"The puppy!" Edward Bonshaw cried. "You burned a dog with your mother and that dear hippie child? You burned another dog in their fire!"
"Everyone should be so lucky as to be burned with a puppy," Juan Diego told the Iowan.
The hissing blue flame had everyone's attention, but Lupe reached up her arms and pulled her brother's face down to her lips. Juan Diego thought she was going to kiss him, but Lupe wanted to whisper in his ear, although no one else could have understood her, not even if they'd heard.
"It's definitely the wet puppy," Rivera was saying.
"La nariz," Lupe whispered in her brother's ear, touching his nose. The second she spoke, the hissing sound stopped--the blue flame disappeared. The flaming blue hiss was the nose, all right, Juan Diego was thinking.
The jolt of Philippine Airlines 177 landing in Bohol didn't even wake him up, as if there were nothing that could wake Juan Diego from the dream of when his future started.
* 16 *
King of Beasts
Several passengers paused at the cockpit exit for Philippine Airlines 177, telling the flight attendant of their concerns about the older-looking, brown-skinned gentleman who was slumped over in a window seat. "He's either dead to the world or just dead," one of the passengers told the flight attendant, in a confounding combination of the vernacular and the laconic.
Juan Diego definitely looked dead, but his thoughts were far away, on high, in the spires of smoke funneling above the Oaxaca basurero; if only in his mind, he had a vulture's view of the city limits--of Cinco Senores, where the circus grounds were, and the distant but brightly colored tents of Circo de La Maravilla.
The paramedics were notified from the cockpit; before all the passengers had left the plane, the rescuers rushed on. Various lifesaving methods were seconds away from being performed when one of the lifesavers realized that Juan Diego was very much alive, but by then the supposedly stricken passenger's carry-on had been searched. The prescription drugs drew the most immediate attention. The beta-blockers signified there was a heart problem; the Viagra, with the printed warning not to take the stuff with nitrates, prompted one of the paramedics to ask Juan Diego, with no little urgency, if he'd been taking nitrates.
Juan Diego not only didn't know what nitrates were; his mind was in Oaxaca, forty years ago, and Lupe was whispering in his ear.
"La nariz," Juan Diego whispered to the anxious paramedic; she was a young woman, and she understood a little Spanish.
"Your nose?" the young paramedic asked; to make herself clear, she touched her own nose when she spoke.
"You can't breathe? You're having trouble breathing?" another of the paramedics asked; he also touched his nose, doubtless to signify breathing.
"Viagra can make you stuffy," a third paramedic said.
"No, not my nose," Juan Diego said, laughing. "I was dreaming about the Virgin Mary's nose," he told the team of paramedics.
This was not helpful; the insanity of mentioning the Virgin Mary's nose distracted the medical personnel from the line of questioning they should have pursued--namely, if Juan Diego had been manipulating the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Yet, to the team of paramedics, the passenger's life signs were okay; that he'd managed to sleep through a turbulent landing (crying children, screaming women) was not a medical matter.
"He looked dead," the flight attendant kept saying to anyone who would listen to her. But Juan Diego had been oblivious to the rocky landing, the sobbing children, the wails of the women who'd been certain they were going to die. The miracle (or not) of the Virgin Mary's nose had completely captured Juan Diego's attention, as it had so many years ago; all he'd heard was the hissing blue flame, which had disappeared as suddenly as it first appeared.
The paramedics didn't linger with Juan Diego; they weren't needed. Meawhile, the nose-dreamer's friend and former student kept sending text messages, inquiring if his old teacher was all right.
Juan Diego didn't know it, but Clark French was a famous writer--at least in the Philippines. It is too simplistic to say this was because the Philippines had a lot of Catholic readers, and uplifting novels of faith and belief were received in a more welcoming fashion there than such novels were greeted in the United States or in Europe. Partly true, yes, but Clark French had married a Filipino woman from a venerable Manila family--Quintana was a distinguished name in the medical community. This helped make Clark a more widely read author in the Philippines than he was in his own country.
As Clark's onetime teacher, Juan Diego still saw his former student as needing protection; the condescending reviews Clark had received in the United States amounted to all that Juan Diego knew of the younger writer's reputation. And Juan Diego and Clark corresponded by email, which gave Juan Diego only a general idea of where Clark French lived--namely, somewhere in the Philippines.
Clark lived in Manila; his wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, was what Clark called a "baby doctor." Juan Diego knew that Dr. Quintana was a higher-up at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center--"one of the leading hospitals in the Philippines," Clark was fond of saying. A private hospital, Bienvenido had told Juan Diego--to distinguish Cardinal Santos from what Bienvenido disparagingly called "the dirty government hospitals." A Catholic hospital was what registered with Juan Diego--the Catholic factor mingled with his annoyance at not knowing if a "baby doctor" meant that Clark's wife was a pediatrician or an OB-GYN.
Because Juan Diego had spent his entire adult life in the same university town, and his life as a writer in Iowa City had (until now) been inseparable from that as a teacher at a single university, he hadn't realized that Clark French was
one of those other writers--the ones who can live anywhere, or everywhere.
Juan Diego did know that Clark was one of those writers who appeared to be at every authors' festival; he seemed to like, or excel at, the nonwriting part of being a writer--the talking-about-it part, which Juan Diego didn't like or do well. In fact, increasingly, as he grew older, the writing (the doing-it part) was the only aspect of being a writer that Juan Diego enjoyed.
Clark French traveled all over the world, but Manila was Clark's home--his home base, anyway. Clark and his wife had no children. Because he traveled? Because she was a "baby doctor," and she saw enough children? Or, if Josefa Quintana was the other kind of "baby doctor," perhaps she'd seen too many terrible complications of an obstetrical and gynecological kind.
Whatever the reason for the no-children situation, Clark French was one of those writers who could and did write everywhere, and there wasn't an important authors' festival or writers' conference that he hadn't traveled to; the public part of being a writer did not confine him to the Philippines. Clark came "home" to Manila because his wife was there; she was the one with an actual job.
Probably because she was a doctor, and one from such a distinguished family of doctors--most medical people in the Philippines had heard of her--the paramedics who'd examined Juan Diego on the plane were somewhat indiscreet. They gave Dr. Josefa Quintana a full account of their medical (and nonmedical) findings. And Clark French was standing right beside his wife, listening in.
The sleeping passenger had an out-of-it appearance; he'd laughingly dismissed the dead-to-the-world episode on the grounds of having been engrossed in a dream about the Virgin Mary.