A Trip to the Stars (52 page)

Deneb backed all this up with a dizzying assortment of geological and oceanographic facts and figures, compiled by scientists whose names sounded as fantastic as their theories—Alan H. Kelso De Montigny, Count Carli de Lalande, Otto Muck. Saving his biggest surprise for last, he disclosed that he had discovered an obscure Greek codex of the Hellenistic period in the archives of the Crusaders’ library in Rhodes which linked Atlantis to the lost city of Tartessos in southern Spain.

“Tartessos is the unshakable link between Atlantis and the Basque people,” Deneb concluded excitedly. “It was a colony of Atlantis, the outpost from which the Atlantans traded in the Mediterranean. Since no one escaped the tidal waves on Atlantis, the bulk of Atlantans who survived their civilization were the colonists in Tartessos. After the Carthaginians razed their city, these colonists fled to the Pyrenees.” Deneb turned to Samax, who was listening with his head cocked, puffing a cigar. “And those full-blooded Atlantans, Junius, who evolved into a fierce and resourceful alpine tribe, are the people we now know as the Basques. Or the Atlantika, which literally means, ‘those who were once of Atlantis.’ ”

Deneb closed his red binder and bowed stiffly as everyone applauded, after which Samax offered up a toast.

But, much as he appreciated Deneb’s well-wrought theory, Samax was really thinking about something else altogether throughout that dinner. Afterward he would tell me that earlier in the day Deneb had mentioned a possible reference in the Greek codex to a rare amulet: sacred to moon worshippers, this amulet was said to hold secrets about the moon never before revealed. Deneb had microfilmed the codex and sent the film out to be developed the day he returned to Las Vegas. The moment it came back from the lab, Samax was poring over it—projected onto a screen in his library—with Labusi as his translator. Though it took them a while, they did find definitive mention of that amulet—aerially depicting the far side of the moon—which had for so long obsessed Samax.

As for Deneb, after his monograph was published, the section on the origins of the Basques was excerpted in the Nevada newspapers, and to his surprise he was feted by the state’s Basque-American Society and the Basque-dominated Chamber of Commerce. Called on to address civic groups, Rotarians, Masons, and schoolchildren, he
became for a while, to Samax’s amusement—for we all knew Deneb as one of the hotel’s most reclusive residents—a local celebrity. The “Atlantis Connection,” as the
Reno Gazette
dubbed him.

Later that night, as Samax and the others retired to the library after Deneb’s speech, Desirée intercepted me in the corridor and took me aside. “I need to see you,” she said in her velvety voice, which still had the power to make my heart skip. “Let’s go outside.”

Desirée had passed up dinner. Atlantis was not one of the lost things that captured her fancy. She led me out past the fountain, into the garden. We stood only inches apart there under the stars with the desert wind ruffling our hair. Without a word, her long lashes concealing her eyes, she unfastened the buttons of her jacket. Was this, I thought, the night I had been waiting for all those years under the same roof with her? Then from her jacket she produced an envelope, which contained a letter to her from Delia.

“You asked me to let you know as soon as I heard from her. I found this when I came in tonight.”

I tilted the envelope into the moonlight. “Postmarked Santa Fe,” I said.

“That’s temporary. She says when she settles down, she’ll send me her address.” Desirée shrugged. “About what I expected. She doesn’t trust me or anybody else. And she’s still afraid of Dolores.” She shook her head. “All these years they all feared Dolores. And all their lives they served her—and served her purposes.” She fell silent for a moment. “There were only three bumps on that road: Doris’s marriage to Samax, which of course Dolores sanctioned, my mother’s fling with Samax, which of course she didn’t, and her affair with Spica, of which I am the living reminder. Dolores never forgave Delia for those two indiscretions, and afterward Delia tried so hard to make it up to her. On some level it must have been excruciating for Delia to take off like that—putting herself first—after Denise’s funeral. When I was small, and we were exiled in Florida, that was Dolores’s doing. She always needed to control the levers. This time Delia went on her own, and that could make Dolores do something really crazy.”

“At her age?”

“Why not? Seems to me all that chamomile tea has worked: she’s
never been sick and she’s strong as a horse. She doesn’t even use a cane to walk. I hope I have just a few of her genes.”

“Does she talk to you at all?”

Desirée shook her head. “She gave up on me a long time ago. Predictably, she did call me in right after Delia split. She said, “Now that your mother’s gone—as good as dead—I want you to know that I expect the hotel to go to you. And I don’t want to hear otherwise.”

“What did you say?”

“What I’ve always said—that, like my mother, I’m not interested. But she doesn’t hear me. It has nothing to do with me. Now it’s something she has to thrash out with Samax, if she uses her last breath to do it. Let them deal with it.” She squeezed my arm. “I’m going to bed, Enzo.” She kissed my cheek, and drinking in that wonderful fragrance of her hair and skin, I held on to it for as long as I could after she had slipped away into the darkness.

Minutes later I could still feel the warmth of Desirée’s lips when I stretched out in the cool grass under Bel’s Tree at the center of the orchard. And no sooner had I closed my eyes than I plunged into a dream.

I was back in the planetarium I had visited with Alma, except instead of being abducted by Ivy I had gotten lost in the basement. The basement was a labyrinth of pitch-black rooms twinkling with pinpricks of starlight. In one of them the floor was littered with astronomical paraphernalia: orreries, telescopes, sextants. At the end of a long corridor, I came on a door marked FIRE, which opened, and a young woman stepped out. It was Bel. Smiling, she approached me slowly and embraced me. Her thin body felt cold, but her breath was warm and her blond hair smelled of jasmine, like Desirée’s. She held me like that for an eternity, just the two of us. Then, as I began to feel her heart beating against my chest even while my own heartbeat was growing louder in my ears, she stepped back into the cool darkness. Groping blindly, I tried to find her, but she was gone.

Opening my eyes, I stared up through the foliage of Bel’s Tree, into a patch of sky where the stars were blazing. Drowsily I stood up and moved across the garden like a sleepwalker, the trees in their quincuncial pattern turning to vapor before me. Like the ghosts of trees, they seemed to leave a sheen on my skin when the wind blew through them.

In my bed I did not return to that dream, as I had hoped, but instead lay awake tossing until dawn. When I finally drifted off, the last thing I heard was two different heartbeats: my own and Bel’s, I thought, as I had heard them in the garden—and as she must have heard them in that room, on just such a night before I was born.

In the deserts of Africa, Pliny wrote, ghosts suddenly confront the traveler and vanish in a flash. This happened in other sorts of deserts as well—the internal variety—which I could find with little effort whether I was crisscrossing the South Pacific, marooned in a northern city in dead of winter, or sailing the Aegean Sea. Hydra, Spetses, Tínos, Santorini … I had been island-hopping again, alone again, eventually settling down for a while for the simple reason that I found myself on an island I didn’t want to leave.

For the first time in years I had begun reading again in Latin—not just the naturalists like Pliny, but historians from whom I had shied away as a student, like Livy, who was so dry, and Suetonius, who could be more salacious than a tabloid columnist. Suetonius also wrote a great deal about ghosts and apparitions: according to him, every Roman emperor from starchy Augustus to lewd Domitian during his last night on earth dreamt fantastical portents of his own death. I had also begun to read again in ancient Greek—especially Herodotus and Plutarch—and while my Latin came back to me quickly, with Greek I plodded. Even so, it made my efforts to pick up the vernacular that much easier. Having settled on Naxos—the largest and least visited of the Cyclades—in the off-season, I had little choice but to speak Greek. And the more I explored the island and its five thousand years of history—Ionic temples, Roman aqueducts, Byzantine churches, Venetian castles—the more I felt that I had finally, at age thirty-four, made the trip to the Mediterranean basin that, before my mother’s death, I had dreamt about in college. With a well-thumbed copy of Pausanias’s
Guide to Greece
under my arm, I felt very much the student at times,
one who had received a far different education than the classics department had planned for me.

Pliny wrote of ghosts in his book on zoology, which did not surprise me; I, too, had come to see them as fully animated, specialized members of the animal kingdom. The ghosts I encountered on Naxos were not like the ones that had visited my seaside cabin on Rarotonga eight years earlier—my deceased relatives and friends and the small legion of the dead I had x-rayed in Vietnam. Nor was Geza Cassiel ever among them. No, these were the ghosts of strangers, which made it no less frightening when I discovered them—materializing for an instant, silent and still—at my table in a noisy restaurant, or by a kiosk on the windswept harbor, or, worst of all, behind the curtain by the small balcony of my room at the Hotel Capella.

Then one rainswept April day the origin of these ghosts came clear to me: I had conjured them, I thought, out of the memories of all the people who had participated in my performances in the five years I had worked as Jorge Gaspard’s assistant. Before our professional relationship ended—that is, before I fled both him and the act in Athens—I calculated that between 1973 and 1978 I had participated in 1,498 performances, during which I must have been on intimate terms with the memories of at least 10,486 members of our audiences. Taking into account the additional thousands of people fixed in the memories of those audience members, this meant that I had been privy, however fleetingly, to the lives of a population as great as any midsized European country’s—say, Denmark. Or Greece. Now, it seemed, these violated ghosts were getting their revenge. Or perhaps they were a kind of ectoplasmic residue: once absorbed into my consciousness, they had remained there as a kind of foreign colony. When I glimpsed them, they resembled shadows with glowing outlines—like shining black auras. Or that special variety of X ray called a skiagram—a figure formed by shading in the outline of a shadow—which I remembered from my technician days. At first these ghosts frightened me, but I almost got used to them after a while, as if they were natural shadows; indeed, if I squinted, they didn’t look much different from the shadows cast by a streetlight on a misty night.

As the months passed, after years of public performances and constant travel I reverted to form on Naxos and began leading a fixed, near solitary existence. I moved from my hotel just below the Kastro,
the hilltop castle that crowned the old town, to a two-room house on Karades Bay, thirty minutes south by motor scooter. The roads to my house devolved from winding asphalt to gravel to rocky dirt. There were two cypress trees in front and some cactus and thorny bushes along one side. The soil was baked, the horseshoe of mountains around the bay like a succession of gray stone skulls. In fields marked off by stone walls, goats grazed on weeds that might have been cut from sheets of tin. Accustomed to the lushness of Kauai, the multiplying gradations of green and blue, I found this stark white landscape made my eyes ache. But it was an aching clarity I welcomed at that point in my life. A clarity I found at night, too, when I sat on my porch gazing at the stars. Touring in cities, I had missed the night sky, and once settled into that house on the coast—on an island again finally—I resumed stargazing in earnest.

In those five years I had only been back to Hawaii once, one Christmas. Olan still lived in my bungalow with my dogs. Though Alvin and Claudia were spending more of their time in Japan, and Estes was visiting the mainland on that occasion, none of my friends had left the island permanently. But it had been painful to go back. I wasn’t yet ready. My anger over the fallout around Francis Beliar’s death had hit me with renewed force once I was away from Kauai. I was still ashamed over the nature of my affair with him—the dope and booze, the twisted sex, feeling cheap all the time—and neither my success onstage nor the fact that for the first time in my life I had some money in the bank helped. However, now that I was away from Gaspard those wounds were beginning to heal, and I realized how much they had been aggravated by my relationship with him. Zigzagging over the rocky, scattershot archipelago of Greece for several months freed me up; it felt like the Cook Islands all over again: the more erratic my route and remote the islands, the stronger their effect on me, and the more sustenance I drew. By the time I reached Naxos, I was experiencing deep tugs for Hawaii, the only place I’d ever really thought of as home. But I knew I needed to be alone for a while first.

I saw that, while I hadn’t fled the chaos of a war or the pain of a severed love affair, my years with Gaspard had taken a toll on me. I had gone from distrusting to detesting him. When I spent two weeks on Santorini, the barrel-chested proprietress of my hotel in
Monolithos informed me that the island was home to all the vampires in the region.
Vrykolakes
, she called them, and no matter how distant the other islands they visited nocturnally—Chios and Samos, for example, off Turkey—she said they always returned to Santorini before dawn. But it was her definition of a vampire that made me think of Gaspard: the truly powerful
vrykolakos
had no need to suck a victim’s blood because he could, with far more devastating results, suck out the entire contents of a man’s soul.

Gaspard had run through his many other assistants indiscriminately, but I knew that one with my gift, who enhanced his drawing power, he would try to keep at all costs. Put simply, I had become a cash cow for him, and in his greediness he had doubled our performance schedule whenever the moon was favorable. When I brought up quitting—even hinted at it—it clearly alarmed him, and during my last months with him, he focused his considerable energies on getting me to stay on. He did it overtly: flattering me, indulging my small extravagances—acupuncture sessions, hydrotherapy, weekends at alpine spas—and, most of all, paying me plenty. I grew accustomed to having more money than I needed, which made me think I needed it all the more. In European capitals I had acquired expensive tastes in clothes—never a vice of mine previously—and, to let off tension, visited casinos where I played the roulette wheel. Gradually, though, I came to believe that Gaspard, a sophisticated manipulator, was using more than money and perks to keep me tethered to him. I didn’t know what, exactly; I knew only that no matter how intensely I wanted to break with him, I wasn’t able to. Presented more than once with opportunities, at the last moment I always shied away from leaving, without understanding why.