Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  Everything was very little. In a sentence or two, it was done: Norma sketched the voice, its dark timber, its tone of menace and violence. This was all. Yerevan, dead. Yerevan, IL. “Is it true?” she asked. “Do you think it’s real?”

  Elmer nodded.

  Rey watched and listened without a sound. He didn’t like Elmer, this pretend tough guy with a slouch and a paunch. He had the faraway gaze of a gambler who rarely wins, of a man who staggers home to punish his family for his own shortcomings. Rey almost smiled: he was exaggerating. There was no violence in Elmer. Rey could, if he wished, tell this man certain facts. He could tell him about the Moon, for instance, or he could speculate with some accuracy about the nature of Yerevan’s final hours. Nine days before, just after the rumor of Yerevan’s involvement had first surfaced, Rey had met his contact and asked what was being done for “our friend at the radio.”

  Rey’s contact, the man in the wrinkled suit, had smiled wanly and taken a sip of his coffee before answering. “There’s very little to be done once a situation has reached this point.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t expect our friend will be on the air again.”

  Rey nodded, but his contact was not finished. “The same would go for us, should it ever come to that.”

  Now Rey watched Elmer pace back and forth across the conference room. Norma sat slumped in her chair, frowning. “People heard,” she said. “The phone lines lit up.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Elmer said. He rubbed his eyes. “They want us to raise a fuss. That’s what they expect. We can’t fall into that.”

  “It’s done, though. People know.”

  Elmer shook his head with a great and exaggerated slowness. “They’ll come for you, Norma, if we say anything.”

  Rey understood then that they weren’t going to say anything, that Yerevan was going to disappear completely. Tomorrow, by the light of day, a peasant farmer would come across the corpse somewhere on the Central Highway. The war had been going on long enough for none of this to be a surprise. The farmer would be afraid. He might go to the police—not for answers, just to wash his hands of it—and they would promise to investigate and dispose of the body themselves. They were not paid to ask impertinent questions. Of course, more than likely, it would begin and end with the farmer. If he was a religious man, he might bury the body himself, or see to it that the body was well hidden behind a rock or in a ravine where no one would stumble upon it again. He would be too afraid to speak of it. Not to his wife or his best friend. Not at Mass on Sunday, when he went, head bowed, to confess all his sins of omission and commission. So Yerevan would lie there, for a day or a week or a month. Forever, if Elmer had his way. It would be the easiest and most convenient, to forget.

  “Does he have a family?” Rey asked.

  Elmer shook his head. “Mercifully, no.”

  God bless him then. Rey had been saved by his family. By Trini. He would probably be dead otherwise, and no one had ever had to explain this to him. It was clear and frightening. In two weeks, Rey would see his contact again and ask, though he knew the answer, if Yerevan was dead.

  His contact gave him a look Rey hadn’t seen in many years. It said, Why are you wasting my time?

  There was a roundup underway, Rey’s contact said after a moment. Yerevan was just the beginning. Already a few operatives had disappeared. Rey listened to the dire speculation, and he meant to shrug; and by shrugging, Rey intended to convey something very specific: that he was tired, that it had gone on very long, this war, that he understood better than most that it couldn’t go on forever. Rey meant to imply that he wasn’t surprised at all: Yerevan, a sympathizer, had given up perhaps the one name he knew, and this man or woman had been picked up, and then…Rey had no illusions; he himself would have talked at the Moon, if only he’d had anything to say. The things they must have done to poor Yerevan. The torturers had had nine years to hone their skills.

  But Rey did not shrug. Somehow, he felt too tired and defeated in that moment to muster even that simple gesture. Instead, he asked his contact, the man in the wrinkled suit, what it meant. “For us,” Rey said.

  “We don’t know,” the man said. “We won’t know until it happens.”

  Then they were silent while a couple walked by, arm in arm: the woman had tilted her head onto her boyfriend’s shoulder, and he walked with the regal confidence of a man who knows he is loved. She had a thin waist and long legs, and had maneuvered her right hand into her boyfriend’s back pocket. Rey felt intensely jealous, for no reason at all he could think of. His son was fourteen days old.

  “We won’t see each other for a while,” Rey’s contact said. He briefly outlined some instructions for the coming months. Rey would be going to the jungle. He would have to be careful, more careful than before. Rey accepted it all with a nod. Then his contact stood and left. He didn’t pay the bill, nor did he offer much in the way of good-bye.

  SIX MONTHS later, his boy was at that age when children begin to acquire a personality. It was miraculous. The rainy season was over, and Norma was home again. Yerevan had never been found, and the up-roar had faded almost completely. Some arrests had been made, but Rey felt certain that most were not IL at all, but those on the periphery: the students and laborers and petty criminals that fit a profile. An unlucky worker caught with a mimeographed flyer, a young woman who asked for an inappropriate book at the central library. They would be tortured, and some would die, but many would be released and swell the ranks of those too angry or too bitter to remain mere spectators of the conflict. In this manner, the war grew.

  Now Rey was in the forest again, the city distant and almost unreal. His mistress strode barefoot across the wooden floor, and Rey watched the boy’s limpid, gray eyes as they tracked his mother across the hut.

  “He can see!” Rey said.

  Adela smiled. “Of course he can see.”

  But Rey hadn’t said it correctly, or rather the words were not nearly precise enough: He did not mean to denote any ordinary kind of observation. It was something altogether new—how do you explain it? The boy, with his new eyes and unblemished personhood, was seeing. It was discovery, it was revelation. The boy peered into the unknown with the intensity of a scientist, and Rey felt immensely proud. He despaired at his own inability to explain. The boy can see! Rey thought again, and he felt his heart pounding. Maybe Adela had already become accustomed to the miracle: the boy pointing, his first finger, pudgy and minuscule, reaching out into the world; the boy, curious and undaunted by the size of the universe. The startling perfection of the child. Rey held his own finger in front of the boy, and Victor took it to his mouth, inspecting its texture with his gums.

  They walked through the village that afternoon, for the first time, as a family. It was such a haphazard place: clusters of raised wooden huts, thatched roofs. Rey received the good wishes and hearty congratulations of a dozen men and women with whom he’d never shared so much as a word. He was prepared: a few phrases from the old language were all that was required. They appreciated him for trying. They laughed at his accent. They kissed the baby and moved on.

  That evening, his first in 1797 since he had become a father, Adela sent him out into the forest to complete his ritual duty. Rey noted the name of the root in his notebook; he was, after all, still a scientist. The root was mashed into a paste, and Rey spooned it with his finger into his mouth, rubbing the mixture on his gums. It had a bitter, acid taste to it. He interrupted to ask questions, but no one answered him. A few minutes passed, and his face felt numb, and then he couldn’t taste anything at all. Adela kissed him on the forehead. The baby’s lips were pressed against Rey’s. “Now off you go,” Adela said. The old women who guided him into the woods were silent. They led him to the bank of the river, where the trees grew thickly, where tendrils of moss hung down over the skin of the water. The women left him, and he sat in the darkness, among the trees, waiting for something to happen. In his mind, he replayed the ima
ge of his boy, chasing movement with his little eyes, and the thought alone was enough to make him smile. Through the canopy of the forest, he could see the sky dotted brightly with stars. It was a moonless night. He closed his eyes and felt a throbbing against his lids, an incipient wave, now a shot of color. He thought of the war, his great and unforgiving taskmaster; he thought of its weight and its ubiquity. Everywhere but here, he said to himself. The trip was beginning. It was a hopeful statement and, of course, wholly untrue. The war, in fact, was right there, just over the next ridge, in a camp he would visit in just four days. Rey felt the divide between his lives disintegrating: at home, Norma was, at this hour, missing him with an almost animal intensity. He could guess that and he could, without much effort, reciprocate. For the first time ever in the jungle, he thought of his wife. Maybe it was vanity, to suppose that she needed him. She would never forgive him if she knew. He touched his damp forehead and reasoned it was the root, its dark magic beginning to loosen the tether of reality. Rey took off his shoes and then his socks, and stepped gingerly into the eddies at the river’s edge. The water was cool and calming. He stepped out, took off all his clothes now, and waded in again, this time to his chest. The water was all around, doing marvelous and inexplicable things to him: tiny, pleasurable pinpricks of cold all over his body. There were dazzling colors hidden behind his eyelids. My child, Rey thought, what of my child? The boy will grow up in this place, and he will never know me well. He will inherit this war I’ve made for him. Rey took a deep breath and sank below the water’s surface. He held his breath until his mind was blank and everything was still, then he rose and breathed, and then he did it again. He felt colors—to say he saw them would be inexact—he felt them all around, a fantastic brightness bubbling within him: reds and yellows and blues in every shade and intensity. He held his breath and felt he was drowning in a pool of orange. It was thrilling and terrifying and shed no light on his son’s future. He exhaled purple into the water: he watched himself blow clouds of it, like smoke. After an hour in the river, he got out, stood naked on the shore, and pondered the stars. He dressed, so that he wouldn’t catch cold. Periodically, stars fell from the sky, great waves of them in blinding cascades of light forming shapes: animals, buildings, faces of people he’d known. He tried to recall what he was there to accomplish. He pulled on his silver chain, put it between his teeth, and chewed on it until the metallic taste was too much. He crawled to the river again and rinsed his mouth. And then his face, and then he was in the water again, fully clothed this time, singing, whistling, drenched in electric colors.

  A few hours later, he was sifting dirt through his fingers, trying to recall the name of a movie he had seen once as a boy. In his mind’s eye, a leggy blonde floated across the screen. An hour after that, he was asleep.

  In the morning, the women went for him and brought him back to the village to feed him. He was groggy and sore. All this was duly noted. Already Rey was being followed, his movements, moods, and physical condition recorded by a mole recruited in the village. Three days later, he left for the camp where he was to meet a man he knew only as Alaf. The mole recorded Rey’s departure and speculated about which way he was headed. It was a guess, but a good one: that the man from the city was headed down the river and over the ridge. Some days, when the wind was right, the mole had heard shooting. There was, he felt certain, something noteworthy happening in that vicinity.

  TWELVE

  THE PORTRAIT was spread on the coffee table, its frayed edges held down by coasters, and Victor could hardly stand to look at it. He didn’t feel curiosity at all toward this man, or rather, toward this drawing of a man. A few seconds was enough to decide his father was an unremarkable-looking human being. He had a full head of whitish hair, and eyes and ears and a nose in all the conventional places. Maybe the drawing was no good. It certainly showed little imagination on the part of the artist: just the flat expression of someone caught unawares, looking sleepy. In the drawing, Rey did not smile. Victor squinted at the face. He had no memories with which to compare it. He didn’t speculate about any resemblance, and this was just as well: there was none.

  Norma asked Manau to repeat what he’d said.

  “That’s Victor’s father,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”

  A dark silence descended on the room. Norma sank back into the couch, and her face turned a watery pink color that Victor had never seen before. She didn’t cry, but looked straight ahead, nodding and whispering to herself. Many times, she began to say something but stopped. All the quiet was discomforting. Victor felt the need to be somewhere else. He expected his teacher to say something, but Manau, too, was silent. Norma took another look at the drawing and then at him, until Victor felt the unpleasant heat of being scrutinized. She reached for him, but he was suddenly afraid. These people did not stop disappointing him. “Victor,” Norma said, but he backed away from her.

  This time, he didn’t go to the street, but out of the room, through the only door available, into the kitchen. Norma and Manau let him go. The door swung open, startling the woman Victor supposed to be Manau’s mother. He was suddenly in another, warmer world. She dropped the spoon she’d been holding, and it fell into a pot on the stove. She gave Victor a careworn smile, then gingerly fished the spoon out. She held it before her, and it steamed. “Are you all right, child?” she asked.

  Victor didn’t feel the need to answer the question, nor did Manau’s mother seem to expect a response. In fact, she took only a small breath before continuing. Victor pulled a chair from under the table, and before he’d even sat, she was talking, in her aimless way, about Manau and the sort of boy he’d been: “…So nice of you to come visit your old teacher because you do seem like such a thoughtful young boy, and I know Elijah had a difficult time there, but he himself was so kind when he was young and that’s what must make him a good teacher. I don’t care what the exams say. He’s such a nice boy, always was, there was a dog he took care of, just a street mutt, but he combed its hair and taught it tricks, and I dare say that people have always liked him, God is merciful. You do like him, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Victor said.

  “Oh, you are a good boy, aren’t you?”

  A moment later, she had served him more tea and placed a bowl of soup before him. There was a beautiful piece of chicken, a drumstick, poking out from beneath the surface of it. His mouth watered. She wiped a spoon against her apron and laid it beside his bowl. Victor didn’t need much more urging, and he didn’t need the spoon. He attacked the submerged piece of chicken, wondering briefly if this was bad manners. It didn’t matter. Manau’s mother had her back to him, rinsing some plates in the sink, prattling on breathlessly about something or other: her husband, she said, was away on business. He drove trucks filled with electronics—had Victor noticed the box of plastic calculators just by the front door? “They come from China,” she added with great admiration, and he liked the sound of her voice. “Your mother is very beautiful,” she said. He had picked the chicken half-clean.

  Victor looked up. It took him a moment to process, to understand. He wondered if it was worth explaining. “Thank you,” he said, when he had decided it wasn’t.

  “WHAT IF,” Norma had once asked her husband, “what if something happens to you? Out there, in the jungle?”

  It seemed naïve and ridiculous now, but she remembered asking him just such a question, something just as clueless and trusting. Maybe she’d never wanted to know. Rey had smiled and said something to the effect of “always being careful.” There were now, of course, multiple and unintended meanings of being careful. He had not been careful, she thought. He’d gotten some jungle woman pregnant and then most likely gotten himself killed. Then there was this boy and these ten years she’d spent alone, praying hopefully that her innocent husband would stumble out of the forest, unharmed. Did she even believe that? Had she ever believed it? She was, Norma realized, one of those women she’d always pitied. Worse, she was her own mother:
a few details altered to suit different times, and still, an exotically costumed but quite conventionally deceived woman. Old school, uninteresting, common. And as alone as she had ever been. The moment, she felt certain, called for some explosive act of violence: for the rending and tearing of some heirloom or photograph, the destruction of a meaningful item, some article of clothing, but she was in a foreign and unknown house, on the other side of the city from her apartment and all the artifacts of her years with Rey: bizarrely, she was struck by the image of a burning shoe. If she were someone else, Norma might have laughed. She wanted, from somewhere deep inside her, to hate the boy. She closed her eyes; she listened to her own breathing. Manau hadn’t stirred; the poor man had no idea what to say besides his repeated apologies. It wasn’t clear any longer what he was apologizing for. For this bad news? For this drawing and all its implications? I should ask for details, Norma thought. I should needle him and see what he knows, but already the moment had begun to pass. The boy was off in another room, and she was alone in a strange house with this stranger and this portrait and this news.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Manau asked.

  She opened her eyes. “A drink?”

  “There’s none in the house. My mother won’t allow it.”

  “What a shame,” Norma said.

  “It’s why my father is never here. Should we go somewhere?”

  Norma shook her head and managed to ask if he had anything else to tell. “Not that this isn’t enough.”

  “No,” he said. The quiet dragged for another moment, then Manau asked if they would stay the night.

  Where else would they go? There was nowhere left in the city. She said something vague about being alone, then felt embarrassed as soon as she had said it. This was hardly the time for confessionals. Already this Manau knew things about her life that she herself had not known only minutes before. There were, she imagined, places in the country where no one knew her name or her voice, somewhere in the unsettled wilds of the nation, a place the radio had never arrived, where she could blend into the landscape, embrace spinsterhood, and live quietly with her disappointments.