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 win.

AS FOR ME

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.

AS FOR US

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.

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’.