The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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 roleplaying 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
     
    W hen 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 tío 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 fukú’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 blackgirl 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