The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

roommates Oscar housed two bottles of orange Cisco I had bought him. You remember Cisco? Liquid crack, they used to call it. So you know Mr. Lightweight was fucked up .
    To my virginity! Oscar shouted.
    Oscar, cool it, bro. People don’t want to hear about all that.
    You’re right, they just want to stare at me.
    Come on, tranquilísate.
    He slumped. I’m copacetic.
    You ain’t pathetic.
    I said copacetic . Everybody, he shook his head, misapprehends me.
    All the posters and books were packed and it could have been the first day again if it hadn’t been for how unhappy he was. On the real first day he’d been excited, kept calling me by my full name until I told him, It’s Yunior, Oscar. Just Yunior.
    I guess I knew I should have stayed with him. Should have sat my ass in that chair and told him that shit was going to be cool, but it was our last night and I was fucking tired of him. I wanted to fuck silly this Indian girl I had on Douglass, smoke a joint, and then go to bed.
    Fare thee well, he said as I left. Fare thee well!
    What he did was this: drank a third bottle of Cisco and then walked unsteadily down to the New Brunswick train station. With its crumbling façade and a long curve of track that shoots high over the Raritan. Even in the middle of the night, doesn’t take much to get into the station or to walk out onto the tracks, which is exactly what he did. Stumbled out toward the river, toward Route 18. New Brunswick falling away beneath him until he was seventy-seven feet in the air. Seventy-seven feet precisely. From what he would later recall, he stood on that bridge for a good long time. Watching the streaking lights of the traffic below. Reviewing his miserable life. Wishing he’d been born in a different body. Regretting all the books he would never write. Maybe trying to get himself to reconsider. And then the 4:12 express to Washington blew in the distance. By then he was barely able to stand. Closed his eyes (or maybe he didn’t) and when he opened them there was something straight out of Ursula Le Guin standing by his side. Later, when he would describe it, he would call it the Golden Mongoose, but even he knew that wasn’t what it was. It was very placid, very beautiful. Gold-limned eyes that reached through you, not so much in judgment or reproach but for something far scarier. They stared at each other—it serene as a Buddhist, he in total disbelief—and then the whistle blew again and his eyes snapped open (or closed) and it was gone.
    Dude had been waiting his whole life for something just like this to happen to him, had always wanted to live in a world of magic and mystery, but instead of taking note of the vision and changing his ways the fuck just shook his swollen head. The train was nearer now, and so, before he could lose his courage, he threw himself down into the darkness.
    He had left me a note, of course. (And behind it a letter each for his sister, his mother, and Jenni.) He thanked me for everything. He told me I could have his books, his games, his movies, his special d10’s. He told me he was happy to have been friends. He signed off: Your Compañero, Oscar Wao.
     
    If he’d landed on Route 18, as planned, it would have been lights out forever. But in his drunken confusion he must have miscalculated, or maybe, as his mother claims, he was being watched from up on high, because the dude missed 18 proper and landed on the divider! Which should have been fine. Those dividers on 18 are like concrete guillotines. Would have done him lovely. Burst him into intestinal confetti. Except that this one was one of those garden dividers that they plant shrubs on and he hit the freshly tilled loam and not the concrete. Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he’d jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.
    I was there, of course, with his mother and his thuggish uncle, who took regular bathroom breaks to snort up.
    He saw us and what did the idiot do? He turned his head and cried.
    His mother tapped him on his good shoulder. You’ll be doing a lot more than crying when I get through with you.
    A day later Lola arrived from Madrid. Didn’t have a chance even to say a word before her mother launched into the standard Dominican welcome. So now you come, now that your brother’s dying. If I’d known that’s