by Junot Díaz
Five month, six month, seventh month. You are in class teaching Intro to Fiction when you get a text from one of her girlfriends saying she has gone into labor, six weeks early. All sorts of terrible fears race around inside of you. You keep trying her cell phone but she doesn’t answer. You call Elvis but he doesn’t answer either, so you drive over to the hospital by yourself.
Are you the father? the woman at the desk asks.
I am, you say diffidently.
You are led around the corridors and finally given some scrubs and told to wash your hands and given instructions where you should stand and warned about the procedure but as soon as you walk into the birthing room the law student shrieks: I don’t want him in here. I don’t want him in here. He’s not the father.
You didn’t think anything could hurt so bad. Her two girlfriends rush at you but you have already exited. You saw her thin ashy legs and the doctor’s back and little else. You’re glad you didn’t see anything more. You would have felt like you’d violated her safety or something. You take off the scrubs; you wait around for a bit and then you realize what you’re doing and finally you drive home.
—
YOU DON’T HEAR from her but from her girlfriend, the same one who texted you about the labor. I’ll come pick up her bags, OK? When she arrives, she glances around the apartment warily. You’re not going to go psycho on me, are you?
No, I’m not. After a pause you demand: Why would you say that? I’ve never hurt a woman in my life. Then you realize how you sound—like a dude who hurts women all the time. Everything goes back into the three suitcases and then you help her wrestle them down to her SUV.
You must be relieved, she says.
You don’t answer.
And that’s the end of it. Later you hear that the Kenyan visited her in the hospital, and when he saw the baby a teary reconciliation occurred, all was forgiven.
That was your mistake, Elvis said. You should have had a baby with that ex of yours. Then she wouldn’t have left you.
She would have left you, Arlenny says. Believe it.
The rest of the semester ends up being a super-duper clusterfuck. Lowest evaluations in your six years as a professor. Your only student of color for that semester writes: He claims that we don’t know anything but doesn’t show us any way to address these deficiencies. One night you call your ex and when the voice mail clicks on you say: We should have had a kid. And then you hang up, ashamed. Why did you say that? you ask yourself. Now she’ll definitely never speak to you again.
I don’t think the phone call is the problem, Arlenny says.
Check it out. Elvis produces a picture of Elvis Jr. holding a bat. This kid is going to be a monster.
On winter break you fly to the DR with Elvis. What the hell else are you going to do? You ain’t got shit going on, outside of waving your arms around every time they go numb.
Elvis is beyond excited. He has three suitcases of shit for the boy, including his first glove, his first ball, his first Bosox jersey. About eighty kilos of clothes and shit for the baby mama. Hid them all in your apartment, too. You are at his house when he bids his wife and mother-in-law and daughter goodbye. His daughter doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening but when the door shuts she lets out a wail that coils about you like constantine wire. Elvis stays cool as fuck. This used to be me, you’re thinking. Me me me.
Of course you look for her on the flight. You can’t help yourself.
You assume that the baby mama will live somewhere poor like Capotillo or Los Alcarrizos but you didn’t imagine she would live in the Nadalands. You’ve been to the Nadalands a couple of times before; shit, your family came up out of those spaces. Squatter chawls where there are no roads, no lights, no running water, no grid, no anything, where everybody’s slapdash house is on top of everybody else’s, where it’s all mud and shanties and motos and grind and thin smiling motherfuckers everywhere without end, like falling off the rim of civilization. You have to leave the rental jípeta on the last bit of paved road and jump on the back of motoconchos with all the luggage balanced on your backs. Nobody stares because those ain’t real loads you’re carrying: You’ve seen a single moto carry a family of five and their pig.
You finally pull up to a tiny little house and out comes Baby Mama—cue happy homecoming. You wish you could say you remember Baby Mama from that long-ago trip, but you do not. She is tall and very thick, exactly how Elvis always likes them. She is no older than twenty-one, twenty-two, with an irresistible Georgina Duluc smile, and when she sees you she gives you a huge abrazo. So the padrino finally decides to visit, she declaims in one of those loud ronca campesina voices. You also meet her mother, her grandmother, her brother, her sister, her three uncles. Seems like everybody is missing teeth.
Elvis picks up the boy. Mi hijo, he sings. Mi hijo.
The boy starts crying.
Baby Mama’s place is barely two rooms, one bed, one chair, a little table, a single bulb overhead. More mosquitoes than a refugee camp. Raw sewage in the back. You look at Elvis like what the fuck. The few family fotos hanging on the walls are water-stained. When it rains—Baby Mama lifts up her hands —everything goes.
Don’t worry, Elvis says, I’m moving them out this month, if I can get the loot together.
The happy couple leaves you with the family and Elvis Jr. while they visit various negocios to settle accounts and to pick up some necessaries. Baby Mama also wants to show off Elvis, natch.
You sit on a plastic chair in front of the house with the kid in your lap. The neighbors admire you with cheerful avidity. A domino game breaks out and you team up with Baby Mama’s brooding brother. Takes him less than five seconds to talk you into ordering a couple of grandes and a bottle of Brugal from the nearby colmado. Also three boxes of cigarettes, a tube of salami, and some cough syrup for a neighbor lady with a congested daughter. Ta muy mal, she says. Of course everybody has a sister or a prima they want you to meet. Que tan mas buena que el Diablo, they guarantee. You all barely finish the first bottle of romo before some of the sisters and primas actually start coming around. They look rough but you got to give it to them for trying. You invite them all to sit down, order more beer and some bad pica pollo.
Just let me know which one you like, a neighbor whispers, and I’ll make it happen.
Elvis Jr. watches you with considerable gravitas. He is a piercingly cute carajito. He has all these mosquito bites on his legs and an old scab on his head no one can explain to you. You are suddenly overcome with the urge to cover him with your arms, with your whole body.
Later, Elvis Sr. fills you in on the Plan. I’ll bring him over to the States in a few years. I’ll tell the wife he was an accident, a one-time thing when I was drunk and I didn’t find out about it until now.
And that’s going to work?
It will work out, he says testily.
Bro, your wife ain’t going to buy that.
And what the fuck do you know? Elvis says. It ain’t like your shit ever works.
Can’t argue with that. By this point your arms are killing you so you pick up the boy in order to put circulation back in them. You look into his eyes. He looks into yours. He seems preternaturally sapient. MIT-bound, you say, while you nuzzle his peppercorn hair. He starts to bawl then and you put him down, watch him run around a while.
That’s more or less when you know.
The second story of the house is unfinished, rebar poking out of the cinderblock like horrible gnarled follicles, and you and Elvis stand up there and drink beers and stare out beyond the edge of the city, beyond the vast radio dish antennas in the distance, out toward the mountains of the Cibao, the Cordillera Central, where your father was born and where your ex’s whole family is from. It’s breathtaking.
He’s not yours, you tell Elvis.
What are you talking ab
out?
The boy is not yours.
Don’t be a jerk. That kid looks just like me.
Elvis. You put your hand on his arm. You look straight into the center of his eyes. Cut the crap.
A long silence. But he looks like me.
Bro, he so doesn’t look like you.
The next day you two load up the boy and drive back into the city, back into Gazcue. You literally have to beat the family off to keep them from coming with you. Before you go one of the uncles pulls you aside. You really should bring these people a refrigerator. Then the brother pulls you aside. And a TV. And then the mother pulls you aside. A hot comb too.
Traffic back into the center is Gaza Strip crazy and there seems to be a crash every five hundred meters and Elvis keeps threatening to turn around. You ignore him. You stare at the slurry of broken concrete, the sellers with all the crap of the earth slung over their shoulders, the dust-covered palms. The boy holds on to you tightly. There is no significance in this, you tell yourself. It’s a Moro-type reflex, nothing more.
Don’t make me do this, Yunior, Elvis pleads.
You insist. You have to, E. You know you can’t live a lie. It won’t be good for the boy, it won’t be good for you. Don’t you think it’s better to know?
But I always wanted a boy, he says. My whole life that’s all I wanted. When I got in that shit in Iraq I kept thinking, Please God let me live just long enough to have a son, please, and then you can kill me dead right after. And look, He gave him to me, didn’t He? He gave him to me.
The clinic is in one of those houses they built in the International Style during the time of Trujillo. The two of you stand at the front desk. You are holding the boy’s hand. The boy is staring at you with lapidary intensity. The mud is waiting. The mosquito bites are waiting. The Nada is waiting.
Go on, you tell Elvis.
In all honesty you figure he won’t do it, that this is where it will end. He’ll take the boy and turn around and go back to the jípeta. But he carries the little guy into a room where they swab both their mouths and it’s done.
You ask: How long will it take for the results?
Four weeks, the technician tells you.
That long?
She shrugs. Welcome to Santo Domingo.
Year 5
You figure that’s the last you’ll hear about it, that no matter what, the results will change nothing. But four weeks after the trip, Elvis informs you that the test is negative. Fuck, he says bitterly, fuck fuck fuck. And then he cuts off all contact with the kid and the mother. Changes his cell phone number and e-mail account. I told the bitch not to call me again. There is some shit that can’t be forgiven.
Of course you feel terrible. You think about the way the boy looked at you. Let me have her number at least, you say. You figure you can throw her a little cash every month but he won’t have it. Fuck that lying bitch.
You reckon he must have known, somewhere inside, maybe even wanted you to blow it all up, but you let it be, don’t explore it. He’s going to yoga five times a week now, is in the best shape of his life, while you on the other hand have to buy bigger jeans again. When you walk into Elvis’s now, his daughter rushes you, calls you Tío Junji. It’s your Korean name, Elvis teases.
With him it’s like nothing happened. You wish you could be as phlegmatic.
Do you ever think about them?
He shakes his head. Never will either.
The numbness in the arms and legs increases. You return to your doctors and they ship you over to a neurologist who sends you out for an MRI. Looks like you have stenosis all down your spine, the doctor reports, impressed.
Is it bad?
It isn’t great. Did you used to do a lot of heavy manual labor?
Besides delivering pool tables, you mean?
That would do it. The doctor squints at the MRI. Let’s try some physical therapy. If that doesn’t work we’ll talk about other options.
Like?
He steeples his fingers contemplatively. Surgery.
From there what little life you got goes south. A student complains to the school that you curse too much. You have to have a sit-down with the dean, who more or less tells you to watch your shit. You get pulled over by the cops three weekends in a row. One time they sit you out on the curb and you watch as all the other whips sail past, passengers ogling you as they go. On the T you swear you peep her in the rush-hour mix and for a second your knees buckle but it turns out to be just another Latina mujerón in a tailored suit.
Of course you dream about her. You are in New Zealand or in Santo Domingo or improbably back in college, in the dorms. You want her to say your name, to touch you, but she doesn’t. She just shakes her head.
Ya.
—
YOU WANT TO MOVE ON, to exorcise shit, so you find a new apartment on the other side of the square that has a view of Harvard skyline. All those amazing steeples, including your favorite, the gray dagger of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church. In the first days of your tenancy an eagle lands in the dead tree right outside your fifth-story window. Looks you in the eye. This seems to you like a good sign.
A month later the law student sends you an invitation to her wedding in Kenya. There’s a foto and the two of them are dressed in what you assume is traditional Kenyan jumpoffs. She looks very thin, and she’s wearing a lot of makeup. You expect a note, some mention of what you did for her, but there is nothing. Even the address was typed on a computer.
Maybe it’s a mistake, you say.
It wasn’t a mistake, Arlenny assures you.
Elvis tears the invite up, throws it out the truck window. Fuck that bitch. Fuck all bitches.
You manage to save a tiny piece of the foto. It’s of her hand.
You work harder than you’ve ever worked at everything—the teaching, your physical therapy, your regular therapy, your reading, your walking. You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn’t come.
You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it?
There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It’s just a matter of willpower: The day you decide it’s over, it’s over. You never get over it.
One night that winter you go out with all the boys to a ghetto-ass Latin club in Mattapan Square. Murder-fucking-pan. Outside it’s close to zero, but inside it’s so hot that everybody’s stripped down to their T-shirts and the funk is as thick as a fro. There’s a girl who keeps bumping into you. You say to her Pero mi amor, ya. And she says: Ya yourself. She’s Dominican and lithe and super tall. I could never date anyone as short as you, she informs you very early on in your conversations. But she gives you her number at the end of the night. All evening, Elvis sits at the bar quietly, drinking shot after shot of Rémy. The week before, he took a quick solo trip to the DR, a ghost recon. Didn’t tell you about it until after. He tried looking for the mom and Elvis Jr. but they had moved and no one knew where they were. None of the numbers he had for her worked. I hope they turn up, he says.
I hope so, too.
You take the longest walks. Every ten minutes you drop and do squats or push-ups. It’s not running, but it raises your heart rate, better than nothing. Afterward you are in so much nerve pain that you can barely move.
Some nights you have Neuromancer dreams where you see the ex and the boy and another figure, familiar, waving at you in the distance. Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter.
And finally, when you feel like you can do so without blowing into burning atoms, you open a folder you have kept hidden under your bed. The Doomsday Book. Copies of all the e-mails and fotos from the cheating days, the ones the ex found and compiled and mailed to you a month after sh
e ended it. Dear Yunior, for your next book. Probably the last time she wrote your name.
You read the whole thing cover to cover (yes, she put covers on it). You are surprised at what a fucking chickenshit coward you are. It kills you to admit it but it’s true. You are astounded by the depths of your mendacity. When you finish the Book a second time you say the truth: You did the right thing, negra. You did the right thing.
She’s right; this would make a killer book, Elvis says. The two of you have been pulled over by a cop and are waiting for Officer Dickhead to finish running your license. Elvis holds up one of the fotos.
She’s Colombian, you say.
He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater’s guide to love.
You think?
I do.
It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny’s Ph.D. defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex’s name and: The half-life of love is forever.
You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down.
The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don’t want to burn them or give up writing forever.
It’s a start, you say to the room.
That’s about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.