by Reif Larsen
“Ana Cristina?” he called. He knocked.
A person appeared in the darkness. A man. Radar tensed, ready to rush in and tackle him, to demand to know what he had done with his girlfriend, but as the figure approached, Radar saw that it was only Javier.
Javier unlocked the doors and pushed them open.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” said Radar.
“You want some?” Javier held up a bottle of water.
“Thanks,” said Radar. The bottle was ice cold. “Is Ana Cristina around?”
“She’s inside,” said Javier.
“She is?” His heart soared. “She’s okay?”
“She looks okay.”
As they were speaking, a Montclair Police car rolled by with lights flashing. The sight of a working police cruiser was startling, given all of the inert vehicles Radar had just seen. The car pulled into the A&P parking lot.
One of the police officers leaned out his window. “What are you doing here?”
“I work here,” said Javier.
“What’s your name?”
“Javier Valdes.” He pulled an apron from out of his back pocket and held it up as evidence.
“And who are you?” the policeman asked Radar.
“He’s okay,” said Javier. “He’s my boy.”
“Well, be careful,” said the policeman. “We got a lot of reports of looting. It might start to get dangerous around here. I’d lock up and get home if I were you.”
As they drove off, Radar said, “Montclair must have electricity.”
“Yeah, everyone does except us,” Javier said.
“How do you know?”
Javier led him back into the store and locked the doors behind them. They walked through aisles of darkened products. Radar could hear the squeak of their shoes against the floor. Javier pointed to a radio sitting on one of the checkout counters. Next to the radio, sitting on the ground, holding her beloved cell phone, was Ana Cristina.
“Oh, hi,” he said, a wave of relief sweeping over him. He kneeled down beside her. “Are you okay?”
Her face instantly changed when she saw him. She wrapped her arms around him and they hugged like this. A small kiss. She was crying.
“Are you okay?” he asked again.
“Yes,” she nodded. “My phone’s dead.”
“We were just listening to the report,” said Javier.
He reached over and turned on the radio. The sound of a voice. A miracle of a voice.
“How does it still work?” said Radar.
“I don’t know. I found it in the walk-in,” said Javier.
“The walk-in?”
Of course. The walk-in freezer had acted like a giant Faraday cage, shielding the radio from the pulse. Why hadn’t he thought of doing this? A simple container of nonferrous metal. A shield. He could’ve saved everything. Houlihan. The station.
They stood listening to the voice on the radio which was speaking in an urgent, clipped tone.
A curfew has been declared for eight P.M. tonight in Essex, Bergen, and Hudson counties. Martial law and a state of emergency remain in effect. Boil advisory for affected areas. The governor’s office is discussing a mandatory evacuation for the affected areas as soon as tomorrow morning. Until then, the governor asks that people limit travel to only essential activities. Senior citizens and those in need of assistance can relocate to several emergency shelters at the designated—
There was a pounding on the glass doors at the front of the store. Radar looked up in terror. He could see the silhouette of a man peering in at them. He was once so critical of those sliding doors, but now they were the only thing between them and what could be a panicking populace.
Javier clicked off the radio. “I’ll go see,” he said. He got up and walked toward the front.
“He’s brave,” said Radar.
“He’s a kid,” said Ana Cristina.
Javier had cracked open the doors and was speaking with the man outside.
“Where’s Lydia?” Radar asked her.
“She freaked and took off,” said Ana Cristina. “I should’ve done the same thing.”
“You’re a good employee.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. Then: “I hope my mama’s okay.”
“I bet she’s okay.”
“She gets nervous.”
“We probably aren’t doing empanadas tonight, are we?”
She reached out and took his hand. They sat like this, hand in hand, and Radar could’ve sat like that forever, as the world slowly crumbled around them.
Javier had closed the door and was going back to the drinks aisle. He fetched two large bottles of water and brought them back to the man.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” whispered Ana Cristina.
“I don’t know, but I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said. “I’d do anything for you.”
She smiled. “You’re so cute.”
“I should go check on my dad.” He sighed. “He’s probably flipping out right now.”
“Can I meet him sometime?” she said. “I mean, if we get out of this?”
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s a little weird. Actually, just to warn you, both of my parents are kind of strange.”
“They made you, didn’t they? They can’t be that bad.”
He was caught again by her belief in him. She actually cared. This was something you could not fake.
“How should I get in touch with you?” he said.
“I don’t know, text me?” she said. “I’m gonna try to get a new phone. I feel, like, naked without it.” She flipped open the blank display.
“I will,” he said. I’ll do the text with you. “I think I’m gonna get my own cell phone, especially after this.”
“You are? Wow. Welcome to the twenty-first century, Radar.”
“I know, right?” he said. “See you soon?” Feeling bold, he leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed him back, and for a brief second, everything was right.
When he stood up, Javier was standing beside him.
“Oh, hi,” Radar said self-consciously. “I was just going. Everything okay up there?”
“He wanted some water. He was going to pay like twenty bucks for it, but I just gave it to him,” he said. He looked down at Ana Cristina. “Don’t tell the boss, okay?”
Radar walked with Javier to the doorway.
“She likes you,” said Javier.
“She does?” A crinkling in his chest. A great roaring in his ears.
Javier nodded. “She’s like the nicest girl I know, so don’t mess with her, okay?”
Radar realized that what he had seen before as a scowl was merely Javier’s look of concentration. Scrutinizing a world that was not inclined to like him.
“You’re a good man, Javier,” he said, offering his hand. “I’m sorry for misjudging you.”
“You and everyone,” said Javier. “My mama said I’m a good book with a bad cover.”
“Yeah,” said Radar. “Me, too.”
• • •
RADAR’S BLOCK WAS TYPICAL of the compressed suburbia you found in Kearny and its environs, where each house rested its chin on a cursory, heavily manicured front yard. On the Fourth of July, Halloween, and Christmas, these diminutive front plots became engulfed by blustery displays of patriotism or typhoons of cobwebs or animatronic Santas that rotated creepily at the waist.
Once upon a time, Kermin had been an eager subscriber to such pageantry.
“We are engaged in uspon. One day we will have in-ground pool,” he used to say, blinking Rudolph lawn ornament in hand.
The uspon. The great climb. Kearny and all the contiguous suburbs just west of the Meadowlands were on a subtle incline such that its residents were forever aware of thei
r precious bodily fluids slowly draining into the swamps. The unspoken immigrant objective was to claw one’s way up to higher and higher elevations, until you eventually graduated to places like Montclair, Livingston, and Maplewood, places far away from the swamps, where one could live in landscaped, cul-de-sac bliss and dig a large, kidney-shaped hole for one’s turquoise-tiled swimming pool. Sinking your pool belowground was the ultimate sign that you had joined the buržoazija and reached the end of the road, baby. A true Amerikanac could command the earth itself.
But while Kermin might have at one point subscribed to the uspon, dreaming of diving boards and paying pool men to suck the scum from his tiled oasis, somewhere along the line to buržoasko blaženstvo, probably right around the time when he shuttered his repair shop for good and hermited himself from the world, the dream had stalled for the Radmanovics, leaving them stuck halfway up the hill, their fluids still draining into the marshes. They weren’t in the shit, but they weren’t that far from it, either. Kermin had signaled his surrender by abandoning first the yearly Rudolph lawn display and then the front-yard maintenance altogether. Oh, if only Deda Dobroslav could have seen this sad display of stalled momentum, this lingering proximity to the shit. To have fought so long against the Communists, the fascists, his own people; to have lost and lost again; to have escaped and fled across a continent and an ocean; to have come so far, only to die in a checkout line and deposit his legacy on the lip of these swamps, a toxic vortex whose centripetal forces would prove too powerful for his offspring to overcome.
Yet seeing Forest Street now, urged into fellowship by the sudden disappearance of electricity, Radar could not help but feel a sense of pride in his home. Why would you want to live anywhere else? The street resembled a collegial, if slightly disorganized, family reunion. Kids squealed in the middle of the road, letting slapshots ricochet against overturned trash cans. Bella and Milos, bedecked in sun hats and matching Hawaiians, presided over the ceremonies from their customary lawn chairs; the Andratti boys tossed a pigskin to their brother in the wheelchair; Genevieve paced worriedly among her gargantuan sunflowers. Mr. Neimann, their next-door neighbor, with his Gorbachev-like wine stain, was waving furiously at a smoking grill with a spatula.
“Rib eye?” he called as Radar went past. “We were saving it for a special occasion, but this seems like as good a time as any.”
“Maybe later,” said Radar. “Have you seen my father?”
“I haven’t seen him in weeks,” he said. “I did hear some kind of bang out behind your house, next to that tower of his. Loud as hell. I was going to go see if everyone was all right back there, but then the lights went out and I forgot all about it.”
“I’ll go check it out,” said Radar. “You heard any updates about the blackout?”
“Bob Deacon said they found out what made it happen.”
“What was it?”
“He didn’t know. He just said they figured it out.” Mr. Neimann lifted the lid of the grill and stabbed at the meat. “You sure you don’t want to take some of this home? It might cheer ol’ Kermin up. I worry about that man sometimes.”
“Thanks. I’ll go ask him.”
“God bless,” Mr. Neimann said. “Anything you need, you let Jean and me know. We’re here to help.”
He made an awkward salute with his spatula. Radar returned the gesture with equal ineptitude.
• • •
THE OLDSMOBILE WAS NOT out front. His father’s Buick was in the driveway, but Charlene was nowhere to be seen. Radar suddenly felt responsible for her. What if a band of hooligans had commandeered her Olds and she’d been left to wander the streets among the panicked mobs? He feared she would not fare well.
“Kermin!” Radar yelled as he opened the front door, though he knew his father was probably not in the main house.
“Kermin!”
He was already walking back through the kitchen, opening the sliding glass doors to the backyard and his father’s domain.
If undersize front yards were the superego, the mantle of decorum, a way to impress and reassure the viewing public that everything was under control, then backyards were the id, the palace of dreams, the impossible private oasis, a five-and-a-half-minute power ballad of whatever this homeowner would do if he or she had one thousand acres of good, clean American soil. The backyards of metro New Jersey contained patios and boat ports and decks and gardens and shrines and doghouses and water features and toolsheds and bocce pits and basketball courts and chicken coops and bonsai nurseries and ancient cannons and a pantheon of wonders that spring from the lavatic recesses of the soul.
In their own backyard, there was a path—carefully lit at all hours by theatrical clamshell lights—that led to the “playpen,” as Charlene called it, the radio shack into which Kermin had retreated, full stop. The shack itself was not very remarkable except for its outsize appendage: a giant 119-foot antenna tower with multiple dipoles and rotatable reflectors mounted up and down its trunk. Even Radar, supposed champion of wave propagation and far-flung DXing, would have been the first to tell you that the tower was obscene and unnecessary, its soaring reticulation shivering upward like the twisted hand of a dying corpse. Here, writ large, was the conundrum of the amateur radioman’s antenna: there were always more signals to catch, always that obscure 5.910-MHz radio wave from Papua New Guinea that could be corralled with just the right forty-five-foot parallel yagi. And so the antenna would grow, collecting its metallic progeny, until it threatened to collapse under its own excess. When he had installed it ten years earlier, the neighbors all served complaints and held town meetings and tried to sue Kermin, but he had done his homework: as long as the tower was under 120 feet and posed no immediate health risk, it was perfectly legal. God bless America.
On the day it was finally complete, when the cranes had left and the very last dump truck had hauled away its load, Kermin, bleeding freely from the forehead after being stabbed by some errant antenna spoke, came into the living room and announced: “We are now part of the world.”
The opposite was true. One year later, he finally shuttered his shop, a business that had been failing steadily since its opening. It could now be freely said out in the open: the Sony Watchman™ had been a flop. Kermin, long blind to the writing on the wall, had been slow to adapt to new, successful technologies. For years, Ravna Gora Communications had languished as one of those sad, musty repair stores with no one coming or going save its hunchbacked owner, haunting his collection of junk like a ghost of spare parts past. After the shop’s closure, with no real reason to leave the house, Kermin had hunkered down in his shack at the base of that monstrosity. He now left their property only to fetch an obscure part at J & A Specialties Electronics or to walk the banks of the Passaic River when a technical problem was particularly vexing.
The strange thing was that for all of their supposed overlap in interest and expertise, Kermin would never talk with Radar about his work in the shack. Radar had learned long ago to stop asking. He had also accepted that no matter his own qualifications, he would never gain entrance into that sacred ground. Such a prohibition might’ve seemed gratuitous once upon a time, but now it was just another fact of life. The closest he had come was several lingering peeks when the door was momentarily left ajar, before Kermin noticed the trespass and snapped the door shut like a lizard’s mouth.
“This world is so big,” he once said. “I just want one space that is only mine.”
After the tower went up, Radar had asked if he could tap the mighty antenna to service his own modest ham station in his bedroom. Kermin had refused. Late one night, Radar tried to run a discreet coaxial line into the tower’s box, but Kermin found it on his inspection rounds the next day and ripped up the cable.
“We must not let others do work we should be doing,” Kermin said, dangling the offensive wire like a demised serpent.
“But I’m your son,” said Radar.
>
“This is the lesson: find your own frequency,” said Kermin. “If you want tower, buy tower, and place tower next to mine. But please don’t cast signal shadow. And you might want to make less than ten meters high so the neighbor won’t get feisty again.”
Radar never did end up building his own tower.
• • •
ON THE DOOR TO the shack, his father had hung the alphanumerics of his call sign, K2W9, carefully burned into a board of stained maple alongside a framed picture of a cartoon radio tower expelling boisterous, parenthetical signals. Radar rapped out a K, dah-dit-dah—•—, on the door. In the past, confronting the shack had always been a reminder of the balance of power in this world, for it was still a forbidden place, a monument to his father’s tenuous generational hold on the reins of authority. But now that the current was gone, the shack suddenly seemed sad and useless, its antenna a ridiculous hubristic appendage. What would he find inside? His father weeping amid a sea of dead receivers?
Radar knocked again. Dah-dit-dah—•—. Dah-dit-dah—•—.
No answer. All was quiet.
He tried the door, assuming it would be double-bolted, but found, to his surprise, that it was unlocked. He tentatively pushed it open. His internal motor hiccuped, upshifted, spinning its gears at this rare chance to glimpse the shack’s coveted interior.
“Hello? Tata? You in there? There’s been a . . .”
An intense wave of burnt metal wafted out from the gloom. He coughed, reeling backwards. The smell made him shudder and gag at the same time.
“Tata? Are you okay?” he called into the gloom, knowing even as he said it that if anyone was inside there, it was highly unlikely they would be okay. He lifted the collar of his shirt above his nose and ventured forth.