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By Root 2013 0

up and not be able to get out of bed. Like he had a ten-ton weight on his chest. Like he was under acceleration forces. Would have been funny if it didn’t hurt his heart so. Had dreams that he was wandering around the evil planet Gordo, searching for parts for his crashed rocketship, 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 fuck off: when he couldn’t write a word, when he went into his tío’s closet and put the Colt up to his temple, when he thought about the train bridge. The days he lay in bed and thought about his mother fixing him his plate the rest of his life, what he’d heard her say to his tío 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 had absconded with it. It’s OK, hijo, 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 OK too, would cook for him, and he’d sit with her and smoke her weed tentatively and not understand why he couldn’t sustain this 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 E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith. He went on long rides. He drove as far 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 flensed from the game, all the performance, just straight unadorned mechanics. How the fucking kids loved that shit! He tried to give Magic a chance, tried to put together a decent deck, but it just wasn’t his thing. Lost everything to an eleven-year-old punk and found himself not really caring. First sign that his Age was coming to a close. When the latest nerdery was no longer compelling, when you preferred the old to the new.)

OSCAR TAKES A VACATION

When Oscar had been at Don Bosco nearly three years, his moms asked him what plans he had for the summer. The last couple of years his río 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 mi madre in a long long time, she said quietly. I have many promesas 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, bedridden for months and convinced that the border was about to be reinvaded, had screamed out Haitians! and then died, and they’d all gone to the funeral.

It’s strange. If he’d said no, nigger would probably still be OK. (If you call being fukú’d, being beyond misery, OK.) 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