Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

And she will have a dream of the No Face Man.

Not now, but soon.

If she’s her family’s daughter—as I suspect she is—one day she will stop being afraid and she will come looking for answers. Not now, but soon. One day when I’m least expecting, there will be a knock at my door.

Soy Isis. Hija de Dolores de León.

Holy shit! Come in, chica! Come in!

(I’ll notice that she still wears her azabaches, that she has her mother’s legs, her uncle’s eyes.)

I’ll pour her a drink, and the wife will fry up her special pastelitos; I’ll ask her about her mother as lightly as I can, and I’ll bring out the pictures of the three of us from back in the day, and when it starts getting late I’ll take her down to my basement and open the four refrigerators where I store her brother’s books, his games, his manuscript, his comic books, his papers—refrigerators the best proof against fire, against earthquake, against almost anything.

A light, a desk, a cot—I’ve prepared it all.

How many nights will she stay with us?

As many as it takes.

And maybe, just maybe, if she’s as smart and as brave as I’m expecting she’ll be, she’ll take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it. That is what, on my best days, I hope. What I dream.

And yet there are other days, when I’m downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar’s dog-eared copy of Watchmen . One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: ‘A Stronger Loving World’. To the only panel he’s circled. Oscar—who never defaced a book in his life—circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt’s plan has succeeded in ‘saving the world’.

Veidt says: ‘I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end’. And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: ‘In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends’.

He managed to send mail home before the end. A couple of cards with some breezy platitudes on them. Wrote me one, called me Count Fenris. Recommended the beaches of Azua if I hadn’t already visited them. Wrote Lola too; called her My Dear Bene Gesserit Witch.

And then, almost eight months after he died, a package arrived at the house in Paterson. Talk about Dominican Express. Two manuscripts enclosed. One was more chapters of his never-to-be-completed opus, a four-book E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith-esque space opera called Starscourge , and the other was a long letter to Lola, the last thing he wrote, apparently, before he was killed. In that letter he talked about his investigations and the new book he was writing, a book that he was sending under another cover. Told her to watch out for a second package. This contains everything I’ve written on this journey. Everything I think you will need. You’ll understand when you read my conclusions. (It’s the cure to what ails us, he scribbled in the margins. The Cosmo DNA.)

Only problem was, the fucking thing never arrived! Either got lost in the mail or he was slain before he put it in the mail, or whoever he trusted to deliver it forgot.

Anyway, the package that did arrive had some amazing news. Turns out that toward the end of those twenty-seven days the palomo did get Ybón away from La Capital. For one whole weekend they hid out on some beach in Barahona while the capitán was away on ‘business,’ and guess what? Ybón actually kissed him. Guess what else? Ybón actually fucked him. Praise be to Jesus! He reported that he’d liked it, and that Ybón’s you-know-what hadn’t tasted the way he had expected. She tastes like Heineken, he observed. He wrote that every night Ybón had nightmares that the capitán had found them; once she’d woken up and said in the voice of true fear, Oscar, he’s here, really believing he was, and Oscar woke up and threw himself at the capitán, but it turned out only to be a turtleshell the hotel had hung on the wall for decoration. Almost busted my nose! He wrote that Ybón had little hairs coming up to almost her bellybutton and that she crossed her eyes when he entered her but what really got him was not the bam-barn-bam of sex—it was the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he’d been a virgin all his life. He wrote that he couldn’t believe he’d had to wait for this so goddamn long. (Ybón was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.) He wrote: So this is what everybody’s always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!

I’d like to give thanks to: the pueblo dominicano. And to Those Who Watch Over Us. Mi querido abuelo Osterman Sanchez. Mi madre, Virtudes Diaz, and mis tías Irma and Mercedes. Mr. and Mrs. EI Hamaway (who bought me my first dictionary and signed me up for the Science Fiction Book Club). Santo Domingo, Villa Juana, Azua, Parlin, Old Bridge, Perth Amboy, Ithaca, Syracuse, Brooklyn, Hunts Point, Harlem, el Distrito Federal de Mexico, Washington Heights, Shimokitazawa, Boston, Cambridge, Roxbury. Every teacher who gave me kindness, every librarian who gave me books. My students. Anita Desai (who helped land me the MIT gig: I never thanked you enough, Anita); Julie Grau (whose faith and perseverance brought forth this book); and Nicole Aragi (who in eleven years never once gave up on me, even when I did).

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Jaime Manrique (for being the first writer to take me serious), David Mura (the jedi master who showed me the way), Francisco Goldman, the Infamous Frankie G (for bringing me to Mexico and being there when it started), Edwidge Danticat, (for being mi querida hermana).

Deb Chasman, Eric Gansworth, Juleyka Lantigua, Dr. Janet Lindgren, Ana María Menendez, Sandra Shagat, and Leonie Zapata (for reading it).

Alejandra Frausto, Xanita, Alicia Gonzalez (for Mexico).

Oliver Bidel, Harold del Pino, Victor Diaz, Victoria Lola, Chris ABaní, Juana Barrios, Tony Capellan, Coco Fusco, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Michele Oshima, Soledad Vera, Fabiana Wallis, Ellis Cose, Lee LlamBelis, Elisa Cose, Patricia Engel (for Miami), Shreerekha Pillai (for spinning dark girls beautiful), Lily Oei (for kicking ass), Sean McDonald (for finishing it).

Manny Perez, Alfredo de Villa, Alexis Pella, Farhad Ashgar, Ani Ashgar, Marisol Alcantara, Andrea Greene, Andrew Simpson, Diem Jones, Denise Bell, Francisco Espinosa, Chad Milner, Tony Davis, and AnYbóny (for building me shelter).

MIT. Riverhead Books. The New Yorker . All the schools and institutions that supported me.

The Family: Dana, Maritza, Clifton, and Daniel.

The Hernandez Clan: Rada, Soleil, Debbie, and Reebee.

The Moyer Clan: Peter and Gricel. And Manuel del Villa (Rest in Peace, Son of the Bronx, Son of Brookline, True Hero).

The Benzan Clan: Milagros, Jason, Javier, Tanya, and the twins Mateo y India.