Avenue of Mysteries

14. Nada

In the corridor outside Edward Bonshaw’s classroom at Niños Perdidos was a bust of the Virgin Mary with a tear on her cheek. The bust stood on a pedestal in a corner of the second-floor balcony. There was often a beet-red smudge on Mary’s other cheek; it looked like blood to Esperanza — every week she wiped it off, but the next week it was back. “Maybe it is blood,” she’d told Brother Pepe.

“It can’t be,” Pepe told her. “There have been no reported stigmata cases at Lost Children.”

On the landing between the first and second floors was the suffer-the-little-children statue of San Vicente de Paul with two infants in his arms. Esperanza reported to Brother Pepe that she’d also wiped blood off the hem of the saint’s cloak. “Every week I wipe it off, but it comes back!” Esperanza had said. “It must be miraculous blood.”

“It can’t be blood, Esperanza,” was all Pepe would say about it.

“You don’t know what I see, Pepe!” Esperanza said, pointing to her fiery eyes. “And whatever it is, it leaves a stain.”

They were both right. It was not blood, but every week it came back and it left a stain. The dump kids had had to lie low with the beet juice after the episode with the good gringo in their bathtub; they’d had to cut back on their nighttime visits to Zaragoza Street, too. Señor Eduardo and Brother Pepe — not to mention that witch Sister Gloria and the other nuns — were keeping a close eye on them. And Lupe was right about the gifts el gringo bueno could afford for them: they were less than outstanding presents.

The hippie had no doubt haggled over the cheap religious figures he’d bought from the Christmas-parties place, the virgin shop on Independencia. One was a small totem, in the category of a statuette — more of a figurine than a lifelike figure — but the Guadalupe virgin was life-size.

The Guadalupe virgin was actually a little bigger than Juan Diego. She was his present. Her blue-green mantle — a kind of cloak or cape — was traditional. Her belt, or what looked like a black girdle, would one day give rise to the speculation that Guadalupe was pregnant. Long after the fact, in 1999, Pope John Paul II invoked Our Lady of Guadalupe as Patroness of the Americas and Protectress of Unborn Children. (“That Polish pope,” Juan Diego would later rail against him — and his unborn business.)

The virgin-shop Guadalupe didn’t look pregnant, but this Guadalupe mannequin appeared to be about fifteen or sixteen — and she had breasts. The boobs made her seem not religious at all. “She’s a sex doll!” Lupe immediately said.

Of course, that wasn’t strictly true; there was, however, a sex-doll aspect to the Guadalupe figure, though Juan Diego could not undress her and she didn’t have movable limbs (or recognizable reproductive parts).

“What’s my present?” Lupe asked the hippie boy.

The good gringo asked Lupe if she forgave him for sleeping with her mother. “Yes,” Lupe said, “but we can’t ever get married.”

“That sounds pretty final,” the hippie said, when Juan Diego translated Lupe’s answer to the forgiveness question.

“Show me the present,” was all Lupe said.

It was a Coatlicue figurine, as ugly as any replica of the goddess. Juan Diego thought it was a blessing that the hideous statuette was small — it was even smaller than Dirty White. El gringo bueno had no clue how to pronounce the name of the Aztec goddess; Lupe, in her hard-to-follow fashion, couldn’t manage to help him say it.

“Your mom said you admired this weird mother goddess,” the good gringo explained to Lupe; he didn’t sound so sure.

“I love her,” Lupe told him.

Juan Diego had always found it hard to believe that one goddess could have so many contradictory attributes attached to her, but it was easy for him to see why Lupe loved her. Coatlicue was an extremist — a goddess of childbirth and of sexual impurity and wrongful behavior. Several creation myths were connected to her; in one, she was impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple — enough to piss anyone off, Juan Diego thought, but Lupe said this was the kind of thing she could imagine happening to their mother, Esperanza.

Unlike Esperanza, Coatlicue wore a skirt of serpents. She was basically dressed in writhing snakes; she wore a necklace of human hearts and hands and skulls. Coatlicue’s hands and feet had claws; her breasts were flaccid. In the figurine the good gringo gave to Lupe, Coatlicue’s nipples were made of rattlesnake rattles. (“Too much nursing, maybe,” Lupe observed.)

“But what do you like about her, Lupe?” Juan Diego had asked his sister.

“Some of her own children vowed to kill her,” Lupe had answered him. “Una mujer difícil.” A difficult woman.

“Coatlicue is a devouring mother; the womb and the grave coexist in her,” Juan Diego explained to the hippie boy.

“I can see that,” the good gringo said. “She looks deadly, man on wheels,” the hippie more confidently stated.

“Nobody messes with her!” Lupe proclaimed.

Even Edward Bonshaw (always looking on the bright side) found Lupe’s Coatlicue figurine frightening. “I understand there are repercussions that come from the ball-of-feathers mishap, but this goddess is not very sympathetic-looking,” Señor Eduardo said to Lupe, as respectfully as anyone possibly could.

“Coatlicue didn’t ask to be born who she was,” Lupe answered the Iowan. “She was sacrificed — supposedly to do with creation. Her face was formed by two serpents — after her head was cut off and the blood spurted from her neck in the form of two gigantic snakes. Some of us,” Lupe told the new missionary, pausing for Juan Diego’s translation to catch up, “don’t have a choice about who we are.”

“But—” Edward Bonshaw began.

“I am who I am,” Lupe said; Juan Diego rolled his eyes when he repeated this to Señor Eduardo. Lupe pressed the grotesque Coatlicue totem to her cheek; it was apparent that she didn’t just love the goddess because the good gringo had given her the statuette.

As for his gift from the gringo, Juan Diego would occasionally masturbate with the Guadalupe doll lying next to him on his bed, her enraptured face on the pillow alongside his face. The slight swell of Guadalupe’s breasts sufficed.

The impassive mannequin was made of a light but hard plastic, unyielding to the touch. Although the Guadalupe virgin was a couple of inches taller than Juan Diego, she was hollow — she weighed so little that Juan Diego could carry her under one arm.

There was a twofold awkwardness attached to Juan Diego’s attempts to have sex with the life-size Guadalupe doll — better said, the awkwardness of Juan Diego’s imagining he was having sex with the plastic virgin. In the first place, it was necessary for Juan Diego to be alone in the bedroom he shared with his little sister — not to mention that Lupe knew her brother thought about having sex with the Guadalupe doll; Lupe had read his mind.

The second problem was the pedestal. The fetching feet of the Guadalupe virgin were affixed to a pedestal of chartreuse-colored grass, which was the circumference of an automobile tire. The pedestal was an impediment to Juan Diego’s desire to snuggle with the plastic virgin when he was lying next to her.

Juan Diego had thought about sawing off the pedestal, but this meant removing the virgin’s pretty feet at her ankles, which would mean the statue couldn’t stand. Naturally, Lupe had known her brother’s thoughts.

“I don’t ever want to see Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down,” Lupe told Juan Diego, “or leaning up against our bedroom wall. Don’t even think about standing her on her head in a corner, with the stumps of her amputated feet sticking up!”

“Look at her, Lupe!” Juan Diego cried. He pointed to the Guadalupe figure, standing by one of the bookshelves in the former reading room; the Guadalupe mannequin looked a little like a misplaced literary character, a woman who’d escaped from a novel — one who couldn’t find her way back to the book where she belonged. “Look at her,” Juan Diego repeated. “Does Guadalupe strike you as being even slightly interested in lying down?”

As luck would have it, Sister Gloria was passing by the dump kids’ bedroom; the nun peered into their room from the hall. Sister Gloria had objected to the life-size Guadalupe doll’s presence in the niños’ bedroom — more unmerited privileges, the sister had presumed — but Brother Pepe had defended the dump kids. How could the disapproving nun disapprove of a religious statue? Sister Gloria believed Juan Diego’s Guadalupe figure more closely resembled a dressmaker’s dummy—“a suggestive one,” was the way the nun put it to Pepe.

“I don’t want to hear another word about Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down,” Sister Gloria said to Juan Diego. The virgins from La Niña de las Posadas were not proper virgins, Sister Gloria was thinking. The proprietors of The Girl of the Christmas Parties and Sister Gloria did not see eye to eye concerning what Our Lady of Guadalupe looked like—not like a sexual temptation, Sister Gloria thought, not like a seductress!

• • •

IT WAS, ALAS, THIS memory — among all the others — that woke Juan Diego from his dream in the suddenly stifling heat of his hotel room at the Makati Shangri-La. But how was it possible for that refrigerator of a hotel room to be hot?

The dead fish floated on the surface of the green-lit water in the becalmed aquarium; the previously upright-swimming sea horse was no longer vertical, its lifeless prehensile tail signifying that it had joined (forever) those lost members of its family of pipefish. Had the aquarium’s water-bubble problem returned? Or had one of the dead fish clogged the water-circulation system? The fish tank had ceased gurgling; the water was unmoving and murky, yet a pair of yellowish eyes stared at Juan Diego from the clouded bottom of the aquarium. The moray — his gills gulping in the remaining oxygen — appeared to be the sole survivor of the disaster.

Uh-oh, Juan Diego was remembering: he’d returned from dinner to a freezing-cold hotel room; the air-conditioning was once more blasting. The hotel maid must have cranked it up — she’d also left the radio on. Juan Diego couldn’t figure out how to turn the relentless music off; he’d been forced to unplug the clock radio to kill the throbbing sound.

And the maid wasn’t easily satisfied: she’d seen how he’d prepared his beta-blockers for his proper dose; the maid had laid out all his medications (his Viagra, too) and the pill cutter. This both irritated and distracted Juan Diego — it didn’t help that he discovered the maid’s interfering attention to his toilet articles and his pills only after he’d unplugged the clock radio and had drunk one of the four Spanish beers in the ice bucket. Was San Miguel ubiquitous in Manila?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How agitated?” Juan Diego asked.

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

“A bite where?” Juan Diego asked.

“A cheek.”

“A cheek!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think you tell them the soldier’s name, and they tell you which plot, which row, which grave,” Bienvenido answered. “You just tell them the name — that’s how it works.”

“I see,” was all Juan Diego said. The driver kept glancing at the tired-looking writer in the rearview mirror. Maybe he thought Juan Diego looked like he’d had a bad night’s sleep. But Bienvenido didn’t know about the aquarium murders, and the youthful driver didn’t understand that the slumped-over way Juan Diego was sitting in the limo’s rear seat was just an indication that the second half of the Lopressor pill was beginning to take effect.

THE SOFITEL, WHERE BIENVENIDO drove him, was in the Pasay City part of Manila — even from his slumped-over position in the limo’s rear seat, Juan Diego noticed the bomb-sniffing dogs.

“It’s the buffet you have to worry about,” Bienvenido told him. “That’s what I hear about the Sofitel.”

“What about the buffet?” Juan Diego asked. The prospect of food poisoning seemed to perk him up. But that wasn’t it: Juan Diego knew he could learn a lot from limo drivers; trips to those foreign-language countries where he was published had taught him to pay attention to his drivers.

“I know where every men’s room in the vicinity of every hotel lobby or hotel restaurant is,” Bienvenido was saying. “If you’re a professional driver, you have to know these things.”

“Where to take a leak, you mean,” Juan Diego said; he’d heard this from other drivers. “What about the buffet?”

“If there’s a choice, the men’s room the hotel restaurant — goers use is a better men’s room than the one in the area of the hotel lobby—usually,” Bienvenido explained. “Not here.”

“The buffet,” Juan Diego repeated.

“I’ve seen people barfing in the urinals; I’ve heard them shitting their brains out in the toilet stalls,” Bienvenido warned him.

“Here? At the Sofitel? And you’re sure it’s the buffet?” Juan Diego asked.

“Maybe the food sits out forever. Who knows how long the shrimp has been lying around at room temperature? I’ll bet it’s the buffet!” Bienvenido exclaimed.

“I see,” was all Juan Diego said. Too bad, he thought — the Sofitel looked as if it might be nice. Miriam must have liked the hotel for some reason; maybe she’d never tried the buffet. Maybe Bienvenido was wrong.

They drove away from the Sofitel without Juan Diego setting foot inside the place. The other hotel Miriam had suggested was the Ascott.

“You should have mentioned the Ascott first,” Bienvenido said, sighing. “It’s on Glorietta, back in Makati City. The Ayala Center is right there — you can get anything there,” Bienvenido told him.

“What do you mean?” Juan Diego asked.

“Miles and miles of shopping — it’s a shopping mall. There are escalators and elevators — there’s every kind of restaurant,” Bienvenido was saying.

Cripples aren’t crazy about shopping malls, Juan Diego was thinking, but all he said was: “And the hotel itself, the Ascott? No reported deaths by buffet?”

“The Ascott is fine — you should have stayed there the first time,” Bienvenido told him.

“Don’t get me started on should have, Bienvenido,” Juan Diego said; his novels had been called should-have and what-if propositions.

“Next time, then,” Bienvenido said.

They drove back to Makati City, so that Juan Diego could make an in-person reservation at the Ascott for his return trip to Manila. Juan Diego would ask Clark French to cancel his reservation at the Makati Shangri-La for him; after the aquarium Armageddon, all parties would doubtless be relieved by the return-trip cancellation.

You took an elevator from the street-level entrance of the Ascott to the hotel lobby, which was on an upper floor. At the elevators, both at street level and in the lobby, there were a couple of anxious-looking security guards with two bomb-sniffing dogs.

He didn’t tell Bienvenido, but Juan Diego adored the dogs. As he made his reservation, Juan Diego could imagine Miriam checking in at the Ascott. It was a long walk to the registration desk from where the elevators opened into the lobby; Juan Diego knew that the security guards would be watching Miriam the whole way. You had to be blind, or a bomb-sniffing dog, not to watch Miriam walk away from you — you would be compelled to watch her every step of the way.

What is happening to me? Juan Diego wondered again. His thoughts, his memories — what he imagined, what he dreamed — were all jumbled up. And he was obsessed with Miriam and Dorothy.

Juan Diego sank into the rear seat of the limo like a stone into an unseen pond.

“We end up in Manila,” Dorothy had said; Juan Diego wondered if she had somehow meant everyone. Maybe all of us end up in Manila, Juan Diego was thinking.

One Single Journey. It sounded like a title. Was it something he’d written, or something he intended to write? The dump reader couldn’t remember.

“I would marry this hippie boy, if he smelled better and stopped singing that cowboy song,” Lupe had said. (“Oh, let me die!” she’d also said.)

How he cursed the names the nuns at Niños Perdidos had called his mother! Juan Diego regretted that he’d called her names, too. “Desesperanza”—“Hopelessness,” the nuns had called Esperanza. “Desesperación”—“Desperation,” they’d called her.

“Lo siento, madre,” Juan Diego said softly to himself in the rear seat of the limo — so softly that Bienvenido didn’t hear him.

Bienvenido couldn’t tell if Juan Diego was awake or asleep. The driver had said something about the airport for domestic flights in Manila — how the check-in lines arbitrarily closed, then spontaneously reopened, and there were extra fees for everything. But Juan Diego didn’t respond.

Whether he was awake or asleep, the poor guy seemed out of it, and Bienvenido decided he would walk Juan Diego through the check-in process, despite the hassle he would have to go through with the car.

“It’s too cold!” Juan Diego suddenly cried. “Fresh air, please! No more air-conditioning!”

“Sure — you’re the boss,” Bienvenido told him; he shut off the AC and automatically opened the limo’s windows. They were near the airport, passing through another shantytown, when Bienvenido stopped the car at a red light.

Before Bienvenido could warn him, Juan Diego found himself beseeched by begging children — their skinny arms, palms up, were suddenly thrust inside the open rear windows of the stopped limo.

“Hello, children,” Juan Diego said, as if he’d been expecting them. (You cannot take the scavenging out of scavengers; los pepenadores carry their picking and sorting with them, long after they’ve stopped looking for aluminum or copper or glass.)

Before Bienvenido could stop him, Juan Diego was fumbling around with his wallet.

“No, no — give them nothing,” Bienvenido said. “I mean, not anything. Sir, Juan Diego, please — it will never stop!”

What was this funny currency, anyway? It was like play money, Juan Diego thought. He had no change, and only two small bills. He gave the twenty-piso note to the first outstretched hand; he had nothing smaller than a fifty for the second small hand.

“Dalawampung piso!” the first kid cried.

“Limampung piso!” shouted the second child. Was that Tagalog they were speaking? Juan Diego wondered.

Bienvenido stopped him from handing out the one-thousand-piso bill, but one of the beseeching children saw the amount before Bienvenido could block the young beggar’s hand.

“Sir, please — that’s too much,” the driver told Juan Diego.

“Sanlibong piso!” one of the beseeching children cried.

The other kids quickly took up the cry. “Sanlibong piso! Sanlibong piso!”

The light turned green, and Bienvenido slowly accelerated; the beggar children withdrew their skinny arms from the car.

“There’s no such thing as too much for those children, Bienvenido — there’s only not enough for them,” Juan Diego said. “I’m a dump kid,” he told the driver. “I should know.”

“A dump kid, sir?” Bienvenido asked.

“I was a dump kid, Bienvenido,” Juan Diego told him. “My sister and I — we were niños de la basura. We grew up in the basurero — we virtually lived there. We should never have left — it’s been all downhill since!” the dump reader declared.

“Sir—” Bienvenido started to say, but he stopped when he saw that Juan Diego was crying. The bad air of the polluted city was blowing in the open windows of the car; the cooking smells assailed him; the children were begging in the streets; the women, who looked exhausted, wore sleeveless dresses, or shorts with halter tops; the men loitered in doorways, smoking or just talking to one another, as if they didn’t have anything to do.

“It’s a slum!” Juan Diego cried. “It’s a sickening, polluted slum! Millions of people who have nothing or not enough to do — yet the Catholics want more and more babies to be born!”

He meant Mexico City — at that moment, Manila was forcefully reminding him of Mexico City. “And just look at the stupid pilgrims!” Juan Diego cried. “They walk on their bleeding knees — they whip themselves, to show their devotion!”

Naturally, Bienvenido was confused. He thought Juan Diego meant Manila. What pilgrims? the limousine driver was thinking. But all he said was: “Sir, it’s just a small shantytown — it’s not exactly a slum. I will admit the pollution is a problem—”

“Watch out!” Juan Diego cried, but Bienvenido was a good driver. He’d seen the boy fall out of the overfull and moving jeepney; the jeepney driver never noticed — he just kept going — but the boy rolled (or he was pushed) off one of the rear rows of seats. He fell into the street; Bienvenido had to swerve the car not to run over him.

The boy was a dirty-faced urchin with what appeared to be a ratty-looking stole (or a fur boa) draped over his neck and shoulders; the shabby-looking garment was like something an old woman in a cold climate might wrap around her neck. But when the boy fell, both Bienvenido and Juan Diego could see that the furry scarf was actually a small dog, and the dog, not the boy, was the one injured in the fall. The dog yelped; the dog could not put weight on one of its forepaws, which it tremblingly held off the ground. The boy had skinned one of his bare knees, which was bleeding, but he seemed otherwise unhurt — he was chiefly concerned for the dog.

GOD IS GOOD! the sticker on the jeepney had said. Not to this boy, or his dog, Juan Diego thought.

“Stop — we must stop,” Juan Diego said, but Bienvenido just kept going.

“Not here, sir — not now,” the young driver said. “The checking-in part at the airport — it takes longer than your flight.”

“God isn’t good,” Juan Diego told him. “God is indifferent. Ask that boy. Speak to his dog.”

“What pilgrims?” Bienvenido asked him. “You said pilgrims, sir,” the driver reminded him.

“In Mexico City, there is a street—” Juan Diego began. He closed his eyes, then quickly opened them, as if he didn’t want to see this street in Mexico City. “The pilgrims go there — the street is their approach to a shrine,” Juan Diego continued, but his speech slowed, as if the approach to this shrine was difficult, at least for him.

“What shrine, sir? Which street?” Bienvenido asked him, but now Juan Diego’s eyes were closed; he may not have heard the young driver. “Juan Diego?” the driver asked.

“Avenida de los Misterios,” Juan Diego said, with his eyes closed; the tears were streaming down his face. “Avenue of Mysteries.”

“It’s okay, sir — you don’t have to tell me,” Bienvenido said, but Juan Diego had already stopped talking. The crazy old man was somewhere else, Bienvenido could tell — somewhere far away or long ago, or both.

It was a sunny day in Manila; even with his eyes closed, the darkness Juan Diego saw was streaked with light. It was like looking deep underwater. For a moment, he imagined he saw a pair of yellowish eyes staring at him, but there was nothing discernible in the light-streaked darkness.

This is how it will be when I die, Juan Diego was thinking — only darker, pitch-black. No God. No goodness or evil. No Señor Morales, in other words. Not a caring God. Not a Mr. Morals, either. Not even a moray eel, struggling to breathe. Just nothing.

“Nada,” Juan Diego said; his eyes were still closed.

Bienvenido didn’t say anything; he just drove. But by the way the young driver nodded his head, and in the manifest sympathy with which he regarded his dozing passenger in the rearview mirror, it was obvious that Bienvenido knew the nothing word — if not the whole story.