by Reif Larsen
Fearing that the police from the highway might reappear, Radar decided it was best to get inside as quickly as possible. He doubled back along the frontage road and found an unmanned gate in the chain-link fence. After stopping his bike, he discovered, to his surprise, that the padlock had not been secured. Maybe the contractors had grown complacent. He squeaked open the hinges of the gate, shuffled his bike inside the barrier, and closed the gate behind him.
He was in.
Ahead, he saw the entrance to one of the multilevel parking structures that cradled the mall in a great cement palm. Above him, a massive red-and-yellow-striped structure turned and inclined skyward, like a giant HVAC duct. This had to be the indoor ski slope. According to the plan, people would come and park in these lots on blistering ninety-degree days, they would come and rent skis by the hour, they would ski up and down an artificial hill chilled to subfreezing temperatures inside this giant HVAC duct, and they would laugh and high-five each other’s gloved hands and say, “Friends, this is really living.” Radar had to admit it sounded pretty nice. Particularly the friends part.
He bicycled beneath the ski slope and down into the yawning mouth of the parking garage. Once inside the darkened lot, he saw the blinking lights of a security vehicle coming from the other end. But by this point, he had become a professional at avoiding the Man. He veered sharply to the right and stopped behind a dumpster, breathing hard. The yellow security lights slowly approached, illuminating the cavernous garage in a lazy, sweeping motion. They came up next to him and paused. They must have seen him. He clenched the pedal with his crocodile boot, ready to flee, but then the lights began to move again, fading away into the darkness of the lot. He exhaled.
Where to?
He rooted around in his fanny pack, searching for the scrap of paper with the code on it. He came across the piece of paper with Ana Cristina’s number on it. The sight of those numerals buzzed his wires. How far away she seemed now! He hoped she was still okay, that her mother had not flipped out. He felt a strong urge to see her, to be near her. Soon. But first things first.
After some more rooting, he found what he was looking for:
XANADU P4 D26.
P4 D26? What could it mean? It could be anything, really. He was not a professional code breaker. There were not enough letters to do a letter frequency analysis. He needed some clue, a crib to crack the code.
Dejected, he dismounted his bicycle, swung out the kickstand, and sat down on the ground. He was exhausted. He was exhausted and he was in the middle of a parking garage beneath some abandoned mall, caught on a wild goose chase for a mystery acquaintance of his father’s. It dawned on him that he might in fact be in the completely wrong place, that this Xanadu might not be the Xanadu in the coded message. What then? He had abandoned his mother for nothing. Left her to the wolves as he whiled away the time in a concrete bunker.
He shook his head and looked down at his sad, imperfect body. Who was he kidding? He was still Radar. Just because he now knew the truth of his origins didn’t discount all of his defects. He was still broken.
And that was when he saw it: there, between his legs. In yellow paint.
C21.
For a moment he was confused. And then he realized what it was.
Of course. He looked up and saw a sign hanging above him. PARKING LEVEL 2. It was not some complicated cipher text. Xanadu P4 D26 was a parking space.
Radar jumped back on his bike and took the spiral ramp down and down to the grey semi-darkness of parking level 4, an apparently forgotten domain lit only by the glow of an orange exit sign pointing to nowhere. Well, at least there was that, even if it did point straight at a wall. He had learned not to take illumination for granted anymore.
What could possibly be down here?
Nothing, it seemed. He slowly rode through the empty lot. A. B. C. There were a few lonely traffic cones. A turquoise port-a-john.
He reached section D, a remote corner of the parking lot. 7 8 9 10 11 12 . . . 22 23 . . .
He stopped. There, in the dimness, was one of the most peculiar sights he had ever seen.
It was a tiny house. There was no other way to describe it. A single-story house—perhaps ten feet wide, complete with shingled roof, white lace curtains, and gutters—built on top of a small four-wheeled trailer, sitting in the middle of parking space D26. A yellowish glow came from within.
Radar closed his eyes and opened them again. The house was still there. Could it be real? He parked his bike and approached cautiously.
This, he decided, must be his Xanadu.
After a moment’s hesitation, he walked up the three stairs to the front entrance. On the door he spotted a brass plate and the symbol of an eye.
He stood, took a deep breath, and then rapped out his father’s initial: dah di dah—•—.
8
Come in!” said a voice.
Radar cautiously opened the door. The house was composed of only a single room. The room looked to be a workshop, much like his father’s radio shack, lit by an overhanging light and filled with all manner of mechanical parts. In contrast to the chaos of his father’s workspace, however, this room was infinitely organized. Hundreds of little wooden drawers lined the walls, the contents of each carefully labeled—eyes, twine, feathers, bones, hex flanges, cross dowels, 2" lite-tooth gears, 1" lite-tooth gears, and on and on. Everything clean, accessible, in its place. A perfectly slim bookshelf in one corner. On the opposite wall, a constellation of tools hanging inside their outlines. It felt as if he were looking at a dictionary of existence, as if this room contained a specimen of everything in the world, like a Noah’s Ark of Man’s March of Progress.
An incredibly tall blond man stood in the middle of the room, his head nearly touching the ceiling. He was surveying what looked to be a multiplicity of bird heads spread out across a worktable. Nearby, a pudgy man with long, greasy hair sat at a workbench, inspecting something under a magnifying glass. Radar recognized him as Otik Mirosavic, one of only a handful of people whom Kermin might’ve called a friend.
A symphony was playing from some hidden radio.
“Shostakovich,” said Radar.
“‘Leningrad,’ number 7,” said the tall man, smiling. “Well spotted.”
“I used to have a goldfish who loved Shostakovich.”
“A discerning beast,” said the tall man, holding out his hand. “You must be Radar.”
He was dressed in a tight-fitting yellow tracksuit that matched the tone and timbre of his wheat-colored hair and beard, both of which were trimmed to the same impossibly short length; it was as if he were wearing the world’s thinnest, fuzziest helmet.
“Yes,” said Radar, shaking the man’s hand. “I’m Kermin’s son.” He said it reflexively but then wondered if it was true.
“Lars Røed-Larsen,” the man said, his tongue curling expertly around the contours of the name.
“Lars Rlood-Larsen?” Radar tried to mimic the articulation.
Lars smiled to indicate that he had gotten it wrong but that he was not going to be a stickler about such things.
Otik looked up from his workbench.
“Hello, Radar,” he said in a thick Balkan accent. “Where is Kermin?”
“I don’t know,” said Radar. “I was going to ask you.”
“I’m afraid we’re a bit in the dark,” said Lars. He scrunched his nose. “Sorry, bad metaphor. We’re as uninformed as you.”
“You don’t have any idea?”
“One could always guess, but—”
“But you knew about the vircator.”
“Of course we knew about vircator,” said Otik. “I designed vircator. I gave him all of these plans. Without me, he would have nothing.”
In truth, Radar had never liked Otik. He and Otik must’ve been about the same age, except Otik looked at least fifty, with a large gu
t that he did no favors for by wearing ill-fitting, faded Serbian rock T-shirts. His face, flushed from misuse, was long and ugly, and his balding head was accentuated by a crown of oily, chin-length hair. Charlene and Radar used to have a running joke in which they would ask Kermin whether or not Otik had had his heart attack for the day yet.
Otik had immigrated to New Jersey sometime during the war in the 1990s—from exactly where, and under what circumstances, was unclear. It was also unclear what he had done in Serbia, just as it was unclear what he now did in Jersey. He supposedly taught the occasional class at Bergen Community College in computer science and sometimes continental philosophy—these pedagogical ventures inevitably resulting in long rants to Kermin about the idiocy of today’s youth. Sometimes he and Kermin would play dominoes in the backyard and complain about the general disintegration of government, culture, and footwear. Radar had even seen the two of them disappear into the radio shack together, an event whose significance was not lost upon him, considering he had never received a similar invitation. Why did Kermin choose to spend time with Otik rather than his own son? Was it because Otik spoke the mother tongue? Because Otik laughed like a wounded hyena? Because Otik did not remind him of his failed parenting?
All of which is to say that Radar could not help but feel a needle of jealousy when he spotted Otik in this most spectacular of rooms, sweating away at the workbench in his Rambo Amadeus T-shirt. Mr. Mirosavic had again beaten him to the punch.
“I didn’t know it was you on the line, Otik,” said Radar. “I would’ve been a little nicer.”
“I didn’t know it was you, either.”
“I said it was me.”
“Yes, but who can we trust this days? You say it’s you, but who are you? I cannot know—”
“All right, Otik,” said Lars. “Let’s be gracious hosts. Consider the circumstances.”
“I’m not egregious, I just explain—”
“Otik, enough,” said Lars. He turned to Radar. “He means well, really. He’s just a bit gruff, that’s all.”
“I understand. My father’s the same way.”
“Your father.” Otik shook his head. “Ispario je. I will miss him. I will miss his bones.”
“What?” said Radar.
“Please, sit,” said Lars.
“What did he say?”
“Ignore him. He has a flair for the dramatic,” said Lars. “I’m afraid all I can offer you is some cold coffee. We can stick on a fresh pot if you’d like.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” said Radar, glaring at Otik. He looked around for a place to sit, though there was none.
Seeing his confusion, Lars took up a bucket of parts, dumped them loudly on the floor, and handed the bucket to Radar.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “We don’t usually have visitors.”
“You weren’t easy to find,” said Radar. “P4 D26?”
“We like it that way,” said Lars. “The management company doesn’t bother us. We don’t bother them. It’s a nice little arrangement.”
“Do they know you’re here?”
“Someone knows we’re here.”
Radar sat down awkwardly on his bucket before he remembered his cargo.
“I brought you some birds,” he said, removing his backpack.
“Oh, good,” said Lars. “Good. Otik will be pleased. Did you hear that, Otik? He brought us some birds.”
Otik looked pleased. He leaped up as best his body would allow and trundled over.
Radar opened the backpack. “I wasn’t sure which one to get, so I just grabbed a couple.”
He carefully handed each bird over to Lars, fearful that they had somehow been damaged in transit, but Lars did not even look at the birds before passing them on to Otik.
“Can I ask what these are for?” said Radar.
“They’re for the next bevegelse,” said Lars. “The next movement.”
“The next what?”
Lars look surprised. “Your father never told you?”
“Told me what?”
“About Kirkenesferda?”
“Kirkenesferda? What’s that?”
Otik clapped his hands. “You see? Kermin says nothing. I told you. So we say nothing.”
“My dear Otik,” said Lars. “It’s not possible—”
“Wait, what do you mean, movement?” said Radar. “What was that word you used? Bay vay ghoulsa?”
Lars looked at him sympathetically. “Bevegelse. It’s what we call our shows,” he said. “These birds you so kindly brought over represent years and years of work.”
“They are bitch to make one,” Otik agreed. “They are really bitch to make two thousand.”
“It’s true. Your father has done an exemplary job,” said Lars. “You see, about five years ago, Otik here finally figured out how to entangle particles.” He gestured toward a tube on Otik’s workbench that looked like a smaller replica of the pulse generator in Kermin’s workshop. “We place these entangled particles into a chip inside each of the bird’s heads. Once it’s in place, the birds will be forever linked.”
Radar blinked. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“The birds are puppets,” said Lars. “Entangled puppets.”
“They are entangled,” said Otik.
“Yes, you keep using that word, but I have no idea what it means,” said Radar.
“You know: entangled,” Otik said again.
“I actually don’t know. Like strings entangled?”
Lars sighed. “Of course. I apologize. We get so caught up in our little world.” He picked up one of the bird heads. “Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon. Two particles interact and become linked in perpetuity, even if the two particles are millions of light-years apart.”
“How?” said Radar.
“Yes, How? is the question. Einstein shared your skepticism. He called it ‘spukhafte Fernwirkung’—‘spooky action at a distance’—and when people proposed the existence of entanglement, he said it was impossible. But here’s the thing: entanglement does exist. Scientists have proven this to be true. They’ve managed to entangle particles in the lab, although they’re not very good at it. In fact, they’re quite clumsy,” said Lars. “But recently scientists have discovered that all kinds of quantum reactions actually happen in nature . . . It’s how photosynthesis works, it’s how our smell works—”
“Our smell?” said Radar.
“Olfaction operates via quantum electron tunneling—we actually smell a molecule’s vibration and not the molecule itself. But what’s particularly interesting for our project is that we’ve discovered how birds navigate the magnetic field of the earth using a form of organic quantum entanglement inside their eyes.”
“Inside their retinae,” Otik chimed in.
“We’ve known for a long time that birds have this ability to sense the earth’s magnetism, but we haven’t known the mechanism for how they can sense this magnetism, particularly because the earth’s magnetic field is so weak . . . You would need very precise equipment to measure it. Well, it turns out birds have a series of special cells in their eyes—”
“Retinae,” said Otik.
“In their retinae, in which photons—that is, light—will excite a pair of electrons into a state of entangled superimposition. These two entangled electrons then act like a very sensitive compass, and this is how the birds navigate the poles. They can actually see geomagnetism.” He paused. “So. This was the secret. Why reinvent the wheel when nature has provided the apparatus for you? We extracted the protein from the bird’s eye, modified it using a fiber-optic coupler, and then placed it into the microchip. In essence, Otik has managed to build a rudimentary organic quantum computer. The secret was to put a part of the bird into the machine. Quite elegant, yes? The bird in the machine. For our purposes, it’s really all we need. Our show re
lies on building a flock of puppets that all move in conversation, no matter where they are in the world. One is entangled with the next, who is also entangled with the next, who is entangled with the next and so on. It is a kind of collective consciousness. A bounded swarm, if you will.”
Radar glanced at the birds, lying inert on the table. “They can actually fly?” he said. “I mean, really fly?”
“They can. But flying’s really the least of our worries. A purely mechanical problem. People have been building flying machines for ages. Our dilemma is one of groupthink.”
“And you can control them?”
“Only initially. We control the first input, the spark—‘Tilt up 68, bearing 128, thrust 4.’ And then they’re set free and must discover their own path after that. The question will be if we can train them en masse to participate in the movement. But in the end, the birds will decide together.”
“So they control themselves.”
“There’s been much debate in Kirkenesferda over the years about what constitutes a puppet, whether we must be in constant control of the object for it to be called a puppet, whether a robot or an automaton is a puppet even if it moves under its own volition. Much has been written about this distinction—by my stepbrother and others. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. We’re testing the boundaries of control. Of who controls what. About what control is. About whether control is even possible.”
Otik was slipping something small and fragile into one of the bird heads.
Lars shook his head. “Otik, let’s not do this right now.”