Avenue of Mysteries Read Online Free PDF

the dump reader. “ Whose idea is that?”
    “It could be the one called Hardy—maybe it’s his idea,” Lupe said. “Or, more likely, the Lawrence guy—it sounds like him.”
    When Juan Diego translated what Lupe said for Rivera, el jefe instantly agreed. “ Or the idea of the person writing the book—whoever that is,” the dump boss added. Lupe nodded that this was also true. The book was tedious while remaining unclear; it was seemingly nitpicking scrutiny of a subject that eluded any concrete description.
    “ What ‘fundamental interrelatedness of all beings’— which beings are supposedly related ?” the dump boss cried. “It sounds like something a mushroom hippie would say!”
    That got a laugh out of Lupe, who rarely laughed. Soon she and Rivera were laughing together, which was even more rare. Juan Diego would always remember how happy he was to hear both his sister and el jefe laughing.
    And now, so many years later—it had been forty years—Juan Diego was on his way to the Philippines, a trip he was taking in honor of the nameless good gringo. Yet not a single friend had asked Juan Diego how he intended to pay the dead draft dodger’s respects to the slain soldier—like his lost son, the fallen father was without a name. Of course these friends all knew that Juan Diego was a novelist; maybe the fiction writer was taking a trip for el gringo bueno symbolically.
    As a young writer, he’d been quite the traveler, and the dislocations of travel had been a repeated theme in his early novels—especially in that circus novel set in India, the one with the elephantine title. No one had been able to talk him out of that title, Juan Diego remembered fondly. A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary —what a cumbersome title it was, and what a long and complicated story! Maybe my most complicated, Juan Diego was thinking—as the limo navigated the deserted, snowbound streets of Manhattan, making its determined way to the FDR Drive. It was an SUV, and the driver was contemptuous of other vehicles and other drivers. According to the limo driver, other vehicles in the city were ill equipped for snow, and the few cars that were “almost correctly” equipped had the “wrong tires”; as for the other drivers, they didn’t know how to drive in snow.
    “Where do you think we are—fuckin’ Florida ?” the driver yelled out his window to a stranded motorist who’d slid sideways and blocked a narrow crosstown street.
    Out on the FDR Drive, a taxi had jumped the guardrail and wasstuck 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 shovel but a windshield scraper.
    “Where are you from, you jerk-off—fuckin’ Mexico ?” the limo driver shouted to him.
    “Actually,” Juan Diego said to the driver, “ I’m from Mexico.”
    “I didn’t mean you, sir—you’re gonna get to JFK on time. Your problem is, you’re just gonna wait there,” the driver told him, not nicely. “There’s nothin’ flyin’—in case you haven’t noticed, sir.”
    Indeed, Juan Diego hadn’t noticed that no planes were flying; he just wanted to be at the airport, ready to leave, whenever his flight departed. The delay, if there was one, didn’t matter to him. It was missing this trip that was unthinkable. “Behind every journey is a reason,” he found himself considering—before he remembered that he’d already written this. It was something he’d stated most emphatically in A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary. Now here I am, traveling again—there’s always a reason, he thought.
    “The past surrounded him like faces in a crowd. Among them, there was one he knew, but whose face was it?” For a moment, shrouded by the surrounding snow and intimidated by the vulgar limo driver, Juan Diego forgot that he’d already written this, too. He blamed the beta-blockers.
    F ROM THE SOUND OF him, Juan Diego’s limo driver was