A Trip to the Stars (11 page)

Suddenly I was thirsty. I thought of my room—and its oval bathtub—at the Hotel Canopus. And the ceiling behind the ceiling in the lobby. And, playing that game with Milo as we approached Pollux, Kansas, the one and only time I had guessed a town’s population correctly—1,250—after which he took a picture of me beside the sign reporting the number at the town line. Then, as I had at the factory when Samax told me I was really someone named Enzo Samax, I recalled again that bit of advice Milo offered for moments of crisis: to step back and take a deep breath and reconnoiter. That’s what I’m doing in this concrete park, I thought; what I hadn’t stopped doing, deep down, since that moment at the factory.

One way or the other, I would be moving on now, I told myself as I crossed the street after a security guard opened the doors at Number 4722 to the public.

The County Clerk’s office was on the second floor. The air was overly air-conditioned and fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. I was directed to the Records Office, a pale blue room down a long corridor hung with faded photographs of the desert. There, at a barred window, I made my request of an elderly clerk, a razor-sharp woman with white hair in a bun who was smoking a cigarette in an amber holder. The planes of her cheeks were like paper and the bones in her hands were all clearly visible, as if I were looking at them through an X-ray machine.

“You want a copy of the birth certificate?” she inquired in a raspy voice.

“No, thank you. I’d just like to see the original.”

“And whose is it?” she demanded.

“It’s mine.”

“You have identification?”

I shook my head. “That’s why I want to see it. I mean, I just want to see it. It’s important.”

She pointed behind her at a sign over the wall of filing cabinets that read
BIRTHS AND DEATHS
. “Everything here is important.” She picked the cigarette out of her amber holder and stubbed it out in an ashtray. But she kept the holder clamped between her teeth. “You may
have to wait a bit,” she said finally. “Give me the birth date, and spell the name for me.”

I was still thirsty, and I took a long drink from the fountain across the room, the icy jet numbing my lips. No sooner had I settled into a plastic green chair than the clerk reappeared in the window. Beckoning me, she slid a piece of paper across the marble counter, and at the sight of it my heart started pounding.

“You must remain in this room with it,” she said, inserting a new cigarette into her holder. “The fee for a notarized copy is five dollars, but for that you absolutely need identification or proof of kinship.”

The very fact she had returned with a document meant that there
was
an Enzo Samax born in Las Vegas County on my birthday. At that moment, which really did mark the end of my previous life, I was surprised at the extent of my relief, and at the first twinges of happiness that began to stir in me. The only lingering question was if the document would in all ways be identical to the one Samax had shown me at the factory. And it was. It confirmed to the highest probability that I was Enzo Samax. The son of Bel Samax and the nephew of Junius Samax.

Behind her spectacles and swirls of cigarette smoke, the clerk’s eyes had narrowed. “Your folks know you’re down here?” she said.

“I’m going home now,” I replied with a sigh, sliding the birth certificate back to her. “Thanks.”

Two blocks from the building, there was a taxi queue. The first cabbie had never heard of the Hotel Canopus, and I didn’t know how to direct him there. The second cabbie knew where it was, but told me the fare would be more than $3.75, which was all I had left after the bus ride. The third cabbie agreed to take me there for that amount. He puffed cherry tobacco from a curved pipe and passed me a stick of hot-pepper gum as we sped along the Strip.

When I arrived back at the hotel, it was nine o’clock and a new doorman was on duty. As large and rectangular as Azu was, this daytime doorman, whose name was Yal, was thin and stringy, with a thatch of flyaway hair, small sad eyes, and sallow skin. From the side, he looked to be no more than six inches across. He let me in without a word. Behind the desk now, in the same red jacket and hair band, was
Della, her coral lipstick gleaming as she squinted at me across the lobby above her reading glasses.

“You’re up bright and early, Master Enzo,” she said cheerily. “Ready for breakfast?”

I shook my head and hurried to the red elevator.

When I stepped out on the tenth floor, Samax was waiting for me. He was wearing a burgundy robe and black slippers. Hands in his pockets, he was studying me closely, but with concern, not anger.

I stopped short. “I—”

“Just get some sleep now,” he said quietly. “We can have lunch together, rather than breakfast.”

When we reached my room and he opened the door, I turned to him.

“Good night, Uncle Junius,” I said.

I had surprised him: his face softened, his white moustache twitched, and closing his eyes, compressing his lips, he put his arms around me and drew me close. I returned the hug, and he said, “Sleep well, Enzo.”

And he and I did have lunch—but not until late the following day. For I slept an entire day and a night and then nearly another whole day, and when I did wake up, lifting my head heavily from the pillow and studying my new surroundings, the first thing I discovered was that Calzas had returned from North Africa.

At the foot of my bed, on a wooden stand, was Samax’s very first gift to me, the black marble statuette of Meno, son of the god Ammon, who was gazing at me with his gold eyes—the silver pupils glittering like stars—through the twilight of the curtained room.

Across the room a green ribbon fluttered on the cage of the table fan. A pair of caged macaws squawked, back and forth, in the courtyard below. Through the eucalyptus and colvillea trees, barking dogs ran in and out of puddles, clouds of flies buzzing around their heads. All afternoon the rain had thundered down, drumming the rooftops, spattering in the muddy street. Red rain, like dirt from the sky. On a phonograph in the next room a jazz pianist was improvising around a theme. And down the corridor, one of them tapping his foot, two men were deep in conversation about a woman who had died.

All these sounds flowed to me at once, as one but distinguishable, while I kept my eyes glued to the fan and its ribbon. Spinning ever so slowly, the fan blades sliced the bands of light streaming through the venetian blinds into even longer, golden ribbons which floated up to the ceiling. And hovered there, rippling like seaweed, in the deepening shadows.

A half dozen fans could not have displaced the heat in that room. I soaked it up. And as usual did not sweat. The sheet beneath me was rumpled and damp, but my arms and breasts were as dry as they were hot. My tongue stuck to my palate. My lips were humming, my nipples ached, and the red dot and circles on my palm glowed with heat.

Cassiel, breathing softly beside me, emerging from sleep, forked his fingers into my hair and gently tightened his grip.

“Mala,” he whispered into my ear.

He was the first lover to call me by that name, and despite how I had acquired it, it seemed to belong to me now, during my time with him, in a different way.

“Mala,” he murmured again, “come closer.”

I could not have been closer to him, I wanted to say as he wrapped his arms around me again. I tilted my head back when he put his mouth over mine and slipped his tongue through my lips and slid his leg between my own. His broad shoulders and chest, beaded with sweat, cooled my skin even as my insides felt on fire.

We were in a hotel on the outskirts of Manila. It was the fourth and final day of our leave, January 14, 1969, and we had spent the better part of those days in that bed under the lime-colored sheet making love. Our uniforms hung side by side in the closet behind a curtain of beads. Because Cassiel was an officer, he had been able to requisition a jeep at the naval base at Subic Bay. We had used it to get around Manila and, once, to take a drive up the peninsula to swim at a secluded beach. After being shipboard for four months straight, I had been overwhelmed at first driving out in the open on a fast winding road, awash with scents and colors, flanked by the jungle and the sea.

Cassiel had been discharged from medical care after being checked over at the base hospital the day the
Repose
put in at Subic Bay for refurbishing. From the dock, our patients were either transferred to the base hospital or to the aiport, where transport planes would ferry them to Honolulu. Then the crew of the
Repose
, nurses, doctors, sailors, all went on R&R. Altogether Cassiel had been with us for just over two weeks—from Christmas Day until the tenth of January—recovering from his wounds. In that time, helter-skelter, he and I had shared what time we could. Some days I didn’t see him at all. The first week he had a rough stretch, fighting off a secondary infection and fever. His shoulder swelled up and the pain became intolerable. In addition to antibiotics, the doctors administered morphine, which promptly knocked him out, sometimes for twelve hours straight. In the meantime, I wasn’t exactly idle. The battle in which Cassiel had been shot down was just the beginning of a longer operation. Night after night during Christmas week the number of body bags on deck doubled, then tripled, triage overflowed, and our surgeons worked round the clock. We had badly wounded men jammed up and down the corridors on fold-up cots and, at one point, filling a section of the mess hall that was partitioned off. That was the worst time of all. Hearing the men moaning on their side of the partition while you picked over your breakfast or dinner and tried to get down enough food to make sure you could keep going. Even I, who needed so little sleep, was
dragging myself around. X-raying five or six dozen men daily, I found that after a while not just their faces but their horrific wounds—jagged, burned, blood-caked—began to blur.

His second week on the
Repose
, Cassiel rebounded. Many of the most seriously wounded men, along with those who had healed swiftly, were ferried to Saigon. Cassiel fell into the middle group who remained aboard until we reached the Philippines. As we left the battle zone on January 6, my own duties let up a bit, and he and I were able to spend time together, first at his bedside, then in the cubbyhole office off the X-ray room where I’d bring him in his wheelchair, and finally on deck when he was well enough to walk on his own. There was little privacy on that ship even when it wasn’t filled to capacity with patients, and it was amazing we were ever able to be alone for very long. It was on deck one evening just after sunset as we watched the flat green coast of Palawan Island slide by that he kissed me for the first time, pulling me close with one arm—his other still in a sling.

The jeep Cassiel requisitioned had no top, and we discovered the Hôtel Alnilam during a cloudburst when we pulled off the road to take shelter under the colvillea trees. Tucked away in a quiet, dusty, residential district, far from the flash and clatter of downtown Manila, the hotel was owned by an elderly Frenchman. A slight, balding man, he wore a white suit cut in another era and a pair of oversized eyeglasses. We were the only Americans at the hotel and when we checked in he made a point of telling us that he was strongly pro-American. In the fifties he had left the United States with plans to open a hotel in Saigon. But Dien Bien Phu changed everything and he fled to Manila.

“Whereabout in the States did you live?” Cassiel asked him.

“Las Vegas,” he replied. “But I’ll never go back there.”

Cassiel seemed surprised. “I’m from Reno originally,” he said. I had learned this during one of our bedside conversations on the
Repose
, but Cassiel wouldn’t say much more except to insist, like the Frenchman, that he would never return to Nevada.

“Why won’t you go back?” I asked the Frenchman, glancing at Cassiel out of the corner of my eye.

“It’s bad luck for me,” he replied.

“You lost at the tables?” Cassiel said.

“I never gambled in my life,” the Frenchman said, handing him the key to Room 9. “Fourth floor.”

In the lift, when we were alone, I turned to Cassiel. “Did
you
lose at the tables?” I asked.

“I lost worse than that, Mala,” he said without flinching. Then he took my hand. “But we agreed, no questions for now. There’ll be time enough later.”

I nodded, squeezing his hand.

We had agreed that in our four days alone together we would try to remain in the moment, each moment. Not look back, and try not to look too far ahead. On the other side of the world in what had been my previous life, I would never have made such a pact, never have thought to condition a relationship on these terms. (On the
Repose
, when I told him that I had no family, he replied that he hadn’t seen his few remaining relatives in thirteen years, and we left it at that.) But in a war, with all I had already seen, it was not so difficult to lock myself into the immediate present. In fact, in Vietnam some self-preserving mechanism compelled you to do so. When you knew that everyone was living from hour to hour, acknowledgment of the moment could mean everything. The alternative to survival—vaster than Asia but containable by a body bag—was nothing less than the place where you gave up all your moments.

Our second day on leave, while driving up to a village called Orion near Pampanga Bay, we passed roadside stands with flowers so bright they hurt my eyes. We ate fried shrimp and mashed peppers at a small table under a faded awning. Then we hiked over sand fine and white as snow to an empty cove where the jungle, ending in a line of salt-singed palms, ran nearly to the water. Before leaving the city, Cassiel had stopped at the bazaar and bought a Japanese transistor radio and two pairs of pearldiver’s goggles. Then on our towels in the shadow of the palms we listened to a Filipino rock station that, to celebrate the new year, was playing its top ten hits of 1968 over and over again. We swam underwater through reefs of pink and green coral alongside countless fish, some of which Cassiel identified for me when we returned to shore. Unicornfish, parrotfish, scorpionfish, hawkfish—each of them, it seemed, the incarnation of some other animal. There was even a spiderfish that clung to the underside of the coral.