Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  “Just like that? What did he say?”

  Victor took the empty glass and jabbed the straw at the ice melting at the bottom. He sucked, and there was a gurgling sound for a moment. Then he stopped. “Nothing. He said you would take care of me.”

  “I-I am,” Norma stammered. “I will. But why did he say that? Why did he leave you?”

  Victor shrugged. “He was sad. The old people said he loved my mother.”

  Norma sat back, suddenly amused. As if being in love excused everything. How much could be explained away that easily, how much of her past? This Manau: he had abandoned a boy in the middle of the city because he was heartbroken?

  “It’s like being dizzy,” she said, sighing. “Trying to make sense of all this. It’s like being very, very dizzy.”

  “He knows. I’m sure Manau knows. He can help.”

  “My husband is…was not a simple man,” she said. “He plays tricks.”

  “That’s not nice.”

  Norma rubbed her eyes: the lights, the boy, the note. “You’re right. It isn’t. I’m dizzy,” she repeated. “That’s all.”

  THE TABLE had been cleaned off, the bill paid, when Victor confessed he’d dreamed of his mother. She died in the river, he said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you poor thing,” Norma said, but that wasn’t why he told her: maybe the river brought his mother here. The lunch hour had died down, the waitresses congregated by the neon-lit bar, chatting and sipping sodas.

  “So what do you want to do?” Norma asked the boy.

  “The ocean,” he said. “I want to see it.”

  The city’s beaches are desolate for most of the year, lonely expanses of windswept sand beneath crumbling bluffs. Vagabonds warm themselves around crudely built fires, and sometimes the waves drag a swollen body onto the shore. In winter, the city turns its back to the sea, the clouds drop low and heavy, flat and dim, a dirty cotton ceiling. What beach? What ocean? Every now and then, the wind changes and brings hints of it—a brackish smell rising through the city—but those days are rare. A highway runs along the coastline; the sounds of passing cars and crashing waves melting into a single, blurred noise. Some of the beaches farther north double as work areas, the careful labor of separating and burning trash carried out by a diligent army of thin, tough boys with matted hair. They poke through the heaps with sticks, gathering pig feed from the festering piles.

  Victor, Norma thought, could be one of them. They were his age, his build, his color, their stunted brown bodies stepping expertly through the refuse. And if he were? If he had come from 1797 and not found the radio that first day, if he had wandered the streets hungry and dazed, if he had made a home in the alleys of Asylum Downs, or been picked up by police in the slums behind the Metropole, would that have been surprising? A boy like Victor could live and die in any of a dozen squalid shanties, in The Settlement or Miamiville, in Collectors or The Thousands or Tamoé, and no one would ever know. No mysteries or questions to be asked: another child of obscure origins come to scrape out a life in the nether regions of the city, his success or failure of no consequence to anyone other than himself.

  They rode to the coast to look for her. Norma told him—or began to tell him—that it didn’t work that way, that the river flowed across the continent in the other direction, that the ocean was infinite. But she stopped. This was for him to discover, and he would be cured of his dream when he saw it himself. Norma let him talk, he sputtered on about his village, about his mother, about Manau—“We’ll find him!” he said, though the city was as large as the sea, and this Manau was only one man. She was happy to be in a taxi, with the windows down, the air rushing in, so loud she couldn’t hear her own mind thrumming. She watched his lips move, hearing only scattered words, and held his hand to reassure him.

  At the beach, Norma and Victor watched a small, stooped woman drag a sack behind her. She moved glacially, arthritically, along the ebbing and flowing line of surf, and together the three of them were the only ones there. They watched her for a moment: she sifted sand into her sack through a sieve, then inched forward and did it again. The wind scattered trash across the beach. An occasional strong gust lifted sand into the sky and out to sea. Though the sun was still hidden, it wasn’t too cold.

  Victor went to work, untying his laces, pulling off his socks with greedy resolve. He wiggled his toes, stuffed his socks into his sneakers, and put them all beneath a stone bench at the edge of the sand. He peeled off the sweater that Norma had lent him that morning—given him—an old wool thing that Rey had shrunk in the wash years before. Norma shouldn’t have been amazed, but she was: to Victor, the sweater was simply something to wear against a chill. It meant nothing to him, did not signify anyone living or dead. Of course! He was free of her past, and why wouldn’t he be?

  Norma and Victor walked out onto the sand. She didn’t reach for his hand, as she had in the taxi, though she had an urge to. Instead, she watched him as he bounded ahead, almost to the water’s edge and back. He spun and waved his arms. She followed him toward the water and stopped just where the sand became moist and mushy. It had been years since she came to the beach, since she was a girl. Had she ever come in winter? It seemed possible that she never had. Norma took off her shoes, rolled up the cuffs of her pants, and stepped into the wet sand with one foot. She pressed firmly into the cool earth, and it felt good. She pulled her foot back to the dry sand, and crouched to admire her work: a perfect imprint of her foot. She made another, just ahead, and walked this way to where the waves spread out over the sand, a thin skin of advancing and retreating water. Then she retraced her steps, walking backwards. There it was: her disappearance. She had walked into the ocean and not come back.

  As a girl, she’d spent an afternoon at this beach, carving massive footprints, giant paw-prints, around her father, while he slept with a straw hat slung low over his eyes. How old was she then? Eight? Nine? Norma smiled. Her mother, she recalled, wore a black bathing suit and hat with a dramatic, swooping brim. A bow, perhaps. She’d had the air of a movie star, thought herself much too elegant to swim, so she alternately read or smoked or stared off at the sea. Norma crawled in the hot, bright sand around her parents, carving a trail of strange footprints. She lost herself in it: the curve and sharpness of the claws, the heft of the heel. She filled her plastic bucket with seawater, wetting the sand so it would stick. When her father finally woke, Norma showed him her work. She was serious and determined. The beast she had imagined as she worked was terrifying and vicious. “A strange animal came while you were sleeping, Daddy,” she said. “He had fangs and claws.”

  He took the cigarette that Norma’s mother offered him. He squinted at the footprints around him. “What did the animal do?”

  “He ate you whole.”

  Her father looked at her, feigning worry. “Am I dead then?”

  She told him he was, and he laughed.

  A gust of wind blew sand in her face, and she realized Victor had been talking. His teacher had come with him all the way to the city. They’d left 1797 a few days before, been together all the way to the central bus station in the capital. Then Manau walked Victor to the radio station and left him there. Norma nodded: it was inexplicable, cruel. To abandon a boy in the city, to leave him to fend for himself? And just as inexplicably, Victor seemed to hold no grudges. Why did Manau leave?

  “He was home,” Victor said, as if it were that simple. Of course, Manau left me, Victor said. Of course: he was heartbroken.

  Norma sat on the sand and stretched her legs in front of her. Victor ran off and returned a few minutes later, carrying an armload of driftwood and kelp and a tin can of mysterious origin, rust blooming at its edges. This forgiving boy, this Buddha—he was panting, out of breath, his face flush. “It’s pretty,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  She smiled. It wasn’t clear if he meant the ocean, the sand, or his collection of debris, but in any case, Norma felt it impossible to disagree with the boy about this or anything.

&nbs
p; THE DIRTY sand, the lightless horizon—these details couldn’t obscure the beauty of what lay before him: endless water. It moved, it was alive: its briny smell, its mottled surface of foam and breaking waves, an infinity of water and surf, rising, falling, breathing. The ocean simply could not disappoint.

  Everything had been tinged with green, the bodies and hands and faces of everyone in 1797. His mother was there, too—he was sure of it—but beyond this, his dream had left him nothing: a bitter taste in his mouth, perhaps, but no image to be interpreted, no narrative to untangle. Back home, there was an old woman who interpreted dreams. She claimed to have lived with the Indians deep in the forest, claimed to know their language: medicine, she told Victor, and tree are the very same word. Victor had gone with his mother once to visit her, had waited outside, digging in the earth with a sharp stick. His mother paid the old woman with a bundle of dried tobacco and a half dozen silver fish.

  “What was the dream about?” Victor had asked then.

  “Your father,” she’d said, but hadn’t told him anything more.

  Before they left this morning, Victor had asked permission to look through Norma’s bookshelves. He’d never seen so many books. He didn’t tell her he hoped to find a map of some sort and, on it, his village and its river. If he could trace its crooked and curving path to the sea, it might be possible. Which way did the river flow? These were things they had never learned. At home, tacked in the wood by the door, there was a map, yellowed with mold, its lines and colors fading. It was from before the war, with names, not numbers. His father’s map. But Victor couldn’t remember anything about it, except that when he asked his mother to point out their village, she had sighed.

  “We’re not on it, silly.”

  When he took the map down to show to his teacher, Manau looked at it and smiled. He pointed to the capital, traced the shoreline with his fingernail, then took his red pencil and scratched out the old name. To the left of the starred city, somewhere in the vast ocean, Manau printed the word ONE.

  “What’s it like?” Victor had asked.

  “Beautiful,” said Manau.

  For homework that long-ago evening, Victor corrected his map, updating the names of the various cities with a mimeographed map Manau gave him, replacing each name with a number. The order of it became clear as he worked: less than three digits along the coast, below five thousand in the jungle, above that in the mountains. Odd numbers were usually near a river; evens near a mountain. Numbers ending in ones were reserved for regional capitals. The higher the last digit, the smaller the place.

  At Norma’s, he thumbed through books and found nothing. Books on the history of radio, picture books of jungle plants, dictionaries for languages he’d never heard of. She sat in the kitchen while he blew dust off heavy leather tomes, turned the frayed, dissolving pages of books that hadn’t been opened in years. There were line drawings of birds and plants in notebooks of heavy parchment. Others had text so small that he could barely read them. Victor spent a moment with a graying book of faces, photos of young men and women in formal dress. Each page had a few faces crossed out, with a date beneath the picture. He looked for Norma, but when he couldn’t find her, he put the book away. Closing his eyes, Victor saw it again and again: his mother at the rock, now steady against the current, now floating away, now diving into the foamy waters. Which way did the river flow? When he’d come to the city, had he moved closer or farther from her? Had he followed her to the sea?

  All day, he thought of the ocean. He imagined the word ONE inscribed somewhere in the sea. When they rode to the beach and he saw the size of it, he didn’t despair. It filled him with energy. He felt certain his mother was there. Now he sat beside Norma to gather his breath, and thought of his dream, and before him was so much water. Her eyes were on the surf, on the waves that broke at the horizon. He dropped his armload of stuff on the sand. “What do you have there?” she asked.

  He showed her. “This,” he said, “is a sword.” He gripped the driftwood by its base and took a few swipes at the air in front of him. “See?”

  She took it from him and, with florid strokes, carved her name in the air. “Dangerous. And this?”

  The kelp reminded him of home, of the green moss that clung to the lower limbs of the trees. Was it possible to explain? How it formed curtains of green swaying in the wind, its lowest edges skimming the surface of the river? He tried. The color was just right: a deep, dark green, nearly black, soggy and waterlogged. “Can you picture it?” he asked.

  She said she could.

  They sat listening to the sea. It was neither cold nor warm. A bank of clouds had fissured, jagged bands of light breaking through. Victor asked, “Are you still dizzy?”

  Norma scooted closer to him. “No,” she said. “Are you?”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Norma smiled. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re a strong boy, aren’t you? You may be stuck with me for a while.”

  He jabbed his driftwood sword in the air. For a moment, it was just the ocean and its rhythms. “Is that all right?” Norma asked, and something in her voice made Victor blush. He didn’t answer right away.

  “My mother loved you,” he said. “Everyone in my village did.”

  Norma said nothing.

  The stooped woman had made her away across the beach, dragging her sack behind her. Victor stood suddenly and walked over to her. She smiled and kept working, scooping the sand into the metal screen, letting the smaller grains fall through. Whatever remained, she dropped into her sack. “Auntie,” Victor said, “can I help?”

  “Nice boy,” the woman said.

  He took a handful of sand, and let it fall through his fingers, then offered her the pebbles stuck to his palm. She smiled and dropped them into her sieve. They didn’t fall through. She thanked him and tossed them into her bag. She patted his head, and nodded at Norma. “Nice boy,” the woman repeated, “helping an old woman like me.”

  “Won’t you sit and rest with us a moment?” Norma asked.

  The woman smiled, exposing a mouthful of pinkish-red gums. “Oh, you young people have time to sit and rest! Not me!”

  “I’ll gather rocks for you,” Victor said.

  She sat and handed Victor her sieve. He knelt down and scooped a handful of sand into it. He ran his tongue along his teeth and stared at the sand as it slipped through the wire netting of the sieve. When he was done, he brought it to the woman for inspection.

  “Very good,” she said. From an inside pocket, the woman unrolled a piece of bread. She tore off the crust and offered it to Norma and Victor, but both refused. She ate only the doughy, white inside of the bread, chewing slowly, methodically. A tiny radio hung around her neck by a shoestring. After finishing her bread, she took the single battery from her radio, rubbed it between her palms, then replaced it. The radio crackled to life, spitting out scratchy sound, static, voices.

  Norma glanced at her watch. “One of the daytime shows, Auntie,” she said. “Love advice or police reports.”

  “On Sunday,” Victor announced, “I’ll be on the radio.”

  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 list
ened 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.

  EIGHT

  WHEN 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.