Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving Read Free Book Online

limo driver was thinking—that was his assessment of his Mexican-American passenger.
    “We’re almost at your terminal, pal,” the driver said: the way he’d said the sir word hadn’t been any nicer. But Juan Diego was remembering Lupe, and their time together in Oaxaca. The dump reader was daydreaming;he didn’t really hear his driver’s disrespectful tone of voice. And without his dear sister, the mind reader, beside him, Juan Diego didn’t know the bigot’s thoughts.
    It wasn’t that Juan Diego had never encountered a commonality with the Mexican-American experience. It was more a matter of his mind, and where it wandered—his mind was often elsewhere.

• 3 •
    Mother and Daughter
    The handicapped man had not anticipated that he would be stranded at JFK for twenty-seven hours. Cathay Pacific sent him to the first-class lounge of British Airways. This was more comfortable than what the economy-fare passengers had to deal with—the concessionaires ran out of food, and the public toilets were not properly attended to—but the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, scheduled to depart at 9:15 A . M . on December 27, did not take off till noon of the following day, and Juan Diego had packed his beta-blockers with his toilet articles in his checked bag. The flight to Hong Kong was some sixteen hours. Juan Diego would have to do without his medication for more than forty-three hours; he would go without the beta-blockers for almost two days. (As a rule, dump kids don’t panic.)
    While Juan Diego considered calling Rosemary to ask her if he was at risk being without his medication for an unknown period of time, he didn’t do it. He remembered what Dr. Stein had said: that if he ever had to go off the beta-blockers, for any reason, he should stop taking them gradually. (Inexplicably, the gradually part made him think there was nothing risky about stopping or restarting the beta-blockers.)
    Juan Diego knew he would get scant sleep as he waited in the British Airways lounge at JFK; he looked forward to catching up on his sleep whenever he eventually boarded the sixteen-hour flight to Hong Kong. Juan Diego didn’t call Dr. Stein because he was looking forward to having a break from the beta-blockers. With any luck, he might have one of his old dreams; his all-important childhood memories might come back to him—chronologically, he hoped. (As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.)
    British Airways did its best to make the crippled man comfortable;the other first-class passengers were aware of Juan Diego’s limp and the misshapen, custom-made shoe on his damaged foot. Everyone was very understanding; though there were not enough chairs for all the stranded passengers in the first-class lounge, no one complained that Juan Diego had put two chairs together—he’d made a kind of couch for himself, so he could elevate that tragic-looking foot.
    Yes, the limp made Juan Diego look older than he was—he looked at least sixty-four, not fifty-four. And there was something else: more than a hint of resignation gave him a faraway expression, as if the lion’s share of excitement in Juan Diego’s life had resided in his distant childhood and early adolescence. After all, he’d outlived everyone he’d loved—clearly, this had aged him.
    His hair was still black; only if you were near him—and you had to look closely—could you see the intermittent flecks of gray. He’d not lost any hair, but it was long, which gave him the commingled appearance of a rebellious teenager and an aging hippie—that is, of someone who was unfashionable on purpose. His dark-brown eyes were almost as black as his hair; he was still a handsome man, and a slender one, yet he made an “old” impression. Women—younger women, especially—offered him help he didn’t necessarily need.
    An aura of fate had marked him. He moved slowly; he often appeared to be lost in thought, or in his imagination—as