Avenue of Mysteries (3 page)

“Rivera won’t let us leave the shack unless he’s with us,” Lupe explained. Juan Diego not only translated for her; he elaborated on this detail.

Rivera truly protected them, the boy told Pepe. El jefe was both
like
a father and
better
than a father because he provided for the dump kids
and
he watched over them. “And he doesn’t ever beat us,” Lupe interrupted him; Juan Diego dutifully translated this, too.

“I see,” Brother Pepe said. But he was only beginning to see what the brother and sister’s situation was: indeed, it was better than the situation for many children who separated the stuff they picked through and sorted in the basurero. And it was worse for them, too—because Lupe and Juan Diego were resented by the scavengers and their families in Guerrero. These two dump kids may have had Rivera’s protection (for which they were resented), but el jefe was
not exactly
their father. And their mother, who worked nights on Zaragoza Street, was a prostitute who didn’t actually
live
in Guerrero.

There is a pecking order everywhere, Brother Pepe thought sadly to himself.

“What’s a pecking order?” Lupe asked her brother. (Pepe was now beginning to understand that the girl knew what he was thinking.)

“A pecking order is how the
other
niños de la basura feel superior to us,” Juan Diego said to Lupe.

“Precisely,” Pepe said, a little uneasily. Here he’d come to meet the dump reader, the fabled boy from Guerrero, bringing him good books, as a good teacher would—only to discover that he, Pepe, the Jesuit himself, was the one with a lot to learn.

That was when the constantly complaining but unseen dog showed itself, if it was actually a dog. The weaselly little creature crawled out from under the couch—more rodential than canine, Pepe thought.

“His name is Dirty White—he’s a dog, not a rat!” Lupe said indignantly to Brother Pepe.

Juan Diego explained this, but the boy added: “Dirty White is a dirty little coward—an ungrateful one.”

“I saved him from death!” Lupe cried. Even as the skinny, hunched dog sidled toward the girl’s outstretched arms, his lips involuntarily curled, baring his pointed teeth.

“He should be called Saved from Death, not Dirty White,” Juan
Diego said, laughing. “She found him with his head caught in a milk carton.”

“He’s a puppy. He was starving,” Lupe protested.

“Dirty White is still starving for something,” Juan Diego said.

“Stop,” his sister told him; the puppy shivered in her arms.

Pepe tried to repress his thoughts, but this was harder than he’d imagined it would be; he decided it would be best to leave, even abruptly, rather than allow the clairvoyant girl to read his mind. Pepe didn’t want the thirteen-year-old innocent to know what he was thinking.

He started his VW Beetle; there was no sign of Rivera, or el jefe’s “scariest-looking” dog, as the Jesuit teacher drove away from Guerrero. The spires of black smoke from the basurero were rising all around him, as were the good-hearted Jesuit’s blackest thoughts.

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio looked upon Juan Diego and Lupe’s mother—Esperanza, the prostitute—as the “fallen.” In the minds of the two old priests, there were no fallen souls who had fallen further than prostitutes; there were no miserable creatures of the human kind as lost as these unfortunate women were. Esperanza was hired as a cleaning woman for the Jesuits in an allegedly holy effort to
save
her.

But don’t these dump kids need saving, too? Pepe wondered. Aren’t los niños de la basura among the “fallen,” or aren’t they in danger of
future
falling? Or of falling
further
?

When that boy from Guerrero was a grown-up, complaining to his doctor about the beta-blockers, he should have had Brother Pepe standing beside him; Pepe would have given testimony to Juan Diego’s childhood memories
and
his fiercest dreams. Even this dump reader’s
nightmares
were worth preserving, Brother Pepe knew.

W
HEN THESE DUMP KIDS
were in their early teens, Juan Diego’s most recurrent dream wasn’t a nightmare. The boy often dreamed of flying—well, not exactly. It was an awkward-looking and peculiar kind of airborne activity, which bore little resemblance to “flying.” The dream was always the same: people in a crowd looked up; they saw that Juan Diego was walking on the sky. From below—that is, from ground level—the boy appeared to be very carefully walking upside down in the heavens. (It also seemed that he was counting to himself.)

There was nothing spontaneous about Juan Diego’s movement across the sky—he was not flying freely, as a bird flies; he lacked the powerful, straightforward thrust of an airplane. Yet, in that oft-repeated dream,
Juan Diego knew he was where he belonged. From his upside-down perspective in the sky, he could see the anxious, upturned faces in the crowd.

When he described the dream to Lupe, the boy would also say to his strange sister: “There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands—with
both
hands.” Naturally, this made no sense to a thirteen-year-old—even to a
normal
thirteen-year-old. Lupe’s reply was unintelligible, even to Juan Diego.

One time when he asked her what she thought of his dream about walking upside down in the heavens, Lupe was typically mysterious, though Juan Diego could at least comprehend her exact words.

“It’s a dream about the future,” the girl said.

“
Whose
future?” Juan Diego asked.

“Not yours, I hope,” his sister replied, more mysteriously.

“But I
love
this dream!” the boy had said.

“It’s a death dream,” was all Lupe would say further.

But now, as an older man, since he’d been taking the beta-blockers, his childhood dream of walking on the sky was lost to him, and Juan Diego didn’t get to relive the nightmare of that long-ago morning he was crippled in Guerrero. The dump reader missed that nightmare.

He’d complained to his doctor. “The beta-blockers are blocking my
memories
!” Juan Diego cried. “They are stealing my
childhood
—they are
robbing
my dreams!” To his doctor, all this hysteria meant was that Juan Diego missed the kick his adrenaline gave him. (Beta-blockers really do a number on your adrenaline.)

His doctor, a no-nonsense woman named Rosemary Stein, had been a close friend of Juan Diego’s for twenty years; she was familiar with what she thought of as his hysterical overstatements.

Dr. Stein knew very well why she had prescribed the beta-blockers for Juan Diego; her dear friend was at risk of having a heart attack. He not only had very high blood pressure (170 over 100), but he was pretty sure his mother and one of his possible fathers had died of a heart attack—his mother, definitely, at a young age. Juan Diego had no shortage of adrenaline—the fight-or-flight hormone, which is released during moments of stress, fear, calamity, and performance anxiety,
and
during a heart attack. Adrenaline also shunts blood away from the gut and viscera—the blood goes to your muscles, so that you can run. (Maybe a dump reader has more need of adrenaline than most people.)

Beta-blockers do not prevent heart attacks, Dr. Stein had explained to Juan Diego, but these medications block the adrenaline receptors in
the body and thus shield the heart from the potentially devastating effect of the adrenaline released during a heart attack.

“Where
are
my damn adrenaline receptors?” Juan Diego had asked Dr. Stein. (“Dr.
Rosemary,
” he called her—just to tease her.)

“In the lungs, blood vessels, heart—almost everywhere,” she’d answered him. “Adrenaline makes your heart beat faster. You breathe harder, the hair on your arms stands up, your pupils dilate, your blood vessels constrict—not good, if you’re having a heart attack.”

“What could be
good,
if I’m having a heart attack?” Juan Diego had asked her. (Dump kids are persistent—they’re stubborn types.)

“A quiet, relaxed heart—one that beats slowly, not faster and faster,” Dr. Stein said. “A person on beta-blockers has a slow pulse; your pulse cannot increase, no matter what.”

There were consequences of lowering your blood pressure; a person on beta-blockers should be a little careful not to drink too much alcohol, which raises your blood pressure, but Juan Diego didn’t really drink. (Well, okay, he drank beer, but
only
beer—and not too much, he thought.) And beta-blockers reduce the circulation of blood to your extremities; your hands and feet feel cold. Yet Juan Diego didn’t complain about this side effect—he’d even joked to his friend Rosemary that feeling cold was a luxury for a boy from Oaxaca.

Some patients on beta-blockers bemoan the accompanying lethargy, both a weariness and a reduced tolerance for physical exercise, but at his age—Juan Diego was now fifty-four—what did he care? He’d been a cripple since he was fourteen;
limping
was his exercise. He’d had forty years of sufficient limping. Juan Diego didn’t want more
exercise
!

He did wish he felt more alive, not so “diminished”—the word he used to describe how the beta-blockers made him feel, when he talked to Rosemary about his lack of sexual interest. (Juan Diego didn’t say he was impotent; even to his doctor, the
diminished
word was where he began, and ended, the conversation.)

“I didn’t know you were in a sexual relationship,” Dr. Stein said to him; in fact, she knew very well that he
wasn’t
in one.

“My dear Dr. Rosemary,” Juan Diego said. “If I
were
in a sexual relationship, I believe I
would be
diminished.”

She’d given him a prescription for Viagra—six tablets a month, 100 milligrams—and told him to experiment.

“Don’t wait till you meet someone,” Rosemary said.

He hadn’t waited; he’d not met anyone, but he
had
experimented.

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.