Font Size:  

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 ninos 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.

WHEN 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.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
Articles you may like