Voice, but he was no longer the boy she’d known. Something had changed about him. He had gotten some power of his own.
Two weeks into his Final Voyage his mother arrived, and she came loaded for bear. You’re coming home, right now. He shook his head. I can’t, Mami. She grabbed him and tried to pull, but he was like Unus the Untouchable. Mami, he said softly. You’ll hurt yourself.
And you’ll kill yourself.
That’s not what I’m trying to do.
Did I fly down? Of course I did. With Lola. Nothing brings a couple together quite like catastrophe.
Et tu, Yunior? he said when he saw me.
Nothing worked.
THE LAST DAYS OF OSCAR WAO
How incredibly short are twenty-seven days! 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. Didn’t bother to call Clives, jumped in the first taxi he could find. Once in the parking lot of the Riverside he tried again to kiss her and she turned away with her head, not her body. Please don’t. He’ll kill us.
Twenty-seven days. Wrote on each and every one of them, wrote almost three hundred pages if his letters are to be believed. Almost had it too, he said to me one night on the phone, one of the few calls he made to us. What? I wanted to know. What?
You’ll see, was all he would say.
And then the expected happened. One night he and Clives were driving back from the World Famous Riverside and they had to stop at a light and that was where two men got into the cab with them. It was, of course, Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy. Good to see you again, Grod said, and then they beat him as best they could, given the limited space inside the cab.
This time Oscar didn’t cry when they drove him back to the cane-fields. Zafra would be here soon, and the cane had grown well and thick and in places you could hear the stalks clackclack-clacking against each other like triffids and you could hear kriyol voices lost in the night. The smell of the ripening cane was unforgettable, and there was a moon, a beautiful full moon, and Clives begged the men to spare Oscar, but they laughed. You should be worrying, Grod said, about yourself. Oscar laughed a little too through his broken mouth. Don’t worry, Clives, he said. They’re too late. Grod disagreed. Actually I would say we’re just in time. They drove past a bus stop and for a second Oscar imagined he saw his whole family 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, senora), to his tio (Quit, do, 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 Ybon.v
? ‘No matter how far you travel…to whatever reaches of this limitless universe…you will never be… ALONE!’ (The Watcher,
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 Ybon 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
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. Ybon, 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 Bani.
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
