Avenue of Mysteries

  As Dorothy had told Juan Diego, the food at El Nido was good: rice noodles with shrimp sauce; spring rolls with pork or mushrooms or duck; serrano ham with pickled green mango; spicy sardines. There was also a condiment made from fermented fish, which Juan Diego had learned to be on the lookout for; he thought it gave him indigestion or heartburn. And there was flan for dessert--Juan Diego liked custard--but Dorothy told him to avoid anything with milk in it. She said she didn't trust the milk on the "outer islands."

  Juan Diego didn't know if only a little island constituted an outer island, or if all the islands in the Palawan group were (in Dorothy's estimation) of the outer kind. When he asked her, Dorothy just shrugged. She had a killer shrug.

  It was strange how being with Dorothy had made him forget Miriam, but he'd forgotten that being with Miriam (even wanting to be with Miriam) had once made him forget about being with Dorothy. Very strange: how he could, simultaneously, obsess about these women and forget about them.

  The coffee at the resort was overstrong, or perhaps it seemed strong because Juan Diego was drinking it black. "Have the green tea," Dorothy told him. But the green tea was very bitter; he tried putting a little honey in it. He saw that the honey was from Australia.

  "Australia is nearby, isn't it?" Juan Diego asked Dorothy. "I'm sure the honey is safe."

  "They dilute it with something--it's too watery," Dorothy said. "And where's the water come from?" she asked him. (It was her outer-islands theme, again.) "Is it bottled water, or do they boil it? I say fuck the honey," Dorothy told him.

  "Okay," Juan Diego said. Dorothy seemed to know a lot. Juan Diego was beginning to realize that, increasingly, when he was with Dorothy or her mother, he acquiesced.

  He was allowing Dorothy to give him his pills; she'd simply taken over his prescriptions. Dorothy not only decided when he should take the Viagra--always a whole tablet, not a half--but she told him when to take the beta-blockers, and when not to take them.

  At low tide, it was Dorothy who insisted they sit overlooking the lagoon; low tide was when the reef egrets came to search the mudflats. "What are the egrets looking for?" Juan Diego had asked her.

  "It doesn't matter--they're awesome-looking birds, aren't they?" was all Dorothy had said.

  At high tide, Dorothy held his arm as they ventured onto the beach in the horseshoe-shaped cove. The monitor lizards liked to lie in the sand; some of them were as long as an adult human arm. "You don't want to get too close to them--they can bite, and they smell like carrion," Dorothy had warned him. "They look like penises, don't they? Unfriendly-looking penises," Dorothy said.

  Juan Diego had no idea what unfriendly-looking penises resembled; how any penis could or might look like a monitor lizard was beyond him. Juan Diego had enough trouble understanding his own penis. When Dorothy took him snorkeling in the deep water outside the lagoon, his penis stung a little.

  "It's just the salt water, and because you've been having a lot of sex," Dorothy told him. She seemed to know more about his penis than Juan Diego did. And the stinging soon stopped. (It was more like tingling than stinging, truthfully.) Juan Diego wasn't under attack from those stinging things--the plankton that looked like condoms for three-year-olds. There were no upright-swimming index fingers--those stinging pink things, swimming vertically, like sea horses, the jellyfish he'd heard about only from Dorothy and Clark.

  As for Clark, Juan Diego started getting inquiring text messages from his former student before he and Dorothy left El Nido and Lagen Island.

  "D. is STILL with you, isn't she?" the first such text message from Clark inquired.

  "What should I tell him?" Juan Diego asked Dorothy.

  "Oh, Leslie is texting Clark, too--is she?" Dorothy had asked. "I'm just not answering her. You would think Leslie and I had been going steady, or something."

  But Clark French kept texting his former teacher. "As far as poor Leslie knows, D. has just DISAPPEARED. Leslie was expecting D. to meet her in Manila. But poor Leslie is suspicious--she knows you know D. What do I tell her?"

  "Tell Clark we're leaving for Laoag. Leslie will know where that is. Everyone knows where Laoag is. Don't get more specific," Dorothy told Juan Diego.

  But when Juan Diego did exactly that--when he sent Clark a text that he was "off to Laoag with D."--he heard back from his former student almost immediately.

  "D. is fucking you, isn't she? You understand: I'm not the one who wants to know!" Clark texted him. "Poor Leslie is asking ME. What do I tell her?"

  Dorothy saw his consternation as he stared at his cell phone. "Leslie is a very possessive person," Dorothy said to Juan Diego, without needing to ask him if the text was from Clark. "We have to let Leslie know she doesn't own us. This is all because your former student is too uptight to fuck her, and Leslie knows her tits won't stay perky forever, or something."

  "You want me to blow off your bossy girlfriend?" Juan Diego asked Dorothy.

  "I guess you've never had to blow off a bossy girlfriend," Dorothy said; without waiting for Juan Diego to admit that he hadn't had a bossy girlfriend--or many other kinds of girlfriends--Dorothy told him how he should handle the situation.

  "We have to show Leslie that she doesn't have an emotional ball-and-chain effect on us," Dorothy began. "Here's what you say to Clark--he'll tell Leslie everything. One: Why shouldn't D. and I do it? Two: Leslie and D. did it, didn't they? Three: How are those boys doing--that one kid's poor penis, especially? Four: Want us to say hi to the water buffalo for the whole family?"

  "That's what I should say?" Juan Diego asked Dorothy. She really did know a lot, he was thinking.

  "Just send it," Dorothy told him. "Leslie needs to be blown off--she's begging for it. Now you can say you've had a bossy girlfriend. Fun, huh?" Dorothy asked him.

  He sent the text, per Dorothy's instructions. Juan Diego was aware he was blowing off Clark, too. He was having fun, all right; in fact, he couldn't remember when he'd had this much fun--the quickly passing stinging sensation in his penis notwithstanding.

  "How is this guy doing?" Dorothy then asked him, touching his penis. "Still stinging? Still tingling a tiny bit, maybe? Want to make this guy tingle some more?" Dorothy asked him.

  He could barely manage to nod his head, he was so tired. Juan Diego was still staring at his cell phone, thinking about the uncharacteristic text message he'd sent to Clark.

  "Don't worry," Dorothy was whispering to him; she kept touching his penis. "You look a little tired, but not this guy," she whispered. "He doesn't get tired."

  Dorothy now took his phone away from him. "Don't worry, darling," she said to him in a more commanding fashion than before--the darling word impossibly sounding the way it had when Miriam had said it. "Leslie won't bother us again. Trust me: she'll get the message. Your friend Clark French does everything she wants--except fuck her."

  Juan Diego wanted to ask Dorothy about their trip to Laoag and Vigan, but he couldn't form the words. He couldn't possibly have expressed to Dorothy his doubts about going there. Dorothy had decided--because Juan Diego was an American, and one of the Vietnam generation--that he should at least see where those young Americans, those frightened nineteen-year-olds who were so afraid of being tortured, went to get away from the war (when, or if, they could manage to get away from it).

  Juan Diego had meant to ask Dorothy, too, where exactly the doctrinaire certainty of her opinions came from--you know how Juan Diego was always wondering where everything came from--but he'd been unable to summon the strength to question the autocratic young woman.

  Dorothy disapproved of the Japanese tourists at El Nido; she disliked how the resort catered to the Japanese, pointing out that there was Japanese food on the menu.

  "But we're very near to Japan," Juan Diego reminded her. "And other people like Japanese food--"

  "After what Japan did to the Philippines?" Dorothy asked him.

  "Well, the war--" Juan Diego had started to say.

  "Wait till you see the Manila
American Cemetery and Memorial--if you actually end up seeing it," Dorothy said dismissively. "The Japanese shouldn't come to the Philippines."

  And Dorothy pointed out that the Australians outnumbered all the other white people in the dining hall at El Nido. "Wherever they go, they go as a group--they're a gang," she said.

  "You don't like Australians?" Juan Diego asked her. "They're so friendly--they're just naturally gregarious." This was greeted by Dorothy's Lupe-like shrug.

  Dorothy might as well have said: If you don't understand, I couldn't possibly have any success in explaining it to you.

  There were two Russian families at El Nido, and some Germans, too. "There are Germans everywhere," was all Dorothy said.

  "They're big travelers, aren't they?" Juan Diego had asked her.

  "They're big conquerors," Dorothy had said, rolling her dark eyes.

  "But you like the food here--at El Nido. You said the food is good," Juan Diego reminded her.

  "Rice is rice," was all Dorothy would say--as if she'd never said the food was good. Yet, when Dorothy was in a this-guy mood, her focus was impressive.

  Their last night at El Nido, Juan Diego woke with the moonlight reflecting off the lagoon; their earlier, intense attention to "this guy" must have distracted them from closing the curtains. The way the silvery light fell across the bed and illuminated Dorothy's face was a little eerie. Asleep, there was something as lifeless as a statue about her--as if Dorothy were a mannequin who, only occasionally, sprang to life.

  Juan Diego leaned over her in the moonlight, putting his ear close to her lips. He could not feel the breath escaping her mouth and nose, nor did her breasts--lightly covered by the sheets--appear to rise and fall.

  For a moment, Juan Diego imagined he could hear Sister Gloria saying, as she once had: "I don't want to hear another word about Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down." For a moment, it was as if Juan Diego were lying next to the sex-doll likeness of Our Lady of Guadalupe--the gift the good gringo had given him, from that virgin shop in Oaxaca--and Juan Diego had finally managed to saw the pedestal off the mannequin's imprisoned feet.

  "Is there something you're expecting me to say?" Dorothy whispered in his ear, startling him. "Or maybe you were thinking of going down on me, and waking me up that way," the young woman indifferently said.

  "Who are you?" Juan Diego asked her. But he could see in the silvery moonlight that Dorothy had fallen back to sleep, or she was pretending to be asleep--or else he'd only imagined her speaking to him, and what he'd asked her.

  THE SUN WAS SETTING; it lingered long enough to cast a coppery glow over the South China Sea. Their little plane from Palawan flew on, toward Manila. Juan Diego was remembering the goodbye look Dorothy gave to that tourist-weary water buffalo at the airport, as they were leaving.

  "That's a water buffalo on beta-blockers," Juan Diego had remarked. "The poor thing."

  "Yeah, well--you should see him when there's a caterpillar up his nose," Dorothy had said, once more giving the water buffalo the evil eye.

  The sun was gone. The sky was the color of a bruise. By the far-apart, twinkling lights onshore, Juan Diego could tell they were flying over ground--the sea was now behind them. Juan Diego was staring out the plane's little window when he felt Dorothy's heavy head make contact with his shoulder and the side of his neck; her head felt as solid as a cannonball.

  "What you will see, in about fifteen minutes, are the city lights," Dorothy told him. "What comes first is an unlit darkness."

  "An unlit darkness?" Juan Diego asked her; his voice sounded alarmed.

  "Except for the occasional ship," she answered him. "The darkness is Manila Bay," Dorothy explained. "First the bay, then the lights."

  Was it Dorothy's voice or the weight of her head that was putting him to sleep? Or did Juan Diego feel the unlit darkness beckoning?

  The head that rested on him was Lupe's, not Dorothy's; he was on a bus, not a plane; the mountain road that snaked by in the darkness was somewhere in the Sierra Madre--the circus was returning to Oaxaca from Mexico City. Lupe slept as heavily against him as an undreaming dog; her little fingers had loosened their grip on the two religious totems she'd been playing with, before she fell asleep.

  Juan Diego was holding the coffee can with the ashes--he didn't let Lupe pinch it between her knees when she was sleeping. With her hideous Coatlicue statuette and the Guadalupe figurine--the one Juan Diego had found on the stairs, descending from El Cerrito--Lupe had been waging a war between superheroes. Lupe made the two action figures knock heads, exchange kicks, have sex; the serene-looking Guadalupe seemed an unlikely winner, and one look at Coatlicue's rattlesnake-rattle nipples (or her skirt of serpents) left little doubt that, between the two combatants, she was the representative from the Underworld.

  Juan Diego had let his sister act out the religious war within her in this childish superhero battle. The saintly-looking Guadalupe figurine at first appeared overmatched; she held her hands in a prayerful position, above the small but discernible swell of her belly. Guadalupe didn't have a fighter's stance, whereas Coatlicue looked as poised to strike as one of her writhing snakes, and Coatlicue's flaccid breasts were scary. (Even a starving infant would have been turned off by those rattlesnake-rattle nipples!)

  Yet Lupe engaged the two action figures in a variety of emotionally charged activities: the fighting and fucking were equally intermixed, and there were moments of apparent tenderness between the two warriors--even kissing.

  When Juan Diego observed Guadalupe and Coatlicue kissing, he asked Lupe if this represented a kind of truce between the fighters--a putting aside of their religious differences. After all, couldn't kissing mean making up?

  "They're just taking a break," was all Lupe said, recommencing the more violent, nonstop action between the two totems--more fighting and fucking--until Lupe was exhausted and fell asleep.

  As far as Juan Diego could tell, looking at Guadalupe and Coatlicue in the loosening fingers of Lupe's small hands, nothing had been settled between the two bitches. How could a violent mother-earth goddess coexist with one of those know-it-all, do-nothing virgins? Juan Diego was thinking. He didn't know that, across the aisle of the darkened bus, Edward Bonshaw was watching him when he gently took the two religious figurines from his sleeping sister's hands.

  Someone on the bus had been farting--one of the dogs, maybe; the parrot man, perhaps; Paco and Beer Belly, definitely. (The two dwarf clowns drank a lot of beer.) Juan Diego had already opened the bus window beside him, just a crack. The gap was sufficient for him to slip the two superheroes through the opening. Somewhere, one everlasting night--on a winding road through the Sierra Madre--two formidable religious figures were left to fend for themselves in the unlit darkness.

  What now--what next? Juan Diego was thinking, when Senor Eduardo spoke to him from across the aisle.

  "You are not alone, Juan Diego," the Iowan said. "If you reject one belief and then another, still you aren't alone--the universe isn't a godless place."

  "What now--what next?" Juan Diego asked him.

  A dog with an inquiring look walked between them in the aisle of the circus bus; it was Pastora, the sheepdog--she wagged her tail, as if Juan Diego had spoken to her, and walked on.

  Edward Bonshaw began babbling about the Temple of the Society of Jesus--he meant the one in Oaxaca. Senor Eduardo wanted Juan Diego to consider scattering Esperanza's ashes at the feet of the giant Virgin Mary there.

  "The Mary Monster--" Juan Diego started to say.

  "Okay--maybe not all the ashes, and only at her feet!" the Iowan quickly said. "I know you and Lupe have issues with the Virgin Mary, but your mother adored her."

  "The Mary Monster killed our mother," Juan Diego reminded Senor Eduardo.

  "I think you're interpreting an accident in a dogmatic fashion," Edward Bonshaw cautioned him. "Perhaps Lupe is more open to revisiting the Virgin Mary--the Mary Monster, as you call her."

  Pastora, pacing, passed between
them in the aisle again. The restless dog reminded Juan Diego of himself, and of the way Lupe had been behaving lately--uncharacteristically unsure of herself, perhaps, but also secretive.

  "Lie down, Pastora," Juan Diego said, but those border-collie types are furtive; the sheepdog continued to roam.

  Juan Diego didn't know what to believe; except for skywalking, everything was a hoax. He knew that Lupe was also confused--not that she would admit it. And what if Esperanza had been right to worship the Mary Monster? Clutching the coffee can between his thighs, Juan Diego knew that scattering his mother's ashes--and all the rest--was not necessarily a rational decision, no matter where the ashes were deposited. Why wouldn't their mother have wanted her ashes scattered at the feet of the enormous Virgin Mary in the Jesuit temple, where Esperanza had made a good name for herself? (If only as a cleaning woman.)

  Edward Bonshaw and Juan Diego were asleep when the dawn broke--as the caravan of circus trucks and buses came into the valley between the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca and the Sierra Madre del Sur. The caravan was passing through Oaxaca when Lupe woke up her brother. "The parrot man is right--we should scatter the ashes all over the Mary Monster," Lupe told Juan Diego.

  "He said 'only at her feet,' Lupe," Juan Diego cautioned his little sister. Maybe Lupe had misread the Iowan's thoughts--either when she was asleep or when Senor Eduardo was sleeping, or during some combination of the two.

  "I say the ashes go all over the Mary Monster--make the bitch prove herself to us," Lupe told her brother.

  "Senor Eduardo said 'maybe not all the ashes,' Lupe," Juan Diego warned her.

  "I say all of them, all over her," Lupe said. "Tell the bus driver to let us and the parrot man out at the temple."

  "Jesus Mary Joseph," Juan Diego muttered. He saw that all the dogs were awake; they were pacing in the aisle with Pastora.