PART 1. THE SPECIAL PARTICLES

1. ELIZABETH, NEW JERSEY

April 17, 1975

It was just after midnight in birthing room 4C and Dr. Sherman, the mustached obstetrician presiding over the delivery, was sweating lightly into his cotton underwear, holding out his hands like a beggar, ready to receive the imminent cranium.

Without warning, the room was plunged into total darkness.

Though he had been delivering babies for more than thirty years now, Dr. Sherman was so taken aback by this complete loss of vision that he briefly considered, and then rejected, the possibility of his own death. Desperate to get his bearings, he wheeled around, trying to locate the sans serif glow of the emergency exit sign across the hall, but this too had gone dark.

“Doctor?” the nurse called next to him.

“The exit!” he hissed into the darkness.

All through the hospital, a wash of panic spread over staff and patients alike as life support machines failed and surgeons were left holding beating hearts in pitch-black operating theaters. None of the backup systems — the two generators in the basement, the giant, deep-cycle batteries outside the ICU, usually so reliable in blackouts such as this one — appeared to be working. It was a catastrophe in the making. Electricity had quite simply vanished.

In birthing room 4C, Dr. Sherman was jolted into action by Charlene, the expectant mother, who gave a single, visceral cry that let everyone know, in no uncertain terms, that the baby was still coming. Maybe the baby had already come, under shroud of darkness. Dr. Sherman instinctively reached down and, sure enough, felt the conical crown of the baby’s skull emerging from his mother’s vagina. He guided this invisible head with the tips of his ten fingers, pulling, gathering, turning so that the head and neck were once again square with the baby’s shoulders, which still lingered in Charlene’s birth canal. He did this pulling, gathering, turning without seeing, with only the memory infused in the synapses of his cortex, and his blindness was a fragile kind of sleep.

As he shepherded the child from its wet, coiled womb into a new kind of darkness, Dr. Sherman heard a distinct clicking sound. At first he thought the sound was coming from the birth canal, but then he located the clicking as coming from just behind him, over his right shoulder. Suddenly his vision was bathed in a syrupy yellow light. The father of the newborn, Kermin Radmanovic, who had earlier brought a transceiver radio and a telegraph key into the birthing room in order to announce his child’s arrival to the world, was waving a pocket flashlight wrapped in tinfoil at the space between his wife’s legs.

“He is okay?” asked Kermin. “He comes now?” His accent was vaguely Slavic, the fins of his words dipping their uvular tips into a smooth lake of water.

Everyone looked to where the beam of light had peeled back the darkness. There glistened the torpedo-like head of the child, covered in a white, waxen substance. The sight encouraged Dr. Sherman back into action. He first slipped his finger beneath the child’s chin, but when he felt no sign of the umbilical cord wrapped around the neck, he yelled, “Push!”

Charlene did her best to comply with the order, her toes curling as she attempted to expel the entire contents of her abdomen, and when the breaking point was most certainly reached, surpassed, and then reached again, there was a soft popping sound and the rest of the baby emerged, the starfish body tumbling out into the dim mustard glow of this world.

Kermin leaned in to catch a first glimpse of his new child. Ever since his wife had come hobbling into his tiny electronics closet, staring at her dripping hand as if it were not her own, time had begun to unravel. The labor had come three weeks early. His fingers — so steady as he mended the cathode ruptures and fizzled diodes of his broken radios and televisions — suddenly became clumsy and numb at their tips, as if they were filled with a thick, viscous sap. In the hospital parking lot, he had taken the old Buick up and over the curb onto a low, half-moon shrubbery, which had not weathered this trespass well at all. As he ushered a blanketed Charlene through the rotating doors, Kermin had looked back at the battered shrubs, lit by the ugly glow of the parking lot’s blinking fluorescents, and wondered in that moment if they were prematurely introducing the future into the present.

In the final days of World War II, his younger sister Tura had also been born three weeks early. He and his parents had been fleeing the advancing Communist Partisans for the uncertain refuge of Slovenia and the West when she arrived suddenly, like a sneeze, in the mildewed basement of a Bosnian hotel on the River Sana. He remembered her tiny and pink in their mother’s arms, sheltered by a horsehair blanket while they rode in the back of a sputtering diesel truck past homes that burned and hissed against a light rain.

That is my sister in there, he thought, watching the blanket bounce to the staccato beat of the road’s potholes. She was born in the war, but she will not know the war. I will tell her how it was so that we will always have the same memories.

Tura would not have the same memories as he, nor any memories at all. On the second day, she opened her eyes to the light of this world, but she would not nurse, and so her body grew soft and light like a bird’s. One week later she was dead, from an illness that was never named. They buried her in an abandoned vineyard on the outskirts of Zagreb. After the impromptu ceremony, they were walking back to the truck when they discovered an unexploded German bomb lying only twenty meters from her grave.

“Her headstone,” his father, Dobroslav, had said, and it was not meant to be a joke, but they all began to laugh, and this felt good until their mother started to weep again. Two days later, she too would be dead, at a checkpoint near Ljubljana. Kermin was too young at the time to understand the particulars, but he knew it was because of something vaguely erotic — something wanted by the trigger-happy Russian private with the moth-eaten beard and something refused by his grieving mother, who was malnourished and weak but who was still and always would be a strong-willed Radmanovic woman. His father had just turned from successfully negotiating their passage with the squat colonel, but it was too late; the young Russian guard had already shot her twice through the chest. It was as if the man had meant to push her backwards with the palm of his hand but had simply used the wrong tool. He began to walk quickly away from the scene so his comrades would not see the terror in his eyes. Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting position, like a ruminative Buddha. She was already stiff by the time her husband reached her. He sat down beside her and held her hands as though they were quietly praying together. Later, the colonel apologized to his father and promised that the young guard would be executed before the day was through.

Years later, even after he had fled Europe, Kermin’s limited sexual encounters — in a Meadowlands parking lot; in a Saigon bordello; behind the vestry of St. Sava’s; in the synthetic floral bloom of his dentist’s bathroom — these moments of carnal urgency were still inflected with the lingering sense of crossing a hostile border. Until he had met Charlene, his relationships had not gone well.

In the darkness of birthing room 4C, Kermin tried to hold his pocket light steady on his wife and brand-new baby. All will be fine, he whispered to himself, there is no reason to worry. His own birth had been famously quick and painless. His mother had claimed he leaped out into the world the first chance he got, as if he could not breathe inside her. “I was killing you!” she used to say. Maybe his child would be no different. Kakav otac takav sin. Like father, like son.

But even then he could tell something was not right. Under the pocket light’s dull beam, the child appeared almost prehistoric. The newborn’s skin was covered in a white, gooey plaster, as if he were not a baby but a statue mold of a baby — a golem, complete with tiny plaster penis. Kermin stared. He wanted to press his hand into this creature’s clay skin, to test its warmth, but already here were the first signs of life: the statue-child was squirming, clawing for oxygen, expelling the first sticky mew of a cry, his tiny mouth working the air for the solidity of a nipple.

“Why is he like this?” Kermin whispered, his pocket light inadvertently dipping before he righted its beam again. “Why does he look like this?”

Charlene, completely exhausted but wild with muddied adrenaline, tasted the concern in her husband’s voice. She tried to sit up.

“What is it? What’s wrong? He’s a boy? Is he okay?” The words swung and gimballed.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry. He’s fine,” Dr. Sherman reassured her, gathering the baby and all of his limbs into a pastel blanket. Instinctively, he took the bright white plastic clamp from the tray and snapped it closed at the base of the umbilical cord. “Preterms are often covered in a substance called vernix caseosa. This protects their skin. It will come right off.” In truth, he had never quite seen such a thick vernix coating, but then there had been nothing normal about this night, so he tried not to let his concern reveal itself in the contours of his words.

Charlene’s green eyes burned in the light.

“I want him with me. .” she said.

“You will have him, don’t you worry,” said the nurse. “You’ll have him for the rest of your life.”

Before Charlene could process the ominous undercurrent of this statement, the nurse put a hand on her shoulder and gently eased her backwards onto the bed. She smoothed a wet curl of black hair across Charlene’s forehead and then adjusted the flow of her IV, opening the secondary port to allow an influx of opioids. Charlene let out a quiet groan and slumped back into the darkness.

“Do we have battery power on the suction?” Dr. Sherman asked.

The nurse checked the machine. “No, doctor,” she said.

“That’s all right. I’ll do it myself.”

He took a wet cloth and carefully wiped off the child’s mouth and face and then his left arm. The thick layer of vernix came away easily. “You see?” he said to Kermin, but Kermin did not answer. He was holding his pocket light, staring at his son. Where the doctor had wiped away the globular coating, the child’s skin appeared very dark — so dark it shimmered purple in the beam of light, like an eggplant. Dr. Sherman looked down and caught his breath. He wiped away more of the white substance. The jet-black umbra of the skin beneath the bright vernix was disarming, as if beneath his covering the child was made only of more shadows.

“He is okay?” Kermin was asking from behind. “He looks. .” There was not a word for this. And now the first full-force wail from the infant, announcing his own arrival.

“Doctor, should we do an Apgar test?” the nurse asked. The doctor hesitated, mystified, holding the baby up to the beam of light. The body squirmed, half white, half black — a negative image of itself. There was a chance this was all still a dream, though the pain in his oblique muscles told him otherwise. He had lived long enough to know that pain never appears in dreams.

From somewhere down the hall came the sound of urgent shouting.

Dr. Sherman snapped back to life. “It’s a boy!” he said, flushing out the obvious. He busied himself with wiping away the rest of the vernix and then snipped the umbilical cord with a precision that calmed his nerves.

“I’ll get an Apgar. Can we get some more lamps in here?” He was enjoying speaking aloud. The act of speaking was making this world possible again. “And what the hell happened with the electric? Can someone find out? You would think with all of this modern technology. .”

“Can I have him?” Charlene said from the darkness.

“We just want to run a few tests to make sure—” Dr. Sherman was in the process of handing the baby off to the nurse when a deep, mechanical moan rose up from somewhere in the building. The central air system shuddered and the ducts began to exhale above their heads and then all of the lights in the room sputtered on, one by one.

Those collected in the birthing room blinked as their pupils constricted with this explosion of photons. Everyone stared at the baby wriggling in the doctor’s outstretched hands. In the harsh light of the fluorescents, the infant’s skin, marked by the last globs of remaining vernix, was as black as the darkness from which he had just emerged. The umbilical cord and its apparatus dangled white and translucent against tiny, pumping legs the color of charcoal. Such monochromatic contrast appeared manufactured; the child looked like a puppet come to life.

“Why is he. . so like this?” Kermin finally blurted out.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Dr. Sherman said reflexively, finishing the handoff to the nurse. “Many newborns have a different skin color when they first come out of the womb. A mark of transition. This will all correct itself.”

“Is something wrong?” Charlene asked, drunk on her drugs, her pasty skin flush with the exertion of her labor. She reached for her child, but he was already being wheeled out of the room on a special trolley, followed by the doctor, who began yelling at someone down the hall.

“Is something wrong?” Charlene asked again. “What is that smell?”

“He is. .” Kermin said, staring at the door, left to wander closed on its hinges. They were suddenly, strangely alone. “He is. . Radar.”

“Radar?”

“His name: Radar.”

To her horror, Charlene realized they had never settled on a name. On several occasions they had tentatively circled the topic, but each time, all she could muster was a halfhearted short list of names for girls, and these tended to be lifted directly from famous novels: Anna, Dolores, Hester, Lucie, Edna. Every choice seemed either too obvious or too obscure or both too obvious and too obscure at the same time. How to name someone who existed only in theory? And coming up with a single viable boy name proved next to impossible. You were not just naming the boy—you were naming the man. Kermin, of course, proved no help at all; all five of his suggestions had been lifted from an electromagnetic textbook. And so Charlene succumbed to the narrative that they would have a girl and that all would become clear later. The decision of the name had been abandoned for simpler, tactile assignments, such as assembling the crib. They had cleared out space for the nursery; they had bought diapers and a kaleidoscope of onesies; they had inherited an outdated perambulator from her parents; but they had chosen no name. Except now that the baby had arrived (and left again), now that the baby had in fact revealed himself to be a he, the absence of a name suddenly took on great significance. He could not exist without a name.

“Radar,” Kermin said again. “You know, radar. Like bats. And aeroplanes.”

“I know what radar is,” she said. She willed her brain into action. “What about. . Charles?” Charles had been the name of her preschool boyfriend. He had punched her in the stomach to declare his love. She had not thought of him in at least thirty years, but now his name rose from the depths and became the stand-in for all things male.

“Charles?” said Kermin.

“Yes, he can be a Charlie. . or Chuck. . or Chaz.”

“Chaz? What is Chaz?”

She sighed. She was too tired for this.

“Okay, not Charles, then. What about your father’s name?”

“Dobroslav? This is peasant name.”

“I’m being serious, Kerm! What about your name?”

His own name was not so much a name as a signal of protest. In the small Serbian village in eastern Croatia where he was born, a name was practically all you had. To know your name was to know your history, your present standing, the circumscription of your future. It was the one thing you could never escape. His father, in a feat of madness or brilliance, had bucked their heritage and invented the name Kermin, in service to no tradition, lineage, or culture. Kermin had thus been both blessed and cursed: his singularity established, he could claim to have never met another with his same name, but he had also weathered a lifetime of confused looks when introduced on both sides of the Atlantic. Kermit? Like the frog?

“But listen,” he said. “I am being serious: Radar is name. Have you seen this television program M*A*S*H?” He articulated each letter, as if they were made out of wood. “Corporal Radar O’Reilly can sense the choppers before they arrive. It is like he has this ESP.”

“We don’t want our child to have ESP,” said Charlene, bringing her hands to her face. The hospital bracelet white against her wrist. “I just want to see him. . Where did they take him? They can’t just take him like that. . I want to see him, Kerm. Bring him back to me.”

Later, hunkered down in a deserted corner of the hospital, Kermin tapped out a message on his telegraph key, his thumb conjuring signal with the quiver of the smooth brass lever. The clusters of clicks and clats evaporated into the air, invisible pulses slipping out into the Jersey night, to be collected like dew by the radios of those who were listening in the early-morning hours:


— —•• — •— 4 17 75.

MY SON IS BORN. RADAR RADMANOVIC.

MOTHER IS FINE. BABY IS FINE. I AM FINE.

KAKAV OTAC TAKAV SIN.

73, K2W9

Moments before, the nurse had asked Kermin for the child’s name.

“I must type it up,” she said. “For the certificate.”

He had glanced through the doorway at his sleeping wife.

“Radar,” he said, testing the boundaries of truth. “It’s Radar.”

“Radar?” The nurse raised her eyebrows, unsure she had heard the word correctly.

“Radar,” he confirmed, bouncing and recalling his fingers from an invisible barrier. “Like this: Signal. Echo. Return.”


Fig. 1.1. Radar’s Certificate and Record of Birth

From Popper, N. (1975), “Caucasian Couple Give Birth to Black Newborn at St. Elizabeth’s,” Newark Star-Ledger, April 18, 1975, p. A1

2

The birth of such an extremely dark baby (described as “blacker than the blackest black” by an overeager Star-Ledger reporter) to two white parents was Jersey gossip that could not be kept quiet for long. The news of the birth must have been leaked by one of the orderlies, or one of the janitors, or perhaps even the nurse who had typed up the certificate of birth. Someone had talked to someone who had talked to someone, and suddenly there was a small group of reporters wandering around the maternity ward the next morning asking questions to anyone who would listen: You’re telling me this wasn’t just a mix-up, right? The kid could be from another family. . No? Okay, well, had the mother slept around? All right, all right. Fair enough. So then what was wrong with him? Okay, but what do you call that kind of thing? Was it a disease? What were the chances of this kind of thing happening? Yeah, but ballpark: one in a million? One in a billion? How black was he really? That black? Like Nigerian black? So then, when can we see him? What do you mean? Well, come on now, that’s a load of horseshit.

The day after his birth, the Newark Star-Ledger ran a front-page article with the relatively modest headline “Caucasian Couple Give Birth to Black Newborn at St. Elizabeth’s.” Lacking a serviceable photograph, they settled for a poorly rendered xerox of Radar’s birth certificate, as if this was all the proof anyone could need. Across the Hudson, the New York Post declared, “Jersey Freak of Nature: White Parents. . Black Baby!” and then proceeded to give very few details elaborating on their inflammatory headline. Baby Radar, caught in a genealogical conundrum not of his choosing, had suddenly become a cultural touchstone.

Perhaps all of the fuss was due to the alchemy of that particular time and place: eight years removed from the ’67 Newark riots, urban white flight was now in full swing. The manufacturing industry was steadily collapsing, leaving New Jersey in the throes of a severe recession. People — both white and black alike — were struggling to come to terms with the great expectations laid forth by the civil rights movement of the previous decade. How would such lofty ideals play out in the banal commerce of the everyday? Had everything changed? Or, as many were slowly realizing, had nothing really changed at all?

No doubt the story also gained traction because the simplest and most obvious explanation for Radar’s appearance, the explanation that spawned a thousand breakfast table jokes — a.k.a. “the milkman theory”—ultimately proved inadequate, given the child’s coloring. If the people could only have gotten a good look at the baby, they would have understood, once and for all, that mere infidelity could not possibly have triggered such a dramatic swing in color from the whitest of whites to “the blackest of blacks.” And yet the people could not get a good look at Radar Radmanovic, because there were no photos of him save a (supposed) shot of his incubator, taken from some distance. With such scant evidence, the public was left to wonder on their own about the nature of inheritance, about what was passed down to a child and what was not, about the chances of such a highly unusual genetic occurrence — if it was indeed a genetic occurrence — ever happening to one of their own children. In the midst of all this, the family remained secretive, declining all interviews, shunning photographers, despite rumors of several five-figure offers for an exclusive photo shoot and rights to their story.

On one of the morning talk radio shows, a then relatively unknown Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, who was about to embark on the famous ten-day tour of apartheid South Africa that would subsequently springboard him into the international spotlight, weighed in on the case, admonishing the media for implicitly accusing “the black male scapegoat of raping another one of its white women.”

“This,” he said emphatically, “is an act of God, not of one man. This child is blessed. I hope the family realizes just how lucky they are.”1

Radar’s story lingered in the Jersey tabloids for only a week or so. Various medical professionals and semi-professionals were called in to offer half-baked theories for what might have happened to the baby — theories that ranged from a rare double-recessive melanism gene expression (“A distant black ancestor come to life!”) to toxic waste exposure from one of New Jersey’s many Meadowlands industrial sewage dumps (“The child was a mutant!”). After this initial flurry of coverage, however, the story, like all stories, shriveled up and eventually disappeared, and Radar and his condition would not be heard of again until nearly four years later, when Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald would deliver his much-anticipated diagnosis, “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male,” in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

Charlene Radmanovic, for her part, emerged from the afterglow of the birth with a strange olfactory condition, in which everything around her smelled exactly the same, and of such an intensity as to be almost paralyzing. At first the hospital and all of its contents smelled of something approximate to burnt Cocoa Krispies. The night nurse, the squishy spinach greens in her muted meals, the urine-resistant plastic pillows, the television remote buttons — everything was morning cereal, permanently singed and distinctly nauseating. Most distressing of all was that her own son, whom she was eventually allowed to hold, smelled so strongly that she could not be near him for long without becoming overwhelmed by his smoldering stench. It was the worst kind of torture — to be repulsed by the very thing one should love above all else. Breast-feeding felt like the most unnatural act in the world. He would not latch, and she quickly grew too dizzy to persist for long. Her complaints were answered with more painkillers, and when these did not work, a half-blind British otolaryngologist was summoned to her bedside. He prodded her sensory orifices and declared the condition temporary.

“A childbirth is an explosion,” he said by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?”

A week of intensive tests confirmed that everything else with Radar, save his unlikely hue, was more or less normal. A couple of the results were slightly worrisome: the iron content in his blood was elevated, as were his cortisol levels, though neither of these was unusual for newborns recovering from the hormonal starburst of birthing and the violent adjustment to a new world of oxygen and sunlight. Baby Radar also exhibited slightly higher-than-normal blood pressure and suffered from moderately dry skin that required treatment with a prescription lotion. But nothing so out of the ordinary as to point to a cause for his unusual appearance. His hair, present from birth, was soft and black and straight, just like his father’s. Indeed, if you could look past his darkness, Radar perfectly resembled a little Kermin: there was the same dimpled chin, the same funicular jawline, the same protrusive brow. If not for their diametric coloring, there would be no question of their relation.

Luckily, the public debate around Charlene’s possible infidelity, a debate that had ignited all sorts of heated exchanges about race and sexuality in the local media, had not quite managed to pierce the cocoon of their hospital room. Dr. Sherman had done well to keep the cameras at bay. He was distinctly aware of the care one must take when wading into such a sensitive subject. At the time, comprehensive DNA testing was not readily available, and questions of legitimate parentage could often linger indefinitely. Still, Dr. Sherman thought it his duty to inform them of their options, should they want to pursue certain answers, and so, the day they were scheduled to take Radar home, he called them into his office for a final meeting.

“Here we are!” he said. “Hard to believe it’s only been a week.”

Charlene looked exhausted.

“What,” she asked, bringing a hand to her nose, “do we do now?”

“Well. .” He thumbed at his pen. “That all depends. I’m not sure if you want to do a test.”

“A test?” she said. “For what?”

He paused. “For paternity. There’s a new procedure available that uses HLA from both father and baby, but it’s expensive, and the lab needs a significant amount of blood to test, so we would need to wait until the baby is at least six or eight months—”

“What’re you saying?” she said.

“What am I saying?”

A silence.

Dr. Sherman held up his hands. “Look, I didn’t mean to suggest anything one way or another. I was merely pointing out that there are tests out there, should you choose to want to know these things.”

Kermin was staring at his wife. She was looking back at him, steadily. After a moment, her eyes filled with tears.

“Kermin,” she said, reaching out for his hand. “Kermin. Kermin.”

Dr. Sherman decided it was time to start speaking again. “It’s all your choice, of course. Regardless, you’ll no doubt want to see a specialist about your son.”

He handed her a list of referrals, which Charlene accepted, only briefly shifting her gaze away from her husband’s face. His eyes had stayed hot, but there was now something dull and sooty around their edges, something she had not seen before, like glowing embers suddenly shushed by a bucket of water.

“One of these doctors I’m sure will help you get to the bottom of what’s going on here. Truly, in all my years, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” He paused, looking at them over his spectacles. “But I say this not to worry you.”

That evening, at the suggestion of Dr. Sherman, they left the hospital through a service entrance, so as to avoid any lingering paparazzi. They arrived home to a house that felt like it belonged to a couple of strangers. Everything was familiar but not their own. The curtains were too brown, the forks were too big.

During her first week out of the hospital, Charlene’s olfactive focus gradually transitioned from burnt breakfast cereal to something more sinister. Descriptors proved elusive; the closest she could come to describing the stench was rotten meat that had been heavily grilled and then doused with an astringent lemon-scented cleaner. It was a three-toned miasma that pounded her in waves. She tried to nurse her son but would quickly be consumed by an enduring sensation of rotting flesh. One evening, she left him squirming on the bed as she fled to the bathroom, weeping at her own futility.

“Are you okay?” Kermin said through the door, their child in his arms.

“I can’t,” she said from the other side.

He tried the door.

“Charlene?” he called.

When there was no answer, Kermin clumsily swaddled Radar like a burrito and walked the ten blocks to the A&P, where he bought a case of formula tins. He fed their child in the Shaker rocking chair in the kitchen, the metronome of his son’s suckling beating against the static hush of his transistor radio on the countertop. Now and again a Halifax ham could be heard reading verses from Leaves of Grass to no one in particular.

At some point, Charlene emerged from the bathroom and stood at the threshold of the kitchen. Father and son had fallen asleep in the chair. She observed them as one observes a painting in a museum, as if she might set off an alarm by venturing too close.

One day, she woke up and found the rotten meat smell had parted and given way to the particulars of the world: she could now smell things individually, though these were warped and amplified a hundredfold. Citrus and all of its iterations triggered a special torment; she was tortured by their downstairs neighbors’ heavy hands with the lemon vinaigrette at their weekly family reunions. On one of her first forays into the outside world, she almost passed out on the sidewalk from a single blast of truck fumes. People, too, despite their concoctions of deodorants and perfumes, emitted strong psychological odors, such that she could instantly read a person’s mood with a single sniff. She quickly learned how to brave the world with two wads of cotton surreptitiously stuffed up her nostrils.

Yet what was more maddening than this evolving cast of odors was what had remained the same: Radar’s smell was the one smell that had not changed since those early days of charred cereal. He smelled exactly as he had the moment he was born. Or: her perception of his smell had not changed since the moment he was born. She was not so naive as to think her perceptions provided an objective dictum on the truth.

As the days and weeks went by, she slowly learned to tolerate her intense olfactive repulsion for him. Such repulsion was not acceptable, she knew — this was her child, after all, her own flesh and blood — and so she willed herself to love the repulsion itself. The dizzier she became, the tighter she held him. If this was her curse, then so be it. And yet she also became convinced that if only she could determine what had gone wrong with Radar, then she would also discover the secret to loving him as a mother should. All she needed was a medical diagnosis that could be spoken out loud and everything would be fixed.

They took Radar to each of the pediatric dermatologists that Dr. Sherman had recommended. Charlene expected an answer to come quickly. Surely, science would give them a name for what had happened, some kind of explanation or clinical history. The doctors, however, did not hold up their end of the bargain. They gave the Radmanovics more slips with more references, each of which Charlene diligently pursued. They crisscrossed New York City, visiting a growing list of increasingly suspect specialists who would pluck biopsies from Radar’s squirming thighs or rub on seven-syllabled creams that did nothing but irritate his skin. Nothing worked, nor did these specialists seem to have a clue about what, if anything, was wrong. Each doctor, after some fancy medical footwork, eventually admitted he was at a complete loss for an explanation.

Kermin seemed unfazed — content, even — with the utter lack of answers, but Charlene underwent a slow metamorphosis while she waited in all of those waiting rooms. The process began to consume the purpose. She started to collect medical textbooks; she began subscribing to half a dozen obscure dermatology newsletters and journals; she amassed a detailed, cross-referenced Rolodex of doctors’ names, which she slowly crossed off one by one. With each successive visit, Charlene became more and more determined to find the root cause of her son’s extraordinary condition, though her reasons for doing so were both circular and tautological. Something was wrong with him because no one could figure out what was wrong with him. In an African American family, Radar would be a dark, slight-featured baby with unusually straight hair — nothing more, nothing less. The problem (if one could even call it a problem) arose only when you placed him alongside his biological parents.

When Charlene once sheepishly confessed her own smell condition to Dr. Zeikman, a specialist in Queens who was attempting to treat Radar, he told her it was most likely psychosomatic, that she was simply internalizing the situation with her son. This rebuke so shook her that she could not sleep for three nights straight. Could it actually be that her condition was all in her mind? But surely he could tell there was something wrong with her son? This, she had not made up. This — everyone could see. Right?

She called Dr. Zeikman’s office several days later, under the pretense of complaining about the peroxide formula he had prescribed for Radar. In truth, she wanted to press him on the extent to which he thought her delusional. If it was not her son but she who must be treated, then. . then what on earth should she do?

The phone in the doctor’s office rang and rang until the answering machine clicked on. There was a long pause, and then, in a quavering voice, the secretary announced that Dr. Arnold Zeikman had passed away the night before from a heart attack. All future appointments were canceled.

Charlene stood with the phone in her hand, shocked. She stared at Radar dozing in his bouncy seat. She felt sad for a minute, sad for the briefness of life, sad for Dr. Zeikman’s family. But then this feeling was quickly replaced — she was ashamed to admit — by disapproval. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but she found herself wondering how a doctor of any skill had managed to die of a heart attack. Shouldn’t his alleged expertise on the body’s mechanics shield him from his own mechanics ever breaking down?

She put down the phone and went over to her sleeping son. She let the tips of her fingers brush across his forehead. His skin was warm to the touch. He stirred; his lips trembled.

“Radar, my Radar,” she whispered. “What have I done to you?”

3

Well, we just think it’s all so crazy,” said Louise. “Don’t we?”

Don’t we?” she repeated.

“We do,” said Bertrand. “We don’t think it’s right.”

They were congregated in the Radmanovics’ cramped kitchen in Elizabeth. Charlene’s parents, Louise and Bertrand, now retired, had just returned from an anniversary trip to Cornwall, and they were sipping tea and eating wine gums as Radar sat at their feet, sucking on a pair of headphones. A stack of dermatology textbooks loomed precariously close to the toaster oven.

“I mean, who’s he to tell us there’s something wrong with him?” said Louise.

“That’s not the point, Mom. We just need to find out what happened.”

“Why?”

“If it was your child, you’d want the same thing.”

“So what’s this doctor going to tell you?”

“I don’t know, Mom. That’s why he’s the doctor.”

On a whim, Charlene had recently contacted Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald. Based at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Fitzgerald was a veritable rock star in the field. He was the author of the industry standard textbook Dermatology in General Medicine and recently the creator of the six-point Fitzgerald Skin Type Classification Scale. His handwritten reply to her query, in which he had expressed great interest in Radar’s condition, sat on the kitchen table. The letter, which Charlene had brought to her nose on more than one occasion, carried the faint scent of what must have been the doctor’s aftershave — a slightly unpleasant odor, like molding carrots, but the kind of unpleasant one could come to love.

“Was this his idea?” asked Louise, nodding at Kermin.

“No, Mom, it was our idea. The man’s from Harvard. He’s not some quack.”

“He’s a quack!” said Bertrand, producing various duck noises and pinching Radar’s cheek. Radar giggled at the attention.

Her parents’ skepticism was not without its effect. The steady drumbeat of professional bafflement surrounding Radar’s condition had left Charlene battered by uncertainty. Maybe her mother was right: she did not need another flummoxed doctor, however prestigious, to add to the veritable choir of diagnostic confusion. Charlene silently resolved to file his letter away in Radar’s already bulging medical folder and think no more of it.

In the corner of the kitchen, Kermin was only half listening as he worked the dials of his shortwave, trying to catch a signal from Côte d’Ivoire. This was nothing personal. Try as he might, he could only ever half listen to Charlene’s parents. They generally meant well, but he found they often fell back into that particularly American stance of self-satisfaction masked as liberal open-mindedness, a brand of moral disembodiment to which he had never quite grown accustomed, despite having lived in the country for more than thirty years.

He quietly swore into the cauldron of static coming from the radio’s speaker. The eleven-year sunspot cycle was rapidly declining to a minimum, at which point a year-and-a-half period of near-impossible long-distance communication would descend upon all amateur radio operators. Kermin had cut out a timeline of the last 150 years of this solar cycle from a recent issue of QST and thumbtacked it to the wall of his workshop. In blue pen he had cleverly traced how many of the world’s disasters — Archduke Ferdinand’s and President Kennedy’s assassinations, the 1931 China floods — lined up all too well with each electromagnetic trough.

The Volmers, as they always did, mistook his attentiveness to his radio for calculated resentment. They had slowly constructed a portrait of their son-in-law — through the sad summation of pillow talk and unarticulated accusation — as the instigator and primary engine behind “fixing” their grandchild. In truth, they did not like Kermin at all, though they would never say as much, out of respect for their daughter’s life choices. His awkwardness in conversation and his habit of dismantling electronics during their infrequent visits allowed them to easily cast him as their Balkan scapegoat. He would return from his radio repair closet and utter whatever was on his mind, even if this was not polite (“You look bad. Are you tired?”). He still dropped his articles and slipped up on his tenses in English, substituting future perfect for present perfect — verbal transgressions that Louise, the former grammar instructor, found obtuse and oddly aggressive. “After all these years in this country, he should at least know how to talk about the future,” she had said aloud on more than one occasion. More than anything, they blamed him for sequestering their daughter in the small, nearly impenetrable Serbian Orthodox community in Elizabeth, which was the main reason, they assumed, that she rarely called them anymore.

Several years ago, Charlene had met them at the Newark Museum to see the much-talked-about exhibit of J. M. W. Turner’s seascapes. They walked through the show in silence, squinting at chiaroscuro shipwrecks, and afterwards, in the poorly lit museum café with the wobbly tables, she had announced that she was going to marry Kermin, a man Bertrand and Louise had met only three times, to increasingly poor reviews. They had first protested — Bertrand with silence, Louise with cylindrical sentences that went nowhere — and then, with a thirty-year-old look of surrender passed between them, they collectively sighed and wilted into faux-progressive resignation.

“We’re happy if you’re happy,” Louise said finally.

The wedding was an incense-heavy Orthodox affair that her parents silently endured. Soon after, Charlene came down to Trenton to tell them the news: she was pregnant. It was clear to all that the deed had been done well before the nuptials. A silence descended across the room.

“I didn’t mean for it. . I didn’t want it like this,” said Charlene quietly.

This, too, was digested.

Charlene waited for the wash of disapproval she knew was to come, the chronic sense of condemnation she had come to both begrudge and savor. But then Bertrand rose from the love seat.

“A grandson!” he said.

“We don’t know what it is—” Charlene began to say, but he did not seem to hear her. He hiked up his pants and did a little jig on the rug. It was the first time she had ever seen her father dance. He had always been definitively anti-dance, cultivating a proud stoicism in the face of all organized revelry. Now, to see him move like this — giddy, tout seul, all hips and wobble — felt so intimate that Charlene almost had to look away. And then Louise got up from the couch and they all came in close and held hands. An impromptu communion for the spirit of her unborn child. Bertrand put on a Smokey Robinson record. Charlene slow-danced with her mother while her father reprised his newfound boogie, adding arrhythmic snaps to his repertoire. They were to be grandparents. Such a promise erased all else.

Thus, when Radar emerged in the midst of a fleeting Jersey blackout, Louise and Bertrand were the first to arrive, white peonies in hand, to greet the baby boy they had already predicted was coming. Like everyone else, they were at first shocked by their grandson’s appearance and deeply concerned that something might be seriously wrong. After it had been determined that the child was otherwise healthy, Louise was embarrassed to admit to enjoying a guilty morsel of comfort at the possibility that Kermin might not actually be the father. But this would mean there was an anonymous dark progenitor wandering around somewhere in the belly of the city. Soon they cast all complications aside. This was America in 1975, after all, a land of multiculturalism and acceptance, and Baby Radar was one of their own. Maybe even more so than their own daughter. It was not hard for them to adore him as a counterpoint to Charlene’s recalcitrance, so much so that Louise would ache when she was away from her grandson for any length of time. As Radar was ushered around from one specialist to another, Louise became more and more horrified. She vaguely assumed all of this stemmed from some kind of Old World xenophobia on the part of her son-in-law.

What she didn’t know, because she never asked, was that her own daughter, not Kermin, was the sole engine behind the quest to find a name for Radar’s condition. Kermin had merely become a reluctant follower in their prolonged search for answers. Never once did he lament his son’s appearance or complain about the lot that life had given him. In the wake of World War II, after losing his newborn sister and mother, Kermin had fled with his father across a smoldering Europe to Bergen, Norway, where they snuck onto a thirty-foot boat bound for the New World. After six weeks at sea, Kermin had arrived in New Jersey with a bad case of pneumonia and a distinct perspective on that which was worth worrying about.

In the world he had left behind, the differences people used to judge each other, to kill each other, to declare war upon each other — these differences were often largely invisible: religious, ideological, ethnic distinctions not obvious until a name, an accent, or a birthplace was revealed. During the war, the armies wore uniforms that designated them as Partisan, Chetnik, Ustaše, but for the populace at large, one could shape-shift between these definitions, depending on who was knocking on your door. The result of such indeterminism was that in the pre-Tito Yugoslavia from which he had fled, family trumped race, religion, and creed. Above all else, you took care of your own, primarily because you could not be sure about the slippery identity of your neighbor. Kermin had spent only the first ten years of his life in Yugoslavia, but during these ten years he had learned everything there was to know about whom you must protect and whom you must reject, and such lessons can never be unlearned. In his own quiet way, Kermin threw himself into loving his son.

And yet he also knew better than to protest his wife’s growing obsession with tracking down a tangible diagnosis. He instinctively understood that her quest superseded the fragile boundaries of their little nuclear family. He, like her, had begun to subscribe to the belief that a diagnosis would solve much of what was wrong in their life, but whereas Charlene hoped such a naming would bring back her child, Kermin hoped it would bring back his wife. He had seen enough suffering in the world to know that Charlene — despite everything — was the greatest prize an immigrant electrical engineer could ever hope for. There were still days when he marveled at his luck: Charlene was beautiful. Charlene was brilliant. Charlene was his.

So he would dutifully drive his wife and child to all of their dermatology appointments, sitting patiently in the magazined waiting rooms, listening to ionosphere updates on his handheld. When asked, he would hold his son or feed his son, and when Charlene was busy, he would take Radar to the Ravna Gora Communications Shop, on Grove Street, where he placed him in a crib among the sea of spare parts as he reassembled radios and pocket TVs, which were his specialty.

It was also Kermin who bore the brunt of scrutiny from the Serbian community in Elizabeth, a community he quietly resented but could not shake. On the surface, Saša and her band of skeptical kerchiefed babas were kind and supportive, but he could hear the phlegm-inflected whispers they uttered behind closed doors. There were rumors that Charlene had been seen philandering with black men at certain slick-necked jazz clubs across the river in Harlem.

“Ona voli crni kurac,” he overheard snot-nosed Olga say after Easter services. He tried to convince himself it was possible that they were talking about someone else who was not his wife.

On Sunday afternoons, as he and Charlene strolled down Broad Street, they both felt the lingering stares, from stoops and bodegas, from slow-rolling Buicks and the palm-smudged window of Planavic’s Diner. The unmistakable wash of gooseflesh that arises from being observed. Despite the pieces of cotton in her nostrils, Charlene still smelled their judgment.

“Zašto je još uvek sa tom kurvom?”

“What did she say?” she asked one bitter January morning as they passed a conspiratorial Iliana and Jasmina eyeing Radar in his carriage.

Kermin looked skyward. “They say. .” he shrugged. “They say weather is too cold for baby to be outside. They say he will now catch the chill.”

“What do they care about our child?”

Kermin shrugged. “In Serbia, it is very bad for baby to catch the chill. They are worrying for us. Our child is their child.”

This was no more true than his translations.

At Radar’s baptism, the congregation that huddled outside the front steps of St. Sava’s was large and unusually restless. Kermin did not know what to make of such an audience. He had barely spoken a word to many of these people. He wanted to understand their intentions as noble, but when he looked out across the crowd of faces, no one would meet his eyes.

On the church steps, Kermin protected Radar from the cold air in the same woolen horse blanket that had sheltered his sister and then him on his journey across the sea. Father Bajac, unusually sober and bright-eyed, held up a hand to silence those assembled. He turned to Kermin and said in Serbian, “On behalf of your son, Radar Radmanovic, do you renounce Satan and all of his services, all of his devices, all of his works, and all of his vengeful pride?”

They were facing west, toward the assembled congregation spilling out into the street, beyond which lay the endless dodecahedral sprawl of America, beyond which, according to the ancient belief, lay the unyielding temptations of Hades’s lair. Down one step and to his left, Charlene watched silently. She was neither a Serb nor a Christian, but she had insisted on the baptism more adamantly than he had. His was not a faith but a habit, a reminder of his weakness. Down another step stood the Volmers, grimly, dutifully.

“I do,” said Kermin.

They turned to face the east, toward the large double doors of the church. Beyond this, the ocean and the Old World, where his birthplace in the hills of Croatia beckoned. He would not recognize it if he went back now. Such was the blindness of migration.

“Do you unite yourself with Christ?” asked Father Bajac in Serbian. “Do you offer your son into the fold of the Holy Trinity?”

As Kermin felt his son squirm inside the confines of the coarse fabric, he was blessed with the sensation of being present and yet not being present at all. It was a mirrored existence that, as a radio operator, he had become all too familiar with. Every time he worked the dials of his transceiver and cast his hungry net into the invisible RF spectrum, trolling for broadcasts from Guyana or Kinshasa or Battambang, searching for the tender points of his fellow radiomen’s aerials, a part of his soul was cast out into this network of signals, even as a part of him remained seated in his workshop. Kermin closed his eyes, and for an instant, the mothballed scent of the blanket became a kind of mnemonic radio, collapsing space and time until he was back inside that Norwegian schooner; the blanket cloaking his fever, the creaking roll and tumble of seawater on the hull, the slow-dance rhythm of an ocean without end. Above, the captain speaking slipshod in his singsong tongue, his father shimmying down the hatch, parting the wool to test the throbbing heat of his contagion. The boat had barely survived the battering of a North Atlantic gale, developing a crack in its hull, before finally limping into New York Harbor on a sublime September morning. Neither father nor son spoke English; in the clerical scrum of Ellis Island, they had lost the acute diacritical mark softening the at the end of their family name, thereby condemning them to a future of hard-consonant mispronunciation. The ch became a k—a sign of times to come. But they had arrived. Dobroslav had fulfilled his last promise to his wife to keep their child safe, to deliver him from their devastated homeland to a new world.

Father Bajac cleared his throat.

Kermin opened his eyes, and the wool-scented memory dissolved into the present Jersey nativity scene: the church, the steps, the priest, the crowd shifting in the frigid Meadowlands air. There is only one now now, Kermin told himself, and yet he still did not believe it.

“I do,” he said.

Father Bajac licked his thumb and made the sign of a cross above the baby’s body.

“Amen,” the congregation called, almost out of relief. The priest motioned for them all to enter the church. Inside St. Sava’s, the family circled the copper baptismal font three times as the congregation slowly filed into the knave and heralded the progress of their circumnavigations. Above, a wayward crow that had somehow found its way into God’s house squawked and crashed against a window. Everyone stared. A white-robed boy emerged from behind the altar with a broom; he beat at the bottoms of the windows but could not reach the bird. After a while he gave up, and the priest continued, ignoring the creature shuddering in the rafters.

“I’m grateful so many of you are here to witness another child becoming a Christian,” Father Bajac said in Serbian, resting his un-Bibled hand on the lip of the font. “This is a rebirth that we all should witness, that we all can learn from, again and again. Jesus teaches us it is never too late for a second chance.”

The priest produced a vial from inside his robes and then poured a sprock of oil in the shape of a cross onto the surface of the water. Kermin watched the oil swirl and curl back into itself, like a man slowly placing his arms on his hips. Father Bajac plucked Radar from him, letting the old blanket fall to the ground. He thumbed another cross above the child’s head. Radar hung there, quiet and resplendent, and then he was dunked three times. The water gurgled and splashed with each entrance. His pitch-black skin glistened in the hard fluorescent light of the church. The congregation leaned forward as one, peering at the baby, the wafts of incense swirling around him.

Before they fled at the end of the war, Kermin and his mother used to attend the services in their tiny village church outside Knin. He would lean against the folds of his mother’s dress, mouthing the words to the Gospels without making a sound, his feet tired from standing so long. They stood for the whole service to show their reverence for God, his mother had explained, and Kermin had nodded as one nods when one does not understand but knows that one should understand. Dobroslav was away, fighting Tito’s Partisans way up in the hills with Vojvoda Momcilo Dujic, the famous priest turned Chetnik warrior. Dobroslav was the vojvoda’s personal radioman, a source of pride that Kermin reminded the other boys in town of every chance he got. Dobroslav had once told Kermin how the vojvoda would sometimes summon him for his radio microphone in their mountaintop bivouac and then proceed to deliver sermons to no one but the empty valley, filling up forgotten frequencies. “My words are only for God to hear,” said the vojvoda. Retreating deeper into the recesses of his mother’s dress, Kermin found himself wondering whether his father and the vojvoda were out there now, high up in the mountains, broadcasting one of their radio sermons to a God who apparently could be everywhere and nowhere at once.

4

Charlene awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of an explosion. She shot up in bed, breathing, listening to the chorus of car alarms wailing outside. Next to her, Kermin had barely stirred. She heard Radar give a little hiccuping sob in the other room. She rose. Through the curtains she saw lights flicking on, people emerging onto their front porches.

She went to her son and gathered up his wriggling body. He folded into her, quieting. A small hand tapped at the shelf of her clavicle. She dipped and swayed, mimicking the rocking of a boat, humming a lullaby her mother had once hummed for her. She wondered if there were any words to the song. Outside, a single car alarm still blared through its cycle. She swayed. She was aware of his weight in her arms. She was aware of her arms, the muscles in her arms, holding this weight. She was aware of gravity’s pull, of the thousand invisible forces acting upon her.

All of a sudden, she was enveloped by a kind of vertigo — she had felt this sensation before, though she could not remember when. It was a feeling of being not herself, of being trapped in the wrong body, as if she had recently been miscast in a play that was her own life.

She felt herself listing; she was suddenly worried that she would collapse onto the baby. In desperation, she uttered a single sound, something soft and round, like “Hwah.” And then, just as quickly as it had come, the feeling evaporated, leaving her with only herself again and the hazy memory of a counterfeit existence.

She clutched him. His breath against her neck. Those fierce scoops of oxygen. He was aware of none of her turmoil. He simply was. Breathing.

If only she could just breathe.

When she was sure he was asleep again, she carefully placed him next to his stuffed bear and slipped from the room. Still dressed in her nightgown, she slid into her boots and left the apartment.

As soon as she stepped outside, she smelled it. A stench like singed flesh. Several fire trucks had already arrived. At first she couldn’t see what the source of the smell was. She gagged and closed her eyes. Hand over her mouth, she looked up again and realized why she hadn’t seen anything. There was nothing there: the giant ginkgo tree across the street, such a familiar anchor to their world, was gone. Vanished. A yawning, empty space where its canopy had once resided.

“What happened?” she asked a neighbor who was standing nearby, smoking a cigarette in his bathrobe.

“Lightning,” he said. “Freak strike. Could’ve killed someone.”

And now she saw the huge chunks of wood lying all over the road, on top of people’s cars. One piece had landed forty yards away in a bed of daffodils. The heat from the electricity had burst the tree like a melon. Against a palette of blue and red emergency lights, she stood with her neighbors and watched as firemen worked at dislodging a missile-size log from Mrs. Garrison’s front window. The roar of chain saws filled the night. She tried not to breathe, since every time she got a waft of the smell, she felt as if she might vomit.

Nearby, a bleary-eyed boy stood holding his mother’s hand. His face read the twin emotions of terror and fascination as he watched the firemen unwind the destruction. Charlene saw his mother lean over and whisper into his ear. The boy nodded, without taking his eyes off the scene. In his hand he was clutching a little piece of wood. It must’ve come from the tree. The wind shifted, and Charlene was again hit by a horrific wash of burnt flesh. She heaved and fled back into her apartment building. Through the portal in the front door she looked, but the boy and his mother were gone.

She couldn’t sleep. Through the windows she watched them cut up the tree. They loaded the pieces into a truck and hauled them away. She paced. She looked in on Radar. She washed and rewashed her hands. At some point, she fetched Dr. Fitzgerald’s handwritten letter from the manila folder. When the sun finally rose, she picked up the telephone and dialed the number beneath the letterhead. It was much too early to call, she knew, and no one would answer, but it comforted her to hear the ringing on the other end. It meant there was an other end. The line rang and rang. The rings began to bleed together.

And then: “Hello?”

It was a man’s voice. She was caught completely off guard.

“Hello?” the voice said again. She could tell he was getting ready to hang up.

“Yes.” She came to life. “I’d. . I’d like to speak to Dr. Fitzgerald, please.”

“Speaking.”

“Oh!” she said. It was him. She had not expected it to be him. A secretary, perhaps, but not him.

“Oh,” she said again. “I’m sorry to call you so early.”

A silence on the other end.

“I’m. . I’m Charlene Radmanovic. You wrote us a letter.”

“Ah.” The voice shifted. She could hear the squeak of a chair in the background. “Mrs. Radmanovic. I’m so glad you called.”

“Please,” she said after a moment.

“Yes?”

“I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“In regards to what?”

“My son.”

“Your son?”

“I need to know what happened.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

“I need to know what I did to him.”

There was a pause. “Why don’t you come up here and see me? We can discuss everything.”

Gratefully, she fell into the plush confines of his expertise. Twice a month, Charlene and Radar would ride the train up to Boston, all expenses paid, and visit the doctor’s laboratory, inside the twisting hospital complex next to the old city jail. From the moment she sat down in his office, she realized that he was the doctor she had always imagined before all of those useless specialists had unraveled her faith in the medical profession. He maintained a distinct air of calm that was neither contrived nor austere. Though he was already well into his sixties, he seemed both younger and older than this — perhaps it was the way in which he quoted Japanese proverbs with ease while sipping on a can of Tab soda. If he had not been a doctor, she could have seen him as a soft-spoken Sedona guru pursued by legions of followers.

Her many late nights reading textbooks and obscure dermatological articles had turned her into a bit of an expert in the field, and she had already familiarized herself with Dr. Fitzgerald’s many impressive achievements. After two years in the Army, a fellowship at Oxford, and a series of high-profile research projects on melanoma tumor growth at the Mayo Clinic, he had become, at age thirty-nine, Harvard Medical School’s youngest chaired professor. Now, twenty years later, he had just released a revolutionary schema to classify the color of skin. Designed primarily for dermatologists to diagnose skin types, Fitzgerald’s classification system was an attempt to update the largely problematic Von Luschan chromatic scale from 1897, which separated all human skin tone into thirty-six tiers. In the first half of the twentieth century, “respected” anthropometrists like George Vacher de Lapouge and Carleton S. Coon had drawn upon Von Luschan’s scale in order to categorize and sublimate racial populations within the extremely dubious discipline of “race science.” Following the Holocaust and the events of World War II, Von Luschan’s scale had largely been abandoned by the scientific community.

Fitzgerald’s system, by contrast, jettisoned such nuanced and largely subjective differentiation for a much more generalized six-point scale, focusing not on racial categorization but rather on the skin’s responsiveness to UV light, ranging from Type I (scores 0–6), “pale white; always burns, never tans,” to Type VI (scores 35+), “deeply pigmented dark brown to black; never burns, tans easily.” To his credit, Dr. Fitzgerald appeared well aware of the great potential for misuse of his schema. In a 1976 Archives of Dermatology editorial, in which he elucidated his motivation for creating such a scale, Dr. Fitzgerald also issued a warning, which Charlene had underlined in red pen: “Given the destructive history of trying to classify a person’s race based upon various phenotypical attributes, under no circumstances should the Fitzgerald scale be mistaken for any kind of comprehensive racial classification. . [Appearance] alone does not dictate an individual’s reaction to ultraviolet radiation nor his or her membership in any racial grouping. . [The] clues to our composition, more often than not, lie beneath the surface” (Fitzgerald 1976, 142).

“You,” the doctor said to Radar on their first visit to Boston as Radar sat in his lap, wondering at the pad of the doctor’s stethoscope. “You are the most special person I’ve ever met.” He twirled his hands in the air: one finger became two, and then two became one. A simple metamorphosis that made Radar giggle in amazement.

Radar was comfortable with Dr. Fitzgerald from the start, but then he was comfortable around most. Though he was only two and a half, his short life had been one of constant medical inspection, and Radar had become pliable in a doctor’s hands. He had come to expect these intrusions into his person, for he had known no other existence than that of the examined. Perhaps because of this, he remained a silent child. Even his cries were fleeting, muted affairs, as if he was reluctant to disrupt the world around him.

“This is fine,” said Dr. Fitzgerald. “Many children take a while to find their voice. My mother always told me that I didn’t speak until I was three. And you know what? Those were the happiest days of my life. What’s the rush to join the chorus? Most of the time, we say nothing of consequence.”

During their second visit, after a day of testing basic reflexes, blood work, and UV tests, Radar fell asleep on the doctor’s examination table. He appeared at peace, forgiving of all trespasses, and as they admired him, the doctor spoke lovingly: “‘Oh, the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh, the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!’”

Charlene stared. A button depressed.

“Dickens?” she ventured.

He nodded. “The Chimes. He’s a well I return to often.”

This led to a surprisingly impassioned back-and-forth on which was his best work (he: Bleak House; she: Great Expectations) and whether or not the serialized novel could ever be revived. It was a literary cauldron she had not stirred in years. The talk of books quickened her pulse and dampened the divot just above her lip.

She sat back, marveling.

“What is it?” said the doctor.

“I just hadn’t expected this. . It’s not usual that you talk about these things with a doctor,” she said. “And I’ve met quite a few lately. I thought you were all. .”

“What?”

“Boring?” she ventured.

He laughed. “Most of us are, I’m afraid. You know, it’s funny, but I find that books are essential to my profession. I’m a better surgeon if a story has its claws in me. All I need is a little dose of Melville or Dickens and his dirty alleyways, and my scalpel grows steady.”

She had a vision of him lounging in his surgeon’s gown between surgeries, his feet thrown up on the operating table as he savored the last few pages of Bleak House.

“I know I shouldn’t admit it,” she said, “but a part of me always struggled with Dickens. Sometimes it feels like he’s just trying so damn hard. His characters aren’t real, you know what I mean? They’re like these little parts of a machine. Like that man who just spontaneously combusted in the middle of the book—”

“Krook.”

“Yes, Krook. That always bothered me. I mean, it’s so careless to make a character disappear like that. Either he wants us to know that it’s just a novel and he’s in total control or he just wants to annoy us for caring.”

The doctor smiled. “As a man of science, of course, I would find it highly unlikely that a person could simply combust into thin air without provocation. . and yet. .” He paused, thinking. “The distance between the world within the book and our own world must be exactly right — it cannot be too near or too far. That distance is what I savor: Krook combusts. We see him combust, and his combustion gives me courage. I can walk around it. I can run my hands beneath it. The combustion is here, and I am there. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not really,” she said, though she knew exactly what he meant.

He nodded. “If I show you something, will you promise not to laugh?”

“Well, I can try,” she said. “I can’t promise. I tend to do the opposite of what I’m told.”

He bent down and retrieved a typewriter from beneath his desk. Then a tall stack of paper covered in print. Finally, a thick burgundy book. A flicker of the familiar ran through Charlene. He slid the stack of pages over to her.

“I haven’t shown this to anyone before,” he said. “Not even my wife.”

She read the first line aloud: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

She looked up. “Anna Karenina.”

“The greatest novel ever written,” he said. “Okay — we can debate it.”

“No,” she said. “I agree.”

“Well, then. We don’t have to debate.”

She glanced through the stack of pages. It was the entire novel. Typed out, word for word.

“What is this?” she said. How had he known? This book, of all books.

“It’s a little crazy, I admit, but I suppose I wanted to see what would happen to that distance if I wrote the book myself.”

“You’ve retyped the whole thing?”

“Oh, no. It isn’t finished,” he said. “I’m a slow typer.”

She stared at the pages. She could see places where he had whited out his mistakes. The words bent and swayed in her vision. She had read these words so many times before, but she had never seen them like this. Now they felt entirely alive, ready to jump off the page and fight her with their kinetic energy. She flipped to the last page. The story cut off in midsentence. Why had he not bothered to even finish the sentence? She touched the spot where the words ended, rubbing the paper, as if she could invoke whatever comes next.

“I probably shouldn’t have shown you this,” he said quickly.

“No—” she said, but he was already reaching for the pages. Their fingertips brushed against one another. A shot ran through her arm.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“I don’t know.” She suddenly felt ill.

“You don’t look well.”

He came around the desk and took her wrist in his hand. Two fingers pressed at her pulse. There was certainty in that touch, manifested from a lifetime of expertise. He was counting in his head. The skin where he was touching her felt as if it were burning. She let him lift her chin. He shined a light into her eyes. Her head swam. Something stirred between her legs.

He was old enough to be her father. Older. And yet. .

“I’m fine,” she said, pushing him away. “Really, I’m fine.”

She was in such a state that she did not remember the rest of their visit, but as she was leaving with Radar in her arms, still caught in a murky farrago of desire, the doctor put a hand on her shoulder. Again, that heat. Her pulse, beating.

“One more thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’m going to need a quart of your husband’s blood.”

“A quart?” she said.

“I assure you, it’s nothing personal. We simply must look at every possibility.”


• • •

BACK HOME in their apartment, for the first time in more than three years, she stared at the jumble of books on her shelves. She wiped a layer of dust from her abandoned copy of Anna Karenina. It was the 1965 Modern Library hardcover edition. A copper stain like a half moon along the fore edge. She opened the book and read the first few lines, smelling the faint tendrils of mildew trapped within its spine, but she felt none of the same electricity that the doctor’s facsimile had elicited in her. She slid the book back into its empty slot and scanned the rows of forgotten titles. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Ada, or Ardor. Hopscotch. Why had she deserted them so completely? These books, once her lifeblood, had become a graveyard. She could not blame the books for everything that had gone wrong. The books were a smoke screen. The books gave only what they got.

She stood a moment more in front of the bookshelf, then she retrieved the copy of Anna Karenina again. She found her old typewriter beneath the bed, rolled a fresh page into the platen, and began to type.


• • •

WHEN ASKED, CHARLENE had always explained away her life as a series of false starts that finally had disqualified her from running the race. It was a convenient shorthand metaphor, though, like all metaphors, it was not quite true.

Since childhood, she had combated her low-grade neuroses with the infinite act of indexing. Unlike her older sister Vivienne, who had started dying her hair blond at thirteen and had safely married a Florida real estate mogul by the time she turned twenty-one, wiry, pale Charlene had grown up uncomfortable in her own skin, and yet she seemed to revel in this discomfort, no doubt due in part to a pervasive intellect that she had never quite been able to tame. At age nine, she began collecting obituaries from the New York Times, completely taken with the act of summarizing a life in only a couple hundred words. She collected classics of the genre—“Emilie Dionne, 20; Nun, Quintuplet”; “Marion Tinsley, 55; Checkers Champion Who Regularly Beat Men”—and then began to pen her own for (still living) neighbors, friends, and family.

“My little deaths,” she called them. “Mes petites morts.” (She had just started taking French, though she did not pick up on the sexual overtones of her declaration.) Such a morbid fascination had elicited a worried burst of letters from her teacher, until it was determined that this, like everything else, must be just a phase.

Charlene was a voracious, practically manic reader, and her bedroom in the attic had quickly filled with books that threatened to overrun the house. Her mother, Louise, the grammar instructor, recognized the imminent bibliographic chaos brewing above their heads. She warned her younger daughter about the dangers of disorder:

“When you can’t find something,” she said, “it may as well not exist.”

This pronouncement struck an elemental chord in young Charlene. She felt a great panic welling up just beyond the boundaries of her consciousness, so she asked her father to help her build floor-to-ceiling shelves in her bedroom. Charlene then took up organizing all of her books alphabetically by the author’s last name, an incredibly satisfying task that made her fingertips tingle with anticipation of the distinct order she was carving out of nothing. Except that when she was finished, the allure of such an index was swiftly overshadowed by the consequent hollowness of the system: the author’s name was divorced from what was actually taking place in the books themselves. The Age of Innocence, for instance, written by Wharton, E., was marooned on the very bottom shelf, which did not seem right at all. She set about discovering a new method of intimate organization that came as close as possible to mirroring the peaks and valleys of her own mind. In fact, she was chasing that same first tingle in the fingertips, a sensation she would never be able to quite replicate. Still, she searched. Painstakingly, over a period of months, she arranged and then rearranged the books using increasingly obscure criteria: first it was alphabetically by subject, then by character, then according to a much more mystical system based on how important each book was to her, a scheme that inevitably shifted daily and required constant tending. She even made a card catalog system for her collection of books and periodicals and created a ledger book with checkout slips for lending. Her mother offered to give her an old date stamper from school, but she refused, instead deciding to steal one from their local public library. It was by far the worst thing she had ever done, but it made her own library feel bona fide, legitimated by an act of petty larceny. When it was finally all ready to go, she put posters up at school touting the grand opening of the Volmer Collection Privée. This was what she called it, thinking herself quite grown up for knowing a French word like privée. On Saturday, she set up a desk by her bedroom door and waited for the people to come explore her vast, perfectly organized collection privée.

But no one came. No one sought her advice for irresistible summer reads, for books that could change your life, for books that could make you cry, but in the way that we love to cry. No one came, least of all her sister, who viewed reading as a deplorable habit, akin to picking one’s nose. That afternoon, her mother ascended the stairs with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and checked out The Phantom Tollbooth, though Charlene could tell she was not going to read the book and was just doing it so that the ledger book would not stand empty.

“Where did you get this stamp?” Louise asked as Charlene checked her out.

“Your book is due in two weeks,” Charlene said, imprinting the card with great violence.

That evening, as she lay in bed reading The Scarlet Letter, Charlene realized she was relieved that the masses hadn’t come to pilfer her shelves. Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library. Thereafter, lending privileges were suspended for everyone except herself, which was probably a good thing, for her methods of organizing the books continued to change until it was impossible for anyone except Charlene to find the book they might be looking for. Even she struggled with the logic of the system: somewhere in her library she lost her copy of The Scarlet Letter and never managed to find it again.

She would graduate summa cum laude from Douglass College in 1966, with a B.A. in English, one of the last all-female classes before the college merged with Rutgers. Instead of listening to her conscience and pursuing a professional life of books, she had decided to test her luck in the big city, selling high-end women’s footwear and perfume in a spotless, cathedral-ceilinged department store on Madison Avenue. It was not a good match. It didn’t take her long to realize that success at the job was dependent not on sophistication or her instinctual prowess for predicting trends in the sociocultural zeitgeist but rather on wearing the right kitten heel pumps so as to encourage sexual harassment from the boss. Charlene quit her job — dramatically, fittingly — by throwing a rare bottle of Diorissimo across the store, its shattered remains filling the room with the intense velveteen wash of lily of the valley.

She lived, practically for free, in a grimy fourth-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, with two twin Dadaist painters named Lila and Vespers. The twins slept all day in the same bed and, from what she could tell, were locked in some kind of ménage à trois with the same man. Their art, which they worked on in tandem, involved pasting found objects — scissors, thimbles, shoelaces — onto a canvas, painting these objects white and then creating false labels for each item. “Scissors” became “meatloaf,” and so on. Charlene was not impressed.

Lila and Vespers also frequently enjoyed “expanding their horizons,” as they termed it. Before she met them, Charlene had never even seen a drug. She had drunk in college now and then, but cautiously, for she had never enjoyed relinquishing control, and she sensed her possession of the same gene that had left her aunt in a vodka-fueled stupor in western Pennsylvania. The gene was almost certainly present in her sister Vivienne, as evidenced by her daily succession of postmeridian double martinis.

One evening, Charlene reluctantly tagged along with Lila and Vespers to a party in a Lower East Side basement. The theme was “The Future.” The twins wrapped themselves in tinfoil. Charlene went costumeless. At some point Lila or Vespers — it did not matter which — handed her a tab of acid, which she surprised herself by considering for only the briefest of instants before popping into her mouth. Later that night, on the Brooklyn Bridge, she also tried her first quaalude, or what a man in a mustache said was a quaalude. The night was transcendent, but not because of the drugs — she felt as if she had shed a skin, as if anything was possible now.

As she did with everything, Charlene became very obsessed with getting high. It turned into a game, and then it turned into more than a game. Her parents had reluctantly agreed to supply her with a small monthly allowance until she got “her feet back on the ground.” She returned this favor by spending their money on cheap Spanish wine and various barbiturates and psychedelics, which Lila and Vespers initially supplied her and which she eventually supplied herself via their contact, a boorish fisherman named Vlada, who most likely was not a fisherman at all. She met people at the parties. Those parties. At first she went with the twins and then she went alone. It was just that if you dipped into it, you were utterly consumed. You couldn’t go halfway. Charlene felt that she was a part of something very important, something utterly new. This was New York. This was 1967. As the rest of America continued to button its top button, she howled into the night with artists and beboppers and hippies, tripping down the Bowery, high as a kite, debating the ideas of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt with anyone who cared to listen. She fell in love. She fell out of love. There were a number of men. There were a number of men with mustaches. There was even one woman. And it was this woman who introduced Charlene to Hazel, which is what she called heroin. In retrospect, this was a horrifically innocent moniker. Charlene had always been terrified of needles, but when she felt the drop for the first time, the warmth that erased inside from out, the seven thousand hands upon her, she realized she had found exactly what she was looking for.

It was wonderful. It was wonderful and wonderful and wonderful, until it wasn’t wonderful anymore. She quickly burned through her allowance. She sold all of her books to the Strand Bookstore save two—A Tale of Two Cities and a recently purchased copy of Anna Karenina upon which she had spilled lukewarm tea. The trouble was that even the drugs did not fully extinguish her systemic neuroses, her tingling desire for order. Each morning, she would choose which way to sequence the pair of books. There were only two options, two dichotomous takes on the world. She rearranged them nonetheless. Each was plausible, but not quite true: Did the city make the woman or did the woman make the city?

Beyond the confines of that shelf, however, the city itself could not be ordered. The tines of disarray would put her to bed each night, gnawing at the recesses of her mind as she lay there sleepless, and they would greet her each morning when she awoke with a splitting headache to the idling motors of graffitied delivery trucks or the wail of police sirens. Soon the drugs were all there was. Every moment in her day was organized around either acquiring them, taking them, or recovering from their effects. Her body was not so much hers as a vehicle that she occasionally tended. Even the twins, who were some of the most unobservant people she knew, began to remark upon her descent.

In November, after vomiting for the fifth morning in a row and fearing some permanent damage, Charlene finally dragged herself to a hospital. The doctor performed some tests and told her she was suffering from a most common condition: she was pregnant.

“What do you mean, pregnant?” she said.

“Do you want me to draw you a diagram?” he said.

As she was leaving, he looked up from his desk. “If I may,” he said. “You’re now responsible for two people. Everything you put into you, you are also putting into your baby.”

Charlene sat in the kitchen with the twins and the malnourished creeper plant, trying to imagine a theoretical child with each of her ghostly mustached lovers, an exercise that caused her to start hyperventilating.

“It’s no big deal,” said Lila. “We know someone who can fix it.”

“He’s creepy but cheap,” Vespers added. Vespers wore a faux-gypsy rhinestone headband, even while sleeping. It was a convenient clue for telling the two apart.

Lila handed Charlene the number, scrawled on the back of a prescription bottle. “Don’t worry, ShaLa, we’ve both used him,” she said. Charlene had no idea where their nickname for her had come from. They were the kind of people who gave nicknames to mark their territory.

From her lineup of potential progenitors — a shady group whose membership grew the more she thought about the extent of her nocturnal encounters — Charlene could not help but gravitate to one man, hoping against hope that it was he who was the father. His name was T. K. — short for what? She couldn’t remember anymore, or maybe she had never known. T. K., the black boy from St. Paul, Minnesota, with the warm eyes and the learned prairie laugh, no doubt picked up from one of his white foster parents. Mere months after V-J Day, buoyed by the promise of a new era, they had adopted T. K. after hearing his story on the radio: his birth family had perished in a downtown slum fire, and he had survived the blaze by being hurled to safety out of a fourth-story window into the arms of a firefighter. He was six months old.

At least this is what T. K. told Charlene during one of their precious nights together, lying naked in her bed, ankles touching, the twins arguing loudly about Gauguin in the next room. Charlene had imagined his little Minnesotan family — T. K. and his progressive white parents, dressed in down parkas, surrounded by mounds and mounds of snow. He had been first in his class at Humboldt High. Full scholarship to Macalester College. He was one of the smartest people she had ever met, and yet quite clearly sheltered to a fault, for he had been raised on Schubert and Robert Louis Stevenson, had never owned a television, and had never even been out of the state before he left on a bus for Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, smack in the middle of Washington Heights.

“Whatever were they thinking?” Charlene could not help saying out loud.

Naked, T. K. had looked over at her and asked her what she meant by this and she said nothing, but she remembered feeling a kind of infinite sadness. To let a kid like him, a miracle like him, loose in the city? The city relished the chance to eat people like him for breakfast. In the end, of course, she was wrong: it was not him but her whom the city would devour, but she would not understand this until much later, when she was already safely in its belly.

She had first met T. K. at one of those sweaty, drug-heavy midnight Bleecker Street parties, where he had shown up with a fellow first-year med student, looking bewildered and comically out of place in an ill-fitting three-piece linen number, as if he were about to participate in a grade-school ballroom dance competition. She had laughed out loud when she saw him like this, and yet she had also fallen hard, very hard — she could not explain why. Encouraged by the lingering buzz of a Nembutal cocktail, she made a beeline across the room, greeting him with an overly familiar kiss and pulling him, despite his earnest protestations, into a round of astrological strip Ouija.

Things had slipped into place that night, as they sometimes do, and they had both surprised themselves by going back to her place and fucking with what she mistook for a mechanical midwestern urgency and with what he mistook for a groovy East Coast blasé. There had been an incredibly awkward moment when he, still naked, had fumbled for his linen trousers and then produced, unceremoniously, a roll of crumpled bills and offered them to her. She stared at him, bewildered, so offended and yet so moved by his innocence that she started to laugh and pushed the money back at him.

“It was a joke,” he said hastily, repocketing the bills, though the look in his eyes told her he had no idea what to think. They lay in bed afterwards, and he pointed to every bone in her body and named them for her — every bone, including all twenty-eight bones of the skull. Touching her own cranium with her fingertips, she marveled at the power of the naming: to conjure twenty-eight things when before there was only one.

For two weeks, T. K. occupied her every waking thought. Together they explored the city, laughing at the intricacies of urban density — the joy of a child leaping through an open fire hydrant, a ninety-year-old woman walking five shih tzus, an impromptu performance art — cum — Mod dance contest in the middle of Forty-second Street as taxicabs blared their horns — she seeing it all through his eyes for the first time. She wanted to protect him and she wanted to be ravaged by him. It was the closest thing she had felt to love. She shot up only twice during this time, and never in front of him. It felt like cheating.

Strangely, he refused to take her back to his apartment in Washington Heights. He claimed his place was too small.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I want to see where you live.”

“It’s not fit for someone like you,” he said and kissed her on the eyebrow, where she had a tiny scar from falling down the stairs as a child.

And then everything imploded, suddenly, as if it had always been meant to implode like this, as if time were only a prelude to all that which must come to an end. He met her outside her apartment one morning and said he could not see her anymore.

“Why?” she said, crying. She felt the panic rising in her chest. And she wanted to ask, “Is it because I’m white?” and she hated herself for wondering this and she hated herself for not asking it.

And he said, “I just need to concentrate more on school,” even though they both knew it was not true, and what was true would never — could never — be said.

Years later, she would see him again, after having spent many nights dreaming of his voice, his body, his laugh, after searching for him in the streets, at the parties, on the subways, in the parks, in the shadows of the skyscrapers that towered above her. He came calling on her in New Jersey, quite out of the blue — she couldn’t really make out how he had managed to track her down. She was already dating Kermin by then, but when T. K. showed up on her doorstep, it was as if no time had passed. They had sat for a coffee, and she had wanted to ask him a thousand questions — how he had managed, whether the world had defeated him or he had managed to defeat it — but they had not talked about these things or about anything else she could recall. Nor did she ever get to ask him what his initials stood for. Maybe they didn’t stand for anything. And then he was gone again, this time for good, and it was as if she had experienced a dream in which she dreamed of a dream she had had long ago.

And so, as she sat in the kitchen with the twins, she made a secret prayer to God or some vague stand-in for God that the father of her unborn child be T. K. and not Cal, the serial narcissist, or Hector, the Peruvian dealer who had shown her his gun and called her “mi pequeño coño.”

She considered keeping the child. Raising him alone. She really did. Particularly if it was T. K.’s — she could see herself devoting the rest of her life to raising his brilliant little son. Reading him Robert Louis Stevenson. Telling him about the father he never knew. But then she had a fever dream in which she was trapped in an infinitely long hall of white doors, all of them without doorknobs. Each door was unlocked, she knew, but she had no way of opening them. She woke up sweating, terrified. For the first time, the baby growing inside her felt foreign, thrust upon her by a guiltless world.

The next morning, she called the number the twins had written on the prescription bottle and then rode the subway up to Harlem to the fixer’s house. In the subway car, she found herself studying the faces of the weary black men, willing them to be T. K., willing them to come rescue her from what she was about to do.

The fixer’s name was Jarmal, and he was not charming in the least. He took her into his living room, where there was a yellowing dentist’s chair in the middle of a stained afghan rug. The room’s shelving was stuffed with collected Oriental tchotchkes that had been hastily covered in plastic sheeting, creating the impression of an impromptu crime scene.

“Take off your clothes and then take this,” he said, handing her a pill.

Afterwards, she was so groggy and in such excruciating pain that she forgot to ask if the fetus had been black, whether you could even tell that kind of thing before a baby was born.

She paid him $75 for his services. All things considered, this seemed like a fairly good deal until she developed an infection one week later that landed her in the St. Luke’s emergency room. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Her parents arrived, horrified at the doctor’s declaration that their oldest daughter had come within “two hours of dying,” whatever this meant. Vivienne even called her on the phone, her honeydew voice mimicking concern, with mixed results. Her sister was cursed with the unexamined libertarian ignorance that only the very privileged could espouse: she believed everything that happened to you, good or bad, was the result of your own choosing. The problem was that in Charlene’s case, this was most likely true.

Charlene refused her parents’ offer to help her recuperate in their soft Trenton lair and (this part was implied) to take stock of how far she had fallen with a Rutgers degree in hand. Wounded, they made sure she was going to live and then promptly cut off her allowance.

She convalesced back in her squalid little Hell’s Kitchen den, hardly leaving her bed for almost three weeks. Unexpectedly, Lila and Vespers displayed some real maternal behavior, checking in with her nightly and bringing her back sad little clumps of foraged groceries. They even chipped in to cover her rent that month. Charlene, feeling the full effects of her withdrawal, pleaded for opioids. To their credit, the twins refused. Charlene became manic. More than once, she seriously considered suicide. Her only solace was a stray cat that frequented their fire escape. She fed him butter pats and named him Bumble Bee — Bee for short. Bee had a gift for non-judgment.

She rediscovered her books. She read and reread A Tale of Two Cities and then devoured Anna Karenina three times through. The words suddenly all felt new, as if they had been freshly planted on the page. She developed a pathological kinship for Anna’s character. Charlene was not deterred by her limited selection; rather, the repeated rhythms of the narratives beat back the wet terror festering inside her chest.

When she was well enough to leave the apartment, she made two decisions: (1) She would find a job, a real job, and (2) she would go clean. Her fortitude on item number 2 felt shaky, so she wrote her intentions for sobriety down onto a piece of monogrammed stationery that her parents had given her the previous Christmas. She initialed the page and then hid it beneath the floorboards of her room.

In fact, it was her fortitude on item number 1 that proved the problem. She was not good at finding a job. There was something liberating about being completely broke in New York. Or maybe she was just lazy. She began spending all of her waking hours at the Strand, reading entire novels as she stood next to the towering rows of shelving. What a strange population haunted those aisles: maharajas and heart surgeons, shell-shocked vets and Shakespeare scholars, hunchbacked pensioners and schizoid hoboes. Lured by literature or the promise of literature, they came and they usually stayed, and some of them slept and a few of them peed. She read the rest of Tolstoy, then Dostoyevsky, then Dickens, and when she tired of Dickens she turned to Woolf and then Melville. She read the Iliad. She read the new Vonnegut. She read The Crying of Lot 49 and afterwards was so overcome with what we are able to accomplish with the simple constellation of words that she walked right out of the store in a daze, forgetting that she was holding the book in her hands.

A hand grabbed her shoulder. She turned to find a cute, bespectacled young man doing his best impression of an angry manager. He demanded the book back, threatening some kind of intense police intervention. Realizing her folly, Charlene began to apologize profusely, though she also couldn’t help but be amused by this man’s clear dislocation from the outside world. He was a fish out of water; he belonged back among the books. Relieved, the man quickly dropped his austere routine, and soon they were both absorbed in a cyclical conversation about Pynchon, right there on the sidewalk amid the December rush of shoppers. The bookstore and the city and everything else fell away, and the universe contained only him and her and the delightful possibility of the Trystero all around them. She was not sure how much time had passed, but she surprised herself by asking him for a job. She was good, she said. She knew what the books needed.

The man’s name was Petar — it was spelled with an a, as she would later come to learn. Needless to say, she was hired. Needless to say, she also began sleeping with Petar. He was kind and gentle and terribly nerdy. Together they got matching tattoos of the Trystero post horn on their ankles. The relationship lasted just long enough to make her believe that she was capable of caring again.

The job itself was a revelation. She loved haunting the bookstore after hours, glimpsing the occasional spine of an old library copy, its Dewey Decimal numbers protected by a crumbling layer of Scotch tape. She began to memorize the index of Dewey Decimal subjects, pairing those numerals with its far-flung content:


813: American fiction

883: Classical Greek epic poetry and fiction

646.7: Personal grooming

179.7: Euthanasia

621.38416: Radio operations (ham)

The system was a salve against the chaos of life, and the disparate glimpses of its calculus made her miss the rigorous order of a true library, where each volume was slotted into place like a giant stopwatch of human knowledge. She realized she had been avoiding her calling. Books, the cataloging of books, that pursuit without end, was the only way to quell the panic.

She applied and was accepted into the master’s program in library science at Syracuse. The year was 1969. Back in her parents’ good graces, she borrowed their nearly expired woody, packed up everything she owned, which was not all that much, bade the melancholic twins, Bee, Petar, and the great city adieu, and headed north.

It was a tough time to be a librarian. It was never easy to be a keeper of books, but it was particularly tough during that turnover winter of ’69, a hinge point when the world rubbed its eyes and realized all was not as it seemed. Students were too busy protesting and talking about protesting to really read anything of substance, and libraries shifted from being quiet places of study to social justice performance spaces and raucous backdrops for self-important sit-ins. The books, poor things, suffered the brunt of this indignity. Various wet concoctions were thrown around in the stacks that should not have been thrown around in the stacks. The books were used as props, shelter, weapons. Precious manuscripts, seen as relics of the establishment, were soiled with palimpsestic hippie poetry and bodily fluids. Students stole everything by Nietzsche and Marx. The entire section on Zen Buddhism (294.3927) disappeared overnight. Charlene found herself shooing away half-naked couples smoking grass and/or fornicating in the stacks on a daily basis. Heavy times. Groovy times. Just not for a librarian. Charlene might’ve cared more about the whole movement if she hadn’t found it all so completely juvenile. She felt like an older sister watching her younger siblings tear apart the house while their parents were away.

There was a professor in her department, H. H., whom she greatly admired. He excelled at that high-wire act — unique to the professorial métier — of appearing both desperately out of fashion and yet also far ahead of his time. A wearer of herringbone tweeds, H. H. had a thick mass of brown hair that, despite vigorous morning placations with a comb, always seemed to untangle gravity’s spell by lunchtime. He was a true scientist of books, the only person she had met whom she could definitively call a genius. H. H. was working with a library in Ohio to develop a computerized system that would eventually replace the card catalog. He and Charlene got into endless arguments about this — she defending the sanctity of the cards and he dismissing them as already outdated, an anchor weighing down civilization’s eternal march forward.

“Paper will soon be a thing of the past,” he said. “It probably already is.”

“And so what of the library? Should we just burn down all of our cultural cathedrals?”

“The library is not a cultural cathedral. It is an outdated warehouse.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Progress, my dear. It’s the only truth in life. There are some things that you just cannot fight, though I must admit, I find it quite charming when you do.”

When Houston Revere, a drawl-edged southerner in her program, asked her if she was sleeping with H. H. yet, she responded with a surprisingly venomous denial.

He held up his hands defensively. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.

On the one hand, it would’ve been so easy to slide down such a path. Her time in the city had left her with a sexual aptitude that she was not necessarily proud of. She knew that men found her particular mixture of melancholy and candor alluring, but every time she thought of H. H.’s hands upon her (and she would admit, she had thought of those hands, of running her own hands through that pritchkemp mane), she was filled with a sense of terror, of falling backwards into a lake with no bottom. This was familiar territory that she had sworn off for the abstinence of the bibliography. She did not want to turn back. His lingering gaze, despite the heat it elicited in her chest, felt like a force prying her fingers off the tiller.

And so she started sleeping with (it must be said, a somewhat surprised) Houston. True to his southern roots, Houston was polite and oddly balletic in bed, but altogether prosaic. When he came, he sounded like a seagull. It was just what she was looking for. She fought off all uncertainties with the banality of their lovemaking.

Then, in May, the shootings at Kent State popped the balloon of tension that had been steadily inflating that entire spring. Students all across the country recoiled at pictures of bodies lying facedown on the pavement like lonely, discarded mannequins. These pictures were pictures of them: they could’ve been lying on that pavement, with young runaways wailing above them at the bewildered National Guardsmen: What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?

At Syracuse, the academic pursuit seemed wholly worthless in the face of such mortality, and so the remainder of that semester withered and died with barely a whimper. Exams were optional; students, unsure of what still lassoed them to campus, clustered around boys with guitars on the quad who tried to mimic Dylan’s whining pontifications. As she hurried past these sing-alongs en route to the Carnegie Library, Charlene silently tsked their laziness, their disheveled, E-minor self-importance. Where was Homer when you needed him? Mēnis—rage so pure it could be felt only by the gods:

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,

hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls.

These boys with guitars wouldn’t know real rage if it clobbered them on the head. They had no idea. Achilles, who became so intoxicated with mēnis after the Trojans murdered his lover, Patroclus, that he killed everyone in sight, and when their bodies choked the waters, he fought the river god, too. Achilles, who finally tracked down Hector, his lover’s murderer, and threw a spear straight through his neck, tying him to his chariot and dragging him around Troy for nine days until the mass of flesh became unrecognizable as anything human. That was dedication. Not these slow-jam-acoustic-hashish-hippie symposia. This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.

One night, she was working late in the bowels of the library, reorganizing the card catalog — something she often did when she did not want to face the solitude of her insomnia. The campus was practically empty, so she was surprised when H. H. appeared in the doorway, his tie undone, his hair standing at attention. His car was not working, he said. Would she mind if he waited here with her?

She did not ask what he was waiting for. They spoke briefly of something potentially meaningful, about the viability of protest, about the inevitability of cultural evolution. A theorist was mentioned. There was a silence. She was aware of the space between them. And then he was coming toward her, and she could hear the card rustle in her hands and she could smell the drink on his breath and then he was upon her, with his mouth open and his tongue wandering in circles, and she was receiving this tongue, falling into him, hating him.

“Charlene,” he whispered. “I’ve wanted this for so long.”

He undid his corduroy trousers and placed his hand on the back of her head and pushed her down and she took him into her mouth.


• • •

IN THE END, she barely slipped out of Syracuse with a degree. Her version of the narrative blamed everything on that night, located his assailment as a kind of anti — deus ex machina, where the universe performed its ultimate act of subterfuge while she was busy trying to play by the rules. It was analyse réductrice, but it gave her an excuse to drop the tiller entirely.

She started to drink again, with an enthusiasm honed by a year and a half of sobriety. She bounced around several Jersey librarianships, but she had no appetite for the job anymore. The books mocked her. She now saw the arbitrariness of the Dewey system as an exercise in futility — clearly, it was impossible to classify anything of real consequence. Meanwhile, Louise and Bertrand, once so hopeful for their daughter’s turnaround, worried at her sharp descent.

One evening, she was locking up the Hilton Branch of the Maplewood Memorial Library when she decided to have a few drinks from the bottle of rum that she kept hidden in her bottom drawer. She called up a friend she had met at a disco club on the Bowery and invited him over to the library. They dropped four tabs of Popeye blotter paper and proceeded to spend the rest of the night pulling down books. It was the most fun she had had in years. Running up and down the aisles destroying the system, one volume at a time. The books fell with great drama, splaying open on the ground like slaughtered animals. Then they screwed in the children’s section with their socks on, and afterwards it seemed like a good idea to purge the library of its most unworthy members. A small offering to the pagan gods — her own private me¯nis session. The Wrath of Charlene. She started a small fire in a waste bin. She was high, but she knew exactly what she was doing. In went a shelf-ful of mystery novels. An instruction manual on computers. Norman Mailer’s An American Dream. The volume H from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

“The books aren’t burning,” she said, staring at her smoldering creation. “They’re resisting!”

“You’re one wild chick,” her companion said to her. He was naked, save for his socks. He resembled a kind of prehistoric hunter.

The books might not have burned in quite the manner she had hoped, but they created plenty of smoke. The fire alarm was soon triggered, flushing them out into the night.

A lone dog walker found them struggling into their clothes on the lawn outside as a yellow alarm beacon beat open the darkness.

“What’s happening?” he asked, his terrier standing at attention. “Is there a fire?”

“Don’t worry sir,” said Charlene. “We are professionals.”

Three thousand volumes suffered irreparable smoke damage. Thanks largely to her mother’s behind-the-scenes negotiation, Town of Maplewood v. Charlene Volmer was settled out of court; Charlene was placed on probation and sentenced to fifty hours of community service. Needless to say, she was also fired. It was an ignominious end to her career as a librarian.

She fulfilled her obligation to the community at the Legion Hall in Elizabeth. On Veteran Career Finder Day, she sat beneath a sagging magenta banner that declared WELCOME BACK BOYS! blindly distributing self-help literature to the hollow-eyed men fresh from the bunkers of Vietnam. In a distinct violation of her probation terms, she was nursing her second flask of schnapps and Kool-Aid beneath the table.

When she looked up again, he was standing at the head of the line. He, back only two weeks from the war in Vietnam. He, standing with hands folded to keep down the shaking, which had started since his return, or at least this was when he had started noticing it. The day he had left, Staff Sergeant Emerson, never known for saying a nice thing about another human being in his life, had squeezed his shoulder and called him the best damn radio operator he had ever worked with.

“What kind of job are you looking for?” she asked, only half registering the darkened eyebrows and the sculpted Slavic rumba-dimple of his chin.

“Radio operations. Repair. This kind of thing,” he said. Something in his voice.

She looked through her books for the first time that day. “I’m not sure I have that in my pile right here.” A slight slur to her speech. Ready to hand him whatever was on top.

“I know how to do this,” he said. “I do not need your book. I know what I want.”

“You do?” she said. Her eyes focusing.

“I always know this,” he said.

“You do?” she said. Lingering, wondering what was happening to the weight of her body.

“What is your name?” Kermin asked. “I want to know this.”

“You do?” she said again, and the thrice-uttered question sealed their fate. It was the kind of collision where there was no time for courtship, where two wounded planets lock into orbit and can never quite free themselves from the insistence of their gravitational pull. Charlene and Kermin. Kermin and Charlene. Each would come to understand, in very different ways, that what had come before was only the tuning of the instruments before the real movement began.

5

What are you writing?”

Kermin was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She had risen early and was working away at the typewriter.

“Not really anything,” she said, flushing. She closed the novel and maneuvered the typewriter slightly, so that its page was less visible to the room. “It’s just something for Dr. Fitzgerald.”

Kermin nodded. She watched as he began his morning routine. Since Charlene had known him, his breakfast had never varied: white toast, Marmite, slice of cheese, slice of ham, glass of orange juice. He always ate everything until there was only half a bite left, and then he was finished. His consistency was maddening, but then such consistency had also saved her. After so many years of instability, she had come to depend upon that last half-moon of toast remaining on the plate.

“So this doctor,” Kermin said, uncapping the Marmite jar. “He is good?”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course he’s good.”

Kermin sat down across from her.

“He’s good,” she said again, edging the typewriter away.

He took a loud bite of toast.

“So what did he tell you?” he said. Crumbs.

“About?”

“About Radar.”

“Oh, plenty of things. I mean, they’re still doing tests,” she said. “But we’re very lucky that he agreed to take on Radar in the first place. I mean, he’s the best there is. He’s. .”

She tapped at a key on the typewriter, and a faint F thwacked onto the page. She could feel herself blushing again.

Kermin studied her. After a moment, he let his hand drift over to a shortwave radio sitting on the table. A flick of the wrist and the radio came to life. A loud sea of static enveloped them. He slowly turned the dial, stroking the rib cage of the morning’s frequencies.

“Kermin,” she said. “You’ll wake up Radar. He didn’t sleep last night.”

“This doctor,” he said over the noise. “He is the last.”

“What?”

“After this, no more.”

“Kermin, he’s the best there is,” she said. “We’re so lucky that he even—”

“What did he learn from my blood?” he said without looking up from the radio.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask. They’re looking into various genetical possibilities. Something in our DNA. He said it was very advanced science.”

The radio hung briefly on two stations at once, both voices vying for supremacy through a canopy of static.

“Kerm!” she hissed. “Please. Turn it off.”

He snapped the dial. A click. A sudden silence.


• • •

IN TRUTH, HER VISITS to Boston were not going as well as she had initially hoped. Although she could not say exactly what it was she was hoping for. The less frequent their appointments, the more fervently she typed. Her Anna Karenina was taking shape, page by page, and at certain moments, when the beat of the typewriter became like a second pulse, she was blessed with the fleeting sensation that she was the writer of this book, that she, Charlene Radmanovic, was conceiving of Vronsky’s torrid pursuit, of Levin’s fervent idealism. Or, more precisely: that the real Anna Karenina had not truly existed until now, until it had flowed through Tolstoy and then through her and come out the other side. But these moments of transcendent begetting were rare. More often than not, she was aware of herself as nothing more than a scribe, a clumsy regurgitator of words. A book was a dead thing; no manner of resuscitation could change that.

When she finally managed to corner him on the phone, Dr. Fitzgerald claimed he had all the data he needed for his article. The news felt like the thinnest of daggers sliding into the soft space between her ribs.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong, then?” she said into the phone.

“Wrong?”

“With him,” she said. “With us.”

“Nothing’s wrong. He’s a beautiful child.”

“You know what I mean.”

There was a pause. “We’re looking into it. I assure you, we’re doing everything we can.”

She breathed. Wanting to say things that could not be said.

“When can we come back?”

“There’s not really a need—”

“But when?”

He agreed to see her the following Monday. In a panic, she stayed up nearly the entire weekend, desperately trying to finish Anna Karenina’s denouement. Once upon a time, this had been her favorite part of the book, for it was that strangely euphoric space in a novel after the main character is gone, where the author can get away with almost anything. When she had read it all those years ago, she had imagined a world after her own funeral, a world where she existed only in memory. But now, charging through these final pages, Levin’s protracted exchange with the peasant and his resulting epiphany about his own pious fallibility — a realization that had once struck her as desperately profound — came off as dull and belabored. Maybe it was just because she was viewing everything through the lens of transcription, but when, at 3 A.M., she finished typing out Levin’s final declaration to Kitty regarding the power of goodliness, she wanted to shoot the man and Tolstoy for creating such a blatant mouthpiece. And she hated the doctor for goading her into what she now saw as a fruitless endeavor. It was perhaps the loneliest moment of her life.

The next morning, they took the train up to Boston. When they arrived at Dr. Fitzgerald’s office, Radar ran over and punched the doctor in the groin, but playfully, as a kind of familiar salutation.

“Ray Ray!” said Charlene. “Be careful!”

“Doctah Popeye!” said Radar. “Doctah” and “Popeye” were the fourth and ninth words, respectively, in his approximately fifteen-word vocabulary.

“He’s been wanting a Popeye Band-Aid. The one you give him after the blood tests.”

“This can be arranged,” he said. The doctor swung Radar up onto his desk and looked him in the eye. “You’ve done everything we asked and more. You’ve never complained once. I think you’re going to grow up to do something amazing someday. Mark my words.”

Hands fluttering. One became two became one. Radar laughed and did the same back to him, a mirror image: two became one became. . The gesture fell apart.

“You’ll have to practice that one,” said the doctor.

A nurse took Radar from the room for a final physical and the prize of a Band-Aid.

Alone again, they sat in silence.

“Is there anything else?” the doctor said.

Charlene took a breath. From her bag she produced the stack of pages. Her stance toward them had warmed somewhat since her low point. She tidied the pile and then slid them across his desk.

“What’s this?”

“You inspired me,” she said.

He slowly glanced through the pages. Licking his fingers. She tried to read his face.

“I see a mistake,” he noted.

“Yes,” she said, hurt. “Probably. I just finished last night.”

He put the pages down and cleared his throat.

“Charlene,” he said and looked up at her. “Is there anything you’re not telling me?”

She was startled by his question. “Like what?” she said.

“Really any information can be relevant,” he said. “If there’s anything you’re not telling me, it could delay us from our conclusion.”

She considered this. She briefly toyed with telling him about her olfactory condition. She had kept this from him. She had kept many things from him.

“I would tell you anything,” she said. “I mean, I’ve told you everything.”

“Have you?” He was coming around the desk.

“Yes,” she said, shrinking back into her chair. “I think so.”

He was standing in front of her. She closed her eyes. She could smell his aftershave. The hooked barb of musk. She could feel what was about to happen, and she was not sure how she felt about it. But when she opened her eyes again, he had moved to the window. The faintest shiver of rejection.

She went to him. Placed a tentative hand on his shoulder. She could see the false familiar of his reflection.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” she whispered.

“Are you acquainted with the principles of uncertainty?” he said suddenly.

“Yes,” she said, taken aback. She took her hand off his shoulder. “I mean — no, not really.”

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” he said. “People are often confused by it. Heisenberg stated that both the position and velocity of a particle cannot simultaneously be known. You measure one, the other will always remain uncertain. The observation affects that which is observed.”

“Okay,” she said. “What does this have to do with Radar?”

He walked past her to his desk. “This is where people confuse the issue. It’s not the act of observation which makes things inherently uncertain — it’s the system itself which is uncertain. We blame it on us, the observers, but this is merely a convenient excuse, for the uncertainty is actually built into the world. A particle can never have two definite attributes — direction and position. If you define one, the other fades into indeterminism. And so: there is no way to know everything. You must choose your knowledge.”

She could feel the tears. She willed them back, but they came anyway.

“But I’m not asking to know everything! I’m just asking for this one thing! I don’t care about anything else!” she cried. She took a step forward. “Wait, why are you saying all of this?”

“Heisenberg—”

“You don’t want to help us, do you?”

“Of course I want to help you. The question is, do you want to help you?”

“You never wanted to help us!”

“Charlene.”

“You don’t care about us!”

“Charlene, listen,” he said. “The Japanese have a saying: Shiranu ga hotoke.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You must be prepared not to know what you want to know,” he said. “You must be prepared for the question to be the answer.”

The nurse appeared at the doorway with Radar, who was proudly holding up his elbow, recently adorned with a Band-Aid.

“We didn’t have Popeye, but we had a bumblebee,” said the nurse.

“Popeye is bye-bye,” said Radar.

The nurse sensed her intrusion. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

“It’s fine. Everything’s fine,” said the doctor. “We were just finishing up.”

Charlene wiped at her eyes and sniffed. Perhaps it was from crying, but she could no longer smell him.

“Come on, Radar,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

“Charlene!” he called after her. “You forgot your pages.”

“Keep them,” she said without turning around.


• • •

IN THE WEEKS and months after, she fell into a kind of mourning. A month passed without any word from the doctor’s office. Charlene finally caved and called his secretary, who was polite but evasive. She said Dr. Fitzgerald had gone to Europe to promote his skin classification system. And no, she didn’t know when he would return. But she said this in such a way that it was clear she knew exactly when he would return and had been instructed not to share the information.

Two months went by. Then four. What could he be writing? During her visits, Charlene’s sense of smell had calmed somewhat, but now, as she waited for his article, it returned with a vengeance. Some days it was so bad she would wear a swimmer’s nose clip around the house. She found the mild sense of asphyxiation comforting. After dinner, Charlene would lean out their bathroom window and smoke cigarettes into the night. She had not smoked in years. The smoke tasted awful — the tarry remnants would linger and fester in her sinuses for days — but still she found herself leaning out that window again and again.

Sensing a weight he could not name, Kermin started to sleep several nights a week at his communications shop, tinkering away with dismantled cathodes and diodes and dusty vacuum tubes — the tender ligaments of long-distance communication. When he had nothing to work on, he passed the nights turning black-and-white televisions into color and back again.

Radar turned three. He was constantly speaking now, as if making up for lost time. His finger extended, he pointed at the world around him.

House, he said. Birdie. Doggy. Raisin. Man. Choo-choo.

After every word, he would look back at Charlene, seeking confirmation. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she did not nod in agreement, if she instead taught him all the wrong words for things. What if a birdie became a man and a choo-choo became a raisin? She had the power to completely rewire his perception, to enclose him within a false reality. Except when she started to think about her son’s development in this way, she would feel the panic begin to rise — at all the choices she had and hadn’t made, all of the thousands of parental failures she would only come to realize later, when it was already much too late.

Time’s persistence had slowly dulled her preoccupation with the doctor’s verdict. Life settled into the uneasy routine of homebound motherhood, a life she had never thought would be hers. She woke; she made Radar breakfast; she took him to the playground; she made lunch; she read him a book; she napped with Radar; she went for a walk with Radar; she made dinner; Kermin came home; she put Radar to bed; she and Kermin watched television until he began to snore

Repeat.

Still, even if her day was consumed by the business of mothering, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still an impostor, as if all of this would be taken away from her at any moment. And a part of her wished it would be, even though she could not imagine her life any other way.

And then, nearly nine months after her final meeting with the doctor, on a day like all the rest, Charlene opened the mailbox and found a cream-colored envelope lying inside.

“Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald,” read the return address. She caught her breath and then tore open the envelope. The typewritten letter alerted her to a forthcoming article in the next month’s Journal of Investigative Dermatology concerning their son’s “chronic hyperpigmentation.” Standing by the mailbox, Charlene brought the paper to her nose. She searched for a hint of the doctor’s aftershave but found only the elliptical aroma of ink and his secretary’s cheap lilac perfume.

The wait each day for the mail’s arrival became excruciating. Charlene began to hate the mailman, shooting him looks of reproach when he did not deliver what she was looking for.

“You cannot fix him,” Kermin said out of the blue one night as they sat watching a fuzzy episode of Three’s Company on the refurbished Zenith television. “He is not broken.”

She was so startled by this declaration that she didn’t say anything at first.

“You know that’s not what I’m trying to do,” she said finally.

“I don’t know what you are trying to do,” he said.

“Kerm,” she said as he got up and began adjusting the aerials.

“Kerm,” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like.”

On the television screen, John Ritter dissolved into static and then became whole again. Kermin moved the antennae about like a conductor, quietly swearing to himself, but after a while it was no longer clear whether he was trying to clear up the picture or make it worse.


• • •

ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Charlene unlocked their mailbox as usual and nearly cried out. Inside was the beckoning glint of plastic wrap.

“Hey Kermin!” she yelled. She reached for it slowly, her hand trembling. A diagram of a hair follicle graced its cover. She felt herself recoil. Her son’s condition was not worthy of the lead article? A finger loosened the plastic seam on one side. She inhaled its pages, again searching for his elusive aftershave, but all she smelled was the buttery, slightly sterile aroma of processed paper and glue.

“Kermin!” she called up the hallway. “It’s here!”

She was searching the table of contents for the doctor’s name, the electricity flaring out into her fingertips. His name, his name — she wanted to touch his name. And there it was: page 349.

Kermin came down with Radar in his arms. He took a seat on the bottom step.

She read. Neighbors came and went around them. When she was done, she looked up, bewildered.

“So?” said Kermin. “What does it say?”

“I don’t know,” she said. The article was short. Barely three pages. She had expected it to be longer. She thought real science would demand pages and pages. Not this.

Radar was singing to himself, “Den we all say goodnight bunnee. Den we all say goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.”

Kermin rubbed his son’s head.

She sat down beside them and read it again. This time, she even read the figures and the footnotes. Radar grew bored and began walking up and down the stairs, counting each railing as he went. Kermin leaned over and looked briefly at the page, then shook his head.

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know,” she said, exasperated. “I’m not sure it says anything.”

Indeed, as far as she could tell, “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male” was nothing more than a professional shrug of the shoulders. “The unusual uniform darkening in this individual can be linked to a marked increase in melanocyte-stimulating and adrenocorticotropic hormones, though all other pituitary and adrenal gland functions appear normal,” Dr. Fitzgerald wrote in his conclusion, hiding behind the oddly disembodied language of the medical professional. “No doubt further genetic studies need to be performed to ascertain the precise catalyst for the over-production of these hormones, which are not present in either parent or gene group. In all other areas, however, the patient is a normal, functioning male infant. Chance transmutation, it seems, has struck again” (354).


Fig. 1.2. Patient R, Longitudinal Section 8

From Fitzgerald, T., “On an Isolated Incidence of Non- Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male,” Journal of Investigative Dermatology 72: 351

“Chance transmutation?” said Charlene. She slowly collapsed onto the bottom step, let out a long, withering breath, and covered her face with her hands.

Radar came back down the stairs. “Why mommy sad?”

“I don’t know,” said Kermin.

“Someone mean her?”

“Come,” he said. He took his son by the hand and led him back upstairs.


• • •

THE NIGHT AFTER they received the article, Kermin, a man who did not drink but was clearly drunk, barged into their evening bubble bath, shortwave radio in hand.

“There is no more tests!” he said. “Jebeš ljekare!”

“Kerm, careful!”

He swayed. “No more tests, do you hear me?”

“Okay, calm down. Don’t yell so loud.”

“And no more doctors!”

Okay.”

“Fuck this Fitzgerald so-and-so.”

“Kerm.”

“We know more than he does, and we know nothing! If he cannot find such-and-such, then there is nothing to find. Moj sin je zdrav.”

He reached into the bathtub to touch Radar’s head and tripped, dropping the radio into the sea of bubbles. The shortwave, chattering away, sputtered, slurped, and went silent. Charlene screamed, thinking they would both be electrocuted. She clutched their child to her chest. Radar, dark and radiant against his mother’s pale skin, began to whimper. Kermin grasped clumsily at his machine and promptly fell into the bath with them.

A shocked silence. And then Kermin started to laugh. After a moment, Charlene joined him. They laughed and built a tower of bubbles on Radar’s head, who waved at his crown. The air parted, the clouds receding. They did not have to fix this anymore.

6

It was a clean break, or as clean a break as you could hope for. In the months that followed, Charlene felt closer than she had ever felt to Kermin. They started sleeping together again for the first time in almost a year, though she still insisted on using at least two forms of birth control.

Perhaps sensing their daughter had turned over a new leaf, her parents offered to help them buy a house, an offer that Charlene begrudgingly accepted. They moved out of their apartment in Elizabeth and into a single-family faux colonial on a tight suburban street in Kearny, away from the Serbian community that had sustained and battered them. The sultry S-curve of the Passaic River formed the real and imagined border between their old lives and new.

Charlene brought all of her books with her — boxes and boxes of them. There was ample shelving in the new house, and she spread out her collection across several rooms, their spines clustered according to color. Visiting the new house, her mother said the library looked like a Rothko painting.

“It’s not a bad thing,” she said. “Just different.”

Soon after, Charlene hung white sheets in front of the shelves, as if to protect the books from an imminent construction project that never came. The sheets, once hung, were accepted and then forgotten, and would remain in place for the next thirty years. To fetch a book, you had to step through the curtain into another realm, into a mausoleum of forgotten bindings.

Kermin also moved his business across the Passaic, to a lonely little block in Harrison, next to a synagogue and a karate studio. Without the cultural patronage of the Serbs, he had trouble attracting new clients, and what little business which had sustained him in Elizabeth quickly dried up. Kermin sat in his new shop, surrounded by his electronic parts, and waited for the jingle of a bell that rarely came. He was perhaps the best TV-and-radio repairman in New Jersey, but he was not a people person, and the tiny television had not quite caught on in America in the way he had predicted. Americans liked big and bigger, and, most often, biggest. When things broke, they were more likely to buy a new one than fix what they already had.

Once settled into their new home, they enrolled Radar in a local day care. For the first time since his birth, Charlene felt comfortable enough to release him into the care of others.

“He must meet friends, kids, boys, everyone,” said Kermin. “So he can be normal.”

The day care was a brick-and-pastel compound called Shady Dale Tots. The playground out front was padded. There were two neon turtles you could ride like ponies. The adults at Shady Dale Tots cooed and pinched Radar’s cheeks. After his first day, Radar asked Charlene why there were no doctors, only other kids like him.

Her newfound free time terrified her. In the mornings, she would often sit with a copy of the Star-Ledger, a perpetually disappointing, perpetually comforting cultural artifact, reading and half reading, taking little sentence-long sips from stories that outlined the misfortunes of others. One morning, after burning clear through the local news, Charlene suddenly found herself in the classifieds — rare territory she usually found a touch gauche, a touch desperate even for her tastes. (Who would go public with something like that?) But now, faced with these crowded columns of informal commerce, she found herself voyeuristically scanning the personals and job listings and for-sale items. A thousand potential worlds awaited her attention. The personals were particularly mystifying, for the carefully ascribed acronyms and decontextualized details (“SWDM, 58 seeks SWF for LTR. I’m a Catholic-turned-atheist”) made each sound like an encoded diplomatic cable rather than an intimate come-on. In some ways, their impossible brevity reminded her of the obituaries that she had once collected as a child, but these missives were not meant to memorialize a life gone by. The personal ads had been crafted by living, breathing people who were awaiting actual responses. Their summary was like a death before death.

It was then that her eyes fell upon a nondescript ad in the bottom right-hand corner of the page:


DO YOU HAVE A SENSITIVITY TO TASTE AND/OR SMELL?

The International Flavor and Aroma Corporation of Elizabeth, NJ is looking for select, qualified candidates for several entry-level flavorist, perfumer, and quality control positions. Industry and/or science background helpful but not necessary. Apply to: IFAC H&R, PO Box 4923, Elizabeth, NJ 07207

Charlene read the ad twice through and then once more. She took a pair of scissors and carefully cut it out with four neat little snips. When she was done, the slip of newspaper lay by itself on the table. She fetched a piece of paper, fully intending to respond, but when she tried to write a reply, she found she had nothing to write. After several attempts, she gave up. She hid the ad inside a recipe booklet and tried to forget she had ever seen it.

Still, she realized she needed to find some type of job. Kermin’s business was floundering, and even with the financial assistance of her parents (who were incidentally also paying for Radar’s day care), they were in increasing need of a steady source of reliable income. Maureen, mother of Bryan, one of Radar’s day care buddies, found Charlene a position as a part-time receptionist at the semi-upscale hair salon where she worked. The pay wasn’t much, but it kept her busy.

One day at day care pickup, Charlene and Maureen lingered, chatting. Maureen was quietly becoming one of her few confidants. Close female friends were unusual for Charlene, who naturally drifted toward the gruff honesty (and the associated sexual complications) of male companionship. But Maureen was perky and kind and eternally optimistic — everything that Charlene was not.

“I was all, ‘If you try that again, we’ve got a problem,’” Maureen was saying. “You know what I mean, honey? You just can’t take that from people.”

Charlene, half listening, watched the children. She was aware — not for the first time — of their incredible whiteness. They appeared almost sickly under the fluorescent lights, as if they had never been exposed to the sun. The boy with the bowl cut whose name she could never remember was playing a block game with Bryan. Radar sat in his usual spot in the corner, contentedly rewiring one of his radios. At first the teachers had frowned upon having such dangerous elements in the classroom, but when they witnessed the degree to which Radar was consumed by his electronics, they had reluctantly made an exception.

And then Charlene saw the boy with the bowl cut stop and point at Radar. He was pointing right at him. The boy said a word — she couldn’t hear what it was, but his face had twisted into a scowl when he said it, giving him a momentarily precocious air of menace. Charlene stood and stared at the boy thrusting his finger in the direction of her son.

That little shit.

She resisted the urge to go over and slap him. Why on earth was he pointing like that? What had he said about Radar?

“Charlene? Are you okay?” asked Maureen. “What is it?”

The boy was pointing, and now he was saying something to Bryan, next to him, and they were both laughing and kicking at the blocks with their little feet. Charlene could not believe it. Bryan was laughing, too. Bryan was supposed to be Radar’s friend.

“They’re laughing at him,” said Charlene.

“At who?”

But Charlene was already running over. She grabbed the boy’s hand.

“Never,” she hissed at the boy. “Never, ever do that. Do you hear me?” The boy looked bewildered for a moment and then began to cry. Charlene plucked up Radar and hurriedly left the room.

“Wait, Charlene! What happened?” Maureen called after her, but she did not stop. She ran to the car and did not bother putting Radar in his car seat before driving away.


• • •

SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, perambulating Radar down Harrison Avenue, Charlene was lost in thought when she felt the baby carriage hit something. She looked around and saw a black couple in their seventies standing next to her. The man was holding the chassis of Radar’s carriage. Beneath a battered newsie cap, he studied Charlene with sad, elephant eyes magnified by a thick pair of grubby eyeglasses. His knuckles were dry and white with age.

“I’m sorry,” said Charlene, thinking she must’ve clipped them by accident. She tried to push forward but could not break free from the old man’s grip.

“Herb!” His wife grabbed his arm and tried to pull it off the stroller.

He pushed her away and lifted a finger at Charlene.

“You got some nerve, you know that?” His voice like a memory, pressing against her chest.

“Herb!” his wife said again. She uncoiled his fingers from the carriage. “I’m so sorry. He doesn’t know what he’s saying these days.”

She took out a handkerchief and wiped his nose. “Come on, love,” she said. “Let’s go get you some goulash.”

Charlene was paralyzed.

“It’s not what you think,” she finally stammered.

The woman turned and placed her hand on Charlene’s arm. Her eyes were warm.

“I think it’s wonderful what you’re doing, really. God bless,” she said. “So many out there who need good homes, no matter what color they is.”


• • •

THE ENCOUNTER DOGGED HER. It filled the folds of her consciousness. She kept seeing those cataract eyes, large and unblinking behind his Coke bottle glasses. A soft man filled with such malice. She wished she had confessed all to this couple, explained to them what had happened and why, sought their advice, sought their forgiveness. On more than one occasion, she found herself back at the place of their encounter, hoping she might run into them again.

She had always struggled with insomnia, but now she stopped sleeping altogether. After consulting a doctor, she began relying on an array of potent sleeping pills. If she did not take enough, she would not sleep and would wake up nauseated, tired, and depressed. If she took too many, she would pass out and wake up nauseated, tired, and depressed. Every night became an exercise in threading the needle. Days began to blur together.

During a winter playdate with Bryan, she and Maureen huddled on a bench at the playground, watching their parka’d boys attempt to crawl up the red tubular slide, a Sisyphean task that was defeating them.

“He really is gorgeous,” said Maureen.

“Who?”

“Radar,” she said. “Where did you get him? I mean, where’s he from?”

Charlene panicked.

“Originally?” she said, punching at her thighs.

For the first time in many years, she thought of T. K. lying naked in her bed in Hell’s Kitchen. She wondered where he was. The great torment of a life unlived. What if things had gone much differently for her? What if life could be ironed out smooth, like a shirt?

The boys finally made it to the top. They came down the slide knotted together, squealing with gravity’s delight. Radar raised both of his hands to his mother and said, “We come down, we slip down!” He proudly put his arm around Bryan.

“He’s from Minnesota,” she said to Maureen, watching her son. “His parents died in a fire. They were Congolese.”

As soon as she said it, she realized what a terrible thing she had just done. She instantly wanted to rewind time, to take it all back. But she did not. She left her words hanging there in the frigid air, waiting to see what would happen next, like a child standing over a shattered bowl.

“Oh!” Maureen said after a moment. “I wouldn’t have thought. Minnesota! It must’ve been so cold for him.”

“Yes,” said Charlene. “It must’ve been.”

The lie sprouted roots. Charlene began telling everyone that Radar had been adopted after a tragic fire in a Minneapolis apartment building. Sympathy was garnered. At first, Charlene hated herself for saying it, but then she became used to it. She slowly shifted from feeling guilty about the moral culpability of her fiction to being afraid of what Kermin would do if he ever found out.

One afternoon, she went to pick up Radar at day care, only to find him crumpled and sniffling in a corner. His eyes were red from crying. Her heart dropped.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“Matt said some hurtful things,” said Alison, the teacher.

“I knew it! I knew it,” said Charlene. “Who’s Matt? He’s the one with the haircut, isn’t he?”

“We’ve had a conversation, and Matt’s apologized to Radar.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t know what he was saying. He’s so young. He’s just repeating words.”

“What did he say?”

“He called Radar a monkey.”

“What?!”

“We’ve let him know that names can be very hurtful, even if he didn’t mean for it to be hurtful.”

“He meant for it to be hurtful.”

“Matt’s a good kid.”

“Matt’s a shithead,” said Charlene. “You have no fucking idea what you’re doing, do you?”

She took Radar to get a chocolate-and-vanilla Softee swirl, his favorite. He had a habit of trying to put his mouth around the whole ice cream when he first received it — not to eat it, but just to see if the act could be done.

When they arrived home she saw a letter lying on their doormat. The envelope was covered in several colorful stamps and featured a return address in Oslo, Norway.

“What is dat?” Radar asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Someone wrote us a letter.”

She debagged in the hallway and opened the envelope.

27 May 1979

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Radmanovic,

Please excuse the presumptuous gesture of writing to you directly. You don’t know me but I have been following the case of your son since his birth, though from some considerable distance. Several aspects of the case intrigued me as a scientist, writer, and teacher, but until now I have thought it best not to intervene. After giving it some thought, I have had a recent change of heart and deemed it my duty to inform you of an opportunity that may interest you.

In the very north of Norway, there is a community of physicists and artists called Kirkenesferda that have been experimenting with certain electrical shock treatments. This is not their primary business, but among other things, they have discovered a way to profoundly alter the colour of someone’s skin using a precise, one-time treatment. The results have been quite extraordinary.

I cannot guarantee success nor can I absolutely guarantee the safety of the procedure, for it has been sanctioned by no health or governmental organization, but I assure you, these people are exact in their studies and have looked into this matter with great detail. Should you be interested in making a trip to visit this camp, please let me know and I can put you directly in touch. I have a relationship with Leif Christian-Holtsmark, the founder, as I used to be a member myself.

Most Kindest Regards,

Brusa Tofte-Jebsen

Charlene put down the letter and stared out the window.

“What dat man say?” Radar said. “Hello? How are you?”

They had just done a unit on letter writing in day care, in which they had written to Santa Claus to let him know he could park his reindeer outside their school, next to the turtles, when he was not using them.

“He said. . I’m not sure what he said. It’s from Norway.”

“What’s Norway?”

“It’s by the North Pole.”

“Santa write that letter?”

“Not Santa. Someone else who’s not Santa.”

“Who not Santa?”

“Brusa,” she said. And then: “Kirkenesferda.” Trying out the name to see if it sounded real. A community of physicists and artists who have been experimenting with electrical shock treatments? In the Arctic? It couldn’t be real. But then why would someone invent all of this? As a joke? Was this some kind of weird racist joke? No — it was just too preposterous to make up.

She folded the letter and placed it in a drawer in the kitchen, next to the glue and the spare lightbulbs, as if its proximity to the accessories of domesticity might calm its contents.

When Kermin came home that evening, they sat down to an unsuccessful rendition of zucchini-cumin ragout. Charlene’s acute sense of smell had not translated to prowess in the kitchen; her untuned olfactive sensitivity had encouraged a kind of wild and hopeless inventiveness that Kermin and even little Radar usually accepted in resigned silence. This evening, however, Radar, high-chaired, seemed unwilling to play his part. He carefully and deliberately expelled his ragout back onto his plate, giving the eerie impression that he had just ejected something internal and potentially vital.

“Radar!” said Charlene. “Be polite. Chew with your mouth closed.”

Radar shook his head and pushed a hand into his regurgitations.

“Do you want to go to bed without any food? Eat like a big boy, please.”

“We got a letter from Santa,” Radar announced.

“You did?” said Kermin. “What did Santa say? Is he still take suntan in Miami?”

“Noooo,” Radar said, shaking his head. He turned to Charlene. “What dat he say?”

“Nothing. Santa didn’t write to us,” she said.

“He did!”

“Eat your food, please.”

“I don’t want it!” he said and pushed his plate off the table. It shattered on the floor, releasing a puddle of ragout viscera.

“Radar!”

She grabbed his arm, hard — too hard. He began to cry.

“You’ve lost your chance to sit at the big persons’ table because you’re acting like a baby,” she said. “Are you a baby?”

“No!” he wailed.

“Then why are you acting like one?”

You’re a baby, stupid shitty!” he yelled.

She slapped him. It was the first time she had hit her own child. Afterwards, the palm of her hand — the place where her skin had come into contact — felt as if it were bleeding. Radar’s eyes went wide with fright, there was silence, and then he began to wail with everything he had.

Kermin looked at her in surprise. She was having trouble breathing. She was overtaken again by the feeling that she had stepped into the life of another. Kermin picked up Radar and took him upstairs to his room.

“You shouldn’t have hit him,” Kermin said when he returned.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You are okay?”

She noticed her hands were shaking. She wiped them on a napkin. “He had a tough day at day care. They were calling him names.”

“Okay.”

When he said nothing more, she said, “They called him a monkey, Kerm.”

“He doesn’t look like the monkey.”

“Of course he doesn’t look like a monkey!”

“They are children. They don’t know what they are saying.”

“No, they know exactly what they’re saying,” she said. “I can’t stand that place. Every time I go there, I want to burn it down.”

“Don’t do that.”

“We’re paying a small fortune—”

“We are not paying.”

“—to have our child tortured by snobby little white kids. I can’t go back. I cannot go back. I’ll quit my job if I have to. I can take him.”

“You can’t quit. We need money.”

“We’ll make money, Kerm. I’ll ask for more from my parents if I have to.”

He picked up his knife from both ends, as if it were a fragile specimen. “I think soon I will close my shop,” he said.

“Close? Why?”

“They are raising the rents.” He shook his head. “No one likes these small television anymore.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure they ever did.” She reached for his hand. “We’ll make it work. We can try something new.”

“What new? What can I do? I cannot do anything.”

“That’s not true. You know that’s not true. You’re brilliant, Kerm.”

“In this place, brilliant does not matter. It is lucky asshole who wins. Like Edison. He electrocutes the elephant and says, ‘Screw you, Tesla.’ And he wins. Tesla is brilliant, but he lose. He talks to pigeons and dies like the poor man.”

“But with all the things you know? You could do so many things. .”

“I am not electrocuting the elephant.”

She looked at her husband and then she got up, opening the drawer and retrieving the letter.

“Promise me you won’t be mad,” she said.

“About what?”

“Maybe we’re the lucky ones,” she said and handed him the letter.

Kermin read in silence. Charlene watched him. His faced betrayed no hint of expression.

“What is this?” he said finally.

“I thought maybe it was worth looking into.”

“Looking into what?”

“If there’s something that maybe can be done, then I think it’s our duty. . to see what we can do.”

He got up suddenly and went to the trash can. He had already opened the lid before Charlene leaped up and grabbed him.

“Don’t!” she pleaded.

“It’s done. I told you. I don’t want any more of this.”

“Don’t do it, please!” she said, holding on to his arm.

“It is done, Charlene.”

He tore the letter in two, three, four pieces. She looked on in horror as he dropped the remnants into the trash.

Before she knew what she was doing, she was in the trash can collecting the fallen pieces, her hands covered in yolk and the thin, wet husk of an onion. She came back to the table and reassembled the sheets. A stain like a sunset.

They sat with the torn-up letter between them for some time.

“Please,” she said quietly. “It’s just to ask for more information.”

He had picked up a radio and was working the dials, though no sound was coming from its speaker.

“I need to,” she said. “I need to. .”

“What?” He turned on her.

“I need to—”

“What exactly do you need to do to our son?” He was shouting. She shrank back. She had never heard him shout before. “I would like you to tell me this, Charlene. I would very much like you to tell me this.”

His face was pink; she could see the whites of his eyes. He looked as though he wanted to kill her, to bash her brains out with his radio. She felt herself adjusting to a world that included such anger.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please. It’s just to find out information.”

“Information? What fucking information could you possibly want?”

“We don’t have to do anything. Just find out. I’ll feel so much better if I just find out.”

The radio suddenly sparked to life. A symphony materialized, much too loud. Charlene winced and put her hands over her ears.

“Kermin!” she yelled. “Shut it off!”

He twisted a knob, but the sound did not go away. An element of whining static was introduced into the whirlpool of woodwinds and strings.

“Kermin!”

The dial turned, and noise engulfed the signal. Static devouring the notes of music. A great wave coming toward them.

“Kermin!” She grabbed at the radio and stabbed wildly at the power button. “Turn it—”

The silence left behind was long and strange, as if the world had been emptied of all sound.

“You don’t have to do anything,” she said finally. “I’ll do it.”

“God gave us this. We did not choose,” he said. “He chose us. We raise him like this. That is our duty.”

“But maybe this letter is a sign—”

“We are not going to make him into some kind of freak, Charlene!”

“He’s already a freak,” she said quietly.

They stared at each other, wondering at the truth of her words.

“Don’t ever say this,” Kermin said quietly. “Don’t you ever say this about my son.”


• • •

SHE COULD NOT SLEEP. She lay in bed listening to the occasional hush of the passing motorist. Wondering where they were going at this hour. Wondering if they, too, could not sleep. At a certain point, she realized it was no use. She got up and made herself some peppermint tea. At the kitchen table, she wrote Brusa Tofte-Jebsen a letter. Dear Mr. Tofte-Jebsen, I am so glad that you. . and the rest. When she was finished and the envelope was sealed, she felt a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

Three weeks went by before she received a cream-colored envelope covered in lithographed bear stamps.

24 June 1979

Dear Mrs. Radmanovic,

Greetings. I have spoken with Leif and everything has been arranged for your visit. Enclosed you will find three roundtrip airline tickets to Kirkenes. Don’t worry, Kirkenesferda has offered to cover the cost of your transport. Leif said he will meet you at the airport.

May I just say that I am so glad you are taking this chance. I am sure you will not be disappointed. Unfortunately, I will be unable to join you at the Bjørnens Hule but I will make sure to get a full report.

Kindest Regards,

Brusa Tofte-Jebsen

What had been merely a declaration of interest had apparently turned overnight into a trip to Norway. The departure date listed on the tickets was in two weeks. She still had no idea what went on at this place, but Brusa’s reply served as confirmation enough.

She was just beginning to get excited about the whole venture when, that same day, the doorbell rang. When she opened the door, she found herself staring at a man who resembled something of a disheveled bellhop. He was wearing a burgundy suit and a strange, ill-fitting, fez-like cap that slumped awkwardly down the slope of his forehead, despite the chin strap meant to keep it in place. The man did not look excited in the least to be wearing such an outfit. Before she could say anything, he handed her an envelope and said, “Telegram,” then he walked away.

“Wait. What is this?” Charlene said, holding the envelope up. A shy but curious Radar was peeking out from behind her leg.

“It’s a telegram, honey,” the man declared, as if this were the most obvious fact in the world. Then he tromped down their steps and mounted his bicycle, which he had left lying across the sidewalk, leaving Charlene to stare in wonder.

“What’s a telly-gram?” Radar asked when they were back inside. “A letter?”

“It’s like a letter,” she said. “But it’s sent by machines.”

She would’ve thought it was all a dream if not for the envelope still in her hands. She brought it to her nose. The paper smelled of oily, metallic parts and oddly. . cinnamon. Telegrams were confusing documents. Their words had traveled great distances, and yet the physical paper had not. This cinnamon scent was Jersey-borne.

She opened the telegram in the kitchen.

Per Røed-Larsen. The name seemed oddly familiar.


“What dat machine say?” Radar asked.

“It said — well, I’m not sure what it said.” She flipped the telegram over, but there was nothing more.


• • •

THAT EVENING, while they were watching television, Charlene brought out the airplane tickets.

“I didn’t ask for these, I swear. I just asked for some more details,” she said. She sat down on the floor in front of his armchair.

He scrutinized the tickets for a long while, turning them over in his hands as if he were judging their authenticity.

“But isn’t that nice of them? They’re paying for us to come. It must be expensive.” She was readying herself for his explosion — to pounce on him in case he decided to try and tear up the tickets.

“I was in Norway once,” he said after a while.

“Yes,” she said, brightening. “It might be nice for you to go back.”

“I don’t need to go back,” he said.

She placed a hand on his foot. “Kermin.”

A silence.

“You really want this?” he said.

She nodded.

“Just to talk to them?”

“Just to talk.”

“And then you are okay?”

“And then I’ll be okay.”

“And then no more?”

“No more.” She shook her head. “After this, no more.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“We can go.”

“Oh, Kermin!” She jumped up, hugging him, kissing his rough cheek. “We’re just going to find out, I swear. Nothing more. I’ll feel so much better then. And I was doing a little bit of reading. It’s supposed to be really nice in the summer. Land of the midnight sun and all that.”

She did not tell him about the telegram. In truth, she did not know what to make of it herself. So she decided to act as if she had never received it. She hid the telegram in the utility drawer. But soon the drawer felt as though it could no longer safely contain such a document, so she hid the telegram beneath a floorboard in their bedroom that she had pried loose with a hammer. Inside this hole she also put a binder of newspaper articles she had collected about Radar’s birth. And the clipped ad for the IFAC flavorist position that she had stashed away in the recipe booklet. When she could not think of anything more to put down there, she hammered the floorboard back into place and covered it with a rug from another room.

7

Kirkenes turned out to be about four hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, the last town in Norway before the Russian border. On the flight from New York to Oslo, they watched an overexposed screening of Days of Heaven, in which a man murders his boss in a steel mill and then flees with his wife and daughter to the wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle, only to murder his boss again. At least this is what Kermin thought that the movie was about. There was no sound in his stethoscope-like headset, and he was at a bad angle to watch the dreamy images of the wheat fields burning. There was something uncanny about flying over an ocean while watching wheat fields burn. He looked out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the ocean that he had once escaped across in the hull of a boat. It was hard to imagine that the small layer of blue far beneath them was the same sea that had borne him to the New World.

Maybe sea and land were not altogether different, he thought, touching the cold glass of the airplane window. Only a small matter of density.

Inside the clean and empty Oslo airport, they blearily drank a coffee and thumbed through a rack of chunky Telemark sweaters before catching a toothpaste-colored prop plane up to Kirkenes. People in line to board the plane stared openly at Radar, until Charlene glared at them, and then they stared at everything but Radar.

The airplane sputtered and bounced against the hidden pockets of turbulence that lay sleeping above the Kjölen Mountains. Radar threw up twice. The Norwegian stewardess smiled as she took the wet airsick bag from Charlene.

“Poor boy,” she said. “He is so far away from home, yes?”

They came down in a sea of fog. The airplane descended and descended, and suddenly there was the tiny airstrip. The sun glowing dimly from somewhere behind that suspended scrim of moisture. They collected their bags directly from the plane. Under a light breeze, the air smelled sweetly of wet moss. The handful of other passengers made their way into cars and a small bus headed for town, leaving them alone inside the one-room terminal but for a janitor mopping at a floor that looked as if it had already been cleaned.

“They are meeting us here?” Kermin asked.

“That’s what they said.”

“There’s no one here.”

“I can see that, Kerm. Maybe they got the time wrong.”

But as she stared out at the fog rolling in waves across the runway, she knew that no one was coming to meet them. There was no such thing as Kirkenesferda. There were no scientists and artists experimenting with electricity up here. There was only tundra and fog and an invisible sun that never set.

“This is Santa Claus house?” she heard Radar say.

“No,” said Kermin. “Santa Claus does not live here.”

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered to her reflection. Her shoulders slumped. They had come this far for nothing.

There was nobody at the ticketing booth. Charlene walked up to the janitor swabbing at the pristine floor.

“Do you know when the next flight to Oslo leaves?” she asked loudly.

To her surprise, he spoke perfect English. “Five hours, ma’am. If the weather doesn’t get worse.” He looked at Kermin and Radar, sitting on a bench. “Didn’t enjoy your stay?”

“No, no,” she said, embarrassed. “It’s beautiful. There’s just been a mistake. A mix-up. We weren’t supposed to come.”

He nodded. “Same thing happened to me. I’m Swedish. I came here for a woman, but the woman left. I ended up staying. Twenty-five years.”

“Is there someplace we can wait?” she asked.

He looked around the room, as if to indicate that this was the extent of the known universe.

It was at this point that a man in a yellow jumpsuit came dashing into the terminal. He appeared quite frantic, but when he saw them, his expression dissolved into relief.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” he said, coming up, breathless. “There was a little problem at the office.”

The man was hairless — completely bald, no eyebrows. Charlene guessed he was in his late sixties, though his light blue eyes remained young and bright.

“You’re Leif?” said Charlene. He was wearing knee-high mucking boots over his yellow jumpsuit, giving the impression that he had just skydived into a manure field.

“That’s not Santa,” said Radar, and then hid his face in Kermin’s jacket. “Santa has a beard.”

“No, I’m sorry to report that I’m not Santa. He was otherwise engaged.” The man smiled, extending his hand to Charlene. “Leif Christian-Holtsmark.”

“We weren’t sure if. .” she trailed off.

“If I existed? I do. I very much do. My apologies,” said Leif, turning. “And this must be the famous Radar. How old are we, little man?”

Radar burrowed into Kermin’s jacket.

“How old are you, Radar?” said Charlene.

“Dis many,” said Radar, holding up a hand that showed a varying number of fingers, anywhere from two to five.

“He’s four.” Charlene apologized. “He knows he’s four, but he seems to insist on presenting a range of choices.”

“It’s understandable. One can never be sure,” Leif said, and laughed. “But four years old! Now, that is something. Well, Radar, velkommen til Finnmark. You are now on top of the world.”

He drove them in his battered Land Rover out into a light boreal forest of pine and downy birch. The road hugged the bank of a fjord and then turned onto a small dirt track that wound around several kettle-hole lakes thick with summer algae. The trees began to thin, and they found themselves on a long, flat plain.

“We are right on the edge of the tree line,” Lars explained. “To the north is tundra, to the south is the great taiga, which stretches two thousand kilometers into Russia.”

The fog burned off. Charlene could see that the ground was marked by splashes of bright lime-colored lichen. It was unlike any landscape she had ever seen before.

“There,” said Leif. He pointed up to a raised kame terrace. A herd of bone-white reindeer were tracking their progress. Leif stopped the car and rolled down his window. He was silent.

“Do you hear it?” he said finally.

They listened.

“What?” Charlene asked.

“The reindeer,” said Leif. “They have their own frequency. About fifty-eight hertz. Listen.”

They listened. After a while, Charlene could hear it, or at least she could imagine hearing it. Something like a moan that had not quite escaped the lips, but rendered simultaneously by hundreds of animals. The sum of a sound never fully finished.

“Santa’s reindeer!” Radar yelled.

As if in response, several of the reindeer began to run over the terrace, and soon the whole herd, sensing some unspoken signal, was thundering away as one.

Radar looked heartbroken.

“Don’t worry, honey,” said Charlene. “It wasn’t you. They had someplace to go.”

“The Sami have a saying: ‘En rein som står stille, er ikke en rein.’ ‘A still reindeer is not a reindeer,’” said Leif. “Migration is a part of their being. To move is to exist.”

They drove further into the wilderness. Charlene noticed telephone poles running alongside the dirt track, which surprised her, given the remoteness of their surroundings. The poles carried a black cable that was as thick as a grown man’s leg. Gradually, a tower became visible in the distance. The top of the tower was bulbous; it looked like a mushroom-headed rocket ship.


Fig. 1.3. The Wardenclyffe Tower at the Bjørnens Hule, Kirkenes, Norway

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 148

“What is that?” asked Charlene.

“It’s our Wardenclyffe tower,” said Leif.

“What’s a Wardenclyffe tower?”

“Nikola Tesla invention,” said Kermin, craning his head to get a look. “It makes free electricity for whole world. But how did you do this?”

“So you know about Tesla?” Leif said into the rearview mirror.

“Of course. He was Serb,” said Kermin.

“And a poor businessman. But he was also the greatest mind of the last two hundred years.”

“Wait — free electricity for the whole world?” said Charlene. “Is that even possible?”

“Yes, well, it’s all in theory right now,” said Leif. “But Tesla’s design was quite genius. The towers use the earth like a battery, drawing electricity from deep currents—”

“Intra-crustal telluric currents,” said Kermin.

“That’s right.” Leif paused. “And then the tower transmits this current through the atmosphere. The idea is that everyone has a small antenna on their roof and receives their electricity almost like a radio wave—”

“How deep into ground do wires go?” Kermin interrupted.

“Three hundred meters.” Leif smiled. “Deep enough.”

The road ended at the base of the Wardenclyffe tower, where there was a cluster of a dozen or so traditional wooden lodges with sod growing on the roofs. Lying between the buildings were large piles of mechanical equipment — ten-foot diesel engines and generators and strange, loop-de-loop electrical transistors. Wires ran from each house into the tower, then back into the transistors, then into totemlike wooden carvings of animals frozen in ferocious poses, their eyes replaced by lightbulbs. They disembarked from the jeep and stood, blinking.

“Welcome to home base,” said Leif. “We affectionately call it the Bjørnens Hule, or ‘the Bear’s Cave’ in English. We’re somewhere between the Finnish-Norwegian border.”

“What do you mean, between?” Charlene asked.

“Borders are complicated up here. Especially now. The Cold War has made everything a bit testy. You can’t spit near the Russian border without being picked up. But borders are not natural things. Birds do not listen to borders.”

“But we’re in Norway now?”

“Well, something strange happened. A cartographer made a mistake. The Finns thought the border was one line, the Norwegians thought it was another. Normally when this happens you get a big argument and maybe a war or two because someone is claiming too much, but, typical Scandinavians, both countries have claimed too little. And now there’s a space, like this.”

He used his fingers to demonstrate:


“It’s where we get our emblem. The eye.” He pointed at the base of a totem pole, where a stenciled eye watched them without comment.

“Over there,” he said, waving his hand vaguely, “is the Treriksrøysa. A point where Norway, Finland, and Russia all come together. You aren’t allowed to walk around this point fully, like this,” he said, promenading his fingers, “because you would violate international law. Wandering in and out of countries. But how about this: at this point, if such a point could even exist, time fluctuates. Norway is on Central European time, Finland is on Eastern European time, one hour ahead, and Russia is on Moscow time, two hours ahead. One point, three times. How can that be? And yet we’re okay with this being true.”

Charlene looked at her watch, suddenly feeling as if she were losing her bearings.

“What time is it right now? I forgot to set my watch.” She fiddled with the dial, spinning the hour hand forward.

He shrugged. “In the summer, when the sun never sets, time becomes quite relative.”

“Twelve thirty?”


Fig. 1.4. The Treriksrøysa

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 140

“As you wish.” He smiled. “But I’m sorry, I’m being a terrible host. You must be exhausted from your travels. Would you like a sauna? I find it’s the only way to cure jet lag.”

Caught between a haze of weariness and the urge to follow local custom, Kermin and Charlene, against their better judgment, found themselves stripped and sweating alongside Leif inside a small sauna cabin on the outskirts of camp while Radar slept outside on a blanket in the grass.

The ticking of the sauna’s furnace and the resonant smell of the baking cedar planks overwhelmed Charlene’s fragile system. She tried to let the heat perform its restorative magic but found it difficult to relax while naked inside a small, sweltering room alongside this stranger. She peeped out through the little window in the door to see if her son was still there, then she cinched the towel tighter around her breasts.

“So how do you know Brusa Tofte-Jebsen?” she asked.

“Brusa and I taught together in Bergen before the war,” said Leif. His hairless body glistened pink, his small penis a little mole rat of a thing, which she tried to avoid with her eyes. He did not seem to be sweating.

“I have been to Bergen,” said Kermin abruptly.

“Oh?” said Leif. “A beautiful place, isn’t it?”

“I don’t remember,” said Kermin. “It was night and I am sick. We escaped to America. We were not tourists.”

“Ah, well, that’s a shame. It’s funny how beautiful towns can turn very ugly in difficult times. You forget to look at the views, you know what I mean?”

“Then you moved up here?” said Charlene.

“When the Nazis invaded, I had just started my first year teaching physics and chemistry in high school. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be occupied. We all wanted to join the resistance but didn’t know how. It was like a slow death. A silent death. We did simple things, stupid things, like wearing paper clips on our lapels as a sign of protest. We started underground newspapers, declaring all kinds of things. Suddenly you had a newspaper, so you had to have radical ideas to go in the newspaper. Many people think the idea comes first, but it’s usually the other way around. You need a place to put the idea before you can have the idea, you know what I mean? But the real turning point was when the quislings wanted all of us teachers to sign a declaration of allegiance. The declaration stated we could only teach Nazi-sponsored topics and such. So we saw our chance — we would take a stand and break our silence. We refused to sign the document. All of us. Without even consulting each other. Seven hundred teachers were arrested, rounded up, and sent up the coast on a small boat. It was packed to the ceiling. Many of them got very sick on the journey. Some even died. Brusa and I worked for a year in the camp up here in Elvenes. Heavy labor. It was freezing; terrible conditions, you know. But we started a few interesting projects in secret, and after they released us, a couple of us ended up staying. And now I have been here for over thirty years.”

“Brusa lives here, too?”

“No, he ended up leaving. A disagreement over language.” Leif dipped a wooden ladle into a bowl of water and poured it over the stones. A great wall of wet heat rose up and enveloped them.

“Ay,” said Charlene. Her head felt as if it were compressing.

Leif did not seem to notice her distress. “You see, here in Norway,” he said, “there are actually two languages, two different types of Norwegian — Nynorsk and Bokmål. To an outsider, the differences between them might seem minimal, but there have been years of turmoil and cultural warring over who should speak what, and which is the true language and which is not. It’s all a bit silly — I can say this to you now — but back then it mattered a great deal whether ‘I’ was jeg or eg. Somehow everything else depended upon this distinction. Did you say jeg? Or did you say eg? There could be no compromise.”

“So what did Brusa say? Jeg or eg?” she asked, trying to breathe normally.

“Without boring you with the specifics, as a group we chose to speak Nynorsk, which was the language invented for the people, not the elite, who all spoke Bokmål. Bokmål is really a kind of bastardized Danish. And Brusa didn’t like this decision, even though we took a vote and it was all done completely democratically. He thought Nynorsk was one man’s fantasy. So he left. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he ever wanted to stay. He was a different breed than I was. He wanted to be a writer. Some people are meant to do things, and some people are meant to write about these things from a great distance.”

The heat was beginning to get to her. She ran a finger across a sweat-soaked eyebrow.

“Brusa seems to admire you a lot,” she said. “He was the one who recommended we come here.”

“Yes, well, from afar, one can admire one’s nemesis.”

“Nemesis?”

“Perhaps this is a bad translation. In Norwegian we say konkurrent. And this means ‘opponent,’ but it also means ‘someone who is a part of you.’”

“Your English is very good.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’m Norwegian.”

She suddenly had the urge to ask Leif about Per Røed-Larsen and why he might not have wanted them to come, but then she would have had to reveal to Kermin that she had kept the telegram from him. She would have to acknowledge that the telegram had been real.

Instead she said: “So you started a school up here?”

“Not quite,” Leif said. He dipped the ladle into the water again. Charlene wanted to tell him not to do it, but he was already dousing the rocks. The air grew thick with vapor. Charlene’s head started to swim. “At first, when the war was still on, it was a resistance movement. But not with weapons. We were interested in issues of atomics, theater, the avant-garde. You know, we were still young then. We thought we could change everything by staging a little happening about nuclear fission and cultural decimation on the tundra. There was no audience. No one even knew we existed. But I’ve come to learn that this isn’t how you win a war. And it isn’t what the people needed. At the end of the war, this whole area was completely destroyed by the Nazis. Can you imagine? First there was a town, and then there was nothing. Just ashes, bent metal, these terrible memories. For a while there, that’s all there was up here. Terrible, terrible memories. We are lucky memories die with those who have them.”

The heat was causing Charlene’s vision to collapse in on itself.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore. I have to get out,” she said. “I’m going to check on Radar.”

“Yes, it takes some getting used to,” he said. “But it will cure you of almost anything. I hardly notice the heat anymore.”

To her horror, she found Radar asleep amid a swarm of mosquitoes. How stupid she had been to leave him unattended! She swatted angrily at the insects. Attacking her poor, helpless child — how dare they? The mosquitoes responded to her attacks by gleefully turning their attention to her.

“I’m sorry,” Leif said, emerging from the sauna pink and steaming. “I should’ve warned you about the myggs. They can be nasty this time of year. They have a short period to do their damage, and they take their job very seriously. A reindeer can lose two liters of blood per day.”

They flip-flopped back to the main lodge. Now, suddenly, all Charlene could think about were the swarms of mosquitoes dive-bombing their heads. She protectively enshrouded Radar with a towel as they passed a group of men filming what looked like a collection of headless, green-skinned dolls.

From beneath his towel, Radar pointed to the dolls. “Halfway oop or down de stairs,” he said.

“Yes. That’s like Robin’s song, isn’t it?” Charlene sang: “Halfway down the stairs is a stair where I sit. There isn’t any stair quite like it.”

“It isn’t really anywhere, it’s somewhere else instead.” Leif completed the verse. “God bless the Muppets, eh? Jim Henson’s a bit of a deity around here.”

“Where dere heads go?” Radar asked.

“An excellent question, my friend. One that we’re trying to figure out as we speak,” Leif said. “Do you know where we put them?”

“Nooo,” Radar said shyly.

Leif waved at the film crew, but the men were too embroiled in an animated argument to respond. One of them flicked at a green doll, and its body parts flew in all directions. Then the man pulled at an invisible string and the parts returned, the doll whole again. This demonstration calmed the group; they all laughed and then looked up and waved back at Leif.

Charlene noticed a tall, towheaded boy standing among the men.

“Who’s the kid?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s Lars. The first and only child to be born in the Bjørnens Hule. Fortunately, he has caught the bug from his father.”

“Is that you?”

Leif laughed. “No, no. I’m childless, partnerless. My work is my life. My family are these men here. I barely have time to breathe. His father’s the famous Jens Røed-Larsen.”

“Røed-Larsen?” said Charlene.

“That’s right.”

“Any relation to Per Røed-Larsen?” She butchered the rolling ø.

“You know Per?” Leif’s face clouded over.

“No, no,” Charlene said. “I’ve only. . I’ve only read his work.”

“And?”

“I’m not sure what to think.”

“Per’s an interesting character. A bit of a groupie, one must say, though you can’t blame him. Jens had a family before he came here. Per is Jens’s other son. And then Jens abandoned him for us, and Per has never quite gotten over it.”

“Abandoned him?”

“Per stayed in Oslo with his mother. And now he has become obsessed with us. He’s writing our history, you see. Writing it before we’ve even managed to make history.”

“So then Lars. .” She stared at the boy holding one of the green dolls.

“Is from a different woman, yes. Siri. They met here. You’ll probably see her around.”

“How scandalous,” said Charlene.

Leif shrugged. “Strange things happen this far north. I cannot control what others do or say. I can only look after myself.”

In the main lodge, they drank black tea and sampled some local Lapland sautéed reindeer meat that smelled to Charlene of old leather jacket and a particular hairspray that she recognized from somewhere deep in her memory. This was undercut by a lingering aroma of ancient peat moss, finished with a touch of lard that had recently turned. She forced herself to try the meat out of politesse. It was delicious. Salty and rich and sweet all at once. It tasted of wet tundra, of pumping leg muscles, of crystallized sweat on the hide.

“Not so bad, yeah?” Leif chewed. “We call it finnbiff. An acquired taste, but then everything is acquired north of the Arctic Circle.”

“I have a sensitive nose, that’s all,” she said.

“Alas, I’ve never had a sense of smell,” said Leif. “Though one gets used to it and seeks pleasure in other delights.”

Radar licked at the meat on his plate and then recoiled. “Ewwww, ’lectric poop,” he said and hid his face in Charlene’s lap.

Leif laughed.

“Sorry,” said Charlene. “He can be so picky.”

“Not at all. The boy knows what he wants, that’s all. An admirable quality.”

Charlene took a breath. “Thank you, Mr. . Dr. Holtsmark, for all of your hospitality.” She swept her arm around the room.

“Please,” he said. “Call me Leif.”

“Okay,” she said. “Leif, then. May I ask what you propose?”

“Propose?”

She looked at Kermin. “To do with our son.”

He wiped at his lips with a napkin. “Let me show you something.”

He got up and fetched a smooth, white rectangular cube with four bolts protruding from two of its sides. He handed it to Charlene. “Do you know what this is?”

Charlene glanced at the cube and then handed it to Kermin, who inspected it closely. After a moment he said, “It looks like voltage switch, but what is this. . this white box?”

“This is the world’s first organic semiconductor bistable switch. Made of polyacetylenes, or melanin—the pigments in our skin,” said Leif. He took the switch back from Kermin. “The human body is really a wet-tissued machine. It runs on electricity. We’ve been studying the organic circuitry of the human body for some time, particularly the chemical properties of melanin as a semiconductor. It’s such a beauty of a substance. It’s not just in the skin — we have melanin in the brain, in the substantia nigra. You find this in the basal ganglia — it’s the focal site of learning, reward, addiction, eye movement. But of course, melanin’s most visible role is in the dermis, where it performs some of its most remarkable functions, interacting with the environment around us. We’re basically covered in a thin coat of ‘light radios’ that react to UV radiation waves and convert these waves into different energies.”

Kermin was sitting very still. Charlene felt compelled to reach out and hold her husband’s hand. She felt suddenly close to him. As if the two of them were confronting the world together for the first time.

“So what does this mean for Radar?” she said.

“We’ve been doing some research of our own here. We were investigating how we might turn a human being into a puppet. To rewire the body so that it is completely controlled by another. You can imagine the theatrical and philosophical fallout from such a discovery. We were deathly excited about the idea, but it never quite panned out. At least not yet. But during the course of our electrochemical experimentation, we did stumble upon several accidental discoveries. We found that with certain electromagnetic adjustments, we’re actually able to tune the dial of our melanin light radios — I could turn you into a shortwave radio, for instance, or a telephone, or a television — and we’ve done this with a couple of our own people. We’re pale-skinned, so it’s a little more difficult, but Thorgen, one of the puppeteers, was playing Shostakovich for two days straight — except only he could hear it, and it nearly drove him nuts. At first we couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, but we’ve learned more with each experiment. We keep getting better at this.”

“His skin was playing music?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “His dermis was translating radio waves from a station in Murmansk into pulses that resonated throughout his endoskeleton. His body had become a radio, with receiver, speaker, and no tuning dial, unfortunately. This may come later. But this isn’t even the end of what we can do. What’s even trickier is to actually manipulate the physical composition of these melanosome radios to our liking. We can change their structure. And thus their appearance.”

“Meaning you can change a person’s color?”

“Exactly.”

“So what’s wrong with him, then?”

“You mean what’s wrong with your son? This I cannot tell you. Nothing, as far as I can see. But then, it’s all how you view it. I cannot diagnose. What I can do is manipulate the proteins in his skin and change the molecular composition of his dermis.”

“And you’ve done this before?”

“Only once, but it worked beautifully.”

“Who was it?”

“As a doctor, I’m not at liberty to give you his name, but I will say he was a Negro boy living with the Sami. I’m not sure how he got there. He spoke their language perfectly. And they had heard through the Finnmark grapevine that we were doing these kinds of experiments. And so they came and asked for this. They said it was the child’s choice.”

“How old was he?”

“Nine or ten.”

“And he wanted to change his color?”

“Apparently so. Afterwards, his appearance changed dramatically.”

She considered this. “Why did he do it?”

“I think he was confused. He was the only one who looked like he did. He wanted to be one of them.”

“But he was only a kid!” Charlene exclaimed. “How could he know what he wanted? You shouldn’t just be allowed to change him like that. What if he. . came to regret it later?”

“I didn’t give counseling in this regard. I was merely fulfilling their request.”

Kermin shifted in his chair. Radar began to sing quietly to himself, touching his fingers together: “Halfway oop or down stairs, halfway oop or down stairs. .”

Charlene looked at her son.

“Is it dangerous?” she asked.

“I don’t want to mislead you. Everything in life is dangerous. But we’re careful men here. I wouldn’t expose your child to undue harm. For this I give you my word.”

“You electrocute him?”

“It’s more like a reverse electrocution. A negative electromagnetic pulse. We call it electro-enveloping. We would uncharge his subcutaneous layer — specifically his melanosomal proteins — using very precise bilateral voltage switches. We couldn’t guarantee final coloring, but”—he leaned back, eyeing them—“we could get it close to his parents. If that’s what you want.”

Charlene held up her hands. “Well, to tell you the truth, we hadn’t even gotten that far. We haven’t even discussed it at all.”

Leif nodded. “Of course, of course. If it helps to think in these terms: we would be merely correcting a glitch in the system.”

Without warning, Kermin stood up, overturning his chair. Radar stopped and stared at his father.

“We don’t want,” he said. “Thank you, doctor, but we are saying no. To all of this. To everything: thank you, no. Come on, Charlene. We are going.”

“Kermin!” said Charlene, standing with him. “The man is just trying to—”

“This man is crazy,” Kermin hissed. “Jebeno lud. I work with electricity all my life and this man has no idea what he talks about. You cannot uncharge this thing. He will kill him. Do you understand? He will kill him. Dead. On je manijak.

Kermin picked up his son, who was looking worriedly back and forth between mother and father, sensing the bloom of anger. The knots in their voices.

“Kerm—”

“We are gone,” said Kermin, and he walked out the door with Radar in his arms. They heard Radar’s quiet cry before the door swung closed.

“I’m so sorry,” said Charlene. “We didn’t really talk this through.”

“Please, please,” Leif said, holding out his hand. “He’s mad. Okay, no problem. Maybe I came on too strong. In Norwegian we have qualifiers, and I don’t know how to translate these into English. Sometimes I get carried away. But believe me, I understand the gravity of this decision. I don’t take it lightly, at all. Just keep in mind this is a valuable offer that I’m putting on the table. Think it over. Nothing has to be decided now. You’ve come such a long way. Relax. Enjoy the famous Finnmark air. There’s no pressure to do anything right now. You are my guests. My very special guests.”


• • •

A CABIN HAD BEEN arranged for their arrival. Radar played with a miniature troll he had found on the coffee table and sang quietly to himself.

“Billy clop gruff, trip trop goat come knockin’. Knock it up my bridge.”

Charlene walked slowly around the room, running her fingertips across all the old wooden surfaces. She washed her hands and face. Kermin was busy repacking their things.

“I cannot believe it,” he was saying. “What ever happened to Europe? Drkadžije! And how do these people make a living? Where does money come from? Kakvi ludaci jebo te!

She came back into the room and ran her hand through her hair.

“Kermin,” she said, and she was about to ask why they had come all this way just to do nothing, but before she could even begin, Kermin looked up at her and said, without hesitation, “No,” and she knew that he was right. She put her wet hands to her face and tried again, halfheartedly, feeling the tears coming — she was not quite sure why; maybe because she knew it was already over. Her hands were cool and wet against her cheeks, and she knew it was madness. Suddenly she saw herself from a great distance, as though she were standing very still on a stage in an empty theater. How had it come to this? Why had she been so intent on coming here? What had she thought would actually happen?

“Trip trop knockin’ on my bridge, Mama!” said Radar, offering up the troll to her.

She took the troll and turned it over in her hands. “So what do we do?” she asked quietly.

“What do we do?” said Kermin. “What we’re always doing. We go home. We live our lives like people.”

“Okay,” she said. “Yes.” Breathing. “I should’ve told you. There was a telegram. .”

“Telly-gram,” Radar cried. “Machine say ‘Hello how are you?’”

“Don’t worry,” said Kermin. “We go home. We forget this.”

“Okay,” she said. “But we can’t just leave, Kerm. The plane is tomorrow. You can’t just wait by the door the whole evening with your suitcase. Be gracious. The man just wanted to help us.”

“The man does not say what he really wants.”

“Just be nice. For tonight, and then tomorrow we can leave. We don’t have to do anything. It’s a vacation, that’s all. Think of it like that. They paid for it. We’re on vacation.”

He stood still. “For you,” he said finally. “And then we go.”

“And then we go,” she agreed.

They embraced. It had been a long time since they had hugged like this. Radar came over and grabbed their legs. Charlene smelled the beginnings of her husband’s beard, the quiet and familiar symphony of waxen musk lingering in the neglected crinkles behind his ears. She had forgotten all this. Routine had a way of erasing intimacy’s quiet particulars.

8

The evening came, though the sun showed no intention of setting. Leif, now dressed in a crisp white button-down with yellow trousers and plush leather slippers, served them a delicious dinner of salted herring, a rutabaga-and-carrot puree called kålrabistappe, lamb sausage, and a small piece of whale meat, which Charlene tried but could not stomach.

“I’m sorry the others couldn’t join us,” said Leif. “We’re a bit swamped with all of the preparations.”

“What’re you preparing for?” Charlene asked.

“Probably a great disaster.” He laughed. “Would you like to try some aquavit? We make it here.”

Kermin refused the liquor, but Charlene warmed and opened with each glass. Radar gave a running commentary on the meal. With theatrical precision, Leif listened to the child’s words and nodded his agreement.

“Yes, yes, I’ll tell the cook,” he said. “I do apologize.”

Charlene smiled. She felt free. She wanted to tell this man everything. To kiss his bald head. They did not speak of Radar’s treatment. There was no need.

After dinner, they said goodnight to their host and walked into the strange, enduring daytime. On the path back to the cabin, they encountered an older man carrying a stack of books.

“Hello,” said Charlene, tipsy.

The man stopped. “You must be our guests,” he said and bowed. “Jens. Apologies for the mess. Although they seem to like it messy around here. They are artists, you see.”

“You’re Jens?” said Charlene. “Jens Røed-Larsen?”

He smiled at her mangled pronunciation. “I am.”

“Your son wrote to me.”

“Lars?”

“No, Per.”

He looked at her. “There must be some misunderstanding. I don’t have a son named Per.”

“Per Røed-Larsen.”

“I have a daughter, Kari. And Lars. That’s all.”

“But Leif said that Per was your son. He’s writing a history of this place. He sent me a telegram saying. .” Her words drifted off.

Jens gave her a kind smile. “Leif says many things. You must remember this about him: he’s a born performer. He has a tendency to inhabit others. The Per who wrote to you was not my son. He is another Per.”

“What do you mean? Which Per is he?”

“This I cannot say.” Jens bowed again. “Goodnight. I wish you a pleasant night’s sleep. It can be difficult if you aren’t used to the light.”

After he had left them, Kermin shook his head. “These Norwegians are such bullshit. They do not look you into your eyes. They are like a cat.”

“A cat?”

“They never say what they mean.”

Despite being utterly exhausted, Charlene considered taking a sleeping pill when they reached the cabin, fearing the midnight sun might keep her awake. This proved unnecessary: within minutes, she and Radar were both asleep, his head nestled into her belly. Kermin lay down beside her and closed his eyes, but the light seeping in between the blinds pinched at his retinas. The skin of his eyelids was not thick enough.

He shuffled out to the porch and softly twisted the dial of his portable transceiver. The frequencies buzzed and chattered; he tuned the squelch, and his radio locked on to some distant signal before settling again and again into a wash of static. He had expected as much. They were at the end of the earth. He had not brought the dipole multidirectional antenna kit that could reach the horizons beyond the horizon. Perhaps he could tap into the Wardenclyffe tower before they left tomorrow and take a quick peek into the concave Arctic radio spectrum.

Then, somewhere at seventeen meters, a channel crackled. A sign of life. Humans carving out an existence on the pole. It was a garbled Russian weatherman. The Slavic gutturals popped and exploded and then evaporated into the churning shallows of white noise. He kept twisting the dial and caught a snippet of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” Michael Jackson’s young voice rolling up through the sleeve of static, exercising its magnetic pull before the song fell apart beneath the weight of its own interference, disappearing back into the tundra.

Kermin sighed. He was about to put away the radio when he struck upon an eerily clear broadcast at twenty meters. A chorus of drummers. African, perhaps. The beats were syncopated, hypnotic, the sum of their collective polyrhythms emerging and converging, conjuring a high-pitched harmonic tone that sounded like a wet fingertip traveling along the edge of a singing bowl. The harmonics hovered and bobbed and faded away again into the continuous lurch of the drumbeat. Kermin found himself pressing the radio to his ear and closing his eyes. A vision of whales surfacing on a vast ocean, brackish spray exploding into the air. The weightlessness of the sea.

“They’re noaidi drums,” said a voice.

Kermin opened his eyes and saw a perfectly round head. Their host was leaning casually against the porch rail, like a cowboy in the late afternoon. In one of his palms he held a handful of orange berries. He casually tossed one into his mouth.

“Do you want one?” he said, offering a berry to Kermin. “It’s a cloudberry. Very important up here. Cures all ills — even those you didn’t know you had.”

Kermin shook his head. “No, thank you.”

“The noaidi is like a shaman for the Sami people. He plays the drum to transcend this world and enter into the spiritual realm of the gods. The skin of the noaidi drum is painted with a map of this alternate reality. The shamans use the drums to open the avenues to ascendance.”

“And they broadcast this?”

“The Sami are modernizing. They’re still the subjugated people up here, but they’re not stupid. There’s a lot of territory in the north, and not everyone can make the noaidi ceremonies. Radios collapse distance.”

“Radios transmit across distance. Distance cannot collapse.”

“I suppose it’s all in the perception, isn’t it? The world is as we perceive it. During the war, a radio was the most precious commodity. It was how the underground communicated. It was how a family could hear news from the mainland. The Nazis knew this — whoever controlled the radio waves controlled the means of propaganda. So they seized all the radios in Norway. Except we found ingenious ways of hiding them. . Disguised as an iron. Or a bedpost. We would hollow out a log and put one inside and then stick it in the woodpile. You just had to remember which log contained the radio before you burned it.”

“My father was radioman in the war,” said Kermin.

“The most valuable man in the company.”

Kermin was silent.

“You don’t like me, do you, Kermin? You think I want to harm your child.”

“I don’t know you, so there is no way to like you or not.”

“I didn’t force you to come here.”

“You are not connecting Radar to your machine,” said Kermin. “So stop thinking about this.”

Leif smiled. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

“No, thank you,” said Kermin.

“Oh, come now, you’re leaving tomorrow, you came all this way — why not let me show you around a little? I promise, it’ll be worth your time.”

Kermin considered this. “I will only go for two minutes,” he said. “Then I come back.”

“However much time you can spare. Are you sure you don’t want a cloudberry?”

Kermin took the berry from his host. It had a sharp sweetness, a soft pinch on the tongue like the white currants back in Croatia, which he would pluck and squish between his fingers before popping them into his mouth. A wisp of memory he could not quite place sifted across his brain.

“It’s not so bad,” he said.

“Not so bad?”

“Comprehensive.” Kermin volunteered the word that Charlene often used with her smells. “Thank you.”

“Comprehensive? Okay. Kermin, I like it. You see? Would I lie to you? The cloudberry is comprehensive.”

Kermin followed Leif down a path lined with large triangular stones that looked like the oldest objects in the world.

“This place was so different during the war,” said Leif. “I used to think that war only changes us. But it also changes the land. It changes the rocks and stones around us.”

“I was child in the war.”

“Your father was a Chetnik, was he not?”

“Yes,” said Kermin. “So what?”

“I was simply stating a fact, not making a judgment.”

“My father was good man,” said Kermin. “He was fighting for his home. He was radioman, not this general making decisions for all of Chetnik army. He did what they tell him.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“You cannot blame small people for big problems.”

“I’m not suggesting your father was a bad man.”

“If my father did not fight for Chetniks,” said Kermin, “we would not have to run, and we would not go to Bergen and I would not get on this boat to America and then I would not meet Charlene. I would not have Radar. So this all good things.”

“And there would be no RGBNN.”

Kermin stopped and stared at his host. “How did you know about this?” he said.

“You thought no one was listening, didn’t you? We are always listening.”

The RGBNN. Kermin had not thought about these letters in some time. A lantern was lit in the recesses of his memory. How we forget! How we forget everything!

Kermin had been in America only six months when his father, Dobroslav Radmanovic, brave radioman for the vanquished Chetniks, collapsed and died while waiting in line at the A&P, ground chuck in hand. A brain tumor had been slowly filling the soft space beneath his skull, an artery had burst, and Dobroslav had unceremoniously surrendered his ticket, at the age of thirty-seven leaving his son orphaned and alone in a strange land.

Luckily, the bureaucratic beast that was the Bergen County Department of Human Services had sent Kermin to the Simics, a well-meaning Serbian-Australian couple who lived in a diminutive row house a stone’s throw from exit 13 of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Luka, Kermin’s new foster father, was quick to denounce the “Chetnik savages,” who he believed had given Serbs a bad reputation abroad.

“No offense to your father, but those men are wicked,” he said in Serbian. “The only reason to grow your beard this long is because you are shipwrecked. Otherwise, you have something to hide. The Chetnik is the devil sitting on the Serb’s shoulder, whispering everything we do not need to hear.”

“In English,” said Weema, Luka’s wife, emerging with cocktail and spatula in hand. “Otherwise, the little rooster will never learn.”

“In English, in English,” Luka agreed. “Everything is clearer in English. Do you know, my little rooster, that it is impossible to tell a lie in English even if what you say is not true? The opposite is true in Serbian: everything you say is a lie, even if what you say is true. And that is the truth.”

The Simics had done their best to give Kermin a Normal American Childhood. They had indeed taught him English. They had sent him to school. They had brought him to St. Sava’s each Sunday. They had tolerated his strange radio habits. And yet, as Kermin tried to settle into this new life he had inherited, he could not help feeling a great chasm opening up around the question of his father’s legacy. Until the day he died, Dobroslav had never once spoken a bad word about either Dujic or the Chetnik cause. Such unequivocalness left his son balancing a degree of cautious reverence for his father’s memory with a growing mistrust for the Chetniks themselves, whom he had increasingly come to understand as collaborationist, disorganized, and potentially genocidal. How, then, to reconcile the participation of someone you loved in what was most probably a very bad thing? Could his father still be a good man who had also participated in evil deeds?

Kermin had resolved this, at least in part, by founding the Ravna Gora Broadcast News Network (RGBNN) when he was sixteen years old. Transmitting from his bedroom in Elizabeth, using a homebrewed radio setup, the RGBNN was a short-lived exercise in making right what was once wrong: it exclusively broadcast elaborate (and one must say, incoherent) anti-fascist manifestos that Kermin had penned himself. He would read these aloud over Luka’s old Serbian records.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are all equal rights,” young Kermin intoned into his microphone. “No one can tell us how to make difference from others. We are all made from same branches of trees. We are all human branches. Past is past, future is future, man is man, woman is woman.”

Any self-consciousness about the clumsiness of these sermons was mitigated by the knowledge that no one was listening to his frequency, and even if they were, they certainly wouldn’t know who was speaking. At least this was what he had assumed.


• • •

“YOU ARE JOKING ME,” Kermin said to Leif, shaking his head. “Truly — how did you find out? No one knows this.”

“You know what your problem is, Kermin?” said Leif, smiling. “You keep wanting us to be different, but the more you get to know me, the more you realize that we are exactly the same.”

They walked in silence. The light in the sky had grown soft and casual, like the back of a hand. The drumming popped lightly through Kermin’s radio.

Leif stopped. “Tell me, Kermin, are you familiar with Heinrich von Kleist?”

“No.”

“Kleist wrote an essay called ‘On the Marionette Theatre.’ Not an essay, really — more of a dialogue. . in the Socratic tradition. You know Socrates, yes?”

Kermin shook his head. “Not personally.”

Leif laughed out loud. “That is a good one. ‘Not personally.’ I must remember that one.”

Kermin smiled at his unintentional humor. For just an instant, he felt like the smartest man alive.

“Well, I don’t know Socrates personally, either,” said Leif. “Nor Kleist. But in his essay, two men discuss puppetry, which at the time was seen as a petty craft, performed by unskilled peasants for children and criminals. In many ways, not that different from how it is perceived today, yes?”

“Puppets?” said Kermin. “Like Pinocchio?”

“You see? You think of puppets and you immediately think of children. You have been corrupted by a lack of imagination. Kleist’s essay addresses this exact problem. . In his piece, one of the men proposes that the puppet, without any awareness of self, is more graceful, more true, in the Kantian sense, than any human actor can possibly be. This astonishes his partner, who, like you, has never before considered the puppet as anything but a child’s toy. But here, then, is the problem: a human cannot move without also observing his own movement, and in observing it, he corrupts it. A puppet doesn’t suffer from this same condition. It’s free to inhabit only the movement asked of it, nothing more, and in doing so, the puppet tempts perfection — and, indeed, God himself.”

“Without observation, there is no life.”

“But how do you know? This is an assumption on your part, yes?”

Kermin turned off his radio. “You are a crazy man.”

“No, Kermin, I’m a puppeteer. There’s a difference,” said Leif. “Come, I want to show you something.”

They walked down some steps, through a gate, and to the door of a large house that Kermin had not seen before. Leif paused with his hand on the doorknob.

“Don’t be alarmed by what you’re about to see,” he said. “Your life will never be in danger. Do you trust me?”

“No.”

“Fine. Probably better this way,” said Leif and opened the door.

The entire house was one large room, with high ceilings and a dimly lit stage at its center, surrounded by several rows of empty chairs. In the middle of the stage stood a bear, perhaps nine feet tall. At first Kermin thought the bear was merely a taxidermied statue, but then he saw its head twist and one of its paws shudder and he realized the thing was alive. He took a step back against the wall.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Leif. “We’ve controlled Gunnar thoroughly. He only knows his task.”

“He is real bear?”

“As real as you or I,” said Leif. “Now I want you to fight him.”

“Jesi lud.”

“I assure you, there’s no danger. Gunnar will never fight back; he has been trained only to defend.” Leif picked up what looked like a fencer’s rapier. “The point is not sharp, so have no fear about injuring the creature. Your only objective is to try and tap the pendant attached to the bear’s chest. If you do this, the alarm will chime and the fight will be over.”

“I’m not fighting a bear. He will kill me.”

“The bear won’t kill you. The bear cannot kill you. For this I give you my word. The only person who can defeat you is you.”

“I don’t take your word.”

“All right, then. We stand at an impasse,” said Leif. “If you don’t believe another man’s word, then what do you believe?”

The question caught Kermin off guard. He had come to Norway hoping that the trip alone would cure his wife of the strange sickness that continued to consume her. He did not know what had gone wrong between them; he could not point to a piece of their life and say, “This is the part that is broken.” He knew only that at some point, during some brief, quiet moment when he had not been paying attention, they had drifted off course, and they were now in uncharted waters. Kermin never claimed to know much in this world, but he did know that he must never lose Charlene, that without her he would never be whole again. And so he had tried to come to this place with an open mind, even if he knew in his heart that he had relinquished some vital part of himself by even setting foot here. Maybe this was what love had become: the slow act of giving up more and more until nothing of yourself remained. Yet when Leif had described the procedure to treat their son, something inside of him had snapped and recoiled — not because he believed the procedure wouldn’t work or that Radar might be harmed, but because he knew that there was a very real possibility that it would work, and that afterwards, nothing could ever be the same.

Through the shadows of the room, Kermin looked at the bear, who had not moved since their arrival, save for bobbing his head back and forth ever so slightly, giving him an air of reluctant wisdom.

Again the lantern of memory was lit, and Kermin was suddenly taken with a forgotten scene from his past: Once, when he was very young, he was walking through the woods alone, gathering white currants into a thrush basket for his mother’s preserves. He had not told his mother where he was going, because he knew she would never have let him go. The war had already been raging for two years, and she had forbidden him to wander, but he had wanted to surprise her with the basketful of currants, to make her smile again, just like she had done before his father left to go fight in the hills. Together they would dip the jars into the boiling water, mash up the berries, and make her famous preserves.

But somewhere along the way, Kermin had gotten lost. Scared and feeling feverish, he had stumbled into an unfamiliar clearing, and there, sitting in the sunlight, working at one of his paws, was a floppy-skinned brown bear. Kermin’s first thought was that it must be a man in a bear costume, for the bear’s gentle sentience was much too close to his own. And then the bear, startled by his sudden entrance, leaped to its feet and took several tumbling steps toward him. Kermin froze, not daring to move, his basket of currants trembling at his side. He could hear the bear’s ragged breath coming in snorts and sniffles. He realized that the creature was trying to smell him, trying to understand what kind of thing he was.

“I’m Kermin,” he had whispered. “I’m not a person.” He had meant to say “bad person,” but the word bad had gotten lost somewhere in the space between his mind and his throat.

The bear seemed to hear this. It moved its head back and forth, as if attempting to listen to him from both ears, and then it yawned a slow, wild yawn, peeling back the wet skin around its teeth. Kermin remembered feeling not scared so much as deeply, profoundly amazed that the world could contain both him and the bear at the same time. He hoped then that if his father and the Chetniks ever came upon this bear, they would not shoot it with their guns, but would somehow realize that this bear was a peaceful bear who only wanted to lick his paws and eat some currants and look at the moon.

“Don’t shoot him, Tata,” he whispered to the bear. “He’s not the war.”

The bear nodded, turned, and, with one last mournful look in Kermin’s direction, disappeared into the forest.

Now, against the glow of that memory, Kermin looked at the bear standing in the middle of the darkened room. Were these two bears related? No. Impossible. They were thousands of kilometers from the Balkans. But. . did bears possess memories, too? Did that bear in Croatia carry with him the image of a child picking white currants? And what of this bear? Would he remember tonight? Would he remember what was about to happen?

He made a decision, then and there: he would fight the bear. It was clear to him now that he had come here for a reason. If he won the fight, then he would know he was on the right course. He would know his cause was just and that he must not sacrifice his son to satiate his wife’s despair.

And if he lost? If he lost, he was not sure what he would do.

“Give me this stick,” he said to Leif.

His host raised his eyebrows. “So you will do it?”

“If this bear kills me, I will really be pissed off,” he said.

Kermin approached the bear, holding the rapier taut by his side. He could see the yellows of the creature’s eyes, the glint of the pupils following him across the room. And still the bear did not move; it remained reared up on its haunches, waiting, its head gently moving back and forth. Kermin could see the pendant gleam red against its belly. A smell of oily fur and animal flesh hung thickly in the air.

Kermin cautiously approached. This bear was bigger and blacker than the one from his memory. It continued to stand rigid and unmoving in the middle of the room, undeterred by Kermin’s approach. At first wary, but then emboldened by the bear’s eerie stillness, Kermin inched closer and then closer still, until he was only four feet away from the creature. The bear towered above him; its massive head swaying lightly on the sill of its thickset shoulders. One swipe of the creature’s paw would send him careening across the room and most likely shatter his entire body. The bear stood, immobile, trembling just so. Kermin realized that, unlike in his encounter with the bear in the forest, he could not hear the creature’s breath. There was only the sound of his own breathing.

He looked back at his host, who gave him a gesture of encouragement. Maybe this was all a psychological trick. Maybe the bear would never move. He could end this with a single tap. A test of courage and faith. The bear was his konkurrent.

He took a deep breath and swung his rapier as fast as he could at the bear’s chest. He readied himself for the feeling of impact, but at the very last moment, the bear’s paw shot up and parried the blow, pushing the rapier’s path down and to the left so that Kermin’s momentum carried him forward and onto the floor, where he lay helpless at the bear’s feet. He expected the bear to pounce upon him, to tear him to pieces, yet the beast did not move from its upright position.

Kermin got up, burning with the heat of humiliation. He tried again. This time, anticipating the block, he was ready for a counterattack, but this, too, was easily deflected by the bear’s other paw. It could not be! The bear’s reaction time was uncanny. Kermin’s rapier zipped through the air, flicking this way and that, and yet every thrust was met with a perfectly equal and opposite block. The bear did not expend one ounce of extra energy; quickly and quietly, he adjusted to Kermin’s attacks and moved accordingly. And yet when Kermin made to thrust but did not, the bear would not even flinch.

Life shrank to the singular task of delivering the point of his rapier to its intended target. Everything depended upon this very small piece of physics. And yet he could not do it. He became frustrated, then resigned, then angry, then oddly exuberant. The bear blocked attack after attack, hypnotically countering each and every gesture he performed. The pendant gleamed, remaining untouched.

Finally, after he had lunged and was sent sprawling across the floor for the umpteenth time, Kermin lay on the ground, soaked in sweat. The muscles in his arms were shaking uncontrollably.

“That bear, that bear. .” he whispered. “Mamojebac.” He was crying from the pure effort of his defeat.

Leif approached, clapping his hands. “Amazing. We’ve been here for just over an hour. You possess such great resolve. Such self-belief. It is a rare quality these days.”

“This bear is unbelievable,” said Kermin.

“Not so unbelievable. I built him myself.”

Kermin slowly rose to his feet, his head pounding.

Leif carefully circumnavigated the bear and then approached from the rear, where he casually reached around the giant stomach, as if to hug the beast, before tapping the pendant with his finger. An alarm sounded and the bear froze stiff.

“Every problem must have a solution,” he said. “Come here, Kermin. Let me show you.”

Still breathing hard, Kermin joined Leif behind the bear. He had removed a part of the bear’s fur and was holding the flap open for Kermin to see inside. In the dim light, Kermin squinted and saw the glint of metal — hundreds of intricate gears and cables standing still inside the creature.

“What?” said Kermin.

Among the gears he could see the white stencil of the eye.

“Yes. You see?” said Leif. “Every move was preprogrammed. He knew what you would do before you did it.”

“How?” Kermin felt as if he were falling down a deep well.

“He’s a puppet. He’s a god.”


• • •

OUTSIDE, THE SUN was finally setting. The dusk, stretched and weightless. Everything smoldering white, yellow, pink. Not so much a sunset as a suspension of disbelief.

“The sun will rise as soon as she sets. Like a breath,” said Leif. “To really understand the mind-set up here, you must first understand the light. . In the summer, there is no night. We’re illuminated for twenty-four hours a day. Our skin becomes confused — you feel alive, like you might never die, as if anything is possible. People don’t realize this, but there are many more deaths in the summer than the winter, because people believe they’re invincible. In the winter you are much more of a realist. The daylight grows shorter until there is no day at all. But it is not completely dark. There is a wonderful depth to the sky in the winter — the light is almost blue. I feel most at peace then. In the summer I do not sleep, but in the winter — this is when I do my thinking.”

They walked. Kermin was still shaken by the image of the bear’s metallic innards. There was no life in there, only the click and pop of the mechanism. The promise of movement. The sum of all those gears had equaled his defeat.

He patted his sore hands against his hips and looked up. The sky had turned soft and thick, the light suspended above their heads like a sheet. As if light were a language spoken between heaven and earth.

Kermin realized then that this was the most beautiful place he would ever see in his life. The thought saddened him, for it was an empty beauty, a reluctant beauty, a landscape of longing you did not want buried with you in your grave.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the pole,” Leif said suddenly.

“What is the pole?” Kermin asked, not quite listening.

“The North Pole. It’s a place that often recurs in my dreams. Did you know that at the pole, the sun only sets once a year? A six-month day followed by a six-month night.”

“When do you have breakfast?”

“Ah! You are a funny man, Kermin. Most people probably don’t understand this about you. When indeed? Two months in? Three months? Or do you go directly to brunch? You can see my dilemma. On the one hand, the pole is a point of infinite possibility. The lines of longitude converge there, and so the North Pole contains all longitudes at once. In essence, you could choose any coordinate with a latitude of ninety degrees north and you would be correct about your position. How to function with so much choice? But then on the other hand, the only direction you can head is south. Can you imagine? You have no choice. You must head south, there is no other way. Wait—” Leif grabbed Kermin’s arm and pointed.

“Look.”

They stopped and watched the sky. The sun, perched on the lip of the horizon, seemed to tremble before sliding from view. The world blinked, waited, and then there was the sun again, rising unperturbed, as if it had all been some kind of performance.

Kermin turned and seized Leif’s shoulder. They stood looking at each other, caught inside their own magnetic field.

“Will you hurt him?” Kermin asked. His grip was firm, but there was tenderness in that connection, an insistence to the present.

“I will not,” said Leif.

“But you can do what you say?”

“I’m not in the business of lying, my friend. I say what I mean.”

“I care about him more than anything.”

“Of course.”

“But I must also take care of my wife.”

“Of course you must.”

Kermin released his shoulder. “After, how will he be?” he said quietly.

“This I cannot say,” said Leif, shaking his head. “But how does that saying go? ‘To know the son, look at the father.’

They walked on and came to the entrance of another lodge. Another eye above its doorway, staring at them. Leif saw Kermin looking at the emblem.

“If the eye belongs to no one, what does it see?” he asked. And then he opened the door and flicked on the light, which sputtered to reveal a large room filled with shelves of cogs, gears, and pulleys. There were rolls upon rolls of wire and dangerous-looking three-pointed mechanisms and small wooden mannequins contorted into ghastly pirouettes. Kermin looked up at the ceiling. From the rafters hung hundreds of puppets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. All of them headless.

Kermin stared. He had never seen such a collection of wonders in his life.

“As you can see, we’re running out of room,” said Leif.

“Where are their heads?”

“An old superstition. If you leave the puppet’s head on overnight, it may come to life and take its revenge,” said Leif. “You must separate the body from the mind.”

“And all of this stuff is for making your puppets?”

“Yes. But unfortunately, for our next show we need something more.”

“More than this?”

“You know how it is. You want what you cannot have. Our next show is about a brand-new idea in theoretical physics called the quark-gluon plasma, a condition that existed briefly after the Big Bang — at least in theory.”

“I don’t know about this.”

“The basic idea is that following the birth of our universe, there was a moment of extremely high temperatures. We are talking extremely high, as in never before or since — a singular thermopoetic event. At these temperatures, all matter breaks down into essential building blocks. And for a moment there, right after the creation of our world. . everything was broken and everything was the same. No larger unique molecules, no atoms, no nuclei — just a sea of indistinguishable quarks and gluons. Can you imagine it? The whole universe as a sea of sameness.”

“It sounds bad.”

“It sounds beautiful. And it sounds a bit like some of the most extreme forms of communism, yes? Complete and utter equality?”

“Communism never works this way.”

“Not yet, at least. And I’m not talking about your brand of bourgeois Eastern European Tito communism. This is like window dressing. You must look farther east for the plasma. Burma. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. North Korea. China. Well, maybe China no longer.”

“So your show is about this? Quark gluton communism?”

“You’re good, Kermin. One must say this about you,” said Leif. “No, the challenge we face right now is much more mundane. You see, we’re building puppets with screens inside of them. Televisions. So they can become anyone they want. . like an infinite mask. These are certainly our most complex constructions to date. And their circuitry must be able to function in very hot and wet conditions — in the Cambodian jungle, you see, where there’s no electricity. We’re struggling to make all of this work. . The wiring is really very tricky. You work with televisions, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Little televisions?”

“Little televisions.” Kermin felt a great delight in saying this. “Very mini televisions.”

“Maybe I could pick your brain sometime about a few small matters. For instance, we are interested in liquid crystals on plasma-polymerized films. Do you know about these?”

“Of course.”

“Of course you do. You see? You and I are not so different.”

They stood, staring at the vast collection of puppet detritus. In the middle of the room sat a strange machine that looked like a suspended metal barrel resting on two trapezes, with a large collection of spiraling wires exploding from either end. The barrel was covered in bulbous glass protrusions. Kermin put his hand on one of these glass lumps. It was warm to the touch. He felt a sudden, precise absence in his chest and then his head swam, as if he had been holding his breath for too long.

“What is this?” he asked, withdrawing his hand.

“That. That’s a vircator,” said Leif. “That is what will cure your son.”

9

The next morning, Charlene awoke early to find Kermin already up. Radar was next to him, quietly working on an exploded radio at the little wooden table. It was chilly inside the cabin. Outside, summer snow had fallen sometime during the long, illuminated night. A fresh wet coating of white covered the ground, broken only by a lone set of paw prints that wove and wandered through the cluster of buildings.

“What’re you doing?” Charlene said sleepily, coming over to the table.

“We are repairing, aren’t we?” said Kermin.

“This radio is broken,” Radar agreed.

“I had the strangest dream last night.” She yawned. “Did you have any dreams?”

“No,” said Kermin.

“No dream,” Radar agreed.

“It must be something about being up here. Or maybe it’s just all the travel, but I swear, it was so vivid. I was on this boat or barge or something. In the jungle, floating down a big river. And I knew these people were watching me from the trees. I couldn’t quite see them, but I knew they were there. And I hear this shout, like a warning, and I expect some kind of attack, but then I look up and I see that the river is ending. Just disappearing into nothing. It’s like the water is there one minute and then it’s not there. And then, just before I get to the place where the river is ending, I wake up. And you know what’s strange? In the dream, it wasn’t that I was scared to go through that point of no return — it was that I wanted to go through, to see what was on the other side. When I woke up, I could feel this disappointment, you know?”

Kermin looked up at her. “It’s okay to give him treatment.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we can let him treat Radar. I think it’s okay.”

“But. . but you said it was dangerous.” She shivered, hugging herself.

“He will be fine. It’s what you want. It’s what we came here for.”

Charlene studied her husband’s face. Then she sat down in a chair and pulled Radar to her.

“How’re you feeling this morning?” she asked.

“Fiiiineee,” he said, electronics in hand. “I like dat man with da white head.”

“Who’s that?”

“He means Leif. Bald-head Leif,” said Kermin.

Charlene laughed. “You do? You like Leif? Crazy old Leif?”

Radar nodded. “Yeah. He makes Kermint go explode!”

“Kermit or Kermin, honey?”

“He makes little green Kermint go explode!” Radar demonstrated with his hands, sending flecks of saliva onto the table.

Charlene smiled. She turned back to her husband, placing a hand on his leg. “Why have you changed like this?”

“It’s okay.”

“You’re doing this for me?”

Kermin nodded. “I want to fix.”

“But why now?” She was filled with a sudden wash of uncertainty. “You said you didn’t trust him.”

“I think we found something here. You said this yourself. Maybe these things happen for a reason. Maybe Leif is not so crazy as he looks. He’s giving me his promise.”

Radar reached down and plucked up a radio wire from the careful sea of parts.

“No, my little angel,” Charlene said, taking the wire from him. “That’s not for you.”

“Give it!” Radar said, reaching for the wire.

“It’s okay,” Kermin said, handing the wire back to his son. “He knows what’s for him.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know anymore.”

“It is your choice,” he said.

She nodded.

“Everything happens for a reason,” he said.

She turned to her son. “Radar, do you want to do an experiment today?”

“What’s speriment?” he asked.

“It’s where they connect you to a big machine.”

Okaaaay,” Radar said. He touched two wires together and made a fizzling sound with his lips. “Connect. Explode!” He burst his hands apart. The wires flew off the table.

“No explode, honey. Just connect,” she said.

Radar looked disappointed.

“Thank you,” she whispered to Kermin, reaching over and squeezing his hand. “I love you.”

“A telegram came,” said Kermin.

“When?”

“This morning.”

“Who was it from?”

“I didn’t open it. It’s there.”

Before she had even picked it up, she knew.


The rest of the day fled toward a distant horizon. By that afternoon everything had been arranged. They stood outside the cabin that housed the vircator. The thin layer of snow had melted into a blanket of fog, relegating the sun to a distant memory. The air against their skin was cool and damp.

Several of the men they had seen before were now milling around, checking wires, writing on clipboards, looking unnecessarily busy. None of the men introduced themselves. Neither Jens, Siri, nor the boy Lars were anywhere to be seen. As preparations were made, Kermin sat on a half-moon boulder some distance away, a radio pressed to his ear, the faint patter of drums emanating from its speaker. Charlene found his newfound nonchalance about the whole matter slightly annoying. She wanted to go over and shake him. Do you realize what’s about to happen? Everything’s about to change.

Leif handed her a large plastic bottle of solution for Radar to drink.

“It’s to focus the current,” he explained.

“We’re going in there?” she asked, pointing to the large cabin.

He will be going in there,” he said. “I hope you can understand, but it’s not possible for you to be present during the actual procedure.”

“But he’s my son!”

“I’m sorry.”

Charlene thought she would protest more, but she simply nodded, fatigued, haunted by an unsettling feeling that she had seen this all before. The whole scene felt as if it had already happened. She had already been refused entrance to this cabin before. She had already remembered being refused entrance to this cabin before. She tried to shiver away these cycles of recall as she helped Radar drink all of the solution. Then she hugged him and turned him over to Leif.

“Is it painful?” she asked him as he led Radar away.

“Completely painless.”

“Are you sure?”

“He won’t feel a thing. We don’t have nerve sensors for this kind of current.”

And then the door swung shut and they were gone.

Charlene was left with her watch and the horrors of time. The next twenty-one and a half minutes proved to be the most difficult of Charlene’s life. As Kermin clung to his shitty little radio, she alone faced a thousand possibilities and non-possibilities. She defeated them all and in turn was defeated right back. She wound herself into such a frenzy, she had to take off her shoes. Eleven minutes had passed since that door had swung shut. Still she waited, shoeless, confronting the possibility of a child fundamentally altered. Charlene realized for the first time how lucky she was to have a son exactly like Radar Radmanovic. She would not change one single thing. She would not alter a hair on his head. She wanted to cancel the entire procedure, to yell, Stop! Stop! Paralyzed, she did nothing except hate herself for doing nothing, for having done nothing, for having done this.

Twenty-one and a half minutes later, Radar emerged. She ran up and hugged him, prodding at his thin little bones until he began to squirm. There was a new scent about him that she could not identify, but otherwise he seemed unchanged.

“Dat machine make me crackle!” he declared proudly.

“He did fine, just fine,” said Leif.

“You are still you?” She was weeping at his sameness.

“I need to go the pee-potty,” said Radar.

“Thank you, Leif,” she said, smiling through her tears.

“It will take some time,” he said, misunderstanding her relief. “The effects are not instantaneous.”

Kermin stood some distance away, watching Radar and Charlene. He came up and touched his son’s head carefully, with the tips of his fingers, as one examines a melon, and then he nodded at Leif and walked back to their cabin.


• • •

IN THEIR CLOSING MEETING, Leif warned of the possibility of “dermal peeling” in the coming months and said it was a natural part of the melanosomal adjustment process. Charlene did not believe him, but she could not help loving him for having total confidence in his quack methodology. His faith in electricity was endearing. He had given her the greatest gift by making her realize what she already had.

It was strange, given all the endless space that Kirkenesferda had at their disposal, how cramped Leif’s office was. Every shelf seemed to be filled with papers, books, journals, notebooks, boxes of photographs, and reels of eight-millimeter film. There was a pair of limbless mannequin torsos, one of which had its forehead painted with the eye. There was a deflated barrel organ, a whole box of polished black stones, a bushel of branches tied up in the corner, as if a Russian peasant woman had temporarily deposited her burden.

As was her wont whenever a library presented itself, Charlene got up and examined the collection of books. It was often easier to discover someone through his books rather than his words, to see the overlap and divergence between one’s taste and another’s and then to triangulate the rest of that person’s self appropriately. She had slept with plenty of people simply on the merits of their literary curation.

There was no obvious method of organization. Many of the titles were familiar; these were the same books that lived behind the sheets in her own home. Except that here, many of the standbys that had at one time nourished or tormented her were translated into Norwegian. A shadow army of all the classics, rendered through a peculiar Norse lens. She enjoyed trying to guess what each title was. She recognized Turgenev’s Fedre og sønner, Vonnegut’s Slaktehus-5, eller Barnekorstoget: en pliktdans med døden, Bulgakov’s Mester og Margarita, Calvino’s De Usynlige Byer, Conrad’s Det inderste mørke. Could these possibly be the same books that she had read? Had he ingested what she had ingested? She realized that with several of these books, she had fallen in love with a translation that did not exist in the original language, a fact that irked her to no end. Staring at this Arctic library, rendered so beautifully in a tongue she did not comprehend, she found herself wondering: When did a book — ushered across linguistic oceans by the unsteady sloop of translation — stop being the same book?

Leif saw her looking at his shelves. “If you can believe it, there used to be about twice this many,” he said. “I recently sent a shipment down to Africa, to a monk who is building a library along the Congo River.”

“How generous of you,” she said.

In contrast to the light chaos that ruled the rest of the room, she was surprised to find one large shelf in pristine order. Everything was arranged in neat little rows, with not one spine out of place. A shelf of twenty-five numbered binders. It was as if this section belonged to another person who was merely renting the shelf space. Charlene pulled down a thin purple volume, feeling almost guilty for disrupting the order.


GÅSELANDET: TEORIER OM IKKE-DELTAKENDE DRAMA OG ERFARRING, PER RØED-LARSEN

She looked at another. This one was also by Per Røed-Larsen. She looked again. Every single book on the shelf was by him. There were hundreds of them.

“Per Røed-Larsen,” she said aloud. It was not quite an answer, nor really a question.

“Yes,” said Leif. “He has set about the task of writing our history. Though if you ask me, his manner is a bit excessive. Not everything must be documented in such detail. Sometimes a receipt is just a receipt, if you know what I mean.”

“Why do you have all of his books here?”

“Per once wrote to me, ‘If it is not documented, then it never happened.’ Of course, I disagree, but I suppose it’s important for someone to record all of this. Sometimes you learn things when you see your work through the eyes of another. It offers a new perspective.”

“And Brusa? Do you also have his books?”

Leif walked over to another shelf, one of those that had fallen prey to bedlam. “His works are not as conducive to indexing. They impress an order of their own. But most everything is here.”

Charlene looked around the room. “So is anything in here written by you?”

“Surprisingly little. In keeping this place running, performing all of my roles, I can barely find time for myself.”


• • •

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Leif shepherded them back to the airport. They drove through a tundra of moss and lichen, tinged by tight clusters of black crowberry and nascent birch. The trees gradually grew denser until they found themselves back in the soft pine envelope of the taiga. Kermin sat up front, chattering away with their host about the secrets of miniature-television repair. It was in stark contrast to his silence on the ride in, several days before.

In the back of the jeep, Radar slept in Charlene’s lap. Since the procedure, he had been sleeping nearly all the time. Leif had assured them that this, too, was natural.

“His cells are busy at work. It’s exhausting to metamorphose — just ask a caterpillar.” The joke felt oddly misplaced. “But when the butterfly is revealed, all becomes worth it.”

Charlene leaned over and sniffed her son. The new scent had lingered, despite several vigorous baths. A scent gathered in transit. It left her uneasy. Smells are transitory by nature; they should not endure.

At the airfield, Leif wished them well and asked Kermin to stay in touch. “I wish you lived a bit closer,” he said. “We could use someone like you on the team. A genius with screens.”

“Not genius,” said Kermin. “I understand them, like we are friends. That’s it. No: like we are relation. We are family, with the same blood.”

As Leif walked back to his car, Charlene ran after him. She touched his shoulder.

“Leif,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I know who you are.”

“Oh? Who is that?”

“I know you wrote those telegrams.”

He looked at her strangely.

“Why tell us not to do this?” she said. “And then tell us to do it?”

He carefully removed her hand from his arm and got into his car. “Safe travels, Charlene. Good luck.”

“I’m not angry,” she said through the open window. “I’m just wondering why someone would do this. Why pretend you are someone else?”

He started up the car but then paused. “My dear, the mask cannot be the player,” he said. “And the player cannot be the mask.”


• • •

AS THEY WAITED in the terminal for their plane to land, Charlene put her head on her husband’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For letting us come here.” She rubbed Radar’s head as he slept in her lap. “I understand now. Things can be normal again.”

“What’s done will be done,” Kermin said as a low whine rose in the distance. “This is done.”

10

Two weeks later, Charlene found a sheath of dried dermis lying coiled around the leg of their armchair. She did not know what it was until she saw that Radar was missing a large patch of skin on his left thigh. The skin beneath was pale and raw. It blushed pink when touched.

Her heart sank.

She called Kermin at the shop, sobbing.

He was unmoved. “Leif’s a man to trust. This is what you wanted. This is what he gave you.”

“But I didn’t want this.”

“Then what? I gave you everything you wanted.”

“Kermin!” she cried. “Oh, Kermin! What have I done?”

Over the course of two months, Radar went through a series of four separate “peels,” in which his skin came away from his body in great translucent chunks, like a snake shedding its skin. She would find little pieces of him all around the house — beneath the furniture, caught in the door of the oven, inside her slippers. Like pellucid pages from an ancient tome. The skin smelled of wax and wet burlap and slightly rotten leather, sometimes with the thinnest lead note of citrus, a lemon or kumquat tone. She went around the house collecting the pieces in a small paper bag, which she kept hidden beneath the bed. And then one day she lifted the bedspread and found that the bag had vanished.

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.”

“I think,” he said after a moment, “it is not a question of can’t.

“There’s nothing I can—”

“It is a question of must,” he said. “You have no choice. We make him. We make Radar. We did what we did. What is done is done. But he is there, in that room. There. He must go and live tomorrow and tomorrow. So you must go and live tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow after this.”

She stared at her husband. Her eyes welled up. “I ruined him.”

“No,” he said. “There is not just you. There is you and me and him.”

She nodded.

“There is us,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. What do I do? Tell me what to do, Kerm. Tell me.”

“I cannot tell you. Be the person. Love him like always. It is not hard. He is Radar. He is love.”


• • •

THE NEXT MORNING, she got up and cooked pancakes. Mediocre pancakes — misshapen, singed pancakes — but pancakes nonetheless. There were no complaints. She went over and held Radar so tightly that he complained, “Mommy, you’re breaking me!”

That afternoon, she opened up the hole in the bedroom floor. A scent of stillness when the boards came up. A life left behind. She pulled out a folder from the stack and fingered the classified ad for the flavorist job at IFAC.

She sat down and wrote a letter. “I know you’ve probably already filled this position long ago but I wanted to offer myself as a possible candidate as I suffer from an extraordinary sensitivity to certain smells.” She crossed out “suffer from” and wrote “possess.” Underlined it.

To her surprise, she received a phone call barely a week later. They were interested. She went to an interview in the International Flavor and Aroma Corporation headquarters, a giant glass-and-steel monstrosity in an anonymous office park off the turnpike. They had her sniff a series of white strips. She closed her eyes and inhaled. Then she used as many big words as she could think of to tell them what she smelled. Her answers astonished them.

“There are only two people in this building right now who could do that, and one of them is you,” said a man in a lab coat.

They offered her the job on the spot.

“Apparently they call you a nose,” she said to Kermin that evening.

“A nose?”

“That’s the job. You’re a professional nose,” she said. “We’re supposed to make perfumes, or to describe perfumes. Or. . I don’t know. I’ve never been very good at making things.”

“Charlene,” he said, coming to her, embracing her. “You are smartest person I know.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You can make whatever you want. You know this, right?”

“Really?”

“Tell me, what are you waiting for?”

“But—”

“It is time to wake up. Wake up and become the nose.”

She became the nose.

It was not an instant transformation. The job offer was conditional: she had to go back to school. Two courses at Rutgers, her old haunt, in organic chemistry and molecular biology, and then a six-week perfumery intensive in Manhattan. She had to learn the names for everything: the pantheon of citric notes, the coarse parade of musks, the natural accordion florals and the synthetic aldehydes, ketones, and terpenes that silently mimicked the sensory world around us. She had to unlace complex bouquets of scents with just her nose and then measure her precision against a gas chromatograph. But she could do what the chromatograph could never do: compose an exact recipe for the smell using fifty words or fewer. Thus, the early draft of a perfume, zingiberene — pentyl butyrate — thioterpineol — ethyl acetate–2-ethyl–3-methoxypyrazine, became:

A tender bed of hawthorn, supporting a high trio of grapefruit, Asian pear, and elderberry, with lingering undercurrents of hazelnut and a single, faint note of ginger. A late-summer fragrance, perfect for outdoor events.

She could do this. She could dip her hand into the night-pit of the imagination. She knew all the right words from her previous, foiled career. Life had filled her quiver with the right arrows, even when the target itself had been too far away to see.


• • •

GIVEN HER EXTENSIVE BACKGROUND in librarianship, it remains surprising that Charlene never performed a standard literature search on “Kirkenesferda.” If she had, she would’ve discovered that by 1979, there were almost two hundred articles, essays, monographs, or book-length projects that referenced the “experimental puppet troupe,” though the vast majority of these were enfolded within a longstanding (and antagonistic) call-and-response between only two authors: Brusa Tofte-Jebsen and Per Røed-Larsen.

After 1979, there was a mysterious, nearly eighteen-year gap in the literature before Per Røed-Larsen published his comprehensive Spesielle Partikler: Kirkenesferda 1944–1995 (Oslo: J. W. Cappelens). Spesielle Partikler is a fifteen-hundred-page monstrosity that details the troupe’s four major bevegelser, or “movements”: the Poselok nuclear fission installation, outside Murmansk, in 1944; the Gåselandet Island Tsar Bomba show on fusion, in 1961, staged during the middle of the largest hydrogen bomb detonation in history; the disastrous Cambodian performance, in 1979; and the abbreviated Sarajevo show on superstring theory, in the ruins of the National Library of Bosnia in 1995.

The book is not easy to get ahold of. Spesielle Partikler has been out of print for more than ten years and can be found only with some luck, in certain catalogs and rare Norwegian bookshops, where its list price is often well over 3,500 Norwegian kroner. The sole library copy at the Nasjonalbiblioteket, in Oslo, has been listed as “missing and/or damaged” for years, with no apparent attempt to replace and/or repair the inventory.


Fig. 1.5. “Gåselandet/Novaja Zemlya Kart Series #4”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 221

If one is lucky enough to track down a copy, Spesielle Partikler quickly reveals itself to be a most beguiling piece of scholarship. The rise and fall of the Kirkenesferda puppet troupe is documented in detail, obsessively so, with exhaustive accounts of each bevegelse, including intricate analyses of the scientific concepts involved in the performance; charts and maps documenting the means of transport utilized to move equipment to these remote locations; blueprints and an inventory of materials involved in constructing the troupe’s mobile “theater wagon”; and even tables showing the kilowatts used by each electronic puppet-object.

At the end of chapter 18, before turning his attention to the buildup of Kirkenesferda Fire in Sarajevo, Røed-Larsen meticulously describes how the December 1979 Cambodia show — performed for the exiled Khmer Rouge leadership in their mountain hideaway north of Anlong Veng — ended in catastrophe, as nearly all of the troupe’s members were shot and killed in the middle of the night, including its founder, Dr. Leif Christian-Holtsmark. After this tragedy, Røed-Larsen claims, the Bjørnens Hule was abandoned. The camp was destroyed in a fire in 1982, and its Wardenclyffe tower was dismantled and removed “for international safety reasons,” presumably because of its proximity to the Russian frontier, although, according to Røed-Larsen, its circle of concrete feet (with their wires extending deep into the earth) are still visible “somewhere near the Finnish/Norwegian border zone” (295). When Kirkenesferda miraculously resurfaced fifteen years later for Kirkenesferda Fire, it would keep its name but no longer be run out of Norway. Its base of operations was now split between Belgrade and New Jersey.

Mr. Røed-Larsen’s devotion to his subject is quite evident in the long, digressive footnotes and nearly 340 pages of bibliographic end matter, but even a cursory meta-analysis of his vast collection of sources highlights certain inconsistencies and raises serious methodological questions about his scholarship. Many of the documents he cites either do not exist or are so obscure as to essentially be impossible to review. In his harsh review of Spesielle Partikler in the November 1997 issue of Vinduet, Tofte-Jebsen asserts that reading the book and its end matter confirmed for him that “the whole endeavor of documentation is a farce, a lie repeated and repeated into the dark” (“en løgn gjentas og gjentas i mørket”). “To write is to lie,” Tofte-Jebsen writes. “There can be no other way.”

Indeed, you would expect such dubious sourcing to cause any serious scholar to dismiss Spesielle Partikler outright, but after spending a fair amount of time immersed in Røed-Larsen’s bibliographic sleight of hand, a strange phenomenon begins to take hold of the reader: one starts to feel as if one has entered into an uncannily familiar reality with a consistent internal logic all its own — a reality that begins to feel as potentially valid as the one that we now inhabit. Since the form of Røed-Larsen’s account is so obsessive, so thorough, so exhaustively cross-referenced as to be almost mind-numbing, the overall effect of the monograph is to make one steadily question one’s fundamental assumptions about what is and what is not possible, what has happened and what may happen yet. This unease is exacerbated by Røed-Larsen’s tendency to use maxims from science in lieu of sectional headings (“3. For Every Action There Is an Equal and Opposite Reaction,” etc.). Pairing observed, functional certainties from the world of physics against the most suspect of claims at first creates a kind of conjectural dissonance, but after a while the reader cannot help but wonder how anyone could be so committed to something if it were not, at least in some sense, true. Devotion, at its core, must be a kind of truth. In this way, Spesielle Partikler can be hailed as an achievement of psychological engineering, if not quite a piece of historiography. It is a proposal of an alternate existence that abuts our own — lurking, never very far away from the room in which we now breathe — and as such, it is also a window, giving us our reflection even as we look through it into an invented world just beyond our reach.

Many years later, in 1998, Charlene Radmanovic would discover a copy of Spesielle Partikler inside an unmarked box on her front stoop. There were no postal markings on the package, nor any return address listed. She never told anyone about the book’s arrival. After spending some time trying to decipher its contents, she would eventually hide the book in the small, crowded space beneath the floor of her bedroom.

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