A Trip to the Stars (13 page)

“You,” I said, laying my hand on his chest.

He put his hand over mine. “But what else?”

I had been thinking about Loren. That night he had been on my mind even more than usual. It was the first night in three years, after all, that
I
had felt so safe. And it had been even longer than that since I had last made love. When I went to bed alone, in a motel or furnished room or my cramped bunk at sea, and closed my eyes, I couldn’t get it
out of my head that Loren was still
out there
. In the most treacherous seas. Maybe, miraculously, he had landed safely, on some islet; more than likely, he was anything but safe. I wondered whether he was still alive. And, if so, whether he was more lonely and afraid than I could ever imagine. I tormented myself spinning out scenarios of what might have happened to him and, worse, what could still be happening. That first night in Cassiel’s arms, warmed and softened by pleasure, feeling his hands and lips at last touch every part of my body, and touching every part of him, and feeling him push inside me and release all of himself, it was less my fears about Loren, but their constant companion, my guilt, that filled my head. Alongside the rush of happiness, the exhilarating release, I experienced in that hotel room, I would remember that my stay there also marked the first occasion on which the most poisonous torment of all took root in me: that I had deliberately—not carelessly, or innocently—lost Loren. This was the twisted punishment I dished out to myself for having finally taken respite from my grief: guilt with a vengeance.

To Cassiel I finally said, “I’ve lost things too. But, as you know, in another way those become the very things that never leave you.”

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“No, I’m sticking to our agreement.” I knew that if I began telling him about Loren, it would never end, it would overwhelm me and take over our time together. After two years of solitary wandering, I only had those few days with Cassiel and I wasn’t about to share them with my ghosts—not even with Loren, I thought with a shudder. So I pressed my body against Cassiel’s and put my lips to his ear. “There’s just this moment—remember?”

Our second night together, tanned and hot still from being in the sun all day, we ordered dinner in our room. Just cold lemon soup and prawns and fruit salad. We bathed, taking turns in the deep claw-foot tub, soaping one another down. And then, right after we made love, we fell asleep on top of the sheets, holding hands. The night birds were singing outside the shuttered window and the piano music was faintly audible in the next room and Cassiel’s breathing, from his lips to deep in his lungs, resonated softly in my ears.

On our third night, we went out on the town in Manila and enjoyed a seven-course meal of poached bass, crab, eel, and other seafood I had never heard of, on a floating restaurant in the middle of a lake to which
we had to row ourselves. Through a skylight we saw the half-moon glowing gold. And all around the lake parrots chattered in the trees and bats swooped through the steamy air. Later, in the cluttered downtown streets that were bright as day with neon arcades and flashing marquees, we found ourselves in a nightclub called The Galaxy. There were a number of naval aviators at the bar, drinking alone, and a large group at a table, each with a prostitute, throwing back shots of vodka. Unlike us, these officers were in uniform. Two of them were dropping coins and pineapple wedges down the girls’ dresses; the pineapple they fished out with their fingers, the coins the girls kept.

We had had champagne with dinner, followed by brandy, and now Cassiel ordered us another bottle of champagne. He was watching the table of officers absently. On a small stage, a band was accompanying a young woman in a silver dress who sang Filipino love songs. She had a thin soprano voice. A girl in a miniskirt and boots was circling the room, selling cigarettes from a basket. Having grown increasingly subdued, Cassiel bought a pack of Camels from her and lit up, the only time I ever saw him smoke. “Hashish, too,” the girl murmured, pointing to the bottom of her basket, but he waved her off. Then, though we had made love most of the afternoon and spent our meal discussing the sights of the city, he suddenly picked up our conversation of the previous day, at the beach near Orion, as if we had just left off.

“You know that because I was wounded I can end my tour a few months early. I’ve already put the paperwork in motion.”

“When did you do that?”

“Before we left Subic.”

I froze. Ending his tour meant leaving combat, which couldn’t have made me happier; but it also meant being shipped out of Southeast Asia, and where would that leave the two of us, at least in the near future?

The waiter brought our champagne and uncorked it and Cassiel tipped him with a twenty-dollar bill. “Think this stuff is really French?” he muttered, studying the label.

“Where will they send you?” I asked, keeping my voice even.

He shrugged. “First I’ll have to return to Guam. Then I’ll get my orders.”

“Can you go back to the mapmaking flights?”

“I didn’t make any requests.”

I sipped some champagne, which was barely chilled. Or maybe it was just me. My lips and hands were particularly dry and hot that night. “Will you resign your commission?” I said.

“That’s a separate issue.” He glanced at the officersȗ table, where the din was increasing, and put down his glass. “Definitely
not
French,” he said.

“Do you want to go to another club?”

He seemed surprised. “No, why?”

“Geza, look at me.”

His hair combed back, shining, he was wearing a sky-blue sports shirt and white slacks. His arms and chest were darkly tanned. I had on an ankle-length, flowered green dress which I had gone out and bought that morning while he was asleep. When I modeled it for him, he took it off me slowly, kissing my shoulders, my breasts, and then down my sides, before pulling me onto the bed. Later at a stall near the hotel he picked out and bartered for a pair of triangular jade earrings to go with the dress.

“You’re telling me things,” I said, “without telling me anything at all.”

His eyes locked on mine. Refilling our glasses, he said, “All right,” and then drained his glass.

It wasn’t the drunken officers that was bothering him. Or even that he had put in for a transfer. After one more glass of champagne, he brought up the subject which, even on the ship, he had been holding in.

“When we were hit on Christmas Eve,” he began, tapping out another cigarette and tearing off a match which he didn’t light, “the missile exploded right up through the belly of the ship. The pilot and three airmen were killed immediately. In the back, the bombardier was screaming that his legs were gone. In the cockpit, Corelli the copilot and I were covered with blood, but I couldn’t find my wounds. Then I saw that the pilot’s midsection had been blown open. We were going down fast. We couldn’t make Saigon, and crash-landing a B-52 in the jungle is suicide, pure and simple. Suddenly we were being strafed by antiaircraft guns. Corelli was hit and the cockpit filled with smoke, but he still managed to bring us in level, skimming the treetops. Then we
hit the ground, there was an explosion, and we skidded in flames through the trees. The wings were sheared off. And somewhere in there I caught that shrapnel, which knocked me facedown. The noise was deafening. I could barely breathe. I didn’t feel anything. I was waiting for another explosion. Then we stopped. Corelli was dead and I thought I must be dead too. But I could still move, so I crawled to the back and rolled out with that one remaining airman. When search and rescue found me in the bush, I had blacked out. If the NVA had found me first, I’d be a statistic now too.”

Cassiel lit the cigarette, took a drag, and stubbed it out. Crushing the rest of the pack, he signalled the waiter for the check.

“That was my twenty-eighth run out of Guam, Mala,” he went on, “and my last. This much I knew already: carpet-bombing, killing by the acre, from eight miles up is obscene. But watching my whole crew get it like that, up close and dirty—gagging on it—that’s something else. Tasting shrapnel yourself is a lot different than watching six tons of bombs spin down on the radar screen like confetti.”

I drained my own glass, though, as usual, the alcohol was having no effect on me.

He leaned forward. “That X ray you took, where the shrapnel looked like the stars the X-ray telescope had photographed: that was a message to me.”

“A message?”

He tossed another twenty onto the table and pushed his chair back. “If all my stars are lined up that straight, I should go with it. I joined the Air Force just before I turned twenty. I had a whole other life I had to escape. And I needed to fly—I mean really fly—which only they could teach me. But that was in peacetime. Now it’s time to move on.”

Back at the hotel, we undressed completely and he fell asleep as soon as he stretched out on the bed, his head in my arms. The room was stifling, and I had to remind myself that the heat was much harder on him than on me. The ribbon was fluttering on the fan’s cage, but again I could barely feel the effects of the blades. In the courtyard, one of the macaws was complaining. Motor scooters were whining by on the street. A truck backfired. And from the hotel bar I heard glasses and bottles clicking onto shelves as the bartender closed up for the
night. After a swift downpour, it was drizzling, and a fine green mist was seeping through the venetian blinds.

Stirring in my arms, Cassiel might as well have been in another world. Of the four nights we spent together, this was the only one on which he slept through until dawn. So I was able to gaze upon his face, and his body, uninterrupted and unself-consciously. Lightly I stroked his shoulder and arm. His skin, over firm muscles, rippled like water under my fingertips. I ran the back of my index finger over the stubble on his cheek. His natural scent—like salt and honey—was unlike any I had experienced, on a man or a woman. The dark hair on his chest and legs was so soft I could barely feel it. I had never known a man with stronger hands, more sensitive in their movements even than those of the surgeons on my ship.

We had come together so naturally, and seamlessly—under the most unnatural and fragmented of circumstances—that it spooked me, first on the
Repose
, and now, even more so, in Manila. If Cassiel was spooked, he didn’t let on; my feeling was that, for whatever reason, very few things in life held the power to surprise him anymore.

Suddenly my thoughts were broken by a small red spider that scurried across the sheets and up the wall to the ceiling. I recognized it from my days in Zaren Eboli’s basement, a female
Uloborus
, a master weaver of orb webs, huge concentric constructions which she completes in a matter of minutes.

Immediately the spider began spinning out such a web, and watching her at work, going round and round, had a hypnotic, dizzying effect on me. My palms had grown hotter and my lips felt numb and parched. Bits of color, bright shavings, began breaking away from objects and swirling into my field of vision—like a kaleidoscope. When I closed my eyes the colors disappeared, so I kept them closed. And from cradling it in my arms, I gently shifted Cassiel’s head into my hands. At once my own head filled with images, flickering by as they did when I scanned the remoter byways of my memory. But these images were alien to me. There were no half-familiar guideposts—a name, a face, a piece of clothing—to let me in on what part of my past life I was reviewing.

I saw a whirling sheet of sand sweep across the base of a mountain
range that glowed red. From one of the peaks a red hawk with a tremendous wingspan and fiery talons sped toward me, streaming a shower of sparks.

Then a woman running through a dry riverbed. She wore a yellow bandanna and a red dress. Coming to a pillar of boulders, she raced into its long purple shadow and never reemerged.

And then a red car with a sand-coated windshield rolling toward the edge of a ravine in the last rays of the setting sun. One of the car’s headlights was burning, the other was smashed. Suddenly the car burst into flames. Through the windshield I could make out a shadow slumped behind the wheel just before the car, a fireball, plunged into the ravine.

Finally I saw an impenetrable ceiling of slate-colored clouds through which I was ascending in a plane. I was in the rear of the cockpit. The green and blue lights of a radar screen danced before me. Finally the plane leveled off. The pilots’ seats were topped by two white helmets which I saw from behind. All at once the windshield lit up with fire and the plane lurched hard before plummeting, down and down, and smoke poured in, filling my mouth. Then those two seats spun around and under the helmets were slumped what was left of two men in blue uniforms, one of them cut in half floating in his own blood and the other with a gaping hole in his chest.

I opened my eyes and cried out, and there above me on the ceiling the spiderweb turned bloodred for a moment before it disappeared altogether.

Cassiel jumped up. “Mala, what is it?”

I closed my eyes again, and he grasped my shoulders.

“Mala!”

“I’m all right.”

He was looking into my face, his eyes bloodshot, and I realized with a start that those were memories of his I had been looking at. Among the powerful aftereffects of the
Ummidia Stellarum’s
bite, I could now add this: the ability to scan not just my own memories in excruciating detail, but also, under the right conditions, those of another person. And what were those conditions? Holding Cassiel’s head, making love … I had not done these things with anyone else after leaving New Orleans. And maybe there were
other conditions I couldn’t identify so easily: the Hôtel Alnilam, the presence of the spiderweb, the alignment of the stars over Manila. Or maybe it was just Cassiel and me. Something chemical, as Sharline would say. But these were chemicals with which Sharline had no experience.

“You were dreaming,” Cassiel said.

I didn’t want to tell him that I hadn’t even been asleep.

It was dawn. The birds were singing in the colvillea trees. The early traffic was starting up.