“You’re up bright and early, Master Enzo,” she said cheerily. “Ready for breakfast?”
I shook my head and hurried to the red elevator.
When I stepped out on the tenth floor, Samax was waiting for me. He was wearing a burgundy robe and black slippers. Hands in his pockets, he was studying me closely, but with concern, not anger.
I stopped short. “I—”
“Just get some sleep now,” he said quietly. “We can have lunch together, rather than breakfast.”
When we reached my room and he opened the door, I turned to him.
“Good night, Uncle Junius,” I said.
I had surprised him: his face softened, his white moustache twitched, and closing his eyes, compressing his lips, he put his arms around me and drew me close. I returned the hug, and he said, “Sleep well, Enzo.”
And he and I did have lunch—but not until late the following day. For I slept an entire day and a night and then nearly another whole day, and when I did wake up, lifting my head heavily from the pillow and studying my new surroundings, the first thing I discovered was that Calzas had returned from North Africa.
At the foot of my bed, on a wooden stand, was Samax’s very first gift to me, the black marble statuette of Meno, son of the god Ammon, who was gazing at me with his gold eyes—the silver pupils glittering like stars—through the twilight of the curtained room.
8
The Hôtel Alnilam
Across the room a green ribbon fluttered on the cage of the table fan. A pair of caged macaws squawked, back and forth, in the courtyard below. Through the eucalyptus and colvillea trees, barking dogs ran in and out of puddles, clouds of flies buzzing around their heads. All afternoon the rain had thundered down, drumming the rooftops, spattering in the muddy street. Red rain, like dirt from the sky. On a phonograph in the next room a jazz pianist was improvising around a theme. And down the corridor, one of them tapping his foot, two men were deep in conversation about a woman who had died.
All these sounds flowed to me at once, as one but distinguishable, while I kept my eyes glued to the fan and its ribbon. Spinning ever so slowly, the fan blades sliced the bands of light streaming through the venetian blinds into even longer, golden ribbons which floated up to the ceiling. And hovered there, rippling like seaweed, in the deepening shadows.
A half dozen fans could not have displaced the heat in that room. I soaked it up. And as usual did not sweat. The sheet beneath me was rumpled and damp, but my arms and breasts were as dry as they were hot. My tongue stuck to my palate. My lips were humming, my nipples ached, and the red dot and circles on my palm glowed with heat.
Cassiel, breathing softly beside me, emerging from sleep, forked his fingers into my hair and gently tightened his grip.
“Mala,” he whispered into my ear.
He was the first lover to call me by that name, and despite how I had acquired it, it seemed to belong to me now, during my time with him, in a different way.
“Mala,” he murmured again, “come closer.”
I could not have been closer to him, I wanted to say as he wrapped his arms around me again. I tilted my head back when he put his mouth over mine and slipped his tongue through my lips and slid his leg between my own. His broad shoulders and chest, beaded with sweat, cooled my skin even as my insides felt on fire.
We were in a hotel on the outskirts of Manila. It was the fourth and final day of our leave, January 14, 1969, and we had spent the better part of those days in that bed under the lime-colored sheet making love. Our uniforms hung side by side in the closet behind a curtain of beads. Because Cassiel was an officer, he had been able to requisition a jeep at the naval base at Subic Bay. We had used it to get around Manila and, once, to take a drive up the peninsula to swim at a secluded beach. After being shipboard for four months straight, I had been overwhelmed at first driving out in the open on a fast winding road, awash with scents and colors, flanked by the jungle and the sea.
Cassiel had been discharged from medical care after being checked over at the base hospital the day the Repose put in at Subic Bay for refurbishing. From the dock, our patients were either transferred to the base hospital or to the aiport, where transport planes would ferry them to Honolulu. Then the crew of the Repose, nurses, doctors, sailors, all went on R&R. Altogether Cassiel had been with us for just over two weeks—from Christmas Day until the tenth of January—recovering from his wounds. In that time, helter-skelter, he and I had shared what time we could. Some days I didn’t see him at all. The first week he had a rough stretch, fighting off a secondary infection and fever. His shoulder swelled up and the pain became intolerable. In addition to antibiotics, the doctors administered morphine, which promptly knocked him out, sometimes for twelve hours straight. In the meantime, I wasn’t exactly idle. The battle in which Cassiel had been shot down was just the beginning of a longer operation. Night after night during Christmas week the number of body bags on deck doubled, then tripled, triage overflowed, and our surgeons worked round the clock. We had badly wounded men jammed up and down the corridors on fold-up cots and, at one point, filling a section of the mess hall that was partitioned off. That was the worst time of all. Hearing the men moaning on their side of the partition while you picked over your breakfast or dinner and tried to get down enough food to make sure you could keep going. Even I, who needed so little sleep, was dragging myself around. X-raying five or six dozen men daily, I found that after a while not just their faces but their horrific wounds—jagged, burned, blood-caked—began to blur.
His second week on the Repose, Cassiel rebounded. Many of the most seriously wounded men, along with those who had healed swiftly, were ferried to Saigon. Cassiel fell into the middle group who remained aboard until we reached the Philippines. As we left the battle zone on January 6, my own duties let up a bit, and he and I were able to spend time together, first at his bedside, then in the cubbyhole office off the X-ray room where I’d bring him in his wheelchair, and finally on deck when he was well enough to walk on his own. There was little privacy on that ship even when it wasn’t filled to capacity with patients, and it was amazing we were ever able to be alone for very long. It was on deck one evening just after sunset as we watched the flat green coast of Palawan Island slide by that he kissed me for the first time, pulling me close with one arm—his other still in a sling.
The jeep Cassiel requisitioned had no top, and we discovered the Hôtel Alnilam during a cloudburst when we pulled off the road to take shelter under the colvillea trees. Tucked away in a quiet, dusty, residential district, far from the flash and clatter of downtown Manila, the hotel was owned by an elderly Frenchman. A slight, balding man, he wore a white suit cut in another era and a pair of oversized eyeglasses. We were the only Americans at the hotel and when we checked in he made a point of telling us that he was strongly pro-American. In the fifties he had left the United States with plans to open a hotel in Saigon. But Dien Bien Phu changed everything and he fled to Manila.
“Whereabout in the States did you live?” Cassiel asked him.
“Las Vegas,” he replied. “But I’ll never go back there.”
Cassiel seemed surprised. “I’m from Reno originally,” he said. I had learned this during one of our bedside conversations on the Repose, but Cassiel wouldn’t say much more except to insist, like the Frenchman, that he would never return to Nevada.
“Why won’t you go back?” I asked the Frenchman, glancing at Cassiel out of the corner of my eye.
“It’s bad luck for me,” he replied.
“You lost at the tables?” Cassiel said.
“I never gambled in my life,” the Frenchman said, handing him the key to Room 9. “Fourth floor.”
In the lift, when we were alone, I turned to Cassiel. “Did you lose at the tables?” I asked.
“I lost worse than that, Mala,” he said without flinching. Then he took my hand. “But we agreed, no questions for now. There’ll be time enough later.”
I nodded, s
queezing his hand.
We had agreed that in our four days alone together we would try to remain in the moment, each moment. Not look back, and try not to look too far ahead. On the other side of the world in what had been my previous life, I would never have made such a pact, never have thought to condition a relationship on these terms. (On the Repose, when I told him that I had no family, he replied that he hadn’t seen his few remaining relatives in thirteen years, and we left it at that.) But in a war, with all I had already seen, it was not so difficult to lock myself into the immediate present. In fact, in Vietnam some self-preserving mechanism compelled you to do so. When you knew that everyone was living from hour to hour, acknowledgment of the moment could mean everything. The alternative to survival—vaster than Asia but containable by a body bag—was nothing less than the place where you gave up all your moments.
Our second day on leave, while driving up to a village called Orion near Pampanga Bay, we passed roadside stands with flowers so bright they hurt my eyes. We ate fried shrimp and mashed peppers at a small table under a faded awning. Then we hiked over sand fine and white as snow to an empty cove where the jungle, ending in a line of salt-singed palms, ran nearly to the water. Before leaving the city, Cassiel had stopped at the bazaar and bought a Japanese transistor radio and two pairs of pearldiver’s goggles. Then on our towels in the shadow of the palms we listened to a Filipino rock station that, to celebrate the new year, was playing its top ten hits of 1968 over and over again. We swam underwater through reefs of pink and green coral alongside countless fish, some of which Cassiel identified for me when we returned to shore. Unicornfish, parrotfish, scorpionfish, hawkfish—each of them, it seemed, the incarnation of some other animal. There was even a spiderfish that clung to the underside of the coral.
While swimming, I discovered two things: like the circles on my palm during lovemaking, my pendant grew hot the moment it touched the seawater. In Honolulu during my training I had swum in a pool, but this was the first time the pendant had been immersed in the Pacific, where after all it had come into being in the form of volcanic lava. Suspended beneath my breasts as I swam, it trailed a stream of bubbles, but cooled again the moment I surfaced. The other thing was that I seemed able to hold my breath underwater for an inordinate amount of time. Much longer than I could while on land.
Cassiel had first asked me about the red dot and the circles when we were on the Repose. He had spotted them when he was feverish and I was cooling his throat and temples with alcohol. But I was able to put him off and he forgot about them. Only when he was on his feet again, his arm around me at the deck railing the night before we reached Subic Bay, did he see the dot and circles again, with a start of recognition.
“I thought I had dreamed them,” he murmured.
It was after midnight, and we were breaking the fraternization regulations—though not carnally as yet—kissing there under the black sky and the stars, he in his patient’s robe and I in my white uniform unbuttoned to my breasts, barely able to keep our hands off one another in anticipation of our stay in Manila. Despite his being a hero, we both could have been severely disciplined. I surely would have been busted out of the Navy. Still, I preferred taking that chance to borrowing the cabin for an hour from Sharline and Evelyn. Previously, because of his wounds, Cassiel couldn’t have done much in the cabin, and now that we knew we would be sharing leave, we were excited at the mere thought of a hotel room of our own.
Cassiel had been kissing my wrist when suddenly he held my palm up close to his eyes. “Is this a tattoo?” he whispered.
I pulled my hand away gently.
“If so, I want one too,” he smiled.
“You don’t want one of these,” I said, only half-jokingly.
I told him about working for Zaren Eboli, and about the Ummidia Stellarum. But I did not tell him that I had purposely stuck my hand into its terrarium. Nor did I get into the side effects of the bite.
“And it’s been growing all this time?” he said with some alarm. “Have any of the doctors looked at it?”
“Of course. It’s nothing, and it’ll be gone soon.” This was the only time I lied to him in our time together. Then I kissed him again.
“You know,” he said, “you told me the other day that you were opposed to the war, but you never told me why you enlisted.”
For an instant I wondered if he could possibly have intuited the role the spider bite had played in my decision.
“It seems a strange jump from classical languages,” he went on.
“I wanted to start stripping away all that is false, illusory, and fearful in me,” I said slowly. “Those are not my words, but they’ll do.”
He wasn’t expecting this, and I decided that, no, he hadn’t intuited anything about the spider bite. “Whose words are they?” he asked.
“A man in New Orleans passed them on to me.”
“Well, you picked a hell of a place to do it: everything over here is false or illusory, and everyone is fearful.”
“That’s exactly why it was the right place,” I said calmly. “Anyway, everything here isn’t like that. I met you here.”
“Yeah, courtesy of a SAM missile,” he said, pulling me close.
As we sunned ourselves on the snow-white sand near Orion, black-tailed terns circling the palms, I pushed myself up onto one elbow. “You know the name of our hotel?” I said to him. “It occurred to me that Alnilam is an anagram for Manila, with an extra L.”
“I hadn’t caught that,” he grinned, squinting up at me. “Are anagrams another of your hidden skills—like speaking Latin?”
“So you think it is an anagram?”
“I don’t know.” He sat up and took a swig from our thermos of iced tea. “But I do know that Alnilam is also a star, named after the Arab astronomer who discovered it. It’s the twenty-ninth brightest star in the sky, an epsilon, 900 light-years from earth, and it forms the center of Orion’s belt.”
“Did you know about the stars before you became a navigator?”
He shook his head. “But in navigation you learn about them right away. With just a few stars, you can navigate anywhere.”
“If you had to, you could use this star Alnilam to navigate?”
“So long as I had a sextant and a watch. On a navigational chart for this time of year you’d find Alnilam in the east at exactly zero degrees.”
“That’s really all you need—a sextant and a watch?”
“The Polynesians didn’t even have that,” he said, slipping on his sunglasses as he warmed to the subject, “and they roamed the entire Pacific, between the tiniest islands. Magellan, maybe the greatest navigator of all, worked with little more than a compass. In his official portrait, he’s pictured against the sea, seven stars above his head, with a compass in one hand and a map in the other. He named this ocean the Pacific because it happened to be calm through his entire voyage. Then he was killed here in the Philippines, in a senseless incident, hacked up by a swarm of islanders on Mactan soon after discovering his famous strait at Tierra del Fuego, and soon after discovering Guam. There’s a statue of him near my base.” Cassiel took my pendant between his thumb and forefinger. “If there was a greater navigator, it was your friend Cook here. Both of them circumnavigated the globe, but Cook sailed two hundred fifty years after Magellan, so he had two great advantages: a precision sextant and one of the first chronometers, to determine longitude. Oddly, Cook died the same way as Magellan, in a mix-up, speared and then dismembered in Hawaii, which he was the first European to vist. But that was on his third voyage. See, the purpose of his first voyage was not geographical, but astronomical. The Royal Society sent him to the South Pacific two hundred years ago, in 1768, to observe an eclipse of the sun by Venus. There have only been five transits of Venus in history, never in the twentieth century. By timing the passage of Venus across the solar disk, astronomers—and Cook had two aboard his ship—hoped to calculate the distance of the earth from the sun. Though Cook sailed across
every ocean, his real mission extended far out into the solar system.”
“And what about you? If I gave you a sextant, a watch, and some charts.”
“I’m afraid the Air Force beat you to it.”
“You know what I mean.”
He lay back down on the blanket, and I could see the passing clouds reflected on the lenses of his sunglasses. “Right now I’m only looking to get out of the war,” he said finally, “alive, if possible.”
There was a long silence, punctuated only by the soft breaking of the waves. “Did you set out to become a navigator as soon as you enlisted?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. I went into an officer training program especially for navigation. That was in 1957. There was no war then, except the Cold War. I cut my teeth flying redundant reconnaissance missions around Japan and Scandinavia, watching Russian submarines come and go. After that, I volunteered for polar and desert overflights for purposes of charting remote territory. I liked that. There are places like the Arctic and the Sahara where the topography is fluid and maps and charts need to be updated regularly. Then the war started and every navigator was told he’d do a tour here. It was a question of numbers.” He shook his head. “I never expected to end up in this kind of war. A few years ago I had a chance to work in the space program, which I passed up because I would have been forced to resign my commission. I was not prepared to do that then. Anyway, it was a desk job.” He reached out for me. “Now, come lie beside me again—I’m getting lonely down here listening to the sound of my own voice.”
My boyfriends in Boston had been nothing like Cassiel. Though I’d always gotten a lot of attention from men, I only had a couple of serious boyfriends—and even they were short-lived—before I embraced my studies with a vengeance. One was a bass guitarist with a band that had a following around Boston; the other was a field biologist with whom I drove around New England in a VW van, preparing him macrobiotic meals and rolling myself joints. Each time I told myself that I was in love, but looking back I realized I had only the vaguest notion of what that was supposed to mean. And I say that taking my youth into account. My history, after all, didn’t help me much in matters of the heart. I had never seen my mother—a martyr unwavering in her widowhood—in any kind of intimate relationship with a man. And then there was Luna, who had been drawn to Milo as surely—and hopelessly—as a leaf is drawn to a whirlpool. And of course my grandmother, whose great love was the bottle. My old girlfriends in Brooklyn, the crowd I hung out with, didn’t help much either. Their motto might have been that it was better to be screwing, and screwing up, than to be idle. Anything was better than idleness. And recklessness was best of all. So when I became something of a loner with my books, it was a step up for me. Beneath the surface I had become that much hungrier for love—not the kind of love I’d known, but the kind that would nourish me—even as I stopped looking for it in the usual ways.