Lost City Radio (14 page)

Now the bus took a tight turn, the passengers swaying with it—dancers, all of them—and Rey caught another glimpse of the man: we were chained together, Rey thought, and he shut his eyes tightly. The dreams were evenly spaced now, not every night, but twice-weekly explosions of filmic violence. He ground his teeth in his sleep, could feel the soreness in his jaw each morning, the grit of enamel peppering his tongue. He stayed with his father, slept on the sofa, and Trini came over every evening to see his shell-shocked nephew; together, they relived better days over steaming cups of tea. “You need a woman,” Trini said, and it was the only thing Rey's father and uncle could agree on.

The man in the wrinkled suit was staring at him. Or perhaps Rey was staring. It was impossible to tell: one would have imagined that the city was a perfect place for anonymity, a place to disappear, a place so opaque it would do your forgetting for you. But here he was. Their eyes met. It's my second home, the man had said. Rey shuddered. It meant he was marked. A time bomb. More than anything, Rey wanted to get off at the very next stop: he was content to wait for the next bus on any strange, unknown corner of the city, anywhere far away from this man—I'll be late for work, he thought, it doesn't matter. Rey noticed he was sweating, his heart skipping along, frantic, while the man in the wrinkled suit—Rey could see him now, amid the somnolent, workaday crowd—the man seemed perfectly calm. He met Rey's gaze; he didn't flinch or turn away.

Rey rode the rest of the way with his eyes half-closed, pretending to sleep. When he awoke, the man was gone. It was a clear day in Tamoé, a day of bright sun that acted upon him as a drug might: Rey found himself knocking on the wrong doors, stumbling over his prepared speech—I represent the government; I am here to help you legitimize your claim on this land, on this house. Sweat beaded on his brow, stung his eyes. Doors were slammed in his face, women refused to speak with him without their husbands present. He left business cards and promised to return, but the day stretched on in an opiate haze, Rey trudging from one dusty street to the next. He represented the government—just as those soldiers had, the night they pissed on him beneath the stars. The generous embrace of power, Trini called it, with a smirk. “Don't worry, boy,” his uncle had said. “If they blacklisted everyone they sent to the Moon, there'd be no one left to hire.”

A couple of days passed before he saw the man in the wrinkled suit again: on the same morning bus ride through the city to Tamoé. This time, the man boarded a few stops after Rey and nodded at him—it was unmistakable! brazen!—before burying his face in a newspaper. The next day, it was the same thing. And the next. Rey called in sick on the fourth day, an unnecessary courtesy he felt compelled to provide: he was a minion in a swollen bureaucracy, and no one would have noticed. Still, he wrapped himself in a coat, stumbled outside, and called from the pay phone on the corner, shivering. He dutifully reported symptoms as vague as they
were real: a slight sense of vertigo, a pain in his shoulder, a shallowness of breath. He said nothing of the fear or the nightmares of paralyzing intensity. What he needed, he decided as he spoke to an uninterested secretary, was some rest.

Rey returned to work the following day, and this time, the man in the wrinkled suit was waiting for him at the bus stop, seated on the bench with a newspaper folded under his arm, staring blankly at the passing traffic. Rey hadn't mentioned this apparition to anyone—not to his father or Trini. It felt like an assault. There was no one else at the bus stop. Rey glared at the man, and the man smiled back.

“Are you following me?” Rey asked.

“Won't you sit?” The man's tone was warm, avuncular. “We have things to discuss, you and I.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Rey said, but he sat anyway. “I'm not scared of you.”

“Of course,” the man said. He had gained some weight since Rey saw him last. Then again, one might assume they all had. At the Moon, a soldier came by twice a day and dropped pieces of bread into the hole, along with a plastic bag full of water. “Tamoé,” the man said, “is the future of this stricken nation.”

A bus came; a woman with a bag of vegetables stepped off. The bus driver held the door open, waiting for Rey, but the man in the wrinkled suit waved it away.

“In Tamoé, the foundation will be laid. Is being laid, I should say, at this very moment. Tell me, do you enjoy your work?”

What was there to like? It was a slum like any other. Rey coughed into his hand.

“We have people there,” the man continued. He nodded slowly, the edges of his mouth creeping toward a smile. “I would like you to meet them.” He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out an envelope. “I can't visit them with you. It wouldn't be safe.”

Rey looked at the man and then around him at the busy avenue. From a distance, they were simply two men—strangers, acquaintances—chatting. Was anyone watching them? Listening? They could be speaking of the weather, or the weekend scores, or anything. The man placed the envelope on the bench between them. “Why me?” Rey asked.

“Because I know your name,” the man said. “Not the one you were born with. The other one.”

The name, the ID. For an instant, an image flashed before him: the woman he hadn't seen since the night his misfortunes began. Norma was her name.
Norma.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Rey said, but the words had a disappointing lack of weight to them: they sounded weak, tenuous.

“I see they succeeded in frightening you at the Moon. There are other things you can do for us. Quiet things. Clean things. You needn't be public anymore to be useful.”

“I don't understand.”

“Of course. There aren't many of us who really know you.” The man eyed him and didn't blink. “Shall I say your other name? Shall I prove it?”

Rey felt suddenly that his youth was a decade in the past, that he had become, seemingly overnight, old and decrepit, a man with nothing to lose. He was dying. He shook his head. He hadn't seen Norma again, hadn't thought of her until that exact moment. Would he even recognize her? He had spent six months confined by the unsettling substance of his own dreams. Rey took the envelope without looking at it, slipped it into his inside coat pocket. It was thin and waxy. He knew instinctively the envelope was empty. It was a test.

The man smiled. “Avenue F–10. Lot 128. Ask for Marden.”

They'll lock me up again, Rey thought, and this time no one will see me. This time they won't spare me. If he went to the police, what would he say? What would he have for them? An empty envelope and vague descriptions of a man with a thin beard and an ill-fitting suit. And where did you meet this man, the police would ask—oh, here it is, where I give myself away: when I was a prisoner, sir, at the Moon.

The man scratched his brow. “You have questions I can't answer,” he said. “In the meantime, I'll ask you one: those soldiers. The ones who kept us company when we last met. Do you hate them?”

The bus was a half-block away.
Hate
was a word Rey never used. It meant nothing to him. The soldiers had pissed on him joylessly, with the detachment of scientists performing an experiment. When Rey was a boy, he and his friends captured beetles, placed them in plastic tins, and set them on fire, blissfully cruel: a group of boys, charmed by this collabora
tive act of malice. Why did this memory fill him with such nostalgia, and why were the soldiers so dispassionate in their cruelty? They had tortured him with the same conviction with which he wandered around Tamoé. That is to say, they had done so listlessly, by rote. How could he hate them? It was their job. If they had so much as snickered, Rey felt certain, he could. Loathe them. Absolutely. Without that, they seemed strangely innocent.

The bus jerked to a stop before them, and Rey made as if to rise, but the man in the wrinkled suit held him back. “You'll wait for the next one,” he said. He got on the bus and didn't look back.

 

H
E KEPT
on to the envelope for two weeks. That first night, after Trini had come and gone, after his father had gone off to sleep, Rey held it up to the light and verified it was empty. There was a script letter
M
in the upper right-hand corner. The envelope was sealed, thin, and insubstantial.

Rey returned to Tamoé all that week, expecting each morning to see the man with the thin beard. He never did. He walked around the neighborhood as he always had, taking notes, drawing his crude maps, filling out forms with illiterate men who insisted on looking everything over before signing an
X
to the bottom of the page. He studiously avoided Avenue F–10, never crossing it on foot: if he was to work on the north side of F–10, he took the bus a few stops past and spent the entire day there. On other days, he confined himself to the south side, never nearing this new, artificial border.

It took him two weeks, but when Rey finally decided to see Marden, he did it right away. Later he would wonder why he went at all, and decide it was curiosity—a natural curiosity—and tell himself that a healthy interest in the unknown would always be useful. In his career as a scientist, and in his life, if he were allowed to live it. It was not the hate that the man in the wrinkled suit wanted him to feel: Rey felt proud of that somehow. Still, he was afraid. He dressed that day as he normally would, washed his face under the cold-water tap of his father's apartment, and folded the empty envelope into his front pocket. When he pulled the door shut behind him, Rey felt a heaviness in the act.

Avenue F–10 ran roughly east-west through Tamoé, a potholed four-lane road divided by a gravel median, dotted with the occasional withering
shrub. The avenue was lined with squat apartment houses, crowded repair shops, and a few restaurants of questionable cleanliness and limited menus. If a place like Tamoé could be said to possess a center, F–10 was it: one of two avenues with streetlights in the newly colonized district. On his north-side days, Rey's bus ride home crossed the avenue: he could sense its glow, its energy from blocks away. After dark, groups of boys congregated beneath F–10's streetlights: laughing, alive, they squatted around these totems, bathing in the pale orange glow. Rey found it perplexing: it seemed the youth of the district never left Tamoé; instead, they came here, to this avenue, just to stand in the light.

That morning, Rey got off in the heart of F–10 and walked east. Even by day, it was crowded with young people. Women sold tea from wooden carts, emollients of pungent odors, syrups that promised to cure any cough. Moto-taxis clustered on the corner, ferrying vendors to the market a few blocks away. But ten blocks on, the avenue regained the provincial air that defined the rest of the district. The asphalt disappeared abruptly, and the four-and five-story apartment houses, Tamoé's most solidly constructed buildings, were replaced by shanties, of the kind that concerned Rey and his work most directly: ad hoc homes of considerable ingenuity, homes built of material scavenged from the city. Illegal, ubiquitous, inevitable, the city would grow and grow and no one could imagine it ever stopping. The avenue itself petered out at the base of a crumbling, yellow hill, a dusty lane running headlong into a mound of scree. Here, a shirtless child had planted a red flag in the pile of rock. A half-dozen children ran around it, ignoring Rey, now and then clambering up, only to be repelled by a hail of stones. They played war. A thin, black dog sat at a safe distance from the children, chewing nervously on a piece of Styrofoam.

Lot 128 was set just off the dusty edge of the street, to the left of the pile of rocks. It was a house like any other on the block, mud brick with small, paneless windows on either side of the door, and lined with a knee-high fence of woven reeds. Rey stepped over it. The number was painted neatly in the center of the door. Rey resisted the urge to peek through the windows. He knocked twice and waited.

“Marden,” Rey said when the door opened. “I have a message for Marden.”

The man in the doorway was large and pale, wearing an undershirt and dark drawstring pants patched at the knees. He was older than fifty, perhaps much older. His hair was the color of a used cigarette filter, and his face, jowly and slack, had that same exhausted, yellow-gray pallor. If he was Marden, the name seemed to have no effect on him, or rather not precisely the effect Rey had been expecting: a look of recognition, even camaraderie. The man looked down the street suspiciously, then waved Rey in. He pointed to a chair in the center of the room, and squatted in front of a tiny gas burner resting on the dirt floor. With a bent fork, he tended to a single egg. It bobbed and sank in a pot of boiling water.

“Breakfast,” the man said. He apologized for having nothing to offer his visitor, but he did so in a tone Rey could not mistake for warmth.

“I ate, thank you,” Rey said. The man shrugged and tapped his egg.

The room was dark, the air full of dust and smoke and steam. Besides the chair, there was a twin bed and a radio on the nightstand. In the generally colorless room, there was one grand splash of reddish orange: a finely knit bedspread, fiery and bright and out of place.

The man must have caught him looking. “My mother made it,” he said. “Years ago.”

Old men have mothers, too. Subversives, too, even those who live Spartan lives. Rey tried to smile. The man turned off the burner and flipped the egg into a bowl. The water settled in the pot, steaming. He tapped some instant coffee into a cup, then filled it with the same water he'd used to boil the egg. He stirred with a fork and handed the cup to Rey. “When you finish,” he said, “I'll have some.”

Rey nodded and took the cup. Sugar? he almost asked, then thought better of it. He held the cup to his lips. It smelled like coffee, at least.

“This message?” the man said, without looking up. He sat with his legs crossed and peeled his egg carefully, gathering the tiny bits of eggshell in his lap. “Who gave it to you?”