Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  Similar pictures had run that week on the front page of the newspaper—photographs of the arrested man in his youth—at a protest over school fees, and this was all it took.

  “I’m innocent,” he told his father later in the cell.

  “You’re stupid,” his father said. “They think you tried to kill the mayor.”

  And in response, the town had nearly killed Rey, right there in the plaza. The tailor, who had made Rey his first suit, grabbed him by the arm and called out, “Here he is!” There was a struggle; the angry crowd surrounded him, his face still covered, and they yelled:

  Arsonist!

  Criminal!

  Terrorist!

  They didn’t yet know who he was. The fire burned hot, and they puffed their chests out, a pack hungry for retribution. It was an instant, only an instant before his bandanna was removed, and then the crowd gasped again: the headmaster’s son! A terrorist! They recognized his face, and he recognized theirs: the butcher with his heavy mustache; the mayor’s secretary with her perpetually worried look; the stooped, old grounds-keeper, his leathery skin taut and gleaming. His town, the people who had raised him, aghast, betrayed. They surged at him, to eat him, Rey supposed; it was that kind of anger. He was an animal ready for slaughter. Just in time, Trini stepped out of the crowd, took his nephew away by the arm, led him ahead of the crowd, to the jail, the town parading behind the headmaster’s captured son, certain they had found their terrorist.

  YEARS LATER: the party where he met Norma, the evening he toyed with her. You don’t know who I am, do you? They’d danced until the question had its own weight, until Rey himself was wondering who he was and why he had said it. Was he the boy who had stumbled into a crime, the boy who eventually fled the town for the city with his father and uncle? There was a drum and then a cymbal, a syncopated beat being broken and repaired. Who am I? What am I? Involved, he thought, I am involved. In what? Ah, he was asking himself too many questions. Dance, don’t think. In things I can’t talk about, not even to myself. Certainly not to her. A sympathizer? It sounded inessential and soft. Unimpressive. He watched her, her face in shadow, now in light. I am the vanguard, he told himself, and had to frown at the pomposity of the phrasing. Enough: the band played, and his feet moved, and he kept his eyes on her hips as they swayed. Can she see me? His hand was steady at her back. Music! Then they were on the bus, and then there was a roadblock, and in a moment of panic, he had given away all of his secrets, stuffed them in her pocket. She suspected nothing. He expected the worst.

  He rode in the green truck that morning, forcing himself to think of his uncle Trini, of other, more hospitable jails. Trini would get him out of all this, would place a call to an old colleague. There were others in the truck, would they be as lucky? A bearded man in a wrinkled suit had the frazzled look of a man who had dressed quickly. Why would you wear a suit to jail? Rey wondered. A couple of young hardheads, stone-faced and bored. The younger one picked at his ear with his impossibly long pinky nail. The other practiced various poses of disinterest, staring into space as if his worst enemy were floating there, begging to be killed. A few ragtag students sat across from Rey, looking bewildered and drunk, undeniably scared. One of them had lost it, and he sobbed now into his hands. His ears had acquired an unearthly red color, as if they might start bleeding on their very own. No one comforted him. A soldier sat at the front end, rifle in his lap, rather unimpressed by the lot of them.

  It was just before morning, the truck chortling through the vacant, predawn streets. Every pothole shook the old truck like a tremor, but even so, Rey managed to doze off. There was no curfew yet, but it was quiet at that hour. Rey had learned that night of the fire to mistrust quiet: somewhere, something was burning. Of course. Of course—because the army had come to his town the next day to ask questions. Because his friends hadn’t come to his defense. Rey had assumed they’d come forward on their own, but they never did. They’d been afraid, or been told to keep quiet. Because Rey had spent that night asleep on the floor of the cell, wrapped in a blanket that left his feet exposed to the chill, his cheek on the dank floor of the jailhouse. He was a tall, lanky boy—a stupid boy, his father had said, but not a bad one.

  When his anger had subsided, Rey’s father said, “We’ll have to leave, son.”

  The thought made Rey impossibly sad. “Where will we go?” he asked, but of course he knew the answer. The city, the city: it’s where everyone went. They cried together, father and son, and then slept on the floor. Like criminals. It was the only safe place in town for them. Trini let the drunks go so that father and son could have the cell to themselves.

  The mayor, affable and corrupt, stood outside with a crowd behind him. Trini begged them all to go home, said that it would all be settled in the morning. And it was: the green army trucks pulled over the ridge, unloading a division of soldiers ready to speculate with guns about the origins of the fire. They poked around the ashes of the mayor’s office and then through the home of the primary suspect, where even the soldiers remarked on his youth. The angry crowds hid in their homes, afraid to seem too interested, eager to let the authorities do their work. In Rey’s home, the soldiers found a few books on unsavory topics, espousing points of view that had been deemed dangerous in the capital, though the decree had never made it to Rey’s town.

  They took Rey’s father in for questioning. He was released a week later, with a few bruises and a broken rib. Hadn’t Rey’s father taught that arrested man, the one found in the city in a house full of weapons? And how is it that a young man from this town of upstanding citizens was transformed into a criminal? And who was responsible for such a tragedy? Everywhere there were rumors. The school board said it was a shame they had to let Rey’s father go. They gave him two weeks to vacate the house they had rented him, and planned a modest party, which none of the teachers attended. Rey went, dressed in his suit, prepared to say good-bye to his father’s colleagues. He was seething. “They’re afraid, son,” Rey’s father said. “Don’t blame them.”

  Now Rey felt the jab of a rifle in his gut. “Wake up, lover boy.” It was the soldier who had taken him off the bus. He was grinning.

  Rey didn’t have it in him to protest. His neck hurt, and his temples throbbed. Stepping out of the truck, Rey could see it was morning. They weren’t in the city anymore, but in a completely empty place: a bleached, airless planet. The ground was brittle and flecked with glass, pockmarked with craters of all sizes that stretched ahead and all around him in the semidarkness. There were dunes and hills that he could just make out.

  “Where are we?” Rey asked the soldier.

  The soldier didn’t respond.

  “The Moon,” said the bearded man in the wrinkled suit.

  The prisoners were chained together in a group. “Walk straight ahead,” one of the soldiers said, “exactly in the footsteps of the man in front of you.”

  The Moon is a minefield then, thought Rey. The man in the suit was chained in front of him, and he turned now, and smiled. He raised his chained hands and scratched his beard. “It’s easy for me,” he said. “I have small feet. It won’t be so easy for you.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Rey said.

  A shot rang out, not close by but somewhere in the distance. The procession paused for a second. There were the muffled, faraway sounds of people laughing.

  “Have you been here before?” Rey asked the man in front of him.

  The man bit his upper lip and nodded. “This is my second home.”

  They walked, enchained, toward the horizon.

  FIVE

  NORMA IS not a mother. Not in any sense, not remotely. In her apartment, there were two houseplants that could attest to this fact, houseplants whose dusty, dying leaves had bent hopefully and desperately toward light and were now in abject surrender, wilting and forgotten. She lived alone—not for herself, not selfishly, but alone. Her public life was the radio, where she was mother to an imaginary nation of missing people. Her privat
e life was antiseptic and empty, a place for memory, music, and solitude. Norma, who was not a mother, couldn’t comfort a child suffering from a toothache, or discipline one who had broken a piece of china. She couldn’t brush tangled hair painlessly or sew a patch on the worn knee of a pair of pants. These things didn’t come naturally to her. She had no pets: not a clumsy dog clawing at the door for her; not a tabby cat waiting to emerge languidly from behind a bed frame, to acknowledge her with yellow eyes and then slink away. There were no living things to make demands of her except her dying plants, not in her solitary apartment, not since Rey had vanished, no one who asked to be fed, or who needed to be washed, no one who awoke, sweating furiously and shouting, from adolescent nightmares.

  There he was then, her first lesson: that morning, before dawn, Victor awoke with a scream.

  It was torture to summon those kinds of emotions, the kind mothers routinely have: heart-swelling sentiments of selfless love. It was hard enough to pretend on the radio each Sunday. How could she do it now? Her impulse was to shut her door, to block out the sound—only the door was already closed. There was no escaping him: a human being, a child and his pain invading her space. She rubbed her bleary eyes and rose.

  She found the boy still shaken, spent with the force of his yelling, heaving and panting, shirtless and thin, eyes red, looking every bit an animal liberated from a zoo. “Victor,” she said. Norma felt she should touch him, but where? How? She put her hand on his head, and sat on the sofa—her sofa, hers and Rey’s—and the boy melted into her. It was natural, instinct: he didn’t hesitate at all. His hands clasped tightly around her. “It’s all right,” Norma said, “it was just a dream.” It was a phrase she’d heard before, in a movie or on one of the radio soap operas.

  He was breathing heavily, and the beating of his heart shook him from the inside. She could feel him trembling.

  REY DISAPPEARED, and she didn’t see him again for nearly a year. Norma took his ID card, with that strange, foreign-sounding name, and carried it with her. It felt dangerous to own it. She was curious. She should ask someone about it, she thought, one of their friends at the university, but just as quickly decided she couldn’t. It would be some sort of betrayal. The man had secrets, and she suspected they were what made Rey’s young face seem old. How dramatic it had all seemed, how exaggerated, the music and the lights and his absurd and self-important question. Then afterwards, once he had been taken away, the faces of the passengers on the bus, accusing her—rich girl, white girl, disturbing their morning commute with idiocies, putting all their lives in danger, teasing the soldier. It was somehow shameful, but what could she do now, he was gone, and Norma had only the memory of that night and a strange ID to remember him by. She was afraid to ask anyone if they had seen him or heard from him since the night of the party. She was afraid to tell anyone that he had been taken away, that she had seen it. In any case, she wasn’t sure whom she should tell.

  Norma kept quiet but found herself cultivating a fondness for Rey in his absence, even though she had only known him that one evening. Or perhaps that was why: it was as if she had seen him die—and what could be more intimate than that? What if hers was the last friendly face he saw? The last friendly touch? She thought of him at night, wondered when he might appear. She dreamed of marrying him, because it seemed the most romantic act possible. She thought of ways to inquire about him without raising attention: a note? A phone call? Every day the tension rose, and every day, at the university, she expected to find him there among the milling crowds, at the center of some circle of students, cigarette in hand, blithely holding forth about his brief imprisonment. What if she saw him? What if he asked for his ID? She daydreamed about this: I’ve been carrying it, she’d say. She would make sure to smile the way her mother had taught her, that way that her mother had sworn beguiles men without giving away too much. Her mother, the expert on men. Norma often came home from the university to find her alone, glassy-eyed, the radio serenading the empty house. “Your father is off carousing,” she would slur. “He’s abandoned me.”

  Norma would help her to the bedroom at the end of the hallway, undress her, and put her to bed, all the while repeating stories neither of them believed: “He’s working late, mother. Don’t be so suspicious, it’ll make you old.”

  Other times, at the dinner table, Norma’s father and mother spoke in curt monosyllables, and Norma played along. She did her best pantomime of pleasant family life until her eyes crossed and her thoughts slipped away from her, and there he was, Rey blowing smoke through the open window of the bus, smiling stupidly, unaware he was about to vanish. Pass the rice, her father would say, and it would take Norma a moment to place herself again. What’s the matter with you? Nothing, Father. She would pass the plate with wobbly hands, her old man frowning and turning to her mother: You’ve spoiled this girl too much. And her mother would nod, meek in his presence, accepting blame for any and all errors, for the disappointing comportment of the girl on whose education they were wasting all that money. None of this had to be said; Norma knew it by heart, her father’s cold logic, but preferred not to think of it, preferred to think of Rey, mysterious and brave, and not her home with its stillness and its tension and its secrets.

  Later, when she and Rey were a couple, she told him that she’d thought of him while he was gone, before she even knew him, and wondered aloud why her mind had wandered in his direction. He grinned. “I’m irresistible,” he said, as if stating a fact.

  It was vanity, but she had to know: “Did you think of me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s an old story,” he said.

  They were near downtown, in a district called Idorú, outside a movie theater that only played Bollywood films, English-Bengali-Hindu monstrosities. It had been two years since the night they met, a year since Rey had reappeared. He was buying tickets, and now he led her inside. She reached for his hand. The theater played the same movie for two months or more, colorful epics that drew hordes of young girls for the choreographed dance routines, and swarms of teenage boys for the battles with ornate swords and sabers. “I can’t understand Hindi,” Norma whispered, but Rey explained there was no need for translation, that the stories were simple. And it was true: the villains were so recognizable they were met with whistles and boos every time they appeared on screen. The heroes were applauded boisterously, of course, and Rey joined in. He took her hands and clapped them together, and in the low darkness, she could see his smile. Norma was uncomfortable and hot, the theater was loud and smelled of sweat and liquor. On screen, the actors chattered incomprehensibly. “Why do you bring me to these places?” Norma whispered.

  “Because they exist. Aren’t you curious?”

  The movie played continuously and the lights never came on. “All kinds of things happen here,” Rey said, “and all kinds of people come.” He was in the midst of educating Norma about her city. “You live too well,” he’d told her importantly one day. “You don’t know what this place is really like. I’ll show you.”

  “That’s cute, country boy. I was born here.”

  He’d insisted.

  The theater, the dark guts of it, was something she’d never encountered. The people lit cigarettes and threw their butts at the screen, laughing, and the film was as impenetrable as the audiences’ reaction to it: men sang, and women danced, exchanging glances heavy with longing. The audience cheered approvingly when a mustachioed rogue kidnapped a woman, and clapped again when the same man was killed. There were jeers whenever a kiss failed to materialize, and hoots at the svelte, doe-eyed lead, whose silken black hair shone with an otherworldly gilt. Arguments dissolved into song, and the audience came and went from the theater as if it were a waiting room, as if the film were an excuse and completely beside the point. The doors creaked open, washing the screen in pallid yellow light, and she found it hard to concentrate on anything in particular. Language was the least of it: a drunk strummed an out-of-tu
ne guitar in the corner of the theater; in the darkness, a multitude of voices promised to kill him with it.

  After an hour, Norma asked to go.

  But Rey wasn’t done. He walked her through the dense neighborhoods on the edges of downtown, past turn-of-the-century houses with peeling paint and glassless windows covered with thin, white sheets hooked on nails. Houses that looked like tombs, once-bright colors obscured by layers of soot—finally, heads poking out, always a woman with fierce eyes, craning to see what was happening, what the noise was, who was coming up the street, who was leaving and with whom. Ornamented ladies, grim-faced men, loud packs of boys who wore their sneakers without laces, the tongues flapping out in some strange salute. Neighborhoods like these are networks of impulses, Rey said, human, electrical, biological, like the forest: in the summer, inexplicable carnivals of flesh; in the winter, blankets in the windows and darkened homes. It was winter that day. “They use candles,” Rey said. “Like in the mountains.”

  If Norma had known the future, she might have said, “Like we all will, when the war comes to the city,” but she couldn’t know, so she didn’t.

  No one knew how bad it would get.

  She clutched his hand and pressed close to him as they made their way down the crowded sidewalk. “What’s the forest like?” she asked.

  He considered her question, which she had asked more than once simply because she loved to hear him speak of it. “It goes on forever. It’s endless invention, it’s gaudy, it’s gnarled trunks and rotting husks, sunlight peeking through the canopy, and bursts of rain hitting the roof of the forest like tapping on metal. And color, color, color.”