I Am Radar

1. KEARNY, NEW JERSEY

August 10, 2010

On the day that would change everything thereafter and much of what came before, Radar Radmanovic rose before his birdcall alarm clock could tweep out its dreaded tree swallow soliloquy and stumbled into the shower. He closed his eyes as the warm curtain of water enveloped him, letting his forehead come to rest against the same geodesic turquoise tiles that had counseled his bathing for the past thirty years.

The horror. Last night he and Ana Cristina had gone on their fourth date — fifth if you counted their Slurpie meeting on the A&P loading dock, which Radar often did. After each of these dates, he would wake up the next day panic-stricken and horrendously embarrassed, positive he had done or said something that had subsequently ruined his chances of ever seeing her again.

That was my last glimpse of paradise, he would always think, just as he was thinking now, forehead pressed against tile.

Indeed, his relationship with her was one of the universe’s great mysteries: why would beautiful, lovely Ana Cristina — with her duotone lipstick and those impossible hoop earrings and that smile (so effortless!) that revved his transmission and numbed his knees — why would a girl like that stick around with a guy like him? It defied all rational thought. Unless of course she was perpetuating their connection merely to gather amusing stories that she could later share with her muchachos—but such mean-spirited behavior was not like her. No, not like her at all — Ana Cristina was a giver, not a taker. This he had learned as they sat side by side in darkened movie theaters (four times now!) watching terrible movies, his leg inches from hers; he, petrified, unable to listen to a single line from said terrible movie as he contemplated when and if and how he should fulcrum his arm up and over and around her shoulders.

And last night he had finally done it. He had counted to three (or four — he couldn’t remember now) and his arm had shot into the air completely without grace, bordering on some fascist salute, but somehow when it had fallen back to earth it had found an uncertain home around her frame, and it was as if she had been waiting for that arm, because after a moment she had let her head fall — no: drift—onto his shoulder. And then, while Radar was pleading for his body not to shut down, something monumental had transpired. He couldn’t even satisfyingly reconstruct the minute procedures that led up to its apotheosis, but somehow, they had kissed. They had actually kissed. Briefly, her lips had grazed his. It was an event he once could’ve only dreamed about, during all those commercial transactions at the A&P. He had pined after her for months as she plied her trade in checkout lane number 2 before he had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out in what would be one of the most awkward date proposals known to mankind, and now—

Sweet Jesus!

He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and gargled the yellow mouthwash that he hated but continued to buy. The reflection that regarded him, with a degree of curious disgust, was not the reflection of a handsome man. Bald since birth, jaundiced, a nervous, torsadée curvature to his spine that caused his whole body to naturally list to starboard — he would be the first piece of merchandise plucked off the assembly line by a disappointed quality control. And yet, here he still was, rattling down the line, unplucked.

And they had kissed.

Radar returned to his bedroom and dressed slowly, like a man dressing for a funeral. He knew he should feel ecstatic, that this should be the single greatest morning of his life, that he should be singing arias, and yet he could not dispel this lingering sense of dread.

As he struggled into his jack-o’-lantern socks, the alarm clicked on again and the tree swallow began to maniacally twitter out its wake-up call. He made no move to switch it off. The swallow should suffer as he suffered. The swallow should feel the full weight of living on its little swallow back.

While the bird tweeped and tweeped, he went over to the bedside table and opened his Little Rule Book for Life, a hot pink journal he had bought for $1.99 at Dollar Daze, and into which he added, on average, one rule per week.

He wrote:

Rule #238. Don’t do it because you can. Do it because you must.

He wasn’t sure if this was even true, but it sounded good, and it gave him a little dose of precious momentum. He underlined “must.” Twice.

Do it because you must.

The double underline was clearly redundant, the two lines canceling each other out with their excess of enthusiasm, like giving the double middle finger to someone in very close proximity. He tried crossing out one of the lines.

Do it because you must.

He sighed. Such a collision of failed revisionism was a fairly decent summary of his life up until this point. No matter. He donned his fanny pack and trucker’s cap, finally slapped the tree swallow out of its misery, and pattered down to the kitchen.

Two Grundig Ocean Boy radios were blaring away simultaneously in the middle of the breakfast table, flanking a morose-looking ceramic pig centerpiece. An uncapped jar of Marmite, like an offering to this altar of sound, sat next to a plate of half-eaten toast. Clear evidence his father had been on the early-morning prowl. Radar sat down in front of the twin radios, trying to parse the dueling signals in his head. It was an exercise in the impossible. His father was constantly haunted by the thought that he might be missing an important bit of news on a station he wasn’t listening to, so he often had at least two radios going at the same time, though sometimes it could be as many as six. Kermin claimed an ability to pay attention to multiple signals at once, but Radar had a working theory that his father listened to them all so that in the end he wouldn’t have to listen to any of them.

Radar killed one of the Ocean Boys and skizzered the dial of the other to WCCA 990 AM, the financial news station where he worked as head engineer. A familiar prattle of market indices spilled forth from the speaker. Good. All was well at transmission. He clicked off the second radio. He admired the vacuum of silence left behind before he lacquered a healthy dollop of his father’s Marmite onto a slice of seven-grain. Radar hated the Marmite like he hated the mouthwash, but family ritual often trumped logic, and Kermin kept a vast supply of the awful stuff close at hand. As rule #98 stated, Belief is 90 % proximity and 10 % conviction. (Well, maybe the nihilist arithmetic in that one needed to be massaged a bit. It was probably closer to 70/30.)

His mind drifted back to the sequence of the night before. It was not that anything had gone wrong, per se. At least nothing that he could put his finger on. They had even kissed again when they parted ways outside the movie theater. It was a tentative kiss, but it was a kiss nonetheless, one that suggested a future filled with more such kisses.

He cringed again. It was not just that his measuring stick for physical contact was akin to that of a middle schooler — it was that literally every time he opened his mouth, a disaster was waiting to happen. Case in point: While he and Ana Cristina were waiting in line to buy popcorn, Radar had panicked, thinking they were not chatting as much as normal people on normal dates did. So he asked her: “Have you seen any good television movies lately?”

What? Even as he was saying it, he saw that such a question was already dying and curled up in a fetal position on the floor. What an unfathomable idiot he was. He had meant to say “television shows,” but then his mind froze and he transitioned midsentence into “movies,” perhaps because they were in a movie theater, which unfortunately resulted in the very narrow category of made-for-television movies. Very few made-for-television movies were good — it was like starting a race with your legs tied together. Radar knew this much, even though he was not really one for television, which was why his original question had been flawed from the very beginning. He wouldn’t even have been able to sustain a conversation if she had said something like “I enjoy reruns of Friendship.” (Was this even the name of a television show? Or was it merely a complex and precious phenomenon that could develop between two people?) All he could have responded with was “Yes, well, my father enjoyed M*A*S*H, and I watched fuzzy episodes of Muppet Babies for a time on one of our many pocket televisions when I was younger, until my father went crazy and destroyed them all. You see, in his heart I think he was still a radioman, just like his father, and just like me. Maybe he was protesting the death of listening. Do you like to listen? I do. Not to brag, but I would call myself a professional listener.”

But he said none of this. Just the dead television-movie question lying on the floor in front of them. To her great credit, Ana Cristina, looking puzzled, had just laughed in that way she did (where everything in the world seemed both terribly unimportant and important at the same time) and said he was “such a weirdo.” He could not disagree.

Radar bit into his Marmite toast and chewed through his distaste.

She would break up with him today. He just knew it. And truthfully, he probably deserved it. It had been an amazing ride, but the dream could not last forever. She had most likely realized — somewhere in the middle of that kiss — what a terrible kisser he was, what a fumbling, mechanical albatross he was, and, by natural extension, what a terrible mistake this whole endeavor had been. She had realized (and one could not blame her) that things could never work out between a perfect little slip of creation like herself and a malfunctioning human-shaped fabrication like him. But she would be gentle about it. The next time he called or went into the A&P, she would get that sad, inevitable look in her eyes and then she would say, “Radar, we need to talk,” and he would try to take it like a man. In truth, he wasn’t sure how he would take it.

“Have you seen any good television movies lately?” he asked the melancholic pig centerpiece on the breakfast table. If only he could pretend he was a normal person. He didn’t even have to be a normal person; it would be enough just to act like a normal person. Artificial intelligence experts had long ago given up on creating actually intelligent robots — their goal was simply for robots to behave like intelligent beings.

“Television movies?” a woman’s voice said from behind him. “I can’t say that I have.”

Radar wondered briefly if he had been teleported back into his date, whether he was reliving some parallel existence, some second chance where he could be the suave Casanova he had always dreamed himself to be. But this fantasy instantly evaporated as soon as he turned around. There stood his mother in her lab coat.

“I haven’t seen a good movie in ages,” she said, already rummaging through her vast cabinet of tea above the stove. “Have you?”

The cabinet held all sorts of incredibly rare samples from around the globe, one perk of Charlene’s position as head quality-control aromatist at the International Flavor and Aroma Corporation, a position she still held despite reaching and now surpassing the age of retirement. Every morning, she selected her steeping ingredients based upon an elaborate but completely arbitrary formula guided by the phase of the moon, barometric pressure, karmic vibration, and whatever particular ailment she happened to be suffering from. Foot pain required two laces of Tasmanian kelp, a dash of white asparagus extract, and a pinch of powdered tiger shark cartilage. Indigestion called for a teaspoon of fiesole artichoke leaf infusion, two pinches of gentian and Codonopsis root, a drop of bee saliva, and a generous handful of Israeli black horehound.

“What is a television movie, anyhow?” she said. She put the kettle on and began assembling a small collection of glass jars on the countertop. “Is that a movie that’s made for television or a movie that is just being shown on television? Because I think there’s a difference.”

Radar sighed. “I wasn’t talking to you, Mom.”

“Oh,” she said. She crumbled an oolong base into the strainer. Some unidentified twigs. After a moment she said, “May I ask whom you were talking to?”

“I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was recounting.”

“You were recounting,” she said. Half a dozen little red chokeberries disappeared into the strainer. “Recounting what, exactly?”

“Nothing.”

“What kind of nothing?” They had lived together long enough that lying had become an exercise in futility.

He sighed. “I went on a date last night. And I was recounting one of the many ways I screwed it all up.”

“A date?” she said, raising her eyebrows. She sniffed at a jar that looked to contain the remains of a dead bat.

“A date,” she said again. “Well, what makes you think you screwed it up?”

He didn’t want to be having this conversation. “I don’t know — maybe because I say all the wrong things? Maybe because I’m the most awkwardest person on the planet?”

“How long have you known this girl?”

“Uh. . about six months. She works at the A&P.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ana Cristina.”

“And how do you feel about her?”

He rubbed his face. “Mom?”

“I mean, is she worthy of my boy?”

“She’s only the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s not a question of whether she’s worthy of me; it’s whether she and I belong in the same galaxy.”

“Hm.” She considered this. “Well. Be careful.”

“Be careful? That’s your advice to me? Be careful? Thanks, Mom.”

Time had a funny way of playing its hand. Charlene’s quarter-life audacity had slowly wilted during her middle years into a near constant low-grade anxiety at the various provocations of modern existence. Once upon a time, she had dropped acid and nearly burned down a library, but now just answering an e-mail could be enough to send her into a state of panic that she placated with her teas and dream catchers. As their little family had grown into each other, as life had begun to arrange itself so that it became impossible to escape their own nuclear dysfunction, as the time for Radar to move out had come and gone (and then come and gone again), Charlene still maintained that she was the normal one, that she was the one holding it all together, when in fact the converse was closer to the truth. Yes, she lived with two men caught in varying states of electromagnetic purgatory, but she had chosen this life, and as much as she might have claimed otherwise, she took courage from the stagnation of this purgatory. Every complaint she leveled their way also had the effect of steadying her wobbly rudder. They were her Pleiades. Without them, darkness would overtake her night.

“I only mean that women can be complicated,” she said, breaking off some aspect of the bat body and dropping it into the tea strainer. “I should know. I used to be one.”

“You’re still a woman, Mom.”

“They’ll say one thing to your face, but what they’re really thinking is something else entirely.”

“She’s not that kind of girl, Mom. Seriously, she’s wonderful. And honest. And. . and. . I don’t know. She’s just. . her.”

“I’m sure she is. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go out with her,” she said. On the stove, the kettle had already begun to shudder. “Just know that every time she opens her mouth, it’s an opportunity for her to lie to you.”

“Thanks. I’ll take that into consideration.”

“Not that this is always a bad thing. Sometimes a lie can be just as good as the truth.”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s not true.”

The kettle came to life and whistled its disapproval. Charlene looked surprised, as if this boil did not happen every single morning, scooped up the pot, and layered the water through the strainer in an overly ornate spiral. Her mug of choice featured an orgy of rabbits engaged in various balletic sex acts, though after twenty years of use, the humping bunnies no longer registered as carnal agents, save to the rare houseguest, who could be forgiven for staring at Charlene’s crockery in fascinated horror.

“Oh, I was meaning to ask you,” Charlene said, ushering strainer and mug to the kitchen table. “I have to get a new cell phone this afternoon. What’s that one you recommended again?”

“I didn’t.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I don’t have a cell phone, Mom.”

It was true: despite his clairvoyance with all things electronic, cellular phones had always struck him as a gaudy and unnecessary technology. He did not want to be constantly at the mercy of others. And why pay a cell-phone company ridiculous amounts of money each month when there was plenty of frequency in the 1-to-250,000-MHz spectrum open for the taking? Radio signal felt much more organic — like swimming in the ocean versus swimming laps in a tiny pool, though he didn’t know how to swim, so he couldn’t be sure if such an analogy was entirely accurate.

“And why don’t you have a cell phone?” she said. “What’s wrong with you? You and your father, both of you.” She took a sip of tea and wrinkled her nose. “Oh, God, this stuff is awful.”

“It smells awful. Was that a bat?”

“Bolivian chinchilla,” she said. “It’s good for bile flow.”

“Chinchilla?” he said, recoiling. “As in those cute little guys with the crazy soft fur?”

“The ones I use are female.”

“How am I supposed to tell that to my friends? ‘Yeah, and that’s my mom, who drinks chinchilla tea.’”

“Which friends are these?”

“Okay, there’s no need to rub it in.”

She took another sip. “But really, why don’t you get a cell phone?”

“I don’t want a cell phone.”

“So then how am I supposed to call you?”

“You can call the station. We’ve managed without a cell phone for all these years.”

“And what about when you’re not there?” she said. “You know, for when something comes up?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Everyone has cell phones. It’s a part of life now. All the kids — it’s how they communicate. With the text message,” she said. “How are you supposed to talk with this girl if you don’t have the text message?”

He sighed. “Morse code worked just fine before text messages came along.”

“Morse code? Honey, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not the way to a girl’s heart. This girl you’re seeing — what’s her name again?”

“Ana Cristina.”

“I’m betting Ana Cristina probably doesn’t have a ham radio station in her bedroom,” she said. “You have to adapt. You have to learn to speak her language.”

As much as he hated to admit it, she had a point. Ana Cristina was an avid texter and expert multitasker. She could carry on a perfectly coherent conversation with him while she also navigated through dozens of electronic communiqués on her device.

Charlene took another sip of the tea and grimaced. “I’m going to get you and your father cell phones this afternoon.”

“Please don’t,” he said.

“It will just be for emergencies, but if you like it, then you can start the text messages. I’ll even do the text with you.”

“That’s not how you say it. You don’t do the text with someone.”

“Well, how would you know? You don’t even have a cell phone.”

“Don’t get me a phone, Mom. Please?” he said. “I like my life just the way it is.”

“No. . no, you don’t,” she said, almost ruefully. “No one likes their life just the way it is.”

2

The transmission site where Radar worked — indeed, the sum of his life — was located in the Meadowlands, a yawning swath of New Jersey marshland crisscrossed by countless highways and train lines and looping, arterial interchanges, all feeding into the great megalopolitan hydra of New York City. The mosquito-laden swamps were a sprawling back stage for the city, the many container ports and truck depots and train yards housing the props that fueled Manhattan’s insatiable appetite for citrus delicacies and all manner of combustible fineries. The Upper East Side bodega could not exist but for the generosity of the Meadowlands warehouse. Enter, stage left: orange juice from Florida, pineapples from Costa Rica, strawberries from California, tulips from Holland, chicken thighs from Colorado, crates of gum and chips and Mango Tango Dragonberry iced tea. The Meadowlands was the triage point for the inevitable daily deluge of Chinese-made trinkets: handbags and wigs and tampons and dog muzzles and yoga mats and mouse pads and tube socks and Happy Meal figurines. A whole warehouse annex devoted to nothing but boxes and boxes of shrink-wrapped Happy Meal figurines. It was all threaded through the odorous palette of these marshes, beneath the cold, wet tremble-cord of the Hudson River, and up into the waiting mouth of the lonely city denizen.

Aside from providing a perfect habitat for bloodsucking insects, the brackish Meadowlands water was an ideal conductor of AM radio signal, and if you drove the turnpike from here to there during a heavy summer night, you might see those morose clusters of radio towers, blinking their lanky presence to any wayward planes. The WCCA 990 AM transmitter site, perched on the shore of a lagoon, hidden from the world by a forest of reeds, was a thirteen-and-a-half-minute bike ride from their periwinkle faux colonial in Kearny and a seventeen-minute ride from the A&P Express where Ana Cristina worked. This velocipedal commute through the swamps was usually his best thinking time of the day, a kind of moving meditation, as he found the forward momentum and solitude of his transit allowed him to carefully inflate the vision of who he was and who he might want to be, even if this vision would inevitably collapse as soon as he stopped pedaling.

Radar had written half a dozen mediocre poems about his bicycle, affectionally named Hot Lips Houlihan, after that temptress nurse on M*A*S*H. Hot Lips was an Optima Stinger double-suspension custom recumbent with low-point tiller steering. He had blown six months’ salary on the rig four years earlier, and it was the one choice in life that he had never regretted, even in his darkest hours. She boasted more electronics than a small airplane: he had installed a reinforced plexiglass dashboard on top of the stem, upon which sat two transceivers, a decommissioned SRC ground surveillance radar dish, a portable shortwave multiband radio, a Shocker DX locomotive horn, an AmpliVox fifty-watt megaphone, and a plastic hula girl. Above the luggage compartment on the back, he had an extended whip antenna and a multidirectional yagi molded into a swivel plate that rattled behind him like exotic plumage.

As he rode to work on this strange day, this day of potential conquest mired in the foreboding of potential defeat, he sought comfort in Houlihan’s shortwave, which he gently tuned to Radio Skala, a distant signal originating all the way from Belgrade. Somehow the station perfectly utilized the ionosphere’s reflective properties to skip over the Atlantic and right into his lap. The song came on and he recognized it immediately as one of his favorites: “Stani, stani Ibar vodo,” about a lovesick country boy who has a conversation with a river about his darling. How fitting. He liked listening to the music of his people as he rode through the damp material excess of the Meadowlands, broadcasting the wisdom of suffering to trucks filled with capitalism’s runoff. No matter if the music tendered a history he was not entirely sure was his own. But whatever. Today he needed all the Balkan armor he could muster.

“Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu!” he yelled to the swamps.

As is the case with many children of immigrants, particularly those whose sole immigrant parent married an American, Radar knew only a little of his inherited language, gleaned mostly from when his father would produce an incredible string of Serbian swear words, often in the shower. (“Da ideš u tri pizde materine!”) Sometimes his swearing was correlated to his level of annoyance, but more often than not, he swore just because he could. If there was one thing Serbs could never abandon, it was their dangerously poetic and casual manner of cussing. It was not uncommon for his father to toss out the phrase “Jebem ti supu od klinova Isusovih!” which translated roughly as “Fuck the soup made from the nails of Jesus’s crucifixion,” and not think twice about it, even if in English he was unfailingly polite. Radar had never heard him curse even once in English. Serbian remained his language of expression, his private lounge of paroxysms. Thus, after a childhood of exposure to such intricate verbal execrations echoing across his subconscious, Radar could understand the language much better than he could speak it himself.

The Radmanovics had visited Belgrade only once, in 1989, at the invitation of a distant half relation, Julija Maravic, who showered them with kindness and warmth despite having never met them and maintaining only a tenuous familial connection to Dobroslav, Radar’s grandfather. It did not matter: they were part of the family, and she would’ve jumped in front of a train for them. She had said as much on their last night there. This backdrop of extreme hospitality made Radar’s experience with the rest of the population all the more confusing.

“Hej Marko, gle ovog americkog šupka — izgleda ko majmun oboleo od raka,” a pudgy man with a shaved head had said as Radar was lingering with his parents in front of a fruit stand in Žarkovo Selo. Radar’s comprehension of the language was hazy at best, but he knew that this man was talking about him to his friend Marko and that whatever he had just said to Marko was not a very nice thing to say. Clutching his two malnourished beets, Radar was left with that very acrid, mothballed sensation of self-recognition that the Germans no doubt have a word for:

Üblernachredenfremdschämlähmung (n.) — the feeling caused by knowing someone has insulted you even as the slanderer(s) remain(s) unaware that you have seen/heard their insults quite clearly. The consequent self-pity, combined with an embarrassment for the slanderer(s), will often freeze the victim into a state of weary acceptance, such that he or she ends up doing nothing to address this trespass. Ex: While waiting in line for the bathroom at the restaurant, Günther felt a passing sense of üblernachredenfremdschämlähmung when he spotted his waiter spitting into his liverwurst sandwich. Upon returning from the loo, Günther ate his sandwich in silence, despite feeling as if he might throw up at any minute.

Beets in hand, Radar had felt the dull heat of transcultural ignorance wash over him. This fat, odiferous skinhead in his ill-fitting patterned short-sleeve and his sniveling sidekick Marko were supposed to be his people! Still, despite the Serb’s tendency for simultaneous compassion for the family and xenophobia toward the other, Radar felt that there was an ancient knowingness to the Balkan way that he found inexplicably seductive. Yes, yes: he realized he was being just as reductive with his Old World nostalgia as the Serbs themselves. But let us not forget rule #55: Dreaming is the first step to knowing is the first step to dreaming.

• • •

AT THE WCCA TRANSMISSION SITE, Radar relieved Gary on the night shift.

“Knock yourself out, man,” said Gary. Gary said this every morning.

Radar checked the Interplex circuits and restarted the backup microwave systems. He read the weather report live on the air at thirty-three minutes past the hour and walked the rickety catwalk out into the swamps to inspect the twin three-hundred-foot radio towers aging gracefully against the sky.

“Do it because you must,” he said to their soaring heights.

He sat in front of the stacks, listening to the financial news drone on and on. Occasionally he twisted a knob to tweak the signal. He got up and paced. He sat down again. He could not dispel the feeling that something was not right between himself and Ana Cristina. This feeling festered and metastasized and grew horns, until he finally broke down and dialed her cell phone from the station landline. It rang a painful number of times before going to voice mail.

“Hi, hi. Hello!” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “Ana Cristina? This is Radar. Hi. Just checking in. Saying hi. It was fun last night. I hope it was fun for you, too. Even if that movie was kinda bad. Well, terrible, really. One of the worst. But—okay. Nothing really to report here. Just — give a call at the station if you get a chance. Okay, bye. Bye. Talk to you later. Bye.”

Wow. That was ugly. Next time, he needed to remember to hang up before the beep, lest he break her voice mail with his social ineptitude. In fact, the call only served to heighten his unease. She was working today at the A&P. Maybe he could just pop over and say hello? It was clearly forbidden to abandon the station during the middle of his shift, but then this was a borderline emergency.

He checked and rechecked the signal. Everything was fine. Really, what were the chances of the station imploding during the short time he was out? He would be gone forty minutes, tops. No one would have to know.

“Look after yourselves, all right?” he said to the racks of machines.

He took a deep breath and slowly backed out of the station, closing the door behind him. He paused, listening, and then went out to the shed and fetched Houlihan, his noble steed. Once more, he clicked on his bicycle’s radio, calling upon Radio Skala’s infusion of Old World pluck to show him the way forward. The Guca trumpets and the polyrhythmic hither-thwack of the tapan drum blasted forth from the megaphone, weaving its mournful cocoon. Radar wheeled onto the main road and began pedaling fast and easy, bobbing his head to the beat, feeling his skin prickle and ping with the music.

The simple act of transporting his body from here to there did much to calm him. He regained some of his much-needed confidence. Yes, he, Radar Radmanovic, was a conqueror of hearts.Un conquistador! Ana Cristina was Mexican, or at least her estranged father was Mexican and still lived there, in a town called San Cristóbal, which was very beautiful, apparently. This was one of the first things he learned when he had finally worked up the courage to engage her in conversation at the checkout till. (“It’s beautiful there,” she had said while ringing him up. “But I can’t take his shit no more.”) Many of their first conversations had occurred like this, in the fragile space between the checkout beeps. All time was created equal, he knew, but this time between the beeps had been strange and long and wild time, around which the rest of his day had revolved. Oh, Ana! Ana Cristina! Do not abandon me now!

When the automatic doors to the A&P Express hushed open and the sweet, stiff hand of air-conditioning slapped him across the jaw, Radar caught his breath and stopped. There she was. In checkout lane number 2. Wearing those same hoop earrings, painfully beautiful as usual. He watched as she risped off a receipt and handed it to an elderly man in a fedora. Radar’s carefully constructed Houlihan-chutzpah collapsed like a house of cards. The universe could never support such an imbalanced union between him and her. He almost turned around and left right then and there. He would’ve, too, if not for the telling taste of bitter lemon on the back of his tongue.

Oh, crap. He knew exactly what would happen next: a fine-toothed gear fell out of the compartment in his heart and bounced against his ribs, zippering past his groin, down the hollow tube of his leg, before finally settling into the little microphone of his toe. The electric system in his body fluttered, he was enveloped in that familiar, cinnamon waft of doom, and then everything fell away. His vision skittered and finally blinked off. There was only his underwater breath, loud and echoing in the tunnel of his ears. The faraway world floated silently just beyond the cocoon of his perception. A hummingbird against his neck. He waited. And then: that peppery feeling of awakening. The wires sparkling with current. His wrists on fire. His vision whooshing in from the edges. He was back.

A petit mal seizure. Induced by stress or breakdancing or certain dog-whistle frequencies. More and more frequent now that he had stopped taking his meds. After ten years, he had finally decided that the meds essentially took the he out of him. He had begun to miss himself, flawed as he was. According to his parents, he had been blessed with epilepsy since birth, one of the many symptoms of his very particular affliction — an affliction so particular that the doctors had named it for him: Radar’s syndrome. Radar had spent his whole life seesawing between pride and shame for this personalized diagnosis, which he tempered by referring to it only as “me problems,” usually in an embarrassing faux Jamaican accent, usually in the dying swoon of the evening, and usually when he was alone, which was usually always.

Fig. 3.1. “Petit mal #7”

From Wolcott, D., and Henry, H., Epilepsy & Seizures, vol. 3, as cited in Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 884

The diagnosis did bring up a seemingly larger philosophical question: How many medical cases were required for a condition to be officially deemed a syndrome? If there had been only one incidence of the disorder in the history of the universe, was it still worthy of the title? Or was it just another example of extraordinarily bad luck? The underlying assumption behind the doctor’s diagnosis must’ve been that his luck would eventually be shared by others, that no experience could possibly be that unique, so we might as well go ahead and call it a syndrome now, because somewhere down the line there was going to be another poor sucker with exactly this same set of symptoms: the epilepsy; the sallow pallor; the comprehensive alopecia (save his patch—“me patch!”); the partial left-side paralysis; the irregular dark splotches on nipple, calf, and groin; the complete lack of social proficiency.

Meanwhile, Radar had been standing still long enough that the automatic doors decided he was no longer human, or, at the very least, no longer relevant, a nonmoving object that could safely be closed upon. And so they closed, only to squawk open in protest as they crashed against his backpack, the impact dislodging Radar’s mesh trucker’s hat, which was spray-painted with his call sign, K2RAD, in bright red, “urbanized” lettering. He had just purchased this very cool personalized accoutrement from a graffiti artist on the street in Newark. At the time, he remembered wondering why everyone did not transform their lives using one of these hats, which so effortlessly announced to the world one’s hipness totale.

The automatic doors shuddered in horror as they slowly returned to their open position, watching him.

Radar quickly bent down to fetch his fallen cap. He glanced up to see if Ana Cristina had noticed his baldness. She had not. She was still busy with Fedora Man.

“Sorry,” he muttered to the doors. He said this to be nice, though he knew it was their fault. They lacked vision, flexibility, long-term goals.

One of the checkout women turned and stared at Radar standing in the doorway.

“Your doors,” he said nervously, trying to dispel the growing disquietude of the situation. He corrected the bill of his hat.

The checkout woman, who he believed was named Lydia, though he had never sought out her services, yelled, “You in, you out? We lose the cool when you stand there.”

“I’m in,” he said and took a step forward.

But once he was in, he found himself wondering what he should do. He couldn’t just march right up to Ana Cristina and ask her if she still wanted to be his girlfriend. He had to act casual. He needed to fetch some product so he had an excuse to approach the checkout counter. He picked up one of the yellow shopping baskets and began to wander the aisles. What should he get? A seemingly simple question that suddenly felt freighted with significance. Small flecks of panic began to run up and down his legs. He started to sweat into his crocodile boots. His limp grew more pronounced. He needed to pick something. Anything. In an act of desperation, he grabbed a jar of guacamole, only to realize once he was already in line that this was a stupid thing to purchase on its own. Guacamole needed a delivery device, like tortilla chips or a piece of celery. But now it was too late. He was already in Ana Cristina’s line. There was no turning back.

“I can take you over here,” said Lydia. Checkout lane number 1 was empty.

Radar shook his head.

“I can take you here,” she said again, louder this time, thinking that perhaps he had not heard her. Clearly Lydia did not know that he and Ana Cristina were not just commercial acquaintances. Her ignorance made him even more paranoid: clearly Ana Cristina had kept their relationship secret from her co-workers. Clearly she was embarrassed about him.

Radar panicked. He could feel the heat in his face. “My knee,” he said to Lydia, pointing. “My knee is broken.” Which, in a way, was true.

Lydia looked at him strangely, but then a shopper coming from the deli section approached her till and the crisis was narrowly averted.

When it was finally his turn to check out with Ana Cristina, he became flustered again. How on earth was he going to do this? He set his yellow basket on the floor next to the counter.

“Hi,” he said, more to his basket than to her.

“Hi,” she said.

He couldn’t properly read her tone, so he stole a glance at her. She was wearing the dark lipstick again. It covered only the edge of her lips; on the inner part, there was a softer shade of burnt sienna, and the duotone reminded Radar of the interior pattern of his mother’s still-operational 1976 Oldsmobile Omega, an image that should have dispelled the sexiness of her lips but somehow only enhanced it.

Briefly stunned by her chromatic splendor, he bent down and picked up the jar of guacamole from his basket. The basket was covered in a thin brown film. This was the subtle, pernicious ooze of a thousand shoppers’ products — wet bags of cabbage and salami cold cuts and leaky containers of mayonnaise. I cannot be that ooze, he thought. I must be the guacamole and not the ooze.

He came up, guacamole in hand, and said, “I am the guacamole!”

Idiot!

Ana Cristina froze, confused.

“I mean. .” He tried to recover. “I mean, it was fun last night.”

“Yeah,” she laughed nervously. “You were sweet.”

“I was?”

“Yeah. I was gonna call you when I got off. Are you free tonight?”

Radar was so stunned by this reply that he felt his entire body go limp and realized too late that the guacamole had slipped from his grasp. He watched in horror as it rolled along the very edge of the counter in an excruciatingly slow display of physics and then fell and fell and fell until it shattered onto the floor in an octopus splatter of tomato chunks and processed avocado solution.

Radar and Ana Cristina both stared as the puddle slowly grew before their eyes. A green paradise island of guacamole.

“I’m sorry,” said Radar. “I’m so, so sorry.” He could not bear to look at her, so he instead fixed his gaze on the rack of Dentyne Ice gum, which caused a strange sensory dissonance: the promise of spearmint paired with the vulgar wafts of salsa fresca and avocado preservatives.

“It’s okay,” he heard her say. “It’s no problem.”

He stole another quick glance at her and saw that she was not in fact angry, but still smiling, almost laughing, as she thumbed at the microphone above the register. “Javi, Enchanted Valley Light Guacamole spill, checkout 2.” He was amazed at the specificity of her announcement, the natural roll of the word guacamole off her tongue.

“Do you want to get another one?” she asked.

“Another what?”

“Another guacamole?” There it was again. He could listen to her say that word all day.

“Not really,” he said. “You really still like me? Even after everything?”

“Of course,” she said. “Why would I not like you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Because?”

“What is there not to like?”

“Oh, plenty, believe me.”

“You’re like the nicest boy I ever met.”

“I am?” he said.

“Cutest and nicest.” She hesitated, wiping back a stray hair. “Do you want to meet my mama? She’s cooking tonight.”

“Your mama?” His heart soared.

Javier showed up with a mop and bucket. Fifteen-year-old skinny boy Javier. The wolf. He who did not rid the baskets of their ooze. He who carefully launched his coagulate hair heavenward with a pound of toxic gel, he who always kept a white shirt tucked into the back pocket of his shorts, as if he were ready to change at any moment and enter a televised street fight. When had the bad blood started between them, really? Radar had never said a word to Javier, and yet he sensed evil in those bony, slumped shoulders. Maybe he was being unfair. Maybe he was being racist. Maybe Javier was a nice kid. Maybe Javier was in love with Ana Cristina.

And now Javier was mopping at the spill, and Ana Cristina was saying something to him in Spanish, and Radar was straining to pick up its meaning. Javi sighed and propped the mop against Radar and left the scene. He was now pinned to the rack of Dentyne by the mop handle.

“Do you want me to clean it up?” he asked.

Ana Cristina shook her head. “No, no. I told him to get a paper towel. For the glass,” she said. “So, can you come tonight? No pressure or anything, but she asks about you all the time, and I was like, Okay, mama, all right already, you can meet him, jeez. She’s going to cook her empanadas. They’re really good.”

“Empanadas?” he said. Asks about me all the time? “I would love to. Nothing would make me happier.”

She smiled and then leaned across the conveyor belt and took his hand, just for a second, but her touch sent such a strong electrical current through his body that he thought he might have another seizure.

Javier returned, paper towel in hand. He scowled at Radar as he got down on all fours and began picking up the pieces of glass.

Radar. Un conquistador. A man among men.

Do it because you must.

He swept the mop handle aside and carefully sidestepped around the guacamole explosion.

“Good day, Javier. Sorry about the guacama-ole,” said Radar, completely butchering the Spanish accent.

Javier looked up and smirked at him, but Radar did not mind the smirk, nor anything at all, really, for he felt as if he were walking on air.

“And I will call you later,” he said to Ana Cristina, loud enough so that he could be sure Javier heard it. “About the empanadas.”

Then he turned around in slow motion, imagining that he was in a movie with a band of Guca trumpeters serenading his exit.

But he had not gone more than two steps before he became fearful that this whole scene had not really happened, that he had imagined it all, and that he was actually still standing in the doorway experiencing another one of his little deaths.

3

As Per Røed-Larsen notes in his introduction to Spesielle Partikler, the diligent historian often “struggles to work out the details of the hazy then when all we have is its faint, dying echoes in the muddled now” (28). How, then, to accurately capture all the twists and turns of young Radar’s life when the public record offers us such scant insight into the mechanics of our character’s psyche? There are really only a handful of sources we can turn to after the relative supernova of his birth, a few specks of data rather than a rich portrait of a New Jersey juvenescence, and, lest we wade into total conjecture, we must make do with what we have.

After Dr. Fitzgerald’s article in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, there were no more professional writeups concerning Radar — a search for “Radar’s syndrome” in the medical databases turns up a giant, singular blank. His haphazard medical file does indicate a long history of epilepsy, dating back to a first episode at age four, with several major hospitalizations following his grand mal seizures, approximately once every four or five years. The doctors’ notes for these hospitalizations are cursory, noting “left-centered asymmetric claudication,” “near alopecia totalis,” and a “jaundiced xanthoderma,” though from the lack of follow-up on these slightly disturbing observations, it seems clear that Radar was not under the care of any single primary pediatrician, but rather a revolving cast of disparate emergency room doctors, who had neither the time nor the inclination to assemble a working medical history. At age twenty-three, after a particularly vicious grand mal in which Radar almost bit his tongue in half, he did have an MRI at St. Elizabeth’s, the results of which showed some “abnormal dark spots” on his temporal lobe, the part of the brain concerned with, among other things, temporal perception, spatial organization, and object recognition. Following this MRI, it appears he began taking a prescription for Zarontin (ethosuximide), an anticonvulsant, for a period of approximately ten years, though this prescription ended with no follow-up medications prescribed.

Beyond this, there is only a cluster of peripheral sources, which, when viewed in sequence, offers the briefest of glimpses into a restless teenager testing the limits of his great, strange electromagnetic gift.

Fig. 3.2. “Blue Box from Modified Western Electric Test Equipment”

From R. Radmanovic’s NJ Science Fair Project, 1988 (disqualified)

Exhibit A:

During the summer of 1990, the New Jersey Bell pay phone on the corner of Midland Avenue and Forest Street was the target of repeated “phreak attacks,” whereby more than two hundred free long-distance calls were made over the course of three months. The pay phone was eventually removed. “Phone phreaking”—the practice of exploiting the telephone system via unauthorized means — was invented in 1959 by Joe Engressia Jr., a.k.a. “Joybubbles,” a seven-year-old blind boy with perfect pitch who discovered that when he whistled a 2,600-Hz tone into the phone, the call would temporarily disconnect and then search for a new trunk line, allowing him to make another connection to any number in the world, completely free of charge. Joe also figured out how to dial a number entirely by whistling — in essence, he had taught himself how to speak a rudimentary form of “telephone.” Based on Engressia’s breakthrough and several technical documents inadvertently leaked by Bell Systems, subsequent phreaks in the 1960s and ’70s developed and refined a device called the “blue box,” which utilized the 2,600-Hz trunk switch tone to quickly and easily reroute calls from one line to another.

In the case of the Midland Avenue pay phone, calls were made to nearly every corner of the globe, including New Zealand, Norway, France, Thailand, Kenya, Brazil, and Ascension Island, in the middle of the Atlantic. Numerous “reverse link-ups” were also placed from this phone, in which the system was manipulated so that two distant pay phones would call each other, ringing continuously until a bystander on the street picked up the phone and found himself or herself talking to an equally confused citizen on a completely different continent. Officer Burberry, the author of the Kearny Police report on the incident, writes that “[the] perp dialed [a] 1-800 number repeatedly using [a] so-called ‘blue box’ to switch to [a] different number, e.g. in Texas.” As if Texas were as far as Officer Burberry could imagine. What Officer Burberry did not mention was that a traditional phone phreak’s blue box no longer worked on the New Jersey Bell system in 1990. In the Midland Avenue case, the perpetrator must have been using either a highly sophisticated terminal device or — in the tradition of Joybubbles — some other unprecedented means to communicate with the vast inner workings of the telephone network. The case would remain unsolved, and though the phone itself was removed, the phone booth remained, becoming a kind of obscure mecca for certain members of the phone phreaking scene.

Exhibit B:

On the evening of June 17, 1990, approximately seventy-eight separate car alarms were set off, which led Officer Burberry (who was not having a good summer) to conclude that “an individual or group of perps” was going around “disrupt[ing] or tamper[ing] with the vehicles’ anty-theft [sic] devices.” Yet none of the vehicles in question were found to have any damage or exhibited any signs of tampering. Stranger still, the alarms themselves could not be turned off by normal means. Mechanics were required to physically disconnect the alarms from the batteries in order to quiet the cacophony of sirens that had begun to drive Kearny residents into hysterics. It was as if the alarms had been instructed to simply wail of their own accord. It is unclear whether Officer Burberry and his team (Johnson, Altez, et al.) connected this incident with the ongoing investigation of the Midland Avenue phone phreak case. A simple map, however, might have provided them with valuable evidence: if they had merely traced the route of these car alarm incidences, they might have noticed that the path of aural carnage forms a slightly deflated horseshoe beginning and ending at the Forest Street block between Midland and Oakwood Avenues, adjacent to the phreaked pay phone and also the location of the Radmanovic residence.

Fig. 3.3. Car Alarm Incidents in Kearny, N.J. June 17, 1990

From Radmanovic, R., I Am Radar, p. 297

Fig. 3.4. “R2-D2, Halloween, 1988”

Pasted into R. Radmanovic’s Little Rule Book of Life

Exhibit C:

In the Kearny High School faculty meeting minutes dated November 1, 1990, chemistry teacher Emily Gagnon relates an incident of “bullying” that took place at the school on Halloween. The details are hard to fully make out from the meeting’s rather perfunctory notes, but it appears that sophomore Radar Radmanovic, dressed “again” in a tinfoil R2-D2 costume, was “found by a member of [the] janitorial staff” trapped in a “dumpster behind [the] gymnasium.” When pressed for details, Mr. Radmanovic would not elaborate on how he had gotten there. The incident led to a larger discussion at the meeting about bullying at the school, with a host of faculty members chiming in on the perceived severity of the problem. Perhaps most troubling was Ms. Gagnon’s comment, recorded in the minutes, that this was “not [the] first time [we’ve found] Radar in [the] dumpster.”

Exhibit D:

On the afternoon of December 5, 1990, a varsity basketball game inside the Kearny High School gymnasium was interrupted when both teams and the majority of the three dozen spectators experienced what was described in the police report as “cramping” and “diarrhea-like symptoms.” This turns out to be polite language for what was in essence a mass crapping of the pants. A barrage of ambulances and even a P3 CDC hazmat team from Long Island were summoned, and rumors of a “killer virus” whipped through the community like wildfire, but doctors could find nothing wrong with the victims beyond a lasting case of public humiliation and a newfound appreciation for the daily operations of the lower intestine. Curiously, none of the city’s tabloids carried the story, ignoring a golden opportunity for near-infinite scatological punnage. Only WWOR-TV, a local outfit broadcasting from Secaucus, mentioned the incident, briefly, during its evening newscast — and even they neglected to dispatch an on-scene reporter. Neither they nor anyone else, apparently, looked into the possibility of the so-called infrasonic “brown note,” rumored to be somewhere around 22.275 Hz, effective when broadcast at levels of at least 120 decibels. The elusive brown note was purportedly experimented with by the French during World War II and is currently used by certain elite Japanese SWAT teams, although there has never been any official documentation of its effective implementation. Nor did anyone bother to interview Radar Radmanovic, the installer and student operator of Kearny High School’s highly sophisticated (some might say excessive) public address system, who also happened to be working the scoreboard for the game that afternoon.

Fig. 3.5. Sample Tests, KHS Gymnasium PA System (March 1990)

From Notebook of R. Radmanovic

Exhibit E:

Finally, there is the now mostly forgotten “Vladi Affair” from December of that same year. Those living in New York City at the time may remember that for a series of three consecutive days right in the middle of the Christmas rush, the newly installed Sony Trini-lite JumboTron at One Times Square displayed a strange series of interference patterns — including clips from 3-2-1 Contact and various Run-D.M.C. music videos, but most famously a grainy feed of a mildly beleaguered goldfish with a black spot on its forehead, swimming in circles to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (“Leningrad”), which played from a hidden speaker that would take the authorities a day and a half to locate. The iconic image of this fish limping to moribund Soviet nostalgia persisted for almost seventy-two hours, evading the best efforts of the JumboTron’s engineers to correct the malfunction. A December 17 New York Daily News article surmised that some “hacker” (an early use of the term, at least for the Daily News) had managed to create an “off-site remote control” and taken command of the television, despite the fact that the screen was not actually connected to any VHF or cable receiver system but instead received its data from prerecorded LP-size “optical discs.” The Daily News noted that the goldfish had already caused “several car accidents” and that the NYPD, Port Authority, and the FBI were all investigating the crime. On the fourth day, the giant screen at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue was unplugged, an act that met with some popular outcry, as the goldfish — by this point nicknamed “Vladi” by a popular on-air personality — had gained a cultish following among commuters and tourists alike, perhaps buoyed by the recent dramatic fall of Communism. When the JumboTron was finally turned on again two days later, the interference patterns had ceased and did not resume again, though it is debatable whether this was because the JumboTron’s engineers had discovered a way to block the incoming transmissions or whether “the hacker” had ceased his malicious activity. Regardless, the crime remained unsolved. Years later, you could still find certain street kiosks selling T-shirts of the goldfish’s pixelated image, with the caption VLADI LIVES! printed in some heavy-handed pseudo Soviet font.

Fig. 3.6. “Something’s Fishy on Times Sq. Jumbo TV”

From New York Daily News, Dec. 17, 1990

Of course, if the authorities had checked the attendance sheet for Kearny High School, they would have discovered that Radar Radmanovic had been absent from school on the three consecutive days of the JumboTron’s disruption. There also exists a photograph of Radar sitting at his home-brewed ham radio station in his bedroom, giant ear cans on his head, delivering an enthusiastic thumbs-up to the camera. In the background, perched precariously on a transceiver, a mildly beleaguered goldfish is clearly visible. The goldfish matches — in demeanor and appearance, including the single black spot — the famous Vladi, though on the back of the photograph Radar has written R.I.P. DOBROFISH, suggesting that the fish was named for Dobroslav Radmanovic´, the man responsible for bringing their family to the New World before collapsing in a grocery store checkout line, ground chuck in hand.

Other items from the R. Radmanovic file seem important to highlight: Radar graduated from Rutgers, although, due to an apparent computer glitch, he actually graduated twice (if on paper only), with a dual degree in religious studies and electrical engineering, summa cum laude each time, making him the most decorated undergraduate in the history of that school. Such illustrious qualifications landed him a job directly out of college as the WCCA Belleville Transmission Site assistant manager of operations. Now, after thirteen years of exemplary work, he was head engineer of transmission. During that time he had been named employee of the month fourteen times for the Green Channel Network, a midsize regional media conglomerate that spanned the tri-state area as well as parts of western Massachusetts. No other employee had received the honor more than twice. And yet, once he had become master of the transmission site, Radar had not moved up in the corporate hierarchy, despite repeated offers of upper-level management positions. Eventually, the GCN executives had simply stopped trying. Apparently their savant engineer preferred to stay where he was, in the swamps, conjuring signal.

The employee-of-the-month awards were not undeserved. In truth, he probably should have won the accolade every month, but then, this would not have been good for company morale. Radar was that good. A bona fide professional. No — what was the step above bona fide professional? A natural. A motherfucking sorcerer. He would glide his hands across the stacks of panels, checking the levels, whispering a knob here or there, often with eyes closed, adjusting the modulators and repeaters and phase monitors as if he were playing a perfectly sculpted contrapuntal fugue. In that precise moment of propagation and frequency, amplitude and scissor-slip wattage, he was the Buddha himself sitting beneath the electrical bodhi tree.

Radar’s unique spiritual connection to the machines also made it difficult to find another human who enjoyed working with him in that swampland radio outpost. He had gone through no fewer than twenty-one partners in his thirteen years, from poor old Ernie Bailey to his current co-workers, Gary “Knock Yourself Out” Balkin and Moses “Mo’ Money” Rodriguez. The managers seemed willing to accept this revolving door of placeholders in order to keep around an employee who looked mostly humanoid but functioned more like an extension of their radio transmission system. On his watch, they had never lost signal. Not once. How this was possible, the station execs in Manhattan could not say. Every station lost signal — it was the way of the world, of the incoherent spectrum, of the random grumblings of electrons, but Radar was always able to anticipate these electromagnetic hiccups and swivel the backup systems accordingly. It was as if he could look down the barrel of time and see into the future. Even his seizures at the workplace, of which there had been several, had never disrupted his craftsmanship. He would wake up on the floor of the transmission site, sweating and sore, and the fearful machines would be calling to him, wondering how he was doing. They had looked after themselves while he had shifted into another plane. They had felt his contractions, felt the throbbing agony of his synapses, but they had not faltered in his absence. They had his back. They would always have his back.

• • •

PEDALING BACK to the transmission site after his near miracle encounter at the A&P Express, Radar was initially ecstatic over Ana Cristina’s invitation, but as the sulfuric breeze from the swamps blew against his face, a little sandcastle of belief begin to melt inside his chest. There was nothing quite like imagining one’s life through the eyes of another to effectively initiate an irreversible, existential nosedive.

Radar sat in the station cockpit, surrounded by his instruments, and tried to figure out exactly why he felt so depressed. Ana Cristina had invited him to meet her mother! To eat empanadas! Surely this was a good sign. Surely the fact that she was offering to introduce him to kith and kin meant she wanted to keep him around. And that gesture, that touching of his hand at her workplace, no less, meant she was comfortable enough for their relationship to be semi-public, for Lydia and Javier to know of their shared amour. And yet, what did he have to share, really? When Ana Cristina’s mother peered at him over a plate of steaming empanadas and asked him what he had done with his life, whether he was happy with who he had become, whether he was ready to share this happiness with her daughter, what could he possibly say?

For the first time in his life, he realized this: he had been following a path that was not his. He was living the life of another man. It could be said without exaggeration that he was perhaps the best radio engineer in the world, but his heart was just not in it. He did not love what he did. He did it only because he could. And this, he realized, was no reason at all.

Do it because you must.

He remembered a late-summer excursion to Manhattan the previous year in which he had observed an inverted petite chinoise acrobat spinning plates on a street corner in the Lower East Side. It had been appallingly humid out, but the woman — bedecked in a gleaming white rhinestone costume that appeared out of place against the buttery grunge of the summer sidewalk — was so focused on her revolving tableware that it was as if her body had melted away into the heat, or at least her body could not be separated from the task at hand. Radar sensed that the ring of people who had stopped to watch were doing so not because of her enthralling acrobatics (though her acrobatics were enthralling), but because of their collective awareness that this woman, in that moment, could only be doing exactly what she was doing. The laws of the universe had determined it. Transfixed, Radar had waited in line to dump all of his change onto a plate, a plate that had struck him as painfully ordinary and dull, lying so still on the ground. Afterwards he had swerved back into the traffic of humanity, filled with a strange mixture of exhilaration and dread that he would never be able to achieve the elemental beingness of that plate spinner.

Seated in his station chair now, recalling the image of those gleaming, whirling plates, Radar picked up a pen and slowly started to trace a little oblong circle onto a legal notepad. With each added revolution, the circle became more and more perfectly circular, all those wonky, globular loops adding up to something whole and proportional and right, and this summation comforted him.

Rule #49: Many imperfections can and may lead to perfection.

Soon the flimsy yellow paper grew thick with ink and finally tore open, so that now he was drawing circles on the page beneath. If he drew enough circles, maybe he could burrow right through the earth into its molten center and then through to the other side, into the V-necked alpine valleys of Kyrgyzstan. That could be nice. Maybe he could start over again there. He could be a more perfect version of himself.

Distracted by his existential malaise, he wandered into the engine room and lay down next to the big, purring vacuum capacitors that expelled so much electromagnetic energy into the air that the temperature of your skin went up by two degrees and began to tingle. This was the voltaic green room where the radio signal huffed and puffed and readied itself for the great scream. The station’s transmitters took the thinnest trickle of signal and blew it wide open, turned it into a hundred-mile-wide fire hose, an explosion of invisible waves licking the surface of the city, shooting through seawater and brickwork and grocery bags and into the antennae of the thirsty radios, their transistors reshaping the signal into a wiry, pulsing frequency that sent speakers quivering into long streams of S&P numerals.

Radar lay on his back eating an apple and swinging a fluorescent light tube through the air like a lightsaber. The tube lit up magically every time it swung close to the huge, humming induction box.

Dim.

Now glowing.

The world, thick with current.

Dim.

Now glowing.

Like a heartbeat. He wanted to make Ana Cristina glow like this.

Radar sighed. He pulled himself off the ground and was just about to go check on control when it came. Usually, he had an inkling that a seizure was on its way as he was filled with a fleeting sensation akin to reverse déjà vu — a remembrance of things future — but this time he had only a whiff of lemony lilac in the back of his throat and not even a pretense of falling before he was already out, down this time—really, really down. As in: kill the lights down. Not a petit mal, but the full monty. Usually petits came and went, but sometimes they were a sign that a storm was on the horizon, and apparently this was the case today. His last thought was of the cruel misfortune of life: Oh, why today of all days should I suffer such a fate? On this day of imminent empanada conquest? Please don’t let me hurt myself too—

He awoke in total darkness.

Every part of his body ached. For a moment he wondered if he was dead. But could death really be this painful? Once you got through the difficult part of dying, surely they should at least cut you some slack and make you comfortable? No, death was too simple a solution for his lot. He would live and he would suffer.

He tried to deduce his condition. From what he could tell, he was lying on his back, covered in what felt like a thin layer of sweat. He could also feel that his underwear was soaked through. A familiar, swiftly cooling sensation. When he rolled his tongue across the roof of his mouth, he tasted the metallic tang of blood.

He tried to sit up. His head pounded. The sound of crackling glass beneath him. Something wet and squishy against his hand. This, he realized, was the apple core. He reached out and felt blindly through the darkness, felt the cool perforations in the metal wall. He was still in the engine room. So he was definitely not dead. But. . the lights were out. Strange. He wondered how long he had been in there. Was it nighttime? Surely someone would’ve found him by now. Where was Moses? He sat there in the darkness, listening. An absence. The great capacitors around him, normally so full of life, were cold and quiet.

He wiped the blood off his chin. That’s weird, he thought, because if the capacitors are quiet, then that means—

Panicking, he stumbled to his feet, groping around in the dark for the door to control. He hit his head on a low ledge and then finally managed to locate the handle of the door, which he opened to find a darkened control room. A small window in the corner provided the only light. At least it was still daytime outside. But why were all the lights out? He stood, listening. The speakers, lifeless. Not even a hint of static. Nothing.

The signal! The radio signal is dead! The one thing he was supposed to be able to do in this world and he had failed at doing it.

He fell over himself trying to get to the stack, punching at the backup microwave channel to get it up and running, but he quickly found that none of the systems were online. The power. The power was out. He was disoriented, but he knew this shouldn’t be happening. They had two fancy backup generators that should’ve automatically kicked on at this point. In the dimness, he stumbled toward the generator room, his vision wobbling dangerously before he leaned over a trash can and vomited up the apple and the remnants of the Marmite toast.

The generator room was also dark. The twin Generacs simply lying there. He tried to manually start them with a pull cord, but, try as he might, he could not get them to catch. He bent over, panting. The oddest sensation of stillness. He placed his hand against their circuitry, closed his eyes. It was the same feeling he had had in the engine room. An utter absence.

He wandered back into the darkened control room and picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. He clicked the hook switch several times, but the line was dead. Damn. He had no way of letting the station in Manhattan know what was going on. Maybe his mother was right: he should get a cell phone. For emergencies like these.

He looked at his calculator watch. The screen was blank. He squeezed and re-squeezed the mode button, to no avail. Had the watch just run out of batteries? This would be an amazing coincidence. He looked up at the clock on the wall. Its second hand was motionless, the time frozen at 2:44. The exit sign was also dark.

What the hell was going on? And why had everything stopped working — him included — at exactly the same moment?

He felt his way over to the bathroom and, out of habit, flicked on the light switch. Nothing happened. So he was forced to peel off his urine-soaked jeans in the darkness, tripping over the toilet as he hopped up and down on one foot. He fumbled for the faucet and, to his relief, found this working as usual. Thank God. Civilization had not completely disappeared. Using a damp paper towel, he awkwardly wiped at his groin. He changed into the extra pair of sweatpants he kept in his cubby in case of just such an accident, rinsed out his mouth, and gargled some of that horrific-familiar yellow mouthwash. The alcohol stung where he had bitten into his tongue.

Through the dimness, he peered at himself in the mirror. He could just make out the contours of his outline. It was faint, but it was an outline nonetheless. He was still Radar.

He went back into the control room, examining the racks and racks of state-of-the art equipment. Everything completely dead. He touched the cold chassis of a phase modulator, then leaned in and smelled its circuits. No semblance of signal. Minutes earlier, this stack had been brimming with carefully choreographed current. But now? A wasteland.

He was suddenly reminded of the last blackout, in 2003. By coincidence, he had also suffered a grand mal then, just before the power went out. He had been riding his bike when he smelled a scent of burning lilacs and was taken by that feeling of tumbling back into himself. He had just managed to pull over to the side of the road when he felt himself actually tumbling over his bike and into the reeds. He woke up covered in mud, bleeding from a crescent gash in his arm. A wary duck was eyeing him from a little spit of marsh water just beyond. He nodded to the bird, conspiratorially, as if what had just transpired had all been on purpose. The duck had nodded back.

That night, when the lights had not come back on, Radar had wandered the darkened streets alone, pining for lost current. As New Jerseyans partied around him, grilling their defrosting meats and retiring to make blackout babies, he had communed with utility poles, pressed palms to traffic lights, searching for any errant scraps of wattage. The grid, the grid. How he missed the grid. He vowed never again to take that cushion of electricity for granted. Thereafter, he carried a AAA Energizer in his fanny pack as a kind of talisman against the darkness.

Now, sitting alone in the dim control room, filled with a growing feeling of helplessness, he excavated the battery from its pouch and began rolling the cylinder between his palms, warming the metal.

What should he do? He was a radio engineer with no radio frequency to engineer. He idly turned on the portable shortwave that he kept on his desk but found that this, too, was dead.

How could everything have gone dead at once?

Battery in hand, he stepped outside, blinking in the bright sunlight. At least there was still that. It was a beautiful summer day, if only a touch humid — the kind of day that makes you forget the taste of all other days. The sky was a sheet of uninterrupted blue, infinite and resilient and altogether unaware of the dark, broken machines that lurked indoors. He spotted a black plume of smoke rising from somewhere to the west, in Kearny. Such black-looking smoke could never be a good thing. The burning of that which should not burn.

Radar gingerly made his way out onto the creaky catwalk that led across the swamps to the base of the transmitters’ twin antennae. The antennae soared above him, two latticed, triangular fingers pointed heavenward. He sensed their silence, the absence of signal emanating from their tips.

But their silence was not the only silence. From this vantage point, the Meadowlands was normally a humming palace of movement, of planes and trains and automobiles sliding through on their way from here to there. Yet the familiar river of sound from the turnpike was gone. He listened. Birds hummed and twittered across the swamps. No sound of freight. No burring upshift of tractor-trailers. From somewhere in the distance, he heard the call of a police siren. And then, overhead, the muffled wup-wup of a helicopter.

Something was very wrong. This was no ordinary blackout.

Beneath the sagging catwalk, the marsh water was muddy and thick, covered in some kind of plush, aromatic slime. An iced tea bottle floated, half-submerged, its label bleached pinkish white by the sun. Like the flesh of a made-up cadaver. At the end of the catwalk, he startled a great blue heron into flight. He could hear the bird’s wings beat against the air as it circled him once, twice, before heading off east, across a calligraphy of islands.

There were only two scenarios that Radar could think of that would cause not just the electric grid to fail but all electronics to stop working instantaneously. Radar had written a paper in college on the first possibility: a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun, a solar flare so large that it could disrupt modern microprocessors. The last such major CME had occurred in 1859, when a series of solar flares precipitated an unprecedented geomagnetic solar storm, dubbed the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington, the first person to observe and describe the flares. The resulting storm caused havoc in telegraph systems throughout the world, disrupting messages and giving operators powerful electrical shocks. The aurora borealis was seen as far south as the Caribbean and was so bright that people could read newspapers by its light in the middle of the night.

There were all kinds of prediction models for what would happen to the modern-day electrical infrastructure in the event of a solar storm as massive as the Carrington Event — predictions that ranged from the vaguely inconvenient to the totally catastrophic. In truth, no one knew what would happen to a society so dependent upon the semiconductor if the sun unleashed its rage again. But there was just one problem with the solar flare explanation: they were currently in a low point of the eleven-year sunspot cycle, so it was even more highly unlikely that such a highly unlikely solar storm had occurred.

Which left the only other known explanation, a possibility so outrageous that Radar could barely comprehend it: a nuclear bomb had been detonated above the earth’s atmosphere, and New York had just experienced the devastating effects of its electromagnetic pulse.

“Jesus,” Radar said, his brain already making room for the impossible.

4

The world would be crippled. Food and water would instantly be in short supply, particularly around the metropolises, where on any given day, consumables kept on hand could support the populace for three days, maybe four, tops. An EMP was so devastating because it fried all electronic circuitry, and without electricity, the density of urban populations was a death sentence. Refrigeration and air conditioning would be gone. Water pumps gone. Communications gone. Most cars and trucks and planes and trains would be fried, too, as virtually every modern automobile depended on a microprocessor-driven computer system. Everything depended upon the microprocessor. He thought of Grandma Louise, stranded by herself in her little house in Trenton. Old people would be the first to go, along with the sick and the weak. People like him. .

Radar closed his eyes.

Calm down. Maybe he was wrong about all this. Maybe something funky had gone down at the station. Some weird surge of current. Maybe no one else was affected. No need to panic just yet.

First things first. If there had been a massive EMP, he needed to make sure his family was okay. His mother was probably still at work. His father would be in his radio shack at home as usual, no doubt having a conniption at the mass death of all his electronics. He would find his mother, and together they would head home. Yes. This seemed like a sensible plan. One thing at a time. He thought of Ana Cristina in the A&P and wondered if she was safe. He would check on her later.

He left a note for Moses on the off chance he came into his shift as usual, though he was fairly sure this would not happen. He had the feeling that nothing would be as usual ever again. He locked up the station and went out into the heat of the day. Already, refrigerators would be warming — millions of pounds of food slowly spoiling. Entropy would eventually reign supreme. It was the beginning of the end.

He fetched Houlihan from the shed. Sadly, just as he had feared, when he tried to coax one of her transceivers to life, he found that her onboard electronics hadn’t been spared.

“Rest in peace, Houlihan,” he murmured, observing a moment of silence at the handlebars.

Then he gripped the pedal with his crocodile skin boot, took a deep breath, and headed out into a changed world.

On Belleville Turnpike, he quickly came upon a tractor-trailer stopped in the middle of the road. Its driver had opened the hood of the cab, but he now stood off at some distance, smoking and staring out across the swamps.

“You’re the first person I seen come down here,” the man said. He looked tired and unshaven. “I never even looked at this place before. All kindsa birds.”

“Is your truck dead?”

“Everything’s out. Radio doesn’t work. CB. My cell phone won’t even turn on.” He held it up. “You know what’s going on here?”

“I think it was an EMP.”

“An EMP?”

“An electromagnetic pulse.”

“Okay,” the man said, scratching at his chin with his thumb. “How’s that?”

Radar took a deep breath. “It’s usually caused by a nuclear-powered bomb exploding above the atmosphere. Gamma rays from the blast hit atoms in the atmosphere, knocking out electrons, which causes a huge surge of energy directed toward the earth. It’s called the Compton effect. The pulse instantly overloads circuits and fries anything with a semiconductor. Including your truck. Including your cell phone. Including just about anything.”

The man nodded, absorbing this information with surprising calmness. Pulled at his cigarette. Squinted at the sky.

“So how come we still standing here if they nuked us?”

“An EMP bomb is detonated above the atmosphere. There’s no nuclear fallout or physical damage from the blast. The primary weapon is the pulse. Depending on where it was, how many there were — that kind of thing — the whole country could be paralyzed.”

He gestured at Radar’s bicycle. “You’re smart. At least that thing still works.”

“The human body isn’t affected by an EMP. At least, not directly.”

“Not directly?”

“There was some study that said eighty percent of the population would die within six months of a massive nuclear EMP.”

“Damn,” the man said. “Okay.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to scare you, but this could be really serious.”

The man sighed, turning his phone over in his hand. “I’m guessing these things don’t come back to life, then?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“I’d like to call my wife. She’s gonna be worried.”

“I know what you mean. I’m trying to track down my parents.”

They stood, watching as a pair of house sparrows spun above them. The man sucked on the last of his cigarette and threw the stub to the ground. The ember skipped and rolled across the pavement like a furious insect.

“So how come I ain’t never even heard about this EMP?” the man said. “Seems kind of important to keep the citizens informed of that kinda thing.”

“The government’s report on an EMP attack came out the same day as the 9/11 Commission’s report.”

“Bad timing,” the man said, shaking his head. “You know, my niece was born on 9/11. Sweetest little thing. She still doesn’t know.”

• • •

RADAR PASSED three more cars stalled in the middle of the road, their drivers nowhere to be seen. A Jeep Cherokee had driven off into the reeds. Its front bumper was submerged in water. A man dressed in a Hawaiian T-shirt sat on the ground next to the Jeep, looking bewildered but otherwise unharmed.

Radar slowed. “You okay?” he asked. The man didn’t seem to hear him.

Schuyler Avenue was a mess. As soon as the threat of vehicles had been removed, the street quickly became the domain of the pedestrian. It felt like a carnival, except that people were wandering around, appearing alternately elated and terrified. An old man with a fierce underbite was warbling out “Amazing Grace” on a street corner, the hat in front of him overflowing with coins. Nearby, a policeman argued animatedly with a group of construction workers who were all holding their hard hats in their hands, as if they had stumbled into a funeral. Radar passed by the day care center and saw the children busy with their games in the playground, blissfully unaware as their teachers stood whispering in conference by the seesaw.

He made his way across town, weaving around more stalled cars. Perhaps seasoned from the blackout seven years ago, a number of storeowners had already set up grills in the street, and the air was filled with the heavy scent of cooking meat. And yet the mood now was decidedly different from 2003. Coming on the heels of 9/11, that blackout had felt like a paradise of good vibes and bonhomie as soon as people found out that the grid had failed not because of any attack but rather as the result of an accident. Imagine that: an accident! Such happenstance sounded a citywide time-out to the regularly scheduled grind and gave everyone permission to become everyone else’s best friend, lover, or a cappella partner singing early Guns N’ Roses ballads. But now, as Radar bicycled down Schuyler Avenue, he sensed a degree of collective worry he had not witnessed since the day the towers fell. This feeling of foreboding appeared fundamentally connected to the categoric failure of people’s smartphones, which many clutched tenderly, as if they were holding recently deceased pets. Others simply gazed at the sky.

Radar passed a restless crowd of people all staring in the same direction. He looked and saw that someone had smashed the front window of the liquor store. The pavement was covered in broken glass, and a few shattered bottles were strewn across the sidewalk. A policeman had his gun drawn and was standing over a man who was handcuffed and lying facedown on the pavement. Radar tried to catch a glimpse of the man’s face. Was he a crazy person? Or was he just a normal guy who had suddenly panicked and gone for the booze? There was a strange tension in the air. The crowd took a couple of steps forward and the policeman, sensing this, waved his gun above his head.

“Get back!” he said. Then he said something into his walkie talkie, but Radar could plainly see that it was not working, that the policeman was just doing this for effect. Somehow this posturing made the situation all the more scary. Even the police had to pretend they knew what was going on.

Soon we will all be lying on the ground in handcuffs, thought Radar. Either that or the police will be the ones on the ground.

With a shiver, he started to wheel away from the scene, but then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He nearly jumped. He turned around and saw a ponytailed man in an oversize AC/DC shirt.

“You want some ice cream?” the man asked.

“Ice cream?” Radar repeated. The question seemed at once preposterous and perfectly appropriate. He saw now that the man was towing a wagon filled with large buckets of ice cream, their sides perspiring in the summer heat.

“Think about it, man. It might be your last chance.”

“Uh, no thanks,” said Radar. “I’m good.”

This answer left the man looking incredibly distraught. Radar peeled away from the sad sight of the man tugging at his ice cream wagon and rode on. A couple of blocks later, he passed a car accident, slowing when he saw the swath of blood on the street.

“Can I help?” he asked a large woman in yellow. Her shirt was covered in bloodstains.

“They just took him to the hospital,” she said. “Some guy’s VW was still working, and they just put him in there and took him.”

“Was he okay?” Radar asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She brought a hand to her face. She was shaking. “I don’t know.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Does your phone work?”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I want to call my daughter, but I can’t find a phone. I need to talk to her and tell her.” She started to cry. “I just need to hear her voice.”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. His mother was right: sometimes a lie was better than the truth.

• • •

GIVEN THE CHAOS in the streets, he decided to take the back route to his mother’s office. This was a bit of a misnomer, for in the Meadowlands, there really was no front route. It was a land of back doors and frontage roads and side entrances. Radar first cut through the rail yards, passing a group of engineers circled around an inert locomotive. Then he zipped over the old plank bridge to the dirt service road that followed beneath the turnpike. The highway remained astonishingly silent except for a series of helicopters hovering overhead. This gave him hope. If these helicopters still worked, then maybe all was not lost.

At the padlocked gates of the power substation, which was no doubt powerless, he sliced across two abandoned lots, swerving around a scattering of hypodermic needles and a few gulls working at a dead muskrat carcass. He slipped through a peel hole in the NJ Transit fence, across another set of rail tracks, past the rusted shell of a Chevy Nova that he had named Cassiopeia — in honor of glimpsing that celestial cluster from this very spot one miraculously dark night — until he emerged out onto a road that wound lazily through an organized skirmish of industrial parks. A few cars were stalled on the side of the road. People were sitting on the closely mowed grass in front of the corporate parking lots. A few were walking away from the buildings carrying all of their belongings. One man was pushing his office chair, stacked high with boxes, his tie undone. He looked almost content.

Ahead loomed the great gleaming silver behemoth of the International Flavor and Aroma Corporation. A perfect box of a building. All mirrors and secrets. It was here that 60 percent of all flavors and smells in America — including the never released Chanel No. 7, the irresistible saccharine mortar filling for Oreos, and the curiously embedded maple syrup taste in McGriddles — were designed, carefully tested, and then mass-produced for taste buds and quivering olfactory epithelia all across the universe. Whenever you popped open a bag, chances are that first whiff, that first familiar sizzle of brackish powder on the tongue, had been sourced from a vat of clear somewhere inside of this magic mirror box.

The parking lot in front of the building was full of people milling about. Someone had brought out a portable grill and was poking at a large amount of meat that gave off a fruity kind of smell. Several half-empty cartons of anonymous soda lay on the pavement nearby. More boxes of cookies, crackers, and various condiments were scattered around. These had to be IFAC’s test products. In a blackout, they were deemed fair game for consumption.

A group of women in lab coats had set up a table and chairs and were busy playing what looked like gin rummy. Another woman, in a power suit, was sitting on the back of a pickup truck, crying hysterically as a shoeless, heavyset man tried to comfort her. The whole scene had the feeling of a birthday party for someone who was probably dying.

Radar stopped his bike.

“Have you seen Charlene?” he asked a black man picking at a paper plate full of sausage.

“Charlene?” he said. He pointed to an empty parking space. “She drove out of here.”

“She drove?” Radar said. “What do you mean, she drove?”

“Yeah, it was the craziest thing. We’re all stuck here, right, I can’t even get my engine to turn over, and she comes out and starts up the Olds, no problem. We thought she’d been messing with our cars just to prove a point. It’s kind of funny, when you think about it. We’ve been giving her grief about that car for years, but now who’s laughing? I guess that’s just how karma works. She drove five people home and now she’s a hero. She said she was coming back for more.”

The Olds! His mother still drove an oyster grey Oldsmobile Omega that she had acquired the year after his birth. It had upwards of 200,000 miles on it, but she refused to trade it in.

“Why change?” she would ask defensively whenever the topic of getting a new car came up. “Why are we always changing? Just because we can? When something works, let it be, I say.” Another example of her coin-operated wisdom that sounded good at the time but was contradicted by the rest of her behavior.

The Olds. Of course. It was premodern circuitry.

“A mechanical ignition,” said Radar. “Brilliant.”

“What?”

“Her car,” he said. “It doesn’t rely on a computer to run it. That’s why it survived the pulse.”

“She probably knew something we didn’t. I always said that about her. Woman knows something we all don’t. And now she’s the only one who can get the hell out of here.”

“I’m not sure there’s anywhere to go.”

“Someone was saying not everywhere got hit. They say the city’s fine. I mean, they don’t have power, but their phones work. Not like here.”

“The city didn’t get hit?”

“That’s what someone said.”

How could that be? Did this mean there hadn’t been a nuclear explosion?

“You said my mom was coming back here?” said Radar.

“Charlene? Wait, she’s your mom?” The man squinted at him. “Oh, okay. Okay — I can see it now.”

“We don’t really look alike.”

“Hey, my mom’s half Japanese, but you look more Japanese than I do.”

“I’ve gotten that before.”

“People are crazy. They think all kinds of things,” the man said. “So yeah, your mom said she was coming back here, but you know Charlene — she says a lot of things.”

Radar debated waiting around. But no. He should check on Ana Cristina and his father. If Charlene had a working car, she’d be better off than all of them. Either that or she’d become a target. The thought made him shiver.

• • •

ON HIS WAY HOME, he stopped by the A&P. To his relief, he found no evidence of looting. No broken windows, no goods strewn about the parking lot. The place was locked up and dark inside. He put his face up against the now helpless automatic doors and could just make out the darkened aisles of products. The pyramid of Pringles cans. The empty checkout counters. The place where Ana Cristina normally stood. Was it only this morning that she had asked him to come over for empanadas? It seemed like ages ago. A lifetime ago. He wondered if she was still inside. He knocked. Waited. No answer. He tried to pull open the automatic doors, but they wouldn’t budge.

“Ana Cristina?” he called. He knocked.

A person appeared in the darkness. A man. Radar tensed, ready to rush in and tackle him, to demand to know what he had done with his girlfriend, but as the figure approached, Radar saw that it was only Javier.

Javier unlocked the doors and pushed them open.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” said Radar.

“You want some?” Javier held up a bottle of water.

“Thanks,” said Radar. The bottle was ice cold. “Is Ana Cristina around?”

“She’s inside,” said Javier.

“She is?” His heart soared. “She’s okay?”

“She looks okay.”

As they were speaking, a Montclair Police car rolled by with lights flashing. The sight of a working police cruiser was startling, given all of the inert vehicles Radar had just seen. The car pulled into the A&P parking lot.

One of the police officers leaned out his window. “What are you doing here?”

“I work here,” said Javier.

“What’s your name?”

“Javier Valdes.” He pulled an apron from out of his back pocket and held it up as evidence.

“And who are you?” the policeman asked Radar.

“He’s okay,” said Javier. “He’s my boy.”

“Well, be careful,” said the policeman. “We got a lot of reports of looting. It might start to get dangerous around here. I’d lock up and get home if I were you.”

As they drove off, Radar said, “Montclair must have electricity.”

“Yeah, everyone does except us,” Javier said.

“How do you know?”

Javier led him back into the store and locked the doors behind them. They walked through aisles of darkened products. Radar could hear the squeak of their shoes against the floor. Javier pointed to a radio sitting on one of the checkout counters. Next to the radio, sitting on the ground, holding her beloved cell phone, was Ana Cristina.

“Oh, hi,” he said, a wave of relief sweeping over him. He kneeled down beside her. “Are you okay?”

Her face instantly changed when she saw him. She wrapped her arms around him and they hugged like this. A small kiss. She was crying.

“Are you okay?” he asked again.

“Yes,” she nodded. “My phone’s dead.”

“We were just listening to the report,” said Javier.

He reached over and turned on the radio. The sound of a voice. A miracle of a voice.

“How does it still work?” said Radar.

“I don’t know. I found it in the walk-in,” said Javier.

“The walk-in?”

Of course. The walk-in freezer had acted like a giant Faraday cage, shielding the radio from the pulse. Why hadn’t he thought of doing this? A simple container of nonferrous metal. A shield. He could’ve saved everything. Houlihan. The station.

They stood listening to the voice on the radio which was speaking in an urgent, clipped tone.

A curfew has been declared for eight P.M. tonight in Essex, Bergen, and Hudson counties. Martial law and a state of emergency remain in effect. Boil advisory for affected areas. The governor’s office is discussing a mandatory evacuation for the affected areas as soon as tomorrow morning. Until then, the governor asks that people limit travel to only essential activities. Senior citizens and those in need of assistance can relocate to several emergency shelters at the designated—

There was a pounding on the glass doors at the front of the store. Radar looked up in terror. He could see the silhouette of a man peering in at them. He was once so critical of those sliding doors, but now they were the only thing between them and what could be a panicking populace.

Javier clicked off the radio. “I’ll go see,” he said. He got up and walked toward the front.

“He’s brave,” said Radar.

“He’s a kid,” said Ana Cristina.

Javier had cracked open the doors and was speaking with the man outside.

“Where’s Lydia?” Radar asked her.

“She freaked and took off,” said Ana Cristina. “I should’ve done the same thing.”

“You’re a good employee.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. Then: “I hope my mama’s okay.”

“I bet she’s okay.”

“She gets nervous.”

“We probably aren’t doing empanadas tonight, are we?”

She reached out and took his hand. They sat like this, hand in hand, and Radar could’ve sat like that forever, as the world slowly crumbled around them.

Javier had closed the door and was going back to the drinks aisle. He fetched two large bottles of water and brought them back to the man.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” whispered Ana Cristina.

“I don’t know, but I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said. “I’d do anything for you.”

She smiled. “You’re so cute.”

“I should go check on my dad.” He sighed. “He’s probably flipping out right now.”

“Can I meet him sometime?” she said. “I mean, if we get out of this?”

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s a little weird. Actually, just to warn you, both of my parents are kind of strange.”

“They made you, didn’t they? They can’t be that bad.”

He was caught again by her belief in him. She actually cared. This was something you could not fake.

“How should I get in touch with you?” he said.

“I don’t know, text me?” she said. “I’m gonna try to get a new phone. I feel, like, naked without it.” She flipped open the blank display.

“I will,” he said. I’ll do the text with you. “I think I’m gonna get my own cell phone, especially after this.”

“You are? Wow. Welcome to the twenty-first century, Radar.”

“I know, right?” he said. “See you soon?” Feeling bold, he leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed him back, and for a brief second, everything was right.

When he stood up, Javier was standing beside him.

“Oh, hi,” Radar said self-consciously. “I was just going. Everything okay up there?”

“He wanted some water. He was going to pay like twenty bucks for it, but I just gave it to him,” he said. He looked down at Ana Cristina. “Don’t tell the boss, okay?”

Radar walked with Javier to the doorway.

“She likes you,” said Javier.

“She does?” A crinkling in his chest. A great roaring in his ears.

Javier nodded. “She’s like the nicest girl I know, so don’t mess with her, okay?”

Radar realized that what he had seen before as a scowl was merely Javier’s look of concentration. Scrutinizing a world that was not inclined to like him.

“You’re a good man, Javier,” he said, offering his hand. “I’m sorry for misjudging you.”

“You and everyone,” said Javier. “My mama said I’m a good book with a bad cover.”

“Yeah,” said Radar. “Me, too.”

• • •

RADAR’S BLOCK WAS TYPICAL of the compressed suburbia you found in Kearny and its environs, where each house rested its chin on a cursory, heavily manicured front yard. On the Fourth of July, Halloween, and Christmas, these diminutive front plots became engulfed by blustery displays of patriotism or typhoons of cobwebs or animatronic Santas that rotated creepily at the waist.

Once upon a time, Kermin had been an eager subscriber to such pageantry.

“We are engaged in uspon. One day we will have in-ground pool,” he used to say, blinking Rudolph lawn ornament in hand.

The uspon. The great climb. Kearny and all the contiguous suburbs just west of the Meadowlands were on a subtle incline such that its residents were forever aware of their precious bodily fluids slowly draining into the swamps. The unspoken immigrant objective was to claw one’s way up to higher and higher elevations, until you eventually graduated to places like Montclair, Livingston, and Maplewood, places far away from the swamps, where one could live in landscaped, cul-de-sac bliss and dig a large, kidney-shaped hole for one’s turquoise-tiled swimming pool. Sinking your pool belowground was the ultimate sign that you had joined the buržoazija and reached the end of the road, baby. A true Amerikanac could command the earth itself.

But while Kermin might have at one point subscribed to the uspon, dreaming of diving boards and paying pool men to suck the scum from his tiled oasis, somewhere along the line to buržoasko blaženstvo, probably right around the time when he shuttered his repair shop for good and hermited himself from the world, the dream had stalled for the Radmanovics, leaving them stuck halfway up the hill, their fluids still draining into the marshes. They weren’t in the shit, but they weren’t that far from it, either. Kermin had signaled his surrender by abandoning first the yearly Rudolph lawn display and then the front-yard maintenance altogether. Oh, if only Deda Dobroslav could have seen this sad display of stalled momentum, this lingering proximity to the shit. To have fought so long against the Communists, the fascists, his own people; to have lost and lost again; to have escaped and fled across a continent and an ocean; to have come so far, only to die in a checkout line and deposit his legacy on the lip of these swamps, a toxic vortex whose centripetal forces would prove too powerful for his offspring to overcome.

Yet seeing Forest Street now, urged into fellowship by the sudden disappearance of electricity, Radar could not help but feel a sense of pride in his home. Why would you want to live anywhere else? The street resembled a collegial, if slightly disorganized, family reunion. Kids squealed in the middle of the road, letting slapshots ricochet against overturned trash cans. Bella and Milos, bedecked in sun hats and matching Hawaiians, presided over the ceremonies from their customary lawn chairs; the Andratti boys tossed a pigskin to their brother in the wheelchair; Genevieve paced worriedly among her gargantuan sunflowers. Mr. Neimann, their next-door neighbor, with his Gorbachev-like wine stain, was waving furiously at a smoking grill with a spatula.

“Rib eye?” he called as Radar went past. “We were saving it for a special occasion, but this seems like as good a time as any.”

“Maybe later,” said Radar. “Have you seen my father?”

“I haven’t seen him in weeks,” he said. “I did hear some kind of bang out behind your house, next to that tower of his. Loud as hell. I was going to go see if everyone was all right back there, but then the lights went out and I forgot all about it.”

“I’ll go check it out,” said Radar. “You heard any updates about the blackout?”

“Bob Deacon said they found out what made it happen.”

“What was it?”

“He didn’t know. He just said they figured it out.” Mr. Neimann lifted the lid of the grill and stabbed at the meat. “You sure you don’t want to take some of this home? It might cheer ol’ Kermin up. I worry about that man sometimes.”

“Thanks. I’ll go ask him.”

“God bless,” Mr. Neimann said. “Anything you need, you let Jean and me know. We’re here to help.”

He made an awkward salute with his spatula. Radar returned the gesture with equal ineptitude.

• • •

THE OLDSMOBILE WAS NOT out front. His father’s Buick was in the driveway, but Charlene was nowhere to be seen. Radar suddenly felt responsible for her. What if a band of hooligans had commandeered her Olds and she’d been left to wander the streets among the panicked mobs? He feared she would not fare well.

“Kermin!” Radar yelled as he opened the front door, though he knew his father was probably not in the main house.

“Kermin!”

He was already walking back through the kitchen, opening the sliding glass doors to the backyard and his father’s domain.

If undersize front yards were the superego, the mantle of decorum, a way to impress and reassure the viewing public that everything was under control, then backyards were the id, the palace of dreams, the impossible private oasis, a five-and-a-half-minute power ballad of whatever this homeowner would do if he or she had one thousand acres of good, clean American soil. The backyards of metro New Jersey contained patios and boat ports and decks and gardens and shrines and doghouses and water features and toolsheds and bocce pits and basketball courts and chicken coops and bonsai nurseries and ancient cannons and a pantheon of wonders that spring from the lavatic recesses of the soul.

In their own backyard, there was a path — carefully lit at all hours by theatrical clamshell lights — that led to the “playpen,” as Charlene called it, the radio shack into which Kermin had retreated, full stop. The shack itself was not very remarkable except for its outsize appendage: a giant 119-foot antenna tower with multiple dipoles and rotatable reflectors mounted up and down its trunk. Even Radar, supposed champion of wave propagation and far-flung DXing, would have been the first to tell you that the tower was obscene and unnecessary, its soaring reticulation shivering upward like the twisted hand of a dying corpse. Here, writ large, was the conundrum of the amateur radioman’s antenna: there were always more signals to catch, always that obscure 5.910-MHz radio wave from Papua New Guinea that could be corralled with just the right forty-five-foot parallel yagi. And so the antenna would grow, collecting its metallic progeny, until it threatened to collapse under its own excess. When he had installed it ten years earlier, the neighbors all served complaints and held town meetings and tried to sue Kermin, but he had done his homework: as long as the tower was under 120 feet and posed no immediate health risk, it was perfectly legal. God bless America.

On the day it was finally complete, when the cranes had left and the very last dump truck had hauled away its load, Kermin, bleeding freely from the forehead after being stabbed by some errant antenna spoke, came into the living room and announced: “We are now part of the world.”

The opposite was true. One year later, he finally shuttered his shop, a business that had been failing steadily since its opening. It could now be freely said out in the open: the Sony Watchman™ had been a flop. Kermin, long blind to the writing on the wall, had been slow to adapt to new, successful technologies. For years, Ravna Gora Communications had languished as one of those sad, musty repair stores with no one coming or going save its hunchbacked owner, haunting his collection of junk like a ghost of spare parts past. After the shop’s closure, with no real reason to leave the house, Kermin had hunkered down in his shack at the base of that monstrosity. He now left their property only to fetch an obscure part at J & A Specialties Electronics or to walk the banks of the Passaic River when a technical problem was particularly vexing.

The strange thing was that for all of their supposed overlap in interest and expertise, Kermin would never talk with Radar about his work in the shack. Radar had learned long ago to stop asking. He had also accepted that no matter his own qualifications, he would never gain entrance into that sacred ground. Such a prohibition might’ve seemed gratuitous once upon a time, but now it was just another fact of life. The closest he had come was several lingering peeks when the door was momentarily left ajar, before Kermin noticed the trespass and snapped the door shut like a lizard’s mouth.

“This world is so big,” he once said. “I just want one space that is only mine.”

After the tower went up, Radar had asked if he could tap the mighty antenna to service his own modest ham station in his bedroom. Kermin had refused. Late one night, Radar tried to run a discreet coaxial line into the tower’s box, but Kermin found it on his inspection rounds the next day and ripped up the cable.

“We must not let others do work we should be doing,” Kermin said, dangling the offensive wire like a demised serpent.

“But I’m your son,” said Radar.

“This is the lesson: find your own frequency,” said Kermin. “If you want tower, buy tower, and place tower next to mine. But please don’t cast signal shadow. And you might want to make less than ten meters high so the neighbor won’t get feisty again.”

Radar never did end up building his own tower.

• • •

ON THE DOOR TO the shack, his father had hung the alphanumerics of his call sign, K2W9, carefully burned into a board of stained maple alongside a framed picture of a cartoon radio tower expelling boisterous, parenthetical signals. Radar rapped out a K, dah-dit-dah——, on the door. In the past, confronting the shack had always been a reminder of the balance of power in this world, for it was still a forbidden place, a monument to his father’s tenuous generational hold on the reins of authority. But now that the current was gone, the shack suddenly seemed sad and useless, its antenna a ridiculous hubristic appendage. What would he find inside? His father weeping amid a sea of dead receivers?

Radar knocked again. Dah-dit-dah——. Dah-dit-dah—•—.

No answer. All was quiet.

He tried the door, assuming it would be double-bolted, but found, to his surprise, that it was unlocked. He tentatively pushed it open. His internal motor hiccuped, upshifted, spinning its gears at this rare chance to glimpse the shack’s coveted interior.

“Hello? Tata? You in there? There’s been a. .”

An intense wave of burnt metal wafted out from the gloom. He coughed, reeling backwards. The smell made him shudder and gag at the same time.

“Tata? Are you okay?” he called into the gloom, knowing even as he said it that if anyone was inside there, it was highly unlikely they would be okay. He lifted the collar of his shirt above his nose and ventured forth.

“Tata!” he yelled.

The open door let some light into the hut’s darkened interior. The place looked like a disaster zone. Several large shelves had collapsed, spilling heaps of equipment onto the floor. Nearly every surface was covered with electrical components — buckets of antennae, spare parts, wires dangling from the ceiling, all manner of radios in various states of decay. Radar peered into the darkness. Nothing appeared to be on fire, but the smell of cordite was incredibly strong. One wall was completely black and scorched.

In the middle of the room, Radar spotted a giant machine. A long series of interlocking metal cylinders ending in a large cone. It looked like a futuristic ray gun. Radar took a step forward. What the hell was this thing? He noticed that the end opposite the cone appeared heavily damaged. The metal was twisted and gnarled. This must have been what he smelled. It looked as if there had been some kind of explosion.

Radar carefully approached, fearful of another blast. He put a hand on the smooth barrel of the machine. There were three main parts to it: the end that had burst open, the middle series of cylinders, which were covered in a sea of wires, and then the cone, which was made of a very fine mesh.

Could it be? Radar closed his eyes. Counted to three. Opened them again. The machine was still there.

All at once, he realized he had seen this machine before. It was in a science magazine that had been floating around their house for years.

But no. It was preposterous. He could not believe it. This was from a science fiction movie. It couldn’t be real.

Fig. 3.7. Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Oscillating Cathode Electromagnetic Pulse Generator

From Radasky, W. (2005), “Non-Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse Generators,” Journal of Electrical Engineering 27: 24–31

And yet all the proof was here: the exploded flux compression generator that would precipitate the massive blast of electrons, the barrel-like vircator to shape this blast into a brief, powerful pulse of microwave energy, and the conical antenna to diffuse and direct the pulse. He would never have thought it was possible to build a machine like this without massive governmental support, yet here it was. Not only had his father built it (Where had he gotten the parts?), but it had actually worked. The pulse must have been magnified by the giant 119-foot antenna above the shack and been broadcast across a huge area.

Holy, holy crap.

His father, Kermin Radmanovic, had caused the blackout.

5

And yet his father was nowhere to be found.

“Tata?” he called again.

Nothing.

What the hell had his father been doing? Why had he built this thing? The whole idea of an explosively pumped flux compression generator was that it would explode. Didn’t he realize this? Didn’t he realize the potential devastation? Did he want to cause such devastation?

“Tata!” he coughed.

Maybe his father had been blown into a corner and was now knocked unconscious — or worse. He ventured deeper into the room but saw no evidence of Kermin, only more piles and piles of electrical junk. There was an overturned barrel full of various antennae that looked like an arsenal of medieval sabers; a collapsed rack of plush leather earphones; boxes of shattered vacuum tubes; rolls and rolls of wires of all different gauges; a collection of old World War II cryptography machines; and, across one low shelf, a solemn procession of microphones from every era since the dawn of broadcasting, now covered in shrapnel from the blast.

It was then that he looked up. He made a little gasp and tripped, falling backwards against the wall. Bats. The ceiling was filled with bats. There were hundreds of them. The bats were getting ready to sweep down and attack him. He instinctively covered his face.

But there was no attack. In fact, they did not move at all, so, after catching his breath again, Radar stood up and took a closer look. They weren’t bats at all — they were birds. Hundreds of tiny birds. Thousands of tiny birds. All dead. Hanging upside down from strings attached to their feet. He now saw that a number of the birds had been blown around the room during the explosion — he could see them on the floor, littered across the shelves.

Yet there was something wrong with the birds. Not just in their deadness — their bodies were not right. Then Radar realized what it was: the birds had no heads. Every single one of them was headless. This couldn’t have been caused by the explosion alone. He picked up one of the creatures and touched its feathered wing. The joints were soft and supple; the wing bent perfectly against his hands, swinging up and down as if under the influence of an invisible breeze. He had always figured taxidermied birds would be stiff and immovable, but this one was like a little bird robot. He looked into its neck and saw the glint of metal and wire.

What had been going on in here? Electromagnetic pulse generators and flocks of headless robot birds?

“Tata!” he called. “Kermin!”

He shivered. Despite the heat, he suddenly felt chilled and overtaken by the distinct sensation that he was performing some kind of trespass. He dropped the bird and slowly backed out of the shack, slamming the door behind him. In the yard, he stood, breathing, trying to reconcile what was in there with what was out here.

Mr. Neimann had mentioned that he heard a loud bang right before the lights went out. He had also said they had found the source of the blackout. What if the authorities were already on their way? Their entire block would instantly be swarming with FBI agents, CIA, military—everyone. His father would be labeled a whack-job terrorist. He could already see the New York Post headline:

BIRD-CRAZY BALKAN MAN DETONATES E-BOMB, CRIPPLES NEW JERSEY

And where was Kermin? Had he panicked when the explosion went off? Maybe he was hiding somewhere. Yes. Of course.

Radar ran into the house, shouting his father’s name.

“It’s okay, Tata. I saw the machine. I know what happened,” he said. “It’s okay — you can come out now.”

He checked every room in the house. He checked the basement. He looked under the couches, in the attic crawl space, behind the shower curtain. His father was nowhere to be seen. He must’ve fled. Or maybe he was injured and had gone to the hospital?

He heard a car door slam out front. The police! The police had found them already.

Suddenly he was the one looking for a hiding place. The basement! Behind those boxes of his childhood Erector Set! Quick!

There was no time to lose, and yet curiosity drove him into the front parlor, where he hunched on Kermin’s favorite beige couch and parted the linen curtains. He just wanted to see the scrum of SWAT trucks, to see how many guns they had trained on the house. He wanted to see the police tape cordoning off the crowd of anxious, disbelieving neighbors. He wanted to see polite Mr. Neimann’s expression when he heard the news that Kermin, kind old Kermin, was a wanted terrorist.

But there were no guns. No SWAT trucks. There was only the Oldsmobile.

It was Charlene. She was speaking with Mr. Neimann on the sidewalk, gesturing at the car. Mr. Neimann, still holding the spatula, was nodding like a good neighbor.

Radar collapsed back into the couch. Suddenly the question now became: What should he tell her? The truth? That her husband had blown up New Jersey, kept a shackful of headless birds, and was now on the run from the authorities? What would this do to her?

As much as she might argue otherwise, his mother was a fragile woman. Radar had the feeling that she had spent much of her life running from a part of herself, a dark part that had never seen the light of day. While he was away at college, she had battled through multiple bouts of depression, and there were a couple of times when things had gotten really bad, when she had slipped all the way to the edge, when he was terrified that he would wake up to a call in the middle of the night and she would be gone. That call had never come, but the edge was still there. The edge was always there. The threat of her relapsing had created a strong gravitational field around their little family and was part of the reason he had never left home.

He went to the kitchen and sat down at the table. The twin radios, now silent, still flanked the pig centerpiece. His father’s plate and its lunula of forgotten toast. Nearby, the humping-bunny mug, which housed the cold dregs of his mother’s chinchilla concoction. The props of a marriage at equilibrium.

This house. How funny, this house. How funny this house was just another house, and yet it contained all of this.

Outside, the light was beginning to soften. He wondered what time it was. A pang of hunger. He looked at the clock on the wall. Two forty-four. Like all clocks, it had stopped at the moment of the pulse. He guessed it must be at least eight o’clock.

He heard the front door open and close.

“Radar?” his mother called.

“I’m in here, Mom.”

“Radar?”

“In here.”

She was still wearing her lab coat, which was covered in great big streaks of muck, as if she had been thwacking her way through a dense forest. There was a small cut across her forehead.

“Are you okay?” he asked, standing.

“Oh, Radar!” she said, her eyes sparkling. “I was out there. You should’ve seen me. I was out there.”

“You look like you were out there.”

“It was absolutely wild.”

“The Olds worked, huh?”

“Oh, it was beautiful. What justice. I mean, to drive around all these fancy cars — these BMWs, these Mercedes. I just lay into my horn. I had no shame. I think I drove six people to the hospital. Everyone thought I was a doctor because of my coat. But it didn’t matter, I was just out there. Helping people. Doing my duty. I haven’t felt this good. .” She shook her head. “But it’s the strangest thing. My sense of smell is gone.”

“Gone?”

“Well, not gone. You know me. But not like it was. I can’t feel a room anymore.” She sniffed.

“I’m sure it’s just stress,” he said. “How bad is it out there?”

“Well, for the most part, everyone’s helping each other out. But even in the last hour, it’s been getting worse. People were starting to act a little crazy. Like it was the end of the world. Who knew a simple power outage would cause such a panic?”

“It’s not just a simple power outage.”

“A policeman even tried to take my car. Can you believe it? But I told him, ‘No. No way — this is my baby.’ He even had the nerve to pull out his gun and tell me the roads were closed and that I had to give him the car, by law, but I didn’t fall for any of that crap.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I drove away. What was he going to do, shoot me?”

“A policeman pulled a gun on you and you just drove away?”

“They can’t just do whatever they want.”

“Uh, they declared martial law. They actually can do whatever they want.”

“That’s my car. I was helping people. I wasn’t causing trouble,” she said. “I stuck by that car for thirty years; I should at least be able to keep it when the going gets a little rough.”

Radar smiled. “I never would’ve thought, Mom,” he said. “I didn’t know you still had it in you.”

“Just wait until I tell your father about all this. He probably didn’t think I had it in me, either. Where is the old man, by the way?”

Radar blinked.

“I bet he’s in a foul mood. Is his playpen in ruins?”

Radar felt his gears hiccup. Did she know?

“What do you mean?” he said.

“All those electronics he has out there! People were saying everything got fried. You’ve got to feel for the man.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah,” he said, relieved.

“How’s your station?”

“Same as everywhere. The pulse took out all the circuitry. We hadn’t protected it properly,” he said. “It’s my fault.”

“How were you supposed to know about something like this?” Charlene got up and started walking toward the backyard. “Well, I suppose I’ll have to talk him down myself.”

Radar leaped up. “Don’t!”

“What?” She looked surprised.

“He went out.”

“He did? Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, he went out?”

“I mean, he just disappeared.”

She shook her head. “I’ll tell you what — that man. I love him, but that man will drive you nuts.”

Radar considered telling her everything. About the EMP. The birds. He opened his mouth but couldn’t bring himself to speak.

“Well, I for one am going to lie down,” she said. “When he comes back, tell him I’m upstairs and he’s responsible for dinner.”

“Dinner might be a problem. We might be facing a lot of problems.”

“I’m sure we will, but I’m going upstairs,” she said. “I’m going to take a Valium and put my feet up so that when the end of the world comes I’m at least feeling relaxed.”

• • •

RADAR DID NOT DRINK, but as day faded into night, as what was then faded into what will be, he pulled out a dusty bottle of his father’s šljivovica and poured a thumb or two into one of his old Star Wars glasses. As Mr. Neimann had said, now seemed like as good a time as any. And in some strange way, it felt as if he was lighting a homing beacon for his father, even though Kermin also rarely drank. The šljivovica was saved for only momentous occasions — births, deaths, graduations. Blackouts. He sipped the rakija, waiting for someone to walk through the front door. Kermin? The authorities? Surely any investigator with half a brain would be drawn to the house with the absurd, 119-foot antenna that towered above the entire neighborhood?

Yet the front door remained closed. Eventually, after two more thumbs of šljivovica, feeling the quiver of wire in his blood, he lit a dusty candle from their dining room table and headed out to the backyard again. Dusk had already descended on the neighborhood, leaving the houses oddly dark. A sound of sirens rushing a street or two over. He listened, but they did not stop in front of their house, instead Dopplering away to a distant disaster.

When Radar opened the door to the shack, he was again hit by that pungent odor of things burning and now burned. The bird bodies still hung above him; the light from the candle elongated their limbs into a latticework of ghoulish shadows.

He stepped over the detritus and made his way to his father’s cluttered desk. Tacked to the wall just above, two framed black-and-white photographs hung cockeyed. One showed a young Nikola Tesla, looking heavily eyebrowed and manic under the glare of a flashbulb of his own invention. The other was a grainy snapshot of Deda Dobroslav, posing triumphantly on some anonymous mountaintop in Bosnia during World War II with Vojvoda Dujic and a heavily bearded band of Chetniks in black sheepskin shubaras. He leaned in closer to the photograph. In the foreground, Dujic, their talismanic leader, was holding an absurdly long rifle in one hand. This picture must have been taken early on in the war, when hope still carried the day and weary warriors could pause in their day’s pursuit to taste the sun’s riches on the top of a mountain. Crouching beside the cluster of barbarian warriors, his grandfather was the only man without a beard, his face burned dark from the sun. Radar sensed an aura of innocence emanating from those eyes, no doubt enhanced by his giant radio backpack. The resident communications geek. Some things never changed. Though the photograph was blurry, Radar could just make out Dobroslav saying something into the mouthpiece of the radio. Was he actually communicating a message as the camera shutter clicked open? Or was he simply hamming it up for the photographer? Somehow, this picture had survived the war and then made it halfway across the world to America. The captured photons of that fall morning still held true, seventy years later, suspended in silver gelatin, framed above the desk of a radio shack in New Jersey.

It was as he had written once. Rule #48: History persists.

He walked back over to the pulse generator. Touched its hull. He was suddenly taken by a chill, a feeling of emptiness. He looked down and saw something lying on the ground. A little figure. A man, made of sticks and coiled twine. He picked it up, turning it over in his hands. He thought he had seen such a figure before, though he could not remember when.

In one corner of the room, Radar caught sight of a large metal trunk. He touched its side, confused at first, before he realized what it was: a Faraday cage. Of course. His father must have known the potential consequences of his machine, even if he was perhaps not quite aware of how wide-ranging those consequences would be. But he would have at least wanted to protect his own equipment.

Radar looked around the shack. It sure seemed as if he had left a lot out in the open, to simply be fried by the pulse. Maybe he hadn’t really known what he was doing. Certainly he hadn’t considered the role the giant antenna would play in broadcasting the pulse. But all of this — this explosion, this pulse — did not seem like his father’s behavior: his father did not affect things. His father simply was—observing, listening, grumbling. He was a passenger, not the driver. Maybe he had seized the wheel for one brief and terrible moment?

Radar unlatched the trunk and opened its lid. A little gasp. It was indeed a trunk full of riches. There were flashlights and radios and small televisions (apparently he had not thrown all of these out). Earphones. A calculator wristwatch. A cell phone (so his father did have a cell phone!). A Taser. An old IBM laptop. A digital camera.

Just then, released from its cage, one of the transceivers began to beep. The noise sounded foreign to his ears, and Radar realized he had already mentally adjusted to a world devoid of such electronic sounds. He picked up the radio and found that it was connected to an old Vibroplex Morse key — what they called “a bug” in the business. The transceiver must have been in CW mode. The beeps he was hearing were in Morse code:

—— ••• •—•• —•— ••—— •— ———•— ••••

It had been a while since Radar last used Morse, but it was a language deeply ingrained in his psyche. When he was five years old, he had learned the code in just one day, and for weeks afterwards he would speak to people only in Morse, annoying everyone but Kermin to no end.

Radar quickly translated the signal in his head:

QSL K2W9 QTH?

These were the so-called Q Codes — abbreviations developed by CW operators as shorthand for common phrases. QSL meant “Acknowledge that you receive this message.” K2W9 was his father’s call sign. QTH? meant “What’s your position?”

This was most likely one of his father’s ham friends. He probably just wanted to chew the rag about the blackout, not knowing that Kermin was, in fact, the cause of it all.

Radar picked up the paddle key. Positioned thumb and forefinger. The lingering twitch of the first dash. The code came back fast. He realized how much he had missed it. The secret to Morse code was not the length of the dits and the dahs but rather the length of the spaces in between.

—— ••• •—••—•— •—•—•• he tapped, the letters coming out neat and clean. QSL QRZ? This was an acknowledgement of message and a request for the identity of the caller.

There was a pause. And then — — •——••—— This meant: 9 12.

What was this? There was a chance he was hearing it wrong, that he was out of practice, but he didn’t think so, as the sender on the other end had a tight, clear delivery, and Radar could generally understand him perfectly. “9 12” in old Western Union 92 Code meant “Priority business. Do you understand?” It was unusual for anyone to be using such antiquated lingo, but then Kermin kept strange friends.

Two can play this game. Radar tapped out 13, Western Union for “I understand.”

The reply came after a moment:

—— •—• —•• —•— ••—— •— ——•

QRZ WHERE IS K2W9?

His interlocutor obviously was not fooled. Like every CW operator, Radar had his own particular “fist,” or accent, that no doubt diverged from his father’s. It was like a sonic fingerprint. A trained ear could hear the difference between two Morse operators within the first few dashes. Radar wondered about the deviation between his father’s fist and his own. Was he more forceful? His father lazy and self-assured? Well, he would just have to come clean.

—• ••• ••• •• —• —•

QRZ K2RAD, HIS SON, he tapped out. K2W9 IS MISSING.

He waited. A long pause. Maybe he had scared him off.

Then: WHAT HAPPENED?

He responded: DON’T KNOW. I’M IN SHACK. QRZ?

—• ——•—•—• — •— •• — ••• ••••—•—•

He didn’t want to get into the whole pulse generator situation, lest this person decide to report it to the police and ruin everything.

VIRCATOR? EXPLOSION? came the reply.

How did they know?

WHO ARE YOU? Radar tapped.

Pause.

A FRIEND. WHAT ABOUT BIRDS?

Radar looked up at the creatures hanging above him. So they knew about this as well.

THEY SURVIVED, he wrote. WHAT ARE THEY?

—•• •—•— •—• •••—•• •••—•—•••—•—•— •— ••

I WILL COME OVER.

Here? Radar looked around. Kermin wasn’t even here to defend himself. It was a disaster. He couldn’t have anyone here.

HOW YOU KNOW K2W9? he tapped.

WE WORK TOGETHER.

WHY DID K2W9 HAVE VIRCATOR?

—— •••• •—•••—• •••—•• •—• —•— •——— •—• ••— ••

Pause.

FOR THE SHOW.

WHAT SHOW?

Another pause.

I’LL COME AND GET BIRDS.

NO. Radar was suddenly annoyed at the stubbornness of these beeps. Who did this person think he was?

IT’S IMPORTANT, came the response.

K2W9 MUST AGREE, he tapped.

WHERE IS HE?

I DON’T KNOW.

A long pause.

Then: K2RAD, YOU COME HERE. WE WILL SHOW YOU.

——••—— •—• •—•• —••— —•— —— ••—•—•——

SHOW ME WHAT?

THE HEADS. BRING A BIRD.

WHAT ABOUT K2W9?

There was no answer.

DO YOU KNOW WHERE HE IS?

WE ARE AT XANADU P4 D26 came the answer.

Radar took a scrap of paper and wrote this down.

XANADU P4 D26? QSD?

IN 1 HOUR. 73 SX.

“73” was a sign-off. Radar felt himself panicking.

WHAT IS XANADU? he tapped frantically. ROAD? STREET?

There was no answer.

WHICH BIRD?

Silence.

R U THERE? But it was already clear that whoever it was had slipped back into the vast, blank spectrum of night.

“Xanadu?” Radar said by candlelight. “P4 D26?”

He studied the scrap of paper. It was clearly a code of some sort. He had flirted with cryptanalysis in college, and now his mind jumped to possible encryption methods: could it be an alphanumerical substitution cipher? Maybe “Xanadu” was the keyword. Or maybe it was a columnar transposition coordinate system? Or a modified Nihilist symmetric encryption cipher? Or was it a chess move, and the board was some kind of map? It would take him days—weeks—to crack. He did not have weeks. He did not have days. He looked at his watch. He had about fifty-three minutes.

6

There was, of course, still the minor dilemma of what to do with the smoking gun of the pulse generator. With his father nowhere to be found, should he take the liberty of dismantling and destroying the evidence? Sooner or later, the authorities would triangulate the origin of the blackout to their house and they would all — he and Charlene included — be in serious, serious trouble. Radar decided to leave it for the time being. He would come back and handle it shortly, but first he needed to find Xanadu and try to track down his father.

But where could his father have gone? Kermin never went anywhere. That shack was his den. If ever he strayed too far (read: ten blocks or so), he always came rushing back to its safe haven.

Radar went over to the Faraday trunk and proceeded to pilfer it. At this point, he no longer cared what Kermin thought — after nearly blowing up New Jersey, his father had lost the moral high ground. Radar took the flashlights, the radio, one of the pocket televisions, the calculator watch, and the cell phone. He put on the watch and stuffed the rest into a backpack. He also carefully picked out three birds from the ceiling. He tried to choose three varying specimens, but to his eyes, at least, they all looked fairly similar.

Tata, what the hell were you going to do with these things?

Radar took one last look at the carnage of the shack’s interior. This, the epicenter of the Great Jersey Blackout. Would they one day write a book about this room? Radar shook his head. Just before leaving, he felt compelled to pick up the stick figure he had found by the vircator and put this into his backpack as well. Then he closed the door behind him.

Xanadu, Xanadu. . What was Xanadu?

He had heard this name before. In a movie? Or was it a book? He cursed his ignorance of pop culture. His time was ticking away. He looked at his watch. It was 8:23 P.M. He estimated he was already down to forty-five minutes.

The house was dark. He lit another candle and headed upstairs.

“Mom?” he called.

She was lying on her bed, listening to a hand-cranked record player crackling away on the floor. The windows were wide open. There was a collection of uncapped sniffing bottles on the bedside table.

“He still isn’t back?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“I wonder where he’s gone off to?” she said. “Obviously he feels no obligation to protect his own family.”

“I’m sure he has good reason.”

She shifted on the bed. “This is his favorite piece,” she said.

“What is?”

“Caruso singing ‘Una furtiva lagrima.’ We used to take this out and listen together after you had gone to sleep. We would hold hands. Can you believe it? Holding hands,” she said. “I pulled out the record player and thought that if I played it, I might lure him back.”

So they both had their homing beacons: his was liquor; hers was music.

They were quiet, listening to the aria. Caruso sustained, inspected, and released a high note out through the windows and into the ether.

“Where could he be?” she said. “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “You’ll see. There’ll be some explanation and we’ll all laugh about this later.”

Charlene reached over and sniffed one of the bottles on her bedside table.

“I still can’t smell a thing,” she said.

“I’m sure it’ll come back.” He went over and sat on the bed. “You did really good today, Mom. You helped a lot of people. Tata would be proud.”

“Are you sure he’s not in his shack?”

“I—” He again thought about telling her all. “No. I checked.”

He lay down beside her. His parents’ room had morphed and changed colors and layout over the years, but lying on his back now, he was able to recall all of those nights when he would burrow down between his parents after having a nightmare, Kermin sideways and snoring, Charlene rubbing his back and humming a little lullaby. In his memory, this room was a place no nightmares could penetrate.

After a final exhortation from Caruso, the aria clicked to an end. The needle shifted into an endless groove, spinning around and around. Radar got up, cranked the box several times, and then flipped the record to the other side.

“It’s amazing the things that still work now,” he said. “Maybe we’ll become a mechanical society. Everything will be hand-cranked.”

“Do you think we’ll ever get the electricity back?” she asked.

“I think so,” he said. “The city already got its power back. But then, I don’t think the city got hit like we did.”

“Ha! Of course. The city will always have its power.”

“Mom,” said Radar, “what’s Xanadu?”

“Xanadu?” she said. “You mean the poem?”

“The poem?”

She began to orate in a faux British accent:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

“What is that?” he said.

“Coleridge,” she said. “I wasted my time in college writing a useless thesis about Coleridge and narrative fragmentation.”

“It doesn’t sound so useless.”

“Oh, it was. I think the title was ‘Completion as a Function of Interruption’ or some nonsense like that.”

“But is Xanadu an actual place?”

“I think it did exist in China once upon a time.”

“But I mean, we couldn’t actually go to Xanadu now, right?”

“No, but then, that’s the whole point. It’s something not real. . The poem was famous in part because it was incomplete.”

“How do you mean?”

“Coleridge claimed he had been reading this book about Kublai Khan right before he smoked some opium and then he fell asleep. And while he was sleeping, he had this very vivid dream about a poem. . a complete poem, in five parts. . something like three hundred lines long. And so he wakes up and begins writing it all down. But then the doorbell rings and a visitor from Porlock interrupts him. The visitor stays for about an hour or so, and when Coleridge finally gets back to writing the poem, he’s forgotten the rest.”

“So what did he do?”

“He left it as it was. At least that’s what he claimed. A lot of people think he made the whole story up, but I guess I just loved the idea of this mysterious visitor from Porlock coming in and interrupting genius at work. It’s the idea that if only we hadn’t been interrupted, then we could’ve accomplished our magnum opus. . but in the end, we come to realize that the interruption is the work itself.” She paused, opening and closing her hand like a jellyfish. “Did you know that in Lolita, Quilty checks into the hotel as ‘A. Person, Porlock, England’?”

Radar was suddenly struck by the depth of his mother’s knowledge. He realized he had never once asked her about her college thesis. He had always dismissed her as his slightly less hapless parent, when in fact, here she was, a walking literary encyclopedia, a font of information, untapped for all these years. How had he never quite understood this? Perhaps because proximity — contrary to popular belief — did not breed clarity. Her habits were not habits, but merely the backdrop for his own upbringing, quite literally: for as long as he could remember, sheets had obscured all of the bookshelves in the house. He had grown up thinking of books as something dirty, to be kept but never shown, which might explain why as a teenager he would regularly develop random erections in the school library. But these books, her books, hidden as they were, had all been considered, read, placed in an order dictated by a mind at work. For the first time, he saw her as a fully functioning being, someone other than just his mother.

“A. Person, Porlock, England,” he repeated.

“When I first read that, I almost died. It was like Nabokov and I were living in the same world. We were not so different, he and I. We both had our Porlocks.”

“Someone said they would meet me at Xanadu.” He reached into his fanny pack and took out the scrap of paper. “Xanadu P4 D26.”

“Sounds very Dadaistic.”

“I think it’s some sort of code.”

“You mean like spies?” she said.

“Some kind of transposition cipher or something.”

“Or maybe they were talking about Xanadu.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, Xanadu—that monstrosity by the football stadium.”

“What monstrosity by the football stadium?” Radar said. A dim light flickered in his head.

“You know, the mall. Xanadu. The building with the awful stripes?”

The awful stripes. Yes. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Xanadu. The answer had been staring him in the face the entire time. Of course.

“It’s the mall!” he whispered.

“It’s an abomination,” she said. “Have you seen that thing?”

She was right. It was an abomination. Billed as “the largest mall in the world,” the hideously gargantuan pajama-striped mega shopping complex sat at the confluence of the New Jersey Turnpike and Route 3, just across from the newly constructed Meadowlands Stadium, a stone’s throw from the Hackensack River. One day soon, Xanadu promised to offer six million square feet of glory for the entire family, including an indoor ski slope, a skydiving tunnel, a skating rink, a water park, and a three-hundred-foot Ferris wheel that orbited a giant Pepsi symbol visible for twenty-five miles on a clear day. The only problem was that it looked like a day care turned terrorist detention center and had been languishing, empty, for years now — ever since its primary backers, Lehman Brothers and the Mills Corporation, had both gone belly up. Xanadu had been renamed Xanadu Meadowlands Mall, which was then shortened to Meadowlands Mall, which had recently been rechristened again as the American Dream Meadowlands Mall. But Xanadu would always be Xanadu.

“I need to go,” Radar said suddenly.

“To Xanadu?”

“I’ll be back. I swear. I just need to go.” He kissed her forehead. “Thanks, Mom.”

“What did I do?”

“Everything,” he said. “I’m lucky to have you.”

“Don’t go,” she said. “Not you, too.”

“But I’m going to find out what happened to him.”

“At Xanadu?”

“That’s all I’ve got right now.”

She stared at him and narrowed her eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He realized his folly. She was his wife, for God’s sake. It was a bond of intimacy, however flawed, that he would probably never experience. She had a right to know.

He sighed.

“Kermin was the one who caused it,” he said.

“Caused what?”

“The blackout.”

“Kermin? As in my husband?” She blinked. “How?”

He shook his head. “It’s complicated. But when I went into the shack today, I found an electromagnetic pulse generator. It’s very powerful. It had exploded, and it must’ve sent out a pulse that was amplified by the antenna in our backyard.”

“Is he okay?” Her voice rose.

“He wasn’t in there.”

“But why would he do something like that?”

“I don’t know. I got a message on one of his radios to meet this guy at Xanadu.” He reached into his backpack, pulling out the little figurine. “And I found this. Have you ever seen it before?”

She took the stick figure from him. Touched its face with her fingertips.

“It’s strange, but I can’t feel him anymore,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”

“We’ll find him. I’ll go to Xanadu and then I’ll check the hospitals if I have to. He didn’t go far. He couldn’t have gone far.”

“The hospitals?” she said.

“I don’t think it came to that, but we have to be open to—”

“Wait, don’t go,” she said suddenly. She dropped the figurine and grabbed his arm, her fingers digging into his skin. “Don’t.”

“Ow, Mom. Let go. Easy.”

“Please,” she said. “Don’t go. You’re all I have left.”

“It’s gonna be fine, Mom. He’ll turn up. You know him. He probably freaked out when the pulse happened.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. I should’ve listened to him. . and now it’s too late.”

He was trying to pry off her fingers. “Mom, just let go for a second.”

“He was right the whole time.”

He stopped. There was a note of surrender in her voice that had caught his attention. Her hands suddenly went limp.

“Right about what?” he said.

“Oh, my sweet,” she said quietly. “I can’t believe what I did.”

“What did you do?” he said. “You’re kind of freaking me out right now.”

She was very still. Her eyes, looking out into an invisible distance.

“I. .” her mouth opened, hung there. “I almost killed you.”

“No, you didn’t,” he said. “You saved—”

“I did!”

Startled, he looked at her. The moment hung, swayed, tottered. Almost on cue, the record began to skip.

“Your seizures,” she whispered.

“Oh, Mom,” he said. “Stop. I can go back on my meds if you—”

“No, you don’t understand. It was all my fault.” Her eyes were filling with tears. “Your seizures, your hair. Everything. It was all because of me.”

He got up to fix the record. When he clicked the needle into a new groove, Caruso’s tenor again filled the room. The lightness of his voice drifting over a pincushion of notes.

“Mom,” he said, still from the floor. “A lot’s just happened. Tata’s not here, I understand. But don’t be too hard on yourself, okay? Just go easy. They’ll put the power back on, we’ll find Kerm—”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“I am listening to you.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “You were black. I mean, when you were born, you were black.”

“Wait,” he said. “What?”

All at once, he was overcome by a deep and acutely painful sense of déjà vu. As if she had already told him this. As if he had already sat by this record player, listening to this exact melody, looking up at his mother as she sat on the bed in this precise way. It had all happened before. It was as if they were merely rehearsing lines from a play.

“What do you mean, I was black?” Hearing himself say the words again for the first time.

“I don’t know why I did it. He told me not to go.” The glint of tears on her cheeks.

“Did what?” he said.

She got up from the bed.

“Did what?” he repeated. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I just needed to find out what had gone wrong.” She was moving the bedside table, the smelling bottles tinkling against one another, one spilling onto the floor, filling the room with a strong scent of lilies. The candle trembled.

She was down on her hands and knees, prying at a loose floorboard.

“Hey, Mom. Don’t do that,” he said. “What’re you doing?”

He was about to go over and stop her when the board came up and then she was reaching inside the floor and pulling out something from the depths. A folder. Manila. Dusty. She wiped it off, came over, laid it in his lap.

“What’s this?” he said.

“It’s for you,” she said.

Fig. 3.8. “Black Baby’s Condition Remains a Mystery”

From the New York Post, April 25, 1975

Inside, there were pages and pages of newspaper clippings. He moved over to the candlelight and squinted at the text, though, again, he already somehow knew what he would find. “Caucasian Couple Give Birth to Black Newborn at St. Elizabeth’s,” “Easter Miracle in New Jersey,” “Doctors at a Loss to Explain Child’s Appearance.” He saw his name. His parents’ names.

His hands felt as if they were not his own. He saw a copy of a birth certificate, the blurry picture of a baby lying in an incubator. He had seen this picture before. He felt a rushing sensation in his ears. Another burning wash of the familiar frissoned his body’s circuity.

“I’ve never shown this to anyone,” she said.

“This. .” He tapped the picture of the incubated baby. “This is me?”

“Not even Kermin,” she said.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”

She didn’t say anything.

He felt the heat in his face. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me about this? I mean, this seems pretty fucking important, right? Pretty fucking important to let your son in on. .”

“I know—”

“Were you just never going to tell me?”

She was weeping suddenly, uncontrollably, and his anger parted as he watched her crumple onto the bed.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, all right. It’s okay.”

“Your father. . Your father didn’t like to talk about it,” she said finally, wiping her face. “So we just left it. We left it and hoped it would go away.”

“But—” He was staring at a journal article, “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male.” A diagram of skin cells surrounded by a mote of long, polysyllabic words. “I don’t understand. Why was I black? I mean, how is that even possible?”

She slid down beside him on the floor. Put her hand on the page, touching a cross-section of dermis.

“It was just the way of things,” she said slowly. “There were theories. There were theories, but no one could prove anything.”

Radar looked over at the record spinning in circles. Caruso’s voice was full of quiet counsel. He blinked, trying to make room for this. Trying to imagine himself emergent, a black newborn.

“Fuck,” he said.

“I know, I know.”

“So then. . wait.” The wheels spinning. “What does that make Kermin?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is he my father?”

She was silent.

“Mom.”

“There were tests. They tested his blood.”

“And?”

“The doctor said he was your father.”

He turned. “But I’m asking you. Is Kermin my father?”

“Yes! Yes, of course. I mean. .” She sighed. She rubbed her face. “I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t want to believe it.”

“Didn’t want to believe what?”

She was silent.

“Didn’t want to believe what, Mom?”

“It was just one night. He only came back for one night,” she said quietly.

“Who came back for one night?”

She turned back to him and closed her eyes. “Oh, Lord.”

“Who came back for one night?”

“I never knew his real name. T.K. That was it. I had known him from before — when I first moved to New York. And then we lost touch. And right when your father and I were getting married, he came back. He showed up on my doorstep one day.” Her eyes glazed over. “He was from Minnesota. He had a laugh. He had a way of laughing. .”

“He was a black guy?”

She nodded.

“Holy shit,” he said.

“I still couldn’t believe it. Even when you came out how you did. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, I thought. And then there was all this coverage about you, and I thought for sure that he would show up and say, ‘That’s mine, that’s my kid. Give me back my kid.’”

“But I was your kid too.”

“Yeah, but for a while it didn’t feel like that.”

“And so did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Did he come back?”

“No.”

“And you never tried to find him again?”

She shook her head.

He looked down at the diagram of the skin cell. Trying to imagine T.K., this black man from Minnesota, from whom he had possibly sprung.

“Did Kermin know?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He was so quiet. That was his way of getting through things. But he always knew more than he let on. I mean, how could he not know, right? You would look at you and you would look at us, and it was obvious that something had gone wrong.”

“Why didn’t you tell him?”

“If you don’t want to believe, if you do enough not to believe, if you see a doctor and he tells you a whole other possibility. . then you believe what you want,” she said. “But your father. . he was so. . so patient. He loved you from the moment you were born. He always loved you, even when I couldn’t take care of you. Even when I fell apart. He never stopped loving you.”

“But,” Radar said, suddenly feeling dizzy. “But. . I’m not black anymore.”

“You’ve got to understand,” she said. “I became obsessed. I became obsessed for all the wrong reasons. .”

“So what happened?”

“I just got this idea in my head that there was a solution. Some kind of medical solution.”

“What do you mean, medical solution? My father was black. What other solution could there be?”

“I didn’t see it like that. It was like that wasn’t an option. That was impossible. Everything else became possible. I was searching for the possible. And then we found these people. .”

“What people?”

“You’re going to hate me if I tell you.”

“I’m not going to hate you,” he said. “What people?”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. “Well, we saw all these doctors, and no one could tell me what had happened to you. And then, out of the blue, I get this letter. And it was from these people. These scientists. They were in Norway. They said they could help us. And we shouldn’t have. . but we did.”

“Did what?”

“We took you there and. .” She grimaced. “And they electrocuted you.”

“I’m sorry, you what?”

She took his hand. “Oh, Ray Ray, I didn’t think it would actually work! We were just there to — I don’t even know. But it did! It did work! I mean, it made you look how you are now, but it also gave you everything else. Your epilepsy. Your hair. Everything.” She was losing it again. “And it was all. . all my idea. It was all my fault. . Oh, my sweet. My sweet. I’m such a bad person. I’m wicked. I’m such a wicked, selfish person.”

He was trying to understand. He no longer cared if she was falling apart or not. This was his life. This was about him. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “They electrocuted me? How?”

Hearing the hardness in his tone, she took a gulp of air and tried to bring herself back. “Your father, he would be—”

“My father?”

“Kermin would’ve been able to explain it much better than I could, but they connected you to this machine, like a pulse generator. . This is what made me think of it, after all these years. And they zapped your skin. . I didn’t understand it all. But look, that’s the point—there was nothing wrong with you.”

“I was black.”

“You were perfect, honey. Kermin said this, he kept saying that you were just fine as you were, but I didn’t listen to him. I wasn’t listening to anyone. I told you, I got totally crazy with this idea that there was an answer that could make everything better, and then that answer became this thing that we did to you.” She paused. “I was terrified of being a failure. Of being a mother who couldn’t take care of you. Of anyone. And so I did this thing that was exactly the thing I didn’t want to do. That’s always been my problem: I figure out what’s exactly the worst thing to do, the thing that will ruin everything else, and then that’s what I do. It’s cowardice, is what it is. And after doing what I did to you. . for many years, I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. I hated myself so much, it hurt just to get up in the morning. But your father. . he always stuck by me. Even when I couldn’t bear living another day. He told me we still had you. And it was true. We had you. We have you. Oh.”

She reached out for him, but Radar got up, the clippings spilling across the floor. He went over to the bed and fell backwards onto the comforter. Breathing. Trying to let it settle. He stared up at the ceiling, recognizing the same pattern of cracks from his childhood. The cracks resembled a wounded whale. The whale had been wounded for many years. He could hear his mother sniffling on the floor below.

“So,” he said slowly. “So. . I was born black? Like actually black.”

“No,” she said. “You were born dark. Very dark. But that’s the point, honey: You’re weren’t black. You weren’t anything. You’re Radar! My Radar. You’ve always been my Radar. You’re perfect.”

He lay there, hearing her words drift over him. But instead of feeling a great and terrible anger, as he had first expected he might feel, he was filled with a terrific sense of lightness, as if his whole body were lifting off the ground.

“I’m black!” he whispered to the wounded whale.

“No,” Charlene cried. She came up to him on the bed. “You aren’t black.”

“I’m black!”

“You are not black, honey. That’s not what I meant to say. I meant to apologize. I meant to say that I’m sorry. . I’m so incredibly, incredibly sorry for what I did. I’ve managed to live, but only because I had to. I don’t think I can forgive myself. And. . and I don’t expect you to forgive me, either. But just know I love you. I’ve always loved you,” she said. “I can’t imagine my life without you.”

Radar saw himself lying in the bed, saw the two of them in this little dim room surrounded by a great, dark city. As if every moment in his life had merely been a prelude to this moment. All at once, the world felt right. Knowable.

“I just didn’t want it to be a secret anymore,” he heard her say. “It all seems so pointless now. What was I trying to do?”

“It’s not pointless, Mom,” he said. He sat up. His arms felt limber. He felt as if he could scale a mountain. He reached for her wet face and kissed her on the forehead. “Thank you.”

She looked bewildered. “You aren’t mad?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel like I was asleep. And now I’m awake.”

She studied him. “I could’ve so easily killed you,” she said. “Oh, I can’t even think about it.”

“I’m not dead.”

She nodded, biting her lip. “I know.”

“I’m alive.” He felt alive. More alive than he’d ever been before.

“I know.”

“Mom.”

He hugged her, and she fell into him. They were like this for some time, listening to the hollow click of the record player, the scents of lily around them, and then he broke their embrace.

“Listen, I’m going to go find him. I promise I’ll come back, okay?”

“I don’t think you’ll find him.”

“I will. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, I promise. Just stay here and don’t go anywhere.”

“You’ll be careful?” she said. “You want to take my car?”

As soon as she said it, she winced. Radar had never gotten a license because of his epilepsy.

“Thanks, but I’ll bike,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s probably easier to bike at this point anyway. They’ll never find me.”

He reached into his backpack. “Here. Here’s a flashlight. And I’ll light some more candles.”

“It’s okay. I can do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve managed this long. I can fend off the beasts for one more night.” She picked up the figurine and placed it on the bedside table, next to the sniffing bottles. “He’ll protect me.”

Radar gathered up the folder, aware again of the hole still looming in the floor.

“Can I keep this for a little bit?”

“Of course. It’s yours. I’ve been saving it for you.”

He went over and placed a hand on her shoulder. She took hold of it.

“Come back, please,” she said. “Don’t leave me alone.”

“Mom.”

“You promise you don’t hate me?” she whispered.

“I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said. “Not one thing.”

7

Out on Forest Street, Radar emerged into a darkness he did not recognize. He realized he had never seen his neighborhood in such a state, released from the angular confines of the streetlights. Above, he could see stars, stars that had never been there before. But no: they had always been there; they had just been hidden by a scrim of light. To see the stars, you must be able to first see the night.

“Hello,” he whispered heavenward. “Welcome to New Jersey.” And when he said this, he knew he was actually talking to himself.

To the east, a faint, withered glow. So. The city had already gotten its power back, while they were left to suffer in the dark. But what a dark it was. A dark beyond reproach. The kind of dark that was, is, and always will be.

Since he was little, he had maintained a fraught relationship with the dark. Darkness had come to represent not the cyclical arrival of the night, but rather his periodic forced flights from consciousness. To feel the darkness creep into the edges of his vision meant that an involuntary departure from his body must soon follow. Darkness meant the absence of time. Or, more precisely: the absence of him from time. The world continued to spin without him, he hanging suspended between this universe and the next, waiting for the darkness to beat back its retreat and the light to take hold of him again. He had thought a lot about that world — the world that continued to spin while he was gone, the world that did not include him. It was almost impossible to comprehend. The observed could not exist without the observer. If he removed himself from the equation, what remained? The equation could not hold.

Once, when he was five, while they were waiting in the emergency room after one of his grand mals, Radar had turned to his mother.

“Why do I disappear like that?” he asked.

It was a complicated question. Or maybe it was a simple question. Regardless, Charlene had not prepared an answer. The query triggered the first of what would become a long series of awkward explanations that his mother revised and honed over the years. These explanations hinged upon the continuous misuse of phrases like “You’re such a special child” and “There’s no one quite like you” and, worst of all, “It was God’s choice.” Radar could sniff the stink of these answers but could not decipher why his mother was being so shifty. Kermin never ventured into such fraught territory. He had a habit of leaving the room when questions arose about Radar’s condition. Finally, Charlene’s explanations had culminated in that glass cathedral of a term, “Radar’s syndrome.” His syndrome. When she stumbled upon this conceit, she immediately put all of her eggs into this basket, realizing its genius, for the diagnosis was essentially a tautological conversation stopper. Everything could be blamed on the syndrome. The syndrome could explain all, and yet the syndrome itself could not be explained.

Alone in the middle of Forest Street, Radar shivered. There was no such thing as Radar’s syndrome. There had never been a syndrome. There was only him. He was free.

He switched on a flashlight and split open the darkness. Using a bit of duct tape, he strapped the light onto the front of Houlihan’s dashboard. A droopy, but serviceable, headlight.

He took out Kermin’s portable transceiver and clicked it two slots to AM mode. After checking to see if WCCA was up and running (it was not), he trolled the frequencies until a woman’s voice sprouted from out of the bed of static:

Jersey City, Newark, and several other towns in Essex, Bergen, and Hudson counties continue to reel from the baffling blackout that has plagued northern New Jersey today. Experts are now calling the incident “not an accident” and a “deliberate attack.” Authorities are still mystified as to why all electronics in the affected zone have also failed, leading some to believe a so-called e-bomb was detonated in the region. Members of the police and fire departments would not comment on the source of the blackout, saying their primary task was to keep people safe and help return essential services to operation. But as National Guard troops flood into Newark this evening, many government agencies, including the FBI and Homeland Security, have sent in representatives to help solve the mystery of why and how the electrical grid was so paralyzed in today’s incident. A warehouse in Paterson was briefly surrounded by law enforcement officials, but this turned out to be a false alarm—

Radar clipped off the radio.

Jesus Christ. They were coming. They were coming, and he was abandoning his mother alone with a stick figure. How could he do such a thing? He needed to defend her against the troops. He stopped and turned the bike around. A soft glow emanated from the bedroom window upstairs. The distant cajolement of Caruso hitting a high note.

No. He had to keep going. If he didn’t, he would never know.

She would have to fend for herself.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “Stay safe.”

He put his crocodile boot into the pedal clip and pushed forward. His headlight bounced slightly, spooling forth its little patch of light, and he followed, soothed by the simple feeling of movement through space and time. After hearing such a vastly revised version of his birth, his questionable lineage, his apparent electrocution, the true source of his condition, he had expected to feel overwhelmed, askew, for his elemental sense of balance to be forever changed. But in truth, he did not actually feel all that different. Rather, he felt like himself — only more so, as if he had just come up for air after holding his breath for a very long time.

He glided down the darkened street, following his little bouncing patch of light. Rule #4: We will be what we are, and what we are is what we will be. No matter if his parents had electrocuted him in Norway. No matter if he had lost his hair, had developed epilepsy and an eternal sense of inadequacy. No matter if Kermin was not his real father. All that mattered right now was following this little patch of light to Xanadu. Everything would work out if he could only get to Xanadu.

He had been bicycling for only a minute when he came upon a red-and-blue blur of lights strobing across the neighborhood. Two police cars were parked nose to nose. A roadblock.

An officer got out of one of the cars and motioned for Radar to stop.

“There’s a curfew,” the officer said. “You can’t be outside right now.”

He could see, against the psychedelic wash of the police lights, that the officer was a black man.

“All right,” said Radar. He felt a very strong impulse to tell this man everything that had just happened — how he had just found out that he was also black, or at least had been born black. He knew such a declaration would most likely not go over very well and possibly get him into a lot of trouble, so he just stood there, slack-jawed, staring at the man.

“Did you hear me? You can’t be outside right now,” the officer repeated, a hint of irritation in his voice. “You’ve got to get home.”

“All right,” Radar said again. Do not say that you are black! You may want to say this right now, but this is not how people talk about these kinds of things.

“Sir, did you hear what I said? You cannot be out right now. You’ve got to go home.”

“I’m going home,” Radar said suddenly. “I’m headed there right now.”

“What were you doing?”

“Me? I was. . buying a chicken. For my mother.”

“A chicken?”

“Yes. My mother loves chicken.” Oh no.

Radar had always been a terrible liar. The effort of fabricating even the smallest of untruths immediately sent him into a surreal tailspin. His lies could never be simple; they quickly ballooned into elaborate explanations that soon popped under the weight of their own flawed logic. When he was six years old, he had told his first real lie after shoplifting a pack of size-C batteries from the Korean bodega down the road. Kermin had caught him guiltily stroking the alkaline wonders on their porch.

“Where’d you get those?” his father had asked, standing very tall and still.

“From. . the battery man,” Radar said without thinking.

“Battery man? What is that?”

“It’s a man. . He gives you batteries. He gives batteries to everyone.” The lie grew and grew before their eyes, yet even little Radar knew the world couldn’t sustain such a character. Batteries were a precious commodity, not something that could be gifted to strangers by some Peter Pan of electricity.

Now, as the red and blue lights illuminated the police officer’s expression of blatant incredulity, Radar felt the same sinking feeling in his loins. He knew he would crumple under the lightest of cross-examinations. He would never be able to sustain a narrative in which his mother loved chicken so much that she would send him out on a long excursion in the middle of a blackout. It was hopeless. They might as well arrest him right now for perjury, libel, and slander.

Much to Radar’s surprise, however, the officer seemed to relax and then waved him on.

“You better get the old lady some chicken,” he said. “But be careful, you hear? Lot of ways to get hurt right now.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” Radar said. He wanted to hug the officer, and again had this dangerous impulse to declare his newfound identity as a black man who was no longer black. Again, he resisted the urge and instead asked, “Did they figure out what happened yet?”

The officer shrugged. “I’m just doing what they tell me.”

“But do they think it was a terrorist?”

“Look, I don’t know any more than you, son. And frankly, I don’t give a damn if it was al-Qaeda or the Russians or who now. I’m going on my seventeenth straight hour.”

“I don’t think it was a terrorist,” said Radar. “I think it was an accident.”

“Well, that’s some kind of accident,” the officer said. “How ’bout we just keep moving and keep this street clear, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Radar. He wheeled his bike a couple of paces and then turned back.

“I’m with you,” he said.

“All right, son,” said the officer. “We’re with you, too. God bless.”

“God bless.”

After this, Radar switched off his headlight and rode on, commando style. Whenever he saw a blockade or an emergency vehicle, he would veer onto a different block, weaving his way northward. At some point he realized he did not actually know how to get to Xanadu and East Rutherford. In his haste to leave the house, he had consulted neither map nor atlas to untangle the web of highways and byways that knitted the Meadowlands into an impenetrable tapestry of cloverleafs and interchanges. Once he got far enough north, there was actually no way to safely cut east across the swamps by bike. Xanadu mall was not a biking destination. There were no bike paths in this land of automobiles, NJ Transit, and the occasional Boston Whaler.

He had actually been to East Rutherford only once, when, as a twenty-four-year-old, he had attended a Bruce Springsteen concert at the Continental Airlines Arena. He had gone alone, and from the highest possible point in the stadium he had watched the Boss roll and tumble and sweat and stir that magical Jersey elixir with his golden Telecaster, and afterwards, streaming out of the stadium with the rest of the blissful New Jerseyans, he had felt a great pride for his home, as if this were the one true place on earth. The concertgoers had a dazed look on their faces, as though they had just witnessed Jesus turning water into wine, and maybe they had. For one night, at least, the Boss had transformed those swamps into a paradise. After that show, Radar never had the desire to go see another concert. Sometimes, glimpsing the divine just once was enough.

But now, trapped by the constricting geography of wetland and darkness, he was not sure which way to go. He tried to conjure a mental map of the Meadowlands, tried to picture Bruce’s voice calling out to him from somewhere in the middle of all that night.

He rode on, blindly, past rows and rows of darkened homes, past a cemetery, past a silent gas station, through an intersection filled with stalled cars, past an empty city bus frozen like a submarine in the middle of the road. Everything and nothing looked familiar — it was all part of a long and endless Jersey sprawl.

He was just about on the verge of giving up and seeking help from some bystander when out of the darkness he saw an oasis of red light appear. It looked at first as if an alien ship had landed, but as he got closer he saw that it was in fact the sign for Medieval Times, that beloved Lyndhurst medieval-themed dinner theater that featured live jousts as you downed your mutton and gruel. The sign was such a startling sight, after he had seen no lights at all, that Radar nearly crashed from the beauty of it. He felt like a caveman witnessing fire for the first time.

Radar had staged his birthday party at this establishment every year without fail between the ages of ten and fifteen. The number of friends in attendance had slowly dwindled from eleven the first year to only one in that final year — a snotty, heavily myopic boy named Jurqal, who had an unhealthy obsession with anything to do with the Middle Ages. Radar had not been back since. Even now, seeing the glowing Gothic letters in front of two armor-clad knights preparing to collide in mid-joust instantly brought back the same bitter, coppery taste in the back of his throat — a Pavlovian recall of the rejection he had experienced years ago when confronting Jurqal’s sole RSVP.

But how had Medieval Times kept their lights on? What kind of electric sorcery were they practicing inside there? He stared at the letters, hot and proud against an unending sky.

Medieval Times! they shouted. Medieval Frickin’ Times!

More important, he now knew where he was. The entrance to the highway was just beyond. It was the only way across those swamps, and he decided to risk it.

Rule #34: If the choice is between no and yes, choose yes (unless you must choose no).

He turned on his headlight and hit the on-ramp at full speed, weaving around three stalled cars. And then he was on the highway. It was a rush. As he passed more stalled cars, he slalomed between the stripes of the centerline, then drifted to the breakdown lane. How often did one get to bicycle down a highway like this? The world was his private playground.

He noticed the cars beginning to thin out, and then he was passing a tow truck as it was levering up a sedan. Next to the truck was a police car.

Drat! He looked in the dentist mirror attached to his helmet and saw the police car start up and turn around behind him. Lights ablaze. It was coming for him. Ahead, the highway was completely open, devoid of cars. A prison. He saw the stiff rumba of red lights blanket his world as the police car came up right behind him. The car gave him a quick woop woop of its siren: •, a careless little “I” in Morse code.

The car’s loudspeaker came to life: “Please pull your bicycle to the side of the road and dismount.”

Radar responded to this directive by bicycling harder, swerving this way and that, like he had seen gazelles do on the savanna.

“PULL OVER TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD! THIS IS NOT A REQUEST! THIS IS AN ORDER! YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO RIDE A BICYCLE ON THIS ROAD! PULL OVER NOW!”

Up ahead, he saw the highway slope down a grassy knoll. An idea occurred to him. He had once seen a pretty awesome getaway performed by a cyclist in a movie on one of his father’s pocket televisions. He was not sure whether such a maneuver could work beyond the confines of a two-inch screen, but at this point anything was worth a shot.

Radar slowed his bike and pulled over to the breakdown lane. The police car rolled to a stop behind him. In his dentist mirror, he watched as the officers slowly got out of their car. It was then that he remembered that the getaway he was thinking of had actually been performed by a man on a motorcycle and not a recumbent bicycle.

Crap. Well, it was too late now. He couldn’t risk getting caught. Not now. Holding his breath, he waited for the policemen to approach, and when they had almost reached him, without warning, he swung his bike to the right and pedaled down the grassy slope, which led to a darkened little outcrop of bushes. Behind him he heard the policemen yelling and he winced, half expecting a volley of bullets to come flying his way, but then he was riding through the trash-covered underbrush, the branches and bracken whipping at his windshield. He went up and over a culvert before spotting a chain-link fence up ahead. He was certain he was going to crash into it and that would be that, but at the very last possible moment he saw a small hole in the fence, which he just managed to steer through, only to suddenly feel himself go airborne, launched without warning off a four-foot ledge. Time stood still. In midflight, he prepared himself for the spectacular wreck that was sure to follow, but somehow, miraculously, he managed to land on two wheels, swerving wildly before righting the ship. His jerry-rigged flashlight went flying off his bicycle, the hula girl shuddered, and he heard something snap in the chassis, but he paid no heed, and pedaled on like a demon, following the road as it cut beneath the highway through an underpass.

He glanced in his dentist’s mirror. He could see neither the police officers nor much of anything, really. It was dark. Truly dark beneath this underpass.

Holy mother of God. His heart was pounding, but he continued to bicycle forward as best be could, hoping not to crash into the walls of the tunnel.

“Blow me shivers!” he said, out of sheer nervous energy, the words echoing off the concrete underpass.

It was not quite the line he imagined he would say if this were a book or a movie, as it sounded more like the catchphrase of a randy pirate, but it was all he had to offer.

Rule #101: We are more than our words & our words are more than us.

Somehow, he emerged from the underpass without calamity. He was just beginning to wonder where the hell he had ended up when he reached the top of a slight hill, and there, looming ahead of him like a giant oasis, was the Meadowlands Stadium and the mess of the Xanadu mall behind it, all aglow in construction lights.

In truth, he had expected another seizure to overtake him. There were way too many signals going on inside his brain for there not to be some kind of electrical malfunction. He waited for the darkness to come calling, but nothing happened — besides the percolation of adrenaline streaming down his legs, he actually felt okay. Better than okay. Like a frickin’ champ.

Blow me shivers!

As he bicycled into the mall area, he was astonished by the vast amount of light illuminating every square inch of the road, the construction site, the building, the parking lots. At some point he must have passed beyond the boundary of the pulse, across an invisible barrier that separated the worlds of light and darkness. He stared at a streetlight as it buzzed above him. Such a simple thing, but a miracle nonetheless. The blackout already felt like a dream.

The mall complex was a maze of construction fencing and trailers and backhoes and dump trucks parked at odd angles. Radar glided among them all, trying to remain inconspicuous as he cut through various work zones abandoned for the evening. As he approached the behemoth of Xanadu, its hideous striped siding glowing eerily in the light, he wondered how on earth he was going to find the sender of the message amid all of this. Charlene was right: the place was not even open yet. You could spend days wandering its cavernous interior. It was not even clear how you entered the complex, considering that much of the building was blocked off by an imposing moat of construction barriers. The developers were insistent on this point: You can look, good people of New Jersey, but you better not touch.

Fearing that the police from the highway might reappear, Radar decided it was best to get inside as quickly as possible. He doubled back along the frontage road and found an unmanned gate in the chain-link fence. After stopping his bike, he discovered, to his surprise, that the padlock had not been secured. Maybe the contractors had grown complacent. He squeaked open the hinges of the gate, shuffled his bike inside the barrier, and closed the gate behind him.

He was in.

Ahead, he saw the entrance to one of the multilevel parking structures that cradled the mall in a great cement palm. Above him, a massive red-and-yellow-striped structure turned and inclined skyward, like a giant HVAC duct. This had to be the indoor ski slope. According to the plan, people would come and park in these lots on blistering ninety-degree days, they would come and rent skis by the hour, they would ski up and down an artificial hill chilled to subfreezing temperatures inside this giant HVAC duct, and they would laugh and high-five each other’s gloved hands and say, “Friends, this is really living.” Radar had to admit it sounded pretty nice. Particularly the friends part.

He bicycled beneath the ski slope and down into the yawning mouth of the parking garage. Once inside the darkened lot, he saw the blinking lights of a security vehicle coming from the other end. But by this point, he had become a professional at avoiding the Man. He veered sharply to the right and stopped behind a dumpster, breathing hard. The yellow security lights slowly approached, illuminating the cavernous garage in a lazy, sweeping motion. They came up next to him and paused. They must have seen him. He clenched the pedal with his crocodile boot, ready to flee, but then the lights began to move again, fading away into the darkness of the lot. He exhaled.

Where to?

He rooted around in his fanny pack, searching for the scrap of paper with the code on it. He came across the piece of paper with Ana Cristina’s number on it. The sight of those numerals buzzed his wires. How far away she seemed now! He hoped she was still okay, that her mother had not flipped out. He felt a strong urge to see her, to be near her. Soon. But first things first.

After some more rooting, he found what he was looking for:

XANADU P4 D26.

P4 D26? What could it mean? It could be anything, really. He was not a professional code breaker. There were not enough letters to do a letter frequency analysis. He needed some clue, a crib to crack the code.

Dejected, he dismounted his bicycle, swung out the kickstand, and sat down on the ground. He was exhausted. He was exhausted and he was in the middle of a parking garage beneath some abandoned mall, caught on a wild goose chase for a mystery acquaintance of his father’s. It dawned on him that he might in fact be in the completely wrong place, that this Xanadu might not be the Xanadu in the coded message. What then? He had abandoned his mother for nothing. Left her to the wolves as he whiled away the time in a concrete bunker.

He shook his head and looked down at his sad, imperfect body. Who was he kidding? He was still Radar. Just because he now knew the truth of his origins didn’t discount all of his defects. He was still broken.

And that was when he saw it: there, between his legs. In yellow paint.

C21.

For a moment he was confused. And then he realized what it was.

Of course. He looked up and saw a sign hanging above him. PARKING LEVEL 2. It was not some complicated cipher text. Xanadu P4 D26 was a parking space.

Radar jumped back on his bike and took the spiral ramp down and down to the grey semi-darkness of parking level 4, an apparently forgotten domain lit only by the glow of an orange exit sign pointing to nowhere. Well, at least there was that, even if it did point straight at a wall. He had learned not to take illumination for granted anymore.

What could possibly be down here?

Nothing, it seemed. He slowly rode through the empty lot. A. B. C. There were a few lonely traffic cones. A turquoise port-a-john.

He reached section D, a remote corner of the parking lot. 7 8 9 10 11 12. . 22 23. .

He stopped. There, in the dimness, was one of the most peculiar sights he had ever seen.

It was a tiny house. There was no other way to describe it. A single-story house — perhaps ten feet wide, complete with shingled roof, white lace curtains, and gutters — built on top of a small four-wheeled trailer, sitting in the middle of parking space D26. A yellowish glow came from within.

Radar closed his eyes and opened them again. The house was still there. Could it be real? He parked his bike and approached cautiously.

This, he decided, must be his Xanadu.

After a moment’s hesitation, he walked up the three stairs to the front entrance. On the door he spotted a brass plate and the symbol of an eye.

He stood, took a deep breath, and then rapped out his father’s initial: dah di dah——.

8

Come in!” said a voice.

Radar cautiously opened the door. The house was composed of only a single room. The room looked to be a workshop, much like his father’s radio shack, lit by an overhanging light and filled with all manner of mechanical parts. In contrast to the chaos of his father’s workspace, however, this room was infinitely organized. Hundreds of little wooden drawers lined the walls, the contents of each carefully labeled—eyes, twine, feathers, bones, hex flanges, cross dowels, 2" lite-tooth gears, 1" lite-tooth gears, and on and on. Everything clean, accessible, in its place. A perfectly slim bookshelf in one corner. On the opposite wall, a constellation of tools hanging inside their outlines. It felt as if he were looking at a dictionary of existence, as if this room contained a specimen of everything in the world, like a Noah’s Ark of Man’s March of Progress.

An incredibly tall blond man stood in the middle of the room, his head nearly touching the ceiling. He was surveying what looked to be a multiplicity of bird heads spread out across a worktable. Nearby, a pudgy man with long, greasy hair sat at a workbench, inspecting something under a magnifying glass. Radar recognized him as Otik Mirosavic, one of only a handful of people whom Kermin might’ve called a friend.

A symphony was playing from some hidden radio.

“Shostakovich,” said Radar.

“‘Leningrad,’ number 7,” said the tall man, smiling. “Well spotted.”

“I used to have a goldfish who loved Shostakovich.”

“A discerning beast,” said the tall man, holding out his hand. “You must be Radar.”

He was dressed in a tight-fitting yellow tracksuit that matched the tone and timbre of his wheat-colored hair and beard, both of which were trimmed to the same impossibly short length; it was as if he were wearing the world’s thinnest, fuzziest helmet.

“Yes,” said Radar, shaking the man’s hand. “I’m Kermin’s son.” He said it reflexively but then wondered if it was true.

“Lars Røed-Larsen,” the man said, his tongue curling expertly around the contours of the name.

“Lars Rlood-Larsen?” Radar tried to mimic the articulation.

Lars smiled to indicate that he had gotten it wrong but that he was not going to be a stickler about such things.

Otik looked up from his workbench.

“Hello, Radar,” he said in a thick Balkan accent. “Where is Kermin?”

“I don’t know,” said Radar. “I was going to ask you.”

“I’m afraid we’re a bit in the dark,” said Lars. He scrunched his nose. “Sorry, bad metaphor. We’re as uninformed as you.”

“You don’t have any idea?”

“One could always guess, but—”

“But you knew about the vircator.”

“Of course we knew about vircator,” said Otik. “I designed vircator. I gave him all of these plans. Without me, he would have nothing.”

In truth, Radar had never liked Otik. He and Otik must’ve been about the same age, except Otik looked at least fifty, with a large gut that he did no favors for by wearing ill-fitting, faded Serbian rock T-shirts. His face, flushed from misuse, was long and ugly, and his balding head was accentuated by a crown of oily, chin-length hair. Charlene and Radar used to have a running joke in which they would ask Kermin whether or not Otik had had his heart attack for the day yet.

Otik had immigrated to New Jersey sometime during the war in the 1990s — from exactly where, and under what circumstances, was unclear. It was also unclear what he had done in Serbia, just as it was unclear what he now did in Jersey. He supposedly taught the occasional class at Bergen Community College in computer science and sometimes continental philosophy — these pedagogical ventures inevitably resulting in long rants to Kermin about the idiocy of today’s youth. Sometimes he and Kermin would play dominoes in the backyard and complain about the general disintegration of government, culture, and footwear. Radar had even seen the two of them disappear into the radio shack together, an event whose significance was not lost upon him, considering he had never received a similar invitation. Why did Kermin choose to spend time with Otik rather than his own son? Was it because Otik spoke the mother tongue? Because Otik laughed like a wounded hyena? Because Otik did not remind him of his failed parenting?

All of which is to say that Radar could not help but feel a needle of jealousy when he spotted Otik in this most spectacular of rooms, sweating away at the workbench in his Rambo Amadeus T-shirt. Mr. Mirosavic had again beaten him to the punch.

“I didn’t know it was you on the line, Otik,” said Radar. “I would’ve been a little nicer.”

“I didn’t know it was you, either.”

“I said it was me.”

“Yes, but who can we trust this days? You say it’s you, but who are you? I cannot know—”

“All right, Otik,” said Lars. “Let’s be gracious hosts. Consider the circumstances.”

“I’m not egregious, I just explain—”

“Otik, enough,” said Lars. He turned to Radar. “He means well, really. He’s just a bit gruff, that’s all.”

“I understand. My father’s the same way.”

“Your father.” Otik shook his head. “Ispario je. I will miss him. I will miss his bones.”

“What?” said Radar.

“Please, sit,” said Lars.

“What did he say?”

“Ignore him. He has a flair for the dramatic,” said Lars. “I’m afraid all I can offer you is some cold coffee. We can stick on a fresh pot if you’d like.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” said Radar, glaring at Otik. He looked around for a place to sit, though there was none.

Seeing his confusion, Lars took up a bucket of parts, dumped them loudly on the floor, and handed the bucket to Radar.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “We don’t usually have visitors.”

“You weren’t easy to find,” said Radar. “P4 D26?”

“We like it that way,” said Lars. “The management company doesn’t bother us. We don’t bother them. It’s a nice little arrangement.”

“Do they know you’re here?”

“Someone knows we’re here.”

Radar sat down awkwardly on his bucket before he remembered his cargo.

“I brought you some birds,” he said, removing his backpack.

“Oh, good,” said Lars. “Good. Otik will be pleased. Did you hear that, Otik? He brought us some birds.”

Otik looked pleased. He leaped up as best his body would allow and trundled over.

Radar opened the backpack. “I wasn’t sure which one to get, so I just grabbed a couple.”

He carefully handed each bird over to Lars, fearful that they had somehow been damaged in transit, but Lars did not even look at the birds before passing them on to Otik.

“Can I ask what these are for?” said Radar.

“They’re for the next bevegelse,” said Lars. “The next movement.”

“The next what?”

Lars look surprised. “Your father never told you?”

“Told me what?”

“About Kirkenesferda?”

“Kirkenesferda? What’s that?”

Otik clapped his hands. “You see? Kermin says nothing. I told you. So we say nothing.”

“My dear Otik,” said Lars. “It’s not possible—”

“Wait, what do you mean, movement?” said Radar. “What was that word you used? Bay vay ghoulsa?”

Lars looked at him sympathetically. “Bevegelse. It’s what we call our shows,” he said. “These birds you so kindly brought over represent years and years of work.”

“They are bitch to make one,” Otik agreed. “They are really bitch to make two thousand.”

“It’s true. Your father has done an exemplary job,” said Lars. “You see, about five years ago, Otik here finally figured out how to entangle particles.” He gestured toward a tube on Otik’s workbench that looked like a smaller replica of the pulse generator in Kermin’s workshop. “We place these entangled particles into a chip inside each of the bird’s heads. Once it’s in place, the birds will be forever linked.”

Radar blinked. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“The birds are puppets,” said Lars. “Entangled puppets.”

“They are entangled,” said Otik.

“Yes, you keep using that word, but I have no idea what it means,” said Radar.

“You know: entangled,” Otik said again.

“I actually don’t know. Like strings entangled?”

Lars sighed. “Of course. I apologize. We get so caught up in our little world.” He picked up one of the bird heads. “Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon. Two particles interact and become linked in perpetuity, even if the two particles are millions of light-years apart.”

“How?” said Radar.

“Yes, How? is the question. Einstein shared your skepticism. He called it ‘spukhafte Fernwirkung’—‘spooky action at a distance’—and when people proposed the existence of entanglement, he said it was impossible. But here’s the thing: entanglement does exist. Scientists have proven this to be true. They’ve managed to entangle particles in the lab, although they’re not very good at it. In fact, they’re quite clumsy,” said Lars. “But recently scientists have discovered that all kinds of quantum reactions actually happen in nature. . It’s how photosynthesis works, it’s how our smell works—”

“Our smell?” said Radar.

“Olfaction operates via quantum electron tunneling — we actually smell a molecule’s vibration and not the molecule itself. But what’s particularly interesting for our project is that we’ve discovered how birds navigate the magnetic field of the earth using a form of organic quantum entanglement inside their eyes.”

“Inside their retinae,” Otik chimed in.

“We’ve known for a long time that birds have this ability to sense the earth’s magnetism, but we haven’t known the mechanism for how they can sense this magnetism, particularly because the earth’s magnetic field is so weak. . You would need very precise equipment to measure it. Well, it turns out birds have a series of special cells in their eyes—”

“Retinae,” said Otik.

“In their retinae, in which photons — that is, light—will excite a pair of electrons into a state of entangled superimposition. These two entangled electrons then act like a very sensitive compass, and this is how the birds navigate the poles. They can actually see geomagnetism.” He paused. “So. This was the secret. Why reinvent the wheel when nature has provided the apparatus for you? We extracted the protein from the bird’s eye, modified it using a fiber-optic coupler, and then placed it into the microchip. In essence, Otik has managed to build a rudimentary organic quantum computer. The secret was to put a part of the bird into the machine. Quite elegant, yes? The bird in the machine. For our purposes, it’s really all we need. Our show relies on building a flock of puppets that all move in conversation, no matter where they are in the world. One is entangled with the next, who is also entangled with the next, who is entangled with the next and so on. It is a kind of collective consciousness. A bounded swarm, if you will.”

Radar glanced at the birds, lying inert on the table. “They can actually fly?” he said. “I mean, really fly?”

“They can. But flying’s really the least of our worries. A purely mechanical problem. People have been building flying machines for ages. Our dilemma is one of groupthink.”

“And you can control them?”

“Only initially. We control the first input, the spark—‘Tilt up 68, bearing 128, thrust 4.’ And then they’re set free and must discover their own path after that. The question will be if we can train them en masse to participate in the movement. But in the end, the birds will decide together.”

“So they control themselves.”

“There’s been much debate in Kirkenesferda over the years about what constitutes a puppet, whether we must be in constant control of the object for it to be called a puppet, whether a robot or an automaton is a puppet even if it moves under its own volition. Much has been written about this distinction — by my stepbrother and others. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. We’re testing the boundaries of control. Of who controls what. About what control is. About whether control is even possible.”

Otik was slipping something small and fragile into one of the bird heads.

Lars shook his head. “Otik, let’s not do this right now.”

But Otik would not be deterred. He connected a set of wires and then snapped the head of the bird onto the body. He then repeated this preparation on a second bird. His hands were working quickly, massaging the necks of the creatures with an unexpected tenderness. Back at his workbench, he opened a laptop and began to peck away at the keys, muttering to himself.

“Otik, please,” said Lars. “Let’s leave it.”

Otik slapped a final button and raised his arms in triumph.

“Let’s dance, baby,” he said, turning to face the birds.

They waited, Radar holding his breath. Shostakovich played on in the background. Nothing happened. Radar glanced over at Otik, whose face had turned sour. They waited some more. The birds lay still on the table.

“Bem ti sto majki!” said Otik, deflating back into his seat. “I told you it was problem. I told you before: amplitude shackles are such bullshit.”

“And welcome to life at Xanadu,” said Lars. “We spend most of our time attempting to figure out how we just screwed up. It’s a game of outrunning our own failure.”

“Kirkenesferda,” said Radar, stumbling over the strange word. “Wait. Are these the same people who electrocuted me?”

Lars sighed. “First of all, I want you to know I had nothing to do with your electro-enveloping. I was only ten years old at the time, so I plead the ignorance of youth.”

Fig. 3.9. Notes from Den Menneskelig Marionett Prosjektet

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 493

“Electro-enveloping?” Radar said.

“The technology came about accidentally from Kirkenesferda’s investigations into some old Tesla designs. After Kirk To, they began looking into organic circuitry so as to try and make the human body into a puppet of itself. It was an attempt to circumvent Kleist’s dilemma. An awareness of ourselves as an actor on the stage inevitably corrupts the essence of our movements. We think, and therefore we cannot just be. Den Menneskelig Marionett Prosjektet was meant to rewire the body so that another could control our movements, just as if we were a puppet. The project did not pan out, but many other discoveries came from this.”

“Like how to electro-envelope someone’s skin,” said Radar.

“Well, yes. Among other things. But really, they had no idea what they were doing. The technology was primitive, brutally so. Let me tell you this: what they did to you was not right. Leif should never have offered his services. He was charismatic and excitable, but he was also a schizophrenic delusional. At the time, I worshipped him. Everyone did. And everyone wanted to believe in what he said, but now I see that he was just a boy playing with a toy, and this toy should never have been used on a living human being, and certainly not a child. I’d like to think that Kirkenesferda’s come a long way since then. We’ve matured — spiritually, morally, karmically.”

“I’m sorry,” said Radar. “I’m still not quite following you. What is Kirkenesferda?”

“It is most important group in all of performance history,” said Otik, looking up from his workbench.

“Well. . let’s stay modest, shall we?” said Lars.

“It is truth,” said Otik. “You want to argue about this?”

“What he means is that their contributions have often been overlooked.”

“It’s not what I mean,” said Otik. “I mean they are most important group in history.”

“Your father played an important role.”

“It is truth,” said Otik. “Your father, he had so much talent. He was the best.”

“He was?” said Radar. It was only after a moment that he heard the past tense in Otik’s words.

“So much,” said Otik, shaking his head. “So, so much. Genius.”

“But what do you mean, was?”

“Ah, let’s not quibble about semantics. Otik’s English is not the best,” said Lars. Otik opened his mouth, but Lars held up a finger in warning. “I’m going to put on some coffee. Anyone for coffee? Radar?”

“I actually don’t really drink coffee,” said Radar. It was true: coffee, like alcohol, caused his already malfunctioning body to go into overdrive.

“In that case, I’ll just drink yours,” said Lars. He busied himself with an electric kettle. “So how would one describe Kirkenesferda? I think Per called us a ‘metaphysical army of Arctic puppeteers,’ but of course that’s a ridiculous explanation. Per has a tendency to overstate his case.”

“Who’s Per?” Radar asked.

“Per Røed-Larsen. My stepbrother.” Lars went over to the bookshelf and took down a mammoth beige book. He handed it to Radar. “He’s written the most comprehensive history of Kirkenesferda, even if most of it’s not quite true. He and I don’t speak anymore, but I must say his work’s impressive, if perhaps overly critical, although I would be, too, if my father abandoned me for some metaphysical army. I don’t mean to go all Freudian on you, but Per was a little obsessed. He elected himself the primary Kirkenesferda historian, much to the outrage of Brusa Tofte-Jebsen.”

Radar leafed through the book, staring at the pages and pages of graphs and tables. A whiff of the familiar. He felt as if he had held this book before.

“Your father abandoned you?”

Fig. 3.10. Jens Røed-Larsen at the Bjørnens Hule (1968)

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 96

“No. He abandoned Per and his sister. You see, in 1939, my father, Jens Røed-Larsen, was one of the most important nuclear physicists working in Norway.” Lars came over and flipped to a page in the book. “There. That’s him. Per claimed he was on track to win the Nobel Prize, but I’m not sure about all that. Anyway, when the Nazis invaded, Jens was forced to flee to Stockholm with his wife, Dagna, and their baby, Kari. Both the Germans and the Allies of course wanted him for their nuclear weapons programs, but he refused. He was something of a die-hard pacifist at the time. But while he was hunkered down in Sweden, he heard whispers about this avant-garde performance group working on the Russian frontier, in Lapland. They were supposedly making a courageous stand against the war through these art pieces centered around the physics of the nuclear bomb. You’ve got to remember that the bomb at this point was only a dream, a terrifying possibility on the horizon. Hiroshima was still two years away. My father’s interest was piqued. He heard this group were in need of a nuclear physicist on the team, so, in 1943, he essentially left his family and traveled up to Kirkenes. You can imagine what a difficult choice this was.”

“Why did he do it?”

“I still don’t know, really. War causes strange things to happen. People’s priorities shift. I suppose he came to think that this cause was something pure, something effectual. Still, I can’t imagine. It was quite a dangerous trip for my father. You see, the Nazis still controlled the entire North. The whole reason they were occupying Norway in the first place was so they could produce heavy water to make an atom bomb. But my father risked it anyway. He was guided by a small band of Sami. They say it was bitterly cold — one of the worst winters on record — and he lost two toes in the process. But he made it. They took him over the mountains and then down into Fennoscandia to the Bjørnens Hule. My father then worked on Kirk En in 1944, the first of the two nuclear events.”

The kettle began to shiver.

“You sure I can’t interest you in some?” said Lars. “I get it from this great little place by the docks in Constable Hook.”

“No, thanks,” said Radar. “Did you say nuclear events? You mean like bombs?”

“Heavens, no.” Lars laughed. He took out a small French press. “Not bombs—happenings. Movements. Kirk En took place in Poselok, before the war was even finished. This was the whole reason my father was invited up north. It was an installation largely about nuclear fission, but also about longing and witnessing and infinity, I believe, but then, this is just my interpretation. Per, of course, disagrees with me. One of my great regrets is that I never got to see it. They never even took photographs. Can you believe it? All that work, and no evidence of its existence. Sometimes, in my more skeptical moments, I wonder if it even happened. But it must’ve been beautiful — I can picture it in my mind very clearly — a small, isolated island in the Arctic, perhaps twenty meters across. A forgotten shred of land. There’s a chance no human had ever even set foot on the island until they staged this miraculous event. ‘A silent, devastating critique of our obsession with manipulating natura into instruments of mass execution,’ writes Per. I think that’s well put.”

“So what was the event?”

Fig. 3.11. Kirk En Heavy Water Shoe Dip

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 154

“No one actually witnessed it, so all we have left is the description,” said Lars, pushing down the plunger of the French press. “Two hundred and thirty-five jars, arranged in a perfect circle. The jars were all filled with heavy water allegedly stolen from the Nazi plant in Vemork. Inside each jar, three tiny dolls are floating. The dolls are designed to have the exact density as the heavy water, and so they appear essentially weightless. And in the middle of the circle, two hundred thirty-five beautiful puppets, made from fox skeletons, mounted on tracks, each with a single shoe cradled in its arms—”

“Wait, I’m sorry — no one ever even saw the show?” said Radar.

Lars smiled. “Apparently two Russian fishermen eventually did discover the installation sometime in the eighties. You can imagine their surprise. Bože moj!”

Otik snorted. Lars looked over at him.

“What?” said Otik. “It is funny when you speak. Bože moj! You are funny.”

“So,” said Radar. “I don’t mean to be rude. .”

“Please,” said Lars, pouring the coffee into his mug.

“You’re saying your father left his family to put together an installation with jars in the Arctic that no one saw except two Russian fishermen?”

“Forty years later, yes.”

“Forty years later.”

Lars smiled. “When you put it like that, it does sound a bit awful, doesn’t it? But you’ve got to understand that at the time, it was much more serious. It felt like a matter of life and death. They truly believed they were changing the course of history by staging such an event.”

“Of course they were changing history,” said Otik. “It is no doubt.”

“But no one ever saw it!” said Radar.

Otik turned around. “You don’t know anything, do you? You are like little child.”

“Please,” said Lars, holding up his hands. “It’s a fair critique. And it’s a critique that’s been leveled at Kirkenesferda by more than a handful of scholars. Many have called us the worst kind of self-satisfied, pretentious time-wasters — creating our art while others die. Sometimes I harbor these same doubts myself. But then I think back to what Leif said all those years ago: that we were circling around something essential, something far too beautiful to abandon—‘an eternal object,’ he used to call it. He used to say small things affect big things, just as big things affect small things.”

“This is true,” said Otik. “Small and big.”

“Okay,” said Radar, eyeing Otik warily. “So then what happened next?”

“After the war, my father moved back to Oslo with his family for a time. He took up his old position at the university again. He went through his routine, taught his courses, but everyone said he wasn’t the same man. He always had his eyes pointed northward. Per was born in 1952, but even this couldn’t keep him there. My father left maybe three years later for Kirkenes. He couldn’t escape it, I suppose. And he essentially abandoned the family, the toddler, the job, everything. You can imagine the effect this had on Dagna. To be left by the same man twice. She never recovered.”

“So you had a different mother?”

“I did. Her name was Siri. My father met her at the Bjørnens Hule. He had been living up north for ten years or so. This was after they had already staged Kirk To, in 1961. My mother joined them in 1968 or something like this. I’ll have to look at Per’s book. She was the only woman in the camp.”

“Why did she come?”

Fig. 3.12. Frame still from Kirk To, Gåselandet

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 230

“Oh, I don’t know. She was a hippie. A Norwegian hippie. You know — long dresses, no bra, the whole gambit. But beneath this flower-power routine, she was a fiercely intelligent idealist. She was a set designer. Just brilliant. She had seen the famous nuclear bomb footage of the Gåselandet performance at some drug party in Oslo and decided this was what she wanted to do. And when she showed up at the camp, you can imagine. . There was a kind of brutal competition for her affection among the men. Some of them had not seen a woman in years. And yet it was Jens, the old professor, who won out. I don’t think my father was really even interested in meeting a woman. A part of him was still in love with Dagna, and he must’ve felt great guilt about leaving Kari and Per behind. But Siri was Siri, and he couldn’t resist. I’m glad he didn’t. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“So when did my father come in?”

“Your family visited the Bjørnens Hule in 1979. This was when Kermin first met Leif.”

“Who’s Leif again?”

Lars flipped though the book and pointed to a picture. “Leif Christian-Holtsmark,” he said. “He was one of the founders of Kirkenesferda. Him and Brusa Tofte-Jebsen. And then Brusa left after a disagreement about the group’s future, so really Leif became our spiritual mentor for many years. He was the heart. Leif asked your father to help him out for Kirk Tre, the Cambodia movement in Anlong Veng.”

“Cambodia?”

A weary look came across Lars’s face. “It was the first time they did a movement in a place of active warfare. Everything changed after that.”

“And my father went, too?”

Lars shook his head. “No, thank God. But he made the puppets. They were incredible.”

“Incredible,” Otik agreed. “Most.”

“They had screens for heads. It was very complicated, very time-consuming. They were these fantastic creatures with essentially infinite faces. The puppet could become anything you wanted it to be,” said Lars. “And they were magic. Absolute, utter magic. I wish you could’ve seen them. Some of the most beautiful objects ever made. Here — here’s a drawing from Per’s book. It doesn’t really do it justice.”

Otik came over and looked at the image with them. “It changed my life when I see this,” he said. “I remember someone showed me this photo and I think, ‘Ah, okay, everything is possible now. I must work like son of bitch.’”

Radar stared at the image of the thin little puppet-man with the circular television screen for a head. So simple, yet captivating, even in this black-and-white iteration. He imagined the puppet-man moving, eyes blinking on the screen. The slow bend of his arm, the nod of the head. His father had made this. Something approximate to pride stirred inside of him.

“So then?” he said. “What happened in Cambodia?”

“Oh,” said Otik, returning to the workbench.

“Oh?” said Radar. He looked over at Lars and saw a slight grimace pass over his face. The mood in the room shifted.

“Why do you always ask these questions?” said Otik. “You are like child with all of your questions.”

“I’m sorry,” said Radar. “I didn’t mean to—”

Lars held up his hand.

“It’s okay. Of course you didn’t.” He sighed, running a finger around the rim of his mug. When he looked up again his eyes were heavy. “It wasn’t good.”

“It was beautiful,” said Otik.

“Only in theory.”

“In more than theory. Anlong Veng was most important event in twentieth-century performance.”

“It was a human catastrophe,” said Lars. “The only thing we can be grateful for is that your father wasn’t there. Only his work.”

Radar was silent. The music on the radio encountered a brief batch of static. Strings evaporating.

After a moment, Lars began speaking again. His gaze had moved to some distant point, far away from the room. “We got in. It was a bloody miracle that we got in at all, thanks to Raksmey.”

“Raksmey?” He had heard this name somewhere.

“Raksmey Raksmey,” murmured Lars. He stopped and closed his eyes.

“You see?” Otik said to Radar. “You see what you do?”

Lars shook his head. He took a sip of coffee. “I lost everything that night,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” said Radar. “I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

Lars looked up and smiled weakly. “Of course, everyone assumed it was the end. I mean, there’s no way to recover from something like that. And your poor father. . he had no idea what had happened. I was stuck in Thailand in government custody. I turned eleven while I was there. And then, out of nowhere, Brusa Tofte-Jebsen reappeared. He’d been out of the picture for years. He’d been writing his articles about Kirkenesferda, of course, but I’d never met him before. And he just swooped into Bangkok and got me out of there. I don’t know how he did it. . Per claims he paid a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bribe, but Brusa always denied it. As you can imagine, I was in complete shock. For years. After losing both of my parents like that. . There was talk about sending me to live with Dagna and Jens’s old family. But the relationship wasn’t good with her, so in the end, Brusa ended up adopting me. He was also the one who contacted Kermin and told him what had gone down in Cambodia. I think it was hard for your father, being so distant, not knowing what to do. . He had put so much energy into a show that had ended with all of these people getting killed.”

Radar’s throat went dry. He wanted to ask what had happened in Cambodia but didn’t dare.

“So that was it?” he said. “The group was finished?”

“No,” said Lars. “You would think so, but no. Years later, I attended school at Columbia University, in New York. I was studying Portuguese literature, of all things. Writing a thesis on Fernando Pessoa and all of his heteronyms. But who should walk into my dorm room one afternoon? Kermin Radmanovic. I don’t know how he found me, but he just appeared in my doorway and said, ‘I want to do another show.’ No ‘Hello, how are you? By the way, I’m sorry about your parents, I’m sorry about Cambodia.’ Just this announcement. And of course, I was angry. You can imagine. I mean, who the hell was this fucker, and why was he bringing up all this painful shit that I had tried so hard to forget? Truthfully, I wanted to punch him in the face. I think I almost did. But he was insistent. He stayed, and we began to discuss his ideas. He came back the next day, and the next. And after several weeks I realized that I had been waiting for him to come through that door ever since Anlong Veng. It was my destiny to perform another movement.”

“And then your father called me,” said Otik.

“Otik was not Otik back then. His name was Miroslav Danilovic.” Lars looked over at Otik. “Am I revealing too much?”

“Yes.” Otik shrugged.

“Your name is Miroslav?” asked Radar.

“Not anymore,” said Otik. “Names can die like people.”

“Okay,” said Radar. “So how did you first meet my father?”

“I was living in Belgrade during the war,” said Otik. “I was at university working on some little performance here and there. Mostly like street shows. Your father has seen my work in some magazine or something like this, and when I hear he was one who did show in Cambodia, I was excited, because he is my hero. So we become pen pals. And then he explain what he want to do in Sarajevo and I think, Oh, man, he is so crazy, but good crazy, you know? And he want to pull off this something that is so unbelievable — like no shit unbelievable. So I just said, ‘Why not? Of course I work with you, you crazy motherfucker.’”

Lars nodded. “Your father proposed a performance in the Bosnian National Library, in Sarajevo. The library had already been gutted by firebombs several years earlier. At the time, Sarajevo was still under siege, so you can imagine it was an incredibly complex production and a wildly dangerous performance. Just to get the equipment in there was a ridiculous undertaking. We had to bring our own electricity, everything. It’s true that Kermin never went halfway on anything.”

Radar tried to decide if this was true. “When was this?” he said.

“Back in 1995.”

Radar remembered that the summer before his sophomore year in college, Kermin had left on an extended trip to Europe. He had supposedly been visiting friends in Italy who were displaced by the Yugoslavian war. At the time, Radar had been worried because his mother was in one of her depressions, and he didn’t want her sitting around the house alone. So he had moved back home while Kermin was away. Radar tried to imagine Kermin caught in the middle of a war, staging a show in a bombed-out library in Sarajevo, while he and Charlene sat at home playing Scrabble. Why hadn’t he shared any of this? He had come back tired, bearing some sad Italian gifts of biscotti and cheese, but otherwise none the worse.

“He never mentioned anything to us,” said Radar.

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” said Lars. “There were security issues, particularly coming on the heels of Anlong Veng.”

“And Sarajevo? Did it happen?”

Lars looked at Otik. “In many ways it was the masterwork. Per said as much in his book. Brusa agreed. Otik brought a level of technical complexity we’d never seen before. He works in miniature. Otik, would you show him the. . Oh, never mind. We’ll show you later. It will blow your mind,” said Lars. “But the other big difference with Kirk Fire was that we had a public. We had an actual audience. . for the first time in Kirkenesferda’s history. The public came the first four nights of the run, despite the sniper fire and the shelling. They risked their lives to sneak into this destroyed library to see our show about superstring theory. So in this respect it was—”

“It was bad,” Otik said suddenly, looking up from his birds. “I screwed it up, and Thorgen was killed by sniper. Then there was bombing in Markale. No. We had to stop. It was too much.”

“It wasn’t entirely your fault.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Lars. I don’t need your bullshit right now.”

“We had to get Otik”—Lars corrected himself—“Miroslav out of there. He was in poor health.”

“The black boxes, they were killing me, slowly,” said Otik. “Every time I make one, I must leave part of me inside box. And so my body goes like this. I used to be very thin, if you believe.”

“He had also been found out by certain security forces,” said Lars. “It wasn’t safe for him anymore. So we brought him back to a new life with a new name.”

“You brought him here? To New Jersey?” said Radar.

“You could do worse.”

The music on the radio had shifted into a march. The rattle of a snare as an oboe urged them onward.

“I had no idea,” said Radar. “I can’t believe he kept all of this from us.”

“He was a private man. He kept things from everyone.”

Radar thought about this for a moment.

“Do you realize he caused the blackout?” he said.

Lars and Otik looked at each other.

“We had a hunch,” said Lars. “We couldn’t be sure, but when I heard there’d been an accident, I figured as much.”

“I just don’t understand why he would build something like that without thinking about what could happen? I mean, he must’ve known he would fry the whole electrical grid. What was he trying to do?”

“He didn’t build the vircator to fry the grid,” said Lars.

“What was he doing then?”

“He built it for you.”

“For me?”

Lars sighed.

“What do you mean, for me?” said Radar.

“We’ve been experimenting with vircators for some time now.” Lars pointed at the machine next to Otik. “And the more we researched this, the more Kermin became convinced that a high-energy pulse was the secret to reversing the effects of your procedure.”

“My procedure?”

“Your electro-enveloping. Kermin thought that if he just found the right energy and focus, then he could cure you—”

“Cure me?”

“Or at least cure your epilepsy,” said Lars. “Okay, it’s crazy, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. There’s evidence that epilepsy is a quantum phenomenon. But we told him it was a bad idea, particularly because there was no way to know—”

“I tell him so many times this is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” said Otik, looking up from his work. “Like total bullshit. Even if we identify the coherence, seizure is huge reaction. Not some small event. But Kermin, he’s so. . I don’t even know this word.”

“He’s stubborn,” said Lars.

“Yes, stubborn, but more sneaky than this. In Serbian it is called zadrt. Like he is hypnotize.”

“He was building his own vircator,” said Lars. “He didn’t tell us as much, but we had our suspicions. Particularly when he stopped letting Otik come over. He was assembling the birds, he was showing us his work, but on the side he was building his own private EMP generator. We were on the outside, just like you. And we certainly didn’t know how far he’d gotten or how powerful it was.”

“Jesus,” said Radar.

The vircator had been for him. To cure him.

“Obviously, he overestimated the strength of the pulse,” said Lars.

“But how do you build something like that and not know it’s going to screw everything up? He must’ve caused like billions of dollars in damage today. He probably killed people.”

“Yes,” said Lars. “It’s most regrettable. He’s disrupted our work as well. Ten years of planning have all gone out the window.”

“What planning?” said Radar.

“Nothing is out the window,” Otik said from his bench. “We still go.”

“We’re not going, Otik,” said Lars. “We need Kermin.”

“No. He blows it. We get birds and we go. Alone.”

“We can’t go. Not before we find Kermin and make sure he’s okay. We owe this much to him.”

“You were one who said this boat sails only tomorrow,” Otik said to Lars.

“Yes, but we can’t just go without him. We can’t do it alone.”

But Otik had turned back to his computer and was no longer listening. He was typing intently, whispering something inaudible to himself.

Lars smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “As you can see, you’ve caught us at a tricky time. Clearly Otik and I need to discuss a few things here. We were supposed to catch a ship bound for Africa tomorrow morning, but your father’s. . untimely disappearance, shall we say, has complicated matters considerably.”

Radar felt a quiver of guilt. “I should go. I should go look for him,” he said.

“I’m not sure that’s wise,” said Lars.

“I have to,” said Radar, suddenly feeling antsy. “I thought he might be here, but I’ve got to find him. My mom’s waiting alone at home right now. I just worry he got into some trouble.”

“As you wish,” said Lars, bowing his head.

Radar got up to leave. “Thanks,” he said. “Good luck with your—”

“I am telling you! Genius!” Otik yelled.

He punched a button and jumped to his feet with surprising dexterity for someone of his girth.

The light flickered above them, and the march on the radio slowed. Radar felt a hum across his skin, and it was then that the two birds on the table quivered and came to life. They leaped up into the air, spinning around each other, up and up until they crashed against the ceiling, plummeted, rebounded, and smacked against the wall, toppling over a jar of screws, a folder exploding into a cloud of papers. The birds rounded each other, eyes unblinking. They careened into the ceiling again and tumbled down, but just before they hit the ground, they swooped up again. And now an understanding emerged between the two and they began to circle the room in tandem, the oboe on the radio offering a cushion to the sound of their wings against the air, the bare lightbulb gently rocking back and forth in time to the birds’ revolutions. The three of them stood below, watching the pair act and react, react and act, until Otik yelled something in his language that Radar could not quite understand. Otik twisted and leaped like an animal in pain, and then he was at the door to the house, flinging it open with great drama. One of the birds sensed this expansion of space and immediately whipped out through the open door, leaving the other to circle the room alone. The difference between one bird and two was immense. After several more revolutions, the lone bird stopped in midair, hanging there motionless, as if it had forgotten what to do next. There was an impossible pause, a flagrant denial of gravity’s embrace, and just as the bird began to plunge back to earth, it regained itself, remembering, and now it was turning and swooping out through the open doorway. They were both gone just as quickly as they had come to life, and before Radar could ask if what he had just seen was real, Otik was already running out after them, whooping, the sound of his voice echoing against the walls of the garage until this, too, faded away into just the soft question mark of the oboe playing its final notes on the radio.