Lost City Radio (22 page)

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 image 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.

T
HE 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.

 

“W
HAT 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.

“We'll stay,” she said with a nod. “Did everyone know this but me?”

“In the village? No, only a few.”

“But they all knew my husband?”

“Sure,” Manau said. “Adela—Victor's mother—she told me he came three times a year.”

“Sometimes four. He was working on…” Norma trailed off. What a helpless feeling. “Oh, it doesn't matter what he told me, does it?” she said, her voice cracking. What hadn't he lied about? This other woman—Norma very nearly retched at the thought, some jungle tramp fucking her Rey, their bodies pressing together, their sweat, their odors. Their pleasure. She covered her eyes. She couldn't speak.

“I'm not happy,” Manau said. “I didn't want to tell you this.”

“And I didn't want to hear it.” Norma peeked through her fingers.

He nodded, and bowed his head, staring into his lap. “They love you in the village, Miss Norma.”

She took his hand and thanked him. “This drawing,” she asked. “Where did it come from?”

“There was an artist who came to the village. Years ago.”

She looked back at the portrait. “His hair is so white,” she said. She couldn't remember if he had looked this old when she last saw him.

Her head hurt. She meant to ask for an explanation, but didn't. Or couldn't. A muffled voice came from the kitchen.

“He didn't make it, did he?” Norma said.

“Madam?”

“He didn't survive. I'm asking.”

“You don't know?” Manau said.

“Isn't it obvious by now that I don't know anything?” It took all the calm she could muster not to yell it.

“They took him. It's what Victor's mother told me.”

“They?”

“The army.”

“Oh,” Norma whispered.

 

W
HEN
R
EY
returned from the jungle after meeting his newborn son, he had resolved to end his activities. He hadn't seen his contact since Yerevan was disappeared. It was all too exhausting. He felt, for the first time, that he had brought home some of the forest with him, something affecting and real, a germ, a curse. His life—his lives, their carefully maintained boundaries now breached, seemed overwhelmingly complex. He found himself thinking of the child the way a father ought to: with pride, with impressive and unexpected swells of love clouding his thoughts at the most inopportune moments. More than anything, he wanted to share this illicit joy with Norma, and this shamed him. What right did he have to be happy? Still, these things cannot be helped: they are biological, evolutionary. He wished he had a wallet-sized photograph of the boy—to show whom exactly? Strangers, he supposed. On the bus, he could pretend he was a real father, that he'd done nothing wrong. On more than one occasion, after a deep yawn, he explained to a passenger in the seat beside him, always a woman, that he was exhausted because the baby had been up all night. He said it knowingly, nonchalantly, or tried to. He liked the way the women smiled at him, the way they nodded and
understood. They spoke of their own young ones, then pictures were shown, and good wishes offered. At home, he and Norma made love every night; at his insistence, they returned to the debauched and beautiful rituals of the first days of their pairing: sex in the morning, before dinner, before sleeping. Norma was happy, they were both happy, until some dark thought intruded and he remembered the kind of man he was, the kind who would lie and make mistakes and one day bring home a child from the jungle to be raised in the city. It was what had to happen: his son would have to be educated. He couldn't very well leave the boy to play in the dirt, could he? But he and Norma would have their own child first, Rey decided optimistically: the two of them, and it would be wonderful, and in this way, she would forgive him.

At the university one day, he decided to take a walk. It was between classes, an hour and a half when he might have stayed in his classroom reading or correcting papers, but it was a nice afternoon, breezy, with skies that could be mistaken for clear. There were students about in packs, and it struck Rey that he could scarcely remember his own days as an undergraduate. It hadn't come easy—he remembered that. He spent a year trying to get in. He did three years, then went to the Moon, returned a year later to resume his studies, and the two parts of his higher education seemed altogether unrelated. He met Norma, he met the man in the wrinkled suit, and this pair had changed everything he thought he knew about his life. Now Rey wandered off campus to the avenue, and then to the corner just past the university gates. There was a newsstand there, and a crowd of young men reading the headlines with hands in their pockets. Rey bought a sports paper, scanned the headlines. A rust-colored car idled at the corner, the radio blaring through the open windows. The driver wore mirrored sunglasses and tapped the steering wheel with his fingers. There was a girlie magazine open on the dashboard. Farther along, beneath a tattered awning, a man in a green vest sold puppies. He had a half-dozen in a single cage atop a slanting wooden table: eyes shut, tiny, the puppies awoke yawning, pawed around, and fell back asleep. The little beasts were putting on a show. A crowd of children had dragged their mothers to see them. A black-haired boy nervously poked his finger through the wire cage; an obliging puppy licked it sleepily, and the boy squealed with pleasure. Rey stood to watch, newspaper under his
arm. He was watching the children, he realized, and not the puppies. I'll bring my boy here, Rey thought. Why not? I'll get him a dog. Various images of domesticity played out before him, and he smiled. Just then, a man tapped him on the shoulder. “Uncle,” a voice said.

The man had the boyish face of a high school senior, probably didn't even shave yet, but something in his manner of dress was wrong. “What are you reading, Uncle?”

“Excuse me?”

“What've you got there?” the young man asked, pointing to the newspaper.

“Sports. Why?”

The young man frowned. “Let me begin again.” He pulled a badge from his pocket and flashed it, just fast enough that Rey could see its glint. “ID, please,” he said in a low voice. “Don't make a fuss in front of the kids.”

“Oh,” Rey said, “is that what this is?” He smiled. These undercovers were getting younger and younger. He'd become accustomed to this, and never again would he make the mistake he'd made the night he met Norma. Just show them something, that was the rule now, show them anything. They weren't looking for you, because if they were, they'd already have you. Rey took his wallet from his back pocket, made a show of taking out his university ID. “No fussing in front of the kids. And how old are you?”

“I'll ignore that.” The undercover looked the ID over and nodded. “I thought it was you, professor. Trini was my captain,” he said, handing the ID back. “Come with me.”

“Trini?”

The undercover nodded.

“Do I have to?”