I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  Fig. 5.4. “Massakren og Escape på Camp 808”

  From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 856

  By contrast, Kirkenesferda Fire, the Sarajevo performance, seemed almost tame, though Radar spent perhaps the longest time studying these diagrams, as his father felt most present here. He became frustrated with his total ignorance of Norwegian, with not being able to unravel and savor every detail of the performance. The language barrier felt almost personal; he became convinced that if he could just understand this show, then he would understand everything about his father. He would have to ask Lars to tell him about what had happened, what went wrong, why the show ended early.

  Radar did fall in love with a series of images from the performance, although he could not quite explain their origins. The images appeared to have been taken through a strong microscope. In the sequence, a tiny (microscopic?) old man reads a book as he sits amid a lunar landscape. Several frames show him turning pages, until, in the final two frames, he disappears inside a fiery flash of light. Radar could not help feeling kinship with this minute reader. They were not so different. In many ways, he was simply another reader waiting for a spark of light to burn him up.

  Radar did not sleep well, perhaps because of the close quarters, perhaps because of the malaria medication’s nocturnal effects. He still did not remember most of his dreams, but he often awoke in the middle of the night still caught in the lingering lacunae of their wake, immersed in the feeling of experiencing a horror that could not be known, and such a feeling of unknowing bled into his days. He missed the comforts of his Little Rule Book for Life and briefly regretted giving it to his mother. Where would he put all of his stupid little thoughts?

  The world had slowly shrunk to only this particular patch of sea. Land became a memory, true and not quite true at the same time. Those afternoons on the quarterdeck with the sun on his face and the seabirds hang-gliding next to the railings as if they were unaware of gravity’s embrace—those afternoons flowed together into one long, long day, a day that included all days before and all days after. The ocean of water melded with the text of the book, and he was a helmsman in each, making his way through a vast wilderness to a forever unattainable point on the horizon.

  201-998-2666: Dear Mom, I’ve been reading the book you gave me. Not really reading, more like taking it in. I don’t understand everything (or anything) but it’s somehow wonderful. Thank you. Did you find Tata yet? I just wonder what could have happened to him?? He never went anywhere. And the lights? Are they back on? I left you in such a terrible place. Why did you tell me to go??? [Message not sent.]

  201-998-2666: Dear Ana Cristina, do you think we could be happy together? Like really happy? Would you grow tired of me? I would never grow tired of you. I would find something new about you every day. [Message not sent.]

  201-998-2666: Sorry about the last text. I guess I shouldn’t treat these like journal entries. But if you will never get them and if no one will ever read them except me does it really matter? Let’s test it: I love you, Ana Cristina, I love you. [Message not sent.]

  4

  When he was not at his spot on the quarterdeck, Radar roamed the many passageways of the Aleph. The 456-foot ship was a maze of steam and boilers and valves, and he would wander through it all, laying his hands on random pipes and the walls of containers just to see if he could discern what lurked within. Sometimes the pipes were hot. Sometimes the containers were cold.

  The Aleph flew a Liberian flag, was owned by a Portuguese shipping company based in China, and was skippered by an Argentinean who commanded a predominantly Russian and Estonian crew. For the number of tons of cargo she was hauling, the number of crewmen seemed ridiculously small—aside from the three of them, there were only fifteen men on board, including a full-time cook. The crew appeared to spend most of their time sanding rust off the decks and painting whatever lay beneath. Sometimes it felt as if the whole boat was made of rust. Radar wondered what would happen if they sanded it all away, slowly replacing the frame of the boat with paint, until she was composed only of latex. Would she still float? Would she still carry five above her summer Plimsoll? Or would she slowly sink—so slowly that no one would notice?

  For the most part, the crew ignored him as he passed them sanding down the hallways. He could not read their expressions beneath their ventilator masks, but he imagined that they regarded him like a feral dog that they must tolerate but might eventually have to put out of its misery. One day he, too, would be sanded away.

  Only the second mate, Ivan Kovalyov, took a liking to him. Ivan had the face of a baby and the body of a wrestler. He was also missing his left pinkie. He was originally from Vanavara, a tiny town in the middle of Siberia on the banks of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. He was the only man on the ship, besides Lars and himself, who did not drink.

  “Where I come from, if you don’t take vodka . . . well, this is actually worse than homosexual,” said Ivan. “I am outcast, you see. I am lamb.”

  His only vice, he claimed, was music, but he pronounced this word as if it had an extra, secret syllable that only he knew about: myoo-zi-ka.

  “When I was little, I spent all of my monies on compact discs,” he said. “Grigor and I would drive down to Krasnoyarsk and get all of the latest hits. Like Crash Test Dummies or Midnight Oil. These bands, I truly love. They are like family. Like fathers. Like my sisters.

  “Once there was this kid, who gets into an accident and he couldn’t go to school,” he sang. He shook his head. “That is so beautiful and also so true.”

  When he was not on watch, Ivan would sit against the bulwark of the poop deck and strum his battered guitar. He had discovered a specific spot where the acoustics caused the music to drift down into the ventilators and naturally amplify throughout the corridors of the ship so that you could hear him playing all the way down in Moby-Dikt. Ivan had a surprising number of original love songs in his repertoire. They were named after different women (“Nadja,” “Carolina,” “Julie Julie”), and they all sounded exactly alike.

  “I have only four fingers,” he explained, holding up his hand. “So I must play simple songs.” He strummed a chord, as if to demonstrate. “Ooo-ooo-ooo, and her name was Nadja.”

  “Have you met all of these women?” Radar asked Ivan.

  “Not yet,” said Ivan. “Ooo-ooo-ooo, and her name was Oleana.”

  But Ivan did not get many chances to play his songs, because Ivan’s true gift was in celestial navigation. Ivan could read the stars in his sleep, and thus he was always in demand on the bridge. Captain Daneri—who otherwise thought little of his “Red Army,” as he called the Russian crew—confirmed the astonishing nature of Ivan’s astral gifts:

  “He’s the best I’ve ever seen. Sweet Jesus, that boy was born in the sky,” he said.

  Radar greatly enjoyed watching Ivan shoot the heavens with his sextant. The indexing arm slid across the arc, the mirror clicked into place, and the course was confirmed.

  “And what is that one?” Radar said from the deck one night. He was pointing at a star glowing just off their bow.

  “That is Sirrah. It looks like one star, but she is actually two stars very close together, like this. Very close, so from ninety-seven light-years away, we see only one star. But you have to remember, you are seeing past right now. You are seeing very old light. Ninety-seven years old. So this light is from before World War I, when people still poop in holes,” he said. “I always like Sirrah. She is beautiful because she is in two constellations at once. She is head of Andromeda and she is also penis of Pegasus. She is both. One day, I will write song about this.”

  Rarely did an exchange go by with Ivan that did not end in this phrase.

  To really see Ivan at work, however, you needed to observe him in the chart room, with its drawers and drawers of maps covering nearly every coastline in the world. This was his true domain. Iv
an spun his plotters in great pirouettes, cutting lines with his red pencil, tapping and wrapping the dividers across the great expanse of depth readings. All he needed was a single star and he could take you anywhere you wanted. The Aleph was equipped with various radar and GPS locating devices, but the electrical work was shoddy and sometimes the systems would fizzle out with no apparent warning, leaving them seemingly without a location. But with Ivan, there was no worry. With Ivan, they would always have a location, because Ivan did not fail.

  “How did you learn how to read the stars?” Radar asked him at dinner one evening.

  “You must understand that in Soviet Union we didn’t have very many things. But one thing we have more than anyone is space. I mean like literally outer space. Our space program was best in the world. We did not fake moon landing like the Americans. We send up Sputnik first and we send up Laika, first dog into space. And then we send up Yuri Gagarin, first man in space. After this, everyone believed anything is possible. So of course I wanted to be a cosmonaut when I was little. Just like every other Russian boy.”

  “I’m not sure the Americans faked the moon landing.”

  “Of course they did. That is common fact,” said Ivan, chewing thoughtfully on a forkful of mashed potatoes. “But probably real reason I became interested in stars is because of the event.”

  “The event?”

  “I think this is what you call it in English.”

  “What event?”

  “Tunguska Event. In 1908, there was huge explosion in Siberia. It blew out two thousand square meters of forest, something like this. Eighty million trees destroyed. Center of explosion was seventy kilometers from Vanavara, but the people there, they still felt heat blast all across their skin. The shockwave broke windows, collapsed woodsheds. It blew the men right off their horse. It was powerful, so powerful. Stronger than an atom bomb.”

  “This was 1908?”

  “Yes, 1908. In June. There is a monument in Vanavara, because after this everyone wanted to come to see what happened. Scientists, tourists, acrobats.”

  “Acrobats?”

  “Okay, one acrobat. But he was very famous. He did his Tunguska show, where he launched himself from a wire and disappeared into a puff of smoke. It was very famous and very beautiful.”

  “So what caused the explosion?”

  “Well, that is a lot of debating. When I was little, government report said this was meteor, but many older people who are still religious could not believe this. They said it was God’s doing. They said the government had made God angry by mistreating its people and so God is punishing them. I can still remember this . . . There was line of scientists giving their report. They were standing in these white coats. And I said to myself, Ivan, if you cannot be cosmonaut, maybe you can become scientist like these men. These men know about everything in sky. Look how clean their coats are! They are so powerful and so clean. This is what I thought. So I get books and I get chart and I get spotter and . . . I spend time with sky. I spend lots of time with sky. Just watching. In Siberia, sky is amazing. Maybe best sky in world. Like fish eye spinning around and around. You can see stars shoot once every ten seconds, no problem. You look straight ahead and you see more stars in your—how do you call it, on these sides?”

  “Your periphery.”

  “Yes, your periphery. Your periphery is having serious party. And when you look there, you see more stars over there, and so on. But funny thing is that when I was looking at stars, it was like looking at myself. At my own hand, but this hand I forget I have. It was like . . . I have to learn this part of me again.”

  “So you learned all of the constellations?”

  “Yes, but not exactly like that. It is like I am becoming familiar again, if you understand. But of course I can’t see every star. I feel like I know them, but I can’t see them. And then I realize: there is whole Southern Hemisphere that I have never seen. So this is when I leave Vanavara and my family. To see sky I cannot see. I am not cosmonaut, I am not scientist, but I am next best thing. I become sailor. The sea is my outer space now.”

  “Rule number two-thirty-nine.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  • • •

  ONE AFTERNOON, Radar was sitting up on the bridge while Ivan was at the helm on the eight-to-four watch. A call came in on an ACR VHF transceiver, but it warbled and fizzled out in the middle of the transmission.

  “What did they say?” asked Radar.

  “I can’t hear. That radio is broken,” said Ivan with a shake of his head. “Everything on this ship is broken.”

  “Not everything,” said Captain Daneri, coming into the wheelhouse. “We are not broken, Mr. Kovalyov.”

  “Pardon, Captain,” said Ivan.

  Radar cleared his throat. “Maybe I could fix it.”

  “I think it is impossible. Igor tried and he said it is hopeless,” said Ivan.

  “Igor’s a fool,” said the captain. Igor was one of those unfortunate souls who had convinced himself that the world was bent on deceiving him. He was also supposedly the boat’s electrician. But as far as Radar could tell, he devoted nearly all of his time to hitting the cooling devices on the refrigerated containers with his wrench and cussing in his native tongue. The clang of his wrench had become a common refrain in the ship’s painful symphony.

  “Well, I could just take a look,” said Radar.

  “Mr. Kovalyov, would you believe it? Our guest wants to tame the dragon,” said the captain. “Our guest is calling Igor un idiota incompetente.”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Radar.

  “You are correct: Igor es un idiota incompetente.”

  “If I could just take a peek,” said Radar. “I might be able to—”

  “He just wants to take a peek,” repeated the captain.

  “Let him take a peek,” said Ivan.

  “Please,” the captain bowed, and gestured at the radio. “She awaits your intentions.”

  After removing the front panel, it took Radar barely a minute to discover the corroded transistor switch running off the link board. Telling Ivan and an amused captain that he would be right back, he detached the transceiver from the stack and made his way down to Moby-Dikt. Otik offered no response when Radar asked him if he could borrow one of the soldering irons, so he went ahead. Utilizing a spare transistor he found in a drawer, he fashioned a new switch, and what he could not solder he secured with a small wad of well-chewed watermelon-flavored bubble gum.

  • • •

  BACK ON THE BRIDGE, he presented his handiwork.

  “It’ll run for now, but you may want to get a more permanent solution when you get back to port,” he said.

  Ivan marveled like a child. “That,” he said. “That is something incredible. Chewing gum.”

  “Well, don’t tell Igor,” said the captain. “Wait, on second thought, let’s tell Igor. Let’s tell him that un yanki bobalicón is doing the job he cannot do.”

  “One day, I will write song about this,” said Ivan.

  Later, Daneri would touch Radar’s shoulder and say, “You’re a part of her now. She doesn’t ever forget.”

  Indeed, ever since offending him that first day in port, Radar had slowly finessed his way back into the captain’s good graces. Or maybe it was simply a case of Radar being the only available audience member. It had become clear that Captain Daneri was really just a showman in search of a show. Perhaps this was why he had agreed to shepherd them across the ocean in the first place. Yet in this regard, Otik and Lars were not holding up their end of the bargain. Despite repeated invitations by the captain to join him in his quarters for an after-dinner maté, Otik and Lars consistently excused themselves so as to return to their feverish preparations. Things were not going well with the vircator. A palpable air of panic could be felt inside Moby-Dikt, so Radar returned there as seldom
as possible now, only to catch a few hours of nightmarish sleep, though even this was proving difficult, as his companions worked all hours of the night. When Radar tried to query them about their progress, both grew cagey, even hostile. Radar was thus left to be Daneri’s sole patron.

  Entering into the captain’s cabin was a bit like entering into a time machine. The room was paneled in a lush African mahogany so dark it appeared almost purple by the light of a candle. At the center of the room was a giant desk of such immense proportions, it was unclear how the piece had ever entered the cabin or how it would ever be removed.

  Captain Daneri presided over their evenings together from a body-worn burgundy armchair, sipping his maté out of a calabash gourd through a thick silver straw. Occasionally he would light up a Cuban cigar, although these he dutifully rationed, explaining that his father had lost his entire throat to cancer and did not speak a word for the last fifteen years of his life.

  “Do you know what we’re carrying right now on this ship?” the captain asked Radar one evening.

  “Not really,” said Radar, gingerly sipping at his maté. As usual, Otik and Lars had already bidden their farewells, and he found himself wishing they were there to deflect the attention or at least make a pass at one of the captain’s riddles.

  “Well, good. No one does. At least no one can speak with absolute certainty. I myself have not opened any of the containers, so I can only tell you what the system tells me, and the system speaks only in terms of possibility. A container does not contain something—it ‘is said to contain something’. The same can be said of a good book.” He picked up a piece of paper. “TPMU 839201 3, said to contain 6,800 pounds of frozen chicken; RITU 559232 0, said to contain 14,000 pounds of frozen fish; CSQU 938272 8, said to contain 3,400 pounds of hypodermic needles, pharmaceuticals, and other medical equipment . . . said to contain 6,000 women’s long-sleeve shirts . . . said to contain 550 youth bicycles . . . said to contain 55,000 pounds of aircraft engines . . . said to contain 20,000 pounds of computer equipment . . . said to contain 8,000 pounds of unbalanced polymer . . . said to contain 4,000 pounds of gems, precious metals, and coins . . . said to contain 15,000 pounds of barley. That’s a lot of barley.”