Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [122]
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—
EIGHT
The End of the Story
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.
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
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.
THE DREAMS
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