by Reif Larsen
“It smells awful. Was that a bat?”
“Bolivian chinchilla,” she said. “It’s good for bile flow.”
“Chinchilla?” he said, recoiling. “As in those cute little guys with the crazy soft fur?”
“The ones I use are female.”
“How am I supposed to tell that to my friends? ‘Yeah, and that’s my mom, who drinks chinchilla tea.’”
“Which friends are these?”
“Okay, there’s no need to rub it in.”
She took another sip. “But really, why don’t you get a cell phone?”
“I don’t want a cell phone.”
“So then how am I supposed to call you?”
“You can call the station. We’ve managed without a cell phone for all these years.”
“And what about when you’re not there?” she said. “You know, for when something comes up?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Everyone has cell phones. It’s a part of life now. All the kids—it’s how they communicate. With the text message,” she said. “How are you supposed to talk with this girl if you don’t have the text message?”
He sighed. “Morse code worked just fine before text messages came along.”
“Morse code? Honey, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not the way to a girl’s heart. This girl you’re seeing—what’s her name again?”
“Ana Cristina.”
“I’m betting Ana Cristina probably doesn’t have a ham radio station in her bedroom,” she said. “You have to adapt. You have to learn to speak her language.”
As much as he hated to admit it, she had a point. Ana Cristina was an avid texter and expert multitasker. She could carry on a perfectly coherent conversation with him while she also navigated through dozens of electronic communiqués on her device.
Charlene took another sip of the tea and grimaced. “I’m going to get you and your father cell phones this afternoon.”
“Please don’t,” he said.
“It will just be for emergencies, but if you like it, then you can start the text messages. I’ll even do the text with you.”
“That’s not how you say it. You don’t do the text with someone.”
“Well, how would you know? You don’t even have a cell phone.”
“Don’t get me a phone, Mom. Please?” he said. “I like my life just the way it is.”
“No . . . no, you don’t,” she said, almost ruefully. “No one likes their life just the way it is.”
2
The transmission site where Radar worked—indeed, the sum of his life—was located in the Meadowlands, a yawning swath of New Jersey marshland crisscrossed by countless highways and train lines and looping, arterial interchanges, all feeding into the great megalopolitan hydra of New York City. The mosquito-laden swamps were a sprawling back stage for the city, the many container ports and truck depots and train yards housing the props that fueled Manhattan’s insatiable appetite for citrus delicacies and all manner of combustible fineries. The Upper East Side bodega could not exist but for the generosity of the Meadowlands warehouse. Enter, stage left: orange juice from Florida, pineapples from Costa Rica, strawberries from California, tulips from Holland, chicken thighs from Colorado, crates of gum and chips and Mango Tango Dragonberry iced tea. The Meadowlands was the triage point for the inevitable daily deluge of Chinese-made trinkets: handbags and wigs and tampons and dog muzzles and yoga mats and mouse pads and tube socks and Happy Meal figurines. A whole warehouse annex devoted to nothing but boxes and boxes of shrink-wrapped Happy Meal figurines. It was all threaded through the odorous palette of these marshes, beneath the cold, wet tremble-cord of the Hudson River, and up into the waiting mouth of the lonely city denizen.
Aside from providing a perfect habitat for bloodsucking insects, the brackish Meadowlands water was an ideal conductor of AM radio signal, and if you drove the turnpike from here to there during a heavy summer night, you might see those morose clusters of radio towers, blinking their lanky presence to any wayward planes. The WCCA 990 AM transmitter site, perched on the shore of a lagoon, hidden from the world by a forest of reeds, was a thirteen-and-a-half-minute bike ride from their periwinkle faux colonial in Kearny and a seventeen-minute ride from the A&P Express where Ana Cristina worked. This velocipedal commute through the swamps was usually his best thinking time of the day, a kind of moving meditation, as he found the forward momentum and solitude of his transit allowed him to carefully inflate the vision of who he was and who he might want to be, even if this vision would inevitably collapse as soon as he stopped pedaling.
Radar had written half a dozen mediocre poems about his bicycle, affectionally named Hot Lips Houlihan, after that temptress nurse on M*A*S*H. Hot Lips was an Optima Stinger double-suspension custom recumbent with low-point tiller steering. He had blown six months’ salary on the rig four years earlier, and it was the one choice in life that he had never regretted, even in his darkest hours. She boasted more electronics than a small airplane: he had installed a reinforced plexiglass dashboard on top of the stem, upon which sat two transceivers, a decommissioned SRC ground surveillance radar dish, a portable shortwave multiband radio, a Shocker DX locomotive horn, an AmpliVox fifty-watt megaphone, and a plastic hula girl. Above the luggage compartment on the back, he had an extended whip antenna and a multidirectional yagi molded into a swivel plate that rattled behind him like exotic plumage.
As he rode to work on this strange day, this day of potential conquest mired in the foreboding of potential defeat, he sought comfort in Houlihan’s shortwave, which he gently tuned to Radio Skala, a distant signal originating all the way from Belgrade. Somehow the station perfectly utilized the ionosphere’s reflective properties to skip over the Atlantic and right into his lap. The song came on and he recognized it immediately as one of his favorites: “Stani, stani Ibar vodo,” about a lovesick country boy who has a conversation with a river about his darling. How fitting. He liked listening to the music of his people as he rode through the damp material excess of the Meadowlands, broadcasting the wisdom of suffering to trucks filled with capitalism’s runoff. No matter if the music tendered a history he was not entirely sure was his own. But whatever. Today he needed all the Balkan armor he could muster.
“Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu!” he yelled to the swamps.
As is the case with many children of immigrants, particularly those whose sole immigrant parent married an American, Radar knew only a little of his inherited language, gleaned mostly from when his father would produce an incredible string of Serbian swear words, often in the shower. (“Da ideš u tri pizde materine!”) Sometimes his swearing was correlated to his level of annoyance, but more often than not, he swore just because he could. If there was one thing Serbs could never abandon, it was their dangerously poetic and casual manner of cussing. It was not uncommon for his father to toss out the phrase “Jebem ti supu od klinova Isusovih!” which translated roughly as “Fuck the soup made from the nails of Jesus’s crucifixion,” and not think twice about it, even if in English he was unfailingly polite. Radar had never heard him curse even once in English. Serbian remained his language of expression, his private lounge of paroxysms. Thus, after a childhood of exposure to such intricate verbal execrations echoing across his subconscious, Radar could understand the language much better than he could speak it himself.
The Radmanovics had visited Belgrade only once, in 1989, at the invitation of a distant half relation, Julija Maravic, who showered them with kindness and warmth despite having never met them and maintaining only a tenuous familial connection to Dobroslav, Radar’s grandfather. It did not matter: they were part of the family, and she would’ve jumped in front of a train for them. She had said as much on their last night there. This backdrop of extreme hospitality made Radar’s experience with the rest of the population all the more confusing.
“Hej Marko
, gle ovog americkog šupka—izgleda ko majmun oboleo od raka,” a pudgy man with a shaved head had said as Radar was lingering with his parents in front of a fruit stand in Žarkovo Selo. Radar’s comprehension of the language was hazy at best, but he knew that this man was talking about him to his friend Marko and that whatever he had just said to Marko was not a very nice thing to say. Clutching his two malnourished beets, Radar was left with that very acrid, mothballed sensation of self-recognition that the Germans no doubt have a word for:
Üblernachredenfremdschämlähmung (n.)—the feeling caused by knowing someone has insulted you even as the slanderer(s) remain(s) unaware that you have seen/heard their insults quite clearly. The consequent self-pity, combined with an embarrassment for the slanderer(s), will often freeze the victim into a state of weary acceptance, such that he or she ends up doing nothing to address this trespass. Ex: While waiting in line for the bathroom at the restaurant, Günther felt a passing sense of üblernachredenfremdschämlähmung when he spotted his waiter spitting into his liverwurst sandwich. Upon returning from the loo, Günther ate his sandwich in silence, despite feeling as if he might throw up at any minute.
Beets in hand, Radar had felt the dull heat of transcultural ignorance wash over him. This fat, odiferous skinhead in his ill-fitting patterned short-sleeve and his sniveling sidekick Marko were supposed to be his people! Still, despite the Serb’s tendency for simultaneous compassion for the family and xenophobia toward the other, Radar felt that there was an ancient knowingness to the Balkan way that he found inexplicably seductive. Yes, yes: he realized he was being just as reductive with his Old World nostalgia as the Serbs themselves. But let us not forget rule #55: Dreaming is the first step to knowing is the first step to dreaming.
• • •
AT THE WCCA TRANSMISSION SITE, Radar relieved Gary on the night shift.
“Knock yourself out, man,” said Gary. Gary said this every morning.
Radar checked the Interplex circuits and restarted the backup microwave systems. He read the weather report live on the air at thirty-three minutes past the hour and walked the rickety catwalk out into the swamps to inspect the twin three-hundred-foot radio towers aging gracefully against the sky.
“Do it because you must,” he said to their soaring heights.
He sat in front of the stacks, listening to the financial news drone on and on. Occasionally he twisted a knob to tweak the signal. He got up and paced. He sat down again. He could not dispel the feeling that something was not right between himself and Ana Cristina. This feeling festered and metastasized and grew horns, until he finally broke down and dialed her cell phone from the station landline. It rang a painful number of times before going to voice mail.
“Hi, hi. Hello!” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “Ana Cristina? This is Radar. Hi. Just checking in. Saying hi. It was fun last night. I hope it was fun for you, too. Even if that movie was kinda bad. Well, terrible, really. One of the worst. But—okay. Nothing really to report here. Just—give a call at the station if you get a chance. Okay, bye. Bye. Talk to you later. Bye.”
Wow. That was ugly. Next time, he needed to remember to hang up before the beep, lest he break her voice mail with his social ineptitude. In fact, the call only served to heighten his unease. She was working today at the A&P. Maybe he could just pop over and say hello? It was clearly forbidden to abandon the station during the middle of his shift, but then this was a borderline emergency.
He checked and rechecked the signal. Everything was fine. Really, what were the chances of the station imploding during the short time he was out? He would be gone forty minutes, tops. No one would have to know.
“Look after yourselves, all right?” he said to the racks of machines.
He took a deep breath and slowly backed out of the station, closing the door behind him. He paused, listening, and then went out to the shed and fetched Houlihan, his noble steed. Once more, he clicked on his bicycle’s radio, calling upon Radio Skala’s infusion of Old World pluck to show him the way forward. The Guca trumpets and the polyrhythmic hither-thwack of the tapan drum blasted forth from the megaphone, weaving its mournful cocoon. Radar wheeled onto the main road and began pedaling fast and easy, bobbing his head to the beat, feeling his skin prickle and ping with the music.
The simple act of transporting his body from here to there did much to calm him. He regained some of his much-needed confidence. Yes, he, Radar Radmanovic, was a conqueror of hearts. Un conquistador! Ana Cristina was Mexican, or at least her estranged father was Mexican and still lived there, in a town called San Cristóbal, which was very beautiful, apparently. This was one of the first things he learned when he had finally worked up the courage to engage her in conversation at the checkout till. (“It’s beautiful there,” she had said while ringing him up. “But I can’t take his shit no more.”) Many of their first conversations had occurred like this, in the fragile space between the checkout beeps. All time was created equal, he knew, but this time between the beeps had been strange and long and wild time, around which the rest of his day had revolved. Oh, Ana! Ana Cristina! Do not abandon me now!
When the automatic doors to the A&P Express hushed open and the sweet, stiff hand of air-conditioning slapped him across the jaw, Radar caught his breath and stopped. There she was. In checkout lane number 2. Wearing those same hoop earrings, painfully beautiful as usual. He watched as she risped off a receipt and handed it to an elderly man in a fedora. Radar’s carefully constructed Houlihan-chutzpah collapsed like a house of cards. The universe could never support such an imbalanced union between him and her. He almost turned around and left right then and there. He would’ve, too, if not for the telling taste of bitter lemon on the back of his tongue.
Oh, crap. He knew exactly what would happen next: a fine-toothed gear fell out of the compartment in his heart and bounced against his ribs, zippering past his groin, down the hollow tube of his leg, before finally settling into the little microphone of his toe. The electric system in his body fluttered, he was enveloped in that familiar, cinnamon waft of doom, and then everything fell away. His vision skittered and finally blinked off. There was only his underwater breath, loud and echoing in the tunnel of his ears. The faraway world floated silently just beyond the cocoon of his perception. A hummingbird against his neck. He waited. And then: that peppery feeling of awakening. The wires sparkling with current. His wrists on fire. His vision whooshing in from the edges. He was back.
A petit mal seizure. Induced by stress or breakdancing or certain dog-whistle frequencies. More and more frequent now that he had stopped taking his meds. After ten years, he had finally decided that the meds essentially took the he out of him. He had begun to miss himself, flawed as he was. According to his parents, he had been blessed with epilepsy since birth, one of the many symptoms of his very particular affliction—an affliction so particular that the doctors had named it for him: Radar’s syndrome. Radar had spent his whole life seesawing between pride and shame for this personalized diagnosis, which he tempered by referring to it only as “me problems,” usually in an embarrassing faux Jamaican accent, usually in the dying swoon of the evening, and usually when he was alone, which was usually always.
Fig. 3.1. “Petit mal #7”
From Wolcott, D., and Henry, H., Epilepsy & Seizures, vol. 3, as cited in Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 884
The diagnosis did bring up a seemingly larger philosophical question: How many medical cases were required for a condition to be officially deemed a syndrome? If there had been only one incidence of the disorder in the history of the universe, was it still worthy of the title? Or was it just another example of extraordinarily bad luck? The underlying assumption behind the doctor’s diagnosis must’ve been that his luck would eventually be shared by others, that no experience could possibly be that unique, so we might as well go ahead and call it a syndrome now, because somewhere down the line there was going to be an
other poor sucker with exactly this same set of symptoms: the epilepsy; the sallow pallor; the comprehensive alopecia (save his patch—“me patch!”); the partial left-side paralysis; the irregular dark splotches on nipple, calf, and groin; the complete lack of social proficiency.
Meanwhile, Radar had been standing still long enough that the automatic doors decided he was no longer human, or, at the very least, no longer relevant, a nonmoving object that could safely be closed upon. And so they closed, only to squawk open in protest as they crashed against his backpack, the impact dislodging Radar’s mesh trucker’s hat, which was spray-painted with his call sign, K2RAD, in bright red, “urbanized” lettering. He had just purchased this very cool personalized accoutrement from a graffiti artist on the street in Newark. At the time, he remembered wondering why everyone did not transform their lives using one of these hats, which so effortlessly announced to the world one’s hipness totale.
The automatic doors shuddered in horror as they slowly returned to their open position, watching him.
Radar quickly bent down to fetch his fallen cap. He glanced up to see if Ana Cristina had noticed his baldness. She had not. She was still busy with Fedora Man.
“Sorry,” he muttered to the doors. He said this to be nice, though he knew it was their fault. They lacked vision, flexibility, long-term goals.
One of the checkout women turned and stared at Radar standing in the doorway.
“Your doors,” he said nervously, trying to dispel the growing disquietude of the situation. He corrected the bill of his hat.
The checkout woman, who he believed was named Lydia, though he had never sought out her services, yelled, “You in, you out? We lose the cool when you stand there.”
“I’m in,” he said and took a step forward.
But once he was in, he found himself wondering what he should do. He couldn’t just march right up to Ana Cristina and ask her if she still wanted to be his girlfriend. He had to act casual. He needed to fetch some product so he had an excuse to approach the checkout counter. He picked up one of the yellow shopping baskets and began to wander the aisles. What should he get? A seemingly simple question that suddenly felt freighted with significance. Small flecks of panic began to run up and down his legs. He started to sweat into his crocodile boots. His limp grew more pronounced. He needed to pick something. Anything. In an act of desperation, he grabbed a jar of guacamole, only to realize once he was already in line that this was a stupid thing to purchase on its own. Guacamole needed a delivery device, like tortilla chips or a piece of celery. But now it was too late. He was already in Ana Cristina’s line. There was no turning back.