Lost City Radio (13 page)

The woman looked up. “How nice.”

“I'll say your name. If you want me to.”

She glanced at Victor. “That would be just fine.”

Victor was on his knees again, sifting pebbles. The woman began explaining to Norma how she had stumbled upon this work, how her
husband had been in construction. She wanted to talk, she couldn't help it. Victor listened as she told how her husband had fallen from a beam and died, how she had approached his partner and begged him for something to do. She'd stayed home all her adult life. What could she do? This is what she was offered. She sold the pebbles to a concrete mixer on Avenue F.

“He cheated me,” she said, her voice breaking. “My husband promised me. He said he wouldn't leave.”

“They do that,” Norma said. “They say those things. They may even mean them, Auntie.”

Victor listened and emptied the sieve into her sack of pebbles, and twice interrupted to ask her name. Both times, the woman ignored him and stared at Norma. “Are you from Lost City, madam?”

Norma blushed and nodded.

Smiling, the woman took Norma's hand in hers and squeezed. “Why weren't you on the radio this morning?”

“A day off, Auntie. That's all.”

“You'll be back?” the woman asked. “Tomorrow?”

“Or the next day,” Norma said.

A flock of sea gulls circled overhead. The clouds were thin and gauzy now. “I'm so happy,” the woman said after a while. “I'm so happy you're real.”

Norma held her hand and stroked the back of her neck. Victor sat and placed his hand on the woman's back. She was dirty and smelled of the sea. She had crumpled into Norma's embrace and didn't even notice Victor.

“Auntie,” Norma said, “is there anyone I can help you with?”

The old woman leaned back, nodding. “Oh, Norma,” she whispered. She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. “I had a man type it for me,” she said. “What does it say?”

Norma read two names aloud, and the woman nodded. “God is merciful,” she said. “Tell them I work this beach. They're my children.” Then she gathered her things, and thanked them both. “But especially you, boy,” she said. “Give Auntie a kiss.”

She bent down and offered him her cheek. Victor kissed her obediently.

When she had walked a little ways, Victor grabbed his sword. Then he grabbed a handful of sand and dropped it into his pocket. He stared off into the ocean, scanning from right to left across the horizon. His mother, of course, wasn't there. But Norma was, walking just ahead of him to the highway, holding the old woman's list in her hand, tightly, so it wouldn't fly away.

W
HEN HE
was still a young professor, as the war was beginning in earnest, Rey revived his old pseudonym to publish an essay in one of the city's more partisan newspapers. The central committee had decided it was worth the risk: a calculated provocation. In spite of the paper's tiny circulation, the essay caused something of a controversy. In a series of articles, Rey described a ritual he had witnessed in the jungle. He named the ritual
tadek
, after the psychoactive plant used, though he claimed the natives of the village had more than a half-dozen discrete names for it, depending on the time of year it was employed, the day of the week, the crime it was designed to punish, et cetera.
Tadek
, as Rey described it, was a rudimentary form of justice, and it functioned this way: confronted by a theft, for example, the town elders chose a boy under the age of ten, stupefied him with a potent tea, and let the intoxicated child find the culprit. Rey had witnessed this himself: a boy stumbling drunkenly along the muddy paths of a village, into
the marketplace, seizing upon the color of a man's shirt, the geometric patterns of a woman's dress, or a smell or sensation only the boy, in his altered state, could know. The child would attach himself to an adult, and this was enough. The elders would proclaim
tadek
over and lead the newly identified criminal away, to have his or her hands removed.

If Rey's article had been merely an anthropological description of a rarely used ritual, that might have been the end of it. This much was not controversial, as the jungle regions in those days were known primarily for being unknown, and the lay person could hardly be surprised by a violent pagan rite emerging from the dark forest. But Rey went further.
Tadek
, he argued, had been near extinction, but was now experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Furthermore, he refused to condemn it, did not call it barbarism or give any pejorative spin at all to his descriptions of its cruelty.
Tadek
, in Rey's view, was the antique precursor to the absolutely modern system of justice now being employed in the nation. Wartime justice, arbitrary justice, he contended, was valid both ethically (one could never know what crimes were lurking in the hearts and minds of men) and practically (swift, violent punishment, if random in nature, could bolster the cause of peace, frightening potential subversives before they took up arms). In measured prose, he applauded a few well-publicized cases of tortured union leaders and missing students as successful, contemporary versions of
tadek
, whereby the state assigned guilt based on outward signifiers (youth, occupation, social class) no more or less revealing than the geometric pattern of a woman's dress. The drunken child was perhaps extraneous in a modern context, but the essence was the same.
Tadek
's presence in the jungle was not some vestigial expression of a dying tradition but a nuanced reinterpretation of contemporary justice as seen through the prism of folklore. The nation-state, in wartime, had finally succeeded in filtering down to the isolated masses: to condemn them now for re-creating our institutions in their own communities was nothing less than hypocrisy.

In the city, among the literate classes, there was shock and disgust.
Tadek
was discussed on the radio (there were nearly a dozen stations then), and to the surprise of many, some people, often calling from scratchy pay phones in the city's dustier districts, defended it. They didn't employ Rey's arguments—no one did—but invoked instead tradition,
community, culture. They were happy to see it coming back. They told stories of village cripples, living symbols, who took their punishment without complaint. They were lessons for the children. Detractors called it retrograde and barbaric. A few case studies of
tadek
appeared in other local papers, alongside similarly disquieting dispatches from the interior: shootouts in formerly calm and altogether forgotten villages, policemen kidnapped from their posts in broad daylight, army patrols ambushed and relieved of their weapons on windy mountain passes.

The government had no choice but to shut down the partisan newspaper and a few others. A radio man who had done a series expanding on Rey's articles was jailed briefly, questioned, and released. A congressman who considered himself very progressive introduced a bill to outlaw the practice. The bill passed, of course, with senator after senator rising to the dais to express his indignation. The president himself denounced the practice of
tadek
when he signed the legislation, saying the very concept offended the dignity of a modern nation. He preached continued faith in progress, and, as he did in nearly every speech in those days, alluded vaguely to a discontented minority bent on disrupting the calm of a peaceful, loyal people. The war itself, so long in coming, had finally arrived, but received only these oblique official references for the first five years of its violent life.

When Rey published his articles, the war had been raging in the interior for nearly three years, but in the city, it had scarcely been felt at all. Everything in the capital was different when the war began, so clean and ordered—before The Settlement was settled, before the Plaza was razed and replaced with Newtown Plaza, back when The Cantonment was a cantonment and not a furiously expanding slum along the northern edge of the city. In this place—which no longer exists—it was an affront to imagine
tadek
could be real. It offended the city's sense of itself: as a capital, as an urban center in dialogue with the world. But it wasn't only that: the war itself was an insult to the literate classes, and so
tadek
was patriotically legislated out of existence, and with it the war—all nation's unpleasant realities excised from newspapers and magazines, deemed unmentionable on the radio.

Early on, Rey's editor at the newspaper went into hiding—this had been previously agreed upon—but before he did, he promised Rey no
one would give him up. That name of his hadn't been in circulation in many years, and he had never really been a public figure outside of the small, insular world of campus politics. But still, the tension was real: for weeks after, Rey expected armed men to burst into his home, to kick open his door at dawn and take him back to jail, back to the Moon. No one will read it, they'd told him. But Rey slept nervously, tightly entwined with Norma, with a chemical certainty in his blood that each evening together would be their last. They had been married only a few months, and he hadn't even warned her.

Somehow, he had imagined he could take this step without her ever knowing. One afternoon, before the worst of it, he came home and found his wife in the kitchen of their one-bedroom apartment, standing by the stove, stirring a pot of rice. He kissed her on the back of her neck, and she shrank from him. The obscure newspaper that no one read was right there, on the kitchen table. “They're going to kill you,” she said.

He'd had precisely the same thought when the project was proposed. He'd been assured it was safe. He composed himself before he answered her. “No one knows who I am.”

Norma laughed. “You're serious? You can't really believe that.”

But what else could he believe?

“Why would you write these things?”

Of course, he'd been asked to, and it had been approved. But he couldn't tell her that. Rey reached for her, and she pulled away. Rey had proposed, and they had married; four years had passed since the day they met, and still the questions had not come. Now, with the essays published, out in the world, Norma was going to ask what she was entitled to know. She was his wife, after all, and he her husband. These were the questions he had expected since the day he proposed to her in his father's apartment: “Who are you?”—in various permutations. Now they had come. “Ask me anything,” he said, and she began, as any journalist would, at the beginning: “Why didn't you tell me your father was alive?”

“I thought I was going to die.”

This much was true.

“And I was sure they would come back for me. I wanted to protect you. The less you knew about me, the better.”

He had not lied—not yet. It still shocked him sometimes: that he
hadn't died in a pit and never been heard from again. But here was the proof: he was in his own apartment, with his wife, who was preparing dinner for the two of them. Hundreds of men might be doing the same thing at that exact moment. Thousands. Who could say he was any different from them? Many of these men, he could suppose, did not expect to die that day. Rey sighed. The kitchen was dark and claustrophobic. He longed for a beautiful day, for thin, high clouds spread like muslin across the sky. For a breeze. Before the war came to the city's finer neighborhoods, there were parks of olive trees and lemon trees planted in rows, and flower beds bursting with flowers of alarming colors, shady places for napping on a spread blanket, places where couples might stroll, hand in hand, and discuss in whispers all manner of personal things. This, too, the war would bring to an end. The city would become unrecognizable. In only a few weeks, at the height of the
tadek
controversy, Rey would write his will, would go over it with a colleague from the university, a law professor, who would view the entire affair as a morbid paranoia. You'll live to be old, the law professor would say over and over again, laughing nervously, laughing all the more because Rey would not. Rey would leave Norma everything. When the radio man was jailed, Rey knew they would come for him, too. It was only a matter of time: he visited his father to promise him a grandson but didn't explain. He begged his wife for forgiveness. All this would come later, but now he approached Norma, felt her tense when he touched her. He turned her around, until she faced him, but she wouldn't look up. He took Norma's hand in his, and worked his thumb along her knuckles, weaving figure eights. He could hurt her, he realized, and it could happen easily. The thought frightened him.

“Are you IL?” she asked.

He thought for a moment he should say what they had taught him, what the bearded professor at the Moon had told him: that there was no such thing. That the IL was an invention of the government, designed to frighten and distract the people. He almost said it—and just then she batted an eye. “Tell me the truth,” Norma said, “and I'll never ask you again.”

She was his wife, and they were in their own home; the doors were locked and bolted, and they were safe. Rey felt his heart surge for this woman, for this illusion called life: tomorrow the longed-for sun might
come out, and they could walk through that quiet city park. The worst of the war was so far off it was unimaginable.

And so Rey had pronounced himself cured, as if subversion were a disease of the body. “No, I'm not IL. Let me explain.” At the Moon, he told his wife, they buried him in a pit and he stood there for seven days, unable even to bend his knees properly, unable to squat. The hole was covered with wooden boards, with tiny slats wide enough to see a sliver of the sky: just a sliver, but enough to pray on. What did you pray for, Rey? Clouds, he said. By day, when the sun blazed above, it was stifling and hot, like being baked alive, and he felt insects all over but couldn't decide if they were real. He convinced himself they weren't. If he jumped, he could almost reach the top, but after the first day, he couldn't jump. Rey spent hours trying to reach down to massage the cramped and leaden muscles of his calves. It was a delicate procedure that involved pulling his leg up toward his chest, until his knee hit the earthen walls of the hole he had come to think of as his, tilting to one side, and reaching down into the darkness. My hole wasn't wide enough, he told Norma. My tomb, he might have said. He dug at the sides with his fingernails, scraped at the bottom with his curled toes. Rey longed to knead his calves, but had to content himself with scratching a spot just below the knee. He scratched until it hurt, and then he scratched some more. On the fourth night, a couple of drunken soldiers took the cover off. Rey saw stars, the glittering firmament full of light, and he knew he was far from the city. The sky was beautiful, and for a moment, he believed in God. Then the soldiers unzipped their pants and urinated on him: a wordless, joyless transaction. He expected them to laugh, to joke, to find happiness in cruelty, but there was nothing, only the starlight and the marmoreal glow of his tormentors' faces. Rey slept standing. He could smell himself. The fifth day passed, and the sixth. He was unconscious when they pulled him out on the seventh and placed him in a cell with a half-dozen prisoners: the bearded man in the wrinkled suit and a few others, all of them shrunken, deformed, able simply to lie on the floor, unable to speak.

Rey promised Norma: he'd been cleansed of all political ambitions. “It's simple,” he said with such fervor she might have believed him. Indeed, the essence of what he said was true: “I want to live. I want to grow old with you. I don't ever want to go back.”

 

B
UT IT
began only six months after he'd returned from the Moon, a few years before the
tadek
controversy, on a morning crosstown bus, the day Rey spotted the man with the beard. He wore the same wrinkled suit, the same look of amused indifference. Was it him? It was; it wasn't. Rey rubbed his eyes. Here, among strangers, he usually did his best thinking: divagations of the mind, blurring and then effacing that which he did not care to remember. The Moon, the Moon: it stayed with him, a song whose melody he couldn't escape. His uncle Trini had found him a job in Tamoé, inspecting the settlements, working for the government agency that ratified land takeovers. It was temporary, an invisible post in an invisible bureaucracy, something to hold him over until he could muster the strength to return to the university. He'd been there only three weeks, wandering among the shanties, asking questions of mothers who eyed him suspiciously, as if he were coming to take their homes away. He wrote names on his clipboard, drew rudimentary maps of the squalid neighborhoods on graph paper the office provided him. He lunched in silence at the open-air market, and these were his days. He remembered the Moon, imagined it just behind every hill. The bus ride was an hour and a half each way, spent between sleep and a kind of autohypnotism he'd perfected: watching his fellow passengers until his eyes crossed, until they became shapes and colors and not people at all. The city passed in the window, now and then a word calling him from the newspaper someone might be reading, the war appearing in headlines, still on an inside page, still a distant nightmare. He himself never read the newspaper; he made a point not to.