A Trip to the Stars (77 page)

Bel. The same Bel who Cassiel had told me about, who ran alongside that ravine in her red dress. Loren’s mother. No, Enzo’s. Loren was the name my sister Luna gave him. Enzo is the name Bel gave him.

I said to him at one point, trying to keep my wits about me as the two names danced in my head, “If you put together your names, you know, you could be called ‘Lorenzo.’ ”

He smiled—the same smile I remembered seeing in Brooklyn, but so much quicker and brighter now. In Brooklyn he hadn’t had much to smile about. He liked this idea about the name. But he said to me, gently, “I know how you must feel about my other name. But I want you to call me Enzo. Is that okay?”

Of course it was okay. And he was to call me Mala. Which once meant “bad,” but now meant many other things to me, all the things I’d done and been for better or worse, over the last fifteen years. That my former name was Alma was the one element of my story I had omitted with Cassiel, who had so often told me how much he loved the name Mala. I would never change it back. I was Mala now. Just as Loren was Enzo.

“It seems right,” I said, “that we should have other names now.”

He thought about this for a long time. “You mean, it’s part of what happened,” he said.

This was the way he was, I realized. He took things in and turned them over. He was cautious. Like Cassiel. And he kept his own counsel—which was not surprising. At the same time, that smile, and the way he carried himself and spoke to me, told me that somehow he had had a good life with these people he was describing—the very people who, through malevolence or selfishness or sheer negligence, had altered the course of my own life with such breathtaking ease. Whatever pain he had felt and losses he had suffered, it was not like what I had imagined when he was abducted, or later when I was searching hopelessly for him, half out of my mind. Whatever resentment I felt toward those people—most of them, apparently, dead now or near death—I wasn’t going to express it to him at that moment. In the end, he had been well taken care of, he had thrived—but at what ferocious cost to both of us. And it was obvious to me that he
was sensitive to these feelings of mine, had been aware of them and thought them through, long before he found me that night.

“But tell me more of what happened to you,” he said. “After that day.”

I tried to tell him, there at my kitchen table with the dogs sleeping at his feet as if they had known him forever. I tried so hard, late into the night, until finally I broke down—though that was the last thing I had wanted to do—sobbing on his shoulder and hugging him to me as if he had come back from the dead. Or as if I had. He had Cassiel’s letter with him, the one that had been mailed to me from New Mexico; explaining how I had come to be the woman to whom that letter was written, and then the woman whose wanderings had brought her to this island, and finally the woman who would soon become not just his foster aunt, but his stepmother, took me the rest of the night.

I had kept up my reading in Latin after Naxos and just that week had been making my way through Plotinus, who wrote long passages on astronomy that were really about fate. It was he who observed that all previous philosophers saw the stars in two ways: as the words that spell out our fates perpetually being inscribed and modified on the chalkboard of the heavens, or inscribed once and for all, like the zodiac. Plotinus argued that to approach fate in either of these ways you have to assume the earth is stationary—which he thought impossible. He held that if you trace the stars’ movements in relation to a revolving earth, the map you get is utterly chaotic. No neatly inscribed words or frozen zodiac, but a jumble of circles, ellipses, crisscrosses, and zigzags—which is what he proposed a cartographic transcription of our lives would truly resemble if we mapped them out.

By sunrise, Enzo and I were exhausted from trying to recreate, and overlay, our own respective maps. There was, as I had always thought, one previous point of intersection after his disappearance. Also on the eve of his birthday. Taken aback that I should know of it, Enzo confirmed that he was indeed in the Star Room of The Stardust Casino in Las Vegas on December 15, 1974, accompanied by a woman in a red dress. When I told him that I was the blindfolded woman onstage in the mind-reading act, it took him a few moments to remember, but when he did, he remembered it all—the sparkles in my hair, my glittery dress, the audience volunteers approaching me. We had come so
close that night, the two of us, but we had had to wait another six years before we found ourselves in the same place again.

For it was now the morning of December 16, 1980, Enzo’s twenty-fifth birthday, fifteen years to the day after he had disappeared from the planetarium. It was also the day that Geza Cassiel, at 3:42
P.M
. Hawaii time, would be launched to the stars. I had planned to be at the NASA Observatory at Waimea for the liftoff, with Estes as my host. Now Enzo would join me.

First we needed to catch a few hours’ sleep, though for me that proved impossible. I was so excited to have Enzo under my roof at last that, on top of my intense excitement over Cassiel’s mission, I found it almost unbearable to close my eyes. Enzo, on the other hand, having suffered a barrage of shocks recently even before he walked up my front path, was able simply to collapse at that moment. How gratifying it was to me that he felt safe enough to do so in my house. Within minutes of sprawling beneath a single blanket on the pullout sofa, he plunged into a deep sleep—a scene I had rarely permitted myself to imagine over the previous fifteen years. Outside of the day Cassiel and I had found one another on Naxos, I can think of few things in my life that gave me as much pleasure and comfort as the sound of Enzo’s steady breathing over the next five hours.

When he woke, I was sitting on the lanai in my bathrobe watching the heavy clouds stream seaward out of the mountains. There had been a heavy shower, and now the sun’s rays were breaking through again, glittering in the dripping leaves of the trees. I had put a pot of coffee on the stove and sliced up two red papayas, and after Enzo had showered and dressed, I fried some eggs and bacon. However overwhelmed I was, I kept trying to imagine how he must be feeling, first to learn that, of all the women in the world, I should be the one with whom his father had fallen in love, and, second, that his father himself, already an enigma—former delinquent, former airman, war hero—was now an astronaut who on that very day would begin a space mission.

So it made perfect sense to me that, after his deep sleep, Enzo retreated inside himself. I might have felt calmer myself that morning if I had managed some sleep. Over breakfast, he expressed his admiration for my house and for the beauty of the island itself, but said little
else. Then, as I reached over for the coffee, I noticed he was staring at my necklace, which had swung free of my robe.

“That key,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“Geza—your father gave it to me.”

“May I see it?” he said.

I took off my necklace and he examined the key, especially the circle of onyx below the key-ring hole. Handing it back to me without a word, he went to his suitcase and brought back a black velvet box with an identical circle inlaid on the lid.

“Do you know what that circle is?” I asked.

“In astronomy it symbolizes the far side of the moon,” he replied. “This box contains an ancient Egyptian amulet depicting the far side only as someone orbiting the moon could have viewed it. It had a twin, depicting the earth itself, which was destroyed in the fire I told you about. For years this box was in the possession of my grandfather, Vitale Cassiel. He gave it to me only last week. Last night when you told me about my father’s mission, I was thinking of it. And now I find that you have the key.”

“Your father asked me to hold it for him while he’s gone. He swallowed it a long time ago—”

“To keep it out of my grandfather’s hands. I know. This key is what he stole when he ran away with my mother. Then he swallowed it. Without it, my grandfather could never open the box.” He passed the box to me. “You open it.”

I thought of Cassiel’s instructions—to make sure I trusted the person with whom I opened it—and without hesitation I inserted the silver key in the lock and turned it. When I lifted the lid, the box began playing music—beautiful high-pitched notes in slow succession. Like the music of the stars recorded by radio telescopes that Estes had once played me at his house. Nestled into a cavity in the black velvet I found the amulet, a highly polished black stone, three inches in diameter. Etched onto one side in white were the craters, seas, and mountains of the moon’s far side, rendered in minute detail, just as Enzo had said they would be. In amazement I held it up to him and he smiled.

As we drove across the island in my jeep, Enzo held that amulet in his closed fist. Behind the wheel, I again experienced the fear that had shot through me the previous night, wondering if he would disappear
on me suddenly—this time not if I touched him, but if I took my eyes off him too long while negotiating the road. During the night, he had asked me a lot of questions about myself, but now he wanted to know more about Cassiel, and his mission, which I had barely sketched out for him after pointing out the projected landing site on a lunar map.

Where I left off, Estes picked up an hour later, greeting us at the door of the NASA Observatory. He ushered us out of the blinding sunlight into the twilit coolness, where Enzo’s cowboy boots clicked sharply on the marble floor. Estes was wearing what for him was formal dress: a long white jacket with the NASA insignia on the pocket and matching white pants. He looked healthier than he had in years; he never got formally sober, but his days of smoking ganja had ended abruptly when he was stricken with pleurisy and a bleeding ulcer one winter, and so he now limited himself to a single glass of rice wine with dinner. He had also taken up transcendental meditation—his guru had a temple by one of the waterfalls above Wailua—with the same devotion that he once brought to getting high.

“It’s very hush-hush,” he said of Cassiel’s mission. “You know, Mala, that you’re only here as a spouse-to-be, not as my friend. Having another close relative of a crewman on hand,” he nodded to Enzo, “is an honor for us. Here on Kauai, I know about this misson, and my assistant Maxwell, and Estelle, the new astronomer who’s joined us from Mauna Kea. Several other people at Mauna Kea have been briefed on the mission, and there’s a communications man on Midway, but that’s it for the Hawaiian Islands—and we’re NASA’s main Pacific outpost. In Australia two guys at our listening post near Perth have been briefed, and a couple of others on Guam. We’ve all been warned that if we talk to anyone about the mission, we’ll get our walking papers.”

“How is the weather in Florida?” I asked.

“It’s a cool night, with light fog. 52°, vertical visibility ten miles. Everything’s go. The last dispatch I got, the astronauts had their final physicals and boarded the ship an hour ago.”

I thought of the doctors in their sterilized jumpsuits listening to Cassiel’s heart and lungs, checking his blood pressure, his pulse, taking his temperature, hooking him up for an electrocardiogram. Then attaching the nodes and sensors that would transmit all his vital signs back from space, into a computer in Houston. I thought of his silk
undersuit clinging to the line of shrapnel scars across his shoulder and to the thicker welts where the sniper’s bullets had come out of his leg. I thought of the soft hair on his arms, and his gray eyes wide and steady their silver lights flickering, behind the blue visor of his helmet, and the adrenaline pumping through him at that moment, and my pendant in one of the zippered pockets of his pressurized suit.

Enzo looked up at the clock as we stepped into the glass-walled console room within the observatory dome. It was 3:02.

“T minus 40,” a voice from Cape Canaveral intoned over the speaker system. Then we heard the flight commander running through a seemingly endless checklist with mission control in Houston. Midway through it, he ticked off several navigational items, and then deferred to Cassiel, whose voice broke in suddenly, giving readings, confirming numbers, crisp, relaxed, concluding his portion of the checklist with, “Navigation is go, Houston.”

Enzo’s eyes locked on mine and I nodded, getting a chill in my stomach, knowing this was the first time he had ever heard his father’s voice.

“December 16th,” Estes said, sipping from a coffee mug, “is one of the prouder days in NASA history. In 1965, it was the day the Pioneer 6 satellite was launched”—and this time Enzo and I didn’t have to exchange glances—“that went on to orbit the moon and Venus before circling some of the outer planets. Someday it will leave the solar system altogether, spinning out among the stars. Someday too there will be men out there, but right now this mission will do just fine,” he smiled. “ ‘A Trip to the Stars.’ ”

“What did you say?” Enzo asked, reacting with the same amazement I had when Cassiel told me the name of the mission in Houston.

“That’s what the astronauts dubbed this mission,” Estes replied. “Now it’s official.”

At that moment a young Hawaiian woman, also wearing a white NASA jacket and a short white skirt, came through the door with a clipboard under her arm. She was very pretty, with long black hair and black eyes and a face at once serious and warm. Estes introduced us.

“This is Estelle,” he said. “She’ll be running the radio telescope here from now on.”

“Listening to the stars,” I said.

“Yes,” she smiled, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Enzo return the smile.

“Today she’s going to track the
Constellation
on the reflector telescope,” Estes said. “We’ll be able to follow the ship visually for a while after it leaves the atmosphere.”

“Even at that speed?” Enzo asked her.

She nodded. “It’s no faster than a comet. And that’s how we set the telescope to follow it—like a comet. We’ll run the telescope’s images into the monitors while we’re filming them.”

She took her place in the reclining seat of the reflector telescope and began setting the instrumentation. Estes excused himself and, putting on a headset, took a seat at a brightly lit panel in the next room. The lights dimmed, and the monitor before him—and the one suspended overhead in the room where Enzo and I remained—came to life. There was the Saturn V on the launchpad in Florida, steam pouring from its vents and fumes rising from beneath the funnel rims of its giant engines. Blue and green lights twinkled around it in the fog blowing in from the ocean. The last of the ground crew had just descended the gantry in a cage elevator, and floodlights from nearby towers had been turned on the rocket.