Lost City Radio (9 page)

He smiled and nodded in agreement, but she wasn't joking. She couldn't grasp the callousness of it: to present his father as dead, then to spring him on her like this?

The old man's eyesight was failing, but he maneuvered expertly through the apartment. The tray hardly trembled in his hands, and he spilled no water. Rey cleared a spot on the coffee table and, after the old man had refused space on the couch and sat instead atop a pile of newspapers, they each took their mason jar of water and raised it in a toast. “To reunions,” the old man said. They were quiet for a moment, sipping the turbid tap water. Then Rey's father coughed into his wrinkled hand. The room was dim and moldering. “Where have you been?” he said to his son. “Waiting for me to die?”

There was an odd silence between the three of them. Rey sat still, as if considering what his father had said. Norma blinked away a fly that had landed on her face.

“Well, don't let's start there,” the old man said, laughing, and he waved
away the question, as if scattering smoke or fog, as if it had meant nothing at all. His face was yellowed and tired, his few hairs combed straight back. His bald pate was severe and pale. “Are you well, son?”

Rey nodded.

“I get by,” the old man said. “And thanks for asking. Do you see your uncle?”

“Now and again.”

It was an interview, and Norma was superfluous. The old man had barely acknowledged her, and Rey hadn't introduced her. She sat, trying to be invisible, while father and son stared each other down, ping-ponged questions at one another: studies, health, money, distant family ties.

When they seemed to run out of topics, the old man pulled a pack of cigarettes from a drawer and offered them around. Rey took one, and then the two of them were smoking. They held their cigarettes the same way, between their second and third fingers. It looked odd. “You should quit, son,” the old man said.

“I will. You should too.”

The old man nodded. “So who is this pretty young lady?”

“This is Norma.”

The moment called for a smile; Norma did her best. The old man nodded and tipped an imaginary hat. Then he placed his hands in his lap and said, “Child, you deserve better than my derelict son.”

“Don't fill her head with ideas,” Rey snapped.

“Has he told you?”

“Told me what?” Norma asked.

“That they took him to the Moon.” The old man eyes were gleaming. He shifted on his pile of newspapers, gave her a wry smile. “My son is a wanted man,” he said.

“That's why I don't visit you, Father,” Rey said, shaking his head. “You talk crazy.”

“But how long has it been since you saw each other?” Norma asked. As soon as the words were spoken, she regretted getting involved.

They both shrugged, together, as if on cue. “Not so long,” Rey's father said. “A year. He lived here when he came back. Have you told her?” he asked again.

“Came back?”

“From the Moon,” Rey said.

“I know they took him,” Norma said. “I was there. It was two years ago.”

“You were at the Moon? How romantic: you met my boy at the Moon?”

“No, sir.”

“My son, the terrorist,” the old man muttered. “It's what you get for talking loud in this country.”

“But I was there when they took him,” she said. Her most private memory: the bus, the vanishing. The long weeks of waiting, of falling in love with a stranger. “I—”

“We're getting married,” Rey said, interrupting her. “Norma is my fiancée.”

Norma shot Rey a fierce glance. He pinched her leg.

“Aha!” the old man exclaimed, putting his water down. He clapped and smiled like a child presented with a new toy. “I knew there was a reason you came!”

There was hardly any air in the apartment, and barely any light. The smoke had gathered in clouds at the ceiling. Married? The old man seemed genuinely delighted, watching intently as Rey pushed the table away from the dilapidated couch. He bent down on one knee. Norma looked at Rey, at the old man, puzzled, dismayed. Then Rey was speaking, and this was exactly as she hadn't pictured it: in a cramped apartment on the wrong side of town, in winter, in front of an old man risen from the dead. “Norma,” he was saying, “will you be my wife?” It had been two years since they'd met, and the time had passed so quickly. Rey grinned wildly, the old man clapped, and the totality of it was too strange.

“Yes,” she said, scanning back and forth between Rey and his father. It was the only answer that occurred to her. The walls looked as if they might cave in. Rey's father was up again. “Spirits,” he called. “A drink!” Norma examined the simple silver ring Rey had just placed around her finger. “Is this just a show?” she asked. “For him?”

“It's for us,” Rey said.

The old man came back with a bottle of clear liquor, emptied his water into a potted plant that stood wilting next to a stack of books, and beckoned Rey and Norma to do the same. He poured them both gener
ous shots and again proposed a toast. “If only your mother was alive. Have you told Trini?” Rey's father said. He was talking fast, very nearly running out of breath. The old man was excited. “When will you have the ceremony?”

“We don't know, Father.”

The old man squinted. “Will I be invited?”

“Of course!” Norma said.

“Of course,” Rey added.

Things were happening that Norma didn't understand. The old man poured some liquor onto his handkerchief, and cleaned the lenses of his glasses with it. “Let me see that ring,” he said. Norma held her left hand out, and the old man shook his head. “I see your career is not so lucrative, son.”

“I should have been a poet like you,” Rey said, and the old man laughed. They raised their glasses again, and everyone smiled.

“But child,” the old man said, turning to Norma, suddenly serious. “If you're smart, you won't take this name of ours.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

The old man and his yellow skin; the old man and the crooked teeth of his yellow smile. His lonely, wrinkled face. The room full of smoke. “This is no time to play dumb, child.”

“Don't listen to him,” Rey said. “My father's talking crazy.”

In the control room, years later, Elmer scanning the list: “Norma,” he said abruptly. “We have a problem.”

“I love you, Norma,” Rey said.

Those nightmares, Rey, where do they come from? What did they do to you?

“Our name is tainted, child.” The old man bit his lip and looked down. “I did my part, and my son has done his. I promise you: you don't want it.”

“And I love you, Rey.”

The boy rapped on the window. He pressed his face to the glass and puffed his cheeks out. He was a beautiful boy.

“Norma, I'm sorry,” Elmer repeated, “but we have a problem.”

E
LIJAH
M
ANAU
was a rosy-cheeked man from the capital, and had been living in 1797 for six months when the soldiers came. He was a timid man, and not without reason. To be exiled here to teach in this humid backwater was a testament to his consistent mediocrity. He had scored near the bottom on the regional placement exam, well below the cutoff for a job in the city at one of the better schools. The dispiriting results were announced on the radio a few nights after the test, in alphabetical order. It took several hours. His family was neither wealthy nor well connected, and so nothing could be done. He was thirty when he left home. He had never been to the jungle before. In fact, he had never left the city.

Manau carried with him the shame of an exposed man who had imagined his mediocrity to be a secret. It was dawning on him that he may have become the failure his father had always predicted he would be. The town, his new home, was perpetually soggy and heat-swollen. The rains
came and brought little relief. He rented a room from a man named Zahir, who had lost both hands in the war. Zahir's son, Nico, was an unwilling student, seemed to distrust his teacher and housemate. Sometimes Manau helped them tend to their small plot, but in truth, he had no skill for it. The earth held no romance for him. Manau longed for concrete and everything else he had left behind. Nico's crippled father dug holes with his stumps, he carried heavy loads on his back, balancing rucksacks on his broad shoulders with help from his son. The man was a rock. At night, Manau listened to the mosquitoes thrumming in the humid air, to the distant cawing and various shrieks the jungle produced and, with his thin curtain drawn, he checked his naked body for the progress of the sores and rashes that were always afflicting him. It was his daily chore, an exercise in personal hygiene that had devolved into a strange kind of vanity. The pitiable condition of his person played a central role in his sexual fantasies. To be nursed back to health! To be massaged and anointed in fruit essences, in herbal potions! With a cloudy shaving mirror and the kerosene lamp, he examined himself—the carbuncular skin blossoming on his back and buttocks, beneath his armpits—and was satisfied that one day soon, he would look pathetic enough to stir something soft and generous in a woman's heart. In the city, it was assumed that the heat made jungle women freer, and the prospect of these unknown women, their bronzed and beautiful legs spread wide, had, in fact, been Manau's only consolation when he was informed of his teaching assignment.

Most mornings, after the rains, Manau arrived to the school early, to sweep the puddles away. The roof leaked, and there was nothing to be done about it. At the very least, he could be grateful for the raised wooden floor of the schoolhouse. Zahir said it would have to be replaced in a few years, but for now, it was fine: able to withstand, with a minimum of creaking, Manau's unhappy pacing. The government had seen fit to send fifteen primitive desks where his students sat diffidently, waiting to be entertained—twenty had been promised, but an official in 1791 kept five for himself, and no one complained, so neither did Manau. He taught cheerlessly every morning, and sent his students home for lunch a bit earlier each day. They were all primitives. Manau had hoped to be seen as a knowledgeable and cultured gentleman from the city, but instead they were amused by his ignorance of trees and plants, disappointed
by his inability to distinguish between the calls of various birds. “I don't care about birds,” he said one day, and to his surprise, the words came out angrily.

It wasn't that the children disliked him. Manau was inoffensively boring, taught listlessly, but he let them out early, on some days canceled class altogether, and no one seemed to mind. The day that the soldiers arrived in a pair of rusty, creaking green trucks, Manau was quick to call off school: there was an excitement in his students' faces that he couldn't compete with. He'd written some rules about fractions on the blackboard. He had never liked arithmetic. Outside, the engines rattled, and the soldiers set up tarps in the plaza. It was, he would later learn, the first time in more than a year that the soldiers had come. The presence of outsiders was electric and disconcerting. Eyes were wandering. Manau heard anxious fingernails scraping against the desks. It was no use. Go out into the streets, he ordered, learn about life! He smiled proudly as the schoolhouse emptied, as if, by dint of laziness, he had stumbled upon a new pedagogy, an educational masterstroke. His students left, all of them except Victor, whom he asked to stay.

In Manau's visions, it was Victor's mother, a widow, who would eventually take him in. She was older, he knew that, but with these jungle people, one could never tell. In his time in the village, Manau had learned a little of her past: she had fallen in love before with a stranger from the city, who had disappeared into the jungle at the end of the war. People said he was dead. So she was a free woman, and wasn't Manau also a stranger from the city? The possibilities were quite obvious. But what stirred Manau most was what he could see: she was a real woman, with substantial thighs and a pleasing weight to her. She wore her black hair tied with a red band, and her smallish mouth seemed always ready to break into a smile. She was doe-eyed, a hint of pink in her cheeks. Her name was Adela.

Now the classroom had cleared, and her boy stood before him, waiting. “Victor,” he said. “Was your father a soldier?”

The boy looked baffled. In fact, Manau wasn't sure himself why he had asked it. Only recently had his isolation become so stark, so complete, that he had resolved to do something about it. He saw her every day in the village, carrying a tray of silver fish on her head. Her undersized
boy sat in the first row, next to Zahir's son. Manau saw them; they were there—all he had to do was speak.

“No, sir,” Victor said. “I don't think he was.”

“Oh.” Manau nodded. The boy was anxious to leave, swiveling his head every few moments toward the door. “Do you want to be a soldier?” Manau asked.

“I don't know, sir.”

“It would break your mother's heart if you left.”

“Do you know my mother, sir?” the boy asked very politely.

Manau suddenly felt the red skin beneath his clothes awaken in complaint. He steeled himself against the urge to itch. “I do,” he said.

“Oh.”

“But not well,” Manau added. “Not well.”

Insinuating a woman through her child, thought Manau, what a despicable and cowardly thing to do! He wanted to be done with it. From his bag, he produced a new lead pencil. He offered it to Victor, and the boy took it without hesitation. Manau meant to send the boy off, but Victor coughed into his hand and asked permission to speak. When Manau assented, the boy said, “Sir, how old were you when you left home?”

“What a strange question!”

“I'm sorry, sir.”

Manau stood, and wondered what he might say. Was it a trip around the world at age twelve, a stowaway in the hold of a ship headed north? Could he lie and say he'd been to the other side of the continent, or farther—to Africa? Might he say, I have seen the grand cathedrals of Europe, the skyscrapers of New York, the temples of Asia? Of course, by leaving home, the boy meant something completely different. Seeing the world was incidental: if you were born in a place like 1797, leaving was what you did to begin your life.

“I'm from the city, boy. We don't have to leave.”

Victor nodded, and Manau was aware that what he had said was terrible, cruel, and untrue. In the city, like here, the children dreamed of escape.

“I'm thirty years old and I've only just left my home,” Manau said. “Why?”

The boy bit his lip, shot a glance toward the door and then back at
his teacher. “It's Nico,” he said. “He's always said he would leave with the soldiers. He says he doesn't care if his family starves without him.”

Manau nodded. His landlord had often confessed that fear: “Without Nico's hands, we'll go hungry. What can I do with these stumps?”

“Why is it your business?”

“Somebody should do something,” Victor said. “He's my friend.”

“You're a good boy,” Manau said. He thanked Victor, patted him on the shoulder, and told him not to worry. “I'll talk with his father.” He led the boy to the door and watched him scamper off to join his friends. The teacher returned to his desk, straightened some papers, then erased the board with a wet rag. Outside, the boys hovered around the soldiers, entranced. Soon their mothers would come to shoo them away, to send them into the jungle to hide. But that fear was old-fashioned, and the children knew it. When he strolled by on his way, Manau saw in their eyes looks of excitement, looks no student had ever shown him.

 

L
ATER, WHEN
his mother died and he left 1797, Victor would remember this day as the beginning of the village's dissolution. Nico spoke of leaving, and Victor worried. The two of them watched the soldiers, admired them from a distance and then up close, brought water and fruit when they were told to. After an hour, Nico asked one soldier where he was from. The young man looked barely eighteen. He gave a number and said it was in the mountains. Victor and Nico nodded in unison.

“How can you boys stand this heat?” the soldier said, scowling, his face flush. He sat slumped and sweating beneath the shade of the tarp.

“We can't,” Nico said. “We hate it here.”

The soldier laughed and called over a few of his friends. “They hate it here too,” he said, and everyone agreed they were smart boys.

Victor didn't hate it. He watched his friend enumerate the town's shortcomings for the soldier and felt ashamed. There's no work, Nico said, but that wasn't exactly true: all anyone did was work. Nico said there was nothing to do, but Victor still considered climbing trees an activity. All Nico's complaints sounded cruel, uncharitable. In the afternoon, they would go swimming in the river—that's how we stand the heat, he wanted to say. And it's great. It's beautiful. The water is cool and murky, and at the bottom you can plunge your toes into the cold mud,
feel it close around your feet, suctioning like it wants to drown you. The thought of it made him smile. You come out clean. But he didn't say any of this. Nico spoke with such confidence that to contradict him seemed almost dangerous. He listened in silence until the young soldier eyed him and said, “What about you, little man? What do you have to say?”

The soldier pointed with a thin, bony finger. Victor looked quickly over his own shoulder, and everyone laughed.

Just then, the mothers arrived and hurriedly dispersed their children. His own mother was there, and she glared at the soldier. “Shame,” she said, and the soldier backed away, as if from a wild animal.

“I'm fine, Ma,” Victor muttered, but it was no use. She wasn't listening. The mothers were taking turns shouting at the soldiers; the children hung their heads and listened. Victor's mother held his hand tightly; her voice rose above everyone else's. There she was, with an accusing finger drawing circles in the air, upbraiding the captain. “What do you want with our boys?” she said. “Can't you see they're all we have?”

The captain was a burly giant of a man with wide, round eyes and a mustache flecked with gray. As Victor's mother spoke, he nodded apologetically. “Madam,” the captain said when she was finished. “My sincerest apologies. I will instruct my soldiers to avoid speaking with your boys.”

“Thank you,” Victor's mother said.

“Do you hear that, men?” the captain shouted.

A round of
yessirs
came from the enlisted men. They stood at attention out of respect for the women.

The apologies continued. As the captain spoke, he twirled his cap by the bill. “I'm afraid we have sullied relations with the people of this fine village,” he said, shaking his head. “We are only here to help. It is our solemn mandate.”

The women all nodded, but Victor knew the captain was only addressing his mother. He could see it in the man's eyes. She squeezed his hand, and Victor squeezed back.

“I assure you we want nothing with your boys, madam,” the captain continued, his lips curling into a smile. “It's this town's women who are so beguiling.”

 

T
HAT EVENING,
the canteen was crowded with soldiers. They were stripped down to their undershirts, had taken off their boots and laid them in a pile by the door. The heat that day had been an animal thing: scalding, heavy. The entire village had given in to its weight, with the evening set aside for recovery. A breeze blew now and again through the open windows of the canteen. Inside, it smelled of feet and beer. The soldiers were drinking the place dry, singing along to the radio. The wooden floor was shiny and slick. Manau was feeling gloomy, sharing liter bottles with a few disaffected, unhappy men. They grumbled about the dwindling beer supply and the thirsty soldiers. There was only one glass, so they drank in circles. “Who do these brats think they are?” Manau heard a man complain. “They'll leave us with nothing.”

It was a real concern among the regulars. Periodically, someone offered the soldiers a rueful smile and a toast, then mumbled curses under his breath.

Nico's father arrived, placed his stumps on the bar, and confirmed their worst fears. It would be ten days before the next truck came. “That's if the roads aren't washed out,” Zahir added. He knew the delivery schedules well. Whenever the beer truck or any other truck came, he lent his broad back to the driver for loading and unloading. He had a special cart that clasped around his chest so that he could be useful even without his hands.

Manau nodded at his landlord, at the gathered men, and felt tolerated. Nothing builds community like complaining. He looked Zahir in the eye and knew there was something he should tell him. What if Nico were to leave? Victor had spoken of it as a child would: without nuance, certain of right and wrong. “He doesn't care if his family starves without him,” Victor said of his friend, horrified. Manau didn't see it so clearly: what a place this is to grow into adulthood! No one would starve—even Zahir must know that! Of course, the boy wanted to leave. He was the oldest boy in the school by nearly two years. He had celebrated his fourteenth birthday a few months before, on a dismal, rainy day, surrounded by children who barely reached his shoulders. All the boys his age had gone off to the city. Let them, Manau thought. Let Nico go, too. It struck Manau as comic: the slow disappearance of the place, the boarded-up houses
all along the streets off the muddy plaza. Padlocked, shuttered, rotting inside. Their owners don't visit, they don't send money. It won't be long now; soon they'll stop pretending, pack up en masse, and close the town for good. They'll say a prayer, turn their backs on this place, and let the jungle surround it, colonize it, disassemble it.