A Trip to the Stars (45 page)

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:

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 Rhyolite.

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.

“It’s not delicious puzzles from Capablanca’s secret journals,” Samax said one night in the solarium to Hadar and me, “or ever more intricate memory palaces that will get through to him—those are the things he’s always gone after. He needs to take up something completely different.”

“Like what?” Hadar said.

“Just leave it to me,” Samax replied confidently, which made me squirm, for in my heart I was as skeptical as Hadar.

“But we can’t even get him to leave his rooms most of the time,” Hadar grumbled.

“Exactly my point,” Samax said. “Because what he needs is utterly unavailable to him now. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. What’s the one thing Labusi ever left the hotel for, gentlemen? Not women and wine, but …”

“Song!” I said.

Samax nodded. “We’ll give him something new,” he murmured, “and something old.”

Samax began bringing in chamber groups from the area to perform in the ballroom every Friday night. The first such Friday, when a string quintet arrived, he simply went up to Labusi’s quarters himself, and without a word conveyed him to the ballroom. Every Friday after that, at eight o’clock sharp, Labusi would be in the ballroom waiting for the musicians to arrive. The night they played Boccherini’s 2nd String Quintet, one of his very favorites, the tears ran down my old tutor’s cheeks—the first time I ever saw him weep.

The “something new” that Samax provided Labusi was even more ingenious, and I marveled that it had occurred to Samax at all. He had commissioned a company in Carson City to construct a customized billiard table, fully convertible to pocket billiards, of regulation size and specifications, but resting on electronically adjustable legs that could rise at the touch of a button from thirty-two inches—exactly the right height for someone in a wheelchair—to the customary forty-five inches. The legs operated with such precision, and the table’s internal honeycomb, springs, and balances were so perfectly calibrated, that when the legs went up and down not a single ball on the table stirred a millimeter. So Labusi could play pool or shoot billiards with anyone. And play he did, sometimes for ten hours a day. With his still-steady cellist’s hands and steely chess player’s nerves, his Pythagorean passion for geometry, and of course his memory skills—filing away countless variations of bank and combination shots—Labusi was a natural at all billiard games. He could best any of us at the hotel in the game of our choice—mine was always 8-ball—and when he craved stiffer competition, he found that, living in Las Vegas,
there was no shortage of first-rate players with whom he could compete seriously. First in pickup games, for which various pool sharks came to the hotel, and then in formal competitions in town to which Labusi traveled with his custom-made table in a small truck. “Like a pianist,” he said to me drily, the
s
whistling faintly through the triangular chip in his front teeth, “with his Steinway.” For thus, through his own and Samax’s perseverance—a quality my uncle perhaps prized above all others—Labusi began his third career, following a painful yet surprisingly symmetrical route in his life’s journey: from chess champion, to scholar and tutor, to the billiards champion he would soon become.

Would that the other catastrophes occurring in and around the hotel at that time had lent themselves to such constructive, even happy, resolutions. In fact, happiness was fast becoming a scarce commodity at the Hotel Canopus; Labusi aside, Samax’s Midas touch and vaunted ingenuity, rather than overcoming that trend, seemed to aggravate it. In ancient days, heroes single-handedly diverted the courses of rivers to alleviate drought or prevent flood; in our own times, deciding on your own to divert the course of someone’s life in order to secure his happiness might be a comparably dramatic achievement. And a tremendous gamble, too, as Samax had acknowledged on the day he undertook just such an action with regard to my life, informing me right away that he had once been a gambler. But, whatever the magnitude of their feats, those ancient heroes I had read about in Homer and Virgil were convinced that no man could change his or anyone else’s fate, which was written in the stars. When a man thought otherwise (signalling, in effect, that he had gone mad), he was struck down. I doubt that Samax shared this conviction.