Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

They waited respectfully for him to finish and then they said, their faces slowly disappearing in the gloom, Listen, we’ll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English.

Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself:

Oscar—

That’s pretty much it.

We flew down to claim the body. We arranged the funeral. No one there but us, not even AI and Miggs. Lola crying and crying. A year later their mother’s cancer returned and this time it dug in and stayed. I visited her in the hospital with Lola. Six times in all. She would live for another ten months, but by then she’d more or less given up.

I did all I could.

You did enough, Mami, Lola said, but she refused to hear it. Turned her ruined back to us.

I did all I could and it still wasn’t enough.

They buried her next to her son, and Lola read a poem she had written, and that was it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Four times the family hired lawyers but no charges were ever filed. The embassy didn’t help and neither did the government. Ybón, I hear, is still living in Mirador Norte, still dancing at the Riverside but La Inca sold the house a year later, moved back to Baní.

Lola swore she would never return to that terrible country. On one of our last nights as novios she said, Ten million Trujillos is all we are.

I wish I could say it worked out, that Oscar’s death brought us together. I was just too much the mess, and after half a year of taking care of her mother Lola had what a lot of females call their Saturn Return. One day she called, asked me where I’d been the night before, and when I didn’t have a good excuse, she said, Good-bye, Yunior, please take good care of yourself: and for about a year I scromfed strange girls and alternated between Fuck Lola and these incredibly narcissitic hopes of reconciliation that I did nothing to achieve. And then in August, after I got back from a trip to Santo Domingo, I heard from my mother that Lola had met someone in Miami, which was where she had moved, that she was pregnant and was getting married.

I called her. What the fuck, Lola—

But she hung up.

Years and years now and I still think about him. The incredible Oscar Wao. I have dreams where he sits on the edge of my bed. We’re back at Rutgers, in Demarest, which is where we’ll always be, it seems. In this particular dream he’s never thin like at the end, always huge. He wants to talk to me, is anxious to jaw, but most of the time I can never say a word and neither can he. So we just sit there quietly.

About five years after he died I started having another kind of dream. About him or someone who looks like him. We’re in some kind of ruined bailey that’s filled to the rim with old dusty books. He’s standing in one of the passages, all mysterious-like, wearing a wrathful mask that hides his face but behind the eyeholes I see a familiar pair of close-set eyes. Dude is holding up a book, waving for me to take a closer look, and I recognize this scene from one of his crazy movies. I want to run from him, and for a long time that’s what I do. It takes me a while before I notice that Oscar’s hands are seamless and the book’s pages are blank.

And that behind his mask his eyes are smiling.

Zafa

Sometimes, though, I look up at him and he has no face and I wake up screaming.

Took ten years to the day, went through more lousy shit than you could imagine, was lost for a good long while—no Lola, no me, no nothing—until finally I woke up next to somebody I didn’t give two shits about, my upper lip covered in coke—snot and coke—blood and I said, OK, Wao, OK. You win.

These days I live in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, teach composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College, and even own a house at the top of Elm Street, not far from the steel mill. Not one of the big ones that the bodega owners buy with their earnings, but not too shabby, either. Most of my colleagues think Perth Amboy is a dump, but I beg to differ.

It’s not exactly what I dreamed about when I was a kid, the teaching, the living in New Jersey, but I make it work as best as I can. I have a wife I adore and who adores me, a negrita from Salcedo whom I do not deserve, and sometimes we even make vague noises about having children. Every now and then I’m OK with the possibility. I don’t run around after girls anymore. Not much, anyway. When I’m not teaching or coaching baseball or going to the gym or hanging out with the wifey I’m at home, writing. These days I write a lot. From can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. Learned that from Oscar. I’m a new man, you see, a new man, a new man.

Believe it or not, we still see each other. She, Cuban Ruben, and their daughter moved back to Paterson a couple of years back, sold the old house, bought a new one, travel everywhere together (at least that’s what my mother tells me—Lola, being Lola, still visits her). Every now and then when the stars are aligned I run into her, at rallies, at bookstores we used to chill at, on the streets of NYC. Sometimes Cuban Ruben is with her, sometimes not. Her daughter, though, is always there. Eyes of Oscar. Hair of Hypatia. Her gaze watches everything. A little reader too, if Lola is to be believed. Say hi to Yunior, Lola commands. He was your tío’s best friend.

Hi, tío , she says reluctantly.

Tío’s friend , she corrects.

Hi, tío’s friend .

Lola’s hair is long now and never straightened; she’s heavier and less guileless, but she’s still the ciguapa of my dreams. Always happy to see me, no bad feelings, entiendes. None at all.

Yunior, how are you?

I’m fine. How are you?

Before all hope died I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved, that we would be in bed together like the old times, with the fan on, the smoke from our weed drifting above us, and I’d finally try to say words that could have saved us.

But before I can shape the vowels I wake up. My face is wet, and that’s how you know it’s never going to come true.

Never, ever.

It ain’t too bad, though. During our run-ins we smile, we laugh, we take turns saying her daughter’s name. I never ask if her daughter has started to dream. I never mention our past. All we ever talk about is Oscar.

It’s almost done. Almost over. Only some final things to show you before your Watcher fulfills his cosmic duty and retires at last to the Blue Area of the Moon, not to be heard again until the Last Days.

Behold the girl: the beautiful muchachita: Lola’s daughter. Dark and blindingly fast: in her great-grandmother La Inca’s words: una jurona. Could have been my daughter if I’d been smart, if I’d been. Makes her no less precious. She climbs trees, she rubs her butt against doorjambs, she practices malapalabras when she thinks nobody is listening. Speaks Spanish and English.

Neither Captain Marvel nor Billy Batson, but the lightning.

A happy kid, as far as these things go. Happy!

But on a string around her neck: three azabaches: the one that Oscar wore as a baby, the one that Lola wore as a baby, and the one that Beli was given by La Inca upon reaching Sanctuary. Powerful elder magic. Three barrier shields against the Eye. Backed by a six-mile plinth of prayer. (Lola’s not stupid; she made both my mother and La Inca the girl’s madrinas.) Powerful wards indeed.

One day, though, the Circle will fail.

As Circles always do.

And for the first time she will hear the word Fukú .