At the top of the escalator, the three travelers arrived at a baffling intersection of underground passages — signs pointing to Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and to somewhere called the Sai Kung Peninsula.
“We’re taking a train?” Juan Diego asked his lady admirers.
“Not now,” Miriam told him, seizing his arm. They were connected to a train station, Juan Diego guessed, but there were confusing advertisements for tailor shops and restaurants and jewelry stores; for jewels, they were offering “endless opals.”
“Why endless? What’s so special about opals?” Juan Diego asked, but the women seemed strangely selective about listening.
“We’ll check into the hotel first, just to freshen up,” Dorothy was telling him; she’d grabbed his other arm.
Juan Diego limped forward; he imagined he wasn’t limping as much as he usually did. But why? Dorothy was rolling Juan Diego’s checked bag and her own — effortlessly, the two bags with one hand. How can she manage to do that? Juan Diego was wondering when they came upon a large floor-length mirror; it was near the registration desk for their hotel. But when Juan Diego quickly assessed himself in the mirror, his two companions weren’t visible alongside him; curiously, he did not see these two efficient women reflected in the mirror. Maybe he’d given the mirror too quick a look.
“We’ll take the train to Kowloon — we’ll see the skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island, their lights reflected in the water of the harbor. It’s better to see it after dark,” Miriam was murmuring in Juan Diego’s ear.
“We’ll grab a bite to eat — maybe have a drink or two — then take the train back to the hotel,” Dorothy told him in his other ear. “We’ll be sleepy then.”
Something told Juan Diego that he had seen these two ladies before — but where, but when?
Was it in the taxi that had jumped the guardrail and got stuck in the waist-deep snow of the jogging path that ran alongside the East River? The cabbie was attempting to dig out his rear wheels — not with a snow shovel but with a windshield scraper.
“Where are you from, you jerk-off — fuckin’ Mexico?” Juan Diego’s limo driver had shouted.
The peering faces of two women were framed in the rear window of that taxi; they could have been a mother and her daughter, but it seemed highly unlikely to Juan Diego that those two frightened-looking women could have been Miriam and Dorothy. It was difficult for Juan Diego to imagine Miriam and Dorothy being afraid. Who or what would frighten them? Yet the thought remained: he’d seen these two formidable women before — he was sure of it.
“It’s very modern,” was all Juan Diego could think of saying about the Regal Airport Hotel when he was riding on the elevator with Miriam and Dorothy. The mother and daughter had registered for him; he’d only had to show his passport. He didn’t think he’d paid.
It was one of those hotel rooms where your room key was a kind of credit card; after you’d entered your room, you stuck the card in a slot that was mounted on the wall just inside the door.
“Otherwise, your lights won’t work and your TV won’t turn on,” Dorothy had explained.
“Call us if you have any trouble with the modern devices,” Miriam told Juan Diego.
“Not just trouble with the modern shit—any kind of trouble,” Dorothy had added. On Juan Diego’s key-card folder, she’d written her room number — and her mom’s.
They’re not sharing a room? Juan Diego wondered when he was alone in his room.
In the shower, his erection returned; he knew he should take a beta-blocker — he was aware he was overdue. But his erection made him hesitate. What if Miriam, or Dorothy, made herself available to him — more unimaginable, what if both of them did?
Juan Diego removed the beta-blockers from his toilet kit; he put the tablets beside the water glass, next to his bathroom sink. They were Lopressor tablets — elliptical, a bluish gray. He took out his Viagra tablets and looked at them. The Viagra were not exactly elliptical; they were somewhat football-shaped, but four-sided. The closer similarity, between the Viagra and the Lopressor, was the color of the tablets — they were both a gray-blue color.
If such a miracle as Miriam or Dorothy making herself available to him were to happen, it would be too soon to take a Viagra now, Juan Diego knew. Even so, he removed his pill-cutting device from his toilet kit; he put it next to the Viagra tablets, on the same side of his bathroom sink — just to remind himself that half of one Viagra would suffice. (As a novelist, he was always looking ahead, too.)
I’m imagining things like a horny teenager! Juan Diego thought as he was getting dressed to rejoin the ladies. His own behavior surprised him. Under these unusual circumstances, he took no medication; he hated how the beta-blockers diminished him, and he knew better than to take half of one Viagra tablet prematurely. When he got back to the United States, Juan Diego was thinking, he must remember to thank Rosemary for telling him to experiment!
It’s too bad that Juan Diego wasn’t traveling with his doctor friend. “To thank Rosemary” (for her instructions concerning Viagra usage) was not what the writer needed to remember. Dr. Stein could have reminded Juan Diego of the reason he was feeling like a star-crossed Romeo, limping around in an older writer’s body: if you’re taking beta-blockers and you skip a dose, watch out! Your body has been starved for adrenaline; your body suddenly makes more adrenaline, and more adrenaline receptors. Those misnamed dreams, which were really heightened, high-definition memories of his childhood and early adolescence, were as much the result of Juan Diego not taking a single Lopressor tablet as was his suddenly supercharged lust for two strangers — a mother and her daughter, who seemed more familiar to him than strangers ever should.
THE TRAIN, THE AIRPORT Express to Kowloon Station, cost ninety Hong Kong dollars. Maybe his shyness prevented Juan Diego from looking closely at Miriam or Dorothy on the train; it’s doubtful he was genuinely interested in reading every word on both sides of his round-trip ticket, twice. Juan Diego was a little interested in comparing the Chinese characters to the corresponding words in English. SAME DAY RETURN was in small capitals, but there seemed to be no equivalent to small capitals in the unvarying Chinese characters.
The writer in Juan Diego found fault with “1 single journey”; shouldn’t the numeral 1 have been written out as a word? Didn’t “one single journey” look better? Almost like a title, Juan Diego thought. He wrote something on the ticket with his ever-present pen.
“What are you doing?” Miriam asked Juan Diego. “What can be so fascinating about a train ticket?”
“He’s writing again,” Dorothy said to her mother. “He’s always writing.”
“ ‘Adult Ticket to City,’ ” Juan Diego said aloud; he was reading to the women from his train ticket, which he then put away in his shirt pocket. He really didn’t know how to behave on a date; he’d never known how, but these two women were especially unnerving.
“Whenever I hear the adult word, I think of something pornographic,” Dorothy said, smiling at Juan Diego.
“Enough, Dorothy,” her mother said.
It was already dark when their train arrived at Kowloon Station; the Kowloon harborfront was crowded with tourists, many of them taking pictures of the skyscraper-lined view, but Miriam and Dorothy glided unnoticed through the crowds. It must have been a measure of Juan Diego’s infatuation with this mother and daughter that he imagined he limped less when either Miriam or Dorothy held his arm or his hand; he even believed that he managed to glide as unnoticed as the two of them.