by Reif Larsen
“Radar!” she screamed. “Radar!”
She comprehended his death with complete clarity. Such finality halted the most basic functions in her body. She could barely breathe. Life without him was incomprehensible. He was all there was, all there could ever be.
“Come back to me,” she cried. “I promise I will never let this happen again . . . Come back to me. Please.”
Eventually the contractions subsided and Radar’s body settled into an uneasy quiet. His bald head was covered in a pin screen of sweat. On the television, a commercial showed two blond twins laughing in ski coats as they shuffled gum into their mouths. Charlene held her son and stroked his head. She whispered something small and true into his ear. His eyes slowly came back into focus, darting around the room in fear.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “You’re here. You’re back. Radar, my love, my sweet, we’re together.”
Charlene felt a strong urge to yell, but there was no one there to hear her except her limp son and the synchronized twins on the television.
It was his first grand mal seizure. Despite her promise, it would not be his last.
That autumn, Charlene exchanged several heated letters with Leif. The inherent delay caused by the intercontinental postal system left her plenty of time to fill the spaces in between with a vast ocean of anxiety. At first, Leif was sympathetic when he heard of Radar’s hair loss and epilepsy. He asked her to describe the symptoms in detail and even to send pictures, which she curtly refused to do. When she accused him of betraying their trust and threatened legal action, he distanced himself from any responsibility and then, around Christmas, abruptly ended their communication altogether. Desperate, she even wrote several letters to the address she had for Brusa Tofte-Jebsen in Oslo, but these all came back RETURN TO SENDER. The trail had gone utterly cold.
With nothing left to do, Charlene unraveled. She quit her receptionist job at the salon. She stopped eating. Soon she was no longer leaving the house. Kermin began taking Radar to his shop every day. He did all of the shopping, the housework, the little administrative tasks of life, as his wife lay prone in bed. He persisted. He persisted and said nothing to her of her descent. There was nothing left to say.
• • •
ONE NIGHT CHARLENE AWOKE, shivering. Her body felt as if it were eating itself alive.
“Kerm,” she hissed, terrified.
He stirred, mumbling.
“Kermin!”
“Yes?”
“I can’t do it.” Surprised at her own certainty.
The bedside light clicked on. He blinked, rubbed his eyes in the dimness.
“I can’t do it. I just can’t,” she said. “I’m afraid of what I might do.”
“I think,” he said after a moment, “it is not a question of can’t.”
“There’s nothing I can—”
“It is a question of must,” he said. “You have no choice. We make him. We make Radar. We did what we did. What is done is done. But he is there, in that room. There. He must go and live tomorrow and tomorrow. So you must go and live tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow after this.”
She stared at her husband. Her eyes welled up. “I ruined him.”
“No,” he said. “There is not just you. There is you and me and him.”
She nodded.
“There is us,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. What do I do? Tell me what to do, Kerm. Tell me.”
“I cannot tell you. Be the person. Love him like always. It is not hard. He is Radar. He is love.”
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, she got up and cooked pancakes. Mediocre pancakes—misshapen, singed pancakes—but pancakes nonetheless. There were no complaints. She went over and held Radar so tightly that he complained, “Mommy, you’re breaking me!”
That afternoon, she opened up the hole in the bedroom floor. A scent of stillness when the boards came up. A life left behind. She pulled out a folder from the stack and fingered the classified ad for the flavorist job at IFAC.
She sat down and wrote a letter. “I know you’ve probably already filled this position long ago but I wanted to offer myself as a possible candidate as I suffer from an extraordinary sensitivity to certain smells.” She crossed out “suffer from” and wrote “possess.” Underlined it.
To her surprise, she received a phone call barely a week later. They were interested. She went to an interview in the International Flavor and Aroma Corporation headquarters, a giant glass-and-steel monstrosity in an anonymous office park off the turnpike. They had her sniff a series of white strips. She closed her eyes and inhaled. Then she used as many big words as she could think of to tell them what she smelled. Her answers astonished them.
“There are only two people in this building right now who could do that, and one of them is you,” said a man in a lab coat.
They offered her the job on the spot.
“Apparently they call you a nose,” she said to Kermin that evening.
“A nose?”
“That’s the job. You’re a professional nose,” she said. “We’re supposed to make perfumes, or to describe perfumes. Or . . . I don’t know. I’ve never been very good at making things.”
“Charlene,” he said, coming to her, embracing her. “You are smartest person I know.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You can make whatever you want. You know this, right?”
“Really?”
“Tell me, what are you waiting for?”
“But—”
“It is time to wake up. Wake up and become the nose.”
She became the nose.
It was not an instant transformation. The job offer was conditional: she had to go back to school. Two courses at Rutgers, her old haunt, in organic chemistry and molecular biology, and then a six-week perfumery intensive in Manhattan. She had to learn the names for everything: the pantheon of citric notes, the coarse parade of musks, the natural accordion florals and the synthetic aldehydes, ketones, and terpenes that silently mimicked the sensory world around us. She had to unlace complex bouquets of scents with just her nose and then measure her precision against a gas chromatograph. But she could do what the chromatograph could never do: compose an exact recipe for the smell using fifty words or fewer. Thus, the early draft of a perfume, zingiberene–pentyl butyrate–thioterpineol–ethyl acetate–2-ethyl–3-methoxypyrazine, became:
A tender bed of hawthorn, supporting a high trio of grapefruit, Asian pear, and elderberry, with lingering undercurrents of hazelnut and a single, faint note of ginger. A late-summer fragrance, perfect for outdoor events.
She could do this. She could dip her hand into the night-pit of the imagination. She knew all the right words from her previous, foiled career. Life had filled her quiver with the right arrows, even when the target itself had been too far away to see.
• • •
GIVEN HER EXTENSIVE BACKGROUND in librarianship, it remains surprising that Charlene never performed a standard literature search on “Kirkenesferda.” If she had, she would’ve discovered that by 1979, there were almost two hundred articles, essays, monographs, or book-length projects that referenced the “experimental puppet troupe,” though the vast majority of these were enfolded within a longstanding (and antagonistic) call-and-response between only two authors: Brusa Tofte-Jebsen and Per Røed-Larsen.
After 1979, there was a mysterious, nearly eighteen-year gap in the literature before Per Røed-Larsen published his comprehensive Spesielle Partikler: Kirkenesferda 1944–1995 (Oslo: J. W. Cappelens). Spesielle Partikler is a fifteen-hundred-page monstrosity that details the troupe’s four major bevegelser, or “movements”: the Poselok nuclear fission installation, outside Murmansk, in 1944; the Gåselandet Island Tsar Bomba show on fusion, in 1961, staged during the middle of the largest hydrogen bomb detonation in history; the disastro
us Cambodian performance, in 1979; and the abbreviated Sarajevo show on superstring theory, in the ruins of the National Library of Bosnia in 1995.
The book is not easy to get ahold of. Spesielle Partikler has been out of print for more than ten years and can be found only with some luck, in certain catalogs and rare Norwegian bookshops, where its list price is often well over 3,500 Norwegian kroner. The sole library copy at the Nasjonalbiblioteket, in Oslo, has been listed as “missing and/or damaged” for years, with no apparent attempt to replace and/or repair the inventory.
Fig. 1.5. “Gåselandet/Novaja Zemlya Kart Series #4”
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 221
If one is lucky enough to track down a copy, Spesielle Partikler quickly reveals itself to be a most beguiling piece of scholarship. The rise and fall of the Kirkenesferda puppet troupe is documented in detail, obsessively so, with exhaustive accounts of each bevegelse, including intricate analyses of the scientific concepts involved in the performance; charts and maps documenting the means of transport utilized to move equipment to these remote locations; blueprints and an inventory of materials involved in constructing the troupe’s mobile “theater wagon”; and even tables showing the kilowatts used by each electronic puppet-object.
At the end of chapter 18, before turning his attention to the buildup of Kirkenesferda Fire in Sarajevo, Røed-Larsen meticulously describes how the December 1979 Cambodia show—performed for the exiled Khmer Rouge leadership in their mountain hideaway north of Anlong Veng—ended in catastrophe, as nearly all of the troupe’s members were shot and killed in the middle of the night, including its founder, Dr. Leif Christian-Holtsmark. After this tragedy, Røed-Larsen claims, the Bjørnens Hule was abandoned. The camp was destroyed in a fire in 1982, and its Wardenclyffe tower was dismantled and removed “for international safety reasons,” presumably because of its proximity to the Russian frontier, although, according to Røed-Larsen, its circle of concrete feet (with their wires extending deep into the earth) are still visible “somewhere near the Finnish/Norwegian border zone” (295). When Kirkenesferda miraculously resurfaced fifteen years later for Kirkenesferda Fire, it would keep its name but no longer be run out of Norway. Its base of operations was now split between Belgrade and New Jersey.
Mr. Røed-Larsen’s devotion to his subject is quite evident in the long, digressive footnotes and nearly 340 pages of bibliographic end matter, but even a cursory meta-analysis of his vast collection of sources highlights certain inconsistencies and raises serious methodological questions about his scholarship. Many of the documents he cites either do not exist or are so obscure as to essentially be impossible to review. In his harsh review of Spesielle Partikler in the November 1997 issue of Vinduet, Tofte-Jebsen asserts that reading the book and its end matter confirmed for him that “the whole endeavor of documentation is a farce, a lie repeated and repeated into the dark” (“en løgn gjentas og gjentas i mørket”). “To write is to lie,” Tofte-Jebsen writes. “There can be no other way.”
Indeed, you would expect such dubious sourcing to cause any serious scholar to dismiss Spesielle Partikler outright, but after spending a fair amount of time immersed in Røed-Larsen’s bibliographic sleight of hand, a strange phenomenon begins to take hold of the reader: one starts to feel as if one has entered into an uncannily familiar reality with a consistent internal logic all its own—a reality that begins to feel as potentially valid as the one that we now inhabit. Since the form of Røed-Larsen’s account is so obsessive, so thorough, so exhaustively cross-referenced as to be almost mind-numbing, the overall effect of the monograph is to make one steadily question one’s fundamental assumptions about what is and what is not possible, what has happened and what may happen yet. This unease is exacerbated by Røed-Larsen’s tendency to use maxims from science in lieu of sectional headings (“3. For Every Action There Is an Equal and Opposite Reaction,” etc.). Pairing observed, functional certainties from the world of physics against the most suspect of claims at first creates a kind of conjectural dissonance, but after a while the reader cannot help but wonder how anyone could be so committed to something if it were not, at least in some sense, true. Devotion, at its core, must be a kind of truth. In this way, Spesielle Partikler can be hailed as an achievement of psychological engineering, if not quite a piece of historiography. It is a proposal of an alternate existence that abuts our own—lurking, never very far away from the room in which we now breathe—and as such, it is also a window, giving us our reflection even as we look through it into an invented world just beyond our reach.
Many years later, in 1998, Charlene Radmanovic would discover a copy of Spesielle Partikler inside an unmarked box on her front stoop. There were no postal markings on the package, nor any return address listed. She never told anyone about the book’s arrival. After spending some time trying to decipher its contents, she would eventually hide the book in the small, crowded space beneath the floor of her bedroom.
1
VIŠEGRAD, BOSNIA
April 17, 1975
On the day they brought home his younger brother from the hospital, Miroslav Danilovic, barely three years old, swallowed the key to the cabinet that held the family’s rifle. The brass key, itself shaped like a small pistol, hung on a hook in the kitchen that was normally out of young Miroslav’s reach, but while they were busy fussing with the newborn, he slid over the chair, unleashed the key from its resting place, and promptly swallowed it whole.
“I ate it!” he announced, triumphant, as Stoja nursed baby Mihajlo at her breast.
“Ate what?” said Danilo.
Miroslav showed his father the chair and the empty hook.
The Ukrainian doctor in Višegrad urged patience and calm. The key would pass.
The doctor made a small circle with his thumb and finger. “If it’s smaller than this, fine. If it’s larger than this, then we’ll have problems,” he said, which did not really make sense to Stoja, given the irregular shape of the key. Depending on which way you looked at it, the key could be many different keys. There was no telling which one he had swallowed.
Thereafter, Miroslav was forced to squat and shit into a paper bag. Stoja would put Mihajlo down, don her gardening gloves, and search Miroslav’s excrement for the offending object.
“You’re a good mother,” Danilo said to her. “Your patience is a curse.”
“I’m a mother,” she said, hushing the baby to sleep. “My patience is all I have left.”
Weeks went by. The key made no appearance. Miroslav’s appetite had decreased since the incident, but he did not seem particularly ill. Nor did he suffer from the kinds of gastrointestinal pains that the doctor had warned them about. After several months, Stoja threw up her hands.
“The key has moved on,” she concluded. And so must she. Still, in spite of her reasonable, almost stoic nature, in spite of her declaration that the episode was now closed, Stoja could not shake the lingering threat of that gun-shaped key—for the rest of her life, she was awoken by the same nightmare, in which a metallic bug would crawl up her son’s throat, choking him while he slept.
Miroslav, a slender boy to begin with, never fully recovered his taste for food. Getting him to eat became a daily negotiation, involving bribery and complex feats of logical reasoning. A bowl of pasulj was traded for an extra half hour of drawing time before bed. In contrast to Miroslav, little Miša—who was not all that little—would eat anything that was put before him, like a goat. This indiscriminateness brought its own problems. Once, when he was four, he ate a whole roast chicken, bones and all. Yet no one was really worried for Miša, even as he cried out in pain on the toilet. Miša was going to survive whatever the world might throw at him. He was born to be a Danilovic, with the same protruding jaw, the same large eyes, the same tuberous forehead as his father. If there was a crowd of boys at school, Danilo could always point to broad-shouldered Miša and say, “There�
�there is my son.” And nobody in the village could disagree.
Things had always been different with his eldest. Miroslav did not have the Danilovic jaw. His cheeks disappeared into his neck without much enthusiasm. His forehead was long and narrow. While Mihajlo easily became “Miša” to everyone, only Stoja called Miroslav “Miro.” Perhaps the diminutive didn’t stick, due to his air of unsettling politeness—he would formally address the women of the village as “Gospoda,” bowing slightly in the old way, as if greeting them at a ball.
How strange, whispered the people of the village. Did you know that he’s a podmece?
This was the unfortunate term for the victim of a maternity ward swap, of which there had recently been several high-profile cases. There was no concrete evidence that Miroslav had shared their fate, but if such a thing was said often enough, it no longer mattered what was true and what was not.
Yes. I heard that. I heard his real mother was a Hungarian Jew.
Their scrutiny did not go unnoticed by Miroslav. Even before his younger brother came along, he had always sensed the narrow chasm of incongruity, the painful gap between himself and the idea of who he should be; yet, being so young, he lacked the language to articulate such existential displacement. To calm his unease, he had taken to playing with wires and string, sculpting tiny men of varying shapes and sizes and naming them all Miroslav. Danilo would help him suspend these figures from the ceiling of his bedroom, like a constellation of possible selves.