Lost City Radio (28 page)

By the middle of the second day of shooting, Elmer began making small changes to the prepared texts: fighting
raged
instead of
continued
. When these passed by unnoticed, he began culling some safe statements from the Lost City Radio answering machine, to be played on the air as firsthand accounts. In this way, the station was the first to report on the fires. Norma herself took some calls, listened as one or another desperate resident described the inferno that was beginning to remake the landscape of the district. They want our land, the callers said, they want our homes. The fire was still in the lower neighborhoods of Tamoé, and in the slums that bordered the Central Highway, but it was moving up the hill, and north from the highway. One caller after another made the same accusation: it was the army. They were setting fire to everything. They were bulldozing homes and setting fire to the rubble. At night, from the conference room, you could see the eastern district smoldering. By day, the smoke hung over the city, but was not mentioned in the newspapers or on most radio stations.

In 1797, the people gathered in the canteen to listen to Zahir's radio. The reception wasn't bad, and everyone took turns admiring the machine. Zahir, with whom Rey had spoken a handful of times, sat next to it, gracefully accepting congratulations on his purchase. By the third day, they were calling it the Battle of Tamoé on the radio, and the news was
exclusively of a great fire. The shooting had stopped. In 1797, the villagers were crowded in—children, too, sitting under the tables, among their parents' feet, or balanced on the windowsills. A soft rain fell, and Zahir turned up the volume of his new machine so they could hear, over the pitter-patter on the metal roof, about the latest block to fall to the army, or the newest official count of dead.

They listened as if it were a sporting match in which they had not taken sides. One woman thought she had a son who lived in this place—Tamoé?—but she couldn't be sure. She sat uncomfortably, pulled a strand of her hair into her mouth and sucked on it nervously. She accepted condolences from the gathered crowd; her worry was authentic and her sadness complete.

Rey sat among them, unnoticed at first, but as the afternoon became evening, something changed. They had in their midst a real expert: the villagers were watching him. Finally, someone addressed Rey directly: an elderly woman whose voice he had never heard before. “Where is this Tamoé?” she asked.

“Yes,” the adults echoed. “Where is it?”

Rey blushed. “Tell them,” Adela said, and so he had no choice. He stood up, walked to the front of the canteen, and was, quite suddenly, a professor again. He had been a teacher all his adult life. His father was a teacher, and his father's father, too, back when the town Rey had abandoned at age fourteen was a village no larger than 1797. Rey cleared his throat. “It's the edge of the city,” he said, “north of the Central Highway, in the foothills of the eastern mountains.”

It meant nothing to them. “Is there a map I could use to show you?” he asked.

There was laughter: a map? Of the city—who would have such a thing? Adela had a map of the country, of course; he'd brought it himself.

The questions came furiously. Yes, he knew of it. Yes, he had been there. Was it big? He had to smile: compared with the village where they all sat, how could it be anything but? Hands shot up, and he did his best to keep pace. Who lives there? What kind of people?

“Poor people,” Rey said, and the men and women nodded.

“Where are they from?”

“They come from all over the country,” he said. The mountains, the
jungle, the decaying towns of the north. From the abandoned sierra.

He was very polite, or tried to be, but the questions kept coming. Someone had turned the radio down: Rey could hear his wife's voice, but couldn't concentrate on the words. They wouldn't let him listen. The villagers knew nothing about the war, and here they were, awaiting its end, wanting quite suddenly to know everything about it.

“How did it begin?” a man asked. He wore his black hair in a braid.

“I don't know,” Rey said, and there was a clatter of protest. Of course he knew!

Which grievance was it and when? Had it begun that night he spent in jail as a boy? Sleeping next to his father on the damp floor, while an angry mob clamored for his punishment? Before that, long before that: everyone knew it was coming. But it had officially begun ten years ago, he told them. Nearly a decade. How? He forgot now. Someone was angry about something. This someone convinced many hundreds and then many thousands more that their collective anger meant something. That it had to be acted upon. There was an event, wasn't there? Violence to mark a fraudulent election? An explosion timed to commemorate some patriotic anniversary? He thought he remembered an opposition leader, a politician well known and admired for his honesty, being poisoned, dying slowly and very publicly over the course of three weeks. The name escaped him now. Was this how it began? He didn't know what to tell them, this roomful of curious faces; the radio turned down to a low buzzing and the evening having evolved into a disquisition on recent national history by an anonymous city-dweller. It was useless to plead ignorance in this setting. No one would believe him. The war, he decided, would have happened anyway. It was unavoidable. It's a way of life in a country like ours.

The rain let up, and in this new quiet, the evening took on the austerity of a prayer meeting. He answered every question as it came, as well as he could. They had been at it an hour or more when there came the question he would die pondering. Had he ever known the answer? At one time, sure, but that was long ago. The question was posed by the owner of the radio, and there was an innocence to it that Rey appreciated, a genuine need to know, without a hint of malice. “Tell us, sir,” Zahir asked, already speaking of the war in the past tense, “who was right in all of this?”

I
T WAS
two in the morning when they climbed into Manau's father's car and willed it to start. Manau nearly flooded the engine—it had been over a year since he'd driven—but then the ignition caught, and the engine spat bursts of noise. Manau turned to Norma, flashing a satisfied smile that reminded her how young he was. Victor was half-asleep, resting his head in her lap, and she had laid a blanket on top of him. It was a long way to the radio station. The heater was barely working, and the night was unexpectedly cold. The city was still under curfew. They could make it there and be gone before the morning newscast. Before Elmer arrived.

The car moved slowly through the deserted streets, so slowly Norma imagined they were sightseeing. The headlamps splashed dim yellow splotches on the road ahead, and the engine failed twice before they made it to the first blinking red traffic light. Still, there was an air of leisure to the whole endeavor: the pleasing, throaty rumble of the engine, the city passing by in silence. Even the air had an agreeable crispness to it. Block
after empty block; and it didn't seem at this hour to be a city but a museum of a city, a place she was viewing as if from some distant future, an artist's model built to demonstrate how human beings had once lived.

Manau eased the car down to the seaside highway, where they could see the beach dotted with fires. The tide had gone out, and the sand stretched for a quarter-mile, glowing orange and gold. The ocean, mute and black, pushed into the infinite, and the moonless sky was dark enough to be one and the same with the sea. A row of red lights bobbed at the horizon—the fishing trawlers, where at this hour men were sleeping, resting their bodies for the day's work ahead. Norma had one hand over the boy, enough to feel him breathe; in the other, she held the list, which had been touched by a dozen people in the past week, had been creased, folded, nearly destroyed, saved, and stolen. It felt good to have it, but not like a victory so much as a reprieve. Ten years had passed, ten years that comprised a vast, inviolable silence, and then these three days, of which, she suspected, she would remember only noise: the chattering dissonance of many voices, sounds at once indistinct and pressing, calling her urgently in different directions. Wounding her, certainly, but no worse than the silence had.

The road rose back to the city, and there, as they came over the hump, was a police checkpoint, brightly lit with flood lamps, a patch of daylight within the darkness. It was still a half-mile ahead, but there was no way around it. The car chugged forward. The boy was still asleep.

“Do I stop?” Manau asked. She could see in the rearview mirror, even in the dim light, that he was afraid.

She bit her lip. “Of course,” Norma said after a moment, and by then, they were there already, there was no choice, and the ordeal was beginning. Or was it simply continuing? In either case, her body tightened, bracing as if for a great impact.

 

I
N
T
AMOÉ,
in the last year of the war, there lived a girl, age five. She didn't like the army helicopters that flew over her neighborhood. This is what the war meant to her: helicopters blowing up dust and, with their great noise, keeping her dolls awake when she felt they should be resting. A nuisance. Her father had been in hiding for two years, fighting with the IL. He was an expert explosives man named Alaf. Before he left the fam
ily forever, he told his daughter that if soldiers ever came to the house, she should spit on them. He was a true believer. “Say it with me,” Alaf whispered. “They're animals.”

“They're animals,” the little girl repeated. She was three years old then.

“What will you do when they come?”

“Spit on them,” she answered and then began to cry. Two years later, she could not remember her father: not what he looked like, not the sound of his voice. Nor would her mother speak of him.

After she was killed by a stray bullet, a battle began in her name. Not spontaneously. The IL had been waiting for a blameless victim. She lived in a corner house without running water or electricity, a house that was always damp and cool and smoky. Its second story had not been completed, and so the roof was sometimes used by neighborhood IL snipers to pick off soldiers who patrolled the area. An army commander made the entirely reasonable decision to put an end to this nonsense. The girl was small for her age, and always had a cough. The day she died, she had not eaten enough and was walking to her friend's house, hoping to be offered a piece of bread. Though she was hungry, she was also proud, and had resolved not to ask for it. But if it were
offered
—this, she had decided, was entirely different. Her mother was at the market, and there were shooters on her roof. Later, men would argue about which way she fell, the possible trajectories of the bullet or bullets that killed her, but the truth is, neither the army nor the IL snipers much noticed her when she first went down. Certainly, no one intended to kill her. The fighting continued for another half-hour. She had hidden behind an oil drum when the shooting began. She would later be described as holding a doll, as flaxen-haired and innocent, and she may have been all these things, but when she died, no one noticed her, just as no one had noticed her when she lived. Later, her face was put on banners that were carried to the edge of the district and then into the heart of the city by hundreds of well-meaning and outraged people who had never known her. They were met with bullets in the plaza that would be razed and renamed Newtown Plaza. There, many more people died, and then the war was over.

Her father never knew that his daughter died in this way, but it would be a mistake to say he was unaffected. The bond between parent and child
is chemical, fierce, and inexplicable, even if that parent is a sworn killer. This connection cannot be measured; it is at once more subtle and more powerful than science. In the days before his daughter was murdered, Alaf felt a pain in his chest. For two nights, he couldn't sleep. He ate little, and even went so far as to take his own temperature. He was certain he was dying, and he despaired. In his mind, Alaf began to compose a letter to send to his wife and daughter back in Tamoé, asking for forgiveness. He wondered if his daughter could read by now. How long had it been? How did any of this happen? He promised to learn a useful trade and devote himself to it. He described the exotic charms of a quiet and peaceful life, and it made his heart quicken: late breakfasts on Sundays, afternoons dedicated to home repair or to listening to a soccer match on the radio. He might walk his daughter to school on Monday. He and his wife might have a son. Or, it struck him, they could leave the city altogether and settle here, in the endless jungle where land was plentiful and the soil fertile. A small farm, he thought, and set about imagining a life he would never have. Of course, he did not actually write the letter, and so he did not send it. He died a few days after the Battle of Tamoé, not far from 1797, killed in an ambush before he so much as fired a shot.

 

T
HE PERSON
Norma missed most of all in Rey's absence was not Rey but the person she had been when she was with him. The roadblock brought it all back: there was a part of her—not a small part—that had been seduced at the exact moment the soldier pulled Rey off the bus so many years ago. She had become in her time with Rey a woman who lived alongside that danger, who, in one way or another, conquered fear in order to be with the man she loved. Because what did she remember from her years with Rey? Not the sword that hung over them, not the tension, the suspicions, but the laughter, the joking, walking down the street hand in hand, the happiness that existed in spite of everything else. The world collapsed around them, and still they stood together, imperturbable, calm; it was the relationship they had made, pliant and modern; the alchemy that happened when they turned out the lights, when they folded their bodies into each other and felt no shame.

She had to remind herself sometimes, because it was easy to forget: Rey had wanted her.

The road up from the beach was lit brightly, the bluffs on either side shining with a white fluorescence. The car rolled slowly to a stop, and there it was again: the point of a rifle insinuating itself into her life. Rey, she thought. She very nearly said it out loud. This was all routine. She looked straight ahead and not at the rifle to her left. There were two staggered rows of stones and razor wire lying across the road. To one side, a soldier, a boy about five years older than Victor, stood warming himself by a fire.

“Out,” the rifle ordered. If there was a body attached to the weapon, Norma decided not to notice it.

Already Manau was outside. She roused the boy, and a moment later, she was there, too, with Victor by her side, half-asleep. She held her hands over her head and faced the car the way she'd seen criminals do in movies. The boy-soldier demanded papers, identification, and she felt faint.

The jungle, Rey had told her many times, was a pharmacological paradise. Uncharted and unclaimed, the cures to all the world's diseases were there, hidden, waiting to be found. It would take a generation or more to discover the gifts it held, if they didn't disappear first. One of the war's many unintended consequences—one of its only positive ones—was that it had rendered the jungle relatively inaccessible, therefore slowing the pace of its destruction. People fled the jungle. It was only a matter of time, Rey had said, until they fled
to
it: when the cities became too crowded, too choked with smoke and noise, when peace came and allowed them once again the freedom to roam within the borders of the nation-state.

“Can't I come with you?” she'd asked him once.

“Of course. Once the war is over.”

She'd laughed then: “Silly, this war won't ever end.”

Rey brought back stories of drugs that cured all kinds of ills, showed her the careful notes he took. The very nation might be saved by the forest: there might be a plant for every kind of miracle. “They have plants for potency,” he told her once, as he pulled her into the apartment and onto the couch. “Not that I need them.” That day, he still smelled of travel, of buses and smoke and places she had never visited. “Who have you been with while I was gone? Tell me, make me jealous…”

“A whole city of men wakes up with me whispering in their ears.”

“Stop.”

“It's true,” she said, biting her lip, and already his hands were under her clothes, her body tingling. She was cold and hot all at once. Looking over Rey's shoulder, she saw the door was open. He had closed it with his foot in his hurry to take her into his arms, and the lock hadn't caught. Their neighbor's ten-year-old son stood in the doorway, watching. He was wide-eyed and curious, just a child. “Rey,” Norma whispered, but he wasn't listening. She felt she should shoo the child away, but then she didn't care. They were behind the couch, and he couldn't see anything. So she closed her eyes and imagined they were alone. It wasn't hard to do. The war had always been with them, and she was accustomed to pretending.

“Hands up,” the rifle barked. He stepped to Manau and patted him down. He took Manau's wallet out and flipped through it. He seemed disappointed by its contents. He held Manau's ID up to the light. “This is fake.”

“It's not fake,” Manau said. “Who has fakes?”

“Shut up.”

“Norma, tell them.”

“I said shut up.”

“Norma.”

It was cold, and her body stiffened. She turned to Manau and glared. Tell them what? These people didn't want to hear her stories, they didn't want to know of her disappointments.

“Where are you going?”

“The radio,” Manau said. “
Norma
.”

“Who's Norma? Which Norma?”

“
Norma
Norma.”

For a moment, the rifle seemed to consider this possibility. With the end of the weapon pointed downwards, he told Norma to turn around. She did, and he examined her in the harsh, white light. He seemed suddenly nervous. “You're Norma? You don't look like Norma.”

“But have you ever seen her?” Manau said.

The rifle was raised suddenly to eye level, Manau pushed roughly against the car, the end of the weapon at his temple: “Are you ever going to shut up?”

“Please, not in front of the boy. It's me. Really. It's me.”

“They'll all love you,” Elmer had said when it began. But how had he said it? With his head shaking and his lips pressed into a tight, disbelieving frown. “It's that voice you have…” Norma had felt the unpleasant sensation of being pitied. And then Rey disappeared, and she'd felt it every day since: Rey's absence clinging to her like some contagion. Elmer had been right, of course: they did love her. For years, she'd received perfumed letters full of names, modest gifts wrapped in newsprint. At the station, there were a half-dozen shoeboxes full of photographs with scalloped edges, each with an inscription noting which of the smiling faces in the picture might still be alive. And this was it:
might be
. This not knowing, this exhaustion—you could hear it in every voice that called, see it in the careful script of every letter. It was mercy they sought: an answer, a yes or a no to release them from the burdens of waiting and hoping and wondering. It was what she heard in the soldier's voice, too: something unexpectedly timid, something afraid.

“I don't believe you,” the soldier said. He still held the gun to Manau's head. “You think I'm stupid.”

“No, no,” Norma said, “no one said—”

“Let me hear you.”

It was, in the end, what she was good at: being heard. She should have been a poet or a preacher. A hypnotist, a politician, a singer. Norma took a deep breath.

“Talk!” the soldier yelled, and she did.

“This evening,” Norma purred, “on Lost City Radio: from the jungle comes a boy…”