"I'll go find Josefa myself," Clark said helplessly to the ER nurse. (Good riddance--you're of no use here! she might have thought, if she thought anything.) "No priest!" Clark repeated, almost angrily, to the old nun. The nun said nothing; she'd seen dying of all kinds--she was familiar with the process, and with all sorts of desperate, last-minute behavior (such as Clark's).
The ER nurse knew when a heart was finished; neither an OB-GYN nor a cardiologist would jump-start this one, the nurse knew, but--even so--she went looking for someone.
Juan Diego was looking like he'd lost count of something. Isn't it only two more steps, or is it still four more? Juan Diego was thinking. He hesitated to take the next step. Skywalkers (real skywalkers) know better than to hesitate, but Juan Diego just stopped skywalking. That was when he knew he wasn't really skywalking; that was when Juan Diego understood that he was just imagining.
It was what he was truly good at--just imagining. Juan Diego knew then that he was dying--the dying wasn't imaginary. And he realized that this, exactly this, was what people did when they died; this was what people wanted when they passed away--well, it was what Juan Diego wanted, anyway. Not necessarily the life everlasting, not a so-called life after death, but the actual life he wished he'd had--the hero's life he once imagined for himself.
So this is death--this is all death is, Juan Diego thought. It made him feel a little better about Lupe. Death was not even a surprise. "Ni siquiera una sorpresa," the old nun heard Juan Diego say. ("Not even a surprise.")
Now there was no chance to leave Lithuania. Now there was no light--there was only the unlit darkness. That was what Dorothy had called the view from the plane of Manila Bay, when you were approaching Manila at night: an unlit darkness. "Except for the occasional ship," she'd told him. "The darkness is Manila Bay," Dorothy had explained. Not this time, Juan Diego knew--not this darkness. There were no lights, no ships--this unlit darkness was not Manila Bay.
In her shriveled left hand, the old nun clutched the crucifix around her neck; making a fist, she held the crucified Christ against her beating heart. No one--least of all, Juan Diego, who was dead--heard her say, in Latin, "Sic transit gloria mundi." ("Thus passes the glory of this world.")
Not that anyone would have doubted such a venerable-looking nun, and she was right; not even Clark French, had he been there, would have uttered a qualifying word. Not every collision course comes as a surprise.
* ACKNOWLEDGMENTS *
* Julia Arvin
* Martin Bell
* David Calicchio * Nina Cochran * Emily Copeland * Nicole Dancel * Rick Dancel
* Daiva Daugirdiene * John DiBlasio * Minnie Domingo * Rodrigo Fresan * Gail Godwin
* Dave Gould
* Ron Hansen
* Everett Irving * Janet Irving * Stephanie Irving * Bronwen Jervis * Karina Juarez * Delia Louzan * Mary Ellen Mark * Jose Antonio Martinez * Anna von Planta * Benjamin Alire Saenz * Marty Schwartz * Nick Spengler * Jack Stapleton * Abraham Verghese * Ana Isabel Villasenor
* ABOUT THE AUTHOR *
JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven.
Mr. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times--winning once, in 1980, for his novel The World According to Garp. He received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for his short story "Interior Space." In 2000, Mr. Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person.
An international writer--his novels have been translated into more than thirty-five languages--John Irving lives in Toronto. His all-time bestselling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Avenue of Mysteries is his fourteenth novel.
John Irving, Avenue of Mysteries
(Series: # )
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