A Trip to the Stars (8 page)

I had never been on a private plane before. In fact, until that day I had never flown. Buses, cars, and vans were the only vehicles I knew before I rode on the New York subways. My only interstate train trip had been from Pittsburgh to New York when my grandmother came to get me, and to make funeral arrangements for Milo and Luna, after the car crash.

But I knew something about planes, and Samax’s was a twin-engine Learjet that seated eighteen. The fuselage and wings were painted yellow, with red markings. The seats were red leather and the carpeting was yellow, adorned with clusters of darker yellow pomegranates. Pillows and blankets followed the same design. There was a
small galley in the front and a bar over which hung an antique mirror, its perimeter etched with balloonists in flight. The bar was stocked with liquor, but also with a vast assortment of fresh fruit juice. Samax was a fruit enthusiast, and he himself squeezed me a mixture of black grape and plum juice and stuck a wedge of kiwi onto the rim of the glass. From the galley I was served a piece of just-baked loganberry pie topped with thin slices of quince.

I was very impressed with all of this. Only later did I learn how much Samax disliked flying. He especially disliked commercial air travel because it involved putting his life completely in someone else’s hands, which was anathema to him. So, because flying was a necessity in his business, he had conceded himself the luxury of the private plane—to keep control. But strictly in his own fashion. He hired a first-rate maintenance crew who worked solely on his plane, and the pilots were top-flight Air Force veterans, also on exclusive contract, whom he paid double what they would have received elsewhere. And, of course, as with all his possessions and habitations, he had had the plane modified to his own specifications.

I would come to see that though he was abundantly wealthy, and by any standard lived luxuriously, Samax in fact chose his personal indulgences with care and then always followed the same pattern: going all the way—and sometimes over the top—with them. One of the many paradoxes about him was that while he demanded utter control over his physical surroundings and treated his material reality as first and foremost a malleable thing, in his most private affairs and daily habits he maintained a rigidly spartan regime, which he kept to his entire life. At the center of the endless flux he himself initiated, he could remain—or retain the illusion of remaining—essentially unchanged. The inherent tension thus created, he would tell me one day, served him in twofold fashion: it kept those around him whom he had reason to distrust off-balance; and it ensured that he was stimulated at times when he might easily—constitutionally—have lapsed into intellectual or emotional torpor.

The takeoff had knocked the breath out of me, literally. Unlike a 707 or other big plane, the Learjet had taxied fast and then climbed even faster, nearly straight up—or what felt like straight up to me, buckled in tight by Samax, palms glued to the armrests—in a steep arc. As we rose, watching the Manhattan skyline recede in the winter
smog, I thought of Alma somewhere in that enormous maze: I worried about her and hoped that when she got that letter she would understand and not be too worried herself. Then we passed over Brooklyn and I tried to figure out which of the sprawling cemeteries below was the one my grandmother was newly buried in, but seconds later the plane leveled off and there we were above the clouds.

Samax and I sat alone in the front, one seat apart. There were three other passengers, each in a different row far behind us. His niece Ivy sat with her seat turned to one side, her back to everyone. Then there was a beautiful young woman introduced to me as Desirée who had very long black hair and wore a leather jacket with silver studs and matching boots. She sat in the last row, wearing earphones, erect behind a silent portable typewriter at a small oval conference table. And at a window seat on the other aisle there was a man who boarded at the last minute and to whom I was not introduced. After a moment, I recognized him: the man in the white coat and oversized gloves who had been crisscrossing the vacant lot beside the abandoned factory with the metal detector. Now wearing a gray parka, he was a larger man than I’d thought, broad at the shoulders and flat-footed. His face was flat, too, with piercing shiny eyes, deep within corkscrew sockets that were fixed in a permanent squint. He spent most of the flight bent over a pocket calculator, making annotations in a notebook. Occasionally he muttered to himself, but I never heard him exchange a single word with Ivy and Desirée, nor did the two of them speak to each other. To my dismay—for I had felt comfortable with him even in the short time he had been with us—the muscular young man with the crew cut and the blueprint was not onboard. On the way to the airport he told me his name was Calzas and assured me that I would like Las Vegas. And after seeing us off at the terminal, he had sauntered off with a single well-traveled suitcase and a fedora pulled low over his eye.

I think Samax put a seat between us hoping that this space would take the edge off the fear he had seen grip me anew as we left the abandoned factory. He was close to me, but not too close. And he seemed at ease with himself, which helped put me at ease.

Soon after we took off, he gave me a deck of cards and suggested I try my hand at solitaire.

“You know the game?” he said.

“Yes, I’ve played before.” Milo had taught me when I was five, and said it was nearly impossible to win unless you cheated.

“Play with this deck.”

On the backs of the cards, red palm trees were outlined against a yellow sky.

While keeping one eye out the window at the rapidly changing landscapes below—green mountains and industrial belts easing into farmland and then open prairie—I also stole glances at Samax, who, having slipped on a white cashmere cardigan and a pair of glove-leather slippers, was absorbed in studying a map and making notes on a pad in red ink. Every so often he would look up and smile at me. I felt as if he and I were in our own little world in the front of the plane. Under the circumstances, I was surprised how comfortable this began to feel and—as would often be the case in years to come—how little I cared that the people around us seemed so remote. At first I couldn’t help staring back at them with curiosity, Desirée typing, Ivy rigid with her back to us, but by the time we were halfway across the country my mind was elsewhere. On the playing cards, for one thing, which I was examining much more closely after playing six games of solitaire in a row and winning every one of them. Samax had observed me doing so.

“Have any luck?” he said, his pen never slowing on the paper.

“Luck?”

We were over the desert now, and pointing his free hand toward the window, he said, “Did you know that all of this was once the floor of an ocean?”

I nodded, and at the same time craned my neck to see the map before him.

“It’s a map of the desert,” he said. “Not this—another desert. Come, sit next to me.”

I unbuckled my seat belt. Sitting that much closer to him, I studied his profile and inhaled the scent of his cologne, which was dry and pleasantly citric. Above the neat white moustache he had a large, straight nose, broad across the bridge. Closely shaven, his cheeks were remarkably clear and unblemished for a man his age. His brow was deeply but cleanly lined, as if he had spent much time alone, in contemplation. But considering that he lived in the desert, he had few
wrinkles around his eyes. Two simple reasons for this, I would learn, were that he seldom squinted—his eyesight was sharp and he regularly wore dark glasses—and that regardless of his changes of expression, from a smile to a grimace, his pale eyes remained open, level, and slightly inquisitive.

He turned them on me fully now. “Do you like the plane?”

I nodded.

“Like to know the speed at which we’re traveling?”

“About five hundred miles an hour.”

“Oh, so you’re an old hand at this.”

I shook my head. “I never flew on a plane before.”

He looked surprised.

“But I’ve read about them,” I went on.

“What have you read?”

“Oh, a book about the U-2 spy planes. They don’t fly so fast, but they can cruise fourteen miles up. And they weigh much less than other planes. Without the pilot, they’re not even one ton.”

He nodded appreciatively, stroking his chin. “I didn’t know that.”

“And I always liked to read
Aviation
magazine in the school library. Until they stopped getting it.”

“I think we can arrange to get it for you now.”

I shrugged.

“Well,” he said, and I could see he was measuring his words, “I’m glad to be with you the first time you’re flying. How about if we go up to the cockpit in a while and the pilot can show you some things firsthand?”

“Okay.”

“First, though, look out my window.” He tilted his head back so I could gaze past him. “That’s the Painted Desert. Also known as the Colorado Plateau. There’s a point in its northeast corner, which we just passed, called Four Corners, where four states meet: you can walk in a little circle around that point and in about thirty seconds visit Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. I did it once. Most of the Painted Desert is in Arizona. Calzas’s people, the Zuni Indian tribe, have their roots in the New Mexican part. It’s called ‘painted’ because of all the reds and oranges you see. Those ridges are sandstone, formed from massive sand dunes and clay hills that just baked in place 180 million
years ago.” He pulled down the tray in front of my seat and laid the map on it. “Now,” he went on, warming to the subject, “this desert on the map is surprisingly similar to what you see below. It’s a small section of the Sahara that straddles the border between Algeria and Tunisia, called ‘The Hammada of Fiery Stone.’ ”

I studied it. “The Sahara must be much bigger than this desert.”

“The Sahara is the largest desert in the world. Over three million square miles. But did you know that one-fifth of the earth’s surface is desert?”

I shook my head.

“You see, a desert is simply anyplace that receives less than ten inches of rain a year. Of all the continents, only Europe has no deserts. Most of the Sahara is an ‘erg,’ which is a desert of flat sand and sandy dunes. Much rarer is a ‘hammada,’ ” Samax continued, “which in Arabic means a series of plateaus and ridges of bare stone—like the Painted Desert.” He circled a point on the map with his index finger. “Here on the western edge of the hammada, fifty miles from the nearest village, in a small ruined temple dating to the time of Alexander the Great, there is an underground chamber containing a statuette of Meno, son of the god Ammon. The statuette is a foot high. It is carved from black marble and has inlaid eyes of gold with silver pupils. Except for one broken finger on the right hand, it is in perfect condition.” He paused for a long moment, until I looked up at him. He was smiling, but his eyes were gazing out the window, into the bright sunlight. “In two days,” he said, “I shall be holding it in my hand in Las Vegas. Calzas is on his way to obtain it as we speak.”

I had listened to this speech with astonishment, though soon enough such speeches would not seem so out of the ordinary to me. Out of all the questions that popped into my head, I even asked one—one which Samax seemed to approve of.

“How exactly will he get there?”

He further opened the map so that several more panels appeared. “First he’ll land in Madrid,” he said, then ran his finger across the pale green of Spain, over the rich turquoise of the Mediterranean, into the yellow of North Africa, “and make a connecting flight to Algiers. From there he flies south to El Oued, an oil town with a small airport. Then he’ll set out overland by Land Rover with a guide and two bodyguards,
first to Bir Beressof, a village, and then here, to a former oasis east of Bir Lahrache. That is where the erg ends and the hammada begins. Over the hammada he will have to travel on foot for several hours until he reaches the temple. Here.” Samax lifted his finger and placed my own on the spot. In doing so, he ran his thumb over my index finger, the one I had broken that never healed properly. And, peering closely at me, he said aloud what had already crossed my mind. “Yes, it is this same finger that is broken on the statuette of Meno.” Then, slowly, he folded up the map.

By the time we were descending over the Mojave Desert into Las Vegas, dusk was falling. It seemed to me that I had traveled across, not just time zones, but whole worlds since Alma and I walked out of the house in Brooklyn and set out for the planetarium. My head was heavy, and had we remained in the air much longer I would surely have rested it against my seat and fallen into a deep sleep.

Two blue sedans—identical to the one in which I had ridden earlier—awaited us on the apron at the private air terminal. My first gulps of desert air, taken on the tarmac with the wind whipping my hair, surprised me: for all its dryness, it felt as if I were swallowing, not air, but a cool dark liquid, and I was suddenly wide awake again. Samax and I got into the back of the first sedan, Desirée sat in the front with the driver, and we sped off. My first close impression of Desirée was the smell of her leather jacket mingled with a subtle jasmine scent emanating from her long hair, which was so lush and glossy, silver highlights twinkling in the black, that I wanted to lean over the seat and touch it. Instead, she turned around to me.

“Enjoy the flight?” she said pleasantly. She had a low, musical voice.

She smiled at me, and though her eyes, large and brown, were on my face, they seemed to be looking far away—so much so that she could have been smiling, too, at whatever she was seeing there.

Through the car windows, the lights of the airport had no sooner faded behind us than the glow of the city proper, a great golden cloud of light beneath the royal blue sky, appeared through the windshield. From a distance the garish flashing neon of the Strip was like an electric rainbow that had shattered and was sputtering on the ground. But we left the interstate highway for a narrower, less traveled road and gradually veered left, away from the city, into a network of dark, quiet
streets. We passed ranch houses with sleek lawns and ironwood trees, Spanish villas with terra-cotta roofs, Tudor mansions with serpentine driveways, and even a mock-Roman temple flanked by a pair of brightly lit horseshoe swimming pools. Then we entered a long road paved with silvery asphalt on which there were no houses. Eventually it tapered into a single broad driveway through an iron gate that ended in a cul-de-sac. There, at the very edge of the desert, a startlingly large, white building with many lighted windows loomed before us. In a courtyard in front of the building, there was a marble fountain, adorned with a statue, from which a plume of water rose high in the air, glittering under spotlights.