for him was formal dress: a long white jacket with the NASA insignia on the pocket and matching white pants. He looked healthier than he had in years; he never got formally sober, but his days of smoking ganja had ended abruptly when he was stricken with pleurisy and a bleeding ulcer one winter, and so he now limited himself to a single glass of rice wine with dinner. He had also taken up transcendental meditation—his guru had a temple by one of the waterfalls above Wailua—with the same devotion that he once brought to getting high.
“It’s very hush-hush,” he said of Cassiel’s mission. “You know, Mala, that you’re only here as a spouse-to-be, not as my friend. Having another close relative of a crewman on hand,” he nodded to Enzo, “is an honor for us. Here on Kauai, I know about this misson, and my assistant Maxwell, and Estelle, the new astronomer who’s joined us from Mauna Kea. Several other people at Mauna Kea have been briefed on the mission, and there’s a communications man on Midway, but that’s it for the Hawaiian Islands—and we’re NASA’s main Pacific outpost. In Australia two guys at our listening post near Perth have been briefed, and a couple of others on Guam. We’ve all been warned that if we talk to anyone about the mission, we’ll get our walking papers.”
“How is the weather in Florida?” I asked.
“It’s a cool night, with light fog. 52°, vertical visibility ten miles. Everything’s go. The last dispatch I got, the astronauts had their final physicals and boarded the ship an hour ago.”
I thought of the doctors in their sterilized jumpsuits listening to Cassiel’s heart and lungs, checking his blood pressure, his pulse, taking his temperature, hooking him up for an electrocardiogram. Then attaching the nodes and sensors that would transmit all his vital signs back from space, into a computer in Houston. I thought of his silk undersuit clinging to the line of shrapnel scars across his shoulder and to the thicker welts where the sniper’s bullets had come out of his leg. I thought of the soft hair on his arms, and his gray eyes wide and steady their silver lights flickering, behind the blue visor of his helmet, and the adrenaline pumping through him at that moment, and my pendant in one of the zippered pockets of his pressurized suit.
A Trip to the Stars Page 60
