I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  Mihajlo Danilo, his only remaining son, lived in semi-hiding as a bricklayer in a hamlet outside Belgrade, occasionally writing to his father. He returned once to Višegrad for a reunion of sorts, but neither father nor son could say he recognized the other. Eventually his underground network of supporters began to unravel and he was forced to flee to Argentina, where he worked reshelving books at a municipal library, even though he could not read a word of Spanish. Over the years, many of his friends and colleagues, former paramilitaries and Srpska army officials, were arrested and brought to trial by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Mihajlo Danilo was never captured. He remained at large, existing only in the memory of those who had once known him.

  1

  KEARNY, NEW JERSEY

  August 10, 2010

  On the day that would change everything thereafter and much of what came before, Radar Radmanovic rose before his birdcall alarm clock could tweep out its dreaded tree swallow soliloquy and stumbled into the shower. He closed his eyes as the warm curtain of water enveloped him, letting his forehead come to rest against the same geodesic turquoise tiles that had counseled his bathing for the past thirty years.

  The horror. Last night he and Ana Cristina had gone on their fourth date—fifth if you counted their Slurpie meeting on the A&P loading dock, which Radar often did. After each of these dates, he would wake up the next day panic-stricken and horrendously embarrassed, positive he had done or said something that had subsequently ruined his chances of ever seeing her again.

  That was my last glimpse of paradise, he would always think, just as he was thinking now, forehead pressed against tile.

  Indeed, his relationship with her was one of the universe’s great mysteries: why would beautiful, lovely Ana Cristina—with her duotone lipstick and those impossible hoop earrings and that smile (so effortless!) that revved his transmission and numbed his knees—why would a girl like that stick around with a guy like him? It defied all rational thought. Unless of course she was perpetuating their connection merely to gather amusing stories that she could later share with her muchachos—but such mean-spirited behavior was not like her. No, not like her at all—Ana Cristina was a giver, not a taker. This he had learned as they sat side by side in darkened movie theaters (four times now!) watching terrible movies, his leg inches from hers; he, petrified, unable to listen to a single line from said terrible movie as he contemplated when and if and how he should fulcrum his arm up and over and around her shoulders.

  And last night he had finally done it. He had counted to three (or four—he couldn’t remember now) and his arm had shot into the air completely without grace, bordering on some fascist salute, but somehow when it had fallen back to earth it had found an uncertain home around her frame, and it was as if she had been waiting for that arm, because after a moment she had let her head fall—no: drift—onto his shoulder. And then, while Radar was pleading for his body not to shut down, something monumental had transpired. He couldn’t even satisfyingly reconstruct the minute procedures that led up to its apotheosis, but somehow, they had kissed. They had actually kissed. Briefly, her lips had grazed his. It was an event he once could’ve only dreamed about, during all those commercial transactions at the A&P. He had pined after her for months as she plied her trade in checkout lane number 2 before he had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out in what would be one of the most awkward date proposals known to mankind, and now—

  Sweet Jesus!

  He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and gargled the yellow mouthwash that he hated but continued to buy. The reflection that regarded him, with a degree of curious disgust, was not the reflection of a handsome man. Bald since birth, jaundiced, a nervous, torsadée curvature to his spine that caused his whole body to naturally list to starboard—he would be the first piece of merchandise plucked off the assembly line by a disappointed quality control. And yet, here he still was, rattling down the line, unplucked.

  And they had kissed.

  Radar returned to his bedroom and dressed slowly, like a man dressing for a funeral. He knew he should feel ecstatic, that this should be the single greatest morning of his life, that he should be singing arias, and yet he could not dispel this lingering sense of dread.

  As he struggled into his jack-o’-lantern socks, the alarm clicked on again and the tree swallow began to maniacally twitter out its wake-up call. He made no move to switch it off. The swallow should suffer as he suffered. The swallow should feel the full weight of living on its little swallow back.

  While the bird tweeped and tweeped, he went over to the bedside table and opened his Little Rule Book for Life, a hot pink journal he had bought for $1.99 at Dollar Daze, and into which he added, on average, one rule per week.

  He wrote:

  Rule #238. Don’t do it because you can. Do it because you must.

  He wasn’t sure if this was even true, but it sounded good, and it gave him a little dose of precious momentum. He underlined “must.” Twice.

  Do it because you must.

  The double underline was clearly redundant, the two lines canceling each other out with their excess of enthusiasm, like giving the double middle finger to someone in very close proximity. He tried crossing out one of the lines.

  Do it because you must.

  He sighed. Such a collision of failed revisionism was a fairly decent summary of his life up until this point. No matter. He donned his fanny pack and trucker’s cap, finally slapped the tree swallow out of its misery, and pattered down to the kitchen.

  Two Grundig Ocean Boy radios were blaring away simultaneously in the middle of the breakfast table, flanking a morose-looking ceramic pig centerpiece. An uncapped jar of Marmite, like an offering to this altar of sound, sat next to a plate of half-eaten toast. Clear evidence his father had been on the early-morning prowl. Radar sat down in front of the twin radios, trying to parse the dueling signals in his head. It was an exercise in the impossible. His father was constantly haunted by the thought that he might be missing an important bit of news on a station he wasn’t listening to, so he often had at least two radios going at the same time, though sometimes it could be as many as six. Kermin claimed an ability to pay attention to multiple signals at once, but Radar had a working theory that his father listened to them all so that in the end he wouldn’t have to listen to any of them.

  Radar killed one of the Ocean Boys and skizzered the dial of the other to WCCA 990 AM, the financial news station where he worked as head engineer. A familiar prattle of market indices spilled forth from the speaker. Good. All was well at transmission. He clicked off the second radio. He admired the vacuum of silence left behind before he lacquered a healthy dollop of his father’s Marmite onto a slice of seven-grain. Radar hated the Marmite like he hated the mouthwash, but family ritual often trumped logic, and Kermin kept a vast supply of the awful stuff close at hand. As rule #98 stated, Belief is 90% proximity and 10% conviction. (Well, maybe the nihilist arithmetic in that one needed to be massaged a bit. It was probably closer to 70/30.)

  His mind drifted back to the sequence of the night before. It was not that anything had gone wrong, per se. At least nothing that he could put his finger on. They had even kissed again when they parted ways outside the movie theater. It was a tentative kiss, but it was a kiss nonetheless, one that suggested a future filled with more such kisses.

  He cringed again. It was not just that his measuring stick for physical contact was akin to that of a middle schooler—it was that literally every time he opened his mouth, a disaster was waiting to happen. Case in point: While he and Ana Cristina were waiting in line to buy popcorn, Radar had panicked, thinking they were not chatting as much as normal people on normal dates did. So he asked her: “Have you seen any good television movies lately?”

  What? Even as he was saying it, he saw that such a question was already dying and curled up in a fetal position on the floor. Wh
at an unfathomable idiot he was. He had meant to say “television shows,” but then his mind froze and he transitioned midsentence into “movies,” perhaps because they were in a movie theater, which unfortunately resulted in the very narrow category of made-for-television movies. Very few made-for-television movies were good—it was like starting a race with your legs tied together. Radar knew this much, even though he was not really one for television, which was why his original question had been flawed from the very beginning. He wouldn’t even have been able to sustain a conversation if she had said something like “I enjoy reruns of Friendship.” (Was this even the name of a television show? Or was it merely a complex and precious phenomenon that could develop between two people?) All he could have responded with was “Yes, well, my father enjoyed M*A*S*H, and I watched fuzzy episodes of Muppet Babies for a time on one of our many pocket televisions when I was younger, until my father went crazy and destroyed them all. You see, in his heart I think he was still a radioman, just like his father, and just like me. Maybe he was protesting the death of listening. Do you like to listen? I do. Not to brag, but I would call myself a professional listener.”

  But he said none of this. Just the dead television-movie question lying on the floor in front of them. To her great credit, Ana Cristina, looking puzzled, had just laughed in that way she did (where everything in the world seemed both terribly unimportant and important at the same time) and said he was “such a weirdo.” He could not disagree.

  Radar bit into his Marmite toast and chewed through his distaste.

  She would break up with him today. He just knew it. And truthfully, he probably deserved it. It had been an amazing ride, but the dream could not last forever. She had most likely realized—somewhere in the middle of that kiss—what a terrible kisser he was, what a fumbling, mechanical albatross he was, and, by natural extension, what a terrible mistake this whole endeavor had been. She had realized (and one could not blame her) that things could never work out between a perfect little slip of creation like herself and a malfunctioning human-shaped fabrication like him. But she would be gentle about it. The next time he called or went into the A&P, she would get that sad, inevitable look in her eyes and then she would say, “Radar, we need to talk,” and he would try to take it like a man. In truth, he wasn’t sure how he would take it.

  “Have you seen any good television movies lately?” he asked the melancholic pig centerpiece on the breakfast table. If only he could pretend he was a normal person. He didn’t even have to be a normal person; it would be enough just to act like a normal person. Artificial intelligence experts had long ago given up on creating actually intelligent robots—their goal was simply for robots to behave like intelligent beings.

  “Television movies?” a woman’s voice said from behind him. “I can’t say that I have.”

  Radar wondered briefly if he had been teleported back into his date, whether he was reliving some parallel existence, some second chance where he could be the suave Casanova he had always dreamed himself to be. But this fantasy instantly evaporated as soon as he turned around. There stood his mother in her lab coat.

  “I haven’t seen a good movie in ages,” she said, already rummaging through her vast cabinet of tea above the stove. “Have you?”

  The cabinet held all sorts of incredibly rare samples from around the globe, one perk of Charlene’s position as head quality-control aromatist at the International Flavor and Aroma Corporation, a position she still held despite reaching and now surpassing the age of retirement. Every morning, she selected her steeping ingredients based upon an elaborate but completely arbitrary formula guided by the phase of the moon, barometric pressure, karmic vibration, and whatever particular ailment she happened to be suffering from. Foot pain required two laces of Tasmanian kelp, a dash of white asparagus extract, and a pinch of powdered tiger shark cartilage. Indigestion called for a teaspoon of fiesole artichoke leaf infusion, two pinches of gentian and Codonopsis root, a drop of bee saliva, and a generous handful of Israeli black horehound.

  “What is a television movie, anyhow?” she said. She put the kettle on and began assembling a small collection of glass jars on the countertop. “Is that a movie that’s made for television or a movie that is just being shown on television? Because I think there’s a difference.”

  Radar sighed. “I wasn’t talking to you, Mom.”

  “Oh,” she said. She crumbled an oolong base into the strainer. Some unidentified twigs. After a moment she said, “May I ask whom you were talking to?”

  “I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was recounting.”

  “You were recounting,” she said. Half a dozen little red chokeberries disappeared into the strainer. “Recounting what, exactly?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What kind of nothing?” They had lived together long enough that lying had become an exercise in futility.

  He sighed. “I went on a date last night. And I was recounting one of the many ways I screwed it all up.”

  “A date?” she said, raising her eyebrows. She sniffed at a jar that looked to contain the remains of a dead bat.

  “A date,” she said again. “Well, what makes you think you screwed it up?”

  He didn’t want to be having this conversation. “I don’t know—maybe because I say all the wrong things? Maybe because I’m the most awkwardest person on the planet?”

  “How long have you known this girl?”

  “Uh . . . about six months. She works at the A&P.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Ana Cristina.”

  “And how do you feel about her?”

  He rubbed his face. “Mom?”

  “I mean, is she worthy of my boy?”

  “She’s only the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s not a question of whether she’s worthy of me; it’s whether she and I belong in the same galaxy.”

  “Hm.” She considered this. “Well. Be careful.”

  “Be careful? That’s your advice to me? Be careful? Thanks, Mom.”

  Time had a funny way of playing its hand. Charlene’s quarter-life audacity had slowly wilted during her middle years into a near constant low-grade anxiety at the various provocations of modern existence. Once upon a time, she had dropped acid and nearly burned down a library, but now just answering an e-mail could be enough to send her into a state of panic that she placated with her teas and dream catchers. As their little family had grown into each other, as life had begun to arrange itself so that it became impossible to escape their own nuclear dysfunction, as the time for Radar to move out had come and gone (and then come and gone again), Charlene still maintained that she was the normal one, that she was the one holding it all together, when in fact the converse was closer to the truth. Yes, she lived with two men caught in varying states of electromagnetic purgatory, but she had chosen this life, and as much as she might have claimed otherwise, she took courage from the stagnation of this purgatory. Every complaint she leveled their way also had the effect of steadying her wobbly rudder. They were her Pleiades. Without them, darkness would overtake her night.

  “I only mean that women can be complicated,” she said, breaking off some aspect of the bat body and dropping it into the tea strainer. “I should know. I used to be one.”

  “You’re still a woman, Mom.”

  “They’ll say one thing to your face, but what they’re really thinking is something else entirely.”

  “She’s not that kind of girl, Mom. Seriously, she’s wonderful. And honest. And . . . and . . . I don’t know. She’s just . . . her.”

  “I’m sure she is. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go out with her,” she said. On the stove, the kettle had already begun to shudder. “Just know that every time she opens her mouth, it’s an opportunity for her to lie to you.”

  “Thanks. I’ll take that into consideration.”

  “Not that t
his is always a bad thing. Sometimes a lie can be just as good as the truth.”

  “Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s not true.”

  The kettle came to life and whistled its disapproval. Charlene looked surprised, as if this boil did not happen every single morning, scooped up the pot, and layered the water through the strainer in an overly ornate spiral. Her mug of choice featured an orgy of rabbits engaged in various balletic sex acts, though after twenty years of use, the humping bunnies no longer registered as carnal agents, save to the rare houseguest, who could be forgiven for staring at Charlene’s crockery in fascinated horror.

  “Oh, I was meaning to ask you,” Charlene said, ushering strainer and mug to the kitchen table. “I have to get a new cell phone this afternoon. What’s that one you recommended again?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I don’t have a cell phone, Mom.”

  It was true: despite his clairvoyance with all things electronic, cellular phones had always struck him as a gaudy and unnecessary technology. He did not want to be constantly at the mercy of others. And why pay a cell-phone company ridiculous amounts of money each month when there was plenty of frequency in the 1-to-250,000-MHz spectrum open for the taking? Radio signal felt much more organic—like swimming in the ocean versus swimming laps in a tiny pool, though he didn’t know how to swim, so he couldn’t be sure if such an analogy was entirely accurate.

  “And why don’t you have a cell phone?” she said. “What’s wrong with you? You and your father, both of you.” She took a sip of tea and wrinkled her nose. “Oh, God, this stuff is awful.”