A Trip to the Stars

  “What happened?”

  She shook her head, biting her lip. “I breathed too much of the fire’s fumes and could not escape so quickly.”

  I waited in vain for her to stop sobbing. “And?”

  “And this!” She pulled the robe off her left shoulder and, just below the tattoo of the iceberg on fire, there was a swollen red and blue welt.

  “What’s that?”

  “What do you think?” She was crying hysterically now. “She bit me.”

  “The woman bit you?”

  “She’s not a woman!”

  “Dalia, why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” I said, grabbing her arm. I was trying to believe her, but at the same time I didn’t want to.

  “Don’t touch it!” she cried.

  “Dinner, the casino—all that time you said nothing.” And now I knew why in the desert on the blanket she—who always preferred making love stark naked—had kept her dress on.

  “I wasn’t ready to tell you,” she said defiantly, wiping her tears, her eyes more bloodshot than ever.

  “Look, you have to see a doctor.” Whether it was a bite or not, she needed help.

  “Doctors cannot help me.”

  “Don’t talk crazy—when did this happen?”

  “Two nights ago.”

  “And you didn’t even dress the wound?”

  “It would make it worse.”

  Slowly I put my palm against her cheek, fighting the wave of nausea that was passing through me. “Dalia, listen to me. We can get help.”

  “No.”

  “There’s someone here who can help. Remember Zaren Eboli?”

  She knitted her brow. “The man with the spiders? He cannot help me.”

  “He knows about these things, about bites and poisons.”

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t know about this. It’s not the same—this is not spiders. I wish it were.”

  “But he’ll know what to do.”

  She leaned across the table and her breath was hot on my face, and sickly sweet now, like the fumes she had described. “I know what to do,” she said urgently. “Enzo, I didn’t show you this for nothing. There is someone I can see. You can take me to him tonight.”

  “It’s three-thirty.”

  “Enzo, this is how you can help me.”

  “And he’s not a doctor?”

  “He is a kind of doctor,” she said slowly. “Can you do that for me? Now. Without any more talk.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was pushing the Galaxie hard, northward into the desert, on the two-lane secondary road that Dalia insisted on. I followed her directions despite the fact she seemed to be wasting away beside me with each passing minute. I thought eventually she’d exhaust herself and I’d take her to the hospital. She wore my gray trench coat over her red bathrobe; the trench coat was large on her to begin with, but by the end of our journey that night she was not so much wearing it as floating within it, animating its form more as vapor than bone and sinew. The journey was strange and alarming in itself, through places I had never seen at night, and then places I had heard of but never seen, and finally places I had never heard of—though they were only two hours from Las Vegas—and would never see again. Even when I later tried to find them.

  Gradually we veered northwest, encountering fewer and fewer cars in either direction. We passed the federal maximum-security prison at Indian Springs. Samax once told me he often thought about the prison, since it was just ten miles from the hotel, and about the innocent men he knew must be in it; he added with only a trace of irony that while he had met some evil men in prison, he had also known several innocent men at Ironwater besides himself and Rochel, and they too were no better or worse than other men just because they were terribly wronged. Wronged, however, in a way no man on the outside could understand. “No more than we can understand, but can only imagine, what it’s like to be murdered,” he had concluded, “because what they say is true, when you’re put away, a part of you is killed off.”

  Dalia’s conversation, meanwhile, was lapsing into delirium. By the time we reached Mercury, the off-limits Air Force town at the lip of the Nevada Test Site, she was speaking strictly in staccato fragments. We were in the strange, charged corridor in southern Nevada where the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts overlap. On our right there was a stretch of radioactive sand flats—scene of both above- and underground atomic tests—and on our left the eastern border of Death Valley. Still, it wasn’t the local geography, but that of New Mexico, that so obsessed Dalia suddenly. Specifically, a peculiar fact which she claimed was evident on any map of that state.

  “Can you picture it?” she said, wringing the sleeves of the trench coat as the wind whipped her hair. “A triangle … three points … each of them a town: Luna … Los Lunas … Puerto de Luna … You think those names are a coincidence?… a triangle of lunar towns … at its center the mouth of the Río Puerco.… Do you remember the Río Puerco?”

  In fact, I did, for I had seen it from Acoma when I was there with Calzas four years earlier: a faint brown ribbon in the east that fed into the Río San José.

  “It is the river Friar Varcas was following,” Dalia went on, “when he encountered the crucified woman and that first vampire. Near Los Lunas,” she added emphatically. “Just as the road stop was in Puerto de Luna.”

  The high clouds over the test site were stationary, and faded, as if they had been painted onto the sky long ago. And in the wind blowing from that direction there was a faint hiss of irregular static, an edgy whine—the residue, I thought, of all those atomic blasts, the afterbuzz and debris of split atoms. A wind of free-floating electrons which lent an incandescence to Dalia’s tightening features. Her voice, though, was drifting, increasingly free-floating itself. And I was increasingly alarmed. Over the course of the drive, and from the moment she had shown me the welt on her shoulder, I had been running on adrenaline. At first I had been skeptical of much she was telling me, but that changed. And the more apprehensive I grew, the more I fell back on old instincts, withdrawing into silence and holding my feelings in check.

  “But Puerto de Luna made those places look tame,” she started up again. “That’s where I was two days ago … where Varcas disappeared in the end … where his book breaks off … February 29, 1852. The last entry is just seven words: Found the lost Mansion of the Moon. Do you know what that means? The cabalists said there are 301,655,722 angels abroad … and that they live in the twenty-eight mansions of the moon. But there is a twenty-ninth, a lost mansion, here on earth where the fallen angels live … los angelos infiernos … the ones from hell. Under the full moon, one night each month, it opens its door … Puerto de Luna … Varcas found it … he entered and never came out again—never as Varcas, that is. A mansion with many occupants and many outposts. That way,” she concluded, pointing through the windshield, “the left-hand fork to the next town.”

  We had just passed Beatty, where the wind’s static jumped from a hiss to a sizzle and those high clouds darkened from indigo to black, barely visible against the sky. Dalia was back to wringing her sleeves, clawing at them with her long fingers, and I was trying to keep my eyes on the road.

  “I went to Puerto de Luna,” she continued, “on a clear night, but without a single star shining … as if all the stars had burnt up and fallen into the mountains. I came to a crooked road … all the trees dead, the earth scorched, the wind foul … I left my car and walked … it was as if I was walking the length of my entire life, and at the end of the road there was a huge lodge … black stone … a single door … a window glowing with moonlight … and in the surrounding darkness, cries and howls … the ground moving … a carpet of snakes … some dogs with human eyes. Despite all I had seen following Varcas’s path, I was overcome with fear, yet I didn’t want to leave … not when I had found my way to the center of his labyrinth. A woman in a gown came out the door and took my hand … there was blood under her fingernails but I could see right through her hands … she
led me to the door … behind her there was a press of bodies … dancers, gliding in pairs, their features part human, part animal … I glimpsed an owl’s stiffened ears, a wolf’s snout, an ant’s many-lensed eyes. Suddenly the dancers parted and a man with a beard stepped out to greet me … he wore a black coat and high black boots … he had long white hair, a beard, and a hooked nose … his wide-set eyes stared through me as if I were glass … it was—turn right here,” she interrupted herself. “Go up the hill.”

  She didn’t say another word as I drove up to a sign with phosphorescent letters that read ENTERING RHYOLITE, past abandoned mining shacks in a cratered hollow, a crumbling depot, and the skeleton of a burnt-out church. Then, just over the crest, she pointed at a boxy black building sitting solitary to my left, in utter darkness.

  “Stop here,” Dalia said, her eyes widening.

  Gazing down the long street illuminated by my high-beam lights, I realized that Rhyolite was a ghost town. We were at one end of the main street, which was lined with broken-down buildings and rubble. I knew that rhyolite was a volcanic rock, the lava form of granite; along with the vast gold deposits, the rhyolite must have long ago been mined out of that windless bluff overlooking Death Valley. On mild days, it would reach 110° up there; even at five A.M. in December the air was stifling, rank with sulphurous fumes.

  I pulled up outside the building. It was all stone, windowless in front, with a metal door and a narrow walk covered with dust white as snow. The few trees near the building were dead, and up the walls there were thick vines that looked just as lifeless.

  At Rhyolite, the feelings I had been holding in all that time, listening to Dalia rant, flooded over me. By the time I sat in front of that building, the nausea in my gut had coalesced into a rush of fear. My lips were so numb it felt as if I would have to pry them open. Gripping the steering wheel hard, squinting into the inky darkness, I read the plaque beside the building’s door: THE LOST MUSEUM.

  “After traveling this country, I can tell you they are everywhere,” Dalia said, startling me, for her voice was suddenly cold and precise. “Just as Varcas said. Only their occupations have changed: now they’re croupiers, rodeo riders, store clerks, cocktail waitresses—oh yes, and priests. The ones who avert their eyes from the crosses in their own churches. Some of them go back to Varcas’s time, others just fifty years, and some,” she whispered, “just a few days.… But all of them will live forever.”

  “You mean, Varcas—”

  “I mean, it’s all true—everything he reported.”

  “And this museum—what is it?”

  “Just what it says,” she replied evenly. “For those who are lost, never to be found. You once told me your uncle’s hotel is filled with people who are lost, or who are looking for lost things. You are one of those people, just as I was. But in finding what I was looking for, I have lost everything else. Perhaps that is always the way it is.” She wet her lips and they gleamed sharply. “Now you see why that money was nothing to me. At this museum you pay a different kind of admission.”

  “Dalia, let’s get out of here.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re going to do,” she said, slipping out of my trench coat. She was no longer shivering and her hands were finally at rest.

  “Without you?”

  “Leave here as soon as I enter that door,” she said. “And don’t look back.”

  “And the man who was going to help you?”

  “He’s here.” Her eyes were wide again, and the color seemed to be draining from her irises. “You are a deep soul, and I enjoyed our times together,” she said in a distant voice. “I wanted to see you once more. And I had some business to finish. I was given two days and they’re over now, at sunrise.”

  I had been afraid, but for the first time I was afraid of her.

  “Let’s not pretend I have to explain, Enzo.” Her mouth curled into a tight smile as she leaned close and whispered, “Make no mistake, I would love to take you with me.” Then she pulled away and opened her door. “So just go.…”

  When she stepped from the car, I made no attempt to stop her. She came around to my side and said, “The manuscript of my translation is in an envelope in the desk in my room. Mail it for me.”

  My lips parted, but I could not speak.

  “Will you do that?” she said, squeezing my wrist. My hand was cold, but hers was like ice. Then she brushed my cheek with her fingernails—not hard enough to scratch, but nearly so. “You will,” she nodded.

  Turning toward the Lost Museum, she whispered, “Can you see him?” But I saw nothing.

  Dropping the red bathrobe from her shoulders, Dalia was naked when she walked up to the door of the museum. Her white skin shone against that black door, which swung open the moment she reached it. She stepped through it and never looked back.

  I hesitated, then got the flashlight from the glove compartment and rushed up the stone path. My hand was shaking as I entered the single rectangular room that was the Lost Museum. It was hot as a furnace and absolutely bare. There were cold ashes in the fireplace. The cement floor was thick with dust, but did not bear a single print from Dalia’s feet. Where could she have gone? The only other exit from the room was a window in the rear wall, barely large enough to accommodate a child. Through that window I saw a small red light streaking across the desert, growing fainter by the second. It was going too fast to be a motorcycle, I thought, and then I watched it rise suddenly from the floor of Death Valley and disappear altogether.

  I jumped into the Galaxie and spun it around, keeping my eyes glued to the rearview mirror. Straining to suck down some air, flooring the accelerator, I rode the double line the four miles back past Beatty, then got onto the interstate just as the sun was peeping over the mountains.

  During the drive home, I resisted rushing into State Police headquarters near Indian Springs, even after pulling off the highway to do so. How could I have told the police what had just happened to me without provoking them to administer a Breathalyzer test—which I would have failed—and locking me up? Could I have explained that after a night of dinner, lovemaking, gambling, and other diversions, my date had stripped naked and vanished into a phantom museum? And if I just reported Dalia as a missing person, what would I become—the only person she had been with all night, and the last one she was seen with—but a murder suspect who was deranged. No, the police were out of the question. And when I arrived back at the hotel, still frightened, I also resisted the impulse to rush into the garden to Samax, who was eating breakfast. He was having enough trouble at that time without my adding this particular madness to the mix.

  Instead, I went directly to Dalia’s room. At first glance, it appeared she had not left a trace: no clutter, no personal effects, the dresser bare, the bedcovers taut. Maybe she just hadn’t unpacked the previous afternoon, I thought, but then I found her suitcase in the closet, containing only the red dress and shoes she had worn when we went out. Since the red bathrobe was standard issue to guests, when she arrived at the hotel her suitcase’s sole contents must have been the fat red envelope in the desk drawer which she had asked me to mail. A gray address label had already been affixed to the envelope, with the following typed in red ink:

  REVENANT PRESS

  3000 DAEDALUS CIRCLE

  ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

  The envelope was sealed, and I did not open it. But behind it, far back in the drawer, I did find the old Spanish edition of Friar Varcas’s memoir, titled Vampiri en Española Califorñia y en Gran Mexico, from which Dalia had made her translation. Brown, with a heavy battered binding and yellowed pages, it was a book I had seen in her hands many times, but had never opened myself. When I did, I didn’t get beyond the frontispiece, where there was a faded photograph—the only one known to exist, according to the caption—of the author. With wide-set eyes, a hooked nose, and long hair—but without the beard—it was obviously the man Dalia claimed to have seen at Puerta de Luna, and again, just hours before, at Rhyol
ite.

  Putting the book back into the drawer, I hurried to my own room. With Sirius at my feet, I stared out the window onto the brightening desert sands until I dozed off fitfully around noon. I was up all night, and the following morning I returned to Dalia’s room. I found the envelope where I had left it, and I promptly mailed it, but there was no trace of Varcas’s book in the desk drawer. And I never saw Dalia again—at least not as I had known her, though I felt in subsequent years that I might have glimpsed her on occasion in other incarnations. Always benign—to me, at least. And not always in my dreams, which she sometimes frequented, standing out more vividly than anyone else, as if it were her true element.

  If I hadn’t been sleeping well before, Dalia had ensured that I wouldn’t be for some time to come. But even the incredible circumstances of her disappearance soon receded in my consciousness, so intense did the swirl of events at the Hotel Canopus become later that winter. Many gears on the complex apparatus that was daily life at the hotel began spinning out of control at the same time. At first this seemed coincidental, a matter of bad luck, but it soon became clear that these simultaneous events were of course connected in subtle ways.

  In fact, much had transpired at the hotel, with people of great significance and long standing in my life, well before Dalia’s sudden arrival and departure. Labusi, for one, had been paralyzed in an automobile accident two years earlier—a horrible blow, and a shock to all of us at the hotel. There was a railroad strike at the time, and, terrified of air travel, rather than miss a performance of Turandot he had been looking forward to, Labusi hired a car and driver to take him to the opera house in San Francisco. On the return trip, he told me later, as he dozed in the rear seat, dreaming of the moment when Turandot first sings, a van of tourists who had lost their way ran the car off the highway. His driver escaped with a couple of fractures, but Labusi would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. His intellectual processes were unaffected, but for nearly a year he tumbled into a seemingly bottomless depression. Even the elaborate chess problems and mnemonic challenges that all of us brought to him failed to arrest his descent. He made a pathetic figure, propelling himself through the lobby in his chromium wheelchair, his large head cocked stiffly to one side, or sitting in mutual silence and sipping iced chamomile tea all afternoon with Dolores in her little niche of the garden, encircled by hedges. What an unlikely, and unhappy looking, pair they made. I hated to see him like that, stripped of his vitality and wit. Silence, however, was the only element of his Pythagorean beliefs to which Labusi continued to adhere. His dietary strictures—he began eating beans, then fish—had fallen by the wayside. And by the end of that year, when he even stopped listening to his extensive music collection—including the late string quartets of Beethoven, without which, he had once told me, life would literally be meaningless—I truly feared that he might have become suicidal. Evidently this was a red flag for Samax as well. For what finally snapped Labusi back to some measure of his former self was an inspired notion of Samax’s.