by Reif Larsen
Once, when he was five, while they were waiting in the emergency room after one of his grand mals, Radar had turned to his mother.
“Why do I disappear like that?” he asked.
It was a complicated question. Or maybe it was a simple question. Regardless, Charlene had not prepared an answer. The query triggered the first of what would become a long series of awkward explanations that his mother revised and honed over the years. These explanations hinged upon the continuous misuse of phrases like “You’re such a special child” and “There’s no one quite like you” and, worst of all, “It was God’s choice.” Radar could sniff the stink of these answers but could not decipher why his mother was being so shifty. Kermin never ventured into such fraught territory. He had a habit of leaving the room when questions arose about Radar’s condition. Finally, Charlene’s explanations had culminated in that glass cathedral of a term, “Radar’s syndrome.” His syndrome. When she stumbled upon this conceit, she immediately put all of her eggs into this basket, realizing its genius, for the diagnosis was essentially a tautological conversation stopper. Everything could be blamed on the syndrome. The syndrome could explain all, and yet the syndrome itself could not be explained.
Alone in the middle of Forest Street, Radar shivered. There was no such thing as Radar’s syndrome. There had never been a syndrome. There was only him. He was free.
He switched on a flashlight and split open the darkness. Using a bit of duct tape, he strapped the light onto the front of Houlihan’s dashboard. A droopy, but serviceable, headlight.
He took out Kermin’s portable transceiver and clicked it two slots to AM mode. After checking to see if WCCA was up and running (it was not), he trolled the frequencies until a woman’s voice sprouted from out of the bed of static:
Jersey City, Newark, and several other towns in Essex, Bergen, and Hudson counties continue to reel from the baffling blackout that has plagued northern New Jersey today. Experts are now calling the incident “not an accident” and a “deliberate attack.” Authorities are still mystified as to why all electronics in the affected zone have also failed, leading some to believe a so-called e-bomb was detonated in the region. Members of the police and fire departments would not comment on the source of the blackout, saying their primary task was to keep people safe and help return essential services to operation. But as National Guard troops flood into Newark this evening, many government agencies, including the FBI and Homeland Security, have sent in representatives to help solve the mystery of why and how the electrical grid was so paralyzed in today’s incident. A warehouse in Paterson was briefly surrounded by law enforcement officials, but this turned out to be a false alarm—
Radar clipped off the radio.
Jesus Christ. They were coming. They were coming, and he was abandoning his mother alone with a stick figure. How could he do such a thing? He needed to defend her against the troops. He stopped and turned the bike around. A soft glow emanated from the bedroom window upstairs. The distant cajolement of Caruso hitting a high note.
No. He had to keep going. If he didn’t, he would never know.
She would have to fend for herself.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “Stay safe.”
He put his crocodile boot into the pedal clip and pushed forward. His headlight bounced slightly, spooling forth its little patch of light, and he followed, soothed by the simple feeling of movement through space and time. After hearing such a vastly revised version of his birth, his questionable lineage, his apparent electrocution, the true source of his condition, he had expected to feel overwhelmed, askew, for his elemental sense of balance to be forever changed. But in truth, he did not actually feel all that different. Rather, he felt like himself—only more so, as if he had just come up for air after holding his breath for a very long time.
He glided down the darkened street, following his little bouncing patch of light. Rule #4: We will be what we are, and what we are is what we will be. No matter if his parents had electrocuted him in Norway. No matter if he had lost his hair, had developed epilepsy and an eternal sense of inadequacy. No matter if Kermin was not his real father. All that mattered right now was following this little patch of light to Xanadu. Everything would work out if he could only get to Xanadu.
He had been bicycling for only a minute when he came upon a red-and-blue blur of lights strobing across the neighborhood. Two police cars were parked nose to nose. A roadblock.
An officer got out of one of the cars and motioned for Radar to stop.
“There’s a curfew,” the officer said. “You can’t be outside right now.”
He could see, against the psychedelic wash of the police lights, that the officer was a black man.
“All right,” said Radar. He felt a very strong impulse to tell this man everything that had just happened—how he had just found out that he was also black, or at least had been born black. He knew such a declaration would most likely not go over very well and possibly get him into a lot of trouble, so he just stood there, slack-jawed, staring at the man.
“Did you hear me? You can’t be outside right now,” the officer repeated, a hint of irritation in his voice. “You’ve got to get home.”
“All right,” Radar said again. Do not say that you are black! You may want to say this right now, but this is not how people talk about these kinds of things.
“Sir, did you hear what I said? You cannot be out right now. You’ve got to go home.”
“I’m going home,” Radar said suddenly. “I’m headed there right now.”
“What were you doing?”
“Me? I was . . . buying a chicken. For my mother.”
“A chicken?”
“Yes. My mother loves chicken.” Oh no.
Radar had always been a terrible liar. The effort of fabricating even the smallest of untruths immediately sent him into a surreal tailspin. His lies could never be simple; they quickly ballooned into elaborate explanations that soon popped under the weight of their own flawed logic. When he was six years old, he had told his first real lie after shoplifting a pack of size-C batteries from the Korean bodega down the road. Kermin had caught him guiltily stroking the alkaline wonders on their porch.
“Where’d you get those?” his father had asked, standing very tall and still.
“From . . . the battery man,” Radar said without thinking.
“Battery man? What is that?”
“It’s a man . . . He gives you batteries. He gives batteries to everyone.” The lie grew and grew before their eyes, yet even little Radar knew the world couldn’t sustain such a character. Batteries were a precious commodity, not something that could be gifted to strangers by some Peter Pan of electricity.
Now, as the red and blue lights illuminated the police officer’s expression of blatant incredulity, Radar felt the same sinking feeling in his loins. He knew he would crumple under the lightest of cross-examinations. He would never be able to sustain a narrative in which his mother loved chicken so much that she would send him out on a long excursion in the middle of a blackout. It was hopeless. They might as well arrest him right now for perjury, libel, and slander.
Much to Radar’s surprise, however, the officer seemed to relax and then waved him on.
“You better get the old lady some chicken,” he said. “But be careful, you hear? Lot of ways to get hurt right now.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” Radar said. He wanted to hug the officer, and again had this dangerous impulse to declare his newfound identity as a black man who was no longer black. Again, he resisted the urge and instead asked, “Did they figure out what happened yet?”
The officer shrugged. “I’m just doing what they tell me.”
“But do they think it was a terrorist?”
“Look, I don’t know any more than you, son. And frankly, I don’t give a damn if it was al-Qaeda or the Russians or
who now. I’m going on my seventeenth straight hour.”
“I don’t think it was a terrorist,” said Radar. “I think it was an accident.”
“Well, that’s some kind of accident,” the officer said. “How ’bout we just keep moving and keep this street clear, all right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Radar. He wheeled his bike a couple of paces and then turned back.
“I’m with you,” he said.
“All right, son,” said the officer. “We’re with you, too. God bless.”
“God bless.”
After this, Radar switched off his headlight and rode on, commando style. Whenever he saw a blockade or an emergency vehicle, he would veer onto a different block, weaving his way northward. At some point he realized he did not actually know how to get to Xanadu and East Rutherford. In his haste to leave the house, he had consulted neither map nor atlas to untangle the web of highways and byways that knitted the Meadowlands into an impenetrable tapestry of cloverleafs and interchanges. Once he got far enough north, there was actually no way to safely cut east across the swamps by bike. Xanadu mall was not a biking destination. There were no bike paths in this land of automobiles, NJ Transit, and the occasional Boston Whaler.
He had actually been to East Rutherford only once, when, as a twenty-four-year-old, he had attended a Bruce Springsteen concert at the Continental Airlines Arena. He had gone alone, and from the highest possible point in the stadium he had watched the Boss roll and tumble and sweat and stir that magical Jersey elixir with his golden Telecaster, and afterwards, streaming out of the stadium with the rest of the blissful New Jerseyans, he had felt a great pride for his home, as if this were the one true place on earth. The concertgoers had a dazed look on their faces, as though they had just witnessed Jesus turning water into wine, and maybe they had. For one night, at least, the Boss had transformed those swamps into a paradise. After that show, Radar never had the desire to go see another concert. Sometimes, glimpsing the divine just once was enough.
But now, trapped by the constricting geography of wetland and darkness, he was not sure which way to go. He tried to conjure a mental map of the Meadowlands, tried to picture Bruce’s voice calling out to him from somewhere in the middle of all that night.
He rode on, blindly, past rows and rows of darkened homes, past a cemetery, past a silent gas station, through an intersection filled with stalled cars, past an empty city bus frozen like a submarine in the middle of the road. Everything and nothing looked familiar—it was all part of a long and endless Jersey sprawl.
He was just about on the verge of giving up and seeking help from some bystander when out of the darkness he saw an oasis of red light appear. It looked at first as if an alien ship had landed, but as he got closer he saw that it was in fact the sign for Medieval Times, that beloved Lyndhurst medieval-themed dinner theater that featured live jousts as you downed your mutton and gruel. The sign was such a startling sight, after he had seen no lights at all, that Radar nearly crashed from the beauty of it. He felt like a caveman witnessing fire for the first time.
Radar had staged his birthday party at this establishment every year without fail between the ages of ten and fifteen. The number of friends in attendance had slowly dwindled from eleven the first year to only one in that final year—a snotty, heavily myopic boy named Jurqal, who had an unhealthy obsession with anything to do with the Middle Ages. Radar had not been back since. Even now, seeing the glowing Gothic letters in front of two armor-clad knights preparing to collide in mid-joust instantly brought back the same bitter, coppery taste in the back of his throat—a Pavlovian recall of the rejection he had experienced years ago when confronting Jurqal’s sole RSVP.
But how had Medieval Times kept their lights on? What kind of electric sorcery were they practicing inside there? He stared at the letters, hot and proud against an unending sky.
Medieval Times! they shouted. Medieval Frickin’ Times!
More important, he now knew where he was. The entrance to the highway was just beyond. It was the only way across those swamps, and he decided to risk it.
Rule #34: If the choice is between no and yes, choose yes (unless you must choose no).
He turned on his headlight and hit the on-ramp at full speed, weaving around three stalled cars. And then he was on the highway. It was a rush. As he passed more stalled cars, he slalomed between the stripes of the centerline, then drifted to the breakdown lane. How often did one get to bicycle down a highway like this? The world was his private playground.
He noticed the cars beginning to thin out, and then he was passing a tow truck as it was levering up a sedan. Next to the truck was a police car.
Drat! He looked in the dentist mirror attached to his helmet and saw the police car start up and turn around behind him. Lights ablaze. It was coming for him. Ahead, the highway was completely open, devoid of cars. A prison. He saw the stiff rumba of red lights blanket his world as the police car came up right behind him. The car gave him a quick woop woop of its siren: • •, a careless little “I” in Morse code.
The car’s loudspeaker came to life: “Please pull your bicycle to the side of the road and dismount.”
Radar responded to this directive by bicycling harder, swerving this way and that, like he had seen gazelles do on the savanna.
“PULL OVER TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD! THIS IS NOT A REQUEST! THIS IS AN ORDER! YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO RIDE A BICYCLE ON THIS ROAD! PULL OVER NOW!”
Up ahead, he saw the highway slope down a grassy knoll. An idea occurred to him. He had once seen a pretty awesome getaway performed by a cyclist in a movie on one of his father’s pocket televisions. He was not sure whether such a maneuver could work beyond the confines of a two-inch screen, but at this point anything was worth a shot.
Radar slowed his bike and pulled over to the breakdown lane. The police car rolled to a stop behind him. In his dentist mirror, he watched as the officers slowly got out of their car. It was then that he remembered that the getaway he was thinking of had actually been performed by a man on a motorcycle and not a recumbent bicycle.
Crap. Well, it was too late now. He couldn’t risk getting caught. Not now. Holding his breath, he waited for the policemen to approach, and when they had almost reached him, without warning, he swung his bike to the right and pedaled down the grassy slope, which led to a darkened little outcrop of bushes. Behind him he heard the policemen yelling and he winced, half expecting a volley of bullets to come flying his way, but then he was riding through the trash-covered underbrush, the branches and bracken whipping at his windshield. He went up and over a culvert before spotting a chain-link fence up ahead. He was certain he was going to crash into it and that would be that, but at the very last possible moment he saw a small hole in the fence, which he just managed to steer through, only to suddenly feel himself go airborne, launched without warning off a four-foot ledge. Time stood still. In midflight, he prepared himself for the spectacular wreck that was sure to follow, but somehow, miraculously, he managed to land on two wheels, swerving wildly before righting the ship. His jerry-rigged flashlight went flying off his bicycle, the hula girl shuddered, and he heard something snap in the chassis, but he paid no heed, and pedaled on like a demon, following the road as it cut beneath the highway through an underpass.
He glanced in his dentist’s mirror. He could see neither the police officers nor much of anything, really. It was dark. Truly dark beneath this underpass.
Holy mother of God. His heart was pounding, but he continued to bicycle forward as best be could, hoping not to crash into the walls of the tunnel.
“Blow me shivers!” he said, out of sheer nervous energy, the words echoing off the concrete underpass.
It was not quite the line he imagined he would say if this were a book or a movie, as it sounded more like the catchphrase of a randy pirate, but it was all he had to offer.
Rule #101: We are more th
an our words & our words are more than us.
Somehow, he emerged from the underpass without calamity. He was just beginning to wonder where the hell he had ended up when he reached the top of a slight hill, and there, looming ahead of him like a giant oasis, was the Meadowlands Stadium and the mess of the Xanadu mall behind it, all aglow in construction lights.
In truth, he had expected another seizure to overtake him. There were way too many signals going on inside his brain for there not to be some kind of electrical malfunction. He waited for the darkness to come calling, but nothing happened—besides the percolation of adrenaline streaming down his legs, he actually felt okay. Better than okay. Like a frickin’ champ.
Blow me shivers!
As he bicycled into the mall area, he was astonished by the vast amount of light illuminating every square inch of the road, the construction site, the building, the parking lots. At some point he must have passed beyond the boundary of the pulse, across an invisible barrier that separated the worlds of light and darkness. He stared at a streetlight as it buzzed above him. Such a simple thing, but a miracle nonetheless. The blackout already felt like a dream.
The mall complex was a maze of construction fencing and trailers and backhoes and dump trucks parked at odd angles. Radar glided among them all, trying to remain inconspicuous as he cut through various work zones abandoned for the evening. As he approached the behemoth of Xanadu, its hideous striped siding glowing eerily in the light, he wondered how on earth he was going to find the sender of the message amid all of this. Charlene was right: the place was not even open yet. You could spend days wandering its cavernous interior. It was not even clear how you entered the complex, considering that much of the building was blocked off by an imposing moat of construction barriers. The developers were insistent on this point: You can look, good people of New Jersey, but you better not touch.