I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  “This is where we’re headed,” said Lars. “Maybe we’ll see his hospital.”

  “This area is very famous for its talking drums. But the Lokele don’t use skin drums like these. That’s why I was wondering if it would work. I learned on a drum made from a log with a long hole cut out of it. They call it a bongungu.”

  “But how do they talk with it?” asked Radar.

  “The drumming language is like speaking words. When you play, you sound out a word. Like lisaka.”

  He played: Two taps on the low drum, and then one on the high drum.

  “But Kele is a tonal language. A lot of African languages are. Depending on how you say lisaka, it can mean different things.

  Every syllable can be soft or hard, and this changes the meaning. each syllable said soft, means a puddle, or like a wet piece of land. with the last syllable hard, means a promise that you make to someone. And with two syllables hard, means poison.”

  “Seems pretty easy to screw up.”

  “For people not used to tones, yes. When you drum, all you can drum is the soft and the hard, not the actual syllable. The drum has a soft tone”—he played the low drum—“and the hard tone”—he played the high drum.

  “Like the dot and the dash.”

  “The Lokele call it the male and the female . . . But because you cannot say the word, only the tones, when you drum this”—he hit soft soft hard —“it could be ‘li-sa-ka,’ as in puddle, but it could also be ‘bo-son-go,’ the river current. So you must say more than just the word. You must talk around the word to let the others know what you mean. So ‘moon,’ which is normally koko, becomes he drummed this out, “which means ‘the moon looks down at the earth.’ Or if you want to drum ‘don’t worry’ which is owangeke, you must actually drum which means ‘take away the knot of the heart and throw it up into the air.’”

  “Don’t worry,” Radar said, and tapped out the Morse code: beat out Horeb.

  Lars, who had been watching them, jumped to his feet.

  “This changes everything,” he said. “Horeb, you’ll be our chorus. You’ll narrate the story with the drum. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I don’t know that many phrases in Kele. I only went to drumming club for one year.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Use the words you have. That’s all we can ever do. Radar will fill in the gaps with Morse code, yes? But I want people to hear the story before they see it. I want people to feel it before they know what it is. Radar, you’ll do the equations as well. I’ve got them here.”

  • • •

  THEY PRACTICED. They practiced that day and the next. Radar worked his radios, scrabbling up sequence, tapping out code. His stage-left station became an elaborate array of Morse bugs, keyboards, speakers, cables, and shortwave radios. Otik finally got the vircator up and running, and the birds leaped off the barge and began to fly again, first in pairs, then in groups of four, and finally in great swarms. Lars set up a projector that sent out images of diagrams and equations. In the evening, as the birds flew across the beams of light, you could see snippets of these equations come to life, the bodies of the birds a flickering canvas that would materialize out of thin air like wisps of smoke. Occasionally, actual birds would come to investigate the swarm, perhaps thinking there was a school of fish to feed on, but after a moment of confusion, in which they would recognize something familiar in the strange puppet forms and yet also sense the distinct shroud of otherness, these living birds would lose interest and fly on.

  Fig. 5.6. “Projected Flock Equations”

  From Radmanovic, R. (2013), I Am Radar, p. 620

  Meanwhile, Horeb was studying the text of Attar’s poem, working out the words and phrases, taking breaks only to sleep, eat, and pray. With his limited vocabulary on the drum, he did his best to translate the story of the birds into music, his beats intertwining with the Morse code beeps until the two of them had developed a sonic rapport that wove open the night:

  Fig. 5.7. “Conference of the Birds, Drum/Morse/Radio Palimpsest”

  From Radmanovic, R. (2013), I Am Radar, p. 621

  As darkness fell on the river, the pousser would slow and they would search out a calm area where they could shelter for the night. Their barge would soon be surrounded by men in pirogues offering fish, dead monkeys lashed to sticks, baby crocodiles, cassava, reed baskets filled with squirming fluorescent caterpillars. And books. Books and books and books. As in the first village from which they had launched, everywhere they went these neatly wrapped books were paddled out and offered to Funes, who emerged from his pousseur to receive them, foot braced against the bow railing, hands extended as if he were a king surveying his domain.

  That first night on the river, one of the villagers, after spotting the theater wagon on the barge, asked Horeb what it was for.

  “A performance,” Horeb said in Lingala. “These men have come from across the ocean to put on a performance.”

  The villagers interpreted this to mean that the performance was meant for them. Word spread through the village, and soon everyone was on the beach, ready for the show.

  Radar looked over at Lars.

  “What do you think?” Lars asked as they gathered in conference.

  “They are waiting. They will be pleased,” said Horeb.

  “Seems okay to me,” said Radar.

  “We see it as public rehearsal,” said Otik. “We don’t get too upset. We don’t get mad.”

  “It’s not traditionally what we do,” said Lars.

  “What is tradition? Shitty rules made by shitty people,” said Otik.

  “A debatable point, but I see what you mean,” said Lars.

  They assumed their positions: Horeb at the drums, Radar at his console, Otik at the vircator, Lars with the lights, the projector, and the hand crank for the scrolling backdrops and the shadow puppets. The show began in total darkness, and then the lights rose across a barren desert and they were off. The shadow puppet of the hoopoe appeared, and then the birds—great swarms of birds encircling him, encircling the boat, the village, everything. A barrage of drumbeats announced their entrance. Radar found a radio station of a man humming to himself—he could not imagine who this was or where this man must be humming, but there it was, and there it was now on the stage.

  Hmmm hmmmm hhmmmmm.

  Radar listened to the drum, nodding his head, and then he began to tap out code on the Morse bug. As they had before, Horeb and Radar slipped into mutual understanding. Not that Radar could tell exactly what Horeb was saying with his drum, but he knew without knowing as he introduced another radio signal, this one full of static and what sounded like a sermon. He tapped his key alongside Horeb’s drum, as if they were strolling down a path together. For a moment, everything meshed perfectly. The birds overhead, thousands of wings engulfing them, flashing into the light, melting, everyone listening to the hoopoe’s story. The villagers oohing and laughing as the projectors lit up wing and beak, equations dissolving and evolving. Desert melted into the first valley, the Valley of the Quest, and the backdrop scrolled, then suddenly a light fizzled and popped. There was a shower of sparks on the boat, and a clump of birds plummeted out of the sky like stones into the river. They heard Otik swear loudly from behind the wagon.

  “Cancel this show, cancel this fucking show!” he bellowed. “Stop! Stop! Stop! I hate this motherfucking shit. Nabijem na kurac ove jebene ptice!”

  Radar stopped keying and turned off his radios, but Horeb did not stop drumming. Radar looked over at Otik and Lars, knowing they would not take well to this act of insubordination. But then he heard the people. Unlike the crowd the night before, the people of this village seemed to love what they were seeing. They whooped and cried, and several drums were brought out onto the beach and played, and Horeb began to match the beats. As Otik retreate
d into the container and Lars worked to fix the broken lights, women, men, children began to dance. Leg, hand, limb flashing in the firelight. Whistles of delight, ululations, catcalls, a shiver of chest, a pounding of feet into earth. Circles formed around the best dancers, and above them the birds still flew, diving, dipping, as if egging the people on.

  After it was done, they were mobbed by the villagers coming onto the barge, shaking their hands, hugging them, smiling. A crowd of boys came to Radar and touched his radios. He found a station that played some kind of African soukous hip-hop, and the kids all showed him their moves, brushing hands against face, popping shoulders back and forth, jumping onto and off of knees.

  Horeb said that they had been invited to meet the chief of the village.

  “I don’t want to meet any chief,” said Otik, still toiling away at his vircator.

  “It would be rude not to accept this invitation,” said Horeb.

  They made their way through the village, lit only by the bright blue glare of the occasional battery-operated fluorescent light. A smell of charcoal and meat cooking. The forest open, breathing around them. In a large mud house they found a man in blue jeans, T-shirt, and a dinner jacket seated at a plastic table. A radio sat on a shelf.

  “Bonjour,” he said. “Je suis le chef.”

  Horeb spoke with the chief for a long while. Outside, the entire village was watching them through the doorway.

  “He says he is grateful for this gift we have given his people,” said Horeb. “They will never forget it. They want to give us a goat as a sign of their appreciation.”

  “Tell them we don’t want any goat,” said Otik. “Tell them we want to buy that radio. We need radios.”

  Horeb spoke with the chief.

  “He says he’s sorry, but he cannot give you his radio, because it is important for the protection of his people. He listens to a radio station called La Voix de la Rivière, and this is where he gets the news for his village. This is how they find out if the rebels are coming back.”

  “The rebels?” said Lars. “What rebels?”

  “He cannot give you the radio, but he offers you a goat.”

  “We don’t want any goat,” said Otik.

  “I am telling you . . . it’s very rude to refuse a goat,” said Horeb. “Usually, a goat is only given as a wedding gift. So you see, it would be unwise to not take the goat.”

  They took the goat, though the goat was not pleased to be taken. He bleated and wailed.

  On their way back to the barge, Radar noticed several of the children who had danced to his radio, standing and staring at him, hands on their heads.

  “Bonjour,” he said. “You are good dancers.”

  They giggled and hid their faces. One boy jumped out again and began to gyrate, to the great amusement of all. He was wearing a dirty grey sweatshirt that read NY GIANTS SUPER BOWL XXXV CHAMPIONS, 2001. Though it must be said that Radar did not know much about sports, he was fairly sure the Giants had not, in fact, won that year. He remembered this because he had eaten too much guacamole at a Rutgers alumni Super Bowl viewing party, and his sense of loneliness after the game was matched only by the curious postmortem displays of despair by Giants fans, who looked and acted as if a loved one had just died a horrible death.

  “His shirt is wrong,” he whispered to Horeb. “The Giants lost the Super Bowl in 2001.”

  “This happens,” said Horeb. “Someone once said Africa exists in a parallel world. When they have a big game like this in America, they make winning T-shirts for both teams. It is America, you see—they must plan for all possibilities. The television cannot wait for the people to go back to the factory and say, ‘Oh, so-and-so has won, please print this shirt.’ And everyone waits patiently on the field. No . . . this would not happen in America. So they print both shirts, but only one team can win, and so afterwards they send the shirts of the losing team here. They donate them to the starving Africans and they feel very good about themselves. So you see, there are many little boys and girls running around with a different history on their chests.”

  “Should I tell him?”

  “I think he already knows,” said Horeb. “He knows which world he lives in.”

  • • •

  AND SO IT WENT. Up the great river they chugged, past a forest without end, spending long days in the sun, broken only by brief and torrential rainstorms that forced them to head for shore, the rain lashing at the theater wagon and the two containers. They would throw tarps over the equipment and run for cover.

  During these storms, Radar would curl up in his cot and listen to the rain pound against the metal roof of the container. He could feel the doubt creeping in then, the little parakeets of discontent imploring him to say what precisely he was doing here. The sky poured buckets, and he was left to wonder if it had all been a mistake.

  201-998-2666: Dear Ana Cristina, I miss you. I have come to see life as a collection of diminishing failures. I know this sounds depressing, but I don’t mean it like that - to fail less badly is something to aspire to. Also, I have begun to write. R

  He waited in the doorway of the container, watching the rain fall and waiting for the message to not send. But instead of dying in his phone, the icon changed to a checkmark. The text had gone through! Tiny miracle of miracles! Maybe it was the rain. Maybe the ladders of water were conducting his messages into the heavens. Suddenly he felt guilty. He considered texting Ana Cristina and telling her everything that had gone on in Matadi. But some messages, he realized, could not be sent.

  201-998-2666: Mom! I’m here! I’m okay. Everything is fine. Have you found Tata? I hope you get this. Love, love, love, RADAR.

  This, too, was released. He waited, but no answer came back.

  • • •

  THEY STOPPED BRIEFLY in Mbandaka, a forgotten river city, both bigger and smaller than it ought to be. They purchased supplies and diesel for the pousser’s engines and for their own generators, which they were now running day and night, since it was the current from these generators that kept the birds alive and on which their entire show depended. While in Mbandaka, they heard about the unrest upriver. A rebel group had come down from Ituri to take control of a new diamond mine near Basoko. There were stories of mass rape. Whole villages disappearing.

  “We cannot be sure what is true,” said Horeb. “That region has been stable since 2002. I’m not saying it is impossible that this is true, but in general, you must say the rebels are interested in the two heads of the serpent and not the body. The war has changed recently. It is less political, more like an exercise in capitalism. Capitalism without regulation. These rebel groups, they are like start-up companies in your America. They want to make money. So if they are killing people, it is for an end.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a start-up company,” said Radar.

  “I cannot guarantee your safety, but I would not worry. It is your choice.”

  Radar worried. Professor Funes emerged briefly to collect his books and then disappeared back into his cabin before they could ask him about the rebel situation. It had been like this ever since they had left. Not once had their host come out to watch their rehearsals or shows, to investigate the action occurring on the deck of his barge. At first this behavior had struck Radar as most unusual, but soon his absence blended with everything else that was strange on the river. It simply became a part of the reality.

  And so, as the sun rose in the sky, they pulled out of Mbandaka as if nothing had changed, as if that which had been said could not be known and so had not been said.

  11

  For such a grand river, the Congo had surprisingly few boats navigating its waters, bar an occasional fisherman’s pirogue. On the third day, they passed a barge full of perhaps three hundred people and animals that had gotten stuck on a sandbank, but the pousser did not stop, and they chugged on past.

  The sounder, always,
swinging his pole: “Ah yeah! Mayee! Ah yeah mayee!”

  Once, they passed a hand-painted sign sticking out of the water: LE SANDWICH, it read, in careful sans serif. An arrow pointed upward.

  “It is unlikely,” said Horeb.

  Radar tried to monitor his radios for news of the rebels, though he could not understand the language. Nor was he ever able to locate La Voix de la Rivière.

  Yet even if he could not understand what exactly the radios were saying, he made several breakthroughs with their transmission. On the third evening, he figured out how to wire the radios to himself. Using very sensitive electrical nodes adapted from a heart rate monitor he had found in a forgotten drawer inside Moby-Dikt, he connected the radios to several contact points on his temples, wrist, and chest. It took him a while to adjust the sensitivity of the connection and to figure out exactly how he could control the dials without touching them, but once he had determined the correct voltage and resistance, the rest came fairly easily. It was as if the radios had become a natural extension of him. All he had to do was simply envision the radio switching channels and it would change, just like that. When he came upon something in the spectrum that felt right, the radio would hold, as if it too knew what was needed for the performance. This freed up Radar’s hands to flutter across the Morse key and the mixing board.