A Trip to the Stars (26 page)

In my seven months on Rarotonga, one by one nearly all symptoms of the spider bite had disappeared. Most obviously, I began getting my period regularly, more punctually in fact than ever before. Mornings I coughed out lots of phlegm, and as had begun to happen during my stay on Ocean Island, I sweated freely. It felt like my body was ridding itself of deeply embedded toxins from the spider’s venom. As the symptoms disappeared, so did the red dot on my palm and the twelve concentric circles that surrounded it. On Rarotonga, a circle disappeared roughly every seventeen days, and each time one did, the red dot faded a little more. Until finally all that remained was a kind of palimpsest on my palm that shone faintly when my hand was tilted at a certain angle to the light.

At the same time, there were other changes. I couldn’t hold my breath underwater nearly so long anymore, or soak up the hot sun all afternoon. Gradually I began sleeping uninterrupted for seven hours most nights and eating two complete meals a day. And I was no longer able to roam the corridors of my memory at will, though my powers of memory did remain stronger than they had been before the spider
bit me. In spurts I could remember long-ago conversations verbatim, or entire landscapes as I had glimpsed them from a train or car, or the faces of people I had met in passing years before. And yet now there were things that seemed to have been erased completely. Everyone’s memory is selective, but mine became relentlessly, and peculiarly, so. For example, while I could not now remember my last telephone conversation with my mother, I recalled in its entirety a college lecture I had attended on the illusion of time in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
—including the professor’s quips and asides. And when it came to Loren and Cassiel, and the brief intersections of their lives with mine—I had spent a matter of days with each of them—I had total recall. Every scent and gesture, every word and hesitation. Many times I relived that final hour with Loren at the planetarium and my last night with Cassiel at the Hôtel Alnilam, attempting to excavate clues about the riddles of their disappearances. But I never found answers there—just more pain.

Altogether the venom of the
Ummidia Stellarum
had affected me in full force for over two and a half years, from December 14, 1967, when I was bitten in New Orleans, to August 2, 1970, when I left the Cook Islands. I was twenty-five years old, and I would remain forever altered by that bite. Not only in the way my memory worked, but also in the magnetic attraction I continued to feel toward the stars—less obsessive, perhaps, but no less powerful—which did not abate. Zaren Eboli had told me that the effects of the venom could last up to three years, during which time much that was false and illusory in me would be stripped away; back in New Orleans I didn’t understand the full implications of this, and on that torrid August day, walking along the coral road to Avarua, I was just beginning to grasp them. I little knew that the bite had affected me in ways of which I was not yet aware.

There was one runway at the airport—a squat shingled building with a corrugated roof—and one scheduled turboprop flight a day in and out of Auckland, where I would connect with a jumbo jet for Honolulu. Only two other passengers were aboard that day, Australians in cowboy hats, as we took off into a blindingly blue sky. On my wrist I wore Cassiel’s bracelet and around my neck my pendant.

The previous morning, I had climbed the rough mountain to the
summit of the island’s dormant volcano, intending to hurl my pendant into its brush-filled crater. In traveling with me all the way from Savannah, Georgia, the pendant had, over the course of two hundred years, by way of sloop, schooner, prop plane, and jet transport, circumnavigated the globe, and it seemed fitting I should now return it permanently to its source. But at the last moment I balked. There was an appealing symmetry in returning it (which I thought Cassiel, a student of circumnavigation, would have appreciated), but it had occurred to me suddenly that while one part of my own journey with that pendant might be completed, the pendant still had places to go, with or without me, outside the circle that began and ended with the volcano. Where exactly, and with whom, I didn’t know, but I was sure it would be wrong to leave it in that crater. Had that volcano still been active, had I been tossing the pendant into the molten lava it once was, I might have felt different. But who was to say, after all, that it was preferable for things, or people, to return to their origins rather than to get as far away from them as circumstances and luck—good and bad—allowed? Maybe that was easy for me to say because, even if I wanted to, I had nothing and no one to go back to. But as the plane hummed out over the open sea, I tucked my pendant into my shirt and was glad it was there.

Of one thing I was certain. Over the previous year, first instinctively, unconsciously, and then by design, I had begun a pattern, choosing to live on islands, and only islands, as I knew now I would do, not just for the next few months, but for the rest of my life.

Columbus Day 1971 has always occupied a bright niche in my memory on account of an event unrelated to Christopher Columbus. Columbus had taught all Americans, including me—who as a boy kept his
Journals
alongside those of Cook and Drake—that the most spectacular discoveries are often stumbled on, rather than planned: in seeking the East Indies, you might well end up inventing the West Indies. I was to learn this lesson again on that particular October 12, in Room 512 at the Hotel Canopus, when making a different sort of discovery, no less exciting for me: sometime around midnight, on a silk-sheeted bed in the blood-warm glow of lamps with red bulbs, I had lost my virginity. It was an event I had avidly awaited, but despite the numerous, increasingly complex erotic scenarios I had spun out in my imagination over the previous two years, I was deeply surprised at the way things actually turned out—not only by the timing, but the identity of my partner, with whom, even an hour earlier, I would never have suspected I would find myself naked, head whirling, being pulled on top of her.

The evening had begun with two other unexpected events. At dinner, to most everyone’s astonishment, Dr. Deneb announced that at long last he was prepared to begin writing his monograph on Atlantis. All research was completed, all sources exhausted, and he had drawn his conclusion, which he claimed—and his immodesty was so devoid of arrogance, so natural, that it seemed almost charming—would be the definitive one.

“Will my monograph be long?” he said, echoing Labusi’s question. “Absolutely not. I need no more than one hundred fifty pages to make my case.”

“And will you tell us on which theory you finally settled?” Samax asked calmly, serving himself pimento salad.

“For that you will all have to wait. Even you, Junius. Just as I will not open another book on the subject while I am composing my monograph, I must not talk out my ideas, deflating them before they come alive on the page.”

“Fair enough,” Samax nodded.

“So when will we be able to read your conclusions?” Labusi asked, tucking his napkin into his collar and smoothing it down the front of his shirt.

“In four years. No more or less.” Deneb inhaled deeply and tapped the frame of his dark glasses. “Which brings me to one sad offshoot of this good news. For the complete solitude this task requires, I must leave the hotel during that time.”

Now even Samax was surprised. “Surely you’ve enjoyed plenty of solitude here.”

“Completely. These ten years could never have been so productive anywhere else. For that I will always be grateful. But now I must carve out a harsher solitude for myself. No convivial meals, no stimulating companions—just a room with a table and simple fare.”

“A monastery?” Labusi said.

“Or a prison,” Samax murmured.

“A little of both,” Deneb chuckled. “I shall secure lodgings on a tiny island off Amorgós in the Aegean Sea. It was a garrison for the Greek Navy after the First World War. Then it became a prison island. Now they rent rooms under conditions so spartan it scares off any misguided tourists. In three years I’ll be back,” he concluded.

“And you’ll be welcome,” Samax said, raising his glass of hibiscus tea.

“Here, here,” drawled the man beside me, one of the hotel’s newest “permanent” guests, raising his own glass with his four-fingered, pinkieless hand.

Zaren Eboli, whose specialty was spiders, had been summoned by Samax two years earlier when the aftereffects of my spider bite began manifesting themselves. For three weeks he treated me, and then, at Samax’s invitation, transported his laboratory from New Orleans to a space adjacent to Hadar’s in the subbasement of the hotel. Samax told him he could pursue his research under the roof of the hotel for as
long as he needed; Eboli had never spent any time out west, and he was very excited by this open-ended invitation. “In three years,” he declared, “I should be able to collect specimens representing eighty percent of the species in this region.” And so to the eclectic roster of studies at the Hotel Canopus—Atlantology, meteoritics, pomology, and mnemonics—was added arachnology.

At fifteen, I was already a good six inches taller than Eboli. Stooped, with thick tinted spectacles, he wore a goatee which had gone nearly all white, like his long hair. His crow’s-feet were deep and his brow jaggedly furrowed. He always wore Turkish slippers and a black velvet smoking jacket to dinner, and aside from his daily field trips into the desert, his most frequent excursions from the hotel were to hear jazz bands and quartets on the Strip. Often Auro and I listened to him play the piano in the lounge, which he invariably did after dinner.

I was fascinated by Eboli’s proficiency with only eight fingers, but Auro, increasingly obsessed with music—possessing near perfect pitch, he could imitate any instrument—was enchanted by Eboli on every level. Though excruciatingly shy with the other guests, from whom he fled on sight, Auro took to following Eboli around and assisting him in his lab. The two developed a strong affinity—Eboli, born missing his pinkies, empathetic toward a boy with echolalia as others could never be. And in addition to filling the void left in Auro’s life by the death of Nestor, Eboli’s influence was a tonic to Ivy’s increasingly malignant attitudes. Before Eboli’s arrival, Auro had been a virtual recluse, furtive in the hotel corridors, merging with the shadows of potted palms, or hiding in the greenhouse and echoing the cries of the birds in the darkness. There is no doubt in my mind that, without Eboli, Auro would never have ventured into the desert, where he came to relish their spider expeditions. More importantly, I doubt Auro would have found his calling quite so early as the musician he was to become—a jazz drummer, to Ivy’s consternation, of ferocious dedication. So among the surprising consequences of my spider bite was the fact that, as much as it affected my life, it surely changed the course of Auro’s.

It was six weeks after the moon landing that a red dot and a circle had appeared on my right palm one morning. At first, they frightened me; I wondered if I had contracted a strange virus, or a case of ringworm, or if, having entered a state of perpetual adolescent arousal, I
had brought on this shameful mark (as the old wives’ tale warns) by playing with myself with increasing frequency. Only after several hours did I connect the dot and circle with the spider bite. Three concentric circles in all would appear, and just as quickly disappear a year later, leaving a faint shiny trace that I could only see from odd angles. The day after the moon landing, Calzas had set out for Morocco on business, so I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask him about the bite; and by the time he came back weeks later, I felt no ill effects and frankly was so preoccupied with the return of Ivy and Auro that all my other concerns had receded. Samax, too, had his hands full with Ivy at that time, as was to be expected, and I wasn’t going to bother him about an insect bite.

But all that changed when the dot and the first circle appeared. Both Samax and Calzas—the two people least prone to alarm I had ever known—were distinctly alarmed. Calzas recognized the circle as the aftermath of a spider bite.

“For six weeks you said nothing?” he demanded.

“For six weeks, nothing happened,” I replied.

“Find me the best—the most creative—arachnologist in the country,” Samax had instructed Desirée, and within forty-eight hours I was sitting in Samax’s library with him, Calzas, and Zaren Eboli.

Calmly Eboli interrogated me, and before I had finished describing its burrow, he knew the type of spider it was. He asked me the spider’s size, how quickly I had sucked out its venom, and what symptoms I felt. He noted the date of the bite and the date the dot and circle had appeared. He asked me what I had eaten that night before I was bitten (Samax remembered) and what I ate the next morning (nothing). He asked me my weight, medical history, and date of birth. Concerning the latter, we had an unusual exchange.

“December 16, 1955,” I said.

“Really.” He peered hard at me through his spectacles. “You know, December 16 is a special day in some circles.”

I shook my head.

“It is the day, in 1941, on which Ferdinand La Menthe died.”

Calzas and Samax exchanged glances, and Samax shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“He was the greatest jazz pianist who ever lived,” Eboli added, then got back down to business.

He asked me some more questions, and then, after taking my pulse and temperature, looking down my throat with a flashlight, and examining my eyes through a magnifying glass, turned to Samax and said, “He’ll be all right. We’ll do a blood test to check the exact amount of venom in his system, but I’m certain it will be minimal. Had the circle appeared within a week of the bite, it would be a different matter. The spider is a trap-door variety called the
Ummidia Stellarum
. Because its fang is long, and twice-jointed, one has to work at it to receive a full dose of its venom. That is, it has to be almost a self-induced bite after the spider is trapped in one’s hand.” He paused. “I know of only one person, in my own experience, who has suffered such an intentional, prolonged bite, and she brought it on herself.” He stared out the big plate-glass windows into the desert. “I have often wondered what happened to her,” he added softly.