Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  The bus rolled through the streets, in fitful half-block spans. The city sang chromatic and atonal: honks and whistles and the low rumbling of a thousand engines. The man seated next to them slept, his head lolling about, his briefcase tight against his chest. A heavyset boy a little older than Victor stood, his face frozen in a scowl, brazenly counting money, daring anyone to take it. It was the same every day, but Norma felt suddenly that she should have taken a cab or a crosstown train, that the spectacle might be overwhelming for a boy from a jungle hamlet. And it was. Victor, she noticed, was trying to slip his little hand out of hers. She gripped it tighter and looked down at him sternly. “Careful,” she said.

  He glared and pulled his hand free, waving his liberated fingers in front of his face. The bus jerked to a stop, and he dashed off, through the door and into the street.

  Norma could do nothing but follow.

  It was the purple-hued end of the day. The boy was off and scampering down the sidewalk, in and out of the shadows. His footsteps went tap tap on the concrete, and Norma was alone in a part of the city she didn’t know, on a street quieter than most. The buildings were low and thick, so stoutly built they seemed ready to sink under their own weight, their stucco walls painted in mottled pastels. Victor’s spindly legs carried him down the block. There was no way she could catch him.

  But she should have known by now how the city works. She was born here and raised here, and still its gestures bordered on the perverse, even more so after the war. Now it was something else entirely, something stranger. A white-haired man approached from a nearby doorway. He wore a thin, gray jacket over a yellowed undershirt. “Madam,” he said, “is that your boy?”

  Victor was a tiny moving shadow bouncing in the orange lights of the streetlamps. She nodded.

  “Pardon me,” the man said. He raised two fingers to his mouth and blew, piercing the low noise of the street with a sharp whistle. A head shot out of each window, and a moment later, a man or woman was standing at the door of each building. The man whistled again. He smiled benevolently at Norma, his warm face touched with red. They waited.

  “Are you new to the neighborhood?”

  “I don’t live here,” Norma said. She was wary of being recognized. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  They waited for a moment longer, and soon a matronly woman in a pale blue housedress was walking up the block, Victor in tow. The man spoke to himself as she approached—here you are, there we go—as if he were coaching her. She held the boy’s hand firmly, and he was hardly struggling at all. With a smile, she led the boy to Norma. “Madam,” she said, bowing, “your son.”

  “Thank you,” Norma said.

  A bus gurgled by, imposing silence on them. The three adults smiled at each other; poor Victor stood stiff, a prisoner ready for marching. Night was falling, a cool breeze whispering through the street. The man offered Norma his jacket, but she declined. The woman in the housedress turned to Norma. “Shall we help you beat him?” she asked graciously, straightening the folds of her dress.

  The government counseled solid beatings of children, in the name of regaining that discipline lost in a decade of war. The station ran public-service announcements on the subject. Norma herself had recorded the voice-overs, but she’d never actually hit a child, having no children of her own. It shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did. “Oh, no,” Norma stammered. “I wouldn’t dare ask for help.”

  “It’s no problem,” the white-haired man said. “We look out for each other here.”

  They watched Norma expectantly. Victor, too, with steely eyes. They were such helpful people. “Maybe just a slap,” Norma said.

  “That’s right!” The man leaned over the boy. “It’s how we learn, isn’t that right, son?”

  Victor nodded blankly. Norma was struck again by how strange the city must seem to him. The truth is, everything had changed. She didn’t even recognize it anymore. She’d heard of places in the countryside where life continued as it always had; of villages in the mountains, in the jungle, where the war had passed by, unperceived. But not here. Parts of the city had been abandoned, the IL had detonated buildings, the army had torched entire neighborhoods in search of subversives. The Great Blackouts, the Battle of Tamoé: wounds severe enough to be named. 1797 had not been spared, either. She could see that in Victor’s eyes. We are in a new stage, the president had announced, a stage of militarized calm. A rebuilding stage. An unruly child should be punished. The woman held Victor by his shoulders. But how do you do it? Victor was a skeletal thing, a nothing child, easily broken. He didn’t blink; he stared.

  Norma raised her right arm up above her head, stalled for a moment. She brushed her hair back. She knew what she should do: let gravity guide her, imitate all the mothers she’d seen in the streets, in the markets, on public transport. Her duty. She closed her eyes for a moment, long enough to imagine it: Victor’s head flopping to one side like a doll’s, a red handprint blooming on his cheek. He wouldn’t make a sound.

  “I’m sorry,” Norma said. “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “No. I’m sorry. He’s not mine.”

  The woman nodded, but she hadn’t understood. She smothered Victor in an embrace. “Your mother spoils you, boy,” the woman said.

  “She’s not my mother.”

  Norma’s fingers had gone numb. She looked at the boy and felt terrible. “He’s not mine,” she repeated.

  The woman in the housedress rubbed the child’s bald head. Without looking up at Norma, she said, “You sound so familiar.”

  Above, the streetlamp flickered on. It was night now. Norma shrugged. “I get that a lot. We should be going. Thank you for everything.”

  “She’s from the radio,” said Victor, folding his arms across his chest. “Lost City.”

  The white-haired man looked up, startled. “God is merciful.”

  Norma watched the glow of recognition pass across their faces. She pulled Victor toward her, took his hand in hers. “Don’t talk nonsense, child,” she scolded.

  But it was too late. “Miss Norma?” The woman stepped closer to her, as if by looking at her she could tell. “Is that you? Say something, please; let me hear you!”

  At her side, the man’s smile was bright and orange beneath the streetlamp. “It’s her,” he said, and whistled a third time, while Norma muttered protests.

  The streets filled with people.

  BEFORE THE war began, those of Norma’s generation still spoke of violence with awe and reverence: cleansing violence, purifying violence, violence that would spawn virtue. It was all anyone could talk about, and those who did not or could not accept violence as a necessity weren’t taken seriously. It was embedded in the language young people used in those days. It was the language that her husband, Rey, fell in love with.

  He also fell in love with Norma. She was studying journalism; he was finishing his thesis in ethnobotany. The university then was falling apart, strained well past capacity, underresourced and overcrowded. The buildings were crumbling, the classes choked with students. Professors were shouted down in midlecture, and graffitied walls announced the coming war. The president warned ominously of occupying the grounds, using force to punish the dissidents. In his famous Independence Day speech just before Norma met Rey, the president stepped on the dais in the main plaza and condemned “that illegitimate legion of rabble-rousers that provoke chaos and disrupt the general order!” He pounded his fist in the air, as if beating an imaginary enemy, and was met with thunderous applause. The president announced new measures to combat subversion, and the teeming crowd surged with approval.

  The following day, the newspapers published the entire text of his speech, along with panoramic photographs of the plaza from the air, a weltering sea of flesh beneath the summer sun. It was impressive: the masses overwhelming the confines of the plaza, overrunning the fountain, pushing up against the steps of the cathedral. Of cour
se, the president had rigged his reelection, but from the looks of it, he needn’t have bothered with fraud. Men hung from street lamps, clutching banners, tambourines, and drums. Round-faced children smiled for the cameras, waving tiny flags they had made in school with crayons and newsprint and plastic straws. This was almost a year before the war began, when the government seemed invincible. The crowd, it was later revealed, had been paid for their ser vices, for their enthusiasm. They’d been bused in, had accepted donations of rice and flour for a day’s work cheering the speech. Many of them came from distant villages and didn’t even speak the language. They cheered on cue like good workers, collected their payment, and went home.

  Rey and Norma met through mutual friends at a dance that same week. Rey was handsome in a broken kind of way: the kind of young man who had looked old his entire life. His nose bent subtly to the left, and his eyes hid in the recessed shadows beneath his brow. Still, he had a strong jaw and an incongruously silly, dimpled smile and, for this, Norma liked him. He smoked incessantly, a habit he would later give up, but that first night it seemed integral to who he was. A group of them sat together, talking about the city and the government and the university and the future. They spoke of the crowds that had filled the plaza: the people, always myopic, always easy to fool. Indians, Rey said, imagine! They don’t even know who the president is! It was all laughter and noise and the melting of ice cubes. They made fun of the president, who was weak and expendable and whose troubles were only beginning. The Illegitimate Legion! It was only a punch line then: how would these enemies be any different from those who had come before? Hadn’t the war been just around the corner for fifteen years? It was impossible to take seriously, so they drank more and joked more, and spoke most obliquely about sex. Norma felt deliciously lost in the music, in the rising heat. She leaned in closer to the new stranger. He didn’t pull away. She drank furiously. His foot tapped the rhythm, and she realized she’d been speaking for a while and had heard nothing for longer. Conversation was impossible. Their table emptied in pairs, their friends slipping onto the dance floor, until it was only the two of them. It was nearly midnight before Rey finally asked her to dance. They were in an old building with high ceilings, the band playing loud and brash, energized by the cathedral-like acoustics. Brassy bursts of sound cut through the din of the dancers and the drinkers. Rey took Norma by the arm and led her to the middle of the floor. He spun her and held her close, young in his movements, his old face adorned with a wry smile. During the third song, he pulled her in and whispered in her ear, “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  The rhythm caught them and spread them apart again, the heat of his breath still tickling her ear. What did he mean? She felt his hand on her back, guiding her across the floor. The hall was filled with flashing colored lights, like a dream she’d had once or a film she’d seen. They moved. Rey was gliding through the crowd, in time with the song. Bam! A snare, a cymbal, a pulse within the music: the tight skin of the drum singing war! She was drunk, she realized, and her feet were moving without her. He led and she followed, and when the music brought them back together, she took her chance to tell him she knew only that his name was Rey.

  He laughed. He raised his hand up Norma’s back and pulled her closer, so close her lips almost touched his. She could breathe him. Then he spun her away, twirled her like a plaything.

  They danced for the rest of the night and hardly spoke at all.

  When the party broke up, he offered to accompany Norma home. This was before downtown was abandoned; there were little bodegas still open, selling gum and toasted plantains, aspirin and cigarettes. Rey bought a candy bar, and they shared it as they waited for the bus. There were young people everywhere, on every corner, sharing smokes, raising their voices in cheerful arguments—that four a.m. logic, that drunken lucidity. Norma’s curfew had come and gone. It was summer, and there was even a moon in the sky, or a sliver of one, and the couples that walked by clutched each other tightly, beautiful people all of them. It seemed the war would never come.

  Norma and Rey cramped together in the back row of a crosstown bus, their legs pressed up against each other. Rey wrapped his left arm around her. She felt his thumb rubbing her shoulder. Norma had nowhere to put her hands, and so she dropped them on his thigh. Her index finger stroked the fabric of his jeans, and it amazed her, because she was not this type of girl. His black hair had been combed back earlier, but with all the dancing, it was starting to fall in his eyes. It was nearly dawn, and the bus rolled lazily along empty avenues. He played absentmindedly with the silver chain around his neck, then pulled a cigarette from behind his ear. There was a match stuck in the end. While he looked around for a place to strike it, she asked him what he had meant by such a strange question.

  Rey smiled and pretended not to remember. His eyes closed, as if he were still hearing the loud crash of a cymbal or the blare of a trumpet. “Nothing,” he said.

  “I’ll guess then.”

  He nodded. They were in the back, the window open to the night air. He bent forward and lit the match against the back of the seat, where two names had been scratched into the metal with a pocketknife: LAUTARO & MARIA, FOREVER. Rey slung his right arm out the window and blew smoke over his shoulder. He watched her.

  “You must be somebody’s son,” Norma said. “And by somebody, I mean somebody famous. Why else would you ask me?”

  “Somebody’s son?” he asked, grinning. “Is that what you think?” He laughed. “How astute. Aren’t we all somebody’s children?”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “You’ll have to ask your friends.”

  “Why would you ask me that unless you were well known?”

  He smiled coyly. “I don’t aspire to fame.”

  “You’re clearly not an athlete.”

  He took a puff from his cigarette, blue smoke trailing from his lips. “Is it obvious?” he asked, amused. He flexed his bicep and pretended to be impressed with himself.

  Norma laughed. “Are you a politician?”

  “I hate politicians,” he said. “And, in any case, there’s no such thing anymore: only sycophants and dissidents.”

  “A dissident then.”

  He grinned and made a show of shrugging his shoulders.

  “If you were, why would you tell me?”

  “Because I like you.”

  There was something so confident about him, so brash, it was almost distasteful—except it was intoxicating. She remembered this night: the dancing and the drinking, their easy and light conversation in the early morning hours, so enthralling they didn’t even notice the bus ease to a stop, or the idling rumble of the motor, or the flashing lights. It was a roadblock, only a few stops from her house. She remembered apologizing to Rey for the hassle, after he had come all this way to drop her off. Rey frowned but said not to worry.

  Then a soldier was aboard, holding a flashlight in one hand, his right arm resting on the barrel of his rifle. Rey took two quick puffs from the end of his cigarette and tossed it to the sidewalk. He exhaled into the bus. The soldier took his time, let his gun do the detective work, and each tired passenger handed over identification papers without argument. When the soldier got to them, Norma took a good look at him and realized he was young, just a kid. It emboldened her, or maybe she just wanted to impress Rey.

  “You don’t have to point that thing at me,” Norma said, handing the soldier her ID. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Be quiet,” said Rey.

  The young soldier scowled. “Listen to your boyfriend.” He patted his gun gently, as if it were an obedient child. “Where’s yours, boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have identification, sir,” Rey said.

  “What?” the solider barked.

  “I’m sorry. It’s at home.”

  The soldier examined Norma’s ID under the flashlight, then handed it back. “There’s always a wise guy,” he mumbled, turning to Rey, then leaned over them out the window an
d yelled for an officer. “You’re coming with us,” he said to Rey. “Sorry, girlfriend, looks like you’re going home alone.”

  A quiet panic seized the bus. Every head turned to face them, though no one made eye contact. Only the driver pretended not to notice: he held the steering wheel tightly and looked straight ahead.

  “I’ll go,” Rey said quietly. “We’ll straighten this out. My ID is at home. It’s no problem.”

  “Good,” the soldier said. “We all hate problems.”

  “Where are you taking him?” Norma said.

  “You want to come?” said the soldier.

  “No, she doesn’t,” Rey answered for her.

  They led him off the bus. Norma watched from the window as they put Rey in a green military truck.

  There were only a few more stops to her house. Norma rode them in silence, the cool air in her face, aware that everyone was aware of her. She felt young and frivolous: she was a drunk girl coming home from a party when everyone else, it seemed, was shaking off sleep, on their way to work. They felt no pity for her. Fear perhaps, or anger. As she got off, she could feel the bus exhale, as if she were a bomb that might have exploded, and now they were finally safe.