I Am Radar

by Reif Larsen

  Horeb was impressed. “I cannot drum with my mind,” he said.

  “Not yet,” said Radar.

  • • •

  201-998-2666: Ana Cristina, I’ve become the radio and the radio is me! When I get back I have things to tell u. How are you? I think of u everyday. Of your lips and the sound of your voice. I’m trying to remember everything -><-

  The birds, for their part, had also gone through a kind of evolution. The first few days, they had flown only when called upon and then they would dutifully return to the wagon and fall quiet. But gradually they had developed a mind of their own. They now roosted all over the boat, in the container, on the roof of the pousser. They always traveled in pairs. At all hours of the day and night, you could invariably spot a few pairs flittering about here and there, even in the pouring rain. Otik, who had begun acting more and more erratic with each passing day, did not seem to notice or care about the unraveling of his flock.

  “They are entangled,” is all he would say.

  “I still don’t know what this means,” said Radar.

  “I believe also two people can become quantumly entangled,” said Otik.

  “Two people?”

  “Yes, two people. These two people are two people, but also same person. Everything that you do affects other person, even if you never meet him.”

  “Okay,” said Radar. “So have you ever been entangled with someone?”

  “Not anymore,” said Otik. “Once, but not anymore. It is untangle that hurts.”

  Though they resembled live birds in beak, wing, and feather, the puppet birds continued to project a muddled signal of sentience. They would sit huddled and quivering, staring at Radar with empty eyes as he entered Moby-Dikt and lay down on his cot. Several pairs of birds had even taken to nesting in bed with him. He would reach out in the darkness and touch their bodies, feeling the quiet churn of their gears. They were warm to the touch, but not with the warmth of life. Radar tried to figure out what was required for something to be considered alive. Was it sufficient to just appear alive? If no one else could tell the difference, wasn’t that enough?

  Order had not completely disappeared, however: when Otik fired up the vircator, the birds would still respond to their creator, leaving their perches to converge upon the wagon, forming a great mass that, as soon as the drums began, swarmed into the air as if on command.

  “It is command—of course it is command. They are electrical, I command them,” said Otik when pressed, though the precise degree of control he exerted over them was becoming less and less clear. Increasingly, pairs of birds could be seen breaking away from the pack in the middle of a rehearsal and flying off across the river and into the jungle. The flock was still large, but there were noticeable gaps now. Radar wondered what a man might think wandering through the jungle and coming across the carcass of a bird puppet.

  “Why do they fly away?” asked Radar.

  “This is malfunction—of course there is malfunction,” said Otik. “Everyone malfunction—you malfunction, I malfunction. Remember, what we are doing is very complex and even crazy. More crazy than rocket science, more crazy than human clones.”

  • • •

  201-998-2666: Hello Mom. The smells! I wish you could smell these smells! R

  On the fourth night, they had again moored near the bank, though this time no village was in sight. A couple of pirogues approached from downstream, the men offering a meager assortment of fish that Horeb examined and declared inedible. The men in the pirogues presented no books, which by now was highly unusual. Blasphemous, even. Indeed, the country in these parts felt swollen with a sinister brand of quiet. Like a recently abandoned crime scene. Except that there was no body, no crime.

  Another coal fire was lit on the deck of the barge to discourage the mosquitoes, and chairs were pulled round. Lacking any other food, Horeb went about making fufu paste in a pot. Radar sat near one of his radios, writing in his journal. Lars and Otik sat together, quietly arguing about some obscure dramaturgical point, a conversation that had no doubt been going on for years. The man with the sounding pole huddled just on the edge of the firelight, smiling at something small and precise and entirely his own.

  They had all settled into a strange routine, the kind of routine men fall into when they are trapped in the pursuit of the divine. Nearby, their goat, whom they had named Bertolt Brecht, bleated softly, homesick. And still: a hundred or so birds shivered and watched them from all around the barge. Not quite watching. Waiting. For whatever would come.

  Radar found himself looking up at the vast compartment of stars above. He thought of Ivan then; wondered whether he was back across the sea already. Whether he would ever see his child again. He tried to find Alpha Centauri, with its A and B and its little Proxima, but one star blurred into the next, and when he found what he thought must be it, he was immediately consumed with doubt. What he lacked was Ivan’s certitude. To be certain was almost better than being right.

  Suddenly, Professor Funes appeared in the firelight. The sight of him caught all of them off guard. Lars and Otik stopped talking. Horeb looked up from his cooking. Radar lifted up his pen in the middle of the sentence. Funes stood there in hat and dark glasses, his blanched skin glowing in the light of the flames.

  And then, before anyone could say anything, he spoke:

  “Come you lost atoms to your Centre draw,

  And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:

  Rays that have wander’d into Darkness wide,

  Return, and back into your Sun subside.”

  A rustling from the birds. Bertolt Brecht bleated quietly in the shadows.

  “The last lines of Attar’s poem,” said Funes. “FitzGerald’s translation, 1887. I’ve wanted to tell you this for some time.”

  They stared at him. No one spoke until Radar got up from his seat.

  “Would you like to join us?” he said.

  Funes shook his head. “I can’t.”

  More silence. Radar pressed his luck. “We haven’t really seen you around much,” he said.

  “You must understand that everything is quite painful for me.”

  Radar peered at the professor’s skin. It was stretched too tight in places, and had grown lumpy in others. The skin did not match the man.

  “Are you ill?” he asked. He was immediately ashamed of his impertinence, but Funes did not look offended by the question.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Though in all of human history, my condition has been documented only once before.”

  “What’s your condition?” said Radar. His forwardness was quite out of character, but then, he also boasted a condition documented only once before.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Funes sank into Radar’s vacated chair.

  “I’ve taken this river hundreds of times,” he said. “It is never the same river twice.”

  “It’s my first river,” said Radar. “Well, if you don’t count the Passaic, back in New Jersey.”

  “It counts. If it’s watery and it flows, it’s a river,” said Lars.

  “Barely water. Mostly toxic waste,” said Otik.

  “It’s getting cleaner,” said Lars.

  “Clean, my asshole,” said Otik.

  “No, thank you,” said Lars.

  Radar could see that Funes was growing uncomfortable.

  “You’ve lived here a long time?” he said, trying to include him in the conversation.

  Funes said nothing at first. They all watched the bent frame of their host. His eyes were transfixed by the fire’s glowing coals. Radar was just about to fill the space left behind by his silence, but then Funes began:

  “I am from Uruguay,” he said. “I grew up in a modest house not far from the river in Fray Bentos. My mother was a washerwoman. Her name was María Clementina. I never knew my father. My mother rarely
spoke of him. You can find all of this in the archives of Fray Bentos. I was unsettled as a child, but I had a good mind for names and places . . . I could tell you the time without the aid of any watch. It should not come as a surprise that I was able to read from a very early age, even though my mother herself was illiterate. When I was seven, I fell off a horse and was badly injured. To this day, I carry a limp on my left side and my knee aches when the weather changes.”

  “Me, too,” said Radar.

  Funes glared at him. Evidently this was not a dialogue. He resumed: “My mother sent me away to Catholic school in Montevideo, though how she found the money for my tuition I still don’t know. But I did well there . . . I was good at following instructions, and I didn’t ask many questions that did not have answers. When I turned eighteen, I swore my life to God: I became a monastic. I joined the Benedictine order at the Abadía de San Benito, in Luján. This too can be confirmed in the various public records. After two years in Luján, I heard about an opening at a monastery in Africa. Knowing this might be my only opportunity to see the world, I jumped at the chance. This is how I came to Zaire. The year was 1971. I joined the Monastère du Quatre Fleuves, near Kisangani. I barely spoke a word of French when I arrived, but the brothers took me in. There were ten of them. This has been recorded in several sources as well. They were kind men, with patience that could last one thousand years. It’s a pity our bodies and minds abandon us so soon—only the soul can take advantage of such patience. Soon after my arrival, Mobutu started his campaign of Zairianization. This was a difficult time for the young country . . . The government seized all properties from foreign nationals and former colonials and gave them out to Mobutu’s friends. Some would say the country was already lost at this point, though the end would not come until much later. Luckily, we were sheltered under the church’s wing. It was a kind of immunity, but we all knew it could not last forever.

  “I had noticed during my time in Kisangani that the town did not have a proper library, aside from that at the college. Books had always been a refuge for me, perhaps because I had always been an outsider wherever I went. And so I decided to start a small library for those who might take similar comfort in the realms of the imagination. . . . At first, it was mostly exegetic and hermeneutic texts. We had various translations of the Bible left behind by missionaries in transit, but I made an appeal to several schools in Paris and Montevideo and also New York City to send us their old secular books. I didn’t expect any response, but soon the books came—at first just a few, but then more and more. A woman in Paris sent us three hundred detective novels, which the children of course loved. We still had a reliable post system back then . . . The river was open, and the mining companies had regular flights. It was all quite sophisticated. Our little library grew. I housed it in the old greenhouse in the back of the monastery, and the children would come. Many of them began to work for me as docents, organizing the books, making library cards, resealing bindings. We had all kinds of books. Lots of poetry, travel novels, plays, American literature—Melville, Twain, Steinbeck. I will not recount every title at La Petite Bibliothèque de la Connaissance, but it was well used. The sign above the door squeaked in the wind—I can still hear it now. . . . I will tell you that some of the other brothers in the order disapproved of the library. They claimed I was wasting my time. They didn’t consider the contents appropriate, but I was of the mind that God was in all books, and we should not bar the path to spiritual awakening, for there are many ways to climb up the mountain and feel His glory. At least this is what I told myself.”

  He paused as a pair of birds flew out of the darkness and settled in the space beneath his chair. Funes looked down at them and then continued:

  “Then the day I knew was coming finally arrived. The rebels came from the jungle and attacked the people. They were upset with the way the country was being run—or not being run—and they held us colonials responsible. I was, as usual, in the library . . . I heard the shots. And my first instinct, I’m ashamed to admit, was not to go to my brothers’ aid but to protect the books. I locked the door and put a chair against it. But it was not enough, for soon the rebels came for me . . . They shot down the door. They rushed in; they were so angry, swearing, cursing—it was as though they had been looking for the books this whole time, as though they blamed the books for their misfortune. None of them could read or write a word, but here they were, standing in my little library, fuming at the idea of such a place. One of them held me while they sprayed gasoline all over the shelves. What a waste of gasoline, I thought. I asked them why they were doing this, but all they said was ‘Be calm, be calm, Papa.’ They made me watch as they lit each shelf . . . I couldn’t bear it. I broke away from my captors and I ran . . . I ran straight into the flames, and the last thing I remember feeling was not the presence of God, as I might have expected—no, I was overwhelmed by this great sense of human effort . . . to write, to live, to destroy. So much effort in the world, and in the end, all for nothing.”

  “These don’t sound like the words of a monk,” Lars said from the shadows.

  Professor Funes nodded slowly. “You’re right. I was never a monk. I only came to realize this much later.”

  “But you survived?” said Radar.

  “I awoke several days later. I had never expected to wake again, of course, but the family of one of my docents had found me in the library alive. He had gone into the flames and rescued me. I was badly burned, very badly burned, but alive. The books had collapsed on me, you see . . . It turns out books are actually quite difficult to burn because of their thickness, because of their density, and so they formed a kind of shield around me. The father of this docent was one of the village healers. He wrapped me in aloe vera and sandalwood leaves and gave me a narcotic to chew for the pain . . . Still, I could not move, as nearly all of my skin had peeled off. The ash from the books had cured into my flesh. It was like a balm. Even as I lay in such a painful state, I could also see how very lucky I was. Undoubtably, I was and remain grateful to the docent and his family, who risked their lives to shelter me. Soon after I awoke, it did not take long for me to discover that everything was different. Everything was not as it was . . . Time had disappeared.”

  He stopped speaking. Bertolt Brecht gave a little yip. The sounder was gently singing to himself.

  His high-pitched voice began again: “Time, of course, had not disappeared. It was I who had changed—irrevocably. It took me a while to realize how, for once one changes, there’s no way to compare what it was like before the change, because you, the one who must compare, are already different. Bertucci called this ‘the conundrum of self-parallax’ in his Treatise of the Psyche. But eventually I came to comprehend my condition. Put simply: the fire had gifted me with the capacity for perfect and complete memory. Or cursed me, as it were. I had gained entrance into the Akashic Records, the record of all records. As unbelievable as it sounds, this has been my reality from that moment forth. I have become a catalog of existence. During those long months of recovery, while I lay in bed nursing my wounds, I remember every single crack in those hut walls . . . I can draw them for you now. I remember every single call from the yellow-throated cuckoo that presided over the acacia adjacent to my window . . . I gave him no name, knowing it would only deepen my curse. I remember every smell that came in from the cooking stove behind the little garden. I could recount every single meal during those three months, though every meal was the same. I remember every bee, every millipede, every lizard that crossed my sight and even those that did not. Before, I had only the slightest grasp of the Kele language of the natives, but, lying in bed and hearing them talk around me for perhaps a week, I already knew over a thousand words and could speak them perfectly . . . If I wasn’t quite fluent, then I spoke as if I were one of them, as if I were a mirror. What, then, is the difference between this and fluency? I realized we were nothing but imperfect copies of those around us.

  “
And then there were the books. The first thing I did when I was well enough to speak was to demand books. Now that the library was gone, these were hard to come by, but they were brought in from the college, which was under government protection and had been spared from the rebels’ assault. I opened each book I received and just as quickly shut it, for I had already absorbed its contents. It was a kind of constant torture—reading no longer yielded the pleasure it once had for me: I was invariably hungry for more, and yet my hunger could never be satiated. I read every book in that library before I could even rise from my bed. I read and read and never reread, for once was more than enough. When I had read all the books in Kisangani, I had them send for more from Kinshasa and from South Africa and Kenya. I wrote letters to all of my contacts in Paris, in London, in New York, in Buenos Aires, anywhere I could find . . . I explained what had happened; I explained that I needed more books, that I would die without my books. All this before I could walk. The books began to come . . . My friends around the world took pity on me. And I read like an addict, like a man gasping for air.” His voice fell into a kind of trance. “I read Homer and the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes. I read Plato and Aristotle and Lucretius and Cicero. I read Virgil and Ovid and Sappho and Seneca. I read Saint Augustine. I read the Koran and the Torah and the Talmud and the Bible again for the first time. I read Dante and Machiavelli and Chaucer and Marlowe. I read Dogen and the Sutras. I read all of Shakespeare. I read Bacon and Milton and Dumas and Vaughan and del Castillo and Swift and Cervantes and Diderot and von Kleist and Goethe and Corneille and Mistral and Rochefoucauld and Molière and Rousseau and Voltaire and Burke and Pelayo. I read Khaqani and Rudaki and Rumi and Khayya¯m and Hafiz and Saadi and Attar. I read Defoe and Asturias and Sterne and Stendhal and Verga and Carducci and Blasco Ibáñez and Hugo and Verne and Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert and Baudelaire and Sand and Verlaine and Paz and Maupassant and Ibsen and Wordsworth and Austen and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats and Blake and Scott and Carpentier and García Márquez and Puig and Cortázar and García Lorca. I read Dickens and Stevenson and Eliot and Wilde and Cabrera Infante and Onetti and Thackeray and the Brontës and Proust and Borges and Carroll and Trollope and Ruskin and Hoffman and Nietzsche and Emerson and Dickinson and Whitman and Melville and Hawthorne and Shelley and Poe and Gogol and Pushkin and Turgenev and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Blok and Leskov and Chekhov and Pessoa and Thoreau and Alcott and James and Twain and Naipaul and Calvino and Nabokov.” Horeb began to beat lightly on his drum.