Avenue of Mysteries - Page 55

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, Senor 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 Senor 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, Senor 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 guar

ds 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 Senor 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.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net
readsnovelonline.net Copyright 2016 - 2024