Avenue of Mysteries

31. Adrenaline

Another nighttime arrival in another hotel, Juan Diego was thinking, but he’d seen the lobby of this one before — the Ascott, in Makati City, where Miriam had said he should stay when he returned to Manila. How strange: to be checking in with Dorothy, where he’d once imagined Miriam’s attention-getting entrance.

As Juan Diego remembered, it was a long walk to the registration desk from where the elevators opened into the lobby. “I’m a little surprised my mother isn’t—” Dorothy started to say; she was looking all around the lobby when Miriam just appeared. It was no surprise to Juan Diego how the security guards never took their eyes off Miriam, all the way from the elevators to the registration desk. “What a surprise, Mother,” Dorothy laconically said, but Miriam ignored her.

“You poor man!” Miriam exclaimed to Juan Diego. “I would guess you’ve seen enough of Dorothy’s ghosts — frightened nineteen-year-olds aren’t everyone’s shot of tequila.”

“Are you saying it’s your turn, Mother?” Dorothy asked her.

“Don’t be crude, Dorothy — it’s never as much about sex as you seem to think it is,” her mother told her.

“You’re kidding, right?” Dorothy asked her.

“It’s that time — it’s Manila, Dorothy,” Miriam reminded her.

“I know what time it is — I know where we are, Mother,” Dorothy said to her.

“Enough sex, Dorothy,” Miriam repeated.

“Don’t people still have sex?” Dorothy asked her, but Miriam once again ignored her.

“Darling, you look tired — I’m worried about how tired you look,” Miriam was saying to Juan Diego.

He watched Dorothy as she was leaving the lobby. She had an irresistibly coarse allure; the security guards watched Dorothy coming toward them, all the way to the elevators, but they didn’t look at her in quite the same way they had looked at Miriam.

“For Christ’s sake, Dorothy,” Miriam muttered to herself, when she saw that her daughter had left in a huff. Only Juan Diego heard her. “Honestly, Dorothy!” Miriam called after her, but Dorothy didn’t appear to have heard; the elevator doors were already closing.

At Miriam’s request, the Ascott had upgraded Juan Diego to a suite with a full kitchen, on one of the uppermost floors. Juan Diego certainly didn’t need a kitchen.

“After El Escondrijo, which is about as sea-level and depressing as it gets, I thought you deserved a more high-up view,” Miriam told him.

The high-up part notwithstanding, the view from the Ascott of Makati City — the Wall Street of Manila, the business and financial center of the Philippines — was like many high-rise cityscapes at night: the variations on subdued lighting or the darkened windows of daytime offices were offset by the brightly lit windows of hotels and apartment buildings. Juan Diego didn’t want to sound unappreciative of Miriam’s efforts on behalf of his view, but there was a universal sameness (a void of national identity) to the cityscape he saw.

And where Miriam took him to dinner — very near the hotel, in the Ayala Center — the atmosphere of the shops and restaurants was refined but fast-paced (a shopping mall relocated to an international airport, or the other way around). Yet it may have been the anonymity of the restaurant in the Ayala Center, or the traveling-businessman atmosphere of the Ascott, that compelled Juan Diego to tell Miriam such a personal story: what had happened to the good gringo — not only the burning at the basurero but every verse of “Streets of Laredo,” the lyrics spoken in a morbid monotone. (Unlike the good gringo, Juan Diego couldn’t sing.) Don’t forget, Juan Diego had been with Dorothy for days. He must have thought that Miriam was a better listener than her daughter.

“Wouldn’t you cry if you never forgot how your sister was killed by a lion?” Miriam had asked the children at the Encantador. And then Pedro had fallen asleep with his head against Miriam’s breast, as if he had been bewitched.

Juan Diego decided he should talk to Miriam nonstop; if he never let her talk, maybe she wouldn’t bewitch him.

He went on and on about el gringo bueno — not only how the doomed hippie had befriended Lupe and Juan Diego, but the embarrassing business of Juan Diego’s not knowing the good gringo’s name. The Manila American Cemetery and Memorial had beckoned Juan Diego to the Philippines, but Juan Diego told Miriam he had no expectations that he would ever be able to locate the missing father’s actual grave — not among the eleven burial plots, not without knowing the dead father’s name.

“Yet a promise is a promise,” was the way Juan Diego put it to Miriam at the restaurant in the Ayala Center. “I promised the good gringo I would pay his respects to his dad. I imagine the cemetery is pretty overwhelming, but I have to go there — I should at least see it.”

“Don’t see it tomorrow, darling — tomorrow is a Sunday, and not just any Sunday,” Miriam said. (You can see how easily Juan Diego’s decision to talk nonstop was derailed; as so often happened with Miriam and Dorothy, these women knew something he didn’t know.)

Tomorrow, Sunday, was the annual procession known as the Feast of the Black Nazarene. “The thing came from Mexico — a Spanish galleon carried it to Manila from Acapulco. Early 1600s, I’m guessing — I think a bunch of Augustinian friars brought the thing,” Miriam told him.

“A black Nazarene?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Not racially black,” Miriam explained. “It’s a wooden, life-size figure of Jesus Christ, frozen in the act of bearing his cross to Calvary. Maybe it was made from some kind of dark wood, but it wasn’t supposed to be black — it was burned in a fire.”

“It was charred, you mean?” Juan Diego asked her.

“It was burned at least three times, the first time in a fire on board the Spanish galleon. The thing arrived charred, but there were two more fires after the Black Nazarene got to Manila. Quiapo Church was twice destroyed by fire — in the eighteenth century and in the 1920s,” Miriam said. “And there were two earthquakes in Manila — one in the seventeenth century, one in the nineteenth. The Church makes a big deal about the Black Nazarene’s ‘surviving’ three fires and two earthquakes, and the thing survived the Liberation of Manila in 1945—one of the worst bombings in the Pacific Theater of World War Two, by the way. But what’s the big deal about a wooden figure that ‘survives’—a wooden figure can’t die, can it? The thing just got burned a few times, and it turned blacker!” was the way Miriam put it. “The Black Nazarene was shot once, too — in the cheek, I think. The gun incident was fairly recent — in the 1990s,” Miriam said. “As if Christ didn’t suffer enough, on the way to Calvary, the Black Nazarene has ‘survived’ six catastrophes — both the natural and the unnatural kind. Believe me,” Miriam said suddenly to Juan Diego, “you don’t want to leave the hotel tomorrow. Manila is a mess when the Black Nazarene’s devotees are having their crazy procession.”

“There are thousands of marchers?” Juan Diego asked Miriam.

“No, millions,” Miriam told him. “And many of them believe that touching the Black Nazarene will heal them of whatever ails them. Lots of people get hurt in the procession. There are male devotees of the Black Nazarene who call themselves Hijos del Señor Nazareno—‘Sons of the Lord Nazarene’—and their devotion to the Catholic faith causes them to ‘identify,’ as they put it, with the Passion of Christ. Maybe the morons want to suffer as much as Jesus suffered,” Miriam said; the way she shrugged gave Juan Diego a chill. “Who knows what true believers like that want?”

“Maybe I’ll go to the cemetery on Monday,” Juan Diego suggested.

“Manila will be a mess on Monday — it takes them a day to clean up the streets, and all the hospitals are still dealing with the injured,” Miriam said. “Go Tuesday — the afternoon is best. The most fanatical people do everything as early in the morning as they’re allowed — don’t go in the morning,” Miriam told him.

“Okay,” Juan Diego said. Just listening to Miriam made him feel as tired as he might have felt if he’d marched in the Black Nazarene procession, suffering the inevitable crowd injuries and dehydration. Yet as tired as he was, Juan Diego doubted what Miriam had told him. Her voice was always so authoritative, but this time what she said seemed exaggerated, even untrue. It was Juan Diego’s impression that Manila was huge. Could a religious procession in Quiapo really affect the Makati area?

Juan Diego drank too much San Miguel beer and ate something curious; any number of things could have been the cause of his not feeling well. He suspected the Peking duck lumpia. (Why did they put duck in a spring roll?) And Juan Diego didn’t know that lechon kawali was deep-fried pork belly, not until Miriam informed him; the sausage served with bagoong mayonnaise took him by surprise, too. Later, Miriam told him the mayonnaise was made with that fermented-fish condiment — the stuff Juan Diego thought gave him indigestion or heartburn.

In truth, it may not have been the Filipino food (or too much San Miguel beer) that upset his stomach and made him feel sick. The all-too-familiar craziness of the fervent followers of the Black Nazarene upset him. Of course the burned Jesus and his charred-black cross had come from Mexico! Juan Diego was thinking, as he and Miriam navigated the escalators in the vast mall of the Ayala Center — as they rode the elevator, up and up, to their suite in the Ascott.

Once again, Juan Diego almost didn’t notice how his limp seemed to go away when he was walking anywhere with Miriam or Dorothy. And Clark French was assailing him with one text message after another. Poor Leslie had been texting Clark; she’d wanted Clark to know his former teacher was “in the clutches of a literary stalker.”

Juan Diego didn’t know there were literary stalkers; he doubted that Leslie (a writing student) was besieged by them, but she’d told Clark that Juan Diego had been seduced by a “groupie who preys on writers.” (Clark persisted in calling Dorothy just plain “D.”) Leslie had told Clark that Dorothy was a “woman of possibly satanic intentions.” The satanic word never failed to excite Clark.

The reason there were so many text messages from Clark was that Juan Diego had turned off his cell phone before the flight from Laoag to Manila; not until he was leaving the restaurant with Miriam did he remember to turn it back on. By then, Clark French’s imagination had taken a fearful and protective turn.

“Are you all right?” Clark’s most recent text message began. “What if D. is satanic? I’ve met Miriam — I thought she was satanic!”

Juan Diego saw he’d missed a text message from Bienvenido, too. It was true that Clark French had made most of the arrangements for Juan Diego in Manila, but Bienvenido knew that Mr. French’s former teacher was back in town and that he had changed hotels. Bienvenido didn’t exactly contradict Miriam’s warnings about Sunday, but he wasn’t as adamant.

“Best to lie low tomorrow, due to crowds attending the Black Nazarene event — at least avoid any proximity to the procession routes,” Bienvenido texted him. “I’ll be your driver Monday, for the onstage interview with Mr. French and the dinner afterward.”

“WHAT onstage interview with you Monday, Clark — WHAT dinner afterward?” Juan Diego immediately texted Clark French, before addressing the satanic situation that had so excited his former writing student.

Clark called to explain. There was a small theater in Makati City, very near Juan Diego’s hotel—“small but pleasant,” Clark described it. On Monday nights, when the theater was dark, the company hosted onstage interviews with authors. A local bookstore provided copies of the authors’ books, for signing; Clark was often the interviewer. There was a dinner afterward for patrons of the writers’ onstage series—“not a lot of people,” Clark assured him, “but a way for you to have some contact with your Filipino readers.”

Clark French was the only writer Juan Diego knew who sounded like a publicist. And, like a publicist, Clark mentioned the media last. There would be a journalist or two, at the onstage event and the dinner, but Clark said he would warn Juan Diego about the ones to watch out for. (Clark should just stay home and write! Juan Diego thought.)

“And your friends will be there,” Clark suddenly said.

“Who, Clark?” Juan Diego asked.

“Miriam and her daughter. I saw the guest list for dinner — it just says ‘Miriam and her daughter, friends of the author.’ I thought you would know they were coming,” Clark told him.

Juan Diego looked carefully around his hotel suite. Miriam was in the bathroom; it was almost midnight — she was probably getting ready for bed. Limping his way to the kitchen area of the suite, Juan Diego lowered his voice when he spoke on his cell phone to Clark.

“D. is for Dorothy, Clark — Dorothy is Miriam’s daughter. I slept with Dorothy before I slept with Miriam,” Juan Diego reminded his former writing student. “I slept with Dorothy before she met Leslie, Clark.”

“You admitted you didn’t know Miriam and her daughter well,” Clark reminded his old teacher.

“As I told you, they’re mysteries to me, but your friend Leslie has her own issues — Leslie is just jealous, Clark.”

“I don’t deny that poor Leslie has issues—” Clark started to say.

“One of her boys was trampled by a water buffalo — the same boy was later stung by pink jellyfish swimming vertically,” Juan Diego whispered into his cell phone. “The other boy was stung by plankton resembling condoms for three-year-olds.”

“Stinging condoms — don’t remind me!” Clark cried.

“Not condoms — the stinging plankton looked like condoms, Clark.”

“Why are you whispering?” Clark asked his old writing teacher.

“I’m with Miriam,” Juan Diego whispered; he was limping around the kitchen area, trying to keep an eye on the closed bathroom door.

“I’ll let you go,” Clark whispered. “I thought Tuesday would be a good day for the American Cemetery—”

“Yes, in the afternoon,” Juan Diego interrupted him.

“I’ve booked Bienvenido for Tuesday morning, too,” Clark told him. “I thought maybe you would like to see the National Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe — the one here, in Manila. There are only a couple of buildings, just an old church and monastery — nothing as grand as your Mexico City version. The church and monastery are in a slum, Guadalupe Viejo — the slum is on a hill above the Pasig River,” Clark carried on.

“Guadalupe Viejo — a slum,” was all Juan Diego managed to say.

“You sound tired. We’ll decide this later,” Clark abruptly said.

“Guadalupe, sí—” Juan Diego started to say. The bathroom door was open; he saw Miriam in the bedroom — she had only a towel around her, and she was closing the bedroom curtains.

“That’s a ‘yes’ to Guadalupe Viejo — you want to go there?” Clark French was asking.

“Yes, Clark,” Juan Diego told him.

Guadalupe Viejo didn’t sound like a slum — to a dump kid, Guadalupe Viejo sounded more like a destination. It seemed to Juan Diego that the very existence of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Manila was more of a reason for his taking this trip to the Philippines than the sentimental promise he’d made to the good gringo. More than the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, Guadalupe Viejo sounded like where a dump reader from Oaxaca would end up—to use Dorothy’s blunt way of putting it. And if it was true that an aura of fate had marked him, didn’t Guadalupe Viejo sound like Juan Diego Guerrero’s kind of place?

“You’re shivering, darling — do you have a chill?” Miriam asked him when he came into the bedroom.

“No, I was just talking to Clark French,” Juan Diego told her. “There’s an onstage event Clark and I are doing — an interview together. I hear you and Dorothy are coming.”

“We don’t get to go to a lot of literary events,” Miriam said, smiling. She’d spread the towel for her feet on the carpet, on her side of the bed. She was already under the covers. “I put out your pills,” she said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t know if it was a Lopressor or a Viagra night,” Miriam told him in that insouciant way of hers.

Juan Diego was aware he’d been alternating nights: he chose the nights when he wanted to feel adrenalized; he resigned himself to those other nights, when he knew he would feel diminished. He was aware that his skipping a dose of the beta-blockers — specifically, to unblock the adrenaline receptors in his body, to give himself an adrenaline release — was dangerous. But Juan Diego didn’t remember when it became routine for him to have either “a Lopressor or a Viagra night,” as Miriam had put it — a while ago, he imagined.

Juan Diego was struck by what was the same about Miriam and Dorothy; this had nothing to do with how they looked, or their sexual behavior. What was the same about these two women was how they were able to manipulate him — not to mention that whenever he was with one of them, he was inclined to forget about the other one. (Yet he forgot and obsessed about both of them!)

There was a word for how he was behaving, Juan Diego thought — not only with these women but with his beta-blockers. He was behaving childishly, Juan Diego was thinking — not unlike the way he and Lupe had behaved about the virgins, at first preferring Guadalupe to the Mary Monster, until Guadalupe disappointed them. And then the Virgin Mary actually had done something — enough to get the dump kids’ attention, not only with her nose-for-a-nose trick but with her unambiguous tears.

The Ascott was not El Escondrijo — no ghosts, unless Miriam was one, and any number of outlets where Juan Diego could have plugged in and charged his cell phone. Yet he chose an outlet in the area of the bathroom sink, because the bathroom was private. And Juan Diego hoped that — whether she was a ghost or not — Miriam might have fallen asleep before he was finished using the bathroom.

“Enough sex, Dorothy,” he’d heard Miriam say — that oft-repeated line — and, more recently, “it’s never as much about sex as you seem to think it is.”

Tomorrow was Sunday. Juan Diego would be flying home to the United States on Wednesday. He’d not only had enough sex, Juan Diego was thinking — he’d had enough of these two mysterious women, whoever they were. One way to stop obsessing about them was to stop having sex with them, Juan Diego thought. He used the pill-cutting device to slice one of the oblong Lopressor tablets in half; he took his prescribed dose of the beta-blockers, plus this additional half.

Bienvenido had said it was “best to lie low” on Sunday; Juan Diego would lie low, all right — he would miss most of Sunday in a diminished state. And it wasn’t the crowds or the religious insanity of the Black Nazarene procession Juan Diego was intentionally missing. He wished Miriam and Dorothy would just disappear; it was feeling diminished, as usual, that he wanted.

Juan Diego was making an effort to be normal again — not to mention that he was trying, albeit belatedly, to follow his doctor’s orders. (Dr. Rosemary Stein was often on his mind, if not always as his doctor.)

“Dear Dr. Rosemary,” he began his text to her — once again sitting with his hard-to-understand cell phone on the bathroom toilet. Juan Diego wanted to tell her he’d taken some liberties with his Lopressor prescription; he wanted to explain about the unusual circumstances, the two interesting (or at least interested) women. Yet Juan Diego wanted to assure Rosemary that he wasn’t lonely, or pathetic; he also wanted to promise her that he would stop fooling around with the required dose of his beta-blockers, but it seemed to take him hours just to write “Dear Dr. Rosemary”—the stupid cell phone was an insult to any writer! Juan Diego could never remember which stupid key you pushed to capitalize a letter.

That was when a simpler solution occurred to Juan Diego: he could send Rosemary the photograph of him with Miriam and Dorothy at Kowloon Station; that way, his message could be both shorter and funnier. “I met these two women, who caused me to diddle around with my Lopressor prescription. Fear not! Am back on track and abstinent again. Love—”

That would be the briefest way to confess to Dr. Rosemary, wouldn’t it? And the tone wasn’t self-pitying — no hint of the longing or lost opportunity attached to that night in the car on Dubuque Street, when Rosemary had seized Juan Diego’s face and said, “I would have asked you to marry me.”

Poor Pete was driving. Poor Rosemary tried to revise what she’d said; “I just meant I might have asked you,” was the way Rosemary said it. And, without looking at her, Juan Diego had known she was crying.

Ah, well — it was best for Juan Diego and his dear Dr. Rosemary not to dwell on that night in the car on Dubuque Street. And how could he send her that photo taken at Kowloon Station? Juan Diego didn’t know how to find the photo on his stupid cell phone — not to mention how to attach the photo to a text. On the infuriating keypad of his little phone, even the key for “clear” wasn’t spelled out. The correct key for “clear” was marked CLR — there was room on the keypad for two more letters, in Juan Diego’s opinion. He angrily cleared his text message to Rosemary, one letter at a time.

Clark French would know how to find the photo that young Chinese man took at Kowloon Station; he could show Juan Diego how to send the photo with a text message to Dr. Rosemary. Clark knew how to do everything, except what to do with poor Leslie, Juan Diego was thinking as he limped to bed.

No dogs were barking, no gamecocks were crowing, but — not unlike New Year’s Eve at the Encantador — Juan Diego could discern no detectable breathing from Miriam.

Miriam was asleep on her left side, with her back turned toward him. Juan Diego thought he could lie on his left side and put his arm around her; he wanted to put his hand on her heart, not on her breast. He wanted to feel if her heart was beating or not.

Dr. Rosemary Stein could have told him that you can feel a pulse better in other places. Naturally, Juan Diego felt Miriam — all over her chest! — but he couldn’t feel her heartbeat.

While he was groping all around, his feet touched her feet; if Miriam was alive, and not a spectral presence, surely she must have felt him touching her. Nevertheless, Juan Diego was bravely trying to assert his familiarity with the spiritual world.

The boy who’d been born in Guerrero was no stranger to spirits; Oaxaca was a town full of holy virgins. Even that Christmas-parties place, the virgin shop on Independencia — even one of those sex-doll replicas of the city’s famous virgins — was a little holy. And Juan Diego was a Lost Children kid; surely the nuns, and the two old priests at the Temple of the Society of Jesus, had exposed the dump reader to the spiritual world. Even the dump boss was a believer; Rivera had been a Mary worshiper. Juan Diego wasn’t afraid of Miriam or Dorothy — whoever, or whatever, they were. As el jefe had said: “We don’t need to declare what a miracle is or isn’t — we saw it.”

It didn’t matter who or what Miriam was. If Miriam and Dorothy were Juan Diego’s personal angels of death, he was unimpressed. They wouldn’t be his first or his only miracle. As Lupe had told him: “We’re the miraculous ones.” All this was what Juan Diego believed, or what he tried to believe — what he sincerely wanted to believe — while he went on touching Miriam.

The sudden, sharp intake of Miriam’s breath nonetheless startled him. “It’s a Lopressor night, I’m guessing,” she said to him in her low, husky voice.

He tried to reply to her nonchalantly. “How did you know?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Your hands and feet, darling,” Miriam told him. “Your extremities are already turning colder.”

It’s true that beta-blockers reduce blood circulation to the extremities. Juan Diego didn’t wake up until noon on Sunday, and his hands and feet were freezing. He wasn’t surprised that Miriam was gone, or that she hadn’t left him a note.

Women know when men don’t desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death — even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.

Juan Diego felt so diminished; he wouldn’t remember how that Sunday, and Sunday night, slipped away. Even that extra half of a Lopressor tablet had been too much. On Sunday night, he flushed the unused half of the pill down the toilet; he took only the required dose of his Lopressor prescription. Juan Diego would still sleep till noon on Monday. If there was any news that weekend, he missed it.

The writing students at Iowa had called Clark French a “do-gooder Catholic,” an “übernerd,” and Clark had been busy with Leslie while Juan Diego slept. “I believe poor Leslie’s foremost concern is your well-being,” Clark’s first text message to Juan Diego began. There were more messages from Clark, of course — mostly to do with their onstage interview. “Don’t worry: I won’t ask you who wrote Shakespeare, and we’ll skirt the issue of autobiographical fiction as best we can!”

There was more about poor Leslie, too. “Leslie says she’s NOT jealous — she wants nothing to do with D.,” Clark’s text message declared. “I’m sure that Leslie is strictly concerned with what witchcraft, what violent sorcery, D. may unleash on you. Werner told his mom the water buffalo was INCITED to charge and trample — Werner said D. stuck a caterpillar up the buffalo’s nose!”

Someone is lying, Juan Diego was thinking. He didn’t put it past Dorothy to have stuck the caterpillar all the way up one nostril, as far as it would go. Juan Diego didn’t put it past young Werner, either.

“Was it a green and yellow caterpillar, with dark-brown eyebrows?” Juan Diego texted Clark.

“It WAS!” Clark answered him. I guess Werner got a good look at the caterpillar, Juan Diego was thinking.

“Definitely witchcraft,” Juan Diego texted Clark. “I’m not sleeping with Dorothy or her mother anymore,” he added.

“Poor Leslie will be at our onstage event tonight,” was Clark’s reply. “Will D. be there? With her MOTHER? Leslie says she’s surprised D. has a mother, living.”

“Yes, Dorothy and her mother will be there,” was Juan Diego’s last text message to Clark. It gave him some small pleasure to send it. Juan Diego was noticing it was less stressful to do mindless things when you were a little low on adrenaline.

Was this why retired men were content to putter around their backyards, or play golf, or do shit like that — like sending text messages, one tedious letter at a time? Juan Diego was wondering. Was trivia more tolerable when you were already feeling diminished?

He’d not anticipated that the news on TV, and in the newspaper the hotel delivered to his room, would be all about the Black Nazarene procession in Manila. The only news was local. He’d been so out of it on Sunday, he hadn’t noticed there was a drizzling rain all day—“a northeast monsoon,” the newspaper called it. Despite the weather, an estimated 1.7 million Filipino Catholics (many of them barefoot) turned out for the procession; the devotees were joined by 3,500 police officers. As in previous years, several hundred injuries were reported. Three devotees fell or jumped off the Quezon Bridge, the Coast Guard reported; the Coast Guard also said they’d deployed several intelligence teams in inflatable boats to patrol the Pasig River—“not only to provide security for the devotees, but to be on the lookout for any outsiders who might create an unusual scenario.”

What “unusual scenario”? Juan Diego had wondered.

The procession always ended up back at Quiapo Church, where the practice called pahalik was performed — the act of kissing the statue of the Black Nazarene. Mobs of people waited in line, crowding the altar area, waiting for a chance to kiss the statue.

And now a doctor was on TV, speaking dismissively of the “minor injuries” suffered by 560 devotees at this year’s Black Nazarene procession. The doctor strongly suggested that all the lacerations were to be expected. “Typical crowd-type injuries, such as tripping — the bare feet are just asking for trouble,” the doctor said. He was young and impatient-looking. And the abdominal issues? the young doctor was asked. “Brought on by bad food choices,” the doctor said. What about all the sprains? “More crowd-type injuries — falls, from all the pushing and shoving,” the doctor answered, sighing. And all the headaches? “Dehydration — people don’t drink enough water,” the doctor said, with rising contempt. Hundreds of marchers had been treated for dizziness and difficulty breathing — some fainted, the doctor was told. “Unfamiliarity with marching!” the doctor cried, throwing up his hands; he reminded Juan Diego of Dr. Vargas. (The young doctor seemed on the verge of crying out, “The problem is religion!”)

How about the incidences of back pain? “Could be caused by anything — definitely exacerbated by all the pushing and shoving,” the doctor replied; he had closed his eyes. And hypertension? “Could be caused by anything,” the doctor repeated — he kept his eyes closed. “More marching-related business is a likely cause.” His voice had all but trailed away when the young doctor suddenly opened his eyes and spoke directly to the camera. “I’ll tell you what the Black Nazarene procession is good for,” he said. “The procession is good for scavengers.”

Naturally, a dump kid would be sensitive to this derogatory-sounding use of the scavengers word. Juan Diego wasn’t only imagining los pepenadores from the basurero; in addition to the professional trash collectors of the dump-kid kind, Juan Diego was thinking sympathetically of dogs and seagulls. But the young doctor wasn’t speaking derogatorily; he was being very derogatory about the Black Nazarene procession, but in saying the procession was good for “scavengers,” he meant it was good for poor people — the ones who followed after the devotees, cashing in on all the discarded water bottles and plastic food containers.

Ah, well—poor people, Juan Diego thought. There was certainly a history that linked the Catholic Church to poor people. Juan Diego usually fought with Clark French about that.

Of course the Church was “genuine” in its love for poor people, as Clark always argued — Juan Diego didn’t dispute this. Why wouldn’t the Church love poor people? Juan Diego was in the habit of asking Clark. But what about birth control? What about abortion? It was the “social agenda” of the Catholic Church that made Juan Diego mad. The Church’s policies — in opposition to abortion, even in opposition to contraception! — not only subjected women to the “enslavement of childbirth,” as Juan Diego had put it to Clark; the Church’s policies kept the poor poor, or made them poorer. Poor people kept reproducing, didn’t they? Juan Diego kept asking Clark.

Juan Diego and Clark French had fought on and on about this. If the subject of the Church didn’t come up when the two of them were onstage tonight, or when they were out to dinner afterward, how could it not come up when they were together in a Roman Catholic church tomorrow morning? How could Clark and Juan Diego coexist in the Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Manila without a recurrence of their oh-so-familiar Catholic conversation?

Just thinking about this conversation made Juan Diego aware of his adrenaline — namely, needing it. It wasn’t only for sex that Juan Diego wanted the adrenaline release he’d been missing since he’d started the beta-blockers. The dump reader had first encountered a little Catholic history on the singed pages of books saved from burning; as a Lost Children kid, he thought he understood the difference between those unanswerable religious mysteries and the man-made rules of the Church.

If he was going to the Our Lady of Guadalupe church with Clark French in the morning, Juan Diego was thinking, maybe skipping a dose of his Lopressor prescription tonight wasn’t a bad idea. Given who Juan Diego Guerrero was, and where he came from — well, if you were Juan Diego, and you were going to Guadalupe Viejo with Clark French, wouldn’t you want as much adrenaline as you could get?

And there was the ordeal onstage, and the dinner afterward — there was tonight and tomorrow to get through, Juan Diego considered. To take, or not to take, the beta-blockers — that is the question, he was thinking.

The text message from Clark French was short but would suffice. “On second thought,” Clark had written, “let’s begin with my asking you who wrote Shakespeare — we know we agree about that. This will put the issue of personal experience as the only valid basis for fiction writing behind us — we know we agree about this, too. As for the types who believe Shakespeare was someone else: they underestimate the imagination, or they overesteem personal experience — their rationale for autobiographical fiction, don’t you think?” Clark French wrote to his former writing teacher. Poor Clark — still theoretical, forever juvenile, always picking fights.

Give me the adrenaline, all I can get, Juan Diego thought — once more not taking his beta-blockers.