Avenue of Mysteries (10 page)

“No—it’s not road kill,” Juan Diego said. “It’s
my
blood. It dripped from Rivera’s truck—Diablo didn’t lick up every drop.”

“Were you
writing
?” Miriam, the imperious mother, asked Juan Diego.

“It sounds like a gruesome story,” the daughter, Dorothy, said.

Their two less-than-angelic faces peered down at him; he was aware that they’d both been to the lavatory and had brushed their teeth—their breath, but not his, was very fresh. The flight attendants were fussing about the first-class cabin.

Cathay Pacific 841 was descending to Hong Kong; a foreign but welcome smell was in the air, definitely
not
the Oaxaca basurero.

“We were about to wake you, when you woke up,” Miriam told him.

“You don’t want to miss the green-tea muffins—they’re almost as good as sex,” Dorothy said.

“Sex, sex, sex—enough sex, Dorothy,” her mother said.

Juan Diego, aware of how bad his breath must be, gave the two women a tight-lipped smile. He was slowly realizing where he was, and who these two attractive women were. Oh, yes—I skipped the beta-blockers, he was remembering. I was briefly back where I
belong
! he was thinking; how his heart ached to be back there.

And what was
this
? He had an erection in his comical Cathay Pacific sleeping suit, his clownish trans-Pacific pajamas. And he hadn’t taken even half of one Viagra—his gray-blue Viagra tablets, together with the beta-blockers, were in his checked bag.

Juan Diego had slept for more than fifteen hours of what was a flight lasting sixteen hours and ten minutes. He limped off to the lavatory with noticeably quicker, lighter steps. His self-appointed angels (if not quite in the
guardian
category) watched him go; both mother and daughter seemed to regard him fondly.

“He’s
darling,
isn’t he?” Miriam asked her daughter.

“He’s cute, all right,” Dorothy said.

“Thank goodness we found him—he would be utterly lost without us!” the mother remarked.

“Thank goodness,” Dorothy repeated; the
goodness
word escaped somewhat unnaturally from the young woman’s overripe lips.

“He was
writing,
I think—imagine writing in your
sleep
!” Miriam exclaimed.

“About blood dripping from a truck!” Dorothy said. “Doesn’t
diablo
mean ‘the devil’?” she asked her mom, who just shrugged.

“Honestly, Dorothy—you do go on and on about green-tea muffins.
It’s just a
muffin,
for Christ’s sake,” Miriam told her daughter. “Eating a muffin isn’t remotely the same as having sex!”

Dorothy rolled her eyes and sighed; her body had a permanent aspect of slouching about it, whether she sat or stood. (One could best imagine her lying down.)

Juan Diego emerged from the lavatory, smiling to the oh-so-engaging mother and daughter. He’d managed to extricate himself from the crazy Cathay Pacific pajamas, which he handed to one of the flight attendants; he was looking forward to having a green-tea muffin, if not quite as much as Dorothy apparently did.

Juan Diego’s erection had only slightly subsided, and he was very aware of it; after all, he’d missed having erections. Normally, he needed to take half a Viagra to have one—until now.

His maimed foot always throbbed a little after he’d been asleep and had just woken up, but the foot was throbbing in a new and different way—or so Juan Diego imagined. In his mind, he was fourteen again, and Rivera’s truck had just flattened his right foot. He could feel the warmth of Lupe’s lap against his neck and the back of his head. The Guadalupe doll, on Rivera’s dashboard, jiggled this way and that—the way women often seemed to be promising something unspoken and unacknowledged, which was the way Miriam and her daughter, Dorothy, presented themselves to Juan Diego right now. (Not that their hips jiggled!)

But the writer could not speak; Juan Diego’s teeth were clenched, his lips tightly sealed, as if he were still making an effort not to scream in pain and thrash his head from side to side in his long-departed sister’s lap.

•
6
•

Sex and Faith

The elongated passageway to the Regal Airport Hotel at Hong Kong International was bedecked with an incomplete assortment of Christmas memorabilia—happy-faced reindeer and Santa’s elf-laborer types, but no sleigh, no gifts, no Santa himself.

“Santa’s getting laid—he probably called an escort service,” Dorothy explained to Juan Diego.

“Enough sex, Dorothy,” her mother cautioned the wayward-looking girl.

From the testiness that infiltrated their seemingly more than mother-daughter banter, Juan Diego would have guessed this mother and daughter had been traveling together for years—improbably, for centuries.

“Santa is definitely staying here,” Dorothy said to Juan Diego. “The Christmas shit is year-round.”

“Dorothy, you’re not
here
year-round,” Miriam said. “You wouldn’t know.”

“We’re here
enough,
” the daughter sullenly said. “It
feels like
we’re here year-round,” she told Juan Diego.

They were on an ascending escalator, passing a crèche. To Juan Diego, it seemed strange that they’d not once been outdoors—not since he’d arrived at JFK in all the snow. The crèche was surrounded by the usual cast of characters, humans and barn animals—only one exotic creature among the animals. And the miraculous Virgin Mary could not have been entirely human, Juan Diego had always believed; here in Hong Kong she smiled shyly, averting her eyes from her admirers. At the crèche moment, wasn’t all the attention supposed to be paid to her precious son? Apparently not—the Virgin Mary was a scene-stealer. (Not only in Hong Kong, Juan Diego had always believed.)

There was Joseph—the poor fool, as Juan Diego thought of him. But if Mary truly was a virgin, Joseph appeared to be handling the childbirth episode as well as could be expected—no fiery glances or suspicious looks at the inquisitive kings and wise men and shepherds, or at the manger’s other gawkers and hangers-on: a cow, a donkey, a rooster, a camel. (The camel, of course, was the one exotic creature.)

“I’ll bet the father was one of the wise guys,” Dorothy offered.

“Enough sex, Dorothy,” her mother said.

Juan Diego wrongly surmised he was alone in noticing that the Christ Child was missing from the crèche—or buried, perhaps smothered, in the hay. “The Baby Jesus—” he started to say.

“Someone kidnapped the Holy Infant years ago,” Dorothy explained. “I don’t think the Hong Kong Chinese care.”

“Maybe the Christ Child is getting a face-lift,” Miriam offered.

“Not everyone gets a face-lift, Mother,” Dorothy said.

“That Holy Infant is no kid, Dorothy,” her mother remarked. “Believe me—Jesus has had a face-lift.”

“The Catholic Church has done more to cosmetically enhance itself than a face-lift,” Juan Diego said sharply—as if Christmas, and all the crèche promotion, were strictly a Roman Catholic affair. Both mother and daughter looked inquiringly at him, as if puzzled by his angry tone. But surely Miriam and Dorothy couldn’t have been surprised by the sting in Juan Diego’s voice—not if they’d read his novels, which they had. He had an ax to grind—not with people of faith, or believers of any kind, but with certain social and political policies of the Catholic Church.

Yet the occasional sharpness when he spoke surprised everyone about Juan Diego; he
looked
so mild-mannered, and—because of the maimed right foot—he moved so slowly. Juan Diego didn’t resemble a risk-taker, except when it came to his imagination.

At the top of the escalator, the three travelers arrived at a baffling intersection of underground passages—signs pointing to Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and to somewhere called the Sai Kung Peninsula.

“We’re taking a train?” Juan Diego asked his lady admirers.

“Not now,” Miriam told him, seizing his arm. They were connected to a train station, Juan Diego guessed, but there were confusing advertisements for tailor shops and restaurants and jewelry stores; for jewels, they were offering “endless opals.”

“Why
endless
? What’s so special about
opals
?” Juan Diego asked, but the women seemed strangely selective about listening.

“We’ll check into the hotel first, just to freshen up,” Dorothy was telling him; she’d grabbed his other arm.

Juan Diego limped forward; he imagined he wasn’t limping as much as he usually did. But why? Dorothy was rolling Juan Diego’s checked bag and her own—effortlessly, the two bags with one hand. How can she manage to do that? Juan Diego was wondering when they came upon a large floor-length mirror; it was near the registration desk for their hotel. But when Juan Diego quickly assessed himself in the mirror, his two companions weren’t visible alongside him; curiously, he did not see these two efficient women reflected in the mirror. Maybe he’d given the mirror too quick a look.

“We’ll take the train to Kowloon—we’ll see the skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island, their lights reflected in the water of the harbor. It’s better to see it after dark,” Miriam was murmuring in Juan Diego’s ear.

“We’ll grab a bite to eat—maybe have a drink or two—then take the train back to the hotel,” Dorothy told him in his other ear. “We’ll be sleepy then.”

Something told Juan Diego that he had seen these two ladies before—but where, but
when
?

Was it in the taxi that had jumped the guardrail and got stuck in the waist-deep snow of the jogging path that ran alongside the East River? The cabbie was attempting to dig out his rear wheels—not with a snow shovel but with a windshield scraper.

“Where are you from, you jerk-off—fuckin’
Mexico
?” Juan Diego’s limo driver had shouted.

The peering faces of two women were framed in the rear window of that taxi; they could have been a mother and her daughter, but it seemed highly unlikely to Juan Diego that those two frightened-looking women could have been Miriam and Dorothy. It was difficult for Juan Diego to imagine Miriam and Dorothy being
afraid.
Who or what would frighten them? Yet the thought remained: he’d seen these two formidable women before—he was sure of it.

“It’s very
modern,
” was all Juan Diego could think of saying about the Regal Airport Hotel when he was riding on the elevator with Miriam and Dorothy. The mother and daughter had registered for him; he’d only had to show his passport. He didn’t think he’d paid.

It was one of those hotel rooms where your room key was a kind of credit card; after you’d entered your room, you stuck the card in a slot that was mounted on the wall just inside the door.

“Otherwise, your lights won’t work and your TV won’t turn on,” Dorothy had explained.

“Call us if you have any trouble with the modern devices,” Miriam told Juan Diego.

“Not just trouble with the modern shit
—any
kind of trouble,” Dorothy had added. On Juan Diego’s key-card folder, she’d written her room number—and her mom’s.

They’re not sharing a room? Juan Diego wondered when he was alone in his room.

In the shower, his erection returned; he knew he should take a beta-blocker—he was aware he was overdue. But his erection made him hesitate. What if Miriam, or Dorothy, made herself
available
to him—more unimaginable, what if
both
of them did?

Juan Diego removed the beta-blockers from his toilet kit; he put the tablets beside the water glass, next to his bathroom sink. They were Lopressor tablets—elliptical, a bluish gray. He took out his Viagra tablets and looked at them. The Viagra were not exactly elliptical; they were somewhat football-shaped, but four-sided. The closer similarity, between the Viagra and the Lopressor, was the color of the tablets—they were both a gray-blue color.

If such a miracle as Miriam or Dorothy making herself
available
to him were to happen, it would be too soon to take a Viagra now, Juan Diego knew. Even so, he removed his pill-cutting device from his toilet kit; he put it next to the Viagra tablets, on the same side of his bathroom sink—just to remind himself that
half
of one Viagra would suffice. (As a novelist, he was always looking ahead, too.)

I’m imagining things like a horny teenager! Juan Diego thought as he was getting dressed to rejoin the ladies. His own behavior surprised him. Under these unusual circumstances, he took no medication; he hated how the beta-blockers diminished him, and he knew better than to take half of one Viagra tablet prematurely. When he got back to the United States, Juan Diego was thinking, he must remember to thank Rosemary for telling him to experiment!

It’s too bad that Juan Diego wasn’t traveling with his doctor friend. “To thank Rosemary” (for her instructions concerning Viagra usage) was
not
what the writer needed to remember. Dr. Stein could have reminded Juan Diego of the reason he was feeling like a star-crossed Romeo, limping around in an older writer’s body: if you’re taking beta-blockers and you skip a dose, watch out! Your body has been starved for adrenaline;
your body suddenly makes
more
adrenaline, and more adrenaline receptors. Those misnamed dreams, which were really heightened, high-definition memories of his childhood and early adolescence, were as much the result of Juan Diego not taking a single Lopressor tablet as was his suddenly supercharged lust for two strangers—a mother and her daughter, who seemed more familiar to him than strangers ever should.

T
HE TRAIN
,
THE
A
IRPORT
Express to Kowloon Station, cost ninety Hong Kong dollars. Maybe his shyness prevented Juan Diego from looking closely at Miriam or Dorothy on the train; it’s doubtful he was genuinely interested in reading every word on both sides of his round-trip ticket, twice. Juan Diego was a little interested in comparing the Chinese characters to the corresponding words in English.
SAME DAY RETURN
was in small capitals, but there seemed to be no equivalent to small capitals in the unvarying Chinese characters.