Dr. Stein had refilled his prescription every month. "Maybe half a tablet is sufficient," Juan Diego told her, after his experiments. He hoarded the extra tablets. He'd not complained about any of the side effects from the Viagra. It allowed him to have an erection; he could have an orgasm. Why would he mind a stuffy nose?
Another side effect of beta-blockers is insomnia, but Juan Diego found nothing new or particularly upsetting about that; to lie awake in the dark with his demons was almost comforting. Many of Juan Diego's demons had been his childhood companions--he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.
An overdose of beta-blockers can cause dizziness, even fainting spells, but Juan Diego wasn't worried about dizziness or fainting. "Cripples know how to fall--falling is no big deal to us," he told Dr. Stein.
; Yet, even more than the erectile dysfunction, it was his disjointed dreams that disturbed him; Juan Diego said that his memories and his dreams lacked a followable chronology. He hated the beta-blockers because, in disrupting his dreams, they had cut him off from his childhood, and his childhood mattered more to him than childhood mattered to other adults--to most other adults, Juan Diego thought. His childhood, and the people he'd encountered there--the ones who'd changed his life, or who'd been witnesses to what had happened to him at that crucial time--were what Juan Diego had instead of religion.
Close friend though she was, Dr. Rosemary Stein didn't know everything about Juan Diego; she knew very little about her friend's childhood. To Dr. Stein, it probably appeared to come out of nowhere when Juan Diego spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness to her, seemingly about the beta-blockers. "Believe me, Rosemary, if the beta-blockers had taken my religion away, I would not complain to you about that! On the contrary, I would ask you to prescribe beta-blockers for everyone!"
This amounted to more of her passionate friend's hysterical overstatements, Dr. Stein thought. After all, he'd burned his hands saving books from burning--even books about Catholic history. But Rosemary Stein knew only bits and pieces about Juan Diego's life as a dump kid; she knew more about her friend when he was older. She didn't really know the boy from Guerrero.
* 2 *
The Mary Monster
On the day after Christmas, 2010, a snowstorm had swept through New York City. The next day, the unplowed streets of Manhattan were strewn with abandoned cars and cabs. A bus had burned on Madison Avenue, near East Sixty-second Street; spinning in the snow, its rear tires caught fire and ignited the bus. The blackened hulk had dotted the surrounding snow with ashes.
To the guests in those hotels along Central Park South, the view of the pristine whiteness of the park--and of those few brave families with young children, at play in the newly fallen snow--contrasted strangely with the absence of any vehicular traffic on the broad avenues and smaller streets. In the brightly whitened morning, even Columbus Circle was eerily quiet and empty; at a normally busy intersection, such as the corner of West Fifty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue, not a single taxi was moving. The only cars in sight were stranded, half buried in the snow.
The virtual moonscape, which Manhattan was that Monday morning, prompted the concierge at Juan Diego's hotel to seek special assistance for the handicapped man. This was not a day for a cripple to hail a cab, or risk riding in one. The concierge had prevailed upon a limousine company--not a very good one--to take Juan Diego to Queens, though there were conflicting reports regarding whether John F. Kennedy International Airport was open or not. On TV, they were saying that JFK was closed, yet Juan Diego's Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong was allegedly departing on time. As much as the concierge doubted this--he was certain that the flight would be delayed, if not canceled--he had nonetheless indulged the anxious and crippled guest. Juan Diego was agitated about getting to the airport on time--though no flights were departing, or had departed, in the aftermath of the storm.
It was not Hong Kong he cared about; that was a detour Juan Diego could do without, but a couple of his colleagues had persuaded him that he shouldn't go all the way to the Philippines without stopping to see Hong Kong en route. What was there to see? Juan Diego had wondered. While Juan Diego didn't understand what "air miles" actually meant (or how they were calculated), he understood that his Cathay Pacific flight was free; his friends had also persuaded him that first class on Cathay Pacific was something he must experience--something else he was supposed to see, apparently.
Juan Diego thought that all this attention from his friends was because he was retiring from teaching; what else could explain why his colleagues had insisted on helping him organize this trip? But there were other reasons. Though he was young to retire, he was indeed "handicapped"--and his close friends and colleagues knew he was taking medication for his heart.
"I'm not retiring from writing!" he'd assured them. (Juan Diego had come to New York for Christmas at the invitation of his publisher.) It was "merely" the teaching he was leaving, Juan Diego said, though for years the writing and the teaching had been inseparable; together, they'd been his entire adult life. And one of his former writing students had become very involved with what Juan Diego now thought of as an aggressive takeover of his trip to the Philippines. This former student, Clark French, had made Juan Diego's mission in Manila--as Juan Diego had thought of it, for years--Clark's mission. Clark's writing was as assertive, or forced, as he'd been about taking over his former teacher's trip to the Philippines--or so Juan Diego thought.
Yet Juan Diego had done nothing to resist his former student's well-intentioned assistance; he didn't want to hurt Clark's feelings. Besides, it wasn't easy for Juan Diego to travel, and he'd heard that the Philippines could be difficult--even dangerous. A little overplanning wouldn't hurt, he'd decided.
Before he knew it, a tour of the Philippines had materialized; his mission in Manila had given rise to side trips and distracting adventures. He worried that the purpose of his going to the Philippines had been compromised, though Clark French would have been quick to tell his former teacher that the zeal to assist him was borne of Clark's admiration for what a noble cause (for so long!) had inspired Juan Diego to take this trip in the first place.
As a very young teenager in Oaxaca, Juan Diego had met an American draft dodger; the young man had run away from the United States to evade the draft for the Vietnam War. The draft dodger's dad had been among the thousands of American soldiers who'd died in the Philippines in World War II--but not on the Bataan Death March, and not in the intense battle for Corregidor. (Juan Diego didn't always remember the exact details.)
The American draft dodger didn't want to die in Vietnam; before he died, the young man told Juan Diego, he wanted to visit the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial--to pay his respects to his slain father. But the draft dodger didn't survive the misadventure of his running away to Mexico; he had died in Oaxaca. Juan Diego had pledged to take the trip to the Philippines for the dead draft dodger; he would make the journey to Manila for him.
Yet Juan Diego had never known the young American's name; the antiwar boy had befriended Juan Diego and his seemingly retarded little sister, Lupe, but they knew him only as "the good gringo." The dump kids had met el gringo bueno before Juan Diego became a cripple. At first, the young American seemed too friendly to be doomed, though Rivera had called him a "mescal hippie," and the dump kids knew el jefe's opinion of the hippies who came to Oaxaca from the United States at that time.
The dump boss believed that the mushroom hippies were "the stupid ones"; he meant they were seeking something they thought was profound--in el jefe's opinion, "something as ridiculous as the interconnectedness of all things," though the dump kids knew that el jefe himself was a Mary worshiper.
As for the mescal hippies, they were smarter, Rivera said, but they were "the self-destructive ones." And the mescal hippies were the ones who were also addicted to prostitutes, or so the dump boss believed. The good gringo was "killing himself on Zaragoza Street," el jefe said. The dump kids had hoped not; Lupe and Juan Diego adored el gringo bueno. They didn't want the darling boy to be destroyed by his sexual desires or the intoxicating drink distilled from the fermented juice of certain species of agave.
"It's all the same," Rivera had told the dump kids, darkly. "Believe me, you're not exactly uplifted by what you end up with. Those low women and too much mescal--you're left looking at that little worm!"
Juan Diego knew the dump boss meant the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle, but Lupe said that el jefe had also been thinking about his penis--how it looked after he'd been with a prostitute.
"You believe all men are always thinking about their penises," Juan Diego told his sister.
"All men are always thinking about their penises," the mind reader said. To a degree, this was the point past which Lupe would no longer allow herself to adore the good gringo. The doomed American had crossed an imaginary line--the penis line, perhaps, though Lupe would never have put it that way.
One night, when the dump reader was reading aloud to Lupe, Rivera was with them in the shack in Guerrero, listening to the reading, too. The dump boss was probably building a new bookcase, or there was something wrong with the barbecue and Rivera was fixing it; maybe he had stopped by just to see if Dirty White (a.k.a. Saved from Death) had died.
The book Juan Diego was reading that night was another discarded academic tome, a mind-numbing exercise in scholarship, which had been designated for burning by one or the other of those two old Jesuit priests Father Alfonso and Father Octavio.
This particular work of unread academia had actually been written by a Jesuit, and its subject was both literary and historical--namely, an analysis of D. H. Lawrence's writing on Thomas Hardy. As the dump reader had not read anything by Lawrence or Hardy, a scholarly examination of Lawrence's writing on Hardy would have been mystifying--even in Spanish. And Juan Diego had selected this particular book because it was in English; he'd wanted more practice reading English, though his less-than-rapt audience (Lupe and Rivera and the disagreeable dog Dirty White) might have understood him better en espanol.
To add to the difficulty, several pages of the book had been consumed by fire, and a vile odor from the basurero still clung to the burned book; Dirty White wanted to sniff it, repeatedly.