Avenue of Mysteries (28 page)

In the harsh light of the aquarium calamity, Juan Diego saw there was only
one
beer bobbing in the tepid water in the ice bucket. Did he drink
three
beers after dinner? And when had he turned the air-conditioning completely
off
? Maybe he’d woken up with his teeth chattering, and (half frozen to death, and half asleep) he’d shivered his way to the thermostat on the bedroom wall.

Keeping a watchful eye on Señor Morales, Juan Diego quickly dipped an index finger in and out of the aquarium; the South China Sea was never this warm. The water in the fish tank was nearly as hot as a slowly simmering bouillabaisse.

Oh, dear—what have I done? Juan Diego wondered. And such vivid dreams! Not usual—not with the right dose of the beta-blockers.

Uh-oh, he was remembering—uh-oh, uh-oh! He limped to the bathroom. The power of suggestion would reveal itself there. He’d apparently used the pill-cutting device to cut a Lopressor tablet in half; he’d taken
half
the right dose. (At least he’d not taken half a Viagra instead!) A double dose of the beta-blockers the night before, and only a half-dose last night—what would Dr. Rosemary Stein have said to her friend about that?

“Not good, not good,” Juan Diego was muttering to himself when he walked back into the overheated bedroom.

The three empty bottles of San Miguel confronted him; they resembled small but inflexible bodyguards on the TV table, as if they were defending the remote. Oh, yes, Juan Diego remembered; he’d sat stupefied (for how long, after dinner?) watching the obliteration-to-blackness of the limping terrorist in Mindanao. By the time he’d gone to bed, after the three ice-cold beers and the air-conditioning, his
brain
must have been refrigerated; half a Lopressor tablet was no match for Juan Diego’s dreams.

He remembered how hot and humid it had been outside on the street when Bienvenido drove him back to the Makati Shangri-La from the restaurant; Juan Diego’s shirt had stuck to his back. The bomb-sniffing dogs had been panting in the hotel entranceway. It upset Juan Diego that the night-shift bomb-sniffers weren’t the dogs he knew; the security guards were different, too.

The hotel manager had described the aquarium’s underwater thermometer as “most delicate”; maybe he’d meant to say
thermostat
? In an air-conditioned hotel room, wasn’t it the underwater thermostat’s job to keep the seawater warm enough for those former residents of the South China Sea? When Juan Diego had turned off the air-conditioning, the thermostat’s job had changed. Juan Diego had cooked an aquarium of Auntie Carmen’s exotic pets; only the angry-looking moray eel was clinging to life among his dead and floating friends. Couldn’t the thermostat also keep the seawater
cool
enough?

“Lo siento, Señor Morales,” Juan Diego said again. The eel’s overworked gills weren’t merely undulating—they were flapping.

Juan Diego called the hotel manager to report the massacre; Auntie Carmen’s store for exotic pets in Makati City had to be alerted. Maybe Morales could be saved, if the pet-store crew came quickly enough—if they disassembled the aquarium and revived the moray in fresh seawater.

“Maybe the moray needs to be sedated for traveling,” the hotel manager suggested. (From the way Señor Morales was staring at him, Juan Diego thought the moray would not take kindly to sedation.)

Juan Diego turned on the air-conditioning before he left his hotel room in search of breakfast. At the doorway to his room, he took what he hoped would be a last look at the loaned aquarium—the fish tank of death. Mr. Morals watched Juan Diego leave, as if the moray couldn’t wait to see the writer again—preferably, when Juan Diego was on his deathbed.

“Lo siento, Señor Morales,” Juan Diego said once more, letting the door close softly behind him. But when he found himself alone in the stifling stink-box of an elevator—naturally, there was no air-conditioning there—Juan Diego shouted as loudly as he could. “
Fuck
Clark French!” he cried. “And fuck
you,
Auntie Carmen—whoever the fuck you are!” Juan Diego yelled.

He stopped shouting when he saw that the surveillance camera was pointed right at him; the camera was mounted above the bank of the elevator buttons, but Juan Diego didn’t know if the surveillance camera also recorded
sound.
With or without his actual words, the writer could imagine the hotel security guards watching the lunatic cripple—alone and screaming in the descending elevator.

The hotel manager found the Distinguished Guest as he was finishing breakfast. “Those unfortunate fish, sir—they’ve been taken care of. The pet-store team, come and gone—they wore surgical masks,” the manager confided to Juan Diego, lowering his voice at the
surgical-masks
part. (No need to alarm the other guests; talk of surgical masks might imply a contagion.)

“Perhaps you heard if the moray—” Juan Diego started to say.

“The eel survived. Hard to kill, I imagine,” the manager said. “But very
agitated.
”

“
How
agitated?” Juan Diego asked.

“There was a biting, sir—not serious, I’m told, but there was a bite. It drew blood,” the manager confided, again lowering his voice.

“A bite
where
?” Juan Diego asked.

“A cheek.”

“A
cheek
!”

“Not serious, sir. I saw the man’s face. It will heal—not a bad scar, just
unfortunate.
”

“Yes—
unfortunate,
” was all Juan Diego could say. He didn’t dare ask
if Auntie Carmen had come and gone with the pet-store team. With any luck, she’d left Manila for Bohol—she might be in Bohol, waiting to meet him (with the Filipino side of Clark French’s whole family). Naturally, word of the slain fish would reach Auntie Carmen in Bohol—including the report on the
agitated
Señor Morales, and the
unfortunate
pet-store worker’s bitten cheek.

What is happening to me? Juan Diego wondered, upon returning to his hotel room. He saw there was a towel on the floor by the bed—doubtless where some of the seawater from the aquarium had spilled. (Juan Diego imagined the moray thrashing his tail and attacking the face of his frightened handler, but there was no blood on the towel.)

The writer was about to use the toilet when he spotted the tiny sea horse on the bathroom floor; the sea horse was so small that it must have escaped the attention of the pet-store team, at that moment when the little creature’s fellow fish were flushed away. The sea horse’s round and startled eyes still seemed alive; in its miniature and prehistoric face, the fierce eyes expressed an indignation at all humankind—like the eyes of a hunted dragon.

“Lo siento, caballo marino,” Juan Diego said, before he flushed the sea horse down the toilet.

Then he was angry—angry at himself, at the Makati Shangri-La, at the servile wheedling of the hotel manager. The fashion plate with his fussy mustache had given Juan Diego a brochure of the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, a publication of the American Battle Monuments Commission, Juan Diego had learned (in a cursory reading of the little brochure, on the elevator after breakfast).

Who had told the busybody hotel manager that Juan Diego had a personal interest in the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial? Even Bienvenido knew Juan Diego intended to visit the graves of those Americans lost to “operations” in the Pacific.

Had Clark French (or his Filipino wife) told
everyone
about Juan Diego’s intentions to pay his respects to the good gringo’s hero father? Juan Diego had, for years, possessed a
private
reason for coming to Manila. Leave it to the well-meaning Clark French, in his devoted way, to make Juan Diego’s mission in Manila a matter of public knowledge!

Naturally, Juan Diego was angry at Clark French. Juan Diego had no desire to go to Bohol; he barely understood what or where Bohol was. But Clark had insisted that his revered mentor couldn’t be alone in Manila for New Year’s Eve.

“For God’s sake, Clark—I’ve been alone in Iowa City for most of my
life
!” Juan Diego had said. “Once
you
were alone in Iowa City!”

Ah, well—perhaps the well-meaning Clark hoped Juan Diego might meet a future
wife
in the Philippines. Just look what had happened to Clark! Hadn’t
he
met someone? Wasn’t Clark French (possibly
because of
his Filipino wife) insanely happy? Truthfully, Clark had been insanely happy when he was alone in Iowa City. Clark was
religiously
happy, Juan Diego suspected.

It might have been the wife’s Filipino family—maybe
they
had made a big deal of inviting Juan Diego to Bohol. But in Juan Diego’s opinion, Clark was capable of making a big deal out of the invitation all by himself.

Every year, Clark French’s Filipino family occupied a seaside resort at a beach near Panglao Bay; they took over the whole hotel for a few days following Christmas, through New Year’s Day and the day after.

“Every room in the hotel is
ours
—no strangers!” Clark had told Juan Diego.

I’m
a stranger, you idiot! Juan Diego had thought. Clark French would be the only person he knew. Naturally, Juan Diego’s image as a murderer of precious underwater life would precede him to Bohol. Auntie Carmen would know everything; Juan Diego didn’t doubt that the exotic-pet person would (somehow) have
communicated
with the moray. If Señor Morales had been
agitated,
there was no telling what Juan Diego should expect for
agitation
from Auntie Carmen—a likely
Mrs.
Morals.

As for his rising anger, Juan Diego knew what his beloved physician and dear friend, Dr. Rosemary Stein, would say. She would surely have pointed out to him that anger of the kind he’d vented in the elevator, and was still experiencing now, was an indication that half a Lopressor tablet wasn’t enough.

Was not the level of anger he was feeling a sure sign that his body was making more adrenaline, and more adrenaline receptors? Yes. And, yes, there was a lethargy that came with the
right
dose of the beta-blockers—and the reduced blood circulation to the extremities gave Juan Diego cold hands and feet. And, yes, a Lopressor pill (the
whole
pill, not a half) could potentially give him as disturbed and vivid dreams as he’d had when he went off the beta-blockers altogether. This was truly confusing.

Yet he not only had very high blood pressure (170 over 100). Hadn’t
one of Juan Diego’s
possible
fathers died of a heart attack at a young age—if Juan Diego’s mother could be believed?

And then there was what had happened to Esperanza—I hope
not
my next disturbing dream! Juan Diego thought, knowing that the idea would lodge in his mind, making it all the more likely to be the case. Besides, what had happened to Esperanza—in Juan Diego’s dreams
and
in his memory—was recurrent.

“No stopping it,” Juan Diego said aloud. He was still in the bathroom, still recovering from the flushed-away sea horse, when he saw the untaken half of the Lopressor tablet and swallowed it quickly, with a glass of water.

Was Juan Diego consciously welcoming a diminished feeling for the rest of the day? And if he took a full dose of his beta-blockers later tonight in Bohol, wouldn’t Juan Diego once more experience the ennui, the inertia, the sheer sluggishness, he’d so often complained about to Dr. Stein?

I should call Rosemary right away, Juan Diego thought. He knew he’d tampered with the dosage of his beta-blockers; he may even have known he was inclined to keep altering the dose, in an on-and-off fashion, because of his temptation to manipulate the results. He knew perfectly well he was
supposed to
block the adrenaline, but he missed the adrenaline in his life, and—he also knew—he wanted
more
of it. There was no good reason why Juan Diego
didn’t
call Dr. Stein.

What was really going on here is that Juan Diego understood, very well, what Dr. Rosemary Stein would say to him about
playing with
his adrenaline and adrenaline receptors. (He just didn’t want to hear it.) And because Juan Diego understood, very well, that Clark French was one of those people who knew everything—Clark was either all-knowing or poised to find out about anything—Juan Diego made an effort to memorize the most conspicuous information in the tourist brochure about the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial. Anyone would have thought that Juan Diego had already visited the place.

In fact, in the limo with Bienvenido, Juan Diego was tempted to say he’d been there. (
There was a World War II veteran staying at the hotel—I went with him. He’d come ashore with MacArthur—you know, when the general returned in October 1944. MacArthur landed at Leyte,
Juan Diego almost told Bienvenido.) But instead he said: “I’ll go see the cemetery another time. I want to take a look at a couple of hotels—places to stay when I come back. A friend recommended them.”

“Sure—you’re the boss,” Bienvenido told him.

In the brochure about the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, there’d been a photo of General Douglas MacArthur striding ashore at Leyte in the knee-deep water.

There were more than seventeen thousand headstones in the cemetery; Juan Diego had committed this figure to memory—not to mention, more than thirty-six thousand “missing in action” but fewer than four thousand “unknowns.” Juan Diego was dying to tell someone what he knew, but he restrained himself from telling Bienvenido.

More than one thousand U.S. military were killed in the Battle of Manila—at about the same time those amphibious troops were recapturing Corregidor Island, the good gringo’s lost dad among the fallen heroes—but what if one or more of Bienvenido’s relatives had been killed in the monthlong Battle of Manila, when one hundred thousand Filipino civilians died?

Juan Diego did ask Bienvenido what he knew about the headstone locations in the vast cemetery—more than 150 acres! Juan Diego wondered if there was a specific area for the U.S. soldiers killed at Corregidor, either in ’42 or ’45. The brochure made mention of a specific memorial for the servicemen who lost their lives at Guadalcanal, and Juan Diego knew there were as many as eleven burial plots. (However, not knowing the good gringo’s name—or the name of his slain father—was a problem.)