Transcript for:
Oscar Wao: Identity, Love, and Legacy

hi guys um today we will be doing audiobooks again today i will be reading the brief wondrous life of oscar wow written by juno diaz read by me jordan barclay because i want to all right with that said let's dive in the brief wondrous life of oscar well part one ghetto nerd at the end of the world the golden age our hero was not one of those dominican cats everybody's always going on about he wasn't a home gun hitter or a fly bucketer not a playboy with a million hearts on his jock and except for one period early in his life dude never had much luck with the females how very undominican of him he was seven then in those blessed days of his youth oscar was something of a casanova one of those preschool lover boys who was always trying to kiss the girls always coming up behind them doing the meringue and giving them the pelvic pump the first one to learn the pujito and the one who danced at any chance he got because in those days he was still a normal dominican boy raised in a typical dominican family his nascent pimpliness was encouraged by blood and friends alike during parties and there were many parties in those long ago 70s days before washington heights was washington heights before the bergen lean became a straight shot of spanish for almost 100 blocks some drunk relative inevitably pushed oscar onto some little girl and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hypnotism of the adults you should have seen him his mother sighed in our last days he was our little porfirio gubergosa all the other boys his age avoided the girls like they were a bad case of captain trips not oscar the little guy loved himself the females the girlfriends galois he was a stout kid heading straight to fat but his mother kept him nice in haircuts and clothes and before the proportions of his head changed he had these lovely flashing eyes and these cute-ass cheeks visible in all his pictures the girls his sister lola's friends his mother's friends even their neighbor marie colon a 30-something postal employee who wore red on her lips and walked like she had a bell for an ass all purportedly fell for him did it hurt that he was earnest and clearly attention deprived not at all in the dr during summer visits to his family digs in bani he was the worst would stand in front of nena inca's house and call out to passing women to eres guapa toures guapa until a seventh-day adventist complained to his grandmother and she shut down the hit parade lickety-split muchacho del diablo this is not a cabaret it truly was a golden age for oscar one that reached its apotheosis in the fall of his seventh year when he had two little girlfriends at the same time his first and only menage our choice with moritza chakon and olga polanso moritza was lola's friend long-haired and prissy so pretty she could have played young deja toys olga on the other hand was no friend of the family she lived in the house at the end of the block that his mother complained about because it was filled with puerto ricans who were always hanging out on their porch drinking beer what they couldn't have done that in cuomo oscar's mom asked crossley olga had 90 cousins all who seemed to be named hector or luis or wanda and since her mother was una modita boraca to quote oscar's mom ogre smelled on some days of ass which is why the kids took to calling her mrs peabody mrs peabody or not oscar liked how quiet she was how she let him throw her to the ground and wrestle with her the interest she showed in a star trek dolls mugiza was just plain beautiful no need for motivation they were always around too and it was just a stroke of pure genius that convinced him to stick it to them both at once at first he pretended that it was his number one hero shazam who wanted to date them but after they agreed he dropped all pretense it wasn't shazam it was oscar those were more innocent days so their relationship amounted to standing close to each other at the bus stop some undercover hand-holding and twice kissing on the cheeks very seriously first maritza then ogre or they were hidden from the street by some bushes look at little machacho his mother's friend said hombre the threesome only lasted a single beautiful week one day after school murita cornered oscar behind the swing set and laid down the law it was either her or me oscar held moritz's hand and talked seriously and at great length about his love for her and reminds her that they had agreed to share but moritza wasn't having any of it she had three older sisters knew everything she needed to know about the possibilities of sharing don't talk to me no more unless you get rid of her muriza with a chocolate skin and narrow eyes always expressing the ogre and energy that she would chop at everybody with the rest of her life oscar went home mugos to his pre-korean sweatshop era cartoons to the herculoids and space ghost what's wrong with you his mother asked she was getting ready to go to her second job the eczema on her hands looking like a messy meal that had set when oscar whimpered girls mom's de leon nearly exploded tu talugando por una muchacha she hauled oscar to his feet by azir mommy stop it his sister cried stop it she threw him to the floor she panted then see if the little pootoo respects you if he'd been a different he might have considered the galatasa it wasn't just that he didn't have no kind father to show him the masculine gropes he simply lacked all aggressive and martial tendencies unlike his sister who fought boys and packs of morgena girls who hated her thin nose and straight ashay oscar had like a zero combat waiting even olga and her toothpick arms could have stomped him silly aggression and intimidation out of the question so he thought it over didn't take him long to decide after all moritzo was delightful and olga was not ogre sometimes smelled like pee and maritza did not mojitsa was allowed over their house and olga was not a puerto rican over here his mother scuffed jamas his logic as close to the yes no math of insects as a could get he broke up with ogre the following day on the playground moritza at his side and how olga had cried shaking like a rag in her hand-me-downs and in the shoes that were four sizes too big snots point out her nose and everything in later years after he and olga had both turned into overweight freaks oscar could not resist feeling the occasional flash of guilt when he saw olga loping across the street or staring blankly out near the new york bus stop couldn't stop himself from wondering how much his cold as balls breakup had contributed to her present [ __ ] upness breaking up with her he would remember hadn't felt like anything even when she started crying he hadn't been moved he said no be a baby what had hurt however was when moritza dumped him monday after he'd fed ogre to the dogs he arrived at the bus stop with his beloved planet of the apes lunch box only to discover a beautiful maritza holding hands with butt ugly nelson pardo nelson pardo who looked like chaka from land of the lost nelson pardo who was so stupid he thought the moon was a stain that god had forgotten to clean he'll get to it soon he assured his whole class nelson pardo who would become the neighborhood b and e expert before joining the marines and losing eight toes in the first gulf war at first oscar thought it was a mistake the sun was in his eyes he not slept enough the night before and soon next to them and admired his lunchbox how realistic and diabolical dr zaius looked but moiritsa wouldn't even smile at him pretended he wasn't there we should get married she said to nelson and nelson grinned morganically turning up the street to look for the bus oscar had been too hurt to speak he sat down on the curb and felt something overwhelming surged up from his chest scared the [ __ ] out of him and before he knew it he was crying when his sister lola walked over and asked him what the matter he'd shaken his head look at the american sito somebody snickered somebody else kicked his beloved lunch box and scratched it right across general erko's face when he got on the bus still crying the driver a famously reformed pcp addict had said christ don't be a [ __ ] baby how had the breakup affected olga what he was really thinking was how had the breakup affected oscar it seemed to oscar that from the moment maritza dumped him shazam his life started going down the tubes over the next couple of years he grew fatter and fatter early adolescence hit him especially hard scrambling his face into nothing you could call cute splotching his skin with the zits making himself conscious and his interest in genres which nobody had said boo about before suddenly became synonymous with being a loser with a capital l couldn't make friends for the life of him too dorky too shy and if the kids from his neighborhood are to be believed too weird had a habit of using big words he had memorized only the day before he no longer went anywhere near the girls because at best they ignored him at worst they shrieked and called him gordo ascoroso forgot the pogito forgot the pride he felt when the women in the family had called him hungry did not kiss another girl for a long long time as though almost everything he had in the gold apartment had burned up that one [ __ ] week not that his girlfriends favored much better it seemed that whatever bad no-love karma hit oscar hit them too by seventh grade olga had grown huge and scaly a troll jean in her somewhere started drinking 151 straight out the bottle and was finally taken out of school because she had a habit of screaming natas in the middle of home room even her breasts when they finally emerged were floppy and terrifying once on the bus ogre had called oscar a keiki and he'd almost said look who's talking pricker but he was afraid that she would rear back and trample him his cool index all getty low couldn't have survived that kind of a polizza would have put him on par with the handicapped kids and with joe luca tondo he was famous for masturbating in public and the lovely mogita chakon the hypotenuse of our triangle how had she favored well before you could say oh mighty isis mogita blew up into the fliest guapa in patterson one of the queens of new peru since they stayed neighbors oscar saw it plenty a ghetto mary jane hair is black and lush as a thunderhead probably the only peruvian girl on the planet with pillow curlier than his sister's he hadn't heard of afro-peruvians yet or of a town called chingcha body fine enough to make old men forget their infirmities and from the sixth grade on dating men two three times her age maritza might not have been good at much not sports not school not work but she was good at men did that mean she had avoided the curse that she was happier than oscar or olga that was doubtful from what oscar could see moritza was a girl who seemed to delight in getting slapped around by her boyfriends since it happened to her all the time if a boy hit me lola said cockley i would bite his face see moritza french kissing on the front stoop of her house getting in or out of some rough next guide being pushed down onto the sidewalk oscar would watch the french kissing the getting in and out the pushing all through his cheerless sexless adolescence what else could he do his bedroom window looked out over the front of her house and so he always peeped her while he was painting his dnd miniatures while reading the latest stephen king the only things that changed in those years were the models of the cars the size of moritz's ass and the kind of music vaulting out of the car's speakers first freestyle then ill will air hip-hop and right at the very end for just a little while hector leveaux and the boys he said hi to her almost every day all upbeat and faux happy and she said hi back indifferently but that was it he didn't imagine that she remembered their kissing but of course he could not forget inferno high school was don bosco tech and since don bosco tech was an urban all-boys catholic school packed to the strikes with a couple hundred insecure hyperactive adolescents it was for a fat sci-fi reading night like oscar a source of endless anguish for oscar high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle like being put in the stalks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged halfwits an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person but that's not really what happened and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years later he never quite figured out what they were he walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was and all he could think about was the day of his manumissions when he would at last be set free from this unending horror hey oscar are there any unmars hey kazoo catch this the first time he heard the term morganic inferno he knew exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants sophomore here oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping 245 260 when he was depressed which was often and it had become clear to everybody especially his family that he'd become the neighborhood pariguayo had none of his higher powers of your typical dominican male couldn't have pulled a goal if his life depended on it couldn't play sports for [ __ ] or domino's was beyond uncoordinated threw a ball like a girl had no knack for music or business or dance no hustle no gap no g and most damning of all no looks he wore his semi-kink hair in a puerto rican afro grocked and neuma's section 8 glasses his anti-pussy devices al and migs his only friends called them sported an unappealing trace of mustache on his upper lip and possessed a pair of close set eyes that made him look somewhat [ __ ] the eyes of mingus a comparison he made himself one day going through his mother's record collection she was the only old school dominicana he knew who had dated the mogano until oscar's father put an end to that abrello his nana inca had told him on one of his visits to the dei which should have been some comfort who doesn't like resembling an ancestor except this particular ancestry had ended his days in prison oscar had always been a young knight the kind of kid who read tom swift who loved comic books and watched ultraman but by high school his commitment to the genres had become absolute back when the rest of us were learning to play wall ball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers as cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents's eyes he was gorging himself on a steady stream of lovecraft wells burgers howard alexander herbert asimov bova and heinlein and even the old ones who were already beginning to fade ee doc smith stapleton and the guy who wrote all of the doc savage books moving hungrily from book to book author to author age to age it was his good fortune that the libraries of paterson was so underfunded that they still kept a lot of the previous generations nerdery in circulation you couldn't have torn him away from any movie or tv show or cartoon where they were monsters or spaceships or mutants or doomsday devices or destinies or magic or evil villains in these pursuits alone oscar showed the genius his grandmother insisted was part of the family patrimony could write and elvish could speak czecho bapsa could differentiate between aslan a dorsai and a lensman in acute detail knew more about the marvel universe than stan lee and was a role-playing game fanatic if only he'd been good at video games it would have been a slam dunk but despite only an atari and an intellivision he didn't have the reflexes for it perhaps if like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness maybe [ __ ] would have been easier for him but he couldn't dude would his nerdiness like a jedi wars lightsaber or a lensman her lens couldn't have passed for normal if he wanted to oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and watched nerd british shows like doctor who in blake seven and could tell you the difference between a very tech fighter and a century walker and he used a lot of huge sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to who would barely graduate from high school one of those nerds who was always hiding out in the library who adored tolkien and later the margaret wise and tracy hickman novels his favorite character was of course graceland and who as the 80s marched on developed a growing obsession with the end of the world no apocalyptic movie or book or game existed that he had not seen or read or played windham and christopher and gamawalt were his absolute favorites you get the picture his adolescent nightiness vaporizing any iota of chance he had of young love everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes their first dates their kisses while oscar sat in the back of class behind his dm screen and watched his adolescent stream by sucks to be left out of adolescence sort of like getting locked in the closet on venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years it would have been one thing if like some of the annoyed boys i'd grown up with he hadn't cared about girls but alas he was still the passionate anna mogato who fell in love easily and deeply he had secret loves all over town the kind of curly haired big bodied girls who wouldn't have said boo to a loser like him but about whom he could not stop dreaming his affection that gravitational mass of love fear longing desire and lust that he had directed at any and every go in his vicinity without regard to looks age or availability broke his heart each and every day despite the fact that he had considered it this huge sputtering voice it was actually most like a ghost because no girl ever really seemed to notice it occasionally they might shudder or cross their arms when he walked near but that was about it he cried often for his love of some girl or another cried in the bathroom when nobody could hear him anywhere else this triple zero batting average with the ladies might have passed without comment but this is a dominican kid we're talking about in a dominican family tood was supposed to have atomic level g was supposed to be pulling in the [ __ ] with both hands everybody noticed his lack of game and because they were dominican everybody talked about it his tio gudoffo only recently released from his last and final bid in the justice and now living in their house on main street was especially generous in his tutelage listen paloma you have to grab a muchacha e metacello they will take care of everything start with affair kohei that had four kids with three different women so that was without doubt the family's resident metacello expert his mother's only comment you need to worry about your grades and the more introspective moments just be glad you didn't get my luck hijo what luck is tia snorted exactly she said his friends al and migs dude you're kind of way fat you know his umbrella la inca hi-ho you're the most brain muscle man i know oscar sister lola was a lot more practical now that her crazy years were over what dominican girl doesn't have those she turned into one of those tough jersey dominicans a long distance runner who drove her own car had her own checkbook called men [ __ ] and would eat a fat cat in front of you without a speck of aguenza she was in the fourth grade when she'd been attacked by an auto acquaintance and this was common knowledge throughout the family and by extension a sizable section of paterson union city and teaneck and surviving that urakan of pain judgment and bocinche had made her tougher than adam time recently she'd cut her hair short flipping out her mother yet again partially i think because when she'd been little her family had let it go down past her ass a source of pride something i'm sure her attacker noticed and admired oscar lola warned repeatedly you're going to die a virgin unless you start changing don't you think i know that another five years of this and i'll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me cut the hair lose the glasses exercise and get rid of those porn magazines they're disgusting they bother mammy and they'll never get you a date sound counsel that in the end he did not adopt he tried a couple of times to exercise leg lifts sit-ups walks around the block in the early morning that sort of thing but he wouldn't notice how everybody else had a goal but him and would despair plunging right back into eating penthouses designing dungeons and self-pity i seem to be allergic to diligence and lola said ha what you're allergic to is trying it wouldn't have been half bad if patterson ended surging precincts had been like don bosco or those 70s feminist sci-fi novels he sometimes read an all-male exclusion zone patterson however was girls the way nyc was goals patterson was goals the way santo domingo was girls patterson had mad girls and if that wasn't guavas enough for you well [ __ ] then go south and there'd be newark elizabeth jersey city the oranges union city west new york weehawken perth amboy an urban swath unknown to everywhere as negropolis won so in effect he saw girls hispanophone caribbean goals everywhere he wasn't safe even in his own house his sister's girlfriends were always hanging out permanent guests when they were around he didn't need no penthouses her goals were too smart but they were fine as [ __ ] the sword of hardest balls latinas who only dated weightlifting morganas were latino cats with guns in their crips they were all on the volleyball team together and tall and fit as cults and when they went for guns it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven bergen's county's very own ciguapas la primera was gladys who complained endlessly about a chest being too big that maybe she'd find normal boyfriends if she'd had a smaller period mayor saw he would end up at mit and hated oscar but whom oscar liked most of all leticia just off the boat half haitian half dominican that special blend the dominican government swears no existing who spoke with a deepest accent a girl so good she refused to sleep with three consecutive boyfriends it wouldn't have been so bad that these chickies hadn't treated oscar like some deaf mute harem guard ordering him around having him run their errands making fun of his games and his looks to make [ __ ] even worse they blithely went on about the particulars of their sex lives with no regard for him or he sat in the kitchen clutching the latest issue of dragon hey he would yell in case you're wondering there's a male unit in here where marisol would say blandly i don't see one and when they talked about how all the latin guys only seemed to want to date white girls he would offer i like spanish girls to which may i saw responded with wide condescension that's great oscar only problem is no spanish girl would date you leave him alone leticia said i think you're cute oscar yeah right mayor saw left rolling my eyes now he'll probably write a book about you these were oscar's furies his personal pantheon the goals he must dreamed about and must beat off to and who eventually found their way into his little stories in his dreams he was either saving them from aliens or he was returning to the neighborhood rich and famous it's him the dominican stephen king and then mayor saw would appear carrying one of each books for him to sign please oscar may me oscar trolley i'm sorry marisol i don't marry ignorant [ __ ] but then of course he would muriza he still watched from afar convinced that one day when the nuclear bombs fell or the plague broke out or the tripods invaded and civilization was wiped out he would end up saving her from a pack of irridated ghouls and together they'd set across a ravaged america in search of a better tomorrow in these apocalyptic daydreams he was always some kind of platano doc savage a super genius who combined world-class martial artistry with deadly firearms proficiency not bad for it who'd never even shot an aero rifle thrown a punch or scored higher than a thousand on his sats oscar is brave senior year i found him bloated dispetic and most cruelly alone in his lack of her girlfriend his two nerd boys al and miggs had in their craziest twist of fortune both succeeded in landing themselves girls that year nothing special skanks really but girls nonetheless al had met his at menlo park she'd come on to him he'd bragged and when she informed him after she sucked his dick of course that she had a girlfriend desperate to meet somebody al had dragged migs away from his atari and out to a movie and the rest was as they say history by the end of the week migs was getting his too and only then did oscar find out any about any of it while they were in his room setting up for another hail gazing champions adventure against the death dealing destroyers oscar had to retire his famous aftermath campaign because nobody else but him was hankering to play in the post-apocalyptic ruins of vigorous act america at first after hearing about the double booty coupe oscar didn't say nothing much he just rolled his d10s over and over said you guys sure got lucky it killed him that they hadn't thought to include him in their gold heists he hated al for inviting migs instead of him and he hated migs for getting a goal period al getting a goal oscar could comprehend l real name a luck was one of those tall indian pretty boys who would never have been pegged by anyone as a role-playing nude it was mix's goal-getting he could not fathom that astounded him and left him sick with jealousy oscar had always considered miggs to be an even bigger freak than he was acne galois and a retards laugh and a grey [ __ ] teeth from having been given some medicine too young so is your girlfriend cute he asked migs he said dude you should see you she's beautiful big [ __ ] tits el seconded that day what little faith oscar had in the world took an ssn17 snipe to the head when finally he couldn't take it no more when he asked pathetically what these girls don't have any other friends al and megs traded glances over their character sheets i don't think so dude in a guy there he learned something about his friends he'd never known or at least never admitted to himself right there he had an epiphany that echoed through his fat self he realized his [ __ ] up comic book reading role playing game loving no sports playing friends were embarrassed by him knocked the architectural guide out of his legs he closed the game early the exterminators found the destroyer's hideout right away that was bogus al gelsed after he showed them he locked himself in his room laying in a bed for a couple of stunned hours then got up undressed in the bathroom he no longer had to share because his sister was at rutgers and examined himself in the mirror the fat the miles of stretch marks the tumescent horribleness of his proportions he looked straight out of a daniel close comic book or like a fat blackish kid in beto her hand days palomar jesus christ he whispered i'm a morlock the next day at breakfast he asked his mother am i ugly she sighed well heo you certainly don't take after me dominican parents you gotta love them spent a week looking at himself in the meow turning every which way taking stock not flinching and decided at last to be like roberto jordan no mess that sunday he went to chucho's and had the barber shave as puerto rican throw off wait a minute choo choo's partner i said you're dominican oscar lost the mustache next and then the glasses bought contacts with the money he was making at the lumber yard and tried to polish what what remained of his dominicanness tried to be more like his cursing swaggering cousins if only because he had started to suspect that in their latin hyper maleness there might be an answer but he was really too far gone for quick fixes the next time al and mig saw him he'd been starving himself with three days straight mix said dude what's the matter with you changes oscar said pseudo cryptically what are you some album cover now he shook his head solemnly i've been biking on a new cycle of my life listen to the guy he already sounds like he's in college that summer his mother sent him and his sister to santo domingo and this time he didn't fight it like he had in the recent past it's not like he had much in the states keeping him he arrived in bani with a stack of notebooks and a plan to fill them all up since he could no longer be a game master he decided to try his hands at being a real guitar the trip turned out to be something of a turning point for him instead of discouraging his writing chasing him out of the house like his mother used to his abuela nana let him be allowed him to sit in the back of the house as long as he wanted didn't insist that he should be out in the world she had always been overprotective of him and her sister too much bad luck in this family she sniffed kept the music off and brought him his meals at exactly the same time every day his sister ran around with a hot island fence always jumping out of the house in a bikini and going off to different parts of the island for overnight trips but he stayed put when any family members came looking for him his abuela chased them off with a single imperial sweep of her head can't you see the muchacho is working what's he doing his cousin asked confused he's being a genius is what la inca replied hardly now vayance later when he thought about it he realized that these very cousins would probably have gotten him laid if only he'd bothered to hang out with him but you can't regret his life if you didn't lead in the afternoons when he couldn't write another word he'd sit out in front of the house with his abuela and watch the street scene listen to the darkest changes between the neighbors one evening at the end of his trip his abuela confided your mother could have been a doctor just like your grandfather was what happened la inca shook her head she was looking at her favorite picture of his mother on our first day of private school one of those typical serious dr shots what always happens un maldito hombre you wrote two books that summer about a young man fighting mutants at the end of the world neither of them survived took crazy amounts of field notes too names of things he intended to later adapt for science fictional and fantastic purposes heard about the family curse for like the thousandth time but strangely enough he didn't think it worth incorporating into his fiction i mean [ __ ] what latino family doesn't think it's cursed when it was time for him and his sister to return to patterson he was almost sad almost his abuela placed her hand on his head in blessing kua know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you and jfk almost not being recognized by his uncle great is tio said lugina scans at his complexion now you look haitian after his return he hung out with migs and al saw movies with them talked lot's of brothers herrandes frank miller and alan moy with them but overall they never regained the friendship they had before santo domingo oscar listened to their messages on the machine and resisted the urge to gun over to their places didn't see them but once twice a week focused on his writing those were some [ __ ] lonely weeks when all he had were his games his books and his words so now i have a hermit for his son his mother complained bitterly at night unable to sleep he watched a lot of bad tv became obsessed with two movies in particular zydos which he'd seen with his uncle before they put him away for the second time and virgus the japanese end of the world movie with a hot chick romeo and juliet virus especially he could not watch to the end without crying the japanese hero arriving at the south pole base having walked from washington dc down the hall spine of the andes for the woman of his dreams i've been working on my fifth novel he told the boys when they asked about his absences it's amazing see what did i tell you mr college boy in the old days when a so-called friends would hurt him or drag his trust through the mud he always crawled voluntarily back into the abuse out of fear and loneliness something he'd always hated himself for but not this time if they existed in his high school years any one moment he took pride in it was clearly this one even told his sister about it during her next visit she said way to go oh he finally showed some backbone hence some pride and although it hit it also felt [ __ ] good oscar comes close in october after all his college applications were in farley dickinson montclair rutgers drew glassboro estate william patterson he also sent an app to nyu a one in a million shot and they rejected him so fast he was amazed the [ __ ] it hadn't come back on a pony express and winter was settling its pale miserable ass across northern new jersey oscar fell in love with a girl in his sat prep class the class was being conducted in one of those learning centers not far from where he lived less than a mile so he'd been walking a healthy way to lose weight he thought he hadn't been expecting to meet anyone but then he'd seen the beauty in the back row and felt his senses fly out of him her name was anna obigun a pretty loud mouth of gordita who read henry miller while she should have been learning to wrestle logic problems on about their fifth class he noticed her reading sexist and she noticed him noticing and leaning over she showed him a passage and he got an erection like a [ __ ] you must think i'm weird right she said during the break you ain't weird he said believe me i'm the top expert in the state anna was a talker had a beautiful caribbean girl ice pure anthracite and was the sort of heavy that almost every island dug a body that you just knew would look good in and out of clothes wasn't shy about a weight either she wore a tight black striped pants like every other girl in the neighborhood and the sexiest underwear she could afford and was a meticulous put it on of makeup an intricate bit of multitasking for which oscar never lost his fascination she was this peculiar combination of badmash and little girl even before he'd visited her house he knew she'd have a whole collection of stuffed animals avalanched on her bed and there was something in the seamlessness with which she switched between these aspects that convinced him that both were masks that there existed a third anna a hidden anna who determined what mask to throw up for what occasion but who was otherwise obscure and impossible to know she'd gotten into melee because her ex-boyfriend manny had given her the books before he joined the army he used to read passages to her all the time that made me so hot she'd been 13 when they started dating he was 24 a recovering coke addict anna talking about these things like they weren't nothing at all you were 13 and your mother allowed you to date a septuagenarian my parents loved manny she said my mom used to cook dinner for him all the time he said that seems highly unorthodox and later at home he asked his sister back on winter break for the sake of argument would you allow your pubescent daughter to have relations with a 24 year old male i'd kill him first he was amazed how relieved he felt to hear that let me guess you know somebody who's doing this he nodded she sits next to me in s.a.t class i think she's like audacious lola considered him with her tiger-colored irises she'd been back a week and it was clear that college-level track was kicking her ass the sclera and her normally wide manga eyes were shot through with blood vessels you know she said finally we colored folk talk plenty of [ __ ] about loving our children but we really don't she exhaled we don't we don't we don't he tried to put a hand on his sister's shoulder but she shrugged it off you better go bust out some crunches mystery that's what she called him whenever she was feeling tender or wronged mystery later she'd want to put that on his gravestone but no one would let her not even me stupid amoe de pendejo he and anna sat in sat class he and anna in the parking lot afterwards he and anna at the mcdonald's he and anna became friends each day oscar expected her to be adios each day she was still there they got into the habit of talking on the phone a couple of times a week about nothing really spinning words out of there every day the first time she called him offering him a guide to s.a.t class a week later he called her just to try it his heart beating so hard he thought he would die but all she did when she picked him up was say oscar listen to the [ __ ] my sister pulled and off they'd gone building one another of their word scrapers by the fifth time he called he no longer expected the big blow-off she was only the girl outside his family who admitted to having a period he actually said to him i'm bleeding like a hug an astounding confidence he turned over and over in his head sure it meant something and when he thought about the way she laughed and as though she owned the aorgante his heart thudded inside his chest a lonely rada ana obregon unlike every other girl in his secret cosmology he actually fell for it as they were getting to know each other because her appearance and his life was sudden because she'd come in under his radar he didn't have the time to raise his usual wall of nonsense or level some wild ass expectations her way maybe he was playing tired after four years of not getting ass or maybe he'd finally found his own incredibly enough instead of making an idiot out of himself as one might have expected given the hard fact that this was the first girl he had ever had a conversation with he actually took it a day at a time he spoke to her plainly and without effort and discovered that his constant self-deprecation pleased her immensely it was amazing how it was between them he would say something obvious and uninspired and she'd say oscar you're really [ __ ] smart when she said i love men's hands he spread both of his across his face and said faux casual like oh really it cracked her up she never talked about what they were she only said man i'm glad i got to know you and he said i'm glad i'm me knowing you one night while he was still listening to new order and trying to chug through clay's ark his sister knocked on his toy he got a visitor i do yup lola leaned against his toy frame she shaved her head down to the bone cined style and now everybody including their mother was convinced she'd turn into a lesbian you might want to clean up a little she touched his face gently shave those [ __ ] hairs it was anna standing in the foyer wearing a full length leather her trigwena skin blood charged from the cold her face gorgeous with eyeliner mascara foundation lipstick and blush freezing out she said she had a gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet hey was all he managed to say he could hear his sisters upstairs listening what you doing anna asked like nothing like let's go to a movie then like okay he said upstairs his sister was jumping up and down on his bed low screaming it's a date it's a date and then she jumped on his back and nearly toppled them clean through the bedroom window so is this some kind of date he said as he slipped into a car she smiled wainly you could call it that anna drove to casita and instead of taking them to the local theater she headed down to the amboy multiplex i loved this place she said as she was wrangling for a parking space my father used to take us here when it was still a drive-in did you ever come here back then he shook his head though i heard they steal plenty of cars here now nobody's stealing this baby it was so hard to believe what was happening that oscar really couldn't take it seriously the whole time the movie man hunter was on he kept on expecting people to jump out with cameras and scream surprise boy he said trying to remain on a map this is some movie anna nodded she smelled of some perfume he could not name and when she pressed close the heat off her body was voided ginuous on the guide home anna complained about having a headache and they didn't speak for a long time he tried to turn on the radio but she said no my hand's really killing me he joked would you like some crack no oscar so he sat back and watched the hess building and the rest of woodbridge slide pass through a snuggle of overpasses he was suddenly aware of how tired he was the nervousness that had raged through him the entire night had exhausted his ass the longer they went without speaking the more mugos he became it's just a movie he told himself it's not like it's a date anna seemed unaccountably sad and she chewed her bottom lip ohio bembe until most of her lipstick was on her teeth he was going to make a comment about it but decided not to you eating anything good nope she said you i'm reading dune she nodded i hate that book they reached the elizabeth exit which was what new jersey is really known for industrial waste on both sides of the turnpike he had started holding his breath against those horrible fumes when anna let loose a scream that threw him into his passenger door elizabeth she street close your [ __ ] legs then she looked over at him tipped back her head and laughed when he returned to the house his sister said well well what did did you [ __ ] her jesus lola he said blushing don't lie to me i do not move so precipitously he paused and then said again in other words i didn't even get her scarf off sounds a little suspicious i know you dominican men she held up her hands and flexed the fingers in playful menace san popos the next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat like he'd been washed clean of his misery and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way and then he said her name oscar in love and so now every week they headed out to either a movie or the mall they talked he learned that her ex-boyfriend manny used to smack the [ __ ] out of her which was the problem she confessed because she liked it when guys were a little rough with her in bed he learned that her father had died in a car accident when she was a young girl in mccoys and that her new stepfather didn't care two shits about her but that it didn't matter because once she got into penn state she didn't ever intend to come back home in turn he showed her some of his writings and told her about the time he'd gotten struck by a car and put in the hospital and about how his tio used to smack the [ __ ] out of him in the old days he even told her about the crush he had a moritza shotgun and he screamed or eats a shotgun i know that query oh my god oscar i think even my stepfather slept with her oh they got close all right but did they ever kiss another car did he ever put his hands up her skirt did he ever thumb her [ __ ] did she ever push up against him and say his name in a throaty voice did he ever stroke her hair while she sucked him off did they ever [ __ ] poor oscar without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those let's be friends vortexes the bane of nerd boys everywhere these relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks in you go plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows perhaps some knowledge of self and of women perhaps in april he got a second sat scores back 10 20 under the old system and a week later he learned he was heading to rutgers new brunswick well you did it here his mother said looking more relieved than was polite no more selling pencils for me he agreed you'll love it his sister promised him i know i will i was meant for college as for anna she was on her way to penn state honors program full guide and now my stepfather can kiss my ass it was also in april that her ex-boyfriend manny returned from the army anna told him during one of their trips to be joahan ma his sudden appearance and anna's joy over it shattered the hopes oscar had cultivated he's back oscar act like forever and a nodded apparently manny had gotten into trouble again drugs but this time anna assisted he'd been set up by these three chocolates a word he never heard her used before so he figured she'd gotten it from manny poor manny she said yeah poi manny oscar muttered under his breath point manny poi ayanna poor oscar things changed quickly first off anna stopped being home all the time and oscar found himself stacking messages on a machine this is awesome a bear is chewing my legs off please call me this is oscar they want a million dollars or it's over please call me this is oscar i've just spotted a strange meteorite and i'm going out to investigate she always got back to him after a couple of days and was pleasant about it but still then she cancelled three fridays in ago and he had to settle for the clearly reduced birth of sunday after church she'd pick him up and they'd drive out to boulevard east and park and together they'd stare out over the manhattan skyline he wasn't an ocean or a mountain range it was at least to oscar better and it inspired their best conversations he was doing one of those little chats that anna let slip god i'd forgotten how big manny's [ __ ] was like i really needed to hear that he snapped i'm sorry she said hesitantly i thought we could talk about everything well it wouldn't be bad if you actually kept manny's anatomical anointing to yourself so we can't talk about everything he didn't even bother answering her with manny and his big cocoa ground oscar was back to dreaming about nuclear annihilation hell through the miraculous accident he'd hear about the attack first and without pausing he'd steal his tio's car drive it to the stores stock it full of supplies maybe shoot a couple of looters on root and then fetch anna what about manny she'd wail there's no time he'd insist peeling out shoot a couple more looters now slightly mutated and then repaired to the sweaty love den where anna would quickly succumb to his take charge genius and his by then ectomorphic physique when he was in a better mood he let anna find manny hanging from a light fixture in his appointment his tongue a swollen purple bladder in his mouth his pants around his ankles the news of the imminent attack on the tv a half little note pinned to his chest a kuna take it and then oscar would comfort anna with the toys inside he was too weak for this whole new world so she has a boyfriend lola asked him suddenly yes he said you should back off for a little while did he listen of course he didn't available anytime she needed to chef and he even got joys of joyce the opportunity to meet the famous manny which was about as fun as being caught up during school assembly which had happened twice met him outside anna's house he was this intense emaciated guy with marathon runner limbs and voracious eyes when they shook hands oscar was sure the man was going to smack him he acted so slowly manny was moybald and completely shaved his head to hide it had a hoop in each ear and his leathery out in the sun buzzardry look of an old cat straining for youth so you're anna's little friend manny said that's me oscar said in a voice so full of cheerful innocuousness that he could have shot himself for it oscar is a brilliant guido anna offered even though she had never once asked to read anything he wrote he snorted what would you have to write about i'm into the more speculative genres he knew how absurd he sounded the more speculative genres manny looked ready to cut a stake off him you sound mad coiny guy you know that oscar smiled hoping somehow an earthquake would demolish all of patterson i just hope you ain't trying to chisel into my girl guy oscar said ha ha hannah flushed red looked at the ground a joy with manny around he was exposed to an entirely new side of anna all they talked about now the little they saw each other was manny and the terrible things he did to her manny smacked her manny kicked her manny called her fat [ __ ] manny cheated on her she was [ __ ] with this cuban chicky from the middle school so that explains why i couldn't get a date in those days it was manny oscar joked but anna didn't laugh they couldn't talk 10 minutes without manny beeping and her having to call him back and assure him she wasn't with anybody else and one day she arrived at oscar's house with a bruise on her face and her blouse torn and his mother had said i don't want any trouble here what am i going to do she asked over and over and oscar always found himself holding her awkwardly and telling her well i think if he's this bad for you you should break up with him but she shook her head and said i know i should but i can't i love him love oscar knew he should have checked out right then he liked to kid himself that it was only called anthropological interest that kept him again to see how it would all end but the truth was he couldn't extricate himself he was totally and irrevocably in love with anna what he used to feel for the girls he never really known was nothing compared to the ammo he was carrying in his heart for anna it had the density of a dwarf [ __ ] star and at times he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad the only thing that came close was how he felt about his books only the combined love he had for everything he'd read and everything he'd hoped to write came even close every dominican family has stories about crazy loves about [ __ ] who take love too far and oscar's family was no different zabarello 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 nana inca had lost her husband six months after they got married he had drowned on samana santa and she never remarried never touched another man we'll be together soon enough oscar had heard her say your mother his tioru belka 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 was obvious what was happening but what could he do there was no denying what he felt did he lose sleep yes did he lose important hours of concentration yes did he stop reading his andre norton books and even lose the interest in the final issues of watchmen which were unfolding in the illest way yes did he start borrowing his tia's car for long rides to the shore parking at sandy hook where his mom used to take them before she got sick back when oscar hadn't been too fat before she stopped going to the beach altogether yes did his youthful unrequited love cause him to lose weight unfortunately this alone it did not provide and for the life of him he couldn't understand why when lola had broken up with golden gloves she lost almost 20 pounds what kind of genetic discrimination was this handed down by what kind of scrub god miraculous things started happening once he blacked out while crossing an intersection and woke up with a rugby team gathered around him another time migz was goofing on him talking smack about his aspirations to write role-playing games complicated story the company oscar had been hoping to write for fantasy games unlimited and which was considering one of his modules for cyworld had recently closed scuttling all of oscar's hopes and dreams that he was about to turn into the next gayle geeks well meg said it looks like that didn't work out and for the first time ever in their relationship oscar has lost his tempo and without a word swung on migs connected so hard that homeboy's mouth spouted blood jesus christ al said calm down i didn't mean to do it he said unconvincingly it was an accident [ __ ] makes said [ __ ] he got so bad that one desperate night after listening to anna sobbing to him on the phone about manny's latest [ __ ] he said i have to go to church now and put down the phone went to his tio's room rodolfo was out at the titty boy and stole his antique virginia dragoon that oh so famous first nation exterminating colt 44 heavier than bad luck and twice as ugly suck it impressive snout down the front of his pants and proceeded to stand in front of manny's building almost the entire night got real friendly with the aluminum sighting come on [ __ ] he said calmly i got a nice 11 year old girl for you he didn't care that he would more than likely be put away forever while that [ __ ] like him got ass and mouth raped in jail or that if the cops picked him up and found the gun they'd send his tio'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 guiding 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 clear it 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 anna was his last [ __ ] chance for happiness this was clearly on his mind it was also that he never ever in all his miserable 18 years of life experienced anything like he'd felt when he was around that goal i've waited forever to be in love he growed his sister how many times i thought this is never going to happen to me when in the 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 tio called from the back room where he was quietly snorting you know what it's like i swallowed a piece of heaven you go 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 built to their dead abuelo and had him swear on their mother's living soul that he never pulled anything like that again as long as he lived she even cried she was so worried about him you need to stop this mystery i know i do he said but i don't know if i'm even here you know that night he and his sister but 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 it dawned he dreamt about the girlfriends he never had go upon go upon go upon her go like the extra bodies that the miracle people had in alan moore's miracle man you can do it they said he awoke cold with a dry throat they met at the japanese mall on edgewater road 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 a view of manhattan the only guy jin 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 in manhattan's western flank looked out like he was some deep [ __ ] then he told her there were no surprises her eyes weren't 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 doan bosco see them at graduation his mother starting to look thin the cancer would grab her soon enough udolpho high as [ __ ] only lola looking my 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 [ __ ] up olga had not attended even one prom dude mix 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 tio 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 [ __ ] 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 him with inhuman cheeriness the kids of color upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body shook their heads you're not dominican and he said over and over again but i am soy dominicano dominicano soy after a spate of parties that had led to nothing but being threatened by some drunk white boys a dozens of classes where not a single girl looked at him he felt the optimism wane and before he even realized what had happened he had bailed himself and what amounted to the college version of what he'd majored in all throughout high school getting no ass his happiest moments were genre moments like when akira was released in 1988 pretty sad twice a week he and his sister were dying at the douglas dining hall she was a big woman on campus and knew just about everybody with any pigment had a hand on every protest in every march but that didn't help a situation any during their get-togethers she would give him advice and he would nod quietly and afterward would sit at the e-bus stop and stare at all the pretty douglas skulls and wonder where he'd gone wrong in his life he wanted to blame the books the sci-fi but he couldn't he loved them too much despite swearing early on to change his nerdy ways he continued to eat continued not to exercise continued to use flash words and after a couple semesters without any friends but his sister he joined the university's resident greek organization ru gamers which met in the classrooms beneath frederick glewson and boasted an entirely male membership he had thought college would be better as far as goals were concerned but those first years it wasn't end of chapter one chapter two wildwood 1982 to 1985. it's never the change we want that change everything this is how it all starts with your mother calling you into the bathroom you will remember what you were doing at the precise moment for the rest of your life you were reading watership down and the rabbits and their does were making their dash for the boat and you didn't want to stop reading the book has to go back to your brother tomorrow but then she called you again louder her i'm not [ __ ] around voice and you mumble irritably see senoga she was standing in front of the medicine cabinet naked from the waist up her bra slung about a waist like a torn sail the scar on her back as vast and inconsolable as a sea you want to return your book to pretend you didn't hear her but it is too late her eyes meet yours the same big smokey eyes you will have in the future veyaka she commanded she is frowning at something on one of her breasts your mother's breasts are immensities one of the wonders of the world the only ones you've seen that are bigger are in the nudie magazines or on really fat ladies the 35 triple d's and the auroras are as big as saucers in black as pitch and their edges are fierce as hairs that sometimes she plucked and sometimes she didn't these breasts have always embarrassed you and when you walk in public with her you are always conscious of them and her face and her hair her chest and what she is most proud of your father can never get enough of them she always brags but given the fact that he ran off on her after the third year of marriage it seemed in the end that he could you dread conversations with your mother those one-sided dressing downs you figure that she has called you in to give you another earful about your diet your mom's convinced that if you eat more platanos you will suddenly acquire her same extraordinarily trainwrecking secondary sex characteristics even at that age you were nothing if not your mother's daughter you were 12 years old and already as tall as she was a long slender-necked ibis of a girl you had her green eyes clearer though and a straight hair which makes you look more hindu than dominican and a behind that the boys haven't been able to stop talking about since the fifth grade and whose appeal you do not yet understand you have a complexion too which means you are dark but for all your similarities the tides of inheritance have yet to reach your chest you have only the slightest hint of breast from most angles you're fat as a boy and you're thinking she's going to order you for stop wearing bras again because they're suffocating your potential breasts discouraging them from popping out of you you're ready to argue with her to the death because you're as possessive of your bras as you are of the pads you now buy yourself but no she doesn't say a word about eating more platanos instead she takes your right hand and guides you your mom is rough in all things but this time she is gentle you do not think her capable of it do you feel that she asks in a too familiar raspy voice at first all you feel is the heat of her and the density of the tissue like a bread that never stopped rising she needs your fingers into her you're as close as you've ever been and your breathing is what you hear don't you feel that she turns towards you chono muchacha stop looking at me and feel so you close your eyes and your fingers are pushing down and you're thinking of helen keller and how when you were little you wanted to be her except more nunish and then suddenly without warning you do feel something a knot just beneath her skin tight and secretive as a plot and at that moment for reasons you will never quite understand you are overcome by the feeling the premonition that something in your life is about to change you become light-headed and you can feel a throbbing in your blood a beat a rhythm a drum bright light zoom through you like photon torpedoes like comets you don't know how or why you knew this thing but you know it cannot be doubted it is exhilarating for as long as you've been alive you have had bruja ways even your mother will begrudge you that much hija de liborio she called you after you picked your tears numbers for her and you assumed laborio was a relative that was before santo domingo before you knew about the great power of god i feel it you say too loudly lo siento and like that everything changes before the winter is out the doctors remove that breast you were needing along with the auxiliary lymph node because of the obligations she will have trouble lifting her arm over her head for the rest of her life her hair begins to fall out and one day she pulls it all out of herself and puts it inside a plastic bag you change it too not to guide away but it happens and it's in that bathroom where it all begins where you begin a punk chick that's what i became i see uxie and the banshees loving punk chick the puerto rican kids on the blocks couldn't stop laughing when they saw my hair they called me blacula and the morgenos they didn't know what to say they just call me devil [ __ ] yo devil [ __ ] yo yo my tio rubelka thought it was some kind of mental illness hija she said while flying pastelitos maybe you need help but my mother was the worst it was the last straw she screamed the last straw but it was always that with her mornings when i came downstairs she'd be in the kitchen making a coffee in la greca and listening to radio wado when she saw me and my hair she'd get mad all over again as if during the night she forgotten who i was my mother was one of the tallest women in paterson and her anger it was just as tall it pincered you in its long arms and if you showed any weakness you were finished muchacha tanfia she said in disgust splashing the rest of her coffee in the sink they has become my new name nothing new really she's been saying stuff like that all our lives my mother would never win any awards believe me you could call her an absentee parent if she wasn't at work she was sleeping and when she was around it seemed all she did was scream and hit as kids me and oscar were more scared of our mother than we were of the dark or el cuco she would hit us anywhere in front of anyone always free with the chanklers and the kogea but now with a cancer there's not much she can do anymore the last time she tried to wail on me it was because of my hair but instead of cringing or gunning i punched her hand he was a reflex more than anything but once it happened i knew i couldn't take it back not ever and so i just kept my fist clenched waiting for whatever came next for her to attack me with her teeth like she did to this one lady in the pathmark but she just stood there shaking in a stupid wig and a stupid bata with two huge foam prosthesis in her the smell of burning wig all around us i almost felt sorry for her this is how you treat your mother she cried and if i could have i would have broken the entire length of my life across her face but instead i screamed back and this is how you treat your daughter things had been bad between us all year how could they not have been she was my old wild dominican mother and i was her only daughter the one she had raised up herself with the help of nobody which meant it was her duty to keep me crushed under her heel i was 14 and desperate for my own patch of world that had nothing to do with her i wanted the life that i used to see when i watched the big blue marble as a kid the life that drove me to make pen pals and to take atlases home from school the life that existed beyond paterson beyond my family beyond spanish and as soon as she became sick i saw my chance and i'm not going to pretend or apologize i saw my chance and eventually i took it and if you didn't grow up like i did then you don't know and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge you don't know the hold our mothers have on us even the ones that are never around especially the ones that are never around what it's like to be a perfect dominican daughter which is just a nice way of saying a perfect dominican slave you don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never paid a positive thing in her life not about a children or the world who was always suspicious always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams when my first pen pal tomoko stopped guiding me after three letters she was the one who laughed you think someone's going to lose life writing to you of course i cried i was eight and i had already planned that tamako and her family would adopt me my mother of course saw clean into the mayo of those dreams and laughed i wouldn't lie to you either she said she was that kind of mother who makes you doubt yourself who would wipe you out if you let her but i'm not gonna pretend either for a long time i let her say what she wanted about me and what was worse for a long time i believed her i was a failure i was worthless i was an idiot from ages 2 to 13 i believed her and because i believed her i was the perfect hija i was the one cooking cleaning doing the wash buying groceries writing letters to the bank to explain why a house payment was going to be late translating i had the best grades in my class i never caused trouble even when the morgenas used to come after me with scissors because of my straight straight hair i stayed at home and made sure oscar was fed and that everything ran right while she was at work i raised him and i raised me i was the one you am i here she said that's what you're supposed to be doing when that thing happened to me when i was eight and i finally told her what he had done she told me to shut my mouth and stop crying and i did exactly that i shut my mouth and clenched my legs and my mind and within a year i couldn't have told you what that neighbor looked like or even his name all you do is complain she said to me but you have no idea what life really is season yoga when she told me that i could go on my sixth grade sleep away to bare mountain and i brought a backpack with my own paper route money and wrote bobby santos notes because he was promising to break into my cabin and kiss me in front of everyone i believed her and went on the morning of the trip she announced that i wasn't going and i said but you promised and she said muchacha del diablo you i promised you nothing i didn't throw my backpack out or pull out my eyes and when it was laura saiyans who ended up kissing bobby santos not me i didn't say anything either i just lay in my room with stupid bear bear and sang under my breath imagining where i would run away to when i grew up to japan maybe where i could track down tomoko or to austria where my singing would inspire a remake of the sound of music all my favorite books from that period were about runaways watership down the incredible journey my side of the mountain and when bon jovi's runaway came out i imagined it was me they were singing about no one had any idea i was the tallest dorkiest kid in school the one who dressed up as wonder woman every halloween the one who never said a word people saw me in my glasses and my hand me down clothes and could not have imagined what i was capable of and then i was 12. i got that feeling the scaly witchy one and before i knew it my mother was sick and the wildness that had been in me all along that i tried to tamp down with choice and with homework and with promises that once i reached college i would be able to do whatever i pleased burst out i couldn't help it and try to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces it was a message more than a feeling a message that told like a bell change change change it didn't happen overnight yes the wilderness was in me yes it kept my heart beating as fast all the long day yes it danced around me while i walked down the street yes it let me look boys straight in the face when they stared at me yes it turned my laugh from a cough into a long wild fever but i was still scared how could i not be how was my mother's daughter her hauled on me stronger than love and then one day i was walking home with karen xerpeda who at that time was like my friend karen did the god thing really well she had spiky robert smith haley and more black and had skin color of a ghost walking with her in patterson was like walking with a bearded lady everybody would stay and it was the scariest thing and that was i guess why i did it we were walking down main and being stared at by everybody and out of nowhere i said karen i want you to cut my hair as soon as i said it i knew the feeling in my blood delgado came over me kayon raised her eyebrow what about your mother you see it wasn't just me everybody was scared abelicia de leon [ __ ] i said karen looked at me like i was being stupid i never cursed but that was something else that was about to change the next day we locked ourselves in her bathroom and downstairs her father and uncles were bellowing at some soccer game well how do you want it she asked i looked at the girl in the miui for a long time all i knew was that i didn't want to see her ever again i put the clippers in kaelin's hands turned them on and guided her hand until it was all gone so now you're punk cairn asked uncertainly yes i said the next day my mother threw a wig at me you're going to wear this you're going to wear it every day and if i see you without it on i'm going to kill you i didn't say a word i held the wig over the burner don't do it she swore as the burner clicked don't you dare it went up in a flash like gasoline like stupid hope and if i hadn't thrown it in the sink it would have taken my hand the smell was horrible like all the chemicals from all the factories in elizabeth that was when she slapped at me so i struck her hand and she snatched it back like i was the fire of course everyone thought i was the worst daughter ever my tia and our neighbors kept saying here she's your mother she's dying but i wouldn't listen when i caught a hand a door opened and i wasn't about to turn my back on it but god how we fought sick or not dying or not my mother wasn't going to go down easily she wasn't una padenja i'd seen her slap grown men push white police officers onto their asses curse a whole group of bulging chairs she had raised me and my brother by herself she had worked three jobs until she could buy this house we lived in she had survived being abandoned by my father she had come from santa domingo all by herself and as a young girl she claimed to have been beaten set on fire left for dead there was no way she was going to let me go without killing me first for gura and demo dare she called me you think you're someone but you ain't nada she dug hard looking for my seams wanting me to tear like always but i didn't weaken i wasn't going to it was the feeling i had that my life was waiting for me on the other side that made me fearless when she threw away my smiths and sisters of mercy posters akui yo i bought replacements when she threatened to tear up my new clothes i started keeping them in my locker and at karen's house when she told me that i had to quit my job at the greek diner i explained to my boss that my mother was starting to lose it because of a chemo so when she called to say i couldn't work there anymore he just handed me the phone and stared out at his customers in embarrassment when she changed the locks on me i had started staying out late going to the limelight because even though i was 14 i looked 25 i would knock on oscar's window and he would let me in scared because the next day my mother would run around the house screaming who the hell let that he had delagran puta in the house who who and oscar would be at the breakfast table stammering i don't know mammy i don't who gaged filled the house stale smoke it got into everything into our hair and our food like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow my brother didn't know what to do he stayed in his room though sometimes he would lamely try to ask me what was going on nothing you can tell lola he said i could only laugh you need to lose weight i told him in those final weeks i knew better than to walk near my mother most of the time she just looked at me with the stink eye but sometimes without warning she would grab me by my throat and hang on until i pried her fingers from me she didn't bother talking to me unless it was to make death threats when you go up you'll meet me in a dark alley when you least expect it and then i'll kill you and nobody will know i did it literally gloating as she said this you're crazy i told her you don't call me crazy she said and then she sat down panting it was bad but no one expected what came next so obvious when you think about it all my life i've been swearing that one day i would just disappear and one day i did i ran off dk because of a boy what can i really tell you about him he was like all boys beautiful and callow and like an insect he couldn't sit still with long hairy legs i met one night at limelight his name was aldo he was 19 and lived down at the jersey shore with his 74 year old father in the back of his oldsmobile on university i pulled my leather skirt up and my fishnet stockings down and the smell of me was everywhere this was our first date the spring of my sophomore year he wrote and called each other at least once a day i even drove down with karen to visit him in wildwood she had a license i didn't he lived and waited near the boardwalk one of three guys who obligated the bumper cars the only one without tattoos you should say he told me that night while kaelin walked ahead of us on the beach where would i survive i asked and he smiled with me don't lie i said but he looked out at the surf i want you to come he said seriously he asked me three times i counted i know that summer my brother announced that he was going to dedicate his life to designing role-playing games and my mother was trying to keep a second job for the first time since her obligation it wasn't working out she was coming home exhausted and since i wasn't helping nothing around the house was getting done some weekends my teokubelka would help out with the cooking and cleaning and would lecture us both but she had her own family to watch after so much of the time were on our own come he said on the phone she had graduated from high school a year earlier if i don't see patterson again it will be too soon she said before she left that was the september i cut school six times in my first two weeks i just couldn't do school anymore something inside me just wouldn't let me it didn't help that i was reading the fountainhead and had decided that i was dominique and out of his work i'm sure i could have stayed that way forever too scared to jump but finally what we'd all been waiting for happened my mother announced at dinner quietly i want you both to listen to me the doctor is running more tests on me oscar looked like he was going to cry he put his head down and my reaction i looked at her and said can you pass me the salt these days i don't blame her for smacking me across my face but right then it was all i needed we jumped on each other and the table fell and the sancocho spilled all over the floor and oscar just stood in the corner bellowing stop it stop it stop it he had the tumor delta maje she shrieked and i said this time i hope you die from it for a couple days the house was a war zone and then on friday she let me out of my room and i was allowed to sit next to her on the sofa and watch novellas with her she was waiting for her blood work to come back but you would never have known her life was in the balance she watched the tv like it was the only thing that mattered and whenever one of the characters did something underhanded she would start waving her arms someone has to stop her can't they see what that puta is up to i hate you i said very quietly but she didn't hear go get me some water she said put an ice cube in it that was the last thing i did for her the next morning i was on the bus bound for the show one bag two hundred dollars in tips tio gudolfo's old knife i was so scared i couldn't stop shaking the whole guy down i was expecting the sky to split open and my mother to reach down and shake me but it didn't happen nobody but the man across the aisle noticed me you're really beautiful he said like a girl i once knew i didn't write them a note that's how much i hated them hey that night while we lay an older sweltering kitty litter infested room i told him i want you to do it to me he started unbuttoning my pants are you sure definitely i said grimly he had a long thin dick that hurt like hell but the whole time i just said oh yes aldo yes because that was what i imagined you were supposed to say while you were losing your virginity to some boy you thought you loved it was the stupidest thing i ever did i was miserable and so bored but of course i wouldn't admit it i had run away so i was happy happy audo had neglected to mention all those times he told me to live with him that his father hated him like i hated my mother otto signo had been in world war ii and he never forgiven the chaps for all the friends he had lost my dad's so full of [ __ ] out of said he never left for dicks i don't think his father said four words to me the whole time i lived with them he was one mean vegito and even had a padlock around the refrigerator stay the hell out of it he told me we couldn't even get ice cubes out aldo and his dad lived in one of the cheapest little bungalows and me and otto slept in a room where his father kept the cat little for his two cats and at night we would move it out into the hallway but he always woke up before us and put it back in the room i told you to leave my crap alone which was funny when you think about it but it wasn't funny then i got a job selling french fries on the boardwalk and between the hot oil and the cat piss i couldn't smell anything else on my days i would drink without a well i would sit in the sand dressed in all black and try to guide in my journal which i was sure would form the foundation for a utopian society after we blew ourselves into radioactive kibble sometimes other boys would walk up to me and would throw lines at me who [ __ ] died what's with their hayward they would sit down next to me in the sand you a good looking girl you should be in a bikini why so you can greet me jesus christ one of them said jumping to his feet what the hell is wrong with you to this day i don't know how i lasted at the beginning of october i was laid off from the french fry palace by then most of the boardwalk was closed up and i had nothing to do except hang out at the public library which was even smaller than my high school one aldo had moved on to working with his dad in his garage which only made them more pissed at each other and by extension were pissed off at me when they got home they would drink schlitz and complain about the phillies i guess i should count myself lucky that they didn't just decide to bailey the hatchet by gang-banging me i stayed out as much as i could and waited for the feelings to come back to me to tell me what i should do next but i was born dry burgerft no visions whatsoever i started to think that maybe it was like in the books as soon as i lost my virginity i lost my power i got really mad at aldo after that you had drunk i told him and an idiot so what he shot back your [ __ ] smells then stay out of it i will but of course i was happy happy i kept waiting to run into my family posting up flyers of me on the boardwalk my mom the tallest blackest chestiest thing in sight oscar looking like the brown blob my tio gubelka maybe even my tio if they could get him off the heroin long enough but the closest i came to any of that was some flyers someone had put up for a cat they lost that's white people for you they lose a cat and it's an all points bulletin but we dominicans we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon by november i was so finished i would sit there with aldo and his putrid father and the old shows would come on tv the ones me and my brother used to watch when we were kids please company what's happening the jeffersons and my disappointment would grind against some organ that was very soft and tender it was starting to get cold too and the wind just walked right into the bungalow and got under your blankets or jumped in the shower with you it was awful i kept having these stupid visions of my brother trying to cook for himself don't ask me why i was the one who cooked for us the only thing oscar knew was how to make a grilled cheese i imagined him thin as a reed wandering around the kitchen opening cabbage for lonely i even started dreaming about my mother except in my dreams she was a little girl and i mean really little i could hold her in the palm of my hand she was always trying to say something i would put her right up to my ear and i still couldn't hear i always hated obvious dreams like that i still do and then aldo decided to be cute i knew he was getting unhappy with us but i didn't know exactly how bad it was until one night he had his friends over his father had gone to atlantic city and they were all drinking and smoking and telling dumb jokes and suddenly aldo says do you know what pontiac stands for poi or thinks it's a cadillac but who was he looking at when he told this punchline he was looking straight at me that night he wanted me but i pushed his hand away don't touch me don't get sore he said putting my hand on his [ __ ] it was nothing and then he laughed so what did i do a couple days later a really dumb thing i called home the first time no one answered the second time it was oscar the deleon residence how may i direct your call that was my brother for you this is why everybody in the world hated his guts it's me dumbass lola he was so quiet and then i realized he was crying where are you you don't want to know i switched ears trying to keep my voice casual how is everybody lola mammy's going to kill you dumbass could you keep your voice down mammy isn't home is she she's working what a surprise i said mammy working on the last minute of the last hour of the last day my mother would be at work she would be at work when the missiles were in the air i guess i must have missed him real bad or i just wanted to see somebody who knew anything about me or the cat piss had damaged my common sense because i gave him the address of a coffee shop on the boardwalk and told him to bring some of my clothes and some of my books bring me money too he paused i don't know where miami keeps it you know mister just bring it how much he asked timidly all of it that's a lot of money lola just bring me the money oscar okay okay he inhaled deeply will you at least tell me if you're okay or not i'm okay i said and that was the only point in the conversation where i almost cried i kept quiet until i could speak again and then i asked him how he was going to get down here without our mother finding out you know me he said weekly i might be a dork but i'm a resourceful dork i should have not known to trust anybody whose favorite book as a child were encyclopedia brown but i wasn't really thinking i was so looking forward to seeing him by then i had this plan i was going to convince my brother to run away with me my plan was that we could go to dublin i had met a bunch of irish guys on the boardwalk and they had sold me their country i would become a backup singer for you two and both bono and the drummer would fall in love with me and oscar could become the dominican james joyce i really believed it would happen too the next day i walked into the coffee shop looking brand new and he was there with the bag oscar i said laughing you're so fat i know you said ashamed i was worried about you we embraced for like an hour and then he started crying lola i'm sorry it's okay i said and that's when i looked up and saw my mother and my tiogru belka and my tear walk into the shop oscar i screamed but it was too late my mother already had me in her hands she looked so thin and worn almost like a hag but she was holding on to me like i was her last nickel and underneath her red wig her green eyes were furious i noticed absently that she had dressed up for the occasion that was typical buchacha del diablo she shrieked i managed to haul her out of the coffee shop and when she pulled back her hand to smack me i broke free i ran for it behind me i could feel her sprawling hitting the curb hard with a crack but i wasn't looking back no i was running in elementary school whenever we had field day i was always the fastest girl in my grade took home all the ribbons they said it wasn't fair because i was so big but i didn't care i could even have beat the boys if i wanted to so there was no way my sick mother my messed up tio and my fat brother were going to catch me i was going to a gun as fast as my long legs could carry me i was going to run down the boardwalk past aldo's miserable house out of wildwood out of new jersey and i wasn't going to stop i was going to fly anyway that's how it should have worked out but i looked back i couldn't help it it's not like i didn't know my bible all that pillars of salt stuff but when you're someone's daughter that she raised by yourself with no help from anybody habits die hard i just wanted to make sure my mom hadn't broken her arm or cracked open her skull i mean really who the hell wants to kill her own mother by accident that's the only reason i glanced back she was sprawled on the ground her wig had fallen out of reach her poor bald head out in the day like something private and shameful and she was bawling like a lost calf here here and there i was wanting to run off into my future it was right there when i needed that feeling to guide me but i wasn't anywhere in sight only me in the end i didn't have the ovaries she was on the ground bald as a baby crying probably a month away from dying and here i was her one and only daughter there was nothing i could do about it so i walked back and when i reached down to help her she clamped on to me with both hands that was when i realized she hadn't been crying at all she'd been faking her smile was like alliance yatta tengo she said jumping triumphantly to her feet to tango and that is how i ended up in santo domingo i guess my mother thought it would be harder for me to run away from an island where i knew no one and in a way she was great i'm into my sixth month here and these days i'm just trying to be philosophical about the whole thing i wasn't like that at first but in the end i had to let it go it was like the fight between egg and the guck my abuela said no winning i'm actually going to school and that it's going to count when i return to patterson but it keeps me busy and out of mischief and around people my own age you don't need to be around as vue hosts all day abuela says i have mixed feelings about the school for one thing it's improved my spanish a lot the academy is a private school a koa morgan wannabe filled with people my tio carlos moyer calls lojios de mommy yapapi and then there's me if you think it was tough being a goth and patterson try being a dominican new york in one of those private schools back in dr you will never meet bitchier girls in your whole life they whisper about me to death someone else would have a nervous breakdown but after wildwood i'm not so brittle i don't let it get to me in the irony of all agonies i'm on our school's track team i joined because my friend rozio the scholarship girl from los mina told me i could win a spot on the team on the length of my legs alone those are the pins of a winner she prophesied well she must have known something i didn't because i'm now i was school's top gunner in the 400 meters and under that i have talent at this simple thing never ceases to amaze me karen would pass out if she could see me running sprints out behind my school while coach cortes screams at us first in spanish then in catalan breathe breathe breathe i've got like no fat left on me and the musculature of my legs impresses everyone even me i can't wear shorts anymore without causing traffic jams and the other day when my abuela locked us out of the house she turned to me in frustration and said here just kick the door open that pushed a laugh out of both of us so much has changed these last months in my head in my heart crozier has me dressing up like a real dominican girl she's the only one who fixed my hair and who helps me with my makeup and sometimes when i see myself in mirrors i don't even know who i am anymore not that i'm unhappy or anything even if i found a hot air balloon that would whisk me straight to youtube's house i'm not sure i would take it i'm still not talking to my trailer brother though but the truth is i'm even thinking of staying one more year abuela doesn't want me to ever leave i'll miss you she says so simply it can't be anything but true and my mom has told me i can stay if i want to but that i would be welcome at home too teohubelka tells me she's hanging tough my mother that she's back from two jobs they send me a picture of the whole family and abuela frames it and i can't look at them without misting up my mother's not wearing her fakies in it she looks so thin and i don't even recognize her just know that i would die for you she told me the last time we talked and before i could say anything she hung up but that's not what i wanted to tell you it's about that crazy feeling that started this whole mess the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton the feeling that tells me that everything in my life is about to change it's come back just the other day i woke up from all these dreams and it was there pulsing inside of me i imagine this is what it feels like to have a child in you at first i was scared because i thought it was telling me to run away again but every time i looked around a house every time i saw my abuela the feeling got stronger so i knew this was something different i was dating a boy by then a sweet moenito by the name of max sanchez whom i had met in los mina while visiting rosia he's short but his smile and his snappy dressing make up for a lot because i'm from nuevo yo he talks about how good she's going to become and i try to explain to him that i don't care about that but he looks at me like i'm crazy i'm going to get a white mercedes-benz he says to varys but it's the job he has that i love best that got me and him started in center domingo two or three theaters often share the same set of wheels for a movie so when the first theater finishes with the first reel they put it in max's hands and he guides his motorcycle like crazy to make it to the second theater and then he drives back waits picks up the second wheel and so on if he's held up or gets into an accident the first wheel will end and there will be no second reel and the people in the audience will throw bottles so far he's been blessed he tells me and kisses his san miguel medal because of me he brags one movie becomes three i'm the man who puts together the pictures max is not from la clase alta as my abuela would describe it and if any of the stuck-up [ __ ] in school saws they would just about die but i'm fond of him he holds open doors he calls me his mogena and when he's feeling brave he touches my arm gently and then pulls back anyway i thought maybe the feeling was about max and so one day i let him take us to one of the love motels he was so excited he almost fell off the bed and the first thing he wanted to look at my ass i never knew my big ass could be such a star attraction but he kissed it four five times gave me goosebumps with his breath and pronounced it a tessero when we were done and he was in the bathroom washing himself i stood in front of the mirror naked and looked at my cooler for the first time a test ago i repeated a treasure well rosia asked at school and i nodded once quickly and she grabbed me and laughed and all the girls i hated turned to look but what could they do happiness when it comes is stronger than all the jerks in santo domingo combined but i was still confused because the feeling it just kept getting stronger and stronger wouldn't let me sleep wouldn't give me any peace i started losing races which was something i never did you ain't so great are you gringa the girls on the team hissed at me and i could only hang my head coach cortez was so unhappy he just locked himself in his car and wouldn't say anything to any of us the whole thing was driving me crazy and then one night i came home from being without max he had taken me for a walk along the malecon he never had money for anything else and we had watched the bats zigzagging over the palms and an old ship head into the distance he talked quietly about moving to the u.s while i stretched my hamstrings my abuela was waiting for me at the living room table even though she still wears black to mourn the husband she lost when she was young she's one of the most handsome women i've ever known we've half the time jag lightning bolt part and the first time i saw her at the airport i didn't want to admit it but i knew that things were going to be okay between us she stood like she was her own best thing and when she saw me she said here i have waited for you since the day you left and then she hugged me and kissed me and said i'm your abuela but you can call me la inca standing over her that night her part like a crack in her hair i felt a surge of tenderness i put my arms around her and that was when i noticed she was looking at the photos old photos the kind i'd never seen in my house photos of my mother when she was young and of other people i picked one up mamie was standing in front of a chinese restaurant even with the apron on she looked potent like someone who was going to be someone she was very guapa i said casually abuela snoited guapa soyo your mother was a diosa but so cabeza do when she was your age we never got along i didn't know that i said she was cabeza yoga and i was esigente but it all turned out for the best she sighed we have you and your brother and that's more than anyone could have hoped for given what we came before she plucked out one photo this is your mother's father she offered me the photo he was my cousin and she was about to say something else and then she stopped and that's when it hit me with the force of a hurricane the feeling i stood straight up the way my mother always wanted me to stand up my abuela was sitting there for loin trying to gobble together the right words and i could not move or breathe i felt like i always did at the last seconds of a race when i was sure that i was going to explode she was about to say something and i was waiting for whatever she was going to tell me i was waiting to begin end of chapter 2 chapter the three heartbreaks of belissia cabral 1955 to 1962. look at the princess before there was an american story before patterson spread before oscar and lola like a dream or the trumpets from the island of our eviction had even sounded were they always their mother apatia belissia cabral a girl so tall your leg bones aches just looking at her so dark it was as if the creatics had in her making blinked who like her yet to be born daughter would come to exhibit a particularly jersey male malice the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres under the sea she lived in those days in bunny not the frenzied bunny of right now supported by an endlessly supply of doyos who've laid claim to most of boston providence new hampshire this was the lovey-bonny of times past beautiful and respectful a city famed for its resistance to blackness it was there alas that the darkest character in our story resided on one of the main streets near the central plaza in a house that no longer stands it was here that bali lived with her mother aunt if not exactly content then certainly in a state of relative tranquility from 1951 on here and madre running their famous bakery near the plaza central and keeping their fading aeolus house in tip-top shape before 1951 our orphaned girl had lived with another foster family monstrous people if though rumors are to be believed a dark period of her life neither she nor her madre ever referenced their very own pagina el blanco these were the beautiful days when la inca were to account for bali her family's illustrious history while they pounded the wrong dough with bare hands your father your mother your sisters your house when the only talk between them was the voices on carlos moyes's radio and the sound of the butter being applied to belly's ruined back days of mangoes days of bread they are not many surviving photos from that period but it's not hard to imagine them arrayed in front of their immaculate house and lost pescadores not touching because it was not their way respectability so dense and lagrande that you need a blowtorch to cut it and a garden is so minus teareth in la pequena that you'd need the whole of mordor to overcome it tears was the life of the good people of soy church twice a week and on fridays a stroll through barney's parque central where in those nostalgic truly your days stick up kids were nowhere to be seen and the beautiful bands did play they shared the same sagging bed and in the morning while inca fished around blindly for a chunk lettuce belly would shiver out to the front of the house and while la inca brewed her coffee belly would lean against the fence and stare at what the neighbors the rising dust at the world here la inca would call here come here four five times until finally la inca walked over to fetcher and only then did belly come why are you shouting belly wanted to know annoyed bla inca pushing my back toward the house will you listen to the skull thinks herself a person when she's not belly clearly one of those audio souls always turning allergic to tranquilidad almost any other third world goal would have thanked diaz santosimo for the blessed life she led after all she had a madre who didn't beat her who out of guilt or inclination spoiled her gotten bought her flash clothes and paid her bakery wages peanuts i'll admit but that's more than what 99 percent of other kids in similar situations earned which was nathan our goal had it made and yet it did not feel so in our heart for reasons she only dimly understood by the time of our narrative belly could no longer abide working at the bakery or being the daughter of one of the most upstanding women in bani she could not abide period everything about her present life okay she wanted with all her heart something else when this dissatisfaction entered a heart she could not recall would later tell her daughter that it had been with her all her life but who knows if this is true what exactly it was she wanted was never clear either her own incredible life yes a handsome wealthy husband yes beautiful children yes a woman's body without question if i had to put it to words i'd say what she wanted more than anything was what she'd always wanted throughout her last childhood to escape from what was easy to enumerate the bakery her school dol espani sharing a bed with her madre the inability to buy the dresses she wanted having to wait until 15 to straighten her hair the impossible expectations of la inca the fact that her long gone paintings had died when she was one the whisper is that trueillo had done it those first years of her life when she'd been an orphan the horrible scars from that time her own despised black skin but where she wanted to escape too she could not tell you i guess it wouldn't have mattered if she'd been a princess in a high castle or if her dead parents his former estate the glorious casa hatui had been miraculously restored from trulia's omega effect she would have wanted out every morning the same routine hepatia under her breath you belly had the introit longing of nearly every adolescent escapist of an entire generation but i ask you so [ __ ] what no amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the dominican republic of raphael leonidas trulia molina the dictangius dictator whoever dictated this was a country a society that had been designed to be virtually escape proof alcatraz of the antilles there weren't any houdini holes in that plantano cotton options are as rare as tynos and for irratible dark skinned flockers of modest means they were greater still if you want to cast a restlessness in a broader light she was suffering the same suffocation that was affixiating a whole generation of young dominicans 20 odd years of the truliado had guaranteed that hers was the generation that would launch the revolution but which for the moment was turning blue for want of air the generation reaching consciousness in a society that lacked any the generation that despite the consensus that declared change impossible hankered for change all the same at the end of her life when she was being eaten alive by cancer billy would talk about how trapped they all felt it was like being at the bottom of an ocean she said there was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you but most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal they forgot even that there was a world above but what could she do billy was a girl for [ __ ] sake she had no power or beauty yet or talent or family that could help her transcend only la inca and la inca wasn't about to help our girl escape anything on the contrary mon ferreira la inca with her stiff skirts and imperious areas had as a central goal the planting of ballistia in the provincial soil of bonnie end in the inescapable fact of a family's glorious golden past the family belly had never known whom she had lost early remember your father was a doctor a doctor and your mother was a nurse a nurse la inca expected belly to be the last best hope of her decimated family expected her to play the key role in a historical rescue mission but what did she know about her family except the stories she was told ad nauseam and ultimately what did she carry she wasn't a more detailed guapa with her feet pointing backward in the past her feet pointing forward she reminded la inca over and over pointed to the future your father was a doctor like inca repeated unperturbed your mother was a nurse they owned the biggest house in la vega belly did not listen but at night when the elysee winds blew in our gold would groan in our sleep la chica when belly was 13 la inca landed her scholarship at elga dentoy one of the best schools in bunny on paper it was a pretty solid move boyfriend or not belly was the third and final daughter of one of the caballo's finest families and a proper education was not only her do it was her birthright la inca also hoped to take some of the heat off belly's restlessness a new school with the best people in the valley she thought what couldn't this cure but despite the girl's admirable lineage belly herself had not grown up in her parents upper class malayu had had no kind of breathing until la inka her father's favorite cousin had finally managed to track her down rescue her really and brought her out of the darkness of those days and into the light of bani in these last seven years meticulous punctilius la inca had undone a lot of the damage that life and outer azera had inflicted but the girl was still crazy rough around the edges had all the upper class arrogance you could want but she also had the mouth of a kalmato superstar would shoot anybody out for anything her years and outer azer were to blame putting her dark-skinned media camps cena ass in a tony school where the majority of pupils were the white-skinned children of the regime's top ladronazos turned out to be a better idea in theory than in practice brilliant doctor father or not belly stood out in elgidentoi given the delicacy of the situation another goal might have adjusted the polarity of a persona to better fit in would have kept her head down and survived by ignoring the ten thousand one barbs directed at her each day by students and staff alike not belly she never would admit it even to herself but she felt utterly exposed at elga dentoy all those pale eyes gnawing out of duskiness like locus's and she didn't even know how to handle such vulnerability did what had always saved her in the past was defensive and aggressive and mad over reactive you said something slightly off-color about her shoes and she brought up the fact that you had a slow eye and dance like a goat with a rock stuck in its ass ouch you would just be plain and homegirl would be coming down on you off the top of goat let's just say by the end of a second quarter belly could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her the downside of this of course was that she was completely alone it wasn't like in the time of the butterflies where a kindly morable sister steps up and befriends the poor scholarship student no miranda here everybody's shunned despite the outsized expectations belly had had on our first days to be number one in her class and to be crowned prom queen opposite handsome jack polios billy quickly found herself exiled beyond the bone walls of the macroverse itself flung there by the ritual of the chute she wasn't even lucky enough to be demoted into that lamentable subset those mega losers that even the losers pick on she was beyond that in sycogarg's territory her fellow ultra deletes included the boy in the iron lung whose servants would wheel him into the corner of the class every morning and who always seemed to be smiling the idiot and the chinese girl whose father owned the largest potpourri in the country and was known dubiously as trulia's china's in her two years at elga dentoi wayne never managed to learn more than a glass of spanish yet despite this obvious impediment she reported dutifully to class every day in the beginning the other students had scourged her with all the usual anti-asian nonsense they cracked on our hay it's so greasy on our eyes can you really see through those on chopsticks i got some twigs for you on language variations of ching chong ease the boys especially love to tug their faces back and buck tooth chinky-eyed richters chiming jokes are plenty but once the novelty wore off she didn't ever respond the students exiled way to the phantom zone and even the cries of china china china died down eventually this was who bali sat next to her first two years of high school but even wei had some choice words for belly you black she said fingering belly's thin forearm black black belly tried her hardest but she couldn't spin bomb grade plutonium from the light grade uranium of her days during her last years there had been no education of any kind that gap had taken a toll on her neural pathways such that she could never fully concentrate on the material at hand it was stubbornness and the expectations of la inca that keplesia lashed to the mast even though she was miserably alone and her grades were even worse than ways you would think la inca complained that you could score higher than a china the other students spent furiously over their exams while police stared at the hurricane whirl at the back of jack paul's crew cut senorita cabral are you finished no maestro and then a forced return to the problem sets as though she was submerging herself in water against her will no one in iberio could have imagined how much she hated school la inca certainly didn't have a clue elgadentoi was about a million miles removed from the modest working-class neighborhood where she and la inca lived and belly did everything possible to represent her school as a paradise which she coveted with the other immortals a four-year interval before the final hypothesis took on even more heirs way before la inca had to correct her on her grammar and against using slang she now had the best addiction and locution in lower bunny she's staring to talk like cervantes but inca bragged to the neighbors i told you that school would be worth the trouble belly didn't have much in the way of friends only deuter the daughter of the woman who cleaned for la inca who owned exactly no pair of shoes and worshipped the ground balee walked on for dorka she put on a show to end all shows she wore her uniform straight through the day until la inca forced her to take it off what do you think these things were free and talked unseasonably about her schoolmates painting each one as her deepest friend and confrodante even the girls who made it their mission to ignore and exclude her from everything four girls we will call the squadron supreme found themselves rehabilitated in her tables as benevolent older spirits and dropped in on belisia every now and then to give her invaluable advice on the school and life in general the squadron it turned out were all very jealous of a relationship with jack poyles who she reminded doica is my boyfriend and invariably one member or another of the squadron fell to weakness and attempted to steal her novio but of course he always rebuked their treacherous advances i am appalled jack would say casting his husty aside especially considering how well belisia cabral daughter of the world famous surgeon has treated you in every version after a prolonged period of iciness the offending squadron member would throw herself at belly's feet and beg forgiveness which after tense deliberation belly invariably grunted they can't help it that they're weak she explained to doica or that jack is so guapo what a world she spun belly talked of parties and pools in polo games and dinners where a bloody steak was heaped onto plates and grapes were as common as tangerines she in fact without knowing was talking about the life she never knew the life of casa hatui so astonishing were her descriptions that dorika often said i would like to go to school with you one day belly snorted you must be crazy you're too stupid and doika would lower her head stay at her broad feet dusty in their chancletas la inca talked about billy becoming a female doctor you wouldn't be the first but you'd be the best imagined or here raising test tubes up to the light but belly usually passed her school days dreaming about the various boys around her she had stopped staring at them openly after one of her teachers had getting a letter home to la inca and la inca had chastised her what do you think you are a bugatto this is the best school in bani muchacha yoguru in your reputation and if not about the boys then about the house she was convinced she would one day own furnishing it in her mind room by room by room where madre wanted her to bring back casa hartoue a history house but belly's house was new and crisp had no history at all attached to it in my favorite maria montez daydream a dashing european of the jean's pierre armand of ogaiari who happened to look exactly like jack puyos who would catch sight of her in the bakery and fall madly in love with her and sweep her off to his chateau in france wake up girl you're going to burn the panda agua she wasn't the only girl dreaming like this the here in gongzo was in the ao it was dream [ __ ] that they fed girls day and night it's surprising belly could think of anything else what with that heavy rotation of bolugos canciones and verso spinning on her head with the listen diario society pages spread before her belly at 13 and love like a 70 year old widow who's been abandoned by family husband children and fortune believes in god felicia was if it was possible even more susceptible to the casanova wave than many of her peers our goal was straight boy crazy to be boy crazy in a country like santo domingo is a singular distinction it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average north americana to cinders she stared at the young braavos on the bus secretly kissed the bread of the bren moses who frequented the bakery saying to herself all those beautiful cuban love songs god save your soul la inca grumbled if you think boys are an answer to anything but even the boy situation left a lot to be desired if she'd been interested in the [ __ ] in burrito our belly would have had no problem these cats would have obliged her romantic spirit by jumping her lickety-split but alas la inca's hope that the rarefied private areas of kalaheo elga dentoy would have a solitary effect on the girl's character like a dozen wet belt beatings or three months in an unheated convent head at least in this one aspect-borne fruit for belly at 13 only had eyes for the jackpoolers of the world as is usually the case in these situations the high-class boys she so desired didn't reciprocate her interest belly didn't have quite enough of anything to snap these ruby rosas out of their rich skull reveries what a life each day turning on its axis slower than a year she endured school the bakery la inca suffocating solicitude with a furious jar she watched hungrily for visitors from out of town through her open arms at the slightest hint of a wind and at night she struggled jacob-like against the oceans pressing down on her kimota so what happened a boy happened her first numero uno jacques puyo's of course the school's handsomest greed whitest boy a hearty slender melnabonian of pure european stock whose cheeks look like they'd been nabbed by a master and whose skin was unflawed by sky mole blemish or hair his small nipples were the pink perfect ovals of sliced saucer his father was the colonel in the trujillo's beloved air force a heavy duty player in bani would be instrumental in bombing the capital during the revolution killing all those helpless civilians including my poor uncle velenicio and his mother a former beauty queen of venezuelan proportions now active in the church a kisser of cardinal gangs and a circle of orphans jack eldest son privileged seed he obelio anointed one revered by his female family members and that endless monsoon reign of praise and indulgence had quickened in him the bamboo of entitlement he had the physical swagger of a boy twice his size and an unbearable loudmouthed cockiness that he drove into people like a metal spa in the future he would throw his lot in with a demon bogue and end up ambassador to panama as his reward but for the moment he was the school's apollo it's mithra the teachers the staff the girls the boys all through petals of adoration beneath his finely arched feet he was proof positive that god the great god absolute the center and circumference of all democracy does not love his children equally and how did bali interact with this insane object of attraction in a way that is fitting of her bullhead of directness she would march down the hallway books pressed to a pubescent chest staring down at her feet and pretending not to see him would smash into his hollowed vessel kagame he sputtered wheeling about and then he'd see it was belisia a girl now stooping over to recover her books and he bent over too he was if nothing a cabela's his anger defusing becoming confusion irritation what are you a bat watch where you're going he had a single-way line creasing his high forehead his part as it became known and eyes of the deepest cerulean the eyes of atlantis once belly had overheard him bragging to one of his many female admirers oh these old things i inherited dumb for my german abuela come on cabral what's your difficulty it's your fault she swoye meant it more ways than one maybe she'd see better one of his lieutenants cracked if it was dark out it might as well have been dark out for all intents and purposes she was invisible to him and would have stayed invisible too if the summer of sophomore year she'd not hit the biochemical jackpot not experienced the summer of her secondary sex characteristics not been transformed utterly a terrible beauty has been born where before her belly had been a gangly ibis of a girl pretty in a typical sort of way by summer's end she become unmohair in total acquiring that body of hers that body that made her famous in bunny her dead parents his jeans on some roman polanski [ __ ] like the older sister she had never met billy was transformed almost overnight into an underage stunner and if trujillo had not been on his last directions he probably would have grunted for her like he'd been rumored to have gunned for her poor dead sister for the record that summer our girl caught a couple pazzo so berserk that only a pornographer or a comic book artist could have designed it with a clear conscious every neighborhood has its tattoo but belly could have put them all to shame she was late to a suprema the tetanus were globes so implausibly titanic they made generous souls pity their bearer and drove every straight male in their vicinity to evaluate his sorry life she had the breasts of luba 35 triple d and what about that super sonic kulo that could tear to ward right out of fucker's mouths pull windows from out of their [ __ ] frames akoyo habala mas ke una yunta debu e tiosmio even your mother watcher reviewing her old pictures is struck by what a [ __ ] babe she was anded el diablo la inca exclaimed here what in the world are you eating if belly had been a normal girl being the neighborhood's most prominent tattooer might have pushed her into shyness might even have depressed the [ __ ] out of her and at first belly had both these reactions and also the same feeling that gets delivered to you by the bucket for free during adolescence shame shogam for gwenza she no longer wanted to bathe with la inca a huge change their morning routine well i guess you're grown enough to wash yourself like inka said lightly but you could tell she was hurt and those darkness of their wash closet belly circled discontently around her novioibis avoiding her hypersensitive nipples at all costs now every time she had to head outside belly felt like she was stepping into a danger room filled with men's laser eyes and women's razor whispers the blast of car horns enough to make her fall over herself she was furious at the world for his newly acquired burden and furious at herself for the first month that is gradually belly began to see beyond the cat calls and the dia samio assassina and the esa tertitorio and the k petro nalalitad to the hidden mechanisms that drove these comments one day on the way back from the bakery la inca marinara side about that day's receipts it dawned on belly men liked it not only did they like her they liked her [ __ ] lot the proof was the day that one of their customers the local dentist slipped her a note with his money and it said i want to see you as simple as that belly was terrified scandalized and giddy the dentist had a fat wife who ordered a cake for my inca almost every month either for one of her seven children or for her 50 some cousins but most likely for her and her alone she had a waddle and an enormous middle-aged ass that challenged all chairs belly mooned over that note like it was a marriage proposal from god's hot sun even though the dentist was bald and ponchio then an otp regular and had a tracery of fine red veins all over his cheeks the dentist came in as he always did but now his eyes were always questing hello senorita belly his greeting now fettered with lust and threat and belly's heart would beat like nothing she'd ever heard after two such visits she shall goat on a whim a little note that said simply yes you can pick me up at the park at tall and tall time and passed a two back to him with his change and by hook and crook against be walking with la inca threw the pike at the very moment of the assignation her heart going like crazy she didn't know what to expect but she had a wild hope and just as they were about to leave the park belly spotted the dentist sitting in a car that was not his pretending to read the paper but looking forward lonely in her direction look madre belly said loudly it's the dentist and la inca turned and homeboy threw the car frantically into gear and tore out of there before la inca could even wave how very strange la inca said i don't like him belly said he looks at me and now it was his wife who comes to the bakery to pick up the cakes ia dentista belly inquired innocently that one's too lazy to do anything his wife said with no little exasperation belly who'd been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life was sent over the moon by what she now knew by the undeniable correctness of a desirability which was in its own way power like the accidental discovery of the one ring like stumbling into the wizard shazam's cave while finding the crashed ship of the green lantern hypatia belicia cabral had finally had power and a true sense of self started pinching her shoulders back wearing the tightest clothes she had dios mio la inca said every time the girl headed out why would god give you that burden in this country of all places telling belly not to flaunt those curves would have been like asking the persecuted fat kid not to use his recently discovered mutant abilities with great powers comes great responsibility a [ __ ] our goal ran into the future that our new body represented and never ever looks back hunt the light knight now fully ahem endowed belly could turn to elga dentoy for summer break to the alarm of faculty and students alike and set out to track down jack puyo's with a great deliberation of a hob after you know who and of all these things the albino boy was a symbol wonder yay then and at the fiery hunt another goal would have been more subtle drawn her prey to her but what did belly know about process or patience she threw everything she had at jack batted her eyes so much adam that she almost sprained her eyelids put a tremendous chest in his line of sight every chance she got adopted a walk that got her yelled at by the teachers but that brought the boys and the male faculty ogunning but poyos was unmoved observed her with his deep dolphin eyes and did nothing after about a week of this belly was going out of her mind she had expected him to fall instantly and so one day out of shameless desperation she pretended to accidentally leave buttons on her blouse open she was wearing this lacy bra she stole from deuka who had acquired quite a nice chest herself but before belly could bring her colossal cleavage to bailey her very own wave motion gun way blushing deeply ran over and buttoned her up you showing jack drifting disinterestedly away she tried everything but no dice before you know it belly was back to banging into him in the hall he said with a smile you have to be more careful i love you she wanted to scream i want to have all your children i want to be your woman but instead she said you be careful she was mugos september ended and alarmingly enough she had her best month at the school academically english was the number one subject how ironic she learned the names of the 50 states she could ask for coffee a bathroom the time where the post office was her english teacher a deviant assured her that her accent was superb superb the other girls allowed him to touch them but belly now finally attuned to masculine weirdness and certain that she was worthy only of a prince sidled out from under his bombi hands a teacher asked them to start thinking about the new decade where would you like to see yourself your country and our glorious president in the coming years no one understood the question so we had to break it down into two simple parts one of her classmates mauricio ledezme got in serious trouble so bad that his family had to spirit him out of the country he was a quiet boy who sat next to one of the squadron stewing always in his love for her perhaps he thought he'd impress her not that far fetched for soon comes the generation whose number one ass getting technique will not be to be like me but to be like shea perhaps he just had enough he wrote in the crabbed hand guiding of a future poet revolutionary i'd like to see our country be a democracy like the united states i wish we would stop having dictators also i believe that it was trujillo who killed galindus that's all it took the next day both he and the teacher were gone no one's saying nothing belly's essay was far less controversial i will be married to a handsome wealthy man i will also be a doctor with my own hospital that i will name after trujillo at home she continued to brag to deutsche about her boyfriend and when jack poirier's photo appeared in the school newspaper she brought it home in triumph torque was so overwhelmed she spent the night in her house inconsolable crying and crying belly could hear her loud and clearly and then in the first days of october as the pueblo was getting ready to celebrate another trujillo birthday belly heard a whisper that jack pouriers had broken up with his girlfriend belly had always known about this girlfriend who attended another school but do you think she cared she was sure it was just a rumor didn't need any more hope to torture her but it turned out to be more than ogumo and more than hope because not two days later jack poyo stopped belly in the hallways as though he was seeing her for the very first time cabral he whispered you're beautiful the sharp spice of his cologne like an intoxication i know i am she said her face are blazed with heat well he said bearing a mitt in his perfectly straight hairy the next thing you know he was giving her guides in his brand new mercedes and buying her helados with a knot of dollars he carried in his pocket legally he was too young to drive but do you think anybody in santo domingo stopped the colonel's son for anything especially the son of a colonel who was said to be one of grampy's julio's confidants amoy it wasn't quite the romance she would later make it out to be a couple of talks a walk on the beach while the rest of the class was having a picnic and before she knew it she was sneaking into a closet with him after school and he was slipping at 2a something terrible let's just say that she finally understood why other boys had given him the nickname jack the rippier he had what even she knew to be an annoymous penis a shiver-sized lingam a destroyer of worlds and the whole time she thought they'd been calling him jack though duh later after she'd been with the gangster she would realize how little respect polio's had for her but since she had nothing to compare it to at the time she assumed [ __ ] was supposed to be like she was being run through with a cutlass the first time she was scared shitless and it hurt bad 4d10 but nothing could obliterate the feelings she had that finally she was on her way the sense of a journey starting of a first step taken of the beginning of something big afterward she tried to embrace him to touch his silk and hey but she shook off for chaoses hurry up and get dressed if we get caught my ass will be under the fire which was funny because that's exactly how our ass felt for a month they scorped in various isolated corners of the school until the day a teacher acting on an anonymous tip from a member of the student body surprised the undercover couple in flagrante delecito in a broom closet just imagine belly butt naked her vast sky like nothing anybody had seen before and jack with his pants puddled around his ankle the scandal remember the time in the place bonnie in the late 50s faction that jack puyol's was the number one son of the blessed bee a clan one of bernie's most vulnerable and filthy rich families factor in that he'd been caught not with one of his own class though that might have also been a problem but with the scholarship goal uno prieta to boot the [ __ ] of poi prietas was considered standard operating procedure for elites just as long as it was kept on the down low what is elsewhere called the strom thurmoid maneuver puyos of course blamed belly for everything sat in the office of director and explained in great detail how she had seduced him it wasn't me he insisted it was her the real scandal however was that poyos was actually engaged to that girlfriend of his the half in the grave rebecca brito herself a member of bonnie's other powerful family the eye and he better believe jack getting caught in a closet with una prieta kebabs any future promise of matrimony her family very particularly about their christian reputation puyo's old man was so infuriated and humiliated that he started beating the boy as soon as he laid hands on him and within the week had shipped him off to a military school in puerto rico where he would in his criminal words learn the meaning of duty belly never saw him again except once in the listing diario and by then they were both in their 40s poyos might have been a bitch-ass rat but belly's reaction was one for the history books not only was our girl not embarrassed by what had happened even after being shaken down by the rector and the nun and the janitor the holy triple team she absolutely refused to profess her guilt if she had rotated her head around 360 degrees and vomited green pea soup it would have caused only slightly less of an uproar in typical hard-headed belly fashion our girl insisted that she'd done nothing wrong that in fact she was well within our rights i'm allowed to do anything i want belly said stubbornly with my husband polios it seemed had promised belicia that they would be married as soon as they both finished high school and belly had believed him hook line and cinco hard to square her credulity with the hard-nosed no-nonsense femme matador i'd come to know but one must remember she was young and in love talk about fantasist the girl sincerely believed that jack would be true the good teachers of elga dentoy never squeezed anything close to a mere culpa from the go she kept shaking her head as stubborn as the laws of the universe themselves no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no not that it mattered in the end belisia's tenure at the school is over and so will our inca's dreams of recreating in belly her father's genius his majes his excellence in all things in any other family such a thing would have meant the beating of belly to within an inch of her life beating her straight into the hospital with no delay but then once she was better beating her again and putting her back into the hospital but leinka was not that kind of parent la inca you see was a serious woman an upstanding woman one of the best of her class but she was capable of punishing the girl physically call it a hitch in the universe call it mental illness but la inca just couldn't do it not then not ever all she could do was wave her arm in the air in her laments how could this have happened la inca demanded how how he was going to marry me belly cried we were going to have children are you insane by uncle gord here have you lost your mind took a while for [ __ ] to calm down the neighbors loving the whole thing i told you that blackie was good for nothing but eventually things did and only then did la inca convoke a special session on our girl's future first la inca gave belly tongue lashing number 500 million and five excruciating her poor judgment her poor moguls report everything and only when those preliminaries were good and settled did la inca lay down the law you were returning to school not to elgar dentoy but somewhere nearly as good padre bellini as belly her eyes stood swollen from jackloss laughed i'm not going back to school not ever had she forgotten the suffering that she had endured in our last years in the pursuit of education the costs the terrible scars on her back the burning perhaps she had perhaps the prerogatives of this new age had rendered the vow of the old irrelevant however during those tumultuous post-expulsion weeks while she'd been gathering in her bed over the loss of her husband our goal had been rocked by instances of stupendous stupidity a first lesson in the fragility of love and the prenatural cowardice of men and out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang belly's first adult oath one that would follow her into adulthood to the states and beyond i will not serve never again would she follow any lead other than our own not the rectors not the nuns not la incas not our poor dead parents only me she whispered me this oath did much to galij not long after the back to school showdown belly put one of the la inca's dresses was literally bursting in it and caught a guy down to the parquet central this was not a huge trip but still for a girl-like belly it was a precursor of things to come when she returned to the house in the late afternoon she announced i have a job la inga snorted i guess the cabarets were always hiring it was not a cabaret belly might have been a puta major in the cosmology of her neighbors but acquired she was not no she had landed a job as a waitress at a restaurant on the parquet the owner a stout well-dressed chinese by the name of juan then had not exactly needed anyone in fact he didn't know if he needed himself business terrible he lamented too much politics politics bad for everything but politicians no excess money and already many impossible employees but belly was not willing to be rejected there's a lot i can do and pinch her shoulder blades to emphasize her assets which for a man any less righteous would have been an open invitation but one simply sighed no obligated be without shame we try you up probationary period can't promise is built political conditions give promises no hospitality what's my salary salary no salary you a waitress you tips how much are they once again the glumness it is without certainty i don't understand his brother jose's bloodshot eyes glanced up from the sports section what my brother is saying is that it all depends and they are like inca shaking her head a waitress but here you're a baker's daughter you don't know the first thing about waitressing la inca assumed that because belly had of late not shown any enthusiasm for the bakery or school or for claiming she devoted to a zangana but she forgotten that our girl had been a creator in her first life for half her years she'd known nothing but work la inca predicted that belly would call it quits within a couple of months but belly never did on the job our girl in fact showed her quality she was never late never milling good worked her sizeable ass off heck she liked the job he was not exactly president of the republic but for a 14 year old who wanted out of the house it paid and kept her in the world while she waited for it for her glorious future to materialize 18 months she worked at the palacio packing originally called el tocero day in honor of the admiral's true and never reached destination but the brothers then had changed it when they learned that the admiral's name was a fuku chinese no like curses once said she would always say she came of age in the restaurant and in some ways she did she learned to beat mena dominoes and prove herself so responsible that the brothers then could leave her in charge of the cook and the other weight staff while they slipped out to fish and visit her thick-legged girlfriends in later years belly would lament that she had never lost touch with her chinas they were so good to me she moaned oscar and lola nothing like your worthless espana of a father juan the melancholy gambler who waxed about shanghai as though it were a love poem sung by a beautiful woman who love but cannot have 1. the short cider romantic whose girlfriends robbed him blind and who never mastered spanish though in later years when he was living in skokie illinois he would yell at his americanized grandchildren in his guttural spanish and they laughed at him thinking in chinese juan who taught belly how to play dominoes and whose only fundamentalism was his bulletproof optimism if only admiral will come to our restaurant first imagine the trouble that could be avoided sweating gentle one who would have lost the restaurant if not for his older brother jose the enigmatic who hovered at the periphery with all the menace of a cyclone jose the bravo the guapo his wife and children dead by warlord in his thirties jose who protected the restaurant and the rooms above with an implacable ferocity whose grief had extracted from his body all softness idle chatter and hope he never seemed to approve of belly or any of the other employees but since she alone wasn't scared of him my mom is as tall as you why he reciprocated by giving her practical instructions you want to be a useless woman all your life like how to hammer nails fix electrical outlets cook chow fun and drive a koi all would come in good use when she became the empress of diaspora jose would acquit himself bravely in the revolution fighting i must regretfully report against the pueblo and would die in 1976 in atlanta cancer of the pancreas crying out his wife's name which the nurses confused for more chinese goobly goop extra emphasis in their minds on the and then there was lillian the other waitress a squat rice tub whose answer against the world turned to glee only when humanity exceeded in its venality brutality and mendacity even her own expectations she didn't take to belly at first thought her competition but eventually would treat belly more or less with courtesy she was the first woman at our goal who met who read the paper her son's bibliomania would remind her always of lillian how's the world keeping beliasque yodido was always her answer and indian benny a quiet meticulous waiter who had the sad heirs of a man long accustomed to the spectacular demolition of dreams rumor at the restaurant had it that indian benny was married to a huge lusty azuana who regularly put him on the street so that she could bunk some new sweet meat the only time indian benny was known to smile was when he beat hosea dominos the two were consummate tile slingers and of course bitter rivals he too would fight in the revolution for the home team and it was said that throughout that summer of our national liberation indian benny never stopped smiling even after a marine sniper cavitated his brains over his entire command he didn't stop and what about the cook marco antonio a one-legged no ear grotesque straight out of goymen gust his explanation for his appearance i had an accident his bag was an almost fanatical distress of cebenos whose regional pride he was convinced masked imperial ambitions on a haitian level they want to seize the public i'm telling you cristiano they want to start their own country the whole day she dealt with homebreeze of all stripes and it was here barely perfected her rough spun salt of the earthbound homie as you might imagine everybody was in love with her including her co-workers but jose had warned them off touch her and i'll pull your guts out your kulo you must be joking marco antonio said in his own defense i couldn't climb that mountain even with two legs the customer's attention was exhilarating and she in turn gave the boy something that most men could never get out of gibbin solicitous mothering of an attractive woman plant still plenty of in bounty old customers who remember her with great fondness la inca of course was anguished by belly's fault from princessa to mazera what is happening to the world at home the two greatly spoke anymore la inca tried to talk but belly wouldn't listen and for her part la inca filled that silence with prayer trying to summon a miracle that would transform belly into a dutiful daughter as fate would have it once belly had slipped her grasp not even god had enough chao chara saw to bring her back every now and then la inga would appear at the restaurant she'd sit alone erect as a lectwin all in black and between sips of tea would watch the girl with a mournful intensity perhaps she hoped to blame belly into returning to operation restore house of cabrillo but belly went about her work with her customer ezeel it must have dismayed la inca to see how drastically her daughter was changing for belly the girl who never used to speak in public who could be still as no displayed at palacio pecking a gracatura's gift for apollo that delighted a great many of the all-male clientele those of you who have stood at the corner of 142nd and broadway can guess what it was she spoke the blunt irreverent cant of the pueblo that gives all dominicanos culto's nightmares on their 400 thread count sheets and that la inca had assumed had perished along with belly's first life in our azura but here it was so alive it was like it had never left paso esposa nomidigas eventually there came a moment when she paused at la inca's table do you want anything else only that you would return to school mia sorry belly picked up potassa and wiped the table in one perfunctory motion we stopped saving padengia last week and then la inca paid a quarter and was gone and a great weight lifted off belly proved that she'd done the right thing in those 18 months she learned a great deal about herself she learned that despite all her dreams to be the most beautiful woman in the world to have the brothers jumping out of windows and awake when felicia cabral felt in love and stayed in love despite the trove of men handsome plain and ugly who marched into the restaurant intent on winning her handed marriage or at least in fuckage she never had a thought for anyone but jack pourios turns out that in our heart our goal was more penelope than horror of barbell on of course la inca who witnessed the parade of men muddying her doorstep would not have agreed barely belly often had dreams where jack returned from military school dreams where he'd been waiting for her at the job spilled out at one of the tables like a beautiful bag of swag a grin on his magnificent face his eyes of atlantis on her at last only on her i came back for you miyamoy i came back our goal learned that even to a chooch like jack poirios she was true but that didn't mean she reclused herself entirely from the world of men for all her fidelity she would never be a sister who liked being without male attention even in this rough period belly had her princess in waiting brother is willing to brave the barbed wire minefields of her affections in the hopes that beyond the cruel middle elysium might await the poor deluded trumps the gangsters would have her every which way but these poor sappers who came before the gangster they were lucky to get an abrazo let us summon back from the abyss two sappers in particular the fiat dealer the bald white and smiling a regular hippolyta mayhem but suave and cavalier and so enamored of north america baseball that he risked his life and limb to listen to games on a contraband shortwave radio he believed in baseball with a fervor of an adolescent and believed also that in the future dominicans would storm the major leagues and compete with the montplais and the marissas of the world marriage hall is only the beginning he predicted of a reconquista you're crazy belly said mocking him and his wigito in an inspired stroke of counter programming her other paramour was a student at the uasd one of those city college types who's been in school 11 years and is always five credits shy of a degree student today don't mean na but in a latin america whipped into a frenzy by the fall of arbenz by the stoning of nixon by the gorillas of the sierra madre by the endless cynical maneuverings of the yankee pig dogs in a latin america already a year and a half into the decade of the gorilla a student was something else altogether an agent for change a vibrating quantum string in the stayed newtonian universe such a student was acquittees he also listened to the shortwave but not for dodger scores what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of havana news of the future aquaman's was therefore a student the son of a zapotero and a midwife a tear pedera and a quebecoma for life being a student wasn't a joke not with trujillo and johnny abbas scooping up everybody following that foiled cuban invasion of 1959 wasn't a day that passed that his life wasn't in danger and he had no fixed address appeared in belly's day with no warning archie as he was known had an immaculate head of hair and hector level glasses and the intensity of the south beach dietitian invasion of the dr and dominicans for their annexationist subservience to the north guacaghi had cursed us all that his most beloved ideologues were a couple of germans who never met a [ __ ] they liked was beside the point both of these dudes barely played hard visited them at their digs and at the dealership and dished them their daily recommended allowance of no play a date couldn't pass without the fiat delay begging her for a single grope just let me touch them with the back of my hands he mirrored but nearly every time she picked him off in a fielder's choice equipment when we buffed at least showed some class he didn't pout or marry what the hell am i wasting my money for he preferred to stay philosophical the revolution is not made in a day he'd say lethally and then kick back and entertain her with stories about dodging the secret police even to a chooch like jack pourios she was true yes but eventually she did get over him oh romantic she was but not a pandeya when she finally came to however things had turned dicey say the least the country was in an upgo after the failed invasion of 1959 an underground conspiracy of youth had been uncovered and everywhere young people were being augusted and tortured and killed politics juan spat standing at the empty tables politics jose didn't offer comment he simply cleaned his smith and wesson in the privacy of his upstairs groom i don't know if i'll make it out of this one what quimity said in a bare-faced attempt to cage a pity [ __ ] you'll be fine belly snorted pushing off his embrace she was right in the end but she was the one of the few who made it through his balls unfried archie survives into the present and when i drive through the capital with my man pedro i occasionally spot his grill on campaign posters for one of the radical splinter parties whose sole platform is to bring electricity back to the dominican republic pedro snorts escaladron nova pad in february lillian had to quit the job and return to her campo to care for her alien mother a senior who lillian claimed had never given a damn for her well-being but it is the fate of women everywhere to be miserable always lillian declared and then she was gone and only the cheap freebie calendar she liked marketing off remained a week later the brothers then hired a replacement a new girl constantina in her twenties sunny and amiable whose cuerpo was all people in new cooler amuhai and the parlance of the period more than once constantina argive to lunch straight from a night of partying smelling of whiskey and stale cigarettes muchacha you wouldn't believe a leo and she was disarmingly chill and could curse the black off a crow and perhaps recognizing the kindred spirit alone in the world took an immediate liking to our goal my hermanita she called belly the most beautiful girl you're proof that god is dominican constantina was the person who finally pried the sad battle of jack pourios out of her her advice forget that here de la pora that como evo every disco crazier who walks in here is in love with you you could have had the whole more detailed world if you wanted the world it was what she desired with her entire heart but how could she achieve it she watched the flow of traffic past the parquet and did not know one day in a barbua a girlish impulse they finished work early and taking their earnings to the spaniards down the street bought a pair of matching dresses now you look candela constantina said approvingly so what are you gonna do now belly asked a crooked tooth smile me i'm going to the hollywood for a dance i have owned bran amigo working in the door and from what i hear there will be a whole assembly line of rich men with nothing to do but adore me i see she shivered her hands down the slopes of her hips then she stopped the show why does the private school princess actually want to come along belly thought about it a moment thought about la inca waiting for her at home thought about her heartbreak that was beginning to fade in her yes i want to go there it was the decision that changed everything or as she broke it down to lola in her last days all i wanted was to dance what i got instead was esto she said opening her arms to encompass the hospital her children her cancer america el hollywood el hollywood was belly's first real club imagine not in those days el hollywood was the it place to be in bunny it was alexander cafe atlantico and jet set gold into one the lights the opulent decoy the guapos and the fine threads the woman striking their best bird of paradise poses the band upon the stage like a visitation from a wall of rhythm the dance was so caught up in the planting of heel you would have thought they were bidding farewell to death itself it was all here belly might have been out of a league couldn't order drinks or sit in the high chairs without losing her cheap shoes but once the music started well it didn't matter a corpulent accountant put his hand out and for the next two hours belly forgot her awkwardness her wonderment her trepidation and danced dios mio did she dance dancing cafe out of the sky and exhausting part night after partnering even the band leader assault and pepper vergano from a dozen campaigns throughout latin america and miami shouted her out la negra esta encinida la negra esta and sadida indeed here at last is a smile burn it into your memory you won't see it often everybody mistook her for a ballerina cubana from one of the shows and couldn't believe that she was dominicana like them it can't be no la perez etc etc and it was in this world again of pesos guapos and aftershave that he appeared she was at the bar waiting for tina to return from a cigarette break her dress wrecked her perm kicking her arches like they'd been given a starter course in foot binding he on the other hand was the essence of relaxed core here he is future generation of de leons and cabrals the man who stole your founding mother's height who catapulted her in hers into diaspora dressed in a rat pack ensemble of black smoking jacket and white pants and not a dot of sweat on him like he'd been keeping himself in a refrigeration handsome in that loose pot-bellied mid-40s hollywood producer sort of way with pouched gray eyes that had seen and didn't miss much eyes that had been scoping belly for the better part of an hour and it wasn't like belly had a notice the [ __ ] was some kind of baller everybody in the club was paying tribute to him and he locked enough gold to have grandson at walpa let's just say their first contact was not promising how about i buy you a drink he said and when she turned away komo unoguda he grabbed her arm hired and said where are you going morgena and that was all it took a belly la salio el lobo first she didn't like to be touched not at all not ever second she was a morena even the car dealer knew better called her india and third there was a temper of hers when balor twisted her arm she went from zero to violence in under 0.2 seconds shrieked no me torques threw a drink her glass and then i purse at him if there had been a baby nearby she would have grown that too then let him have it with a stack of cocktail napkins and almost a hundred plastic olive grappiers and when those were done dancing on the tile she unleashed one of the great street fighter chain attacks of all time during this unprecedented first delay of blows the gangster hunkered down and didn't move to deflect the stray chop away from his face when she finished he lifted his head as though out of a foxhole and put a finger to his lips you missed a spot he said solemnly well it was nothing but a simple encounter the fight she had with la inca upon her return was far more significant la inca waiting up for her with a belt in her hand and when belly stepped into the house worn out from dancing la inca lit by the chaos scene lamp lifted the belt in the air and belly's diamond eyes locked onto her the primal scene between daughter and mother played out in every country of the world go ahead madre belly said but la inca could not do it his strength leaving her here if you ever come home late again you'll have to leave this house and belly's saying don't worry i'll be leaving soon enough that night la inca refused to get into bed with her sleeping in organ chair not speaking to her the next day either going off to work by herself her disappointment looming above her like a mushroom cloud no question it was her madre she should have been worried about but for the rest of that week belly found herself instead brooding on the stupidity of that gordo azarzo who in her words had ruined her whole night almost every day she found herself recounting the details of the confrontation to both the cardinali and irrequirementies but with each telling she added further outrages which were not exactly true but seemed accurate in spirit un bruto she called him an animal how dare he try to touch me as though he was someone say poco hombre ese so he hit you the car dealer was trying to pin her hand down to his leg but failing maybe that's what i need to do and you'd get exactly what he got she said aquimatus who had taken to standing in a closet while she visited him just in case the secret police burst in pronounce the gangster a typical bourgeoisie type his voice reaching through her all that fabric that card dealer had brought her and which belly stored at his place is it the mink fairy he asked her grab it she said more ghostly i should have stabbed him he said to constantina muchacha i think he should have stabbed you what the hell do you mean i'm just saying you talk about him a whole lot no she said hardly it's not like that at all then stop talking about him tina glanced down at a pretend watch five seconds it must be you'll get good she tried to keep him out of her mouth but it was hopeless her forearm ached at the oddest of moments and she could feel his hand-dog eyes on her everywhere the next friday was a big day at the restaurant the local chapter of the dominican party was having an event and the staff busted their ass from early to late belly who loved the bustle showed some of her magis for hard work and even jose had to come out of the office to help cook jose awarded the head of the chapter with a bottle of what he claimed was chinese gum but which in fact was johnny walker with the label scraped off the higher echelons enjoyed their ciao fun immensely but the campo underleans poked at the noodles miserably and asked over and over if there was any augaz khan habetruelas of which of course there was none all in all the event was a success you never would have guessed there was a dirty war going on but when the last of the drunks was shuffled onto his feet and ushered into a cab belly feeling not the least bit tired asked tina can we go back where to el hollywood but we have to change don't worry i brought everything and before you know it she was standing over his table one of his dinner companions said hey dionysio isn't that the girl que te dio una pella last week the baller nodded glumly his buddy looked her up and down i hope for your sake she's not back for a rematch i don't think he'll survive what are you waiting for the baller asked the bell dance with me now it was her turn to grab him and drag him onto the pista he might have been a dense slab of tuxedo and though but he moved like an enchantment you came looking for me didn't you yes she said and only then did she know i'm glad you didn't lie i don't like liars he put his finger under his chin what's your name she tore her head away my name is hypatia belicia cabral no he said with the gravity of an old school pimp your name is beautiful the gangster we're all looking for how much belly knew about the gangster we will never know she claims that he only told her he was a businessman of course i believed him how was i supposed to know different well he certainly was a businessman but he was also a flunky for the truliado and not a minor one don't misunderstand our boy wasn't no gringaith but he wasn't a oik either due partially to belly silence on the matter and other folks's lingering unease when it comes to talking about the resume info on the gangsters is fragmented i'll give you what i've managed to on earth and the guests will have to wait for the day the paginas and blanco finally speak the gangster was born in samana at the dawn of the twenties the fourth son of a milkman a balling worm infested brat no one thought would amount to ana an opinion his parents endorsed by turning him out of the house when he was seven but folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation powerlessness and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character by the time the gangster was 12 his scrawny unremarkable boy had shown a resourcefulness and fearlessness beyond his years his claims that the failed cattle thief had inspired him got him to the attention of the secret police and before you could say sim salabim our boy was infiltrating unions and fingerings indicators left and right at age 14 he killed his first communista a favor for the appalling felix bernardino and apparently the hit was so spectacular so [ __ ] chunky the half of the left in bonnie immediately abandoned the dr for the relative safety of nueva york with the money he earned he bought himself a new suit and four pairs of shoes from that point on the sky was the limit for our young villain over the next decade he traveled back and forth to cuba dabbled in forgery theft extortion and money laundering all for the everlasting glory of the truliada but it was even rumored never substantiated that a gangster was the hammer man who slew mauricio baez in havana in 1950 who can know it seems a possibility by then he'd acquired deep contacts in the havana underworld and clearly had no compunction about slain [ __ ] hard evidence though is scarce that he was a favorite of johnny abbas and of porphyrio gibberosa there can be no denying he had a special passport from the palacio and the rank of major in some branch of the secret police skilled our gangster became in many a perfidy but where our man truly excelled where he smashed records and grabbed gold was in the flesh trade then like now santo domingo was to papola what switzerland was to chocolate and there was something about the binding selling and degradation of woman that brought out the best in the gangster he had an instinct for it a talent call in the car car call of coulo by the time he was 22 he was obligating his own string of brothels in and around the capital owned houses and cars in three countries never stinted the efe on anything be it money praise or a prime cut of chula from colombia and so loyal was he to the resume that he once slew a man at a bar simply for pronouncing el jefe's mother's name wrong now here's a man oh yeah was rumored to have said it was kappas the gangster's devotion did not go unrewarded by the mid-forties the gangster was no longer simply a well-paid operator he was becoming an al green in photos he appears in the company of the regime's three witchings johnny abbas joaquin and felix bernardino and while none exists of him and el jefe that they broke bread and talked [ __ ] could not be doubted for it was the great i himself who granted the gangster authority over a number of the trulia's family's concessions in venezuela in cuba and under his draconian administration the so-called bang for the buck ratio of dominican sex workers trebled in the 40s the gangsters was in his prime he traveled the entire length of the americas from gozorio to nova york in pimp daddy style staying at the best hotels banging the hottest gods never lost his sereno taste for the mugenos though dining and four-star restaurants confabing with arch criminals and the world over an inexhaustible opportunist he spun deals everywhere he went suitcases of dollars accompanied him back and forth from the capital life was not always pleasant plenty of acts of violence plenty of beat downs and knifings he himself survived any number of gank attempts and after each shootout after each drive by he always combed his hair and straightened his tie a dandy's reflex he was a true gangster gully to the bone lived the life all those phony rap acts can only rhyme about it was also in this period that the long dalians with cuba was formalized the gangsters might have harbored love with venezuela and its many long-lengthened mulattas and burned for the tall icy beauties of argentina and swooned over mexico's incomparable brunettes but it was cuba that clove his heart that felt to him like home if he spent six months out of 12 in havana i'd call that a conservative estimate and in honor of his predecations the secret police's code name for him was max gomez so often did he travel to havana that it was more a case of inevitability that bad luck that on new year's eve 1958 the night that volgensio bastista sacco ps out of havana and the whole of latin america changed the gangster was actually partying with johnny abbas and havana sucking whiskey out of the navels of underage hoys when the gorgillas reached santa clara it was only the timely arrival of one of the gangsters informants that saved them all you better leave now or you'll all be hanging from your huevos in one of the greatest blunders in the history of dominican intelligence johnny abbas almost didn't make it out of havana that new year's eve the dominicans were literally on the last plane smoking the gangster's face pressed against the glass never took a turn when belly encountered the gangster that ignominious midnight flight still haunted him beyond the financial attachment cuba was an important component to his prestige to his manhood really and our man could still not accept the fact that the country had fallen into a rabble of scurvyed students some days he was better than others but whenever the latest news reached him of the revolution's activities he would pull his hair and attack the nearest wall in sight not a day passed when he did not fulminate against batista that ox that peasant or castro the goat [ __ ] communista or cia chief alan dulis that effeminate who had failed to stop batista's ill-advised mother's day amnesty that freed fidel and the other casitas to fight another day if doulas was right here in front of me i'd shoot him dead he swore to belly and then i'd shoot his mother dead life it seemed had struck the gangster a deloreanous blow and he was uncertain as to how to respond the future appeared cloudy and there was no doubt he sensed his own mortality and that of trulia in the fall of cuba which might explain why when he met belly he jumped on a stat i mean what straight middle-aged brother has not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young [ __ ] and if what he often said to her daughter was true belly had some of the finest [ __ ] around the sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas and while the upper class boys might have had their issues with her the gangster was a man of the world had [ __ ] more pietas than you could count he didn't care about that [ __ ] what he wanted was to suck belly's annoying his breasts to [ __ ] her [ __ ] until it was mango juice swamp to spoil his senseless so that cuba and his failure there disappeared as the viejo say clava suck a clover and only a girl like belly could erase the debacle of cuba from a brother's mind at first belly had her reservations about the gangster her ideal amoi had been jack poyos and here was this middle-aged calibian who dyed his hair and had a thatch of curlies on his back and shoulders more like a third based umpire than an avatar of a glorious future but one should never underestimate what a sidduity can accomplish when assisted by heaping portions of lana and privilege the gangster who romanced the girl like only middle-aged [ __ ] know how chipped at her reservation with cool aplomb and unless unconscious curiness grazed on her head enough flowers to garland as were bonfires of roses at the job and her house it's romantic tina sighed it's vulgar la inca complained he resorted her to the most exclusive restaurants of the capital took her to the clubs that had never tolerated a non-musician prieto inside their door before dude was that powerful to break the injunction against black places like the hamakah the tropicalia do not alas the country club even he didn't have the juice he flattered her with top-notch moellers from what i heard he paid a couple of grad school soranos to churn them out treated her to plays movies dances bought her wardrobes of clothes and pyro's chest of jewelry introduced her to famous celebrities and once even togami says trulio himself in other words he exposed her to the [ __ ] world at least one circumscribed by the d.o and you'd be surprised how even a hard-headed girl like belly committed as she was to an idealized notion of what love was could find it in her heart to revise her views if only for the gangster he was complicated some would say comical affable some would say laughable man who treated belly very tenderly and with great consideration and under him literally and metaphorically the education begun at the restaurant was completed he was oon hombre being social enjoyed being out and about seeing and being seen and that dovetailed nicely with belly's own dreams but also un hombre conflicted about his past deeds on the one hand he was proud of what he'd accomplished i made myself he told belly all by myself i have cars houses electricity clothes brendas but when i was a nino i didn't even own a pair of shoes not one pair i had no family i was an orphan do you understand she an orphan herself understood profoundly on the other hand he was tormented by his crimes when he drank too much and that was often he would murder things like if you only knew the diabolas i've committed you wouldn't be here right now and on some nights she would wake up to him crying i didn't mean to do it i didn't mean it and it was on one of those nights while she cradled his head and brushed away his tears that she realized with a start that she loved this gangster belly in love ground too but unlike what happened with polios this was the real deal pure uncut unadulterated love the holy grail that would so bedevil her children throughout their lives consider that belly had longed hungered for a chance to be in love and to be loved back not very long in real time but forever by the chromometer of her adolescence never had the opportunity of her first lost childhood and in the intervening years her desire for it had doubled over it and doubled over like a katana being forged until finally it was sharper than the truth with a gangster our girl finally got a chance he was surprised that in the final four months of her relationship with him there would be such an outpouring of effect as expected she the daughter of the fall recipient of its heaviest radiations loved atomically as for the gangster he normally would have tried right quick of such an intensely adoring play thing but our gangster grounded by the hurricane winds of history found himself reciprocating writing checks with his mouth that his ass could never hope to cover he promised her that once the troubles with the communists were over he would take her to miami and to havana i'll buy you a house in both places just so you know how much i love you a house she whispered her hair standing on ed you're lying to me i do not lie how many rooms do you want 10 she said uncertainly 10 is nothing make it 20. the thoughts he put in the head someone should have arrested him for it and believe me la inca considered it he's a pandora she declaimed a thief of innocence there's a pretty solid argument to be made that la inca was right the gangster was simply an old truly praying on belly's naivety but if you looked at it from say a more generous angle you could argue that the gangster adored our goal and that adoration was one of the greatest gifts anybody had ever given her it felt unbelievably good to belly shook her to the koi for the first time i actually felt like i owned my skin like it was me and i was it he made her feel guava and wanted to be safe and no one had ever done that for her no one under nights together he would pass his hand over her naked body nicest is stoking that pull of his mermaid guapa guapa over and over again he didn't care about the burn scars on her back it looks like a painting of cecline and that's what ui me nagrita una toymenta and la madruga the gandhi old goat could make love to her from sun up to sun down and it was he who taught her all about her body her orgasms her rhythms who said you have to be bold and for that he must be honored no matter what happens in the end this was the affair that once and for all incinerated belly's reputation in santo domingo no one in bounty knew exactly who the gangster was and what he did he kept his [ __ ] hush-hush but it was enough that he was a man in the minds of belly's neighbors the pieta campogana had finally found a true station in life as a cuero old-timers have told me that during our last months in the dui belly spent more time inside the love motels than she had in school an exaggeration i'm sure but a sign of how low our goal had fallen into the pueblo's estimation belly didn't help matters talk about a poi winner now that she vaulted into a higher order of privilege she strutted around the neighborhood exalting and heaping steaming piles of contempt on everybody and everything that wasn't the gangster dismissing her bergio as an inferno and her neighbours as brutus and cochinas she bragged about how she would be living in miami soon wouldn't have to put up with his own country much longer our girl no longer maintained even a modicum of respectability at home stayed out until all hours of the night and permed her hair whenever she wanted la inca didn't know what to do with her anymore all her neighbors advised her to beat the girl into a blood clot you might even have to kill her they said regretfully but la inga couldn't explain what it had meant to find the burnt girl locked in a chicken coop all those years ago how that sight had stepped into her and rearranged everything so that now she found she didn't have the strength to guys her hand against the girl she never stopped trying to stalk sense unto her though what happened to college i don't want to go to college so what are you going to do be a gangster's girlfriend your whole life your parents god bless their souls wanted so much better for you i told you not to talk to me about those people you're the only parents i have and look how well you've treated me look how well maybe people are right like anger despaired maybe you are cursed belly laughed you might be cursed but not me even the chinos had to respond to belly's change and attitude we have to go juan said i don't understand he licked his lips and tried again we have to you go you're fired jose said please leave your apron on the counter the gangster heard about it and the next day some of his goons paid the brothers then a visit and what do you know if our goal wasn't immediately reinstated it wasn't the same no more though the brothers wouldn't talk to her wouldn't spin no stories about their youth in china and the philippines after a couple of days of the silent treatment belly took the hint and stopped showing up altogether you don't have a job la inca pointed out helpfully i don't need a job he's going to buy me a house a man whose own home you yourself have never visited is promising to buy you a house and you believe him oh here yes sir i would go believed after all she was in love the world was coming apart at the seams santa domingo was in the middle of a total meltdown the truliato was tottering police blockades on every corner and even the kids she'd gone to school with the brightest and the best were being swept up by the taylor a girl from elgidento told her that jack polio's little brother had gotten caught organizing against el jefe and the colonel's influence could not save the boy from having an eye gouged out with electric shocks belly didn't want to hear it after all she was in love in love she walked through a day like a woman with a concussion it's not like she had a number for the gangster or even an address bad sign number one girls and he was in the habit of disappearing for days without warning bad sign number two and now that truly is war against the world was reaching its bitter crescendo and now that he had belly on the lock the days could become weeks and when he reappeared from his business he would smell of cigarettes and old fear and want only to [ __ ] and afterward he would drink whiskey and motto to himself by the love motel window his hair belly noticed was growing and gray she didn't take kindly to these disappearances they made her look bad in front of la inca and the neighbors who were always asking her sweetly where is your savior now moses she defended him against every criticism of course no brother has had a better advocate but then took it out on his ass upon his return pouted when he appeared with flowers made him take her to the most expensive restaurants pestered him around the clock to move her out of the neighborhood asked him what the hell he'd be doing these past x days talked about the weddings she read about in the listen and just so you can see that la inca's doubts were not entirely wasted wanted to know when he was going to bring her to his house he we're in the middle of a war here he stood over her and his wife beat her waving a pistol don't you know what the communists do to girls like you they'll hang you up by your beautiful tits and then they'll cut them off just like they did the [ __ ] in cuba doing one of the gangsters long absences belly bored and desperate to escape the shot and food in our neighbor's eyes took it upon herself to guide the blue ball express one last time in other words she checked in on her old flames ostensibly she wanted to end things in a formal way but i think she was just feeling down and one in male attention which is fine but then she made the classic mistake of telling these dominican hombres about how new love of her life how happy she was don't ever do this it's about as smart as telling the judge who's about to sentence you that back in the day you finger [ __ ] his mother the card dealer always so gentle so decorous threw a whiskey bottle outta screaming why should i be happy for a stupid stinking mona they were in his appointment on the melesan at least he showed you his house constantino would later crack and if he had been a better guidy she would have ended up brained perhaps raped and killed but his fastball only grazed her and then it was her turn on the mound she put him away with four sinkers to the head using the same whiskey bottle he'd thrown at her five minutes later panting and barefoot in a cab she was pulled over by the secret police tipped off because they'd seen her gunning and it was only when they questioned her that she realized that she was still holding the bottle and it had bloody hair on one of its edges the card deal is straight blonde hairy once they heard what happened they let me go to his credit aquaman acquitted himself in a more mature fashion maybe because she told him first and had not yet grown flip after her confession she heard a little noise from the closet where he was hiding and nothing else five minutes of silence and then she whispered i better go she never saw him again in person only on the tv giving speeches and then later years would wonder if he still thought of her as she sometimes did of him what have you been up to the gangster asked the next time he appeared nothing she said throwing her arms around his neck absolutely nothing a month before it all blew up the gangster took belly on a vacation to his old hans in samana their first real trip together a peace offering prompted by a particularly long absence a promissory note for future trips abroad for those capitalenos who never leave the 27 de febrero or who think wale is the center of the universe one of the doctors of the king james bible traveled the caribbean and i often think that it was a place like samana that was on his mind when he sat down to pen the eden chapters for eden it was a blessed mergidian where martin saul and green have forged their union and produced a stubborn people that no amount of high falaten pros can generate the gangster was in high spirits the war against the subversives was going swell it seemed we got him on the gun he gloated very soon all will be well as for belly she remembered that trip as the nicest time she'd ever had in the diy she would never again hear the name samana without recalling that final primavera of her youth the primavera of her perfection when she was still young and beautiful samana would forever evoke memories of their lovemaking of the gangster's rough chin scraping her neck of the sound of the mario caribe romancing those flawless resortless beaches of the safety she experienced and the promise three photos from that trip and in every one she's smiling they did all the stuff we dominicans loved to do on our vacations they ate pascato frito and waited in the rio they walked along the beach and drank gum until the meat behind their eyes throbbed it was the first time ever that belly had her own space totally under her control so while the gangsters dozed restfully in his hamakah she busied herself with plain wife with creating a preliminary draft of the household they would soon inhabit mornings she would subject to cabana to the harshest of scorings and hang boisterous profusions of flowers from every beam and around every window all bartering produce and fish from the neighborhoods resulted in one spectacular meal after another showing off the skills she acquired during the last years and the gangster satisfaction the padding of his stomach the unequivocal praise the softer mission of gases as he lay in the himaca he was music to ears in her mind she became his wife that week in every sense but the legal she and the gangster even managed to have heart to hearts on the second day after he showed her his old home now abandoned and hurricane ruined she asked do you ever miss having a family they were at the only nice restaurant in the city where el jefe dined on his visits they still tell you that you see those people he pointed toward the boy all those people have families you can tell by their faces they have families that depend on them and that they depend on and for some of them this is good and for some of them this is bad but it all amounts to the same [ __ ] because there isn't one of them who is free they can't do what they want to do or be who they should be i might have no one in the world but at least i'm free she had never heard anyone say those words i'm free wasn't a popular refrain in the era of trulia but it struck according her put la inca and her neighbors and are still up in the air life in perspective i'm free i want to be like you she told the gangster days later when they were eating crabs he had cooked in an eichiote sauce he had just been telling her about the nude beaches of cuba you would have been the star of the show he said pinching on nipple and laughing what do you mean you want to be like me i want to be free he smiled and chucked her under the chin then you will be me negra bella the next day the protective bubble about their idol finally burst and the troubles of the real world came rushing in a motorcycle driven by a hugely overweight policeman arrived in their cabana kapatan you're needed in the palacio he said from under his chin trap more trouble with the subversives it seems i'll send a card for you the gangster promised wait she said i'll go with you not wanting to be left again but he either didn't he or didn't care wait god damn it she shouted in frustration but the motorcycle never slowed wait the guy never materialized either fortunately belly had gotten into the habit of stealing his money while he slept so that she could maintain herself during his absences otherwise she would have been stranded on that [ __ ] beach after waiting eight hours like a paraguaya she hoisted her bag left his [ __ ] in the cabana and marched through the simmering heat like a vengeance on two legs walked for it felt like half a day until at last she happened upon a kamado where a couple of sun-stroked campesinos was sharing a warm beer while the caramel guadero seated in the only shade in sight waved the flies from his dulces when they realized she was standing over them they all scrambled to their feet by then her anger had drained away and she only wanted to be spared further walking do you know anybody who has a car and by noon she was in a dust choke chevy heading home you better hold the doors the driver advised or it might fall off then a false she said her arms firmly crossed at one point they passed through one of those god-forsaken blisters of a community that frequently afflict the arteries between the major cities sad assemblages of shacks that seem to have been deposited in situ by a hurricane or other such calamity the only visible commerce was a single goat carcass hanging unfetchingly from a goat peeled down to its corded orange muscular tray except for the skin of its faces which was still attached like a funeral mask he'd been skinned very recently the flesh was still shivering under the shag of flies belly didn't know if it was the heat or the two beers she drank while the commodera sent for his cousin or the skinned goat or dim memories of her last years but our goal could have sworn that a man sitting in organ chair in front of me or one of the hovels had no face and he waved at her as she passed before she could confirm it the puebloato vanished into the dust did you see something her driver's side please i can barely keep my eyes on the road two days after her return the cold had settled in the pit of her stomach like something drowned in there she didn't know what was wrong every morning she was vomiting it was like inca who saw it first well you finally did it you're pregnant no i'm not belly you asked white being the feathered mash for my mouth but she was revelation when the doctor confirmed la inca's worst fears belly let out a chill young lady this is not a game the doctor biked she was simultaneously scared shitless and out of her mind with happiness she couldn't sleep for the wonder of it and after the revelation became strangely respectful and pliant so now you're happy my god girl are you a fool for belly this was it the magic she'd been waiting for she placed her hand on the flat stomach and heard the wedding bells loud and clear saw in her mind's eye the house that had been promised that she had dreamed about please don't tell anyone la inca begged but of course she whispered it to a friend doica who put it out on the street success after all loves a witness but failure can't exist without one the pochinchei spread through their sector of bonnie like wildfire the next time the gangsters appeared she had dolled herself up lovely a brand new dress crushed jasmine in her underwear got her hair done and even plucked her eyebrows into twin hyphens of alarm she needed a shave and a haircut and the hairs curling out of his ears were starting to look like a particularly profitable crop you smell good enough to eat he growled kissing the tender glide of her neck guess what she said coyly he looked up what upon further reflection in her memory he never told her to get rid of it but later when she was freezing in basement appointments in the bronx and working her fingers to the bone she reflected that he had told her exactly that but like lover girls everywhere she had heard only what she wanted to hear name game i hope it's a son she said i do too half believing it they were lying in bed in a love motel above them spun a fan it's blades pursued by a half dozen flies what will his middle name be she wondered excitedly it has to be something serious because he was going to be a doctor like me papa before he could reply she said we'll call him ebelloid he's scowled what kind of american name is that if the baby's a boy we'll call him manuel that was my grandfather's name i thought you didn't know who your family was he pulled him from a touch nomiotis wounded she reached down to hold her stomach truth and consequences one the gangster had told belly many things in the course of their relationship but there was one important item he'd failed to reveal that he was married i'm sure you all guessed that i mean he was domicano after all but i bet you never would have imagined whom he was married to i truly are truth and consequences two it's true the gangster's wife was drum girl please trulia's [ __ ] sister did you really think some street punk from semana was going to reach the upper echelons of truliada on hard work alone negro please this ain't a [ __ ] comic book yes truly your sister the one affectionately as lafayette they met while the gangster was carousing in cuba she was a bitter to kanye 17 years his senior they did a lot of work together in the butt business and before you knew it she had taken a shine to his irresistible your div he encouraged it knew a fantastic opportunity when he saw one and before the year was out they were cutting the cake and placing the first piece on el efa's plate there are those alive who claim that lafayette had actually been a pro herself in the time before the guise of her brother but that seems to be more colomny than anything like saying that balaguer fathered a dozen illegitimate children and then used the pueblos money to hush it up wait that's true but probably not the other [ __ ] who can keep track of what's true and what's false in a country as baka is always what is known is that the time before her brother's guise had made her una mujer bien vuerte ebn cruel she was no pandeya and ate girls like belly like they were pandey agua if this was dickens she'd have to run a brothel but wait she did who got in brothels well maybe dickens would have run an orphanage but she was one of those characters only a kleptocracy could have conceived had hundreds of thousands in the bank and not even one win of pity in her soul she cheated everyone she did business with including her brother and had already driven two respectable businessmen to early graves by fleecing them to their last motor she sat in her immense house in la capital like a schlob in her web all day handling accounts and ordering around subordinates and on certain weekend nights she would host tarantulas where her friends would gather to endure hours of poetry declaimed by her preposterously tone deaf son from her first marriage she and the gangster didn't have any children well one fine day in may a servant appeared at a door leave it she said a pencil in my mouth an inhalation dona there's news there's always news leave it an exhale news about your husband in the shadow of the yokoganda two days later belly was wandering about the parquet central in a restless fog her hair had seen better days she was out in the world because she couldn't stand to be at home in la inca and now that she didn't have a job she didn't have a sanctuary into which took a treat she was deep in thought one hand on her belly the other on a pounding head she was thinking about the argument she and the gangster had gotten into earlier in the week he'd been in one of his foul moods and bellowed suddenly that he didn't want to bring a baby into so terrible a world and she had biked that the world wasn't so terrible in miami and then he had said grabbing her by the throat if you're in such a rush to go to miami swim he hadn't tried to contact her since she was wandering around in the hopes of spotting him as if he hung around benny her feet were swollen her head was sending at soil plus ache down her neck and now two huge men with matching pompadours were grabbing her by the arms and propelling her to the center of the park where a well-dressed old lady sat on a bench underneath a decrepit yakuranda white gloves and a coil of pearls about her neck scrutinizing belly with unflinching iguana ice do you know who i am i don't know who in koharo soy trilo i am dionisio's wife it has reached my ears that you've been telling people that you are going to marry him and that you're having this child well i'm here to inform you me monita that you will be doing neither these two very large and capable officers are going to take you to a doctor and after he's cleaned out that tortoise pedito of yours there won't be any baby left to talk about and then it will be in your best interest that i never see a black car at the cooler again because if i do i'll feed you to my dogs myself but enough talk it's time for your appointment say goodbye now i don't want you to be late belly might have felt as though the crone had thrown boiling oil on her but she still had the ovaries to spit commemorating you ugly disgusting vieja let's go elvis once said twisting her iron behind her back and with the help of his partner dragging her across the pike to where a car sat bail for in the sun the yummy she screamed and when she looked up she saw that there was one more cop sitting in the car and when he turned toward her he saw that he didn't have a face all the strength fell right out of her that's right tranquil and now the larger one said what a sad ending it would have been had not our goal hold her luck and spotted jose then ambling back from one of his gambling trips and gold newspaper under his arm she tried to say his name but like in those bad dreams we all have there was no air in our lungs it wasn't until they tried to force her into the car and her hand brushed the burning chrome of the car that she found her tongue jose she whispered please save me and then the spell was broken shut up the elvises struck her in the head and back but it was too late jose then was running over and behind him a miracle where his brother juan and the rest of the palais pessi are pecking crew constantina marco antonio and indian benny the guns tried to draw their pistols but belly was all over them and then jose planted his iron next to the biggest one's skulls and everybody froze except of course belly you hear us de puta i'm pregnant do you understand pregnant she spun to where the crone was held caught but she had inexplicably vanished this girl's under arrest one grunt said suddenly no she's not jose tore belly out of their arms you alone her juan a machete in each hand lisa chino you don't know what you're doing this chino knows exactly what it's doing jose cocked the pistol a noise most dreadful like a rib breaking his face was a dead richtus and in it shown everything he had lost grunbelly he said and she ran tears popping out of her eyes not before taking one last kick at the grunts mischievous she told her daughter saved my life hesitation she should have kept regarding too but she believed for home instead can you believe it like everybody in this damn story she underestimated the depth of the [ __ ] she was in what's the matter here la inca said dropping the flying pan on her hand and holding the girl you have to tell me belly shook her head couldn't catch her breath latched the door in the windows and then crouched on her bed a knife in her hand trembling and weeping the cold in her stomach like a dead fish i went dionysio she blubbered i want him now what happened she should have scrammed i tell you but she needed to see your gangster needed him to explain what was happening despite everything that had just transpired she still held out the rope that she would make everything better that his gruff voice would soothe her heart and stop the animal fear nahinah guts poor belly she believed in the gangster was loyal to the end which was why a couple hours later when a neighbor shouted oye inca the novio is outside she bolted out of bed like she'd been shot from a mass driver flew past la inca passed caution ran barefoot to where his car was waiting and dark she failed to notice that it wasn't actually his car did you miss us elvis one asked slapping cuffs on her wrist she tried to scream but it was too late la inca the divine after the girl had bolted from the house and after she was informed by the neighbors that the secret police had scooped her up la inca knew in an iron-clad height that the goal was fun touch that the doom of the girls had managed to infiltrate her circle at last standing on the edge of the neighborhood rigid as a post staring hopelessly into the night she felt herself born upon a cold tide of despair as bottomless as our needs a thousand reasons why it might have happened starting of course with your cursed gangster but none as important as the fact that it had stranded out in that growing darkness without a name an address or a relative in the palacio la inca alma succumbed let itself be lifted from her moorings and carried like a child like a tangle of sea grate beyond the bright grief of her faith and into the dark reaches it was in that hour of tribulation however that a hand reached out for her and she remembered who it was myotes one of the mighty of the soy you must save her her husband spirit said or no one else will shrugging off her weariness she did what many women of her background would have done posted herself beside the portrait of la vegen de el tagracia and prayed we post modern platanos tend to dismiss the catholic devotion of our viewers as idavistic an embarrassing throwback to the olden days but it's exactly at these moments when all hope has vanished when the end draws near that prayer has dominion let me tell you true believers in the analysis of dominican piety there has never been prayer like this the groceries cabling through like inka's fingers like line flying through a doomed fisherman's hands and before you could say holy holy holy she was joined by a flock of women young and old fierce and monster serious and allegra even those who had previously bagged on the girl and called her ahoy diving without invitation and taking up the prayer without as much as a whisper dorker was there and the wife of the dentist and many many others in no time at all the room was filled with the faithful and pulsed with a spirit so dense that it was rumored that the devil himself had to avoid the surf for months afterward la inca didn't notice a hurricane could have carried off the entire city and it wouldn't have broken her concentration her face veined her neck coided the blood groin in her ears too lost too given over to drawing the girl back from the abyss was she so furious and so unrelenting in fact was la inca's pace that no more than a few women suffered she taught spiritual burnout and collapsed never again to feel the divine breath from the top of the cedar on their neck one woman even lost the ability to determine a right from gong and a few years later became one of balaguera's chief deputies by night's end only three of the original circle remained la inca of course her friend and neighbor momona who had said could cure warts and sex and egg just by looking at it and a plucky seven-year-old whose piety until then had been obscured by a penchant of blowing mucus out of her nostrils like a man to exhaustion and beyond they prayed to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again where all is agony and finally just as my inca was feeling a spirit begin to lose herself from its earthly opinions just as the circle began to dissolve choice and consequences they drove east in those days the cities hadn't yet metastasized into caillou menacing one another with smoking teeming tendrils of shanties in those days their limits were a kobusian dream the urban dropped off as precipitous as a beat one second you were deep in the 20th century well the 20th century of the third world and the next you'd find yourself plunged 180 years into rolling fields of cane the transition between these states was some real-time machine type [ __ ] the moon it has been reported was full and the light that rained down cast the leaves of the euclipties into spectral coin the world outside so beautiful but inside the car they'd been punching a and her right eye had puffed into a malignant slit her right breast so preposterously swollen that it looked like it would burst her lip was split and something was wrong with her jaw she couldn't swallow without causing herself excruciating sharks of pain she cried out each time they struck her but she did not cry in tiendis her fierceness astounds me she will not give them the pleasure there was such fear the sickening blood-draining fear of a drawn pistol of waking up to find a man standing over your bed but held a note sustained indefinitely such fear and yet she refused to show it how she hated these men for her whole life she would hate them never forgive never forgive and she would never be able to think of them without succumbing to a vortex of rage anyone else would have turned her face from the blows but belly offered her us up and between punches she brought up to her knees to comfort her stomach you'll be okay she whispered through a broken mouth you'll live dios mio they parked the car on the edge of the road and marched her into the cane they walked until the cane was growing so loud around them it sounded as if they were in the middle of a storm our goal she kept flinging her head to get her hair out of her face could think only about her poor little boy and that was the sole reason she started a weep the large grunt handed his partner a night stick let's hurry up no belly said how she survived i'll never know they beat her like she was a slave like she was a dog let me pass over the actual violence and report instead on the dimension inflicted her clavicle chicken boned her right humerus a triple fracture she would never again have much strength in that arm five ribs broken left kidney bruised liver bruised right lung collapsed front teeth blown out about 167 points of damage in total and it was only sheer accident that these [ __ ] didn't eggshell her cranium though her head did swell to elephant man proportions was there time for a rape or two i suspect there was but we shall never know because it's not something she talked about all that can be said is that it was the end of language the end of hope it was the sort of beaten that breaks people breaks them utterly throughout most of the cargo guide and even into the first stanzas of that wilding she maintained the false hope that a gangster would save her would appear out of the darkness with a gun and a reprieve and when it became clear that no rescue was forthcoming she fantasized in the instance of a blackout that he would visit her at the hospital and there they would be married he in a suit she and a body cast but then that too was revealed by a plebula by the sickening crack of a humorous and now all that remained was the agony and the foolishness in a blackout she caught sight of him disappearing on the motorcycle again felt the tightness in her chest as she screamed for him to wait wait saw for a brief instant like inca praying in a room the silence that lay between them now stronger than love and in the gloaming of a dwindling strength their yawned loneliness so total it was beyond death a loneliness that obliterated all memory the loneliness of a childhood where she not even had her own name and it was into that loneliness that she was sliding and it was here that she would dwell forever alone black fear scratching at the dust with a stick pretending that the scribble was letters words names all hope was gone but then true believers like the hand of the ancestors themselves a miracle just as our girl was set to disappear across that event horizon just as the code of obliteration was stealing up her legs she found in herself one last reservoir of strength her couple magis and all she had to do was realize that once again she'd been tricked once again she'd been played by the gangster by santo domingo by her own dumb needs to ignite it like superman in the dark knight returns who drained from an entire jungle the photonic energy he needed to survive coldwinger so did our belly resolve out of her anger her own survival in other words her kuraji saved her life like a white light in her like a sun she came to end the ferocious moonlight a broken goal girl atop broken stalks of cane pain everywhere but alive alive and now we arrive at the strangest part of our tale whether what follows was a figment of belly's exact imagination or something else altogether i cannot say even your watcher has his silences his paginas and blanco beyond the source wall few have ventured but no matter what the truth remember dominicans are caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena how else could we have survived what we have survived so his belly was fitting in and out of life they appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt this one was quite larger for its species and placed its intelligent little paws on her chest and stared down arrow you have to guys my baby belly wept mijo hypatia your baby is dead no no no no no it poured at our unbroken arm you have to rise now or you'll never have the son or the daughter what son she wailed what daru the ones who await it was dark and her legs trembled beneath her like smoke you have to follow it rivered into the cane and belly blinking tears realized she had no idea which way was out as some of you know cane fields are no [ __ ] joke and even the cleverest of adults can get amazed in their endlessness only to reappear months later as a cameo of bones but before belly lost hope she heard the creature's voice for it had a woman's lilt was singing in an accent she could not place maybe venezuelan maybe colombian sueno sueno sueno como tu telamus she clung unsteadily to the cane like an anacia clinging to the hammock and panting took her first step a long dizzy spell beating back a blackout and then her next precarious progress because if she fell she knew she would never stand again sometimes she saw the creature's chabin eyes flashing through the stalks the cane didn't want her to leave of course it slashed at her palms jabbed into her flank and clawed her thighs and its sweet stench clogged her throat each time she thought she would fall she concentrated on the faces of our promised future her promised children and from that obtained the strength she needed to continue she pulled from strength from hope from hate from an invincible heart each a different piston driving her forward finally when all were exhausted when she began to stumble headfirst hanging down like a boxer on his last legs she stretched her uninjured arm out and what greeted her was not cane but the open world of life she felt a tarmac under her bare broken feet and in the wind the wind but she had only a second to savor it for just then an unelectrified truck burst out of the darkness in a roy of gears what a life she mused all that lucha only to be run over like a dog but she wasn't flattened the driver who later swore he saw something lion like in the gloom with eyes like terrible amber lamps slammed on the brakes and halted inches from where a naked blood spattered belly tottered now check it the truck held a puerico repair conductor fresh from playing a wedding in okoya took all the courage they had not to pop the truck in reverse and peel out of there cries of it's a baka a saguapa no a haiciano silenced by the lead singer who shouted it's a girl the band members lay belly among their instruments swaddled her with their chakabanas and washed her face with the water they carried for the radiator and for cutting down the clarin down the band pureed grubbing their lips and running nervous hands through thinning hair what do you think happened i think she was attacked by a lion after the driver maybe she fell out of a car it looks like she fell under a car truly oh she whispered aghast the band looked at one another we should leave her the guitarist agreed she must be a subversive if they find her with us the police will kill us too put her back on the road beg the driveway let the lion finish her silence and then the lead singer lit a match and held it in the air and in that splinter of light was revealed a blunt featured woman with the golden eyes of a charbon we're not leaving her the lead singer said in a curious japan accent and only then did belly understand that she was saved fuco versus zafa there are still many on and off the island who offered belly's neo-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the house kapoor was indeed victim of a high-level fuku the local version of house atreus two truly leos in one lifetime and what in kogao else could it be but other heads questions that logic arguing that belly survival must be evidence to the contrary cursed people after all tend not to drag themselves out of cane fields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who vary them home without delay to a mother with mad connections in the medical community if these surrender pieces signify anything say these heads it is that our belly was blessed what about the dead son the world is full of tragedies enough without [ __ ] having to resort to curses for explanations a conclusion like inca wouldn't have argued with to a dying day she believed that belly had met not a curse but god out in that cane field i meant something belly would say godly back among the living touch and go i tell you until the fifth day and when at last she had turned to consciousness she did so screaming her arm felt like it had been pinched off at the elbow by a grindstone her head crowned in a burning hoop of brass her lung like the exploded carcass of a pinata jesus christo she started crying almost immediately but what our girl did not know was that for the last half week two of the best doctors in bonnie had tended her covertly friends of la inca and anti-trulia to the koi they sent her arm and plastered it stitched shut the frightening gashes on her scalp 60 pontos and all doused her wounds with enough mercured chrome to disinfect an army injected her with moifen and against tetanus many late nights of worry but the worst it seemed was over these doctors with a spiritual assist from la inca's bible group had performed a miracle and all that remained was the healing she is lucky that she is so strong the doctor said packing the stethoscopes the hand of god is upon her the prayer leaders confirmed stowing their bibles but blessed was not what our girl felt after a couple of minutes of hysterical sobbing of readjusting to the fact of the bed to the fact of her life she load out la inca's name from the side of the bed the quiet voice of the benefactor don't talk unless it's to thank the savior of your life mama belly cried mama they killed my babe they tried to kill me and they did not succeed la inca said not for lack of trying though she put a hand on the girl's forehead now it's time for you to be quiet for you to be still that night was a late medieval ordeal belly alternated from quiet weeping to gusts of gabia so fiercely threatened to throw her out of bed and reopen her entries like a woman possessed she drove herself into her mattress went as rigid as a boyd flailed her good arm around beat her legs spit and cursed she wailed despite a punctured lung and cracked ribs she wailed inconsolably mama would you like me to call you a gangster no she whispered la inca gates down at her i wouldn't call him either that night belly drifted on a vast ocean of loneliness buffeted by squalls of despair and during one of her intermittent sleeps she dreamt that she had truly and permanently died and she and her child shared a coffin and when she finally awoke for good night and broken and out in the street a grade of grief unlike any she encountered before was being uncoiled a cacophony of whales that seemed to have torn free from the cracked soul of humanity itself like a funeral song for the entire planet mama she gasped mama mama mama is that for me am i dying put her hands awkward hyphens it's truly o gunned down she whispered the night belly had been kidnapped no one knows anything yet except that he's dead la inca in decline it's all true platinums though the numerous power of preyola inca saved the girl's life laid an a plus safa on the cobweb family fuco but at what cost to herself everybody in the neighborhood will tell you how shortly after the girl slipped out of the country la inca began to diminish like galadriel after the temptation of the ring out of sadness for the girl's failure as some would say but others would point to that night of herculean prayer no matter what you take it cannot be denied that soon after belly's departure la inca's hero began to turn a snowy white and by the time lola lived with her she was no longer the great power she had been yes she had saved the girl's life but to what end belly was still profoundly vulnerable at the end of return of the king sargon's evil was taken by a great wind and neatly blown away with no lasting consequences to our heroes but trulia was too powerful too toxic of radiation to be dispelled so easily even after death his evil lingered within hours of el jefe dancing bien pigueto with those 27 bullets his minions ran amok fulfilling as it were his last will in vengeance a great darkness descended on the island and for the third time since the guise of fidel people were being rounded up by truly of son ramfis and a pretty good plenty was sacrificed in the most depraved fashionable imaginable the orgy of terror funeral goods for the father from the sun even a woman as potent as la inca who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within bonnie her own personal authorian knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the eye what was to keep the assassins from returning to finish what they'd started after all they had killed the world famous mayorball sisters who were their name what was to stop them from killing her poor orphanage negrita la inca felt the danger palpably intimately and perhaps it was the strain of a final prayer but each time la inca glanced at the girl she could swear that there was a shadow standing just behind her shoulder which disappeared as soon as you tried to focus on it a dark horrible shadow that gripped her heart and it seemed to be growing la inca needed to do something so not yet recovered from a hail mainly play she called upon her ancestors and upon yeezy cristo for help once again she prayed but on top of that to show her devotion she fasted pulled a mother abigail ate nothing but one orange drank nothing but water after that last vast expenditure of piety her spirit was in an uproy she did not know what to do she had a mind like a mongoose but she was not in the end a worldly woman she spoke to her friends who argued for sending belly to the campo she'll be safe there she spoke to a priest you should pray for her on the third day it came to her she was dreaming that she and her dead husband were on the beach where he had drowned he was dark again as he always was in summer you have to send her away but they'll find her in the camper you have to send her to newer york i have it on great authority that it is the only way and then he strutted proudly into the water she tried to call him back please come back but he did not listen his other worldly advice was too terrible to consider exiled to the north to newer york a city so foreign she herself had never had the ovaries to visit the girl would be lost to her and la inca would have failed her great cause to heal the wounds of the fall to bring house cabrillo back from the dead and who knows what might happen to the goal among the yankees in my mind the us was nothing more and nothing less than a piece overrun by gangsters putas and noah counts its cities swarmed with machines in industry as thick with sinful grancia as santo domingo was at the heat a sukko shot of iron exhaling fumes with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes hala ingo wrestled with herself those long nights but which side was jacob and which side was the angel after all who was to say that the trulias would remain in the power much longer already the necromantic power of el jefe was waning and in its place could be felt something like a wind rumors flew as thick as cigarettes rumors that the cubans were preparing to invade that the marines had been spotted on the horizon who could know what tomorrow would bring why send her beloved go away why be hasty la inca found herself in practically the same predicament belly's father had found himself in 16 years earlier when the house of kabugaw had first come up against the might of the trulios trying to decide whether to act or to stay still unable to choose she prayed for further guidance another three days without food who knows how it might have turned out had not the elvis come calling our benefactor might have gone out exactly like mother abigail but thankfully the elvis surprised her as she was sweeping the front of the house is your name iotis torbiro their pompadour is like the back of beetles african mussels encased in pale summer suits and underneath their jackets the hard oiled holsters of their firearms did creak will you want to speak to your daughter elvis one growled right now elvis too added por su pesto she said when she emerged from the house holding the machete the elvises retreated to their car laughing elvis one we'll be back yeah elvis too believe us who was that belly asked for my bed her hands clutching at a non-existent stomach no one la inca said putting the machete next to the bed the next night no one shot a peephole clean through the front door of the house the next couple of nights she and the girl slept under the bed and a little bit later in the week she told the girl no matter what happens i want you to remember your father was a doctor a doctor and your mother was a nurse and finally the words you should leave i want to leave i hate this place the girl by this time could hobble to the latrine under her own power she was much changed during the day she would sit by the window in silence very much like la inca after her husband drowned she did not smile she did not laugh she talked to no one not even a friend doica a dark veil had closed over her like nada over cafe you don't understand here you have to leave the country they'll kill you if you don't belly laughed oh belly not so ashley not so gashly what did you know about states or diasporas what did you know about nueva yo or unheated old law tenements or children who self-hate short-circuited their minds what did you know madame about immigration don't laugh me nigrita for your world is about to be changed utterly yes a terrible beauty is etc etc take it from me you laugh because you've been ransacked to the limit of your soul because your lover betrayed you almost under death because your first son was never born you laugh because you have no front teeth and you've sworn never to smile again i wish i could say different but i've got it right here on tape la inca told you you had to leave the country and you laughed end of story last days of the republic she would remember little of the final months beyond her anguish and her despair and she desires to see the gangster dead she was in the grips of the darkness passed through her days like a shade passes through life she did not move from the house unless forced at last they had the relationship la inca had always longed for except that they didn't speak what was there to say la inca talked soberly about the trip north but belly felt like a good part of her had already disembarked santa domingo was fading the house la inca the fried yuka she was putting into her mouth were already gone it was only a matter of allowing the rest of the world to catch up the only time she felt close to her old sense was when she spotted the elvis's liking in the neighborhood she would cry out in mortal fear but they drove off with smirks on their faces we'll see you soon real soon at night there were nightmares of the cane of the faceless one but when she awoke from the la inca was always there tranquilla here tranquilla regarding the elvises what stayed their hand perhaps it was the fear of retribution now that the truliato had fallen perhaps it was like inca's power perhaps it was that force from the future reaching back to protect the third and final daughter who can know la inca who i don't think slept a single day during those months la inca who carried a machete with her everywhere homegirl was bout about it knew that when gondolin falls you don't wait around for the bar logs to tap on your door you make [ __ ] moves and make moves she did papers were assembled palms were greased and permission secured and another time it would have been impossible but with el jefe dead and platano curtain shattered all manners of escape when now possible la inca gave belly photos and letters from the woman she'd be staying within a place called el bronx but none of it reached belly she ignored the pictures left the letters on red so that when she arrived at idlewild she would not know who it was she should be looking for la pueblisita just as the standoff between the good and neighbor and what remained a family trulia reached the breaking point belly was brought before a judge la inca made her put oyas de maman in her shoes so he wouldn't ask too many questions homegirl stood through the whole proceedings numb drifting the week before she and the gangster had finally managed to meet in one of the first love motels in the capital the one who run by los cinos about which luis diaz sang his famous song it was not the reunion she had hoped for i me negrita he moaned stroking her hair well once was lightning now there was fat fingers on straight hair we were betrayed you and i betrayed horribly she tried to talk about the dead baby but he waved a dimunitive ghost away with a flick of his wrist and proceeded to remove her enormous breasts from the vast amount of her bra we'll have another one he promised i'm going to have two she said quietly he left we'll have 50. the gangster still had a lot on his mind he was worried about the fate of truliado worried that the cubans were preparing to invade they shoot people like me in the show trials i'll be the first person shea looks for it and thinking of going to nueva york she had wanted him to say no don't go or at least to say he would be joining us but he told her instead about one of his trips to nueva yo a job for the yefe and how the crab at some cuban restaurant had made him sick he did not mention his wife of course and she did not ask it would have broken her later when he started coming she tried to hold on to him but he wrenched free and came on the dark ruined plane of her back like chalk on a blackboard the gangster joked he was still thinking about him 18 days later at the airport you don't have to go like inka said suddenly just before the girl stepped into the line too late i want to her whole life she had tried to be happy but santo domingo [ __ ] santo domingo had foiled her at every turn i never want to see it again don't talk that way i never went to see it again she would be a new person she vowed they said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse but she would show them all don't leave like this tomah for the trip don't say de coco on the line the passport control she would throw it away but for now she held the jar remember me la inca kissed and embraced her remember who you are you were the third and final daughter of the family cabral you were the daughter of a doctor and a nurse last sight of la inca waving attorney with all her might crying more questions at passport control and with the last contemptuous flurry of stamps she was let through and then the boarding and the pre-fight chit-chat from the natty dude on her right four rings on his hand where are you going never never land she snapped and finally the plane throbbing with [ __ ] sung tears itself from the surface of the earth and belly not known for a piety closed her eyes and begged the lord to protect her poor belly almost until the last she half believed that the gangster was going to appear and savor i'm sorry mi nagrita i'm so sorry i should never have let you go she was still big on dreams of rescue she had looked for him everywhere on the guide to the airport in the faces of the official checking passports even when the plane was boarding and finally for an irrational moment she thought he would emerge from the cockpit in a clean pressed captain's uniform i tricked you didn't i but the gangster never appeared again in the flesh only in her dreams on the plane there were other first wavers many water is waiting to become a river here she is closer now to the mother we will need her to be if we want oscar and lola to be born she is 16 and her skin is the darkness before the black the plum of the day's last light her breasts like sunset trapped beneath her skin but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distressing expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure her dreams are spare lack the proportion of a mission her ambition is without traction her fiercest hope that she will find a man what she doesn't yet know the cold the backbreaking drudgery of the factory is the loneliness of diaspora that she will never again live in santo domingo her own heart what else she doesn't know what the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children that after two years together he would leave her her third and final heartbreak and she would never love again she awakened just as in our dreams some siegers were boarding a bus begging for money a dream from our last days the guapo in the seat next to her tapped her elbow senorita this is not something you'll want to miss i've already seen it she snapped and then calming herself she peered out the window it was night and the lights of nueva york were everywhere end of chapter three chapter four sentimental education 1988 to 1992. it started with me the year before oscar fell i suffered some nuttiness on my own i got jumped as i was walking home from the roxy by this mess of new brunswick townses a bunch of [ __ ] morenos 2am and i was on joyce kilmoy for no good reason alone and on foot why because i was hard thought i'd have no problem walking through the thicket of young guns i saw on the corner big mistake remember the smile on this one dude's face the rest of my [ __ ] life only second to his high school gang which plowed a nice fiery into my cheek still got the sky wish i could say i went down swinging but these cats just laid me out if it hadn't been for some samaritan driving by the [ __ ] would have probably killed me the old guy wanted to take me to a garbage wood johnson but i didn't have no medical and besides ever since my brother has died of leukemia i hadn't been hot on doctors so of course i was like no no no no no for having just gotten my ass kicked i actually felt pretty good until the next day when i felt like i had died so dizzy i couldn't stand up without puking and then reattached with paper clips it was pretty bad and all of the friends i had all my great wonderful friends only lola came [ __ ] through heard about the beat down from my boy melvin and shot over asap never so happy to see someone my whole life lola with a big innocent teeth lola who actually cried when she saw the state i was in she was the one who took care of my sorry ass cooked cleaned pick up my classwork got me medicine even made sure that i showered in other words sewed my balls back on and not any woman can do that for a guy believe you me i could barely understand my head hurts so bad but she would wash my back and that was what i remember most about that mess her hand on that sponge and that sponge on me even though i had a girlfriend it was lola who spent those nights with me combing her hair out once twice thrice before folding her long self into bed no more night walking okay kung fu at college you're not supposed to care about anything you're just supposed to [ __ ] around but believe it or not i cared about lola she was a goal it was easy to care about lola like the [ __ ] opposite of the girls i usually marked on pitch was almost six feet tall and no tedders at all and darker than your darkest grandma like two girls in one the skinniest upper body married to a pair of cadillac hips and an ill donkey one of those overachiever chicks who run all the organizations in college and wear suits to meetings was the president of her sorority the head of salsa and co-chair of take back the night spoke perfect stuck up spanish known each other since pre-fresh weekend but it wasn't until sophomore year when my mother got sick again that we had our fling driving me home junior was her opening line and a week later it jumped off i remember she was wearing a pair of douglas sweats and a tribe t-shirt took off the ring her boy had given her and then kissed me dark eyes never leaving mine you have great lips she said how do you forget a girl like that only three [ __ ] nights before she got all guilty about the boyfriend and put an end to it and when lola puts an end to something she puts an end to it hard even those nights after i got jumped she wouldn't let me steal on her ass for nothing so you can sleep in my bed but you can't sleep with me yo soy prieta uni she said pero no soy bruta knew exactly what kind of sushi i was two days after we broke up saw me hitting on her lying sisters and turned her along back to me point is when her brother lapsed into that killer depression at the end of sophomore year drank two bottles of 151 because some girl dissed him home was [ __ ] killing himself and his sick mother in the process who do you think stepped up me surprised the [ __ ] out of lola when i said i'd live with him the next year keep an eye on the [ __ ] dork for you after the suicide drama nobody in democracy wanted to agree with homeboy was going to have to spend junior year by himself no lola either because she was slaughtered to go abroad to spain for that year her big [ __ ] dream finally come true and she was worried shitless about him not lola for a loop when i said i'd do it but it almost killed her dead when i actually did it move in with him in [ __ ] demogust home of all the weirdos and losers and freaks and fembots me a guy who could bench 340 pounds who used to call democrats homo hall like it was nothing who never met a little white artist freak he didn't want to smack around put in my application for the guiding section and by the beginning of september there we were me and oscar together i like to play it up as complete philanthropy but that's not exactly true sure i wanted to help lola out watch out for a crazy ass brother knew he was the only thing she really loved in this world but i was also taking care of my own damn self that year i pulled what was probably the lowest number in the history of the housing lottery was officially the last name on the waiting list which meant my chances for university had seen was zilch to none which meant that my brokenness was either going to have to live at home or on the street which meant that demogus for all its freakery and oscar for all his unhappiness didn't seem like so bad of an option it's not like he was a complete stranger i mean he was the brother of the girl i shadowfucked saw him on campus with her those first couple of years hard to believe he and lola were related me apocalypse he cracked she knew genesis unlike me who would have hidden from a caliban like that she loved the dork invited him to parties and to a rallies holding up signs handing out flyers my fat ass assistant to say i never in my life met a dominican like him would be to put it mildly hail dog of god was how he welcomed me my first day in demogust took a week before i figured out what the hell he meant god domini dog canis hail dominicanus i guess i should have [ __ ] known dude used to say he was cursed used to say this a lot and if i'd really been old school dominican i would have a listen to the idiot and then b run the other way my family was from and if we surrenders from aswa know anything it's about [ __ ] curses i mean jesus have you ever seen azawa my mom wouldn't even have listened would have just run she didn't [ __ ] with fuku's or guangas no way no how but i wasn't an old school as i am now just real [ __ ] dumb assumed keeping an eye on somebody like oscar would it be no herculean choi i mean [ __ ] i was a weight lifter picked up bigger [ __ ] piles than him every damn day you can start the laugh track anytime you want he seemed like the same to me still massive biggie smalls minus the smalls and still lost still guiding 10 15 20 pages a day still obsessed with his fanboy madness do you know what sign fool put up on a dory room speak friend and enter in [ __ ] elvish please don't ask me how i knew this just please when i saw that i said daily on you gotta be kidding elvish actually he coughed it's sindarin actually melvin said it's gay hey hey despite my promises to lola to watch out those first couple of weeks i didn't have much to do with him i mean what can i say i was busy what state school player is it i had my job and the gym and my boys and my novia and of course i had my slutties out so much that first month that what i saw of oh was mostly a big dormant hump crashed out under a sheet only thing that kept his nerd ass up late were his role-playing games and his japanese animation especially akua which i think he must have watched at least a thousand times that year can't tell you how many nights i'd come home and caught and parked in front of that movie i'd bark you watching this [ __ ] again an oscar would say almost as if apologizing for his existence it's almost over it's always almost over i complained i didn't mind it though i like [ __ ] like akira even if i couldn't always stay awake for it i laid back on my bed while canetta screamed tetsuo and the next thing i knew oscar was standing timidly over me saying the movie is finis and i would sit up say [ __ ] wasn't half as bad as i made it out to be later for all his nightiness dude was pretty considerate roommate i never got stupid little notes from him like the last [ __ ] nuts i lived with and he always paid for his half of [ __ ] and i never came in during one of his dungeons and dragons games he'd relocate to the lounge without even having to be asked akua i could handle queen of the demon web pits i could not made my little gestures of course a meal once a week picked up his writings five books to date i tried to read some wasn't my cup of tea dropped the phaser orthogonals prime but even i could tell he had chops could i dialogue crack snappy exposition keep the narrative moving showed him saw my fiction too all god boogies and drug deals and [ __ ] you nando and blow blow blow he gave me four pages of comments for an eight page story did i try to help him with his girl situation share some of my playy wisdom of course i did but the problem was when it came to the mujeres my roommate was like no one on the planet on the one hand he was the worst case of no turtle itis i'd ever seen the last person to even come close was this poor salvadorian kid i knew in high school who was burned all over his face couldn't get no girls ever because he looked like the phantom of the opera well oscar had it worse than him at least jeffrey could claim an honest and medical condition what could oscar claim that it was sargon's fault dude weigh 307 pounds for [ __ ] sake talk like a star trek computer the real irony was that you never met a kid who wanted a girl so [ __ ] bad i mean [ __ ] i thought i was in the females but no one and i mean no one was into them the way oscar was to him they were the beginning and end the alpha and the omega the dc and the marvel holmes had it bad couldn't do so much as see a cute girl without breaking into shakes developed crushes out of nothing must have had at least two dozen high level ones the first semester alone not that many of these shits ever came to anything how could they oscar's idea of g was to talk about goal playing games how [ __ ] crazy is that my favorite was the day on the e bus when he informed some hot morgana if you were in my game i would give you an 18 charisma 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 goals was like trying to throw rocks at eunice the untouchable toot was impenetrable he'd hear me out and then shrug nothing else had any efficiency i might as well be myself but your yourself sucks it is lamentably all i have but my favorite conversation uni what are you awake if it's about star trek no it's not about star trek he coughed i have heard from a reliable source that no dominican male has ever died a virgin you who have experience in these matters do you think this is true i sat up dude was peeing at me in the dark dead serious oh it's against the laws of nature for dominicano to die without [ __ ] at least once that he sighed is what worries me so what happens at the beginning of october what always happens to playboys like me i got bumped no surprise given how balls out i was living wasn't just any bop either my goal suryan found out i was messing with one of her hermanas players never never never [ __ ] with a [ __ ] named a wilder because when she a willed is out on your ass you'll know pain for real the wilder in question dined me for [ __ ] knows what reason actually taped one of my calls to it and before you could say oh [ __ ] everybody knew homegirl must have played that thing like 500 times second time i'd been caught in two years it got good even for me suryan went absolutely nuts attacked me on the ebus the boys laughing and running and me pretending like i hadn't done anything suddenly i was in the dorm a lot taking a stab at a story or two watching some movies with oscar this island earth appleseed project a casting a gown for a lifeline what i should have done was check myself into booty rehab but if you thought i was gonna do that then you don't know dominican men instead of focusing on something hard and useful like say my own [ __ ] i focus something easy and redemptive out of nowhere and not in the least influenced by my own shitty state of course not i decided that i was going to fix oscar's life one night while he was moaning on about a sorry existence i said do you really want to change it of course i do he said but nothing i've tried has been emiliorative i'll change your life really the look he gave me still breaks my heart even after all these years really you have to listen to me though oscar scrambled to his feet placed his hand over his heart i swear an oath of obedience my lord when do we start you'll see next morning 6 a.m i kicked oscar's bed what is it he cried out nothing much i said throwing a sneaker is on a stomach just the first day of your life i really must have been in a danger over syrian which is why i threw myself something serious in the project oscar those first weeks while i waited for syrian to forgive me i had fat boy like master killer in shaolin temple was on his ass 24 7. got him to swear off the walking up to strange girls with his i love you craziness you're only scaring the poor girls oh gotten to start watching this diet and to stop taking crazy negative i am ill-fated i am going to perish a virgin i'm lacking the poultry tude at least while i was around i did positive thoughts i stressed positive thoughts [ __ ] even brought him out with me and the boys not anything serious just out for a drink when it was a crowd of us and his monstrousness wouldn't show much the boy hating what's next we start inviting out the homeless but my biggest coup of all i got the dude to exercise with me to [ __ ] run goes to show you oh really did look up to me no one else could have gotten him to do that the last time he tried running had been freshman year when he'd been 50 pounds lightly i can't lie first couple of times i almost left seeing him huffing down george street those ashy black knees of his are shaking keeping his head down so he wouldn't have to hear or see all the reactions usually just some cackles and a stray hey fat ass the best one i heard look mom that guy's taking his planet out for a gun don't worry about them jokers i told him no worry he heaved dying dude was not into it at all as soon as we were through he'd be back at his desk in no time flat almost clinging to it tried everything he could to weasel out of our guns started getting up at five so when i got up he'd already be at his computer would claim he was in the middle of this amazingly important chapter regret it later [ __ ] after about your fourth we're going he actually got down to his knees please junior he said i can't i snorted just go get your [ __ ] shoes i knew [ __ ] wasn't easy for him i was callous but not that callous i saw how it was you think people hate a fat person try a fat person who's trying to get them brought out the [ __ ] balgaging [ __ ] sweetest girls you'd ever see would say the vilest [ __ ] to him on the street old ladies were jabber you're disgusting disgusting and even hailed who'd never shown much in the way of anti-oscar tendencies started calling him jabba the butt just because it was straight up nuts okay people suck but what were his options oh had to do something 24 7 out of computer guiding sci-fi monster pieces darting out to the student center every now and then to play video games talking about girls but never actually touching one what kind of life was that for [ __ ] sake we were good guys quackers was just girls everywhere and there was oscar keeping me up at night talking about the green lantern wondering aloud if we were orcs wouldn't we at a racial level imagine ourselves to look like elves dude had to do something he did too he quit it was a nutty thing really four days a week we were running i put in five miles myself but with him it was just a little every day though he was doing okay all things considered building you know and then right in the middle of one of our jogs out on george street and i looked back over my shoulder saw that he had stopped sweat running down everywhere are you having a heart attack i'm not you said then why aren't you running i've decided to have gun no more why the [ __ ] not it's not going to work junior it ain't going to work if you don't want it to work i know it's not going to work come on oscar pick up your goddamn feet but he shook his head he tried to squeeze my hand and then walked up to livingston avenue stop took the double e home the next morning i parted him with my foot but he didn't stay i will gun again no more he intoned from under his pillow i guess i shouldn't have gotten mad should have been patient with a herb but i was pissed here i was going the [ __ ] out of my way to help this [ __ ] idiot out and he was pissing it back in my face took this [ __ ] real personal three days straight i badgered him about the running and he kept saying i'd rather not i'd rather not for his part he tried to smooth it over tried to share his movies and his comic books and to keep up the nighty banter tried to go back to how it was before i started the oscar redemption program but i wasn't having it finally dropped the ultimatum you either gone well that's it i don't want to do it anymore i don't it's voice rising stubborn like a sister last chance i said i was sneakered up and ready to go and he was at his desk pretending not to notice he didn't move i put my hands on him get up and that was when he yelled you leave me alone actually shoved me i didn't think he meant it but there it was both of us astounded him trembling scared sick me with my fists out ready to kill for a second i almost let it go just a mistake a mistake but then i remembered myself i pushed him with both hands he flew into the wall hide dumb dumb dumb two days later lola calls from spain five o'clock in the morning what the [ __ ] is your problem junior tired of the whole thing i said without thinking oh [ __ ] off lola [ __ ] off the silence of death [ __ ] you junior don't ever speak to me again say hi to your fiance for me i tried to jio but she'd already hung up mother [ __ ] i screamed throwing the phone into the closet and that was that was that was that the end of our big experiment he actually did try to apologize a couple times in his oscar way but i didn't reciprocate well before i'd been cool with him now i just iced him out no more invitations to dinner or a drink acted like roommates at when they're beefing we were polite and stiff and way before we could jaw about riding and [ __ ] now i didn't have nothing to say to him went back to my own life back to being the ill tsukiyo had this crazy burst of total energy was being spiked for like guess he went back to eating pizzas by the eighth slice and throwing himself kamikaze style at the girls the boys of course sensed what was up that i wasn't protecting the gordo anymore and swarmed i like to think it wasn't too bad the boys didn't slap him around or nothing i didn't steal his [ __ ] but i guess it was pretty heartless any way you slice it you ever eat toto melvin would ask and oscar would shake his head answer decently no matter how many times mel asks probably the only thing you ain't eaten okay hey old would say tu no here is not a del dominicano but oscar would insist unhappily i am dominican i am it didn't matter what he said who the hell i asked you had ever met a domo like him halloween he made the mistake of dressing up as doctor who was really proud of his outfit too when i saw him on easton with two other guiding section clowns i couldn't believe how much he looked like that fat homo oscar wilde and i told him so you look just like him which was bad news for oscar because melvin said oscar wow quienes oscar wow and that was it all of us started calling that hey wow what you doing wow you want to get your feet off my chair and the tragedy after a couple of weeks dudes started answering to it full never got mad when we gave him [ __ ] just sat there with a confused grin on his face made her brother feel bad a couple times after the others left i'd say you know he was just kidding right well i know he'd said away early we cool i said dumping him on the shoulder we cool on the days his sister called and i answered the phone i tried to be cheerful but she wasn't buying is my brother there was all she ever said cold is saturn these days i have to ask myself what made me angrier that oscar the fat loser the quit or that oscar the fat loser defied me and i wonder what hurt him moy that i was never really his friend or that i pretended to be that's all it should have been to some fat kid i roomed with my junior year nothing more nothing more but then oscar the dumbass decided to fall in love and instead of getting him for a year i got the [ __ ] for the rest of my life you ever see that sergeant portrait madame x of course you have oscar had that one up on his wall along with a robotech poster and the original aqua one sheet the one with tetsuo on it and the words neo tokyo is about to explode she was dropped dead like that but she was also [ __ ] crazy if you lived in demographs that year you could have known her yeni munoz she was the boy cured chick from east brick city who lived up with the spanish section first hardcore goth i'd ever met in 1990 us [ __ ] were having trouble wrapping our head around goths period but a puerto rican goth that was as strange to us as a black nazi jenny was her real name but all her little goth buddies called her la lla blessed and every standard a dude like me had this diablo short-circuited gold was luminous beautiful jivara's skin diamond sharp features wore her hair in the super black egypto cut her eyes caked in eyeliner her lips painted black and had the biggest roundest tits you'd ever seen every day halloween for the skull and on actual halloween she dressed up as you guessed it a dominatrix had one of the gay guys in the music section on a leash never seen a body like that though even i was hot for jenny for somewhere but the one time i tried to mack on her at the douglas library she laughed at me and when i said don't laugh at me she asked why not [ __ ] [ __ ] so anyway guess who decided that she was the love of his life who fell head over heels for her because he heard her playing joy division up in a room and surprised he loved joy division too oscar of course at first the dude just stared at her from afar and moaned about a ineffable perfection out of your league i snuck but he shrugged talked to the computer screen everybody's out of my league didn't think nothing of it until a week later when i caught him putting a move on her in broadway comments i was with the boys listening to them growls about the knicks watching oscar and la la blessed on the hot food line waiting for the moment she told him off figured if i'd gotten ghosted she was going to vaporize his ass of course he was full on doing his usual battle of the planet scooting talking a mile a minute sweat running down his face and the home girl was holding a tray and looking at him as scance not many girls can do a scans and keep their cheese fries from plunging off their trays but this was why [ __ ] were crazy about la la blessing she started walking away and oscar yelled out super loud we're talking on and she shot back a shirt all lighted with sarcasm i waved him over so how'd it go romeo he looked down at his hands i think i may be in love how can you be in love you just met the [ __ ] don't call her a [ __ ] he said darkly yeah melvin imitated don't call her a [ __ ] you have to give it to oscar he didn't let up he just kept hitting honor with absolutely no good guard for self in the halls in front of the bathroom door in the dining hall on the buses dude became ubiquitous pinned comic books to a door for christ's sake in my universe when a dork like oscar pushes up on a goal like jenny he usually gets bounced faster than your tia daisy's rent checks but jenny must have had brain damage or been really into fat loser nerd boys because by the end of february she was actually treating him all civil and [ __ ] before i could wrap my brain around that one i saw them hanging out together in public i couldn't believe my [ __ ] eyes and then came the day when i returned for my creative guiding class and found lawyer blessing and oscar sitting in our room they were just talking about alice walker but still oscar looking like he'd just been asked to join the jedi ore jenny's smiling beautiful and me i was speechless jenny remembered me all right looked at me with a cute smoking eyes and said do you want me to get off your bed her jersey accent enough to knock the guff clean out of me nah i said picked up a gym bag and bolted like a [ __ ] when i got back from the weight room oscar was at his computer on a page a billion of his new novel i said so what's up with you and scaly pants nothing what the hell are you two talking about items of little note something about his tone made me realize that he knew about her scorching me the [ __ ] i said well good luck wow i just hope she doesn't sacrifice you to beelzebub or anything oh march they hung out i tried not to pay attention but we were all in the same dorm so it was hard not to lately lola would tell me that the two of them even started going to movies together they saw a ghost and this other terrible piece of ass called hardware went to franklin diner afterward where oscar tried his best not to eat for three i wasn't around for most of this nonsense i was out chasing the [ __ ] and delivering pool tables and out with the boys on the weekends did it kill me that he was spending time with such a fly [ __ ] of course it did i always thought of myself as the kineta of a dia but here i was playing tetsuo jenny really put it on for oscar like to walk arm and arm with him and hug him every chance she got oscar's adoration like the light of a new son being the center of a universe something that suited her she got him all her poetry that what the muse of the muses i heard him say and showed him her little dumb sketches which she [ __ ] hung on our door and told him all about her life which he dutifully noted in his journal living with an aunt because her mom moved to puerto rico to be with her new husband when she was seven spent from 11 on up making guns into the village lived in a squad the year before she came to college the crystal palace it was called was i really reading my roommate's journal behind his back of course i was oh but you should have seen the yo he was like i'd never seen him love the transformer started dressing up more ironing the shirts every morning dug his wooden samurai sword out of his closet and in the early morning stood out in the lawn of demogust bear chested slicing down a billion imaginary foes even started running again well jogging oh now you can run i carped and he saluted me with a brisk upsweep of his hand as he struggled past i should have been happy for the while i mean honestly who was ida begrudge oscar for a little action me he was [ __ ] with not one not two but three fine ass [ __ ] at the same time and that wasn't even counting on the side [ __ ] i scooped at the parties in the clubs me who had [ __ ] coming out my ears but of course i begrudged the [ __ ] a heart like mine which never got any kind of affection growing up is terrible above all things was then is now instead of encouraging him i scoured when i saw him with la ya blessed instead of sharing any woman wisdom i told him to watch himself in other words i was a player hater me the biggest player of them all i shouldn't have wasted the energy jenny always had the boys after her oscar only allow in the action and one day i saw her out on the democrats lawn talking to the tall punk kid who used to hang around demogust wasn't a resident crashed with whatever girl would let him thin as lou reed and as arrogant he was showing her a yoga thing and she was laughing not two days later i found oscar in his bed crying yo holmes i said fingering my weight belt what the hell is the matter with you leave me alone he load did she diss you she dissed you didn't she leave me alone he yelled leave me alone figured it would be like always a week of moaning and then back to the guiding the thing that killed him but it wasn't like always i knew something was wrong when he stopped riding oscar never stopped guiding loved guiding the way i loved cheating just laying in bed and stared at the sdf-1 10 days of him all [ __ ] up of him saying [ __ ] like i dream about oblivion like other people dream of good sex got me a little worried so i copied his sister's number in madrid and kharay on the sly took me a half dozen tries and two million vowels before i got through what do you want don't hang up lola it's about oscar she called him that night asked him what was going on and of course he told her even though i was sitting right there misery she commanded you need to let it go i can't you whimpered my heart is overthrown you have to and so on until at the end of two hours he promised her that he would try come on oscar i said after giving him 20 minutes to stow let's go play some video games he shook his head unmoved i will play street fighter no more well i said to lola later on the phone i don't know she said he gets like this sometimes what do you want me to do just watch him for me okay never got the chance two weeks later lauria blessed gave oscar the coup de friendship he walked in on her while she was entertaining the punk caught them both naked probably covered with blood or something and before she could even say get out he went berserk caught her ahoy and attacked her walls tearing down my posters and throwing her books everywhere i found out because some white girl ran up and said excuse me but your stupid roommate is going insane and i had a bolt upstairs to put him in a headlock oscar i hollered calm down calm down leave me the [ __ ] alone he shrieked trying to stomp down on my feet it was pretty horrible as for punk boy apparently dude jumped right out the window and ran all the way to george street but naked that was democrat for you never a dull [ __ ] moment to make a long story shirt he had to attend counseling to keep from losing his housing couldn't go to the second floor for nothing but now everybody in the dorm thought he was some kind of major psycho the girls especially stayed away from him as for allah blessed she was graduating that year so a month later they relocated her to the river dorms and called it even i didn't really see her again except once while i was on the bus and she was out on the street walking into scott hall with these dominatrix boots and that's how our year ended him vacated of hope and tapping at the computer me being asking the hall how i like dorming with mr crazy man and me asking back how their ass would like joining with my foot a lame couple of weeks when it came time to greet up at the dorm me and oh didn't even talk about it my boys were still stuck with their mom's crib so i had to take my chances with the lottery again and this time i hit the [ __ ] jackpot ended up with a single in frayley hewson when i told oscar that i was leaving demogust he pulled himself out of the depression long enough to look astounded like he was expecting something else i figured i stammered but before i could say another word he said it's okay and then as i was turning away he grabbed my hand and shook it very formally so it's been an honor oscar i said people ask me did you see the signs did you maybe i did and just didn't want to think about it maybe i didn't what the [ __ ] does it really matter all that i knew was that i never seen him more unhappy but there was a part of me that didn't care that wanted out of there the same way i had one out of my hometown on our last night as roommates oscar house two bottles of orange cisco i had bought them you remember cisco liquid crack they used to call it so you know mr lightweight was [ __ ] up to my virginity oscar shouted oscar call it bro people don't want to hear about all that you're right they just want to stare at me come on drink prelate he slumped i'm copacetic you ain't pathetic i said copacetic everybody he shook his head miss apprehends me all the posters and books were packed and it could have been the first day again if it hadn't been for how unhappy he was on the real first day he'd been excited kept calling me by my full name until i told him it's junior oscar just union i guess i knew i should have stayed with him should have set my ass in that chair and told him that [ __ ] was going to be cool but it was our last night and i was [ __ ] tired of him i wanna [ __ ] silly this indian guy i had on douglas smoke a joint and then go to bed fare thee well he said as i left fear thee well what he did was this drink a third bottle of cisco and then walked unsteadily down to the new brunswick train station with its crumbling facade and a long curve of track that shoots high over the raritan even in the middle of the night doesn't take much to get into the station or to walk out onto the tracks which is exactly what he did stumbled out toward the river turned route 18 new brunswick falling away beneath him until he was 77 feet in the air 77 feet precisely from what he would later recall he stood on that bridge for a good long time watching the streaking lights of the traffic below reviewing his miserable life wishing he'd been born in a different body regretting all the books he would ever write maybe trying to get himself to reconsider and then the 412 expressed to washington blue in the distance by then he was barely able to stand closed his eyes or maybe he didn't and when he opened them there was something straight out of ursula lagoon standing by his side later when he would describe it he would call it the golden mongoose but even he knew that wasn't what it was he was very placid very beautiful gold-lined eyes that reached through you not so much in judgment or approach but for something far scarier they stared at each other it's serene as a buddhist he in total disbelief and then the whistle blew again and his eyes snapped open oy closed and it was gone dude i've been waiting his whole life for something just like this to happen to him i'd always wanted the world of magic and mystery but instead of taking note of the vision and changing his ways the [ __ ] just shook his swollen head the train was near now and so before he could lose his courage he threw himself down into the darkness he had left a note of course and behind it a letter for his sister his mother and jenny he thanked me for everything he told me i could have his books his games his movies his special detents he told me he was happy to have been friends he signed off your companero oscar well if he landed on route 18 as planned it would have been lights out forever but in his drunken confusion he must have miscalculated or maybe as his mother claims he was being watched from up on high because the dude missed 18 proper and landed on the divider which should have been fine those dividers on 18 are like concrete guillotines would have done them lovely burst them into intestinal confetti except that this one was one of those garden dividers that they plant shrubs on and he hit the freshly tilted loam and not the concrete instead of finding himself in nerd heaven where every nerd gets 58 virgins to role play with he woke up in robert wood johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder feeling like well he jumped off the new brunswick train bridge i was there of course with his mother and his thuggish uncle who took regular bathroom breaks to snort up he saw us and what did the idiot do he turned his head and cried his mother tapped him on the good shoulder you'll be doing a lot more than crying when i get through with you a day later lola o'guy from madrid didn't have a chance to even say a word before her mother launched into the standard dominican welcome so now you come now that your brother's dying if i'd known that's what it would take i would have killed myself a long time ago ignored her ignored me sat next to her brother took his hand mr she said are you okay shook his head no it's been a long long time but when i think of her i still see her at the hospital on that first day straight from newark airport dark rings around her eyes her hair is tangled as a maintenance and yet she still had taken the time before appearing to put on some lipstick and makeup i was hoping for some good energy even at the hospital trying to get ass but she blew me up instead why didn't you take care of oscar she demanded why didn't you do it four days they took him home and i went back to my life too headed home to my lonely mother and a toy up london terrace i guess if i'd been on guiller pal i would have visited him up in patterson like every week but i didn't what can i tell you it was [ __ ] summer and i was chasing down a couple of new girls and besides i had the job wasn't enough time but what there really wasn't enough of was ghanas i did manage to call him a couple of times to check up on him even that was a lot because i kept expecting his mother and sister to tell me that he was gone but no he claimed he was regenerated no more suicide attempts for him he was writing a lot which is always a good sign i'm going to be the dominican token he said only once did i drop in and that was because i was in p-town visiting one of my sutures not part of the plan but then i just spun the wheel pulled up to a gas station made the call and the next thing i knew i was at the house where he had grown up his mother too sick to come out of her room and him looking as thin as i'd ever seen him suicide suits me he joked his room nerdier than him if that was possible x-wings and tie fighter is hanging from the ceilings mine and his sister's signature is the only real ones on his last cast the great leg broken worse than the left the rest were thoughtful consolations from robert heinlein isaac asimov frank herbert and samuel delaney his sister not acknowledging my presence so i laughed when she walked by the open door asked loudly how's lamuda doing she hates being here oscar said what's wrong with patterson i asked loudly hey muda what's wrong with patterson everything she yelled from down the hall she was wearing these little gunning shorts the side of her leg muscles jiggling alone made the trip worth making me and oscar sat in his room for a little bit not saying much i stared at all his books and his games waited for him to say something must have known i wasn't going to let it slide it was foolish he finally said ill advised you could say that twice what the [ __ ] were you thinking oh he shrugged miserably i didn't know what else to do dude you don't want to be dead take it from me no [ __ ] is bad but dead is like no [ __ ] times 10. only one thing sticks out right before i headed out he said it was the curse that made me do it you know i don't believe in that [ __ ] oscar that's our parents as [ __ ] it's ours too he said is it going to be okay i asked lola on the way out i think so she said filling ice cube trays with faucet water he says he's going back to democrist in the spring is that a good idea she thought about it a second that was lola for you i do she said you know best i fished my keys out so how's the fiance he's fine she said blandly are you and syrian still together kill to even hear her name not for a long time and then we stood there and stared at each other in a better world i would have kissed her over the ice trays and that would have been the end of our troubles but you know exactly what kind of world we live in it ain't no [ __ ] middle earth i just nodded my head said see you around lola and drove home that should have been the end of it right just a memory of some nerd i once knew who tried to kill himself nothing more nothing more but the daily ons it turned out what a clan you could just shake off not two weeks in the senior year he showed up at my dorm room to bring over his guidings and to ask me about mine i couldn't believe it last i heard he was planning on subbing at his old high school taking over classes at bbc but there he was standing standing at my door sheepishly holding a blue folder hail and well met yunyu he said oscar i said in disbelief he had lost even more weight and was trying his best to keep his hair trim and his face shaved he looked if you can believe it good still talking space opera though had just finished with the first of his projected quarter of novels totally obsessed with it now maybe the death of me he sighed and then he caught himself sorry of course nobody a demogress wanted to room with him what a surprise we all know how tolerant and tolerant are so when he returned in the spring he'd have a double to himself not that it did him any good he joked democrats won't be the same without your mesophoric grimness he said matter of factly ha i said you should definitely visit me in paterson when you have a reprieve i have a plethora of new japanimation for your viewing pleasure definitely bro i said definitely i never did go by i was busy god's truth delivering poor tables bringing the grades up getting ready to graduate and besides that fall a miracle happened suryan showed up at my door looking more beautiful than i ever saw her i want us to try again of course i said yes and went out and put a shireno in her that very night dias mio some [ __ ] couldn't have gotten ass on judgement day me i couldn't not get ass even when i tried my negligence didn't stop oh from visiting me every now and then with some new chapter and some new story of a girl he'd spotted on the bus on the street or in class same old oscar i said yes he said weekly same old me rutgers was always a crazy place but that last fall it seemed to be especially bugging in october a bunch of freshman girls i knew on livingston got busted for dealing coke four of the quietest guardians around like they say los que menos quogen vuella on bush the lambda started a fight with the alphas over some idiocy and for weeks there was a talk of a black latino war but nothing ever happened everybody too busy throwing parties and [ __ ] each other to scrap that winter i even managed to sit in my own dorm room long enough to write a story that wasn't too bad about the woman who used to live in the patio behind my house in the dr a woman everybody said was a prostitute but who used to watch me and my brother while my mom and my abuela were at work my professor couldn't believe it i'm impressed not a single shooting was stabbing in the whole story not that it helped any i didn't win any of the creative writing prizes that year i kinda had been hoping and then it was finals and who of all people do i end up running into lola i almost didn't recognize her because her hair was ill long and because she was wearing these cheap blocky glasses the kind and alternative white girl would wear enough silver on her wrist to ransom the goyal family and so much leg coming out of a denim skirt it just didn't seem fair as soon as she saw me she tugged down the skirt not like it did much good this was on the ebus i was on my way back from seeing a go of zero note and she was heading out to some stupid ass farewell party for one of her friends i slapped down next to her and she said what's up her eyes so incredibly big and empty of any guile or expectation for that matter how have you been i asked good how about you just getting ready for the break merry christmas and then just like a day leon she went back to reading her book i poked at the book introduction to japanese what the hell are you studying now didn't they throw you out of here already i'm teaching english in japan next year she said matter of factly it's going to be amazing not that i'm thinking about or i've applied but i am japan i laughed a little mean what the hell is a dominican going out to japan for guide she said turning the page irritably why would anyone want to go anywhere when they have new jersey we let that sit for a sec that was a little harsh i said my apologies like i said it was december my indian goal lily was waiting for me back on college avenue and so was syrian but i wasn't thinking about either of them i was thinking about the one time i'd seen lola that year she'd been reading a book in front of the henderson chapel with such concentration i thought she might hurt herself i'd heard from oscar that she was living in edison with some of her girlfriends working at some office or another saving money for her next big adventure that day i'd seen her i'd wanted to say hi but i didn't have the balls peakers she would egg me i watched commercial avenue slide past and they are in the distance with the lights of groot 18. that was one of those moments that would always be rutgers for me the girls in the front giggling about some guy her hands on those pages nails all painted up in cranberry my own hands like monster crabs in a couple of months i'd be back in london terrace if i wasn't careful and she'd be off to tokyo or kyoto or wherever she was going of all the chicks i'd run up on at rutgers of all the chicks i'd run up on ever lola was the one i'd never gotten a handle on so why did it feel like she was the one who knew me best i thought about syrian and how she would never talk to me again i thought about my own fears of actually being good because lola wasn't so eaten with her i'd have to be someone i'd never tried to be we were reaching college avenue last chance so i made like oscar and said have dinner with me lola i promise i won't try to take your panties off yao guy she said almost gripping her page and the turning i covered her hand in mine and she gave me this frustrated heart-wrenching look like she was already on her way down with me and didn't for the life of her understand why it's okay i said no it's [ __ ] not okay you're too short but she didn't take her hand away we went to a place on handy and before i could really put a hurt on her she stopped everything dragged me up from a toto by my ears why is this the face i can't seem to forget even now after all these years tired from working swollen from lack of sleep a crazy mixture of ferocity and vulnerability that was and shall ever be lola she looked at me until i couldn't stand it anymore and then she said just don't lie to me junior i won't i promise don't laugh my intentions were pure not much more to tell except this that spring i moved back in with him thought about it all winter even at the very end i almost changed my mind was waiting by his daughter endemus and despite the fact that i'd been waiting all morning at the very end i still almost ran off but then i heard their voices on the stairwell bringing up his things i don't know who was more surprised oscar lola or me in oscar's version i raised my hand and said melon took him a second to recognize the word mayon he said finally that fall after the fall was dark i read in his journal dark he was still thinking about doing it but he was afraid of his sister mainly but also of himself of the possibility of a miracle of an invincible summer reading and writing and watching tv with his mother if you try anything stupid his mother swore i'll haunt you for the rest of your life you better believe it i do senora he reported saying i do those months he couldn't sleep and that's how he ended up taking his mother's car out for a midnight spins every time he pulled out of the house he thought it would be his last drove everywhere got lost in camden found the neighborhood where i grew up drove through new brunswick just when the clubs were getting out looking at everybody his stomach killing him even made it down to wildwood looked for the coffee shop where he had saved lola but it had closed nothing had opened to replace it one night he picked up a hitchhiker an immensely pregnant girl she barely spoke any english was a wet back guatemalan with pits on her cheek needed to go to perth amboy an oscar our hero said not a pre-occupation que dios te bendiga she said still looking ready to jump out of a window if need be gave her his number just in case but she never called he wasn't surprised drove so long and so far on some nights that he would actually fall asleep at the wheel one second he was thinking about his characters and the next he'd been drifting a beautiful intoxicating richness about to go all the way under and then some last alarm would sound lola nothing more exhilarating he wrote than saving yourself by the simple act of waking end of chapter four end part one part two men are not indispensable but trujillo is irreplaceable for trujillo is not a man he is a cosmic force those who try to compare him to his ordinary contemporaries are mistaken he belongs to the category of those born to a special destiny la nacion of course i tried once more it was even stupider than the first time 14 months and abuela announced that it was time for me to return to patterson of my mother i couldn't believe what she was saying it felt like the deepest of treacheries to me i wouldn't feel that again until i broke with you but i don't want to go but i don't want to go i protested i want to stay here but she wouldn't listen she held her hands in the air like there was nothing she could do it's what your mother wants and it's what i want and it's what's right but what about me i'm sorry here that's life for you all the happiness you gather to yourself it's will sweep away like it's nothing if you ask me i don't think there are any such things as curses i think there is only life that's enough i wasn't mature i quit the team i stopped going to classes and speaking to all my girlfriends even rozier i told max that we were through and he looked at me like i just shot him between the eyes he tried to stop me from walking away but i screamed at him like my mother screams and he dropped his hand like he was dead i thought i was doing them a favor not wanting to hurt him any more than was necessary i ended up being really stupid those last weeks i guess i wanted to disappear more than anything and so i was trying to make it so i photographed with someone else that's how messed up i was he was the father of one of my classmates always after me even when his daughter wasn't around so i called him one thing you can count on in santo domingo not the lights not the law sex that never goes away i didn't bother with the romance i let him take me to a love motel on my first date he was one of those vain politicos a paladista had his own big air conditioner better when i pulled my pants down he never saw anybody so happy until i asked him for two thousand dollars american i emphasized it's like abuela says every snake always thinks it's biting into a gat until the day it bites into a mongoose that was my big puta moment i knew he had the money otherwise i wouldn't have asked and it's not like i was grabbing from him i think we did it like nine times in total so in my opinion he got a lot more than he gave afterward i sat in the motel and drank gum while he snorted from these little bags of coke he wasn't much of a taco which was good he was always pretty ashamed of himself after we [ __ ] and that made me feel great complained that this was the money of his daughter's school blah blah blah steal it from the state i told him with a smile i kissed him when he dropped me off at my house only so that i could feel him shrink from me i didn't talk to la inca much those last weeks but she never stopped talking to me i want you to do well at school i want you to visit me when you can i want you to remember where you came from she prepared everything for my departure i was too angry to think about her how sad she would be when i was gone i was the last person to share their life since my mother she started closing up the house like she was the one who was leaving what i said you're coming with me no here i'm going to my camper for a while but you hate the campo i have to go there she explained whaley if only for a little while and then oscar called out of the blue trying to make up now that i was due back so you're coming home don't count on it i said don't do anything precipitous don't do anything precipitous i laughed do you hear yourself oscar he sighed all the time every morning i would wake up and make sure the money was still under my bed two thousand dollars in those days could have taken you anywhere and of course i was thinking japan or goa which one of the girls at school had told me about another island but very beautiful she assured us nothing like santa domingo and then finally she came she never did anything quiet my mother she pulled up in a big black town car not a normal taxi and all the kids in the burrito gathered around to see what the show was about my mother pretending not to notice the crowd the driver of course was trying to pick her up she looked thin and worn out and i couldn't believe the taxista leave her alone i said don't you have any shame my mother shook her head sadly looked at la inca you didn't teach her anything my inca didn't blink i taught her as well as i could and then the big moment the one every daughter dreads my mother looking me over i'd never been in better shape never felt more beautiful and desirable in my life and what does the [ __ ] say konyo those 14 months gone like they'd never happened now that i'm a mother myself i realized that she could not have been any different that's who she was like they say platano madugo no se vuelve verde even at the end she refused to show me anything close to love she cried not for me or for herself but only for oscar meepo bria you always think with your parents that at least at the very end something will change something will get better not for us i probably would have gone i would have waited until we got back to the states waited like paella day owls burning slow slow until they dropped their guard and then one morning i would have disappeared like my father disappeared on my mother and was never seen again disappeared like everything disappears without a trace i would have lived far away i would have been happy i'm sure of it and i would never have had any children i would let myself go dark in the sun no more hiding from it let my hair indulge in all its kinks and she would have passed me on the street and never recognized me that was the dream i had but if these years have taught me anything it is this you can never run away not ever the only way out is in and that's what i guess these stories are all about yes no doubt about it i would have gone la inca or not i would have gone but then max died i hadn't seen him at all not since the day of our breakup my poor max who loved me beyond words who said i'm so lucky every time we [ __ ] it was not like we were in the same circles or the same neighborhood sometimes when the peledista drove me to the motelis i could swear that i saw max zipping through the horrendous traffic of the midday a film real under his arm i tried to get him to buy a backpack but he said he liked it this way my brave max who could slip between two bumpers the way a lie can slide between a person's teeth what happened was that one day he miscalculated heartbroken i'm sure and ended up being mashed between a bus bound for the caballo and one bound for bonnie his skull shattering in a million little pieces the film unspooling across the entire street i only heard about it after they buried him his sister called me he loved you best of all she sobbed best of all the curse some of you will say life is what i say life you never saw anybody go so quiet i gave his mother the money i'd taken from the paladin his little brother maxine used to buy a yola to puerto rico and last i heard he was doing good for himself there he owned a little story and his mother no longer lives in the los tres brazos my total good for something after all i will love you always my abuela said at the airport and then she turned away it was only when i got on the plane that i started crying i know this sounds ridiculous but i don't think i really stopped until i met you i know i didn't stop atoning the other passengers must have thought i was crazy i kept expecting my mother to hit me to call me an idiot a bruta a feya a macriada to change seats but she didn't she put her hand on mine and left it there when the woman in front turned around and said tell that girl of yours to be quiet she said tell that trullo of yours to stop stinking i felt sorriest for the vieo sat next to us you could tell he'd been visiting his family he add on a little fedora and his best press check abana it's okay muchacha he said patting my back santo domingo will always be there it was there in the beginning and it will be there at the end for god's sake my mother muttered and then closed her eyes and went to sleep end of the preface of part two chapter five poor abaloid 1944-1946 the famous doctor when the family talks about it at all which is like never they always begin in the same place with abyloid and the bad thing he said about trujillo abalord luis cabral was oscar and lola's grandfather a surgeon who had studied in mexico city in the lazargo cardenas years and in the mid-1940s before any of us were even born a man of considerable standing in la vega un hombre muy serio muy educato e muy bien plantato you can already see where this is headed in those long ago days before delinzu has cena and bank failures before a diaspora the capitals were numbered among the high of the land they were not as filthy rich or as historically significant as the rao cabrals of santiago but they weren't too shabby of a cadet branch either in la vega where the family had lived since 1791 they were practically royalty as much a landmark as la casa amoria and the rio kamu neighbors spoke of the 14 room house that abalone's father had built casa hatui a gambling aft expanded villa eclectic whose original stone koi had been transformed into abyloid study a house bounded by groves of almonds and dwarf mangoes there was also the modern art deco appointment in santiago where abalone often spent his weekends attending the family business the freshly refurbished stables that could have been comfortably belitted a dozen horses the horses themselves six barbers with skin like vellum and of course the five full-time servants of the guayana vulgarity while the rest of the country in that period subsisted on rocks and scraps of yuka and were host to endless coils of intestinal worms the cabrals dined on pastas and sweet italian sausages scraped jalisco silver on flatware from belik a surgeon's income was a fine thing but abalone's portfolio if such things existed in those days was the real source of the family wealth from his hateful cantankerous father now dead abeloid had inherited a pair of prosperous super mercados in santiago a cement factory entitles to a string of fingers in the scepter journalists the cabrals were as you might have guessed members of the fortunate people somewhere as they borrowed a cousin's cabana in puerto plata and decamped there for a period of no less than three weeks abloyd's two daughters jaquelin and astrid swam and played on the surf often suffering mulatto pigment degradation disorder aka tans under the watchful gaze of their mother who unable to risk no extra darkness remained chained to her umbrella's shadow while their father were not listening to the news from the boy who groaned the short line his face set in tense concentration he walked barefoot stripped down to his white shirt and his vest his pant legs rolled his demi afro an avuncular torch plump with middle age sometimes a fragment of a shell or a dying horseshoe crab would catch abalone's attention and he'd get down on all fours and examine it with a gem cutter's glass so that to do both his delighted daughters as well as to his appalled wife he resembled a dog sniffing a turd there are still those in ceballo who remember abalone and all will tell you that besides being a brilliant doctor he possessed one of the most remarkable minds in the country indefatigably curious alarmingly prodigious and especially suited for linguistic and computational complexity the vieo was widely read in spanish english french latin and greek a collector of grave books an advocate of outlandish abstractions a contributor to the journal of tropical medicine and an amateur ethnographer in the fernando ortiz mode abyloid was in short a brain not entirely uncommon in the mexico where he had studied but an exceedingly rare species on the island of supreme general rafael leonidas trujillo molina he encouraged his daughters to read and prepared them to follow him into the profession they could speak french and read latin before they were nine and so keen was he about learning that any new piece of knowledge no matter how arcane or trivial could send his ass over the van allen belt his parlor so tastefully wallpapered by his father's second wife was hangout number one for the local turtle logos discussions would rage for entire evenings and while ability was often frustrated by the poor quality nothing like at the unam he would not have abandoned these evenings for anything often his daughters would bid their father goodnight only to find him the next morning still engaged in some utterly obscure debate with his friends eyes red hair akimbo woozy but game they would go to him and he would kiss each in turn calling them as these youthful intelligence he often boasted to his friends will best us all the gain of trujillo was not the best time to be a lover of ideas not the best time to be engaging in parlor debate to be hosting tortellius to be doing anything out of the ordinary but abyloid was nothing if not meticulous never allowed contemporary politics in essence trujillo to be bandied about kept [ __ ] on the abstract plane allowed anybody who wanted including members of the secret police to attend his gatherings given that you could get lit up for even mispronouncing the failed cattle thief's name it was a no-brainer really as a general practice abloy tried his best not to think about el jefe at all followed sort of the tao of dictator avoidance which was ironic considering that abalord was unmatched in maintaining the outward appearance of the enthusiastic trujillista both as an individual and as the executive officer of his medical association he gave unstintingly to the poitito dominicano he and his wife who was his number one nurse and best assistant joined every medical mission that trujillo organized no matter how remote the campo and no one could suppress a gefar better than abalone when el jefe won an election by a hundred three percent what enthusiasm from the pueblo when banquets were held in trujillo's honor ability always drove to santiago to attend he arrived early left late smiled endlessly and didn't say nothing disconnected his intellectual warp engine and obligated strictly on impulse power when the time came abaloid would shake el yafa's hand cover him in the warm effusion of his adoration if you think the chuhiyada was not homoerotic then to quote the priest you got another thing coming and without further ado fade back into the shadows allah oscar's favorite movie point-blank kept as far away from el jefe as possible he wasn't under any delusion that he was trujillo's equal or his buddy or some kind of necessary individual after all [ __ ] who messed with him had a habit of ending up with a bad case of the deads it didn't hurt that abelord's family was not totally in the jeffy's pocket that his father had cultivated no lands or negrosias in geographic or competitive proximity to the fa's own holding his fuck-face contact was blessedly limited abyloid and the failed cattle thief might have glided past each other in the halls of history if not for the fact that starting in 1944 abyloid instead of bringing his wife and daughter to yfa events as custom dictated began to make a point of leaving them at home he explained to his friends that his wife had become nervous in that jacqueline took care of her but the real reason for the absences was trujillo's notorious capacity earned his daughter jaclyn's off the hook looks abalone's serious intellectual oldest daughter was no longer her tall awkward flaquita self adolescence had struck with a fury transforming her into a young lady of great beauty she had caught a serious case of the hip's ass chest a condition which during the mid-40s spelled trouble with a capital t to the i to the u to the j to the eo ask any of our elders and they will tell you trujillo might have been a dictator but he was a dominican dictator which is another way of saying he was our number one balacco in the country believed that all the toto in the doi was literally his it was a well documented fact that in trujillo's dr if you were of a certain class and you put your cute daughter anywhere near el jefe within the week she'd be marmando his repeal like an old pro and there would be nothing you could do about it part of the prize in living in santo domingo one of the island's best known secrets so common was the practice so insatiable trujillo's appetites that there were plenty of men in the nation hombres de calidad e posixion who believe it or not offered up their daughters freely to the failed cattle thief abyloid to his credit was not one of them as soon as he realized what was what after his daughter started stopping traffic on caye esso after one of his patients looked at his daughter and said you should be careful with that one he pulled a rapunzel on her ass and locked her in it was a brave thing not in keeping with his character but he'd only had to watch jacqueline preparing for school one day big in body but still a child god damn it still a child and the brave thing became easy hiding your dog-eyed large-breasted daughter from trujillo however was anything but easy like keeping the ring from sargon if you think the average dominican guy's bad trujillo was 5 000 times worse dude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass if the procurement of ass had been any more central to the trujillo the regiment would have been the world's first callocracy and maybe in fact it was in this climate hoarding your woman was tantamount to treason offenders who didn't cough up the muchachos could easily find themselves enjoying the invigorating chime of an eight-shark bath let us be clear abaloyd was taking an enormous risk it didn't matter that he was upper class or that he prepared for groundwork well coming as far as having a friend diagnose his wife as manic then letting the word leak through the elite circles in which he ran if trujillo and company caught wind of his duplicity they'd have him in chains and jacqueline on her back in two seconds flat which was why every time elfa shuffled down the welcome line shaking hands abalone expected him to exclaim in that high shrill voice of his dr abella cabral where is that delicious daughter of yours i've heard so much about it from your neighbors it was enough to make abaloid phobia his daughter jacqueline of course had absolutely no idea what was at stake those were more innocent times and she was an innocent girl getting raped by your illustrious president was the furthest thing from her excellent mind she of his two daughters had inherited her father's brains was studying french religiously because she decided to imitate her father and go abroad to study medicine at the faculty de medicine de paris to france to become the next madame qe hit the books night and day and would practice her french with both her father and with their servant esteban ogaya who'd been born in haiti and still spoke a pretty good frog neither of his daughters had any idea were as carefree as hobbits never guessing the shadow that loomed on the horgaizen on his days off when he wasn't at the clinic or in a study writing ability would stand at his rear window and watch his daughters at their silly children's game until his aching heart could stand at no more each morning before jackie started her studies she wrote on a clean piece of paper tarde vientibus ulcer to the latecomers i left the bones he spoke of these matters only to three people the first of course was his wife sekoga sekorgo it must be said here was a talent in our own right a famous beauty from the east hegue and the source of all her daughter's pulchritude sokogo had looked in her youth like a dark hue deja thorgas one of the chief reasons abloy had pursued a girl so beneath its class and was also one of the finest nurse practitioners he had ever had the honor of working with in mexico or the dominican republic which given his estimation of his mexican colleagues is no small place the second reason he'd gone after her work hoistness and her encyclopedic knowledge of folk cures and traditional remedies made her an indispensable partner in his practice her reaction though to his trujillo worries was typical she was a clever skilled hard-working woman who didn't blink when faced with arterial spray hissing from a machete chopped arm stump but when it came to more abstract menaces like say trujillo she stubbornly and willfully refused to acknowledge there might be a problem all the while dressing jacqueline in the most suffocating of clothes why are you telling people that i'm loca she demanded he spoke of it as well with his mistress senor lydia abenade one of the three women who had rejected his marriage offered upon his return from his studies in mexico now a widow and his number one lover she was the woman his father had wanted him to bag in the first place and when he'd been unable to close the deal his father had mocked him as a half-man even unto his final days a billious life the third reason he'd gone after sokoga last time he spoke with his longtime neighbor and friend marcus applegate roman whom he often had to ferry back and forth from presidential events because marcus lacked a car with marcus it had been a spontaneous outburst the weight of the problem truly pressing on him they'd been cruising back to la vega on one of the old marine occupational goats middle of the night in august through the black black farmlands of the caballo so hot they had to drive with the windows cranked down which meant a constant stream of mosquitoes scooting up their nostrils and out of nowhere abalone began to talk young women have no opportunity to develop unmolested in this country he complained then he gave as an example the name of a young woman whom the jefe had only recently despoiled a muchacha known to both of them a graduate of the university of florida and the daughter of an acquaintance at first marcus said nothing in the darkness of the packard's interior his face was an absent a pull of shadow a worrisome silence marcus was no fan of the efe having more than once an abalone's presence calling him a bruto imbecile but that didn't stop abelord from being suddenly aware of his colossal indiscretion such was life in those secret police days finally abaloid said this doesn't bother you mike is hunched down to light a cigarette and finally his face reappeared drawn but familiar nothing we can do about it haploid but imagine you were in similar straits how would you protect yourself i'd be sure to have ugly daughters lydia was far more realistic she'd been seated at her armory brushing her moorish hair he'd been lying on the bed naked as well absolutely pulling on his repeal lydia had said send her her way to the nuns send her to cuba my family there will take care of her cuba was lydia's dream it was her mexico always talking about moving back there but i need permission from the state ask for it then but what if el jefe notices the requests lydia put down her brush with a sharp click what are the chances of that happening you never know abalone said defensively in this country you never know his mistress was for cuba his wife a household guest his best friend said nothing his own consciousness told him to await further instructions and at the end of the year he got them at one of the interminable presidential events el jefe had shaken adelaide's hand but instead of moving on he paused a nightmare come true held onto his fingers and said in a sure voice you are doctor abeloid kapoor abaloid bowed at your service your excellency in less than a nanosecond abalone was drenched in sweat he knew what was coming next the failed cattle thief had never spoken more than three words to him his whole life what else could it be he dared not glance away from trujillo's heavy powered face but out the corner of his eyes he caught glimpses of the lambesacos hovering beginning to realize that an exchange was in the making i've seen you here often doctor but lately without your wife have you divorced her i am still married your enormity to circular hernandez batista that is good to hear oh yeah i was afraid that you might have turned into un mauikon then he turned to the lumbosecos and laughed oh yefe they screamed you were too much it was at this point that another [ __ ] might have in a fit of cajones said something to defend his honor but abalone was not that [ __ ] he said nothing of course oh yeah if he continued knuckling a tail from his eyes you would know me or a coin for i've heard that you have daughters dr cabral una que es muy bella e agante no abaloid had rehearsed dozens of answers to this question but his response was pure reflex came out of nowhere yes cafe you are correct i have two daughters but to tell you the truth they're only beautiful if you have a taste for women with mustaches for an instant el jefe had said nothing and in that twisting silence abalone could see his daughter being violated in front of him while he was lowered with excruciating slowness into trujillo's infamous pool of sharks but then miracle of miracles el jefe had crinkled his poison face and left abalone had laughed too and oyefe moved on when abloy returned home to la vega late that evening he woke his wife from a deep slumber so that they could both pray and thank the heavens for their family's salvation verbally abloy had never been quick on the draw the inspiration could only have come from the hidden spaces within my soul he told his wife from a numinous being you mean god his wife pressed i mean someone abaloid said darkly and so for the next three months abaloy waited for the end waited for his name to start appearing in the four-year-old popular section of the paper thinly veiled criticisms aimed at a certain bone doctor from la vega which was often how the resume began the destruction of a respected citizen such as him with disses about the way your socks and your shirts did a match waited for a letter to arrive demanding a private meeting with the efe waiting for his daughter to turn up missing on a trip back to school lost nearly 20 pounds during this awful vigil began to drink copiously nearly killed a patient with a slip of the hand if his wife hadn't spotted the damage before they stitched who knows what might have happened screamed at his daughter's wife almost every day could not get it up for much of his mistress but the rain season turned into a hot season and the clinic filled with the hapless the wounded the afflicted and when after four months nothing happened abalord almost let out a sigh of relief maybe he goat on the back of his hairy hand maybe santo domingo confidential in some ways living in santo domingo doing the trujillato was a lot like being in that famous twilight zone episode that oscar loves so much the one where the monstrous white kid with the god-like powers go over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world a town called peaksville the white kid is vicious and random and all the people in the community live in straight taylor of him denouncing and betraying each other at the drop of a hat in order not to be the person he maims for or ominously sends to the coin after each atrocity he commits whether it's given a golfer three hands or banishing a no longer interesting playmate to the coin or gaining snow down on the last crops the horrified people of peaksville have to say it was a good thing you did anthony a good thing between 1930 when the failed cattle thief seized power in 1961 the year he got blazed santo domingo was the caribbean's very own peaksville with trujillo playing the part of anthony and the rest of us reprising the role of the man who got turned into jack in the box you might roll your eyes at the comparison but friends it would be hard to exaggerate the power trujillo exerted over the dominican people and the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region homeboy dominated santo domingo like it was his very own private mordoy not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world isolated behind the platano curtain he acted like it was his very own plantation acted like he owned everything and everyone killed whomever he wanted to kill sons brothers fathers mothers took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about the great honeymoon he died the night before his eyes was everywhere he had a secret police that outside the saucy that kept watch on everyone even those everyone's who lived in the states a security apparatus so ridiculously mongoose that you could say a bad thing about oyfa at 8 40 in the morning and before the clock struck 10 you'd be in the corrienta having a cattle card shoved up your ass who says that we third world people are inefficient it wasn't just mr friday the 13th you had to worry about either it was the whole shavata nation he helped spun for like every dark lloyd with his shadow he had the devotion of his people it was widely believed that any one time between the 42 and 87 percent of the dominican population was on the secret police's payroll your own [ __ ] neighbors could acabar con you just because you had something they coveted or because you cut in front of them at the komodo mad folks went out in that manly betrayed by those they consider the ponies by members of their own family by slips of the tongue one day you were a law-abiding citizen cracking nuts on your galleria and the next day you were in the curienta getting your nuts cracked [ __ ] was so tight that many people actually believed the true eo had supernatural powers it was whispered that he did not sleep did not sweat that he could see smell feel events hundreds of miles away that he was protected by the most evil fuku on the island you wonder why two generations later our parents are still so damn secretive while you'll find out your brother ain't your brother only by accident but let's not go completely overboard trujillo was certainly formidable and the regime was like a caribbean mordor in many ways but there were plenty of people who despised del jefe who communicated in less than veiled ways their contempt who resisted but abalone was simply not one of them homeboy wasn't like his mexican colleagues who were always keeping up with what was happening elsewhere in the world he believed that change was possible he didn't dream of revolution didn't care that trotsky had lived and died not 10 blocks from his student pensions in koyogan wanted only to tent his wealthy ailing patience and afterward could turn to a study without worrying about being shot in the head or thrown into the sharks every now and then one of his acquaintances usually marcus would describe for him the latest trujillo atrocity an affluent clan stripped of its properties and sent into exile an entire family fed piece by piece to the sharks because a son had dared compared trujillo to adolf hitler before a terrified audience of his peers a suspicious assassination in bornao of a well-known unionist listened to these horrors tensely and then after an awkward silence would change the subject he simply didn't wish to dwell on the fates of unfortunate people on the going ons in peaksville he didn't want those stories in his house the way abloy saw it his trujillo philosophy if you will he only had to keep his head down his mouth shut his pockets open his daughter is hidden for another decade or two by then he prophesized trujillo would be dead and the dominican republic would be a true democracy abyloid it turned out needed help in the prophecy department santa domingo never became a democracy he didn't have no couple of decades either his luck ran out earlier than anyone expected the bad thing 1945 should have been a capital year for abalone and family two of abalord's articles were published to minor acclaim one in the prestigious and the second in a small journal out of kugaku's and he received complimentary response from a couple of continental doctors very flattering indeed business in the super mercados couldn't have been much better the island was still flush from the war boom and his managers couldn't keep anything on the shelves the finkas were producing and leaping profits the worldwide collapse of agricultural prices was still years off abloyd had a full load of clients performing a number of tricky surgeries with impeccable skill his daughters were prospering jaclyn had been accepted at a prestigious boarding school in la jave to begin the following year her chance to escape his wife and mistress were pouring on the adoration even the servants seemed content not that he ever really spoke to them all in all the good doctors should have been immensely satisfied with himself should have ended each day with the speed up unciga in the corner of his mouth and a broad grin creasing his ear sign features it was dare we say it a good life except it wasn't in february there was another presidential event for independence day and this time the invitation was explicit for dr abeloid luis cabral and wife and daughter jacqueline the daughter jacqueline part had been underlined by the party's host not once not twice but three times abloy nearly fainted when he saw the damn thing slumped back at his desk his heart pushing up against his esophagus stared at the vellum square for almost a whole hour before folding it and placing it inside a shirt pocket the next morning he visited the host one of his neighbors the man was out in his crocodile staring barefootly as some of his servants were trying to get one of his stallions to stud when he saw abyloid his face darkened what the hell do you want from me the order came straight from the palacio when abalone walked back to his car he tried not to show that he was shaking once again he consulted with marcus and lydia he said nothing of the invitation to his wife not wanting to panic and by extension his daughter not wanting even to say the words in his own house where the last time he'd been somewhat rational this go around he was foreign raved like a madman waxed indignant to marcus for nearly an hour about the injustice about the hopelessness of it all an amazing amount of circumlocution because he never once directly named who it was he was complaining about alternated between impotent rage and pathetic self-pity in the end his friend had to cover the good doctor's mouth to get a word in edgewise but abaloid kept talking it's madness sheer madness i'm the father of my household i'm the one who says what goes what can you do mike is said with no little fatalism trujillo's the president and you're just a doctor if he wants your daughter at the party you can do nothing but obey but this isn't human when has this country ever been human aboloid you're the historian you of all people should know that lydia was even less compassionate she read the invite and swore a konyo under her breath and then she turned on him i warned you abaloyd didn't i tell you to send your daughter abroad while you had the chance she could have been with my family in cuba safe and sound but now you're hodido now he has his eye on you i know i know lydia but what should i do jesus abeloid she said tremulously what options are there this is trujillo you're talking about back home the portrait of trujillo which every good citizen had hanging in his house beamed down on him with insipid fibrous benevolence maybe if the doctor had immensely grabbed his daughters and his wife and smuggled them all abroad a boat in puerto plata or if he'd stolen with them across the border into haiti they might have had a chance the platano curtain was strong but it wasn't that strong but alas instead of making his move avaloid flooded and temporized and despaired he couldn't eat couldn't sleep pace the halls of their house all night long and all the weight he regained at these last months he immediately lost if you think about it maybe he should have heeded his daughter philosophy tarde ventibus osa every chance he got he spent with his daughters jackie who was her parents as golden child who already had memorized all the streets in the french quarter and who that year alone had been the object of not four not five but twelve may edge proposals all communicated to abalone and his wife of course jackie knowing nothing about it but still and plainly the jokester the believer who played the meanest piano in all of the shabayo and who was her big sister's ally in all things the sisters wondered about their father's sudden attentiveness are you on vacation pappy he shook his head sadly no i just like spending my time with you is all what's the matter with you his wife demanded but he refused to speak to her let me be muhair things got so bad with him that he even went to church a first for abeloid which might have been a really bad idea since everybody knew that the church at that time was in trujillo's pocket he attended confession almost every day and talked to the priest but he got nothing out of it except to pray and to hope and to light some [ __ ] stupid candles he was going through three bottles of whiskey a day his friends in mexico would have grabbed their rifles and taken into the interior at least that's what he thought they would have done but he was his father's son in more ways than he had cared to admit his father an educated man who had resisted sending a son to mexico but who had always played ball with trujillo when in 1937 the army had started murdering all the haitians his father had allowed them to use his horses and when he didn't get any of them back he didn't say nothing to trujillo just chalked it up as the cost of doing business abloyd kept drinking and kept fretting stop seeing lydia isolated himself in his study and eventually convinced himself that nothing would happen it was only a test told his wife and daughter to prepare for the party didn't mention it was a trujillo party made it seem like nothing was amiss hated himself to his koi for his mendacity but what else could he have done today venentibus osa it probably would have gone off without a hitch too but jackie was so excited since it was her first big party who's surprised that it became something of an event for her she went shopping for a dress with her mother got her hair done at the salon bought new shoes and was given a pair of pearl earrings by another of our female relatives sequoia helped her daughter with every aspect of the preparation no suspicions but about a week before the party she started having these terrible dreams she was in her old town which she'd grown up before her aunt adopted her and put her in nursing school before she discovered he had the gift of healing staring down that dusty foundrapani lined the road that everybody said led to the capital and in the heat ripple distance she could see a man approaching a distant figure who struck in her such dread that she woke up screaming ability leaping out of bed in panic the girls crying out in their rooms had that dream almost every damn night that final week a countdown clock on t-2 lydia urged abaloy to leave with her on a steamer bound for cuba she knew the captain he would hide them sword could be done we'll get your daughters afterwards i promise you i can't do that he said miss ripley i can't leave my family she returned to kaminohe they said not another word on the afternoon of the party as abalord was dolefully tending to the car he caught sight of his daughter in a dress standing in the salah hunched over another one of her french books looking absolutely divine absolutely young and right then he had one of those epiphanies us lit majors are always forced to talk about it didn't come in a burst of light or a new color or a sensation in his heart he just knew knew he just couldn't do it told his wife to forget about it said same to dary ignored their horrified protestations jumped in the car picked up marcus and headed to the party what about jacqueline marcus asked she's not coming marcus shook his head said nothing else reception line trujillo again paused before abaloid sniffed the air like a cat and your wife and daughter abaloid trembling but holding it together somehow already sensing how everything was going to change my apologies your excellency they could not attend his poison eyes narrowed so i see he said coldly and then dismissed abyloid with a flick of his wrist not even marcus would look at him chi stay apocalyptus not four weeks after the party dr abelard luis cabral was arrested by the secret police the charge slander and gerst colomny against the person of the president if the stories are to believe it all had to do with a joke one afternoon so the story goes shortly after the fateful party abeloid who we had better reveal was a short bearded heavyset man with surprising physical strength and curious close set ice drove into santiago in his old packard to buy a burger for his wife and of course to see his mistress he was still a mess and those who saw him that day would call his disheveled appearance his distraction the burger was successfully acquired and lashed half-hazardly to the roof of the automobile but before he could shoot over to lydia's crib abelard was buttonholed by some buddies on the street and invited for a few drinks at the club santiago who knows why he went maybe to try to keep up appearances but because every invitation felt like a life or death a failure that night at club santiago he tried to shake off his sense of imminent doom by talking vigorously about history medicine or aristophanes by getting very very drunk and when the knight wound down he asked the boys for assistance in relocating the birgo to the trunk of his packard he did not trust the valets he complained for they had stupid hands the muchacho had naturally agreed but while ability was fumbling with the keys to open the trunk he stated loudly i hope there aren't any bodies in here that he made the foregoing remark is not debated habloid conceded much in his confession this trunk joke in itself caused discomfort among the boys who were all too aware of the shadow that the packard automobile casts on dominican history it was the car in which trujillo had in his early years terrorized his first two elections away from the pueblo during the hurricane of 1931 the yefe's henchmen often drove their packards to the bonfires where the volunteers were burning the dead and out of their trunks they would pull out victims of the hurricane all of whom looked strangely dry and were often clutching opposition party materials the wind the henchmen would joke drove a bullet straight through the head of this one high high what followed is still to this day hopefully disputed there are those who swear on their mothers that when abaloid finally opened the trunk he poked his head inside and said nope nobody's here this is what abalone himself claimed to have said a poor joke certainly but not slander a gross colony in abloy's version of the events his friends laughed the bureau was secured and avi drove to a santiago apartment where lydia was waiting for him 42 and still lovely and still worried shitless about his daughter the court officers and their hidden witnesses however argued that something quite different had happened that when dr abelard louise cabral opened the trunk of our packard he said nope nobody's here trujillo must have cleaned them out for me end quote in my humble opinion it sounds like the most unlikely load of jiri ganza on the side of the sierra madre but one man's jiren garden sir is another man's life the fall he spent that night with lydia it had been a weird time for them not 10 days earlier lydia had announced that she was pregnant i'm going to have your son she crowed happily but two days later the sun proved to be a false alarm probably just some indigestion there was relief like he needed anything else on the plate and what if had been another daughter but also disappointment for abalone wouldn't have minded a little son even if the kaahito could have been a child of a mistress and born in his darkest hour he knew that lydia had been wanting something for some time now something real that she could claim was theirs and theirs alone she was forever telling him to leave his wife and move in with her and while that might have been attractive indeed while they were together in santiago the possibility vanished as soon as he set foot back in his house and his two beautiful daughters crushed him he was a predictable man and liked his predictable comforts but lydia never stopped trying to convince him in a low-intensity way that love was love and for that reason it should be obeyed she pretended to be sanguine over the non-appearance of their son why would i want to ruin these breasts she joked but he could tell she was disheartened he was too for the last few days abeloid had been having vague troubled dreams full of children crying at night and his father's first house left a disquieting stain on his walking hours without really thinking about it he'd not seen lydia since that night the news turned bad had gone out drinking in part i believe because he feared that the boy's non-birth might have broken them but instead he felt for her the old desire the one that nearly knocked him over the first time they met at his cousins emma carr's birthday when they both seemed so slender and young and so jam-packed with possibilities for once they did not talk about trujillo can you believe how long it's been he asked her in amazement during the last saturday night tryst i can believe it she said sadly pulling that the flesh of her stomach were clocks abolide nothing more abalone shook his head we're more than that we are marvels me a moy i wish i could stay in this moment wish i could extend ability's happy days but it's impossible the next week two atomic eyes opened over civilian centers in japan and even though no one knew it yet the world was then remade not two days after the atomic bomb scarred japan forever sukugo dreamed that the faceless man was standing over her husband's bed and she could not scream could not say anything and then the next night she dreamed that he was standing over her children too i've been dreaming she told her husband but he waved his hands dismissing she began to watch the road in front of their home and burn candles in a room in santiago abalot is kissing lydia's hand and she is signed with pleasure and already were heading for victory in the pacific and for three secret police officers in their shiny chevrolet winding up the road to ability's house already it's the fall abyloid in chains to say it was the greatest shock in abelord's life when officers from the secret police it's too early for the sim but we'll call them sim anyway placed him in cuffs and led him to their car would not be an overstatement if it wasn't for the fact that abalone was going to spend the next nine years receiving one of the greatest shock of his life with another please abella begged when he regained his tongue i must leave my wife a note manuel will attend to it essayemian numero uno explained motioning to the largest of the simians who was already glancing about the house abaloid's last glimpse of his home was of manuel rifling through his desk with a practice carelessness abalone had always imagined the sim to be filled with low lives and no reading reprobates but the two officers who locked him in their car were in fact polite less like sadistic toy triggers than vacuum cleaner salesmen simeon numero uno assured him on route that his difficulties were certain to be cleared up we've seen these cases before numago uno explained someone has spoken badly of you but they will quickly be revealed for the liars they are i should hope so abloy said half indignant half and terry is not in the business of imprisoning the innocent numero dos remained silent his suit was very shabby and both men abeloid modest reeked of whiskey he tried to remain calm fear as dune teaches us is the mind killer but he could not help himself he saw his daughters and his wife raped over and over again he saw his house on fire if he hadn't emptied his bladder right now before the pigs showed up he would have peed himself right there abelard was driven very quickly to santiago everyone he passed on the road made sure to look away at the sight of the vw bug and taken to the fertilizer san luis the sharp edge of a sphere had turned knife once they pulled inside that notorious place are you sure this is correct abalord was so frightened his voice quaked don't worry doctor numagodo said you are where you belong he'd been silent so long abalone had almost forgotten that he could speak now it was numero dos who was smiling and numero uno who focused his attention out the window once inside those stone walls the polite sm officer handed him over to a pair of not so polite guards who stripped him of his shoes his wallet his belt his wedding band and then sat him down in a cramped hot office to fill out some forms there was a pervasive smell of ripe ass in the air no officer reappeared to explain this case no one listened to his requests and when he began to raise his voice about his treatment the guard typing the forms leaned forward and punched him in the face as easily as you might reach over for a cigarette the man was wearing a ging and a toy open abyloid's lip something awful the pain was so sudden his disbelief so annoymous that ability actually asked through clutched fingers why the guard rocked him again hard carved a fugo in his forehead this is how we answer questions around here the guard said matter of factly bending down to be sure his form was properly aligned in the typewriter abalone began to sob the blood spilling out between his fingers which the typing guard just loved he called in his friends from the other offices look at this one look how much he likes to cry before avalon knew what was happening he was being shoved into a general holding cell that stank of malaria sweat and diarrhea and was crammed with unseemly representatives of what broker might have called the criminal class the guides then proceeded to inform the other prisoners that abalone was a homosexual and a communist that is untrue abeloid protested but who was going to listen to a gay communist over the next couple of hours abalone was her gasps lovely and most of his clothes were stripped from him one heavyset cebaenyo even demanded his underwear and when abaloyd coughed them up the man pulled them over his pants son mui komodos he announced to his friends abalord was forced to hunker naked near the [ __ ] pots if he tried to crawl near the dry areas the other prisoners would scream at him kaidete ahi con la and this was how he had to sleep amidst urine feces and flies and more than once he was awakened by someone tickling his lips with a dried turd preoccupation with sanitation was not high among the fotolizanos the deviants didn't allow him to eat either stealing his mingo allotted portions three days straight on the fourth day a one-armed pickpocket took pity on him and he was able to eat an entire banana without interruption even tried to chew up the fibrous peel he was so famished poor abaloid it was also on day four that someone from the outside world had finally paid him attention late in the evening when everybody else was asleep a detachment of guards dragged him into a smaller crudely lit cell he was strapped down not unkindly to a table from the moment he'd been grabbed he'd not stop speaking this is all a misunderstanding please i come from a very respectable family you have to communicate with my wife and my lawyers they will be able to clear this up i cannot believe that i've been treated so despicably i demand that the officer in charge hear my complaints he couldn't get the words out of his mouth fast enough it was until he noticed the electrical contraption that the guards were fiddling with in the corner that he felt quiet abyloid stared at it with a terrible jed and then because he suffered from an insatiable urge to taxonomize asked what in god's name do you call that we call it the pulpo one of the guards said they spent all night showing him how it worked it was three days before socorro could track down her husband another five days before she received permission from the capitol to visit the visiting room with sokoga awaited her husband seemed to have been fashioned from a latrine there was only one sputtering kerosene lamp and looked as though a number of people had taken mountainous shits in the corner an intentional humiliation that was lost on sakura she was too over got to notice after what felt like an hour again another senior would have protested but sakura boy the [ __ ] smell and the darkness and the no chair stoically abaloid was brought in handcuffed he'd been given an undersized shirt and an undersized pair of pants he was shuffling as though afraid that something in his hands or in his pockets might fall out only been inside a week but already he looked frightful his eyes were blackened his hands and neck covered in bruises and his torn lip had swollen monstrously was the color of the meat inside your eye the night before he had been interrogated by the gods and they had beaten him mercilessly with leather truncheons one of his testicles would be permanently shriveled from the blows poor socoga here was a woman whose lifelong preoccupation had been calamity her mother was mute her drunk father filtered away the family's middle class patrimony one teriya at a time until their holdings had been reduced to a shack and some chickens and the old man was forced to work other people's land condemned to a life of constant movement poor health and broken hands it was said that pasta corgo had never recovered from seeing his own father beaten to death by a neighbor who almost happened to be a sergeant in the police security's childhood had been about missed meals and cousin clothes about seeing her father three four times a year visits where he didn't talk to anybody just lay in his room drunk sakura became an anxious muchacha for a time she thinned her hair by pulling it was 17 when she caught abaloid's eye in a training hospital but didn't start menstruating until a year after they were married even as an adult sukhoga was in the habit of waking up in the middle of the night in terror convinced that the house was on fire would rush from room to room expecting to be greeted by a carnival of flame when abeloid read to her from his newspaper she took special interests in earthquakes and fires and floods and cattle stampedes and the sinking of ships she was the family's first catastrophist would have made corvair proud what had she been expecting while she fiddled with the buttons of her dress while she shifted the purse on her shoulder and tried not to unbalance her macy's hat a mess untoyo certainly but not a husband looking nearly destroyed you shuffled like an old man whose eyes shone with a sort of fear that is not easily shed it was worse than she and all her apocalyptic favorite had imagined it was the fall when she placed her hands on abaloid he began to cry very loudly very shamefully tears streamed down his face as he tried to tell her all that had happened to him it wasn't long after that visit that sakura realized that she was pregnant with abalord's third and final daughter zafa or fuku you tell me there would always be speculation at the most basic level did he say it did he not which is another way of asking did he have a hand in his own destruction even the family was divided la inca adamant that her cousin had said nothing it had all been a setup orchestrated by abella's enemies to strip the family of their wealth their properties and their businesses others were not so sure he probably had said something that night at the club and unfortunately for him he'd been overheard by the fa's agents no elaborate plot just drunken stupidity as for the carnage that followed casey yo just a lot of bad luck most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist they believed that not only did trujillo want abelord's daughter but when he couldn't snatch her out of spite he put a fuku on the family's ass which is why all the terrible [ __ ] that happened happened so which was it you ask an accident a conspiracy or a fuku the only answer i can give you is the least satisfying you'll have to decide for yourself what's certain is that nothing's certain we are trolling in silences here trujillo and company didn't leave a paper trail they didn't share their german contemporaries lust for documentation and it's not like the fuku itself would leave a memoir or anything the remaining girls ain't much help either on all matters related to abaloy's imprisonment and to the subsequent destruction of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations that sphinx is all attempts at narrative reconstruction a whisper here and there but nothing more which is to say if you're looking for a full story i don't have it oscar searched for it too in his last days and it's not certain whether he found it either let's be honest though the gap about the girl trujillo wanted is a pretty common one on the island as common as krill not that krill is too common on the island but you get the drift so common that maria vargas-lossa didn't have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out in the air there's one of these biako tales in almost everybody's hometown it's one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it all trujillo took your houses your properties but your pops and your mom's in jail well it was because he wanted to [ __ ] the beautiful daughter of the house and your family wouldn't let him [ __ ] really is perfect makes for plenty of fun reading but there's another less known variant of the abyloid vs trujillo narrative a secret history that claims that abloy didn't get in trouble because of his daughter's chulo or because of an imprudent joke this version contends that he got in trouble because of a book cue the theomen please sometime in 1944 so the story goes while abelord was still worried about whether he was in trouble with trujillo he started writing a book about what else trujillo by 1945 there was already a tradition of ex-officials writing tell-all books about the trujillo regime but that apparently was not the kind of book abalord was writing his [ __ ] if we had to believe the whispers was an expose of the supernatural roots of the trujillo regime a book about the dark powers of the president a book in which abello had argued that the tales the common people told about the president that he was supernatural that he was not human may in some ways have been true that it was possible that trujillo was if not in fact then in principle a creature from another world i only wish i could have read that thing i know oscar did too that [ __ ] would have been one wild [ __ ] guide alas the grimoire in question so the story goes when it's conveniently destroyed after abalord was arrested no copy survived not his wife or his grandchildren knew about its existence either only one of the servants who helped him collect the folk tales on the sly etc etc what can i tell you in santo domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow it was one of those fictions with a lot of disseminators but no believers oscar as you might imagine found this version of the fall very very attractive appealed to the deep structures in his noid brain mysterious books a supernatural or perhaps alien dictator who had installed himself on the first island of the new world and then cut it off from everything else who could send a curse to destroy his enemies that was some new age lovecraft [ __ ] the last final book of dr abalord luis cabral i'm sure that this is nothing more than a figment of our island's hyper-trophied voodoo imagination and nothing less the goal trujillo wanted might be trite as far as foundation myths go but at least it's something you can really believe in no something real strange though that when all was said and done trujillo never went after jackie even though he had abeloid in his grasp he was known to be unpredictable but still it's odd isn't it also strange that none of abelord's books not the four he authored or the hundreds he owned survive not in an archive not in a private collection not a one all of them either lost or destroyed every paper he had in his house was confiscated and reportedly burnt you want creepy not one single example of his handwriting remains i mean okay true here was thurgo but not one scrap of paper with his handwriting that was more than togo you gotta fear [ __ ] or what he's writing to do something like that but hey it's only a story with no solid evidence the kind of [ __ ] only a nerd could love the sentence no matter what you believe in february 1946 abellord was officially convicted of all charges and sentenced to 18 years 18 years gaunt abaloy dragged from the courtroom before he could say your word sicorgo immensely pregnant had to be restrained from attacking the judge maybe you'll ask why was there no outcry in the papers no actions among the civil rights groups no opposition parties rallying to the curse [ __ ] please there were no papers no civil rights groups no opposition parties there was only trujillo and talk about jurisprudence got one phone call from the palacio and promptly dropped the appeal it's better we say nothing he advised to kogo you'll live longer say nothing say everything it didn't matter it was the fall the 14-gram house in la vega the luxurious appointment in santiago the stables in which you could comfortably belay a dozen horses the two prosperous super masadas and the string of fingers vanished in the detonation were all confiscated by the chuhilado and ended up dispersed among the yefe and his minions two of whom had been out with abyloid the night he said the bad thing i could reveal their names but i believe you already know one of them he was a certain trusted neighbor but no disappearance was more total more ultimate than abalone's losing your house and all your properties that was part for the course which the truhiado but the arrest or if you're more into the fantastic that book precipitated an unprecedented downturn in the family fortune tripped at some cosmic level a lever against the family call it a whole lot of bad luck outstanding karmic debt or something else fuku whatever it was the [ __ ] started coming at the family something awful and there are some peoples who would say it's never ever stopped fallout the family claims the first sign was that abelord's third and final daughter given the light early on in her father's capsulation was born black and not just any kind of black but black black congo black shango black cali black zapote black gekka black and no amount of fancy dominican racial legendary maine was going to obscure the fact that's the kind of culture i belong to people took their child's black complexion as an ill omen you want a real first sign not two months after giving birth to the third and final daughter who was named apashya belicia cabral socorrogo perhaps blinded by her grief by her husband's disappearance by the fact that all her husband's family had begun avoiding them like well ifuku by postpartum depression stepped in front of a speeding ammunition truck and was dragged nearly to the front of la casa amoria before the driver realized something was wrong if he wasn't dead on impact she was certainly dead by the time they pried her body from the truck's axles it was the very worst kind of luck but what could be done with a dead mom and a dad in prison with the rest of the family scarce and i mean trujillo scarce the daughters had to be divided up among whoever would take them jackie got sent to a wealthy god parents in la capital while astrid ended up with relatives in san juan de bellam iguana they never saw each other or their father again even those among you who don't believe in fuku's or any kind might have wondered what in creation's name was going on shortly after sequoia's horrible accident esteban de gallo the family's number one servant was fatally stabbed outside a cabaret the attackers were never found literally appeared soon after some say of grief others of a cancer in their womanly parts her body was not found for months after all she lived alone in 1948 jackie the family's golden child was found drowned in a god parent's pool the pool that had been drained down to its last two feet of water up to that point she'd been unflaggingly cheerful the sort of talkative negra who could always have found a positive side to a mustard gas attack despite her traumas despite the circumstances around her segregation from her parents she disappointed no one exceeded all expectations she was number one in her class academically beating out even the private school children of the american colony so off the hook intelligent she made a habit of correcting a teacher's mistakes on exams she was captain of the debate team captain of the swim team and in tennis had no equal was [ __ ] golden but never got over the fall of a role in it was how people explained it though how odd it is that she was accepted to medical school in france three days before she killed herself and from all evidence couldn't wait to be gone from santa domingo her sister astrid we scarcely knew you babe wasn't much luckier in 1951 while playing in a church in san juan where she lived with a teos a stray bullet flew down from the aisle and struck her in the back of the head killing her instantly no one knew where the bullet had come from not even recalled hearing a weapon discharge of the original family quartet abalone lived the longest which is ironic since nearly everyone in a circle including la inca believed the government when they announced in 1953 that he was dead why did they do this because it was only after he died for real [ __ ] that it was revealed that he'd been in negrois prison for all along served 14 straight years in true years justice what a nightmare a thousand tells i could tell you about abalord's imprisonment a thousand tales to ring the salt from your [ __ ] eyes but i'm going to spare you the anguish the torture the loneliness and the sickness of those 14 wasted years spare you in fact the events and leave you with the only the consequences and you should wonder greatly if i've spared you of anything in 1960 at the height of the clandenstein resistance movement against trujillo abaloid underwent a particularly gruesome procedure he was manicled to a chair placed out in the scorching sun and then a wet rope was clenched cruelly about his forehead it was called la corona a simple but horribly effective torture at first the rope just grips your skull but the sun dries and tightens it the pain becomes unbearable would drive you mad among the prisoners of the trujillato few torturers were more feared since it neither killed you nor left you alive abloy survived it but it was never the same turned him into a vegetable the proud flame of his intellect extinguished for the rest of his short life he existed in an imbecilic stupor but they were prisoners who remembered moments when he seemed almost lucid when he would stand in the fields and stare at his hands and weep as if recalling that there was once a time when he had been more than this the other prisoners out of respect continued to call him a dog toy it was said he died a couple days before truhia was assassinated buried in an unmarked grave somewhere outside of neguwa oscar visited the site on his last days nothing to report looked like every other scrabby field in santo domingo he burned candles left flowers prayed and went back to his hotel the government was supposed to have erected a plaque out to the dead new guru or prison but they never did the third and final daru what about the third and final daughter apache belissia cabral who was only two months old when my mother died who never met her father who was held by your sisters only a few times before they too disappeared you spent no time inside casa atui who was the literal child of the apocalypse what about her she was not as easy to place as astrid or jackie she was a newborn after all and well the scuttlebutt around the family has it that as she was so dark no one on abaloid's side of the family would take her to make matters worse she was born bikini underweight sickly she had problems crying problems nursing and no one outside the family wanted the dark child to live i know it's taboo to make this accusation but i doubt that anybody inside the family wanted her to live either for a couple weeks it was touch and go and if it hadn't been for kindly dark-skinned woman named zoyla who gave her some of her own baby's breast milk and held her for days when she probably couldn't have made it by the end of her fourth month the baby seemed to be staging a comeback she was still bikini central but she was starting to put on weight and her crying which before had sounded like a murmur from the grave was growing more and more piercing zoyler who had become a guardian angel of sorts stroked the baby's modeled head and declared after six months mihita and yobi mas fuerte que lelis belly didn't have six months stability was not in our girls stars only change without any warning a group of securities distant relatives showed up and claimed the child tore her clean out of zoyla's arms the very same relative sergo had happily put behind her when she married i suspect these people hadn't actually intended to take care of the girl for any length of time were only doing it because they expected some monetary reward from the kapgals and when no loot was for the coming the fall was total the pluto's passed the goal onto some even more distant relatives on the outskirts of asuwa and here is where the trail gets funky these people in azeroth seem to be some real whack jobs what my mom called salvages after only a month of caring for the unhappy infant the moms of the family disappeared one afternoon with the baby and when she returned to the village the baby didn't she told her the seniors that the baby had died some people believed her belly after all had been ailing for a while the tiniest little negrita on the planet fugu but most folks figured that she had sold the gold to some other family by then as now the buying and selling of children common enough and that's exactly what happened like a character in one of oscar's fantasy books the orphan who may or may not have been the object of a supernatural vendetta was sold to complete strangers in another part of azeroa that's right she was sold became a creator of estovic lived anonymously among the poorest sectors on the island never knowing who a real people were and subsequently she was lost from sight for a long time the burning the next time she appears is in 1955 as a whisper in la inca's ear i think we should be very clear and very honest about la inca's disposition during the period we have been calling the fall despite some claims that she was living in exile in puerto rico during the fall la inca was in fact bani isolated from her family mourning the death of her husband three years earlier point of clarification for the conspiracy minded his death occurred before the fall so he was definitely not a victim of it those early years of her morning had been bad her hubby the only person she had ever loved who had ever really loved her and they'd been married only months before she passed she was lost in the wilderness of a grief so when word came down that her cousin abalone was in big trouble with trujillo la inca to her underlying shame did nothing she was in such pain what could she have done when news reached her of the death of sokogo and the dispersal of the daughters she still to her everlasting shame did nothing let the rest of the family figure it out it wasn't until she heard that both jackie and astrid had passed that she finally pulled herself out of her malaise long enough to realize that dead husband or no dead husband morning or no morning she had failed utterly in her responsibility toward her cousin who had always been kind to her and who had supported her marriage when the rest of the family did not this revelation both shamed and mortified la inca she got herself cleaned up and went looking for the third and final daughter but when she got to the family in azera that had bought the girl they showed her a little grave and that was it she had powerful suspicions about this evil family about the girl but since she wasn't a psychic or a csi there was nothing she could do she had to accept that the girls had perish and it was in part her fault one thing about that shame and that guilt it blew her out of her mourning she came back to life opened a string of bakeries dedicated herself to serving her customers every now and then would dream about the little negrita the last of her dead cousins seed hi tia the girl would say and la inca would wake up with a knot in a chest and then it was 1955 the year of the benefactor la inca's bakeries were kicking ass she had re-established herself as a presence in her town when one fine day she heard an astonishing tale it seems that little campesino girl living in outer azawa had tried to attend at the new google school the trujillado had built out there but her parents who weren't her parents didn't want her to attend the girl though was immensely stubborn and the parents who weren't her parents flipped when the girl kept skipping out on work to attend classes and in the ensuing brawl the poor muchachita got burned horribly the father who was not her father splashed a pan of hot oil on a naked back the burn nearly killing her in santa domingo good news might travel like thunder but bad news travels like light and the wildest part of the story rumor has it that this burned girl was a relative of la inca how could it be possible like inca demanded do you remember your cousin who was the doctor up in la vega the one who went to prison for saying the bad thing about trujillo well fulana who knows fulana who knows fulana said that little girl is his daughter for two days she didn't want to believe people were always starting rumors about everything in santa domingo didn't want to believe that the girl could have survived could be alive in outer azawa of all places for two nights she slept poorly had to medicate herself with mamawana and finally after dreaming of a dead husband and as to settle her own conscience at anything la inca asked her neighbors and number one donator carlos moyer the man who had once needed her dough before the running off and getting married to drive her to where the skull was supposed to live if she is my cousin's daughter i will know her by just looking at her she announced 24 hours later la inca returned with an impossibly tall and possibly skinny half dead belisia in tow la inca's mind firmly and permanently set against both campos and their inhabitants not only had these savages burned the goal they proceeded to punish her further by locking her in a chicken coop at night at first they hadn't wanted to bring her out she can't be her family she's a prieta but la inca insisted use the voice on them and when the girl emerged from the coop unable to bend her body because of the burn la inca stared into her wild furious eyes and had seen abyloid and sequoia staring back at her forget the black skin it was her the third and final daughter thought lost now found i am your real family la inca said forcefully i am here to save you and so in a heartbeat by a whisper where two lives irrevocably changed la inga installed belly in the same room in her house where her husband had once taken his naps and worked on his carvings filed the paperwork to give the girl an identity called in the doctors the girls burns were unbelievably savage 110 hit points minimum a monster glove of festering rumination extending from the back of her neck to the base of her spine a bomb crater a walled sky like those of a hibakusha as soon as she could wear real clothes again la inca dressed the girl and had her first real photo taken out in front of her house here she is apache belicia cabral the third and final daughter suspicious angry scowling uncommunicative a wound and hungering campesina but with an expression and posture they shouted in bold gothic letters defiant dark skinned but clearly her family's daughter of this there was no doubt already taller than jackie in my prime her eyes exactly the same color as those of her father she knew nothing about forget me not of those nine years end of the burning belly did not speak it seems that as soon as our days in outer azawa were over as soon as she reached bani that entire chapter of her life got slopped into those containers in which government stored nuclear waste triple sealed by industrial lasers and deposited in the dark uncharted trenches of her soul it says a lot about belly that for 40 years she never released word one about that period of her life not a madre not to her friends not to her lovers not to the gangster not to her husband and certainly not to her beloved children lola and oscar 40 years what little anyone knows about belly ozawa's days comes exclusively from what la inca heard the day she rescued balee from her so-called parents even today la inca rarely saying anything more than kazila akagon in fact i believe that barring a couple of key moments belly never thought about that life again embrace the amnesia that was so common throughout the islands five parts denial five parts negative hallucination embrace the power of the on tiles and from it forged herself anew sanctuary but enough what matters is that in bani in la inca's found sanctuary and in la inca the mother she never had taught the girl to read write dress eat behave normally la inca of finishing score on fast forward for here was a woman with a civilizing mission a woman driven by her own colossal feelings of guilt betrayal and failure and bully despite all that she'd endured or perhaps because of it turned out to be a most apt pupil took to la inca's civilizing procedures like a mongoose to chicken by the end of sanctuary's first year belly's rough lines had been kneaded out as she might have cursed more had more of a tempo her movements more aggressive and unrestrained had the merciless eyes of a falcon but she had the posture and speech and arrogance of uno muchacho respectably and when she wore long sleeves the scar was only visible on her neck the edge of a large ruination certainly but greatly reduced by the cut of the cloth this was the girl who would travel to the us in 1962 whom oscar and lola would never know la inca the only one to have seen belly at her beginnings when she finally slept fully dressed and screamed in the middle of the night you saw her before she constructed a better self one with victorian table manners and disgust of filth and poor people theirs as you might imagine was an odd relationship la inca never sought to discuss belly's time in azura would never refer to it oiled to the burning she pretended it didn't exist the same way she pretended that the poor slobs in her burrito didn't exist when they in fact were overrunning the place even when she greased the girls back every morning and every night la inca only said sientes say a qui senorita it was a silence a lack of probing that belly found most agreeable if only the waves of feeling that would occasionally lap her back could be so easily forgotten instead of talking about the burning or other azera la inca talked to belly about a lost forgotten past about her father the famous doctor about her mother the beautiful nurse about her sisters jackie and astrid and about that marvelous castle in the caballo casa hatuwei they may never have become best friends belly too furious like inca too correct but la inca did give belly the greatest of gifts which she could appreciate only much later one night la inca produced an old newspaper pointed to a photograph this she said is your father and your mother this she said is who you are the day they opened their clinic so young both of them looking so serious for belly those months truly were one of her and only sanctuary a world of safety she never thought possible she had clothes she had food she had time and la inca never ever yelled at her not for nothing and didn't let anybody else yell at her either before la inca enroller in colegio elga dentoy with the richie's belly attended the dusty fly infested public school with children 3 years younger than her made no friends she couldn't have imagined it any other way and for the first time in her life began to remember her dreams it was a luxury she never dare indulge in and in the beginning they seemed as powerful as storms she had the whole variety from flying to being lost and even dreamt about the burning how her father's face had turned blank at the moment he picked up the skillet in her dreams she was never scared would only shake her head you're gone she said no more 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 boyd and in their minds the children were calling her what they call her in the world variations on la prieta when belly sat down the teacher glanced over her scroll and said well done senorita cabrero she would never forget that day even when she became the queen of diaspora well done senorita cabral she would never forget she was 9 years 11 months it was the error of trujillo end of chapter 5 chapter 6 land of the lost 1992-1995 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 ocua and terminator 2. now that reagan and the evil empire had ridden off into never neverland 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 80s [ __ ] and he kicked around doing nada for almost 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 cleanse 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 ins mount 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 changed the same charge of gleeful sadism that he remembered from his youth still electrified the house and if he thought don bosco had been the morganic inferno when he was young try now that he was older in teaching english and history jesus santa maria a nightmare he wasn't great at teaching his heart wasn't in it the boys of all the grades and dispositions [ __ ] 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 fought mercilessly the students he knew laughed as much at his embarrassment as the image they had of him crushing down some hapless goal they drew cartoons of said crushings and oscar found these on the floor after crass 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 feminine the gay and in every one of these clashes he saw himself in the old days it had been the white kids who had been the chief toy mentors but now it was the 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 were not alone you know in the 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 sign ups 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 listen to the roy of receding footsteps in the halls the occasional shout of beam me up and na nu nanu outside his story then after 30 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 29 year old alternate latina named natalie yes she reminded him of jenny minus the outrageous pulchritude minus the smaller natalie had spent four years in a mental hospital nerves she had and was an avowed wiccan her boyfriend stan the can whom she'd met in the nut house our honeymoon worked as an ems technician and natalie told oscar that the body stand the can saw splattered on the street turned him on for some reason stan he said sounds like a very curious individual you can say that again natalie sighed despite natalie's homelessness and the medicated fog she inhibited oscar entertained some pretty strange hailed lotto 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 the kitchen only in an apron while she remained fully clothed from there it only got weirdly at the end of his first year natalie who used to sneak whiskey during breaks who introduced him to sandman and eight ball and who borrowed a lot of money from him and never paid her back transferred to widgwood 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 heroes world the fantasy novels at walden books the nerd circuit stared at the toothpick thin black girl who worked at the friendlies whom he was in love with but with whom he would never speak al and migs hadn't chilled with them in a long time they 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 magitsa he didn't see no more either heard she'd married a cuban dude lived in t-neck had a kid and everything an ogre nobody knew exactly kumar had it she tried to rob the local safeway dana plato's style hadn't bothered toyo 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 50. no girls who loved him no girls anywhere in his life not a one at least at gutkas there had 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 crosstown bus even told him to stop thinking about it i know what you're up to she hissed so stop it i'm the permanent bachelor he wrote in a letter to her sister he would abandon 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 eyes who wrote there is in me the home life didn't kill him but didn't sustain him either his mom's dinner quieter less afflicted by the craziness of her youth still the white golem still allowed her peruvian borders to pack as many relatives as they wanted into the first floors and theo gudolfo vofo to his friends had relapsed to some of his hard pre-prison habits he was on the caballo again broke into lightning sweats at dinner had moved into lola's room and now oscar got to listen to him chicken boning his stripper girlfriends almost every single night tio he yelled out at once less bass on the headboard if you will on the walls of his room teogue dolfo hung pictures of his first years in the bronx when he'd been 16 and wailing all the fly willie colon pimped [ __ ] before he'd gone off to vietnam only dominican he exclaimed in the whole damned armed voices and there were pictures of oscar's mom and dad young taken in the two years of their relationship you loved him he said to her she laughed don't talk about what you know nothing about on the outside oscar simply looked tired no tally no fatter only the skin under his eyes pouched from years of quiet desperation had changed inside he was in a wall of hurt he saw black flashes before his eyes he saw himself falling through the aoe he knew what he was turning into he was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet an old bitter dork saw himself at the game groom picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life he didn't want this future but he couldn't see how it could be avoided couldn't figure his way out of it fuku the darkness some mornings he would wake up and not be able to get out of bed like he had a 10 ton weight on his chest like he was under acceleration voices would have been funny if it didn't hurt his head so had dreams that he was wandering around the evil planet gordo searching for parts for his crashed rocket ship but all he encountered were burned out ruins each seething with new debilitating forms of radiation i don't know what's wrong with me he said to his sister over the phone i think the word is crisis but every time i open my eyes all i see is meltdown this was when he threw students out of class for breathing when he would tell his mother to [ __ ] off when he couldn't write a word when he went into his tio's closet and put the cult up to his temple when he thought about the train bridge the days he lay in bed and thought about his mother fixing him the plate the rest of his life what he heard her say to his t.o the other day when she thought he wasn't around i don't care i'm happy he's here afterward when he no longer felt like a whipped dog inside when he could pick up a pen without wanting to cry he would suffer from overwhelming feelings of guilt he would apologize to his mother if there's a goodness part of my brain it's like somebody have absconded with it it's okay here she said he would take the car and visit lola after a year in brooklyn she was now in washington heights was letting her hair grow had been pregnant once a real moment of excitement but she aborted it because i was cheating on her with some girl i have returned he announced when he stepped in the door she told him it was okay too would cook for him and he'd sit with her and smoke her weed tentatively and not understand why he couldn't sustain his feeling of love in his heart forever he began to plan a quartet of science fiction fantasies that would be his crowning achievement j.r.r tolkien meets ee doc smith he went on long rides he drove as far away as amish country would eat alone at a roadside diner eye the amish girls imagine himself in a preacher's suit sleep in the back of the car and then drive home sometimes at night he dreamed about the mongoose 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 flinched from the game all the performance just straight unadorned mechanics how the [ __ ] kids love that [ __ ] 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 11 year old punk and found himself not really caring first sign that his age was coming to a close when the latest notary was no longer compelling when he preferred the old to the new oscar takes a vacation when oscar had been at don bosco nearly three years his mom's asked him what plans he had for the summer the last couple of years his tio had been spending the better part of july and august in santo domingo and this year his mom had decided it was time to go with i have not seen my madre in a long long time she said quietly i have many premises to fulfill so better now than when i'm dead oscar hadn't been home in years not since his abuela's number one servant better getting for months and convinced that the border was about to be re-invaded had screamed out haitians and then died and they'd all gone to the funeral it's strange if he said no it would probably still be okay if you call it being fukud you'd beam bond misery okay but this ain't no marvel comics what if speculation will have to wait time as they say is growing short that may oscar was for once in better spirits a couple of months earlier after a particularly nasty bout with the darkness he'd started another one of his diets and combined it with long lumbering walks around the neighborhood and guess what the [ __ ] stuck with it and lost close to 20 pounds i'm a lager he'd finally repaired his ion drive the evil planet gordo was pulling him back but his 50 style rocket the hijo de sacrificio wouldn't quit behold our cosmic exploit eyes wide lash into his acceleration couch hand over his mutant height he wasn't svelte by any stretch of the imagination but he wasn't joseph conrad's wife no moy either earlier in the month he'd even spoken to a bespectacled black girl on a bus said so you're into photosynthesis and she actually lowered her issue of cell and said yes i am so what if he hadn't ever gotten past earth sciences or if he hadn't been able to convert that slight communication into a number or a date so what if he'd gotten off at the next stop and she hadn't as he had hoped homeboy was for the first time in 10 years feeling resurgent nothing seemed to bother him not as students not the fact that pbs had cancelled doctor who not his loneliness not his endless flow of rejection letters he felt insufferable and santa domingo summers well santa domingo somewheres have their own particular alley even for one as nerdy as oscar every summer santa domingo slaps the diaspora engine into reverse yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can necks and luggage carousels grown under the accumulated weight of the year's cadenas and parquetas and pilots fear for their planes overburdened beyond belief and for themselves restaurants bars clubs theaters malaconas beaches resorts hotels motels extra rooms boguillos colonias campos ingenios swarm with quicuanos from the world over like someone had sounded a general reverse evacuation order back home everybody back home from washington heights to goma from prith amboy to tokyo from brierport to amsterdam from lawrence to san juan this is when basic thermodynamic principle gets modified so that reality can now reflect a final aspect the picking up of big-ass girls and the taking of said to motelis it's one big party one big party for everybody but the poi the dyke the jobless the sick the haitian the children the pad tastes the kids that certain canadian american german and italian toys love to rape yes so nothing like a santa demeanor summer and so for the first time in the years oscar said my eldest spirits have been talking to me ma i think i might accompany you he was imagining himself in the middle of all that ass getting imagine himself in love with an island girl a brother can't be wrong forever can he so abrupt a change in policy was this that even lola quizzed him about it you never go to santa dominico he shrugged i guess i want to try something new the condensed notebook of a return to a native land family daily on flew down to the island on the 15th of june oscar scared shitless and excited but no one was funnier than their mother who'd got done up like she was having an audience with king juan carlos of spain himself if she'd own a fur she would have won it anything to communicate the distance she traveled to emphasize how not like the rest of these dominicanas she was oscar for one had never seen her looking so dolled up in elegante or acting so compogona belisia giving everybody a hard time from the check-in people to the flight attendants and when they settled into their seats in first class she was paying she looked around as if scandalized these are not gentle decaled it was also reported that oscar drooled on himself and didn't wake up for the meal or the movie only when the plane touched down and everybody clapped what's going on he demanded alarmed relax mister that just means we made it the beat you down heat was the same and so was the fikan tropical smell that he had never forgotten that to him was more evocative than any madeleine and likewise the air pollution and the thousands of mottos and cars and dilapidated trucks on the roads and the clusters of peddlers at every traffic light so dark he noticed and his mother said dismissively mondito hitianos and people walking languidly with nothing to shade from the sun and the buses that charged past so overflowing with passengers that from the outside they looked like they were making a rush delivery of spare limbs to some far-off war and the general ruination of so many of the buildings as if santa domingo was the place that crumbled crippled concrete shells came to die and the hunger on some of the kids faces can't forget that but it also seemed in many places like a whole new country was materializing atop the ruins of the old one there were now better goads and nicer vehicles and brand new luxury air-conditioned buses plying the longer routes to the caballo and beyond the u.s fast food restaurants dunkin donuts and burger king and local ones whose names and logos he did not recognize poyos victorina and l provocon number four and traffic lights everywhere that nobody seemed to heed biggest change of all a few years back la inca had moved her entire operation to la capital were getting too big for bonnie and now the family had a new house in mirador norte and six bakeries throughout the city's outer zones capitalenos his cousin pedro pablo who had picked them up at the airport announced proudly la inca 2 had changed since oscar's last visit she had always seemed ageless family's very own galadriel but now he could see that it wasn't true nearly all her hair had turned white and despite her severe unbent carriage her skin was finally cross hatched with wrinkles and she had to put on glasses to read anything she was still spy and proud and when she saw him first time in nearly seven years she put her hands on her shoulders and said mijo you have finally returned to us hi abuela and then awkwardly then decion nothing more moving though than la inca and his mother at first saying nothing and then his mother covering her face and breaking down saying in this little girl voice maje i'm home and then the both of them holding each other and crying and lola joining them in oscar not knowing what to do so he joined his cousin pedro pablo he was shuttling all the luggage from the van to the patio to actress it really was astonishing how much he'd forgotten about the dui the little lizards that were everywhere and the roosters in the morning followed shortly by the cries of the platineris and of the barcala guy and his tia carlos moyer who smashed him up that first night with shots of google and who got all misty at the memories he'd had of him and his sister but what he had forgotten most of all was how incredibly beautiful dominican women were duh lola said on the guides he took those first couple of days he almost threw his neck out i'm in heaven he wrote in his journal heaven his cousin pedro pablo sucked his teeth with exaggerated disdain esto aqui evidence of a brother's past in the pictures lola brought home there are shots of oscar in the back of the house reading octavio butler shots of oscar on the malik zone with a bottle of presidente in his hand shots of oscar at the columbus lighthouse where half of villa duarte used to stand shots of oscar with pedro pablo in vila juana buying spark plugs shots of oscar trying on a hat on the con day shots of oscar standing next to a burger in barney shots of oscar next to a sister she in a string bikini that could have blown your corneas out you can tell he's trying too he's smiling a lot despite the bafflement in his eyes he's also you might notice not wailing his fat guy coat oscar goes native after his initial homecoming week after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called who asked sky by everybody that was his dominican name something else he'd forgotten after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-time immigrants carry inside themselves the whisper that says you do not belong after he'd gone to about 50 clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa mugen oy bakata had sat and drunk presidentes while lola and his cousins burnt holes in the floor after he explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separating from his sisters at birth after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own guiding after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin pedro pablo to pick him up after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe after his mother took them all to dinner in the zona colonia and the waiters kept looking at their party ask ants watch out mom lola said they probably think you're haitian haitiana aqui aries too me a moy she retorted after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny after his sister had said you think that's bad you should see the bates after he'd spent a day in bani the camp or la inca had been raised and he'd taken a dump in the latrine and wiped his ass with a coin cop now that's entertainment he wrote in his journal after he'd gotten someone used to the surreal whirlwind gig that was life in la capital the guangas the cops the mind-bargaining poverty the dunkin donuts the beggars the haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections the mind-boggling poverty the [ __ ] tourists hogging up all the beaches the zika del silva novellas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that lola and his female cousins were cracked on the afternoon walks on the con day the mind boggling poverty the snore go of streets and gusting zinc shacks that were barrios popularis the masses of [ __ ] he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their broke down shotguns the music though gonchi jokes heard on the streets the mind-boggling poverty being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers the music the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth the signs that banned donkey kards from the same tunnels after he'd gone to boca chica in villamella hadn't eaten so much chicharrones he had to throw up on the side of the road now that his tiago dolpho said is entertainment after his tear carlos moyer braided him for having stayed away so long after his abuela brigaded him for having stayed away so long after his cousins brigaded him for having stayed away so long he saw again the unforgettable beauty of the czech bio after he heard the stories about his mother after he stopped marveling at the amount of political propaganda plastered up on every spare wall madrones his mother announced one and all after the touched in the head tio who'd been tortured during bellagua's reign came over and got into a heated political argument with carlos moyer after which they both got drunk after he'd caught his first sunburn in boca chica after he'd swum in the caribbean after tio gudolfo had gotten him blasted on mama juana de marisco after he'd seen his first haitians kicked off a gawaga because [ __ ] claimed they smelled after he nearly got nuts over the ballets he saw after he helped his mother install two new air conditioners and crushed his fingers so bad he had dark blood under the nail after all the gifts they brought had been properly distributed after lola introduced him to the boyfriend she dated as a teenager now a capitaleno as well after he'd seen the pictures of lola in a private school uniform a tall muchacho with heartbreak eyes after he brought his flowers to his abuela's number one servant's grave who had taken care of him when he was little after he had diarrhea so bad his mouth watered before each detonation after he visited all the rinky dink museums in the capital with his sister after he stopped being dismayed that everybody called him gordo and worse gringo after he'd been overcharged for almost everything he wanted to buy afterlife inca prayed over him nearly every morning after he caught a cold because his abuela set the air conditioner in his room so high he decided suddenly and without warning to stay on the island for the rest of the summer with his mother and his tio not to go home with lola it was the decision that came to him one night on the malazone while staring out over the ocean what do i have waiting for me in patterson he wanted to know he wasn't teaching that some way and he had all his notebooks with him sounds like a good idea to me his sister said you need some time in the patriarch maybe you'll even find yourself a nice campesina it felt like the right thing to do helped clear his head and his heart of the gloom that had filled them these months his mother was less hot on the idea but la inca waved her into silence here you can stay here all your life though he found it strange that she made him put on a crucifix immediately thereafter so after lola flew back to the states take good care of yourself mister and the taylor and joy of his return had subsided after he settled down in abuela's house the house that diaspora had built and tried to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his summer now that lola was gone after his fantasy of an island girlfriend seemed like a distant joke who the [ __ ] had he been kidding he couldn't dance he didn't have loot he didn't dress he wasn't confident he wasn't handsome he wasn't from europe he wasn't [ __ ] no island school after he spent one week riding and ironically enough turned down his male cousin's offer to take him to a whorehouse like 50 times oscar fell in love with a semi-retired puta her name was yabon pimento oscar considered her the start of his real life she lived two houses over and like the de leons was a newcomer to morgan deute oscar's mom had bought their house with double shifts at her two jobs yaban bought hers with double shifts too but in a window in amsterdam she was one of those golden mulattas that french-speaking caribbeans call champagnes that my boys called chicas de orgo she had snorled apocalyptic hair copper eyes and was one white-skinned relative away from the yabba at first oscar thought she was only a visitor this tiny slightly punchy babe who was always high-heeling it out to her pathfinder she didn't have the nuevo mundo wannabe american look of the majority of his neighbors the two times oscar bumped into her during breaks in his riding he would go for walks along the hot bland cul-de-sacs or sit at the local cafe she smiled at him and the third time they saw each other here folks is where the miracle begins she sat at his table and said what are you reading at first he didn't know what was happening and then realized holy [ __ ] a female was talking to him it was an unprecedented change in fortune as though his threadbare scheme of deity had accidentally gotten tangled with that of a doper more fortunate brother turned out your bond knew his abuela gave her guides whenever carlos moya was out making deliveries you're the boy in the pictures she said with a sly smile i was little he said defensively and besides that was before the war changed me she didn't laugh that's probably what it is well i have to go on went the shades up went the ass and out went to bellezza oscar's erection following her like a dowser's wand yvonne had attended the uasd a long time ago but she was no college girl she had lines around her eyes and seemed to oscar at least mad open mad worldly had the sort of intense zipper gravity that hot middle-aged women exude effortlessly the next time he ran into her front of the house he had watched for her she said good morning mr de leon in english how are you i'm well he said and you she beamed i'm well thank you he didn't know what to do with his hands so he laced them behind his back like a gloomy person and for a minute there was nothing and she was unlocking her gate and he said desperately it is very hot i see she said and i thought it was just my menopause and then looking over her shoulder at him curious perhaps at a strange character who was trying not to look at her at all or recognizing how in crush he was with her and feeling charitable she said come inside i'll give you a drink the casa near empty his abuela's crib was spare but this was on some next [ __ ] haven't had the time to move in yet she said offhandedly and because there wasn't any furniture besides a kitchen table a chair a burrow a bed and a tv they had to sit on the bed oscar peeped the astrology books under the bed and the collection of paolo cuello's she followed his gaze and said with a smile paula coelho saved my life she gave him a boy had a double scotch then for the next six hours we gailed him with tails for my life you could tell she hadn't had anyone to talk to in a long time oscar had used to nodding and trying to laugh when she laughed the whole time he was sweating bullets wondering if this is when he should try something it wasn't until midway through their chat that it hit oscar that the job you bond talked so vulnerably about was prostitution it was holy [ __ ] the sequel even though putas were one of santa domingo's premier exploits oscar had never been in a prostitute's house in his entire life staring out her bedroom window he saw his abuela in her front lawn looking for him he wanted to raise the window and to call to it but your bond didn't allow for any interruptions your bond was an odd odd bird she might have been talkative the sort of easy-going woman a brother can relax around but there was something slightly detached about her too as though oscar's words hanau she was some mogooned alien princess who existed partially in another dimension the sort of woman who cool as she was slips out of your head a little too quickly as though she relished the short bursts of attention she provoked for men but not anything sustained she didn't seem to mind being the girl you called every couple of months at 11 at night just to see what she was up to as much relationships as she could handle reminds me of the more vivid plants we played with as kids except in reverse her jedi mind tricks did not however work on oscar when it came to girls the brother had a mind like a yogi he latched on and stayed latched by the time he left her house that night and walked home through the island's million attack mosquitoes he was lost did it matter that your bond started mixing italian in with her spanish after her fourth drink or that she almost fell flat on her face when she showed him out of course not he was in love his mother and his abuela met him at the door excuse the stereotype but both had their hairs in rollers and couldn't believe his sinvergu and chair do you know that woman's are putter do you know she bought that house truliando for a moment he was overwhelmed by their rage and then he found his footing and shot back do you know her aunt was a judge do you know her father worked for the phone company you want a woman i'll get you a good woman his mother said peeing angrily out the window but that puta's only going to take your money i don't need your help and she ain't a puta la inca laid one of her looks of incredible power on him here obey your mother for a moment he almost did both women focusing all their energies on him and then he tasted the beer on his lips and shook his head is teogudofo who was watching the game on tv took that moment to call out in his best grandpa simpson voice prostitutes ruined my life more miracles the next morning oscar woke up and despite the tremendous tidings in his height despite the fact that he wanted to run over to yubon's house and shackle himself to her bed he didn't he knew he had to koigulokan take it easy he knew he had to reign in his lunatic heart or he would blow it whatever it was of course the [ __ ] was entertaining mad fantasies in his head what do you expect he was a not so fat fat boy who never kissed to go never even laying in bed with one and now the world was waving a beautiful puta under his nose yapon he was sure was the higher power's last ditch attempt to put him back on the proper path of dominican maltitude if he blew this well he was back to playing villains and vigilantes for him this is it he told himself his chance to win he decided to play the oldest card in the deck the wait so for one whole day he moped again the house tried to write but couldn't watched a comedy show where black dominicans in grass skirts put white dominicans in safari outfits onto cannibal cook pots and everybody wondered aloud where the biscocho was scary by noon he had driven delores the 38 year old heavily scarred muchacha who cooked and cleaned for the family up a wall the next day at one he pulled on a clean chakabana and strolled over to her house well he sort of trotted a red jeep was parked outside nose to nose with her pathfinder a pulisia nacional plate he stood in front of a gate while the sun stomped down on him felt like a stooge of course she was married of course she had boyfriends his optimism that swollen red giant collapsed down to an obligating point of gloom from which there was no escape didn't stop him coming back the next day but no one was home and by the time he saw her again three days later he was starting to think that she had wiped back to whatever foreign world had spawned her where were you he said try not to sound as miserable as he felt i thought maybe you fell in the tub or something she smiled and gave her ass a little shiver i was making the patriarchy a strong miami he had caught her in front of the tv doing aerobics in a pair of sweatpants and what might have been described as a halter top it was hard for him not to stare at her body when she first let him in she'd screamed come in come in a note from your author i know what knee girls are going to say look he's riding suburban tropical now a puta and she's not an underage short addicted mess not believable should i go down to the failure and pick me up a more representative model would it be better if i turned your barn into this other puta i know yaria a friend and a neighbor in villauana who still lives in those old style pink wooden houses with the zinc roof your quintessential caribbean poota half cute half not who'd left home at the age of fifteen and lived in curacao madrid amsterdam and gome who also has two kids who'd gotten from an enormous breast job when she was 16 in madrid bigger almost than luba from love and rockets but not as big as belly who claimed proudly that apogato had paved half the streets in her mother's hometown would it be better if i had oscar meet your bond at the world famous lava cargo where your horror works six days a week where a brother can get his head and his fenders polished while he waits talk about convenience would this be better yes but then i'd be lying i know i've thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix but this is supposed to be a true account of the brief wondrous life of oscar well can't we believe that your bond can exist and that a brother like oscar might be due a little luck after 23 years this is your chance if blue pill continue if red pill returned to the matrix to go from sambana iglesia in their photos your bond looks young it's a 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 tata here i am take it or leave it she's just young too but she was a solid 36 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 16 a body like this is free when you're 40 it's a full time occupation the third time oscar came over your bond doubled up on the scotches again and then took down her photo albums for the closet and showed him all the pictures of herself when she'd been 16 17 18. always on a beach always in an early 80s bikini always with big hair always smiling always with her arms around some middle-aged 80s yakub looking at those old hailey 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 yvonne puta's progress through italy portugal and spain i was so beautiful in those days she said wistfully it was true a smile could have put out a son but oscar didn't think she was any less fine now the slight declensions in her appearances only seemed to add to her lustre the last bright before the fade and he told herself you're so sweet miami she knocked back another double and grasped what's your sign how lovesick he became he stopped riding 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 height had swung open and he felt light on his feet he felt weightless he felt life his abuela steady gave him [ __ ] told him that not even god loves a puta yeah his t.o left but everybody knows that god loves a pluto his tio seemed thrilled that he no longer had a pogaho for a nephew i can't believe it he said proudly a payama was finally a man he put oscar's neck in the new jersey state police patented [ __ ] killer luck when did it happen i want to play that date as soon as i get home here we go again oscar and your barn at a house oscar and you're blind at the movies oscar any born at the beach ubon talked voluminously and oscar slipped some words in too ibon told him about her two sons sterling and perfecto who lived with her 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 me roll my eyes but oscar brought it hook line and cinco she told him about the two abortions she 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 taught him of a trip she'd taken to berlin in the company of a rebuilt brazilian [ __ ] 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 a dominican boyfriend the capitan and her foreign boyfriends the italian the german and the canadian the three banditos 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 zerza i hear they love toys and she laughed and told her to play nice he in turn talked about the one time he and his dwight 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 ebon 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'd 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 poet pushed to the foy and she became very cold and uncommunicative when she had called him an idiot americana for spilling his beer on these days she opened her door and threw herself in bed and didn't do anything hard to be a gaundre 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 afterwards 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 a head in his lap and talk to him sometimes in italian sometimes in spanish sometimes about the beatings the woman 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 what aya cemetero pours to oyos ibon 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 came back it was a hard at first once you've been a fuerago 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 pathfinders did he ever put his hands on a super shot 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 tango that was her hair while she sucked him off did they ever [ __ ] 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 caught him in the bathroom staring at a soapstone what the hell is this peculiar mineral he said it seemed to oscar that he was one of a few real friends outside the boyfriends foreign and domestic outsider psychiatrist's sister in san cristobal and her alien 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 rocket ship the heel does safa kisio was up and off but that it was heading for the ana oybugon baillio at the speed of light oscar at the rubicon at the beginning of august iban started mentioning her boyfriend the capitan a lot more seems he'd heard about oscar and wanted to meet him he's really jealous he bonds that rather weakly just have him meet me oscar said i make all boyfriends feel better about themselves i don't know iban 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 on my mind a jealous third world cup boyfriend maybe we shouldn't spend so much time together any other [ __ ] would have pulled a scooby-doo double take who would have thought twice about staying in santa domingo another day hearing the capitan 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 this overly air-conditioned room and realized with unusual clarity that he was heading down that road again the girl where he became so nuts over a girl he stopped thinking the world where very bad things happened you should stop right now he told himself but he knew with the lapid daily clarity that he wasn't going to stop he loved ibon and love for this kid was a geese something that could not be shaken or denied that night before she'd been so drunk that he had to help her in the 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 guiding out her clothes didn't care that he was there he tried not to look until she was under the 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 laid down next to her on top of the sheets didn't walk home until i was starting to get lights out he'd seen her beautiful chest and knew nothing 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 teo examining the front door what's the matter his tio 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 engaged [ __ ] dominicans probably host 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 the 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 rebonds they were supposed to be going to the duarte that day oscar gets beat in the middle of august oscar finally met the capitan but he also got his first kiss ever so you could say that day changed his life iban had passed out again after giving him a long speech about how they had to give each other space which she'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 carbs up ahead let clive's pass and then ask oscar to please step out of the vehicle it's not my truck he explained it's hers he pointed to the sleeping irban we understand if you could pull over for a second he did so a little worried but right then ebon sat up and stared at him with her light eyes do you know what i want oscar i am he said was too afraid to ask i want she said moving into position unbeso and before he could say anything she was on him the first fear of a woman's body pressing against yours who among us can ever forget that and what that first real kiss well to be honest i've gotten both of these first but oscar never would for a second he was in disbelief this is it this is really it her lips plush and pliant her tongue pushing into his mouth and then there were lights all around them and he thought i'm going to transcend transcendence is mine but then he realized that the two plain clothes 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 guerilla god for simplicity's sake were blaming their flashlights into the car and who was standing behind them looking into the scene inside the car with an expression of sheer murder why the capitan of course it bond's boyfriend grad and grundy yanked him out of the car and did your barn fight to keep him in her arms did she protest the rude interruption of their making out of course not home girl just passed out right again the capitan a skinny 40-something yabbayo standing near his spotless red jeep dressed nice in slacks and a crisply pressed white button down his shoes bright as scalabs one of those tall arrogant acrobilically handsome [ __ ] that most of the planets feel inferior to also one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away he'd been young during the trikiardo so he never got the chance to a gun with some real power wasn't until the north american invasion that he earned his stripes like my father he supported the us 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 balague shooting at syndiciatos from the back seats of course burning down organizers homes smashing in people's faces with crowbars the 12 years were good times for men like him in 1974 he held an old woman's head underwater until she died she tried to organize some peasants for land rights in san juan in 1977 he played mazeltov on a 15-year-old boy's throat with the heel of his flourishing another communist troublemaker good [ __ ] riddance i know this guy well he was family in queens and every christmas he brings his cousin bottles of johnny walker black his friends call him fito and when he was young he wanted to be a lawyer but then the kali scene had pulled him from and forgot about all that lawyering business so you're the new yorker when oscar saw the captain's eyes he knew he was in deep [ __ ] the capitan 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 grew straight out of him i didn't do anything oscar quailed then he blurted out i'm an american citizen the capitan 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 brought mine in miami google of god said not me solomon gundy lamented i only have my residency please you have to believe me i didn't do anything the capitan smiled [ __ ] even had first world teeth do you know who i am oscar nodded he was inexperienced but he wasn't dumb you're your bond's ex-boyfriend i'm not an ex-novio you muldito paraguayo the capitan screamed the cords in his neck standing out like a crick of fulsy drawing she said you were her ex oscar insisted the capitan grabbed him by the throat that's what she said he whimpered oscar was lucky if he had looked like my panna 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 une maldito paraguayo who had never had no luck in his life the capitan took golem 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 down out of him so bad he honestly thought he was going to die of asphyxiation the capitan's face appeared over his if you ever touch my mujere again i am going to kill you paraguayo and oscar managed to whisper you're the ex before i messed serious gundy and god picked him up with some difficulty squeezed him back into their camry and drove off oscar's last sight of your bond the capitan dragging her out of the pathfinder cabin by her hair he tried to jump out of the car but gorilla god elbowed him so hard that all the fight jumped clean out of him night time in santa 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 good turn oscar's so bewildered and frightened he pissed himself didn't you go 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 guide there oscar tried to find his voice but he couldn't he was too shook in situations like these he had always assumed a secret hero would emerge and snap necks a lot 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 a bond at the funeral in a neatly see-through black sheath but couldn't saw his mother in la inca at the gravesite didn't we tell you didn't we tell you watched santa 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 keep it down grundy said but oscar couldn't stop even when he put his hands in his mouth they drove for a long time and then finally abruptly they stopped at the cain's field masseurs grodd and grundy pulled oscar out of the car they opened the trunk but the batteries were dead in the flashlight so they had to drive back to a kamado buy the batteries and then drive back while they argued with a kamado owner about prices oscar thought about escaping thought about jumping out of the car and running down the street screaming but he couldn't do it fear is the mind killer he chanted in his head but he couldn't force himself to act they had guns he stared out into the night hoping that maybe there would be some u.s marines out for a stroll but there was only a lone man sitting in his rocking chair out in front of his ruined house and for a moment oscar could have sworn the dude had no face but then the killers got back into the car and drove their flashlight newly activated they walked him into the cane never had he heard anything so loud and alien the surrogation the crackling the flash's emotion underfoot snake mongoose overhead even the stars all of them gathered in vainglorious congress and yet this world seemed strangely familiar to him he had the overwhelming feeling that he'd been in this very place a long time ago it was worse than deja vu but before he could focus on it the moment slipped away drowned by his fear and then the two men told him to stop and turn around we have something to give you they said amiably which brought oscar back to the real please he shrieked don't but instead of the muzzle flash and the eternal dark god struck him once hard in the head with a butt of his pistol for a second the pain broke the yoke of his fear and he found the strength to move his legs and was about to turn and run but then they both started wailing on him with their pistols it's not clear whether they intended to scare him or kill him maybe the captain had ordered one thing and they did another perhaps they did exactly what he asked or perhaps oscar got lucky can't say all i know is it was the beating to end all beatings it was the gutter demo gong of beat a beatdown so cruel and relentless that even camden the city of the ultimate beatdown would have been proud yes sir nothing like getting smashed in the face with those patented and passion mere presentation grips he shrieked but it didn't stop the beating he begged and that didn't stop it either he blacked out but that was no relief the [ __ ] kicked him in the nuts and perked them right up he tried to drag himself into the cane but they pulled him back it was like one of those nightmare 8 am mla panels endless man gorilla grad said this kid is making me sweat most of the time they took turns striking him but sometimes they got into it together and there were moments oscar was sure that he was being beaten by three men not two that the faceless man from in front of the commander was joining them toward the end as all of his life began to slip away oscar found himself facing his abuela she was sitting in the rocking chair and when she saw him she snuggled what did i tell you about those putas didn't i tell you we're going to die and then finally god jumped down on his head with his boots and right before it happened oscar could have sworn that there was a third man with them and he was standing back behind some of the cane but before oscar could see his face it was good night sweet prince and he felt like he was falling again falling straight for group 18 and there was nothing he could do nothing at all to stop it clive's to the rescue the only reason he didn't lay out in that wrestling endless cane for the rest of his life was because clives the evangelical texista had had the guns and the smarts and yes the goodness too follow the cops on the sly and when they broke out he turned on the headlights and pulled up to where they'd last been he didn't have a flashlight and after almost half an hour of stomping around in the dark he was about to abandon the search until the morning and then he heard someone singing a nice voice too and clives who sang for his congregation knew the difference he headed toward the source full speed and then just as he was about to part the last stocks a tremendous wind ripped through the cane nearly blew him off his feet like the first slap of a hurricane like the blast an angel might lay down on takeoff and then just as quickly as it had kicked up it was gone leaving behind only the smell of burnt cinnamon and there was just behind a couple stalks of cane lay oscar unconscious and bleeding out of both ears and looking like he was one finger tap away from dead clives tried his best but he couldn't drag oscar back to the car alone so he left him where he was just hold on drove to a nearby bailly and recruited a couple of haitian procares to help him which took a while because the brassieres were afraid to leave the batte lest they got whooped as bad as oscar by their overseers finally clives prevailed and back they raced to the scene of the crime this is a big one one of the brassicas cracked mucho platanos another joked mucho mucho platanos said a third and then they heaved him into the back seat as soon as the door shut clives popped his car into gear and was off driving as fast in the name of the lord the haitians throwing rocks at him because he had promised to give them a guide back on their camp close encounters of the caribbean kind oscar remembers having a dream where mongoose was chatting with him except the mongoose was the mongoose what will it be at machacho he demanded more or less and for a moment he almost said less so tired and so much pain less less less but then in the back of his head he remembered his family lola and his mother in nena inca remembered how he used to be when he was younger and more optimistic the lunch box next to his bed the first thing he saw in the morning planet of the apes moy he croaked said the mongoose and then the wind swept him back in the darkness dead or alive broken nose shattered zygomatic arch crushed seventh cranial nerve three of his teeth snapped off at the gun concussion but he's still alive isn't he his mother demanded yes the doctor is concealed let us pray la inca said grimly she grabbed belly's hand and lowered her head if they noticed the similarities between past and present they did not speak of it briefing for a descent into hell he was out for three days in that time he had the impression of having the most fantastic series of dreams though by the time he had his first meal ricardo de poyo he could not alas remember them all that remained was the image of an aslam-like figure with golden eyes who kept trying to speak to him but oscar couldn't hear a word above the blair of the mogang coming from the neighbor's house only later during this day would he actually remember one of those streams an old man was standing before him in a ruined bailey holding up a book for him to read the old man had a mask on it took a while for oscar's eyes to focus but then he saw that the book was blank the book is blank those were the words like inca servant heard him say just before he broke through the plane of unconsciousness and into the universe of the real alive that was the end of it as soon as mom's delian got a green light from the doctors she called the airlines she wasn't no fool had her own experience with these kind of things put it in the simplest terms so that even his adult condition he could understand you stupid worthless no good geodella garpoota are going home no he said through demolished lips he wasn't falling either when he first woke up and realized that he was alive he asked for a bun i love her he whispered and his mother said shut up you shut up why are you screaming at the boy la inca demanded because he's an idiot the family doctor ruled out the epidural hematoma but couldn't guarantee that oscar didn't have brain trauma she was a cop's girlfriend teogadolfo whistled i'll vouch for the brain damage send him home right now the doctors said but for four days oscar resisted any attempt to pack him up on a plane which says a lot about that fat kid's fortitude he was eating morphine by the handful and his grill was in agony he had a round-the-clock quadruple migraine and couldn't see squat out of his right eye motherfucker's head was so slow he looked like john mayer jr and anytime he attempted to stand the ground whisked right out from under him christ in a handbasket he thought so this is what it felt like to get your ass kicked the pain just wouldn't stop going and no matter how hard he tried he could not command it he swore never to guide another fight scene as long as he lived it wasn't all bad though the beating granted him strange insights he realized rather unhelpfully that had he and a bond not been serious the capitan would probably never have [ __ ] with him proof positive that he and your bond had a relationship should i celebrate he asked the dresser or should i cry other insights one day while watching his mother tear sheets off the beds it dawned on him that the family curse he'd heard about his whole life might actually be true fuku he rolled the word experimentally in his mouth [ __ ] you his mother raised her fist in a fury but le inka intercepted it their flesh slapping are you mad like inca said and oscar couldn't tell if she was talking to his mother or to him as for ibon she didn't answer her patriot and the few times he managed to limp to the window he saw that a pathfinder wasn't there i love you he shouted into the street i love you once he made it to a door and buzzed before his tear realized that he was gone and dragged him back inside at night all oscar did was lie in bed and suffer imagining all sorts of horrible sukeso style endings for ibon when his head felt like it was going to explode he tried to reach out to her with his telepathic powers and on day three she came while she sat on the edge of his bed his mother banged pots in the kitchen and said puta loud enough for them to hear forgive me if i don't get up oscar wistered i'm having slight difficulties with my cranium she was dressed in white and her hair was still wet from the shower a tumult of brownish curls of course the capitan had beaten the [ __ ] out of her two of course she had two black eyes he'd also put his 44 magnum in her vagina and asked her who she really loved and yet there was nothing about her that oscar wouldn't have gladly kissed she put her fingers on his hand and told him that she could never be with him again and for some reason oscar didn't see her face it was a blow she had retreated completely into that other plane of hers heard only the sago of her breathing where was the girl who had noticed him checking out a faquita the week before and said half joking only a dog likes a bone oscar where was the girl who had to try on five different outfits before she left the house he tried to focus his eyes but what he saw was only his love for her he held out the pages he'd written i have so much to talk to you about me and are getting married she said curtly ebon he said trying to form the words but she was already gone acaba his mother and his abuela and his teo delivered the ultimatum and that was that oscar didn't look at the ocean or the scenery as they drove to the airport he was trying to decipher something he'd written the night before mouthing the words slowly it's beautiful today clive's remarked he looked up with tears in his eyes yes it is on the flight over he sat between his tio and his mom's jesus oscar udolfo said nervously you look like they put a shirt on a turd his sister met them at jfk and when she saw his face she cried and didn't stop even when she got back to my apartment you should see mystery she subbed they tried to kill him what the [ __ ] oscar i said on the phone i leave you alone for a couple days and you almost get yourself slabbed his voice sounded muffled i kissed her go junior i finally kissed her go uh but oh you almost got yourself killed it wasn't completely egregious he said i still had a few hit points left but then two days later i saw his face and was like holy [ __ ] oscar holy [ __ ] [ __ ] he shook his head bigger game afoot than my appearances you wrote out one word for me fuku some advice travel light she extended her arms to embrace her house maybe the whole world patterson again he returned home he lay in bed he healed his mother so infuriated she wouldn't look at him he was a complete and utter knew he loved her like he'd never loved anyone knew what he should be doing making like a lola and flying back [ __ ] the capitan [ __ ] gundy and god [ __ ] everybody easy to say in the rational day but at night his balls turned to ice water and ran down his [ __ ] legs like piss dreamed again and again of the cane the terrible cane except now it wasn't him at the receiving end of the beating but his sister his mother heard them shrieking begging for them to stop please god stop but instead of racing toward the voices he ran away woke up screaming not me not me he watched vigorous for the thousandth time and for the thousandth time he teared up when the japanese scientists finally reached tierra del fuego and the love of his life he read the lord of the rings for what i'm estimating the a millionth time one of the greatest loves and greatest comforts since he'd first discovered it back when he was 9 and lost and lonely and his favorite librarian had said here try this and with one suggestion changed his life got through almost the whole trilogy but then the line and out of fire-haired black men like half trolls and he had to stop his head and heart hurting too much six weeks after the colossal beatdown he dreamed about the cane again but instead of bolting when the cries began when the bones started breaking he summoned all the courage he ever had would ever have and forced himself to do the one thing he did not want to do that he could not bear to do he listened end of chapter six and part two end of chapter six and part two part three this happened in january me and lola were living up in the heights separate apartments this was before the white kids started their invasion when you could walk the entire length of upper manhattan and see not a single yoga mat me and lola weren't doing that great plenty i could tell you but that's neither here nor they all you need to know is that if we talked once a week we were lucky even though we would nominally boyfriend and girlfriend all my fault of course couldn't keep my grabber in my pants even though she was the most beautiful [ __ ] girl in the world anyway i was home the week no call from the temp agency when oscar buzzed me from the street hadn't seen his ass in weeks since the first days of his return jesus oscar i said come up come up i waited for him in the hall and when he stepped out of the elevator i put the mitts on him how are you bro i'm copacetic he said we sat down and i broke up with a dutch while he filled me in i'm going back to don bosco soon would i said what he said his face was still [ __ ] up the left side a little droopy you want to smoke i might partake just a little though i would not want to cloud my faculties the last day on our couch he looked like a man at peace with himself a little distracted but at peace i would tell lola that night that it was because he'd finally decided to live but the truth would turn out to be a little more complicated you should have seen him he was so thin he had lost all the weight and was still still what had he been doing writing of course and reading also getting ready to move from patterson wanting to put up the past behind him and start a new life was trying to decide what he would take with him was allowing himself only 10 of his books the core of his canon his words was trying to pare it all down to what was necessary only what i can carry it seemed like another odd oscar thing until later we would realize it wasn't and then after an inhale he said please forgive me junior but i'm here with an ulterior motive i wish to know if you could do me a favor anything bro just ask it he needed money for a security deposit had a line on an appointment in brooklyn i should have thought about it oscar never asked anybody for money but i didn't fell over myself to give it to him my guilty conscience we smoked the dutch and talked about the problems me and lola were having you should never have had carnal relations with the paraguayan girl he pointed out i know i said i know she loves you i know that why did you cheat on her then if i knew that it wouldn't be a problem maybe you should try to find out he stood up you ain't going to wait for lola i must be away to patterson i have a date you're [ __ ] me he shook his head the tricky [ __ ] i asked is she beautiful he smiled she is on saturday he was gone end of the preface 2.3 chapter 7 the final voyage the last time he flew to santo domingo he'd been startled when the applause broke out but this time he was prepared and when the plane landed he clapped until his hand stung as soon as he hit the airport exit he called clives and homeboy picked him up an hour later found him so grounded by taxistas who were trying to pull him into their cabs cristiano clive said what are you doing here it's the ancient powers oscar said grimly they won't leave me alone they parked in front of her house and waited almost seven hours before she returned clive's tried to talk him out of it but he wouldn't listen then she pulled up in the pathfinder she looked thinner his heart sees like a bad leg and for a moment he thought about letting the whole thing go about returning to bosco and getting on with his miserable life but then she stooped over as if the whole world was watching and that settled it he winched down the window he born he said she stopped shaded her eyes and then recognized him she said his name too oscar he popped the door and walked over to where she was standing in an embracer her first words miami you have to leave right now in the middle of the street he told her how it was he told her that he was in love with her and that he'd been hurt but now he was all right if he could just have a week alone with her one short week then everything would be fine in him and he would be able to face what he had to face and she said i don't understand and so he said it again that he loved her more than the universe and it wasn't something that he could shake so please come away with me for a little while lend me your strength and then it would be over if she wanted maybe she did love him a little bit maybe in her heart of hearts she left the gym bag on the concrete and got in the taxi with him but she'd known men like the capitan all her life he'd been forced to work in europe one year straight by [ __ ] like that before she could start earning her own money knew also that in the dui they called a copter voice a bullet the gym bag was not left on the street i'm going to call him oscar she said misting up a little so please go before he gets here i'm not going anywhere he said go she said no he answered he led himself into his abuela's house he still had the key the capitan showed up an hour later honked his horn a long time but oscar didn't bother to go out he had gotten out all of la inca's photographs was going through each and every one when la inca returned from the bakery she found him scribbling at the kitchen table oscar yes abuela he said not looking up it's me it's hard to explain you wrote his sister later i bet it was curse of the caribbean for 27 days he did two things he researched and he chased her sat in front of her house called her on the beeper went to the world famous riverside where she worked walked to the supermarket whenever he saw her truck pull out just in case she was on her way there nine times out of ten she was not the neighbors when they saw him on the curb shook their heads and said look at that loco at first it was pure terror for her she didn't want nothing to do with him she wouldn't speak to him wouldn't acknowledge him and the first time she saw him at the club she was so frightened her legs buckled under her he knew he was scaring her shitless but he couldn't help it by day 10 though even terror was too much effort and when he followed her down an aisle was smiled at her at work she would hiss please go home oscar she was miserable when she saw him and miserable she would tell him later when she didn't convinced that he'd gotten killed he slipped along passionate letters under her gate written in english and the only response he got was when the capitan and his friends called him and threatened him to chop him to pieces after each threat he recorded the time and then phoned the embassy and told them that officer had threatened to kill him could he please help he had hope because if she really wanted him gone she could have lured him out in the open and let the capitan destroyed him because if she wanted to she could have had him banned from the grievous side but she didn't boy you can dance good he got an alert in another he laid out the plans he had to mail her and take her back to the states she started scribbling back notes and passed them to him at the club or had them mailed to his house please oscar i haven't slept in a week i don't want you to end up hurt or dead go home but beautiful girl above all beautiful girls he wrote back this is my home your real home meow moi a person can't have two knight 19 ibong rang at the gate and he put down his pen knew it was her she leaned over and unlocked the truck door and when he got in he tried to kiss her but she said please stop it they drove out toward la guamana where the capitan didn't have friends supposedly nothing new was discussed but he said i like your new haircut and she started laughing and crying and said really you don't think it makes me look cheap you and sheep do not compute ibon what could we do lola flew down to see him begged him to come home told him that he was only going to get ibon and himself killed he listened and then said quietly that she didn't understand what was at stake i understand perfectly she yelled no he said sadly you don't his abuela tried to exert her power tried to use the voice but he was no longer the boy she'd known something had changed about him he had gotten some power of his own two weeks into his final voyage his mother arrived and she came loaded for bayer you're coming home right now he shook his head i can't mammy she grabbed him and tried to pull but he was like eunice the untouchable mammy he said softly you'll hurt yourself and you'll kill yourself that's not what i'm trying to do did i fly down of course i did with lola nothing brings a couple together quite like catastrophe it too yunyo he said when he saw me nothing worked the last days of oscar well how incredibly short are 27 days one evening the capitan and his friends stalked into the riverside and oscar stared at the man for a good 10 seconds and then whole body shaking he left didn't bother to call clives jumped in the first taxi he could find once in the parking lot of the riverside he tried again to kiss her and she turned away with her head not a body please don't you'll kill us 27 days wrote on each and every one of them wrote almost 300 pages if his letters are to be believed almost had it too he said to me one night on the phone one of the few calls made to us what i wanted to know what you'll see was all he would say and then the expected happened one night he and clives were driving back from the world famous riverside and they had to stop at a light and that was where two men got in the cab with them it was of course gorilla grodd and solomon grundy good to see you again grad said and then they beat him as best they could given the limited space inside the cab this time oscar didn't cry when they drove him back to the cane fields safra would be here soon and the cane had grown well and thick in places you could hear the stalks clack clack clacking against each other like triffids and you could hear the creole voices lost in the night the smell of the ripening cane was unforgettable and there was a moon a beautiful full moon and clives begged the men to spare oscar but they laughed you should be worrying god said about yourself oscar laughed a little too through his broken mouth don't worry clives he said they're too late god agreed actually i would say we're just in time they drove past a bus stop and for a second oscar imagined he saw his whole family getting on aguagua even his poor dead abuelo and his poor dad abuela and who was driving the bus but the mongoose and who is the cobrado but the man without a face but it was nothing but a final fantasy gone as soon as he blinked and when the car stopped oscar sent telepathic messages to his mom i love you senora to his tio quit tio and live to lola i'm sorry it happened i will always love you to all the women he had ever loved olga moritza anna jenny karen and all the others whose name he'd never known and of course to ibon they walked him into the cane and then turned him around he tried to stand bravely clives they left tied up in the cab and while they had their backs turned he slipped into the cane and he would be the one who would deliver oscar to the family they looked at oscar and he looked at thumb and then he started to speak the words coming out like they belong to someone else his spanish good for once he told them that what they were doing was wrong that they were going to take a great love out of the world love was a rare thing easily confused with a million other things and if anybody knew this to be true it was him he told them about ibon and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they'd started to dream the same dreams and say the same words he told them that it was only because of her love that he'd been able to do the thing that he had done the thing that could no longer stop told them if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side and over there he wouldn't be no fat boy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved over there he'd be a hero an avenger because anything you can dream he put his hands up you can be they waited respectfully for him to finish and they said their face is slowly disappearing in the gloom listen we'll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in english fire he blurted out unable to help himself oscar end of chapter seven chapter eight the end of the story that's pretty much it we flew down to claim the body we arranged the funeral no one there but us not even out in mix lola crying and crying a year later their mother's cancer returned and this time it dug in and stayed i visited her in the hospital with lola six times in all she would live for another 10 months but by then she'd more or less given up i did all i could you did enough mommy lola said but she refused to hear it turned her ruined back to us i did all i could and it still wasn't enough they buried her next to her son and lolo got a poem she had written and that was it ash's two ashes dust to dust four times the family hired lawyers but no charges were ever filed the embassy didn't help and neither did the government iban i hear is still living in mirador norte still dancing at the riverside but la inca sold the house a year later moved back to bani lola's voice she would never return to that terrible country on one of our last nights as novios she said 10 million trujillos is all we were as for us i wish i could say it worked out that oscar's death brought us together i was just too much the mess and after half a year of taking care of her mother lola and what a lot of females call their saturn good turn one day she called asked me where i'd been the night before and when i didn't have a good excuse she said goodbye yunji please take good care of yourself and for about a year i scrumped strange girls and alternated between [ __ ] lola and these incredibly narcissistic hopes of reconciliation that i did nothing to achieve and then in august after i got back from a trip to santa domingo i heard from my mother that lola had met someone in miami which was where she had moved that she was pregnant and getting married i called her what the [ __ ] lola but she hung up on a super final note years and years now and i still think about him the incredible oscar well i have dreams where he sits on the edge of my bed in this particular dream he's never thin like at the end always huge he wants to talk to me he's anxious to jaw but most of the time i can never say your word and neither can he so we just sit there quietly about five years after he died i started having another kind of dream about him or someone who looks like him we're in some kind of ruined bailey that filled to the rim with old dusty books he's standing in one of the passages all mysterious like wearing a wrathful mask that hides his face but behind the eye halls i see a familiar pair of close set eyes dude is holding up a book waving for me to take a closer look and i recognize the scene from one of his crazy movies i want to run from him and for a long time that's what i do it takes me a while before i notice that oscar's hands are seamless and the book's pages are blank and that behind his mask his eyes are smiling zafa sometimes though i look up at him and he has no face and i wake up screaming the dreams took 10 years to the day went through more lousy [ __ ] than you could imagine was lost for a good long while no lola no me no nothing until finally i woke up next to somebody i didn't give two shits about my upper lip covered in coke snot and coke blood and i said okay well okay you win as for me these days i live in pyth amboy new jersey teach composition and creative writing at middlesex community college and even own a house at the top of elm street not far from the steel mill not one of the big ones the bodega owners buy with their earnings but not too shabby either most of my colleagues think perth amboy is a dump but i beg to differ it's not exactly what i dreamed about when i was a kid the teaching the living in new jersey but i make it work as best as i can i have a wife i adore and who adores me an agrita from salkando whom i do not deserve and sometimes we even make vague noises about having children every now and then i'm okay with the possibility i don't run around after girls anymore not much anyway when i'm not teaching or coaching baseball or going to the gym or hanging out with a wifey i'm at home riding these days i ride a lot from can't see in the morning to can't see at night learned that from oscar i'm a new man you see a new man a new man as for us believe it or not we still see each other she cuban rubin and their daughter moved back to paterson a couple years back sold the old house bought a new one travel everywhere together at least that's what my mother tells me lola being lola still visits her every now and then when the stars are aligned i've gone into her at rallies at bookstores we used to chill at on the streets of nyc sometimes the cuban rubin is with her sometimes not a daughter though is always there eyes of oscar hair of hepatia her gaze watches everything a little heater too if lola is to be believed say hi to junior lola commands he was your tia's best friend hi tio she says reluctantly tia's friend she corrects hi tio's friend lola's hair is long now and never straightened she's heavier and less guileless but she's still the saguaro of my dreams always happy to see me no bad feelings and tiendas none at all how are you i'm fine how are you before i all hope i died i used to have this stupid dream that [ __ ] 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 tried to say the words that could have saved us but before i can shape the towels i wake up my face wet and that's how you know it's never going to come true never ever it ain't too bad though during our run-ins we smile we laugh we take turns saying her daughter's name i never ask if her daughter has started to dream i never mentioned our past all we ever talk about is oscar it's almost done almost over only some final things to show you before your watcher fulfills his cosmic duty and retires at last to the blue area of the moon not to be heard again until the last days behold the goal the beautiful muchachita lola's daughter dark and blindingly fast in her great grandmother la inca's words una hurona could have been my daughter if i'd been smart if i'd been makes her no less precious she climbs trees she rubs her butt against door jambs she practices malapalabras when she thinks nobody is listening speaks spanish and english neither captain marvel nor billy baston but the lighting a happy kid as far as these things go happy but on a string around her neck three as a batches the one that oscar wore as a baby the one that lola wore as a baby and the one that belly was given by la inca upon reaching sanctuary powerful elder magic three barrier shields against the eye backed by a six mile plinth of prey lola's not stupid she made both my mother and la inca the girls madrinas powerful words indeed one day though the circle will fail as circles always do and for the first time she will hear the word fuku and she will have a dream of the no face man not now but soon if she's her family's daughter as i suspect she is one day she will stop being afraid and she will come looking for answers not now but soon one day when i'm least expecting there will be a knock at my door soyesis here daddy delores daily on holy [ __ ] come in chica come in i'll notice that she still wears her as a batches that she has her mother's legs her uncle's eyes i'll pour her a drink and the wife will fry up her special pastelitos i'll ask her about her mother as lightly as i can and i'll bring out the pictures of the three of us from back in the day and when it starts getting late i'll take her down to my basement and open the foil refrigerators where i store her brother's books his games his manuscript his comic books his papers refrigerators the best proof against fire against earthquake against almost anything a light a desk a cut i've prepared it all how many nights will she stay with us as many as it takes and maybe just maybe if she's as smart and as brave as i'm expecting she'll be she'll take all we've done and all we've learned and had her own insights and she'll put an end to it that is what on my best days i hope what i dream and yet there are other days when i'm downtrodden or mugos when i find myself at my desk late at night unable to sleep flipping through of all things oscar's dog-eared copy of watchmen one of the few things that he took with him on the final voyage that we recovered the original trade i flipped through the book one of his top three without question the last horrifying chapter a stronger loving world to the only panels he circled oscar who never defaced a book in his life circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home the panel where adrian wright and dr manhattan are having their last convo after the mutant brain has destroyed new york city after dr manhattan has murdered rorschach after wright's plan has succeeded in saving the world fight says i did the right thing didn't i it all worked out in the end in manhattan before fading from my universe replies in the end nothing ends adrian nothing ever ends end of chapter eight the final letter a couple of cards with some breezy platitudes on them quote me one called me count venus recommended the beaches of azeroth if i hadn't already visited them quote lola too called my dear being a jesuit witch and then almost eight months after he died a package arrived at the house in patterson talk about dominican express two manuscripts enclosed one was more chapters of his never to be completed opus a four book ee doc smith-esque space opera called starskridge and the other was a long letter to lola the last thing he wrote apparently before he was killed in that letter he talked about his investigations and the book he was writing a book that he was sending under another cover told her to watch out for a second package this contains everything i've written on this journey everything i think you will need you'll understand when you read my conclusions it's the cure to what ails us he scribbled in the margins the cosmo dna the only problem was the [ __ ] thing never arrived either got lost in the mail or he was slain before he put it in the mail or whomever he trusted to deliver it forgot anyway the package that dittogive had some amazing news turns out toward the end of those 27 days the palomar did get ebon away from la capital for one whole weekend they hid out on some beach in barohona while the capitan was away on business and guess what ebon actually kissed him guess what else iban actually [ __ ] him praise be to jesus he reported that he liked it and that he bonds you know what hadn't tasted the way he had expected she tastes like heineken he observed he wrote that every night iban had nightmares that the capitan had found them once she'd woken up and said in the voice of true fear oscar he's here really believing he was and oscar woke up and threw himself at the capitan but it turned out only to be a turtle shell the hotel had hung on the wall for decoration almost busted my nose he wrote that iban had little hairs coming up to almost her belly button and that she crossed her eyes when he entered but what really got him was not the bam bam bam of sex it was the little intimacies that he never in his whole life anticipated like comey or hero or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck the intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he'd been a virgin all his life he wrote that he couldn't believe he'd had to wait for this so god damn long iban was the one who suggested calling the weight something else yeah like what maybe she said you could call it life he goat so this is what everybody's always talking about diablo if only i'd known the beauty the beauty end of the final letter this is the end of the brief wondrous life of oscar wow written by juno diaz this was read by me jordan barclay just because i wanted to to help out people during the quarantine and covet 19. um if you enjoyed the production of this audiobook please feel free to give it a like i'd appreciate it if you have any requests on books that you're reading for school or anything else comment below and i'll see if i can get to it as soon as possible and if you want to be updated on these audio recordings um be sure to hit that subscribe button ring the bell for notifications all right guys this is one of the best works of fiction i read this year thank you so much whoever requested this for me i appreciate it immensely and have a great rest of your day guys until then i am out peace