Radar was suddenly struck by the depth of his mother’s knowledge. He realized he had never once asked her about her college thesis. He had always dismissed her as his slightly less hapless parent, when in fact, here she was, a walking literary encyclopedia, a font of information, untapped for all these years. How had he never quite understood this? Perhaps because proximity — contrary to popular belief — did not breed clarity. Her habits were not habits, but merely the backdrop for his own upbringing, quite literally: for as long as he could remember, sheets had obscured all of the bookshelves in the house. He had grown up thinking of books as something dirty, to be kept but never shown, which might explain why as a teenager he would regularly develop random erections in the school library. But these books, her books, hidden as they were, had all been considered, read, placed in an order dictated by a mind at work. For the first time, he saw her as a fully functioning being, someone other than just his mother.
“A. Person, Porlock, England,” he repeated.
“When I first read that, I almost died. It was like Nabokov and I were living in the same world. We were not so different, he and I. We both had our Porlocks.”
“Someone said they would meet me at Xanadu.” He reached into his fanny pack and took out the scrap of paper. “Xanadu P4 D26.”
“Sounds very Dadaistic.”
“I think it’s some sort of code.”
“You mean like spies?” she said.
“Some kind of transposition cipher or something.”
“Or maybe they were talking about Xanadu.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, Xanadu—that monstrosity by the football stadium.”
“What monstrosity by the football stadium?” Radar said. A dim light flickered in his head.
“You know, the mall. Xanadu. The building with the awful stripes?”
The awful stripes. Yes. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Xanadu. The answer had been staring him in the face the entire time. Of course.
“It’s the mall!” he whispered.
“It’s an abomination,” she said. “Have you seen that thing?”
She was right. It was an abomination. Billed as “the largest mall in the world,” the hideously gargantuan pajama-striped mega shopping complex sat at the confluence of the New Jersey Turnpike and Route 3, just across from the newly constructed Meadowlands Stadium, a stone’s throw from the Hackensack River. One day soon, Xanadu promised to offer six million square feet of glory for the entire family, including an indoor ski slope, a skydiving tunnel, a skating rink, a water park, and a three-hundred-foot Ferris wheel that orbited a giant Pepsi symbol visible for twenty-five miles on a clear day. The only problem was that it looked like a day care turned terrorist detention center and had been languishing, empty, for years now — ever since its primary backers, Lehman Brothers and the Mills Corporation, had both gone belly up. Xanadu had been renamed Xanadu Meadowlands Mall, which was then shortened to Meadowlands Mall, which had recently been rechristened again as the American Dream Meadowlands Mall. But Xanadu would always be Xanadu.
“I need to go,” Radar said suddenly.
“To Xanadu?”
“I’ll be back. I swear. I just need to go.” He kissed her forehead. “Thanks, Mom.”
“What did I do?”
“Everything,” he said. “I’m lucky to have you.”
“Don’t go,” she said. “Not you, too.”
“But I’m going to find out what happened to him.”
“At Xanadu?”
“That’s all I’ve got right now.”
She stared at him and narrowed her eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”
He realized his folly. She was his wife, for God’s sake. It was a bond of intimacy, however flawed, that he would probably never experience. She had a right to know.
He sighed.
“Kermin was the one who caused it,” he said.
“Caused what?”
“The blackout.”
“Kermin? As in my husband?” She blinked. “How?”
He shook his head. “It’s complicated. But when I went into the shack today, I found an electromagnetic pulse generator. It’s very powerful. It had exploded, and it must’ve sent out a pulse that was amplified by the antenna in our backyard.”
“Is he okay?” Her voice rose.
“He wasn’t in there.”
“But why would he do something like that?”
“I don’t know. I got a message on one of his radios to meet this guy at Xanadu.” He reached into his backpack, pulling out the little figurine. “And I found this. Have you ever seen it before?”
She took the stick figure from him. Touched its face with her fingertips.
“It’s strange, but I can’t feel him anymore,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”
“We’ll find him. I’ll go to Xanadu and then I’ll check the hospitals if I have to. He didn’t go far. He couldn’t have gone far.”
“The hospitals?” she said.
“I don’t think it came to that, but we have to be open to—”
“Wait, don’t go,” she said suddenly. She dropped the figurine and grabbed his arm, her fingers digging into his skin. “Don’t.”
“Ow, Mom. Let go. Easy.”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t go. You’re all I have left.”
“It’s gonna be fine, Mom. He’ll turn up. You know him. He probably freaked out when the pulse happened.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. I should’ve listened to him. . and now it’s too late.”
He was trying to pry off her fingers. “Mom, just let go for a second.”
“He was right the whole time.”
He stopped. There was a note of surrender in her voice that had caught his attention. Her hands suddenly went limp.
“Right about what?” he said.
“Oh, my sweet,” she said quietly. “I can’t believe what I did.”
“What did you do?” he said. “You’re kind of freaking me out right now.”
She was very still. Her eyes, looking out into an invisible distance.
“I. .” her mouth opened, hung there. “I almost killed you.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “You saved—”
“I did!”
Startled, he looked at her. The moment hung, swayed, tottered. Almost on cue, the record began to skip.
“Your seizures,” she whispered.
“Oh, Mom,” he said. “Stop. I can go back on my meds if you—”
“No, you don’t understand. It was all my fault.” Her eyes were filling with tears. “Your seizures, your hair. Everything. It was all because of me.”
He got up to fix the record. When he clicked the needle into a new groove, Caruso’s tenor again filled the room. The lightness of his voice drifting over a pincushion of notes.
“Mom,” he said, still from the floor. “A lot’s just happened. Tata’s not here, I understand. But don’t be too hard on yourself, okay? Just go easy. They’ll put the power back on, we’ll find Kerm—”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“I am listening to you.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “You were black. I mean, when you were born, you were black.”