Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

There was a dream, however, that did haunt her. Where she walked alone through a vast, empty house whose roof was being tattooed by rain. Whose house was it? She had not a clue. But she could hear the voices of children in it.

At first year’s end, the teacher asked her to come to the board and fill in the date, a privilege that only the ‘best’ children in the class were given. She is a giant at the board and in their minds the children are calling her what they call her in the world: variations on La Prieta Quemada or La Fea Quemada. When Beli sat down the teacher glanced over her scrawl and said, Well done, Sñorita Cabral! She would never forget that day, even when she became the Queen of Diaspora.

Well done, Sñorita Cabral! She would never forget. She was nine years, eleven months. It was the Era of Trujillo.

After graduation Oscar moved back home. Left a virgin, returned one. Took down his childhood posters—Star Blazers, Captain Harlock —and tacked up his college ones— Akira and Terminator 2 . Now that Reagan and the Evil Empire had ridden off into never-never land, Oscar didn’t dream about the end no more. Only about the Fall. He put away his Aftermath! game and picked up Space Opera.

These were the early Clinton years but the economy was still sucking an eighties cock and he kicked around, doing nada for al most seven months, went back to subbing at Don Bosco whenever one of the teachers got sick. (Oh, the irony!) He started sending his stories and novels out, but no one seemed interested. Still, he kept trying and kept writing. A year later the substituting turned into a full-time job. He could have refused, could have made a ‘saving throw’ against Torture, but instead he went with the flow. Watched his horizons collapse, told himself it didn’t matter.

Had Don Bosco, since last we visited, been miraculously transformed by the spirit of Christian brotherhood? Had the eternal benevolence of the Lord cleansed the students of their vile? Negro, please. Certainly the school struck Oscar as smaller now, and the older brothers all seemed to have acquired the Innsmouth ‘look’ in the past five years, and there were a grip more kids of color—but some things (like white supremacy and people-of-color self-hate) never change: the same charge of gleeful sadism that he remembered from his youth still electrified the halls. And if he’d thought Don Bosco had been the moronic inferno when he was young—try now that he was older and teaching English and history. Jesú Santa Maria. A nightmare. He wasn’t great at teaching. His heart wasn’t in it, and boys of all grades and dispositions shitted on him effusively. Students laughed when they spotted him in the halls. Pretended to hide their sandwiches. Asked in the middle of lectures if he ever got laid, and no matter how he responded they guffawed mercilessly. The students, he knew, laughed as much at his embarrassment as at the image they had of him crushing, down on some hapless girl. They drew cartoons of said crushings, and Oscar found these on the floor after class, complete with dialogue bubbles. No, Mr. Oscar, no! How demoralizing was that? Every day he watched the ‘cool’ kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the Indian, the Arab, the immigrant, the strange, the feminino, the gay—and in every one of these clashes he saw himself: In the old days it had been the whitekids who had been the chief tormentors, but now it was kids of color who performed the necessaries. Sometimes he tried to reach out to the school’s whipping boys, offer them some words of comfort, You are not alone, you know, in this universe, but the last thing a freak wants is a helping hand from another freak. These boys fled from him in terror. In a burst of enthusiasm he attempted to start a science fiction and fantasy club, posted signs up in the halls, and for two Thursdays in a row he sat in his classroom after school, his favorite books laid out in an attractive pattern, listened to the roar of receding footsteps in the halls, the occasional shout of Beam me up! and Nanoo-Nanoo! outside his door; then, after thirty minutes of nothing he collected his books, locked the room, and walked down those same halls, alone, his footsteps sounding strangely dainty.

His only friend on the staff was another secular, a twenty-nine-year-old alterna-latina named Nataly (yes, she reminded him of Jenni, minus the outrageous pulchritude, minus the smolder). Nataly had spent four years in a mental hospital (nerves, she said) and was an avowed Wiccan. Her boyfriend, Stan the Can, whom she’d met in the nuthouse (‘our honeymoon’), worked as an EMS technician, and Nataly told Oscar that the bodies Stan the Can saw splattered on the streets turned him on for some reason. Stan, he said, sounds like a very curious individual. You can say that again, Nataly sighed. Despite Nataly’s homeliness and the medicated fog she inhabited, Oscar entertained some pretty strange Harold Lauder fantasies about her. Since she was not hot enough, in his mind, to date openly, he imagined them in one of those twisted bedroom-only relationships. He had these images of walking into her apartment and ordering her to undress and cook grits for him naked. Two seconds later she’d be kneeling on the tile of her kitchen in only an apron, while he remained fully clothed.

From there it only got weirder.

At the end of his first year, Nataly, who used to sneak whiskey during breaks, who introduced him to Sandman and Eightball , and who borrowed a lot of money from him and never paid it back, transferred to Ridgewood—Yahoo, she said in her usual deadpan, the suburbs—and that was the end of their friendship. He tried calling a couple of times, but her paranoid boyfriend seemed to live with the phone welded to his head, never seemed to give her any of his messages, so he let it fade, let it fade.

Social life? Those first couple of years home he didn’t have one. Once a week he drove out to Woodbridge Mall 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 black girl who worked at the Friendly’s, whom he was in love with but with whom he would never speak.

AI 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 cross-town 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.