The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Maritza he didn’t see no more, either. Heard she’d married a Cuban dude, lived in Teaneck, had a kid and everything.

And Olga? Nobody knew exactly. Rumor had it she tried to rob the local Safeway, Dana Plato style—hadn’t bothered to wear a mask even though everybody at the supermarket knew her and there was talk that she was still in Middlesex, wouldn’t be getting out until they were all fifty.

No girls who loved him? No girls anywhere in his life?

Not a one. At least at Rutgers there’d been multitudes and an institutional pretense that allowed a mutant like him to approach without causing a panic. In the real world it wasn’t that simple. In the real world girls turned away in disgust when he walked past. Changed seats at the cinema, and one woman on the cross-town bus even told him to stop thinking about her! I know what you’re up to, she’d hissed. So stop it.

I’m the permanent bachelor, he wrote in a letter to his sister, who had abandoned Japan to come to New York to be with me. There’s nothing permanent in the world, his sister wrote back. He pushed his fist into his eye. Wrote: There is in me.

The home life? Didn’t kill him but didn’t sustain him, either. His moms, thinner, quieter, less afflicted by the craziness of her youth, still the work-golem, still allowed her Peruvian boarders to pack as many relatives as they wanted into the first floors. And tio Rudolfo, Fofo to his friends, had relapsed to some of his hard pre-prison habits. He was on the caballo again, broke into lightning sweats at dinner, had moved into Lola’s room, and now Oscar got to listen to him chickenboning his stripper girlfriends almost every single night. Tio, he yelled out once, less bass on the headboard, if you will. On the walls of his room do Rudolfo hung pictures of his first years in the Bronx, when he’d been sixteen and wearing all the fly Willie Colon pimpshit, before he’d gone off to Vietnam, only Dominican, he claimed, in the whole damned armed forces. And there were pictures of Oscar’s mom and dad. Young. Taken in the two years of their relationship.

You loved him, he said to her.

She laughed. Don’t talk about what you know nothing about.

On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired, no taller, no fatter, only the skin under his eyes, pouched from years of quiet desperation, had changed. Inside, he was in a world of hurt. He saw black flashes before his eyes. He saw himself falling through the air. He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork. Saw himself at the Game Room, picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life. He didn’t want this future but he couldn’t see how it could be avoided, couldn’t figure his way out of it.

Fuku.

The Darkness. Some mornings he would wake up and not be able to get out of bed. Like he had a ten-ton weight on his chest. Like he was under acceleration forces. Would have been funny if it didn’t hurt his heart so. Had dreams that he was wandering around the evil planet Gordo, searching for parts for his crashed rocketship, but all he encountered were burned-out ruins, each seething with new debilitating forms of radiation. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, he said to his sister over the phone. I think the word is crisis but every time I open my eyes all I see is meltdown. This was when he threw students out of class for breathing, when he would tell his mother to fuck off: when he couldn’t write a word, when he went into his tio’s closet and put the Colt up to his temple, when he thought about the train bridge. The days he lay in bed and thought about his mother fixing him his plate the rest of his life, what he’d heard her say to his tio the other day when she thought he wasn’t around, I don’t care, I’m happy he’s here.

Afterward—when he no longer felt like a whipped dog inside, when he could pick up a pen without wanting to cry—he would suffer from overwhelming feelings of guilt. He would apologize to his mother. If there’s a goodness part of my brain, it’s like somebody had absconded with it. It’s OK, hijo, she said. He would take the car and visit Lola. After a year in Brooklyn she was now in Washington Heights, was letting her hair grow, had been pregnant once, a real moment of excitement, but she aborted it because I was cheating on her with some girl. I have returned, he announced when he stepped in the door. She told him it was OK too, would cook for him, and he’d sit with her and smoke her weed tentatively and not understand why he couldn’t sustain this feeling of love in his heart forever.

He began to plan a quartet of science-fiction fantasies that would be his crowning achievement. J.R. R. Tolkien meets E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith. He went on long rides. He drove as far as Amish country, would eat alone at a roadside diner, eye the Amish girls, imagine himself in a preacher’s suit, sleep in the back of the car, and then drive home.

Sometimes at night he dreamed about the Mongoose.

(And in case you think his life couldn’t get any worse: one day he walked into the Game Room and was surprised to discover that overnight the new generation of nerds weren’t buying role-playing games anymore. They were obsessed with Magic cards! No one had seen it coming. No more characters or campaigns, just endless battles between decks. All the narrative flensed from the game, all the performance, just straight unadorned mechanics. How the fucking kids loved that shit! He tried to give Magic a chance, tried to put together a decent deck, but it just wasn’t his thing. Lost everything to an eleven-year-old punk and found himself not really caring. First sign that his Age was coming to a close. When the latest nerdery was no longer compelling, when you preferred the old to the new.)

OSCAR TAKES A VACATION

When Oscar had been at Don Bosco nearly three years, his moms asked him what plans he had for the summer. The last couple of years his rio had been spending the better part of July and August in Santo Domingo and this year his mom had decided it was time to go with. I have not seen mi madre in a long long time, she said quietly. I have many promesas to fulfill, so better now than when I’m dead. Oscar hadn’t been home in years, not since his abuela’s number-one servant, bedridden for months and convinced that the border was about to be reinvaded, had screamed out Haitians! and then died, and they’d all gone to the funeral.

It’s strange. If he’d said no, nigger would probably still be OK. (If you call being fuku’d, being beyond misery, OK.) But this ain’t no Marvel Comics What if? —speculation will have to wait—time, as they say, is growing short. That May, Oscar was, for once, in better spirits. A couple of months earlier, after a particularly nasty bout with the Darkness, he’d started another one of his diets and combined it with long lumbering walks around the neighborhood, and guess what? The nigger stuck with it and lost close on twenty pounds! A milagro! He’d finally repaired his ion drive; the evil planet Gordo was pulling him back, but his fifties-style rocket, the Hijo de Sacrificio, wouldn’t quit. Behold our cosmic explorer: eyes wide, lashed to his acceleration couch, hand over his mutant heart.

He wasn’t svelte by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t Joseph Conrad’s wife no more, either. Earlier in the month he’d even spoken to a bespectacled black girl on a bus, said, So, you’re into photosynthesis, and she’d actually lowered her issue of Cell and said, Yes, I am. So what if he hadn’t ever gotten past Earth Sciences or if he hadn’t been able to convert that slight communication into a number or a date? So what if he’d gotten off at the next stop and she hadn’t, as he had hoped? Homeboy was, for the first time in ten years, feeling resurgent; nothing seemed to bother him, not his students, not the fact that PBS had canceled Doctor Who, not his loneliness, not his endless flow of rejection letters; he felt insuperable, and Santo Domingo summers…well, Santo Domingo summers have their own particular allure, even for one as nerdy as Oscar.

Every summer Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can; airports choke with the overdressed; necks and luggage carousels groan under the accumulated weight of that year’s cadenas and paquetes, and pilots fear for their planes—overburdened beyond belief—and for themselves; restaurants, bars, clubs, theaters, malecones, beaches, resorts, hotels, moteles, extra rooms, barrios, colonias, campos, ingenios swarm with quisqueyanos from the world over. Like someone had sounded a general reverse evacuation order: Back home, everybody! Back home! From Washington Heights to Roma, from Perth Amboy to Tokyo, from Brijeporr to Amsterdam, from Lawrence to San Juan; this is when basic thermodynamic