There was no answer.
WHICH BIRD?
Silence.
R U THERE? But it was already clear that whoever it was had slipped back into the vast, blank spectrum of night.
“Xanadu?” Radar said by candlelight. “P4 D26?”
He studied the scrap of paper. It was clearly a code of some sort. He had flirted with cryptanalysis in college, and now his mind jumped to possible encryption methods: could it be an alphanumerical substitution cipher? Maybe “Xanadu” was the keyword. Or maybe it was a columnar transposition coordinate system? Or a modified Nihilist symmetric encryption cipher? Or was it a chess move, and the board was some kind of map? It would take him days—weeks—to crack. He did not have weeks. He did not have days. He looked at his watch. He had about fifty-three minutes.
6
There was, of course, still the minor dilemma of what to do with the smoking gun of the pulse generator. With his father nowhere to be found, should he take the liberty of dismantling and destroying the evidence? Sooner or later, the authorities would triangulate the origin of the blackout to their house and they would all — he and Charlene included — be in serious, serious trouble. Radar decided to leave it for the time being. He would come back and handle it shortly, but first he needed to find Xanadu and try to track down his father.
But where could his father have gone? Kermin never went anywhere. That shack was his den. If ever he strayed too far (read: ten blocks or so), he always came rushing back to its safe haven.
Radar went over to the Faraday trunk and proceeded to pilfer it. At this point, he no longer cared what Kermin thought — after nearly blowing up New Jersey, his father had lost the moral high ground. Radar took the flashlights, the radio, one of the pocket televisions, the calculator watch, and the cell phone. He put on the watch and stuffed the rest into a backpack. He also carefully picked out three birds from the ceiling. He tried to choose three varying specimens, but to his eyes, at least, they all looked fairly similar.
Tata, what the hell were you going to do with these things?
Radar took one last look at the carnage of the shack’s interior. This, the epicenter of the Great Jersey Blackout. Would they one day write a book about this room? Radar shook his head. Just before leaving, he felt compelled to pick up the stick figure he had found by the vircator and put this into his backpack as well. Then he closed the door behind him.
Xanadu, Xanadu. . What was Xanadu?
He had heard this name before. In a movie? Or was it a book? He cursed his ignorance of pop culture. His time was ticking away. He looked at his watch. It was 8:23 P.M. He estimated he was already down to forty-five minutes.
The house was dark. He lit another candle and headed upstairs.
“Mom?” he called.
She was lying on her bed, listening to a hand-cranked record player crackling away on the floor. The windows were wide open. There was a collection of uncapped sniffing bottles on the bedside table.
“He still isn’t back?” she said.
“No,” he said.
“I wonder where he’s gone off to?” she said. “Obviously he feels no obligation to protect his own family.”
“I’m sure he has good reason.”
She shifted on the bed. “This is his favorite piece,” she said.
“What is?”
“Caruso singing ‘Una furtiva lagrima.’ We used to take this out and listen together after you had gone to sleep. We would hold hands. Can you believe it? Holding hands,” she said. “I pulled out the record player and thought that if I played it, I might lure him back.”
So they both had their homing beacons: his was liquor; hers was music.
They were quiet, listening to the aria. Caruso sustained, inspected, and released a high note out through the windows and into the ether.
“Where could he be?” she said. “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “You’ll see. There’ll be some explanation and we’ll all laugh about this later.”
Charlene reached over and sniffed one of the bottles on her bedside table.
“I still can’t smell a thing,” she said.
“I’m sure it’ll come back.” He went over and sat on the bed. “You did really good today, Mom. You helped a lot of people. Tata would be proud.”
“Are you sure he’s not in his shack?”
“I—” He again thought about telling her all. “No. I checked.”
He lay down beside her. His parents’ room had morphed and changed colors and layout over the years, but lying on his back now, he was able to recall all of those nights when he would burrow down between his parents after having a nightmare, Kermin sideways and snoring, Charlene rubbing his back and humming a little lullaby. In his memory, this room was a place no nightmares could penetrate.
After a final exhortation from Caruso, the aria clicked to an end. The needle shifted into an endless groove, spinning around and around. Radar got up, cranked the box several times, and then flipped the record to the other side.
“It’s amazing the things that still work now,” he said. “Maybe we’ll become a mechanical society. Everything will be hand-cranked.”
“Do you think we’ll ever get the electricity back?” she asked.
“I think so,” he said. “The city already got its power back. But then, I don’t think the city got hit like we did.”
“Ha! Of course. The city will always have its power.”
“Mom,” said Radar, “what’s Xanadu?”
“Xanadu?” she said. “You mean the poem?”
“The poem?”
She began to orate in a faux British accent:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
“What is that?” he said.
“Coleridge,” she said. “I wasted my time in college writing a useless thesis about Coleridge and narrative fragmentation.”
“It doesn’t sound so useless.”
“Oh, it was. I think the title was ‘Completion as a Function of Interruption’ or some nonsense like that.”
“But is Xanadu an actual place?”
“I think it did exist in China once upon a time.”
“But I mean, we couldn’t actually go to Xanadu now, right?”
“No, but then, that’s the whole point. It’s something not real. . The poem was famous in part because it was incomplete.”
“How do you mean?”
“Coleridge claimed he had been reading this book about Kublai Khan right before he smoked some opium and then he fell asleep. And while he was sleeping, he had this very vivid dream about a poem. . a complete poem, in five parts. . something like three hundred lines long. And so he wakes up and begins writing it all down. But then the doorbell rings and a visitor from Porlock interrupts him. The visitor stays for about an hour or so, and when Coleridge finally gets back to writing the poem, he’s forgotten the rest.”
“So what did he do?”
“He left it as it was. At least that’s what he claimed. A lot of people think he made the whole story up, but I guess I just loved the idea of this mysterious visitor from Porlock coming in and interrupting genius at work. It’s the idea that if only we hadn’t been interrupted, then we could’ve accomplished our magnum opus. . but in the end, we come to realize that the interruption is the work itself.” She paused, opening and closing her hand like a jellyfish. “Did you know that in Lolita, Quilty checks into the hotel as ‘A. Person, Porlock, England’?”