by Reif Larsen
“It’s strange, but I can’t feel him anymore,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”
“We’ll find him. I’ll go to Xanadu and then I’ll check the hospitals if I have to. He didn’t go far. He couldn’t have gone far.”
“The hospitals?” she said.
“I don’t think it came to that, but we have to be open to—”
“Wait, don’t go,” she said suddenly. She dropped the figurine and grabbed his arm, her fingers digging into his skin. “Don’t.”
“Ow, Mom. Let go. Easy.”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t go. You’re all I have left.”
“It’s gonna be fine, Mom. He’ll turn up. You know him. He probably freaked out when the pulse happened.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. I should’ve listened to him . . . and now it’s too late.”
He was trying to pry off her fingers. “Mom, just let go for a second.”
“He was right the whole time.”
He stopped. There was a note of surrender in her voice that had caught his attention. Her hands suddenly went limp.
“Right about what?” he said.
“Oh, my sweet,” she said quietly. “I can’t believe what I did.”
“What did you do?” he said. “You’re kind of freaking me out right now.”
She was very still. Her eyes, looking out into an invisible distance.
“I . . .” her mouth opened, hung there. “I almost killed you.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “You saved—”
“I did!”
Startled, he looked at her. The moment hung, swayed, tottered. Almost on cue, the record began to skip.
“Your seizures,” she whispered.
“Oh, Mom,” he said. “Stop. I can go back on my meds if you—”
“No, you don’t understand. It was all my fault.” Her eyes were filling with tears. “Your seizures, your hair. Everything. It was all because of me.”
He got up to fix the record. When he clicked the needle into a new groove, Caruso’s tenor again filled the room. The lightness of his voice drifting over a pincushion of notes.
“Mom,” he said, still from the floor. “A lot’s just happened. Tata’s not here, I understand. But don’t be too hard on yourself, okay? Just go easy. They’ll put the power back on, we’ll find Kerm—”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“I am listening to you.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “You were black. I mean, when you were born, you were black.”
“Wait,” he said. “What?”
All at once, he was overcome by a deep and acutely painful sense of déjà vu. As if she had already told him this. As if he had already sat by this record player, listening to this exact melody, looking up at his mother as she sat on the bed in this precise way. It had all happened before. It was as if they were merely rehearsing lines from a play.
“What do you mean, I was black?” Hearing himself say the words again for the first time.
“I don’t know why I did it. He told me not to go.” The glint of tears on her cheeks.
“Did what?” he said.
She got up from the bed.
“Did what?” he repeated. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I just needed to find out what had gone wrong.” She was moving the bedside table, the smelling bottles tinkling against one another, one spilling onto the floor, filling the room with a strong scent of lilies. The candle trembled.
She was down on her hands and knees, prying at a loose floorboard.
“Hey, Mom. Don’t do that,” he said. “What’re you doing?”
He was about to go over and stop her when the board came up and then she was reaching inside the floor and pulling out something from the depths. A folder. Manila. Dusty. She wiped it off, came over, laid it in his lap.
“What’s this?” he said.
“It’s for you,” she said.
Fig. 3.8. “Black Baby’s Condition Remains a Mystery”
From the New York Post, April 25, 1975
Inside, there were pages and pages of newspaper clippings. He moved over to the candlelight and squinted at the text, though, again, he already somehow knew what he would find. “Caucasian Couple Give Birth to Black Newborn at St. Elizabeth’s,” “Easter Miracle in New Jersey,” “Doctors at a Loss to Explain Child’s Appearance.” He saw his name. His parents’ names.
His hands felt as if they were not his own. He saw a copy of a birth certificate, the blurry picture of a baby lying in an incubator. He had seen this picture before. He felt a rushing sensation in his ears. Another burning wash of the familiar frissoned his body’s circuity.
“I’ve never shown this to anyone,” she said.
“This . . .” He tapped the picture of the incubated baby. “This is me?”
“Not even Kermin,” she said.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”
She didn’t say anything.
He felt the heat in his face. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me about this? I mean, this seems pretty fucking important, right? Pretty fucking important to let your son in on . . .”
“I know—”
“Were you just never going to tell me?”
She was weeping suddenly, uncontrollably, and his anger parted as he watched her crumple onto the bed.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, all right. It’s okay.”
“Your father . . . Your father didn’t like to talk about it,” she said finally, wiping her face. “So we just left it. We left it and hoped it would go away.”
“But—” He was staring at a journal article, “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male.” A diagram of skin cells surrounded by a mote of long, polysyllabic words. “I don’t understand. Why was I black? I mean, how is that even possible?”
She slid down beside him on the floor. Put her hand on the page, touching a cross-section of dermis.
“It was just the way of things,” she said slowly. “There were theories. There were theories, but no one could prove anything.”
Radar looked over at the record spinning in circles. Caruso’s voice was full of quiet counsel. He blinked, trying to make room for this. Trying to imagine himself emergent, a black newborn.
“Fuck,” he said.
“I know, I know.”
“So then . . . wait.” The wheels spinning. “What does that make Kermin?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is he my father?”
She was silent.
“Mom.”
“There were tests. They tested his blood.”
“And?”
“The doctor said he was your father.”
He turned. “But I’m asking you. Is Kermin my father?”
“Yes! Yes, of course. I mean . . .” She sighed. She rubbed her face. “I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t want to believe it.”
“Didn’t want to believe what?”
She was silent.
“Didn’t want to believe what, Mom?”
“It was just one night. He only came back for one night,” she said quietly.
“Who came back for one night?”
She turned back to him and closed her eyes. “Oh, Lord.”
“Who came back for one night?”
“I never knew his real name. T.K. That was it. I had known him from before—when I first moved to New York. And then we lost touch. And right when your father and I were getting married, he came back. He showed up on my doorstep one day.” Her eyes glazed over. “He was from Minnesota. He had a laugh. He had a way of laughing . . .”
“He was a black guy?”
Sh
e nodded.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“I still couldn’t believe it. Even when you came out how you did. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, I thought. And then there was all this coverage about you, and I thought for sure that he would show up and say, ‘That’s mine, that’s my kid. Give me back my kid.’”
“But I was your kid too.”
“Yeah, but for a while it didn’t feel like that.”
“And so did he?”
“Did he what?”
“Did he come back?”
“No.”
“And you never tried to find him again?”
She shook her head.
He looked down at the diagram of the skin cell. Trying to imagine T.K., this black man from Minnesota, from whom he had possibly sprung.
“Did Kermin know?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He was so quiet. That was his way of getting through things. But he always knew more than he let on. I mean, how could he not know, right? You would look at you and you would look at us, and it was obvious that something had gone wrong.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“If you don’t want to believe, if you do enough not to believe, if you see a doctor and he tells you a whole other possibility . . . then you believe what you want,” she said. “But your father . . . he was so . . . so patient. He loved you from the moment you were born. He always loved you, even when I couldn’t take care of you. Even when I fell apart. He never stopped loving you.”
“But,” Radar said, suddenly feeling dizzy. “But . . . I’m not black anymore.”
“You’ve got to understand,” she said. “I became obsessed. I became obsessed for all the wrong reasons . . .”
“So what happened?”
“I just got this idea in my head that there was a solution. Some kind of medical solution.”
“What do you mean, medical solution? My father was black. What other solution could there be?”
“I didn’t see it like that. It was like that wasn’t an option. That was impossible. Everything else became possible. I was searching for the possible. And then we found these people . . .”
“What people?”
“You’re going to hate me if I tell you.”
“I’m not going to hate you,” he said. “What people?”
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. “Well, we saw all these doctors, and no one could tell me what had happened to you. And then, out of the blue, I get this letter. And it was from these people. These scientists. They were in Norway. They said they could help us. And we shouldn’t have . . . but we did.”
“Did what?”
“We took you there and . . .” She grimaced. “And they electrocuted you.”
“I’m sorry, you what?”
She took his hand. “Oh, Ray Ray, I didn’t think it would actually work! We were just there to—I don’t even know. But it did! It did work! I mean, it made you look how you are now, but it also gave you everything else. Your epilepsy. Your hair. Everything.” She was losing it again. “And it was all . . . all my idea. It was all my fault . . . Oh, my sweet. My sweet. I’m such a bad person. I’m wicked. I’m such a wicked, selfish person.”
He was trying to understand. He no longer cared if she was falling apart or not. This was his life. This was about him. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “They electrocuted me? How?”
Hearing the hardness in his tone, she took a gulp of air and tried to bring herself back. “Your father, he would be—”
“My father?”
“Kermin would’ve been able to explain it much better than I could, but they connected you to this machine, like a pulse generator . . . This is what made me think of it, after all these years. And they zapped your skin . . . I didn’t understand it all. But look, that’s the point—there was nothing wrong with you.”
“I was black.”
“You were perfect, honey. Kermin said this, he kept saying that you were just fine as you were, but I didn’t listen to him. I wasn’t listening to anyone. I told you, I got totally crazy with this idea that there was an answer that could make everything better, and then that answer became this thing that we did to you.” She paused. “I was terrified of being a failure. Of being a mother who couldn’t take care of you. Of anyone. And so I did this thing that was exactly the thing I didn’t want to do. That’s always been my problem: I figure out what’s exactly the worst thing to do, the thing that will ruin everything else, and then that’s what I do. It’s cowardice, is what it is. And after doing what I did to you . . . for many years, I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. I hated myself so much, it hurt just to get up in the morning. But your father . . . he always stuck by me. Even when I couldn’t bear living another day. He told me we still had you. And it was true. We had you. We have you. Oh.”
She reached out for him, but Radar got up, the clippings spilling across the floor. He went over to the bed and fell backwards onto the comforter. Breathing. Trying to let it settle. He stared up at the ceiling, recognizing the same pattern of cracks from his childhood. The cracks resembled a wounded whale. The whale had been wounded for many years. He could hear his mother sniffling on the floor below.
“So,” he said slowly. “So . . . I was born black? Like actually black.”
“No,” she said. “You were born dark. Very dark. But that’s the point, honey: You’re weren’t black. You weren’t anything. You’re Radar! My Radar. You’ve always been my Radar. You’re perfect.”
He lay there, hearing her words drift over him. But instead of feeling a great and terrible anger, as he had first expected he might feel, he was filled with a terrific sense of lightness, as if his whole body were lifting off the ground.
“I’m black!” he whispered to the wounded whale.
“No,” Charlene cried. She came up to him on the bed. “You aren’t black.”
“I’m black!”
“You are not black, honey. That’s not what I meant to say. I meant to apologize. I meant to say that I’m sorry . . . I’m so incredibly, incredibly sorry for what I did. I’ve managed to live, but only because I had to. I don’t think I can forgive myself. And . . . and I don’t expect you to forgive me, either. But just know I love you. I’ve always loved you,” she said. “I can’t imagine my life without you.”
Radar saw himself lying in the bed, saw the two of them in this little dim room surrounded by a great, dark city. As if every moment in his life had merely been a prelude to this moment. All at once, the world felt right. Knowable.
“I just didn’t want it to be a secret anymore,” he heard her say. “It all seems so pointless now. What was I trying to do?”
“It’s not pointless, Mom,” he said. He sat up. His arms felt limber. He felt as if he could scale a mountain. He reached for her wet face and kissed her on the forehead. “Thank you.”
She looked bewildered. “You aren’t mad?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel like I was asleep. And now I’m awake.”
She studied him. “I could’ve so easily killed you,” she said. “Oh, I can’t even think about it.”
“I’m not dead.”
She nodded, biting her lip. “I know.”
“I’m alive.” He felt alive. More alive than he’d ever been before.
“I know.”
“Mom.”
He hugged her, and she fell into him. They were like this for some time, listening to the hollow click of the record player, the scents of lily around them, and then he broke their embrace.
“Listen, I’m going to go find him. I promise I’ll come back, okay?”
“I don’t think you’ll find him.”
“I will. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, I promise. Just stay here and don’t go anywhere.”
“Y
ou’ll be careful?” she said. “You want to take my car?”
As soon as she said it, she winced. Radar had never gotten a license because of his epilepsy.
“Thanks, but I’ll bike,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s probably easier to bike at this point anyway. They’ll never find me.”
He reached into his backpack. “Here. Here’s a flashlight. And I’ll light some more candles.”
“It’s okay. I can do it.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve managed this long. I can fend off the beasts for one more night.” She picked up the figurine and placed it on the bedside table, next to the sniffing bottles. “He’ll protect me.”
Radar gathered up the folder, aware again of the hole still looming in the floor.
“Can I keep this for a little bit?”
“Of course. It’s yours. I’ve been saving it for you.”
He went over and placed a hand on her shoulder. She took hold of it.
“Come back, please,” she said. “Don’t leave me alone.”
“Mom.”
“You promise you don’t hate me?” she whispered.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said. “Not one thing.”
7
Out on Forest Street, Radar emerged into a darkness he did not recognize. He realized he had never seen his neighborhood in such a state, released from the angular confines of the streetlights. Above, he could see stars, stars that had never been there before. But no: they had always been there; they had just been hidden by a scrim of light. To see the stars, you must be able to first see the night.
“Hello,” he whispered heavenward. “Welcome to New Jersey.” And when he said this, he knew he was actually talking to himself.
To the east, a faint, withered glow. So. The city had already gotten its power back, while they were left to suffer in the dark. But what a dark it was. A dark beyond reproach. The kind of dark that was, is, and always will be.
Since he was little, he had maintained a fraught relationship with the dark. Darkness had come to represent not the cyclical arrival of the night, but rather his periodic forced flights from consciousness. To feel the darkness creep into the edges of his vision meant that an involuntary departure from his body must soon follow. Darkness meant the absence of time. Or, more precisely: the absence of him from time. The world continued to spin without him, he hanging suspended between this universe and the next, waiting for the darkness to beat back its retreat and the light to take hold of him again. He had thought a lot about that world—the world that continued to spin while he was gone, the world that did not include him. It was almost impossible to comprehend. The observed could not exist without the observer. If he removed himself from the equation, what remained? The equation could not hold.