Avenue of Mysteries

29. One Single Journey

“Cockfighting is legal here, and very popular,” Dorothy was saying. “The psycho roosters are up all night, crowing. The stupid gamecocks are psyching themselves up for their next fight.”

Well, Juan Diego thought, that might explain the psycho rooster who’d crowed before dawn that New Year’s Eve at the Encantador, but not the subsequent squawk of the rooster’s sudden and violent-sounding death — as if Miriam, by merely wishing the annoying rooster were dead, had made it happen.

At least he’d been forewarned, Juan Diego was thinking: there would be gamecocks crowing all night at the inn near Vigan. Juan Diego was interested to see what Dorothy would do about it.

“Someone should kill that rooster,” Miriam had said in her low, husky voice that night at the Encantador. Then, when the deranged rooster crowed a third time and his crowing was cut off mid-squawk, Miriam had said, “There, that does it. No more heralding of a false dawn, no more untruthful messengers.”

“And because the cocks crow all night, the dogs never stop barking,” Dorothy told him.

“It sounds very restful,” Juan Diego said. The inn was a compound of buildings, all old. The Spanish architecture was obvious; maybe the inn had once been a mission, Juan Diego was thinking — there was a church among the half-dozen guesthouses.

El Escondrijo, the inn was called—“The Hiding Place.” It was hard to discern what kind of place it was, arriving after ten o’clock at night, as they did. The other guests (if there were any) had gone to bed. The dining room was outdoors under a thatched roof, but it was open-sided, exposed to the elements, though Dorothy promised him there were no mosquitoes.

“What kills the mosquitoes?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Bats, maybe — or the ghosts,” Dorothy answered him indifferently. The bats, Juan Diego guessed, were also up all night — neither crowing nor barking, just silently killing things. Juan Diego was somewhat accustomed to ghosts, or so he thought.

The unlikely lovers were staying on the sea; there was a breeze. Juan Diego and Dorothy were not in Vigan, or in any other town, but the lights they could see were from Vigan, and there were two or three freighters anchored offshore. They could see the lights from the freighters, and when the wind was right, they could occasionally hear the ships’ radios.

“There’s a small swimming pool — a kids’ pool, I guess you would call it,” Dorothy was saying. “You have to be careful you don’t fall in the pool at night, because they don’t light it,” she warned.

There was no air-conditioning, but Dorothy said the nights were cool enough not to need it, and there was a ceiling fan in their room; the fan made a ticking sound, but given the crowing gamecocks and barking dogs, what did a ticking fan matter? The Hiding Place was not what you would call a resort.

“The local beach is adjacent to a fishing village and an elementary school, but you hear the children’s voices only from a distance — with kids, hearing them from a distance is okay,” Dorothy was saying, as they were going to bed. “The dogs in the fishing village are territorial about the beach, but you’re safe if you walk on the wet sand — just stay close to the water,” Dorothy advised him.

What sort of people stay at El Escondrijo? Juan Diego was wondering. The Hiding Place made him think of fugitives or revolutionaries, not a touristy place. But Juan Diego was falling asleep; he was half asleep when Dorothy’s cell phone (in the vibrate mode) made a humming sound on the night table.

“What a surprise, Mother,” he heard Dorothy say sarcastically in the dark. There was a long pause, while cocks crowed and dogs barked, before Dorothy said, “Uh-huh,” a couple of times; she said, “Okay,” once or twice, too, before Juan Diego heard her say, “You’re kidding, right?” And these familiar Dorothyisms were followed by the way the less-than-dutiful-sounding daughter ended the call. Juan Diego heard Dorothy tell Miriam: “You don’t want to hear what I dream about — believe me, Mother.”

Juan Diego lay awake in the darkness, thinking about this mother and her daughter; he was retracing how he’d met them — he was considering how dependent on them he’d become.

“Go to sleep, darling,” Juan Diego heard Dorothy say; it was almost exactly the way Miriam would have said the darling word. And the young woman’s hand, unerringly, reached for and found his penis, which she gave an ambivalent squeeze.

“Okay,” Juan Diego was trying to say, but the word wouldn’t come. Sleep overcame him, as if on Dorothy’s command.

“When I die, don’t burn me. Give me the whole hocus-pocus,” Lupe had said, looking straight at Father Alfonso and Father Octavio. That was what Juan Diego heard in his sleep — Lupe’s voice, instructing them.

Juan Diego didn’t hear the crowing cocks and the barking dogs; he didn’t hear the two cats fighting or fucking (or both) on the thatched roof of the outdoor shower. Juan Diego didn’t hear Dorothy get up in the night, not to pee but to open the door to the outdoor shower, where she snapped on the shower light.

“Fuck off or die,” Dorothy said sharply to the cats — they stopped yowling. She spoke more softly to the ghost she saw standing in the outdoor shower, as if the water were running — it wasn’t — and as if he were naked, though he was wearing clothes.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you—I was speaking to those cats,” Dorothy told him, but the young ghost had vanished.

Juan Diego hadn’t heard Dorothy’s apology to the quickly disappearing prisoner of war — he was one of the ghost guests. The emaciated young man was gray-skinned and dressed in prison-gray garb — one of the tortured captives of the North Vietnamese. And by his haunted, guilty-looking expression — as Dorothy would later explain to Juan Diego — she’d surmised he was one of the ones who’d broken down under torture. Maybe the young P.O.W. had capitulated under pain. Perhaps he’d signed letters that said he did things he never did. Some of the young Americans had made broadcasts, reciting Communist propaganda.

It wasn’t their fault; they shouldn’t blame themselves, Dorothy always tried to tell the ghost guests at El Escondrijo, but the ghosts had a way of vanishing before you could tell them anything.

“I just want them to know they’re forgiven for whatever they did, or were forced to do,” was how Dorothy would put it to Juan Diego. “But these young ghosts keep their own hours. They don’t listen to us — they don’t interact with us at all.”

Dorothy would also tell Juan Diego that the captured Americans who’d died in North Vietnam didn’t always dress in their gray prison garb; some of the younger ones wore their fatigues. “I don’t know if they have a choice regarding what they wear — I’ve seen them in sportswear, Hawaiian shirts and shit like that,” was the way Dorothy would put it to Juan Diego. “Nobody knows the rules for ghosts.”

Juan Diego hoped he would be spared seeing the tortured P.O.W. ghosts in their Hawaiian shirts, but his first night at the old inn on the outskirts of Vigan, the ghostly appearances of the long-dead R&R clientele at El Escondrijo were as yet unseen by Juan Diego; he slept in the contentious company of his own ghosts. Juan Diego was dreaming — in this case, it was a loud dream. (It’s no wonder Juan Diego didn’t hear Dorothy speaking to those cats or apologizing to that ghost.)

Lupe had asked for the “whole hocus-pocus,” and the Temple of the Society of Jesus had not held back. Brother Pepe did his best; he tried to persuade the two old priests to keep the service simple, but Pepe should have known there would be no restraining them. This was the Church’s bread and butter, the death of innocents — the death of children didn’t call for restraint. Lupe would get a no-holds-barred service — nothing simple about it.

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had insisted on the open casket. Lupe was in a white dress, with a white scarf snug around her neck — hence no bite marks, no swelling, showed. (You were forced to imagine what the back of her neck must have looked like.) And there was so much incense-swinging, the unfamiliar-looking face of the broken-nosed Virgin Mary was obscured in a pungent haze. Rivera was worried about the smoke — as if Lupe were being consumed by the hellfires of the basurero, as she once would have wanted.

“Don’t worry — we’ll burn something later, like she said,” Juan Diego whispered to el jefe.

“I’ve got my eye out for a dead puppy — I’ll find one,” the dump boss answered him.

They were both disconcerted by the Hijas del Calvario — the “Daughters of Calvary,” the wailing nuns for hire.

“The professional weepers,” as Pepe called them, seemed excessive. It was enough to have Sister Gloria leading the orphaned kindergartners in their oft-rehearsed responsive prayer.

“¡Madre! Ahora y siempre,” the children repeated, after Sister Gloria. “Mother! Now and forever, you will be my guide.” But even to this repetitive plea, and to all else — to the cry-on-command Daughters of Calvary, to the incense wreathing the Mary Monster’s towering presence — the darker-skinned Virgin Mary, with her boxer’s nose, made no response (not that Juan Diego could see her clearly in the rising clouds of sacred smoke).

Dr. Vargas came to Lupe’s service; he rarely took his eyes from the untrustworthy statue of the Virgin Mary, nor did he join the procession of mourners (and curious tourists, or other sightseers) who filed to the front of the Jesuit temple for a look at the lion girl in her open casket. That was what they were calling Lupe, in and around Oaxaca: the “lion girl.”

Vargas had come to Lupe’s service with Alejandra; these days, she seemed to be more than a dinner-party girlfriend, and Alejandra had liked Lupe, but Vargas wouldn’t join his girlfriend for a look at Lupe in the open casket.

Juan Diego and Rivera couldn’t help overhearing their conversation. “You’re not looking?” Alejandra had asked Vargas.

“I know what Lupe looks like — I’ve seen her,” was all Vargas said.

After that, Juan Diego and the dump boss didn’t want to see Lupe all in white in the open casket. Juan Diego and el jefe had hoped that their memories of Lupe, when she was alive, would be how they always saw her. They sat unmoving in their pew, next to Vargas, thinking the way a dump kid and a dump boss think: of things to burn, of the ashes they would sprinkle at the Mary Monster’s feet—“just sprinkle, don’t throw,” as Lupe had instructed them—“maybe not all the ashes, and only at her feet!” as Lupe had distinctly said.

The curious tourists and the other sightseers who’d seen the lion girl in her open casket rudely left the temple before the recession; apparently, they were disappointed not to see signs of the lion attack on Lupe’s lifeless body. (There would be no open-casket viewing of Ignacio’s body — as Dr. Vargas, who’d seen the lion tamer’s remains, fully understood.)

The recessional hymn was “Ave Maria,” unfortunately sung by an ill-chosen children’s choir — also for hire, like the Daughters of Calvary. These were brats in uniforms from a superior-sounding school of music; their parents were taking snapshots during the departing procession of the clergy and the choir.

At this point, discordantly, the “Hail Mary” choir was met by the circus band. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had insisted that the circus band remain outside the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús, but La Maravilla’s brass-and-drum version of “Streets of Laredo” was difficult to suppress; their moribund and dirgelike distortion of the cowboy’s lament was loud enough for Lupe herself to have heard it.

The music-school children’s voices, straining to make their “Ave Maria” heard, were no match for the uproarious blare and percussion of the circus band. You could hear the piteous lamenting of La Maravilla’s “Streets of Laredo” in the zócalo. Flor’s friends — those prostitutes at work in the Hotel Somega — said the cowboy’s histrionic death song reached them as far away from the Jesuit temple as Zaragoza Street.

“Perhaps the sprinkling of the ashes will be simpler,” Brother Pepe said hopefully to Juan Diego, as they were leaving Lupe’s service — the unholy hocus-pocus, the flat-out mumbo jumbo of a Catholic kind, which was exactly what Lupe had wanted.

“Yes — more spiritual, perhaps,” Edward Bonshaw had chimed in.

He’d not at first understood the English translation of Hijas del Calvario, which indeed did mean “Daughters of Calvary,” though in the pocket dictionary Señor Eduardo consulted, the Iowan seized upon the informal meaning of Calvario or Calvary, which could mean “a series of disasters.”

Edward Bonshaw, whose life would be a series of disasters, had mistakenly imagined that the nuns who wept for hire were called “Daughters of a Series of Disasters.” Given the lives of those orphans left at Lost Children, and given the awful circumstances of Lupe’s death — well, one can appreciate the parrot man’s misunderstanding of the Hijas del Calvario.

And one could sympathize with Flor — her appreciation of the parrot man was wearing a little thin. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Flor had been waiting for Edward Bonshaw to shit or get off the pot. Upon Señor Eduardo’s confusing the Daughters of Calvary with an order of nuns dedicated to a series of disasters — well, Flor had just rolled her eyes.

When, if ever, would Edward Bonshaw find the balls to confess his love for her to the two old priests?

“The main thing is tolerance, right?” Señor Eduardo was saying, as they were leaving the Temple of the Society of Jesus; they passed the portrait of Saint Ignatius, who was ignoring them but looking to Heaven for guidance. Pajama Man was splashing his face in the fountain of holy water, and Soledad and the young-women acrobats bowed their heads there as Juan Diego limped by.

Paco and Beer Belly were standing outside the temple, where the brass-and-drum bombardment of the circus band was loudest.

“¡Qué triste!” Beer Belly shouted, when he saw Juan Diego.

“Sí, sí, Lupe’s brother — how sad, how sad,” Paco repeated, giving Juan Diego a hug.

Now, amid the dirgelike din of “Streets of Laredo,” was not the time for Señor Eduardo to confess his love for Flor to Father Alfonso and Father Octavio — whether or not the Iowan would ever find the balls for such a formidable confession.

As Dolores had said to Juan Diego, when The Wonder herself was talking him down from the top of the main tent: “I’m sure you’re going to have the balls for lots of other stuff.” But when, and what other stuff? Juan Diego was wondering, while the circus band played on and on — it seemed the dirge would never end.

The way “Streets of Laredo” was reverberating, the corner of las calles de Trujano y Flores Magón was shaking. Rivera might have felt it was safe to shout; the dump boss may have thought no one would hear him. He was wrong — not even the brass-and-drum version of the cowboy’s lament could conceal what Rivera shouted.

The dump boss had turned to face the entrance to the Jesuit temple, off Flores Magón; he’d shaken his fist in the direction of the Mary Monster — he was so angry. “We’ll be back, with more ashes for you!” el jefe had shouted.

“You mean the sprinkling, I assume,” Brother Pepe said to the dump boss, as if Pepe were speaking conspiratorially.

“Ah, yes — the sprinkling,” Dr. Vargas joined in. “Be sure you tell me when that’s happening — I don’t want to miss it,” he told Rivera.

“There’s stuff to burn — decisions to be made,” the dump boss mumbled.

“And we don’t want too many ashes — just the right amount this time,” Juan Diego added.

“And only at the Virgin Mary’s feet!” the parrot man reminded them.

“Sí, sí—these things take time,” el jefe cautioned them.

But not always in dreams — sometimes dreams go fast. Time can be compressed in dreams.

• • •

IN REAL LIFE, IT took a few days for Dolores to show up at Cruz Roja, presenting Vargas, as she did, with her fatal peritoneal infection. (In his dream, Juan Diego would skip that part.)

In real life, el hombre papagayo — the dear parrot man — would take a few days to find the balls to say what he had to say to Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, and Juan Diego would discover that he did have the balls for “lots of other stuff,” as Dolores had tried to assure him when he just froze at eighty feet. (In his dream, of course, Juan Diego would skip how many days it took him and the Iowan to discover their balls.)

And, in real life, Brother Pepe spent a couple of days doing the necessary research: the rules regarding legal guardianship, pertaining (in particular) to orphans; the role the Church could play, and had played, in appointing or recommending legal guardians for kids in the care of Lost Children. Pepe had a good head for this kind of paperwork; constructing Jesuitical arguments from history was a procedure he understood well.

It was unremarkable, in Pepe’s opinion, how often Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were on record for saying, “We are a Church of rules”; yet Pepe discovered that the two old priests were not once on record for saying they could or would bend the rules. What was remarkable was how frequently Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had bent the rules — some orphans weren’t very adoptable; not every potential guardian was indisputably suitable. And, not surprisingly, Pepe’s precisionist preparation and presentation regarding why Edward Bonshaw and Flor were (in Juan Diego’s difficult case) the dump reader’s most suitable guardians imaginable — well, you can understand why these academic disputations weren’t dream material. (When it came to dreaming, Juan Diego would skip Pepe’s Jesuitical arguments, too.)

Last but not least, in real life, it would take a few days for Rivera and Juan Diego to sort out the burning business — not only what went into the fire at the basurero, but how long to let it burn and how many ashes to take out. This time, the container for the ashes would be small — not a coffee can but just a coffee cup. It was a cup Lupe had liked for her hot chocolate; she’d left it in the shack in Guerrero, where el jefe had kept it for her.

There was, importantly, a second part to Lupe’s last requests — the sprinkling-of-the-ashes part — but the preparation of those interesting ashes would also be absent from Juan Diego’s dream. (Dreams not only can go fast; they can be very selective.)

His first night at El Escondrijo, Juan Diego got up to pee — he wouldn’t remember what happened, because he was still dreaming. He sat down to pee; he could pee more quietly sitting down, and he didn’t want to wake up Dorothy, but there was a second reason for his sitting down. He’d seen his cell phone — it was on the countertop next to the toilet.

Because he was dreaming, Juan Diego probably didn’t remember that the bathroom was the only place he could find to plug in his cell phone; there was only one outlet next to the night table in the bedroom, and Dorothy had beaten him to it — she was such an aware young woman, technologically speaking.

Juan Diego wasn’t at all aware. He still didn’t understand how his cell phone worked, nor could he access the things on (or not on) his cell phone’s irritating menu — those things other people found so easily and stared at with such transfixed fascination. Juan Diego didn’t find his cell phone very interesting — not to the degree that other people did. In his routine life in Iowa City, there had been no younger person to show him how to use his mysterious phone. (It was one of those already-old-fashioned cell phones that flipped open.)

It irked him — even half asleep, and dreaming, and peeing while he was sitting down — that he still couldn’t find the photo the young Chinese man had taken in the underground of Kowloon Station.

They could all hear the train coming — the boy had to hurry. The photo caught Juan Diego, and Miriam and Dorothy, by surprise. The Chinese couple seemed to think it was a disappointing picture — perhaps out of focus? — but then the train was there. It was Miriam who’d snatched the cell phone away from the couple, and Dorothy who — even more quickly — had taken it from her mom. When Dorothy gave him back his phone, it was no longer in the camera mode.

“We don’t photograph well,” was all Miriam had said to the Chinese couple, who’d seemed unduly disturbed by the incident. (Perhaps the pictures they took usually turned out better.)

And now, sitting on the toilet in his bathroom at El Escondrijo, Juan Diego discovered — completely by accident, and probably because he was half asleep and dreaming — that there was an easier way to find that photo taken at Kowloon Station. Juan Diego wouldn’t even remember how he found the picture the young Chinese man took. He’d unintentionally touched a button on the side of his cell phone; suddenly his screen said, “Starting Camera.” He could have taken a photo of his bare knees, extending from the toilet seat, but he must have seen the “My Pics” option — that was how he saw the photo taken at Kowloon Station, not that he would remember doing this.

In fact, in the morning, Juan Diego would think he’d only dreamed about the photograph, because what he’d seen when he was sitting on the toilet — what he’d seen in the actual photo — couldn’t have been real, or so he thought.

In the photo Juan Diego had seen, he was alone on the train platform at Kowloon Station — as Miriam had said, she and Dorothy truly didn’t “photograph well.” No wonder Miriam had said that she and Dorothy couldn’t stand the way they looked in photographs — they didn’t show up in photos, at all! No wonder the young Chinese couple, who’d seen the picture, seemed unduly disturbed.

But Juan Diego wasn’t really awake in the present moment; he was in the grip of the most important dream and memory in his life — the sprinkling part. Besides, Juan Diego couldn’t have accepted (not yet) that Miriam and Dorothy hadn’t been captured in the photo at Kowloon Station — the one that caught all three of them by surprise.

And when Juan Diego, as quietly as possible, flushed the toilet in his bathroom at The Hiding Place, he failed to see the young ghost standing anxiously under the outdoor shower. This was a different ghost from the one Dorothy saw; this one was wearing his fatigues — he looked too young to have started shaving. (Dorothy must have left the shower light on.)

In the split second before this young ghost could vanish, forever missing in action, Juan Diego had limped back into the bedroom; he would have no memory of seeing himself alone on the train platform at Kowloon Station. Knowing that he hadn’t been alone on that platform was sufficient to make Juan Diego believe he’d merely dreamed he was making this journey without Miriam and Dorothy.

As he lay down beside Dorothy — at least it seemed to Juan Diego that Dorothy was really there — perhaps the journey word reminded him of something before he could fall back to sleep and fully return to the past. Where had he put that round-trip ticket to Kowloon Station? He knew he’d saved it, for some reason; he’d written something on the ticket with his ever-present pen. The title for a future novel, perhaps? One Single Journey—was that it?

Yes, that was it! But his thoughts (like his dreams) were so disjointed, it was hard for him to focus. Maybe it was a night when Dorothy had dispensed a double dose of the beta-blockers — not a night to have sex, in other words, but one of those nights to make up for the beta-blockers he’d skipped? If so — if he’d taken a double dose of his Lopressor prescription — would it have mattered if Juan Diego had seen the young ghost standing anxiously under the outdoor shower? Wouldn’t Juan Diego have believed he was only dreaming he saw the soldier’s ghost?

One Single Journey—it almost sounded like the title for a novel he’d already written, Juan Diego was thinking as he drifted back to sleep, more deeply into his lifelong dream. He thought of “single” in the sense of unaccompanied by others — in the sense of lone or sole—but also “single” in the sense of having no equal (in the sense of singular, Juan Diego supposed).

Then, as suddenly as he’d gotten up and gone back to bed, Juan Diego wasn’t thinking anymore. Once again, the past had reclaimed him.