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 scientist (??) 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.
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?