Kermin looked up at her. “It’s okay to give him treatment.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we can let him treat Radar. I think it’s okay.”
“But. . but you said it was dangerous.” She shivered, hugging herself.
“He will be fine. It’s what you want. It’s what we came here for.”
Charlene studied her husband’s face. Then she sat down in a chair and pulled Radar to her.
“How’re you feeling this morning?” she asked.
“Fiiiineee,” he said, electronics in hand. “I like dat man with da white head.”
“Who’s that?”
“He means Leif. Bald-head Leif,” said Kermin.
Charlene laughed. “You do? You like Leif? Crazy old Leif?”
Radar nodded. “Yeah. He makes Kermint go explode!”
“Kermit or Kermin, honey?”
“He makes little green Kermint go explode!” Radar demonstrated with his hands, sending flecks of saliva onto the table.
Charlene smiled. She turned back to her husband, placing a hand on his leg. “Why have you changed like this?”
“It’s okay.”
“You’re doing this for me?”
Kermin nodded. “I want to fix.”
“But why now?” She was filled with a sudden wash of uncertainty. “You said you didn’t trust him.”
“I think we found something here. You said this yourself. Maybe these things happen for a reason. Maybe Leif is not so crazy as he looks. He’s giving me his promise.”
Radar reached down and plucked up a radio wire from the careful sea of parts.
“No, my little angel,” Charlene said, taking the wire from him. “That’s not for you.”
“Give it!” Radar said, reaching for the wire.
“It’s okay,” Kermin said, handing the wire back to his son. “He knows what’s for him.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know anymore.”
“It is your choice,” he said.
She nodded.
“Everything happens for a reason,” he said.
She turned to her son. “Radar, do you want to do an experiment today?”
“What’s speriment?” he asked.
“It’s where they connect you to a big machine.”
“Okaaaay,” Radar said. He touched two wires together and made a fizzling sound with his lips. “Connect. Explode!” He burst his hands apart. The wires flew off the table.
“No explode, honey. Just connect,” she said.
Radar looked disappointed.
“Thank you,” she whispered to Kermin, reaching over and squeezing his hand. “I love you.”
“A telegram came,” said Kermin.
“When?”
“This morning.”
“Who was it from?”
“I didn’t open it. It’s there.”
Before she had even picked it up, she knew.
The rest of the day fled toward a distant horizon. By that afternoon everything had been arranged. They stood outside the cabin that housed the vircator. The thin layer of snow had melted into a blanket of fog, relegating the sun to a distant memory. The air against their skin was cool and damp.
Several of the men they had seen before were now milling around, checking wires, writing on clipboards, looking unnecessarily busy. None of the men introduced themselves. Neither Jens, Siri, nor the boy Lars were anywhere to be seen. As preparations were made, Kermin sat on a half-moon boulder some distance away, a radio pressed to his ear, the faint patter of drums emanating from its speaker. Charlene found his newfound nonchalance about the whole matter slightly annoying. She wanted to go over and shake him. Do you realize what’s about to happen? Everything’s about to change.
Leif handed her a large plastic bottle of solution for Radar to drink.
“It’s to focus the current,” he explained.
“We’re going in there?” she asked, pointing to the large cabin.
“He will be going in there,” he said. “I hope you can understand, but it’s not possible for you to be present during the actual procedure.”
“But he’s my son!”
“I’m sorry.”
Charlene thought she would protest more, but she simply nodded, fatigued, haunted by an unsettling feeling that she had seen this all before. The whole scene felt as if it had already happened. She had already been refused entrance to this cabin before. She had already remembered being refused entrance to this cabin before. She tried to shiver away these cycles of recall as she helped Radar drink all of the solution. Then she hugged him and turned him over to Leif.
“Is it painful?” she asked him as he led Radar away.
“Completely painless.”
“Are you sure?”
“He won’t feel a thing. We don’t have nerve sensors for this kind of current.”
And then the door swung shut and they were gone.
Charlene was left with her watch and the horrors of time. The next twenty-one and a half minutes proved to be the most difficult of Charlene’s life. As Kermin clung to his shitty little radio, she alone faced a thousand possibilities and non-possibilities. She defeated them all and in turn was defeated right back. She wound herself into such a frenzy, she had to take off her shoes. Eleven minutes had passed since that door had swung shut. Still she waited, shoeless, confronting the possibility of a child fundamentally altered. Charlene realized for the first time how lucky she was to have a son exactly like Radar Radmanovic. She would not change one single thing. She would not alter a hair on his head. She wanted to cancel the entire procedure, to yell, Stop! Stop! Paralyzed, she did nothing except hate herself for doing nothing, for having done nothing, for having done this.
Twenty-one and a half minutes later, Radar emerged. She ran up and hugged him, prodding at his thin little bones until he began to squirm. There was a new scent about him that she could not identify, but otherwise he seemed unchanged.
“Dat machine make me crackle!” he declared proudly.
“He did fine, just fine,” said Leif.
“You are still you?” She was weeping at his sameness.
“I need to go the pee-potty,” said Radar.
“Thank you, Leif,” she said, smiling through her tears.
“It will take some time,” he said, misunderstanding her relief. “The effects are not instantaneous.”
Kermin stood some distance away, watching Radar and Charlene. He came up and touched his son’s head carefully, with the tips of his fingers, as one examines a melon, and then he nodded at Leif and walked back to their cabin.
• • •
IN THEIR CLOSING MEETING, Leif warned of the possibility of “dermal peeling” in the coming months and said it was a natural part of the melanosomal adjustment process. Charlene did not believe him, but she could not help loving him for having total confidence in his quack methodology. His faith in electricity was endearing. He had given her the greatest gift by making her realize what she already had.
It was strange, given all the endless space that Kirkenesferda had at their disposal, how cramped Leif’s office was. Every shelf seemed to be filled with papers, books, journals, notebooks, boxes of photographs, and reels of eight-millimeter film. There was a pair of limbless mannequin torsos, one of which had its forehead painted with the eye. There was a deflated barrel organ, a whole box of polished black stones, a bushel of branches tied up in the corner, as if a Russian peasant woman had temporarily deposited her burden.