The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

write role-playing games—complicated story, the company Oscar had been hoping to write for, Fantasy Games Unlimited, and which was considering one of his modules for PsiWorld, had recently closed, scuttling all of Oscar’s hopes and dreams that he was about to turn into the next Gary Gygax. Well, Miggs said, it looks like that didn’t work out, and for the first time ever in their relationship Oscar lost his temper and without a word swung on Miggs, connected so hard that homeboy’s mouth spouted blood. Jesus Christ, AI said. Calm down! I didn’t mean to do it, he said unconvincingly. It was an accident. Mudafuffer, Miggs said. Mudafuffer! He got so bad that one desperate night, after listening to Ana sobbing to him on the phone about Manny’s latest bullshit, he said, I have to go to church now, and put down the phone, went to his tio’s room (Rudolfo was out at the titty bar), and stole his antique Virginia Dragoon, that oh-so-famous First Nation-exterminating Colt.44, heavier than bad luck and twice as ugly. Stuck its impressive snout down the front of his pants and proceeded to stand in front of Manny’s building almost the entire night. Got real friendly with the aluminum siding. Come on, motherfucker, he said calmly. I got a nice eleven-year-old girl for you. He didn’t care that he would more than likely be put away forever, or that niggers like him got ass and mouth raped in jail, or that if the cops picked him up and found the gun they’d send his tio’s ass up the river for parole violation. He didn’t care about nada that night. His head contained zero, a perfect vacuum. He saw his entire writing future flash before his eyes; he’d only written one novel worth a damn, about an Australian hunger spirit preying on a group of small-town friends, wouldn’t get a chance to write anything better—career over. Luckily for the future of American Letters, Manny did not come home that night.

It was hard to explain. It wasn’t just that he thought Ana was his last fucking chance for happiness—this was clearly on his mind—it was also that he’d never ever in all his miserable eighteen years of life experienced anything like he’d felt when he was around that girl. I’ve waited forever to be in love, he wrote his sister. How many times I thought this is never going to happen to me. (When in his second-favorite anime of all time, Robotech Macross, Rich Hunter finally hooked up with Lisa, he broke down in front of the TV and cried. Don’t tell me they shot the president, his tio called from the back room, where he was quietly snorting you-know-what.) It’s like I swallowed a piece of heaven, he wrote to his sister in a letter. You can’t imagine how it feels.

Two days later he broke down and confessed to his sister about the gun stuff and she, back on a short laundry visit, flipped out. She got them both on their knees in front of the altar she’d built to their dead abuelo and had him swear on their mother’s living soul that he’d never pull anything like that again as long as he lived. She even cried, she was so worried about him.

You need to stop this, Mister. I know I do, he said. But I don’t know if I’m even here, you know?

That night he and his sister both fell asleep on the couch, she first. Lola had just broken up with her boyfriend for like the tenth time, but even Oscar, in his condition, knew they would be back together in no time at all. Sometime before dawn he dreamt about all the girlfriends he’d never had, row upon row upon row upon row, like the extra bodies that the Miraclepeople had in Alan Moore’s Miracleman. You can do it, they said.

He awoke, cold, with a dry throat.

They met at the Japanese mall on Edgewater Road, Yaohan, which he had discovered one day on his long I’m-bored drives and which he now considered part of their landscape, something to tell their children about. It was where he came for his anime tapes and his mecha models. Ordered them both chicken katsu curries and then sat in the large cafeteria with the view of Manhattan, the only gaijin in the whole joint.

You have beautiful breasts, he said as an opener.

Confusion, alarm. Oscar. What’s the matter with you?

He looked out through the glass at Manhattan’s western flank, looked out like he was some deep nigger. Then he told her.

There were no surprises. Her eyes went soft, she put a hand on his hand, her chair scraped closer, there was a strand of yellow in her teeth. Oscar, she said gently, I have a boyfriend.

She drove him home; at the house he thanked her for her time, walked inside, lay in bed.

In June he graduated from Don Bosco. See them at graduation: his mother starting to look thin (the cancer would grab her soon enough), Rudolfo high as shit, only Lola looking her best, beaming, happy. You did it, Mister. You did it. He heard in passing that of everybody in their section of P-town only he and Olga—poor fucked-up Olga —had not attended even one prom. Dude, Miggs joked, maybe you should have asked her out.

In September he headed to Rutgers New Brunswick, his mother gave him a hundred dollars and his first kiss in five years, his tio a box of condoms: Use them all, he said, and then added: On girls. There was the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college, free of everything, completely on his fucking own, and with it an optimism that here among these thousands of young people he would find someone like him. That, alas, didn’t happen. The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, But I am. Soy dominicano. Dominicano soy. After a spate of parties that led to nothing but being threatened by some drunk white-boys, and dozens of classes where not a single girl looked at him, he felt the optimism wane, and before he even realized what had happened he had buried himself in what amounted to the college version of what he’d majored in all throughout high school: getting no ass. His happiest moments were genre moments, like when Akira was released (1988). Pretty sad. Twice a week he and his sister would dine at the Douglass dining hall; she was a Big Woman on Campus and knew just about everybody with any pigment, had her hand on every protest and every march, but that didn’t help his situation any: During their get-togethers she would give him advice and he would nod quietly and afterward would sit at the E bus stop and stare at all the pretty Douglass girls and wonder where he’d gone wrong in his life. He wanted to blame the books, the sci-fi, but he couldn’t—he loved them too much. Despite swearing early on to change his nerdly ways, he continued to eat, continued not to exercise, continued to use flash words, and after a couple semesters without any friends but his sister, he joined the university’s resident geek organization, RU Gamers, which met in the classrooms beneath Frelinghuysen and boasted an entirely male membership. He had thought college would be better, as far as girls were concerned, but those first years it wasn’t.

TWO Wildwood 1982-1985

It’s never the changes we want that change everything.

This is how it all starts: with your mother calling you into the bathroom. You will remember what you were doing at that precise moment for the rest of your lift: You were reading Watership Down and the rabbits and their does were making their dash for the boat and you didn’t want to stop reading, the book has to go back to your brother tomorrow, but then she called you again, louder, her I’m-not- fucking-around voice, and you mumbled irritably, Si, senora.

She was standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, naked from the waist up, her bra slung about her waist like a torn sail, the scar on her back as vast and inconsolable as a sea. You want to return to your book, to pretend you didn’t hear her, but it is too late. Her eyes meet yours, the same big smoky eyes you will have in the future. Ven aca, she commanded. She is frowning at something on one of her breasts. Your mother’s breasts are immensities. One of the wonders of the world. The only ones you’ve seen that are bigger are in nudie magazines or on really fat ladies. They’re 35 triple-Ds and the aureoles are as big as saucers and black as pitch and at their edges are fierce hairs that sometimes she plucked and sometimes she didn’t. These breasts have always embarrassed you and when you walk in public with her you are always conscious of them. After her face and her hair, her chest is what she is most proud of. Your father could never get enough of them, she always brags. But given the fact that he ran off on her after their third year of