Lost City Radio (11 page)

“These soldiers don't remember, Don Zahir. They don't know. Even this teacher of yours, this learned man—even
he
doesn't remember.”

“But I didn't live here then. I'm from the city.”

“Of course.”

“And in the city,” Zahir said, “everything was fine?”

Manau met his landlord's gaze. His son would leave, if not now, soon. He would starve. His wife and his daughter, too. The town, with any luck, would disappear into the jungle. Manau shook his head. “No, you're right. In the city everything was—”

“Terrible,” the captain said. He smiled. “Pardon me, good sir. But let it be said: everything was terrible.”

Manau nodded. “I'm sorry, Zahir. I didn't mean to interrupt.”

“That's all of it. They took my hands! And yet I am not a helpless man.”

“Of course not, Don Zahir,” murmured the captain.

“And do you know what I miss most?” Zahir asked in a low voice. He leaned in close.

“Playing guitar,” one of the other men said. “Don Zahir, you could play beautifully!” He sang a
tra-la-la
, a rising melody, and lovingly stroked an invisible instrument.

“No, no, that's not it.”

“The earth, fertile and damp, in your hands.”

Zahir shook his head. “You talk like a bad poet!”

“What then?” Manau asked.

“I'll tell you.” He threw an arm over Manau, another around the captain. “My fingers,” Zahir whispered, “inside my wife.”

“No!” the captain protested, overjoyed.

“Yes!”

“Don Zahir! What vulgarity!”

But he had the face of an oblate praying for grace. Manau sat in awe. He would have lent Zahir his own hands for a night of love, if such a thing were possible.

“She was so wet,” Zahir said, “and so warm…Dear God!”

“To women!” the captain said.

“To women!” shouted the roomful of men.

And even outside, a few of the children saluted as well. The girls among them blushed and curtsied.

“I'm still a girl,” said Joanna, smiling beatifically.

“Victor, are you okay?” Nico asked for the hundredth time. He was starting to worry.

Inside, Nico's father fell silent, and Manau felt a warmth descending from above, something narcotic. The glass was passed to him again. No one mentioned the beer truck or the impassable roads. They would drink it all. What is tomorrow? An idea, nothing more.

 

W
HEN
V
ICTOR
was carried into the canteen a few minutes later, the men and the soldiers were still in ecstasies over Zahir's revelation. The radio played unaccompanied by a single voice, each man plunged into private ruminations of warm vaginas they had known. Years ago, decades ago, it didn't matter how long it had been; the smell and the sheen
of imagined sex was everywhere in the room. They looked at their hands and fingers with hopeless devotion. Beer had been spilled in great quantities, the floor now wet enough to skate on.

All around Manau, men dreamed lustily. The captain and Zahir whispered conspiratorially about the pleasures of the flesh. A few of the soldiers had fallen asleep, splayed out on the floor, musty boots beneath their heads as pillows. Manau was done with memory's women; they were few anyway. He looked up to find Nico standing awkwardly in the doorway, with Adela's boy, limp and dazed, in his arms.

Victor was a frail and sickly child. It wasn't something that Manau had always recognized. He was a smiling, good-natured kid, and his mother kept him clean and neatly dressed. But now Manau was sure he had never seen such a fragile human being.

“I fell,” Victor said, before Manau had a chance to ask. “Will someone call my mother?”

The child's voice was enough to blot out waking dreams. The captain snapped to attention, his face contorted in an exaggerated expression of worry. These army men love a crisis, Manau thought. But Zahir was up at once, took Victor from his son. The boy's thin arms slung around the older man's neck. “You'll be fine,” Zahir said. With his right stump, he patted the boy's head.

“I pushed him,” Nico said. “It was my fault.”

But no one was listening. The captain was up. “We're taking the boy home,” Zahir said.

“Will he be okay?” Nico asked.

“Yes,” Manau said quickly. “He'll be fine.”

“He won't die?”

“Of course not.” Manau paused.

Nico nodded.

He wasn't a boy anymore. He could be reasoned with. The bar had emptied, and they were alone. “You can't leave,” Manau said. “Not now. Victor told me everything. And I forbid it.”

Manau let that final grand statement linger there.
I forbid it.
It had authority, weight. “Do you understand me?”

Nico nodded.

“Do you have anything to say?” Manau asked.

But he didn't. Or wouldn't. So Manau left him in the empty canteen and went off into the night to see about Adela's boy.

 

H
IS HOME
wouldn't be this crowded again until his mother died. Then he would once again be the center of attention, women and friends and strangers huddled around him, afraid to speak, afraid not to. But this night, the night before Nico left, a drunk army captain told him he was a tough boy, a true son of the homeland. This night, his best friend's handless father carried him through town, and his nervous, frightened teacher kept pace, scratching himself as discreetly as he could. A midnight procession beneath an infinity of stars, and the children followed, worried for their classmate. They sang songs, they saluted women. They'd tried to rouse him unsuccessfully by the canteen wall, before Nico had finally said, “Enough, I'll take him.” In the end, it had for Victor that same movement and madness that his mother's death would have—except this was a celebration. He was the center of the world. A battalion of soldiers stood guard outside his door. Don Zahir dropped him in his bed. Victor heard his mother's voice, too concerned to scold him. Warm rags were placed on his forehead, and he dreamed of a helicopter made of silver light. The old women appeared by his bedside, uttering prayers in the old dialect.

Did he whisper in Don Zahir's ear, did he tell him Nico was leaving? He meant to. Later, he told himself he had. It was no use: in the morning, his best friend was gone.

S
HE HAD
held it in her hands, glanced over the names: not one had registered. How had she not seen it that first day? While Victor played in the control room, pressing buttons and turning knobs haphazardly, Len watching over him, Elmer took the list and pulled out a black felt-tip marker. Norma gasped. What was worse: realizing Rey's name was there, that she had somehow missed it, or seeing it disappear again?

“Wait. Let me see it.” She reached for Elmer's hand. “Why do that?”

“It's not safe.”

“Let me hold it.”

He relented with a sigh and passed her the paper. “Did you know about this?” he asked.

Norma spread the list across her thigh, smoothing its wrinkles with the palms of her hands. “Of course not,” she said, without looking up. “I never know.” She ran her fingers over the letters of her husband's name. It was there, Rey's false name hidden among two dozen others. “Did you?”

He shook his head. “I'm sorry, Norma,” Elmer said. “Either I destroy it or we go to the police. This list—they could be collaborators, sympathizers. Rey is still a wanted man.”

Even if he's dead.

And so everything would be canceled, the list never read, no special program for Victor or the rest of them, the sons and daughters of 1797, with no one to tend to their memory. People disappear, they vanish. And with them, the history, so that new myths replace the old: the war never happened at all. It was just a dream. We are a modern nation, a civilized nation. But then, years later, a tiny echo of those missing. Do you ignore it?

“It's a mistake, it must be a mistake.” She wanted to laugh, and she did—but it came out nervously, awkwardly, as if she were hiding something. Elmer frowned. “I'll keep it,” Norma said. “I can do the show without his name.”

“But I'll hold the list.”

“Don't you trust me?”

Elmer sighed. “Everyone on this piece of paper could be guilty of something. I don't want to take that chance. It's my life too, you know. I'm responsible for this station.”

“I'll get to the bottom of this.”

Elmer shook his head, and he certainly had his reasons—good, solid reasons—but she wasn't listening. He spoke, he explained with his hands, his fists opening and closing. His face was soft and understanding—it didn't matter. Surely he invoked her own safety, their friendship, strained at times but real—she couldn't hear him. Hadn't he always cared for her? Hadn't he stayed by her side through all of this, and never betrayed her? There were other men—he said carefully—who could not truthfully make such claims.

But Norma wouldn't hear him. She stood and knocked on the window of the control room until she had the boy's attention. She gave him a big smile, and could feel the muscles of her face working. He was young. He smiled back.

Norma held the list up to the light. There was a single spot of black ink next to her husband's false name, where Elmer had touched the paper with the very tip of the marker.

“What are you doing?” Elmer asked.

The boy watched through the window. Norma folded the note into fourths. Without saying a word, she lifted her shirt and slipped the list into her underwear.

Elmer rubbed his chin. “Is this your idea of a joke?”

She pointed Victor to the door. On the other side of the window, Len shrugged. The boy disappeared through the door. He would wait for her. Norma turned to Elmer. “I'm sorry,” she said, and left the control room without another word. He let me leave, she thought, the door closing behind her. “Norma,” Elmer said, but that was all.

Victor was waiting for her in the station's dilapidated version of a green room. He sat on a couch of sunken cushions, poking his pinky finger into the torn upholstery.

“Lunch,” Norma said in her sweetest voice. Her heart was pounding: she could feel it in her chest, in her throat. “Do you want lunch?”

Victor grinned. Boys his age were always hungry. Of course he wanted lunch. To the elevator then and through the lobby—give the receptionist a smile and a nod—now out into the streets. She took his hand.

They left the radio and made their way to Newtown Plaza, to the reconstructed heart of the city, twenty blocks or more from the station. At the station she'd left behind, Elmer was stewing. She felt sure of this, could almost see him, pacing the halls of the radio, considering his options. Maybe he would send someone after her. Maybe there would be police waiting at her apartment that night. Norma doubted it. Elmer had let her go, after all, with the list. She could feel it against her skin. She was safe for now. Norma and Victor passed restaurant after restaurant, and at each one, the boy slowed, lingering for a moment at its doorway. Chickens turning on spits in the windows, buxom waitresses handing menus to passersby, and Victor took each one, stuffing them into his pocket as Norma dragged him on. She wanted to be tolerant of his curiosity, but it was hard at a moment like this. There were soldiers on every other corner, so much a part of the scenery that they had become nearly invisible: the same boys with rifles that had tormented her once, that had dragged her Rey off a bus twenty years before. Pedestrians moved chaotically between the featureless, modern buildings, beneath a clouded sky that threatened to clear. Taxis honked, vendors shouted, police whistles squealed.

They found a place and sat in the back, far from the noise of the street, in a corner of mirrored walls and glowing tubes of neon light spelling out the names of local beers and sports teams. The waitress was pretty but with bad teeth, and had a jungle accent she seemed to be trying to mask. The food came quickly. Victor drank orange soda through a straw and ate greedily with his hands, content to do so in silence. Norma picked at the fries, sipped her water. Eleven: in a year, Victor would be a different person; in five, unrecognizable and nearly a man. He ate, smiling now and then with bits of chicken stuck between his teeth. He swished mouthfuls of orange soda, puffing out his lips and cheeks. She had the urge to rub her hand across his shaved head: it would be prickly, like sandpaper. Her mind skipped over moments of the previous ten years, and then the decade before that, images of Rey and his various names, his hidden histories, his evasions, his disappearances and disguises. The boy deserved to know.

“There was a name on the list.” She breathed deeply and exhaled. Slowly. Norma took a pen from her purse and wrote the name on a napkin, in capital letters. She observed it. How long had it been since she'd written it out—this oddly spelled name from her past? A decade—or more? Since she wrote him love letters in the weeks after his disappearance, addressed to the name on the ID she'd found in her pocket—
that
long. She sighed. “Do you recognize it?”

Victor worked on a mouthful of chicken. Looking the name over carefully, he shook his head. “How do you say it?”

Norma smiled. She took a sip of Victor's soda. The bottle was cold and moist in her palm. She wiped its wetness on her forehead. The headache she'd had since the station subsided for just a moment. Her voice nearly broke.

Victor repeated it. “What was he like?”

The boy wanted to know what he was like. She'd never heard anyone say the name aloud; it made her smile.

Or rather, nearly cry. One of those smiles that hold back so much, a dishonest smile. Where to begin? In the mirrored walls, Norma could see the street and its furious movement, men and women caught in the city's fevered charade of reconstruction. It was worth asking: Had there ever been a war? Was it something we all imagined? Newtown Plaza was
only a few blocks away, a monument to forgetting built atop the ruins of the past.
What was he like?
Thank God for mirrors, Norma thought, and for these people and those people rushing past, for the frantic work of survival, but none of them were Rey and none of them knew his name: he was a liar, a beautiful man who told beautiful lies. In the restaurant, there were neon lights and long-legged waitresses with breasts bursting from orange tube tops, women dressed like candy to be eaten, bedecked in the colors of boxes of laundry detergent. Clean, young vixens! This city would drive her mad, or her loneliness would, and still Victor watched her in the mirror, eyes darted about, a nation at feeding time, chicken was torn from the bone, devoured, a dozen young and old faces were adorned with greasy smiles. An insipid melody floated just below the hum of conversation, and Norma felt her head might explode.

“Are you all right?” the boy asked. His voice was soft.

Norma shook her head. “No.”

“My mother was this way sometimes.” He paused and leaned forward. “Like her head was coming loose.”

That was it exactly. Her head had come loose. Norma drew a deep breath. It had come loose that first night she met Rey, had stayed that way for decades. How much longer would this swoon last? Victor wiped his mouth carefully with the same napkin she'd written on. Norma took it from him and spread it flat on the table. It was stained and greasy, the smudged ink barely legible. Unrecoverable. She could feel the blood coloring her cheeks.

Victor apologized, but she waved it away. “See,” she said, “I don't know what he was like. I thought I did. He wasn't a stranger. We were together for so long. And we've been apart so long.” She sighed. “Then he reappears sometimes. And today, it feels”—how did it feel?—“like a joke.”

The boy looked confused. “A joke, Miss Norma?”

“No. You're right, not a joke exactly.” She curled her bottom lip. “I don't know what to call it. I've been waiting for so long.”

Victor was a child and a stranger, as much a foreigner as she would be in Arabia or the Ukraine—but she wanted him to understand. More than that, she felt that he
could
, if only he wanted to.

But what was he really thinking? She could only guess: about the chicken probably, its lingering taste on his lips, or the satisfying heaviness
in the pit of his stomach. The glittering jukebox behind her, with its shiny buttons and compact discs and selection of songs he'd probably never heard? The buxom waitress and her bad teeth? It was as if Victor had suddenly gained a new tint to him, something that set him apart: he wasn't a boy any longer. His gaze could move in a hundred different directions, find a hundred distractions, but Norma could see only this: that he had brought a piece of paper from the jungle. And on that piece of paper, a name that proved he had communed with the dead.

“I haven't seen my husband in ten years,” she said. Victor seemed to be listening, and that was enough for her. “I'm not stupid, Victor. He's not missing. He's on a list they keep in the palace: his name can't even be said out loud. Every night on the radio—can you understand this—I want to talk to him. But I don't. If I let myself say his name, it would be terrible.”

“What would happen, Miss Norma?” the boy asked.

“At the very least, inconvenient questions. More likely, arrests, investigations, disappearances.” She sighed. “It's worse than that: if I said his name again, it would be admitting I still thought he might hear me. I'm not sure I can take that.”

“What if I said it?”

She cupped her hands over Victor's. “Can I tell you something?”

“Yes,” Victor said. He pushed his plate away and reached for the soda, offered her the last of it. When she demurred, he drank it, sucking on the straw with a frown.

“I'm a bit afraid of you.”

He raised his eyebrows for an instant, then let his eyes drift to the table. He wouldn't look up.

“It's okay,” Norma said. “I expect you're probably afraid of me too. Aren't you?” She pressed his hands; they were still a boy's hands, his fingers thin and bony, the skin soft. “A little bit scared?” she asked.

The boy nodded.

“It's scary,” she said, no longer to Victor or to herself, but to the space between them. “It is.”

“I didn't come alone.” Victor paused and took a breath. “I came with my teacher. He might know. His name is Manau.”

“Tell me what happened.”

The boy slipped his hands from beneath hers and scratched his head.
“He was my mother's friend. Her boyfriend. He was supposed to take care of me. But he didn't. He left me at the station.”

“Just like that? What did he say?”

Victor took the empty glass and jabbed the straw at the ice melting at the bottom. He sucked, and there was a gurgling sound for a moment. Then he stopped. “Nothing. He said you would take care of me.”

“I-I am,” Norma stammered. “I will. But why did he say that? Why did he leave you?”

Victor shrugged. “He was sad. The old people said he loved my mother.”

Norma sat back, suddenly amused. As if being in love excused everything. How much could be explained away that easily, how much of her past? This Manau: he had abandoned a boy in the middle of the city because he was heartbroken?

“It's like being dizzy,” she said, sighing. “Trying to make sense of all this. It's like being very, very dizzy.”

“He knows. I'm sure Manau knows. He can help.”

“My husband is…was not a simple man,” she said. “He plays tricks.”

“That's not nice.”

Norma rubbed her eyes: the lights, the boy, the note. “You're right. It isn't. I'm dizzy,” she repeated. “That's all.”

 

T
HE TABLE
had been cleaned off, the bill paid, when Victor confessed he'd dreamed of his mother. She died in the river, he said. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you poor thing,” Norma said, but that wasn't why he told her: maybe the river brought his mother here. The lunch hour had died down, the waitresses congregated by the neon-lit bar, chatting and sipping sodas.

“So what do you want to do?” Norma asked the boy.

“The ocean,” he said. “I want to see it.”