Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  Trini did not cultivate anger. It never appeared in the letters, and yet, for Rey, it was the essential message of the text. Trini wrote with a single fear: that he had accomplished nothing in his life, that he would never have the chance to make up for the wasted time. Nothing notable, exceptional, or even brave. He tended to list his disappointments, and this last letter was no different: the woman who wouldn’t speak to him again, the son who would never visit him. In this last letter, he mentioned the boy by name—something he’d never done before—and wondered if the boy’s mother had changed it. It came down to this: everywhere else, he was forgettable—everywhere except here, in this prison full of men he’d mistreated, men he’d arrested, men who never forgot a slight. In his last letter, Trini told stories. About getting drunk with a bicycle thief in Ciencin. About waking up in the arms of a wealthy heiress in La Julieta. He had almost beat a man to death in The Thousands, and claimed not to remember anything about the incident, except that they’d only just met, and that minutes before, they had been laughing together. None of it mattered, Trini wrote. It was a long letter, four pages of cramped handwriting, full of implied good-byes, confessions, and retractions. But Trini had only one thought, repeated on every page: to survive. To live long enough to walk out of the prison. If he were to pull this off, he wrote, it would redeem a life of mediocrity, a life without substance. It would be an accomplishment.

  Trini was serving his second year when he was killed in a prison brawl. When Rey’s grieving was over, he met his contact. “I’m ready,” he said, and took his first trip into the jungle not as a scientist but as a messenger.

  IN PREPARATION for his guests, Manau showered and shaved. It was the first time he had done so since his arrival in the capital. He’d spent the previous day and a half shuttling listlessly between his bed and the kitchen table, where his mother sat watch over him, making sure he ate. He did, three times that day with little enthusiasm, then returned to his room, where in his absence, Manau’s father had set up an office to organize his extensive stamp collection. The room was crowded with envelopes, laminating books, and tin boxes of small, obscure tools. A magnifying glass hung from a hook on the wall above his bed. There had been no regular mail ser vice in 1797, and his father’s obsession now struck Manau as absurd. He had received only two letters during his year in the jungle, neither from his father. The old man wouldn’t waste stamps on him. Manau’s life scarcely seemed believable to him. He hadn’t yet unpacked his bag.

  Manau put on a fresh shirt and a pair of pants that he’d left behind when he moved to 1797 a year before. The crease had kept, and he found this admirable. In the jungle, nothing lasted, no condition was permanent: the heat and the soggy air and the light degraded everything. The weather changed a dozen times in a single day. It was the earth in flux, as changeable as the ocean, as terrifying, as beautiful.

  Since arriving in the city, he had found that his hours did not need filling. Nearly two days had passed in and of themselves. It was only a matter of time until Victor found him, and Manau neither dreaded nor looked forward to it. Norma would do her job. She would come. And he would tell her what she wanted to know, the secrets Adela had whispered to him on those dark, hot evenings not so long ago. Manau sighed. Or rather, so very long ago. Time had never been his friend. He had awoken one day to learn he was thirty years old, his life half-finished. Now he was thirty-one, and he could sense that the details of this past year wouldn’t stay with him very long. Can you remember the forest, the feel of it and smell of it, the people you’d known there—can you really recall any of it without actually being there?

  His hair combed, his pants pressed, his body as clean as it had been in twelve months, Manau went to the front room. He was idly rearranging the family pictures when his mother came from the kitchen. Even with his back to her, he could tell she was waiting. She made no sound. Manau let her stand there for a minute. “Who are these people who are coming?” she asked finally.

  There were photos here that could not be real. That was not him, and these were not his parents. He squinted at himself. A thin film of dust covered the glass, and with his index finger, he brushed it clean. Still, he couldn’t recognize the face in the picture.

  “Elijah?”

  He turned to his mother and realized, with a shock, that she might cry. Manau frowned; these people and their obscure emotions! She had aged, even in these last two days. He gave her a smile—what question had she asked him? Oh, yes. “They’re people I knew from the jungle,” he said. “They won’t be here long.”

  “Well then, I’ll make tea,” she said, and this seemed to satisfy her. But still she wouldn’t stop looking at him. Manau held her gaze for as long as he could manage, then turned away.

  “Thank you, Mother,” he said.

  They came within the hour. Manau himself opened the door. “Good evening,” he said to the woman he supposed to be Norma. “Victor,” he said to the boy, and then another word appeared in his brain and had slipped out before he himself could have known what it meant. It was from the old language: we that includes you. The boy smiled. They embraced for a moment, long enough for Manau to feel the weight of what he had done when he left the boy at the station. He wanted to say more, but was afraid his voice might break. Instead, Manau invited them both in with the wave of an arm. “Please,” he managed, “please, sit.”

  Norma had not expected to see such an old-looking young man. This Manau was ragged and thin, surprisingly pale for someone who had lived in the tropics for a year. He was dressed neatly, but moved with the languor of a man who spent the entire day in his pajamas. She felt sorry for him. Manau’s mother, a woman a decade older than Norma, entered the room with a tray of tea, smiling with the exaggerated glow of a theater marquee. She cast worried glances at her son, she rubbed the boy’s head. Victor’s hair had grown just a bit in the previous two days, into a fine, black stubble. Norma smiled politely when she was introduced, grateful that Manau didn’t explain everything about who she was.

  This Manau: he began with apologies that made Norma uncomfortable. She focused on the room to avoid staring as the man began to break down. It was decorated in pastels, or in once-vivid colors that had been allowed to fade. She couldn’t tell. “I made a mistake,” Manau said. He was hoarse, color bloomed in his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said, and it seemed he didn’t know whom exactly to apologize to. It seemed, in fact, that he might choke, that he might expire before them. Norma let him talk. Her anger had dissipated completely, but she felt he owed this to them, to the boy. He babbled about promises made and broken, and looked pleadingly at Norma when he described Victor’s mother and her drowning. Before long, Victor had moved to his teacher’s couch, was comforting this grown man with words that Norma couldn’t make out. The old language perhaps, but she doubted that Manau could understand them, either.

  She let some time pass, a minute or more, but could hardly contain the impatience she felt. Her Rey was on this list—alive or dead, here was someone who might be able to tell her more. It was all she had ever wanted: more of Rey’s time, of his heart, of his body. If she had been honest, she would have admitted it years before: that she’d always wanted more from Rey than he was willing to give. The night of the fire in Tamoé, the night of the first Great Blackout, she and Rey had gone back into the bar, had huddled inside the tense room full of strangers while someone went in search of a car battery to power the radio. A few candles were lit and, as they waited, people began talking. “I live in Tamoé,” someone said. “I knew this was coming. These people have no scruples.” Another: “The police do nothing.” Another: “They torture the innocent, they disappeared my brother!” Someone said, “Fuck the IL!” and someone—not Rey—answered, “Fuck the president!”

  And so on it went, a civilized shouting match in the flickering yellow light. The room had grown unbearably smoky, and someone opened a window. Norma recalled it now in such fine detail: the way the cool night air filled the room, the yellin
g that continued, the waves of words, exhortations, of confessions and condemnations. It was impossible to make out who was speaking, only the barest facts that their accents exposed: this one, from the mountains; that one, from the city. This man and that woman, and the varying shades of their anger, spreading, that evening, in all directions. It was a knife edge they walked: they might gather in a giant, tearful embrace; or a dozen weapons might be pulled, and they could kill each other blindly in this suddenly dark, suddenly cold room.

  Then someone mentioned the Moon, and Norma felt Rey tense. Whoever the state kills deserved it, someone yelled. Trini had been dead for almost a year, murdered, Rey always said, by the state that had betrayed him. She pushed her body into Rey’s, and realized in that moment what she’d been afraid of: that he might say something. That he might say the wrong thing, because how can you read the mood of an anonymous crowd in a poorly lit room? She held him tightly, wrapped her arms around his chest. She ran her hands under his shirt and locked her fingers. There, in his shirt pocket, was Trini’s letter. She felt it. He’d read it to her one night, and they had cried together. Trini had been such a nice man. But be quiet now, Rey, she thought, stay quiet, my husband.

  “Hush,” she whispered.

  “Have you seen the list?” Norma asked Manau when he’d finished apologizing. She didn’t wait for an answer; after all, she knew that he had. She said slowly, “I need to know about the list.” Norma touched her own forehead; she was sweating. Had she begun to lose him that night?

  Manau nodded. He knew why they had come. Why she had come. He rose and excused himself. “I have something to show you.”

  Norma sat with her memories. The boy wandered the room, scrutinizing the photographs in their dusty frames. “It’s Manau,” he said, pointing, but Norma couldn’t do more than smile at him.

  Back in his room, Manau opened the bag he’d brought from 1797. He rummaged through it without turning on the light. He didn’t need to: there was only one thing he had for Norma, and he found it right away. It was a piece of parchment, rolled up, wrapped in bark, and tied with a string. Adela had given it to him for safekeeping. It smelled of the jungle, and he was seized by the urge to lie down, to sleep and dream until these visitors had gone away, but he didn’t. There were murmurs from the front room. They were waiting. Manau shut the bag and then the door behind him.

  “I’ve been to the Moon,” Rey said that night the war began, and Norma pinched him, but it came louder the next time: “I’ve been to the Moon!”

  She bit his ear, she put her hand over his mouth: was it too late?

  “Fuck you, IL dog!” came the first shout.

  “What’s this?” Norma said when Manau gave her the parchment.

  Then the boy had joined them. “What is it?” he asked. Norma untied the string, unrolled the bark, and spread the parchment on the table. Victor held the edges with his little fingers. Manau helped him. That night fourteen years before, the night the war came to the city, what saved Rey was darkness. Someone yelled, “You IL piece of shit!” and there was a stir, but what more could they or anybody do? It was the first Great Blackout, the war had arrived in the city, and they all were strangers to one another, people stranded on their way to other places, crowded now into this dreary bar. They were squatters. “Quiet!” someone else called, a man’s voice, heavy with authority. “The radio!” A crackle from the speaker, a blue spark from the battery. On that night in Tamoé, an angry crowd marched on one of the police stations, carrying torches and throwing stones with the zeal of true believers. The first shots were fired in warning. These were followed by shots fired in anger, and then hundreds of people were running, scattering through the dark night, doubling back to retrieve their wounded, their fallen. The next day, the first funerals were held: slow, dismal processions along Avenue F–10, to the hills where the district ended, where the houses ended. Caskets sized for children were carried to the tops of the low mountains and burned in accordance with the traditions of those who had settled the place. That night in Asylum Downs, many were too afraid to leave their homes, and those who owned radios and batteries listened for news with the volume humming almost inaudibly. Men gathered their guns in case the looters came, and they locked their frightened wives and sleepy children in the most hidden rooms, the ones farthest from the street. Shots were heard into the early morning, the last casualty of that long night coming just after dawn, when an old man, a beggar, was killed next to his shopping cart piled high with clothes, in an alleyway not even ten blocks from the bar where Norma and Rey stayed but did not sleep. All night, the radio spat news that was progressively worse, and sometime after midnight, the decision was made to padlock the door of the bar. The windows were closed as well, and again the room grew thick with smoke. Some people managed to sleep. In the middle of the night, someone called for water, and suddenly everyone was thirsty and hot. Outside, bandits scurried along the streets, but no one paid any attention, because the news held them all rapt: tanks, it was announced, had moved into the Plaza, were patrolling the main arteries of their city. Looting was widespread. A couple had been seen jumping hand in hand from the balcony of their burning apartment building. Inside the bar, a woman fainted and was revived. Two times in the night there was an urgent knocking at the door, followed by a thin, high-pitched plea for help, but the candles had burned out, and inside it was dark, and no one could look anyone in the eye. There was no obligation to do anything except stay quiet and wait. Norma held Rey, and they rested with their backs against the door, and eventually the knocking stopped, and the pleading ended, and the sounds of footsteps could be heard, now fading, as the supplicant moved elsewhere in search of refuge.

  “Hush, Rey,” Norma said.

  It was then that Manau’s mother stepped back into the room. She’d been watching through the cracked kitchen door, listening to her son and his visitors for the last half hour, unable to discern who was what to whom in this strange trio. Something was not quite right with the woman named Norma and her own son: what had happened to her Elijah? She carried a tray and a thermos with hot water. “Does anyone want more tea?” she said, with all the innocence she could muster. Her son, the woman, and the boy were looking over the parchment, no one saying a thing. “Oh,” Manau’s mother said, because silence had always, always troubled her, “what a fine drawing! What a handsome young man!”

  “It’s Rey,” Norma said.

  “It’s your father,” said Manau to the boy.

  Understanding neither comment, Manau’s mother returned quickly to the kitchen, where she stood by the door and listened for many minutes, but heard nothing.

  In the morning, when the door was unbarred and the windows opened, Norma kissed Rey good-bye and walked back to the radio station. She had washed her face with a splash of water from a communal basin. “How will you make it home?” she asked her husband. She felt an acute exhaustion, a soreness that ran the length of her legs. Rey smiled and said he would walk. The air still smelled of smoke, and the sky was stained sepia. Many buildings had burned the previous night, and some, at that hour, were still burning.

  PART THREE

  ELEVEN

  DURING 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 rele
ase. 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.