Free A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher

first time I focused beyond him, about a dozen feet, on the wreath of blinking lights that had been hung on the wall on Christmas Eve.
    “Yes. Merry Christmas,” I said.

7
The Hotel Canopus
    My first glimpse of the desert came from seven miles up, in an airplane. It was like a white mirror that, according to the plane’s movements, tilted every so often in the blazing sunlight and blinded me. Sheer columns of rock, boulders piled upon boulders vertically, cast their shadows straight as compass needles for thousands of feet—shadows that led nowhere. Behind vast thermal currents, rippling faintly, mountains loomed in the distance. Eventually the great expanses of sand were replaced by rocky flats and choppy ridges of sandstone that ran to the horizon, where long red clouds, rough as stone, mirrored them in the sky. And there were ravines, deep blues at their lowest depths, dotted with brush, and canyons of graduated spirals, in the shape of tops. Of all the places I had ever gone with Milo and Luna, the desert was one we seemed to have bypassed, always taking the northern route out west and back. Furtive in their habits, they would have avoided those glaringly open spaces.
    I had never been on a private plane before. In fact, until that day I had never flown. Buses, cars, and vans were the only vehicles I knew before I rode on the New York subways. My only interstate train trip had been from Pittsburgh to New York when my grandmother came to get me, and to make funeral arrangements for Milo and Luna, after the car crash.
    But I knew something about planes, and Samax’s was a twin-engine Learjet that seated eighteen. The fuselage and wings were painted yellow, with red markings. The seats were red leather and the carpeting was yellow, adorned with clusters of darker yellow pomegranates. Pillows and blankets followed the same design. There was asmall galley in the front and a bar over which hung an antique mirror, its perimeter etched with balloonists in flight. The bar was stocked with liquor, but also with a vast assortment of fresh fruit juice. Samax was a fruit enthusiast, and he himself squeezed me a mixture of black grape and plum juice and stuck a wedge of kiwi onto the rim of the glass. From the galley I was served a piece of just-baked loganberry pie topped with thin slices of quince.
    I was very impressed with all of this. Only later did I learn how much Samax disliked flying. He especially disliked commercial air travel because it involved putting his life completely in someone else’s hands, which was anathema to him. So, because flying was a necessity in his business, he had conceded himself the luxury of the private plane—to keep control. But strictly in his own fashion. He hired a first-rate maintenance crew who worked solely on his plane, and the pilots were top-flight Air Force veterans, also on exclusive contract, whom he paid double what they would have received elsewhere. And, of course, as with all his possessions and habitations, he had had the plane modified to his own specifications.
    I would come to see that though he was abundantly wealthy, and by any standard lived luxuriously, Samax in fact chose his personal indulgences with care and then always followed the same pattern: going all the way—and sometimes over the top—with them. One of the many paradoxes about him was that while he demanded utter control over his physical surroundings and treated his material reality as first and foremost a malleable thing, in his most private affairs and daily habits he maintained a rigidly spartan regime, which he kept to his entire life. At the center of the endless flux he himself initiated, he could remain—or retain the illusion of remaining—essentially unchanged. The inherent tension thus created, he would tell me one day, served him in twofold fashion: it kept those around him whom he had reason to distrust off-balance; and it ensured that he was stimulated at times when he might