The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

getting on a guagua, even his poor dead abuelo and his poor dead abuela, and who is driving the bus but the Mongoose, and who is the cobrador but the Man Without a Face, but it was nothing but a final fantasy, gone as soon as he blinked, and when the car stopped, Oscar sent telepathic messages to his mom (I love you, señora), to his tío (Quit, tío, and live), to Lola (I’m so sorry it happened; I will always love you), to all the women he had ever loved—Olga, Maritza, Ana, Jenni, Karen, and all the other ones whose names he’d never known—and of course to Ybón. 33
    They walked him into the cane and then turned him around. He tried to stand bravely. (Clives they left tied up in the cab and while they had their backs turned he slipped into the cane, and he would be the one who would deliver Oscar to the family.) They looked at Oscar and he looked at them and then he started to speak. The words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once. He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Ybón and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they’d started to dream the same dreams and say the same words. He told them that it was only because of her love that he’d been able to do the thing that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop, told them if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either, not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side and over there he wouldn’t be no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved; over there he’d be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.
    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—
    33 . “No matter how far you travel … to whatever reaches of this limitless universe … you will never be … ALONE!” (The Watcher, Fantastic Four #13 May 1963.)
     

EIGHT
     

The End of the Story
     
     
    T hat’s pretty much it.
    We flew down to claim the body. We arranged the funeral. No one there but us, not even Al 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.

AS FOR US
     
    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.

ON A SUPER FINAL NOTE
     
    Y ears 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