by Reif Larsen
“Are you okay?” Kermin said through the door, their child in his arms.
“I can’t,” she said from the other side.
He tried the door.
“Charlene?” he called.
When there was no answer, Kermin clumsily swaddled Radar like a burrito and walked the ten blocks to the A&P, where he bought a case of formula tins. He fed their child in the Shaker rocking chair in the kitchen, the metronome of his son’s suckling beating against the static hush of his transistor radio on the countertop. Now and again a Halifax ham could be heard reading verses from Leaves of Grass to no one in particular.
At some point, Charlene emerged from the bathroom and stood at the threshold of the kitchen. Father and son had fallen asleep in the chair. She observed them as one observes a painting in a museum, as if she might set off an alarm by venturing too close.
One day, she woke up and found the rotten meat smell had parted and given way to the particulars of the world: she could now smell things individually, though these were warped and amplified a hundredfold. Citrus and all of its iterations triggered a special torment; she was tortured by their downstairs neighbors’ heavy hands with the lemon vinaigrette at their weekly family reunions. On one of her first forays into the outside world, she almost passed out on the sidewalk from a single blast of truck fumes. People, too, despite their concoctions of deodorants and perfumes, emitted strong psychological odors, such that she could instantly read a person’s mood with a single sniff. She quickly learned how to brave the world with two wads of cotton surreptitiously stuffed up her nostrils.
Yet what was more maddening than this evolving cast of odors was what had remained the same: Radar’s smell was the one smell that had not changed since those early days of charred cereal. He smelled exactly as he had the moment he was born. Or: her perception of his smell had not changed since the moment he was born. She was not so naive as to think her perceptions provided an objective dictum on the truth.
As the days and weeks went by, she slowly learned to tolerate her intense olfactive repulsion for him. Such repulsion was not acceptable, she knew—this was her child, after all, her own flesh and blood—and so she willed herself to love the repulsion itself. The dizzier she became, the tighter she held him. If this was her curse, then so be it. And yet she also became convinced that if only she could determine what had gone wrong with Radar, then she would also discover the secret to loving him as a mother should. All she needed was a medical diagnosis that could be spoken out loud and everything would be fixed.
They took Radar to each of the pediatric dermatologists that Dr. Sherman had recommended. Charlene expected an answer to come quickly. Surely, science would give them a name for what had happened, some kind of explanation or clinical history. The doctors, however, did not hold up their end of the bargain. They gave the Radmanovics more slips with more references, each of which Charlene diligently pursued. They crisscrossed New York City, visiting a growing list of increasingly suspect specialists who would pluck biopsies from Radar’s squirming thighs or rub on seven-syllabled creams that did nothing but irritate his skin. Nothing worked, nor did these specialists seem to have a clue about what, if anything, was wrong. Each doctor, after some fancy medical footwork, eventually admitted he was at a complete loss for an explanation.
Kermin seemed unfazed—content, even—with the utter lack of answers, but Charlene underwent a slow metamorphosis while she waited in all of those waiting rooms. The process began to consume the purpose. She started to collect medical textbooks; she began subscribing to half a dozen obscure dermatology newsletters and journals; she amassed a detailed, cross-referenced Rolodex of doctors’ names, which she slowly crossed off one by one. With each successive visit, Charlene became more and more determined to find the root cause of her son’s extraordinary condition, though her reasons for doing so were both circular and tautological. Something was wrong with him because no one could figure out what was wrong with him. In an African American family, Radar would be a dark, slight-featured baby with unusually straight hair—nothing more, nothing less. The problem (if one could even call it a problem) arose only when you placed him alongside his biological parents.
When Charlene once sheepishly confessed her own smell condition to Dr. Zeikman, a specialist in Queens who was attempting to treat Radar, he told her it was most likely psychosomatic, that she was simply internalizing the situation with her son. This rebuke so shook her that she could not sleep for three nights straight. Could it actually be that her condition was all in her mind? But surely he could tell there was something wrong with her son? This, she had not made up. This—everyone could see. Right?
She called Dr. Zeikman’s office several days later, under the pretense of complaining about the peroxide formula he had prescribed for Radar. In truth, she wanted to press him on the extent to which he thought her delusional. If it was not her son but she who must be treated, then . . . then what on earth should she do?
The phone in the doctor’s office rang and rang until the answering machine clicked on. There was a long pause, and then, in a quavering voice, the secretary announced that Dr. Arnold Zeikman had passed away the night before from a heart attack. All future appointments were canceled.
Charlene stood with the phone in her hand, shocked. She stared at Radar dozing in his bouncy seat. She felt sad for a minute, sad for the briefness of life, sad for Dr. Zeikman’s family. But then this feeling was quickly replaced—she was ashamed to admit—by disapproval. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but she found herself wondering how a doctor of any skill had managed to die of a heart attack. Shouldn’t his alleged expertise on the body’s mechanics shield him from his own mechanics ever breaking down?
She put down the phone and went over to her sleeping son. She let the tips of her fingers brush across his forehead. His skin was warm to the touch. He stirred; his lips trembled.
“Radar, my Radar,” she whispered. “What have I done to you?”
3
Well, we just think it’s all so crazy,” said Louise. “Don’t we?”
“Don’t we?” she repeated.
“We do,” said Bertrand. “We don’t think it’s right.”
They were congregated in the Radmanovics’ cramped kitchen in Elizabeth. Charlene’s parents, Louise and Bertrand, now retired, had just returned from an anniversary trip to Cornwall, and they were sipping tea and eating wine gums as Radar sat at their feet, sucking on a pair of headphones. A stack of dermatology textbooks loomed precariously close to the toaster oven.
“I mean, who’s he to tell us there’s something wrong with him?” said Louise.
“That’s not the point, Mom. We just need to find out what happened.”
“Why?”
“If it was your child, you’d want the same thing.”
“So what’s this doctor going to tell you?”
“I don’t know, Mom. That’s why he’s the doctor.”
On a whim, Charlene had recently contacted Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald. Based at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Fitzgerald was a veritable rock star in the field. He was the author of the industry standard textbook Dermatology in General Medicine and recently the creator of the six-point Fitzgerald Skin Type Classification Scale. His handwritten reply to her query, in which he had expressed great interest in Radar’s condition, sat on the kitchen table. The letter, which Charlene had brought to her nose on more than one occasion, carried the faint scent of what must have been the doctor’s aftershave—a slightly unpleasant odor, like molding carrots, but the kind of unpleasant one could come to love.
“Was this his idea?” asked Louise, nodding at Kermin.
“No, Mom, it was our idea. The man’s from Harvard. He’s not some quack.”
“He’s a quack!” said Bertrand, producing various duck noises and pinching Radar’s cheek. Radar giggled at the attention.
Her parents’ skeptic
ism was not without its effect. The steady drumbeat of professional bafflement surrounding Radar’s condition had left Charlene battered by uncertainty. Maybe her mother was right: she did not need another flummoxed doctor, however prestigious, to add to the veritable choir of diagnostic confusion. Charlene silently resolved to file his letter away in Radar’s already bulging medical folder and think no more of it.
In the corner of the kitchen, Kermin was only half listening as he worked the dials of his shortwave, trying to catch a signal from Côte d’Ivoire. This was nothing personal. Try as he might, he could only ever half listen to Charlene’s parents. They generally meant well, but he found they often fell back into that particularly American stance of self-satisfaction masked as liberal open-mindedness, a brand of moral disembodiment to which he had never quite grown accustomed, despite having lived in the country for more than thirty years.
He quietly swore into the cauldron of static coming from the radio’s speaker. The eleven-year sunspot cycle was rapidly declining to a minimum, at which point a year-and-a-half period of near-impossible long-distance communication would descend upon all amateur radio operators. Kermin had cut out a timeline of the last 150 years of this solar cycle from a recent issue of QST and thumbtacked it to the wall of his workshop. In blue pen he had cleverly traced how many of the world’s disasters—Archduke Ferdinand’s and President Kennedy’s assassinations, the 1931 China floods—lined up all too well with each electromagnetic trough.
The Volmers, as they always did, mistook his attentiveness to his radio for calculated resentment. They had slowly constructed a portrait of their son-in-law—through the sad summation of pillow talk and unarticulated accusation—as the instigator and primary engine behind “fixing” their grandchild. In truth, they did not like Kermin at all, though they would never say as much, out of respect for their daughter’s life choices. His awkwardness in conversation and his habit of dismantling electronics during their infrequent visits allowed them to easily cast him as their Balkan scapegoat. He would return from his radio repair closet and utter whatever was on his mind, even if this was not polite (“You look bad. Are you tired?”). He still dropped his articles and slipped up on his tenses in English, substituting future perfect for present perfect—verbal transgressions that Louise, the former grammar instructor, found obtuse and oddly aggressive. “After all these years in this country, he should at least know how to talk about the future,” she had said aloud on more than one occasion. More than anything, they blamed him for sequestering their daughter in the small, nearly impenetrable Serbian Orthodox community in Elizabeth, which was the main reason, they assumed, that she rarely called them anymore.
Several years ago, Charlene had met them at the Newark Museum to see the much-talked-about exhibit of J. M. W. Turner’s seascapes. They walked through the show in silence, squinting at chiaroscuro shipwrecks, and afterwards, in the poorly lit museum café with the wobbly tables, she had announced that she was going to marry Kermin, a man Bertrand and Louise had met only three times, to increasingly poor reviews. They had first protested—Bertrand with silence, Louise with cylindrical sentences that went nowhere—and then, with a thirty-year-old look of surrender passed between them, they collectively sighed and wilted into faux-progressive resignation.
“We’re happy if you’re happy,” Louise said finally.
The wedding was an incense-heavy Orthodox affair that her parents silently endured. Soon after, Charlene came down to Trenton to tell them the news: she was pregnant. It was clear to all that the deed had been done well before the nuptials. A silence descended across the room.
“I didn’t mean for it . . . I didn’t want it like this,” said Charlene quietly.
This, too, was digested.
Charlene waited for the wash of disapproval she knew was to come, the chronic sense of condemnation she had come to both begrudge and savor. But then Bertrand rose from the love seat.
“A grandson!” he said.
“We don’t know what it is—” Charlene began to say, but he did not seem to hear her. He hiked up his pants and did a little jig on the rug. It was the first time she had ever seen her father dance. He had always been definitively anti-dance, cultivating a proud stoicism in the face of all organized revelry. Now, to see him move like this—giddy, tout seul, all hips and wobble—felt so intimate that Charlene almost had to look away. And then Louise got up from the couch and they all came in close and held hands. An impromptu communion for the spirit of her unborn child. Bertrand put on a Smokey Robinson record. Charlene slow-danced with her mother while her father reprised his newfound boogie, adding arrhythmic snaps to his repertoire. They were to be grandparents. Such a promise erased all else.
Thus, when Radar emerged in the midst of a fleeting Jersey blackout, Louise and Bertrand were the first to arrive, white peonies in hand, to greet the baby boy they had already predicted was coming. Like everyone else, they were at first shocked by their grandson’s appearance and deeply concerned that something might be seriously wrong. After it had been determined that the child was otherwise healthy, Louise was embarrassed to admit to enjoying a guilty morsel of comfort at the possibility that Kermin might not actually be the father. But this would mean there was an anonymous dark progenitor wandering around somewhere in the belly of the city. Soon they cast all complications aside. This was America in 1975, after all, a land of multiculturalism and acceptance, and Baby Radar was one of their own. Maybe even more so than their own daughter. It was not hard for them to adore him as a counterpoint to Charlene’s recalcitrance, so much so that Louise would ache when she was away from her grandson for any length of time. As Radar was ushered around from one specialist to another, Louise became more and more horrified. She vaguely assumed all of this stemmed from some kind of Old World xenophobia on the part of her son-in-law.
What she didn’t know, because she never asked, was that her own daughter, not Kermin, was the sole engine behind the quest to find a name for Radar’s condition. Kermin had merely become a reluctant follower in their prolonged search for answers. Never once did he lament his son’s appearance or complain about the lot that life had given him. In the wake of World War II, after losing his newborn sister and mother, Kermin had fled with his father across a smoldering Europe to Bergen, Norway, where they snuck onto a thirty-foot boat bound for the New World. After six weeks at sea, Kermin had arrived in New Jersey with a bad case of pneumonia and a distinct perspective on that which was worth worrying about.
In the world he had left behind, the differences people used to judge each other, to kill each other, to declare war upon each other—these differences were often largely invisible: religious, ideological, ethnic distinctions not obvious until a name, an accent, or a birthplace was revealed. During the war, the armies wore uniforms that designated them as Partisan, Chetnik, Ustaše, but for the populace at large, one could shape-shift between these definitions, depending on who was knocking on your door. The result of such indeterminism was that in the pre-Tito Yugoslavia from which he had fled, family trumped race, religion, and creed. Above all else, you took care of your own, primarily because you could not be sure about the slippery identity of your neighbor. Kermin had spent only the first ten years of his life in Yugoslavia, but during these ten years he had learned everything there was to know about whom you must protect and whom you must reject, and such lessons can never be unlearned. In his own quiet way, Kermin threw himself into loving his son.
And yet he also knew better than to protest his wife’s growing obsession with tracking down a tangible diagnosis. He instinctively understood that her quest superseded the fragile boundaries of their little nuclear family. He, like her, had begun to subscribe to the belief that a diagnosis would solve much of what was wrong in their life, but whereas Charlene hoped such a naming would bring back her child, Kermin hoped it would bring back his wife. He had seen enough suffering in the world to know that Charlene—despite everyth
ing—was the greatest prize an immigrant electrical engineer could ever hope for. There were still days when he marveled at his luck: Charlene was beautiful. Charlene was brilliant. Charlene was his.
So he would dutifully drive his wife and child to all of their dermatology appointments, sitting patiently in the magazined waiting rooms, listening to ionosphere updates on his handheld. When asked, he would hold his son or feed his son, and when Charlene was busy, he would take Radar to the Ravna Gora Communications Shop, on Grove Street, where he placed him in a crib among the sea of spare parts as he reassembled radios and pocket TVs, which were his specialty.
It was also Kermin who bore the brunt of scrutiny from the Serbian community in Elizabeth, a community he quietly resented but could not shake. On the surface, Saša and her band of skeptical kerchiefed babas were kind and supportive, but he could hear the phlegm-inflected whispers they uttered behind closed doors. There were rumors that Charlene had been seen philandering with black men at certain slick-necked jazz clubs across the river in Harlem.
“Ona voli crni kurac,” he overheard snot-nosed Olga say after Easter services. He tried to convince himself it was possible that they were talking about someone else who was not his wife.
On Sunday afternoons, as he and Charlene strolled down Broad Street, they both felt the lingering stares, from stoops and bodegas, from slow-rolling Buicks and the palm-smudged window of Planavic’s Diner. The unmistakable wash of gooseflesh that arises from being observed. Despite the pieces of cotton in her nostrils, Charlene still smelled their judgment.
“Zašto je još uvek sa tom kurvom?”
“What did she say?” she asked one bitter January morning as they passed a conspiratorial Iliana and Jasmina eyeing Radar in his carriage.