I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  But somewhere along the way, Kermin had gotten lost. Scared and feeling feverish, he had stumbled into an unfamiliar clearing, and there, sitting in the sunlight, working at one of his paws, was a floppy-skinned brown bear. Kermin’s first thought was that it must be a man in a bear costume, for the bear’s gentle sentience was much too close to his own. And then the bear, startled by his sudden entrance, leaped to its feet and took several tumbling steps toward him. Kermin froze, not daring to move, his basket of currants trembling at his side. He could hear the bear’s ragged breath coming in snorts and sniffles. He realized that the creature was trying to smell him, trying to understand what kind of thing he was.

  “I’m Kermin,” he had whispered. “I’m not a person.” He had meant to say “bad person,” but the word bad had gotten lost somewhere in the space between his mind and his throat.

  The bear seemed to hear this. It moved its head back and forth, as if attempting to listen to him from both ears, and then it yawned a slow, wild yawn, peeling back the wet skin around its teeth. Kermin remembered feeling not scared so much as deeply, profoundly amazed that the world could contain both him and the bear at the same time. He hoped then that if his father and the Chetniks ever came upon this bear, they would not shoot it with their guns, but would somehow realize that this bear was a peaceful bear who only wanted to lick his paws and eat some currants and look at the moon.

  “Don’t shoot him, Tata,” he whispered to the bear. “He’s not the war.”

  The bear nodded, turned, and, with one last mournful look in Kermin’s direction, disappeared into the forest.

  Now, against the glow of that memory, Kermin looked at the bear standing in the middle of the darkened room. Were these two bears related? No. Impossible. They were thousands of kilometers from the Balkans. But . . . did bears possess memories, too? Did that bear in Croatia carry with him the image of a child picking white currants? And what of this bear? Would he remember tonight? Would he remember what was about to happen?

  He made a decision, then and there: he would fight the bear. It was clear to him now that he had come here for a reason. If he won the fight, then he would know he was on the right course. He would know his cause was just and that he must not sacrifice his son to satiate his wife’s despair.

  And if he lost? If he lost, he was not sure what he would do.

  “Give me this stick,” he said to Leif.

  His host raised his eyebrows. “So you will do it?”

  “If this bear kills me, I will really be pissed off,” he said.

  Kermin approached the bear, holding the rapier taut by his side. He could see the yellows of the creature’s eyes, the glint of the pupils following him across the room. And still the bear did not move; it remained reared up on its haunches, waiting, its head gently moving back and forth. Kermin could see the pendant gleam red against its belly. A smell of oily fur and animal flesh hung thickly in the air.

  Kermin cautiously approached. This bear was bigger and blacker than the one from his memory. It continued to stand rigid and unmoving in the middle of the room, undeterred by Kermin’s approach. At first wary, but then emboldened by the bear’s eerie stillness, Kermin inched closer and then closer still, until he was only four feet away from the creature. The bear towered above him; its massive head swaying lightly on the sill of its thickset shoulders. One swipe of the creature’s paw would send him careening across the room and most likely shatter his entire body. The bear stood, immobile, trembling just so. Kermin realized that, unlike in his encounter with the bear in the forest, he could not hear the creature’s breath. There was only the sound of his own breathing.

  He looked back at his host, who gave him a gesture of encouragement. Maybe this was all a psychological trick. Maybe the bear would never move. He could end this with a single tap. A test of courage and faith. The bear was his konkurrent.

  He took a deep breath and swung his rapier as fast as he could at the bear’s chest. He readied himself for the feeling of impact, but at the very last moment, the bear’s paw shot up and parried the blow, pushing the rapier’s path down and to the left so that Kermin’s momentum carried him forward and onto the floor, where he lay helpless at the bear’s feet. He expected the bear to pounce upon him, to tear him to pieces, yet the beast did not move from its upright position.

  Kermin got up, burning with the heat of humiliation. He tried again. This time, anticipating the block, he was ready for a counterattack, but this, too, was easily deflected by the bear’s other paw. It could not be! The bear’s reaction time was uncanny. Kermin’s rapier zipped through the air, flicking this way and that, and yet every thrust was met with a perfectly equal and opposite block. The bear did not expend one ounce of extra energy; quickly and quietly, he adjusted to Kermin’s attacks and moved accordingly. And yet when Kermin made to thrust but did not, the bear would not even flinch.

  Life shrank to the singular task of delivering the point of his rapier to its intended target. Everything depended upon this very small piece of physics. And yet he could not do it. He became frustrated, then resigned, then angry, then oddly exuberant. The bear blocked attack after attack, hypnotically countering each and every gesture he performed. The pendant gleamed, remaining untouched.

  Finally, after he had lunged and was sent sprawling across the floor for the umpteenth time, Kermin lay on the ground, soaked in sweat. The muscles in his arms were shaking uncontrollably.

  “That bear, that bear . . .” he whispered. “Mamojebac.” He was crying from the pure effort of his defeat.

  Leif approached, clapping his hands. “Amazing. We’ve been here for just over an hour. You possess such great resolve. Such self-belief. It is a rare quality these days.”

  “This bear is unbelievable,” said Kermin.

  “Not so unbelievable. I built him myself.”

  Kermin slowly rose to his feet, his head pounding.

  Leif carefully circumnavigated the bear and then approached from the rear, where he casually reached around the giant stomach, as if to hug the beast, before tapping the pendant with his finger. An alarm sounded and the bear froze stiff.

  “Every problem must have a solution,” he said. “Come here, Kermin. Let me show you.”

  Still breathing hard, Kermin joined Leif behind the bear. He had removed a part of the bear’s fur and was holding the flap open for Kermin to see inside. In the dim light, Kermin squinted and saw the glint of metal—hundreds of intricate gears and cables standing still inside the creature.

  “What?” said Kermin.

  Among the gears he could see the white stencil of the eye.

  “Yes. You see?” said Leif. “Every move was preprogrammed. He knew what you would do before you did it.”

  “How?” Kermin felt as if he were falling down a deep well.

  “He’s a puppet. He’s a god.”

  • • •

  OUTSIDE, THE SUN was finally setting. The dusk, stretched and weightless. Everything smoldering white, yellow, pink. Not so much a sunset as a suspension of disbelief.

  “The sun will rise as soon as she sets. Like a breath,” said Leif. “To really understand the mind-set up here, you must first understand the light. . . . In the summer, there is no night. We’re illuminated for twenty-four hours a day. Our skin becomes confused—you feel alive, like you might never die, as if anything is possible. People don’t realize this, but there are many more deaths in the summer than the winter, because people believe they’re invincible. In the winter you are much more of a realist. The daylight grows shorter until there is no day at all. But it is not completely dark. There is a wonderful depth to the sky in the winter—the light is almost blue. I feel most at peace then. In the summer I do not sleep, but in the winter—this is when I do my thinking.”

  They walked. Kermin was still shaken by the image of the bear’s metallic innards. There was no life in there, only the cli
ck and pop of the mechanism. The promise of movement. The sum of all those gears had equaled his defeat.

  He patted his sore hands against his hips and looked up. The sky had turned soft and thick, the light suspended above their heads like a sheet. As if light were a language spoken between heaven and earth.

  Kermin realized then that this was the most beautiful place he would ever see in his life. The thought saddened him, for it was an empty beauty, a reluctant beauty, a landscape of longing you did not want buried with you in your grave.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about the pole,” Leif said suddenly.

  “What is the pole?” Kermin asked, not quite listening.

  “The North Pole. It’s a place that often recurs in my dreams. Did you know that at the pole, the sun only sets once a year? A six-month day followed by a six-month night.”

  “When do you have breakfast?”

  “Ah! You are a funny man, Kermin. Most people probably don’t understand this about you. When indeed? Two months in? Three months? Or do you go directly to brunch? You can see my dilemma. On the one hand, the pole is a point of infinite possibility. The lines of longitude converge there, and so the North Pole contains all longitudes at once. In essence, you could choose any coordinate with a latitude of ninety degrees north and you would be correct about your position. How to function with so much choice? But then on the other hand, the only direction you can head is south. Can you imagine? You have no choice. You must head south, there is no other way. Wait—” Leif grabbed Kermin’s arm and pointed.

  “Look.”

  They stopped and watched the sky. The sun, perched on the lip of the horizon, seemed to tremble before sliding from view. The world blinked, waited, and then there was the sun again, rising unperturbed, as if it had all been some kind of performance.

  Kermin turned and seized Leif’s shoulder. They stood looking at each other, caught inside their own magnetic field.

  “Will you hurt him?” Kermin asked. His grip was firm, but there was tenderness in that connection, an insistence to the present.

  “I will not,” said Leif.

  “But you can do what you say?”

  “I’m not in the business of lying, my friend. I say what I mean.”

  “I care about him more than anything.”

  “Of course.”

  “But I must also take care of my wife.”

  “Of course you must.”

  Kermin released his shoulder. “After, how will he be?” he said quietly.

  “This I cannot say,” said Leif, shaking his head. “But how does that saying go? ‘To know the son, look at the father.’”

  They walked on and came to the entrance of another lodge. Another eye above its doorway, staring at them. Leif saw Kermin looking at the emblem.

  “If the eye belongs to no one, what does it see?” he asked. And then he opened the door and flicked on the light, which sputtered to reveal a large room filled with shelves of cogs, gears, and pulleys. There were rolls upon rolls of wire and dangerous-looking three-pointed mechanisms and small wooden mannequins contorted into ghastly pirouettes. Kermin looked up at the ceiling. From the rafters hung hundreds of puppets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. All of them headless.

  Kermin stared. He had never seen such a collection of wonders in his life.

  “As you can see, we’re running out of room,” said Leif.

  “Where are their heads?”

  “An old superstition. If you leave the puppet’s head on overnight, it may come to life and take its revenge,” said Leif. “You must separate the body from the mind.”

  “And all of this stuff is for making your puppets?”

  “Yes. But unfortunately, for our next show we need something more.”

  “More than this?”

  “You know how it is. You want what you cannot have. Our next show is about a brand-new idea in theoretical physics called the quark-gluon plasma, a condition that existed briefly after the Big Bang—at least in theory.”

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “The basic idea is that following the birth of our universe, there was a moment of extremely high temperatures. We are talking extremely high, as in never before or since—a singular thermopoetic event. At these temperatures, all matter breaks down into essential building blocks. And for a moment there, right after the creation of our world . . . everything was broken and everything was the same. No larger unique molecules, no atoms, no nuclei—just a sea of indistinguishable quarks and gluons. Can you imagine it? The whole universe as a sea of sameness.”

  “It sounds bad.”

  “It sounds beautiful. And it sounds a bit like some of the most extreme forms of communism, yes? Complete and utter equality?”

  “Communism never works this way.”

  “Not yet, at least. And I’m not talking about your brand of bourgeois Eastern European Tito communism. This is like window dressing. You must look farther east for the plasma. Burma. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. North Korea. China. Well, maybe China no longer.”

  “So your show is about this? Quark gluton communism?”

  “You’re good, Kermin. One must say this about you,” said Leif. “No, the challenge we face right now is much more mundane. You see, we’re building puppets with screens inside of them. Televisions. So they can become anyone they want . . . like an infinite mask. These are certainly our most complex constructions to date. And their circuitry must be able to function in very hot and wet conditions—in the Cambodian jungle, you see, where there’s no electricity. We’re struggling to make all of this work . . . The wiring is really very tricky. You work with televisions, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Little televisions?”

  “Little televisions.” Kermin felt a great delight in saying this. “Very mini televisions.”

  “Maybe I could pick your brain sometime about a few small matters. For instance, we are interested in liquid crystals on plasma-polymerized films. Do you know about these?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course you do. You see? You and I are not so different.”

  They stood, staring at the vast collection of puppet detritus. In the middle of the room sat a strange machine that looked like a suspended metal barrel resting on two trapezes, with a large collection of spiraling wires exploding from either end. The barrel was covered in bulbous glass protrusions. Kermin put his hand on one of these glass lumps. It was warm to the touch. He felt a sudden, precise absence in his chest and then his head swam, as if he had been holding his breath for too long.

  “What is this?” he asked, withdrawing his hand.

  “That. That’s a vircator,” said Leif. “That is what will cure your son.”

  9

  The next morning, Charlene awoke early to find Kermin already up. Radar was next to him, quietly working on an exploded radio at the little wooden table. It was chilly inside the cabin. Outside, summer snow had fallen sometime during the long, illuminated night. A fresh wet coating of white covered the ground, broken only by a lone set of paw prints that wove and wandered through the cluster of buildings.

  “What’re you doing?” Charlene said sleepily, coming over to the table.

  “We are repairing, aren’t we?” said Kermin.

  “This radio is broken,” Radar agreed.

  “I had the strangest dream last night.” She yawned. “Did you have any dreams?”

  “No,” said Kermin.

  “No dream,” Radar agreed.

  “It must be something about being up here. Or maybe it’s just all the travel, but I swear, it was so vivid. I was on this boat or barge or something. In the jungle, floating down a big river. And I knew these people were watching me from the trees. I couldn’t quite see them, but I knew they were there. And I hear this shout, like a warning, and I expect some kind of
attack, but then I look up and I see that the river is ending. Just disappearing into nothing. It’s like the water is there one minute and then it’s not there. And then, just before I get to the place where the river is ending, I wake up. And you know what’s strange? In the dream, it wasn’t that I was scared to go through that point of no return—it was that I wanted to go through, to see what was on the other side. When I woke up, I could feel this disappointment, you know?”

  Kermin looked up at her. “It’s okay to give him treatment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we can let him treat Radar. I think it’s okay.”

  “But . . . but you said it was dangerous.” She shivered, hugging herself.

  “He will be fine. It’s what you want. It’s what we came here for.”

  Charlene studied her husband’s face. Then she sat down in a chair and pulled Radar to her.

  “How’re you feeling this morning?” she asked.

  “Fiiiineee,” he said, electronics in hand. “I like dat man with da white head.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He means Leif. Bald-head Leif,” said Kermin.

  Charlene laughed. “You do? You like Leif? Crazy old Leif?”

  Radar nodded. “Yeah. He makes Kermint go explode!”

  “Kermit or Kermin, honey?”

  “He makes little green Kermint go explode!” Radar demonstrated with his hands, sending flecks of saliva onto the table.

  Charlene smiled. She turned back to her husband, placing a hand on his leg. “Why have you changed like this?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You’re doing this for me?”

  Kermin nodded. “I want to fix.”

  “But why now?” She was filled with a sudden wash of uncertainty. “You said you didn’t trust him.”