A Trip to the Stars (29 page)

“Something illegal?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“And to burn this thing, small enough presumably so that you were able to carry it into the desert, you set a whole tower on fire?”

“I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s what happened.”

“Enzo, you’re trying my patience. If you were smoking pot and the fire started, just say so.”

“But I wasn’t. Uncle Junius, I’m telling you the truth. I’m sorry.”

Samax tilted back in his chair and peered through the parted white curtains at the desert, then leaned forward again. “All right. You say you were angry. At what or whom?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Enzo …”

“I can’t.”

Samax shook his head. It was as if suddenly it weighed a hundred pounds on his neck. I knew he was in pain, not only because of what I’d done but because I’d kept it secret—I was still keeping it secret. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about Ivy and my mother’s pendant: I had made my choice not to go to him in the first place and I was going to stick to it. And, sitting there with the troopers, I thought the truth—already a muddle—would sound even more preposterous.

“Who was the other boy?” one of the troopers asked suddenly.

“There was no one with me, Officer.”

“The hunters were certain there were two of you.”

“They were wrong.”

From his eyes I saw that Samax knew I was lying now. But I saw, too, that he didn’t want this point to be pursued. Gently he deflected the focus. “Why didn’t you tell me about the fire?” he asked. “Is it for the same reason you can’t tell me why you were angry?”

“No,” I said, biting my lip, holding back tears, “it was because I felt so ashamed.”

Looking him in the eye at that moment, seeing how he took in my grief without losing his temper, was my most difficult moment in that room.

The troopers piped in again with more specific questions: what had I used to start the fire; why had I chosen the ghost town; had I set any other fires in the area, and if so, when. At that point Samax cut them off, politely but firmly.

“He’s fully admitted to starting the fire, gentlemen. He’s fourteen years old. He has lived with me for four years. His adoptive parents were killed seven years ago in an automobile accident. He’s never done anything wrong before—certainly nothing involving the law. That ghost town has been food for termites for over forty years. I’ll pay whoever owns the property whatever they ask. If they like, I’ll erect a new hotel on the site. Now, are you going to charge this boy with a crime? If so, I want to get my lawyers out here before any of us says another word. I can have them in this room within thirty minutes.”

The troopers exchanged glances. Samax kept to himself more than most of the truly powerful people—on both sides of the law—in Las Vegas County, but he was no hermit, and many of those people were his friends and acquaintances on various levels. After conferring briefly, the troopers said they would have to take the matter up downtown with their superior after contacting the owner of the property.

“And who might that be?” Samax inquired, and I could see in his face that he was sure they would never file charges against me.

“Hydra is part of a large parcel owned by Xaphan Landshares. They’ve been buying up desert property.”

“Never heard of them,” Samax said.

“They’re a subsidiary of VC Enterprises up in Reno.”

At this, Samax blanched. “Have you had contact with them?”

“With VC? No. Just with the general manager down at Xaphan.”

Samax recovered his composure quickly, and his voice was smoother than ever. “Why don’t I just have my people offer him compensation for the damages?”

“Sir, we still have to take it downtown. It won’t take long.”

“Fine,” Samax said, and he showed them to the door. I sat frozen until he returned to his desk. “Now will you tell me why you did this?” he asked in his lowest voice.

Finally the tears came to my eyes. But I didn’t cry. “I can’t. I’m sorry this ever happened. I’m sorry for all the trouble—”

“Never mind that. I just want to know why, damn it. You know they could take you away from me because of this. If you really have no explanation to offer—if you risked so much for nothing—the thing becomes ten times worse.”

I shook my head slowly.

He threw up his hands. “Have it your way. The other boy—was it Auro?”

I nodded. “I didn’t want to drag him into this, Uncle Junius. He’d freak out. Anyway, it was all my fault.”

“You were right to shield Auro, but that’s the only thing you were right about.” He turned away and fixed his gaze on the desert again. His cheek twitched and he was pressing his fingertips into his temple. “I’ve never been so angry with you, Enzo. And so disappointed. I’m sorry you see fit not to level with me. Maybe you’ll change your tune later, but right now just go to your room and stay there. I have to deal with this man at Xaphan so the matter stays here in Vegas.”

“Why would they care about a ghost town?” I said, pausing at the door. “Nobody ever paid attention to it.”

He spun his chair around again. “And you think that gave you the right to commit arson?”

“No.”

“It’s not the town they would care about in Reno, it would be hearing my name connected to the fire.”

“You mean, VC Enterprises? Do you know them?”

“Know them?” he said sharply, picking up the phone. “Remember I told you about the man who sent me to prison?”

“Vitale Cassiel.”

“Vitale Cassiel is VC Enterprises. He’d like nothing better than to get at me—especially through someone close to me, and at this time there is only one person in my life who fits that description who actually shares my name.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Junius.”

“I hope you’re sorry about more than the fact that you were caught.”

For the next six hours I lay in my bed ruminating hard on the fact that if this Vitale Cassiel had been able to maneuver someone as wily
as Samax into jail—not to mention the fact that he could still make him blanch—he certainly would have little trouble getting me sent to reform school. When Della brought me a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk and told me that Samax had called off the customary sit-down dinner that night, I really started to sweat. Even with all the strings he could pull, maybe it wasn’t going to be enough.

Meanwhile, Auro couldn’t talk, but he could write, and when he got wind of what had happened to me in the meeting with Samax and the state troopers, he sneaked out of his room late that same night, went up to Samax’s library, and handed him a short letter in his cramped script. Samax was horrified.

“This is terrible,” he said.

“Terrible,” Auro echoed, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

Samax wrapped his arms around Auro, and later told me it was the first time he had ever seen Auro cry. It was also the first time in a long while that Samax had held Auro so close—another unintentional but beneficial offshoot of our burning down the ghost town. Actually, the best development of all was to come about an hour later when Samax was sitting at the end of my bed while I read Auro’s letter myself.

“How long has this sort of thing been going on?” Samax asked when I was finished.

“Since the day she brought me to you in New York.”

“I’m not going to ask you why you wouldn’t tell me, because I already know. You were thinking you had to handle this yourself, to fight your own fight, because otherwise it would never end—not
really
end.” He stood up and went over to the window, where Sirius was sleeping, and toyed absently with the telescope. “I know that kind of thinking,” he went on, “because I’ve done it myself, and there’s a lot of me in you. Sometimes you have to fight alone. But thinking you have to do it all the time, on principle, is stubbornness to no purpose. If you’re going to be stubborn, have a good reason for it. The situation with Ivy is my fault. I’ve looked the other way with her once too often, and what was always bad in her has festered into something much worse. For her to destroy that pendant of Bel’s is not just mean, it’s crazy. She’s crazy. Now, I can’t banish her outright from the hotel, because she’ll take it out on Auro for betraying her. And I promised him I wouldn’t betray his confidence. Since she seems to have declared war on you, and your mother’s memory, and who knows what else, I
will deal with her as Sun Tzu advises us to with difficult adversaries—that is, by their own methods—so that this sort of thing never happens to you again. If it should happen, you must promise that you’ll come to me.”

I knew Sun Tzu’s book about warfare—along with von Clausewitz, it was one of Samax’s favorites—but I never knew exactly what Samax did with regard to Ivy, and I never asked. It had the desired effect, however: for a long time, she avoided me like the plague. As for Auro’s letter, he succinctly told Samax about everything except the phoenix flight of the hummingbird we witnessed. That was something we would always keep between us. For, if anything, we became closer after our misadventure in Hydra. On occasion we would meet up in the quincunx orchard at midday—something we had never done before—and Auro would bring out two spaghetti sandwiches, on pumpernickel with ketchup, his favorite meal. Also, without Ivy hovering so close, he was able to join me for the first time in the swimming pool, where I taught him some basic strokes.

Auro went through other changes as well. He was less reclusive, less fearful when he encountered unfamiliar guests at the hotel one on one. One day such a guest, a gypsy friend of Labusi’s who came to visit for a week, gave Auro a parrot. The parrot, with fiery orange plumage and pinwheel eyes, was from Madagascar. Auro named him Echo, though it was
he
who parroted the parrot, the latter chattering fluently from his wicker cage or while perched on Auro’s shoulder. But the biggest change in Auro after the fire was the fact that he took up the drums, with a vengeance. A positive outgrowth of his echolalia, and its unique effect on his hearing faculty, was that he turned out to be a natural percussionist and rhythm man. A room was cork-lined for him on the third floor, where he practiced with a full set of black-pearl Ludwig drums and Avedas Zildjian cymbals which Samax bought him. He went at them night and day, working out his fury at his father’s death and his mother’s tyranny and his increasing frustration with his own muteness. In the process, he became a jazz drummer of phenomenal eloquence, articulate with drum skins and sticks, tempered brass and steel brushes, the high hat and the floor tom-tom, bells, maracas, castanets, tambourines, and the triangle, as he could never be with his voice.

Around the same time, to escape some of this domestic turmoil myself, I plunged into a colossal memory project: to memorize the names of all 3,445 numbered asteroids in the asteroid belt. When I mentioned it to Labusi, he dismissed it out of hand. “Why undertake such a useless endeavor when there are so many important things you can memorize?”

Now, Labusi himself had memorized subjects as esoteric as the catalogues of defunct museums, the names of every member of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and entire games of chess from obscure tournaments, so, aside from his lack of interest in the subject, I knew his true resistance stemmed from the fact that asteroids were Hadar’s domain, and between the two of them there was an intellectual rivalry—based more on vanity than anything else. At any rate, had I confided to Labusi my true reason for memorizing the asteroids’ names, he would have objected even more vehemently, for I knew that deep down he was more pragmatist than Pythagorean. Which was a shame, because in terms of harmony—musical and metaphysical—my notion was surely Pythagorean to the highest degree.

I was convinced that if I could memorize the names of all those asteroids I would in effect be reconstituting mentally the bulk of the exploded planet between Mars and Jupiter of which Hadar claimed the asteroids were the fragments. In short, the planet would become whole again in my head. So from a green astronomical manual I began memorizing the forty pages of asteroid listings, placing the names in sequential slots around my memory palace. However, from the first, the listings obsessed me in a completely unanticipated way: the simple fact, of which I had been ignorant, that most of the asteroids were named after women. The list began with three thousand women’s names! Memorizing them—
Iris, Flora, Victoria, Irene
—filling my memory palace with them—I began deriving an increasingly erotic pleasure. By the time I reached #s 208 to 211,
Lacrimosa, Dido, Isabella, Isolda
, I was arranging the names on a long set of shelves on the ninth-floor corridor of my memory palace, outside Desirée’s room—a
locus
where I wanted to linger. Desirée’s rooms themselves were not a part of my memory palace because, even after five years, I had never entered them in reality.

In fact, the very first time I did enter Desirée’s rooms was a year later, on Columbus Day, 1971—the night of the valedictory dinner at
which Deneb announced his departure, to write his monograph on Atlantis. After that dinner, everyone retired to the ballroom for an impromptu farewell party. And that was where the second—and for me, far more important—auspicious event of the evening occurred, for I danced with Desirée, not once but twice.

The party was the kind Samax liked, because he was the impressario, improvising as he went. First he ordered up a case of Dom Pérignon ’57 from the wine cellar. Then he had the cook lay out a spread of black, white, and red caviar, lobster medallions, roasted prawns, shellfish salad, fresh and pickled fruits from the garden, and a cart of cheeses. Aromatic flowers were brought from the greenhouse and arranged around the room in slender Japanese vases. The lights were dimmed and the curtains opened on the enormous windows overlooking the desert night, a half-moon in the sky over the jagged silhouettes of the mountains.

Eboli was in heaven at the piano, running through his jazz repertoire, from the Jelly Roll Morton rags that were his passion to some Ellington and Monk. His eight fingers flew over the keyboard with amazing fluency and precision, and though Ivy had made only a perfunctory appearance, Auro sat on a stool beside Eboli, watching him raptly. At first, Eboli played solo, but then after Samax, tapping his glass with an oyster fork, had offered Deneb a farewell toast, an extraordinary ensemble took shape around the piano, a trio that played, not jazz or classical pieces, but an eerie, otherworldly music which sounded as if it were emanating from some remote source across a vast, timeless expanse. Rising and falling, sometimes clear, sometimes vaporous, this music carried everyone in the room along with it.