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 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 man*scripts enclosed. One was more chapters of his never-to-be-completed opus, a four-book E. E. “Doc” Smith -esque space opera called Starscourage, and the other was a long letter to Lola, the last thing he wrote , apparently, before he was k**ed. 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 f**ing 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 end of those twenty-seven days the palomo did get Ybón away from La Capital . For one whole weekend they hid out on some beach in Barahona while the capitán was away on “business ,” and guess what? Ybón actually kissed him . Guess what else? Ybón actually f**ed him . Praise be to Jesus! He reported that he's liked it and that Ybón's you-know-what hadn't tasted the way he had expected. She tastes like Heineken, he observed. He wrote that every night Ybón had nightmares that the capitán had found them ; once she'd woken up and said in the voice of true fear, Oscar, he's here, really believing he was, and Oscar woke up and threw himself at the capitán, but it turned out only to be a turtleshell the hotel had hung on the wall for decoration. Almost busted my nose! He wrote that Ybón had little hairs coming up to almost her bellybu*ton and that she crossed her eyes when he entered her but what really got him was not the bam-bam-bam of s** —it was the little intimacies that he'd never in his whole life anticipated , like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he'd been a virgin all his life. He wrote that he couldn't believe he'd had to wait for this so goddamn long. (Ybón was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life .) He wrote: So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty! (pg. 333-335)