The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

and checked the RPGs at the Game Room, the comic books at Hero’s World, the fantasy novels at Waldenbooks. The nerd circuit. Stared at the toothpick-thin blackgirl who worked at the Friendly’s, whom he was in love with but with whom he would never speak.
    Al and Miggs—hadn’t chilled with them in a long time. They’d both dropped out of college, Monmouth and Jersey City State respectively, and both had jobs at the Blockbuster across town. Probably both end up in the same grave.
    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 crosstown 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 tío 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. Tío, he yelled out once, less bass on the headboard, if you will. On the walls of his room tío Rudolfo hung pictures of his first years in the Bronx, when he’d been sixteen and wearing all the fly Willie Colón 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.
    Fukú.
    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 tío’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 tío 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