The Dream Of Oscar Isaac

In which the star of Moon Knight survives a hurricane, floats in a warm ocean, lives in a model home, makes movies, wanders around his apartment, wears tie-dye, trips on mushrooms, hosts SNL, stars in Star Wars, and creates art necessarily in that order.

- By Maaza Mengiste

THE FIRST HOUSE

IT IS 1992 AND A HOUSE BUILT ON HOPE IS CRACKING UNDER PRESSURE.

A frightened young family huddles in the living room, hiding beneath a torn roof, praying to survive. The floors are lifting, the carpet is flooding, and as one wall then another splinters, this family's dreams start to collapse.

Outside, Hurricane Andrew: the sound like a freight train, loud and ominous, relentless and otherworldly. It is coming for them, this force of wind and rain and some other power that feels unstoppable and ungodly, spiteful even. A tree spins through violent gusts, snapped cleanly from its roots. Manicured lawns in the housing development explode. Sidewalks heave and ripple. Windows shatter. It's impossible to know where inside ends and outside begins. Time has stopped, yet everything else is still in motion. The edges of the world have blurred. I'm going to die, thirteen-year-old Oscar Isaac thinks as he hunches beneath flimsy sofa cushions with his brother and sister, his mother and her already fraying marital relationship. I'm going to be hurled into the air by this hurricane and disappear.

It is possible to be young and old at once. To be filled with both a child's confusion and adult terror-and to still have room for some other wordless, ancient fear to thread itself through you and disrupt the sleep that comes at night, even years later. The hurricane will leave a trail of destruction behind, and though Oscar and his family will make it out alive, some things will not survive intact, like his parents' marriage. Something else intangible will come untethered in his life. There is nothing certain anymore. There is no such thing as solid ground. And while it might not be free fall, the boy senses a shift in the balance of the world: The security that (if we're lucky) childhood provides is gone.