I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  “I think we found something here. You said this yourself. Maybe these things happen for a reason. Maybe Leif is not so crazy as he looks. He’s giving me his promise.”

  Radar reached down and plucked up a radio wire from the careful sea of parts.

  “No, my little angel,” Charlene said, taking the wire from him. “That’s not for you.”

  “Give it!” Radar said, reaching for the wire.

  “It’s okay,” Kermin said, handing the wire back to his son. “He knows what’s for him.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know anymore.”

  “It is your choice,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” he said.

  She turned to her son. “Radar, do you want to do an experiment today?”

  “What’s speriment?” he asked.

  “It’s where they connect you to a big machine.”

  “Okaaaay,” Radar said. He touched two wires together and made a fizzling sound with his lips. “Connect. Explode!” He burst his hands apart. The wires flew off the table.

  “No explode, honey. Just connect,” she said.

  Radar looked disappointed.

  “Thank you,” she whispered to Kermin, reaching over and squeezing his hand. “I love you.”

  “A telegram came,” said Kermin.

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “Who was it from?”

  “I didn’t open it. It’s there.”

  Before she had even picked it up, she knew.

  The rest of the day fled toward a distant horizon. By that afternoon everything had been arranged. They stood outside the cabin that housed the vircator. The thin layer of snow had melted into a blanket of fog, relegating the sun to a distant memory. The air against their skin was cool and damp.

  Several of the men they had seen before were now milling around, checking wires, writing on clipboards, looking unnecessarily busy. None of the men introduced themselves. Neither Jens, Siri, nor the boy Lars were anywhere to be seen. As preparations were made, Kermin sat on a half-moon boulder some distance away, a radio pressed to his ear, the faint patter of drums emanating from its speaker. Charlene found his newfound nonchalance about the whole matter slightly annoying. She wanted to go over and shake him. Do you realize what’s about to happen? Everything’s about to change.

  Leif handed her a large plastic bottle of solution for Radar to drink.

  “It’s to focus the current,” he explained.

  “We’re going in there?” she asked, pointing to the large cabin.

  “He will be going in there,” he said. “I hope you can understand, but it’s not possible for you to be present during the actual procedure.”

  “But he’s my son!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Charlene thought she would protest more, but she simply nodded, fatigued, haunted by an unsettling feeling that she had seen this all before. The whole scene felt as if it had already happened. She had already been refused entrance to this cabin before. She had already remembered being refused entrance to this cabin before. She tried to shiver away these cycles of recall as she helped Radar drink all of the solution. Then she hugged him and turned him over to Leif.

  “Is it painful?” she asked him as he led Radar away.

  “Completely painless.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He won’t feel a thing. We don’t have nerve sensors for this kind of current.”

  And then the door swung shut and they were gone.

  Charlene was left with her watch and the horrors of time. The next twenty-one and a half minutes proved to be the most difficult of Charlene’s life. As Kermin clung to his shitty little radio, she alone faced a thousand possibilities and non-possibilities. She defeated them all and in turn was defeated right back. She wound herself into such a frenzy, she had to take off her shoes. Eleven minutes had passed since that door had swung shut. Still she waited, shoeless, confronting the possibility of a child fundamentally altered. Charlene realized for the first time how lucky she was to have a son exactly like Radar Radmanovic. She would not change one single thing. She would not alter a hair on his head. She wanted to cancel the entire procedure, to yell, Stop! Stop! Paralyzed, she did nothing except hate herself for doing nothing, for having done nothing, for having done this.

  Twenty-one and a half minutes later, Radar emerged. She ran up and hugged him, prodding at his thin little bones until he began to squirm. There was a new scent about him that she could not identify, but otherwise he seemed unchanged.

  “Dat machine make me crackle!” he declared proudly.

  “He did fine, just fine,” said Leif.

  “You are still you?” She was weeping at his sameness.

  “I need to go the pee-potty,” said Radar.

  “Thank you, Leif,” she said, smiling through her tears.

  “It will take some time,” he said, misunderstanding her relief. “The effects are not instantaneous.”

  Kermin stood some distance away, watching Radar and Charlene. He came up and touched his son’s head carefully, with the tips of his fingers, as one examines a melon, and then he nodded at Leif and walked back to their cabin.

  • • •

  IN THEIR CLOSING MEETING, Leif warned of the possibility of “dermal peeling” in the coming months and said it was a natural part of the melanosomal adjustment process. Charlene did not believe him, but she could not help loving him for having total confidence in his quack methodology. His faith in electricity was endearing. He had given her the greatest gift by making her realize what she already had.

  It was strange, given all the endless space that Kirkenesferda had at their disposal, how cramped Leif’s office was. Every shelf seemed to be filled with papers, books, journals, notebooks, boxes of photographs, and reels of eight-millimeter film. There was a pair of limbless mannequin torsos, one of which had its forehead painted with the eye. There was a deflated barrel organ, a whole box of polished black stones, a bushel of branches tied up in the corner, as if a Russian peasant woman had temporarily deposited her burden.

  As was her wont whenever a library presented itself, Charlene got up and examined the collection of books. It was often easier to discover someone through his books rather than his words, to see the overlap and divergence between one’s taste and another’s and then to triangulate the rest of that person’s self appropriately. She had slept with plenty of people simply on the merits of their literary curation.

  There was no obvious method of organization. Many of the titles were familiar; these were the same books that lived behind the sheets in her own home. Except that here, many of the standbys that had at one time nourished or tormented her were translated into Norwegian. A shadow army of all the classics, rendered through a peculiar Norse lens. She enjoyed trying to guess what each title was. She recognized Turgenev’s Fedre og sønner, Vonnegut’s Slaktehus-5, eller Barnekorstoget: en pliktdans med døden, Bulgakov’s Mester og Margarita, Calvino’s De Usynlige Byer, Conrad’s Det inderste mørke. Could these possibly be the same books that she had read? Had he ingested what she had ingested? She realized that with several of these books, she had fallen in love with a translation that did not exist in the original language, a fact that irked her to no end. Staring at this Arctic library, rendered so beautifully in a tongue she did not comprehend, she found herself wondering: When did a book—ushered across linguistic oceans by the unsteady sloop of translation—stop being the same book?

  Leif saw her looking at his shelves. “If you can believe it, there used to be about twice this many,” he said. “I recently sent a shipment down to Africa, to a monk who is building a library along the Congo River.”

  “How generous of you,” she said.

  In contrast to the li
ght chaos that ruled the rest of the room, she was surprised to find one large shelf in pristine order. Everything was arranged in neat little rows, with not one spine out of place. A shelf of twenty-five numbered binders. It was as if this section belonged to another person who was merely renting the shelf space. Charlene pulled down a thin purple volume, feeling almost guilty for disrupting the order.

  GÅSELANDET: TEORIER OM IKKE-DELTAKENDE DRAMA OG ERFARRING, PER RØED-LARSEN

  She looked at another. This one was also by Per Røed-Larsen. She looked again. Every single book on the shelf was by him. There were hundreds of them.

  “Per Røed-Larsen,” she said aloud. It was not quite an answer, nor really a question.

  “Yes,” said Leif. “He has set about the task of writing our history. Though if you ask me, his manner is a bit excessive. Not everything must be documented in such detail. Sometimes a receipt is just a receipt, if you know what I mean.”

  “Why do you have all of his books here?”

  “Per once wrote to me, ‘If it is not documented, then it never happened.’ Of course, I disagree, but I suppose it’s important for someone to record all of this. Sometimes you learn things when you see your work through the eyes of another. It offers a new perspective.”

  “And Brusa? Do you also have his books?”

  Leif walked over to another shelf, one of those that had fallen prey to bedlam. “His works are not as conducive to indexing. They impress an order of their own. But most everything is here.”

  Charlene looked around the room. “So is anything in here written by you?”

  “Surprisingly little. In keeping this place running, performing all of my roles, I can barely find time for myself.”

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Leif shepherded them back to the airport. They drove through a tundra of moss and lichen, tinged by tight clusters of black crowberry and nascent birch. The trees gradually grew denser until they found themselves back in the soft pine envelope of the taiga. Kermin sat up front, chattering away with their host about the secrets of miniature-television repair. It was in stark contrast to his silence on the ride in, several days before.

  In the back of the jeep, Radar slept in Charlene’s lap. Since the procedure, he had been sleeping nearly all the time. Leif had assured them that this, too, was natural.

  “His cells are busy at work. It’s exhausting to metamorphose—just ask a caterpillar.” The joke felt oddly misplaced. “But when the butterfly is revealed, all becomes worth it.”

  Charlene leaned over and sniffed her son. The new scent had lingered, despite several vigorous baths. A scent gathered in transit. It left her uneasy. Smells are transitory by nature; they should not endure.

  At the airfield, Leif wished them well and asked Kermin to stay in touch. “I wish you lived a bit closer,” he said. “We could use someone like you on the team. A genius with screens.”

  “Not genius,” said Kermin. “I understand them, like we are friends. That’s it. No: like we are relation. We are family, with the same blood.”

  As Leif walked back to his car, Charlene ran after him. She touched his shoulder.

  “Leif,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Oh? Who is that?”

  “I know you wrote those telegrams.”

  He looked at her strangely.

  “Why tell us not to do this?” she said. “And then tell us to do it?”

  He carefully removed her hand from his arm and got into his car. “Safe travels, Charlene. Good luck.”

  “I’m not angry,” she said through the open window. “I’m just wondering why someone would do this. Why pretend you are someone else?”

  He started up the car but then paused. “My dear, the mask cannot be the player,” he said. “And the player cannot be the mask.”

  • • •

  AS THEY WAITED in the terminal for their plane to land, Charlene put her head on her husband’s shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For letting us come here.” She rubbed Radar’s head as he slept in her lap. “I understand now. Things can be normal again.”

  “What’s done will be done,” Kermin said as a low whine rose in the distance. “This is done.”

  10

  Two weeks later, Charlene found a sheath of dried dermis lying coiled around the leg of their armchair. She did not know what it was until she saw that Radar was missing a large patch of skin on his left thigh. The skin beneath was pale and raw. It blushed pink when touched.

  Her heart sank.

  She called Kermin at the shop, sobbing.

  He was unmoved. “Leif’s a man to trust. This is what you wanted. This is what he gave you.”

  “But I didn’t want this.”

  “Then what? I gave you everything you wanted.”

  “Kermin!” she cried. “Oh, Kermin! What have I done?”

  Over the course of two months, Radar went through a series of four separate “peels,” in which his skin came away from his body in great translucent chunks, like a snake shedding its skin. She would find little pieces of him all around the house—beneath the furniture, caught in the door of the oven, inside her slippers. Like pellucid pages from an ancient tome. The skin smelled of wax and wet burlap and slightly rotten leather, sometimes with the thinnest lead note of citrus, a lemon or kumquat tone. She went around the house collecting the pieces in a small paper bag, which she kept hidden beneath the bed. And then one day she lifted the bedspread and found that the bag had vanished.

  Besides making him tender to the touch, the shedding did not seem particularly painful for Radar, though as the skin sheathed off his face and neck, he began to resemble a walking zombie. Since their return from Norway, Charlene hadn’t brought him back to the day care. She couldn’t even imagine what the other kids would say if they saw him in this condition. The thought made her shudder.

  “Why is that like this?” Radar asked one evening. He was standing in front of the mirror. In his hand was a piece of his skin.

  Charlene panicked.

  “This,” she said, hating every inch of her being, “this happens to everyone. You shed your skin. This is part of growing up.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Am I growned up?”

  “Not yet, honey. Soon.” She brought him close to hide her tears. “Soon.”

  She didn’t dare take him to the doctors, the same doctors whom she knew all too well. She didn’t take him even when she noticed that his smooth black hair had started to fall out in quarter-size chunks, leaving him with an uneven patchwork across his skull. She took to combing and recombing the thin hair that remained. When Charlene took Radar outside, she would rub him with lotion and then enshroud him like a mummy in a series of cashmere scarves. It was a ritual Radar came to greatly enjoy, despite the summer heat.

  “I am a gift!” he said when she brought out the scarves, holding up his arms. “Wrap me up!” He grew attached to fabrics and the safety they offered—she often found him hiding behind the sheets of her Rothko library, palms on the cotton, humming a little tune to himself.

  Kermin was intent on not acknowledging the horror of their son’s condition. On more than one occasion, she had to rebuke him when he was about to take Radar out in public without his protective covering.

  “This is important!” she said, making sure she left a little space for Radar to breathe.

  “He doesn’t care,” said Kermin.

  “People care. I care,” she said, wrapping.

  “I am a gift!” cried Radar.

  Each successive shedding left Radar paler than the last, until his skin settled into a slightly yellowish, flushed cream color—a Type I/II on the Fitzgerald Skin Type Classification Scale, somewhere between the rough-hewn maple of Kermin’s uns
haven cheek and the cautious milky complexion of Charlene’s Franco-Irish-Germanic roots. Certain dark blotches remained around his nipples and belly button and behind his left ankle, where there was a prominent marking resembling the silhouette of a sinking Viking ship. It was like a rebirth.

  But the procedure in Norway also led to several serious complications, none of which Leif had mentioned in his debriefing. Radar’s skin became incredibly sensitive and subject to severe rashes. His hair did not grow back, and after the final shed, he was left almost completely bald, save for a little patch above his left ear.

  “Where is my hair?” Radar asked her.

  “Some boys don’t have hair,” said Charlene. “Like your grandfather.”

  “He’s not a boy!”

  “He was once a boy like you.”

  “Okay,” said Radar. She could tell he didn’t believe her twisted logic.

  The media never got wind of this miraculous transformation. There was no reference to Radar in any of the major New York or New Jersey metropolitan newspapers, nor did Dr. Fitzgerald, as least as far as his personal literature suggested, ever learn of his former research subject’s “recovery.” Not that they would have noticed. The three of them had retreated into a protective cocoon. Some days it felt like the rest of the world barely existed.

  About two months after their Kirkenes trip, Radar was busy deconstructing radio receivers in front of the television, watching an episode of Godzilla. He was wearing his favorite blue knit cap, which he had taken to doing since losing his hair. From the kitchen, Charlene sensed a misplaced stillness in the air. She came into the room and found her son sitting like a statue, his torso rigid and strangely arched backwards, a motherboard lying in the palm of one hand. And then a wave passed through him, and his entire frame began to shiver and shake uncontrollably, sending him tumbling into the pile of radio parts splayed out before him.

  At first she thought he might have electrocuted himself accidentally, but when he continued to shake, she ran over and held him as his eyes rolled backwards and his arms popped and trembled in their sockets. A wilted smell of urine filled the air. She put her hand on his face and felt his jaw balling and grinding into itself with an uncanny mechanical persistence. His hat fell to the ground, revealing the lonely lateral tuft. On the television, the picture of Godzilla went soft and then split into a static that pulsed and thrummed with each of Radar’s convulsions. A stench of burnt wires wafted through the room.