He glanced in his dentist’s mirror. He could see neither the police officers nor much of anything, really. It was dark. Truly dark beneath this underpass.
Holy mother of God. His heart was pounding, but he continued to bicycle forward as best be could, hoping not to crash into the walls of the tunnel.
“Blow me shivers!” he said, out of sheer nervous energy, the words echoing off the concrete underpass.
It was not quite the line he imagined he would say if this were a book or a movie, as it sounded more like the catchphrase of a randy pirate, but it was all he had to offer.
Rule #101: We are more than our words & our words are more than us.
Somehow, he emerged from the underpass without calamity. He was just beginning to wonder where the hell he had ended up when he reached the top of a slight hill, and there, looming ahead of him like a giant oasis, was the Meadowlands Stadium and the mess of the Xanadu mall behind it, all aglow in construction lights.
In truth, he had expected another seizure to overtake him. There were way too many signals going on inside his brain for there not to be some kind of electrical malfunction. He waited for the darkness to come calling, but nothing happened — besides the percolation of adrenaline streaming down his legs, he actually felt okay. Better than okay. Like a frickin’ champ.
Blow me shivers!
As he bicycled into the mall area, he was astonished by the vast amount of light illuminating every square inch of the road, the construction site, the building, the parking lots. At some point he must have passed beyond the boundary of the pulse, across an invisible barrier that separated the worlds of light and darkness. He stared at a streetlight as it buzzed above him. Such a simple thing, but a miracle nonetheless. The blackout already felt like a dream.
The mall complex was a maze of construction fencing and trailers and backhoes and dump trucks parked at odd angles. Radar glided among them all, trying to remain inconspicuous as he cut through various work zones abandoned for the evening. As he approached the behemoth of Xanadu, its hideous striped siding glowing eerily in the light, he wondered how on earth he was going to find the sender of the message amid all of this. Charlene was right: the place was not even open yet. You could spend days wandering its cavernous interior. It was not even clear how you entered the complex, considering that much of the building was blocked off by an imposing moat of construction barriers. The developers were insistent on this point: You can look, good people of New Jersey, but you better not touch.
Fearing that the police from the highway might reappear, Radar decided it was best to get inside as quickly as possible. He doubled back along the frontage road and found an unmanned gate in the chain-link fence. After stopping his bike, he discovered, to his surprise, that the padlock had not been secured. Maybe the contractors had grown complacent. He squeaked open the hinges of the gate, shuffled his bike inside the barrier, and closed the gate behind him.
He was in.
Ahead, he saw the entrance to one of the multilevel parking structures that cradled the mall in a great cement palm. Above him, a massive red-and-yellow-striped structure turned and inclined skyward, like a giant HVAC duct. This had to be the indoor ski slope. According to the plan, people would come and park in these lots on blistering ninety-degree days, they would come and rent skis by the hour, they would ski up and down an artificial hill chilled to subfreezing temperatures inside this giant HVAC duct, and they would laugh and high-five each other’s gloved hands and say, “Friends, this is really living.” Radar had to admit it sounded pretty nice. Particularly the friends part.
He bicycled beneath the ski slope and down into the yawning mouth of the parking garage. Once inside the darkened lot, he saw the blinking lights of a security vehicle coming from the other end. But by this point, he had become a professional at avoiding the Man. He veered sharply to the right and stopped behind a dumpster, breathing hard. The yellow security lights slowly approached, illuminating the cavernous garage in a lazy, sweeping motion. They came up next to him and paused. They must have seen him. He clenched the pedal with his crocodile boot, ready to flee, but then the lights began to move again, fading away into the darkness of the lot. He exhaled.
Where to?
He rooted around in his fanny pack, searching for the scrap of paper with the code on it. He came across the piece of paper with Ana Cristina’s number on it. The sight of those numerals buzzed his wires. How far away she seemed now! He hoped she was still okay, that her mother had not flipped out. He felt a strong urge to see her, to be near her. Soon. But first things first.
After some more rooting, he found what he was looking for:
XANADU P4 D26.
P4 D26? What could it mean? It could be anything, really. He was not a professional code breaker. There were not enough letters to do a letter frequency analysis. He needed some clue, a crib to crack the code.
Dejected, he dismounted his bicycle, swung out the kickstand, and sat down on the ground. He was exhausted. He was exhausted and he was in the middle of a parking garage beneath some abandoned mall, caught on a wild goose chase for a mystery acquaintance of his father’s. It dawned on him that he might in fact be in the completely wrong place, that this Xanadu might not be the Xanadu in the coded message. What then? He had abandoned his mother for nothing. Left her to the wolves as he whiled away the time in a concrete bunker.
He shook his head and looked down at his sad, imperfect body. Who was he kidding? He was still Radar. Just because he now knew the truth of his origins didn’t discount all of his defects. He was still broken.
And that was when he saw it: there, between his legs. In yellow paint.
C21.
For a moment he was confused. And then he realized what it was.
Of course. He looked up and saw a sign hanging above him. PARKING LEVEL 2. It was not some complicated cipher text. Xanadu P4 D26 was a parking space.
Radar jumped back on his bike and took the spiral ramp down and down to the grey semi-darkness of parking level 4, an apparently forgotten domain lit only by the glow of an orange exit sign pointing to nowhere. Well, at least there was that, even if it did point straight at a wall. He had learned not to take illumination for granted anymore.
What could possibly be down here?
Nothing, it seemed. He slowly rode through the empty lot. A. B. C. There were a few lonely traffic cones. A turquoise port-a-john.