Since he was little, he had maintained a fraught relationship with the dark. Darkness had come to represent not the cyclical arrival of the night, but rather his periodic forced flights from consciousness. To feel the darkness creep into the edges of his vision meant that an involuntary departure from his body must soon follow. Darkness meant the absence of time. Or, more precisely: the absence of him from time. The world continued to spin without him, he hanging suspended between this universe and the next, waiting for the darkness to beat back its retreat and the light to take hold of him again. He had thought a lot about that world — the world that continued to spin while he was gone, the world that did not include him. It was almost impossible to comprehend. The observed could not exist without the observer. If he removed himself from the equation, what remained? The equation could not hold.
Once, when he was five, while they were waiting in the emergency room after one of his grand mals, Radar had turned to his mother.
“Why do I disappear like that?” he asked.
It was a complicated question. Or maybe it was a simple question. Regardless, Charlene had not prepared an answer. The query triggered the first of what would become a long series of awkward explanations that his mother revised and honed over the years. These explanations hinged upon the continuous misuse of phrases like “You’re such a special child” and “There’s no one quite like you” and, worst of all, “It was God’s choice.” Radar could sniff the stink of these answers but could not decipher why his mother was being so shifty. Kermin never ventured into such fraught territory. He had a habit of leaving the room when questions arose about Radar’s condition. Finally, Charlene’s explanations had culminated in that glass cathedral of a term, “Radar’s syndrome.” His syndrome. When she stumbled upon this conceit, she immediately put all of her eggs into this basket, realizing its genius, for the diagnosis was essentially a tautological conversation stopper. Everything could be blamed on the syndrome. The syndrome could explain all, and yet the syndrome itself could not be explained.
Alone in the middle of Forest Street, Radar shivered. There was no such thing as Radar’s syndrome. There had never been a syndrome. There was only him. He was free.
He switched on a flashlight and split open the darkness. Using a bit of duct tape, he strapped the light onto the front of Houlihan’s dashboard. A droopy, but serviceable, headlight.
He took out Kermin’s portable transceiver and clicked it two slots to AM mode. After checking to see if WCCA was up and running (it was not), he trolled the frequencies until a woman’s voice sprouted from out of the bed of static:
Jersey City, Newark, and several other towns in Essex, Bergen, and Hudson counties continue to reel from the baffling blackout that has plagued northern New Jersey today. Experts are now calling the incident “not an accident” and a “deliberate attack.” Authorities are still mystified as to why all electronics in the affected zone have also failed, leading some to believe a so-called e-bomb was detonated in the region. Members of the police and fire departments would not comment on the source of the blackout, saying their primary task was to keep people safe and help return essential services to operation. But as National Guard troops flood into Newark this evening, many government agencies, including the FBI and Homeland Security, have sent in representatives to help solve the mystery of why and how the electrical grid was so paralyzed in today’s incident. A warehouse in Paterson was briefly surrounded by law enforcement officials, but this turned out to be a false alarm—
Radar clipped off the radio.
Jesus Christ. They were coming. They were coming, and he was abandoning his mother alone with a stick figure. How could he do such a thing? He needed to defend her against the troops. He stopped and turned the bike around. A soft glow emanated from the bedroom window upstairs. The distant cajolement of Caruso hitting a high note.
No. He had to keep going. If he didn’t, he would never know.
She would have to fend for herself.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “Stay safe.”
He put his crocodile boot into the pedal clip and pushed forward. His headlight bounced slightly, spooling forth its little patch of light, and he followed, soothed by the simple feeling of movement through space and time. After hearing such a vastly revised version of his birth, his questionable lineage, his apparent electrocution, the true source of his condition, he had expected to feel overwhelmed, askew, for his elemental sense of balance to be forever changed. But in truth, he did not actually feel all that different. Rather, he felt like himself — only more so, as if he had just come up for air after holding his breath for a very long time.
He glided down the darkened street, following his little bouncing patch of light. Rule #4: We will be what we are, and what we are is what we will be. No matter if his parents had electrocuted him in Norway. No matter if he had lost his hair, had developed epilepsy and an eternal sense of inadequacy. No matter if Kermin was not his real father. All that mattered right now was following this little patch of light to Xanadu. Everything would work out if he could only get to Xanadu.
He had been bicycling for only a minute when he came upon a red-and-blue blur of lights strobing across the neighborhood. Two police cars were parked nose to nose. A roadblock.
An officer got out of one of the cars and motioned for Radar to stop.
“There’s a curfew,” the officer said. “You can’t be outside right now.”
He could see, against the psychedelic wash of the police lights, that the officer was a black man.
“All right,” said Radar. He felt a very strong impulse to tell this man everything that had just happened — how he had just found out that he was also black, or at least had been born black. He knew such a declaration would most likely not go over very well and possibly get him into a lot of trouble, so he just stood there, slack-jawed, staring at the man.
“Did you hear me? You can’t be outside right now,” the officer repeated, a hint of irritation in his voice. “You’ve got to get home.”
“All right,” Radar said again. Do not say that you are black! You may want to say this right now, but this is not how people talk about these kinds of things.
“Sir, did you hear what I said? You cannot be out right now. You’ve got to go home.”
“I’m going home,” Radar said suddenly. “I’m headed there right now.”
“What were you doing?”
“Me? I was. . buying a chicken. For my mother.”
“A chicken?”
“Yes. My mother loves chicken.” Oh no.
Radar had always been a terrible liar. The effort of fabricating even the smallest of untruths immediately sent him into a surreal tailspin. His lies could never be simple; they quickly ballooned into elaborate explanations that soon popped under the weight of their own flawed logic. When he was six years old, he had told his first real lie after shoplifting a pack of size-C batteries from the Korean bodega down the road. Kermin had caught him guiltily stroking the alkaline wonders on their porch.
“Where’d you get those?” his father had asked, standing very tall and still.
“From. . the battery man,” Radar said without thinking.
“Battery man? What is that?”
“It’s a man. . He gives you batteries. He gives batteries to everyone.” The lie grew and grew before their eyes, yet even little Radar knew the world couldn’t sustain such a character. Batteries were a precious commodity, not something that could be gifted to strangers by some Peter Pan of electricity.