The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

  This is your chance. If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the Matrix.

  THE GIRL FROM SABANA IGLESIA

  In their photos, Ybón looks young. It’s her smile and the way she perks up her body for every shot as if she’s presenting herself to the world, as if she’s saying, Ta-da, here I am, take it or leave it. She dressed young too, but she was a solid thirty-six, perfect age for anybody but a stripper. In the close-ups you can see the crow’s-feet, and she complained all the time about her little belly, the way her breasts and her ass were starting to lose their firm, which was why, she said, she had to be in the gym five days a week. When you’re sixteen a body like this is free; when you’re forty—pffft!—it’s a full-time occupation. The third time Oscar came over, Ybón doubled up on the scotches again and then took down her photo albums from the closet and showed him all the pictures of herself when she’d been sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, always on a beach, always in an early-eighties bikini, always with big hair, always smiling, always with her arms around some middle-aged eighties yakoub. Looking at those old hairy blancos, Oscar couldn’t help but feel hopeful. (Let me guess, he said, these are your uncles?) Each photo had a date and a place at the bottom and this was how he was able to follow Ybón’s puta’s progress through Italy, Portugal, and Spain. I was so beautiful in those days, she said wistfully. It was true, her smile could have put out a sun, but Oscar didn’t think she was any less fine now, the slight declensions in her appearances only seemed to add to her luster (the last bright before the fade) and he told her so.

  You’re so sweet, mi amor. She knocked back another double and rasped, What’s your sign?

  How lovesick he became! He stopped writing and began to go over to her house nearly every day, even when he knew she was working, just in case she’d caught ill or decided to quit the profession so she could marry him. The gates of his heart had swung open and he felt light on his feet, he felt weightless, he felt lithe. His abuela steady gave him shit, told him that not even God loves a puta. Yeah, his tío laughed, but everybody knows that God loves a puto. His tío seemed thrilled that he no longer had a pájaro for a nephew. I can’t believe it, he said proudly. The palomo is finally a man. He put Oscar’s neck in the NJ State Police-patented nigger-killer lock. When did it happen? I want to play that date as soon I get home.

  Here we go again: Oscar and Ybón at her house, Oscar and Ybón at the movies, Oscar and Ybón at the beach. Ybón talked, voluminously, and Oscar slipped some words in too. Ybón told him about her two sons, Sterling and Perfecto, who lived with their grandparents in Puerto Rico, whom she saw only on holidays. (They’d known only her photo and her money the whole time she’d been in Europe, and when she’d finally returned to the Island they were little men and she didn’t have the heart to tear them from the only family they’d ever known. That would have made me roll my eyes, but Oscar bought it hook, line, and sinker.) She told him about the two abortions she’d had, told him about the time she’d been jailed in Madrid, told him how hard it was to sell your ass, asked, Can something be impossible and not impossible at once? Talked about how if she hadn’t studied English at the UASD she probably would have had it a lot worse. Told him of a trip she’d taken to Berlin in the company of a rebuilt Brazilian trannie, a friend, how sometimes the trains would go so slow you could have plucked a passing flower without disturbing its neighbors. She told him about her Dominican boyfriend, the capitán, and her foreign boyfriends: the Italian, the German, and the Canadian, the three benditos, how they each visited her on different months. You’re lucky they all have families, she said. Or I’d have been working this whole summer. (He wanted to ask her not to talk about any of these dudes but she would only have laughed. So all he said was, I could have shown them around Zurza; I hear they love tourists, and she laughed and told him to play nice.) He, in turn, talked about the one time he and his dork college buddies had driven up to Wisconsin for a gaming convention, his only big trip, how they had camped out at a Winnebago reservation and drank Pabst with some of the local Indians. He talked about his love for his sister Lola and what had happened to her. He talked about trying to take his own life. This is the only time that Ybón didn’t say anything. Instead she poured them both drinks and raised her glass. To life!

  They never discussed the amount of time they spent together. Maybe we should get married, he said once, not joking, and she said, I’d make a terrible wife. He was around so often that he even got to see her in a couple of her notorious ‘moods,’ when her alien-princess part pushed to the fore and she became very cold and uncommunicative, when she called him an idiot americano for spilling his beer. On these days she opened her door and threw herself in bed and didn’t do anything. Hard to be around her but he would say, Hey, I heard Jesus is down at the Plaza Central giving out condoms; he’d convince her to see a movie, the going out and sitting in a theater seemed to put the princess in partial check. Afterward she’d be a little easier; she’d take him to an Italian restaurant and no matter how much her mood had improved she’d insist on drinking herself ridiculous. So bad he’d have to put her in the truck and drive them home through a city he did not know. (Early on he hit on this great scheme: he called Clives, the evangelical taxista his family always used, who would swing by no sweat and lead him home.) When he drove she always put her head in his lap and talked to him, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes about the beatings the women had given each other in prison, sometimes sweet stuff, and having her mouth so close to his nuts was finer than one might imagine.

  LA INCA SPEAKS

  He didn’t meet her on the street like he told you. His cousins, los idiotas, took him to a cabaret and that’s where he first saw her. And that’s where ella se metió por sus ojos.

  YBÓN, AS RECORDED BY OSCAR

  I never wanted to come back to Santo Domingo. But after I was let go from jail I had trouble paying back the people I owed, and my mother was sick, and so I just came back.

  It was hard at first. Once you’ve been fuera, Santo Domingo is the smallest place in the world. But if I’ve learned anything in my travels it’s that a person can get used to anything. Even Santo Domingo.

  WHAT NEVER CHANGES

  Oh, they got close all right, but we have to ask the hard questions again: Did they ever kiss in her Pathfinder? Did he ever put his hands up her super-short skirt? Did she ever push up against him and say his name in a throaty whisper? Did he ever stroke that end-of-the-world tangle that was her hair while she sucked him off? Did they ever fuck?

  Of course not. Miracles only go so far. He watched her for the signs, signs that would tell him she loved him. He began to suspect that it might not happen this summer, but already he had plans to come back for Thanksgiving, and then for Christmas. When he told her, she looked at him strangely and said only his name, Oscar, a little sadly.

  She liked him, it was obvious, she liked it when he talked his crazy talk, when he stared at a new thing like it might have been from another planet (like the one time she had caught him in the bathroom staring at her soapstone—What the hell is this peculiar mineral? he said). It seemed to Oscar that he was one of her few real friends. Outside the boyfriends, foreign and domestic, outside her psychiatrist sister in San Cristóbal and her ailing mother in Sabana Iglesia, her life seemed as spare as her house.

  Travel light, was all she ever said about the house when he suggested he buy her a lamp or anything, and he suspected that she would have said the same thing about having more friends. He knew, though, that he wasn’t her only visitor. One day he found three discarded condom foils on the floor around her bed, had asked, Are you having trouble with incubuses? She smiled without shame. That’s one man who doesn’t know the word quit.

  Poor Oscar. At night he dreamed that his rocketship, the Hijo de Sacrijicio, was up and off but that it was heading for the Ana Obregón Barrier at the speed of light.

  OSCAR AT THE RUBICON

  At the beginning of August, Ybón started
mentioning her boyfriend, the capitán, a lot more. Seems he’d heard about Oscar and wanted to meet him. He’s really jealous, Ybón said rather weakly: Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves. I don’t know, Ybón said. Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time together. Shouldn’t you be looking for a girlfriend?

  I got one, he said. She’s the girlfriend of my mind.

  A jealous Third World cop boyfriend? Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time together? Any other nigger would have pulled a Scooby-Doo double take—Eeuoooorr?—would have thought twice about staying in Santo Domingo another day. Hearing about the capitán only served to depress him, as did the spend-less-time crack. He never stopped to consider the fact that when a Dominican cop says he wants to meet you he ain’t exactly talking about bringing you flowers.

  One night not long after the condom-foil incident Oscar woke up in his overly air-conditioned room and realized with unusual clarity that he was heading down that road again. The road where he became so nuts over a girl he stopped thinking.

  The road where very bad things happened. You should stop right now, he told himself. But he knew, with lapidary clarity, that he wasn’t going to stop. He loved Ybón. (And love, for this kid, was a geas, something that could not be shaken or denied.) The night before, she’d been so drunk that he had to help her into bed, and the whole time she was saying, God, we have to be careful, Oscar, but as soon as she hit the mattress she started writhing out of her clothes, didn’t care that he was there; he tried not to look until she was under her covers but what he did see burned the edges of his eyes. When he turned to leave she sat up, her chest utterly and beautifully naked. Don’t go yet. Wait till I’m asleep. He lay down next to her, on top of the sheets, didn’t walk home until it was starting to get light out. He’d seen her beautiful chest and knew now that it was far too late to pack up and go home like those little voices were telling him, far too late.

  LAST CHANCE

  Two days later Oscar found his tío examining the front door. What’s the matter? His tío showed him the door and pointed at the concrete-block wall on the other side of the foyer. I think somebody shot at our house last night. He was enraged. Fucking Dominicans. Probably hosed the whole neighborhood down. We’re lucky we’re alive.

  His mother jabbed her finger into the bullet hole. I don’t consider this being lucky.

  I don’t either, La Inca said, staring straight at Oscar.

  For a second Oscar felt this strange tugging in the back of his head, what someone else might have called Instinct, but instead of hunkering down and sifting through it he said, We probably didn’t hear it because of all our air conditioners, and then he walked over to Ybón’s. They were supposed to be going to the Duarte that day.

  OSCAR GETS BEAT

  In the middle of August Oscar finally met the capitán. But he also got his first kiss ever. So you could say that day changed his life.

  Ybón had passed out again (after giving him a long speech about how they had to give each other ‘space,’ which he’d listened to with his head down and wondered why she insisted on holding his hand during dinner, then). It was super late and he’d been following Clives in the Pathfinder, the usual routine, when some cops up ahead let Clives pass and then asked Oscar to please step out of the vehicle. It’s not my truck, he explained, it’s hers. He pointed to the sleeping Ybón. We understand, if you could pull over for a second. He did so, a little worried, but right then Ybón sat up and stared at him with her light eyes. Do you know what I want, Oscar?

  I am, he said, too afraid to ask.

  I want, she said, moving into position, un beso.

  And before he could say anything she was on him.

  The first feel of woman’s body pressing against yours—who among us can ever forget that? And that first real kiss—well, to be honest, I’ve forgotten both of these firsts, but Oscar never would.

  For a second he was in disbelief. This is it, this is really it! Her lips plush and pliant, and her tongue pushing into his mouth. And then there were lights all around them and he thought I’m going to transcend! Transcendence is miiine! But then he realized that the two plainclothes who had pulled them over—who both looked like they’d been raised on high-G planets, and whom we’ll call Solomon Grundy and Gorilla Grod for simplicity’s sake were beaming their flashlights into the car. And who was standing behind them, looking in on the scene inside the car with an expression of sheer murder? Why, the capitán of course. Ybón’s boyfriend!

  Grod and Grundy yanked him out of the car. And did Ybón fight to keep him in her arms? Did she protest the rude interruption to their making out? Of course not. Homegirl just passed right out again.

  The capitán. A skinny forty-something jabao standing near his spotless red Jeep, dressed nice, in slacks and a crisply pressed white button-down, his shoes bright as scarabs. One of those tall, arrogant, acerbically handsome niggers that most of the planet feels inferior to. Also one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away. He’d been young during the Trujillato, so he never got the chance to run with some real power, wasn’t until the North American Invasion that he earned his stripes. Like my father, he supported the U.S. Invaders, and because he was methodical and showed absolutely no mercy to the leftists, he was launched—no, vaulted—into the top ranks of the military police. Was very busy under Demon Balaguer. Shooting at sindicatos from the backseats of cars. Burning down organizers’ homes. Smashing in people’s faces with crowbars.

  The Twelve Years were good times for men like him. In 1974 he held an old woman’s head underwater until she died (she’d tried to organize some peasants for land rights in San Juan); in 1977 he played mazel-tov on a fifteen-year-old boy’s throat with the heel of his Florsheim (another Communist troublemaker, good fucking riddance). I know this guy well. He has family in Queens and every Christmas he brings his cousins bottles of Johnnie Walker Black. His friends call him Fito, and when he was young he wanted to be a lawyer, but then the calie scene about all that lawyering business.

  So you’re the New Yorker. When Oscar saw the capitán’s eyes he knew he was in deep shit. The capitán, you see, also had close-set eyes; these, though, were blue and terrible. (The eyes of Lee Van Cleef!) If it hadn’t been for the courage of his sphincter, Oscar’s lunch and his dinner and his breakfast would have whooshed straight out of him.

  I didn’t do anything, Oscar quailed. Then he blurted out, I’m an American citizen.

  The capitán waved away a mosquito. I’m an American citizen too. I was naturalized in the city of Buffalo, in the state of New York.

  I bought mine in Miami, Gorilla Grod said. Not me, Solomon Grundy lamented. I only have my residency.

  Please, you have to believe me, I didn’t do anything.

  The capitán smiled. Motherfucker even had First World teeth. Do you know who I am? Oscar nodded. He was inexperienced but he wasn’t dumb. You’re Ybón’s ex-boyfriend. I’m not her ex-novio, you maldito parigüayo! the capitán screamed, the cords in his neck standing out like a Krikfalusi drawing.

  She said you were her ex, Oscar insisted.

  The capitán grabbed him by the throat.

  That’s what she said, he whimpered.

  Oscar was lucky; if he had looked like my pana, Pedro, the Dominican Superman, or like my boy Benny, who was a model, he probably would have gotten shot right there. But because he was a homely slob, because he really looked like un maldito parigüayo who had never had no luck in his life, the capitán took Gollum-pity on him and only punched him a couple of times. Oscar, who had never been ‘punched a couple of times’ by a military-trained adult, felt like he had just been run over by the entire Steelers backfield circa 1977. Breath knocked out of him so bad he honestly thought he was going to die of asphyxiation. The captain’s face appeared over his: If you ever touch my mujer again I’m going to kill you, parigüayo, and Oscar managed to whisper, You’re the ex, before Messrs. Grundy and Grod picked him
up (with some difficulty), squeezed him back into their Camry, and drove off. Oscar’s last sight of Ybón? The capitán dragging her out of the Pathfinder cabin by her hair.

  He tried to jump out of the car but Gorilla Grod elbowed him so hard that all the fight jumped clean out of him. Nighttime in Santo Domingo. A blackout, of course. Even the Lighthouse out for the night.

  Where did they take him? Where else. The cane-fields.

  How’s that for eternal return? Oscar so bewildered and frightened he pissed himself.

  Didn’t you grow up around here? Grundy asked his darker-skinned pal.

  You stupid dick-sucker, I grew up in Puerto Plata.

  Are you sure? You look like you speak a little French to me.

  On the ride there Oscar tried to find his voice but couldn’t. He was too shook. (In situations like these he had always assumed his secret hero would emerge and snap necks, à la Jim Kelly, but clearly his secret hero was out having some pie.) Everything seemed to be moving so fast. How had this happened? What wrong turn had he taken? He couldn’t believe it. He was going to die. He tried to imagine Ybón at the funeral in her nearly see-through black sheath, but couldn’t. Saw his mother and La Inca at the grave site. Didn’t we tell you? Didn’t we tell you? Watched Santo Domingo glide past and felt impossibly alone. How could this be happening? To him? He was boring, he was fat, and he was so very afraid. Thought about his mother, his sister, all the miniatures he hadn’t painted yet, and started crying. You need to keep it down, Grundy said, but Oscar couldn’t stop, even when he put his hands in his mouth.