Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  A few people fell out of line. Rey stood there, silent and seething. His jaw hurt. He remembered everything, every detail of every moment. At night, he had been surrounded by other broken men whom he could not see. They sobbed alone, and no one comforted anyone else. They were afraid.

  “They were going to eat me.”

  Trini raised an eyebrow. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “I do, boy. Six days a week.”

  Half the line had cleared out by now, abandoned their places. Too much talking, too much indiscretion. A breeze blew, momentarily clearing the smoke from the street. A man in a knit cap sat on the curb, rolling a cigarette. Rey stepped out of line. Trini followed and caught him at the corner. They walked together—or rather, not together at all, but in the same direction. Finally, at a busy intersection, Rey and Trini waited side by side to cross.

  “Talking doesn’t help,” Trini said. “I’ve learned that. It’s why I never ask.” The light changed, and they crossed the street toward home.

  THE TELECENTER was crowded at this hour. A pale, unhealthy-looking man with greasy hair gave Norma a number: it entitled her to booth number fourteen. Then he gave her a form and motioned for her to sit. “You write the numbers here,” he explained, “and I dial them for you.”

  Norma nodded. “How long is the wait?”

  “Thirty minutes. Maybe more,” the man said, scanning his list. He looked up with a smile. “But you must have a phone at home, madam. Why are you here with us?”

  Norma blushed. She did, of course, have a phone, but what difference did that make? It never rang. Is that what the man wanted to hear? That she, too, was alone? She ignored his questions and asked him for a directory.

  “A local call, madam?” the man said, then shrugged and pulled the tattered book from beneath his desk. Norma thanked him in a whisper.

  The end of a working day—all over the city, it was the same. Evening in America, past midnight in Europe, already tomorrow morning in Asia. Time to call and check in, to reassure those who had left that you were on your way, that you were surviving, that you hadn’t forgotten them. To reassure yourself that they hadn’t forgotten you. Norma sighed. There were twenty-five phones in twenty-five cubicles, each with its overflowing ashtray, and each, she could see, occupied. Men and women hunched over, cradling the receivers tenderly, straining to hear the voices on the other end. Most had their backs to the waiting area, but she knew them even without seeing them: these were the voices she heard every Sunday. She knew them from the needy murmur that rose in the room—always that sound. The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it. Where were they calling? That voice, where was it coming from? The whole world had scattered, but there they were, so close you could feel them. So close you could smell them. You had only to close your eyes, to listen, and there they were. They respected the telephone, these people. They handled it as if it were fine china: for special occasions only. The radio was the same. It was even more. Norma hoped no one would recognize her.

  She had sent Victor to sit, and she found him now, seated beside a young man with a shaved head and a tattoo that ran diagonally across the side of his neck. Victor had saved her a place, no small accomplishment in this crowded room.

  “Manau,” she said when she sat down.

  Victor nodded.

  It was not a common surname; at the very least, Norma could be grateful for that. She had already decided they would not go home that night. Elmer might have sent someone there, to wait for her to arrive, to bring her and the boy in. Elmer was afraid, of course, and this wasn’t irrational: ten years on, and still the government took no chances with the war. No, going home wasn’t safe. Instead they would find this teacher, this Manau. They would ambush him: squeeze it out of him, whatever he knew. She felt she might strike this man when she saw him. That was the kind of anger she felt: how many times in her life had she hit someone? Once, twice, never? She thumbed through the phone book and found it: twelve different Manau households, in nine different districts. No Elijahs or E. Manaus. He lived with his parents then. Of course. Two could be discarded by the fancy addresses. Rich families don’t send their young to places like 1797 to teach.

  She carefully wrote the ten numbers on the form the greasy-haired man had given her.

  “What will we do when we find him?” Victor asked.

  “We’ll ask him what he knows,” said Norma. “What else can we do?”

  “Okay.”

  Norma closed the phone book. “Why?”

  “What if he won’t talk to us?”

  She hadn’t considered that. Not really. By what right would this Manau, this spineless creature, withhold anything from her? Norma was about to answer when her number was called. “Come with me,” she said to Victor, and they stepped through the people to the front desk. She gave the greasy-haired man her form, and took Victor by the hand to their booth. “He’ll talk,” she said to Victor, to herself.

  It was hot, and there was barely enough room for the two of them. They pressed in. There was only one chair and a small table with a phone, a timer, and an ashtray. Victor stood. The phone had a green light that blinked when the call was patched through. They waited in the airless booth, and the boy said nothing. The man at the counter dialed their way down the list of numbers. Norma picked up the phone, each time seized by an expectant, implausibly optimistic feeling. Six times she asked for Elijah Manau, and six times she was told there was no such person. She was beginning to suspect he didn’t have a phone, that it was all a waste, when on the seventh call, a woman with a tired voice said, “Wait, wait. Yes, he’s here.” Norma wanted to shout. The woman cleared her throat, then yelled, “Elijah, you have a call!”

  Norma could hear a voice, a man’s voice, still far away. “Yes, mother,” it said, “I’m coming. Tell them to wait.” If he was surprised, Norma couldn’t hear it. It was as if he’d been expecting their call all along.

  IN THE weeks that followed, whenever Trini came over to visit, he would tell Rey of the latest IL transgression, the latest threat. It was only a matter of time, he said. We’re in for trouble. Rey began his own work in Tamoé, and together they shared stories about the teetering ship of the state as seen from the inside: its myopic bureaucracy, its radical incompetence made manifest in Tamoé or in the prison’s dark terrors. Rey’s father chimed in, that it had always been that way, that everything was always getting worse. He could be counted on for a dose of pessimism. A half a year passed, Rey met Marden, he returned to the university. Trini filed reports and made official complaints, but nothing came of it. Another guard was killed today, he told them one evening, looking distraught, and Rey told his uncle to be careful. Quit, Rey’s father said, but there weren’t many other jobs available. Bodyguard, security guard—and were either of those really a step up? Safer?

  Just before the war was declared, ten months after Rey was released from the Moon, the prison officials made a tactical retreat, ceding an entire pavilion to the IL. It was a truce of sorts, and it held for longer than anyone had expected it to: for a year, and most of another. Trini continued to work at the prison, and no one entered the IL’s pavilion. The IL taught classes there, held trainings, and the prison officials preferred not to think of it. Every now and then, an operative was caught and tossed in with his comrades. They clothed and fed him: he had survived the Moon to be nursed to health within the prison’s liberated territory.

  It was in November, nearing the war’s second official anniversary, when the inevitable happened: the prison break that marked one of the IL’s first successes in the city. A tunnel the length of four city blocks had been dug beneath the prison walls into an adjacent neighborhood, rising out of the earth in the living room of a rented and then abandoned home. The press went crazy, and a scapegoat was urgently needed. Those in charge wanted a peon, a single man with no fam
ily to make a fuss. They found Trini.

  When he was arrested, Trini was living with Rey’s father. They came on a Sunday afternoon, kicked in the door, and threw everyone against the walls: Rey, his father, Norma, Trini. They would’ve taken them all if Norma hadn’t threatened them: I work at the radio, she said. I’ll make a big fuss. She was only an intern then, but the soldiers weren’t going to take any chances. They took Trini. He didn’t resist. They took Rey, too, but only as far as the street, and then they let him go. The woman wouldn’t stop yelling.

  “I warned you!” she screamed. “Murderers! Killers! Thieves!”

  The soldiers fired shots in the air to disperse the gathered crowd. Idorú was that kind of neighborhood: where everyone spied on everyone else, where police were not welcome. Because his hands were cuffed, he couldn’t wave good-bye, but with great effort, Trini did manage a nod to his family—his brother, his nephew—before he was pushed into the back of an army truck.

  WHEN REY disappeared, Norma returned to that night in Tamoé, that night when the war became real. It shook her, it fed her nightmares. She imagined it had been Rey bound to that chair all along; that all the years they had spent together were a lie, that her husband had always been imprisoned by the war. The accusations that he had been IL were, for Norma, irrelevant; the war had long ago ceased to be a conflict between distinct antagonists. The IL blew up a bank or a police station; the army ran its tanks over a dozen homes in the dark of night. In either case, people died. Rey went off to the jungle, the IL made its last stand in Tamoé and lost. Most of the district was razed. Then the killing flared and burned out in the jungle, and then it was over. Just like that, the lights came on. And where was Rey? The war had been for many years a single, implacably violent entity. And it had swallowed him. An engine, a machine, and the men with guns—they were simply its factotums. When enough of them died, it was finished.

  That night of the fire, the long bus ride back to the station gave her time to consider her options. Norma felt an animal fear churning in her gut, and suspected she wasn’t cut out for journalism. Perhaps she could leave the country, board a plane bound for Europe, and become a nanny, a surrogate mother to a gaggle of wealthy children. She could learn a new language—and seeing the world, wasn’t that her right? She was twenty-eight, too old to go back to the university and pursue some other profession. It was too late to do what her father had always asked of her: learn secretarial skills and marry an executive, a man with a driver and a house bunkered somewhere in the hills where problems would not intrude. She had married Rey. He studied plants and was not an executive. He went off into the forest for weeks at a time. They had survived the tadek episode, but she knew enough to recognize that with Rey, problems would always intrude.

  So lost in thought was Norma that she didn’t notice the soldiers lining the sidewalks in front of government buildings, or the driver pushing the bus faster and faster through the streets, or the unusually light traffic. It was late when Norma arrived, nearly ten, but the station was busy. She turned in her unused tape recorder, put her untouched notepad in the file cabinet, and was prepared, had she been asked, to resign. She felt sick with shame, with fear, but no one seemed to notice her. Norma shared a desk with another reporter, a pudgy-faced young man named Elmer. He worked long hours, even sleeping at the station some nights, and so, she wasn’t surprised to find him at the desk, rubbing his temples and looking happily beleaguered. A green pen poked out from between his teeth. He gave her a smile and said, “This world is going to shit.”

  Norma didn’t know what to say. Elmer took the green pen from his mouth and twirled it between his fingers. He passed her the text he was working on. “Assassinations,” he said. “A half dozen all over the city. All the same, Norma, my dear. Men burned in their own homes.”

  Norma sank heavily into her chair. “Where?”

  “Venice, Monument, The Metropole. A few in Collectors. One in Ciencin and one in Tamoé. Weren’t you there?”

  A phone rang at the next desk. Norma nodded. “I didn’t see anything,” she said. “It was already over when I showed up.”

  “Didn’t you get anything?”

  “There was a woman. She was selling juice.”

  The phone kept ringing.

  Elmer gave her an incredulous look, but Norma didn’t turn away. Something in him alarmed her. He was red-faced and excitable, too young for the deep creases on his forehead. He would be old soon. He was a mama’s boy, and he would grow wings before striking another man in anger, but on this night, this splendidly violent city night, he was enjoying himself.

  “What?” Elmer asked.

  How perverse: this adrenaline, these dead men.

  “It’s awful.”

  Elmer nodded and said, “It is,” but he couldn’t mean it. She was sure of that: he said the words, but they meant something altogether different when he did. He was a voyeur. He wanted to see how bad things could get. If pressed, it was something he might admit. Perhaps he was even proud of it.

  “Rey called for you.”

  Norma looked up. “He’s back?”

  Elmer handed her a note where he had scrawled the name of a bar not far from the station. “But you should stay, Norma. Tonight, you should stay.”

  “Tell them I was sick.” The phone had stopped ringing. She stood to go. “Please.”

  It wasn’t a long walk to the bar, but the empty streets made it seem so. She saw only one person on her way: a hunchbacked old man pushing a shopping cart piled high with clothes down the middle of an alley. There was scarcely any traffic, and the air was still. Winter had ended, spring hadn’t yet come. Norma liked this time of year, this time of night. Why weren’t more people out to enjoy it? A streetlight flickered, dimmed, then glowed brightly. She was alone in the city, and she knew, however vaguely, that something terrible had happened. In fact, many terrible things had happened all at once. She heard the clink of the juice-cart bell, still echoing blithely in her mind. She never saw the dead man: how could she be sure he was real? As long as she didn’t know, there was an innocence to the evening, and it didn’t seem forced to her. It seemed sane.

  The bar was quiet. The radio was on, and everyone listened. Norma scanned the room for Rey and found him, sharing a corner table with a few men she didn’t recognize. No one seemed to be looking at anyone else; instead, they watched the radio, a dented and scuffed black box sitting atop the refrigerator. A red-haired man chewed his fingernails. An olive-skinned woman with braided hair sat at the bar, tapping her foot nervously. There was an air of worry throughout the bar, and the waiters moved through the crowd with the grace and silence of mimes. The announcer was describing the evening’s events: dozens of dead, a shootout in the Monument district, sections of Regent Park on fire. Armed gangs had taken to the streets: there were reports of looting downtown, and burning cars in Collectors. The city was under attack. The president would be speaking soon.

  Normally, the people would have jeered at the mention of the man, but on this night, there was no response.

  Was it so long ago that the IL had been a joke? A straw man?

  “Rey,” Norma said across the silent room. He saw her and held his finger to his lips. He got up and wove through the chastened, hushed drinkers to where she stood by the door. He looked tired and sunburned. He took Norma by the arm and pulled her out into the street. There, beneath the washed-out light of a street lamp, Rey kissed her.

  “What a way to come home, no?”

  “Let me see you,” Norma said, but it was dark, and she couldn’t make out the details of him.

  He’d arrived at the train station just after the first fire, at four in the afternoon, around the time she’d been leaving the station for Tamoé. The buses had stopped running from the station, and so Rey had walked three hours, until he was tired of carrying his bag. He’d been stopped twice at checkpoints. Then, when he felt his legs were about to give out, he found himself in front of this bar, realized he was near the r
adio, and decided it was best to stay put.

  “How will we make it home?” Norma asked.

  Rey smiled. “Maybe we’ll stay here.”

  And, in fact, they did. Norma had just asked him about his trip, and Rey was telling her about a town in the eastern forest where the Indians still knew the old language, where he’d met an old man who had walked him deep into the forest and showed him a dozen new medicinal plants. Norma could sense the excitement, the curiosity in her husband’s voice. The town sounded like a lovely place. “I’d like to see it myself,” she said, then there was a distant rumble. They fell silent. It was somewhere off in the hills, and for a moment, nothing happened. For a moment, they both thought they had imagined this unexplained sound. Then there was another, and then another, a deep shaking, a call and response in the hills. An earthquake? The lights along the street flickered again, and this time, they did not recover. There was a shout from inside the bar. The president had been about to address the nation. He had just cleared his throat when the radio went dead. Inside and outside, the darkness was complete.

  LISTEN TO me, youngster. It’s how Trini began all his letters. This was his last one, and Rey kept it with him always. By his bedside, in his wallet, in his briefcase—it migrated among his things, but was always near. Sometimes Rey woke in the middle of the night, took it to the kitchen, and read it there. He pulled it out on the bus, or between classes, or as he waited for his contact in some dingy bar in Miamiville. Trini had missed their June wedding. Rey and Norma left an empty chair for him at the table of honor. Rey’s father read the toast Trini sent from prison. He had missed the tadek mess, though he never would have known who was behind it. He had missed the beginning of Rey’s work at his alma mater, the first steps in his career. He’d missed all of this, and the war’s rude beginnings as well. Of course, there had been other prison breaks since, and other scapegoats, too.