John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“Did you say un milagro?” Edward Bonshaw asked Father Octavio.

“Milagroso!” Lupe shouted. Señor Eduardo had no trouble understanding the miraculous word.

“Esperanza fell off the ladder, Edward,” Father Octavio told the Iowan.

“She was struck dead before she fell!” Lupe was babbling, but Juan Diego left the struck-dead drama untranslated; darting eyes don’t kill you, unless you’re scared to death.

“Where’s Mary’s nose?” Edward Bonshaw asked, pointing at the noseless giant Virgin.

“Gone! Vanished in a puff of smoke!” Lupe was raving. “Keep your eye on Bad Mary — her other parts may start to disappear.”

“Lupe, tell the truth,” Juan Diego said.

But Edward Bonshaw, who hadn’t understood a word Lupe said, couldn’t take his eyes from the maimed Mary.

“It’s just her nose, Eduardo,” Brother Pepe tried to tell the zealot. “It means nothing — it’s probably lying around somewhere.”

“How can it mean nothing, Pepe?” the Iowan asked. “How can the Virgin Mary’s nose not be there?”

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were down on all fours; they weren’t praying — they were looking for the Mary Monster’s missing nose under the first few rows of pews.

“You wouldn’t know anything about la nariz, I suppose?” Brother Pepe asked Juan Diego.

“Nada,” Juan Diego said.

“Bad Mary’s eyes moved — she looked alive,” Lupe was saying.

“They’ll never believe you, Lupe,” Juan Diego told his sister.

“The parrot man will,” Lupe said, pointing to Señor Eduardo. “He needs to believe more than he does — he’ll believe anything.”

“What won’t we believe?” Brother Pepe asked Juan Diego.

“I thought that’s what he said! What do you mean, Juan Diego?” Edward Bonshaw asked.

“Tell him! Bad Mary moved her eyes — the giant Virgin was looking all around!” Lupe cried.

Juan Diego crammed his hand in his crowded pocket; he was actually holding the Virgin Mary’s nose when he told them about the giant Virgin’s angry-looking eyes, how they kept darting everywhere but always came back to Esperanza’s cleavage.

“It’s a miracle,” the Iowan said matter-of-factly.

“Let’s get the man of science involved,” Father Alfonso said sarcastically.

“Yes, Vargas can arrange an autopsy,” Father Octavio said.

“You want to autopsy a miracle?” Brother Pepe asked, both innocently and mischievously.

“She was frightened to death — that’s all you’ll find in an autopsy,” Juan Diego told them, squeezing the Holy Mother’s broken nose.

“Bad Mary did it — that’s all I know,” Lupe said. True enough, Juan Diego decided; he translated the Bad Mary bit.

“Bad Mary!” Sister Gloria repeated. All of them looked at the noseless Virgin, as if expecting more damage — of one kind or another. But Brother Pepe noticed something about Edward Bonshaw: only the Iowan was looking at the Virgin Mary’s eyes — just her eyes.

Un milagrero, Brother Pepe was thinking as he watched Señor Eduardo — the Iowan is a miracle monger, if I’ve ever seen one!

Juan Diego wasn’t thinking at all. He had a grip on the Virgin Mary’s nose, as if he would never let go.

DREAMS EDIT THEMSELVES; DREAMS are ruthless with details. Common sense does not dictate what remains, or is not included, in a dream. A two-minute dream can feel like forever.

Dr. Vargas didn’t hold back; he told Juan Diego much more about adrenaline, but not everything Vargas said found its way into Juan Diego’s dream. According to Vargas, adrenaline was toxic in large amounts, such as would be released in a situation of sudden fear.

Juan Diego had even asked the man of science about other emotional states. What else, besides fear, could lead to an arrhythmia? If you had the wrong kind of heart, what else could give you these fatal heart rhythms?

“Any strong emotion, positive or negative, such as happiness or sadness,” Vargas had told the boy, but this answer wasn’t in Juan Diego’s dream. “People have died during sexual intercourse,” Vargas told him. Turning to Edward Bonshaw, Dr. Vargas said: “Even in religious passion.”

“What about whipping yourself?” Brother Pepe had asked in his half-innocent, half-mischievous way.

“Not documented,” the man of science slyly said.

Golfers had died hitting holes-in-one. An unusually high number of Germans suffered sudden cardiac deaths whenever the German soccer team was competing for the World Cup. Men, only a day or two after their wives have died; women who’ve lost their husbands, not only to death; parents who’ve lost children. They have all died of sadness, suddenly. These examples of emotional states leading to fatal heart rhythms were missing from Juan Diego’s dream.

Yet the sound of Rivera’s truck — that special whine the reverse gear made when Rivera was backing up — made its insidious way into Juan Diego’s dream, no doubt at the moment the landing gear was dropping down from his plane, which was about to arrive in Bohol. Dreams do this: like the Roman Catholic Church, dreams co-opt things; dreams appropriate things that are not truly their own.

To a dream, it’s all the same: the grinding sound of the landing gear for Philippine Airlines 177, the whine that Rivera’s truck made in reverse. As for how the tainted smell of the Oaxaca morgue managed to infiltrate Juan Diego’s dream on his short flight from Manila to Bohol — well, not everything can be explained.

Rivera knew where the loading platform was at the morgue; he knew the autopsy guy, too — the forensic surgeon who cut open the bodies in the anfiteatro de disección. As far as the dump kids were concerned, there’d never been any need to perform an autopsy on Esperanza. The Virgin Mary had scared her to death, and — what’s more — the Mary Monster had meant to do it.

Rivera did his best to prepare Lupe for what Esperanza’s cadaver would look like — the stitched autopsy scar (neck to groin), running straight down her sternum. But Lupe was unprepared for the pile of unclaimed corpses awaiting autopsies, or for the post-op body of el gringo bueno, whose outstretched white arms (as if he’d just been removed from the cross, where he’d been crucified) stood in stark relief against the more brown-skinned cadavers.

The good gringo’s autopsy gash was fresh, newly stitched, and there’d been some cutting in the area of his head — more damage than a crown of thorns would have caused. The good gringo’s war was over. It was a shock to Lupe and Juan Diego to see the hippie boy’s cast-aside cadaver. El gringo bueno’s Christlike face was at last at rest, though the Christ tattooed on the beautiful boy’s pale body had also suffered from the forensic surgeon’s dissection.

It was not lost on Lupe that her mother and the good gringo were the most beautiful bodies on display in the amphitheater of dissection, though they’d both looked a lot better when they were alive.

“We take el gringo bueno, too — you promised me we would burn him,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “We’ll burn him with Mother.”

Rivera had talked the autopsy guy into giving him and the dump kids Esperanza’s body, but when Juan Diego translated Lupe’s request — how she wanted the dead hippie, too — the forensic surgeon had a fit.

The American runaway was part of a crime investigation. Someone in the Hotel Somega told the police that the hippie had succumbed to alcohol poisoning — a prostitute claimed the kid had “just died” on top of her. But the autopsy guy had learned otherwise. El gringo bueno had been beaten to death; he’d been drunk, but the alcohol wasn’t what killed him.