I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  Fig. 3.6. “Something’s Fishy on Times Sq. Jumbo TV”

  From New York Daily News, Dec. 17, 1990

  Of course, if the authorities had checked the attendance sheet for Kearny High School, they would have discovered that Radar Radmanovic had been absent from school on the three consecutive days of the JumboTron’s disruption. There also exists a photograph of Radar sitting at his home-brewed ham radio station in his bedroom, giant ear cans on his head, delivering an enthusiastic thumbs-up to the camera. In the background, perched precariously on a transceiver, a mildly beleaguered goldfish is clearly visible. The goldfish matches—in demeanor and appearance, including the single black spot—the famous Vladi, though on the back of the photograph Radar has written R.I.P. DOBROFISH, suggesting that the fish was named for Dobroslav Radmanovic´, the man responsible for bringing their family to the New World before collapsing in a grocery store checkout line, ground chuck in hand.

  Other items from the R. Radmanovic file seem important to highlight: Radar graduated from Rutgers, although, due to an apparent computer glitch, he actually graduated twice (if on paper only), with a dual degree in religious studies and electrical engineering, summa cum laude each time, making him the most decorated undergraduate in the history of that school. Such illustrious qualifications landed him a job directly out of college as the WCCA Belleville Transmission Site assistant manager of operations. Now, after thirteen years of exemplary work, he was head engineer of transmission. During that time he had been named employee of the month fourteen times for the Green Channel Network, a midsize regional media conglomerate that spanned the tri-state area as well as parts of western Massachusetts. No other employee had received the honor more than twice. And yet, once he had become master of the transmission site, Radar had not moved up in the corporate hierarchy, despite repeated offers of upper-level management positions. Eventually, the GCN executives had simply stopped trying. Apparently their savant engineer preferred to stay where he was, in the swamps, conjuring signal.

  The employee-of-the-month awards were not undeserved. In truth, he probably should have won the accolade every month, but then, this would not have been good for company morale. Radar was that good. A bona fide professional. No—what was the step above bona fide professional? A natural. A motherfucking sorcerer. He would glide his hands across the stacks of panels, checking the levels, whispering a knob here or there, often with eyes closed, adjusting the modulators and repeaters and phase monitors as if he were playing a perfectly sculpted contrapuntal fugue. In that precise moment of propagation and frequency, amplitude and scissor-slip wattage, he was the Buddha himself sitting beneath the electrical bodhi tree.

  Radar’s unique spiritual connection to the machines also made it difficult to find another human who enjoyed working with him in that swampland radio outpost. He had gone through no fewer than twenty-one partners in his thirteen years, from poor old Ernie Bailey to his current co-workers, Gary “Knock Yourself Out” Balkin and Moses “Mo’ Money” Rodriguez. The managers seemed willing to accept this revolving door of placeholders in order to keep around an employee who looked mostly humanoid but functioned more like an extension of their radio transmission system. On his watch, they had never lost signal. Not once. How this was possible, the station execs in Manhattan could not say. Every station lost signal—it was the way of the world, of the incoherent spectrum, of the random grumblings of electrons, but Radar was always able to anticipate these electromagnetic hiccups and swivel the backup systems accordingly. It was as if he could look down the barrel of time and see into the future. Even his seizures at the workplace, of which there had been several, had never disrupted his craftsmanship. He would wake up on the floor of the transmission site, sweating and sore, and the fearful machines would be calling to him, wondering how he was doing. They had looked after themselves while he had shifted into another plane. They had felt his contractions, felt the throbbing agony of his synapses, but they had not faltered in his absence. They had his back. They would always have his back.

  • • •

  PEDALING BACK to the transmission site after his near miracle encounter at the A&P Express, Radar was initially ecstatic over Ana Cristina’s invitation, but as the sulfuric breeze from the swamps blew against his face, a little sandcastle of belief begin to melt inside his chest. There was nothing quite like imagining one’s life through the eyes of another to effectively initiate an irreversible, existential nosedive.

  Radar sat in the station cockpit, surrounded by his instruments, and tried to figure out exactly why he felt so depressed. Ana Cristina had invited him to meet her mother! To eat empanadas! Surely this was a good sign. Surely the fact that she was offering to introduce him to kith and kin meant she wanted to keep him around. And that gesture, that touching of his hand at her workplace, no less, meant she was comfortable enough for their relationship to be semi-public, for Lydia and Javier to know of their shared amour. And yet, what did he have to share, really? When Ana Cristina’s mother peered at him over a plate of steaming empanadas and asked him what he had done with his life, whether he was happy with who he had become, whether he was ready to share this happiness with her daughter, what could he possibly say?

  For the first time in his life, he realized this: he had been following a path that was not his. He was living the life of another man. It could be said without exaggeration that he was perhaps the best radio engineer in the world, but his heart was just not in it. He did not love what he did. He did it only because he could. And this, he realized, was no reason at all.

  Do it because you must.

  He remembered a late-summer excursion to Manhattan the previous year in which he had observed an inverted petite chinoise acrobat spinning plates on a street corner in the Lower East Side. It had been appallingly humid out, but the woman—bedecked in a gleaming white rhinestone costume that appeared out of place against the buttery grunge of the summer sidewalk—was so focused on her revolving tableware that it was as if her body had melted away into the heat, or at least her body could not be separated from the task at hand. Radar sensed that the ring of people who had stopped to watch were doing so not because of her enthralling acrobatics (though her acrobatics were enthralling), but because of their collective awareness that this woman, in that moment, could only be doing exactly what she was doing. The laws of the universe had determined it. Transfixed, Radar had waited in line to dump all of his change onto a plate, a plate that had struck him as painfully ordinary and dull, lying so still on the ground. Afterwards he had swerved back into the traffic of humanity, filled with a strange mixture of exhilaration and dread that he would never be able to achieve the elemental beingness of that plate spinner.

  Seated in his station chair now, recalling the image of those gleaming, whirling plates, Radar picked up a pen and slowly started to trace a little oblong circle onto a legal notepad. With each added revolution, the circle became more and more perfectly circular, all those wonky, globular loops adding up to something whole and proportional and right, and this summation comforted him.

  Rule #49: Many imperfections can and may lead to perfection.

  Soon the flimsy yellow paper grew thick with ink and finally tore open, so that now he was drawing circles on the page beneath. If he drew enough circles, maybe he could burrow right through the earth into its molten center and then through to the other side, into the V-necked alpine valleys of Kyrgyzstan. That could be nice. Maybe he could start over again there. He could be a more perfect version of himself.

  Distracted by his existential malaise, he wandered into the engine room and lay down next to the big, purring vacuum capacitors that expelled so much electromagnetic energy into the air that the temperature of your skin went up by two degrees and began to tingle. This was the voltaic green room where the radio signal huffed and puffed and readied itself for the great scream. The station’s transmitters took the thinnest trickle of signal and
blew it wide open, turned it into a hundred-mile-wide fire hose, an explosion of invisible waves licking the surface of the city, shooting through seawater and brickwork and grocery bags and into the antennae of the thirsty radios, their transistors reshaping the signal into a wiry, pulsing frequency that sent speakers quivering into long streams of S&P numerals.

  Radar lay on his back eating an apple and swinging a fluorescent light tube through the air like a lightsaber. The tube lit up magically every time it swung close to the huge, humming induction box.

  Dim.

  Now glowing.

  The world, thick with current.

  Dim.

  Now glowing.

  Like a heartbeat. He wanted to make Ana Cristina glow like this.

  Radar sighed. He pulled himself off the ground and was just about to go check on control when it came. Usually, he had an inkling that a seizure was on its way as he was filled with a fleeting sensation akin to reverse déjà vu—a remembrance of things future—but this time he had only a whiff of lemony lilac in the back of his throat and not even a pretense of falling before he was already out, down this time—really, really down. As in: kill the lights down. Not a petit mal, but the full monty. Usually petits came and went, but sometimes they were a sign that a storm was on the horizon, and apparently this was the case today. His last thought was of the cruel misfortune of life: Oh, why today of all days should I suffer such a fate? On this day of imminent empanada conquest? Please don’t let me hurt myself too–

  He awoke in total darkness.

  Every part of his body ached. For a moment he wondered if he was dead. But could death really be this painful? Once you got through the difficult part of dying, surely they should at least cut you some slack and make you comfortable? No, death was too simple a solution for his lot. He would live and he would suffer.

  He tried to deduce his condition. From what he could tell, he was lying on his back, covered in what felt like a thin layer of sweat. He could also feel that his underwear was soaked through. A familiar, swiftly cooling sensation. When he rolled his tongue across the roof of his mouth, he tasted the metallic tang of blood.

  He tried to sit up. His head pounded. The sound of crackling glass beneath him. Something wet and squishy against his hand. This, he realized, was the apple core. He reached out and felt blindly through the darkness, felt the cool perforations in the metal wall. He was still in the engine room. So he was definitely not dead. But . . . the lights were out. Strange. He wondered how long he had been in there. Was it nighttime? Surely someone would’ve found him by now. Where was Moses? He sat there in the darkness, listening. An absence. The great capacitors around him, normally so full of life, were cold and quiet.

  He wiped the blood off his chin. That’s weird, he thought, because if the capacitors are quiet, then that means—

  Panicking, he stumbled to his feet, groping around in the dark for the door to control. He hit his head on a low ledge and then finally managed to locate the handle of the door, which he opened to find a darkened control room. A small window in the corner provided the only light. At least it was still daytime outside. But why were all the lights out? He stood, listening. The speakers, lifeless. Not even a hint of static. Nothing.

  The signal! The radio signal is dead! The one thing he was supposed to be able to do in this world and he had failed at doing it.

  He fell over himself trying to get to the stack, punching at the backup microwave channel to get it up and running, but he quickly found that none of the systems were online. The power. The power was out. He was disoriented, but he knew this shouldn’t be happening. They had two fancy backup generators that should’ve automatically kicked on at this point. In the dimness, he stumbled toward the generator room, his vision wobbling dangerously before he leaned over a trash can and vomited up the apple and the remnants of the Marmite toast.

  The generator room was also dark. The twin Generacs simply lying there. He tried to manually start them with a pull cord, but, try as he might, he could not get them to catch. He bent over, panting. The oddest sensation of stillness. He placed his hand against their circuitry, closed his eyes. It was the same feeling he had had in the engine room. An utter absence.

  He wandered back into the darkened control room and picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. He clicked the hook switch several times, but the line was dead. Damn. He had no way of letting the station in Manhattan know what was going on. Maybe his mother was right: he should get a cell phone. For emergencies like these.

  He looked at his calculator watch. The screen was blank. He squeezed and re-squeezed the mode button, to no avail. Had the watch just run out of batteries? This would be an amazing coincidence. He looked up at the clock on the wall. Its second hand was motionless, the time frozen at 2:44. The exit sign was also dark.

  What the hell was going on? And why had everything stopped working—him included—at exactly the same moment?

  He felt his way over to the bathroom and, out of habit, flicked on the light switch. Nothing happened. So he was forced to peel off his urine-soaked jeans in the darkness, tripping over the toilet as he hopped up and down on one foot. He fumbled for the faucet and, to his relief, found this working as usual. Thank God. Civilization had not completely disappeared. Using a damp paper towel, he awkwardly wiped at his groin. He changed into the extra pair of sweatpants he kept in his cubby in case of just such an accident, rinsed out his mouth, and gargled some of that horrific-familiar yellow mouthwash. The alcohol stung where he had bitten into his tongue.

  Through the dimness, he peered at himself in the mirror. He could just make out the contours of his outline. It was faint, but it was an outline nonetheless. He was still Radar.

  He went back into the control room, examining the racks and racks of state-of-the art equipment. Everything completely dead. He touched the cold chassis of a phase modulator, then leaned in and smelled its circuits. No semblance of signal. Minutes earlier, this stack had been brimming with carefully choreographed current. But now? A wasteland.

  He was suddenly reminded of the last blackout, in 2003. By coincidence, he had also suffered a grand mal then, just before the power went out. He had been riding his bike when he smelled a scent of burning lilacs and was taken by that feeling of tumbling back into himself. He had just managed to pull over to the side of the road when he felt himself actually tumbling over his bike and into the reeds. He woke up covered in mud, bleeding from a crescent gash in his arm. A wary duck was eyeing him from a little spit of marsh water just beyond. He nodded to the bird, conspiratorially, as if what had just transpired had all been on purpose. The duck had nodded back.

  That night, when the lights had not come back on, Radar had wandered the darkened streets alone, pining for lost current. As New Jerseyans partied around him, grilling their defrosting meats and retiring to make blackout babies, he had communed with utility poles, pressed palms to traffic lights, searching for any errant scraps of wattage. The grid, the grid. How he missed the grid. He vowed never again to take that cushion of electricity for granted. Thereafter, he carried a AAA Energizer in his fanny pack as a kind of talisman against the darkness.

  Now, sitting alone in the dim control room, filled with a growing feeling of helplessness, he excavated the battery from its pouch and began rolling the cylinder between his palms, warming the metal.

  What should he do? He was a radio engineer with no radio frequency to engineer. He idly turned on the portable shortwave that he kept on his desk but found that this, too, was dead.

  How could everything have gone dead at once?

  Battery in hand, he stepped outside, blinking in the bright sunlight. At least there was still that. It was a beautiful summer day, if only a touch humid—the kind of day that makes you forget the taste of all other days. The sky was a sheet of uninterrupted blue, infinite and resilient and altogether unaware of the dark, broken machines that
lurked indoors. He spotted a black plume of smoke rising from somewhere to the west, in Kearny. Such black-looking smoke could never be a good thing. The burning of that which should not burn.

  Radar gingerly made his way out onto the creaky catwalk that led across the swamps to the base of the transmitters’ twin antennae. The antennae soared above him, two latticed, triangular fingers pointed heavenward. He sensed their silence, the absence of signal emanating from their tips.

  But their silence was not the only silence. From this vantage point, the Meadowlands was normally a humming palace of movement, of planes and trains and automobiles sliding through on their way from here to there. Yet the familiar river of sound from the turnpike was gone. He listened. Birds hummed and twittered across the swamps. No sound of freight. No burring upshift of tractor-trailers. From somewhere in the distance, he heard the call of a police siren. And then, overhead, the muffled wup-wup of a helicopter.

  Something was very wrong. This was no ordinary blackout.

  Beneath the sagging catwalk, the marsh water was muddy and thick, covered in some kind of plush, aromatic slime. An iced tea bottle floated, half-submerged, its label bleached pinkish white by the sun. Like the flesh of a made-up cadaver. At the end of the catwalk, he startled a great blue heron into flight. He could hear the bird’s wings beat against the air as it circled him once, twice, before heading off east, across a calligraphy of islands.