Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  What made the episode so curious was the revelation, a few weeks after Yerevan’s sudden disappearance, that there was, in fact, some truth to the rumors. Some of the callers, it was said, had been speaking in code. Norma, after consulting with Rey, went to discuss the situation with Elmer, and he admitted that the station director was afraid. It was, Elmer said, worse than they had previously suspected. The station had indeed been infiltrated. A search had been ordered for tapes of Yerevan’s recent shows.

  “He was IL, Norma, and no one knew,” Elmer said. “What could we do?”

  Norma had spent many hours with the accused, had monitored the calls, chatted good-naturedly with people she assumed to be music lovers, but who, in actuality, might have been terrorists. She’d even been on the air a half dozen times, introducing songs, discussing music with Yerevan. Had she implicated herself?

  “Should I be afraid?” she asked.

  Elmer nodded. He was thoughtful and capable, and it was universally assumed he would one day be director himself. “You can stay at the station for a while. We’ll make room for you and you’ll be safer here.”

  That night, her exile began. It would be a month before she would go home again. The next day, the radio abruptly canceled any further protests, and even went so far as to ask the army to disperse those Yerevan supporters who remained. The forces of order complied enthusiastically with the request, and so dozens of students and music lovers and night-shift workers and even a few unfortunate passersby were beaten and then arrested in the lot adjacent to the radio. For an hour or so, there was a pitched battle, with stone-throwing and tear gas spreading in great, sickly clouds across the avenue. Many of the employees of the radio gathered in the conference room to watch the events from the broad windows, and Norma was among them. She had slept there that night, quite uncomfortably, in the same conference room where she would meet Victor eleven years later. Her neck hurt badly. She watched the battle, as they all did, without comment, foreheads pressed against the window, looking down. She was grateful for the tear gas: through its fog, there were intimations of great violence, but she was spared the sight of it. The battle had erupted in the middle of the day, but the station’s director decided to omit any mention of it from the news. He felt, quite justly, that his job had become far too dangerous. Within the year, he would authorize a report obliquely critical of the interior minister and pay for this mistake with his life. Elmer would happily replace him.

  This was the sort of country it had become.

  In 1797, it should be noted, Yerevan was not missed at all. Classical music was thought of as foreign and pretentious. The only fan of his show was the village priest, who had, by this point, been dead four years.

  WHEN HIS only son was born, Rey was in the city, only vaguely aware that his mistress was due. These were the days when Norma was a prisoner of the radio station. They spoke on the phone four times a day, and each afternoon, he made a trip to the radio to see her. His life in the city, his life as a husband and scientist, was all-consuming; whatever had or might soon happen in the far-off jungle, Rey couldn’t fathom. In the here and now, he was worried about Norma. She wasn’t handling the stress well. She was losing weight and, when he saw her, she worried aloud that her hair was falling out. “Stay with me,” she asked him one afternoon, a week into her exile. Her eyes were red and puffy. “Stay with me tonight.”

  They were drinking instant coffee in the conference room: the sun was setting, the mountains and the city below shone orange. Norma had a beleaguered look to her; her day was just beginning. She slept in the mornings now: a few days into her internment, the station director, at Elmer’s suggestion, decided to put her on the air overnight. Yerevan’s slot had to be filled. “It’s not like you’re sleeping well,” Elmer had said, and it was decided. These were the dead hours of radio, but, to everyone’s surprise, Norma had been inundated with calls, requests, advice, gossip. She played mostly romantic songs and, in between, let the people talk freely. The night before, as Rey prepared for bed in the empty apartment, he had listened to his wife’s voice and then dreamed of her. It was beautiful, narcotic, lulling, and he wasn’t the only one who thought so.

  “It’s lonely here,” Norma said. “The entire place is empty. Just me and the watchman.”

  “And the callers.”

  She sighed. “And the callers.”

  He took her hands in his. “They love you.”

  “Can you stay?”

  Her on-air shift ran from eleven to four in the morning, so Rey had time to go home and change before her show began. He made dinner for both of them, prepared an overnight bag, locked up the apartment, and was back at the radio at ten-thirty. The station was already desolate. They drank more coffee, strong and sugarless, and Rey could tell she was happy to have him around. A few minutes before eleven, they went to the control room, chatted for a few minutes with the evening host. He was short and thin, an awkward, prematurely white-haired man who had always had a crush on Norma. When he had packed his things and left, and they were alone, Norma threw her arms around Rey’s neck. An old ballad played, the record slightly warbled, the guitars falling in and out of tune. She kissed him. By the time the record ended, they were both unclothed and laughing. Norma strode across the studio, picked up the needle, and let the song play two more times before she began her show.

  IT WAS a gift to be able to separate so thoroughly the two halves of his life. When he was home in the city, he rarely thought of the jungle, except in an academic sense: the mysteries of plant life, the demands of the climate, human adaptation to its exigencies. Sometimes an image from the cool heart of the forest: the mossy black trunk of an ancient tree, the white stones along the river’s edge, water-carved into the most fantastical shapes—and this was all. Not the people he knew there, or the woman who had beguiled him. His trips to the rain forest included a similar kind of disassociation: an hour or two outside the city, when the raw and disordered slums had disappeared and the road wove up into the still-uninhabited hills, Rey felt himself cleansed of worldly responsibilities, going backwards in time, a man returning to a more innocent and purer state. Outside the city, he never went by Rey. So complete was his transformation that the sound of his own name, his city name, had no effect on him beyond the limits of the capital.

  He made his first trip to the jungle soon after returning to the university. It was a purely scientific expedition, before Trini’s murder changed his mind, a trip made under the guidance of a potbellied old professor who spoke three Indian dialects and walked the halls of the university chewing medicinal roots. The students were charged with writing technical descriptions of plants they found—about the sticky texture of the leaves or their acid smell—and they pressed samples into the pages of heavy books that the professor had brought for this very purpose. The jungle had seemed to Rey, from books, from conversations, from photographs, to be the exact opposite of the city where he had lived since he was fourteen. Uncharted and unknowable, a universe where the rules were still being ironed out and fought over, it was the frontier, and its draw was powerful. This was the first year of the war. Later, when Elijah Manau traveled the same paths, the jungle was already part of the nation—there were schools and roads maintained, at least in theory, by the state—but when Rey went for the first time, travel involved riding atop a truck or bartering with a villager for a canoe ride along the muddy rivers. They encountered natives, who spoke only their own impossible language. They washed in sweet-water rivers, and slept in hammocks, and instead of sleeping, Rey would stay up, eyes closed, listening to the rising and ebbing sounds of the forest, certain it was the most beautiful place he had ever heard.

  The land belonged to whoever claimed it, and in those days especially, the dense forest was an ideal place to disappear, to hide from the eyes of the law. As the war progressed, the government would learn to keep an eye on those who came and went from the nation’s jungle regions. There were men who moved weapons and men who transported
drugs. There were money men who bribed police officers or army captains or village chiefs. There were scouts who cased bridges for bombing, and men who pretended to be loggers or traders or even wandering musicians. And there were men like Rey, who left the city as credentialed students or scholars and who, somewhere along the way, became other people, with other names. These were men who never carried guns, men charged with something much more valuable: information.

  He never saw Marden again. But by the time of the Yerevan episode, Rey and the man in the wrinkled suit had been seeing each other, off and on, for almost nine years, like furtive lovers: nine years of meetings at bus stops, of purposefully vague conversations and random duties, enough for Rey to come to know his contact, insofar as one could know a man like that. He came to recognize the man’s muted expressions of worry, the way his weight fluctuated with the intensity of the conflict. There were times when Rey’s contact looked positively ill, with unshaven, sunken cheeks, slack expressions, and unruly hair. As an agent, he was frighteningly transparent: days later, something, somewhere in the city, exploded, and by the next meeting, Rey’s contact had regained some air of calm. Then it began again. In nine years, they had even met socially, at various dinner parties where they had been introduced as strangers and played the part convincingly, exchanging a few polite words before studiously ignoring each other for the rest of the evening. Even Norma had shaken his hand once or twice; had commented, after a party, as she undressed in the blue darkness of their apartment, on the coldness of Rey’s contact, his unfriendly, unsmiling greeting. Rey felt compelled to defend him, but of course, he did not: he pretended not to recall—what was his name again? They were even colleagues of a sort: in different fields, at different universities. After the first Great Blackout, which had taken Rey and the entire city by surprise, their meetings were monthly, and the tasks so mundane it was possible for Rey to believe the war had nothing whatsoever to do with him. He left envelopes in trash cans, wore a bright red shirt and sat in a windowed café at an appointed time, or made calls to pay phones, never saying much more than an address to whoever picked up on the other end. His days as a well-known student leader were long past. He was invisible now. After returning from the Moon, he had never again made a speech, or spoken of politics in public, save for his aborted confession in the darkened bar the night of the first Great Blackout. Besides the man in the wrinkled suit, Rey knew nobody in the city who was involved. He had been as surprised as anyone to discover that Yerevan was a sympathizer. For years, Rey had thought of the war and his own involvement in it as an intimate act. Of course, he knew there were other people participating, but he never thought of them, never wondered who they were, felt no kinship with these mysterious and invisible allies. He didn’t read the paper much, except for sports, and gleaned what he knew of the war’s progress from the increasing militarization of the city streets. And he went home each night to Norma, who had decided to believe her husband kept no secrets.

  In the jungle, where his mistress was preparing to give birth, it was the rainy season: the skies alternating between a deep blue and a dark, purplish black. The river had swelled, as it did every year, flooding the fields at the edge of the village. Rey never liked the rainy season: he found the consistent downpour overwhelming, dreary, in sharp contrast to the rest of the year, when the rain came in spurts, brief and violent showers that passed in the course of half an hour, followed by bright and garish sunlight. Travel, never easy, was nearly impossible during the rainy months. The roads were muddy, and the jungle violently overgrown. He had once spent ten days trying to travel a dozen kilometers between a town and a camp hidden in the forest. The jungle was crawling with secretive men. In the rainy months, it was all too gloomy.

  In a city hospital, the boy would have been weighed and washed by white-clad nurses, held and inspected by doctors, showed off by a proud father passing out cigars. 1797 was not the city. It was a place with its own rituals, though, at this late date, with the war having bled the town of its men for more than half a decade, one might say the celebration accompanying Victor’s birth was half-hearted at best. That year, another eight young men had left to fight. Five would not return—another five names on the list Victor would take to the city eleven years later. The town was in no mood for celebrations. In the old days, a feast would have been prepared and a tree felled for a bonfire, but everything had changed, even the blessings: the standard incantation now asked specifically that the child be protected from bullets. It was common among young mothers to observe that their boys were only on loan to them from the armies.

  One tradition had remained, in spite of the war, and it was the only one Adela insisted upon when Rey returned to 1797 six months later. He was sent into the jungle for a night, to ponder his child’s future with the aid of a psychoactive root. In its hallucinatory sway, Rey was assured, all kinds of truths would be revealed. He went unwillingly, but felt he owed it to the mother of his child, whom he had mistreated in every other way. He hadn’t been present at Victor’s birth; but then, no one expected this of him. He hadn’t helped choose the boy’s name, hadn’t been there to hold Adela’s hand or take the baby to his chest and feel the infant’s warmth. Rey had promised his father a grandson, but when it finally happened, he was unaware that his promise had been fulfilled. Rey’s father would never know. When Victor was born, Rey was at the radio station in the distant, gray city, half-clothed and asleep in an armchair in the sound booth.

  That night, while Victor slept against his mother’s breast, Norma hardly answered the phones. She was content to let the songs do her talking for her, content to watch her husband sleep in the chair across from her. His presence calmed her. Around three in the morning, though, her strength was fading, she’d had her fill of coffee, and she decided to take a few calls, just to help her stay awake. What did she expect? One of the usual suspects: someone lonely or grieving, a man or a woman who found themselves unhappily and unwillingly alone. On a night like this, the radio felt like a public ser vice. She had acquired more than a few admirers in her brief run as Yerevan’s replacement, and she was not immune to pride. What harm could come from flirting now and again with a caller? They told her she was beautiful, or that she sounded beautiful, and was there really a difference? It was the middle of the night, the sound booth still smelled of sex, and she was happy. Norma patched through a few calls, listened with some interest as a woman described the confectionery her grandfather had once owned downtown. “It’s all gone,” the woman said with a sigh. She spoke with unhinged nostalgia, enough for Norma to suspect she’d been drinking. She was afraid to go down there now, the woman told Norma, afraid of what, if anything, had replaced her grandfather’s candy store. What if it was boarded up? What if there were squatters living there—a family of those mountain people?

  Norma did not judge, she didn’t stop her. “Be nice,” was all she said. She played a song, then took another call, and was not surprised when a man’s voice announced that he’d been trying to get through all night.

  “Well, now you’ve found me,” Norma said. “You’re live on the air. What can I do for you?” She played a jazz record in the background: something with strings and a bluesy trombone.

  “You can’t do anything for me,” the man on the other end said. “Shouldn’t Yerevan’s show be on the air now?”

  They had all been advised not to say his name on the air. She began to say that Yerevan was away on vacation—this was the line the station was using in emergencies—but something made her stop: the abrupt tone of the caller, perhaps, something in the sound of his voice. She shouldn’t have asked, but she did: “Who’s this?”

  “Never mind who this is. The question is, who was Yerevan? An IL dog. That’s why you can find his body in a ditch by the Central Highway. This is what happens to terrorists.”

  Before Norma could respond, the line was dead. She sat there for a moment, scarcely breathing. The jazz record stopped, and it was ten seconds before she gathered
the presence of mind to play another. She grabbed one at random and put it on with trembling hands. It began too fast: she’d set the wrong speed. A horn squealed, a voice crept unpleasantly into the higher register. Meanwhile, the phone lines were lit up, every last one of them. She stared helplessly at the blinking red lights. Rey didn’t stir until she had called his name for the third time.

  “MUSIC ONLY,” Elmer said when Norma called him at home. “Music only until I get there. No phone calls, not on the air or off.”

  So she sat with Rey, and they played cheerful pop songs and said nothing. Under different circumstances, he might have sung for her, but instead, they put on one side of a Hollywood record, a musical, and went to the conference room. It was a clear night, just past three in the morning, that hour when the sleeping city seemed like the inside of a dimly glowing machine. They could see, from the radio’s high, broad windows, the coruscating grid of lights below: the Metropole and its blinking neon sign, the strings of orange streetlamps along the avenues, each pointing toward the center of town. From this vantage point, it did not seem an unpleasant place to live—no fire in the hills, no blackout. The shanties, in this light, might not be shanties at all. Norma and Rey could squint and imagine it to be an orderly city, like any of hundreds that exist in the world. They stood together, holding hands, and there was very little that could be said. The Central Highway ran over the mountains in the east—you couldn’t see it from here. Yerevan was somewhere along that road, in a place where he would surely be found.

  Elmer arrived within the hour, looking harried and sleepy. “What are you doing here?” he said to Rey, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “It doesn’t matter,” he said and turned to Norma. “Tell me everything.”