Lost City Radio (20 page)

D
URING THE
summer of the eighth year of the war, a radio personality at the station where Norma worked disappeared. The authorities denied any involvement, but the rumors spoke of treason and collaboration with the IL. His name was Yerevan, and it shook everyone who knew him. Quiet and unassuming, of slight build and mottled complexion, Yerevan was a confirmed bachelor who lived for his radio show, a twice-weekly late-night classical music program. He taught a class at the university as well, specializing in the development of Western music after the discovery of the New World. He was popular and well liked among the students.

For a few weeks after his disappearance, there was a clamor. Yerevan and the station's director had been very close, and so the radio was un-characteristically bold in his defense, broadcasting hourly proclamations of Yerevan's innocence and demanding his release. Groups of university students kept vigil in front of the station. Fans of his show came as well,
and there was a strange feeling to the demonstrations. An unlikely cross-section of the city had been assembled: aficionados of classical music, students of history and art, late-night shift workers, various insomniacs and shut-ins. Most had never seen the accused, but all knew his voice well and admired his keen taste and encyclopedic knowledge of the music. It was, as far as protests go, a joyful gathering. A string quartet, laid off from the recently dissolved City Orchestra, played for the crowd one evening at the hour Yerevan's show would have aired. The radio, in an inspired decision, carried the performance live.

In spite of all this, Yerevan was sent to the Moon where he surely received the kind of welcome that Rey had survived nine years before. Two weeks passed, and Yerevan was not heard from. Everyone expected the worst. It was no secret by now what sorts of things happened to those who disappeared. He had been, in the year or so prior to his disappearance, a friend of Norma's. She had recovered from her fear that night of the first Great Blackout, and proven her mettle on more than a few occasions. She was on the air now with some regularity, though the cult of her voice was not yet what it would become. Norma often stayed late at the station, editing pieces for the following morning's news hour and, when her work was done, she liked to visit Yerevan in the sound booth. The soothing music was a draw, as was his quiet good nature, but mostly, she liked the feel of the room. It was the heart of the radio, and this was before she had become disenchanted with it all. She loved this place, the hum of its machines, its light and music and motion. A few times, she had produced the show, patching through calls from listeners who wanted to request a song or simply speak with Yerevan about music. There was a looseness to it that Norma liked: it was late night, and so there were fewer time constraints. Yerevan was content to let his callers talk, Norma happy to listen, and in these moments, she felt that the radio might actually serve a purpose.

What made the episode so curious was the revelation, a few weeks after Yerevan's sudden disappearance, that there was, in fact, some truth to the rumors. Some of the callers, it was said, had been speaking in code. Norma, after consulting with Rey, went to discuss the situation with Elmer, and he admitted that the station director was afraid. It was, Elmer said, worse than they had previously suspected. The station had
indeed been infiltrated. A search had been ordered for tapes of Yerevan's recent shows.

“He was IL, Norma, and no one knew,” Elmer said. “What could we do?”

Norma had spent many hours with the accused, had monitored the calls, chatted good-naturedly with people she assumed to be music lovers, but who, in actuality, might have been terrorists. She'd even been on the air a half dozen times, introducing songs, discussing music with Yerevan. Had she implicated herself?

“Should I be afraid?” she asked.

Elmer nodded. He was thoughtful and capable, and it was universally assumed he would one day be director himself. “You can stay at the station for a while. We'll make room for you and you'll be safer here.”

That night, her exile began. It would be a month before she would go home again. The next day, the radio abruptly canceled any further protests, and even went so far as to ask the army to disperse those Yerevan supporters who remained. The forces of order complied enthusiastically with the request, and so dozens of students and music lovers and night-shift workers and even a few unfortunate passersby were beaten and then arrested in the lot adjacent to the radio. For an hour or so, there was a pitched battle, with stone-throwing and tear gas spreading in great, sickly clouds across the avenue. Many of the employees of the radio gathered in the conference room to watch the events from the broad windows, and Norma was among them. She had slept there that night, quite uncomfortably, in the same conference room where she would meet Victor eleven years later. Her neck hurt badly. She watched the battle, as they all did, without comment, foreheads pressed against the window, looking down. She was grateful for the tear gas: through its fog, there were intimations of great violence, but she was spared the sight of it. The battle had erupted in the middle of the day, but the station's director decided to omit any mention of it from the news. He felt, quite justly, that his job had become far too dangerous. Within the year, he would authorize a report obliquely critical of the interior minister and pay for this mistake with his life. Elmer would happily replace him.

This was the sort of country it had become.

In 1797, it should be noted, Yerevan was not missed at all. Classical
music was thought of as foreign and pretentious. The only fan of his show was the village priest, who had, by this point, been dead four years.

 

W
HEN HIS
only son was born, Rey was in the city, only vaguely aware that his mistress was due. These were the days when Norma was a prisoner of the radio station. They spoke on the phone four times a day, and each afternoon, he made a trip to the radio to see her. His life in the city, his life as a husband and scientist, was all-consuming; whatever had or might soon happen in the far-off jungle, Rey couldn't fathom. In the here and now, he was worried about Norma. She wasn't handling the stress well. She was losing weight and, when he saw her, she worried aloud that her hair was falling out. “Stay with me,” she asked him one afternoon, a week into her exile. Her eyes were red and puffy. “Stay with me tonight.”

They were drinking instant coffee in the conference room: the sun was setting, the mountains and the city below shone orange. Norma had a beleaguered look to her; her day was just beginning. She slept in the mornings now: a few days into her internment, the station director, at Elmer's suggestion, decided to put her on the air overnight. Yerevan's slot had to be filled. “It's not like you're sleeping well,” Elmer had said, and it was decided. These were the dead hours of radio, but, to everyone's surprise, Norma had been inundated with calls, requests, advice, gossip. She played mostly romantic songs and, in between, let the people talk freely. The night before, as Rey prepared for bed in the empty apartment, he had listened to his wife's voice and then dreamed of her. It was beautiful, narcotic, lulling, and he wasn't the only one who thought so.

“It's lonely here,” Norma said. “The entire place is empty. Just me and the watchman.”

“And the callers.”

She sighed. “And the callers.”

He took her hands in his. “They love you.”

“Can you stay?”

Her on-air shift ran from eleven to four in the morning, so Rey had time to go home and change before her show began. He made dinner for both of them, prepared an overnight bag, locked up the apartment, and was back at the radio at ten-thirty. The station was already desolate.
They drank more coffee, strong and sugarless, and Rey could tell she was happy to have him around. A few minutes before eleven, they went to the control room, chatted for a few minutes with the evening host. He was short and thin, an awkward, prematurely white-haired man who had always had a crush on Norma. When he had packed his things and left, and they were alone, Norma threw her arms around Rey's neck. An old ballad played, the record slightly warbled, the guitars falling in and out of tune. She kissed him. By the time the record ended, they were both unclothed and laughing. Norma strode across the studio, picked up the needle, and let the song play two more times before she began her show.

 

I
T WAS
a gift to be able to separate so thoroughly the two halves of his life. When he was home in the city, he rarely thought of the jungle, except in an academic sense: the mysteries of plant life, the demands of the climate, human adaptation to its exigencies. Sometimes an image from the cool heart of the forest: the mossy black trunk of an ancient tree, the white stones along the river's edge, water-carved into the most fantastical shapes—and this was all. Not the people he knew there, or the woman who had beguiled him. His trips to the rain forest included a similar kind of disassociation: an hour or two outside the city, when the raw and disordered slums had disappeared and the road wove up into the still-uninhabited hills, Rey felt himself cleansed of worldly responsibilities, going backwards in time, a man returning to a more innocent and purer state. Outside the city, he never went by Rey. So complete was his transformation that the sound of his own name, his city name, had no effect on him beyond the limits of the capital.

He made his first trip to the jungle soon after returning to the university. It was a purely scientific expedition, before Trini's murder changed his mind, a trip made under the guidance of a potbellied old professor who spoke three Indian dialects and walked the halls of the university chewing medicinal roots. The students were charged with writing technical descriptions of plants they found—about the sticky texture of the leaves or their acid smell—and they pressed samples into the pages of heavy books that the professor had brought for this very purpose. The jungle had seemed to Rey, from books, from conversations, from photographs, to be the exact opposite of the city where he had lived since he
was fourteen. Uncharted and unknowable, a universe where the rules were still being ironed out and fought over, it was the frontier, and its draw was powerful. This was the first year of the war. Later, when Elijah Manau traveled the same paths, the jungle was already part of the nation—there were schools and roads maintained, at least in theory, by the state—but when Rey went for the first time, travel involved riding atop a truck or bartering with a villager for a canoe ride along the muddy rivers. They encountered natives, who spoke only their own impossible language. They washed in sweet-water rivers, and slept in hammocks, and instead of sleeping, Rey would stay up, eyes closed, listening to the rising and ebbing sounds of the forest, certain it was the most beautiful place he had ever heard.

The land belonged to whoever claimed it, and in those days especially, the dense forest was an ideal place to disappear, to hide from the eyes of the law. As the war progressed, the government would learn to keep an eye on those who came and went from the nation's jungle regions. There were men who moved weapons and men who transported drugs. There were money men who bribed police officers or army captains or village chiefs. There were scouts who cased bridges for bombing, and men who pretended to be loggers or traders or even wandering musicians. And there were men like Rey, who left the city as credentialed students or scholars and who, somewhere along the way, became other people, with other names. These were men who never carried guns, men charged with something much more valuable: information.

He never saw Marden again. But by the time of the Yerevan episode, Rey and the man in the wrinkled suit had been seeing each other, off and on, for almost nine years, like furtive lovers: nine years of meetings at bus stops, of purposefully vague conversations and random duties, enough for Rey to come to know his contact, insofar as one could know a man like that. He came to recognize the man's muted expressions of worry, the way his weight fluctuated with the intensity of the conflict. There were times when Rey's contact looked positively ill, with unshaven, sunken cheeks, slack expressions, and unruly hair. As an agent, he was frighteningly transparent: days later, something, somewhere in the city, exploded, and by the next meeting, Rey's contact had regained some air of calm. Then it began again. In nine years, they had even met socially, at
various dinner parties where they had been introduced as strangers and played the part convincingly, exchanging a few polite words before studiously ignoring each other for the rest of the evening. Even Norma had shaken his hand once or twice; had commented, after a party, as she undressed in the blue darkness of their apartment, on the coldness of Rey's contact, his unfriendly, unsmiling greeting. Rey felt compelled to defend him, but of course, he did not: he pretended not to recall—what was his name again? They were even colleagues of a sort: in different fields, at different universities. After the first Great Blackout, which had taken Rey and the entire city by surprise, their meetings were monthly, and the tasks so mundane it was possible for Rey to believe the war had nothing whatsoever to do with him. He left envelopes in trash cans, wore a bright red shirt and sat in a windowed café at an appointed time, or made calls to pay phones, never saying much more than an address to whoever picked up on the other end. His days as a well-known student leader were long past. He was invisible now. After returning from the Moon, he had never again made a speech, or spoken of politics in public, save for his aborted confession in the darkened bar the night of the first Great Blackout. Besides the man in the wrinkled suit, Rey knew nobody in the city who was involved. He had been as surprised as anyone to discover that Yerevan was a sympathizer. For years, Rey had thought of the war and his own involvement in it as an intimate act. Of course, he knew there were other people participating, but he never thought of them, never wondered who they were, felt no kinship with these mysterious and invisible allies. He didn't read the paper much, except for sports, and gleaned what he knew of the war's progress from the increasing militarization of the city streets. And he went home each night to Norma, who had decided to believe her husband kept no secrets.