Lost City Radio (5 page)

Norma sighed. “That sounds dangerous,” she said.

Victor heard her alter her voice, draining it of its sweetness. The driver didn't know. He couldn't know.

It was dark when they arrived at home. Norma's apartment had a
wide window that looked out onto a quiet street. She had said it was small, but to Victor it seemed palatial. “You'll sleep here,” she said, and pointed to the couch. A neon sign cast a harsh blue light over the room. Norma explained that it was a pharmacy, that you could buy medicine there. She turned on a lamp, and the shadows dispersed. He could see she was tired. He expected to be reprimanded, but instead she slipped away into the kitchen and set some water to boil. Victor sat on the sofa, staring at his hands. He was afraid to look at the strange apartment.

Norma emerged with tea and a basket of bread. “Are you feeling better?”

He hadn't eaten all day, and the emptiness in his stomach stirred. She must have seen the hunger in his eyes. “Eat,” Norma said. “A boy needs to eat.”

The bread she served was strange: square, with a neat brown trim, its center a white the color of milk. Victor bit into a slice, and it dissolved in his mouth, coming apart like string. Still, he ate greedily, and it felt good. He strained to swallow mouthfuls of the stuff, but it expanded like bubble gum, rolling over his teeth and against his cheeks. He looked up. Norma, he realized, was smiling. He stopped chewing.

“It's okay,” she said. “I was just watching.”

Victor nodded. She wasn't old. She wasn't like the abandoned elderly that crept through town with their bent wooden canes, but she was older than his mother, and didn't have the copper glow his people had. She was pale, and her black hair fell straight in a ponytail down to the middle of her back. She gave the impression of not caring so much what she looked like. In 1797, Norma would have a hard time finding a husband. Victor ate and watched her. Her angular face contained a geometry he didn't recognize, like the bread she offered him, built of right angles. Maybe the softness of her voice clashed with her sharp features. He'd never seen anyone like her up close, not that he could remember. No one this color. After having listened to her for so many years, strangely, it had never occurred to him to put a face with that voice. He had never wondered what she looked like, not once. Did anybody? That lack of imagination struck Victor as strange: had he thought of her as some kind of spirit? As a voice without a body or a face or even a soul? More ghosts. He'd never thought of her as real.

“You must be tired,” Norma said after a while.

Victor nodded.

“I've never been to the jungle,” she said.

He chewed and nodded. “It's different,” he offered.

“I imagine it is,” Norma said. Could she see how tired he was? Did she know what he wanted to tell her? They were silent for a moment.

“You don't want to talk, do you?” Norma asked.

“No,” Victor said, surprising himself. There was too much to tell.

I
F
N
ORMA
were honest, she might remember Rey's disappearance as what it was: a series of tiny flashes of light, a rising sense of danger, and then, in place of some plosive event, only this: a surreal, mystifying stillness. He leaves for a trip into the jungle—a trip like dozens he's taken before. Then there is the cold, hard fact of his silence. No news, no word, and Norma's life changing with each passing day, flattened beneath a crushing weight, bled of its color.

It had been ten years now.

The early days were torturous: a pain emanating outwards from each cell in her body, and the fact of his absence everywhere. She stopped strangers in the street, inspected the faces of people on buses and trains, their wrinkles, their smiles, the shapes of their tired eyes, even the shoes they wore. Each day her husband did not return, she felt herself losing her balance, the work of carrying on too much and too cruel. The ways she missed him were endless: his smell still pervaded their apartment,
that mixture of sweat and cheap soap. She missed his dimpled cheeks, his kiss, and the affected way he read the newspaper, as if his sharp gaze could bore a hole in the text. He folded it into lengthwise thirds and was embarrassed to admit he indulged only in the sports section. She missed this, too: his body, his touch. His hands running up and down her back. Her own fingernails finding his spine, clawing, as if she could tear into him. She missed the face he made, always the same anguished expression, eyes flittering closed, deep concentration, and when he was behind her, she loved it, but she missed seeing him, seeing the blood rush to his face, the clouding of his features, the release. At night, she stayed awake and thought of him, too afraid to touch herself. Dread was everywhere. What if he never came back?

For ten years, he had existed in memory, in that netherworld between death and life—despicably, sadistically called
missing—
and she had lived with the specter of him, had carried on as normal, as if he were away on an extended vacation and not disappeared and likely dead. In the beginning, she had played detective, and in a sense, everything had been easier since she stopped. Not given up; simply stopped. In the first year of his absence, she had visited each of his colleagues at the university to ask for information. Where had he gone? It was a bent older gentleman who told her: he wasn't sure, but he'd heard the number 1797. What was he researching? Medicinal plants, said another, but this much she knew. Had they heard anything? And here they all shook their heads and looked away.

One professor told her Rey'd had a taste for psychoactives, jungle juju, he said, but this wasn't news, was it? Norma shook her head: of course not, of course not. It was a bright autumn day, and the war had been over for two months. The list of collaborators had been read on the radio a week before. The professor scratched his beard and looked distractedly out the window at a swatch of blue sky. His office and his person were in disarray. “Maybe he just lost it.”

“I don't understand.”

“It's just a thought. Took too much of something. Went native.” He smoothed the wrinkles of his suit. “Maybe he'll snap out of it. Maybe he'll wander back.”

Norma shook her head. It made no sense. “What about the list they read? What about the IL? Was Rey IL?”

Why did she ask? Did she even want to know? It was the same every time: a blank look, a stammered response, and then a pause as her husband's colleagues took the measure of her. Doors were closed discreetly, blinds drawn, telephones unplugged—all this at the mere mention of the IL. But the war was over, wasn't it?

This professor turned to face her. They had known each other socially—Christmas parties and birthdays, nothing more.

“Were you followed?” he asked.

It hadn't occurred to her. “Who would follow me?”

The professor sighed. “It doesn't matter,” he said. “I knew your husband well. We were at the Moon together. He wasn't IL. He couldn't have been.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone knows there was no such thing.”

Norma was silent. She hardly breathed.

“It was a government invention, a fraud. Something the Americans cooked up to scare us.”

“Oh,” she managed.

“You'd do well to be careful when asking questions such as these.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Someone might misinterpret.”

Norma thanked him for his time, gathered her things and left quickly.

She scoured the papers for any news, but there was so much to tell about the end of the war. Who had time for a missing professor? There were battles to write about and lists of casualties to collect. The country seemed to be collapsing on itself: a shootout between decommissioned soldiers erupted in an underground bar in The Thousands. A man in Asylum Downs was run out of the neighborhood, his house set ablaze after his name had been listed among the collaborators. It was the war in its death throes, every day something new, the violence sputtering to its anarchic conclusion.

Still, the city was becoming accustomed to the idea of peace. She knew by now what his absence meant, but when the war ended, there was euphoria, a sudden and unexpected reason to smile. Norma had expected Rey to come home, sunburned and smiling, haggard perhaps, but alive, shaking his head and telling the tale of another close call searching for medicinal plants at the edge of a war zone. He was a scientist, first
and foremost, an ethnobotanist committed to the preservation of disappearing plant species. This is what he told her, and for a time, she believed him. She had always wanted to believe him. When they were newlyweds, she had asked him: what about that night we met, the dancing, the ID? Where did they take you?

“They cured me,” Rey told her. “They took me to the Moon and they fixed me right up. No more,” he said. “I'm not interested in politics. I'm interested in living.”

So he went into the jungle and returned with stories of insects the size of his hand, of dense, verdant valleys and their mysteries, of fluttering birds plumed in electric colors. And then he didn't return, and Norma waited. Then word filtered around the radio of a battle fought near the town of 1797 in the eastern jungle, of men captured and some killed. The rumors said many were buried and would soon be lost in the impossibly thick forest. They said it had been a slaughter, a victory celebration in the form of mass graves and anonymous dead—what does the end of a war mean if not that one side ran out of men willing to die? Peace was coming, now it was here. The battle near 1797 was ignored. And there were others: the war's coda, a string of killings in faraway places that were better left alone. In the city, there had been a battle as well, but now it was over; couldn't the people be forgiven if they noticed the sky for the first time in years, mistook its opaline glaze for sunlight, and began to forget?

There were two kinds of lists in those days, official and unofficial, and each contained different tallies of dead and missing, of exiled and imprisoned. With the right connections, Norma thought, she might be able to see those other lists, the real ones, that grim accounting of the war and its yield. But she never did. The next months passed in a haze, Norma going through the motions of living. She appeared at work, read the news without understanding or even attempting to understand what she was reading. She asked for a break from her Sunday-night show. Her many fans called in, expressing concern: was Norma all right? She had made the rounds at the university, been told in a variety of ways that the IL was not real, that her husband would be coming home, that it was only a matter of time, that he was on a drug binge in the forest, that the stress had finally gotten to him. Many refused to see her at all, citing their
busy schedules or family obligations, but she sensed they were afraid of her. She didn't eat, spent a few nights a week at the station, afraid to go home and confront the empty apartment. When she returned to Lost City Radio, she was dispirited, her honey-voice weary, but the calls came anyway, by the dozens: with the fighting over, people were now asking, with sudden abandon, where their loved ones had wandered off to.

One day, when her condition could no longer be ignored, Elmer suggested they go to the prisons. Rey had been mistaken for an IL sympathizer, Elmer reasoned, which explained his name on the list that had been read on the air. He'd been found lost and wandering through the eastern jungle, and arrested. There, among the various half-dead in prison, she might find him, and, if he were there, strings could be pulled. Elmer was a friend then. He encouraged her. Papers were filed, permits granted, and the station, still currying favor with the newly victorious government, promised a positive report on conditions inside. The war had been over for a year.

Norma and Elmer drove to the prison in the station's four-by-four, through neighborhoods of haphazard construction, past homes with street numbers scrawled in chalk on the outside walls, past shanties topped with metal sheeting. They presented their papers at various roadblocks, some manned by uniformed soldiers, some by neighborhood thugs, and everything was solved with a few coins and a deferential smile. Children chased the truck as it sped by, waving through the billows of dust. They drove through communities whose essential feature was their color: a burnt, dry shade of yellowish gray, everything bathed in murky sunlight. These were the areas that Norma could just make out from the station on a clear day, where the mountains first appeared and city seemed to end—only it didn't. It never ended. More people arrived each day as the jungle and the sierra emptied of human life. The capital's new residents made homes here, in the inhospitable folds of the lower mountains, in the city's dry and teeming servants' quarters.

The prison was a sprawling complex, its watchtowers rising high above the surrounding neighborhood in a district known as Collectors. There were crowds of people by the visitors' door, women selling newspapers, sandwiches, and knickknacks to bribe the guards with: foreign coins, plastic key-chains, old comic books. Norma and Elmer waited in
line with restless mothers, with anxious wives and girlfriends. They were all turned away.

Except Norma and Elmer, who passed through the first of a half-dozen locked doors: they stepped into a long corridor to another lock and another young man with a weapon. Each time, they were told to pull up their right sleeves, and the guard stamped their forearms. At the next gate, the guard would count the number of stamps, add his own, and wave them through. Eventually, they were ushered into a spare, windowless room with humming fluorescent light above. There were three metal folding chairs. They sat down to wait.

“Don't be nervous,” Elmer said after a while. “It's not so bad. Look at your arm.”

So she pulled back her sleeve once more and inspected the blurred purple markings. There was no state seal or a flag or code of any kind. She smiled.
CITY'S BEST OFFICE SUPPLY, VETCHER BROTHERS CANNERY, A–1 WINDOW REPAIR, THE METROPOLE HOTEL, ELEGANCE WITHOUT COMPROMISE
. This was her security clearance.

“I expected something more official,” said Norma.

“That's because you haven't been here before.”

Then a gruff man in a faded-olive uniform appeared and showed them to his office. He didn't shake hands, or even look at them, but the name tag on his uniform said
ROSQUELLES
. He sat down at his desk and announced that no one had informed him of their visit. “How do I even know who you are?” he asked.

They had decided it would be best for Elmer to speak, so as not to offend the official. With a nod to Norma, Elmer pulled some papers from his inside pocket. “We have letters.”

But instead, Rosquelles stared at Norma, his gaze between menacing and dismissive. “Woman,” he said, “why would you want to go in there?”

The office was dank and disordered, crammed with file cabinets that seemed ready to vomit their contents all over the floor. A cheaply framed photograph of a Swedish mountain scene hung askew. This was popular then, a way of idealizing life in the country's provinces: transforming the lost, war-ravaged hamlets into tidy Scandinavian villages with crystalline streams and quaint windmills, hills covered with bright swaths of green. Norma almost smiled. Our mountains are not like that.

She considered mentioning Rey, explaining that there had been some kind of mistake, but then she thought better of it. “We have approval, sir.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“I suppose I don't understand your question then.”

Rosquelles sighed. “Inside we have the killers and the beasts and the assassins that we should have disposed of the moment we found them. These are the people you want to see?”

“I'm a journalist, sir.”

“I hate journalists,” Rosquelles said. “You make excuses for these killers.”

“No one is making excuses for them anymore,” Elmer said. “The war is over.”

“It's not over in there,” the official said.

“Yes, sir.”

“How many prisoners are there?” Norma asked.

Rosquelles shrugged. “We quit counting years ago. It's a steady population now. No more growth. We don't take prisoners anymore.”

“I see,” said Norma.

“We kill them first.”

“I see,” she repeated.

He stood up. From a cabinet, Rosquelles removed a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a bag of cotton balls. He opened the bottle, soaked a cotton ball, and passed it to Norma. He pointed at her forearm. “You don't need those anymore. You're with me.”

She hesitated.

“Take it,” the official said. “You might as well clean it now. The kids outside will charge you fifty cents.”

When they had finished, Rosquelles led the way with a jangling of keys, out of the office, along a dark corridor, then up a spiral staircase into a system of fenced-in raised causeways above the prison proper. They walked above the yard, along its perimeter: from this height, Norma could see the ocher mountains dotted with shanties, and below her, the prisoners standing in the dusty yard, staring back at her. A group of men were being led in stretching exercises by a fellow prisoner, others seemed to be debating among themselves. Some looked up in disgust, others with calm disinterest.
The sun was bright, and they squinted up at the visitors. There were whistles and catcalls at Norma; she was a woman, after all, in a community of caged men. Some followed her, swarming and clamoring in the yard below, kicking up clouds of yellow earth, laughing. “Baby,” they called, and they said other things as well: about her pussy and the taste of it, about what they would do to her. Norma reached instinctively for Elmer's hand, and he gave it to her. She didn't feel safe. The causeway groaned with each step, and she imagined the entire structure collapsing, depositing her on the prison yard to be devoured. No one could save her, not with a knife or a gun or an army. Rosquelles ran his keys against the chain-link sides of the causeway. His graying hair was oily, and the back of his neck glistened. Periodically, he spat through the fence on the prisoners.