Lost City Radio

by Daniel Alarcón

  “Draw what?”

  “The city.”

  Victor smiled. “You can’t draw a city.” He started laughing and, to his surprise, everyone laughed with him.

  “Yeah, Nico. You can’t draw a city,” they echoed. They stretched the word out, let it linger: draaaaaaw.

  But what if he had? What if you could? This is not what he imagined: not these people, not this house. Not this puzzle, not the radio, full of light and metal. Not any of it: not Norma and her mystery, not the image of the father he didn’t remember, not the list of names, the commercial, or the woman selling bread and cursing them. Draw the city: dark and dense, a knot that can’t be untied. Tall buildings, indeed. Shiny cars—he hadn’t come across one yet. Victor closed his eyes and yawned. It was the night of the longest day he could remember. He knew enough to know that it was cold outside.

  In his life, Victor had told three lies that he considered important. The first, to his teacher, not Manau but a previous one. Victor cheated on a geography test—everyone had looked at the maps his father had left. He had let them; they were the only maps in town. With the passing of time, this transgression seemed less and less significant, but he could, if he tried, still recall the anxiety of that day. The second, to Nico: I don’t remember. Victor had said it with his jaw set, stern, so convincing he almost believed it himself. Swear, Nico said. Promise. And Victor did, without hesitation, though the memory of tadek never left him alone. The third, to his mother: do you remember your father? she’d asked him once, and there seemed, from the way her voice quavered, from the dull sadness in her eyes, to be only one correct answer. She pulled him to her when he nodded, and began to sob. She couldn’t have believed him.

  THE WAY Rey figured it, this was the problem: you did not quit the IL—how could you, if you had never joined it? If its existence was not acknowledged, not even between you and your contact? The situation was alluded to, as if it were something that had sprouted, wild and unbidden, from the earth. It was remarked upon, shaped indirectly by your actions, but this fact you could not admit to yourself or to anyone. You read the news and, like all your countrymen, shook your head in dismay at the downward spiral of events. You didn’t allow yourself to feel responsibility for any of it.

  Even at this late date, some nine years into the war, there were a few adventurous newspapers and radio stations that raised doubts as to whether any organized armed insurgency existed. It might have been shocking to hear if it hadn’t been so commonplace. Bogeymen, they said, created by the government with the transparent aim of manipulating a terrified population. Camps in the jungle—the very camps Rey had visited? Hogwash, aerial photographs doctored in a lab. The IL, they said, was shorthand for the many varieties of rage loose within the borders, an unrecognized complaint given voice, lumped together by the powers-that-be beneath one unseemly umbrella. It represented the inability of the governing and literate classes to comprehend the depth of the people’s unhappiness. Every angry young man with a rock in his hand—was he a subversive? The learned analysts scoffed at the notion, as if such a thing were unthinkable, but Rey listened and thought to himself: Yes. They are, every last one of them. Whether he knows it or not, that young man is doing our work. Our plan includes him, just as it included me even before the IL had a name.

  Over the years, Rey had developed an intuitive understanding of the plan. Coordinated attacks on the more vulnerable symbols of government power: remote police outposts, polling places in distant villages. A campaign of propaganda that included the infiltration of newspapers and radio stations; the maintenance of camps in the jungle for arms training, in preparation for an eventual assault on the capital. Meanwhile, in the city, kidnappings and ransoms, in order to finance the purchase of weapons and explosives facilitated by supporters abroad. Daring prison breaks to impress the average man. No one had ever shown him a manual, nor did Rey know who decided which targets would be destroyed. Communiqués were signed simply THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE and appeared on city streets suddenly, as if dropped from the skies. The violence was ratcheted up: encircle the city, instill terror. The campaign depended upon military escalation from the forces of order, drew strength and purpose from the occasional massacre of innocents, or the disappearance of a prominent and well-liked sympathizer.

  What did it all mean?

  Consider the improbability of it: that the multiple complaints of a people could somehow coalesce and find expression in an act—in any act—of violence. What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement? Yet Rey had been a party to this for nine years. The war had become, if it wasn’t from the very beginning, an indecipherable text. The country had slipped, fallen into a nightmare, now horrifying, now comic, and in the city, there was only a sense of dismay at the inexplicability of it. Had it begun with a voided election? Or the murder of a popular senator? Who could remember now? They had all been student protesters, had felt the startling power of a mob, shouting as one chorus of voices—but that was years ago, and times had changed. No one still believed all that, did they? The war had bred a general exhaustion. It was a city of sleepwalkers now, a place where another bomb hardly registered, where the Great Blackouts were now monthly occurrences, announced in vitriolic pamphlets slipped beneath windshield wipers like shopping circulars. The government retaliated every fortnight with its army of poorly trained boy-soldiers, one or two died in the crossfire, and partisans took to the streets, filling the long avenues and clashing with riot police, before racing home to listen to descriptions of themselves on the radio news the same evening. Marches became riots of predictable fury, buildings burned while firemen watched, and so on and so on.

  “Do you hate them?” his contact had asked early on, and when Rey said he didn’t, the man in the wrinkled suit shook his head. “You read too much poetry, young man. Be certain they hate you.” This was nine years before. Even then the soldiers fired into unarmed crowds. Even then anyone paying attention should have known what was coming. But they had stepped together into this chaos, the insurgency and the government, arm in arm, and for nine violent years, they’d danced.

  The war, Rey hoped, would be finished before his son was as tall as a rifle.

  He’d met these boys in the camps. Fourteen, fifteen years old. He met them on the same trip when he met his own son. They came from out-of-the-way places plunged in some craggy forested valley or balanced on a rocky promontory or stranded on a barren patch of desert. Places like 1797. They wore hard, expressionless faces, and were not concerned with what bullets could and could not accomplish. They did not expect to die. They all hoped to see the city one day. They told stories about it, spoke of marching down the wide avenues in formation, of being received as liberators. It was what the commanders had told them to expect. When? they asked. Soon. Next month. Next year. When military equilibrium is achieved. What does equilibrium mean? We’ll take the capital, the commanders said, and the boys repeated it to Rey, and he could tell they believed it. Meanwhile, they practiced making bombs in the jungle. None had even the cloudiest sense of what the war was about, and none had ever asked. They were happy to be out of their homes. Once a month, they marched into some town to kill a priest or burn a flag fluttering above a police outpost. They ambushed a military convoy on a bridge and shot at boys their own age, boys who came from towns much like theirs. They were paid in cash on good months, but in a pinch, they accepted promissory notes to be redeemed when victory was achieved. And so Rey, the man from the city, heard one question most of all from these eminently practical young men. “Sir,” they said. “We are winning, aren’t we?”

  At first, he didn’t understand. Then it was clear they had money on their minds. “Of course,” Rey reassured them. “Of course we’re winning.”

  In the city, it was impossible to speak of the war in those terms. Rey thought of it now as a race to stay alive. If he could survive until the weapons were laid down, if he could live to see that day, then
his mistakes could be atoned for. When he saw Norma each night, and saw that she loved him, he despaired. He was most afraid of being alone.

  There were quiet months when the war went on without him. Rey left on his single trip to the jungle and returned. He met his boy and dreamed of him and sulked guiltily around the apartment. He made love to his wife and bragged of his child to strange women. He was warned to put it all behind him, and this, finally, was what he intended to do when he met with his contact ten months after Yerevan had disappeared.

  It had become a year-end tradition in the press to speculate about peace talks. It was all over the radio and the newspapers. Of course, it was impossible: the IL had no visible leaders, so who would represent them? No one expected it to happen, but they spoke of it because it made them feel better. It was no different when Rey and his contact met at a bus stop in The Settlement that December, near the hills that rose to the southeast of the capital. Rey was never afraid to meet his contact: the city was infinite, designed for hiding in plain sight. They walked to a dingy little bar that was really a poor family’s living room. Christmas lights were strung along the ceiling, intermittently casting splotches of faint red and green light. They sat at a wobbly wooden table and drank instant coffee. The owner stood behind his counter, listening to the radio and thumbing through an old newspaper. Beyond the bar, from the dimly lit room that comprised the rest of the house, Rey could hear a baby crying. He was anxious to say it: I’m out, I’m done, it’s finished, let the war go on without me. It was what he needed to say, but it stuck in his throat. The air was smoky, and then Rey’s contact announced he was going underground. It came as a shock. “And you should too,” he said. “From now until the end.”

  “The end?”

  Rey’s contact smiled wanly. “All good things must come to a close eventually.”

  THIRTEEN

  THE GOVERNMENT had not survived nearly a decade of rebellion without learning a few things about defending itself. Mainly, it had learned how and when and on whom to inflict great pain. Everyone talked eventually. Suspects were brought to the Moon every night and submitted to savage and primitive police work: if they were too strong, or if they had nothing to tell (it was still difficult to know the difference), they were flown by helicopter to the sea and tossed, flailing, into the murky waters below. Others were placed in the same tombs Rey had survived. Some of these suspects were released, and many others were buried in the dusty hills. By current standards, Rey’s stay had been luxurious.

  In addition, and perhaps more important, eyes and ears had been recruited throughout the country—no easy task in a nation as large and ungovernable as this one. In the city, an army of street persons was paid to sift through the domestic trash of various suspicious men and women. This work had yielded a surprising number of arrests. Neighbors were encouraged to turn each other in, with cash rewards distributed discreetly to those who supplied useful information. Outside the city, progress was being made as well. In nearly every regional capital, and even in some remote villages, people were in place; people who, for a relatively small sum, could keep an eye on the strangers who passed through. They traded in gossip and insinuation, but were occasionally quite useful.

  In 1797, this man was Zahir. He was typical of these ersatz agents: not naturally suspicious, or particularly inclined to support the government, and as far as the war was concerned, relatively indifferent to its outcome. Like many, he probably believed it would never end, with or without his minor involvement. He was, however, a conscientious father and husband, and therefore happy to accept the small but consistent monies offered, for the good of his family. His simple mandate was to keep an eye on things, and this was something he would have done anyway: as one of only a handful of fighting-age men still left in 1797, Zahir had come to consider himself the man in charge. Unlike the others who had stayed, he was not a drunkard, or dim-witted, and was generally liked by the towns-people. He was a married man with a daughter and a son and a small, unproductive plot of land. Zahir considered his new position—secret though it was—a ratification of his own opinion of himself within the village. Most people in 1797 probably didn’t know Zahir could read.

  By the time Rey’s son was born, Zahir was an expert of sorts on the strange men who passed through the village and into the forest. They stopped to rest for a day or two, usually worn out, and by the way they carried themselves, Zahir could tell they were not from the nation’s tropical regions. He took spare notes about their demeanor, wrote down bits of overheard conversation, speculated about the origins of their accents. Their faces betrayed an exhaustion buried deep within, and this was their common trait.

  There were few books in 1797 when Zahir was a boy. Once, a traveler passing through left a crime novel with the village as a gift. It caused a sensation. There was an elder who knew how to read, and he took it upon himself to share the novel with the boys. He read it aloud over the course of a month, and Zahir fell in love: there were detectives who wore hats and men who smoked in every scene; there were busty women drinking in out-of-the-way dives, and the odd appearance of a gun waiting to fire. The city it described was full of hoodlums and shiny cars and blind alleys where brave men fought with knives until only one was left standing. Nothing could have been more exciting. Zahir had loved its dark tension, as had all the boys his age, and so the reading of this book became a yearly event until the elder who organized it passed away. The novel itself was lost, or perhaps the village buried the book with him; Zahir couldn’t remember. By then, his schooling had already ended.

  When he became an informer, Zahir thought of this book for the first time in many years, and was struck, as if by a distant love. His reports, he decided, would be like that novel, but to his dismay, they never came out quite right. The village was full of a darkness, a furtive movement that Zahir found impossible to explain. And the strangers: it was not enough to guess where they came from, where they were going. He wanted to capture the faces of these men, but no matter what words he used, they never seemed quite suspicious enough.

  Rey, by virtue of his repeated visits, was the first man Zahir was able to describe reasonably well. He thought little of it, did not at the time consider it to be a betrayal of any sort. It was practice: this stringing together of words, these syllables lining up, and with them, an image taking shape. He wrote and rewrote it, labored until it was perfect, and though he was proud of his writing, Zahir didn’t think it was worth showing anyone, at least not yet. Who was this man anyway? Like everyone else in the village, Zahir saw the coquettish way that Adela spoke with the stranger, and neither approved, nor disapproved. It simply was. The man was nice enough, always polite, though not talkative by any stretch. He came three times a year, sometimes more. He spent his time with Adela, and then left for the forest. They said he was a scientist. Of course, no one in 1797 knew him as Rey.

  The next month, when Zahir traveled to the provincial capital to turn in his report, he brought with him, in a separate pocket, his description of Rey—three carefully edited pages in which Zahir noted the color of his skin, the shape of his smile, the timbre of his voice, and in which he had invented a story for the stranger to inhabit: the man was IL, a leader, a guerrilla. He had invented tire-burning, he murdered police officers for sport. Zahir transcribed a confession that had never taken place, and these sections of dialogue were, he was certain, the best writing he had ever done. Of course, he wouldn’t show it to the government man, but Zahir liked knowing that he could. These meetings always made him nervous.

  Zahir arrived in midafternoon, after traveling all day. It had rained throughout the night. The office was off a muddy side street, not far from the center of town, but then nothing was far from the center of town.

  “Anything?” the government man asked after they had completed the requisite pleasantries and complaints about the heat. He had never given his name, but the man was nice enough. He was from the city. He leaned back in his chair. His dress shirt was undone
and soaked through with sweat.

  “It’s all there, boss,” Zahir said.

  The man looked through it—there were only two pages—and frowned.

  “Is it all right?”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, and please don’t take offense. How much schooling do you have?”

  “Sir?”

  “School. How much did you do?”

  Zahir reddened. No one had ever asked him such a thing. With the priest dead and the mayor gone, he might have been the most educated man in the village. “Four years, sir,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “If you count what the priest taught me, five.”

  The government man nodded. He was a light-skinned man with a bad complexion, but when he smiled, there was something very gentle about him. He smiled now, and motioned for Zahir to sit. “I like you, you know that. You work hard. I’m embarrassing you. Don’t be that way. Listen…Well now…Out with it: I have a gift.”

  He opened his desk and retrieved a small book. “I had this sent for you, from the city.”

  It was red and small enough to fit in Zahir’s pocket. He flipped through it quickly and saw that the print was very small, smaller even than the Bible the priest had shown him once. Zahir had never seen a book like this one before. “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s a dictionary. You’re very sharp for a villager,” the government man said, “and I thought you might enjoy it. It has words, along with what they mean.” He handed Zahir an envelope, then placed his palms flat on the desk and stood up. “I recommend you go to the market now. Prices only go one way around here: up.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Zahir said. He stood and bowed. His heart was pounding in his chest. Had he been made fun of? There was prickly heat on his skin, and he was sweating. With a flourish, Zahir put the dictionary in his breast pocket and smiled. “I have something for you as well.”