A Trip to the Stars (76 page)

“When he left here for the last time, twenty-five years ago, in a rage, your father took the key to this box with him. I made it so Junius couldn’t have what was inside the box, but Geza made it so I couldn’t have it, either.” His voice was so low now, I had to strain to pick it up. “See, only that one key can open the box. There’s no duplicate. If you try to use another key, or to force the lock, the contents of the box are destroyed at once. It’s an old Japanese design. I had it made for me in Tokyo. And it’s all yours. Take it with you.” Again, the laugh that was a dry cough. “Of course you’ll have to find your father to open it—providing he didn’t throw the key away. Or lose it. But I’ll never see the inside of that box again. There’s another box waiting for me.”

I didn’t say good-bye, for he had already closed his eyes and the nurses were moving toward the bed as one, like clockwork. A moment later I was escorted downstairs and out the door. The straight-back chair on the verandah was empty and the parrot was gone.

On the way out of Reno, lost in thought, I stopped by the Fleischmann Planetarium, ostensibly to check out the design for the planetarium in Phoenix, but really to see the place where Samax had begun his seduction of my grandmother Stella. In my head, however, I kept scanning the photograph of her, and the one of my father. The planetarium itself left me cold: it was difficult to conjure up ghosts there after being in the presence of a pair of living ghosts like Ivy and Vitale Cassiel. Though I hated to admit it, Vitale Cassiel had been right about one thing: there was plenty of blood—mostly bad—to go around, and it had ended up on just about everybody’s hands, including Samax’s. Ivy just had more of it than anyone else. All those years, none of them had ever escaped either one another or themselves.

Back at my apartment in Santa Fe, accompanied by Sirius, I found two packages in the pile of mail that awaited me. One contained an audiocassette of The Echo Quintet’s second album sent by Auro, the other a signed copy of Dalia’s translation of Friar Varcas’s book on vampires, just published by the Revenant Pess. Enclosed in a plain brown jacket, inscribed
To Enzo
in a shaky hand, it looked like any other book, but I noticed the next day, while flipping through it during
my flight to Honolulu, that it had one amazing peculiarity which sent a shiver through me: when you tilted its pages out of the light, their ink appeared to be red, not black.

My flight to Honolulu out of Albuquerque was at two o’clock, and I had to make one stop before going to the airport. Actually, it was an extended detour to Acoma, for which I had to start out early in the morning. I put on the same clothes I would be wearing when I arrived in Honolulu that evening—a plaid shirt and jeans, black lizard boots, and a dark blue jacket—and with Sirius curled up beside me in the front seat, I lowered the top on the old Ford Galaxie. The sky was already a hot, clear blue. We passed the gas station where I had seen Geza Cassiel and the Zuni cemetery where there was a grave marker but no grave for Calzas’s father; but Sirius, who had always enjoyed looking at the sights when we drove, didn’t once raise his head.

He had been agitated for weeks, as Desirée had told me, slipping away into the desert for the night, uncharacteristically hiding around the hotel, and not eating for days at a time. Losing weight, he had begun to look haggard, concave around the rib cage. Fourteen years old now, for the first time since Calzas had given him to me he seemed every bit his age. Samax’s murder and the cataclysmic loss of the hotel—the only home Sirius had ever known—were major shocks, which only aggravated his restlessness. Mrs. Resh had attributed his behavior before the fire to my extended absences from the hotel, but Sirius and I knew better.

Those last days in Las Vegas and Reno, and the very last night, in Santa Fe, he stuck close to me, and even slept at my feet on the bed, which he hadn’t done in years. I knew, well before we had left Nevada, that before I did anything else he wanted me to take him to Acoma. That morning when I awoke, I found Sirius staring out the window, westward toward the desert sky.

With just a last few miles to go on the winding two-lane blacktop into the valley, Sirius sat up as soon as the mesa of Acoma, and the Enchanted Mesa beyond it, came into view. The last time I had been there with him was nine years earlier, when he had run off and Calzas and I couldn’t find him. Now his ears were extended, his tail began ticking, and his eyes focused suddenly. Gazing through the windshield, he remained riveted on Acoma until I parked the car and switched off the engine. Only then did he turn to me, and laying his
paws on my left shoulder, rested his head against my own. His breath felt warm against the nape of my neck. His body was trembling. I put my arm around him for a long moment and drew in his scent and whispered his name just once. Then with a yelp, and an energy I hadn’t seen in him for some time, he bounded from the car and ran directly to the rocky trail that spiraled up the mesa.

I didn’t call out to him. I got out of the car and walked to the trail myself. I could no longer see him after he rounded the second bend in the trail, still running hard, but I knew where he was heading: that pyramid of black rocks on the plateau where Calzas had found him.

When I reached the plateau, I followed his tracks from the trail, through the grass and brambles, directly to the pyramid of rocks surrounded by lavender grass, where they ended abruptly. There was no sign of Sirius atop the pyramid or anywhere else. I knew there wouldn’t be.

Wiping my brow, I sat down on a flat boulder and gazed out across the brown valley, its bright dust rising into the sunlight, at the Enchanted Mesa. I saw the blue ribbon of the Río Puerco. And the Gallo Mountains far off in the haze. Above me the sky-city of Acoma shone gold in the midday sun. I knew that when night fell and Canis Major rose in the eastern sky, the Dog Star would be back in its place, at the constellation’s center. It was Calzas who told me that your life is a road along which you leave many markers—points in time and places on the map. The ones in time you can only revisit in your mind, and they never change. The places can be revisited firsthand, but they’re constantly changing. To keep a place the same, he said, you can no longer return to it—and then it becomes a point in time. For me, Acoma would be such a place now. And for the first time since Samax’s death, and the destruction of the Hotel Canopus, and all the farewells of the previous days, I buried my face in my hands and started to cry. I cried for so long that when I lowered my hands, the Enchanted Mesa looked as if it were underwater, and the valley itself filled with tears.

Throughout the long flight from Albuquerque to Honolulu, I listened to Auro’s tape, which was entitled
Star-Crossed;
its cover illustration was a silver X composed of small stars, with a red star at its center. If his first album had been eclectic and joyous, this one was elegiac, long dark understated riffs in minor keys around Frankie Fooo’s heavy bass and the alto sax and the lower octaves of the piano.
And behind it all Auro’s drumming, his soft touch with the bass pedal and his delicacy with the brushes on muted cymbals. The music played into my own mood so exactly it was unsettling at first. Auro, too, it seemed, had come to the end of something.

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.”

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 …