Avenue of Mysteries

22. Mañana

“If something in your life is wrong, or just unresolved, Mexico City is probably not the answer to your dreams,” Juan Diego had written in an early novel. “Unless you’re feeling in charge of your life, don’t go there.” The female character who says this isn’t Mexican, and we never learn what happens to her in Mexico City — Juan Diego’s novel didn’t go there.

The circus site, in northern Mexico City, was adjacent to a graveyard. The sparse grass in the stony field, where they exercised the horses and walked the elephants, was gray with soot. There was so much smog in the air, the lions’ eyes were watering when Lupe fed them.

Ignacio was making Lupe feed Hombre and the lionesses; the girl acrobats — the ones who were anticipating their periods — had revolted against the lion tamer’s tactics. Ignacio had convinced the girl acrobats that the lions knew when the girls got their periods, and the girls were afraid of bleeding near the big cats. (Of course, the girls were afraid of getting their periods in the first place.)

Lupe, who believed she would never get her period, was unafraid. And because she could read the lions’ minds, Lupe knew that Hombre and the lionesses never thought about the girls’ menstruating.

“Only Ignacio thinks about it,” Lupe had told Juan Diego. She liked feeding Hombre and the lionesses. “You wouldn’t believe how much they think about meat,” she’d explained to Edward Bonshaw. The Iowan wanted to watch Lupe feeding the lions — just to be sure the process was safe.

Lupe showed Señor Eduardo how the slot in the cage for the feeding tray could be locked and unlocked. The tray slid in and out, along the floor of the cage. Hombre would extend his paw through the slot, reaching for the meat Lupe put on the tray; this was more a gesture of desire on the lion’s part than an actual attempt to grab the meat.

When Lupe slid the tray full of meat back inside the lion’s cage, Hombre always withdrew his extended paw. The lion waited for the meat in a sitting position; like a broom, his tail swished from side to side across the floor of his cage.

The lionesses never reached through the slot for the meat Lupe was putting on the feeding tray; they sat waiting, with their tails swishing the whole time.

For cleaning, the feeding tray could be entirely removed from the slot at the floor of the cage. Even when the tray was taken out of the cage, the slot wasn’t big enough for Hombre or the lionesses to escape through the opening; the slot was too small for Hombre’s big head to fit through it. Not even one of the lionesses could have stuck her head through the open feeding slot.

“It’s safe,” Edward Bonshaw had said to Juan Diego. “I just wanted to be sure about the size of the opening.”

Over the long weekend when La Maravilla was performing in Mexico City, Señor Eduardo slept with the dump kids in the dogs’ troupe tent. The first night — when the dump kids knew the Iowan was asleep, because he was snoring — Lupe said to her brother: “I can fit through the slot where the feeding tray slides in and out. It’s not too small an opening for me to fit through.”

In the darkness of the tent, Juan Diego considered what Lupe meant; what Lupe said and what she meant weren’t always the same thing.

“You mean, you could climb into Hombre’s cage — or the lionesses’ cage — through the feeding slot?” the boy asked her.

“If the feeding tray was removed from the slot — yes, I could,” Lupe told him.

“You sound like you’ve tried it,” Juan Diego said.

“Why would I try it?” Lupe asked him.

“I don’t know — why would you?” Juan Diego asked her.

She didn’t answer him, but even in the dark he sensed her shrug, her sheer indifference to answering him. (As if Lupe couldn’t be bothered to explain everything she knew, or how she knew it.)

Someone farted — one of the dogs, perhaps. “Was that the biter?” Juan Diego asked. Perro Mestizo, a.k.a. Mongrel, slept with Lupe on her cot. Pastora slept with Juan Diego; he knew the sheepdog hadn’t farted.

“It was the parrot man,” Lupe answered. The dump kids laughed. A dog’s tail wagged — there was the accompanying thump-thump. One of the dogs had liked the laughter.

“Alemania,” Lupe said. It was the female German shepherd who had wagged her big tail. She slept on the dirt floor of the tent, by the tent flap, as if she were guarding (in police-dog fashion) the way in or out.

“I wonder if lions can catch rabies,” Lupe said, as if she were falling asleep, and she wouldn’t remember this idea in the morning.

“Why?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Just wondering,” Lupe said, sighing. After a pause, she asked: “Don’t you think the new dog act is stupid?”

Juan Diego knew when Lupe was deliberately changing the subject, and of course Lupe knew he’d been thinking about the new dog act. It was Juan Diego’s idea, but the dogs hadn’t been very cooperative, and the dwarf clowns had taken over the idea; it had become Paco and Beer Belly’s new act, in Lupe’s opinion. (As if those two clowns needed another stupid act.)

Ah, the passage of time — one day when he’d been dog-paddling in the pool at the old Iowa Field House, Juan Diego realized that the new dog act had amounted to his first novel-in-progress, but it was a story he’d been unable to finish. (And the idea that lions could catch rabies? Didn’t this amount to a story that Lupe had been unable to bring to a close?)

Like Juan Diego’s actual novels, the dog act began as a what-if proposition. What if one of the dogs could be trained to climb to the top of a stepladder? It was that type of stepladder with a shelf at the top; the shelf was for holding a can of paint, or a workman’s tools, but Juan Diego had imagined the shelf as a diving platform for a dog. What if one of the dogs climbed the stepladder and sailed into the air, off the diving platform, into an open blanket the dwarf clowns were holding out?

“The audience would love it,” Juan Diego told Estrella.

“Not Alemania — she won’t do it,” Estrella had said.

“Yes — I guess a German shepherd is too big to climb a stepladder,” Juan Diego had replied.

“Alemania is too smart to do it,” was all Estrella said.

“Perro Mestizo, the biter, is a chickenshit,” Juan Diego said.

“You hate little dogs — you hated Dirty White,” Lupe had told him.

“I don’t hate little dogs — Perro Mestizo isn’t that little. I hate cowardly dogs, and dogs who bite,” Juan Diego had told his sister.

“Not Perro Mestizo — he won’t do it,” was all Estrella said.

They tried Pastora, the sheepdog, first; everyone thought that a dachshund’s legs were too short to climb the steps on a stepladder — surely Baby couldn’t reach the steps.

Pastora could climb the ladder — those border-collie types are very agile and aggressive — but when she got to the top, she lay down on the diving platform with her nose between her forepaws. The dwarf clowns danced under the stepladder, holding out the open blanket to the sheepdog, but Pastora wouldn’t even stand on the diving platform. When Paco or Beer Belly called her name, the sheepdog just wagged her tail while she was lying down.

“She’s no jumper,” was all Estrella said.

“Baby has balls,” Juan Diego said. Dachshunds do have balls — for their size, they seem especially ferocious — and Baby was willing to try climbing the stepladder. But the short-legged dachshund needed a boost.

This would be funny — the audience will laugh, Paco and Beer Belly decided. And the sight of the two dwarf clowns pushing Baby up the stepladder was funny. As always, Paco was dressed (badly) as a woman; while Paco pushed Baby’s ass, to help the dachshund up the stepladder, Beer Belly stood behind Paco — pushing her ass up the ladder.

“So far, so good,” Estrella said. But Baby, balls and all, was afraid of heights. When the dachshund got to the top of the stepladder, he froze on the diving platform; he was even afraid to lie down. The little dachshund stood so rigidly still that he began to tremble; soon the stepladder started to shake. Paco and Beer Belly pleaded with Baby as they held out the open blanket. Eventually, Baby peed on the diving platform; he was too afraid to lift his leg, the way male dogs are supposed to do.

“Baby is humiliated — he can’t pee like himself,” Estrella said.

But the act was funny, the dwarf clowns insisted. It didn’t matter that Baby wasn’t a jumper, Paco and Beer Belly said.

Estrella wouldn’t let Baby do it in front of an audience. She said the act was psychologically cruel. This was not what Juan Diego had intended. But that night in the darkness of the dogs’ troupe tent, all Juan Diego said to Lupe was: “The new dog act isn’t stupid. All we need is a new dog — we need a jumper,” Juan Diego said.

It would take him years to realize how he’d been manipulated into saying this. It was so long before Lupe said something — in the snoring, farting troupe tent for the dogs — Juan Diego was almost asleep when she spoke, and Lupe sounded as if she were half asleep herself.

“The poor horse,” was all Lupe said.

“What horse?” Juan Diego asked in the darkness.

“The one in the graveyard,” Lupe answered him.

In the morning, the dump kids woke up to a pistol shot. One of the circus horses had bolted from the sooty field and jumped the fence into the graveyard, where it broke its leg against a gravestone. Ignacio had shot the horse; the lion tamer kept a.45-caliber revolver, in case there was any lion trouble.

“That poor horse,” was all Lupe said, at the sound of the shot.

La Maravilla had arrived in Mexico City on Thursday. The roustabouts had set up the troupe tents the day they’d arrived; all day Friday, the roustabouts were raising the main tent and securing the animal barriers around the ring. The animals’ concentration was affected by traveling, and they needed most of Friday to recover.

The horse had been named Mañana; he was a gelding, and a slow learner. The trainer was always saying that the horse might master a trick they’d been practicing for weeks “tomorrow”—hence Mañana. But the trick of jumping the fence into the graveyard, and breaking his leg, was a new one for Mañana.

Ignacio put the poor horse out of his misery on Friday. Mañana had jumped a fence to get into the graveyard, but the gate to the graveyard was locked; disposing of the dead horse shouldn’t have become a matter of such insurmountable difficulty. However, the gunshot had been reported; the police came to the circus site, and they were more of a hindrance than a help.

Why did the lion tamer have a big-caliber gun? the police asked. (Well, he was a lion tamer.) Why had Ignacio shot the horse? (Mañana’s leg was broken!) And so on.

There was no permit to dispose of the dead horse in Mexico City — not on a weekend, not in the case of a horse that hadn’t “come from” Mexico City. Getting Mañana out of the locked graveyard was just the start of the difficulties.

There were performances throughout the weekend, starting with Friday night. The last was early Sunday afternoon, and the roustabouts would collapse the main tent and dismantle the ring barriers before nightfall that day. La Maravilla would be on the road again, heading back to Oaxaca, by the middle of the day on Monday. The dump kids and Edward Bonshaw planned to go to the Guadalupe shrine on Saturday morning.

Juan Diego watched Lupe feeding the lions. A mourning dove was having a dust bath in the dirt near Hombre’s cage; the lion hated birds, and maybe Hombre thought the dove was after his meat. For some reason, Hombre was more aggressive in the way he extended his paw through the slot for the feeding tray, and one of his claws nicked the back of Lupe’s hand. There was only a little blood; Lupe put her hand to her mouth, and Hombre withdrew his paw — the guilty-looking lion retreated into his cage.

“Not your fault,” Lupe said to the big cat. There was a change in the lion’s dark-yellow eyes — a more intense focus, but on the mourning dove or on Lupe’s blood? The bird must have sensed the intensity of Hombre’s calculating stare and took flight.

Hombre’s eyes were instantly normal again — even bored. The two dwarf clowns were waddling past the lions’ cages, on their way to the outdoor showers. They wore towels around their waists and their sandals were flapping. The lion looked at them with an utter lack of interest.

“¡Hola, Hombre!” Beer Belly called.

“¡Hola, Lupe! ¡Hola, Lupe’s brother!” Paco said; the cross-dresser’s breasts were so small (almost nonexistent) that Paco didn’t bother to cover them when she walked to and from the outdoor showers, and her beard was at its most stubbly in the mornings. (Whatever Paco was taking for hormones, she wasn’t getting her estrogens from the same source Flor got hers; Flor got her estrogens from Dr. Vargas.)

But, as Flor had said, Paco was a clown; it wasn’t Paco’s aim in life to make herself passable as a woman. Paco was a gay dwarf who, in real life, spent most of her time as a man.

It was as a he that Paco went to La China, the gay bar on Bustamante. And when Paco went to La Coronita, where the transvestites liked to dress up, Paco also went as a he—Paco was just another guy among the gay clientele.

Flor said that Paco picked up a lot of first-timers, those men who were having their first experiences at being with another man. (Maybe the first-timers looked at a gay dwarf as a cautious way to start?)

But when Paco was with her circus family at La Maravilla, the dwarf clown felt safe to be a she. She could be comfortable as a cross-dresser around Beer Belly. In the clown acts, they always acted as if they were a couple, but in real life Beer Belly was straight. He was married, and his wife wasn’t a dwarf.

Beer Belly’s wife was afraid of getting pregnant; she didn’t want to have a dwarf for a child. She made Beer Belly wear two condoms. Everyone in La Maravilla had heard Beer Belly’s stories about the perils of wearing an extra condom.

“Nobody does that — no one wears two condoms, you know,” Paco was always telling him, but Beer Belly kept using double condoms, because it was what his wife wanted.

The outdoor showers were made of flimsy, prefabricated plywood — they could be assembled and taken apart fairly fast. They sometimes fell down; they had even collapsed on the person taking a shower. There were as many bad stories about the outdoor showers La Maravilla used as there were about Beer Belly’s extra condoms. (Lots of embarrassing accidents, in other words.)

The girl acrobats complained to Soledad about Ignacio looking at them in the outdoor showers, but Soledad couldn’t stop her husband from being a lecherous pig. The morning Mañana was shot in the graveyard, Dolores was taking an outdoor shower; Paco and Beer Belly had timed their arrival at the showers — they were hoping to get a look at Dolores naked.

The two dwarf clowns were not lecherous — not in the case of the beautiful but unapproachable skywalker, The Wonder herself. Paco was a gay guy — what did Paco care about getting a look at Dolores? And Beer Belly had all he could possibly handle with his two-condom wife; Beer Belly wasn’t personally interested in seeing Dolores naked, either.

But the two dwarfs had a bet between them. Paco had said: “My tits are bigger than Dolores’s.” Beer Belly bet that Dolores’s were bigger. This was why the two clowns were always trying to get a look at Dolores in the outdoor shower. Dolores had heard about the bet; she wasn’t happy about it. Juan Diego had imagined the shower falling down — Dolores exposed, the dwarf clowns arguing about breast size. (Lupe, who’d used the mouse-tits definition for Dolores’s breasts, was on Paco’s side; Lupe believed Paco’s tits were bigger.)

That was why Juan Diego followed Paco and Beer Belly to the outdoor showers; the fourteen-year-old hoped something might happen, and he would get to see Dolores naked. (Juan Diego didn’t care that her breasts were small; he believed she was beautiful, even if her tits were tiny.)

The dwarf clowns and Juan Diego could see Dolores’s head and bare shoulders above the prefabricated barrier of the outdoor shower. That was when one of the elephants appeared in the avenue of troupe tents; the elephant was dragging the dead horse, who had been chained around the neck. The police followed after Mañana’s body; there were ten policemen for one dead horse. Ignacio and the policemen were arguing.

Dolores’s head was thickly lathered with shampoo — her eyes were closed. You could see her ankles and her bare feet below the flimsy plywood barrier; the shampoo suds covered her feet. Juan Diego was thinking that maybe the shampoo stung the open wounds on the tops of her feet.

The lion tamer stopped talking when he saw that Dolores was in one of the outdoor showers. The policemen all looked in The Wonder’s direction, too.

“Maybe now isn’t such a good time,” Beer Belly said to his dwarf buddy, Paco.

“I say now’s the perfect time,” Paco said, waddling faster. The dwarf clowns ran to Dolores’s outdoor shower. They couldn’t have seen over the prefabricated barrier without (impossibly) standing on each other’s shoulders, so they looked under the plywood at the bottom of the shower — staring upward, into the falling water and shampoo. They were looking for only a second or two; their heads were wet with water (and frothy with shampoo) when they straightened up and turned away from Dolores’s shower. Dolores was still washing her hair; she’d never noticed the dwarfs stealing a look at her. But then Juan Diego tried to peer over the top of the prefabricated barrier; he had to pull himself up, off his feet, with both his hands gripping the flimsy plywood.

Later, Beer Belly said that it would have been a funny clown act; the unlikeliest cast of characters were assembled on a small stage in the avenue of troupe tents. The dwarf clowns, already dappled with Dolores’s shampoo, were just bystanders. (Clowns can be at their funniest when they’re just standing around, doing nothing.)

Later, the elephant trainer said that what happens in the periphery of an elephant’s vision can be more startling to the elephant than something the beast is looking at directly. When Dolores’s outdoor shower collapsed, she screamed; she couldn’t see (she was blinded by shampoo), but she surely sensed that the walls surrounding her had vanished.

Later, Juan Diego said that although he was pinned under one of the prefabricated walls of the shower, he could feel the ground shake when the elephant broke into a run mode, or a gallop mode (or whatever mode elephants break into when they panic and bolt).

The elephant trainer ran after his elephant; the chain, still attached to the neck of the dead horse, had snapped — but not before Mañana was jerked forward into a kneeling (or praying) position.

Dolores had dropped to all fours on the raised wooden platform that served as a makeshift floor to the shower; she was keeping her head under the stream of water, so she could rinse the shampoo out of her hair — she wanted to see again, of course. Juan Diego had crawled out from under the collapsed plywood barrier. He was trying to give Dolores her towel.

“It was me — I did it. I’m sorry,” he said to her; she took the towel from him, but Dolores seemed in no hurry to cover herself. She used the towel to dry her hair first; it was only when she saw Ignacio, and the ten policemen, that The Wonder covered herself with the towel.

“You got more balls than I thought—some balls, anyway,” was all Dolores said to Juan Diego.

No one realized that she’d not noticed the dead horse. All the while, the dwarf clowns just stood watching in the avenue of troupe tents — the towels around their waists. Paco’s breasts were so small that not one of the ten policemen looked at her twice; the policemen definitely thought Paco was a guy.

“I told you Dolores’s are bigger,” Beer Belly said to his fellow dwarf clown.

“Are you kidding?” Paco asked him. “Mine are bigger!”

“Yours are smaller,” Beer Belly told her.

“Bigger!” Paco said. “What do you say, Lupe’s brother?” the cross-dresser asked Juan Diego. “Are Dolores’s bigger or smaller?”

“They’re prettier,” the fourteen-year-old said. “Dolores’s are more beautiful,” Juan Diego said.

“You got some balls, all right,” Dolores told him; she stepped off the shower platform into the avenue of troupe tents, where she fell over the dead horse. The bullet hole was still bleeding. The wound was on the side of Mañana’s face, between the ear and one of the horse’s wide-open eyes.

Later, Paco would say that she disagreed with Beer Belly — not only about the relative size of Dolores’s breasts, but also about the suitability of the shower episode as a clown act. “Not the dead-horse part — that wasn’t funny,” was all Paco would say about it.

Dolores, lying on the dead horse in the avenue of troupe tents, kicked her bare legs, thrashed her bare arms, and screamed. Ignacio, uncharacteristically, ignored her. He walked on with the ten policemen, but before the lion tamer continued his argument with the law-enforcement officers, he said quite a mouthful to Juan Diego.

“If you have ‘some balls,’ ceiling-walker, what are you waiting for?” Ignacio asked the boy. “When are you going to try skywalking at eighty feet? I think Some Balls should be your name. Or how about Mañana? It’s a free name now,” the lion tamer said, pointing to the dead horse. “It’s yours, if you want it — if you’re always going to put off becoming the first male skywalker until ‘tomorrow.’ If you’re going to keep putting it off — till the next mañana!”

Dolores had gotten to her feet; her towel was stained with the horse’s blood. Before she walked off in the direction of the girl acrobats’ troupe tent, she gave both Beer Belly and Paco a whack on the tops of their heads. “You disgusting little creeps,” she told them.

“Bigger than yours,” was all Beer Belly said to Paco, after Dolores had left them standing there.

“Smaller than mine,” Paco told him quietly.

Ignacio and the ten policemen had walked on; they were still arguing, although the lion tamer was doing all the talking.

“If I need a permit to dispose of a dead horse, I suppose I don’t need a permit to butcher the animal and feed the meat to my lions — do I?” the lion tamer was saying, but he wasn’t waiting for an answer from the ten policemen. “I don’t suppose you expect me to drive a dead horse back to Oaxaca, do you?” Ignacio asked them. “I could have left the horse to die in the graveyard. You wouldn’t have liked that very much, would you?” the lion tamer went on, unanswered.

“Forget about skywalking, Lupe’s brother,” Paco said to the fourteen-year-old.

“Lupe needs you to look after her,” Beer Belly told Juan Diego. The two dwarf clowns waddled off; there were some outdoor showers still standing, and the two clowns started taking theirs.

Juan Diego thought that he and Mañana were alone in the avenue of troupe tents; he hadn’t seen Lupe until she was standing beside him. Juan Diego guessed she’d always been there.

“Did you see—” he started to ask her.

“Everything,” Lupe told him. Juan Diego just nodded. “About the new dog act—” Lupe began; she stopped, as if she were waiting for him to catch up to her. She was always a thought or two ahead of him.

“What about it?” Juan Diego asked her.

Lupe said: “I know where you can get a new dog — a jumper.”

• • •

THE DREAMS OR MEMORIES he’d missed, because of the beta-blockers, had risen up and overwhelmed him; his final two days at the Encantador, Juan Diego dutifully took his Lopressor prescription — the correct dose.

Dr. Quintana must have known Juan Diego wasn’t acting; his return to torpor, to a diminished level of alertness and physiological activity, was evident to everyone — he did his dog-paddling in the swimming pool (no sea urchins were lurking there) and ate his meals at the children’s table. He kept company with Consuelo and Pedro, his fellow whisperers.

In the early mornings, drinking coffee by the swimming pool, Juan Diego would reread his notes (and make new notes) on One Chance to Leave Lithuania; he’d gone back to Vilnius two more times since his first visit in 2008. Rasa, his publisher, had found a woman in the State Child Rights Protection and Adoption Service to talk with him; he’d brought Daiva, his translator, to the first meeting, but the woman from Child Rights spoke excellent English, and she was forthcoming. Her name was Odeta — the same name as the mystery woman on the bookstore bulletin board, the not-a-mail-order bride. That woman’s photograph and phone number had disappeared from the bulletin board, but she still haunted Juan Diego — her suppressed but visible unhappiness, the dark circles under her late-night-reading eyes, her neglected-looking hair. Was there still no one in her life to talk with her about the wonderful novels she’d read?

One Chance to Leave Lithuania had, of course, evolved. The woman reader was not a mail-order bride. She’d put her child up for adoption, but the adoption (long a work-in-progress) had fallen through. In Juan Diego’s novel, the woman wants her baby to be adopted by Americans. (She’d always dreamed of going to America; now she will give up her child, but only if she can imagine her child as happy in America.)

The Odeta in Child Rights had explained to Juan Diego that it was rare for Lithuanian children to be adopted outside Lithuania. There was quite a lengthy waiting period, allowing the birth mother a second chance to change her mind. The laws were strict: at least six months for international decisions, but the period of time (the waiting period) could take four years — hence older children were the ones most likely to be adopted by foreigners.

In One Chance to Leave Lithuania, the American couple waiting to adopt a Lithuanian child has a tragedy of their own — the young wife is killed on her bicycle by a hit-and-run driver; the widowed husband is in no shape to adopt a child by himself (not that Child Rights would allow him to).

In a Juan Diego Guerrero novel, everyone is a kind of outsider; Juan Diego’s characters feel they are foreigners, even when they’re at home. The young Lithuanian woman, who has had two chances to change her mind about putting her child up for adoption, now has a third chance to change her mind; the adoption of her child is put on hold. Another awful “waiting period” confronts her. She puts her photo and her phone number on the bulletin board at the bookstore; she meets other women readers for coffee or beer, talking about the novels they’ve read — the myriad unhappiness of others.

This is a collision we should see coming, Juan Diego was thinking. The American widower takes a trip to Vilnius; he doesn’t expect to see the child he and his late wife were going to adopt — Child Rights would never have let him. He doesn’t even know the name of the single mother who’d put her child up for adoption. He’s not expecting to meet anyone. There is an atmosphere he hopes to absorb — an essence their adopted child might have brought to America. Or is his going to Vilnius a way of reconnecting with his dead wife, a way of keeping her alive a little longer?

Yes, of course, he goes to the bookstore; maybe it’s the jet lag — he thinks a novel would help him sleep. And there, on the bulletin board, he sees her photo — someone whose unhappiness is both hidden and apparent. Her lack of attention to herself draws him to her, and her favorite novelists were his wife’s favorite novelists! Not knowing if she speaks English — of course she does — he asks the bookseller for assistance in calling her.

And then? The question that remained was an earlier one — namely, whose one chance to leave Lithuania was it? The collision course in One Chance to Leave Lithuania is obvious: they meet, each discovers who the other is, they become lovers. But how do they handle the crushing weight of the extreme coincidence of their meeting each other? And what do they do about their seeming fate? Do they stay together, does she keep her child, do they all three go to America — or does this lonely American widower remain with this mother and her child in Vilnius? (Her child has been staying with her sister — not a good situation.)

In the darkness of the single mother’s tiny apartment — she is sleeping in his arms, more soundly than she’s slept in years — he lies there thinking. (He has still seen only photos of the child.) If he’s going to leave this woman and her child and go back to America alone, he knows he’d better leave now.

What we shouldn’t see coming, Juan Diego thought, is that the eponymous one chance to leave Lithuania could be the American’s—his last chance to change his mind, to get out.

“You’re writing, aren’t you?” Clark French asked his former teacher. It was still early in the morning, and Clark had caught Juan Diego with one of his notebooks, pen in hand, at the Encantador swimming pool.

“You know me — they’re just notes about what I’m going to write,” Juan Diego answered.

“That’s writing,” Clark confidently said.

It seemed natural enough for Clark to ask Juan Diego about the novel-in-progress, and Juan Diego felt comfortable telling him about One Chance to Leave Lithuania—where the idea came from, and how the novel had evolved.

“Another Catholic country,” Clark suddenly said. “Dare I ask what villainous role the Church plays in this story?”

Juan Diego hadn’t been talking about the role of the Church; he hadn’t even been thinking about it — not yet. But, of course, Juan Diego would have a role for the Church in One Chance to Leave Lithuania. Both the teacher and his former student surely knew that. “You know as well as I do, Clark, what role the Church plays in the case of unwanted children,” Juan Diego replied. “In the case of what causes unwanted children to be born, in the first place—” He stopped; he saw that Clark had closed his eyes. Juan Diego closed his eyes, too.

The impasse presented by their religious differences was a familiar standoff, a depressing dead end. When, in the past, Clark had used the we word, he’d never meant “you and I”; when Clark said “we,” he meant the Church — especially when Clark was trying to sound progressive or tolerant. “We shouldn’t be so insistent on issues like abortion or the use of contraceptive methods, or gay marriage. The teachings of the Church”—and here Clark always hesitated—“are clear.” Clark would then continue: “But it isn’t necessary to talk about these issues all the time, or to sound so combative.”

Oh, sure — Clark could sound progressive, when he wanted to; he wasn’t the absolutist about these issues that John Paul II was!

And Juan Diego, over the years, had also been insincere; he’d pulled his punches. He’d teased Clark with that old Chesterton quote too many times: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.” (Clark, naturally, had laughed this off.)

Juan Diego regretted that he’d wasted dear Brother Pepe’s favorite prayer in more than one of his arguments with Clark. Of course Clark was incapable of recognizing himself in that prayer from Saint Teresa of Ávila, the one Pepe had faithfully repeated among his daily prayers: “From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us.”

But why was Juan Diego reliving his correspondence with Brother Pepe, as if Pepe had written only yesterday? Years ago, he’d written that Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had died in their sleep within days of each other. Pepe expressed his dismay to Juan Diego, regarding how the two old priests had “slipped away”; they’d always been so dogmatic, so punitively opinionated — how had those two dared to die without a final fuss?

And Rivera’s departure from this life also pissed Pepe off. El jefe hadn’t been himself since the old dump had moved in 1981; there was a new dump now. Those first ten families from the colony in Guerrero were long gone.

What really undid Rivera was the no-burning policy instituted after the creation of the new dump. How could they have put an end to the fires? What kind of dump didn’t burn things?

Pepe had pressed el jefe to tell him more. The end of the hellfires in the basurero hadn’t bothered Brother Pepe, but it was Juan Diego’s paternity that he wanted to know more about.

That woman worker in the old basurero had told Pepe that the dump boss was “not exactly” the dump reader’s father; Juan Diego himself had always believed that el jefe was “probably not” his dad.

But Lupe had said: “Rivera knows something — he’s just not saying.”

Rivera had told the dump kids that Juan Diego’s “most likely” father had died of a broken heart.

“A heart attack, right?” Juan Diego had asked el jefe — because that’s what Esperanza had told her children, and everyone else.

“If that’s what you call a heart that’s permanently broken,” was all Rivera had ever said to the kids.

But Brother Pepe had finally persuaded Rivera to tell him more.

Yes, the dump boss was pretty sure he was Juan Diego’s biological father; Esperanza had been sleeping with no one else at the time — or so she said. But she’d later told Rivera he was too stupid to have fathered a genius like the dump reader. “Even if you are his father, he should never know it,” Esperanza had said to el jefe. “If Juan Diego knows you’re his father, it will undermine his self-confidence,” she’d said. (This no doubt undermined what little self-confidence the dump boss ever had.)

Rivera told Pepe not to tell Juan Diego — not until the dump boss was dead. Who knew if el jefe’s heart had killed him?

No one ever knew where Rivera actually lived; he died in the cab of his truck — it had always been his favorite place to sleep, and after Diablo died, Rivera missed his dog and rarely slept anywhere else.

Like Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, el jefe had also “slipped away,” but not before he’d made his confession to Brother Pepe.

Rivera’s death, including his confession, was a big part of Brother Pepe’s correspondence that Juan Diego would relive — constantly.

How had Brother Pepe managed to live the epilogue to his own life so cheerfully? Juan Diego was wondering.

At the Encantador, no more roosters crowed in the darkness; Juan Diego slept through the night, unmindful of the karaoke music from the beach club. No woman slept (or had vanished) beside him, but he woke up one morning to discover what looked like a title — in his handwriting — on the notepad on his night table.

The Last Things, he’d written on the pad. That had been the night he’d dreamed about Pepe’s last orphanage. Brother Pepe started volunteering at Hijos de la Luna (“Children of the Moon”) sometime after 2001; Pepe’s letters had been so positive — everything seemed to energize him, and he was then in his late seventies.

The orphanage was in Guadalupe Victoria (“Guadalupe the Victorious”). Hijos de la Luna was for children of prostitutes. Brother Pepe said the prostitutes were welcome to visit their kids. At Lost Children, Juan Diego remembered, the nuns kept the birth mothers away; this was one of the reasons that Esperanza, the dump kids’ birth mother, had never been welcomed by the nuns.

At Children of the Moon, the orphans called Pepe “Papá”; Pepe said this was “not a big deal.” According to Pepe, the other men who volunteered at the orphanage were also called “Papá.”

“Our dear Edward wouldn’t have approved of the motorcycles parked in the classroom,” Brother Pepe had written, “but people steal the motorcycles if you park them on the street.” (Señor Eduardo said a motorcycle was a “death-in-progress.”)

Dr. Vargas would surely have disapproved of the dogs in the orphanage — Hijos de la Luna allowed dogs: the kids liked them.

There was a large trampoline in the courtyard of Children of the Moon — dogs were not allowed on the trampoline, Pepe had written — and a big pomegranate tree. The upper branches of the tree were festooned with rag dolls and other toys — things the children had thrown upward, into the receptive branches. The girls’ and boys’ sleeping quarters were in separate buildings, but their clothes were shared — the orphans’ clothes were communal property.

“I’m not driving a VW Beetle anymore,” Pepe had written. “I don’t want to kill anyone. I’ve got a little motorcycle, and I never drive it fast enough to kill anyone I might hit.”

That had been Brother Pepe’s last letter — one of the things to be counted in The Last Things, the apparent title Juan Diego had written in his sleep, or when he was only half awake.

The morning he left the Encantador, only Consuelo and Pedro were awake to say goodbye to him; it was still dark outside. Juan Diego’s driver was that feral-faced boy who looked too young to drive — the horn-blower. But the boy was a better driver than he was a waiter, Juan Diego remembered.

“Watch out for the monitor lizards, Mister,” Pedro said.

“Don’t step on any sea urchins, Mister,” Consuelo said.

Clark French had left a note for his former teacher with the desk clerk. Clark must have thought he was being funny — at least funny for Clark. Until Manila—that was the message.

All the way to the airport in Tagbilaran City, there was no conversation with the boy driver. Juan Diego was remembering the letter he’d received from the lady who ran Children of the Moon in Guadalupe Victoria. Brother Pepe had been killed on his little motorcycle. He’d swerved to avoid hitting a dog, and a bus had hit him. “He had all your books — the ones you signed for him. He was very proud of you!” the lady at Hijos de la Luna had written to Juan Diego. She’d signed her name—“Mamá.” The lady who’d written to Juan Diego was called Coco. The orphans called her “Mamá.”

Juan Diego would wonder if there was only one “Mamá” at Children of the Moon. As it turned out, that was the case — only one — as Dr. Vargas would write Juan Diego.

Pepe had been mistaken about the use of the Papá word, Vargas wrote to Juan Diego. “Pepe’s hearing wasn’t so good, or he would have heard the bus,” was how Vargas had put it.

The orphans hadn’t called Pepe “Papá”—Pepe had misheard them. There was only one person the kids called “Papá” at Hijos de la Luna — he was Coco’s son, the Mamá lady’s son.

Leave it to Vargas to straighten everything out, to give you the scientific answer, Juan Diego had thought.

What a long way it was to Tagbilaran City — and that was just the start of the long day’s trip he was taking, Juan Diego knew. Two planes and three boats lay ahead of him — not to mention the monitor lizards, or D.