A Trip to the Stars (24 page)

It took me a half hour to find my father’s grave, one of hundreds of white crosses in an emerald expanse along the flank of a high plateau. At the foot of his cross,
FRANCIS VERELL
was chiseled onto a limestone slab. My old name jumped out at me as I knelt down on one knee. I had switched around two letters when I left New York, so just as Alma had become Mala, Verell had become Revell—Mala Revell—the name by which Zaren Eboli, the U.S. Navy, my shipmates on the
Repose
, and of course Cassiel all knew me. Perhaps because I had not seen or heard my former name for three years, it was all the more startling to have it stare up at me suddenly. This was the one and only time I was ever near my father’s physical self—whatever was left of it. My mother told me she had written him a letter in early July 1944 to inform him that he was going to be a father again, but he never received it. Two days after he was killed, the letter arrived on the troop transport that had brought him to Guam, and then was returned to her around the time she was presented with the Silver Star by a marine colonel in the Federal Building in lower Manhattan.

I had bought a cluster of yellow allamanda flowers at a roadside stall outside the cemetery and, sinking to my knees, placed it on his grave. Then, feeling as if my heart were going to burst, I cried and cried, first for my mother and father, and then for myself, a fatherless child even before my life began, but most of all for Geza Cassiel, who I was sure was lost to me forever. My parents had been lost to me long ago, but it didn’t seem possible that Cassiel, so new to my life—as Loren had been—could have joined them so quickly.

After my arrival in Guam the previous day, I had spent four futile hours at Andersen trying to get information about him. Everywhere I turned, I hit a brick wall. No one would tell me anything more than what I had last heard five months earlier aboard the
Repose:
they could not confirm that a Captain Cassiel had ever been based there, flown as a navigator in a B-52 squadron, been shot down, or disappeared flying solo from Manila to Guam. They would not deny outright that he ever existed, but they refused to state that he was missing in action, as I had first been told, or even that such a person had ever been a member of the U.S. Air Force, which anyway was classified information for someone without a security clearance. That I had been a nurse on a hospital ship where I claimed an officer
by the name of Geza Cassiel was treated was interesting, but without his medical record, beside the point. And so on, round and round, from the file clerk in a sweaty trailer right up to the commandant’s adjutant in a sleek office beneath a photograph of the president, until I left the base exhausted, past the statue of Ferdinand Magellan—bearded, frowning, whitened by bird droppings—which Cassiel had described to me.

For the fact was that
I
was beside the point, as was brought home to me politely but firmly. No longer even an active-duty nurse, with what negligible clout that position carried, I was now a civilian with a medical discharge—and even less clout in the civilian sector: which is to say, none. And perhaps all the clout in the world wouldn’t have helped me. Though I knew Cassiel existed, what the military bureaucracy knew, or didn’t know, or didn’t want anyone else to know, was something else. In Manila, disgusted with the war, Cassiel had already requested reassignment: that much I was sure of. I could only guess how that request had gone over. Had he been treated punitively because of it? The fact that, in the course of my inquiries, his status had devolved from an airman missing in action to a frankly nonexistent person could mean any number of things. He could be a prisoner of war, a spy, a deserter, a casualty in a secret operation, or any combination of those four. And they were just the obvious possibilities.

Obvious to me now, but not so clear when I fell apart completely on the
Repose
and was shipped out to the Navy hospital in Honolulu. Aboard the
Repose
, where bed space was precious and the wounded were being ferried in by choppers around the clock, there was no room—and rightly so—for nurses who broke down. Instead I found myself on the fourth floor of the Admiral Perry Hospital, where my room overlooked one of the brown mountains that ringed the city. There were three other beds in my room, but my sole roommate was another nurse who never spoke to me or anyone else in the sixteen days I was there. Stationed in a small field hospice near Da Nang that had been overrun by the NVA, she was one of only two survivors out of a staff of five and nineteen patients.

My first week, I didn’t speak either, and our mutual silences, night and day, became almost palpable, as if we were suspended underwater. After many months as a nurse, it was strange to find myself a patient suddenly, tended to—even x-rayed—by other nurses. The doctors had
diagnosed me as suffering acute battlefront stress and depression bordering on psychosis. Had I been a soldier, they would have just said I was shell-shocked. When they inquired about the red dot and concentric circles on my palm, I told them the truth, even to detailing the aftereffects of the spider bite on my appetite and sleep patterns, and describing my ongoing hallucinations and acute sensory abilities. They didn’t believe a word of my explanation, and wrote it off to my disturbed mental state. Nor did they believe that the seven stars on my gold bracelet had been forged from pieces of shrapnel removed from an airman’s shoulder. They promptly suggested drug counseling, figuring that, like so many burnt-out cases in the war, I had been heavily into dope. They also prescribed powerful antidepressants, which I didn’t take. Whatever chemical and emotional crosscurrents were running riot in my bloodstream, I was terrified of these drugs, which my instincts told me would only exacerbate my condition. I had learned a few tricks as a nurse, and so was able to palm the pills, or slide them up beside my molars, and then flush them when my nurse had left the room. I rarely got out of bed that first week, yet my chronic insomnia had not lifted: hour after hour, day and night, I lay awake, my mind racing, my body listless, feeling alternately heavy as iron and weightless as silk. Finally, desperate for sleep, I did allow myself the two Nembutal tablets they brought in the evening, but like alcohol and ganja, they had no effect on me.

And all the while—like steel shavings dancing, drawn inward, around a magnetic pole—my thoughts revolved around Cassiel. Still able to scan portions of my memory closely, I went over and over the intense days and nights I had shared with him in Manila—our meals, our lovemaking, our fitful sleep—and before that the more fragmented moments aboard the
Repose
.

One of our bedside conversations in particular kept spinning around in my head. Two days after Christmas, the third time I visited him, he was feverish and in pain; fearing infection, the doctors had upped his dosage of antibiotics and administered morphine. He was very drowsy, and after a minute or so too exhausted to talk. When his eyes closed and stayed closed, I waited quietly, then stood up to leave. But before I could turn around, his hand shot out from the sheets and gripped my wrist. This was the first time he touched me. Though his hand was burning, his grip was strong.

“Hear bells there,” he murmured, barely parting his lips. “Must go. Must go back to her.”

Then his eyes flipped opened, and I don’t know which of us was more startled. “I’m sorry,” he said, letting go of my wrist and turning his head on the pillow. The next day, it was as if it hadn’t happened, and I never brought it up.

What bells he heard, and with whom he associated them, I couldn’t guess. But later, at the Hôtel Alnilam, this brief moment only reinforced my feeling that he had been deeply in love at some point in his not-so-recent past. Lying now in my hospital bed in Honolulu, I couldn’t get this phantom he had referred to out of my head. Who was she, and where, and was that what his disappearance was really about: had Cassiel been one of Sharline’s territorial bachelors, after all, who had gone back to another woman, in a place where bells were ringing?

Before leaving my hospital bed, I tried to come to grips with the fact I might not find him. I knew I couldn’t pursue a yearlong search as I had with Loren, even if I wanted to; the logistics, in Southeast Asia, were simply impossible. And, in fact, I didn’t want to. I knew I couldn’t take the emotional roller coaster—not with the one person I had allowed myself to fall in love with. Part of me just wanted to die in that hospital, and I flirted with the idea of swiping a vial of strychnine from medical stores and injecting it. But I wasn’t going to do that—not when there was a chance that Cassiel was still alive.

No longer allowed to abuse my body as I had while at sea, strung out on adrenaline amid the daily insanity of blood and guts, I recovered my physical strength quickly. A month of enforced bed rest and silence, with all my needs met, had restored me remarkably. But with only six weeks remaining on my tour of duty, the military shrinks were not about to send me back to the
Repose
. They offered me a choice: a mindless job in a stateside facility, or an honorable medical discharge and one-way transportation home (and where was that?) or to my destination of choice, worldwide. I took the latter, with passage, not to common favorites like Paris, Amsterdam, or Río de Janeiro, but to the island of Guam, which Cassiel had referred to as a gigantic aircraft carrier. The shrinks were stunned that I would choose a place still within the war zone to exit the war, cementing their judgment that I was crazily, perhaps dangerously, unfit for active duty.

The moment I was released, I allowed myself a short time to take
a last stab at learning Cassiel’s fate. At Pacific Command Headquarters in Honolulu I made the rounds exactly as I would in Guam—obviously with the same lack of success. It was amazing how many different functionaries in two branches of the armed forces told me exactly nothing in exactly the same way. I boarded my flight out of Hawaii angry and discouraged, and heartbroken as well when I considered that I had been planning to spend my leave there, not in a hospital, but in Cassiel’s arms. Yet even before arriving in Guam eight hours later, I realized deep down that I had already given up my search for Cassiel, that I was in fact traveling to that island as much—or more—to visit my father’s grave as to touch down in the place where Cassiel was stationed when he entered my life. Maybe it was less painful just then to think of the father I had never known than of the lover to whom I had given myself so deeply, only to lose him. I wasn’t going to torture myself with the miraculous hope I would discover Cassiel alive and well on Guam. No, I knew only that I would conclude my formal search for him there and would then find myself feeling more emptied out than ever. But maybe, too, I would find some freedom in that emptiness; though it was not the sort I would have sought, I sensed it was a freedom I had better embrace all the same, for my sanity.

And so, sitting in the Pyramid Bar in Tamuning in mid-afternoon, beneath a bamboo ceiling fan, I nursed a ginger ale and waited for the astronauts to open the hatch of their lunar module. My head ached and the humidity beaded on my brow like perspiration, but still I wasn’t sweating. The crowded bar had fallen silent, and the seconds were ticking off loudly on an old glass clock among the shelved bottles. When the first astronaut emerged on the television screen, and planted the flag, his convex visor reflecting stars, I was intrigued by his spindly movements, the delicate ballet he executed on the lunar surface in his bulky, puffed-up suit.

The patrons of the bar broke into applause, and the bartender announced drinks on the house. This time I ordered a double Scotch, but as usual the alcohol had no effect on me. It tasted bitter in that heat. Everything tasted bitter. The food, the air, the tears with which I had cried myself to sleep the previous night. I was sick of tears and of bitterness. I was eager to move on the next morning. I had decided I would do what I first tried to do when Loren disappeared, which was
to disappear myself. To lose myself. Except this time I would finish the job. Without falling in love or ending up on a psychiatric ward.

Instead of wandering from city to city on the American mainland, I would island-hop in the South Pacific—two days, a few weeks, finally months—on islands and atolls, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles apart. I would disappear into those myriad island chains with one clear criterion for each successive destination: it had to be an island I had never heard of, literally, each name a complete mystery to me. And that covered just about every island for seven thousand miles, from Micronesia to the Marquesas. I traveled by air and sea, flying standby on small commercial airlines, bumming occasional rides on private planes, or paying my way on schooners and small freighters. In addition to my severance pay, I had saved nearly all of my paychecks during my eighteen months in the Navy, and it was this money I would live on now, until it ran out.

I began by flying south seven hundred miles from Guam to Truk Island. Truk was really a single exploded volcanic island that had become forty islets and atolls within an enormous lagoon. While there overnight, I dreamed of the original island reforming itself beneath me, all those fragments rising from the lagoon’s still depths and fusing into the huge circle that Truk once was. It was also American territory, one of the Caroline Islands, and little did I know when I set out the next morning for the Gilbert Islands, which were British, that I would not officially set foot in the United States again for a year.

I landed in Naura, spent two nights in a seaside pension, then went on to Ocean Island. Only three miles wide and divided in two by the equator, by day it was 100° and by night close to 80°, and the trade winds never stopped blowing. The rains were torrential, coming off the sea in black sheets, and in a ramshackle hotel in a town called Ooma I slept straight through for the better part of two weeks, waking on occasion only to eat a plate of sliced breadfruit and papaya, drink voluminous quantities of water, and stagger down the hall to the WC. It felt in those weeks as if I was catching up on some small fraction of my years of lost sleep. As if the aftereffects of the spider bite were finally beginning to ebb. When the rains stopped, I woke up refreshed. I had lost ten pounds, which I never did gain back. For the first time since New Orleans, I had begun to sweat finally; the first few nights it had just been a dampness that rose up across my shoulder
blades, between my breasts, and in the crook of my elbows. Then it poured off me, soaking the sheets, salt coating on my lips and crusting in the corners of my eyes. Buckets of sweat like saltwater. But I was also in pain. My breasts were swollen and the cramps in my uterus made me wince. My kidneys were burning, too. And then, for the first time in over a year, I got my period, all at once, and it was heavy, thick black clots the size of quarters mixed in with the blood. For a day and a night I lay still with two pillows propped under my back, gazing at the same two palms swaying out my window. When the cramps subsided, I drank a pot of hibiscus tea and bathed myself slowly. First I scrubbed my body with coconut soap, then rubbed it with palm oil, which I also poured into my hair, dry and brittle after weeks of equatorial sun, letting it soak in for hours before I washed it out. I didn’t have to pack because I had never unpacked. I ate a meal of broiled bonito and green rice, drank more tea, then walked through the jagged, up-and-down streets of the town and booked passage for the next day to Tarawa, the Gilberts’ capital, where I connected by jet and seaplane for Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, three thousands miles to the southeast.