And here the dream ends, here her grief runs into the reality of it. She can’t say his name. She tries, but she can’t. Someone else must do it for her.
It is nearly morning in the city and the war has been finished for ten years. Crimes have been forgiven, or at least forgotten, and still her Rey has not returned. She buried his father without him. She placed an obituary in the paper. It read: “Survived by his son…” The war had been over for three years then, and it felt like a lie. No one came to the funeral. She hadn’t seen the old man in many months. They had nothing to say to each other. Once, her father-in-law had made it past the screeners and onto the air. At first she hadn’t recognized him.
“Norma,” he’d said, voice breaking. “Where is he?”
“Who?” she asked, because she always asked. It was her job. “Why don’t you tell us about him?”
On the other end, there was a long pause. Breathing.
“Sir? Who are we talking about?”
“Your husband,” said the old man, now weeping openly. “My son.”
Elmer cut to commercial immediately.
And it felt then the way it always had, the way it always would: like someone clutching her throat, trying and very nearly succeeding in squeezing the life from her. The worst of it passed in a matter of seconds, but the recovery took days, even weeks. Or a lifetime. During the long, uncomfortable break, Norma felt no one would look at her. Elmer came in with a cup of tea. “The wrong name, Norma. I’m sorry, but the wrong name and we’re dead. You and me both.” He said it without looking her in the eye.
She put on a record and let it play through. When she began again, there was a new caller, a new voice that made no mention of Norma’s loss, and the show resumed without incident.
Early morning now, ten years without war, and Norma has come to this place again. She is moving without thinking now. Give the boy a microphone. Give Manau a microphone. Headphones all around. There is the couch where Rey and I made love. Close eyes: remember. Not now. Breathe. There are lights blinking, a record playing, and Norma feels as if she is the conductor of an orchestra, that the city just waking or just drifting to sleep is hers to control. Cue music and let it play.
Breathe.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she says when the song has finished. “Welcome to a special edition of Lost City Radio. My name is Norma.”
It has begun.
Rey described once the way the world melted in the heat of a psychoactive plant. Why was he so interested in these? The mystery, he said, lay in the discovery: whatever you hallucinated was something that had always been there, waiting to escape. The thrill, the surprise: what is it that you had buried from yourself? What emerged from the shadows, from the cobwebbed corners, from behind locked doors thrown suddenly, ludicrously, open? What did you find, Rey?
You.
Me?
You. Norma. You, in strange shapes and forms. As various animals, as air, as water. As light. As the dense and fertile earth. As a rhymed poem, as a song sung in a high-pitched voice. As a painting. You. As someone I don’t deserve.
When was this? Years ago. In the last year of the war. He nestled himself closer to her.
She has been talking now for a few minutes, and the realization scares her: the words are forming in her throat, not in her mind. The words are expelled and thrown into space before she has a moment to reflect on them. Rey. She’s said one of his names already, and so there’s no going back. Rey Rey Rey. There are no calls coming in. It is only her voice, roaming over the city. It might be, she thinks, despairing, that no one is listening. No one at all. Maybe this is the best way. The boy glances at her with tired eyes. “Who are you looking for?” Norma asks.
He shrugs, and she loves him. He looks nothing like Rey. “People from my village,” he says.
“Which is?”
“1797.”
“You have a list, don’t you?”
The boy nods. You can’t hear a nod on the radio. She asks him again, until he says yes, he does, and if he should read it.
Of course he must read it. Who else can get away with it? They won’t do anything to the boy. He is blameless. But she can’t bear it. Not yet. “In a moment,” she says.
But why wait? Isn’t this what she has always wanted? Isn’t this where her perfect show always ended?
“And you?” she says, turning to Manau. She has always loved shows with guests. There have been dozens of reunions in this room, nearly a hundred since the war ended—people have wept joyfully here, have embraced their loved ones, and have received the congratulatory calls of strangers. She has been witness to this, and perhaps if she hadn’t seen it, she wouldn’t believe it could happen. But now, it is as if she can feel the heat of those many reunions, this room suddenly peopled with ghosts.
“And you, Mr. Manau, who are you looking for?”
He seems surprised by the question. He shakes his head. His expression is glum. “No one,” he says.
“You came together. Tell us what that was like.”
The boy and his teacher look at each other, each hoping the other will talk. Finally, Manau coughs. “It’s a long way to come, Norma, for anybody. Especially for a boy of eleven, but even for me. We came on a truck and then on a boat and then on a bus that drove all night. Where else would we come? In this country, all roads lead to the city.”
“Let’s return to the list.”
“Of course.”
The boy says, “They’re the missing people from my village,” and before she can ask, he adds, “I didn’t know many of them. Only a few.”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“Nico,” the boy says, “was my best friend. He left.”
“Everyone leaves,” offers Manau.
Norma smiles. “It’s true.”
“Aren’t you tired, Miss Norma?” the boy asks.
“Oh no,” Norma says. “Tired of what?”
“I don’t remember him, Miss Norma.”
“Nico?”
“Your husband,” Victor says. “My father.”
Norma blows the boy a kiss. “I know you don’t. No one expects you to.”
“I told my mother I did.”
“You’re a good boy.”
“I’m tired, Miss Norma, even if you aren’t.”
“Let’s read the list,” Manau says. “It’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Norma says with a nod. She’s been stalling, she can’t stand it any longer. “It’s why we’re here. Are you ready? Will you read for us, dear?”
Victor nods. You can’t hear a nod on the radio. It is just past three in the morning when he clears his throat and begins.
And now she can’t even hear the names. Norma has her eyes closed, and the war has been over for ten years. Let the boy read, let him, they won’t do anything to him. They’ll send me to prison, they’ll reopen the Moon for my benefit, and welcome me as they did my husband. I’m sorry, Elmer. Maybe they’ll pretend it never happened. It’s the middle of the night, and no one is listening anyway. It’s just us. He reads very well, and Manau should be proud of what he has taught the boy. The names mean nothing, not to Manau, not to Victor. One or another is familiar, a surname he has heard before, but most are empty. There is his father’s name, and he nearly skips over this one altogether. Norma sits upright at the sound, as if someone has touched her. “Pardon me?” she says. “Could you repeat that last one?”
Victor looks up from his list.
“What a nice name,” Norma says. It’s all she can do not to scream.
And in an instant, it has passed: here are the names written by the old man with the X-rays, and the ones added by the woman at the beach, and by the soldiers just now. Victor reads these as well, his voice not wavering but gaining strength. Thank God no one is listening. Thank God it’s only us in this sleeping city. Close your eyes and imagine we are alone. Nearly three dozen names; what good can come of this?
In two minutes, it is fi
nished.
“The phone lines are open,” she manages, as if this were just another show. She looks hopefully at the switchboard, but there is nothing, not yet. There must be a record here somewhere: a song, any song to fill the empty space.
And now, it is time to wait.
IF REY had no answers about how the war began, it was very clear how it ended: almost ten years after it had started, in a truck, blindfolded, surrounded by soldiers smoking and laughing and poking him again and again with their rifles. He was taken along with two other men from the village, but the soldiers, for some reason, only seemed concerned with him. “Where you from, man?” one of them asked.
Rey strained to see through the black cloth. There was only darkness. “You’ve never heard of it.”
“Junior’s read books. You should try him.”
“He’s from the city,” one of the other prisoners said.
“No one’s talking to you,” a soldier snapped.
They all laughed. They were just kids. Rey pretended he was somewhere else: flying, yachting even. He’d never done either. One of the village men had begun to sob. Rey was seated between the two of them, men about whom he knew very little. Why were they here? The man to his left was shaking. “Where are we going?” he asked, but the soldiers ignored him. Instead, the one named Junior said, “How’d you end up here, city boy?”
It took Rey a moment to realize they meant him. He sighed. “I’m not from the city.”
“IL piece of shit.”
“There’s no such thing,” Rey said, and he felt the business end of a rifle jab his gut. There was laughter.
“Keep talking, funny guy.”
“You’re famous,” another voice said. “You’re thinner than I thought you’d be. They say you plant bombs and kill cops. They say you invented tire-burning.”
Rey blinked against the blindfold.
“I bet you want to go home.”
“I bet he does.”
“But sometimes we don’t get what we want.”
The road out of 1797 had been bumpy, but the jeep managed, and once they were moving, everything changed. The smells changed, and the quality of the heat that surrounded them. The forest was not a monolithic entity: it was many places all at once. He’d been down this road that led away from 1797: grown over with vines, and above, a thick canopy of trees that broke only rarely. It was cool and damp. He listened: they had turned and were approaching the water. He’d been here as well, on one of his trips to the camps. At the riverbank, he was separated from the two village men. One of them begged: “I’ll tell you everything!” He pleaded with such ferocity that Rey had to wonder what it was the man knew.
Then they put him on a raft, hands still tied, eyes still blind. By the sounds of it, Rey felt the platoon had shrunk, or broken into smaller units. There were three or four soldiers with him. He couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. Yachting, Rey said to himself, for the last time. In the middle of the river, where the trees did not reach, there was golden sunlight, and for a moment, Rey allowed himself to take in its warmth. He luxuriated in it; he let the light make colors behind his eyelids, let it illumine scenes and images of people and places he loved and would never see again. These are the small moments one can appreciate fully only when death is near. “We’re almost there,” a voice said after a while, and Rey knew this to be the truth. They hadn’t come far, but then the camp had never been that far from 1797. A bend in the river, a hike into the forest from the bank. Two hours downstream at most. The water was calm. Rey was calm. If he hadn’t been blindfolded, he might have enjoyed the scenery: his beloved forest, the earth at its most garishly alive. Even from this vantage point, with most of its secrets hidden beyond the banks, it was impossible not to be impressed. These were the dark places that had enchanted him his entire life: he listened for the humming of the jungle, for a bird call or the chirrup of a red monkey. What had he come here for—in the beginning? Norma, he thought and, saying it softly to himself, he felt comforted. What had he come looking for, when he had everything? He’d had her. Norma, he said again, and her name was like the final word of a prayer.
“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” he asked in the dark.
No one answered him, but then, no one had to. The sun warmed his face. A drop of sweat rolled down his forehead, beneath the blindfold and into his right eye. He nodded. “All right,” he said, blinking. “All right, okay then.” He was still nodding when the soldier everyone called Junior shot him in the chest.
Rey died instantly.
They were all boys, and though the prisoner was a stranger to them, they each mourned him in their private way. The war was ending, and Rey’s was one of the last bodies they would see. A battle awaited them at the camp, of course, but that would come tomorrow, and they would not fight it alone. They would come upon a tired band of IL fighters, among them a man named Alaf, who, like many others, would die before firing a shot. But that would be all noise and light, whereas Rey’s was a smaller, more intimate death. One of them pulled the silver chain from around the dead man’s neck. They checked his pockets, hoping to find money, but there was only a handwritten letter, of no use to anyone. They stared at Rey. From another raft on the river, a grinning soldier gave them a thumbs-up. One of them pulled off the dead man’s blindfold and closed his eyelids; another took his shoes. For many minutes, no one spoke. They let the current carry them, and they watched Rey, as if expecting him to speak. Finally, it fell upon Junior, who was the oldest, a three-year veteran, a boy of nineteen, to push the bound man’s body off the raft and into the river. It made a small splash, and, for a quarter-mile, it floated alongside them, bobbing and sinking facedown in the river. Still, no one spoke. One of the younger soldiers, of his own initiative, used the oar to push Rey’s body toward the shore. With this accomplished, they all felt better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SINCE 1999, when I began researching this novel, many people have shared their stories of the war years with me. There is no way to repay this generosity and trust.
I couldn’t do anything without my family—Renato, Graciela, Patricia, Sylvia, Pat, Marcela, and Lucia—and my friends, scattered in two dozen countries, but always near to my heart.
Vinnie Wilhelm, Mark Lafferty, and Lila Byock provided invaluable feedback on early drafts of this novel, for which I am immensely grateful.
About the Author
Daniel Alarcón’s story collection, War by Candle light, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award. He is the associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine published in his native Lima, Peru. He lives in Oakland, California.
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ALSO BY DANIEL ALARCÓN
War by Candlelight
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LOST CITY RADIO. Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Alarcón. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition January 2007 ISBN 9780061748707
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