If you ever get this letter, you’ll know what happened to me after I left you that day. Why I disappeared. And I wanted you to know about my life before we met, at least the crucial events before that Christmas Eve when I was shot out of the sky.
In this room the last few days, sitting at this desk, it feels as if time has stopped. The atmosphere could not be more static: the temperature and humidity never vary by a single degree; the food is uniformly bland; the silence, set off by the hum of air conditioners, deep and unwavering. Time had to stop for me to write to you like this. Thinking of how we both disappeared on each other, I sometimes ask myself, as you perhaps do, whether we were ever in Manila at all. I have many memories, but only a single tangible object from that time remains in my possession: the leaf from the playing-card bush on which you wrote our names one afternoon. I’ve kept it in the only large book I own: the Air Force’s Star Catalogue.
The Bru have a saying. One of those things that’s so simple you’re sure you heard it before: Only when you stop looking for something will you find it.
I can’t imagine not looking for you. If I have to stop looking, I will. But I’ll still find you. Until then, my love,
Geza
17
Honolulu
There was a ceiling fan revolving slowly over the bed. A garden outside in which the birds were chattering. Hibiscus and jacaranda scents wafting.
We were up high in a hotel called The Altair, out beyond Diamond Head. From our lanai in the early morning, when the mist lifted over the sea, we could see the island of Molokai smoky on the horizon.
For the first time since Manila we were in a room that was not just his or mine, but ours. Neither of us wanting, ever now, to be apart again.
Yet knowing that soon we were going to be as far apart as technology permitted two human beings to be in the year 1980. A separation fraught with risks, technological and human. And after that—what?—maybe we would be together always. Which, as I had learned with considerable pain, could mean a single day or many years.
And so I was holding on to each moment: a skill I thought I had been honing my entire life, not in the way of my Buddhist friends, but as a woman accustomed to losing the people and things she loved—and even those she didn’t. In my twenties, when I lost first Loren, then Cassiel, I would have thought this fatalism hopelessly self-pitying. But I was thirty-five now and I knew that I’d better hold on to the present moment for dear life because it was all I might ever have. I had learned that I could either insulate myself, nursing the illusion I had nothing to lose, or push on, taking risks, with the knowledge that in the end we all lose everything, never on our own terms, and never in the way we would like. All of us come into this world crying, and some of us leave it crying. Those who don’t aren’t necessarily stronger or weaker. Luckier or unluckier. Maybe they’re just cried out.
All the same, the very real possibility that I could lose Geza Cassiel a second time, forever, at that point in my life, was one blow I knew, in my heart, I couldn’t afford to absorb.
My fears would be tested, but not because Cassiel ever wavered in his devotion. He loved me a great deal—maybe more than I had imagined. Maybe as much as I loved him, though I told him that was not possible. His love for me, more enduring and unconditional than any I had received in my life, was what I had hoped for after Manila. I had believed in him so much, after all. But, in the back of my mind, I could not be sure over all the years that he hadn’t forgotten me, fallen in love with someone else, or even married. In fact, those were the easy torments: for a long time I had doubted he was even alive.
Lying in bed together at The Altair, running my fingertip along the stubble on his jaw, I asked him if he had been in love again since Manila.
“I was with other people, here and there. But it wasn’t like with you, Mala. All the time there was only you.”
I had forgotten how direct he could be, though it was one of the very qualities that had attracted me to him. “It was the same for me,” I said. “Why do you think it’s like this? We were together so briefly—how did we know? I mean, I was so young, I didn’t know anything, but I always knew about us.”
“Maybe because it’s not something you can learn. There’s no wisdom involved. You can’t explain it. That’s why some people let it slip through their fingers, though they’re handed all the breaks.” He pulled me closer. “We didn’t allow that to happen, even when it seemed we got no breaks at all.”
For two months we had waited for this long weekend in Hawaii—the rendezvous we never had during the war. After meeting on the beach, we spent one night together in my house on Naxos. Then he had to go back to Crete and I remained on Naxos, two islands separated, not by an unknowable, unbreachable expanse, but a hundred-mile stretch of open sea. It was a shock—finding each other, having to separate so soon, yet at the same time, after the years of separation and silence, being able to communicate and see each other. Communications were limited, for Cassiel was restricted to his base, in training for a mission which he wouldn’t discuss much at first. Gradually I learned just how highly classified, top-security, his mission was.
In those two months we did have a weekend in Xanía, in eastern Crete, and a night in Iráklion, but otherwise had to rely on the telephone and the mail, either speaking or writing to each other every day. In this way, I learned a great many things about him, and he about me. Before, he had known that my father was buried on Guam, that my mother had died suddenly, and that I could speak a few ancient languages. I tried to fill him in on the rest, beginning with the aftermath of my mother’s death and Loren’s abduction and the twists and turns my life had taken before and after I met him on the Repose. It felt good to get this part of my story out to him; he comforted me, and also told me that he understood better now the fear and dread he sensed had been at work in me in Manila, which he had attributed to the war.
“You entered the war looking for refuge,” he said as we walked along the promenade in Xanía one night. “For something that might be bigger and more oppressive than your own grief. I can understand that.”
“Then you know it didn’t make my grief any smaller.”
“But it sounds like you did everything you could to find this boy.”
“He would be twenty-four now, twenty-five in December. I had to let go, Geza. Even more than I let go with you. Or I really would have gone insane. As it was, I took myself to the brink.”
And more difficult than telling him about Loren, I related the entire tale of my first years on Kauai, my job at the hospital, my affair with Francis Beliar, including the accident, and all the drinking and drugging. By the time Jorge Gaspard entered my story, he seemed—in comparison, in retrospect—a welcome figure.
Cassiel told me that, likewise, over the course of the long years, through countless lonely nights, he had spun out endless scenarios to fill the enormous gaps in his knowledge of my life.
“You were too beautiful and too unique, Mala. At times, I was certain you must be married, or with someone else, and that you had become a classics professor at some university. At one point when I was searching for you, I actually got in touch with a national association of classics professors. I envisioned you in a big colonial house on a green campus translating The Peloponnesian Wars or Plato’s Symposium.”
He also said he had written me a long letter nine years earlier, while staying in a hotel in Albuquerque, and was disappointed that I had never received it. In the letter, he too had tried to fill in some gaps: his boyhood, his parents, the circumstances that led him to enlist in the Air Force before he was twenty years old. Who he had loved before me, and what had happened to him after he walked out of the Hôtel Alnilam in Manila in January, 1969.
Over time, Cassiel shared most of the contents of that long letter with me. It had been written, he said, in a furious burst when he was just out of the hospital, recovering from bad wounds, disgusted with the war and heading for his next assignment with decidedly mixed
feelings about remaining in uniform at all. He had wanted me to know the events that had shaped his early life, and everything that had happened to him in the war after Manila, from being shot down again, and taken prisoner, to his long rehabilitation. I saw that my fears about him—short of my fear that he was dead—paled beside the actual events. In the eyes of the Air Force, Cassiel had been a genuine hero. But he had known that, after Vietnam, his days in the military were numbered. He gave me his various medals in Honolulu, saying only that he preferred me to have them because during the war I had saved, rather than taken, lives. And so I slipped his Silver Star into the velvet-lined box beside the one my father had been awarded.
And yet what happened to Cassiel in the war seemed no more harrowing than the story he told me of his early life: his mother’s abandoning him, his estrangement from his father, his short tragic relationship with Bel, the one and only girl in his life besides me he said he had loved. None of the scenarios I had concocted about Cassiel’s past could match what had actually happened to him. Especially, for me, the most shocking fact of all: that he had enlisted in the Air Force at eighteen only because he had just killed a man—bravely, in self-defense, but also brutally with a gunshot to the head and a gruesome attempt at covering it up.
So, in addition to all those long-standing questions, I had an answer now, too, to the biggest question of all: how and where Cassiel had spent the previous eleven years. And that, too, was a surprise. For he had become an astronaut.
Five years earlier, he decided to take the step he had flirted with before the war, resigning his commission as an Air Force colonel and enrolling in NASA’s astronaut-training program. That he was a highly decorated veteran opened doors for him. But, in truth, NASA was happy to have him for reasons of its own: namely that he had developed a reputation as the best navigator in the Air Force, specializing in exploring and charting difficult and unknown territories. A specialty that would be no small part of his NASA mission as the navigator on a three-man spaceflight in a modified Apollo spacecraft. A secret flight—all three crewmen volunteers—which the public might not know about for some time. By the time we left Greece, I knew he was going to the moon—which seemed incredible enough—but only when we were in Honolulu did he confide to me the exact nature of his mission and the reason it was being kept under wraps. I had just flown in from Athens, having closed up the house on Naxos, and he had been on the Big Island all week in his final on-site training, in the lava fields that so eeriely approximated the lunar surface.
Before joining NASA, Cassiel’s last Air Force assignment was in the Falkland Islands, where he had worked with cartographers and geodesists to remap the islands off the western half of Antarctica. Coordinating aerial photographs and laser measurements with high-resolution radiometer pictures from satellites, they had charted the coastlines and interiors of places previously too remote to be surveyed by plane. Over several years, Cassiel and his partners had created or updated hundreds of conventional, geoid, and contour maps, detailing geologic folds and glacier lines and establishing alpine landmarks and coastal boundaries down to the meter. Before that, stationed in New Zealand, he helped to chart the numerous island groups in the South Pacific—Society, Gilbert, Caroline, Phoenix, Cook—which had not been looked at since the 1920s. All those islands I had hopped through, I marvelled, he had charted. The mapping of islands was Cassiel’s specialty. In fact, as bit by bit we compared notes, we were astonished—and heartbroken—to discover that his tenure at an air base in Auckland, New Zealand, overlapped my stay on Rarotonga by a couple of months. And that Rarotonga was one of the islands he charted from the air.
In Manila, Cassiel and I had spent at least half our time in bed, and that didn’t change in Honolulu. We made love before we fell asleep and soon after we woke up. He was as gentle and thorough in giving pleasure as he was in taking it—just as I remembered him to be. I loved, as before, to run my hands over his body and drink in his scent, still like salt and honey. The hair on his chest had begun to gray, but his skin remained smooth, and he still had the strongest hands and fingers I had ever seen. In fact, despite the passage of years, and the severe wounds he had incurred, his entire body felt even stronger to me than it had in Manila. He was far better conditioned as an astronaut than any Air Force officer could have dreamed of keeping himself during the Vietnam War.
When we did leave our room, it was to take long excursions in a rented convertible, visiting remote beaches on the north shore of Oahu and diving for shells. We browsed through the open-air flea markets, and after late-night suppers strolled through the city parks with their eucalyptus groves and carp ponds. Like our lovemaking, all of this was just as it had been in Manila. Yet in some ways everything had changed. We were eleven years older, and at thirty-five and forty-three felt much closer in age. We had each been around the world several times. Our years of separation, of loss, had scarred and defined us, individually and as a couple. At the same time, it was apparent that those years had also brought us closer together and burned the superfluous edges, the false connections, off our conversation. Long into the night we sat on the lanai looking at the stars set low in the sky, in the velvet darkness, and barely exchanged a word. I had expected us to have a million things to say, but most of those things didn’t need to be said.
For me, the weekend went by in a flash. Our last night in Honolulu I came out on the lanai to find Cassiel lying on a chaise longue, gazing at the blinking lights of the transoceanic jets out of Melbourne and Hong Kong and Djakarta as they descended on Honolulu International. Nestling beside him, I was reminded of the moment on the deck of the Repose when I saw his squadron of B-52s pass overhead, and then the day I first met him, lying in the postoperative ward, a Christmas wreath strung with lights flashing on the wall behind him. The powerful forces and impulses which had first drawn us together, I thought, were still at work when I went to the Festival of Scorpio and found him—one of the two people for whom (in my heart, at least) I had long been searching without truly expecting to find them. Before Cassiel and I left that deserted beach near Moutsana, he made that same point in his own way, drawing the symbol for a celestial fix in the sand, just as he had drawn it on the envelope containing my bracelet in Manila. We both knew that in the vast expanses of time and space we had somehow homed in on each other. The disparate worldly events that brought this about seemed fated because they felt so accidental. In fleeing Gaspard, I had caught the first boat out of Piraeus one sultry night and ended up on Naxos; many months later, going on leave from an intensive survival course on Crete, Cassiel had chosen Naxos out of dozens of Aegean islands for the simple, and perverse, reason that it had no airport and, up to his neck in matters aeronautical, he had a whim to travel somewhere accessible only by boat.
Maybe it was a similar whim the following afternoon which prompted him to suggest that he fly me to Kauai in a small plane, just the two of us. I had never flown with him, after all, and I had always wanted to. We were to have left Honolulu that night separately, me on a Hawaiian Airlines flight to Kauai, he in an Air Force fighter to Houston.
“We can land at the airstrip at the Barking Sands Missile Range and someone will drive you home. I’ll have just enough time to turn around, change planes here, and get to Houston by eleven o’clock Central Time, when I’m due back.”
He had caught me off guard. Anticipating the distractions that would arise on Kauai after my long absence, I had preferred to spend the few days I had with Cassiel in Honolulu, undisturbed. At the same time, I was dying to share with him the one island where I had truly made a home for myself. To share my treasures: my house by the sea, the garden, the mountains, and the only permanent set of friends I’d ever had. Kauai was the place, after all, where I now dared allow myself to dream that Cassiel and I might one day live together.
“But I want you to see the island,” I said.
“I will see it.”
“I mean, from the ground.”
“I’ll see i
t next time,” he replied. “And not just for one night.”
While I packed, Cassiel drove over to Hickam Air Force Base, where he requisitioned a sleek two-engine Learjet with the NASA insignia on the fuselage. It was a four-seater that NASA used to ferry astronomers, engineers, and other personnel around the islands between their various observation posts, like Mauna Kea on the Big Island, which housed the world’s largest telescopes, and the Kokee Observatory in Waimea Canyon, where Estes worked.
Cassiel took the controls and I strapped myself into the copilot’s seat. I had been around a lot of planes and helicopters in Vietnam, but I had never before sat in the cockpit of a jet. Doing so with Cassiel, seeing him for the first time in his element, I enjoyed it all the more. It was five o’clock, still sunny, as we taxied into position, past rows of gray military transports and silver F-16s. Cassiel checked with the tower, raised the flaps, and opening up the throttle, hurtled us down the runway. The small jet got up speed incredibly fast, and within seconds I was pressed back flat as we climbed a steep arc through the clouds while Honolulu—the pink and white skyline, the beachfront hotels, Diamond Head, our own hotel where an hour before I had stepped from the shower—fell away from us, toy-sized.
Cassiel did not take us on a direct route from Honolulu to Lihue, which was only a twenty-five-minute hop across the Kauai Channel. If he had had his way, I would have seen the entire Hawaiian chain as far as Midway, two thousand miles to the northwest: Nihoa and Kure, inhabited by birds and monk seals, and the atolls and shoals named after ships’ captains who went aground on their reefs—Pearl, Hermes, Laysan, Necker, Gardner—and Disappearing Island, which I would have loved to see before it lived up to its name completely. Instead, for the next two hours, we zigzagged over the main islands: Molokai, Lanai, Maui, the Big Island (where we swooped down low over Mauna Kea, enveloped in snow), and then, after an hour of open turquoise sea punctuated by whitecaps, Niihau, the Forbidden Island.