A Trip to the Stars (6 page)

The image of my mother, that shadow, and the black hat combined to fill a place in my imagination where, until then, there had only been a vacuum. For a long time, they would be all I had of my father.

The band of blood across the waist of my white uniform, where I leaned against the X-ray table, had dried and darkened by the time I got off duty and went on deck. The nurses had their own sundeck, which was off limits to all other personnel. By day, we could stretch out in the blistering sun or play cards at a fold-up table. At night, we stood at the railing smoking ganja and drinking White Angels—iced gin with a dash of bitters—from a stainless steel thermos with a red cross on its cap and
US NAVY
down the side.

I had scrubbed down quickly and still had blood under my nails. Sharline had bitten her nails all the way down and so didn’t have this problem, I observed as she expertly rolled a joint. She stood close beside me, droning a song under her breath and never taking her eyes off the distant jungle that was lighting up, as it did every night, with flares and rockets—blue, green, and gold—like dragonflies whirring insanely in all directions.

Sharline shared a ten-by-ten cabin with double bunks with me and two other nurses. From Tulsa, Oklahoma, she was an operating room nurse, with five years of training, on her second tour of duty. I was an X-ray technician, the lowest rung of military nurse, trained in six months, with a three-month residency on an aircraft carrier in the Solomon Islands. Skilled surgical and postoperative nurses in the war were too essential to use on X-ray work, so the Navy relied on volunteers like me. And throughout South Vietnam, in military hospitals and on hospital ships, X-ray technicians were in demand; because shrapnel wounds were often undetectable by the naked eye, or were obscured by blood and dirt, every wounded soldier brought in for
treatment was routinely x-rayed. Sometimes they were cleaned up before being wheeled into the X-ray room; sometimes I had to help strip them down. That night had been one of the worst since I had come onboard three months before: more than a hundred men had come in within a six-hour span, and working with a single orderly, I was covered with as much blood at the end of my shift as any O.R. nurse.

Sharline had her blond hair drawn back with a torn ribbon. She was about my height, with a very full figure—heavier, she said, ever since she had come to Vietnam. She smelled of iodine and disinfectant soap. Her eyes were bloodshot and her smile blank, as if she had already taken a hit off the packed buds of that pollen-dusty, jade Thai stick she kept in a thin plastic tube taped along her bra strap. After she did take her hit, drawing it in sharply to her lungs, she gazed back at those lights, thirty miles across the choppy sea, as if they were fireworks on the Fourth of July. Like everyone else onboard, at that moment Sharline heard no explosions, no artillery fire—nothing but the wind flapping the pennants on the mast and the slap of the waves against the ship’s hull. But I could hear all the sounds behind those lights: mortar blasts, antiaircraft guns, even the crackle of small arms. No amount of ganja, gin, black beauties, or morphine lifted from the pharmaceutical stores either enhanced or erased them. I had more powerful chemicals at work in my bloodstream, which it seemed nothing could override.

Outwardly they had only manifested themselves at a single point, on my left palm, which was burning more intensely than usual that night. From the red dot that had formed there after the
Ummidia Stellarum
bit me, concentric lines had appeared, tightly packed in an area smaller than a postage stamp. Every month a new red circle rose up from below my skin, twelve of them now radiating from the dot, like the orbits of planets around a red star. I had long given up scrubbing my palm, or soaking it, or applying compresses, or ice. I was careful to keep it concealed, but whenever one of the doctors or another nurse saw it, I told them it was a tattoo. Which did not explain why it kept growing larger. After a while, I no more wanted to eradicate it than I would have wanted to reverse the strange effects of the spider’s bite.

The new doctor specializing in tropical diseases, which were often
transmitted by insect bites, had just come on-line, and I had borrowed several of his reference books one night, but under
spider bites
found no symptoms remotely resembling my own. I took my own pulse and temperature, and both were normal, but the temperature of my palm, which I measured with a flat thermometer, was always 105°. In addition to insomnia, my other symptoms were frequent loss of appetite: sometimes I went a whole day without food and didn’t realize it until the next morning. At the same time, my weight remained exactly the same. Sometimes I drank two liters of water at a sitting, and like a spider craved the heat, but I never sweated, even on the hottest days. After leaving New Orleans, I began having very irregular periods, months apart, and then I stopped getting them altogether. In Savannah, when no rings had yet appeared in my palm, I underwent a complete blood workup after my induction, but it had been all clear.

I soon discovered that the powers of my memory were greatly heightened: I seemed able to scan its contents, no matter how remote or obscure the incident, to the minutest detail, as if I had at my disposal for review in my mind’s eye vaults of unedited film footage encompassing my entire life. With the utmost clarity, I reviewed a visit to the Statue of Liberty with my third-grade class; a trek to the grocery store with my mother during the famous blizzard of 1948; and Luna’s eleventh birthday party. I also suffered (or enjoyed) occasional bursts of visual hyperacuity, when I could perceive remote objects in great detail: the flags on ships crossing the horizon, the plumage of birds winging near shore, the auras around individual stars.

With battles, this meant I not only heard, but saw, far more than I wanted to—often more than I could bear. As I did at the end of that boiling night, when the last mortars streaked into vapor, and the choppers ferried us the wounded and the dead, and it became grimly clear, as always, that the fireworks display had been a ferocious pitched battle—one small corner of bedlam brought to us at dawn in the persons of soldiers, most of them my own age or younger, broken and blood-drenched, piled six deep in triage.

The USS
Repose
housed a crew of three hundred twenty men and thirty women—all nurses—and at any one time as many as two hundred male patients. Some of these—the lucky few—had come in with tropical diseases or “natural” emergencies like appendicitis. The others
had limbs blown off by land mines, eyes scorched by phosphorus bombs, feet and hands shredded in booby traps, torsos gaping open or riddled by gunfire and grenades, skin charred by incendiaries like meat in an oven.

“Wanna play name that tune?” Sharline said, moistening her parched lips.

Even if I had known it, I could not have identified the song she was droning.

“It’s ‘Star Jam,’ by Jelly Roll Morton.”

Zaren Eboli’s generous notion of a small bonus when I gave him notice had been five hundred dollars, which I had spent in one shot in Savannah on the night before my induction into the Navy. With a year of motels and furnished rooms behind me, I had taken a room for the weekend at the only four-star hotel in the city, paid for with the two hundred fifty dollars I received for my Impala. Then I spent my bonus from Eboli on a pendant.

Just around the corner from my hotel I had wandered into a shop so small it could only accommodate two customers at a time. Not that people were waiting on line to get in. It was just before midnight and the place was about to close. The walls were hung with posters of movie stars and faded tapestries from Indonesia. Behind the counter, the proprietor had long platinum hair and half-lidded eyes. He wore a tie-dyed shirt, an Indian vest, and a scarlet bandanna around his head. In the single cracked glass case before him, among a scattering of gaudy trinkets, cigarette lighters, and cheap earrings, my pendant stood out. Literally, a gem.

It was a piece of highly polished volcanic stone—blacker than onyx and flecked with silver. According to the proprietor, it was created during a massive eruption in the South Pacific in 1701. Never cut, the stone was shaped by natural forces—lava hitting the raw tropical air and then cooling in the sea—into a seven-pronged star. The pendant hung from a black chain with a silver clasp, and had been brought to England in 1779, by one of Captain Cook’s men after the captain was killed in Hawaii. Fifty years later, the proprietor assured me, it found its way to America in the possession of a woman who died at the age of one hundred and five in Savannah. Longevity was one of the qualities it might confer, he added. He wanted to fill me in on more of its
history—he said he’d brew some tea—but I was in a hurry, and after paying him, followed the directions he gave me and joined an antiwar candlelight vigil in a public park across town. It was about that time the war had truly begun raging out of control, so there was a large crowd. Several speakers took the podium: a just-returned vet, a priest, and an activist lawyer who was aiding draft resisters. A pair of guitarists played. A Buddhist monk led a chant. In my last year at college in Boston, I had regularly participated in sit-ins and demonstrations. During the last of these, I narrowly escaped arrest after being gassed by the police outside Government Center.

Since that night in Savannah I had taken off the pendant only once, after riding a taxi out to the naval base at Point Vincent and stripping down for my physical examination. I had already cropped my long hair to fit the regulation length for the nursing corps, and after being vaccinated, photographed, and measured, I was issued two uniforms, identification papers, training manuals, and a regulation watch, ultrashockproof, with radium numerals and hands.

Which were glowing now on my wrist at two-thirty in the morning as Sharline and I sat down side by side on two beach chairs. Prolonging our stay on deck as long as possible before submitting to the claustrophobia of our cabin, we turned our attention to the sky and I began picking out constellations—Cetus, Taurus, and Perseus—for her. The sky was velvety black and the stars were blazing so brightly they seemed to be falling toward us at great speed. But Sharline had already absorbed all the stimulation she could that day, and after finishing her joint and taking a last sip from the thermos, she fell asleep, her head cocked sharply to one side, her mouth open.

Aside from my pendant, I only had one other prized possession which I had brought into the Navy, the only object that I kept when I sold my mother’s house: the Silver Star my father was awarded after he was killed on Guam. Living on the eastern seaboard all my life, that island had always seemed utterly remote to me—outside of time and space—but now I was due north of it, in the same ocean. I remember Luna showing it to me in an atlas when I was five years old, a tiny green dot far from any other dot, in an endless blue expanse. When I sailed back to Honolulu from the Solomons after completing my residency, we passed near it, but not near enough to see. Having polished
the Silver Star, badly tarnished after all those years on the living room wall in Brooklyn, I kept it in my locker in the velvet-lined box in which my pendant had come.

Among our personal effects on board, we were allowed only three books apiece. The library in our cabin contained two Bibles, a dogeared
Arabian Nights
, Sharline’s copy of
The Dhammapada
, given her by a dying marine lieutenant, and some detective novels. I had brought along books on astronomy by Pliny and Manilius and a selection of Cicero, all in Latin, which were not of any use to the others and had previously been of no interest to me back in Boston, in my other life. In Pliny I read that Hipparchus had been the first ancient astronomer to question the notion that the stars were embedded in a solid sphere—like a giant Fabergé egg—which surrounded the earth. After witnessing a stellar nova, he realized the stars had not all been created simultaneously, and he began cataloguing them by position and brightness so that future astronomers could trace their evolution. And it was Cicero, drawing on Anaximander, who believed that the innumerable stars in the heavens were, each of them, gods. That night, a week before Christmas, I thought they must be so, certain that on occasion some of them fell to earth and mingled among us, shimmering with light or burnt out like cinders.

Later in the same book, trying to pin down a definition of the human soul, Cicero sets forth Democritus’s theory that the soul, like any material object, results from an accidental collision of atoms, and Empedocles’s that the soul is the blood permeating our hearts. Though many others, Cicero adds, hold that the soul is an unknowable substance in the brain, he concluded that the soul is simply breath; after a man’s death, his soul—freed, immortal suddenly—rises into the upper atmosphere, where it is vivified by the same forces that stoke the eternal fires of the stars.

At the X-ray machine I looked into men’s bodies for twelve hours a day. Sometimes longer. In studying X rays day after day of these wounded men, who were often dying men, and always men in peril, I personally subscribed to the theories of those who called the soul an unknowable substance. Unknowable but not invisible. After a while, in that small room dark as a cave, I was sure at times that I could see a man’s soul rising up at me from the photographic plates, floating there, piecemeal or condensed, among the bones and muscles and
nerves and the dark shadows of the organs which I came to know so intimately. I scanned the smears and blurs, the fogs and mists, within each body, and the even darker shadows hovering behind the organs, for the white slashes of shrapnel or the duller streaks of bullets. Iron that had torn into, and settled deep within, the flesh.

At six
A.M
. every day except Sunday those of us who were asleep were awakened by “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the P.A. system. I was usually up already, sitting on deck, waiting to assume my duties and watching the sun rise pink and hot across the sea. I no longer drank coffee—no longer needed it. I had quit smoking cigarettes just as abruptly. And no matter how exhausting my stint in the X-ray room, I never slept more than two hours at a stretch during the twelve months I served on that ship. In fact, I had required very little sleep since New Orleans: three hours a day at most. And Christmas Eve that year was no exception.