The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - By Junot Diaz Page 0,121

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’.

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’.

THE FINAL LETTER

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