“No — it’s not road kill,” Juan Diego said. “It’s my blood. It dripped from Rivera’s truck — Diablo didn’t lick up every drop.”
“Were you writing?” Miriam, the imperious mother, asked Juan Diego.
“It sounds like a gruesome story,” the daughter, Dorothy, said.
Their two less-than-angelic faces peered down at him; he was aware that they’d both been to the lavatory and had brushed their teeth — their breath, but not his, was very fresh. The flight attendants were fussing about the first-class cabin.
Cathay Pacific 841 was descending to Hong Kong; a foreign but welcome smell was in the air, definitely not the Oaxaca basurero.
“We were about to wake you, when you woke up,” Miriam told him.
“You don’t want to miss the green-tea muffins — they’re almost as good as sex,” Dorothy said.
“Sex, sex, sex — enough sex, Dorothy,” her mother said.
Juan Diego, aware of how bad his breath must be, gave the two women a tight-lipped smile. He was slowly realizing where he was, and who these two attractive women were. Oh, yes — I skipped the beta-blockers, he was remembering. I was briefly back where I belong! he was thinking; how his heart ached to be back there.
And what was this? He had an erection in his comical Cathay Pacific sleeping suit, his clownish trans-Pacific pajamas. And he hadn’t taken even half of one Viagra — his gray-blue Viagra tablets, together with the beta-blockers, were in his checked bag.
Juan Diego had slept for more than fifteen hours of what was a flight lasting sixteen hours and ten minutes. He limped off to the lavatory with noticeably quicker, lighter steps. His self-appointed angels (if not quite in the guardian category) watched him go; both mother and daughter seemed to regard him fondly.
“He’s darling, isn’t he?” Miriam asked her daughter.
“He’s cute, all right,” Dorothy said.
“Thank goodness we found him — he would be utterly lost without us!” the mother remarked.
“Thank goodness,” Dorothy repeated; the goodness word escaped somewhat unnaturally from the young woman’s overripe lips.
“He was writing, I think — imagine writing in your sleep!” Miriam exclaimed.
“About blood dripping from a truck!” Dorothy said. “Doesn’t diablo mean ‘the devil’?” she asked her mom, who just shrugged.
“Honestly, Dorothy — you do go on and on about green-tea muffins. It’s just a muffin, for Christ’s sake,” Miriam told her daughter. “Eating a muffin isn’t remotely the same as having sex!”
Dorothy rolled her eyes and sighed; her body had a permanent aspect of slouching about it, whether she sat or stood. (One could best imagine her lying down.)
Juan Diego emerged from the lavatory, smiling to the oh-so-engaging mother and daughter. He’d managed to extricate himself from the crazy Cathay Pacific pajamas, which he handed to one of the flight attendants; he was looking forward to having a green-tea muffin, if not quite as much as Dorothy apparently did.
Juan Diego’s erection had only slightly subsided, and he was very aware of it; after all, he’d missed having erections. Normally, he needed to take half a Viagra to have one — until now.
His maimed foot always throbbed a little after he’d been asleep and had just woken up, but the foot was throbbing in a new and different way — or so Juan Diego imagined. In his mind, he was fourteen again, and Rivera’s truck had just flattened his right foot. He could feel the warmth of Lupe’s lap against his neck and the back of his head. The Guadalupe doll, on Rivera’s dashboard, jiggled this way and that — the way women often seemed to be promising something unspoken and unacknowledged, which was the way Miriam and her daughter, Dorothy, presented themselves to Juan Diego right now. (Not that their hips jiggled!)
But the writer could not speak; Juan Diego’s teeth were clenched, his lips tightly sealed, as if he were still making an effort not to scream in pain and thrash his head from side to side in his long-departed sister’s lap.
6. Sex and Faith
The elongated passageway to the Regal Airport Hotel at Hong Kong International was bedecked with an incomplete assortment of Christmas memorabilia — happy-faced reindeer and Santa’s elf-laborer types, but no sleigh, no gifts, no Santa himself.
“Santa’s getting laid — he probably called an escort service,” Dorothy explained to Juan Diego.
“Enough sex, Dorothy,” her mother cautioned the wayward-looking girl.
From the testiness that infiltrated their seemingly more than mother-daughter banter, Juan Diego would have guessed this mother and daughter had been traveling together for years — improbably, for centuries.
“Santa is definitely staying here,” Dorothy said to Juan Diego. “The Christmas shit is year-round.”
“Dorothy, you’re not here year-round,” Miriam said. “You wouldn’t know.”
“We’re here enough,” the daughter sullenly said. “It feels like we’re here year-round,” she told Juan Diego.
They were on an ascending escalator, passing a crèche. To Juan Diego, it seemed strange that they’d not once been outdoors — not since he’d arrived at JFK in all the snow. The crèche was surrounded by the usual cast of characters, humans and barn animals — only one exotic creature among the animals. And the miraculous Virgin Mary could not have been entirely human, Juan Diego had always believed; here in Hong Kong she smiled shyly, averting her eyes from her admirers. At the crèche moment, wasn’t all the attention supposed to be paid to her precious son? Apparently not — the Virgin Mary was a scene-stealer. (Not only in Hong Kong, Juan Diego had always believed.)
There was Joseph — the poor fool, as Juan Diego thought of him. But if Mary truly was a virgin, Joseph appeared to be handling the childbirth episode as well as could be expected — no fiery glances or suspicious looks at the inquisitive kings and wise men and shepherds, or at the manger’s other gawkers and hangers-on: a cow, a donkey, a rooster, a camel. (The camel, of course, was the one exotic creature.)
“I’ll bet the father was one of the wise guys,” Dorothy offered.
“Enough sex, Dorothy,” her mother said.
Juan Diego wrongly surmised he was alone in noticing that the Christ Child was missing from the crèche — or buried, perhaps smothered, in the hay. “The Baby Jesus—” he started to say.
“Someone kidnapped the Holy Infant years ago,” Dorothy explained. “I don’t think the Hong Kong Chinese care.”
“Maybe the Christ Child is getting a face-lift,” Miriam offered.
“Not everyone gets a face-lift, Mother,” Dorothy said.
“That Holy Infant is no kid, Dorothy,” her mother remarked. “Believe me — Jesus has had a face-lift.”
“The Catholic Church has done more to cosmetically enhance itself than a face-lift,” Juan Diego said sharply — as if Christmas, and all the crèche promotion, were strictly a Roman Catholic affair. Both mother and daughter looked inquiringly at him, as if puzzled by his angry tone. But surely Miriam and Dorothy couldn’t have been surprised by the sting in Juan Diego’s voice — not if they’d read his novels, which they had. He had an ax to grind — not with people of faith, or believers of any kind, but with certain social and political policies of the Catholic Church.
Yet the occasional sharpness when he spoke surprised everyone about Juan Diego; he looked so mild-mannered, and — because of the maimed right foot — he moved so slowly. Juan Diego didn’t resemble a risk-taker, except when it came to his imagination.