It was at her front door, as she was digging in her pockets for her keys, that she found Rey’s ID card. Or rather, it was his picture. The name belonged to someone else.
TWO
OF COURSE, he’d heard Norma’s voice before. In 1797, the owner of the village’s canteen had a good radio, with an antenna long enough to get a signal from the coast, and so, each Sunday, the women and the children and the remaining men crowded in to listen. It was what they did instead of church. They gathered an hour before to eat and drink and gossip. Potatoes, mushy overripe fruit, and thin silver fish salted in broth. Loud voices, the beginnings of a song. They brought portraits of their missing, simple drawings that an itinerant artist had done years before. They hung these on the walls, rows of creased and smudged faces Victor didn’t recognize, whose mute presence made the village seem even smaller. Then, at eight o’clock, there was a hush, and static, and that unmistakable voice through the tinny speakers: Norma, to listen and heal them; Norma, mother to them all.
They were waiting to hear the names of those who had left. Boys, some only a few years older than Victor, wandered away, leaving 1797 emptier and smaller each year. They grew up and became men elsewhere. A few returned, after being gone for years, to choose a wife and take her away, or to tend their father’s plot of earth. But most never reappeared. It was all the women spoke of: where had their husbands gone? Their sons? Sad mothers still lamented the days of forced conscriptions, when their boys had been rounded up in the plaza and given rustic wood carvings in the shapes of machine guns. The children fell on their stomachs and slithered across the dirt; the mothers watched them, terrified: oh, how they played.
Victor had heard all the stories. Even when he was a boy of six, with the war long over, his mother sent him to hide in the trees whenever an army truck belched its way into the village. He watched from the forest: angry sergeants picking carefully between the plumpest chickens, ordinary soldiers carrying rucksacks bulging with fruit. Did the soldiers notice the village had no young people? When the truck left, Victor and all the other boys emerged from the jungle to be received by their mothers with kisses and tears. Everyone knew the children who left on green trucks never came back.
Some left for work, especially since the war ended and there was no more need for fighters. Mostly to the capital, or to labor on the highways being built up and down the coast, or over the spine of the mountains to the sierra. There was always work in contraband along the eastern border, and the fisheries in the north hired anyone willing to work seven days a week. Some, it was said, made it to the beaches, cultivating dreams of foreign women, making a living selling trinkets to tourists. These were the rumors anyway, but really no one knew for certain. There was no resentment toward the lost, only sadness at being left behind. Those who remained placed their hopes on the radio. The village had entrusted a few letters to passing travelers, but nothing had ever come of it. So, they waited for Sunday and the next and the next. Those evenings impressed upon Victor the danger of remembering. His mother, he assumed, was listening for news of that phantom, his father. Victor prayed: that she’ll forget me when my time comes. He planned to set out for the city one day too; he’d known it since he was a little boy. Happiness, he’d decided, was a kind of amnesia.
This is how it happened: Victor went off to school one morning and returned to a house filled with mourners. His mother had drowned, they said. They repeated the words, various women in tones of concern and affection, but none of it made any sense. What would they do with him? The women around him grieved loudly, they wailed and sang dirges in an old language he couldn’t understand. No one explained a thing. No one had to. His favorite place in the village was an empty field at the edge of the jungle, a sometime park, sometime trash dump full of flowering wild plants and lizards with golden eyes, a field alive with the cawing of invisible birds—they can bury me there, Victor thought, they can bury me now because it’s all the same to me. He could feel his fingers tingling. He had the strangest sensation of sinking, a curtain falling, his life going black. The women coddled him, fed him, sang, and prepared his things.
“Can I see her?” he asked.
They took him to the river’s edge. It was swollen with the previous week’s rain, and the water spun and quaked like a living thing. Victor could hear the adults whispering about him: Adela’s boy is here, Adela’s boy. He tried to ignore it. The village was there, and the men who wouldn’t acknowledge Victor—the men who should have saved her—and his classmates, too, all eyes trained on a rock halfway between the shores, jutting above the water line, wrapped fiercely in white foam. His mother’s body cut the current too, slumped, clutching the stone as if it were a life raft when, more likely, it had killed her. The men were trying to string up a safety line from the other bank. They seemed helpless. Above, the skies were clear and deep blue, betraying no trace of the last week’s storms. Her body, Victor realized, wouldn’t stay there forever: the men might reach her before the current carried her away, but, just as likely, they would not. She’d been fishing, one of the women said. She lost her footing in the eddies where blind silver fish gather to eat and be eaten, the village’s staple food. She must have been distracted, because these things never happen. Then the river had carried her here.
Now the women were telling him things that made his head hurt. She’s with your father now, they said, and Victor felt sick to his stomach imagining that dead and empty space. Victor had never known him. His mother told stories, but they were few and vague: your father was from the city; he was an educated man. Not much more, not even a name. But they were together now, the women said, and Victor blinked and wondered what that could mean. The river churned, and his dead mother clung to a rock, the moiling currents poised to take her away, downstream, toward further indignities. A boy approached him and then another, until Victor was surrounded by his friends. Together they waited for the disaster to end, and nothing was said. It was in their faces, in the shifting weight of their bodies: the tension, the despair, the relief that it was not their mother, dead, astride a rock in the river. One of the boys touched him, took him by the shoulder or squeezed his arm. Only a few moments more, Victor thought, and the river would undress her, strip her bare, exposing her skin, the muscles of her back. The men were rushing, but not fast enough. Elijah Manau was among them, Victor’s teacher, his mother’s lover. Victor had watched them walking through the village together, nearly every night since his best friend Nico left, never touching hands until they stepped into the forest. Manau worked alongside the men now, more frantic than the rest, more flushed and helpless. They were the two men of her life. Victor tried to catch Manau’s eye, but couldn’t.
She was dead anyway, he thought, why rush? For a moment, he hated these men, who moved as one to save her body but who had not saved her. They couldn’t feel what he felt. Nico had left 1797 a few months before. Now his mother was gone, too, and the town might as well implode and sink into the earth. She clung to the rock. Nico’s father worked clumsily, glancing up at the river, now back at his stumps and the knot he could not quite tie. He had the rope between his teeth. He’d lost his hands in the war.
“Good for nothing,” Victor muttered to himself. “Useless cripple.” It was the cruelest thought he’d ever had.
The line was nearly set, stretched taut across the river. Who would wade into the current to pull her free? The men had fashioned a raft to carry Victor’s mother’s body back to shore. They organized themselves, and there was Manau, barreling into the water, and the village watched breathless, and Victor knew before it happened that he wouldn’t reach her in time. Manau was up to his chest in its turbid black waters when the river surged, and she let go. Victor never saw her face, only the back of her, his mother set free, her body bobbing and sinking beneath the surface, and then she was gone.
Victor had lied to Norma at the station. He knew why they’d sent him: there was no reason to stay. His mother had prepared it all. She’d wanted him t
o leave, they said, and it was her instructions that formed the essence of the note he carried to the station. The women of 1797 had sewn the note carefully into the pocket of his pants—there are thieves on the road, they warned him—along with a small sum of money, and a list of all the town’s disappeared. Take it to Norma, they’d said, and he promised he would. He looked at the list, at the dozens of names filling two columns on both sides of a sheet of lined paper. Nico was there, the very last name, but the others he didn’t recognize. One of them was his father, but Victor didn’t know which one. There were so many, strangers mostly, young men who had gone and never returned. Did they suppose Victor could bring them back?
Just to have the names read would count for something. Victor’s voice filling the crowded canteen would be enough. The old spinsters, the men who remained, his classmates—they would celebrate him, as if he had done something extraordinary: conquered a foreign land, crossed a frontier, or subdued a monster. He would read, that would be all; read the names and remind the radio listeners to pray for his mother, who had drowned and been carried by the river to the sea.
This was only three days ago. Since then, his life had acquired a velocity he could scarcely comprehend. Everything was out of order, the contents of his world spilled and artlessly rearranged. Here he was, watching the river boil and steal his mother. Here he was, planting a cross in the sweet-smelling field at the edge of town, a dark-clad throng of mourners behind him at a respectful distance. Here he was, having his head shaved—these were the protocols of mourning—and saying good-bye to his friends, one by one, trying not to cry.
Though his contract was for one more year, the town didn’t have the heart to make Manau stay. He’d been in love. It was what everyone said, and Victor knew it was true. Manau would travel with Victor to the city. He’ll help you, the women told him, and so they left 1797 at dawn, in the back of an old truck, mist still clinging to the hillsides, along a red-earth road cut through the jungle. A small crowd, a half-dozen women, some of his schoolmates, gathered to wish him luck. Victor carried a small, woven bag with a few belongings: a change of clothes, a photograph of the city his mother had saved from a magazine, a bag of seeds. On either side was the forest, a wall of green and black shadows. The truck bounced along the road, through deep ruts pooled with water, and left them in a village named 1793.
Here they waited, but no boat came. The morning grew hot and bright. There was a sign by the river, and a few young men waiting in its shadow. At noon, a small launch came, just a raft with a motor. He would take six, the captain said, but a dozen people pushed their way aboard. The vessel swayed and trembled. Victor sat on his bag and put his head between his knees. There was so much noise: the captain barking out prices, the passengers shouting back. A few people got off, cursing the captain: “Abuse!” a woman yelled. She had a baby in her arms. Then the engine came to life, and everyone pressed together tightly. Victor stayed low while the rest stood; he looked out between legs and baggage at the surface of the black river and the mass of vegetation that curled over the water’s edge. The launch pushed upstream. Victor felt Manau rub his head, but he didn’t look up.
The provincial capital was called 1791. It was an inelegant town of wooden houses clustered around a clapboard church. The bus, they were told, would come that evening or perhaps the next morning. No one could say for sure. “Where can we eat?” Manau asked, and the bespectacled man who sold tickets nodded in the direction of the market.
Victor and Manau wandered among the stalls where the old women were closing up and putting away their wares for the day. They shared a plate of cold noodles and soup. Manau ordered a beer and drank from the bottle. Patriotic songs played over the loudspeaker. “Your mother told me to take care of you,” Manau said. The skin around his eyes was puffy and red.
Victor nodded but said nothing. It seemed for a moment that his teacher was trying to make a joke.
“But who’s going to take care of me?” Manau asked, his voice cracking.
They successfully wasted the day, playing marbles in the plaza, visiting the church to light a candle for his mother. Manau read a newspaper he found beneath a bench. It was damp and yellowed, but only two weeks old. In the late afternoon, they slept a few hours with their backs against the town’s only lamppost, then the bus appeared just before midnight, and 1791 came to life. Women rose to sell silver fish and cornmeal, cigarettes and clear liquor in plastic bags. Small, wiry men carried packages twice their size to and from the bus. The driver and his passengers ate hurriedly, plates of rice steaming in the nighttime chill. Young men smoked and spat, raised their hats at the girls selling tomato sandwiches. Dozens of people gravitated to the bus, were pulled into its orbit. It was loaded in the yellow-tinged darkness, by a group of boys Victor’s age, who clambered atop the roof, tying packages to the rack in an impossible bundle. And then, as soon as it began, it was over: now they were leaving, the doors closing, the bus pulling away with a grunt of the motor. Victor had never seen so much movement. The district capital disappeared, spent by its burst of energy; the women went back to sleep, the men to drinking. In a few moments, the single streetlight had faded, and there was only the heat of the crowded bus and the complaint of the engine.
The road was bumpy, and Victor hardly slept, his head knocking against the window a dozen times in the night. Manau gave up his seat to an old man, sat stolidly on an overstuffed suitcase in the aisle, eventually sleeping with his head cradled in his hands. Victor was alone, and he’d never left the village before. Outside, there was only darkness, the blue-black sky indistinguishable from the earth. Just before morning, a thin line of red appeared at the horizon. He was in the mountains now. In the dim violet light, the ridges seemed like the ruddy spine of an alligator. Beside him, the old man slept, snoring fiercely, his head back and mouth agape, a stack of shiny plastic sheets in his lap. They looked like giant photographs. Victor had seen something like this in school. In a book. He thought he could recognize in them bones and the shape of a human chest. The old man’s white hair was thin, his lips parched. Victor looked down again at the photographs: there were ribs! He touched his own, felt his skin slide over the bones. He felt his own chest, with the pictures before him like a map, this cloudy photo of a man’s heart. They shone and had the color of science about them. He wanted to touch them, but the man’s hands lay over them, even as he heaved and choked in his sleep. The sky was stained orange, now yellow, and the world outside was revealed, dusty and fawn, a scarcely living disappointment. Something dry and withered poked out from the pebbled earth. The bus moved slowly. Victor wanted to hold the photographs up to the light. When the man coughed himself awake, Victor tapped him.
“These?” the old man said, smiling. “I’m sick, child.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So is my wife,” he said. “She’s sorry. And my children too. And me.”
The bus was waking now, but most of the curtains were still pulled to block out the rising sun. In the distance, the mountains seemed to be made of gold.
“Are you going to be okay?” Victor asked.
The old man frowned for a moment. “I’ll show you.” His fingers were thick and calloused. Pulling off the first of the sheets, he reached over Victor and placed it against the window. The morning light shone through the film. Victor saw a man’s chest, his rib cage, his arms at his sides. Victor even saw his spine. The image cut off just above the jaw, a slab of white jutting unexpectedly into the frame.
Victor looked at the photograph and then at the old man. “Is it you?” he asked.
“Have you seen an X-ray before?”
Victor admitted he hadn’t. He’d never heard the term before.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
The man sighed. He had a deep, red scar on his cheek, and he touched it carelessly. “My bones and my heart,” he said in a singsong voice. “My lungs and my brain and my blood!”
“Everythin
g?”
“Everything,” he said brightly. “I am the complete man.” He coughed and pulled another X-ray from the stack, placing it against the window. “These are my lungs,” he said and clapped his chest. “My puny, weak lungs.”
There were tiny holes in the tissue, like scattered coins.
“Diseased lungs,” the man whispered. He said there was a hospital, in the sierra outside the city, for veterans. He said he’d had medals, but he sold them when the war ended, to pay for his medicines.
“My father died in the war,” Victor said, and it was a fact he thought might be true, lost and dead being brothers.
“I’m sorry, child.”
It was nothing to say that his father was dead because he’d never really known him. His mother being dead? That was a secret wound, something dark and hidden, not to be told. Victor coughed.
“Don’t get too close to me, child. Not until I’m better. The air at the hospital is clean and dry. They’ll fix me up.”
They were silent for a while, and around them, the passengers shook off sleep, or held stubbornly to it. Manau hadn’t looked up yet. The bus rumbled along. They were between ranges, on a rocky plain. There was nothing green, nothing at all that seemed to be alive. Tufts of pale, weedy grasses grew in the shadows at the base of the rocks. A stocky plant with needles. “A cactus,” the old man said. To Victor, it looked as foreign, as strange as the moon or any distant planet. It was an ancient ocean, dry, disappeared. He imagined waves and currents and silver fish. He felt the note rubbing against his skin. His secret, his mission. Like the X-rays, the note was the picture of his insides. Next to him, the old man drifted in and out of sleep. Eventually, he coughed himself awake, and when he did, he winked at Victor. “I’m going to be fine,” he whispered just before his eyes clamped shut, his head falling back against the seat.
Lost City Radio Page 3
