We don’t quite understand miracles. This is the way of most divine things; saints and miracles belong to a different world and use a different set of rules. It is hard to tell the human purpose of St. Joseph of Cupertino’s miraculous levitation, for instance. Whenever he was transported by faith, he was also transported by physics, often several feet into the air, sometimes in the middle of a homily. He would at times remain up there for hours, paused in mid-speech, while his fellow brothers waited for him to descend and finish his thought. It is also difficult to tell the usefulness of the miracles of St. Christina the Astonishing—after rising from the dead in her twenties, she would upon occasion hurl herself into a river and allow herself to be carried downstream into the path of a churning mill wheel. There she would be thrown in violent circles before emerging unscathed: a miracle. And then there was St. Anthony of Padua. His miracles were varied, all beyond understanding, but perhaps the most inscrutable was the miracle at the water’s edge. Finding no human company to address, he preached at the water’s edge so piously that a school of fish broke the surface to listen—a miracle difficult to understand, as fish have no souls to save and no voices to convert unbelievers.
Compared to these, the Soria miracles were quite palatable. Yes, sometimes the pilgrims to Bicho Raro became impossibly ugly or fearfully radiant, intensely practical or clumsily fanciful. Some grew feathers. Some shrank to the size of a mouse. Sometimes shadows came to life and scampered around the pilgrim. Sometimes wounds formed that refused to heal. But these oddities were no random punishments but rather messages specific to each pilgrim. The darkness made flesh was a concrete puzzle that, if solved, provided the mental tools the pilgrim needed to move on.
The intention of every Soria miracle was the same: to heal the mind.
Daniel Soria had been telling himself this over and over since the night before. This trial was not a punishment, he reminded himself. This trial was a miracle.
But it did not feel like a miracle.
He was out in the high desert night, sitting cross-legged by a smoldering fire. Although it was very cold, it was a very small fire, because Daniel could not shake the image of Joaquin coming after him despite all warnings and finding him by the light of the blaze. So he kept it near-suffocated, and sat with his palms pressed against the still-warm ground.
It was so dark. Although he was curved into the small orange circle of light provided by a smoldering fire, everything he looked at appeared dull. He seemed to be having difficulty seeing light the same way he had this time yesterday. It was as if there was a gauzy curtain hung between his eyes and the fire, and two heavier curtains on either side of his vision, threatening to close. It was possible, he thought, that they had already closed a little more since he had left Bicho Raro. He did not know what he would do if he went blind out here in the wild scrub.
He knew the miracles were meant to teach the pilgrims something about themselves. Take Tony, for instance, and his newfound gigantism. Daniel figured Tony was someone famous. He didn’t recognize him personally, but he’d seen many celebrities come through Bicho Raro, and he’d gotten pretty good at noting the posturing and style that marked public figures. So Tony, suffering under the public eye as most celebrities do, had received a miracle that ensured he was under even more constant scrutiny. The miracle’s purpose was then clear: If Tony could learn to live as a giant, he would once again be able to live as a man.
This meant that Daniel’s narrowing vision was supposed to teach him something, but he didn’t know what it might be. He had thought that he knew himself pretty well, and yet meaning eluded him. Perhaps this darkness was meant to teach him trust, or humility, or despair. Nothing seemed obvious. Possibly an outsider might have been able to immediately identify the truth of it, just as the meaning of Tony’s darkness was obvious to Daniel. But there was no one else to observe Daniel, and he meant to keep it that way.
Daniel tried not to devote too much time to the most hopeless outcome, which was that Daniel might discover what the darkness truly meant, and still be unable to overcome it. He recalled a pilgrim from Utah whose miracle had left him with a bulbous red face and a helpless desire to gag whenever he tried to put food in his mouth. The man seemed to understand at once what this darkness stood for, because he became overwhelmed with grief and guilt. Daniel, of course, had been unable to speak to him because of the taboo, and the pilgrim had disappeared into the desert overnight. Later he was found dead, his face no longer red; the miracle had died with the pilgrim. The knowing had not helped him.
Perhaps Daniel was meant to learn how difficult miracles were.
No. He thought he knew that already.
“If there wasn’t a moon out tonight, there is one now,” Diablo Diablo said. “Coming up next we’ve got something to put a smile on that moon’s face.”
The radio had managed to snatch the signal of his cousins’ station, and though Daniel knew it would be as easy to die with the sound of Diablo Diablo playing as not, he preferred the company. It distracted him from the black at the corners of his vision, from the cold, and from the distinct feeling that he wasn’t alone. There was something out there in the night, something that had drawn near as soon as he’d broken the taboo. Although he knew that it must be a concrete form of his own darkness, it didn’t feel like an extension of himself. It felt like the concrete manifestation of the strangeness of this valley instead. Perhaps this was what was meant when they said that a Saint’s darkness was worse than an ordinary pilgrim’s. Perhaps that was the reason why he couldn’t find meaning in his miracle. Perhaps this was not healing darkness at all but rather the opposite: a hellish entity sent to caper around and gobble up a fallen saint.
He did not know if it was better or worse that the thing remained out of sight.
Daniel mouthed a prayer. “Mother—”
“Ladies and gentlemen of the San Luis Valley,” said Diablo Diablo, “we interrupt our normal broadcast for a live interview.”
Daniel’s prayer silenced in his mouth. His hand with its spider eyes walked to the knob and turned up the volume. Static hissed in the background.
Diablo Diablo continued, “This is our first interview, so excuse us, excuse us mightily, if we experience any technical difficulties. The first man to walk a road always has to clear a few rocks. Señorita, would you tell all our listeners at home your name? For your privacy, just your first name. We don’t want anyone to stop you on the street and tell you your face is as pretty as your voice.”
Marisita said, “Marisita.”
It was obvious now that the hissing in the background was not static after all; it was the patter of rain falling around Marisita. “Welcome to our show, Marisita.”
“Marisita,” Daniel said out loud, with wonder. Then, understanding what this meant, with worry—“Joaquin.”
Diablo Diablo continued, “Let me catch our listeners up on the situation, because you will not be able to understand Marisita’s story unless you know about the Saint of Bicho Raro.”
Joaquin was not being entirely aspirational by suggesting they had an audience. Apart from Daniel, the station did actually have a few other listeners that night, including two long-distance truckers, a man in a farm truck two ranches over, an old woman with insomnia who was passing the time jarring cactus jelly while her four dogs watched her, and, by a twist of AM radio wave magic, a group of Swedish fishermen who had turned on the radio to listen to as they woke themselves up for their work of catching halibut.
“Imagine … you have a tormented mind,” Diablo Diablo said, his voice dramatic. “You barter with sadness or you fight with grief or you eat arrogance every morning with your coffee. There are saints in this valley who can heal you. You and every other pilgrim can canter to Bicho Raro to receive a miracle. A miracle, you say? A miracle. This miracle makes the darkness inside you visible in amazing and peculiar ways. Now that you see what has been haunting you, you overthrow it, and then you leave this place free and easy. Don’t believe me? Hey, hey, I don’t make the news, I just report it. There’s only one catch: The saints cannot help you tackle your darkness after you receive the miracle, or they will, ah, they will bring darkness on themselves, a worse darkness than any ordinary man’s. Or woman’s, golly.”
And now Daniel laughed out loud, helplessly, because he could hear the crack in Joaquin’s voice that meant Beatriz must have shot him a look. The familiarity of it both comforted and tormented him.
“Now, Marisita, who we have on the show tonight, was recently in the presence of a saint when darkness overtook him. That’s right, isn’t it, Marisita?”
“Yes,” Marisita said.
“And did you see what form his darkness took?”
Marisita said, “I’m sorry, I’m crying. May I have a minute?”
“Oh,” said Diablo Diablo, sounding a little cross and a lot like Joaquin. He pulled it back together. “While you have a cry, the rest of us can join you, including Elvis. Let’s have a listen to ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ ”
You can imagine the effect that this exchange had on Daniel, who was in love with Marisita. He had heard the tears in her voice and it made tears rise up in his throat as well. It was only because he knew that he had brought only so much water with him and could not spare it that he did not allow himself to weep with her.
The song drew to a baleful close, and Diablo Diablo’s voice cut in. “And we’re back. Wipe your eyes, everyone, it’ll be all right, and if it won’t, it’ll be a good story for someone else. Marisita, are you still there?”
“I am.”
“Let’s try this again. Did you see Daniel’s darkness?”
Daniel was as interested in this answer as his cousins were, as he had not yet seen whatever it was that he felt shadowing him. He was certain that Marisita had looked out the window after him as he left—he had been able to feel the familiar weight of her gaze wrapped around him. So it was possible she had seen whatever it was that watched him now.
“No, I did not,” Marisita said in her sweet, sad voice. “Nothing except for the owls. I’m sorry. I want to be able to help. But I didn’t see any change at all. It’s hard for me to imagine that he even had any darkness inside him, because he is—he was—you know how he is.”
Yes, they all knew how he was. But we all have darkness inside us. It is just a question of how much of us is light as well.
“Yes,” Diablo Diablo said bleakly. “He was a Saint.”
“I didn’t see him up close, though. He passed me a note through my door and told me not to come out,” Marisita continued. “It said he was dangerous and that I shouldn’t follow him.”
“Dangerous,” Diablo Diablo repeated, and the word thrilled over teeth. “Did you happen to see which way Daniel went when he left?”
“I looked out the window after him. I saw him going into the night. He stopped near the edge of Bicho Raro, but I don’t know why.”
This had been because Daniel had encountered Antonia Soria’s dogs. They had not yet become aware of his presence. Some were sleeping, some were dozing warily, and yet another was worrying at what was left of Tony’s white jacket. Some men might have tried to sneak past the dogs, or to trick or intimidate them. Daniel did none of these things. Instead, he prayed. He prayed to his mother that the dogs might know how he was feeling. The dogs at once began to weep. They tipped their heads back and instead of howling, they let big tears roll out of their eyes and into their fur. They wept as they understood that Daniel was afraid that he might be going into the desert to die alone. They wept as they understood that Daniel could not bear the thought that he might not see Bicho Raro or his family again. They wept as they understood that he was in love with Marisita Lopez and still, even after all of this, longed for there to be a way to spend his life with her.
As the dogs cried and whimpered, Daniel walked past them. He did not try to comfort them, because he knew there was no comfort. He could hear the strange sound of his darkness moving in the shadows on the other side of the house, but he did not flinch. He was the Saint of Bicho Raro, and he was determined to walk out of Bicho Raro without harming his home.
Diablo Diablo persisted. “You didn’t see where he went after that?”
“No.”
“Just now, you were wandering in the desert after him with no idea of where he went?”
“I had to start somewhere. I can’t imagine him out here alone. And his family can’t help him. I can do something, and so I will.”
“How long are you intending to wander?”
“As long as I need to,” Marisita said.
Daniel was overcome then, and allowed one tear to fall. He would spare one drop of his precious water for this feeling to escape him.
“As long as you need to? And what if you haven’t found him by tomorrow?”
“I will eat some of the food I packed for him and keep looking.”
“And the next day?”
“The same.”
“And the next? And the next?”
“I’m going to look for him until I find him,” Marisita insisted.
There was a long pause here, and Joaquin seemed to be struggling to find a way to put his next question into words. Finally, he merely asked it as it had first come into his head.
“Marisita, are you in love with him?”
“Yes.”
Daniel spared another drop of water. The tear fell to the dust. A pack rat raced out from the brush to grab it, certain it was a jewel because of its shine in the firelight. Daniel’s sorrow had made it tangible enough to carry, and so the pack rat bore it back to its nest, only to later find that offspring raised on a bed of sadness fail to thrive.
Diablo Diablo said, “Marisita, there is a problem with your quest. We have a source here in the station who is telling me that if you are in love with him, you can’t look for him. If you’re in love with him, the family darkness will come on you, too, if you help him.”
Marisita did not immediately answer.
“I think you better play another song,” she finally said. “I need to cry some more.”
Diablo Diablo did not immediately answer either. Daniel suspected (correctly) that this was because he was trying to find another thematic song in his prerecorded session. He put on Paul Anka’s “It’s Time to Cry.” When it was through, he said, “Last question, Marisita: The Saint’s darkness came to him because he helped you and interfered with your miracle. How did Daniel help you?”
Daniel curled on his side, the top of his head touching the radio so he could feel the vibration of the speaker against his skin. He closed his eyes, though his blind spiders’ eyes stayed open to the night as they always did.
In a small voice, Marisita said, “I don’t want to answer this one. I’m sorry— It just, it just makes me cry too much. I can’t tell the story to someone else yet.”
“That’s all right,” Diablo Diablo soothed. After a pause, he added, in a somewhat less Diablo Diablo voice, “Marisita, he’ll be okay. He’s too good not to fight it. Maybe we can have you on the show again?”
Marisita said, “I’d like that.”
Daniel opened his eyes. But it was not very much brighter than it had been with them closed.