The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

Every Dominican family has stories about crazy loves, about niggers who take love too far, and Oscar’s family was no different. His abuelo, the dead one, had been unyielding about one thing or another (no one ever exactly said) and ended up in prison, first mad, then dead; his abuela Nena Inca had lost her husband six months after they got married. He had drowned on Semana Santa and she never remarried, never touched another man. We’ll be together soon enough, Oscar had heard her say. Your mother, his tía Rubelka had once whispered, was a loca when it came to love. It almost killed her. And now it seemed that it was Oscar’s turn. Welcome to the family, his sister said in a dream. The real family.

It’s like I swallowed a piece of heaven, he wrote to his sister in a letter. You can’t imagine how it feels.

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who’s been abandoned by family, husband, children, and fortune believes in God. Belicia was, if it was possible, even more susceptible to the Casanova Wave than many of her peers. Our girl was straight boycrazy. (To be called boycrazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders.)

I tried to give advice, I really did. Nothing too complicated. Like, Stop hollering at strange girls on the street, and don’t bring up the Beyonder any more than necessary. Did he listen? Of course not! Trying to talk sense to Oscar about girls was like trying to throw rocks at Unus the Untouchable. Dude was impenetrable. He’d hear me out and then shrug. Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. But your yourself sucks! It is, lamentably, all I have.

It was foolish, he said finally. Ill advised. You could say that twice. What the fuck were you thinking, O? He shrugged miserably. I didn’t know what else to do. Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.

Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.

It was one of those fictions with a lot of disseminators but no believers.

(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 role-playing 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.)

Before all hope died I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved, that we would be in bed together like the old times, with the fan on, the smoke from our weed drifting above us, and I’d finally try to say words that could have saved us. —————————. But before I can shape the vowels I wake up. My face is wet, and that’s how you know it’s never going to come true.

(What Hatüey said on that pyre is a legend in itself: Are there white people in Heaven? Then I’d rather go to Hell.)