• • •
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.