I opened my eyes and cried out, and there above me on the ceiling the spiderweb turned bloodred for a moment before it disappeared altogether.
Cassiel jumped up. “Mala, what is it?”
I closed my eyes again, and he grasped my shoulders.
“Mala!”
“I’m all right.”
He was looking into my face, his eyes bloodshot, and I realized with a start that those were memories of his I had been looking at. Among the powerful aftereffects of the Ummidia Stellarum’s bite, I could now add this: the ability to scan not just my own memories in excruciating detail, but also, under the right conditions, those of another person. And what were those conditions? Holding Cassiel’s head, making love … I had not done these things with anyone else after leaving New Orleans. And maybe there were other conditions I couldn’t identify so easily: the Hôtel Alnilam, the presence of the spiderweb, the alignment of the stars over Manila. Or maybe it was just Cassiel and me. Something chemical, as Sharline would say. But these were chemicals with which Sharline had no experience.
“You were dreaming,” Cassiel said.
I didn’t want to tell him that I hadn’t even been asleep.
It was dawn. The birds were singing in the colvillea trees. The early traffic was starting up.
“Lie down,” he said, and then curled his body around mine. I couldn’t get that scene in the cockpit out of my head. Turning my face into the pillow, I kept my eyes open, listening to Cassiel’s breathing deepen, feeling him fall away from me, back into sleep—as if it were a place distinct and remote to both of us, which we seemed destined never to share.
Later that morning, our fourth day in Manila, I still felt shaky and told Cassiel I wanted to go for a walk. Wearing straw hats against the sun, we walked for a couple of hours on the periphery of the city, through overgrown deserted parks, over cement expanses and bridges that seemed to lead nowhere, down streets where the shops were closing for the midday siesta. It must have been 100° in the open spaces. As usual I seemed to soak up the heat, and Cassiel, conditioned and trained for tropical warfare, appeared unfazed by it. Eventually, though, we wandered into a coffee bar, out of the blistering sun. It was a bright tiled place with Formica tables and metal stools under long fluorescent lights.
“I feel like you’re not afraid of anything,” I said suddenly as Cassiel stirred sugar into his thick reddish coffee, for despite the walk I had remain fixated all day on what I had seen—or imagined—in that cockpit.
He was surprised. “What makes you think that?”
I shrugged.
“Is that what you want to think?” he said, looking at me closely.
“Is it true?”
“There are things I’m afraid of.”
“Not dying.”
“That’s one you can’t know until the moment arrives.”
“Were you afraid when your B-52 went down?”
“There wasn’t enough time to feel afraid.”
“So, then, what are you afraid of?”
He ran his fingertips down my arm, then laid his hand over mine. “That when you find what you really want, you know that losing it would be worse than losing your life. That makes me afraid.”
“It makes me afraid, too,” I said. I hesitated, then went on, “Is that what you lost before—someone important to you?”
He nodded.
“And now—” I began, but he put his fingers over my lips and drew me close.
“Now that we’ve said it, we don’t have to be so afraid,” he said softly. “The worst thing about fear is what it does to you when you try to hide it.”
On that last night in Manila neither of us had much appetite. We showered and dressed and went down to the hotel restaurant, where we picked at our food. After the waiter cleared the table, we drank tea and Cassiel talked about Guam, where he would be landing in less than twenty-four hours. After telling me about his routine there, he described the place itself as “snake- and mosquito-infested, with more weapons and explosives per square mile than any other island in the world. It’s more aircraft carrier than island. A nexus of bad karma I’ll be glad to leave.” When he went on to mention the terrible battle that had been fought there in the Second World War, my heart quickened.
“In July, they’re going to have a ceremony,” he said. “It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary.”
“Yes, I know. My father was killed in that battle. Before I was born.”
It was the first and only time I saw Cassiel look astonished.
“He was a marine, and he’s buried on Guam,” I added.
“We pass over that cemetery every time we fly in or out,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head, still digesting this information. “But you’ve never been there.”
“No.”
“If you give me his name, I’ll put some flowers on the grave.”
“I appreciate that, but no,” I said, touching his arm. I didn’t want to think of Cassiel in one of those overly green, manicured fields with the endless rows of identical crosses. Also, my father’s last name was different from mine now, and I didn’t want to have to tell Cassiel why I had changed it, along with my first name.
“I’m glad you’ll be leaving there,” I said.
“The next time you see me, we’ll be on a different sort of island altogether.”
My tour was to end in August, and we had agreed earlier that no matter where he was transferred to, I would meet him there. Before that, if he was still in the Pacific in June when I was next scheduled for R&R, I’d hop a transport plane and we’d rendezvous in Hawaii. We had been willing to plan this far ahead, and no more, though I couldn’t imagine living my life without him anymore.
Because we had to leave early the next morning, we had already packed our bags. I was to drive the jeep back to Subic Bay, and a car was coming to pick up Cassiel and take him to the Air Force base at Luzon. So before going upstairs, we stopped at the desk to settle our bill. The owner himself came out of his office, where he had just finished his own dinner, sipping Pernod and puffing an aromatic Thai cigarette. His napkin still tucked inside his striped vest, he was clutching a wad of papers, one of which he handed to Cassiel.
“Your receipt,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “May I buy you both a drink?”
“No, thanks,” Cassiel said.
“Thank you for the flowers,” I said. We hadn’t spoken to the owner since the day we checked in, but every morning with our coffee, guava, and brioche, he had sent us up a different flower, each more beautiful than the last. That last morning, the thin vase on our coffee tray contained a bright flower with alternating red and yellow petals around an orange center.
“My compliments,” the Frenchman replied, and the lenses of his heavy glasses flashed.
“That one this morning,” Cassiel said, “I saw once before in my life. But I’d swear it’s a desert flower.”
The Frenchman turned back to his office. “And you would be correct. I used to have a garden full of them in Las Vegas.” Closing his office door, he glanced back at us with a small smile and said, “Until we meet again.”
In the cage lift ascending to our floor, Cassiel glanced at the receipt and turned pale.
“Did he toss in some surprises?” I smiled.
He looked up at me, but his eyes were far away.
“What is it, Geza?”
“Nothing,” he shook his head, stuffing the paper into his pants pocket. “You go in,” he said, unlocking the door to our room. “I think I’ll bring up a brandy from the bar. Would you like one?”
“Why don’t you ring down for it?”
“This will be quicker.” He kissed me on both eyelids. “I want to be alone with you as much as possible.”
“Then ring down,” I whispered.
He kissed me again. “I’ll be right back.”
He did return quickly, but even paler and more preoccupied. And he had brought back two double Rémys. He took a long sip from one of them
, and without a word removed his shirt and pants, washed his hands and face, and wrapped a towel around his neck.
“Everything okay?”
He finished the brandy. “Everything is fine.”
He came over to the bed, where I was sitting half undressed, and forked his fingers into my hair. As much as I wanted to ask him why he had needed to go see the old Frenchman, I knew that if he wanted to tell me he already would have. Without my asking.
We often went for long stretches without saying a word. And that was what happened for the next few hours. Cassiel held my head to his chest, stroking my hair. I could hear his strong heartbeat. Then he kissed me, and, unhooking my bra and peeling off my underpants, eased me back on the bed and ran his lips and tongue over my body from my toes to my mouth, and then back between my legs. He was very slow, and thorough, before he moved up and slid inside me, and as I closed my eyes, it was not the spiderweb I saw overhead, but the constellation Scorpio, with Antares, the red star, glowing at its center.
An hour later we made love again, for the last time in that room, after which Cassiel fell asleep, spread-eagled on the sheets. The deep silence of the hotel at two A.M. was broken only by the phonograph in the next room where the same music that had been on all day was still playing: the jazz pianist improvising around a theme. Whoever was in there—and all I had heard was someone with a cough, pacing—was wearing out that record. Cassiel was in exactly the same position, and feeling his breath brush my cheek, I finally fell asleep.
Two hours later I awoke with a terrific thirst. I made my way to the bathroom and in the darkness drank half a liter of bottled water and splashed cold water on my face and throat. Then I tiptoed to the chair over which Cassiel had draped his pants. With two fingers I fished the piece of paper from his pocket and took it into the bathroom. I flicked on the lamps shaped like seashells that flanked the mirror, and in their dull, rose glow unfolded and examined the paper. Of course it was not a receipt at all. Hotel stationery—not the Alnilam, but one whose name had been torn off the top, leaving only some digits of a telephone number—the paper was yellowed with age and centered with a block of cramped script:
And the fifth angel sounded and I saw a star
fall from heaven to earth: and to him
was given the key of the bottomless pit.
I didn’t know what this quotation was, but it made my head spin as I memorized it and returned it to his pants. And those words kept going round in my mind when I stood by the bed gazing down at Cassiel. In the gray shadows his strong features were immobile as a statue’s and his thick hair shone black against the pillow. I had never seen him look so peaceful, and I had a premonition at that moment that I would not see him in June or August—that I would not in fact see him for a long time. He had pulled the sheet over him, and slipping under it, I drifted uneasily into sleep.
It seemed only seconds elapsed before I heard my name repeated softly and opened my eyes to Cassiel standing over me in his crisp tan uniform. Sunlight was slanting into the room through chinks in the blinds.
“My car is downstairs,” he said. “No, don’t get up. We said goodbye last night. I want to think of you like this, until next time.”
He leaned over and I put my arm around his neck and kissed him.
“Geza …”
“I know,” he whispered.
And he was gone. I put on my bathrobe and rolled up the blinds. The sunlight dazed me, and feeling cold suddenly, I hugged myself close. Then I spotted an envelope propped against the mirror on the bureau. On the outside, he had written, I wanted you to have this, beside which he had drawn this symbol:
The envelope contained a gold bracelet with seven stars affixed to it. Black iron, highly polished, the stars were forged in the exact shape of my volcanic pendant from the pieces of shrapnel that had been removed from Cassiel’s shoulder. The bracelet fit my wrist perfectly.
I was running my fingers over those stars three days later, in the communications room of the Repose, as we sailed northward, seventy miles off the coast of Vietnam. Cassiel had promised he would wire me that night. But no wire came. The next night I returned and sent one myself to his base on Guam. While waiting for a reply, I asked our communications officer about the triangle with the C inside it.
“It’s the navigational symbol for a celestial fix,” he told me. “It’s when you get a proper lock on the star you’re navigating by.”
An hour later he read me the reply I received from the command headquarters at Andersen Air Force Base that Captain Geza Cassiel was not on Guam. I sent a follow-up, and then another, but that’s all they would tell me. Finally, two days later, I asked our second officer to inquire officially on my behalf, and he received word that Cassiel, aboard a small plane, had been missing in action since January 18, four days after I had last seen him. When we queried again, the Air Force would not confirm that Cassiel had been en route to Guam, or anywhere else, much less tell us why he was aboard a small plane or what kind of action he could have been involved in. Claiming it was classified information, they weren’t exactly intimidated by inquiries coming from a hospital ship. In the meantime, the war was escalating on all fronts, our influx of casualties was three times what it had been when I had first come on-line, and everyone on the Repose was working even more overtime than usual. Personal inquiries like mine were decidedly low-priority material. As the weeks crawled by, I grew frantic and fired off a dozen letters, to both Air Force and Navy brass, in Manila, Guam, Honolulu, even Washington, and every response was the same: MIA.
In the meantime, I learned the origin of those words on the scrap of paper at the Hôtel Alnilam. I was poring over her Bible when my fundamentalist cabinmate, Evelyn, came in exhausted from her shift one morning. Surprised and pleased to find the Bible in my hands, she asked what I was looking for.
“Why, it’s from Revelation, Chapter Nine,” she said, before I had even finished reciting the lines. “In those verses, when the fifth angel sounds his trumpet, a star falls from heaven to earth, and the angel is given the key to the bottomless pit from which locusts emerge in a cloud of smoke. They take the form of scorpions in order to torment evil men. You see,” she went on, “St. John claimed that each star in the sky is an angel,” and I recalled the similar assertion by the pagan Cicero—which I did not share with her—that each star is a god. One that might fall to earth at any moment. Unbuttoning her uniform and leaning against her bunk, Evelyn darkly declaimed the sixth verse of Revelation, Chapter Nine, to me in her best Alabama drawl, with more passion than I had ever heard her invest in anything: “ ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ Not exactly what’s happening around here, is it,” she added bitterly, for even she had sickened of the war by then.
Unable to eat, unable to sleep, I wandered the ship—the decks, the corridors below—every night for hours when I came off duty. I was more restless than ever. And so it was late one night, passing the seamen’s lounge, in a part of the ship I rarely visited, that I encountered again the incessant phonograph music I had heard through the wall of Room 9 at the Hôtel Alnilam. Since leaving Manila I had heard that music so often in my head that it took me a moment to realize it was also playing outside of me now. I stopped short and returned to the open door of the lounge. Inside it was dark. I saw the orange glow of a burning cigarette between the fingers of a sailor whose face I couldn’t make out. He was hunched over a portable phonograph against the wall. The record he was playing hissed with static: but it was the same jazz pianist, all right, improvising variations on that same theme.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Would you tell me what that music is?”
The sailor’s voice was low, and scratchy too, but even over the music I didn’t have to strain to hear it. “It’s called ‘Dead Man Blues,’ ” he replied.
“Jelly Roll Morton?” I whispered, and to my surprise he heard me.
“That’s right. Come in,
if you like.”
But I was already running down the narrow corridor, my sandals slapping on the tiles as I swallowed the scream that was rising in my throat.
In their final communication with me on February 20, which happened to be my twenty-fourth birthday, the Air Force would no longer confirm that there had even been such a flight as I was inquiring after, in any kind of plane, on January 18, out of Luzon or anywhere else. Information-wise, I was going backward, finally being told that there was no information at all, for, incredibly, they refused to confirm that Captain Geza Cassiel had been a crew member on a B-52, or even that he was stationed on Guam before December 24, though I knew full well that he had been shot down while on a mission out of there. I thought I was going out of my mind. His medical charts and the X rays I had taken were now on file at Subic Bay, and the only tangible proof I had that Cassiel existed was my gold bracelet with the stars forged from the shrapnel that had been removed from his back. Or maybe I had bought the bracelet, too, in Manila, all by myself, along with the red transistor radio and the pearldiver’s goggles, which I had kept. Rubbing the patch of concentric circles on my palm, I thought maybe he had never been in Manila with me. Maybe there was no Cassiel, and those four wonderful days at the Hôtel Alnilam had been a product of my delirium, courtesy of the Ummidia Stellarum’s venom. Or so I told myself, over and over again, to deflect my fears that he was really dead. But it was no consolation.
As in New Orleans I had begun to cry myself to sleep again. Often I took refuge on deck, under the stars, so as not to disturb the other nurses. It was on one such night, gripping the railing in rough seas until my fingers were white, with my father’s Silver Star in my pocket, that I finally began screaming, right into the teeth of the wind. A petty officer found me out there and took me down to the infirmary. One of the doctors gave me a sedative which had no effect. I didn’t understand what he was saying to me, or why he was saying it. All I knew was that, like Loren, Cassiel had disappeared off the face of the earth, and once again there was nothing I could do about it.