A Trip to the Stars (25 page)

Rarotonga was another perfectly circular island—this time intact. A road, constructed of pink coral, followed the entire shoreline—a circle within a circle at the center of which a forest ringed four mountain peaks, including the volcano that had created the island. This was the Circle Road, and a sign said it was one thousand years old. In certain spots, the coral was so polished by use I could see my reflection in it. I explored Rarotonga for a week, and liked it very much. There was a stillness to the island, at its lush center, that drew me in powerfully. I decided that after I saw the other major islands in the Cook chain, I would stay put on Rarotonga for a while.

So over the next six months I traveled by frigates and seaplanes to Manihiki and Penrhyn, to Danger Island, Mangaia, and Aitutaki. I spent a week on Aitutaki’s tiny satellite island, Tekopua, which according to legend left its moorings once a year and revolved around Aitutaki, as the moon revolves around the earth. That didn’t happen while I was there, but for the first time since leaving Honolulu I had begun to feel free of my own moorings. It was a tonic to be surrounded by—and one with—the vast Pacific. Each time a new island came up on the horizon my heart leapt. I lived in a small hotel on
Penrhyn, rented a leaky room over a store on Manihiki, and by the time I arrived on Danger Island I had learned the ways of the islands enough to take the cheapest and most practical accommodation: a cabin or shack on the beach, with running water but usually only a kerosene lamp and stove rather than electricity. When I returned to Rarotonga, settling near Matavera in the northeast corner, I found the nicest cabin of all: peeling blue clapboard with a slanted roof and a small iron stove, it was my home for seven months.

Over the various tiny airports and post offices I encountered in the Cook Islands the flag of New Zealand fluttered; a small Union Jack in the upper left, it was a dark blue flag centered by the four stars that make up the Southern Cross. That same Southern Cross—the constellation Crux—I could see from my beach. The ocean moisture made it look like a flaming cross rising out of the waves. Only the tip of the Cross appears in Hawaii, but in the Cook Islands, well below the equator, it is fully visible. Sixteenth-century sailors dropped to their knees crossing themselves when they spotted it. From Manilius’s
Astronomica
, which along with my other books of ancient astronomy I had begun reading again while traveling these islands, I knew that the only star in the southern sky brighter than the ones in the Cross is Canopus.

When I stargazed, as I did again every night, it was in a sky 44° due south of Hawaii, entirely new to my eyes. And filled with new stars! Gazing at constellations I had never seen before, sometimes never even heard of, was very exciting, and during my first week back on Rarotonga I rarely got to sleep until dawn. Even the animals those constellations represented, none of them in the Zodiac because they were not visible to the Babylonians, were unusual: the Peacock, the Toucan, the Flying Fish, the Chameleon. There was also Scorpio, which for the first time I saw in its entirety. In the vast curvature of those skies, with Antares pulsing at its heart, it looked enormous. On clear nights I could also see the Clouds of Magellan, the twin galaxies discovered by Magellan just weeks after he discovered his strait, on that final voyage which Cassiel had told me about.

In fact, whether exploring the night sky, the sea, or the island itself, I could never get far from the influence of those two navigators whom Cassiel deemed the greatest of all time. Magellan had been the first
European to map those skies and Captain Cook, in 1777 on his third voyage, the first to chart those waters and discover the islands that would eventually be named after him. And those he named himself, purely on the basis of his personal experience: Christmas Island because he spent Christmas Day there; and, for obvious reasons, Danger Island, the Friendly Islands, and Savage Island. One of the few books available in the musty, ramshackle general store in Matavera was a secondhand edition of Cook’s
Journals
, which I began reading by kerosene lamp once I could tear myself away from the sky at night. I learned that the island natives thought that Cook and his crew, because of their white skin, colorful clothing, and incomprehensible weapons, were gods, the sons of Tetumu, the creator of the universe.

Reading one night about Cook’s third voyage, I made an amazing discovery of my own. By process of elimination, I realized with a thrill that the volcanic eruption in 1753 which produced my star-shaped pendant had occurred on Rarotonga. Because Cook never actually landed on Rarotonga twenty-four years later, it must have been on Mangaia, to the southeast—where he did anchor—that the member of his crew who later sold the pendant in England originally bartered for it with bits of iron. So I had brought my pendant back to its place of origin. And still, whenever I swam in the sea, the pendant trailed bubbles of steam, as if it were red-hot as the day it sprayed off a jet of lava.

At the general store I also bought a pocket phrase book of Rarotongan and a glossary of local reef fish. In the latter I studied the pictures of countless species—some familiar to me from Manila Bay—including twenty different varieties of angelfish alone. The phrase book, meanwhile, gathered a lot of dust: though the islanders, from the Anglos to the indigenous people, were friendly, and alternated between English, pidgin English, and Rarotongan—a Polynesian dialect—I hardly spoke to anyone in any language. In fact, I had few conversations except around the acquisition of my daily necessities. At the open-air market and the store I exchanged niceties about the weather, the quality of a piece of fish, the ripeness of a mango; when asked about myself, I replied only with the obvious: that I was an American, traveling from Honolulu, formerly a nurse. On one such occasion, the minister of the Church of the Angel Gabriel, an emerald-green building on the road to Avarua, introduced himself and invited
me to his Sunday service. Built in Queen Victoria’s time, the church was small, seating maybe forty people, but with a steeple tall as the tallest palm. The bell rung there had been salvaged from a grounded schooner and could be heard clearly in both towns. I put on the only dress I had kept—the green one Cassiel had bought me in Manila—but only got near enough to the church to hear the congregation of high voices singing “Parting the Waters” before I turned back down the Circle Road to Matavera. I just wasn’t ready to put myself in the midst of any gathering, however small.

Six thousand miles from North America, on an island six miles wide which felt like a bit of confetti in that dazzling, dizzying expanse of open sea, I might as well have been a million miles away from everything I had ever known. Never in my life had I been so starkly, elementally alone—to such a degree that, paradoxically, I seldom felt lonely. In my isolation, the lack of contact with other people limited my capacity for loneliness. It was as if the basis from which loneliness must spring, the raw social interaction—already drastically diminished in my case—had nearly disappeared. Breaking off my dead-end search for Cassiel, I had implicitly broken off with other people. Letting go of Cassiel in turn jarred loose some of the guilt over Loren that had so long weighed on me. Much of that guilt I never would—and maybe never wanted to—shake off. But to be free of even a fraction of it was a relief. In rushing to that particular edge of the world, a volcanic island which on the map approached invisibility, I had also reached an internal vanishing point, from which I hoped to reconstitute myself.

I swam. I dove for shellfish in the lagoons, wearing my pearldiver goggles from Manila. I bought fish and squid and jellyfish from the fishermen, and learned to fish with a net myself in the shallows when the tide came in. The women on Rarotonga fished with twin nets, one in each hand, which they brought together like cymbals, trapping their prey. The black and red angelfish were edible, but I could not bring myself to catch them. Where I did not find fruit growing wild, blood oranges, guavas, and papayas, I bought it in Matavera along with fresh speckled eggs and taro. I learned to make taro cakes and yam pudding. I fried fish in coconut oil on the small stove, or steamed it in banana leaves, or ate it raw cut into thin strips and dipped in vinegar. There
was little meat on the islands, except wild pigs and chicken and the ubiquitous tins of corned beef from Auckland. But that was all right with me because I had stopped eating meat in Vietnam.

The days poured into one another and the weeks slid by. At that latitude, the hours of sunrise and sunset vary little from season to season—seven
A.M
. and seven
P.M
. And the two seasons are summer and winter, dry and rainy. Gradually, by necessity and desire, I had stripped away layers of clothes and possessions, even before I reached Rarotonga. I wore either a two-piece bathing suit or shorts and a T-shirt, invariably with a straw hat or a baseball cap. When I wasn’t barefoot, I put on sandals or thongs. In Tarawa, I had discarded my Navy duffel bag for a single medium-sized knapsack. I bought the darkest sunglasses I could find and a Swiss Army pocketknife, and I traded my watch for a Zippo lighter and a tin of lighter fluid. On Rarotonga my body went from tan to brown to bronze. The sun lightened my hair—it was nearly auburn—and I let it grow very long, halfway down my back. After all those months on the ship, I was getting stronger, leaner, and more muscular from swimming daily and hiking everywhere. With my steady diet of fish and fruit, my eyes were clear and my nails harder. The soles of my feet were toughened, and smooth as teak, from walking barefoot in sand.

In the mountains the rains were intense. The sea winds, full of moisture, hit the steep cliffs and billowed up into black clouds which condensed, drenching the lowlands, before drifting out to sea. Every morning it rained hard before first light. And often at that time, when the foliage was slate-colored through the window of my cabin, I felt the room fill up with silent visitors. Pale and weightless, with downcast eyes, they were the shades of all the dead I had known. My grandmother, my mother, Luna and Milo. Never my father, whom I knew only from photographs. But the legions of dead I had seen, smelled, and tended aboard the
Repose
came in force, overflowing the small room. I had x-rayed every one of them. Looked inside their bodies, occasionally glimpsing in the smoky swirls and deep shadows flickers which I took to be pinpoint windows onto their souls.

To my horror, Cassiel was sometimes among them, emanating dark light. Never for long—I would catch only a fleeting glimpse of him—but I knew it was his handsome features and powerful body. And I despaired when I thought he must be dead. His skin that just ten
months before had rippled like water under my fingertips, his lips, the soft hairs on his arms and legs, his powerful fingers—all gone. To ashes or dust, I wondered with a shudder, buried in scorched earth or in the silt of the seafloor. Or perhaps he wasn’t dead at all, just skirting death somewhere in this world in those few seconds while his spirit flashed before me. This was what I told myself with little consolation. My only real consolation was that among all the shades I saw, from the newly dead whom I remembered blood-smeared and torn apart on surgical tables to the distant dead who must now truly be bones and dust, Loren was not among them. In my cabin on that tiny island I dreamed of him still, as he was at ten and as I imagined he might be now at fourteen, but he never came to me in the predawn. Perhaps because he was alive.

One evening near the end of my stay on the island I was reading beneath the banyan tree near my cabin. The moths were ticking around my lantern, hung from a branch, and at the periphery of its light, toads were snapping mosquitoes out of the air. From behind the mountains, a full moon—the last I would see on the island—was rising through a swirl of clouds. After completing Captain Cook’s
Journals
, I had found a slim, yellowed
History of the Cook Islands
among a bunch of maps in the tackle shop. Written in dry Victorian prose by a vicar named Ormas, who retired to Penrhyn Island, I didn’t get past the first page because of the tears streaming down my cheeks.

Ormas begins with a myth of the Cook Islanders about a girl and her nephew at the dawn of time. On his way across the great ocean to Hawaii, the god Maui drew the islands we call by Captain Cook’s name up from the depths with his fishhook, carved from an ancestor’s bone. Then he hurled his fishhook into the sky, where it became a constellation on the underbelly of Scorpio, called “the Spider” by the Polynesians. Of the four stars in the Fishhook, two are side by side, wedded at the hip. One is the girl Piriereua, which means “the Inseparable”; the other is her nephew. They have fled from home, into the sky, after being ill-treated by their relatives against whom they must struggle, always.

The inseparable
, I thought bitterly, drying my eyes and remembering the moment at the planetarium when someone tapped my shoulder and I let go of Loren’s hand. He and I had been brought together in that place at that moment by the actions of relatives who
had failed us, and against whose spirits, apparently, we had lost our struggle. I was sure of that; but I didn’t think I would ever know who had snatched Loren away from me and sent my life spinning like a top.

During that last month on the island, I became restless—not to wander more, but to settle down, however tenuously, and work out my next move. To do this, I still wanted to be alone, but not quite as alone I was on the Cook Islands. Also, my money was running out, and I needed to act before it was gone completely. So I decided to go back to the States. But though I had grown up in New York, and Massachusetts remained my legal state of residence, there was only one state I even considered going back to: Hawaii, the one state in the union comprised completely of islands, 122 of them in all.

On the last morning I was to awake on Rarotonga, after sipping my tea and spooning the flesh out of a papaya, I took a long swim and closed up my cabin. Then at noon, my knapsack on my back and a straw hat pulled low against sun, I set out for the airport at Avarua. I spotted a pair of Cook’s petrels, two black V’s, circling high overhead. At the beginning of the summer, I thought, I would have been able to examine their gray and white plumage in detail; but those moments of visual hyperacuity were gone.