A Trip to the Stars (7 page)

I got off duty at six
P.M
., skipped dinner, and slept restlessly for an hour. Then I went to the Christmas party in the mess hall. It had been a quiet day: only three wounded men brought in, around noon, and only one of them serious. Doctors and nurses were gathered around a long table with two bowls of wine punch, cans of beer in a bucket of ice, and a chocolate cake with red frosting. A small aluminum Christmas tree from Sears, Roebuck was set up in the corner. Someone had trimmed it with balls of cotton dyed green and cutouts of angels, from a coloring book. A tinfoil star adorned the tip of the tree. On the phonograph Elvis Presley was singing “Silver Bells.”

I scooped a cup of punch, which I didn’t drink, and someone cut me a piece of cake, which I didn’t eat. In our tiny quarters I got along well enough with my three cabinmates, but otherwise I wasn’t much of a mixer. In fact, this was the first social event, such as they were, that I had attended since coming aboard.

The next number, “White Christmas,” came on, the lights were dimmed, and people began slow-dancing. First a surgeon, then a petty officer asked me to dance, but I told them both I wanted to finish my cake first. Instead, I slipped out and went up to the nurse’s deck, where Sharline had dozed off with a joint stuck between her index and forefinger. I removed it and draped my jacket over her. She was skipping the Christmas party altogether. She and I, one of the orderlies had informed me, were considered “the most desirable” nurses aboard by
both the crewmen and those patients whose wounds still allowed them such considerations. At any rate, it was not a distinction that meant much to me one way or the other. Not so with Sharline. She had been getting it on with a sailor who had completed his tour of duty that month and then flown back to Honolulu. Several times a week we gave up the cabin to them for an hour. One of the other nurses had the same arrangement, with an anesthesiologist, but not so frequently. For fraternization of the carnal sort they could all have been discharged and sent home—which wasn’t much of a threat to them, though it would have been to me, had I the slightest interest in fraternizing. There was some irony in this since I was the only one of them who had entered the Navy decidedly opposed to the war. An opposition I confided to no one, though most of my medical shipmates hated the war soon enough more than anyone stateside could imagine. This was not the case, however, with my one dour cabinmate, Evelyn, a starchy, taut-faced Alabaman from a fundamentalist military family who had intuited enough about my feelings on this subject to tell me, unsolicited, that it didn’t matter what had brought me to Vietnam so long as I kept doing my job so well. She was most put off that I read Latin, which she considered a heathen tongue, without a dictionary. As for Sharline, she had been keeping even more to herself, and smoking even more Thai stick, since her paramour’s departure.

“His tan was a shade lighter at the base of his ring finger,” she told me one day. “By now he’s back in Portland and he’s put his wedding band on again.”

The nurses called such sailors “territorial bachelors.” Most nurses avoided them, but they were the only kind of sailor Sharline liked.

“Definitely no emotional strings attached that way,” she observed, flicking her lighter.

The weather could change in seconds in those waters, and suddenly it began to rain, a dark squall that swept the deck with a staccato burst for several minutes. Sharline and I, once again sprawled out on beach chairs, were immediately soaked through, though she never stirred. Just that morning I had read in Pliny of a time during one of Rome’s bloodiest civil wars, before a massive battle, when it was reliably recorded that milk and blood rained down from the sky, then flesh—snatched in midair by the birds—and finally iron. This was a rain which would not have been foreign to Vietnam, I thought,
watching the squall, like a black top, whirl across the sea toward the jungle.

When the stars reappeared, I scanned them. In the constellation Perseus the Medusa’s head has a winking eye, which my star books listed as Algol, a self-eclipsing double star, one star large and dim revolving around the other, which is small and bright. Every three days the larger star briefly eclipses the smaller one, and Medusa winks. As she was doing at the stroke of midnight when the P.A. system blared to life with a scratchy Christmas greeting from the captain and an announcement that a sleigh and eight reindeer would soon be touching down on the landing deck. Sharline woke up and without a word to me went down to our cabin.

Moments later, as I got up to leave, I heard a distant roar in the sky, farther out at sea. Straining my eyes, I finally saw a triangle of stars to the north streaking toward shore: a squadron of high-flying bombers. They were too big and too high to have come off any of the aircraft carriers, so I knew they were B-52s out of Guam. Vulnerable to sabotage, they could not operate out of Saigon, so they flew for eight hours to reach their targets and, after dropping their payloads, returned to the huge air base on Guam. Usually they made their runs much farther north of us. To someone in a faraway command center, I thought, it must have been a very important mission that required men to be sent up on Christmas Eve. Unless that someone had forgotten, or just didn’t care, what night it was.

By dawn a number of the men in those jets were being wheeled into my X-ray room. Dressed in an elf cap, with a cotton beard, I had joined several nurses in serving Christmas breakfast to our patients when the call came in that the choppers were bringing out some casualties: nine airmen—pilots, bombardiers, and a single navigator—who had been shot down while taking out a series of bridges in the wake of a battalion of marines retreating under hostile fire. Their planes were hit with surface-to-air missiles and then strafed with antiaircraft guns as they crash-landed. The survivors suffered multiple shrapnel wounds, broken bones, and burns. Two dozen airmen had died in action, and their bodies, in black bags, were lined up on the deck awaiting transfer to Quang Tri.

So we had nine new patients: Santa and his eight reindeer, Sharline dubbed them.

The last one I x-rayed was the navigator, whose dog tag read
GEZA CASSIEL
.

They wheeled him in facedown because he had shrapnel wounds across his left shoulder in the back. He was lucky—that is, he was going to make it—because the shrapnel, six pieces running in an absolutely straight line, had missed both his heart and lungs, and his neck, by no more than an inch on either side.

I x-rayed him from head to foot, then the orderlies turned him over slowly and one of them supported his shoulder while I x-rayed him up and down in the front. None of the shrapnel had come out his chest. And the X rays turned up one more piece lodged, inexplicably, in his right ankle. It, too, was extracted in surgery, but no entry wound was discovered.

Cassiel was an Air Force captain. Thirty-one years old. A tall, striking man, solidly built, with strong arms and shoulders and sleek black hair cropped short. He had been heavily sedated and his eyes were closed. His body had only been partially cleaned and there was still blood caked on his right hand—not from his wounds, it turned out, but from those of a fellow airman whom he had dragged free of their plane before it was engulfed in flames. Then he had crawled a hundred yards into the jungle, and with the shrapnel embedded in his other shoulder must have been in agony pulling a deadweight like that.

But it was something else—nowhere near his wounds—which the X rays had picked up that most stuck in my mind. It was a small key, with a round head, clearly visible in the bottom of his stomach cavity. Its teeth were complex. At first glance, I thought it had two holes at the top. Then I realized that what looked like a second hole was really a circular mineral or gem set into the key that was the same size as the key-ring hole. During my training in Honolulu we had memorized lists of substances, including minerals, that X rays could penetrate, and I guessed that this was one of them. At any rate, in other men’s X rays I had seen coins, marbles, even a soda bottle cap in their stomachs. But never a key. For that reason, and also because I wanted to see what his eyes looked like, I resolved to drop in on him the day after his surgery.

Sitting up in bed with his arm and shoulder suspended and an I.V. in his other forearm, he calmly watched me cross the postoperative room from the moment I entered it, wending my way through the myriad beds, as if he knew I was coming to see him and him alone.

His eyes were gray, with silver highlights, deeply set beneath a flat, imposing brow. His hair had been combed, and bathed completely now, fully conscious, he looked even more striking: not just handsome, with finely shaped, symmetrical features, but intense. His eyes especially so. “You must be Mala,” he said in a low, pleasant voice. “You were asking after me yesterday when I was still out.”

I was surprised.

“The other nurse told me,” he said. “She said Mala from X ray had never been in asking about anyone before.” He extended the fingers of his right hand. “Thank you for finding all that shrapnel. Including the piece in my ankle, which I’ve been walking around with for who knows how long.”

I touched his fingers, and they were cool. He had large hands and his fingers were long and powerful.

“I asked them to keep it for me,” he went on, indicating a plastic cup on the bedside table that held seven pieces of black iron, each about the size of a nickel.

“You’re feeling all right, then, Captain?” When I spoke finally, my own voice sounded remote, hoarse in my throat. And my palm was burning more than ever.

“They gave me so much morphine that my shoulder and arm are numb right through. But I’ll be all right.” He curled his fingers into a fist and compressed his lips. “All the rest of my crew was killed, blown to bits. And they tell me there was nothing left of our plane.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “And I found out that the airman I pulled out was already dead.”

“I know. The crew that brought you in said it was a miracle you survived, Captain.”

“I used up a few of my nine lives, I know that. Won’t you sit down? And please don’t call me Captain.”

I hesitated. “I have to get back in a few minutes.”

“Then sit for a few minutes.”

There was a metal chair, which I drew closer to the bed.

“Not enough time to tell me your life story?” he said lightly.

I smiled, as I hadn’t smiled in months. The tendons of my jaw and the web of muscles around my eyes seemed to relax all at once.

“Another time, then,” he smiled back, his eyes softening, answering
his own question, as he would often do. “Tell me, where did you get that?” He indicated my pendant.

“Savannah.”

“Can you tell me about it?” he said, studying the pendant.

I told him about the volcano, Captain Cook’s crewman, and the woman who had lived to be 105, and I described the little store in Savannah.

He listened carefully, then said, “It’s probably iron-based, from the earth’s mantle, which shares its composition with the stars. You know, the only pure iron on earth was brought by meteorites. Cook was one of those explorers who navigated by the stars, and when he needed food, he bartered the South Sea islanders iron—in the form of nails and fishhooks—that traced its origins to those same stars.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, fascinated by his words.

“Would you please get me the X ray you took of my back before surgery? I’d like to show you something.”

All his X rays were hanging at the foot of the bed beside his chart. While I sifted through them, he lifted a book from the bedside table and opened it to a page marked with a strip of gauze.

“I borrowed this from the map room,” he said.

My heart quickened when I saw that it was a star atlas with a Navy insignia—twin anchors composed of stars—on the indigo cover.

“This is a photograph of the outer rim of the Andromeda galaxy taken with an X-ray telescope,” he went on. “Time-delayed to capture the movements of the stars. Now, hold my X ray next to it.”

The shrapnel and stars looked the same: clusters of short white streaks against the blackness.

“Iron,” he said softly, “here, inside my body, and there, in another galaxy, as far away from us as we can imagine.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” I said, leaning closer to him.

“I think you know why,” he said, tilting his head and turning his eyes back on mine. “I knew I would be telling you from the moment you walked in here.”

I felt the blood rushing in my head, but he was right: I wasn’t surprised. And we were both aware that whatever forces and impulses had drawn me to him in the first place were just as surely at work in him.

He reached out and took my pendant gently between his thumb
and index finger. “This stone,” he said, examining it closely, “with all its stars—I’ve never seen one like it anywhere.”

“May I ask you something?” I held up the frontal X ray of his torso and pointed to the shadow of his stomach cavity. “Down here—surely this has nothing to do with the war.”

He smiled, and for an instant I was sure this was what he had really been waiting to talk about. “The key? No, I put that there myself. Swallowed it a long time ago, for safekeeping, and never told anyone. It never came out and it’s never bothered me,” he added.

“For safekeeping?”

He lowered his voice. “It opens something very important.” He touched his stomach. “I’ll keep it down here until I need it.”

“You know when that will be?”

He shook his head. “I’ll know when the time comes.”

Hearing myself paged on the P.A., I stood up and put the X ray back with the others.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said.

“I was counting on it.” His eyes brightened. “Merry Christmas, Mala.”

For the first time I focused beyond him, about a dozen feet, on the wreath of blinking lights that had been hung on the wall on Christmas Eve.

“Yes. Merry Christmas,” I said.

My first glimpse of the desert came from seven miles up, in an airplane. It was like a white mirror that, according to the plane’s movements, tilted every so often in the blazing sunlight and blinded me. Sheer columns of rock, boulders piled upon boulders vertically, cast their shadows straight as compass needles for thousands of feet—shadows that led nowhere. Behind vast thermal currents, rippling faintly, mountains loomed in the distance. Eventually the great expanses of sand were replaced by rocky flats and choppy ridges of sandstone that ran to the horizon, where long red clouds, rough as stone, mirrored them in the sky. And there were ravines, deep blues at their lowest depths, dotted with brush, and canyons of graduated spirals, in the shape of tops. Of all the places I had ever gone with Milo and Luna, the desert was one we seemed to have bypassed, always taking the northern route out west and back. Furtive in their habits, they would have avoided those glaringly open spaces.