The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - By Junot Diaz Page 0,17

in jail, or that if the cops picked him up and found the gun they’d send his tío’s ass up the river for parole violation. He didn’t care about nada that night. His head contained zero, a perfect vacuum. He saw his entire writing future flash before his eyes; he’d only written one novel worth a damn, about an Australian hunger spirit preying on a group of small-town friends, wouldn’t get a chance to write anything better — career over. Luckily for the future of American Letters, Manny did not come home that night.

It was hard to explain. It wasn’t just that he thought Ana was his last fucking chance for happiness — this was clearly on his mind — it was also that he’d never ever in all his miserable eighteen years of life experienced anything like he’d felt when he was around that girl. I’ve waited forever to be in love, he wrote his sister. How many times I thought this is never going to happen to me. (When in his second-favorite anime of all time, Robotech Macross, Rich Hunter finally hooked up with Lisa, he broke down in front of the TV and cried. Don’t tell me they shot the president, his tío called from the back room, where he was quietly snorting you-know-what.) It’s like I swallowed a piece of heaven, he wrote to his sister in a letter. You can’t imagine how it feels.

Two days later he broke down and confessed to his sister about the gun stuff and she, back on a short laundry visit, flipped out. She got them both on their knees in front of the altar she’d built to their dead abuelo and had him swear on their mother’s living soul that he’d never pull anything like that again as long as he lived. She even cried, she was so worried about him.

You need to stop this, Mister. I know I do, he said. But I don’t know if I’m even here, you know?

That night he and his sister both fell asleep on the couch, she first. Lola had just broken up with her boyfriend for like the tenth time, but even Oscar, in his condition, knew they would be back together in no time at all. Sometime before dawn he dreamt about all the girlfriends he’d never had, row upon row upon row upon row, like the extra bodies that the Miraclepeople had in Alan Moore’s Miracleman. You can do it, they said.

He awoke, cold, with a dry throat.

They met at the Japanese mall on Edgewater Road, Yaohan, which he had discovered one day on his long I’m-bored drives and which he now considered part of their landscape, something to tell their children about. It was where he came for his anime tapes and his mecha models. Ordered them both chicken katsu curries and then sat in the large cafeteria with the view of Manhattan, the only gaijin in the whole joint.

You have beautiful breasts, he said as an opener.

Confusion, alarm. Oscar. What’s the matter with you?

He looked out through the glass at Manhattan’s western flank, looked out like he was some deep nigger. Then he told her.

There were no surprises. Her eyes went soft, she put a hand on his hand, her chair scraped closer, there was a strand of yellow in her teeth. Oscar, she said gently, I have a boyfriend.

She drove him home; at the house he thanked her for her time, walked inside, lay in bed.

In June he graduated from Don Bosco. See them at graduation: his mother starting to look thin (the cancer would grab her soon enough), Rudolfo high as shit, only Lola looking her best, beaming, happy. You did it, Mister. You did it. He heard in passing that of everybody in their section of P-town only he and Olga — poor fucked-up Olga — had not attended even one prom. Dude, Miggs joked, maybe you should have asked her out.

In September he headed to Rutgers New Brunswick, his mother gave him a hundred dollars and his first kiss in five years, his tío a box of condoms: Use them all, he said, and then added: On girls. There was the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college, free of everything, completely on his fucking own, and with it an optimism that here among these thousands of young people he would find someone like him. That, alas, didn’t happen. The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated