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 neighborhood, and guess what? The nigger stuck with it and lost close on twenty pounds! A milagro! He’d finally repaired his ion drive; the evil planet Gordo was pulling him back, but his fifties-style rocket, the Hijo de Sacrificio, wouldn’t quit. Behold our cosmic explorer: eyes wide, lashed to his acceleration couch, hand over his mutant heart.

He wasn’t svelte by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t Joséph Conrad’s wife no more, 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’d 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 ten years, feeling resurgent; nothing seemed to bother him, not his students, not the fact that PBS had canceled Doctor Who, not his loneliness, not his endless flow of rejection letters; he felt insuperable, and Santo Domingo summers…well, Santo Domingo summers have their own particular allure, even for one as nerdy as Oscar.

Every summer Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can; airports choke with the overdressed; necks and luggage carousels groan under the accumulated weight of that year’s cadenas and paquetes, and pilots fear for their planes — overburdened beyond belief — and for themselves; restaurants, bars, clubs, theaters, malecones, beaches, resorts, hotels, moteles, extra rooms, barrios, colonias, campos, ingenios swarm with quisqueyanos from the world over. Like someone had sounded a general reverse evacuation order: Back home, everybody! Back home! From Washington Heights to Roma, from Perth Amboy to Tokyo, from Brijeporr 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-assed girls and the taking of said to moteles; it’s one big party; one big party for everybody but the poor, the dark, the jobless, the sick, the Haitian, their children, the bateys, the kids that certain Canadian, American, German, and Italian tourists love to rape — yes, sir, nothing like a Santo Domingo summer. And so for the first time in years Oscar said, My elder 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, imagining 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 Santo Domingo. He shrugged. I guess I want to try something new.