“The Ghosts of Gloria Lara,” by Junot Díaz

It was on one of those nights that Mr. Wilson broke into our apartment.

It was, I guess, an honest mistake. Our apartments were mirrors of each other, just on opposite sides of the parking lot. It was three in the morning and dude was mas borracho que el diablo and he tried his key in our door and when that didn’t work he must have decided in a fit of inebriated industry to slide open our kitchen window and wriggle through head first and because he was drunk out of his mind and no ninja, dude face-planted on some dishes and then crashed on the floor, with broken dishes in pursuit.

The noise brought my whole family running. My dying brother with his CZ 75, me in my tighty-whities with a baseball bat, and my mother in her bata fumbling with her glasses.

When we realized that the mumbling mess on the linoleum was Mr. Wilson, relief all around. He’s drunk, my mother announced, and my brother snapped, Se nota.

Come on, let’s go, my brother said. Let’s go.

But Mr. Wilson refused to budge. This is my house. You get out.

Listen to this motherfucker, my brother said. Pick him up.

I put the bat down, hesitated, and that’s when the whole thing went fucking sideways. One second Mr. Wilson was wallowing on the floor amid the broken dishes and the next second he leaped up like a fucking cobra.

Smashed his entire weight against my skeletal brother, pinning him against the fridge, trying to grab at the CZ 75. If you’ve been to the firing range as often as me and my brother had, you know exactly how dangerous that was. I didn’t have time to think; all I could see was my mother’s big eyes and my brother’s bald head, and I jumped in and grabbed Mr. Wilson’s arm and he fell back, classic judo move, and brought us all down onto the floor.

We landed on my brother hard, which sucked, but what really sucked was that my brother had his hand on the pistol, Mr. Wilson had his hand on the pistol, I had my hand on the pistol, and somehow in that lucha libre the barrel ended up pointed straight at my eye and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t pull away or redirect it. Everyone was fighting wildly for the pistol, my brother included, with no regard for my face, and the barrel just got bigger and bigger and everything in me went cold because I knew, in a prophetic out-of-body way, that the CZ 75 was about to cavitate my brains all over the kitchen.

I figured that was it for me, bye-bye, but then my mother shouted Wilson, estop, estop, estop and it was the craziest shit I ever heard, my mom trying to speak English, but he must have heard her because I felt him loosen his grip and with one final twist my brother wrenched the gun away and the black devouring eye of the barrel released me and I dropped back to the real world, to life, in a huge heart-bursting rush.

Put that away, my mother whispered. The police are here.

Our upstairs neighbors, hearing all the commotion, had called them.

At first it looked like everything was O.K. The cops didn’t charge in with weapons drawn or shoot my mother or anything crazy like that, but when they tried to herd Mr. Wilson out of our apartment, it was round fucking two. Dude started another fight, but this was even more berserk than the first. Where the fuck did he find the energy? Shouting and kicking and contorting and crying for his son and even those two massive white cops had a hard time controlling him and they all broke just about everything in the kitchen.

The cops finally pinned him to the ground and the older one jammed the cuffs on, and that was when Mr. Wilson started really screaming. And when I say screaming, I mean screaming. A scream that must have reached to Madison Park, to South Amboy, to New York fucking City. The kind of scream that I never want to hear again as long as I live. You would have thought that someone had plunged a red-hot dagger straight into Mr. Wilson’s heart. My mother, who had been watching the battle in stunned silence, crumpled like she’d been poleaxed.

Remember how I said I experienced my second blast of pure terror because of Mr. Wilson? You might have thought it was the whole pistol-in-the-face moment, which was fucking scary—but it was that scream. That horrible, horrible scream.

Real story: During my first year in the U.S., my first year with my father, he liked to take my brother and me down to the basement and make us look at a collection of fotos he had. In order to toughen us up, to make us dique soldiers. These were from his good old days back on the island: fotos of men and women handcuffed naked to the same metal chair in what must have been a cuartel, probably the one he’d been assigned to. Some of the people were alive; some of them weren’t. During these toughening-up sessions, if either my brother or I looked away my father slapped us, hard, so of course we didn’t look away. We saw.

My mother must have found out, because a short time later those sessions ended. Still, those fotos and the whole ghoulish ritual of being summoned to the basement became once and forever the definition of terror for me, and I still have nightmares even now that I’m in my fifties and live a cosseted middle-class immigrant life.

Foto after foto of young dead Dominicans. But you know what? Mr. Wilson’s scream, if you can believe it, was worse.

In Colombia he’d been tortured for seven weeks straight. They beat him with clubs, water-tortured him until his lungs just about burst, put electric shocks on his legs, arms, chest, and, of course, genitals—and forced him to watch others being tortured. The brigada, into whose hands he had fallen, were convinced that he had something to do with the kidnapping and murder of Gloria Lara—who was from una familia muy rica y poderosa, a política so important she had represented Colombia at the U.N.—but Mr. Wilson’s only crime had been to support a campesino group when he was a young teacher, and since they were the ones who supposedly killed Gloria Lara, the military bashed down his door one night while he was having a beer with his parents.

All of this he told my mother many years later on the phone.

This was after he left London Terrace without saying goodbye.

After he kicked around in N.Y.C. for a few years and then immigrated to Austria to be closer to his son.

After he left Austria because he hated Austria, hated its racism, and because his son barely talked to him anymore, and migrated to Copenhagen at the suggestion of a Colombian acquaintance.

After he decided that Copenhagen wasn’t for him, either, what with the police stopping him on the tram every day to check his I.D. to the point where there were days when he could barely leave his apartment.

He was thinking maybe of returning to Colombia, if he could find the courage, or maybe moving in with a Danish woman he knew who lived in Sweden up near the border with Finland.

Next time I call it might be from the North Pole, he joked.

New Jersey is warmer, she said, and that was the closest she came, I think, to asking him to return.

That was the last time he and my mother spoke.

By then my mother’s hair was all white and she visited my brother’s grave only twice a month as opposed to three or four times a week. She lived in Ridgefield Park, in a house I’d helped her buy.

Do you think he went back to Colombia? I asked her. We were watching one of the Colombian crime dramas that were all the rage on the Spanish-language channels.

I don’t know, she said.

Did you love him?

She removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes. Don’t be ridiculous.

My mother who hadn’t dated anyone after my father left.

Did you at least like him?

Yes, I liked him, but I never had luck with men.

Do you even remember what he looks like? she asked.

Of course I do, I said.

But the truth was, I didn’t. There were no fotographs of him and no one else in the neighborhood remembered Wilson and Alberto Longo and of course my brother wasn’t around to corroborate.

Sometimes I dream about him, she offered.

Really?

She nodded. In the dreams he speaks to me in English and I understand.

When I dreamed of Mr. Wilson, he often looked like my father or my brother. The dreams didn’t change much. We were in a cuartel or my basement or a classroom and Mr. Wilson would stare at me with an impossible distress until I couldn’t take it anymore and then I’d beg him, in Spanish, Please don’t.

He never listened. He opened his mouth as wide as you can imagine.

And I’d brace myself for the scream that never came. ♦