I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  There were only two scenarios that Radar could think of that would cause not just the electric grid to fail but all electronics to stop working instantaneously. Radar had written a paper in college on the first possibility: a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun, a solar flare so large that it could disrupt modern microprocessors. The last such major CME had occurred in 1859, when a series of solar flares precipitated an unprecedented geomagnetic solar storm, dubbed the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington, the first person to observe and describe the flares. The resulting storm caused havoc in telegraph systems throughout the world, disrupting messages and giving operators powerful electrical shocks. The aurora borealis was seen as far south as the Caribbean and was so bright that people could read newspapers by its light in the middle of the night.

  There were all kinds of prediction models for what would happen to the modern-day electrical infrastructure in the event of a solar storm as massive as the Carrington Event—predictions that ranged from the vaguely inconvenient to the totally catastrophic. In truth, no one knew what would happen to a society so dependent upon the semiconductor if the sun unleashed its rage again. But there was just one problem with the solar flare explanation: they were currently in a low point of the eleven-year sunspot cycle, so it was even more highly unlikely that such a highly unlikely solar storm had occurred.

  Which left the only other known explanation, a possibility so outrageous that Radar could barely comprehend it: a nuclear bomb had been detonated above the earth’s atmosphere, and New York had just experienced the devastating effects of its electromagnetic pulse.

  “Jesus,” Radar said, his brain already making room for the impossible.

  4

  The world would be crippled. Food and water would instantly be in short supply, particularly around the metropolises, where on any given day, consumables kept on hand could support the populace for three days, maybe four, tops. An EMP was so devastating because it fried all electronic circuitry, and without electricity, the density of urban populations was a death sentence. Refrigeration and air conditioning would be gone. Water pumps gone. Communications gone. Most cars and trucks and planes and trains would be fried, too, as virtually every modern automobile depended on a microprocessor-driven computer system. Everything depended upon the microprocessor. He thought of Grandma Louise, stranded by herself in her little house in Trenton. Old people would be the first to go, along with the sick and the weak. People like him . . .

  Radar closed his eyes.

  Calm down. Maybe he was wrong about all this. Maybe something funky had gone down at the station. Some weird surge of current. Maybe no one else was affected. No need to panic just yet.

  First things first. If there had been a massive EMP, he needed to make sure his family was okay. His mother was probably still at work. His father would be in his radio shack at home as usual, no doubt having a conniption at the mass death of all his electronics. He would find his mother, and together they would head home. Yes. This seemed like a sensible plan. One thing at a time. He thought of Ana Cristina in the A&P and wondered if she was safe. He would check on her later.

  He left a note for Moses on the off chance he came into his shift as usual, though he was fairly sure this would not happen. He had the feeling that nothing would be as usual ever again. He locked up the station and went out into the heat of the day. Already, refrigerators would be warming—millions of pounds of food slowly spoiling. Entropy would eventually reign supreme. It was the beginning of the end.

  He fetched Houlihan from the shed. Sadly, just as he had feared, when he tried to coax one of her transceivers to life, he found that her onboard electronics hadn’t been spared.

  “Rest in peace, Houlihan,” he murmured, observing a moment of silence at the handlebars.

  Then he gripped the pedal with his crocodile skin boot, took a deep breath, and headed out into a changed world.

  On Belleville Turnpike, he quickly came upon a tractor-trailer stopped in the middle of the road. Its driver had opened the hood of the cab, but he now stood off at some distance, smoking and staring out across the swamps.

  “You’re the first person I seen come down here,” the man said. He looked tired and unshaven. “I never even looked at this place before. All kindsa birds.”

  “Is your truck dead?”

  “Everything’s out. Radio doesn’t work. CB. My cell phone won’t even turn on.” He held it up. “You know what’s going on here?”

  “I think it was an EMP.”

  “An EMP?”

  “An electromagnetic pulse.”

  “Okay,” the man said, scratching at his chin with his thumb. “How’s that?”

  Radar took a deep breath. “It’s usually caused by a nuclear-powered bomb exploding above the atmosphere. Gamma rays from the blast hit atoms in the atmosphere, knocking out electrons, which causes a huge surge of energy directed toward the earth. It’s called the Compton effect. The pulse instantly overloads circuits and fries anything with a semiconductor. Including your truck. Including your cell phone. Including just about anything.”

  The man nodded, absorbing this information with surprising calmness. Pulled at his cigarette. Squinted at the sky.

  “So how come we still standing here if they nuked us?”

  “An EMP bomb is detonated above the atmosphere. There’s no nuclear fallout or physical damage from the blast. The primary weapon is the pulse. Depending on where it was, how many there were—that kind of thing—the whole country could be paralyzed.”

  He gestured at Radar’s bicycle. “You’re smart. At least that thing still works.”

  “The human body isn’t affected by an EMP. At least, not directly.”

  “Not directly?”

  “There was some study that said eighty percent of the population would die within six months of a massive nuclear EMP.”

  “Damn,” the man said. “Okay.”

  “Sorry. I don’t mean to scare you, but this could be really serious.”

  The man sighed, turning his phone over in his hand. “I’m guessing these things don’t come back to life, then?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “I’d like to call my wife. She’s gonna be worried.”

  “I know what you mean. I’m trying to track down my parents.”

  They stood, watching as a pair of house sparrows spun above them. The man sucked on the last of his cigarette and threw the stub to the ground. The ember skipped and rolled across the pavement like a furious insect.

  “So how come I ain’t never even heard about this EMP?” the man said. “Seems kind of important to keep the citizens informed of that kinda thing.”

  “The government’s report on an EMP attack came out the same day as the 9/11 Commission’s report.”

  “Bad timing,” the man said, shaking his head. “You know, my niece was born on 9/11. Sweetest little thing. She still doesn’t know.”

  • • •

  RADAR PASSED three more cars stalled in the middle of the road, their drivers nowhere to be seen. A Jeep Cherokee had driven off into the reeds. Its front bumper was submerged in water. A man dressed in a Hawaiian T-shirt sat on the ground next to the Jeep, looking bewildered but otherwise unharmed.

  Radar slowed. “You okay?” he asked. The man didn’t seem to hear him.

  Schuyler Avenue was a mess. As soon as the threat of vehicles had been removed, the street quickly became the domain of the pedestrian. It felt like a carnival, except that people were wandering around, appearing alternately elated and terrified. An old man with a fierce underbite was warbling out “Amazing Grace” on a street corner, the hat in front of him overflowing with coins. Nearby, a policeman argued animatedly with a group of construction workers who were all holding their hard hats in their hands, as if they had stumbled into a funeral. Radar passed by the day care center and s
aw the children busy with their games in the playground, blissfully unaware as their teachers stood whispering in conference by the seesaw.

  He made his way across town, weaving around more stalled cars. Perhaps seasoned from the blackout seven years ago, a number of storeowners had already set up grills in the street, and the air was filled with the heavy scent of cooking meat. And yet the mood now was decidedly different from 2003. Coming on the heels of 9/11, that blackout had felt like a paradise of good vibes and bonhomie as soon as people found out that the grid had failed not because of any attack but rather as the result of an accident. Imagine that: an accident! Such happenstance sounded a citywide time-out to the regularly scheduled grind and gave everyone permission to become everyone else’s best friend, lover, or a cappella partner singing early Guns N’ Roses ballads. But now, as Radar bicycled down Schuyler Avenue, he sensed a degree of collective worry he had not witnessed since the day the towers fell. This feeling of foreboding appeared fundamentally connected to the categoric failure of people’s smartphones, which many clutched tenderly, as if they were holding recently deceased pets. Others simply gazed at the sky.

  Radar passed a restless crowd of people all staring in the same direction. He looked and saw that someone had smashed the front window of the liquor store. The pavement was covered in broken glass, and a few shattered bottles were strewn across the sidewalk. A policeman had his gun drawn and was standing over a man who was handcuffed and lying facedown on the pavement. Radar tried to catch a glimpse of the man’s face. Was he a crazy person? Or was he just a normal guy who had suddenly panicked and gone for the booze? There was a strange tension in the air. The crowd took a couple of steps forward and the policeman, sensing this, waved his gun above his head.

  “Get back!” he said. Then he said something into his walkie talkie, but Radar could plainly see that it was not working, that the policeman was just doing this for effect. Somehow this posturing made the situation all the more scary. Even the police had to pretend they knew what was going on.

  Soon we will all be lying on the ground in handcuffs, thought Radar. Either that or the police will be the ones on the ground.

  With a shiver, he started to wheel away from the scene, but then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He nearly jumped. He turned around and saw a ponytailed man in an oversize AC/DC shirt.

  “You want some ice cream?” the man asked.

  “Ice cream?” Radar repeated. The question seemed at once preposterous and perfectly appropriate. He saw now that the man was towing a wagon filled with large buckets of ice cream, their sides perspiring in the summer heat.

  “Think about it, man. It might be your last chance.”

  “Uh, no thanks,” said Radar. “I’m good.”

  This answer left the man looking incredibly distraught. Radar peeled away from the sad sight of the man tugging at his ice cream wagon and rode on. A couple of blocks later, he passed a car accident, slowing when he saw the swath of blood on the street.

  “Can I help?” he asked a large woman in yellow. Her shirt was covered in bloodstains.

  “They just took him to the hospital,” she said. “Some guy’s VW was still working, and they just put him in there and took him.”

  “Was he okay?” Radar asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She brought a hand to her face. She was shaking. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Does your phone work?”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I want to call my daughter, but I can’t find a phone. I need to talk to her and tell her.” She started to cry. “I just need to hear her voice.”

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. His mother was right: sometimes a lie was better than the truth.

  • • •

  GIVEN THE CHAOS in the streets, he decided to take the back route to his mother’s office. This was a bit of a misnomer, for in the Meadowlands, there really was no front route. It was a land of back doors and frontage roads and side entrances. Radar first cut through the rail yards, passing a group of engineers circled around an inert locomotive. Then he zipped over the old plank bridge to the dirt service road that followed beneath the turnpike. The highway remained astonishingly silent except for a series of helicopters hovering overhead. This gave him hope. If these helicopters still worked, then maybe all was not lost.

  At the padlocked gates of the power substation, which was no doubt powerless, he sliced across two abandoned lots, swerving around a scattering of hypodermic needles and a few gulls working at a dead muskrat carcass. He slipped through a peel hole in the NJ Transit fence, across another set of rail tracks, past the rusted shell of a Chevy Nova that he had named Cassiopeia—in honor of glimpsing that celestial cluster from this very spot one miraculously dark night—until he emerged out onto a road that wound lazily through an organized skirmish of industrial parks. A few cars were stalled on the side of the road. People were sitting on the closely mowed grass in front of the corporate parking lots. A few were walking away from the buildings carrying all of their belongings. One man was pushing his office chair, stacked high with boxes, his tie undone. He looked almost content.

  Ahead loomed the great gleaming silver behemoth of the International Flavor and Aroma Corporation. A perfect box of a building. All mirrors and secrets. It was here that 60 percent of all flavors and smells in America—including the never released Chanel No. 7, the irresistible saccharine mortar filling for Oreos, and the curiously embedded maple syrup taste in McGriddles—were designed, carefully tested, and then mass-produced for taste buds and quivering olfactory epithelia all across the universe. Whenever you popped open a bag, chances are that first whiff, that first familiar sizzle of brackish powder on the tongue, had been sourced from a vat of clear somewhere inside of this magic mirror box.

  The parking lot in front of the building was full of people milling about. Someone had brought out a portable grill and was poking at a large amount of meat that gave off a fruity kind of smell. Several half-empty cartons of anonymous soda lay on the pavement nearby. More boxes of cookies, crackers, and various condiments were scattered around. These had to be IFAC’s test products. In a blackout, they were deemed fair game for consumption.

  A group of women in lab coats had set up a table and chairs and were busy playing what looked like gin rummy. Another woman, in a power suit, was sitting on the back of a pickup truck, crying hysterically as a shoeless, heavyset man tried to comfort her. The whole scene had the feeling of a birthday party for someone who was probably dying.

  Radar stopped his bike.

  “Have you seen Charlene?” he asked a black man picking at a paper plate full of sausage.

  “Charlene?” he said. He pointed to an empty parking space. “She drove out of here.”

  “She drove?” Radar said. “What do you mean, she drove?”

  “Yeah, it was the craziest thing. We’re all stuck here, right, I can’t even get my engine to turn over, and she comes out and starts up the Olds, no problem. We thought she’d been messing with our cars just to prove a point. It’s kind of funny, when you think about it. We’ve been giving her grief about that car for years, but now who’s laughing? I guess that’s just how karma works. She drove five people home and now she’s a hero. She said she was coming back for more.”

  The Olds! His mother still drove an oyster grey Oldsmobile Omega that she had acquired the year after his birth. It had upwards of 200,000 miles on it, but she refused to trade it in.

  “Why change?” she would ask defensively whenever the topic of getting a new car came up. “Why are we always changing? Just because we can? When something works, let it be, I say.” Another example of her coin-operated wisdom that sounded good at the time but was contradicted by the rest of her behavior.

  The Olds. Of course. It was premod
ern circuitry.

  “A mechanical ignition,” said Radar. “Brilliant.”

  “What?”

  “Her car,” he said. “It doesn’t rely on a computer to run it. That’s why it survived the pulse.”

  “She probably knew something we didn’t. I always said that about her. Woman knows something we all don’t. And now she’s the only one who can get the hell out of here.”

  “I’m not sure there’s anywhere to go.”

  “Someone was saying not everywhere got hit. They say the city’s fine. I mean, they don’t have power, but their phones work. Not like here.”

  “The city didn’t get hit?”

  “That’s what someone said.”

  How could that be? Did this mean there hadn’t been a nuclear explosion?

  “You said my mom was coming back here?” said Radar.

  “Charlene? Wait, she’s your mom?” The man squinted at him. “Oh, okay. Okay—I can see it now.”

  “We don’t really look alike.”

  “Hey, my mom’s half Japanese, but you look more Japanese than I do.”

  “I’ve gotten that before.”

  “People are crazy. They think all kinds of things,” the man said. “So yeah, your mom said she was coming back here, but you know Charlene—she says a lot of things.”

  Radar debated waiting around. But no. He should check on Ana Cristina and his father. If Charlene had a working car, she’d be better off than all of them. Either that or she’d become a target. The thought made him shiver.

  • • •

  ON HIS WAY HOME, he stopped by the A&P. To his relief, he found no evidence of looting. No broken windows, no goods strewn about the parking lot. The place was locked up and dark inside. He put his face up against the now helpless automatic doors and could just make out the darkened aisles of products. The pyramid of Pringles cans. The empty checkout counters. The place where Ana Cristina normally stood. Was it only this morning that she had asked him to come over for empanadas? It seemed like ages ago. A lifetime ago. He wondered if she was still inside. He knocked. Waited. No answer. He tried to pull open the automatic doors, but they wouldn’t budge.