by Reif Larsen
“So what do you do?” repeated the captain.
“Sir?” said Radar.
“You don’t steer where you’re headed.” The captain hooked an eye on him. “We aren’t stopping. You can jump the Kill, but I don’t recommend it. Nasty currents. High traffic.”
“But—”
“Once a man signs up, he’s one of us. There can be no turning back. You sign up for a reason. You’ll get off when you’re ready.”
Radar was about to speak but realized there was nothing left to say. He briefly had the strange and wild urge to strike the captain, a dose of rage he did not know what to do with. But before he could do anything one way or another, the captain spun on his heel and returned to the wheelhouse.
“Looks like we’re stuck with you,” said Otik.
“It’s really for the best,” said Lars.
Radar looked back at the receding bridge, and then down into the opaque green churn of water. He thought of the horse jumping off the boat in Lagos. He lifted one foot onto the railing.
“Don’t,” said Lars, but Radar knew even before his foot had left the deck that he would never be able to do it. Resolve had never been his strong suit.
Soon they had cleared Constable Hook and found themselves out in the harbor. The pilot had negotiated the portside passing of two giant tankers and nimbly maneuvered around a stalled feeder ship in the Kill’s narrows. This balletic performance had done much to revive him; he had discarded his disheveled air, and now went around offering handshakes to the officers with all the gravitas of an ambassador.
“Bon voyage, bon voyage, watch out for the pirates,” he called. “They will rape you if you give them half a chance.”
Captain Daneri clasped the pilot’s shoulder and kissed him on both cheeks.
“An honor,” said the captain. “Un piloto y su puerto.” His opinion had evidently softened.
They slowed and pitched as the pilot climbed down the ladder to meet his boat. He offered a final wave to the Aleph before disappearing into the boat’s cabin.
It was only after the pilot boat had pulled away and was speeding back to shore that Radar realized he could’ve left with them. Why hadn’t he?
You’ll get off when you’re ready.
The sun had already risen over the flats of Brooklyn, but Lady Liberty’s flame had not yet been extinguished. It burned and burned, wary of what the day might bring. She stood, steady and erect as ever, with a clean conscience and an open heart. Behind her gallant robes, the Manhattan skyline paid little heed to their imminent exit. The captain ordered full speed ahead, the engines were fired, and the Aleph turned south, to the gates of the Verrazano and the last buoy before the open sea.
3
Lars had christened their forty-foot container Moby-Dikt. On the second day, he even went so far as to paint on a pair of morose whale eyes at knee height, which always seemed to be watching you no matter where you stood. Moby-Dikt lay by itself on the bottom floor of the number-four cargo hold, just in front of the bridge castle, a full four stories below the quarterdeck. It was always slightly dank down there, and Radar imagined the steel ribs rising up the sides of the hull as if they were the ribs of a great and monstrous whale. A whale inside of a whale inside of a whale and so on, the universe nothing but a series of matryoshka’d leviathans. His vision was enhanced by the constant, ominous creaking of the Aleph’s joints, which would echo and reverberate across the stacks of containers. The ship moaned, complained, howled. But she did not break. Not yet, at least.
Their container had been retrofitted as a hybrid living quarters and workshop, with a firm emphasis on the workshop part of the equation. It was packed to the gills with all manner of tools and mechanical detritus, including two soldering irons, a workbench, a wire draw, a hand loom, Otik’s vircator, two generators, six large speakers, an electric kettle, three computers in varying exploded states of repair, sixteen reams of old telegraph cable, and a full atelier featuring a band saw, a lathe, a power sander, and a spindle molder. There were also four djembe drums and a box of obscure musical instruments, which would occasionally rattle and shake as if of their own volition. In one corner, they had lashed down the gold-and-burgundy theater wagon—the same theater wagon used in Sarajevo. And then, of course, there were also the nearly fourteen hundred mechanical birds they had taken from Kermin’s shack, which now hung and swayed from the ceiling. The birds were still headless, their heads kept on six long racks by Otik’s cot. Radar never got used to this disembodied gallery of unblinking eyes.
The container actually represented an increase in space from the tiny cottage in Xanadu’s parking garage, but it offered precious little maneuvering room when all three men were present. This was not helped by Otik’s ongoing seasickness, exacerbated by the minute nature of his work on the bird heads. His pallor, which prior to their departure had resembled the color of unripe melon, had now taken on the hue of the repurposed ham-and-pea puree they used to serve at the Rutgers dining hall. Otik sat there, sweating and breathing heavily, a little moan escaping his lips every so often to signal his body’s revolt. He would then rip off his magnifying headpiece, raise his great body out of his chair, and proceed to vomit into a five-gallon bucket set up just outside the container’s entrance. The sound of his retching became a kind of metronome for the puppet work in the hull.
Ever since his outburst in port, both Lars and Otik had maintained their distance from Radar, each in his own way. Otik, mired in his nausea, simply chose not to acknowledge his existence. Lars’s evasions were more subtle: when addressing Radar, he would often let the ends of his sentences drift off, as if the most important bits could not be said. Radar watched them from his cot, fiddling absentmindedly with one of his father’s transceivers. It was evident that they were used to working in tandem. Even Kermin must have existed as a distant moon to their mutual dependence. It would have been more amusing to watch them in action if it were not also a reminder of his alienation.
“I hate you,” Otik hissed at Lars, completely unprompted. Yet the line was clearly delivered with such loving familiarity that Radar found himself longing for someone, anyone, to hate him with similar affection.
“Is it possible to have them return and perch ten seconds in?” Lars replied.
“Why to perch?”
“A moment of doubt.”
“Doubt?”
“Of contemplation, reflection. A prelude before the journey.”
“Let me see.”
“Ten seconds in.”
“This is soon.”
“If it’s not possible—”
“‘Nothing is not possible,’ says Kermin Radmanovic, alleged father of him.” Otik thrust his head in Radar’s direction.
“Can I do something?” said Radar.
The two went silent.
“We’re okay for now,” said Lars. “Thank you.”
“We are okay forever,” said Otik. He grunted, removed his magnifier, and then trundled from the room. They soon heard the familiar sound of gagging.
“He takes a while,” said Lars. “But once he accepts you as one of his own, he’ll die for you.”
“Oh, am I one of his own?” said Radar. “I hadn’t realized.”
“It’s a complicated question for a Serb,” said Lars. “But I do know he’s been through a lot in life. You must meet him halfway. He has seen enough not to trust another human being on this planet, and yet . . . he does. And he will. Just give him time; he’ll come around. He’s like an elephant. He never forgets.”
• • •
201-998-2666: Hello Mom. It’s Radar. I miss you. I tried to get off the ship when we started sailing but they wouldn’t let me. I realized this was a mistake. I shouldn’t have left you. Are you okay? Did you find tata? I feel terrible. I will never forgive myself for leaving you like this. Please call me. [Message not sent.]
201-998-2666: Hi Ana Cristina. I’m on the boat. We left yesterday morning. We’re somewhere in the Atlantic. My God I miss you. I feel like I’m the only person on this earth right now. –Radar (lost at sea) [Message not sent.]
Soon after their departure, the text messages would no longer go out. They sat in his phone, unsent, left in a state of perpetual limbo. He cursed himself for not giving his mother a transceiver. How had he gotten stuck with cellular communication as his only avenue? Helpless, voiceless, he would stand up on the forecastle deck, feeling the salty bow spray against his skin, and twiddle the dials, catching signal from Montauk, then from Europe, then from a ham in the Azores, in Dakar, in Guadeloupe, in Cartagena. The ionic skip was strange and beautiful out here. He could reach crazy new locations as if they were barely twenty yards away, and yet there were also whole blank spots on the Eastern Seaboard, including his home, that persisted in silence. He wondered about the blackout. How much had come back. That whole world—the swamps, the radio station, Forest Street—it all felt so far away now, separated by a wide and widening sea.
What was this sea? He spent most of his time staring out at its vast expanse. He felt unsettled on the boat, and not because of the vessel’s constant roll and pitch. His was not a seasickness like Otik’s. This feeling had more to do with absence. An absence of land, an absence of material, an absence of current. The salt water had an electromagnetic frequency all its own, but it was a frequency with which he was not familiar. Its note was singular, ancient, without end. He had come from a symphony, and now he was listening to an old man singing in the dark.
201-998-2666: Ana Cristina, I think about you all the time. Scary how much I think about you and home and everything I had. I wonder if I’ll ever see you again. [Message not sent.]
201-998-2666: Please ignore my last message. [Message not sent.]
201-998-2666: Sorry. It’s just lonely out here. I hope the power has come back there. I feel so far away right now. A blackout would be beautiful right now. Out here there is nothing to black out. [Message not sent.]
When the weather was calm, Radar—who had taken to wearing a knitted sailor’s cap he had found in one of the cargo holds—would curl up on the quarterdeck next to a cargo winch and read. He first looked at the many newspaper clippings in the folder his mother had given him. One would think such a trove of material would be a revelation, particularly coming on the heels of his mother’s announcement. Yet soon one article began to bleed into the next. He could feel the writers grasping for something just out of their reach. All they had were a few facts, some names, dates, and places, but nothing more. It was as if they were giving the particulars of an invented character that was him and yet not him. Even the highly technical “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male,” by Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald, read as a kind of fiction that had very little to do with who he was. Cloaked within the fancy, medical-sounding language was a blatant absence of truth. He soon lost interest. These documents contained no answers.
He next turned his attention to Spesielle Partikler. This book, like the articles, had been fished from that hole in the floor of his parents’ bedroom, and just holding it in his hands made him feel close to her. If he closed his eyes, he could almost conjure the feeling of that night, of listening to Caruso in the dark.
The book was a monstrosity. It felt like a brick in his lap. The binding was the color of sand and had clearly been handled many, many times, for the spine was split in two places and a large chunk of pages had come loose from the headband. Radar had to clutch it, lest the wayward leaves decide to up and blow away in the wind. Many of its passages were marked in a soft purple pencil. He found himself wondering about these markings. Who could have taken the care to mark so much of the text? Surely it wasn’t his mother, who, like him, couldn’t read Norwegian. It must have been the reader before her, or the one before that.
The more he looked at the book, the more intrigued he became, though he could not quite say what drew him to it. Occasionally a familiar name or place would jump out of that incomprehensible sea and there would be a momentary flash of recognition, a pinprick of electricity. He found Lars Røed-Larsen and Miroslav Danilovic (who became Otik Mirosavic on page 1184). He found Leif Christian-Holtsmark, the leader of Kirkenesferda, whom Lars had talked about. On page 490 he even found himself, Radar Radmanovic, along with his mother and father. From what he could make out, their visit to Norway was described in some detail.
When he got to page 493, he stopped. There, in the bottom right corner, was a diagram of a man. Except for a strange, slender headband and a boxy arm-strap contraption, the man was incredibly generic, an everyman. He wondered if this could be the diagram of his treatment. The electro-enveloping, as Lars had called it. Radar leaned in closer. Four or five strokes of the pen conveyed a subtle look of amusement across the man’s lips. Amusement at what? The transient nature of atomic reality? The knowledge that all things must change. Fall apart? Die?
Fig. 5.2. Detail from Den Menneskelig Marionett Prosjektet
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 493
Was this everyman supposed to be him?
It was preposterous, of course. He had been only four years old at the time, and even now, as a (somewhat) grown man, he in no way resembled this diagrammatic stand-in. And yet he could not look away. He leaned in closer, staring at the simple outline of the man’s frame, the hint of tendons in the neck, the twin dips of his pectorals. As he brought his eyes closer and closer to the page, the lines of the man blurred, along with the arrows and their unexplained letters. As their edges softened, he imagined the electricity spilling through this man’s skin, unraveling the cells, reversing proteins, morphing colors, peeling back time. The white of the page became him, became Radar the little boy, receiving that pulse, that quiet disaster of a pulse that would forever alter the shape of his story.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the man in the diagram. “You’re stuck like that.”
There were many such diagrams littered across the book’s pages. Floating within a sea of Norwegian, these diagrams came to represent little islands of potential meaning. He began to anticipate each image as a shipwrecked man anticipates an approaching shoal. Each one a world. Each one a promise of truth.
Gradually, as he sat with the book, a history of Kirkenesferda began to take shape in his mind, although he could not be sure if this history resembled the real history that had actually happened, or whether he was sculpting a new history, whole in and of itself. He was not even sure such a distinction mattered. He could now picture the four Kirk shows: Kirk En was the installation on the island in 1944, with the jars of little people floating in heavy water. One night, Radar had a terrible dream about these jars. He had been having more dreams since he started taking the malarial medication, and he was even remembering some of them the next morning. In the dream, the little people had come alive and were drowning, but he couldn’t figure out how to unscrew the tops of the jars, and so he was forced to watch as they slowly died, one by one, their tiny throats filled with the heavy water, stained a terrible translucent shade of yellow.
Kirk To was the Tsar Bomba show on Gåselandet Island in 1961, where the wagon housing the puppet show apparently exploded in the blast wave of the largest atomic bomb ever detonated. The book featured a series of stills from an eight-millimeter film that allegedly depicted the moment of destruction, but Radar had his doubts. How could the camera have survived? And the stills didn’t really show anything at all, at least as far as he could tell. Why show something if you couldn’t even tell what you were looking at? Maybe he just didn’t know how to look.
Then: Kirk Tre. The horror in Cambodia. He lingered here, knowing what an effect it had had on Lars. Young Lars. Through the palimpsest of diagrams and images he learned about Raksmey Raksmey, who had maybe been found in a hat (?), who had become a scienti
st (??) in Europe, who returned to Cambodia and somehow survived the Khmer Rouge, and who had then been invited to join Kirkenesferda via telegram. At least this is what he believed had happened. He couldn’t ever be sure. Radar studied the diagrams of the complex show, wondered how his father could have helped to create such intricate creatures. What a production it all was! To put on something that elaborate in the middle of the jungle for Pol Pot and his men. So much effort. And for what?
Fig. 5.3. “Gåselandet Still Sequence”
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 231
With a shiver, Radar found the map on page 856: “Massakren og Escape på Camp 808.” The map depicted the aftermath of the night’s bloody ending, in which everyone was shot except little Lars, who escaped with Raksmey, only to see Raksmey die by stepping on a land mine at the Thai border. The maps of course told so little, captured none of the true terror of that night—the smell of death and cordite lingering in the air, the screams, the blood, then the silence, before the buzz of insects slowly returned. The map did not include the sound of Leif Christian-Holtsmark’s wet, ragged breath as the last of his life left him or Siri’s final glance across the hut to see the blood spilling from her husband’s neck. There was only this collection of dotted lines, a cluster of x’s, as if this were from some errant scrimmage in a coach’s playbook. And yet, seeing the unspeakable reduced to a simple black-and-white map, Radar felt himself overtaken by a new kind of horror, a horror of viewing but not knowing, of sensing what must lurk in the white spaces between the lines, beyond the boundaries of the map, beyond the confines of the book, beyond even the vast and unnameable sea. Otik wasn’t the only one who had been through hell and survived. After experiencing that simple map, in all its silence, Radar made a mental note to forgive Lars for everything he had done or would do.