Free A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher Page A

easily—constitutionally—have lapsed into intellectual or emotional torpor.
    The takeoff had knocked the breath out of me, literally. Unlike a 707 or other big plane, the Learjet had taxied fast and then climbed even faster, nearly straight up—or what felt like straight up to me, buckled in tight by Samax, palms glued to the armrests—in a steep arc. As we rose, watching the Manhattan skyline recede in the wintersmog, I thought of Alma somewhere in that enormous maze: I worried about her and hoped that when she got that letter she would understand and not be too worried herself. Then we passed over Brooklyn and I tried to figure out which of the sprawling cemeteries below was the one my grandmother was newly buried in, but seconds later the plane leveled off and there we were above the clouds.
    Samax and I sat alone in the front, one seat apart. There were three other passengers, each in a different row far behind us. His niece Ivy sat with her seat turned to one side, her back to everyone. Then there was a beautiful young woman introduced to me as Desirée who had very long black hair and wore a leather jacket with silver studs and matching boots. She sat in the last row, wearing earphones, erect behind a silent portable typewriter at a small oval conference table. And at a window seat on the other aisle there was a man who boarded at the last minute and to whom I was not introduced. After a moment, I recognized him: the man in the white coat and oversized gloves who had been crisscrossing the vacant lot beside the abandoned factory with the metal detector. Now wearing a gray parka, he was a larger man than I’d thought, broad at the shoulders and flat-footed. His face was flat, too, with piercing shiny eyes, deep within corkscrew sockets that were fixed in a permanent squint. He spent most of the flight bent over a pocket calculator, making annotations in a notebook. Occasionally he muttered to himself, but I never heard him exchange a single word with Ivy and Desirée, nor did the two of them speak to each other. To my dismay—for I had felt comfortable with him even in the short time he had been with us—the muscular young man with the crew cut and the blueprint was not onboard. On the way to the airport he told me his name was Calzas and assured me that I would like Las Vegas. And after seeing us off at the terminal, he had sauntered off with a single well-traveled suitcase and a fedora pulled low over his eye.
    I think Samax put a seat between us hoping that this space would take the edge off the fear he had seen grip me anew as we left the abandoned factory. He was close to me, but not too close. And he seemed at ease with himself, which helped put me at ease.
    Soon after we took off, he gave me a deck of cards and suggested I try my hand at solitaire.
    “You know the game?” he said.
    “Yes, I’ve played before.” Milo had taught me when I was five, and said it was nearly impossible to win unless you cheated.
    “Play with this deck.”
    On the backs of the cards, red palm trees were outlined against a yellow sky.
    While keeping one eye out the window at the rapidly changing landscapes below—green mountains and industrial belts easing into farmland and then open prairie—I also stole glances at Samax, who, having slipped on a white cashmere cardigan and a pair of glove-leather slippers, was absorbed in studying a map and making notes on a pad in red ink. Every so often he would look up and smile at me. I felt as if he and I were in our own little world in the front of the plane. Under the circumstances, I was surprised how comfortable this began to feel and—as would often be the case in years to come—how little I cared that the people around us seemed so remote. At first I couldn’t help staring back at them with curiosity, Desirée typing, Ivy rigid with her back to us, but by the time we were halfway across the country my mind was elsewhere. On the playing cards, for one thing, which I was