The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The wind, the henchmen would joke, drove a bullet straight through the head of this one. Har-har!
    What followed is still, to this day, hotly disputed. There are those who swear on their mothers that when Abelard finally opened the trunk he poked his head inside and said, Nope, no bodies here. This is what Abelard himself claimed to have said. A poor joke, certainly, but not “slander” or “gross calumny.” In Abelard’s version of the events, his friends laughed, the bureau was secured, and off he drove to his Santiago apartment, where Lydia was waiting for him (forty-two and still lovely and still worried shitless about his daughter). The court officers and their hidden “witnesses,” however, argued that something quite different happened, that when Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral opened the trunk of the Packard, he said, Nope, no bodies here, Trujillo must have cleaned them out for me.
    End quote.

CHISTE APOCALYPTUS
     
    I t sounds like the most unlikely load of jiringonza on this side of the Sierra Madre. But one man’s jiringonza is another man’s life.

THE FALL
     
    H e spent that night with Lydia. It had been a weird time for them. Not ten days earlier Lydia had announced that she was pregnant—I’m going to have your son, she crowed happily. But two days later the son proved to be a false alarm, probably just some indigestion. There was relief—like he needed anything else on his plate, and what if it had been another daughter?—but also disappointment, for Abelard wouldn’t have minded a little son, even if the carajito would have been the child of a mistress and born in his darkest hour. He knew that Lydia had been wanting something for some time now, something real that she could claim was theirs and theirs alone. She was forever telling him to leave his wife and move in with her, and while that might have been attractive indeed while they were together in Santiago, the possibility vanished as soon as he set foot back in his house and his two beautiful daughters rushed him. He was a predictable man and liked his predictable comforts, but Lydia never stopped trying to convince him, in a low-intensity way, that love was love and for that reason it should be obeyed. She pretended to be sanguine over the nonappearance of their son—Why would I want to ruin these breasts, she joked—but he could tell she was disheartened. He was too. For these last few days Abelard had been having vague, troubled dreams full of children crying at night, and his father’s first house. Left a disquieting stain on his waking hours. Without really thinking about it, he’d not seen Lydia since that night the news turned bad, had gone out drinking in part, I believe, because he feared that the boy’s nonbirth might have broken them, but instead he felt for her the old desire, the one that nearly knocked him over the first time they’d met at his cousin Ámilcar’s birthday, when they’d both been so slender and young and so jam-packed with possibilities.
    For once they did not talk about Trujillo.
    Can you believe how long it’s been? he asked her in amazement during their last Saturday-night tryst.
    I can believe it, she said sadly, pulling at the flesh of her stomach. We’re clocks, Abelard. Nothing more.
    Abelard shook his head. We’re more than that. We’re marvels, mi amor.
    I wish I could stay in this moment, wish I could extend Abelard’s happy days, but it’s impossible. The next week two atomic eyes opened over civilian centers in Japan and, even though no one knew it yet, the world was then remade. Not two days after the atomic bombs scarred Japan forever, Socorro dreamed that the faceless man was standing over her husband’s bed, and she could not scream, could not say anything, and then the next night she dreamed that he was standing over her children too. I’ve been dreaming, she told her husband, but he waved his hands, dismissing. She began to watch the road in front of their home and burn candles in her room. In Santiago, Abelard is kissing Lydia’s hands and she is sighing with pleasure and already we’re heading for Victory in the Pacific and for three Secret Police officers in their shiny Chevrolet winding up the road to Abelard’s house. Already it’s the Fall.

ABELARD IN CHAINS
     
    T o say it was the greatest shock in Abelard’s life when officers from the Secret Police (it’s too early for the SIM but we’ll call them SIM anyway) placed him in cuffs and led him to their car