A Trip to the Stars (10 page)

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.

“I tried to anticipate your needs,” he said matter-of-factly, “but of course you’ll let us know what else you need—and what you don’t need.”

It was then that I noticed a copy of the current issue of
Aviation
magazine on the footstool before the easy chair. Even with all I had seen, this truly astonished me.

“How did you do that?” I said to Samax.

“It wasn’t so difficult,” he smiled, then nodded to Della, who opened three of the closet’s four louvred doors, one by one.

The closet was full: jackets and pants on hangers, shoes and sneakers on a rack below, shirts neatly folded on built-in shelves, and even some hats on hooks, including a baseball cap for my favorite team, the Houston Astros.

I turned quickly to Samax. “And how did you know that?”

“I told you in New York that I investigated your circumstances,” he replied. “My people are very thorough. Those clothes should all be the correct size.” He signalled Della to open the last louvred door. “And I think you’ll find the things in here to your liking.”

He had saved this for last: the left-hand quarter of the closet was devoted to toys. Much of it was stuff I would have put on a wish list myself. An archery set, a tennis racket, a fishing rod—strange for the desert, I thought—a pile of model plane kits, a chemistry set, a mineralogy kit, a stack of board games, and an electric train set, still in boxes.

“They’re American Flyers,” Samax said, looking to see if I was pleased. “With two locomotives, and all the accessories.”

In Brooklyn, my principal diversion had been constructing model planes, but I had never owned electric trains, and had always wanted them.

“Tomorrow I’ll show you a room where you can set up the track,” he went on. “I thought you’d want to do it yourself. If you’re hungry, the kitchen is right around the corner. You can always get whatever you need. Are you hungry now?”

I shook my head.

His pale eyes were fixed on mine. “What is it? Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“It’s a very nice room,” I said.

“It’s a start,” he said. “But it’s your room now, and so it will change.”

I averted my eyes. “I miss my things.” What I had in mind was my planes, mostly Second World War bombers which I had assembled, painted, and decaled, my stamp collection, which had been Luna’s father’s, a green pocketknife Milo had bought me in St. Louis, and a black silk pouch embroidered with a full moon that Luna had picked up in Chinatown. The pouch contained a packet of snapshots and the few items of jewelry she owned—her wedding ring, a gold bracelet engraved
L. & M. Forever
that Milo had given her, and some pearl earrings. I also missed some of my clothes, like the sky-blue sweater my grandmother had knitted me. But it was Luna’s silk pouch I missed most of all.

“I understand,” Samax said, moving closer to me, “better than you know. And they are the very things I cannot bring you, or replace. I’m sorry.”

Of course as a collector, a man who took enormous pleasure in his things, he did understand—and for other, more intimate, reasons, too, as I would find out.

Still, there was a long silence between us.

“Are you afraid of sleeping here alone?” he said.

“No,” I replied honestly. “That doesn’t bother me.” I had gotten used to sleeping in unfamiliar places years before, when Luna and Milo had left me in motel rooms or furnished apartments while they went off to work.

“Just plain afraid, then?”

I sat down on the edge of the easy chair. When I didn’t reply, a pained expression crossed Samax’s face, which surprised me.

“I am very happy that you are here, Loren, and I hope it will not be too difficult for you. Try to get a good night’s sleep, and perhaps if you think of it this way, it will help: you will go to sleep ‘Loren’ and wake up ‘Enzo.’ ”

This was the one and only time he addressed me as “Loren.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

“If you need anything at all,” Della smiled, “I will be across the hall in Room D this week.”

“I’ll see you for breakfast,” Samax said, squeezing my shoulder, as he had at the factory. “Good night.”

On his way out, he took the red and yellow flower from his lapel and placed its stem in a slender vase on top of the chest. Then he closed the door after him, and suddenly I was alone.

I sat down on the bed and surveyed the rays of light from the city spraying up into the dark sky. Then I walked over to the chest and opened the top drawer, where I found socks of every color, carefully folded. I took down Marco Polo’s
Travels
and opened it: … 
at the point where the traveller enters the Great Desert is a great and splendid city. The people are idolators, use paper money, and burn their dead. They have silk in plenty, and ornaments of gold finely wrought
.…

I returned the book to its place and slid open the rolltop desk. It
contained numerous small drawers, shelves, and paper slots. I opened one of the drawers and found a box of tiny nautilus shells beside a magnifying glass. In another drawer there was a ruler and a pair of scissors beside a jar of white powder labeled
DRIFTWOOD DUST
.

I looked through the telescope, without changing its position. It was already focused, on a red star twinkling at the center of a constellation which I couldn’t identify. At that time, aside from the Big and Little Dippers, I knew nothing about the constellations.

I went into the bathroom, in which the white tiles, sink, and tub were gleaming, and took a pee. The toilet flush was silent. I had never had a bathroom that was not shared. I rinsed my hands and face. I filled the drinking glass with water and sipped, staring at myself in the oval mirror. I looked tired and pale, my eyes wide, my lips chapped. Seeing my reflection for the first time in such alien surroundings was not reassuring: so far away from everything I knew, and from all traces of my former life, I really did begin to feel that I was no longer Loren. Maybe if I had followed Samax’s suggestion, and undressed and gone to bed at that moment, I would indeed have awakened the next day, rather painlessly, as Enzo.

But I chose to take the more painful route. There were two things I had to know before I could lie down in that bed and close my eyes with any degree of peace. First, I had to establish once and for all that, as Samax had assured me, I was not a prisoner.

I sat back in the red chair and waited, trying not to doze off, though at one point I jerked my chin up off my chest and saw on the desk clock that two hours had passed. I waited another hour, until five
A.M
., and walked out of Room E down the corridor to the elevator. I had not taken a single item from my new wardrobe; until I found out what I needed to, I would hold on to Loren’s clothes, if nothing else.

My heavy winter boots squeaked on the marble tiles of the lobby as, heart thumping, I slung my navy pea coat over my shoulder and headed for the door. A man in a rumpled white suit and dark glasses had just entered the hotel. His face was buried in a book which he held in his left hand; with his right, he twirled a black walking stick with an ivory handle. The book’s title was
Atlantis: The Seventh Continent
. When we passed each other, he did not so much as glance
at me. That was not the case with a woman behind the front desk, whose eyes remained riveted on me from the moment I stepped from the elevator.

I did a double take, for though this woman wore the same red jacket as Della, and had similar—though more aquiline—features, she clearly was not Della. Heavily powdered, with bleached blond hair, she was as pale as Della was tanned. And she wasn’t smiling. Nor did she seem particularly concerned to see me leave the hotel. The same was true of Azu, the doorman: with another polite nod, he looked me over once again, slowly, as he opened the door onto the cool velvety desert air and then closed it behind me.

A half hour later I was walking past the mock-Roman temple we had driven by earlier. Though it was still dark out, a pale red band lined the eastern horizon. Crickets were whirring in the brush beyond the houses, whose windows were uniformly black. I had passed no one, and had finally stopped looking over my shoulder to see if I were being followed. At first I had hurried away from the hotel, stepping into my own shadow which the moonlight cast directly before me, but as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and my nerves steadied, I settled into a slower pace.

When I reached the narrow road that led to the highway, I felt I had completed half of my small mission: I could tell myself now that I was not a prisoner at the Hotel Canopus. With four dollars in my pocket, I couldn’t have gotten very far, but I could easily have walked into a police station or picked up a phone and called Alma. In fact, I had no desire to contact the police, and after the letter we had sent her, calling Alma was out of the question. It was the one thing I had promised Samax I would not do; beyond that, I did not want to call her. If Samax was telling me the truth on all counts, I had already decided I would be better off staying with him, and Alma would be far better off living her life without me. That was the gist of what Samax had stressed to her in the letter, couched in the most considerate terms; after my hopeless discussions with her on the subject of our future, not to mention the heartbreaking sight of her trying desperately to patch together a budget in the dead of night, it had made sense to me.
If
he was telling me the truth about who I was. What I had not promised Samax was that I would refrain from running away. Certainly Azu and that blond version of Della had informed him that
I had left the hotel; and I wasn’t so sure that the news would catch him by surprise.

I walked another quarter of a mile, some cars and plenty of trucks whizzing by me now, until I reached Route 15. A Shell station stood at the intersection, its yellow sign rotating atop a gigantic pole, across from a motel called the Twin Stars. In a phone booth beside the air pump there was a Las Vegas directory on a chain. I found and memorized the address I wanted in the blue pages listing government offices. Then I asked the kid in the office behind a Green Lantern comic book—he was a few years older than me—where I could catch a bus into the city. He indicated the curb.

“It passes every half hour,” he mumbled, “beginning at six. Just flag it.”

Soon that first bus rumbled in, carrying only a handful of passengers. Except for a pair of sailors, all the men wore cowboy hats and all of them smoked. I told the driver my destination, then sat in the first seat. Across the aisle were an old woman in a maid’s uniform and a young woman in a vinyl jacket asleep with her mouth open.

In the twilight, before the sun rose, I had my first look at Las Vegas. As if the bus were stationary and the world outside in motion, long desolate streets dusted with sand slid toward me through the convex windshield. The contents of these streets never wavered: boxy apartment houses set back on treeless lots; miniature lawns without grass; parking lots patrolled by Doberman pinschers; drive-in wedding chapels with wedding cakes for roofs. And then a crazy quilt of neon signs advertising motels, topless bars, guns & ammo, palm readings, and charbroiled steaks.

And this was before we turned on Tropicana Avenue and entered the Strip. There the gaudier, more fantastical neon signs and larger-than-life marquees broadcasted the names of crooners and comedians, ventriloquists and dancing dogs. The signs were flickering off now at the tail end of the night and the last patrons were trickling from nightclubs the size of supermarkets. The famous casinos and hotels—Dunes, Aladdin, Stardust, Sahara, Riviera, and Tropicana—twenty-story towers and their long pavilions, with colonnades and arches, elaborate turrets, minarets, and ziggurats, were themselves like something
out of the
Arabian Nights
, garishly updated and transported to the American desert.

The Strip itself was six lanes divided by a median strip along which double streetlights—like the wings of a gull gliding—ran as far as the eye could see. Alongside the curb there was less often sidewalk than a rough shoulder of burnt weeds, and beyond that, abruptly, the desert began, stretching away for miles, to the looming dark mountains. When we were still airborne, Samax told me that this city had materialized, in virgin desert, in seemingly no time at all—as if it had dropped from the sky—and that just sixty years before, it had consisted of some miners’ shacks on dirt roads. The surrounding desert remained unchanged, and as the bus turned onto Sahara Avenue I watched the mountain winds whirl up a tower of sand far to the north.

By the time we turned again, onto Paradise Road, I had closed my eyes, which were burning from lack of sleep. The bus lurched to a halt more frequently now, at traffic lights and bus stops, and when I opened my eyes again, we were in a labyrinth of stark, narrow streets lined with low office buildings and dusty residence hotels.

At the next bus stop, beside a desiccated public park, the driver turned to me and pointed out the door. “That’s the building you want,” he said. “Forty-seven twenty-two.”

The men in cowboy hats were all gone, as was the maid. Only the young woman in the vinyl jacket, still asleep with her mouth open, and one of the sailors remained onboard.

I walked up to Number 4722, a square white building with barred windows on the first floor and a set of limestone steps ascending to its glass doors.
COUNTY OF LAS VEGAS
was chiseled over the entrance, two flags hung limp on jutting poles, and in one of the doors a sign was posted with the building’s hours. It wouldn’t open until eight o’clock, so for the next hour I sat in the little park.

The park was more like a concrete bunker turned inside out: a circle within a square, with six benches facing inward. There were two leafless trees, and some gray weeds, stiff as sandpaper, that pushed up through cracks in the ground. An empty pint bottle lay on one bench and a ratty coat folded up into a pillow on another, where a bum had slept. Meanwhile, the sun was rising, eating away at the red brick of the
surrounding buildings. Workers began filing into those buildings, including Number 4722.