A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

“I’d love to, but I have to run.” I peered into the terrarium: there was a lone spider, silver-green, with black markings, which I tried to identify. “A lynx spider? Female?”

  “That’s good!” Eboli exclaimed. “Yes, she’s a particularly beautiful example of the Peucetia viridans. I found her near Yuma, Arizona. The lynx flourishes all across this region, into Mexico.”

  “Lays her eggs on cactus plants, right?”

  “For protection, yes. On the spiny pads of the prickly pear cactus or the leaves of the jatropha plant.” He smiled. “I must have taught you well back then. You know, I hired you for your proficiency in Latin, but you turned out to have the makings of a first-rate arachnologist.” He hesitated. “You didn’t by chance go into that line of work yourself, did you?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll give me a rain check on that tea.” From his vest pocket he took a card. “Will you call me tomorrow?”

  I did, only to find him extremely agitated. Packing his suitcase. Trying to get the airline on the phone. He had to fly at once to Las Vegas, he said. A dear friend of his had died several days earlier, and he had just been informed of it. “He was my patron for many years. Living at his hotel, I did some of the best research I’ve ever done. He was like family to me.” Through the phone I heard him stifle a sob. “I’m sorry, Mala, but I won’t be able to meet you just now.”

  I gave him my address and phone number in Hawaii and told him I hoped we’d cross paths again. I felt so bad for him because I knew that, like me, he had no real family. That is, until Cassiel came back into my life.

  After leaving Zaren Eboli at the museum, I drove in Cassiel’s Corvette to a Vietnamese restaurant he frequented. It was surrounded by shade trees and had a rock garden at its center with a carp pool. Cassiel’s motorcycle was parked in front and he was waiting for me at a corner table. His face lit up when he saw the green dress. He had already ordered appetizers and, unusual for him, he was drinking a champagne cocktail. Also unusual, he seemed a bit nervous. I found out why when he put a small velvet box and a large sealed envelope on the table before me.

  I opened the envelope first: inside it, enfolded in tissue paper, was the pale, leathery leaf from the playing-card bush on which I had inscribed our names, alongside a pair of stars, in Manila in 1969.

  “I told you I’d save it,” he said.

  I nodded, biting my lip. Then I opened the box and found a diamond ring, the diamond cut into a seven-pronged star that matched my pendant. Inside the gold band was inscribed a single symbol, no words: . The symbol for a celestial fix.

  “For when I get back,” he said, slipping the ring onto my finger. “If you’ll still have me.”

  I had never in my life worn a ring. But, as always, I was wearing my pendant and my star bracelet. Raising my left hand, with both the bracelet and the ring, up beside the necklace, I leaned over to him. “I’m covered with stars,” I said, kissing him.

  The morning I left Houston, he had one last thing to give me. After getting up early, we barely said a word around the house. I packed my bags while he made breakfast. It was a sunny day, with a damp wind blowing off the Gulf of Mexico. Though I knew he had settled into a zone of serenity with regard to the flight, Cassiel had slept badly the night before. I had barely slept at all. It was December 4. The next day he would fly to Cape Canaveral. Eleven days later, at 9:42 P.M. EST, he would be launched out of the earth’s atmosphere.

  As the time approached for him to drive me to the airport, the silence in that house had become deafening. Cassiel had gone for a short walk along the lake, and when he returned, it was he who broke the ice, sitting me down on the patio while he poured himself yet another cup of black coffee.

  “There’s something I have to ask you to hold for me, for safekeeping. I don’t want to leave it here when I go to Florida.”

  He handed me a small metal box; no bigger than a matchbox, it slid open like one, revealing a silver key with complex teeth and a circular black stone inlaid below the key-ring hole.

  “The key with the black stone,” I exclaimed.

  He smiled faintly. “That’s right, it’s the one you saw in the X ray in Vietnam.”

  “I can’t believe I’m holding it now,” I said. Studying the stone, I guessed it was onyx.

  “Up until three months ago, nobody could hold it,” he said, patting his abdomen. “I had it in here for twenty-five years. It’s one of a kind, impossible to duplicate. It opens a box that will probably never come into my possession. But until I’m sure of that, I must know that the key is in a safe place. I didn’t want to take it into space with me, either.”

  “Three months ago you had your appendix removed.”

  “Right. After it became inflamed last year, the doctors wanted it out before the mission. I told them to get this key while they were in there. A long time ago I swallowed it to keep the contents of the box out of somebody’s hands. Please, just hold on to it for me, Mala, until I return.” He hesitated. “I doubt it will happen, but if you ever encounter someone with that box, use your judgment as to whether you want to open it with them.”

  “But how will I know? You’re not telling me enough.”

  “You’ll know.” He sat back. “You’ll know if you trust that person. It’s a long story, and right now you have a plane to catch.”

  I knew him well enough to feel sure that, long or short, it must also be a painful story, one he didn’t want to dredge up just then; had he wanted to go into detail, he would have brought up the key at another time, and not on the morning of my departure.

  Even before we left his house, I put the key on the black chain around my neck where my pendant usually hung. At the airport, waiting awkwardly after checking my bags—neither of us good at, or experienced with, long good-byes—I said to him, “You’ve given me wonderful presents. This one is for you.” And I pressed my pendant into his palm. “Take it with you to the stars, Geza.”

  He pulled me close and kissed me, and before we parted a few minutes later it was he who said to me, without a trace of irony, “Have a safe flight.”

  20

  Fire

  The Hotel Canopus burned down in six hours. Despite the swift arrival of the fire department—six trucks and forty firemen—all that remained of the hotel in the end was a shell of charred steel beams along the western wall. Even the basement and subbasement were gutted by fire. Samax’s library, most of his art collection, the rare furniture and the sacred objects brought to the hotel over the years from every continent, all of it was destroyed. While of necessity many of his secondary pieces were in a warehouse he owned in downtown Las Vegas, Samax was not a man who kept his valuable artworks locked away, out of sight. He liked to admire them openly in the course of his daily affairs. Or as he put it to me one day: “Why should it be easier for me to make myself a sandwich or prune one of the trees than to gaze upon a piece of Cretan bronze work or a mosaic from Umbria it took me ten years to find?”

  Why, indeed. Now no one would ever gaze on them again. And to the bewilderment and dismay of the various museums to which he had bequeathed the bulk of his collections, when his fireproof, flood-proof, explosion-proof vault was opened, it was found to contain a handful of roughly drawn maps from the logs of explorers like Columbus, John Davis, and Martin Frobisher, a sheaf of rare terrestrial maps by Mercator and Cassini, one of Riccioli’s first lunar maps, and a first edition of the very first world atlas, the seventy-map Theatrum Orbis compiled by Abraham Ortelius of Antwerp in 1570. Not a single painting, sketch, or piece of sculpture was found in the vault. While the maps and journals were in themselves worth a fortune, and had always been of interest to Samax, it was not clear that he had kept them beyond the reach of disaster because he valued them more highly than his other possessions or because he valued them less and didn’t mind their being less accessible. I tended to the latter explanation, but even I was surprised at the contents of that fire-blackened vault, hauled by crane from t
he mountain of debris, when I was called to witness its inspection.

  Unimportant to the insurance assessors and museum curators, but very painful to me, was the destruction of Samax’s personal effects and many of my own things, from the small chest containing Bel’s few surviving possessions and the trove of books Samax had given me to the other keepsakes of my childhood (the American Flyer trains, my telescope, the woolen cap I had been wearing the day I was brought to Las Vegas) and the looseleaf binders of architectural drawings I had been filling since adolescence. Gone, too, were Labusi’s music collection and mnemonic memorabilia and the papers and artifacts of former guests like Deneb and Zaren Eboli that had been squirreled away in the hotel’s myriad storerooms. Harahel had escaped the fire unscathed, but the archives of Samax’s life he had been assembling so tediously, the decades of files and records, the voluminous correspondence, were reduced to ashes. I must admit, that project had never particularly touched my heart; I suffered more grief at the notion of the raging flames devouring my uncle’s yellow fountain pen with the red ink, the jade-handled razor with which he had taught me to shave, and the velvet slippers and red robe he had been wearing when he died.

  Most grievous of all to me, Samax himself had been consumed by the fire, very much in the fashion of the old Assyrian kings, those astute stargazers he so admired, whose bodies were laid out on the top floor of a palace filled with their possessions that was then burned to the ground. Once I absorbed the initial shock, I knew he would have preferred this method of cremation, lying on the floor of his private library in the hotel’s penthouse, flanked by his faithful bodyguards Alif and Aym, to the conventional one in a Las Vegas funeral parlor. For in the end Alif and Aym had had no intention of carrying Samax’s body out of the hotel; like a king’s retainers who had failed their master, they apparently decided to die beside Samax—the only casualties that day besides Dolores.

  The instructions Samax had left with regard to his funeral, not just in his will, but in separate conversations with Desirée and me, were quite simple: he didn’t want one. He was to be cremated as soon as possible and then his ashes were to be scattered in the quincunx orchard beneath the very first Samax Astrofructus tree he had planted. There was to be no service, no priest, no guests. And definitely no sermons or eulogies: he just wanted one of his favorite fragments of Heraclitus—a single sentence of seventeen words—recited when the ashes were scattered.

  And so it was, as the fire engulfed the topmost reaches of the Hotel Canopus and I realized that Samax’s body would never be recovered, that I recited Fragment 67 aloud while standing beside Hadar in the driveway. My throat was aching from the smoke and heat washing over us, and firemen were rushing past us with loud cries and clattering equipment, jets of water from their hoses vaporizing as they arced into the flames. Still, I heard at that instant why these words must have resonated so powerfully for a man like Samax, who obviously hoped that his voyaging days would not end just because this particular leg of the voyage, in this short life, had ended: In death men will come on things they do not expect, things utterly unknown to the living.

  Hadar looked long and hard at me as I got the words out, then surprised me with a response, another fragment of Heraclitus’s, in fact. I knew all 124 of them, which Samax had had me memorize as a boy, advising me that if you were to read only one philosopher in your life, it should be Heraclitus.

  Fire catches up with everything in time, Hadar intoned, in that voice of his that sounded like it was coming from underwater.

  But that was to be the end of our philosophical dialogue. The hotel had become Samax’s funeral pyre and this was the hour of his immolation, and as I gazed to the sky, Hadar turned his face to the ground. A moment later, what appeared to be a circular rainbow rose up from the column of fire the hotel had become. At first, it looked like a large halo, or a ring of Saturn. But the colors rapidly differentiated and solidified, and for a few seconds I saw an army of winged forms with shining human faces ascend in spinning concentric circles and disappear into the bright light.

  Of course, I thought: Francesco Gozzoli’s angels, from the ceiling mural, would find another home, just as they had when the Nazis bombed their church on that Greek island. And now, I was sure, my uncle’s soul was among them.

  If Hadar saw them, he didn’t let on, and the next metamorphosis I witnessed would be his own, occurring so quickly and unexpectedly that afterward I doubted my own eyes.

  Hadar had barely escaped the fire, his hair scorched, his face blackened, long after everyone else was out of the hotel. His hundreds of hard-found meteorites, which had survived incineration while plunging into the earth’s atmosphere, reached temperatures in his windowless laboratory that caused them to melt and fuse with one another; later, when they hardened again, they had become as one—not like the lost planet Hadar had imagined, of course, but a formless and grotesque mass of pure iron.

  “I failed him, too,” he said suddenly, but with the deepest resignation. For the first and only time in fifteen years, I saw his corkscrew eyes wide open; reflecting the towering flames, those eyes were even blacker and fiercer than I had imagined them to be when I was a boy. He was the last of the old guests, on Samax’s payroll to the very end, but still I was taken aback by his utter despair; it felt as if, given the choice, he would have preferred the route taken by Alif and Aym.

  The next words he spoke—in a different voice, tinged with bitterness now—floored me, and I looked around to see if it was really him speaking.

  “When I took my body from that prison, I found I could never reinhabit it again. My spirit roved—in and out of men near death, and criminals, and lost wanderers—until it settled in this body and found new purpose. I’d discover a wholeness, not in men’s souls, but in reconstructing the lost planet from those wanderers of space we call meteors. And I’d do it here, under Samax’s roof.” He drew a long breath. “But no more.”

  Then he edged away from me, onto the lawn between the hotel and the greenhouse. He moved slowly, yet put a great distance between us in seconds. With his back to me, and his arms folded, he did not respond when I called after him. For a moment he was backdropped by the intensity of the fire, and I lost sight of him. When he reappeared, it looked as if he were stepping out of a shadow, though he was in an open, sunlit space. But he was no longer Hadar, wearing the baggy white jumpsuit and steel-toed boots. Instead I saw before me a much younger man, lithe and wiry, with a bronze torso and long black hair knotted in back with a piece of rawhide. He wore a vest and khaki pants and moccasins and had a rifle on a leather strap slung over his back. A rifle with a walnut stock and an extra-long barrel—World War One vintage, I thought.

  And suddenly I knew who I was looking at: Rochel, the Zuni sharpshooter, the hero and deserter who became a Sufi in the Levant, Samax’s cellmate who escaped the federal penitentiary. My uncle had intuited correctly that Rochel might have been residing at the hotel in a new incarnation, with a new calling, while watching over him all those years—and over me, too, on occasion. With Samax gone, Rochel had reverted to his old form in the seconds before he himself took flight.

  Hadar was Rochel, I thought in amazement. And it struck me that he was the guest, of course, who most resembled Rochel as Samax had described him: taciturn, self-contained, a loner. The same Rochel who in 1926 had given Samax the ancient blue amulet with the earth rendered as it would look from outer space was also Hadar—the man consumed by celestial phenomena and phantom planets.

  He disappeared now, stepping back into that shadow in the bright light. Just as he must have disappeared from the locked cell in Ironwater, Colorado, I thought, running over, looking in vain for some trace of him.

  Instead, I saw Desirée racing across the lawn with long strides, still in her robe and sandals, her black hair streaming behind her and Sirius at her heels, loping as fast as he could. Several firemen, despite the ferocity of the blaze, stopped to stare at her. More frantic than I had ever seen her, she ran dir
ectly to the greenhouse. Once inside it, Sirius started barking so loudly that the echo carried above the commotion on the lawn.

  The other outbuildings—pool house, toolshed, garage, even the cottage across the orchard where Sofiel the gardener lived—had all been set afire by flying embers and were burning down with the hotel. The fountain in the driveway had been badly damaged, too, the statue of the beautiful woman designed by Spica shattered when the firemen, finding inadequate water pressure in nearby hydrants, tapped into the pipes below. Though closer to the hotel than the other buildings, the greenhouse remained unscathed. Even after the fire was finally extinguished, none of its thousands of windowpanes had been broken.

  Running in after Desirée, I found her on a stepladder, throwing open some old cabinets where Samax used to keep potting soil and peat moss. “You were right,” I said breathlessly. “Forcas isn’t Rochel; it was Hadar.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at me blankly, her mind elsewhere.

  To my surprise, I saw that the potting soil and peat moss had been replaced with material completely unrelated to gardening: many thousands of pages of yellow typewriter paper in crisp yellow folders.

  “So you moved them here?” I said.

  “Only because I began writing here a couple of months ago. First for a change of pace. Then I got to like it.” She began lifting the folders from their shelves. “A bit of luck, I suppose.”

  “Can I help?”

  She paused and looked hard at me, turning something over in her head. “Maybe I’ll show you some of this later,” she said finally.

  “I’d like that.”

  She handed me down some folders. “I hope you won’t be disappointed.”

  Under the dark canopy of Samax’s trees I began carrying them, an armful at a time, to the far side of the greenhouse, where Desirée thought the stone walls that set off the potting area would offer extra protection. I left the manila envelope containing the Hopkins brothers’ report in that area as well, on a shelf beside the zinc sink. I had been clutching that envelope so long—since running up to the penthouse from my room—that I had forgotten it was in my hand. It was the only thing besides the clothes on my back that I took from the hotel when the fire alarms went off, and now it would have to wait.