The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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 succeded 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
     
     
    H e 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 of Azua if I hadn’t already visited them. Wrote Lola too; called her My Dear Bene Gesserit Witch.
    And then, almost eight months after he died, a package arrived at the house in Paterson. Talk about Dominican Express. Two manuscripts enclosed. One was more chapters of his never-to-be-completed opus, a four-book E. E. “Doc” Smith–esque space opera called Starscourge , and the other was a long letter to Lola, the last thing he wrote, apparently, before he was killed. In that letter he talked about his investigations and the new book he was writing, a book that he was sending under another cover. Told her to watch out for a second package. This contains everything I’ve written on this journey. Everything I think you will need. You’ll understand when you read my conclusions. (It’s the cure to what ails us, he scribbled in the margins. The Cosmo DNA.)

    Only problem was, the fucking thing never arrived! Either got lost in the mail or he was slain before he put it in the mail, or whoever he trusted to deliver it forgot.
    Anyway, the package that did arrive had some amazing news. Turns out that toward the