Besides making him tender to the touch, the shedding did not seem particularly painful for Radar, though as the skin sheathed off his face and neck, he began to resemble a walking zombie. Since their return from Norway, Charlene hadn’t brought him back to the day care. She couldn’t even imagine what the other kids would say if they saw him in this condition. The thought made her shudder.
“Why is that like this?” Radar asked one evening. He was standing in front of the mirror. In his hand was a piece of his skin.
Charlene panicked.
“This,” she said, hating every inch of her being, “this happens to everyone. You shed your skin. This is part of growing up.”
“Okay,” he said. “Am I growned up?”
“Not yet, honey. Soon.” She brought him close to hide her tears. “Soon.”
She didn’t dare take him to the doctors, the same doctors whom she knew all too well. She didn’t take him even when she noticed that his smooth black hair had started to fall out in quarter-size chunks, leaving him with an uneven patchwork across his skull. She took to combing and recombing the thin hair that remained. When Charlene took Radar outside, she would rub him with lotion and then enshroud him like a mummy in a series of cashmere scarves. It was a ritual Radar came to greatly enjoy, despite the summer heat.
“I am a gift!” he said when she brought out the scarves, holding up his arms. “Wrap me up!” He grew attached to fabrics and the safety they offered — she often found him hiding behind the sheets of her Rothko library, palms on the cotton, humming a little tune to himself.
Kermin was intent on not acknowledging the horror of their son’s condition. On more than one occasion, she had to rebuke him when he was about to take Radar out in public without his protective covering.
“This is important!” she said, making sure she left a little space for Radar to breathe.
“He doesn’t care,” said Kermin.
“People care. I care,” she said, wrapping.
“I am a gift!” cried Radar.
Each successive shedding left Radar paler than the last, until his skin settled into a slightly yellowish, flushed cream color — a Type I/II on the Fitzgerald Skin Type Classification Scale, somewhere between the rough-hewn maple of Kermin’s unshaven cheek and the cautious milky complexion of Charlene’s Franco-Irish-Germanic roots. Certain dark blotches remained around his nipples and belly button and behind his left ankle, where there was a prominent marking resembling the silhouette of a sinking Viking ship. It was like a rebirth.
But the procedure in Norway also led to several serious complications, none of which Leif had mentioned in his debriefing. Radar’s skin became incredibly sensitive and subject to severe rashes. His hair did not grow back, and after the final shed, he was left almost completely bald, save for a little patch above his left ear.
“Where is my hair?” Radar asked her.
“Some boys don’t have hair,” said Charlene. “Like your grandfather.”
“He’s not a boy!”
“He was once a boy like you.”
“Okay,” said Radar. She could tell he didn’t believe her twisted logic.
The media never got wind of this miraculous transformation. There was no reference to Radar in any of the major New York or New Jersey metropolitan newspapers, nor did Dr. Fitzgerald, as least as far as his personal literature suggested, ever learn of his former research subject’s “recovery.” Not that they would have noticed. The three of them had retreated into a protective cocoon. Some days it felt like the rest of the world barely existed.
About two months after their Kirkenes trip, Radar was busy deconstructing radio receivers in front of the television, watching an episode of Godzilla. He was wearing his favorite blue knit cap, which he had taken to doing since losing his hair. From the kitchen, Charlene sensed a misplaced stillness in the air. She came into the room and found her son sitting like a statue, his torso rigid and strangely arched backwards, a motherboard lying in the palm of one hand. And then a wave passed through him, and his entire frame began to shiver and shake uncontrollably, sending him tumbling into the pile of radio parts splayed out before him.
At first she thought he might have electrocuted himself accidentally, but when he continued to shake, she ran over and held him as his eyes rolled backwards and his arms popped and trembled in their sockets. A wilted smell of urine filled the air. She put her hand on his face and felt his jaw balling and grinding into itself with an uncanny mechanical persistence. His hat fell to the ground, revealing the lonely lateral tuft. On the television, the picture of Godzilla went soft and then split into a static that pulsed and thrummed with each of Radar’s convulsions. A stench of burnt wires wafted through the room.
“Radar!” she screamed. “Radar!”
She comprehended his death with complete clarity. Such finality halted the most basic functions in her body. She could barely breathe. Life without him was incomprehensible. He was all there was, all there could ever be.
“Come back to me,” she cried. “I promise I will never let this happen again. . Come back to me. Please.”
Eventually the contractions subsided and Radar’s body settled into an uneasy quiet. His bald head was covered in a pin screen of sweat. On the television, a commercial showed two blond twins laughing in ski coats as they shuffled gum into their mouths. Charlene held her son and stroked his head. She whispered something small and true into his ear. His eyes slowly came back into focus, darting around the room in fear.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “You’re here. You’re back. Radar, my love, my sweet, we’re together.”
Charlene felt a strong urge to yell, but there was no one there to hear her except her limp son and the synchronized twins on the television.
It was his first grand mal seizure. Despite her promise, it would not be his last.
That autumn, Charlene exchanged several heated letters with Leif. The inherent delay caused by the intercontinental postal system left her plenty of time to fill the spaces in between with a vast ocean of anxiety. At first, Leif was sympathetic when he heard of Radar’s hair loss and epilepsy. He asked her to describe the symptoms in detail and even to send pictures, which she curtly refused to do. When she accused him of betraying their trust and threatened legal action, he distanced himself from any responsibility and then, around Christmas, abruptly ended their communication altogether. Desperate, she even wrote several letters to the address she had for Brusa Tofte-Jebsen in Oslo, but these all came back RETURN TO SENDER. The trail had gone utterly cold.
With nothing left to do, Charlene unraveled. She quit her receptionist job at the salon. She stopped eating. Soon she was no longer leaving the house. Kermin began taking Radar to his shop every day. He did all of the shopping, the housework, the little administrative tasks of life, as his wife lay prone in bed. He persisted. He persisted and said nothing to her of her descent. There was nothing left to say.
• • •
ONE NIGHT CHARLENE AWOKE, shivering. Her body felt as if it were eating itself alive.
“Kerm,” she hissed, terrified.
He stirred, mumbling.
“Kermin!”
“Yes?”
“I can’t do it.” Surprised at her own certainty.
The bedside light clicked on. He blinked, rubbed his eyes in the dimness.
“I can’t do it. I just can’t,” she said. “I’m afraid of what I might do.”