Avenue of Mysteries

32. Not Manila Bay

From Juan Diego’s point of view, the good thing about being interviewed by Clark French was that Clark did most of the talking. The difficult part was listening to Clark; he was such a pontificator. And if Clark was on your side, he could be more embarrassing.

Juan Diego and Clark had recently read James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Both Clark and Juan Diego had admired the book; they’d been persuaded by Mr. Shapiro’s arguments — they believed that Shakespeare of Stratford was the one and only Shakespeare; they agreed that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were not written collaboratively, or by someone else.

Yet why, Juan Diego wondered, didn’t Clark French begin by quoting Mr. Shapiro’s most compelling statement — the one made in the book’s epilogue? (Shapiro writes, “What I find most disheartening about the claim that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the life experience to have written the plays is that it diminishes the very thing that makes him so exceptional: his imagination.”)

Why did Clark begin by attacking Mark Twain? An assignment to read Life on the Mississippi, in Clark’s high school years, had caused “an almost lethal injury to my imagination”—or so Clark complained. Twain’s autobiography had nearly ended Clark’s aspirations to become a writer. And according to Clark, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should have been one novel—“a short one,” Clark railed.

The audience, Juan Diego could tell, didn’t understand the point of this rant — no mention had been made of the other writer onstage (namely, Juan Diego). And Juan Diego, unlike the audience, knew what was coming; he knew that the connection between Twain and Shakespeare had not yet been made.

Mark Twain was one of the culprits who believed that Shakespeare couldn’t have written the plays attributed to him. Twain had stated that his own books were “simply autobiographies”; as Mr. Shapiro wrote, Twain believed “great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical.”

But Clark hadn’t connected this to the who-wrote-Shakespeare debate, which Juan Diego knew was Clark’s point. Instead, Clark was going on and on about Twain’s lack of imagination. “Writers who have no imagination — writers who can only write about their own life experiences — simply can’t imagine that other writers can imagine anything!” Clark cried. Juan Diego wished he could disappear.

“But who wrote Shakespeare, Clark?” Juan Diego asked his former student, trying to steer him to the point.

“Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare!” Clark sputtered.

“Well, that settles it,” Juan Diego said. There was a small sound from the audience, a titter or two. Clark seemed surprised by the tittering, faint though it was — as if he’d forgotten there was an audience.

Before Clark could continue — venting about the other culprits in the camp of unimaginative scoundrels who subscribed to the heresy that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by someone else — Juan Diego tried to say a little about James Shapiro’s excellent book: how, as Shapiro put it, “Shakespeare did not live, as we do, in an age of memoir”; how, as Mr. Shapiro further said, “in his own day, and for more than a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare’s works as autobiographical.”

“Lucky Shakespeare!” Clark French shouted.

A slender arm waved from the stupefied audience — a woman who was almost too small to be seen from the stage, except that her prettiness stood out (even seated, as she was, between Miriam and Dorothy). And (even from afar) the bracelets on her skinny arm were of the expensive-looking and attention-getting kind that a woman with a rich ex-husband would wear.

“Do you think Mr. Shapiro’s book defames Henry James?” Leslie timidly asked from the audience. (This was, without a doubt, poor Leslie.)

“Henry James!” Clark cried, as if James had caused Clark’s imagination another unspeakable wound in those vulnerable high school years. Poor Leslie, small as she was, seemed to grow smaller in her seat. And was it only Juan Diego who noticed, or did Clark also see, that Leslie and Dorothy were holding hands? (So much for Leslie’s saying she wanted nothing to do with D.!)

“Pinning down Henry James’s skepticism about Shakespeare’s authorship isn’t easy,” Shapiro writes. “Unlike Twain, James wasn’t willing to confront the issue publicly or directly.” (Not exactly defamatory, Juan Diego was thinking — though he’d agreed with Shapiro’s description of “James’s maddeningly elliptical and evasive style.”)

“And do you think Shapiro defames Freud?” Clark asked his adoring writing student, but poor Leslie was now afraid of him; she looked too small to speak.

Juan Diego would have sworn that was Miriam’s long arm wrapped around poor Leslie’s shaking shoulders.

“Self-analysis had enabled Freud, by extension, to analyze Shakespeare,” Shapiro had written.

No one but Freud could imagine Freud’s lust for his mother, or Freud’s jealousy of his father, Clark was saying — and how, from self-analysis, Freud had concluded this was (as Freud put it) “a universal event in early childhood.”

Oh, those universal events in early childhood! Juan Diego was thinking; he’d hoped Clark French would leave Freud out of the discussion. Juan Diego didn’t want to hear what Clark French thought of the Freudian theory of penis envy.

“Just don’t, Clark,” said a stronger-sounding female voice in the audience — not Leslie’s timid voice this time. It was Clark’s wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, a most impressive woman. She stopped Clark from telling the audience his impressions of Freud — the saga of the untold damage done to literature and to young Clark’s vulnerable imagination at a formative age.

With a beginning of this oppressive kind, how could the onstage interview hope to achieve a spontaneous liftoff? It was a wonder that the audience didn’t leave — except for Leslie, whose early exit was very visible. It was a mild success that the interview got a little better. There was some mention of Juan Diego’s novels, and it registered as a small triumph that the issue of Juan Diego’s being, or his not being, a Mexican-American writer was discussed without further reference to Freud, James, or Twain.

But poor Leslie hadn’t left alone, not entirely. If not everyone’s idea of a mother and her daughter, those two women with Leslie were certainly competent-looking, and the way they’d escorted Leslie up the aisle and out of the theater suggested they were used to taking charge. In fact, how Miriam and Dorothy had taken hold of the small, pretty woman might have caused some concern among the more observant members of the audience — if anyone even noticed, or had been paying attention. The unshakable grip Miriam and Dorothy had on poor Leslie could have meant they were comforting her or abducting her. It was hard to tell.

And where had Miriam and Dorothy gone? Juan Diego kept wondering. Why should he care? Hadn’t he wished they would just disappear? Yet what did it mean when your angels of death departed — when your personal phantasms stopped haunting you?

THE DINNER AFTER THE onstage event was in the labyrinth of the Ayala Center. To an out-of-towner, the dinner guests were not discernible from one another. Juan Diego knew who his readers were — they announced themselves by their familiarity with the details of his novels — but the dinner guests Clark identified as “patrons of the arts” were aloof; their sympathies toward Juan Diego were unreadable.

You shouldn’t generalize about those people who are patrons of the arts. Some of them have read nothing; they’re often the ones who appear to have read everything. The other ones have an out-of-it expression; they seem disinclined to speak or, if they talk at all, it’s only to make an offhand remark about the salad or the seating plan — and they’re usually the ones who’ve read everything you’ve written, and everyone else you’ve ever read.

“You have to be careful around patron-des-arts types,” Clark whispered in Juan Diego’s ear. “They are not what they seem.”

Clark was wearing thin on Juan Diego — Clark could grate on anyone. There were those known things Clark and Juan Diego disagreed about, but it was when Juan Diego most agreed with Clark that Clark grated on him more.

To be fair: Clark had prepared him to expect “a journalist or two” at the dinner party; Clark had also said he would warn Juan Diego about “the ones to watch out for.” But Clark didn’t know all the journalists.

One of the unknown journalists asked Juan Diego if the beer he was drinking was his first one, or his second.

“You want to know how many beers he’s had?” Clark asked the young man aggressively. “Do you know how many novels this author has written?” Clark further asked the journalist, who was wearing an untucked white shirt. It was a dress shirt, but one that had known fresher days. By its bedraggled appearance and a mélange of stains, the shirt — and the young man wearing it — signified, if only to Clark, a life of unclean disarray.

“Do you like San Miguel?” the journalist asked Juan Diego, pointing to the beer; he was deliberately ignoring Clark.

“Name two titles of novels this author has written — just two,” Clark told the journalist. “Of the novels Juan Diego Guerrero has written, name one you’ve read — just one,” Clark said.

Juan Diego could never (would never) behave like Clark, but Clark was redeeming himself with each passing second; Juan Diego was remembering what he liked best about Clark French — notwithstanding all the other ways in which Clark could be Clark.

“Yes, I like San Miguel,” Juan Diego told the journalist, holding up his beer as if he were toasting the unread young man. “And I believe this is my second one.”

“You don’t have to talk to him — he hasn’t done his homework,” Clark said to his former teacher.

Juan Diego was thinking that his nice-guy assessment of Clark French was not quite correct; Clark is a nice guy, Juan Diego thought, provided you’re not a journalist who hasn’t done your homework.

As for the unprepared journalist, the young man who was not a reader, he had wandered off. “I don’t know who he is,” Clark muttered; he was disappointed in himself. “But I know that one—I know her,” Clark told Juan Diego, pointing to a middle-aged woman who’d been eyeing them from afar. (She’d been waiting for the younger journalist to drift away.) “She is a horror of insincerity — imagine a venomous hamster,” Clark hissed to Juan Diego.

“One of the ones to watch out for, I guess,” Juan Diego said; he smiled knowingly at his former student. “I feel safe with you, Clark,” Juan Diego suddenly said. This was verily spontaneous and heartfelt, but until he said it, Juan Diego hadn’t realized how unsafe he had felt — and for how long! (Dump kids don’t take feeling safe for granted; circus kids don’t assume a safety net is there.)

For his part, Clark felt moved to wrap his big, strong arm around his former teacher’s slender shoulders. “But I don’t think you need my protection from this one,” Clark whispered in Juan Diego’s ear. “She’s just a gossip.”

Clark was talking about the middle-aged woman journalist, who was now approaching — the “venomous hamster.” Had he meant her mind ran in place, making repetitive rotations on the going-nowhere wheel? But what was venomous about her? “All of her questions will be recycled — stuff she saw on the Internet, the reiteration of every stupid question you were ever asked,” Clark was whispering in his former teacher’s ear. “She will not have read a single novel you’ve written, but she’ll have read everything about you. I’m sure you know the type,” Clark added.

“I know, Clark — thank you,” Juan Diego gently said, smiling at his former student. Mercifully, Josefa was there — the good Dr. Quintana was dragging her husband away. Juan Diego had not realized he’d been standing in the food line until he saw the buffet table; it was dead ahead.

“You should have the fish,” the woman journalist told him. Juan Diego saw that she’d inserted herself in the food line beside him, possibly the way venomous hamsters do.

“That looks like a cheese sauce, on the fish,” was all Juan Diego said; he helped himself to the Korean glass noodles with vegetables, and to something called Vietnamese beef.

“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually eat the mangled beef here,” the journalist said. She must have meant to say “shredded,” Juan Diego was thinking, but he didn’t say anything. (Maybe the Vietnamese mangled their beef; Juan Diego didn’t know.)

“The small, pretty woman — the one who was there tonight,” the middle-aged woman said, helping herself to the fish. “She left early,” she added, after a long pause.

“Yes, I know who you mean — Leslie someone. I don’t know her,” was all Juan Diego said.

“Leslie someone told me to tell you something,” the middle-aged woman told him, in a confiding (not quite motherly) tone.

Juan Diego waited; he didn’t want to appear too interested. And he was looking everywhere for Clark and Josefa; he realized he wouldn’t object if Clark bullied this woman journalist, just a little.

“Leslie said to tell you that the woman with Dorothy can’t be Dorothy’s mother. Leslie said the older woman isn’t old enough to be Dorothy’s mother — besides, they look nothing alike,” the journalist said.

“Do you know Miriam and Dorothy?” Juan Diego asked the frumpy-looking woman. She was wearing a peasant-style blouse — the kind of loose shirt the American hippie women wore in Oaxaca, those women who didn’t wear bras and put flowers in their hair.

“Well, I don’t know them — I just saw they were very much with Leslie,” the woman journalist said. “And they left early, too, with Leslie. For what it’s worth, I thought the older of the two women wasn’t old enough to be the younger one’s mother. And they didn’t look anything alike — not to me,” she added.

“I saw them, too,” was all Juan Diego said. It was hard to imagine why Miriam and Dorothy were with Leslie, Juan Diego thought. Perhaps harder to imagine was why poor Leslie was with them.

Clark must have gone to the men’s room, Juan Diego was thinking; he was nowhere in sight. Yet an unlikely-looking savior was headed Juan Diego’s way; she was dressed badly enough to be another journalist, but there was the recognizable glint of unexpressed intimacies in her eager eyes — as if reading him had changed her life. She had stories to share, of how he’d rescued her: maybe she’d been contemplating suicide; or she was pregnant with her first child, at sixteen; or she’d lost a child when she happened to read — well, these were the kind of intimacies glinting in her I-was-saved-by-reading-you eyes. Juan Diego loved his diehard readers. The details they’d cherished in his novels seemed to sparkle in their eyes.

The woman journalist saw the diehard reader coming. Was there some partial recognition between them? Juan Diego couldn’t tell. They were women of a similar age.

“I like Mark Twain,” the journalist said to Juan Diego — her parting shot, as she was leaving. Was that all she had for venom? Juan Diego wondered.

“Be sure to tell Clark,” he told her, but she might not have heard him — she seemed to be leaving in a hurry.

“Go away!” Juan Diego’s avid reader called after the woman journalist. “She hasn’t read anything,” the new arrival announced to Juan Diego. “I’m your biggest fan.”

To tell the truth, she was a big woman, easily 170 or 180 pounds. She wore baggy blue jeans, torn at both knees, and a black T-shirt with a fierce-looking tiger between her breasts. It was a protest T-shirt, expressing anger on behalf of an endangered species. Juan Diego was so out of it, he didn’t know tigers were in trouble.

“Look at you — you’re having the beef, too!” his new biggest fan cried, wrapping an arm as seemingly strong as Clark’s around Juan Diego’s smaller shoulders. “I’ll tell you something,” the big woman told Juan Diego, leading him to her table. “You know that scene with the duck hunters? When the idiot forgets to take off the condom, and he goes home and starts peeing in front of his wife? I love that scene!” the woman who loved tigers told him, pushing him ahead of her.

“Not everyone was fond of that scene,” Juan Diego tried to point out to her. He was remembering a review or two.

“Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, right?” the big woman asked him, pushing him toward a seat.

“Yes, I think so,” Juan Diego said warily. He was still looking all around for Clark and Josefa; he did love his diehard readers, but they could be a little overwhelming.

It was Josefa who found him, and took him to the table where she and Clark had been waiting. “The save-the-tiger woman is a journalist, too — one of the good ones,” Clark told him. “One who actually reads novels.”

“I saw Miriam and Dorothy at the onstage event,” Juan Diego told Clark. “Your friend Leslie was with them.”

“Oh, I saw Miriam with someone I didn’t know,” Josefa said.

“Her daughter, Dorothy,” Juan Diego told the doctor.

“D.,” Clark explained. (It was obvious Clark and Josefa had discussed Dorothy as D.)

“The woman I saw didn’t look like Miriam’s daughter,” Dr. Quintana said. “She wasn’t beautiful enough.”

“I’m very disappointed in Leslie,” Clark told his former teacher and his wife. Josefa said nothing.

“Very disappointed,” was all Juan Diego could say. But all he could think about was Leslie someone. Why would she have gone anywhere with Dorothy and Miriam? Why would she even be with them? Poor Leslie wouldn’t have been with them, Juan Diego thought — not unless she’d been bewitched.

IT WAS A TUESDAY morning in Manila — January 11, 2011—and the weekend news from Juan Diego’s adopted country wasn’t good. This had happened on Saturday: Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, had been shot in the head; she was given a fair chance to survive, if not with all her brain function. Six people were dead in the shooting rampage, including a nine-year-old girl.

The Arizona shooter was a twenty-two-year-old; he’d been firing a Glock semiautomatic pistol with a high-capacity magazine that held thirty rounds. The shooter’s reported utterances made him sound illogical and incoherent — was he another whack-job anarchist? Juan Diego wondered.

Here I am in the faraway Philippines, Juan Diego was thinking, but my adopted country’s home-grown hatreds and vigilante-minded divisiveness are never that far away.

As for the local news — at his breakfast table at the Ascott, Juan Diego was reading a Manila newspaper — he saw that the good journalist, his diehard reader, had done him no damage. The profile of Juan Diego Guerrero was informed and complimentary about his novels; the big journalist Clark had called the “save-the-tiger woman” was a good reader, and she’d been very respectful of Juan Diego. The photo the newspaper ran wasn’t her fault, Juan Diego knew; an asswheel photo editor doubtlessly chose the photograph, nor could the woman who loved tigers be blamed for the caption.

In the photo of the visiting author — at the dinner table, with his beer and his mangled beef — Juan Diego’s eyes were closed. He looked worse than asleep; he appeared to have passed out in an inebriated stupor. The caption read: HE LIKES SAN MIGUEL BEER.

Juan Diego’s irritation at the caption might have been an early indication to him that his adrenaline was raring to go, but he didn’t think twice about it. And whatever slight indigestion he’d been sensing — maybe his heartburn was acting up again — Juan Diego paid no attention to it. In a foreign country, it was easy to eat something that disagreed with your stomach. What he’d had for breakfast, or last night’s Vietnamese beef, could have been the cause — or so Juan Diego assumed as he crossed the long lobby of the Ascott to the elevators, where he saw that Clark French was waiting.

“Well, I’m relieved to see your eyes are open this morning!” Clark greeted his former teacher. Clearly, Clark had seen the photo of Juan Diego with his eyes closed in the newspaper. Clark had a gift for conversation stoppers.

Unsurprisingly, Clark and Juan Diego didn’t know what else to say to each other when they were descending in the elevator at the Ascott. The car, with Bienvenido in the driver’s seat, was waiting for them at street level, where Juan Diego trustingly held out his hand to one of the bomb-sniffing dogs. Clark French, who’d never failed to do his homework, began lecturing as soon as they had gotten under way to Guadalupe Viejo.

The Guadalupe district of Makati City had been formed into a barrio and was named after the “patroness” of the first Spanish settlers—“friends of your old friends, and mine, from the Society of Jesus,” was the way Clark put it to his former teacher.

“Oh, those Jesuits — how they get around,” Juan Diego said; it was not a lot to say, but he was surprised by how hard it was to talk and breathe at the same time. Juan Diego was aware that his breathing no longer felt like a natural process. Something was sitting, most intractably, in his stomach; yet it weighed very heavily on his chest. It must have been the beef — definitely mangled, Juan Diego was thinking. His face felt flushed; he’d started to sweat. For someone who hated air-conditioning, Juan Diego was about to ask Bienvenido to make the car a little colder, but he stopped himself from asking — suddenly, with the effort it took to breathe, he doubted he could speak.

During World War II, the Guadalupe district had been the hardest-hit barrio in Makati City, Clark French was lecturing.

“Men, women, and children were massacred by the Japanese soldiers,” Bienvenido had chimed in.

Of course Juan Diego could see where this was going — leave it to Our Lady of Guadalupe to protect everyone! Juan Diego knew how the so-called pro-life advocates had appropriated Guadalupe. “From the womb to the tomb,” various prelates of the Church were ceaselessly intoning.

And what were the solemn-sounding lines from Jeremiah they were always quoting? Idiots held up signs in the end-zone seats at football games: JEREMIAH 1:5. How did it go? Juan Diego wanted to ask Clark. He knew Clark would know it by heart: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I set you apart.” (It was something like that.) Juan Diego tried to tell Clark his thoughts, but the words wouldn’t come; only his breathing mattered. His sweat now poured forth; his clothes clung to him. If he’d tried to speak, Juan Diego knew he would get no further than “Before I formed you in the womb—” at the womb word, he suspected he would vomit.

Maybe the car was making him sick — a kind of motion sickness? Juan Diego was wondering, as Bienvenido drove them slowly through the narrow streets of the slum on the hill above the Pasig River. In the soot-stained courtyard of the old church and monastery was a sign with a warning: BEWARE OF DOGS.

“Of all dogs?” Juan Diego gasped, but Bienvenido was parking the car. Clark, of course, was talking. No one had heard Juan Diego try to speak.

There was a green bush next to the Jesus figure at the entrance of the monasterio; the bush was decorated with gaudy stars, like a tacky Christmas tree.

“Christmas here goes on for fucking forever,” Juan Diego could hear Dorothy saying — or he imagined that this was what Dorothy would say, if she were standing beside him in the courtyard of the Our Lady of Guadalupe church. But, of course, Dorothy wasn’t there — only her voice. Was he hearing things? Juan Diego wondered. What he heard most of all — what he’d not noticed hearing before — was the wild, ramped-up beating of his heart.

The blue-cloaked statue of Santa Maria de Guadalupe, half obscured by the palm trees shading the soot-darkened walls of the monastery, had an unreadably calm expression for someone who had endured such a calamitous history — Clark, of course, was reciting the history, his professorial tone in seeming rhythm with the percussive pounding of Juan Diego’s heart.

For no known reason, the monasterio was closed, but Clark led his former teacher into the Guadalupe church — it was officially called Nuestra Señora de Gracia, Clark was explaining. Not another Our Lady — enough of the “Our Lady” business! Juan Diego was thinking, but he said nothing, trying to save his breath.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe had been brought from Spain in 1604; in 1629, the buildings of the church and monastery were completed. Sixty thousand Chinese rose in arms in 1639, Clark was telling Juan Diego — no explanation was given as to why! But the Spaniards brought the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the battlefield; miraculously, there were peaceful negotiations and bloodshed was averted. (Maybe not miraculously—who said this was a miracle? Juan Diego was thinking.)

There’d been more trouble, of course: in 1763, the occupation of the church and monastery by British troops — burning and destruction ensued. The image of the Lady of Guadalupe was saved by an Irish Catholic “official.” (What kind of official came to the rescue? Juan Diego was wondering.)

Bienvenido had waited with the car. Clark and Juan Diego were alone inside the old church, except for what appeared to be two mourners; they knelt in the foremost pew, before the tasteful, almost delicate-looking altar table and the not-imposing Guadalupe portrait. Two women, all in black — they wore veils, their heads completely covered. Clark kept his voice low, respecting the deceased.

Earthquakes had nearly leveled Manila in 1850; the vault of the church collapsed amid the tremors. In 1882, the monastery was turned into an orphanage for the children of cholera victims. In 1898, Pío del Pilar — a revolutionary general of the Philippines — occupied the church and monastery with his rebels. Pío was forced to retreat from the Americans in 1899, setting the church on fire as he fled — furniture, documents, and books were burned.

Jesus, Clark — can’t you see there’s something wrong with me? Juan Diego was thinking. Juan Diego knew something was wrong, but Clark wasn’t looking at him.

In 1935, Clark suddenly announced, Pope Pius XI declared that Our Lady of Guadalupe was “patroness of the Philippines.” In 1941, the American bombers came — they shelled the shit out of the Japanese soldiers who were hiding in the ruins of the Guadalupe church. In 1995, the restoration of the church altar and sacristy was completed — thus Clark concluded his recitation. The silent mourners had not moved; the two women in black, their heads bowed, were as motionless as statues.

Juan Diego was still struggling to breathe, but the sharpening pain now made him alternately hold his breath, then gasp for air, then hold his breath. Clark French — as always, consumed by his own way with words — had failed to notice his former teacher’s distress.

Juan Diego believed he couldn’t possibly say all of Jeremiah 1:5; that was too much to say with how little breath he had left. He decided to say only the last part; Juan Diego knew that Clark would understand what he was saying. Juan Diego struggled to say it — just the “before you were born I set you apart.”

“I prefer saying ‘I sanctified you’ to your saying ‘I set you apart’—though both are correct,” Clark told his former teacher, before turning to look at him. Clark caught Juan Diego under both arms, or Juan Diego would have fallen.

In the commotion that followed in the old church, neither Clark nor Juan Diego would have noticed the silent mourners — the two kneeling women had only slightly turned their heads. They’d lifted their veils, no more than enough to allow them to observe the comings and goings at the rear of the church — Clark ran out to fetch Bienvenido; the two men then carried Juan Diego from where Clark had left his former teacher, lying in the hindmost pew. In such obvious emergency circumstances — and kneeling, as the two women were, in the forefront of the dimly lit old church — no one would have recognized Miriam or Dorothy (not all in black, and not with their scarves still covering their heads).

Juan Diego was a novelist who paid attention to the chronology of a story; in his case, as a writer, the choice of where to begin or end a story was always a conscious one. But was Juan Diego conscious that he’d begun to die? He must have known that the effort to breathe and the pain of breathing could not have been the Vietnamese beef, but what Clark and Bienvenido were saying seemed of little importance to Juan Diego. Bienvenido would have vented his opinion of the “dirty government hospitals”; of course Clark would have wanted Juan Diego to go to the hospital where his wife worked — where surely everyone would know Dr. Josefa Quintana, where Clark’s former teacher would receive the best possible care.

“As luck would have it,” Juan Diego may have heard his former student say to Bienvenido. Clark said this in response to Bienvenido’s telling him that the nearest Catholic hospital to the Guadalupe church was in San Juan City; part of metropolitan Manila, San Juan was the town next to Makati, only twenty minutes away. What Clark meant by “luck” was that this was the hospital where his wife worked — the Cardinal Santos Medical Center.

From Juan Diego’s point of view, the twenty-minute drive was dreamlike but a blur; nothing that was real registered with him. Not the Greenhills Shopping Center, which was fairly close to the hospital — not even the oddly named Wack Wack Golf & Country Club, adjacent to the medical center. Clark was worried about his dear former teacher, because Juan Diego didn’t respond to Clark’s comment about the spelling of Wack. “Surely one whacks a golf ball — there’s an h in whack, or there should be,” Clark said. “I’ve always thought golfers were wasting their time — it’s no surprise they can’t spell.”

But Juan Diego didn’t respond; Clark’s former teacher didn’t even react to the crucifixes in the emergency room at Cardinal Santos — this really worried Clark. Nor did Juan Diego seem to notice the nuns, making their regular rounds. (At Cardinal Santos, Clark knew, there was always a priest or two on hand in the mornings; they were giving Communion to those patients who wanted it.)

“Mister is going swimming!” Juan Diego imagined he heard Consuelo cry, but the little girl in pigtails was not among the upturned faces in the enveloping crowd. No Filipinos were watching, and Juan Diego wasn’t swimming; he was walking without a limp, at last. He was walking upside down, of course; he was skywalking, at eighty feet — he’d taken the first two of those death-daring steps. (And then another two, and then two more.) Once again, the past surrounded him — like those upturned faces in the watchful crowd.

Juan Diego imagined Dolores was there; she was saying, “When you skywalk for the virgins, they let you do it forever.” But skywalking wasn’t a big deal for a dump reader. Juan Diego had snatched the first books he read from the hellfires of the basurero; he’d burned his hands saving books from burning. What were sixteen steps at eighty feet for a dump reader? Wasn’t this the life he might have had, if he’d been brave enough to seize it? But you don’t see the future clearly when you’re only fourteen.

“We’re the miraculous ones,” Lupe had tried to tell him. “You have another future!” she’d correctly predicted. And, really, for how long could he have kept himself and his little sister alive — even if he’d become a skywalker?

There were just ten more steps, Juan Diego thought; he’d been silently counting the steps to himself. (Of course, no one in the emergency room at Cardinal Santos knew he was counting.)

The ER nurse knew she was losing him. She’d already called for a cardiologist; Clark had insisted that his wife be paged — naturally, he’d been texting her, too. “Dr. Quintana is coming, isn’t she?” the ER nurse asked Clark; in the nurse’s opinion, this didn’t matter, but she thought it was wise to keep Clark distracted.

“Yes, yes — she’s coming,” Clark muttered. He was texting Josefa again — it was something to do. It suddenly irritated him that the old nun who’d admitted them to the ER was still there, still hovering near them. And now the old nun crossed herself, her lips moving inaudibly. What was she doing? Clark wondered — was she praying? Even her praying irritated him.

“Perhaps a priest—” the old nun started to say, but Clark stopped her.

“No — no priest!” Clark told her. “Juan Diego wouldn’t want a priest.”

“No, indeed — he most definitely wouldn’t,” Clark heard someone say. It was a woman’s voice, very authoritative, a voice he’d heard before — but when, but where? Clark was wondering.

When Clark looked up from his cell phone, Juan Diego had silently counted two more steps — then two more, and then another two. (There were only four more steps to go! Juan Diego was thinking.)

Clark French saw no one with his former teacher in the emergency room — no one except the ER nurse and the old nun. The latter lady had moved away; she was now standing at a respectful distance from where Juan Diego lay fighting for his life. But two women — all in black, their heads completely covered — were passing in the hall, just gliding by, and Clark caught only a glimpse of them before they vanished. Clark didn’t really get a good look at them. He’d distinctly heard Miriam say, “No, indeed — he most definitely wouldn’t.” But Clark would never connect the voice he’d heard with that woman who’d stabbed the gecko with a salad fork at the Encantador.

In all probability — even if Clark French had gotten a good look at those women gliding by in the hall — he wouldn’t have said the two women in black resembled a mother and her daughter. The way the women’s heads were covered, and how they weren’t speaking to each other, made Clark French think the women were nuns — from an order whose all-black habits seemed standard to him. (As for Miriam and Dorothy, they’d just disappeared — in that way they had. Those two were always just appearing, or disappearing, weren’t they?)

“I’ll go find Josefa myself,” Clark said helplessly to the ER nurse. (Good riddance — you’re of no use here! she might have thought, if she thought anything.) “No priest!” Clark repeated, almost angrily, to the old nun. The nun said nothing; she’d seen dying of all kinds — she was familiar with the process, and with all sorts of desperate, last-minute behavior (such as Clark’s).

The ER nurse knew when a heart was finished; neither an OB-GYN nor a cardiologist would jump-start this one, the nurse knew, but — even so — she went looking for someone.

Juan Diego was looking like he’d lost count of something. Isn’t it only two more steps, or is it still four more? Juan Diego was thinking. He hesitated to take the next step. Skywalkers (real skywalkers) know better than to hesitate, but Juan Diego just stopped skywalking. That was when he knew he wasn’t really skywalking; that was when Juan Diego understood that he was just imagining.

It was what he was truly good at — just imagining. Juan Diego knew then that he was dying — the dying wasn’t imaginary. And he realized that this, exactly this, was what people did when they died; this was what people wanted when they passed away — well, it was what Juan Diego wanted, anyway. Not necessarily the life everlasting, not a so-called life after death, but the actual life he wished he’d had — the hero’s life he once imagined for himself.

So this is death — this is all death is, Juan Diego thought. It made him feel a little better about Lupe. Death was not even a surprise. “Ni siquiera una sorpresa,” the old nun heard Juan Diego say. (“Not even a surprise.”)

Now there was no chance to leave Lithuania. Now there was no light — there was only the unlit darkness. That was what Dorothy had called the view from the plane of Manila Bay, when you were approaching Manila at night: an unlit darkness. “Except for the occasional ship,” she’d told him. “The darkness is Manila Bay,” Dorothy had explained. Not this time, Juan Diego knew — not this darkness. There were no lights, no ships — this unlit darkness was not Manila Bay.

In her shriveled left hand, the old nun clutched the crucifix around her neck; making a fist, she held the crucified Christ against her beating heart. No one — least of all, Juan Diego, who was dead — heard her say, in Latin, “Sic transit gloria mundi.” (“Thus passes the glory of this world.”)

Not that anyone would have doubted such a venerable-looking nun, and she was right; not even Clark French, had he been there, would have uttered a qualifying word. Not every collision course comes as a surprise.