A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  If his eyes had evaded me when we skirted this subject the previous year, now, pained as they were, they remained fixed on mine. It was I who had trouble not looking away; whatever dark and soiled image I had at that age of a prison cell, one thing it could not accommodate in my mind was Samax as its inmate. With his dignified bearing, it was impossible for me to see him in the cartoonish striped shirt and baggy pants of a convict’s garb.

  “I served time for exactly one year,” he went on, visibly less tense now that he’d gotten out the bare fact, “for something I did not do. This was in 1926, two years before I made my first fortune on that land in New York I told you about. My cellmate was the one who taught me the memory technique—and a good many other things, as well. Had I not gone to prison and met him, I would not be sitting here today. As often happens, the worst thing that ever happened to me was at the same time the luckiest thing. Fortunately, I realized this soon enough to make the most of it.” He picked up his cigar and tapped off a neat cylindrical ash. “My cellmate’s name was Rochel, and he was the most extraordinary man I ever knew.” He paused again. “Would you like some juice, Enzo, or soda?”

  Listening raptly, I shook my head.

  “I was twenty-five years old,” Samax went on, “and he was only five years older, but it seemed like twenty. He had been sentenced to six years, of which he had served three when I arrived. His crime was desertion from the army during the First World War. As you know, I served in that war, and in the Argonne forest witnessed such carnage as I hope never to see again. Rochel was half Zuni, half mixed blood—mostly French and Mexican. And he was a crack shot with a rifle. In 1916, even before America entered the war he was a sniper with a small expeditionary force, attached to the British command, behind the German lines in Arabia. Having grown up in Arizona, near the Four Corners, he was well adapted to the desert. He was the only non-British soldier in his platoon, a dark-skinned man, and the other soldiers treated him as they would an Indian—the other sort of Indian—in their own army. He kept to himself, slept alone, and was often sent far afield on solo missions. He was good at his work, and by the time America did enter the war, he’d had a bellyful of it. By 1918, the Germans were on the run, but Rochel was informed that he was too ‘valuable’ to be sent home and would be transferred to the American forces in Salonica. Instead, he buried his uniform and rifle and went AWOL, across the desert, into Egypt. ‘For one man, I had killed more than my share of other men,’ he told me. ‘Others fought for twelve months. I was a sniper for two and a half years. I was sick of killing.’ This was his defense when he returned to the U.S. two years later and, to his surprise, was arrested at customs in New York Harbor. But it didn’t wash. Despite his war record—even the British had decorated him—the judge threw the book at him. Guys who had deserted without firing a shot were routinely given two years, but Rochel wasn’t a white man so he got the maximum.

  “Certainly after two years in southern Egypt he looked and felt more Zuni than when he had left the States. In the mountains beside the Red Sea he fell in with a group of Sufis, the mystical Islamic sect, and was amazed at the similarities between some Sufi and Zuni practices. Fasting, for example, to sharpen inner vision. Desert meditation which may evolve into active hallucination. Moral precepts delivered through fables and parables. But, according to Rochel, among the Sufis all this was accompanied by ferocious discipline, of which the Zunis had been sapped by the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries. Centuries of occupation had relegated the intricate, cyclical Zuni religious myths to the shadows. So Rochel sailed across the sea, infused with Sufism, ready to return to his people with a vengeance, and instead he went straight to jail.

  “And that’s where I come in. Rochel had had other cellmates—bank robbers, a swindler, and a child murderer, but they had all been guilty, he told me. ‘You are an innocent man,’ he asserted, moments after I was locked in with him and before I had said a word. Thus I became his first and only student in prison, the recipient of some of the fervor he had been holding in all that time. And I was an innocent man. My supposed crime was tax evasion, for which I had been framed by none other than my brother Nilus, whom you’ve heard about before. For all his ruthlessness, Nilus was a weak man, easily swayed. And he was swayed on this occasion—the absolute nadir of our relationship—by his partner, who was also his lawyer, a man named Vitale Cassiel.”

  Here Samax paused to relight his cigar and pour himself some pomegranate juice. It was nearly midnight. Through the large windows, the stars were glittering over the desert. Sirius was still sleeping. But I was wide awake, and felt as if I had scarcely drawn a breath for the last hour.

  “That is another story, whose particulars I will leave for another time,” Samax continued. “Suffice to say, Nilus needed to get me out of the way, and he left it to his partner to incriminate me, with an airtight set of false documents, in a scam—a complete fabrication—of which I had no knowledge. I had little money for a decent lawyer myself, and when they manuevered me before an unsympathetic—in fact, bribed—judge, I was lucky I only got one year. But that year changed my life. Here is the first Sufi proverb that Rochel passed on to me. ‘If a gem falls into mud, it is still valuable. If dust ascends to heaven, it remains valueless.’ That helped when I thought about my brother.”

  I repeated the proverb in my head, and seeing my lips move, Samax smiled.

  “Rochel taught me various spiritual exercises,” he went on. “How to breathe. How to hone my five senses and clear my mind of debris. How to sleep properly, in what he called ‘the lion posture,’ lying on my right side with my head resting on the palm of my right hand. All of this enabled me to travel deeper into my dreams, exploring portions of my past life that had been confined to darkness. Rochel said that he himself had found doors in his dreams through which he could leave that prison in all but body and roam the earth. Less important to him—in fact, almost as an amusement—he shared with me several of the Sufis’ memory techniques, for they were expected to know by heart vast sets of verses and meditation prayers. The placement method I used at cards was a rudimentary version of the one the Sufi astronomers used to memorize, from night to night, the positions of the stars and planets in order to record their movements. An astronomer would concentrate on one portion of the sky at a time, but even that is an incredibly tedious task, performed today by a multitude of cameras. The Sufis invented chess, and Rochel taught me how to play a game between us in our two minds, without a board or pieces. I tried it once with Labusi, but he still won handily.

  “Needless to say, Enzo, all of this was like a bolt of lightning to me, from where I came from. It turned my entire life inside out. I was someone who really would leave prison a changed man. For, on top of all this, one day Rochel told me that he was close to understanding how to take his body along the next time his mind wandered beyond the prison walls. I had only a month left on my sentence, but he had two years, and he was no longer willing to let them slip away in that cell. ‘Until now,’ he said, ‘I have been here and not been here at the same time. Now I am too much here. I have given them enough, and will give no more.’ That night I fell asleep watching him across the cell, his long black hair tied back with a piece of rawhide, his eye catching the moon’s rays over the mountains as he gazed through our small barred window. Just before my eyes closed for the last time, he turned to me—which he never did—and nodded with a small smile. The next morning I realized he had been saying good-bye. His bunk had not been slept in and there was no trace of him anywhere. The guards searched the prison from top to bottom. His few possessions—toothbrush, comb, meditation beads, a photograph of Acoma, the sky-city—were all gone.”

  “But where did he go?” I asked, breaking my long silence.

  Samax shook his head. “I didn’t know then, and I can only guess now.” He glanced at his watch. “But it’s late, and you’ve heard enough for one night. Before you go to bed, let me show you something.” He slid open the drawer of a lacquered bl
ue end table and took out a small box. “The warden was angry. No one had ever escaped from Ironwater. Search parties fanned out for many miles, and all day they questioned me. But they found nothing, and I knew nothing. I only had to lie once.”

  “About what?”

  He opened the box and handed me a piece of polished blue stone—a beautiful blue, deep but luminous. “I said Rochel had left nothing behind,” Samax said. “And while it was true that he left none of his known effects, he did leave this. Now, with all I own, it is by far my most cherished possession.”

  It was an amulet, flat, three inches in diameter, with a simple but accurate depiction of the earth etched on its surface, all the continents and oceans rendered exactly to scale. The other side was inlaid with three lines of tiny emeralds, a crisscross with a vertical line through it.

  “As you see,” Samax said, “the continents appear as they would in a modern atlas, drawn from satellite photographs. They were etched on that amulet as they would look from space.”

  I looked up at him.

  “Except that amulet predates even the earliest navigational maps made by marine explorers,” he went on. “I’ve had it tested and studied—Hadar’s analyzed it spectroscopically—and there’s no doubt about that. Whoever etched on that stone, around the time the Egyptians erected the pyramids, had a near perfect picture of the earth’s geography, which would be unavailable for centuries.”

  “You mean, they flew?”

  “I didn’t say that. Dr. Deneb can offer you an enticing theory about ancient astronauts, but I have no answers. The map aside, the symbol formed by the emeralds on the other side is a navigational sign, for a fixed star, thought to be unknown before 1700.” He sighed. “Whatever enabled Rochel to disappear from Ironwater remains beyond my comprehension. The same is true of this amulet.”

  “How did he get it?”

  “I don’t know. I found it under my pillow that morning before they searched the cell. But clearly it came into his hands in the Middle East. In the course of my travels there, I have heard from different sources that there is a similar amulet, of Egyptian origin, which depicts the far side of the moon as only someone orbiting the moon could have viewed it. Calzas and I have searched hard for this other amulet, so far without success. Separately, each amulet is worth a fortune; together they are priceless. But that’s not the reason I want to have them both.” He sat back slowly. “Part of it is that they comprise a great mystery—maybe one of the greatest of all. But it is also that the amulet Rochel left me marks the point at which my true life began.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  Samax shook his head. “No. At least, not that I know of. He was a master of disguise—altering his features through sheer muscle control—and sometimes I half expect him to walk into the hotel and reveal himself to me.” He grinned. “Or else I’ll learn that he has been living here, under my very nose, as a guest. I do believe he sends me a sign or message every so often.” He stood up. “Finally you look sleepy. We can continue this some other time. Few people know this part of the story. The rest—that your uncle Junius was a jailbird—I didn’t want you to find out without knowing the facts.”

  I knew now why Samax had founded Asterion House and hired so many ex-convicts around the hotel: he was one himself. And the halfway house, I also realized, was a natural outgrowth of my uncle’s preoccupation with lost people and lost things, for both the transient residents and the soup kitchen regulars were, more often than not, lost souls, or at the very least, souls who had literally—not intellectually—lost their way.

  “Did your brother or his lawyer ever get caught for what they did to you?” I asked Samax as we walked down the hall to my room, preceded by Sirius.

  “My brother died unremorseful. And Vitale Cassiel is still kicking, still a dangerous man. He lives up in Reno, though he has a place here in Las Vegas, too. He and I have tangled again over the years, from a distance, but, no, he never answered for what he did. Not yet.”

  Six months later, I was sitting in the desert on a flat stone beside a saguaro cactus gazing at the full moon in the night sky. The stars around the moon were washed out by its aureole—an electric orange—and the silver rays beyond it. From the mountains, a cool wind was blowing. I was wearing my Astros cap and had the collar of my denim jacket turned up. Sirius was digging in the sand at the tip of the cactus’s long shadow. In a cluster of boulders behind me I heard a rock rattler stalking a lizard. But I never took my eyes off the moon.

  It was 8:47 P.M. on July 20. Six and a half hours earlier the first men had landed on the moon. I had left Samax, Labusi, Deneb, and nearly everyone else at the hotel in the lounge, clustered before the television—the one and only time I recalled seeing such a gathering. But after watching the lunar module touch down, I was restless and wanted to be alone. I felt a powerful urge to go into the desert. I told Samax I preferred to be out there when the astronauts took their first steps onto the lunar surface.

  He searched my face, and nodded. “Go, then. You have your watch? Armstrong will be leaving the module at 8:56.”

  The luminous green numerals and the hands of my watch glowed on my wrist in the darkness. It was 8:50. Suddenly Sirius ran back to me barking. I tried to get him to sit, but he circled me twice, nudging my shoulder with his muzzle and tugging at my cuff.

  I got up and he led me to a small patch of bur sage and silver pebbles to its right. He placed his ear to the sand beside this patch, looked me in the eye, then flopped down into a sphinx position and planted his nose a few inches from the bur sage. I glanced at my watch—8:53—then at the moon.

  “This had better be good,” I said to Sirius, knowing that a jackrabbit or ground squirrel would not arouse him to this extent.

  Then I saw two of the silver pebbles roll away from the sage. Sirius’s tail twitched and his ears stiffened. Dropping to my knees, I discovered a circular lid of hardened earth, maybe two inches across, camouflaged by sage leaves. I pried it with a stone, and had just lifted the lid when Sirius, with a yelp, shoved his paw into the narrow burrow beneath it. With a single scoop, he tossed up a writhing creature—a large black spider with a speckled abdomen—I noted with astonishment as it landed and stuck on my chest. Grabbing it, I felt a fluttering and then a sharp jab in my palm. I threw the spider to the sand, and he scurried off into the boulders with Sirius barking in pursuit. Rubbing my palm against my side, I inspected the spider’s burrow. Digging his hole beside it, Sirius had obviously heard the insect moving within. The camouflaged lid I had lifted was like a miniature trapdoor, hinged with gray webbing, which also lined the entire burrow like a silk sock.

  Soon the stinging I felt in my palm had grown into a hot pulsing that moved into my wrist and up my arm. Breaking into a sweat, I inspected my palm more closely, but saw only the tiniest nick—the skin barely broken—below my thumb. I sucked hard at it, as Calzas had taught me to do, hoping I could draw out the venom, and indeed I tasted the faintest metallic trace on the tip of my tongue. At my elbow, the pulsing enlarged and accelerated, until hot and cold rushes flew up into my head. My tongue was dry, and for an instant my fingers and toes went numb, as did my lips. Then, just as quickly, all these sensations receded. When Sirius lost interest in the spider and returned to me, licking my hand, I felt unsteady on my feet, but strangely calm.

  I looked at my watch. It was 8:55. I sat down in the sand again with Sirius beside me. Throwing my arm around him, I gazed upward, and he followed suit, tilting his head back, his ears twitching. The moon was an enormous radiant circle—as if a hole had been cut in the black fabric of the sky. At the exact moment Neil Armstrong planted his boot in the silvery lunar dust, that circle brightened to the point of incandescence, until I squeezed my eyes shut and Sirius let out a sustained howl. And then my head swam with stars, flowing in at me from above.

  I will never forget what happened next as long as I live. All around us the velvety stillness deepened. The wind stopped blowing. My own though
ts swirled to a standstill, and I experienced a sense of clarity so acute it was as if I was seeing, not with my eyes, but something in me far more powerful. From the vast white sea of the desert, I observed the equally vast dust seas of the moon. The moon suddenly looked so large that I was stunned to discover I could make out its features even more clearly than if I had been studying them through the telescope in my room. I scanned the craters, whose positions I had memorized in my star atlas. I knew all their names, Vasco da Gama and Balboa, Pliny, Hipparchus, and Strabo. I scanned their outlines, studying whether they were steep or shallow, filled with dust or scattered with rubble. Finally, I focused on the Sea of Tranquility, at whose southern shore, beside their landing module, I knew the two astronauts must be walking around, crisscrossing their own tracks in the lunar dust, making gravity-defying leaps, and planting the wired American flag—just as I would see them do on television the next day. But at that moment sitting with Sirius in the Mojave Desert, closing my eyes, I felt I could almost see the tinted visors of the astronauts’ helmets reflecting the blue sphere of the earth suspended in space, lucent in the sun’s rays.

  Two hours passed—seemingly like a few seconds—before Sirius and I returned to the hotel. The television had been turned off, but Samax was holding court in the lounge, where champagne and fruit drinks had been served with hors d’oeuvres. A lively discussion was under way about the ramifications of the moon landing. Dr. Deneb was certain that the geological samples the astronauts were bringing back would answer once and for all the two-moons-in-the-sky theory of Atlantis’s destruction, while Hadar (who scoffed at the theory) was about as excited as I ever saw him, declaring the moon a gigantic treasure trove for meteorite studies, with thousands of perfectly preserved samples strewn everywhere.