A Trip to the Stars (43 page)

During my own routine, I needed all my energy to concentrate. The layout of the main lounge at The Stardust didn’t help: huge, with a domed ceiling, it was called the Star Room, and its low, curved stage, flanked by enormous palms, was backdropped by a gold curtain with silver stars. Two bright spotlights, one on Gaspard, one on me, crisscrossed the stage, following our movements, and a machine in the wings wafted clouds of mist past us, to produce an atmosphere in keeping with our psychic activities. The stage had two runways into the audience, where semicircular tables ran to the back of the room. The closest tables were twenty feet from center stage. The star motif of the room was repeated everywhere: lamps, ashtrays, the waitresses’ star-speckled leotards, not to mention the constellations reproduced on the ceiling and the enormous white marble star embedded in the black floor.

The place was packed. Men in black or white dinner jackets, women in pastel gowns. Diamonds and sapphires flashed in the blackness when the houselights dimmed—dazzling as a night sky.

After his introduction, while he was affixing my blindfold, Gaspard whispered urgently in my ear. “Is everything all right?”

I nodded slowly, but my head was whirling.

The twelve audience volunteers lined up on the right-hand runway. The first two proceeded routinely. The third was a man who identified himself, in a low brooding voice, as “Lieutenant Gregory Castro.” I had heard that sort of voice dozens of times and knew right away that he was not a cop, or an active-duty military man, but a Vietnam vet. Braced for his combat memories, I was about to fix on Lieutenant Castro when a sequence of images far more explosive to me burst into my thoughts. Someone in the first two rows stood up and pushed his chair back so abruptly—at a moment when the rest of the audience was absolutely still—giving off such powerful emanations,
that my concentration immediately shifted to him. To my astonishment and exhilaration this was the memory I saw passing through his head:

He was descending a flight of stairs, into a cramped foyer with a frayed Persian carpet. There was a coatrack on which a green woolen coat hung beside a smaller blue one. Two suitcases sat by the open front door. Down a short slate walk, on a quiet street, a car was idling at the curb with its headlights burning. His cigarette ember glowing, the man behind the wheel was blowing smoke out the window. Overhead the tree branches were lined with snow. The person who descended the stairs took the blue coat off the rack and paused before entering a room off the foyer.

My heart was racing wildly, for I knew that stairway and the carpet and the green coat—they all could have been lifted from my own memory. Which was what I thought for an instant:
your own memory has intruded and this has nothing to do with the person who left his seat
.

But then I became certain it was not my memory, that it was someone else who remembered entering that room off the foyer, a small living room with heavily curtained windows and old overstuffed furniture before a familiar fireplace, and that the scene he witnessed was one I could have witnessed: two women, old and young, arguing toe-to-toe. The older woman’s gray hair was tightly bunned, and her hands were on her hips; the young woman, with dark hair flowing onto the shoulders of her motorcycle jacket, was jabbing the air with her finger, making points.

Neither woman took notice of the person with the blue coat who had just joined them. Then suddenly the older woman slapped the younger one across the cheek, and the person remembering all this backed out of the room with the young woman, flushed and furious, following him, picking up the suitcases, and kicking the front door shut behind them. Only when she was out in the cold air, illuminated by the silver ray from a streetlight, did the tears become visible, glittering like stars on the cheeks of her pale, pretty face.

The face of my sister Luna!

The memory broke off there, and an instant later—to Gaspard’s horror and the surprise of Lieutenant Castro, still waiting on the runway—I tore off my blindfold. Half-blinded by the spotlight, I
glimpsed bewildered faces in the audience before focusing on an empty table for two, with drinks, in the second row. There were three red EXIT signs in the rear, and my eyes darted from one to the other. The middle door was shut; two men were entering the right-hand door; and the door on the left was just closing on a red dress and a man’s white-jacketed shoulder and sleeve. I tried in vain to remember who had been sitting at that second-row table.

Debating which exit I ought to rush for, I instead found myself, on rubbery legs, being assisted offstage by Gaspard, who gripped my arm and, over the buzz of the audience, kept saying, “What is it? What’s gotten into you?”

“Let me go!” I cried the moment we were offstage, and bolting from him, I rushed out into the house.

“Mala!” he shouted after me.

The audience gawked at me as I hurried up through the tables, still clutching my blindfold. I pushed through the right-hand door into the lobby and stopped cold. It was peak hour in the casino proper, and gamblers were milling everywhere. I saw literally dozens of men in white jackets and a good number of women in red. I zigzagged through the crowd desperately, then gave up, fighting back my tears. I got the maître d’ for the Star Room to find the waitress who had served that second-row table, but she remembered only that it had been occupied by a young couple; they had arrived just as my routine began, ordered a mescal Bloody Mary (for her) and a glass of champagne (for him), barely touched them, and walked out minutes later, leaving a big tip. They seemed agitated, the waitress said, as if they’d been arguing, but she couldn’t remember much about them physically except the fact the man was “good-looking” and the woman was a blonde wearing sunglasses. From the rear of the Star Room I saw Gaspard alone onstage, improvising. But I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying and I didn’t care.

I made directly for my dressing room, locked the door, and sat trembling before the mirror as I went over everything that had happened. Perhaps the fact I had gone on so frazzled and exhausted, pained by my memories of Cassiel, was the reason I had picked up on the wrong person’s memory during the performance. That had never happened before. But it was the identity of the person that staggered me: I felt sure it was Loren who had ordered a glass of champagne,
argued with his date, and while leaving the Star Room revisited a boyhood memory of my mother and Luna arguing in my mother’s house. And moments later he and Luna joined Milo, smoking outside in the car, perhaps to begin that final, fatal cross-country trip.

Had the memory broken off, and my blindfold come off, a few seconds earlier, I might have seen him. But as it was, I was sure he was alive—Loren was alive!—and burying my face in my arms on the makeup counter I began to cry, wrenching hard sobs from my gut, and only stopped, much later, when Gaspard’s banging on the door finally reached my ears.

Afterward, I was not so sure what I had experienced that night. But at the time, wanting so badly to believe it so, I told myself that I had crossed paths, however fleetingly, with Loren. This in itself, regardless of his circumstances—and what could they be that he should turn up at a Las Vegas casino?—felt like a miracle. If I was right, then for several precious seconds I had been inside his memory. A particularly accurate memory, I thought, drying my eyes with the blindfold, for even my father’s Silver Star had been present in its green frame over the mantelpiece, exactly as I remembered it, in the lamplight glinting as sharply as Luna’s tears out on the street.

In Las Vegas, “the crossroads of limbo,” my tutor Labusi used to call it, it sometimes felt as if everyone was lost, or in the process of losing something or someone, or of losing themselves in the end. Perhaps that was the real reason—as much pragmatic as esoteric—Samax had settled there and filled up his hotel with people looking for lost things. At that moment, crossing the parking lot of The Stardust Casino behind Dalia, I felt I was about to lose something with her—and it wasn’t going to be as pleasurable as losing my virginity. Suddenly she wheeled around, her eyes flashing in the moonlight, and raised her hand to slap me across the face. When she had tried to slap me in the casino not thirty minutes earlier, I had caught her wrist in midair, infuriating her even more. This time she stopped herself at the last instant, and curling her fingers into a fist, waved it at the sky.

“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do,” she said spitting out the words as if they were hot on her tongue. “Not
tonight
. Not when I’ve found out that back home I’ve lost
everything
.”

“Dalia, I wasn’t telling you what to do.”

“Bull
shit
!” she shouted.

When we reached my car, she opened and slammed shut the passenger-side door, then, hands on hips, began pacing rapidly up and down and kicking at the loose gravel with her red pumps.

I slid behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition. The car was a black 1959 Ford Galaxie convertible that Samax had given me on my eighteenth birthday—exactly a year ago, I thought, watching the luminous minute hand on the dashboard clock inch past midnight. Her red dress flaring in front of the headlights, Dalia circled the car a half
dozen times, broke a heel, flung her shoes across the parking lot, and stopped abruptly to light a cigarette which she smoked with her back to me, red neon from the casino’s sign setting her mane of hair on fire. The top was down on the car and I gazed away from the moon, away from Dalia, toward the mountains, where the stars were brightest and the night was still.

On the Strip, between the human and mechanical traffic, things were anything but peaceful. Even at this hour—especially at this hour—the Seventh Day Adventists in their street-corner booths were bringing their message to the sinners. They warned that Las Vegas, like Nineveh in seventh-century B.C. Babylon—teeming with erotic dancers and courtesans, gamesters and conjurers—would soon be swallowed up by the desert sands. In addition to the city’s round-the-clock frenzy, the nearby (almost suburban) testing of atomic bombs only encouraged such speculation. Nevertheless, in my nine years there, Las Vegas had nearly doubled in both size and population.

The act in the lounge that Dalia and I had begun to watch would have fit in at one of Nineveh’s nocturnal bazaars. I was sorry to be torn away just as I began observing the mind reader’s svelte assistant enter the labyrinth of someone’s memory on cat’s feet and calmly report its contents. With her dress like the night sky, her glittering blindfold and star-speckled hair, this woman especially was right out of my old
Arabian Nights
, which I still dipped into on nights when I couldn’t sleep. Which of late, because of recent developments at the Hotel Canopus, meant almost every night.

My evening with Dalia had been eventful, even for us. And not a little frenetic. I hadn’t seen her in a year, after all, and she had only arrived at the hotel that afternoon, from Santa Fe, in a rented car. After being expelled from Chile in January for political “crimes,” Dalia had flown to Albuquerque and begun driving eastward, covering another line of those crosses on Friar Varcas’s old map. We had dinner at a gaudy Moroccan restaurant in Paradise City, drove out into the desert at 100 mph, smoked some of her moon flower buds, drank mescal from a bottle with a green worm tumbling at its base, and made love on a blanket spread out on the sand.

“The first time we made love,” she murmured, opening the bodice
of her red dress like the petals of a flower, “you were a boy, and now you are a man.” She slid the dress up to her waist, and pushing me onto my back, climbed on top of me. “Let me show you something. I learned it once from a sailor in Punta Arenas. It’s called
Lo Sacacorchos
—The Corkscrew.”

I had dated and slept with a good number of girls since that first time, some who lived near the hotel and others whom I met at the university. But there was no one quite like Dalia. Two years before, when she had returned to the Hotel Canopus for a week, we had taken every opportunity to tear off our clothes, in my room, her room, the billiard room, the greenhouse—where Samax nearly stumbled on us beneath his prized loquat tree—or to drive into the Mojave, and with the car radio blaring, to make love as we were now. Then seventeen, I was beginning to realize just how attractive I was to women. About six one, strong and well-proportioned, I had benefited from all those years of Samax’s rigid dietary standards—an unceasing flow of fresh fruit juices and organic vegetables—as well as from the varied physical activity around the hotel, from swimming and archery to rock climbing in Kyle Canyon and jujitsu lessons. I had briefly grown, and shaved off, a beard, then a moustache, and I still wore my hair long at that time, combed straight back. But I also discovered that when it came to women, it was my upbringing—not just my good looks—that made me feel at ease around them and they around me. Not just girls my age, but young women several years my senior. The pattern I established with Dalia—I fifteen and she eighteen that first time together—I repeated several times afterward. Many of these young women, I would one day see, resembled the image of Alma that I had reconstructed and fixed in my memory from the days we had shared nine years before: tall, slender, blue-eyed brunettes around twenty years old. As for Desirée, who for me had conflated with Alma in even more powerful ways, I was moving closer chronologically—but in no other way I could discern—to my boyhood fantasty of making love to her when I was twenty and she thirty. I didn’t know how my carryings-on with her cousin Dalia, of which Desirée herself was well aware, having instigated them in the first place, might affect my slim possibilities with Desirée one way or the other.

When Dalia and I finally zoomed back to the Strip, we took in an early show at the Sahara, and went on to The Stardust. Her dinner conversation had swung back and forth between two poles: from discovering that morning that the military dictatorship now running Chile had stripped her of her citizenship to the harrowing details of her latest foray into northern New Mexico in search of vampires. She broke off in midstream with both subjects, announcing suddenly that we must make love, not back at the hotel, but right away, in the desert, under the stars. And until we did so, indulging in “The Corkscrew,” among other things, she was lost in a revery. Once we arrived at The Stardust, it was a different story: the lilac smoke of the “flowers of the moon” and the ninety-proof mescal seemed to catch up with her, so that when she returned to her earlier conversation it was with a much fiercer slant. At first, ranting about Chile’s dictator.