A Trip to the Stars (36 page)

Estes grew his own stash in the forest near his house, a half mile from the observatory. Unlike the local foot soldiers of the counterculture, however, he wasn’t smoking it after a day of surfing, practicing tai chi, or tending an organic garden; by the time he lit up, he was totally wired in a small silent office where he once told me he could hear with clarity the silver numbers spinning off his calculations and tinkling in the air. On top of this, he had begun to moisten his throat when smoking, not with peppermint tea, but rum and bitters.

When, a few weeks after I met him, he invited me up to his house for a “candlelight dinner” and a look at the night sky through the observatory telescope, I jumped at the opportunity. Whether I was excited about the candlelight dinner or the fact I would see the stars as never before, I wasn’t sure. The two things spilled into one another. But I dressed with more care and expectation than usual, slipping on a pair of white jeans and a new black jersey embroidered with white flowers.

Estes’s home, in a bamboo forest above Waimea Canyon, was not at all what I had imagined. A simple, lemon-colored ranch house on the outside, the five rooms inside were neat and austere. Instead of the gaudy carpets and wall hangings and overflowing ashtrays I had
expected, the teak floor was highly polished, the white curtains were neatly pressed, and a silent ceiling fan revolved in the living room. There was a meditation cell with a black mat and an incense burner beside the bedroom, which was centered by a large futon behind a silk curtain. There were three framed portraits in the kitchen, of Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, and Clyde W. Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. And in the living room a photograph that looked like star clusters etched on a slab of sandstone; in fact, it was a fossil, a billion years old, that preserved the movements of the oldest known organisms on earth. There was not a single book or paper in that room. All his books were in the study, shelved from floor to ceiling around a solitary rocking chair with its reading lamp. If Estes was walking a razor’s edge with his mental stability, the diligent housekeeper, a young woman from Niihau named Wind, certainly kept the daily machinery of his life in order.

Wind had left a vegetable casserole in the oven. Spooning eggplant and zucchini over brown rice, Estes passed me a predinner joint and a tray of cheese and grapes. We drank rum. Our plates were set out on a low table, lit by candles, where we sat on large cushions and ate with chopsticks. Estes never let the stereo cool: first one Bill Evans record after another, then a set of Coltrane duets called “Interstellar Space.”

“These are just to get you in the mood …” Estes said, pouring me some more rum.

I smiled and crossed my legs in front of me, fully extending them off my cushion.

“… for the telescope,” he added, slipping yet another new record onto the turntable.

Long before we took his car to the observatory, I had stopped keeping up with him joint for joint. I was afraid that everything would blur on me if I got any higher. Just before we arrived at the sentry box, Estes spritzed some Binaca into his mouth. An armed Air Force guard shined a flashlight into the car, wrote down my name, and waved us through with a crisp salute.

It was eleven o’clock. One of Estes’s assistants was on night shift, monitoring the radio telescope behind a semicircular control panel. He was accustomed to seeing Estes come in at all hours, but he was surprised to see me. It was obvious that when Estes made the time
to go on a date, this was not one of his usual stops. Estes didn’t have regular girlfriends and he didn’t conduct love affairs. Without a word spoken on the subject, I realized this even before we had finished dinner. But I chose to persist in the illusion that he and I might enjoy something more than a one-night stand. After all, he had made an exception in taking me to the observatory.

The dome that housed the telescope was dark and empty. Its tile floor gleamed. The air was chilled round the clock, its unvarying temperature calibrated to prevent distortion in the delicate lenses. On all of the island, even the hospital’s pathology lab, I had never been in such a cold place. I climbed the spiral stairway to the telescope’s cage and settled in, adjusting the reclining seat according to Estes’s instructions. Putting my eye to the telescope’s shuttered eyepiece as Estes went to switch on the power, I waited with the expectation of a child for the heavens to unfold before me. Even so, I was completely unprepared when suddenly I found myself zooming among the stars at high speed, encountering them up close—in a rush—on their own terms. I had never looked through a telescope of this magnitude, and it made me feel as if I myself were out in space.

There were white stars phosphorescent as exploding flashbulbs, and icy blue stars like diamonds, and stars embedded in swirls and clusters like particles of mica. Other, remoter stars, even at that magnification, were no more than faint pinpoints. I kept thinking about something Estes had said at dinner: if the sun were the size of the dot in the letter
i
, the next nearest star would be ten miles away; and the nearest to that, several hundred miles, and so on.

“Space,” he had concluded, pushing his long hair back, “is just that. It’s basically empty. What we employ in creating a constellation—a two-dimensional figure—is anywhere from four to four hundred stars at vastly different distances from us and from one another. In three-dimensional space, they’re completely unrelated. Their connections by straight lines on a single plane make them constellations, which exist only in the human imagination, an invention of the navigators. In ancient times, they used animals and religious symbols on their charts. But in the eighteenth century the European navigators who came to these waters placed their own tools in the sky: a sextant, an octant, a triangle, a compass. Even a telescope. Navigators have always been the poets of the constellations.”

Estes had come up beside me, and was manipulating the controls so that I was slowly scanning the sky, from west to east. “The constellations are as transitory as we are,” he said, picking up his earlier line of conversation. “Both physically and imaginatively. There are constellations, recorded long ago, that have disappeared from the charts. Solitaire was named after a bird peculiar to an island in the Indian Ocean: the bird became extinct and the constellation soon followed. Another is the Fox, which used to lie beside Scorpio. That’s all we know about it. Its stars are still there, but there’s no telling which ones they are or how they were connected. Even among modern constellations, the Electric Machine came and went while the Air Pump is still with us. Physically, the stars are always moving—even the sun, at twelve miles per second. One day, billions of years from now, the Big Dipper will look like a semicircle. In the time of the ancient Egyptians, the North Star wasn’t Polaris, but Thuban.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

He touched my shoulder. “You’re looking at it, Mala. In the tail of Draco, the third star. The Egyptians oriented the pyramids toward it. In 14,000 A.D.—if there’s anyone to see it—the North Star will be Vega. But what else would you like to see?”

“How about Scorpio?”

He adjusted the telescope, the focus swung, and I was gazing into a cluster of stars.

“There’s Antares,” I said. What looked like a drop of blood through my binoculars was now an enormous red disk wreathed with smaller white disks. While the white stars twinkled, Antares seemed to pulse. Next to it was a faint green star. “It’s so large,” I said.

“Four hundred times the size of the sun. Larger than Mars’s orbit around the sun.”

“Do you know what
Antares
means in Latin?” I put in. “
Similar to Mars
.”

“I didn’t know that,” he murmured.

“Because it’s so red.”

“It’s the greatest of the Supergiant Reds. The first star observed through a telescope in daylight. The old Chinese astronomers called it the ‘Fire Star,’
Who Sing
, and invoked it for protection against fire.”

I wasn’t sure Estes intended all his talk of stars and constellations as a form of seduction, but it had that effect on me. Still, the mention of navigators made me think of Cassiel, and he was still on my mind
as we drove away from the observatory, the headlights cutting a tunnel into the darkness.

Back at his house, Estes mixed me a rum and tonic and rolled himself another joint. “I have a surprise for you,” he said, blowing out all but one candle. He put a tape on his reel-to-reel and a soft sweeping hiss, punctuated by a delicate crackling, filled the living room like an electric wind.

“This is our greatest-hits tape here at the Kokee Observatory,” he said, exhaling a stream of smoke. “The music of the stars.”

“From the radio telescopes?”

“Two years of our best receptions, edited down and stripped of all interference. Pure interstellar sound.” He laughed. “Even purer than Coltrane.”

We lay side by side on our backs on the rug in his living room listening to the stars. The circle of light from the candle expanded and contracted on the ceiling and slowly fell into the same rhythm as my breathing. Or maybe it was the other way around. I was pretty high myself at that point. Slowly we stopped talking, and started kissing, and then Estes rolled on top of me. And soon enough we had left a trail of our clothes to his futon and quickly made love. For the first and last time. Not badly, not even unsatisfactorily, but much too quickly, with the single burst of energy necessary to slice through the haze of all that rum and ganja. I don’t know what I had expected from a man as cut off from his body—and abusive of it—as Estes. He had been skilled in a mechanical way, and gentle certainly, but with so little feeling for himself that I didn’t imagine he could have had much left for me. After he made me come, and then came himself, he plunged immediately into a deep sleep, his breathing still raspy, one arm thrown over his eyes.

I switched off the tape recorder, blew out the candle, and drove home across the island at two
A.M
., fortifying myself with black coffee at a gas station in Lihue. I took Cassiel’s bracelet out of the drawer in my night table. I hadn’t wanted to be wearing it if I went to bed with someone else. I had taken it off when I made love with Val, too. Now I sat on the edge of my bed running my fingers over the stars and crying. And I didn’t put it back on for a long time.

The next afternoon, a messenger in a NASA van brought me a package at the hospital. It was a tape of the radio telescope recordings,
with a note attached that was notably devoid of sentiment; it said only that we should get together again soon. We didn’t; he never called me, and I was certain he was avoiding places, and gatherings, where I might have crossed paths with him.

At the time I was more upset than I let myself admit, maybe because I had finally, painfully, had to face the fact that I was on the rebound from Cassiel. Postponed, to be sure, for two years had elapsed since I was with him. Nevertheless, first with Val, and now with Estes, I had made a break. With Val the break had felt clean. With Estes, I didn’t like how I felt. I had allowed myself to be far more vulnerable with Estes, in my heart—no matter what my mind told me—seeking romance with someone who so clearly wanted to avoid it. Punishing myself, in effect, for seeking it at all. That Estes had rejected me after a one-night stand revived in me the feeling that Cassiel had rejected me, too, by the mere fact of his disappearance—no matter whether he had been captured, or killed, or had simply found another woman. No sooner had I come to this realization than I suppressed it—and then I felt something snap in me. I began to plummet.

Doing more dope and drinking more heavily than I ever had in my life, I did exactly what I had promised myself I would not do, taking up, in quick succession, with two doctors at the hospital. And what a pair I chose. First, I had a fling—his word for it—with a pathologist. For a week, we slept together every night. Each time my body lay beside his I thought about the fact that he had spent the day cutting up the bodies of the dead on a steel table, probing lifeless organs which he weighed on a hanging scale, extracting fluids from veins and glands, and dissecting tissue to be examined under a microscope. I couldn’t get this out of my head, though he was a mild-mannered middle-aged man, divorced after a long marriage, energetic—even ecstatic—about my more youthful body. I had been around plenty of surgeons and a few pathologists in the war, shared meals with them and worked at close quarters, and had had no feeling about them one way or the other, but then, none of them had ever laid a hand on me, much less touched me in bed. So all that week I tortured myself with these thoughts of what he did in his lab, and with logic equally tortured began to blame Estes for the fact I was with this other man. Estes could have caught me on the rebound, I told myself, but instead had
let me tumble past him, spinning. I began to hate Estes, and that rapidly turned into hatred for myself.

The pathologist and I never once went out that week. From the hospital I drove straight to his house in Lihue. He brought home takeout food. I smoked dope. He drank white wine from an iced glass. We stripped and got into bed in his cluttered bedroom. His skin was very pale, except for his face and forearms, because he rarely went out in the sun. From the constant scrubbing with antiseptic soaps, his fingers were especially soft and white. His dull brown eyes seemed to be floating in his face. I felt utterly removed from my body even while absorbing myself in its rawest sensations: my spasms of pleasure were short-lived, insulated, numbed by pain. He felt and fingered, sucked and licked me, and he fucked me, standing up, lying down, on the floor, on the bed. We exchanged only small talk, and even that in small doses. I felt he could have gone on with this arrangement indefinitely. And me? I didn’t know. Then, on our seventh night together, we woke a couple of hours before dawn, fucked, and sat up in bed talking—a first. This time I drank with him, and as always with wine, two glasses went right to my head.

He ended up telling me, with sudden fervor, that after cutting all through the human body, exploring the remotest nooks and crannies of bones and organs and magnifying single cells a thousandfold, he had never found any evidence of “what people call the soul. If it’s there,” he added acidly, “its primary trait must be that it evades detection.”