by Reif Larsen
Radar’s throat went dry. He wanted to ask what had happened in Cambodia but didn’t dare.
“So that was it?” he said. “The group was finished?”
“No,” said Lars. “You would think so, but no. Years later, I attended school at Columbia University, in New York. I was studying Portuguese literature, of all things. Writing a thesis on Fernando Pessoa and all of his heteronyms. But who should walk into my dorm room one afternoon? Kermin Radmanovic. I don’t know how he found me, but he just appeared in my doorway and said, ‘I want to do another show.’ No ‘Hello, how are you? By the way, I’m sorry about your parents, I’m sorry about Cambodia.’ Just this announcement. And of course, I was angry. You can imagine. I mean, who the hell was this fucker, and why was he bringing up all this painful shit that I had tried so hard to forget? Truthfully, I wanted to punch him in the face. I think I almost did. But he was insistent. He stayed, and we began to discuss his ideas. He came back the next day, and the next. And after several weeks I realized that I had been waiting for him to come through that door ever since Anlong Veng. It was my destiny to perform another movement.”
“And then your father called me,” said Otik.
“Otik was not Otik back then. His name was Miroslav Danilovic.” Lars looked over at Otik. “Am I revealing too much?”
“Yes.” Otik shrugged.
“Your name is Miroslav?” asked Radar.
“Not anymore,” said Otik. “Names can die like people.”
“Okay,” said Radar. “So how did you first meet my father?”
“I was living in Belgrade during the war,” said Otik. “I was at university working on some little performance here and there. Mostly like street shows. Your father has seen my work in some magazine or something like this, and when I hear he was one who did show in Cambodia, I was excited, because he is my hero. So we become pen pals. And then he explain what he want to do in Sarajevo and I think, Oh, man, he is so crazy, but good crazy, you know? And he want to pull off this something that is so unbelievable—like no shit unbelievable. So I just said, ‘Why not? Of course I work with you, you crazy motherfucker.’”
Lars nodded. “Your father proposed a performance in the Bosnian National Library, in Sarajevo. The library had already been gutted by firebombs several years earlier. At the time, Sarajevo was still under siege, so you can imagine it was an incredibly complex production and a wildly dangerous performance. Just to get the equipment in there was a ridiculous undertaking. We had to bring our own electricity, everything. It’s true that Kermin never went halfway on anything.”
Radar tried to decide if this was true. “When was this?” he said.
“Back in 1995.”
Radar remembered that the summer before his sophomore year in college, Kermin had left on an extended trip to Europe. He had supposedly been visiting friends in Italy who were displaced by the Yugoslavian war. At the time, Radar had been worried because his mother was in one of her depressions, and he didn’t want her sitting around the house alone. So he had moved back home while Kermin was away. Radar tried to imagine Kermin caught in the middle of a war, staging a show in a bombed-out library in Sarajevo, while he and Charlene sat at home playing Scrabble. Why hadn’t he shared any of this? He had come back tired, bearing some sad Italian gifts of biscotti and cheese, but otherwise none the worse.
“He never mentioned anything to us,” said Radar.
“I’m sure he had his reasons,” said Lars. “There were security issues, particularly coming on the heels of Anlong Veng.”
“And Sarajevo? Did it happen?”
Lars looked at Otik. “In many ways it was the masterwork. Per said as much in his book. Brusa agreed. Otik brought a level of technical complexity we’d never seen before. He works in miniature. Otik, would you show him the . . . Oh, never mind. We’ll show you later. It will blow your mind,” said Lars. “But the other big difference with Kirk Fire was that we had a public. We had an actual audience . . . for the first time in Kirkenesferda’s history. The public came the first four nights of the run, despite the sniper fire and the shelling. They risked their lives to sneak into this destroyed library to see our show about superstring theory. So in this respect it was—”
“It was bad,” Otik said suddenly, looking up from his birds. “I screwed it up, and Thorgen was killed by sniper. Then there was bombing in Markale. No. We had to stop. It was too much.”
“It wasn’t entirely your fault.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Lars. I don’t need your bullshit right now.”
“We had to get Otik”—Lars corrected himself—“Miroslav out of there. He was in poor health.”
“The black boxes, they were killing me, slowly,” said Otik. “Every time I make one, I must leave part of me inside box. And so my body goes like this. I used to be very thin, if you believe.”
“He had also been found out by certain security forces,” said Lars. “It wasn’t safe for him anymore. So we brought him back to a new life with a new name.”
“You brought him here? To New Jersey?” said Radar.
“You could do worse.”
The music on the radio had shifted into a march. The rattle of a snare as an oboe urged them onward.
“I had no idea,” said Radar. “I can’t believe he kept all of this from us.”
“He was a private man. He kept things from everyone.”
Radar thought about this for a moment.
“Do you realize he caused the blackout?” he said.
Lars and Otik looked at each other.
“We had a hunch,” said Lars. “We couldn’t be sure, but when I heard there’d been an accident, I figured as much.”
“I just don’t understand why he would build something like that without thinking about what could happen? I mean, he must’ve known he would fry the whole electrical grid. What was he trying to do?”
“He didn’t build the vircator to fry the grid,” said Lars.
“What was he doing then?”
“He built it for you.”
“For me?”
Lars sighed.
“What do you mean, for me?” said Radar.
“We’ve been experimenting with vircators for some time now.” Lars pointed at the machine next to Otik. “And the more we researched this, the more Kermin became convinced that a high-energy pulse was the secret to reversing the effects of your procedure.”
“My procedure?”
“Your electro-enveloping. Kermin thought that if he just found the right energy and focus, then he could cure you—”
“Cure me?”
“Or at least cure your epilepsy,” said Lars. “Okay, it’s crazy, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. There’s evidence that epilepsy is a quantum phenomenon. But we told him it was a bad idea, particularly because there was no way to know—”
“I tell him so many times this is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” said Otik, looking up from his work. “Like total bullshit. Even if we identify the coherence, seizure is huge reaction. Not some small event. But Kermin, he’s so . . . I don’t even know this word.”
“He’s stubborn,” said Lars.
“Yes, stubborn, but more sneaky than this. In Serbian it is called zadrt. Like he is hypnotize.”
“He was building his own vircator,” said Lars. “He didn’t tell us as much, but we had our suspicions. Particularly when he stopped letting Otik come over. He was assembling the birds, he was showing us his work, but on the side he was building his own private EMP generator. We were on the outside, just like you. And we certainly didn’t know how far he’d gotten or how powerful it was.”
“Jesus,” said Radar.
The vircator had been for him. To cure him.
“Obviously, he overestimated the strength of the pulse,” said Lars.
“But how do you build so
mething like that and not know it’s going to screw everything up? He must’ve caused like billions of dollars in damage today. He probably killed people.”
“Yes,” said Lars. “It’s most regrettable. He’s disrupted our work as well. Ten years of planning have all gone out the window.”
“What planning?” said Radar.
“Nothing is out the window,” Otik said from his bench. “We still go.”
“We’re not going, Otik,” said Lars. “We need Kermin.”
“No. He blows it. We get birds and we go. Alone.”
“We can’t go. Not before we find Kermin and make sure he’s okay. We owe this much to him.”
“You were one who said this boat sails only tomorrow,” Otik said to Lars.
“Yes, but we can’t just go without him. We can’t do it alone.”
But Otik had turned back to his computer and was no longer listening. He was typing intently, whispering something inaudible to himself.
Lars smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “As you can see, you’ve caught us at a tricky time. Clearly Otik and I need to discuss a few things here. We were supposed to catch a ship bound for Africa tomorrow morning, but your father’s . . . untimely disappearance, shall we say, has complicated matters considerably.”
Radar felt a quiver of guilt. “I should go. I should go look for him,” he said.
“I’m not sure that’s wise,” said Lars.
“I have to,” said Radar, suddenly feeling antsy. “I thought he might be here, but I’ve got to find him. My mom’s waiting alone at home right now. I just worry he got into some trouble.”
“As you wish,” said Lars, bowing his head.
Radar got up to leave. “Thanks,” he said. “Good luck with your—”
“I am telling you! Genius!” Otik yelled.
He punched a button and jumped to his feet with surprising dexterity for someone of his girth.
The light flickered above them, and the march on the radio slowed. Radar felt a hum across his skin, and it was then that the two birds on the table quivered and came to life. They leaped up into the air, spinning around each other, up and up until they crashed against the ceiling, plummeted, rebounded, and smacked against the wall, toppling over a jar of screws, a folder exploding into a cloud of papers. The birds rounded each other, eyes unblinking. They careened into the ceiling again and tumbled down, but just before they hit the ground, they swooped up again. And now an understanding emerged between the two and they began to circle the room in tandem, the oboe on the radio offering a cushion to the sound of their wings against the air, the bare lightbulb gently rocking back and forth in time to the birds’ revolutions. The three of them stood below, watching the pair act and react, react and act, until Otik yelled something in his language that Radar could not quite understand. Otik twisted and leaped like an animal in pain, and then he was at the door to the house, flinging it open with great drama. One of the birds sensed this expansion of space and immediately whipped out through the open door, leaving the other to circle the room alone. The difference between one bird and two was immense. After several more revolutions, the lone bird stopped in midair, hanging there motionless, as if it had forgotten what to do next. There was an impossible pause, a flagrant denial of gravity’s embrace, and just as the bird began to plunge back to earth, it regained itself, remembering, and now it was turning and swooping out through the open doorway. They were both gone just as quickly as they had come to life, and before Radar could ask if what he had just seen was real, Otik was already running out after them, whooping, the sound of his voice echoing against the walls of the garage until this, too, faded away into just the soft question mark of the oboe playing its final notes on the radio.
1
LA SEULE VÉRITÉ PLANTATION, MEKONG RIVER, FRENCH PROTECTORATE OF CAMBODIA
March 2, 1953
Tien was squatting on his haunches in the shade of a banana tree, smoking the last of his three cigarettes, trying to ignore the heat that was beating down on him in waves. He had been up since before dawn, when the mists still hung heavy, tapping 445 rubber trees by the light of a kerosene headlamp that burned hot against the skin of his forehead. The trees could only be cut in the cool dawn air, when they would bleed enough to fill the collecting cups before their spiral incisions dried up in the tropical sun. Tien had half an hour remaining before he had to brave the midday heat and begin the collection, retracing his route from that morning. He could no longer separate this cycle from the pulse of life itself: Cut, drain, retrieve. Repeat. It was as natural as breathing.
He took another drag from the cigarette, slowly, longingly, a breeze bending a twig, and then he heard a noise coming from the ditch behind him, a sound like the hushed whistle of a teakettle left to simmer on a stove. Tien ran the back of his thumb against his lip and shook the ash from the tip of his cigarette. He did not move. It was too hot to move, too hot for anything except that which was absolutely necessary. In heat like this, you had to decide your actions long in advance.
The sound came again, insistent, louder this time. Tien closed his eyes, the image of a woman coming into his mind: a torso, naked and white in the light, a shawl of saffron dragged across the thin curve of her shoulders. The woman turned her face toward him, and that elemental ache returned, but then the vision evaporated as the sound came a third time, now forming into a cry that could only have arisen from the lungs of a human. Tien exhaled, carefully stubbed out his cigarette, and placed it into an overflowing tin can, the label peeled clean. He got down on all fours and peeked over the edge of the ditch, afraid of what he might see.
What he saw stunned him: a naked baby, floating in the scoop basket of a conical sedge hat. The child, exposed to the heat of the sun, was shriveled, a deathly pale yellow-green, the size and color of a pomelo fruit. Too tiny to be alive. But it was alive: now it was moving an arm and again making that strange whistling sound.
“Come,” Tien called to the others. “Come. Come quickly. Look what I’ve found.”
The others looked, blinking in wonder. It was agreed: this was the smallest baby they had ever seen. It was agreed: the child would not survive.
Tien fished the hat from the water and wrapped the baby in his red checkered scarf.
“Go get Suong. She can give him some milk,” he said to Keo.
As they waited, there was much debate among the men. What to do? Was it a test? A trap? The baby looked Cambodian, perhaps Laotian, and the first thought was that it must’ve been one of the workers on the plantation who had delivered the baby and then abandoned him. This theory was passed around and digested and eventually rejected. None of the women workers had been far enough along to deliver even a baby as tiny as this.
Suong arrived at the ditch, the sweat catching in the crinkles of her eyes. It was much too hot for a child to be in the sun. She took him to the shade of the banana tree, where she coddled the child, pinching at the diphthonged knees, the miraculous little legs, no bigger than her fingers. The child’s coloring was all wrong—he was suffering from disease. She lifted him to her breast, humming a wordless song, but he would not take the nipple.
“He’s sick,” she said. “He’s too small to drink. He will die.” Her tense shifted. “He’s dead.”
• • •
AT LEAST this was the version of events described in Brusa Tofte-Jebsen’s obscure novella Jeg er Raksmey (Neset Forlag, 1979), which utilizes the usual mixture of pictures, diagrams, and prose that was so popular in Scandinavian literature at the time. Yet Jeg er Raksmey was also another sad example of a book written but hardly read; it sold barely half of its listed first run of 750 copies before the rest were sent to the pulper in Lysaker. The slim book did have one notable (if not surprising) reader: Per Røed-Larsen. In a section of Spesielle Partikler entitled “En elementær partikkel er en partikkel som ikke kan brytes ned til mindre partikler” (“An elementary
particle is a particle that cannot be broken into smaller particles”), Røed-Larsen devotes a mind-boggling amount of time and space refuting the factual basis of Tofte-Jebsen’s story, despite Tofte-Jebsen’s making no claim that his book is anything but fiction. Røed-Larsen disagrees. “[Jeg er Raksmey] is near-truth posed as fiction and I can think of no worse crime,” he writes. “It has thus become my beholden duty . . . to set the record straight. We must stick with the facts and only the facts” (591).
In particular, Røed-Larsen is bothered by Tofte-Jebsen’s claim that the child was discovered in a floating hat. In building up a case against such an origin story, Røed-Larsen references (among other things) the improbable buoyancy quotient of a newborn’s (even an unusually small newborn’s) staying afloat inside the leaky and unstable containment vessel of a palm-leaf nón lá hat (591–93). Much more likely, Røed-Larsen argues, was that the child was given directly to Tien by one of the women on the plantation, sans floating hat.
No matter. Regardless of how he was discovered, what cannot be disputed is that the child had chosen a most unusual landing point for his entrance onto the stage. Owned by the de Broglie family for three generations, La Seule Vérité was one of the few French rubber plantations still operating along the banks of the Mekong. In 1953, France was already seven years deep into its dirty war with the Viet Minh, unable to relinquish its Indochine colonies without a protracted, bloody fight that would culminate the following spring on the slopes of Dien Bien Phu. La Seule Vérité, perched on an oblong bend in the river, was both of this empire and wholly separate from it, a place that had gracefully excused itself from the normal laws of both space and time.
Fig. 4.1. Nón lá Hydrostatic Buoyancy Analysis
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 592
After some discussion, the workers decided to present the baby-who-was-dead-but-not-dead-yet to the manager of the plantation, Capitaine Claude Renoit. Capitaine Renoit had lost a leg early in the war and had come to La Seule Vérité to sulk and wax on about the decline of everything that once was great about the land. But he was an honest man, and he treated the workers as well as they could hope for. He did not believe in an excess of suffering, and so he would know what to do with the child. If he gave permission for the little thing to die, then the child’s spirit would not blame them when it found no place to rest.