The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

said, Mi hijo, you have finally returned to us.
    Hi, Abuela. And then, awkwardly: Bendición.
    (Nothing more moving, though, than La Inca and his mother. At first saying nothing and then his mother covering her face and breaking down, saying in this little-girl voice: Madre, I’m home. And then the both of them holding each other and crying and Lola joining them and Oscar not knowing what to do so he joined his cousin, Pedro Pablo, who was shuttling all the luggage from the van to the patio de atrás.)
    It really was astonishing how much he’d forgotten about the DR: the little lizards that were everywhere, and the roosters in the morning, followed shortly by the cries of the plataneros and the bacalao guy and his tío Carlos Moya, who smashed him up that first night with shots of Brugal and who got all misty at the memories he had of him and his sister.
    But what he had forgotten most of all was how incredibly beautiful Dominican women were.
    Duh, Lola said.
    On the rides he took those first couple of days he almost threw his neck out.
    I’m in Heaven, he wrote in his journal.
    Heaven? His cousin Pedro Pablo sucked his teeth with exaggerated disdain. Esto aquí es un maldito infierno .

EVIDENCE OF A BROTHER’S PAST
     
    I n the pictures Lola brought home there are shots of Oscar in the back of the house reading Octavia Butler, shots of Oscar on the Malecón with a bottle of Presidente in his hand, shots of Oscar at the Columbus lighthouse, where half of Villa Duarte used to stand, shots of Oscar with Pedro Pablo in Villa Juana buying spark plugs, shots of Oscar trying on a hat on the Conde, shots of Oscar standing next to a burro in Baní, shots of Oscar next to his sister (she in a string bikini that could have blown your corneas out). You can tell he’s trying too. He’s smiling a lot, despite the bafflement in his eyes.
    He’s also, you might notice, not wearing his fatguy coat.

OSCAR GOES NATIVE
     
    A fter his initial homecoming week, after he’d been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he’d gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huáscar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he’d forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong , after he’d gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn’t dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he’d explained to people a hundred times that he’d been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he’d given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he’d watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he’d left on his plate at an outdoor café, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you’re Haitian—La única haitiana aquí eres tú, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that’s bad, you should see the bateys, after he’d spent a day in Baní (the campo where La Inca had been raised) and he’d taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob—now that’s entertainment, he wrote in his journal—after he’d gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital—the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica da Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the