The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

uncommunicative, when she called him an idiot americano for spilling his beer. On these days she opened her door and threw herself in bed and didn’t do anything. Hard to be around her but he would say, Hey, I heard Jesus is down at the Plaza Central giving out condoms; he’d convince her to see a movie, the going out and sitting in a theater seemed to put the princess in partial check. Afterward she’d be a little easier; she’d take him to an Italian restaurant and no matter how much her mood had improved she’d insist on drinking herself ridiculous. So bad he’d have to put her in the truck and drive them home through a city he did not know. (Early on he hit on this great scheme: he called Clives, the evangelical taxista his family always used, who would swing by no sweat and lead him home.) When he drove she always put her head in his lap and talked to him, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes about the beatings the women had given each other in prison, sometimes sweet stuff, and having her mouth so close to his nuts was finer than one might imagine.

LA INCA SPEAKS

He didn’t meet her on the street like he told you. His cousins, los idiotas, took him to a cabaret and that’s where he first saw her. And that’s where ella se metio por sus ojos.

YBON, AS RECORDED BY OSCAR

I never wanted to come back to Santo Domingo. But after I was let go from jail I had trouble paying back the people I owed, and my mother was sick, and so I just came back.

It was hard at first. Once you’ve been fuera, Santo Domingo is the smallest place in the world. But if I’ve learned anything in my travels it’s that a person can get used to anything. Even Santo Domingo.

WHAT NEVER CHANGES

Oh, they got close all right, but we have to ask the hard questions again: Did they ever kiss in her Pathfinder? Did he ever put his hands up her super-short skirt? Did she ever push up against him and say his name in a throaty whisper? Did he ever stroke that end-of-the-world tangle that was her hair while she sucked him off? Did they ever fuck?

Of course not. Miracles only go so far. He watched her for the signs, signs that would tell him she loved him. He began to suspect that it might not happen this summer, but already he had plans to come back for Thanksgiving, and then for Christmas. When he told her, she looked at him strangely and said only his name, Oscar, a little sadly.

She liked him, it was obvious, she liked it when he talked his crazy talk, when he stared at a new thing like it might have been from another planet (like the one time she had caught him in the bathroom staring at her soapstone—What the hell is this peculiar mineral? he said). It seemed to Oscar that he was one of her few real friends. Outside the boyfriends, foreign and domestic, outside her psychiatrist sister in San Cristobal and her ailing mother in Sabana Iglesia, her life seemed as spare as her house.

Travel light, was all she ever said about the house when he suggested he buy her a lamp or anything, and he suspected that she would have said the same thing about having more friends. He knew, though, that he wasn’t her only visitor. One day he found three discarded condom foils on the floor around her bed, had asked, Are you having trouble with incubuses? She smiled without shame. That’s one man who doesn’t know the word quit.

Poor Oscar. At night he dreamed that his rocketship, the Hijo de Sacrijicio, was up and off but that it was heading for the Ana Obregon Barrier at the speed of light.

OSCAR AT THE RUBICON

At the beginning of August, Ybon started mentioning her boyfriend, the capitan, a lot more. Seems he’d heard about Oscar and wanted to meet him. He’s really jealous, Ybon said rather weakly: Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves. I don’t know, Ybon said. Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time together. Shouldn’t you be looking for a girlfriend?

I got one, he said. She’s the girlfriend of my mind.

A jealous Third World cop boyfriend? Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time together? Any other nigger would have pulled a Scooby-Doo double take—Eeuoooorr?—would have thought twice about staying in Santo Domingo another day. Hearing about the capitan only served to depress him, as did the spend-less-time crack. He never stopped to consider the fact that when a Dominican cop says he wants to meet you he ain’t exactly talking about bringing you flowers.

One night not long after the condom-foil incident Oscar woke up in his overly air-conditioned room and realized with unusual clarity that he was heading down that road again. The road where he became so nuts over a girl he stopped thinking.

The road where very bad things happened. You should stop right now, he told himself. But he knew, with lapidary clarity, that he wasn’t going to stop. He loved Ybon. (And love, for this kid, was a geas, something that could not be shaken or denied.) The night before, she’d been so drunk that he had to help her into bed, and the whole time she was saying, God, we have to be careful, Oscar, but as soon as she hit the mattress she started writhing out of her clothes, didn’t care that he was there; he tried not to look until she was under her covers but what he did see burned the edges of his eyes. When he turned to leave she sat up, her chest utterly and beautifully naked. Don’t go yet. Wait till I’m asleep. He lay down next to her, on top of the sheets, didn’t walk home until it was starting to get light out. He’d seen her beautiful chest and knew now that it was far too late to pack up and go home like those little voices were telling him, far too late.

LAST CHANCE

Two days later Oscar found his tio examining the front door. What’s the matter? His tio showed him the door and pointed at the concrete-block wall on the other side of the foyer. I think somebody shot at our house last night. He was enraged. Fucking Dominicans. Probably hosed the whole neighborhood down. We’re lucky we’re alive.

His mother jabbed her finger into the bullet hole. I don’t consider this being lucky.

I don’t either, La Inca said, staring straight at Oscar.

For a second Oscar felt this strange tugging in the back of his head, what someone else might have called Instinct, but instead of hunkering down and sifting through it he said, We probably didn’t hear it because of all our air conditioners, and then he walked over to Ybon’s. They were supposed to be going to the Duarte that day.

OSCAR GETS BEAT

In the middle of August Oscar finally met the capitan. But he also got his first kiss ever. So you could say that day changed his life.