Lost City Radio (15 page)

“Are you Marden?”

The man glanced at Rey, then brushed off his fingers and took the egg into his mouth whole. He chewed for a minute or more, nodding. Rey drank his coffee, for lack of anything else to do. It burned his tongue. Then he sat forward, with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting in his palm. He watched the man eat. The loose skin of the man's cheeks
puffed and stretched. He swallowed with an exaggerated expression of satisfaction and rubbed his belly. “I'm Marden,” he said. “Where'd you get this message?”

Rey put down his coffee and joined the man on the floor. He pulled the envelope from his back pocket. “I don't know his name.”

Marden looked the envelope over, squinted at the
M
, and broke into a grin. “Very nice,” he said. He tore the envelope in half, then into quarters, then into eighths. He handed the bits and pieces back to Rey. “Where is he finding people these days?” he said, amused.

Rey held the scraps of the envelope in his cupped hands. “What do I do with this?” he asked.

Marden shrugged. “Smoke them. Bury them. Confetti at your wedding. It doesn't matter, kid.”

“I don't understand.”

“When he asks, tell him there were eight pieces. When we need you, the professor will find you. He'll tell you where to leave a message for me and you'll do it.” Marden coughed dryly into his hand. “You work in Tamoé?”

Rey nodded.

“Avoid this part of the district. Wait for us. It could be months. It could be a year, or even two. No one knows.”

“No one?”

“I don't. You don't. Not even the professor does. We do as we're told. You'll be a messenger. Your job is to wait.”

Rey put the pieces of the envelope back into his pocket. His coffee had cooled a bit, enough for the bitter liquid to go down without too much trouble. He finished it and passed the cup to Marden. Was this all? Had he waited two weeks to have an empty envelope torn to pieces before him by a jowly, yellow-haired old man? It didn't seem right.

“Were you at the Moon?” Rey asked.

Marden frowned. “I've been there,” he said after a moment. “You have as well?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it to yourself.” Marden sighed. “You won't be coming back here. We have people all over the district. Things are happening.”

The meeting was over. There were no good-byes, no handshakes. The door opened, and the small room released him.

Outside, the children ran in frantic circles, raising a film of fine dust, a low, sandy fog over the street. He could feel it in his nostrils, he could taste it. The day was just beginning. The children paid him no attention. Rey walked away from the hill, down the avenue, absentmindedly scattering remains of the envelope along the way.

 

W
HEN
R
EY
returned to the university that year, just before his twenty-fifth birthday, he still hadn't seen the man in the wrinkled suit, or been to the eastern end of F–10. He'd worked, documenting scores of Indian families and the exact addresses of their ramshackle homes. He interpreted hand gestures and forged signatures for people he thought might benefit. He learned a bit of the Indian dialect, enough to say “good day” and “thank you” and “you're welcome.” A half year in Tamoé, and the dust became a part of him: in the evenings, his clothes shook off clouds of it, his skin felt heavy with it. He was going to be buried alive if he stayed much longer. Every Friday, he made his way to the central office of the district, a blandly decorated room with a single desk and a sun-faded flag, on the district's other lighted avenue. He turned in his paperwork, wondering only briefly what became of these maps and forms and records. Once settled, Rey knew, nothing would move these people. They didn't need his help for anything beyond peace of mind: only a cataclysm would clear the area. He thought now and then of the man in the wrinkled suit, but on these rare occasions, the entire episode was cloaked in absurdity. There was no war of subversion in the making: where were the soldiers? The young men of the district seemed content to spend their evenings leaning against lampposts, posturing for the girls that passed by. The man in the wrinkled suit had invoked the future of the nation when he spoke of Tamoé, but who was the mysterious contact in this vanguard district? A terse, phlegmatic man with an unhealthy pallor, peeling eggs, alone. Marden, with his faraway look and peripheral existence, hardly seemed capable of leaving his home—to say nothing of instigating a general revolt.

Rey arranged to work part-time and resumed his studies. Despite all
the talk, the president's warnings, and the bellicose editorials, life at the university had not yet changed. There were no soldiers inside its gates. Students still gathered in the main courtyard and discussed the coming conflict as they had before, with that strange mix of awe and anxiety. It made Rey nervous to return: there were more than a few people who might remember one or another of the speeches he'd made, his brief and intoxicating turn at the university as an outspoken critic of the government. The prospect of meeting these people made his heart quicken. He'd been on committees that planned trips to the mountains. He'd met in dark rooms to plan protests. Most significant, he'd acquired another name, and with it came responsibilities. But then he had disappeared. His old friends would have questions: Where have you been? What did they do to you? Are you all right? Every so often, in the months of his recovery, Rey's father handed him a note that some concerned young man had brought by the apartment. They were always polite but insistent: that he contact them, because they were waiting. Rey never responded: what could he say? There were people at the university who had looked up to him. He hadn't seen anyone in nearly a year; he had fled to Tamoé. By now, they must consider him a traitor. They had surely interpreted his silence this way, and if they asked, he would have no answers.

Do you hate them? It tormented him, this question. At the university, Rey slipped into class just as the professor began lecturing, and left before the hour ended. He wore hooded sweatshirts even on sunny days, and walked quickly through campus, careful to keep his gaze fixed on the ground before him. All the things he would say to Norma years later were true. He was afraid of politics. He was afraid of dying. He was afraid of finding himself a broken man of fifty, living in a slum at the edge of the city, waiting for the arrival of obscure messages from the great brain of subversion. When Rey met her again, when he saw her and saw that she had seen him as well—he felt a shiver: even at a distance, she recalled for him, in all its immediacy, the terror of what he had done, of Marden and the man in the wrinkled suit and the blank horrors that still penetrated his dreams. He had risked too much. He had come so far from that night of dancing, that night of bombast and boasting. He'd only wanted to impress her. Because she was beautiful. Because she didn't seem to mind looking at him either. And now she was walking toward him. The IL had
found him at a bus stop; why did he believe, even for a moment, that they would forget him now? That he could just walk away? It was a cold, cloudy day—the malaise of winter.

Norma smiled at him, and she looked like sunshine. She hadn't forgotten him, either. Rey panicked.

It was true. It was always true: you could believe one thing and its opposite simultaneously, be afraid and reckless all at once. You could write dangerous articles under an assumed name and believe yourself to be an impartial scholar. You could become a messenger for the IL and fall in love with a woman who believed you were not. You could pretend that the nation at war was a tragedy and not the work of your own hand. You could proclaim yourself a humanist and hate with steely resolve.

When, after the conflict, the displaced thousands returned to the site of the Battle of Tamoé, they found their homes burned, their avenues cratered, their hills littered with unexploded ordnance. Tanks had run through their streets, bulldozers had razed entire blocks of houses. Their beloved streetlights had fallen too, but in any case, there were few young people left to gather around them. The entire district would be rebuilt. Without a monument to the dead, without so much as a plaque to commemorate what had been there before. It was announced that the families who had their paperwork in order would be permitted to return, would be forgiven. If they could find their old plot, it was theirs, regardless of their role in the battle or their sympathies for the IL. An office was set up on a burned-out block of F–10 to process the petitions. A line gathered there each morning before dawn. For months, they came, heads bowed like penitents, carrying the forms Rey had written for them or the maps he had drawn, and it was all they owned in the world.

M
ANAU ARRIVED
in the city and inhaled. Its odor was enough: that potent mix of metal and smoke. He was home. Adela's boy held his hand, and Manau felt keenly the possibility of forgetting: her taste, her body, her caresses. He shut his eyes.

The boy looked up at him: “What will we do?”

Manau squeezed his hand and pulled him along. He carried both their bags over his shoulder. The street outside the bus station was full of people, spilling off the sidewalks, scrambling between the cars. The boy had said almost nothing the last hour of the bus ride. Even this simple question—what will we do?—had to be viewed as progress. He gazed at everything with wide, fearful eyes. The boy was not home: he was in hell. And the city was a terrible place, to be sure, but the world was made up of terrible places. Maybe Victor was too young to take solace in that fact. And there were other facts: Adela was dead, and now they were both alone. Manau tried, as he had for the previous four days, to clear his
mind, but still he was pursued by the urge to weep. Ten days before, he had made love to Adela on a mat of reeds. It had been a moonless night. Around them, above them, in the near distance of the forest, birds had made their bright and inscrutable music. A pang of desire shot through him at the memory: he and Adela had scratched one another and pushed, they had rolled clumsily off the mat and onto the ground. The moist earth had stuck to their bodies. Later, the rains came to clean them: a sky split by lightning, curtains of purple water crashing loudly over the trees.

In the city, the sky and its clouds glowed white. It was a year since he'd seen this shade of color above.

“Is it going to rain?” Victor asked. “Is that what you're looking at?”

Manau managed a smile. “I don't think so.” He didn't say that they were in the coastal desert now, that as long as he stayed in the city, Victor would not see anything recognizable as rain. Always cloudy, this city, always humid. It's a trick, Manau wanted to say. “Are you hungry?” he asked instead, and the boy nodded.

An Indian woman squatted on the sidewalk, selling bread from a covered basket balanced on a crate. She puffed on the stub of a hand-rolled cigar and did not smile. Manau took two rolls of bread and paid her with a handful of coins. The woman held them in her palm for a second, then frowned. She took one between her molars and twisted it. The metal coin bent in her teeth.

“It's fake,” she said, handing it back. “Don't give me this jungle money.”

Her mountain accent was thick with masticated vowels. Jungle money? Manau mumbled an apology and fished a bill from his pocket. The boy watched the proceedings without comment. He had already eaten half of his roll. The woman scowled. “Pay first, then eat, boy.” She held Manau's bill up, inspecting it. “Where do you come from?” she asked.

“From 1797,” Manau said. He tried a joke: “The money's good, madam. I made it myself.”

She released a mouthful of smoke. Not even a smile. “You people have ruined this place.” She handed Manau his change and turned to serve another customer.

Manau felt his blood rising. The city was impregnated with the smell of ruin: it swirled in the sodden air and stuck to you, wherever you went. It followed me all the way to the jungle, Manau thought, and now he
stood accused of bringing it home again. He looked at the woman, at the boy. In the neighborhood where he was raised, there was an Indian woman who shined shoes and sharpened knives. She walked the streets, chatting with the women who knew her, offering candy to the children. She lived beneath the bridge at the end of the street, and she always smiled and never complained, not even when the war got bad and half her customers moved away—that's how they were supposed to be: these mountain people, these desperate poor.

Manau spat on the sidewalk in front of the woman.

“Move on!” she hissed.

Then he had done it, not for himself but for the boy: with a swift kick, Manau upended the woman's basket of bread, knocking it off the crate. There was a shout. Bread spilled everywhere on the dirty sidewalk, rolled into the gutter. In an instant, the woman was up, her face hot, her fists clenched. She would have attacked and certainly hurt him—but there was no time: the passersby had turned on her, had swarmed her, they were stealing her bread. The woman scurried behind them, swatting at hands, but it was no use. Her bread disappeared into the hands of men in work clothes, and mothers in housedresses, and ratty street kids with matted hair. “Thieves!” the woman yelled, red to bursting, her face a livid, unnatural color. Something animal had been unleashed in her, and she waved her cigar in frantic, menacing loops. She attacked a man who had snatched a roll and, for a brief and shocking instant, it seemed she might bite him.

A day's worth of bread vanished in fifteen seconds.

It happened so fast that he couldn't be sure why he had done it, only that he did not regret it. Not at all. Manau tossed some change at the upturned basket, took Victor's hand, and backed away. He looked down the avenue. In the distance was the radio's spire, a woven metal phallus pointing skywards, adorned with blinking red lights. “Let's go,” Manau said to the boy, and they went toward it, first walking, then racing, as if someone or something were chasing them.

 

I
T WAS
only ten days before, as they drank palm wine and waited hopefully for a breeze, that Zahir had invited Manau to touch his stumps. “Be kind to an old man,” he said, though Manau did not think of his landlord and friend as old. “I'm sad today.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. It's about time you did. You stare.”

Manau blushed and began to protest, but Zahir interrupted him. “It's all right,” he said. “Everyone does.”

The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the sky dimmed toward a lacquered blue-black. It was the edge of night in the jungle: a nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed around the kerosene lantern. Manau sipped his wine from a gourd. Nico had been gone for months now, and no one had heard from him. That night and every night, Manau was careful not to mention Zahir's son. When the wine loosened his tongue, Manau felt he might confess, but then he was unsure what to say, and so said nothing. Nearly half a year had passed this way. A harvest had come and gone.

In a few hours, the night breezes would blow, Manau would excuse himself, and wander off to look for Adela, forgetting Nico and his unfortunate father for another day. If the moon was out, or even if it wasn't, he would invite her to swim.

Now Zahir was waiting, eyes shut tight, holding his arms out for inspection. Manau took another sip from his gourd and set it on the floor. He placed a hand over each stump, felt the rough skin against his palms. He held Zahir's right arm by the wrist, and went over the wound with his thumb. Where it had scarred, the flesh turned in on itself, like a sinkhole or a crevasse or the dry and jagged bed of a stream.

“It's been seven years,” Zahir said, opening his eyes. “Seven years today.”

Manau let go. He had come to think of his landlord's stumps as a cruel birth defect, a trial Zahir had always borne. Of course, this wasn't true. He knew it wasn't. Still, it was startling: seven years ago yesterday, Zahir could scratch his temple, light his own cigarette. He could love his wife with ten more possibilities. Manau looked down at his own hands, and they seemed like miracles. He cracked his knuckles; they gave off a satisfying pop. He wiggled his fingers, then caught Zahir watching him.

“I'm sorry.”

“You get used to it. Really. Do you believe me?”

Manau made a point of looking Zahir in the eye. “Of course,” he said.

The dark began just a few feet beyond the steps of Zahir's raised hut. The towns people shuffled by, nearly invisible, now and then calling a greeting. Manau felt unable to speak. In a little more than a week,
he would leave this village, and all the stories he'd heard here would seem burdensome and foreign, woeful tales foisted upon him: his crippled friend, the dozens of missing, the town and its never-ending battle against the encroaching forest. Flood, neglect, war. Manau would look at the boy—his fellow traveler—and be reminded of this day and others, when Zahir told him of 1797 and its history. He would feel disappointed in himself, that he had allowed it, that he had accepted these memories that were not his. At the time, it had seemed painless, even pleasant: the crepuscular light, the lulling haze of the wine, the stories that always ended badly. He had very nearly belonged. He might have made a home there, if Adela hadn't died.

Zahir said, “The IL came and asked for food. We told them the war was over. They accused us of lying. We told them there was no food to spare. They said someone must have stolen the food if there was none to give. There was a thief in town, they said. So they took the boy and did
tadek
.”

He rubbed his face with the end of his arm. On feast days, after he drank, Zahir let his wife tie tassels to his arms. Red and white. Manau had seen him, had seen the whole process. When she reached his stumps, she slowed, massaging the rough skin there, gently, adoringly. Surely she missed his hands too, but the way she lavished attention on his stumps, you would never guess it. She tied thick blooms to them. Then, when the music began in earnest, Zahir danced to the drum and the flute, waving his arms like a bird.

“And Victor picked you?” Manau asked.

“Because he knew me, I suppose. He was Nico's friend, you understand. They were always good friends. He could have picked anyone. It's a miracle he didn't go to his mother.”

Adela without her hands—Manau was seized with terror, imagining it.

“Victor doesn't remember it,” Zahir said, “and that's for the best. What good would it do?”

None, thought Manau. But did Nico remember it? What good would that do? Or what evil had it already done? Manau fumbled for his glass. His wine was warm, but it went down easily. The breezes would begin soon.

“Do you want to know something else?” Zahir said. “I deserved it. The boy was right.”

“No one deserves that.”

“I did.”

Manau waited for his friend to go on, but Zahir didn't. The silence lasted a minute or more, and Manau didn't ask for explanations. He didn't dare. They listened to the forest. When Zahir spoke again, it was in another tone of voice.

“But that was the second time the IL came,” said Zahir. “The first time they came to shoot the priest.”

“There was a priest?” Manau asked.

Then, a woman's voice from the darkness: “Oh, yes, there was a priest.”

It was Adela. She had snuck up on them. She stepped into the orange lamp light, and Manau felt something warm in his chest: he wouldn't have to look for her later. She was right here; maybe she'd been looking for him.

“You found us,” he said.

Her hair was braided loosely; a few strands fell just above her eyes. She very nearly glistened. Adela held her hand out, and Manau obliged with a kiss.

“Don Zahir,” Adela said, with the slightest bow.

He received her with a nod.

Manau offered Adela his chair, but she sat at the top of the stair instead. She pulled her skirt above her knees. He noticed her bare feet, her ankles. “Is there wine?” she asked.

“For you, my dear, there is always wine,” Zahir said, and Manau stood without waiting to be told. He went inside and came back with a gourd. He poured carefully. A full cup. She took a sip.

“Zahir,” Adela said, “you were telling a story.”

“The priest and his fate. These are old tales.”

“Tell it,” she said.

Zahir sighed. She was irresistible, and not just to Manau.

The beginning of the war: a sun-drunk group of fighters stumbled into town. They were young, Zahir said. They stank of youth, and for this reason, many people forgave them. Also, if truth be told, the victim was not a man universally liked. The priest had come from abroad some thirty
years before and, at the time of his death, still clung stubbornly to his accent. He refused to learn any of the old language, and did not contribute to the upkeep of the communal plot. He looked down on the Indians who came to trade medicinal plants and wild birds for cornmeal and razor blades and bullets. They didn't know God, he said. And so the IL waved their weapons and bound his hands, and no one protested. The rebels kept their faces covered. They ordered the entire village, some hundred and twenty families in those days, to gather to watch the execution. The shooter was a young woman. She was very pale.

Zahir took a deep breath, then drank from his gourd. He asked for a cigarette. Manau lit one and held it to Zahir's lips while the old man smoked. Manau took a few puffs as well, held the cool smoke in his lungs. It was that last detail that seemed so strange to him: a woman! They were bad people, these IL, but he couldn't help being intrigued. This jungle wine did strange things to the brain: he had to touch Adela right then. He stretched his leg out; his right toe could just graze her elbow if he nearly slid off his chair. The night had come swiftly, and the breezes were beginning.

She turned to Manau and smiled. She swatted his foot away and pinched her nose.

When the cigarette had burned down, Zahir announced he had come to the interesting part of the story. “Isn't it so, Adela?” he asked.

“If I remember correctly, Don Zahir.”

“Of course you do,” said the cripple.

The IL gave the priest's home to the poorest family in the village, the Hawas, and they had no choice but to accept. A great show was made of carrying their few possessions to the priest's house. But when the IL left a few days later, Mr. Hawa moved his family back to their lean-to near the river. The village begged him to stay, but he wouldn't listen to reason. His wife was heartbroken. She insisted on bringing with her a large bronze crucifix, and would have brought the priest's iron stove as well, had her husband allowed it.