The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Part III

All you need to know is that if we talked once a week we were lucky, even though we were nominally boyfriend and girlfriend.

How are you, bro? I’m copacetic, he said.

That last day on our couch he looked like a man at peace with himself. A little distracted but at peace.

Was trying to decide what he would take with him. Was allowing himself only ten of his books, the core of his canon (his words), was trying to pare it all down to what was necessary.

Please forgive me, Yunior, but I’m here with an ulterior motive.

I should have thought about it—Oscar never asked anybody for money—but I didn’t, fell over myself to give it to him. My guilty conscience.

You should never have had carnal relations with that Paraguayan girl, he pointed out.

The last time he flew to Santo Domingo he’d been startled when the applause broke out, but this time he was prepared, and when the plane landed he clapped until his hands stung.

After each threat he recorded the time and then phoned the
embassy and told them that Officer had threatened to kill him, could you please help?

He had hope, because if she really wanted him gone she could have lured him out in the open and let the capitan destroy him.

Because if she wanted to she could have had him banned from the Riverside.

You and cheap do not compute, Ybon.

His abuela tried to exert her power, tried to use the Voice, but he was no longer the boy she’d known.

Nothing brings a couple together quite like catastrophe.

One evening the capitan and his friends stalked into the Riverside and Oscar stared at the man for a good ten seconds and then, whole body shaking, he left.

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.

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.

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.

Say hi to Yunior, Lola commands. He was your tio’s best friend.
Hi, tio, she says reluctantly.

Lola’s hair is long now and never straightened; she’s heavier and less guileless, but she’s still the ciguapa of my dreams.

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.

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.

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 tio’s books, his games, his manuscript, his comic books, his papers—refrigerators the best proof against fire, against earthquake, against almost anything.

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.

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.

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.

A couple of cards with some breezy platitudes on them.

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.