I Am Radar

1. NEW JERSEY

August 10, 2010

All that night, Radar scoured the land. The blackout and the ensuing curfew lent an eerie post-apocalyptic backdrop to his searchings. He dodged police barricades and wove around checkpoints, using his recumbent’s low profile and the cover of darkness to glide through the abandoned streets undetected. He visited four local hospitals, all of them overrun with patients and non-patients simply seeking out the comforts of electricity’s embrace. His father was not among them.

How intimate, to trace a person’s geography. It was almost like looking through his father’s wallet. Though it was the middle of the night, Radar still followed the route of Kermin’s favorite constitutional along the industrial shores of the Passaic, searching for that familiar hunched profile. He rode past the ghostly rail bridge, permanently frozen in a raised salute, but did not see his father seated at any of his customary benches. He visited J&A Specialties Electrics, in Belleville, site of Kermin’s semi-frequent pilgrimages for obscure radio parts. He swung by the Arlington Diner, where his father would eat exactly three-quarters of a Reuben and half of his slaw before casually dismissing the plate with a swipe of his hand.

Everything was closed, shuttered, dark. Humanity a distant dream.

He even crossed the Passaic and headed south, to his grandfather’s gravesite in Elizabeth, on the off chance that Kermin had sought out his father’s resting place for guidance.

Radar’s flashlight illuminated the engraved letters of the headstone:

DOBROSLAV RADMANOVIC

1910–1947

A GOOD MAN.

Radar had always found this summary a touch dismissive, but Kermin had explained that this was the state’s default epitaph when little was known about the deceased.

“Your son has gone missing,” Radar said to the gravestone.

Dobroslav, the good man, offered no reply.

With each successive foray, it became increasingly clear that he was not going to find his father in any of these places — that his father would not be found simply by looking for him. And yet, in spite of this, he kept looking. Just the act of looking made Radar feel productive, even if he knew he would most likely come up empty-handed. It also gave him time to process all that he had learned in that strange little cottage beneath the mall.

Kermin — the international puppeteer. Kermin — the genius designer. His pride at learning these descriptors was tempered by a certain sadness that he massaged with his velocity. He could not help but feel cheated, as if he had never actually experienced the real Kermin. He had only known his father as his closeted, curmudgeonly progenitor — who had gambled on the tiny television and lost, who had built a monstrous antenna in their backyard so he could communicate only with those farthest away from him and in doing so had shut out those who loved him the most. But Radar had never known his father as this. As a doer. A maker. One who had changed the course of history.

“Oh, Tata,” he whispered to the moonless sky. “I could’ve helped you. We could’ve done it together.”

• • •

FINALLY, EXHAUSTED, BLEARY-EYED, he returned home to Forest Street. He looked at his watch. It was just after 2:00 A.M.

He was almost at their driveway when he noticed the white van parked in front of their house. His system went cold and he swerved wildly, nearly crashing into his mother’s Olds.

The authorities. The authorities were here. He had left his mother all alone, and now she was being handcuffed and questioned by some secret terrorism task force. He only briefly considered the possibility of fleeing before he took a deep breath and surveyed the situation. No. He was the man of the house now. He couldn’t leave her. He would claim all responsibility for the blackout. He would take the fall for his family.

Radar hid his bicycle behind the viburnum and quietly unlocked the front door, readying himself to be tackled by a SWAT team.

All was quiet. The house was dark.

“Mom?” he called tentatively. “It’s me.”

There was no response.

Upstairs in her room, he found the bed empty. Or not exactly empty: his flashlight caught sight of the little wooden figure lying among the sheets.

“Mom?” he said again.

The flashlight’s beam searching the room. Sweeping past a sheeted bookshelf.

“Mom?” An edge of panic rising in his voice.

The record player silent on the rug. The burned-out stub of the candle on the bedside table, a thicket of wax spilling down the wood. The darkened hole in the floor.

He picked up the figurine. Carved-out eyes, the hint of a mouth. A ghastly little thing.

“Charlene?”

“Radar?” said a voice.

He whirled around, the flashlight beam finding her squinting at him from the doorway. She was holding a candle in one hand and a fire poker in the other.

“Jesus, Mom. You scared me.”

“There’s somebody out there!” she hissed.

“Where?”

“In the shack. I can see their lights. I was too scared to go outside.”

He peered out the window. Sure enough, he could see the glint of light through the shack’s open door.

“Maybe it’s Kermin,” said Radar.

“It didn’t look like him, but I couldn’t be sure,” she whispered. “There’s at least two of them.”

They watched the shack but didn’t see any movement.

“You didn’t find him, did you?” she whispered.

Radar shook his head. “I looked everywhere.”

“What should we do?”

Radar took a breath. “I’ll go down.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No,” he said. “It’s better if you stay here.”

She grabbed his wrist. “I’m not letting you go out there alone!”

And so — she with fire poker and he with a flashlight and a hastily retrieved coatrack that he was brandishing like a spear — together they cautiously ventured through the sliding double doors and into the backyard.

As they approached, a figure emerged from the shack. He was carrying a box in his arms.

“Halt!” called Radar. “Who goes there?”

Who goes there? What was this, Medieval Times?

“It’s me!” said the man.

Radar peered into the darkness. The voice, familiar.

“Who’s me?”

“Lars.”

“Lars?” Radar sighed. He put the coatrack down in the middle of the grass. “What’re you doing here?”

“You know him?” said Charlene.

Lars approached, box in hand.

“I’m terribly sorry to barge in on you like this. As you can see, we’re in a bit of a rush.”

“What is that?” said Radar, pointing at the box.

“Well. . After you left, Otik and I had a little. . tête-à-tête. And we agreed that, despite the circumstances, all of the work we’ve done up until this point — including that by your father — really deserves to see the light of day. And it’s true this ship that leaves. . well, now it’s this morning. . this ship could really be our only chance for a long time. So I—” He stopped himself. “Apologies. You must be Charlene Radmanovic.” He put down the box and held out his hand. “Lars Røed-Larsen.”

Charlene, who was still holding the poker with two hands, did not return the handshake.

“You know my husband?” she said.

“Kermin’s been a longtime colleague, hero, and mentor of mine,” said Lars. “You and I have actually met once, long ago. In Norway. I was ten at the time.”

Charlene blinked, squinted. “That was you? The blond boy?”

“No doubt I was probably up to some mischief when you saw me.”

“Lars and I met tonight,” said Radar. “At Xanadu. They’ve been working with Kermin on a show.”

“Kirkenesferda,” Charlene said slowly.

“Wait — you know about them?” said Radar.

“I’ve lived with the man for thirty-five years. Some things you can’t keep secret forever.”

Otik appeared in the doorway of the shack.

“Hey!” he hissed. “What are you doing? There is like eight hundred fifty-five more birds!”

“Otik,” said Lars. “Come out and say hello.”

“What is this?” said Otik. “We need to move!” He ducked back inside.

Lars held up his hands. “And that’s Otik,” he said.

“I know Otik,” said Charlene. “Has he had his heart attack today?”

“Most probably.” Lars smiled.

“So you’re taking the birds?” said Radar.

“If we can manage to find them all. Your father caused quite a mess with that little experiment of his.”

“But you’re taking them without his permission?” said Radar.

Lars bowed. “I realize this isn’t ideal. Believe me, I wish things could be different. In truth, I’m not sure how we’re going to pull it off without him.”

Otik waddled up to them, his flashlight bobbing.

“We will,” he said.

“Will we?”

“You make it with what you have. This is always how we do it.”

“Yes, but this is Kermin we’re talking about,” said Lars. “These are his birds.”

“But after today there is no more ship!” said Otik. “You said so yourself. If we don’t go, we kiss all of them goodbye.”

“But say we leave and he shows up tomorrow,” said Lars. “What would you tell him? ‘Sorry, we didn’t know where you were, so after ten years of planning we decided to abandon you’?”

“First off, he will not show. You and I both know this.” He swung the flashlight to Charlene’s face. “No offense,” he said. The light swung back to Lars. “On second hand, he would also do this. ‘The project comes first,’ he said to me. Always, always, always. It is like this. If I would disappear like him, I would also want you to go without me.”

“We couldn’t do the show without you,” said Lars. “You know that. Or without Kermin, for that matter. We need three people, minimum, to pull it off. Probably more.”

“Not true,” said Otik. “I could do whole show myself.”

“You couldn’t.”

“I could.”

“What about Radar?” Charlene said suddenly.

Everyone turned and stared at her.

“What about him?” Lars asked.

“He could go instead of Kermin,” she said.

A moment of silence.

“Where is this show, by the way?” said Charlene.

After a pause, Lars said, “The Democratic Republic of Congo.”

“The Congo?” she said, eyebrows raised. “Wow. Okay.”

“Wait, Mom, what’re you talking about?” said Radar. “I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

“You know I can’t go. I have to find him.”

She looked at him. “He would want you to go.”

“He would?” The words quarrying something small and dense from the depths of his body. He contemplated his mother, wondering if she could be serious. What could compel her to make such a ludicrous suggestion? She needed him. And yet, his fingers began to tingle with current. At the mere possibility of going somewhere. He had never been anywhere.

“No, no,” said Otik, shaking his head. “No, that is not option. I’m sorry, he cannot. He would be like child out there.”

“Hang on,” said Lars. He turned to Radar. “Would you consider it? Kermin always said you were the most talented in the family.”

“He did?” said Radar. He tried to adjust to this piece of news. Kermin said that about him? “Well, to be honest. . I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Otik. “Everyone, hold on to your horse. Let me just say I am lodging immediate formal complaint. This is not how we are electing team members. This is very important position. I have no idea about this man’s strength in his mind or—”

“Shut up,” said Lars. “Radar? What do you think? Seriously. You could really save us here.”

All at once, Radar remembered Ana Cristina. The feeling of sitting beside her in the store, of her lips, the temperature of her hands on his. Of course he couldn’t go. There were so many reasons he had to stay here, he was surprised he had even entertained the possibility of leaving.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I would love to help you out, but. . I don’t think I’m your man. I can’t.”

“You see?” said Otik. “Even he knows this is not good idea.”

“Why not?” said Charlene. “Why not you?”

“I can’t, Mom,” he said. “You know I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Give me one good reason. And don’t tell me you have to find Kermin, because I can do that by myself. I’ve been looking for him my whole life.”

“Why do you want me to go so badly?” he said.

“I don’t want you to go. You want to go.”

“No, I. .” He began to protest and then stopped. He thought of Ana Cristina again. “You really think I could do Kermin’s job? Me? Radar?” He had intended to say his name as a protest, but it came out sounding like a superhero.

“Of course,” said Charlene, smiling, hearing this. “You’re his son.”

He blinked. His eyes burned.

“I’m his son,” he repeated. “Radar.”

When he said this, it was as if the needle had finally found the groove. A gear shifted, and the machine came to life. Of course. He was Kermin’s son. It was meant to be. They all saw it then.

“Okay,” said Radar.

“Okay what?” said Lars.

“I’ll go. I’ll take his place.” He felt the tingle of leaving already spreading through his bones. He was terrified, quivering in his boots. He hooked his hands in his belt loops to keep them from shaking.

“You realize what this means?” said Lars. “Once you’re in, you’re in.”

Radar nodded. He feared he might collapse, but instead he closed his eyes and said, as coolly as he could manage: “I’m in.”

When he opened them again, he saw his mother dropping her poker and coming to him. Her arms drifted around his neck, and her face came to rest on his shoulder.

“I’m so proud of you,” she whispered.

Otik clapped his hands. “Fine. If it means we go, then okay, he comes. But just know I am still lodging formal complaint, and I am not responsible for him.”

“Formal complaint noted,” said Lars. “And you are responsible for him. We’re all responsible for each other. This is how it works.”

Radar was looking at his mother. “What’re you going to do?”

“What I’ve always done,” she said.

“It could get bad here if the power doesn’t back come on.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” she said. “I have the Oldsmobile, don’t I? And they’ll figure it all out eventually. To be honest, I could use a little life without electricity. Maybe I’ll even read some poetry. Go back to Coleridge. It’ll be good for me. As long as I get my smell back, I don’t care about the rest.”

“But what about Tata? And his vircator? We need to hide what he’s done.”

“We can take care of that,” said Lars.

Radar nodded, though he was not sure what that would entail. “And what about him?”

“Kermin?” said Charlene. “Don’t you worry about him. When he comes back, I’ll give him a piece of my mind. I’ll let him know where you went. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

“But he is not coming back,” Otik said, and with that, he turned and headed back to the shack.

• • •

SO WENT THE NIGHT. Radar helped them load the van with the rest of the bird bodies. There were well over a thousand, and each needed to be hung up in a precise way, according to Otik’s instructions. When they were done, the back of the van resembled an avian congregation frozen in time.

“We’ll cover up the vircator in case anyone comes looking. You’d better get your things for the trip,” Lars said as they slammed the van doors shut. “Pack lightly.”

“Lightly?” Radar realized he had never packed for a journey before.

“Does your mother have a cell phone that works?” said Lars.

“I can give her the one I found in Kermin’s Faraday cage.”

“Good,” said Lars. “You can take this one. It should work where we’re going. You can give her the number in case she wants to be in touch. Here, it’s on this paper.”

“Thanks,” said Radar.

“But be quick,” Otik said, emerging from the back of the van. “We have four hours before boat leaves, and there’s still whole house to pack. So no dillydally.”

• • •

RADAR FOUND CHARLENE SEATED at the kitchen table, an array of her tea jars splayed out before her.

“Hi,” he said.

She looked up at him with sad eyes. “I still can’t smell anything,” she said.

“I’m sure it’ll come back.”

She nodded. “You’re leaving?”

“I don’t have to,” he said, sitting down next to her. “Truly. I can stay here with you. I can help you find him.”

“No,” she said. “No. Don’t miss this.”

“Why? What am I going to miss? Everything I want is here. Everyone I care about is here.”

“Radar,” she said. “One day you’ll wake up and your entire life will have gone by without you ever having lived it. Don’t make the same mistake I did. You have to get out of yourself to know who you are.”

He thought about this. Wondered if he should add it to his rule book.

“I’ve never been anywhere before,” he said.

“It’s not true,” she said. “We took you to Belgrade.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And you’ve been to Norway.”

The only sound was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the other room.

“You know, he did it for me,” he said.

“Did what?”

“The blackout. He was trying to fix me. My epilepsy, I mean.”

Her face had fallen. “How?”

“He built a vircator, like what they used on me in Norway. . and he thought that if he made another one, he could fix me.”

“Did it work?” she said after a moment.

“Did what work?”

“Did it fix you?”

“I don’t think I can be fixed,” he said. “But he did manage to break New Jersey.”

He smiled. She saw this and snorted. Soon they were both laughing. They could not help themselves. The laughter was a substitute for sorrow, racking their bodies, great heaps of it rising from the depths. They were left gasping at the table.

“That man,” she wheezed. “That man.”

“He’s a good man,” Radar breathed, head resting against one of the radios on the table.

“Yes,” she whispered. “He’s the only one we’ve got.”

“I should go pack,” he said. “Lightly.”

“Make sure you bring enough socks.”

In the rush of things, he hurriedly stuffed his backpack full of socks and not much else. A sweatshirt. A cowboy hat. A toothbrush. He saw his pink Little Rule Book for Life and put that in, too. He knew he was doing a bad job planning for the future, but that took time, and he had no time.

Downstairs again, he saw that his mother had not moved from her spot in the kitchen.

“I almost forgot,” he said. He took Kermin’s phone out of his pocket. “They gave me one that will work over there. I’ll leave the number here. We can do the text.”

She smiled. “You finally learned how to say it properly.”

“Oh, Mom.” He hugged her. “I’ll miss you.”

She pushed him back. “I wanted to tell you. .”

“Yes?”

“About before. I didn’t want to give you the wrong idea. About. . T.K., I mean. I’ve no idea if he’s the one or not,” she said. “I just wanted to say that. I didn’t want you to believe something that might not be true.”

He was quiet, staring at the twin radios.

“It’s okay,” he said finally. “I kind of like the idea of having two fathers.”

“You don’t have two fathers.”

“I know,” he said. “Don’t worry. I know who’s the real one.”

He unzipped his backpack again and took out the pink notebook.

“For you,” he said, handing it to her. “It’s mostly stupid, but there’s a couple of good ones in there. Maybe you can read it while I’m gone.”

She opened to a page and read out loud: “Rule number forty-five: Cheese is important.”

He sighed. “Well, maybe not.”

“Rule number forty-six: Everything happens just once, until it happens again.”

“Okay, when you read them like that, they sound terrible!” he said. “Just forget it.”

“Are you sure you don’t want this? You might need it where you’re going.”

“I don’t think a book could help me now.”

She smiled, blinked. “I have something for you,” she said.

“I have to go.”

“I know; it’ll be quick.”

He followed her up to the bedroom. The stairs creaked beneath them, strange and loud in the darkness. Radar thought of the heavy toe-heel creaks his father made as he trudged up these same stairs. His mother always took the stairs like a bird, but his father’s footsteps sounded like those of a sullen pony. He wondered if he would ever hear those toe-heel creaks again.

In the bedroom, Charlene took his flashlight and went over to the hole in the floor. It gaped, darker than the rest of the dark, like a tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum. After rooting around, she came up holding a book.

“Here,” she said. “It’s for you.”

The book looked familiar. After a moment, he realized what it was: Spesielle Partikler: Kirkenesferda 1944–1995, by Per Røed-Larsen.

“I just saw this,” said Radar. “They showed it to me. It’s by Lars’s brother.”

“I was mailed a copy a long time ago. It’s in Norwegian, so I’ve never been able to read it, but it seems important now, particularly if you’re going to go with them. Maybe you’ll have better luck understanding it than I did.”

“Mom,” he said suddenly, the book in his hands. “I’m scared.”

“It’s okay to be scared,” she said. “It means you have something to live for.”

• • •

IT WAS NEARLY 3:30 A.M. by the time they parked the van next to the little cottage beneath Xanadu.

“Okay,” said Otik. “We have three hours. No dillydally.”

There would be no dillydally. They feverishly transferred the birds and much of the cottage’s contents into a white shipping container that sat on a trailer not far away in the parking garage. There was a lot of equipment. More boxes and tools emerged from that little house than seemed physically possible. All of it was apparently fragile, and Otik would bark at both of them about holding this with two hands, or not disrupting that by rattling it around too much. Radar tried to be helpful, but more often than not he felt as if he was simply in the way.

When they were finished, Radar collapsed onto the ground. He was utterly exhausted. He expected to seize, to pass out, for his body to fail him, but somehow he managed to stay online.

He opened his eyes. Lars was standing above him.

“Congratulations,” said Lars. He offered Radar a little white pill.

“What is this?”

“To make it official,” said Lars. “It’ll make you grow small. Like Alice.”

Radar must’ve looked alarmed, because Lars smiled and said, “It’s for malaria. It might give you some unusual dreams, but believe me, the alternative is much worse.”

The three of them poured a little coffee into some mugs, clinked them together, and took down the pills.

“To dreams,” said Lars.

“To entanglement,” said Otik.

“To Kermin,” said Radar. As soon as he had said it, a kernel of doubt popped open in his chest. This pill had not been meant for him.

“To Kermin,” said Lars gravely. “May we make him proud.”

“To boat,” said Otik. “We have half hour before it is gone.”

• • •

201-998-2666: Ana Cristina, hi it’s Radar. I don’t have much time to write because I’m on my way to a boat and you probably will never get this anyway since your phone is dead but I just wanted to tell you that I’m going away for a while. My father was supposed to put on this show in the Congo but he disappeared so now I’m going instead of him. Kind of crazy, I know. So I won’t be able to meet your Mom right now altho

201-998-2666: Sorry, I guess I reached the limit for a single text. I’ve never written one of these before. I guess they don’t want you rambling on for a long time. So I’ll try to keep this short. These buttons are very hard to write on don’t you think? I prefer Morse Code. I’ll teach you someday, okay? It’s not hard, you just have to get used to it. Point is I was so happy when you invited me to meet your mom before

201-998-2666: Wow. Hit the limit again. That’s embarrassing. Now I’m not sure I want you to get these. All I meant to say was: I want to meet your mom, I want to eat empanadas with you. I’ll miss you. I hope Jersey is okay after all this. Talk to you soon. Xo Radar.

609-292-4087: Radar! Hi!!:)

201-998-2666: Ana C? Your phone works?

609-292-4087: I got a new one:)

201-998-2666: I hope I didn’t wake you. It’s like 6?

609-292-4087: I couldn’t sleep

201-998-2666: Are you okay?

609-292-4087: Yeah my mama is freaking but we r okay! I M so sorry 2 hear about your papa:(I hope he is okay

201-998-2666: Me too.

609-292-4087: You don’t know where he is?

201-998-2666: No

609-292-4087: You’ll find him:) Everyone turns up

201-998-2666: Thanks. I hope so.

609-292-4087: So r u really going to congo? That’s in africa????

201-998-2666: Yes. I’m kind of nervous. We’re taking a boat.

609-292-4087: Boat to africa! Like a movie:)

201-998-2666: I’ll miss you

609-292-4087: I was thinking about u

201-998-2666: Yeah?

609-292-4087: Did u know yr name is same forward-> RADAR back-> RADAR:)

201-998-2666: Yours is too! At least ANA is. Cristina kind of messes it up. .

201-998-2666: Just kidding.

609-292-4087: your funny!!!

201-998-2666: Oh. I can’t go. I can’t leave you!!!

609-292-4087: I’ll be here when you get back:)

201-998-2666: You promise? You’re like the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I feel like I’ve known u forever

609-292-4087: I know what u mean

609-292-4087: U there?

201-998-2666: Sorry, We’re here I think. I have to go. Ahh!

609-292-4087: Don’t worry be safe!!! I’ll miss you

201-998-2666: I’ll try to text u when I’m in the congo

609-292-4087: Okay that would be great:)

609-292-4087: Like my own reporter in the jungle:)

201-998-2666: It’s weird how close

201-998-2666: I feel to u now. Just the words between us

201-998-2666:???

609-292-4087: I know

609-292-4087: Nos vemos radar — ><-

201-998-2666: What’s this? — ><-?

609-292-4087: I just made it up:) same backward & forward

201-998-2666: Okay. I get it

609-292-4087: Maybe its being close w/o being close

201-998-2666: — ><- see you

609-292-4087: — ><- x

2

As dawn broke across the Newark quayside, Radar stood on the dock watching the great white shipping container slowly descend into the hull of the ship. The gantry crane jammed and the container jerked sideways, swaying back and forth against a velvet maroon sky. From inside the container they could hear crashing and splintering.

“Jebi se!” Otik yelled next to Radar. “They are fucking it! Tell them they are fucking it!”

But then the cable winch caught again and the box resumed its graceless plunge into the bowels of the boat.

The Aleph—the vessel to which they were about to entrust their passage across the Atlantic — had seen better days. Her hull was pockmarked by welding scars and archipelagoes of rust, and with every meager rise and trough of the sheltered bay, her joints creaked a painful symphony. In an oddly boastful tone for a man revealing his ship’s inadequacies, the captain had informed them that she was supposed to carry six thousand tons but in her current state could manage only five, and that even this sank her below her summer Plimsoll.

“But she will not sink?” Otik said nervously. “She floats, right?”

“It’s true, she’s unhappy with the world,” the captain said in lieu of an answer.

Dressed in the crisp whites of his command, Captain Alfonso Daneri was a barrel of a man. He had greeted each of them with both hands, as if he had known them for years. His beard looked like a giant sea urchin hauled up from the depths, and his eyebrows were two monstrous caterpillars that haunted his forehead, undulating with every consonant.

“Some boats are born this way,” said the captain. “Some boats learn their misery. She was put on the blocks for two years in Quanzhou, and now she trusts no one.” He was rubbing his hands together in slow, languid circles, as if savoring a piece of music that had only just finished.

“‘She trust no one,’” Otik repeated. “What does this mean? This is something you say and everybody says ‘Okay, yes,’ but actually no one knows what in fuck you are talking about.”

“The sea takes back everything she gives,” said Captain Daneri, clearly enjoying himself. He tapped the toe of his boot against one of the kidney-shaped bollards that secured his ship. “She signs no allegiance. She has no kin, keeps no kin, owes no favors.”

Radar noticed the captain swaying ever so slightly. He had the sudden urge to reach out and steady him.

Otik scoffed. “This is man who will take us to Africa? Oh, please. We make some more chance to swim there.”

Lars stepped in, placing a hand on Otik’s shoulder.

“Apologies, Captain. We’re all a little tired,” he said. “What he means to say is only that we’re transporting valuable cargo and want to make sure the ship’s seaworthy.”

Captain Daneri’s face grew suddenly serious.

“You see these boxes?” he said, gesturing at the rows and rows of multicolored containers stacked four high across the deck of the ship. “This is the new world. These boxes disrupt space and time. The world is now inside the box.”

“I don’t know about you,” Otik said to Lars. “But if I’m going to die, I choose to die maybe somewhere in the jungle, on land, not in middle of fucking ocean.”

“All right, calm down,” said Lars. “I happen to agree with the captain. One could make the argument that the world is inside the box.”

“If it makes you feel better, I’ve never lost one,” said the captain. “There once was a group of pirates in Lagos who snuck aboard my ship. They went for one of the boxes sitting on the deck. They didn’t know what was inside; they just went for the nearest one with a crowbar. And do you know what they found? Horses. Thoroughbreds. We were bringing them down to a race in South Africa. Their trainer was upstairs asleep at the time. But can you imagine? The pirates open this box, they are like boys at Christmas, and what do they find? Horses.”

Fig. 5.1. “Parts of Shipping Container” and “How to Load a Ship”

From Peels, S. (1999), A Short History of Deliverance, pp. 69, 83

“You transport horses?” asked Radar.

“Oh, no. Not anymore.”

“So what happened?”

“It was very unfortunate. The horses got loose on the deck. One of the animals went overboard. Another broke its leg. A terrible shame. I had to shoot the beast in the head with a pistol. It looked at me, very calm. It knew what must be done.”

“And what about pirates?” said Otik.

“Oh, we caught them. I showed them the box and I said, ‘You will never touch another box again.’ And then I tied their feet together and I said, ‘Go find me that horse,’ and I pushed them off my ship.”

“You killed them,” said Otik.

“No, no, no,” laughed the captain. “I gave them the gift of the sea.” He made a fist with his hand and kissed it.

• • •

THEY WERE THE ONLY human cargo. Radar was not sure whether their presence on board was even legal or whether technically they were stowaways, but when it came time to depart, the captain made a flourish of inviting them to stand on the bridge wing while they pulled away from the docks. A scruffy local pilot, who looked and smelled as if he had only recently stopped drinking, came aboard to guide them out of the harbor. It was clear the captain was none too pleased with the man’s brazen intoxication, but he did not protest as the pilot parked himself on the bridge and started issuing instructions.

A black-and-white tug latched onto their bow and began turning up chop as it levered the Aleph out of her berth. From the wheelhouse they could hear the pilot rapping out commands in a kind of drunken staccato. Captain Daneri would repeat them, but silkily, like a man cajoling his slighted lover.

“Dead slow ahead!” barked the pilot.

“Dead slow ahead,” intoned the captain.

“Starboard five-oh!”

“Starboard. Five-oh. Please.”

“Stop!”

“Cut the engines, Mr. Piskaryov.”

Drunk or not, the pilot was good. With the tug grumbling by her side, the Aleph gradually backed out into the bay. Above, gulls turned circles overhead. Otik was studying them intensely, writing microscopic notes in a journal. He pointed out some element of their flight dynamics to Lars, who nodded, forming his two hands into a diving bird.

A rip from the ship’s horn made Radar jump. The gulls scattered. Inside the wheelhouse, Captain Daneri kissed his fist and shot them a grin.

The sky lightened, softening the hulls of the great tankers that lined Newark’s port. As they turned, the familiar stench of the Hackensack rose up and filled Radar’s nostrils. He shivered, seized by the violent urge to get back onto dry land. Craning his neck, he tried to catch a last glimpse of home, tried to make out the great swath of darkness that encircled the little shack behind his house on Forest Street, tried to see the A&P where she worked, but the sun had already risen and the darkness had fled. Kearny and its mysteries melted into an endless Jersey panorama.

A panic that had been gathering in Radar all night now broke through and overwhelmed him, as if a large animal pelt had been thrown across his back, so thick and heavy he felt he might collapse under the terrible weight of it. He already missed Ana Cristina. He missed his mother. He missed Kermin. He missed everything.

Radar clenched at the handrail of the boat, reeling. He had made a terrible, horrible mistake.

The intensity and vast ballast of this sensation felt very different from the nimble prelude to a seizure. There was no telltale whiff of lemon or cinnamon, but beyond that, he felt much too clear for an electrical malfunction. No: he could tell his body would not let him disappear into an epileptic netherworld. Not now. It held him fast, forcing him to confront his choice, eyes wide open.

What had he done? He was not supposed to be on this ship.

Desperate, he looked back at the docks. The distance between ship and shore had widened considerably. Fifty feet. Now seventy-five. The water white and restless from their maneuvers. He could dive in. He did not know how to swim, but surely he could make it just by thrashing like a dog. How hard could it be? He would not look back at the ship; he would haul himself from the muck and mire, run home, lie prostrate at his mother’s feet, and offer a thousand apologies for his madness. Then he would find Ana Cristina and he would hold her, wet and shivering, and he would never let her go.

He released his grip on the railing and stumbled up to Lars.

“I need to go back,” he said.

“For what?”

“I can’t go.”

“You can’t go?”

“I need to find Kermin.” He willed back the tears. “I can’t leave her alone like this.”

Lars studied him.

“It’s too late,” he said. “We’ve left.”

“Please,” said Radar. “Tell them to stop the ship.”

“She’ll be okay.”

“She won’t be okay. It wasn’t me who wanted to go,” he said, realizing what he was saying.

“I need to go back,” he said quietly.

Lars looked into his eyes. They stood like this, the tug twirling the boat around, and then Lars nodded and walked into the wheelhouse.

• • •

AS THEY SWUNG AROUND Bergen Point and headed toward the arched gateway of the Bayonne Bridge, Captain Daneri strode out onto the bridgewing, with Lars in tow.

“What’s this I hear about you jumping ship?” bellowed the captain. His posture had changed decidedly. Arms akimbo, he was all right angles and mariner’s scowl. His left eyebrow arched and trembling like a flag in a stiff wind.

“I’ve got to go back, I’m sorry,” said Radar, stepping backwards. “I don’t want to cause any—”

“May I ask why you got on my boat in the first place?” said the captain.

Radar looked around to see if anyone was watching. “I know, I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I really am, but I’ve got to get off. Please.”

Lars was standing behind the captain, delivering a quiet glare in Radar’s general direction. It was the first time Radar had seen this side of him; in all other matters, even during the previous night’s gloomier episodes, Lars had been nothing but calm and cheerful, a steady rudder to Otik’s mania. But here was a glimpse of the fire within. Seeing that glower, Radar understood how a group as obscure and unfeasible as Kirkenesferda had persisted through the years. It was an indirect kind of rage, a seething generalis. He could feel himself shrinking beneath the onslaught.

Hearing the commotion, Otik abandoned his bird-watching and approached their little trio.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Apparently your compadre doesn’t want to voyage with us,” said the captain. The eyebrow twitched.

“I told you!” said Otik. “I told you, Lars. He is like the little child. He is half the man of his father. Less, probably. One quarter-half of one percent.”

Captain Daneri thrust a finger into Radar’s chest. “What’s eating at you, my boy?”

Radar opened his mouth but said nothing.

“Go on,” the captain said. “What’s got you turned around?”

“My father disappeared,” he said. “He’s the one who was supposed to be here, not me. I can’t just abandon my mother in the middle of a blackout. I have to go help her find him.”

“She told him to come,” said Lars.

“She was probably tired of dealing with him,” said Otik. “She wanted him kaput.”

“She didn’t know what she was saying,” said Radar. “Please, sir. Let me off. I won’t bother you anymore. I just need to go back. They don’t even want me here.”

“It’s not true,” said Lars. “We need you. And you need us.”

The Bayonne Bridge was above them. The metal laced into a perfect convex, launched lightly from either bank, unequivocal in its conceit. It was a dream of men. Of all men.

The captain went to the railing. He rubbed his beard with the palm of his hand.

“A nasty little strait, this Kill van Kull,” he said. “Straits are what get you. Your bow is pushed from shore and your stern is sucked in. You must go straight, but you cannot steer straight. So what do you do?” As he said this, he pointed at the wheelhouse, where the pilot was alternately giving commands and speaking of whores. Yet you could tell that he was completely in control from the ease with which he switched between his story and his directional orders. And so could the captain, apparently, who was comfortable enough to leave the pilot while he lingered out here with them.

“So what do you do?” repeated the captain.

“Sir?” said Radar.

“You don’t steer where you’re headed.” The captain hooked an eye on him. “We aren’t stopping. You can jump the Kill, but I don’t recommend it. Nasty currents. High traffic.”

“But—”

“Once a man signs up, he’s one of us. There can be no turning back. You sign up for a reason. You’ll get off when you’re ready.”

Radar was about to speak but realized there was nothing left to say. He briefly had the strange and wild urge to strike the captain, a dose of rage he did not know what to do with. But before he could do anything one way or another, the captain spun on his heel and returned to the wheelhouse.

“Looks like we’re stuck with you,” said Otik.

“It’s really for the best,” said Lars.

Radar looked back at the receding bridge, and then down into the opaque green churn of water. He thought of the horse jumping off the boat in Lagos. He lifted one foot onto the railing.

“Don’t,” said Lars, but Radar knew even before his foot had left the deck that he would never be able to do it. Resolve had never been his strong suit.

Soon they had cleared Constable Hook and found themselves out in the harbor. The pilot had negotiated the portside passing of two giant tankers and nimbly maneuvered around a stalled feeder ship in the Kill’s narrows. This balletic performance had done much to revive him; he had discarded his disheveled air, and now went around offering handshakes to the officers with all the gravitas of an ambassador.

“Bon voyage, bon voyage, watch out for the pirates,” he called. “They will rape you if you give them half a chance.”

Captain Daneri clasped the pilot’s shoulder and kissed him on both cheeks.

“An honor,” said the captain. “Un piloto y su puerto.” His opinion had evidently softened.

They slowed and pitched as the pilot climbed down the ladder to meet his boat. He offered a final wave to the Aleph before disappearing into the boat’s cabin.

It was only after the pilot boat had pulled away and was speeding back to shore that Radar realized he could’ve left with them. Why hadn’t he?

You’ll get off when you’re ready.

The sun had already risen over the flats of Brooklyn, but Lady Liberty’s flame had not yet been extinguished. It burned and burned, wary of what the day might bring. She stood, steady and erect as ever, with a clean conscience and an open heart. Behind her gallant robes, the Manhattan skyline paid little heed to their imminent exit. The captain ordered full speed ahead, the engines were fired, and the Aleph turned south, to the gates of the Verrazano and the last buoy before the open sea.

3

Lars had christened their forty-foot container Moby-Dikt. On the second day, he even went so far as to paint on a pair of morose whale eyes at knee height, which always seemed to be watching you no matter where you stood. Moby-Dikt lay by itself on the bottom floor of the number-four cargo hold, just in front of the bridge castle, a full four stories below the quarterdeck. It was always slightly dank down there, and Radar imagined the steel ribs rising up the sides of the hull as if they were the ribs of a great and monstrous whale. A whale inside of a whale inside of a whale and so on, the universe nothing but a series of matryoshka’d leviathans. His vision was enhanced by the constant, ominous creaking of the Aleph’s joints, which would echo and reverberate across the stacks of containers. The ship moaned, complained, howled. But she did not break. Not yet, at least.

Their container had been retrofitted as a hybrid living quarters and workshop, with a firm emphasis on the workshop part of the equation. It was packed to the gills with all manner of tools and mechanical detritus, including two soldering irons, a workbench, a wire draw, a hand loom, Otik’s vircator, two generators, six large speakers, an electric kettle, three computers in varying exploded states of repair, sixteen reams of old telegraph cable, and a full atelier featuring a band saw, a lathe, a power sander, and a spindle molder. There were also four djembe drums and a box of obscure musical instruments, which would occasionally rattle and shake as if of their own volition. In one corner, they had lashed down the gold-and-burgundy theater wagon — the same theater wagon used in Sarajevo. And then, of course, there were also the nearly fourteen hundred mechanical birds they had taken from Kermin’s shack, which now hung and swayed from the ceiling. The birds were still headless, their heads kept on six long racks by Otik’s cot. Radar never got used to this disembodied gallery of unblinking eyes.

The container actually represented an increase in space from the tiny cottage in Xanadu’s parking garage, but it offered precious little maneuvering room when all three men were present. This was not helped by Otik’s ongoing seasickness, exacerbated by the minute nature of his work on the bird heads. His pallor, which prior to their departure had resembled the color of unripe melon, had now taken on the hue of the repurposed ham-and-pea puree they used to serve at the Rutgers dining hall. Otik sat there, sweating and breathing heavily, a little moan escaping his lips every so often to signal his body’s revolt. He would then rip off his magnifying headpiece, raise his great body out of his chair, and proceed to vomit into a five-gallon bucket set up just outside the container’s entrance. The sound of his retching became a kind of metronome for the puppet work in the hull.

Ever since his outburst in port, both Lars and Otik had maintained their distance from Radar, each in his own way. Otik, mired in his nausea, simply chose not to acknowledge his existence. Lars’s evasions were more subtle: when addressing Radar, he would often let the ends of his sentences drift off, as if the most important bits could not be said. Radar watched them from his cot, fiddling absentmindedly with one of his father’s transceivers. It was evident that they were used to working in tandem. Even Kermin must have existed as a distant moon to their mutual dependence. It would have been more amusing to watch them in action if it were not also a reminder of his alienation.

“I hate you,” Otik hissed at Lars, completely unprompted. Yet the line was clearly delivered with such loving familiarity that Radar found himself longing for someone, anyone, to hate him with similar affection.

“Is it possible to have them return and perch ten seconds in?” Lars replied.

“Why to perch?”

“A moment of doubt.”

“Doubt?”

“Of contemplation, reflection. A prelude before the journey.”

“Let me see.”

“Ten seconds in.”

“This is soon.”

“If it’s not possible—”

“‘Nothing is not possible,’ says Kermin Radmanovic, alleged father of him.” Otik thrust his head in Radar’s direction.

“Can I do something?” said Radar.

The two went silent.

“We’re okay for now,” said Lars. “Thank you.”

“We are okay forever,” said Otik. He grunted, removed his magnifier, and then trundled from the room. They soon heard the familiar sound of gagging.

“He takes a while,” said Lars. “But once he accepts you as one of his own, he’ll die for you.”

“Oh, am I one of his own?” said Radar. “I hadn’t realized.”

“It’s a complicated question for a Serb,” said Lars. “But I do know he’s been through a lot in life. You must meet him halfway. He has seen enough not to trust another human being on this planet, and yet. . he does. And he will. Just give him time; he’ll come around. He’s like an elephant. He never forgets.”

• • •

201-998-2666: Hello Mom. It’s Radar. I miss you. I tried to get off the ship when we started sailing but they wouldn’t let me. I realized this was a mistake. I shouldn’t have left you. Are you okay? Did you find tata? I feel terrible. I will never forgive myself for leaving you like this. Please call me. [Message not sent.]

201-998-2666: Hi Ana Cristina. I’m on the boat. We left yesterday morning. We’re somewhere in the Atlantic. My God I miss you. I feel like I’m the only person on this earth right now. — Radar (lost at sea) [Message not sent.]

Soon after their departure, the text messages would no longer go out. They sat in his phone, unsent, left in a state of perpetual limbo. He cursed himself for not giving his mother a transceiver. How had he gotten stuck with cellular communication as his only avenue? Helpless, voiceless, he would stand up on the forecastle deck, feeling the salty bow spray against his skin, and twiddle the dials, catching signal from Montauk, then from Europe, then from a ham in the Azores, in Dakar, in Guadeloupe, in Cartagena. The ionic skip was strange and beautiful out here. He could reach crazy new locations as if they were barely twenty yards away, and yet there were also whole blank spots on the Eastern Seaboard, including his home, that persisted in silence. He wondered about the blackout. How much had come back. That whole world — the swamps, the radio station, Forest Street — it all felt so far away now, separated by a wide and widening sea.

What was this sea? He spent most of his time staring out at its vast expanse. He felt unsettled on the boat, and not because of the vessel’s constant roll and pitch. His was not a seasickness like Otik’s. This feeling had more to do with absence. An absence of land, an absence of material, an absence of current. The salt water had an electromagnetic frequency all its own, but it was a frequency with which he was not familiar. Its note was singular, ancient, without end. He had come from a symphony, and now he was listening to an old man singing in the dark.

201-998-2666: Ana Cristina, I think about you all the time. Scary how much I think about you and home and everything I had. I wonder if I’ll ever see you again. [Message not sent.]

201-998-2666: Please ignore my last message. [Message not sent.]

201-998-2666: Sorry. It’s just lonely out here. I hope the power has come back there. I feel so far away right now. A blackout would be beautiful right now. Out here there is nothing to black out. [Message not sent.]

When the weather was calm, Radar — who had taken to wearing a knitted sailor’s cap he had found in one of the cargo holds — would curl up on the quarterdeck next to a cargo winch and read. He first looked at the many newspaper clippings in the folder his mother had given him. One would think such a trove of material would be a revelation, particularly coming on the heels of his mother’s announcement. Yet soon one article began to bleed into the next. He could feel the writers grasping for something just out of their reach. All they had were a few facts, some names, dates, and places, but nothing more. It was as if they were giving the particulars of an invented character that was him and yet not him. Even the highly technical “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male,” by Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald, read as a kind of fiction that had very little to do with who he was. Cloaked within the fancy, medical-sounding language was a blatant absence of truth. He soon lost interest. These documents contained no answers.

He next turned his attention to Spesielle Partikler. This book, like the articles, had been fished from that hole in the floor of his parents’ bedroom, and just holding it in his hands made him feel close to her. If he closed his eyes, he could almost conjure the feeling of that night, of listening to Caruso in the dark.

The book was a monstrosity. It felt like a brick in his lap. The binding was the color of sand and had clearly been handled many, many times, for the spine was split in two places and a large chunk of pages had come loose from the headband. Radar had to clutch it, lest the wayward leaves decide to up and blow away in the wind. Many of its passages were marked in a soft purple pencil. He found himself wondering about these markings. Who could have taken the care to mark so much of the text? Surely it wasn’t his mother, who, like him, couldn’t read Norwegian. It must have been the reader before her, or the one before that.

The more he looked at the book, the more intrigued he became, though he could not quite say what drew him to it. Occasionally a familiar name or place would jump out of that incomprehensible sea and there would be a momentary flash of recognition, a pinprick of electricity. He found Lars Røed-Larsen and Miroslav Danilovic (who became Otik Mirosavic on page 1184). He found Leif Christian-Holtsmark, the leader of Kirkenesferda, whom Lars had talked about. On page 490 he even found himself, Radar Radmanovic, along with his mother and father. From what he could make out, their visit to Norway was described in some detail.

When he got to page 493, he stopped. There, in the bottom right corner, was a diagram of a man. Except for a strange, slender headband and a boxy arm-strap contraption, the man was incredibly generic, an everyman. He wondered if this could be the diagram of his treatment. The electro-enveloping, as Lars had called it. Radar leaned in closer. Four or five strokes of the pen conveyed a subtle look of amusement across the man’s lips. Amusement at what? The transient nature of atomic reality? The knowledge that all things must change. Fall apart? Die?

Fig. 5.2. Detail from Den Menneskelig Marionett Prosjektet

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

Was this everyman supposed to be him?

It was preposterous, of course. He had been only four years old at the time, and even now, as a (somewhat) grown man, he in no way resembled this diagrammatic stand-in. And yet he could not look away. He leaned in closer, staring at the simple outline of the man’s frame, the hint of tendons in the neck, the twin dips of his pectorals. As he brought his eyes closer and closer to the page, the lines of the man blurred, along with the arrows and their unexplained letters. As their edges softened, he imagined the electricity spilling through this man’s skin, unraveling the cells, reversing proteins, morphing colors, peeling back time. The white of the page became him, became Radar the little boy, receiving that pulse, that quiet disaster of a pulse that would forever alter the shape of his story.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the man in the diagram. “You’re stuck like that.”

There were many such diagrams littered across the book’s pages. Floating within a sea of Norwegian, these diagrams came to represent little islands of potential meaning. He began to anticipate each image as a shipwrecked man anticipates an approaching shoal. Each one a world. Each one a promise of truth.

Gradually, as he sat with the book, a history of Kirkenesferda began to take shape in his mind, although he could not be sure if this history resembled the real history that had actually happened, or whether he was sculpting a new history, whole in and of itself. He was not even sure such a distinction mattered. He could now picture the four Kirk shows: Kirk En was the installation on the island in 1944, with the jars of little people floating in heavy water. One night, Radar had a terrible dream about these jars. He had been having more dreams since he started taking the malarial medication, and he was even remembering some of them the next morning. In the dream, the little people had come alive and were drowning, but he couldn’t figure out how to unscrew the tops of the jars, and so he was forced to watch as they slowly died, one by one, their tiny throats filled with the heavy water, stained a terrible translucent shade of yellow.

Kirk To was the Tsar Bomba show on Gåselandet Island in 1961, where the wagon housing the puppet show apparently exploded in the blast wave of the largest atomic bomb ever detonated. The book featured a series of stills from an eight-millimeter film that allegedly depicted the moment of destruction, but Radar had his doubts. How could the camera have survived? And the stills didn’t really show anything at all, at least as far as he could tell. Why show something if you couldn’t even tell what you were looking at? Maybe he just didn’t know how to look.

Then: Kirk Tre. The horror in Cambodia. He lingered here, knowing what an effect it had had on Lars. Young Lars. Through the palimpsest of diagrams and images he learned about Raksmey Raksmey, who had maybe been found in a hat (?), who had become a scientist (??) in Europe, who returned to Cambodia and somehow survived the Khmer Rouge, and who had then been invited to join Kirkenesferda via telegram. At least this is what he believed had happened. He couldn’t ever be sure. Radar studied the diagrams of the complex show, wondered how his father could have helped to create such intricate creatures. What a production it all was! To put on something that elaborate in the middle of the jungle for Pol Pot and his men. So much effort. And for what?

Fig. 5.3. “Gåselandet Still Sequence”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 231

With a shiver, Radar found the map on page 856: “Massakren og Escape på Camp 808.” The map depicted the aftermath of the night’s bloody ending, in which everyone was shot except little Lars, who escaped with Raksmey, only to see Raksmey die by stepping on a land mine at the Thai border. The maps of course told so little, captured none of the true terror of that night — the smell of death and cordite lingering in the air, the screams, the blood, then the silence, before the buzz of insects slowly returned. The map did not include the sound of Leif Christian-Holtsmark’s wet, ragged breath as the last of his life left him or Siri’s final glance across the hut to see the blood spilling from her husband’s neck. There was only this collection of dotted lines, a cluster of x’s, as if this were from some errant scrimmage in a coach’s playbook. And yet, seeing the unspeakable reduced to a simple black-and-white map, Radar felt himself overtaken by a new kind of horror, a horror of viewing but not knowing, of sensing what must lurk in the white spaces between the lines, beyond the boundaries of the map, beyond the confines of the book, beyond even the vast and unnameable sea. Otik wasn’t the only one who had been through hell and survived. After experiencing that simple map, in all its silence, Radar made a mental note to forgive Lars for everything he had done or would do.

Fig. 5.4. “Massakren og Escape på Camp 808”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 856

By contrast, Kirkenesferda Fire, the Sarajevo performance, seemed almost tame, though Radar spent perhaps the longest time studying these diagrams, as his father felt most present here. He became frustrated with his total ignorance of Norwegian, with not being able to unravel and savor every detail of the performance. The language barrier felt almost personal; he became convinced that if he could just understand this show, then he would understand everything about his father. He would have to ask Lars to tell him about what had happened, what went wrong, why the show ended early.

Radar did fall in love with a series of images from the performance, although he could not quite explain their origins. The images appeared to have been taken through a strong microscope. In the sequence, a tiny (microscopic?) old man reads a book as he sits amid a lunar landscape. Several frames show him turning pages, until, in the final two frames, he disappears inside a fiery flash of light. Radar could not help feeling kinship with this minute reader. They were not so different. In many ways, he was simply another reader waiting for a spark of light to burn him up.

Radar did not sleep well, perhaps because of the close quarters, perhaps because of the malaria medication’s nocturnal effects. He still did not remember most of his dreams, but he often awoke in the middle of the night still caught in the lingering lacunae of their wake, immersed in the feeling of experiencing a horror that could not be known, and such a feeling of unknowing bled into his days. He missed the comforts of his Little Rule Book for Life and briefly regretted giving it to his mother. Where would he put all of his stupid little thoughts?

The world had slowly shrunk to only this particular patch of sea. Land became a memory, true and not quite true at the same time. Those afternoons on the quarterdeck with the sun on his face and the seabirds hang-gliding next to the railings as if they were unaware of gravity’s embrace — those afternoons flowed together into one long, long day, a day that included all days before and all days after. The ocean of water melded with the text of the book, and he was a helmsman in each, making his way through a vast wilderness to a forever unattainable point on the horizon.

201-998-2666: Dear Mom, I’ve been reading the book you gave me. Not really reading, more like taking it in. I don’t understand everything (or anything) but it’s somehow wonderful. Thank you. Did you find Tata yet? I just wonder what could have happened to him?? He never went anywhere. And the lights? Are they back on? I left you in such a terrible place. Why did you tell me to go??? [Message not sent.]

201-998-2666: Dear Ana Cristina, do you think we could be happy together? Like really happy? Would you grow tired of me? I would never grow tired of you. I would find something new about you every day. [Message not sent.]

201-998-2666: Sorry about the last text. I guess I shouldn’t treat these like journal entries. But if you will never get them and if no one will ever read them except me does it really matter? Let’s test it: I love you, Ana Cristina, I love you. [Message not sent.]

4

When he was not at his spot on the quarterdeck, Radar roamed the many passageways of the Aleph. The 456-foot ship was a maze of steam and boilers and valves, and he would wander through it all, laying his hands on random pipes and the walls of containers just to see if he could discern what lurked within. Sometimes the pipes were hot. Sometimes the containers were cold.

The Aleph flew a Liberian flag, was owned by a Portuguese shipping company based in China, and was skippered by an Argentinean who commanded a predominantly Russian and Estonian crew. For the number of tons of cargo she was hauling, the number of crewmen seemed ridiculously small — aside from the three of them, there were only fifteen men on board, including a full-time cook. The crew appeared to spend most of their time sanding rust off the decks and painting whatever lay beneath. Sometimes it felt as if the whole boat was made of rust. Radar wondered what would happen if they sanded it all away, slowly replacing the frame of the boat with paint, until she was composed only of latex. Would she still float? Would she still carry five above her summer Plimsoll? Or would she slowly sink — so slowly that no one would notice?

For the most part, the crew ignored him as he passed them sanding down the hallways. He could not read their expressions beneath their ventilator masks, but he imagined that they regarded him like a feral dog that they must tolerate but might eventually have to put out of its misery. One day he, too, would be sanded away.

Only the second mate, Ivan Kovalyov, took a liking to him. Ivan had the face of a baby and the body of a wrestler. He was also missing his left pinkie. He was originally from Vanavara, a tiny town in the middle of Siberia on the banks of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. He was the only man on the ship, besides Lars and himself, who did not drink.

“Where I come from, if you don’t take vodka. . well, this is actually worse than homosexual,” said Ivan. “I am outcast, you see. I am lamb.”

His only vice, he claimed, was music, but he pronounced this word as if it had an extra, secret syllable that only he knew about: myoo-zi-ka.

“When I was little, I spent all of my monies on compact discs,” he said. “Grigor and I would drive down to Krasnoyarsk and get all of the latest hits. Like Crash Test Dummies or Midnight Oil. These bands, I truly love. They are like family. Like fathers. Like my sisters.

“Once there was this kid, who gets into an accident and he couldn’t go to school,” he sang. He shook his head. “That is so beautiful and also so true.”

When he was not on watch, Ivan would sit against the bulwark of the poop deck and strum his battered guitar. He had discovered a specific spot where the acoustics caused the music to drift down into the ventilators and naturally amplify throughout the corridors of the ship so that you could hear him playing all the way down in Moby-Dikt. Ivan had a surprising number of original love songs in his repertoire. They were named after different women (“Nadja,” “Carolina,” “Julie Julie”), and they all sounded exactly alike.

“I have only four fingers,” he explained, holding up his hand. “So I must play simple songs.” He strummed a chord, as if to demonstrate. “Ooo-ooo-ooo, and her name was Nadja.”

“Have you met all of these women?” Radar asked Ivan.

“Not yet,” said Ivan. “Ooo-ooo-ooo, and her name was Oleana.”

But Ivan did not get many chances to play his songs, because Ivan’s true gift was in celestial navigation. Ivan could read the stars in his sleep, and thus he was always in demand on the bridge. Captain Daneri — who otherwise thought little of his “Red Army,” as he called the Russian crew — confirmed the astonishing nature of Ivan’s astral gifts:

“He’s the best I’ve ever seen. Sweet Jesus, that boy was born in the sky,” he said.

Radar greatly enjoyed watching Ivan shoot the heavens with his sextant. The indexing arm slid across the arc, the mirror clicked into place, and the course was confirmed.

“And what is that one?” Radar said from the deck one night. He was pointing at a star glowing just off their bow.

“That is Sirrah. It looks like one star, but she is actually two stars very close together, like this. Very close, so from ninety-seven light-years away, we see only one star. But you have to remember, you are seeing past right now. You are seeing very old light. Ninety-seven years old. So this light is from before World War I, when people still poop in holes,” he said. “I always like Sirrah. She is beautiful because she is in two constellations at once. She is head of Andromeda and she is also penis of Pegasus. She is both. One day, I will write song about this.”

Rarely did an exchange go by with Ivan that did not end in this phrase.

To really see Ivan at work, however, you needed to observe him in the chart room, with its drawers and drawers of maps covering nearly every coastline in the world. This was his true domain. Ivan spun his plotters in great pirouettes, cutting lines with his red pencil, tapping and wrapping the dividers across the great expanse of depth readings. All he needed was a single star and he could take you anywhere you wanted. The Aleph was equipped with various radar and GPS locating devices, but the electrical work was shoddy and sometimes the systems would fizzle out with no apparent warning, leaving them seemingly without a location. But with Ivan, there was no worry. With Ivan, they would always have a location, because Ivan did not fail.

“How did you learn how to read the stars?” Radar asked him at dinner one evening.

“You must understand that in Soviet Union we didn’t have very many things. But one thing we have more than anyone is space. I mean like literally outer space. Our space program was best in the world. We did not fake moon landing like the Americans. We send up Sputnik first and we send up Laika, first dog into space. And then we send up Yuri Gagarin, first man in space. After this, everyone believed anything is possible. So of course I wanted to be a cosmonaut when I was little. Just like every other Russian boy.”

“I’m not sure the Americans faked the moon landing.”

“Of course they did. That is common fact,” said Ivan, chewing thoughtfully on a forkful of mashed potatoes. “But probably real reason I became interested in stars is because of the event.”

“The event?”

“I think this is what you call it in English.”

“What event?”

“Tunguska Event. In 1908, there was huge explosion in Siberia. It blew out two thousand square meters of forest, something like this. Eighty million trees destroyed. Center of explosion was seventy kilometers from Vanavara, but the people there, they still felt heat blast all across their skin. The shockwave broke windows, collapsed woodsheds. It blew the men right off their horse. It was powerful, so powerful. Stronger than an atom bomb.”

“This was 1908?”

“Yes, 1908. In June. There is a monument in Vanavara, because after this everyone wanted to come to see what happened. Scientists, tourists, acrobats.”

“Acrobats?”

“Okay, one acrobat. But he was very famous. He did his Tunguska show, where he launched himself from a wire and disappeared into a puff of smoke. It was very famous and very beautiful.”

“So what caused the explosion?”

“Well, that is a lot of debating. When I was little, government report said this was meteor, but many older people who are still religious could not believe this. They said it was God’s doing. They said the government had made God angry by mistreating its people and so God is punishing them. I can still remember this. . There was line of scientists giving their report. They were standing in these white coats. And I said to myself, Ivan, if you cannot be cosmonaut, maybe you can become scientist like these men. These men know about everything in sky. Look how clean their coats are! They are so powerful and so clean. This is what I thought. So I get books and I get chart and I get spotter and. . I spend time with sky. I spend lots of time with sky. Just watching. In Siberia, sky is amazing. Maybe best sky in world. Like fish eye spinning around and around. You can see stars shoot once every ten seconds, no problem. You look straight ahead and you see more stars in your — how do you call it, on these sides?”

“Your periphery.”

“Yes, your periphery. Your periphery is having serious party. And when you look there, you see more stars over there, and so on. But funny thing is that when I was looking at stars, it was like looking at myself. At my own hand, but this hand I forget I have. It was like. . I have to learn this part of me again.”

“So you learned all of the constellations?”

“Yes, but not exactly like that. It is like I am becoming familiar again, if you understand. But of course I can’t see every star. I feel like I know them, but I can’t see them. And then I realize: there is whole Southern Hemisphere that I have never seen. So this is when I leave Vanavara and my family. To see sky I cannot see. I am not cosmonaut, I am not scientist, but I am next best thing. I become sailor. The sea is my outer space now.”

“Rule number two-thirty-nine.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

• • •

ONE AFTERNOON, Radar was sitting up on the bridge while Ivan was at the helm on the eight-to-four watch. A call came in on an ACR VHF transceiver, but it warbled and fizzled out in the middle of the transmission.

“What did they say?” asked Radar.

“I can’t hear. That radio is broken,” said Ivan with a shake of his head. “Everything on this ship is broken.”

“Not everything,” said Captain Daneri, coming into the wheelhouse. “We are not broken, Mr. Kovalyov.”

“Pardon, Captain,” said Ivan.

Radar cleared his throat. “Maybe I could fix it.”

“I think it is impossible. Igor tried and he said it is hopeless,” said Ivan.

“Igor’s a fool,” said the captain. Igor was one of those unfortunate souls who had convinced himself that the world was bent on deceiving him. He was also supposedly the boat’s electrician. But as far as Radar could tell, he devoted nearly all of his time to hitting the cooling devices on the refrigerated containers with his wrench and cussing in his native tongue. The clang of his wrench had become a common refrain in the ship’s painful symphony.

“Well, I could just take a look,” said Radar.

“Mr. Kovalyov, would you believe it? Our guest wants to tame the dragon,” said the captain. “Our guest is calling Igor un idiota incompetente.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Radar.

“You are correct: Igor es un idiota incompetente.”

“If I could just take a peek,” said Radar. “I might be able to—”

“He just wants to take a peek,” repeated the captain.

“Let him take a peek,” said Ivan.

“Please,” the captain bowed, and gestured at the radio. “She awaits your intentions.”

After removing the front panel, it took Radar barely a minute to discover the corroded transistor switch running off the link board. Telling Ivan and an amused captain that he would be right back, he detached the transceiver from the stack and made his way down to Moby-Dikt. Otik offered no response when Radar asked him if he could borrow one of the soldering irons, so he went ahead. Utilizing a spare transistor he found in a drawer, he fashioned a new switch, and what he could not solder he secured with a small wad of well-chewed watermelon-flavored bubble gum.

• • •

BACK ON THE BRIDGE, he presented his handiwork.

“It’ll run for now, but you may want to get a more permanent solution when you get back to port,” he said.

Ivan marveled like a child. “That,” he said. “That is something incredible. Chewing gum.”

“Well, don’t tell Igor,” said the captain. “Wait, on second thought, let’s tell Igor. Let’s tell him that un yanki bobalicón is doing the job he cannot do.”

“One day, I will write song about this,” said Ivan.

Later, Daneri would touch Radar’s shoulder and say, “You’re a part of her now. She doesn’t ever forget.”

Indeed, ever since offending him that first day in port, Radar had slowly finessed his way back into the captain’s good graces. Or maybe it was simply a case of Radar being the only available audience member. It had become clear that Captain Daneri was really just a showman in search of a show. Perhaps this was why he had agreed to shepherd them across the ocean in the first place. Yet in this regard, Otik and Lars were not holding up their end of the bargain. Despite repeated invitations by the captain to join him in his quarters for an after-dinner maté, Otik and Lars consistently excused themselves so as to return to their feverish preparations. Things were not going well with the vircator. A palpable air of panic could be felt inside Moby-Dikt, so Radar returned there as seldom as possible now, only to catch a few hours of nightmarish sleep, though even this was proving difficult, as his companions worked all hours of the night. When Radar tried to query them about their progress, both grew cagey, even hostile. Radar was thus left to be Daneri’s sole patron.

Entering into the captain’s cabin was a bit like entering into a time machine. The room was paneled in a lush African mahogany so dark it appeared almost purple by the light of a candle. At the center of the room was a giant desk of such immense proportions, it was unclear how the piece had ever entered the cabin or how it would ever be removed.

Captain Daneri presided over their evenings together from a body-worn burgundy armchair, sipping his maté out of a calabash gourd through a thick silver straw. Occasionally he would light up a Cuban cigar, although these he dutifully rationed, explaining that his father had lost his entire throat to cancer and did not speak a word for the last fifteen years of his life.

“Do you know what we’re carrying right now on this ship?” the captain asked Radar one evening.

“Not really,” said Radar, gingerly sipping at his maté. As usual, Otik and Lars had already bidden their farewells, and he found himself wishing they were there to deflect the attention or at least make a pass at one of the captain’s riddles.

“Well, good. No one does. At least no one can speak with absolute certainty. I myself have not opened any of the containers, so I can only tell you what the system tells me, and the system speaks only in terms of possibility. A container does not contain something — it ‘is said to contain something’. The same can be said of a good book.” He picked up a piece of paper. “TPMU 839201 3, said to contain 6,800 pounds of frozen chicken; RITU 559232 0, said to contain 14,000 pounds of frozen fish; CSQU 938272 8, said to contain 3,400 pounds of hypodermic needles, pharmaceuticals, and other medical equipment. . said to contain 6,000 women’s long-sleeve shirts. . said to contain 550 youth bicycles. . said to contain 55,000 pounds of aircraft engines. . said to contain 20,000 pounds of computer equipment. . said to contain 8,000 pounds of unbalanced polymer. . said to contain 4,000 pounds of gems, precious metals, and coins. . said to contain 15,000 pounds of barley. That’s a lot of barley.”

“It is a lot of barley.”

“If the barley exists. But even if the barley does not exist, it doesn’t matter. Soon the world will not contain anything definitive anymore; it will only be said to contain things. We will exist in a system of total possibility. It is what I call un desdibujamiento. It’s a wonderful word, isn’t it? Un desdibujamiento. It means ‘the blurring of the local.’ The lines between here and there have begun to blur, and it is all because of the question of the box.” The captain leaned back. “But I can see I’m scaring you. You mustn’t let me get started on one of my little rants. Anyone will tell you this.”

“Desdibujamiento,” repeated Radar.

The captain nodded. “Like caressing a woman,” he said.

Radar wasn’t an expert in caressing women, so he said nothing. They sat in silence. The roll of the ship was causing an imperceptible shift in all the documents around the room. Radar could feel the papers shift back and forth on the desk ever so slightly.

“So tell me,” the captain said. “What are you boys going to do in the Congo? Lars wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”

Radar stiffened in his chair. “I don’t really think I can tell you.”

“I’m not in the habit of asking people their business, but you look like a man who can be trusted.”

“I’m sorry. I would have to ask Lars before—”

“Is it diamonds? Ivory? Ah—” He wagged a finger. “I know. Don’t tell me. It’s coltan. That’s what they’re taking out of there now. Blood coltan, they call it. For making mobile phones. That’s why they have you—el hechicero de la electrónica! It all makes sense now. I’ve seen people do exactly what you’re doing before.”

“We aren’t dealing in those things,” said Radar. “We’re performers.” He caught his breath, but it was too late.

“Performers?” the captain said, raising a gargantuan eyebrow.

“I’m sorry.” Radar lifted his hands. “I can’t say any more.”

“Well. My little troupe of performers. What are you performing, then?”

“You can’t tell them I told you.”

“Go on. Taming of the Shrew? Parsifal? Waiting for Godot?”

“I don’t fully know, if I’m being quite honest. It involves puppets.”

“Puppets? Ave María!”

Radar lifted his hands into a pleading prayer. “I’m sorry, I’ve said too much.”

“And where are you performing with this puppet show?”

“Can you please not say anything to Lars or Otik? I don’t think they’re big fans of me at the moment, and they certainly won’t be if they find out I told you anything.”

“I like you, Mr. Radmanovic. What did you say you were? American? You don’t seem like an American to me. You’re too good at listening.”

“I don’t really know what I am.”

“If I may — a word of advice. You’ve got to be careful where you’re going. The system still has its boundaries. And once you get to these boundaries, things begin to get a little hairy. Un poco peligroso. In the Congo, the box is said to contain x, but the box will not contain x. The box will contain nothing. Or something else entirely. It will drive a man insane.”

“I think that’s why we’re going there. To perform where the system has broken down.”

The captain lifted his arms. “Performers! To think, this whole time and I had no idea. Well, I love it. The Aleph has never had its own performers, have you, my little darling?” He reached out and tenderly stroked the wall of the cabin.

Suddenly the captain jumped up from his seat.

“Come,” he said. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

They took three flights of stairs down to the main deck and then out a doorway and into the chilly night. Radar looked up. The stars enveloped them like a casket. He followed Daneri as he wandered through the maze of containers, the captain tapping their sides with his hand as if they were a herd of animals. They wove their way toward the bow and then turned and passed through a doorway that Radar had never seen before. They went down a small flight of stairs to a tween deck below the main deck, where they followed several more narrow corridors before slipping through another doorway and down two more flights of stairs. Radar had long since lost his bearings. If he were not with the captain, he would never be able to get back again. He was not even sure they were on the same ship anymore.

The captain abruptly stopped.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a crimson container illuminated only by a dim sea light on the far wall.

“What is it?”

“Open it.”

“Am I allowed to?”

“This one doesn’t belong to them.”

Radar was afraid the box would be either locked or horrendously complicated to open, but he pulled a lever and heard a satisfying click, and the door swung open easily. A familiar smell. A smell of home. He peered into the darkness, half expecting to see his mother, his father, to see everything the way it was before. He squinted. At first he could not understand what he was looking at, but then he saw them. Books. Endless stacks of books. Thousands of them.

“I deliver one of these every time I do the West African route.”

“Who does it go to?”

“He’s a remarkable man. He has a library in the middle of the jungle. It is said to contain every book in the world. Of course, this is impossible. But it’s a noble pursuit. And I’m glad to play my part.”

Radar stared at the books, lying, waiting like corpses. The captain swung the door shut.

“Or maybe it’s just a glitch,” he said. “Maybe the library does not exist. But the system demands it, and I must deliver what the system demands.”

5

On the evening of the sixth day, the seas began to swell. An electricity spread through the normally stoic crew. The men chatted nervously in the galley and then dumped their trays and left early to take care of their evening rounds. Hatches needed to be battened, stacking braces secured.

At the officers’ table, Radar sensed a palpable air of anticipation.

“We’re in for something nasty,” Ivan confirmed over his goulash.

“Is this normal for this time of year?” Lars asked politely.

“There’s no normal when it comes to the sea,” said Daneri.

“The radar didn’t see much,” said Akaki, the chief mate.

“The radar never sees much,” said the captain. “We’re in for one tonight.”

Ivan, seeing the alarm on Radar’s face, leaned over and whispered, “I wouldn’t worry.”

Back in Moby-Dikt, Otik, who had not been present at dinner, had already imploded into the sinkhole of his nausea. He lay on his cot, pale and moaning, one paw gripping the rim of his vomit bucket.

“Please,” he mumbled, delirious. “Tell my father. .”

“He’ll be all right,” said Lars.

But Otik did not look all right. “Tell my father. . to meet me at the café,” he whispered.

Lars tried to continue at the workbench, though even his normally glowing Nordic countenance had faded to a pale shade of avocado. The pitching grew worse, and his tools began to slide off the bench and clatter onto the floor.

With nothing else to do, Radar burrowed down into his bed and tried to sleep. As he lay supine, the boat’s roll and pitch became magnified. He closed his eyes, trying to reassure himself with the protection offered by these great layers of steel wrapped around his little cot. Surely such an awesome creation of man was immune to the forces of nature? He thought of the Titanic and its own claims to invincibility. The Aleph was no Titanic. She was made of much weaker stock. A shiver passed through him. Outside their container, the ship creaked and groaned. When Radar finally drifted off, his dreams were, as usual, fitful, incomprehensible affairs marked by leaks sprouting in hulls, horses swimming in open oceans, German U-boats breaching the surface in an explosion of foam.

After several hours of tossing and being tossed, Radar was awoken by a sharp, stabbing pain on his forehead. He opened his eyes to find the inside of the container in chaos, the world tipping upward at an impossible angle. It was as if a giant had decided to pick up the opposite corner of the box in order to get a peek at him. The downward slope had caused much of the equipment to come off the walls and the chairs to all slide up against his cot. In his bed he found several tools, including the one that had apparently attacked him: a silver T square. He touched his fingers to his head. They came away wet with blood.

Just when it appeared as if the world could not possibly tip any more, lest the floor become the ceiling and visa versa, they reached a kind of equilibrium point. There was a moment of rest, and then the container began to pitch steadily back in the other direction. The loose tools, the teakettle, and the conference of chairs dutifully complied with this new incline by sliding away to the opposite wall. Radar saw one of his boots tumble by. Again, just when it seemed the container would flip entirely, the angle of repose was reached, and the chairs came sliding back to him. Radar gripped the edge of the cot, transfixed by this display of inanimate migration.

“Help me with. . would you?” he heard someone shout.

He looked up and saw Lars pressed against a rack of tools. Lars’s legs were dancing about as if he were a drunkard, flailing against the extreme rolls of the boat. His furious effort to contain the remaining tools was proving futile.

“What’s going on?” Radar shouted. A stupid question.

“It’s. . storm,” yelled Lars. This word did not come close to capturing what was taking place inside the container. To be sure, the ship had been engaged in a slight roll and pitch ever since their departure, a vectoring that Radar had steadily grown accustomed to, unlike poor Otik. But this was such a grotesque display of the sea’s violence that the situation would have been laughable if it weren’t so utterly, utterly terrifying.

“When did it get so bad?” Radar shouted. The container had reached its angular apogee and was now lurching in the other direction, causing the chairs to march away again. More clattering and a crash as the lathe toppled over onto a computer.

“The. . half an hour. . so. . can’t.” Lars moved to the lathe, trying to extricate it from the IBM.

“What?” Radar yelled. He realized he couldn’t hear what Lars was saying because of the incredible racket that was reverberating throughout the container. It was one of the more horrible sounds he had ever heard — a groan sustained and amplified into a curdling wail that came and went, came and went, like the wail of a mother who has just lost her son. Except that this wail came not from any living creature but from the ship itself. The bones of the ship were crying.

“Where’s Otik?” yelled Radar over the noise. Otik’s cot was empty save for fifty or so errant bird heads, which rolled and tumbled across the sheets.

Lars pointed.

Beneath the terrible yowl of the wind, Radar heard a noise. It was a human wheeze. An escaping of air from parted lips.

“Otik?”

Radar stumbled over to the cot, dodging the minefield of detritus on the move, and found him on the floor, half wrapped in a top sheet, facedown, bird heads all around, a thin puddle of merguez-colored vomit spilling from his mouth like a speech bubble.

Otik murmured something inaudible.

“What?” Radar leaned in. The man’s giant back was hot to the touch. The ship reached the peak of its roll, hung, and came hurtling down again, bird heads tumbling everywhere. A chair hit them and Radar winced, trying to shield himself.

“Molim te,” Otik wheezed. “Ja umirem.”

“You’re going to be okay, Otik,” said Radar, rubbing his back. “It’s just a storm. It won’t be long now.” He had no idea how long it would be. The storm felt like it might last forever.

“I’m dying,” wheezed Otik.

“You’re not dying, Otik,” said Radar. He blundered across the room and grabbed a towel. Scrambling back to Otik, nearly falling into him, he began to wipe at the vomit smeared across the floor.

“Lars!” he yelled. “We need to get out of here!”

“Ostavi me,” mumbled Otik. “Reci im da mi je žao. Reci im da nisam kreten.”

“Don’t say that, Otik. You’re going to be fine.”

“Ja sam Dubre,” Otik wheezed.

“You’re doing good work,” said Radar. “You’re doing great work. No one can do what you do.”

“Ja nisam dobra osoba.”

“Ti si dobar covek, Charlie Brown,” said Radar. It was one of the few lines he could say in Serbian.

Otik opened his eyes and looked up at Radar. He was crying. Radar tried to heave him off the floor. It was like trying to lift a small car.

“Lars!” he called. “We need to get him out of here. The tools—” He ducked as a bow saw came flying off its hook and twanged against the table.

Lars had a rope in his hand and was attempting to lash the lathe to the wall. The lights inside the container suddenly flickered and went out. Radar felt his heart sink. Not another blackout. Here? In the middle of the ocean? In the middle of the storm of all storms? He could think of nothing worse.

The lights blinked and buzzed back on again. Radar looked up. The birds. He had forgotten about the birds. They still hung from the ceiling, swaying wildly about, palindroming with the sea.

“Lars!”

“What?”

“We’ve got to get him out of here!” he yelled.

With much effort, they managed to half-carry, half-drag Otik out the door.

“Ostavite me,” he kept saying. “Ostavite me, ostavite me.”

Outside, in cargo hold number four, there were no flying projectiles, but the sound was even more hellacious than inside the container. The wail had turned into a full-pitched scream, and Radar could hear the ribs of the ship straining, their fibers pulled and compressed to the breaking point. It was like being in the belly of a dying whale. At the next roll, Radar tripped and fell and immediately found himself soaked. The floor of the hold was covered in seawater. The water quickly slopped away as the roll reached its vertex and then just as quickly came spilling back onto him. The beams, the bulwark, the very superstructure of the ship screeched in protest. From somewhere ahead, what sounded like an essential support cracked, and the cargo hold around him gave what could only be described as a death rattle.

For the first time, Radar saw what was going to happen: This ship is going to sink. I’m going to die on this ship. The idea of his own death did not elicit panic but rather resignation, as if he had known it would end like this the whole time.

“Get him upstairs!” shouted Lars. “There’s a lounge on the lower deck.”

Radar snapped out of his morose reverie and grabbed Otik’s shoulder. Urged on by adrenaline and the threat of a watery grave, they maneuvered themselves to the opening of the stairwell. Radar would have thought it impossible to go any farther, but somehow they pinballed up the four flights of stairs despite his own handicaps, the immensity of Otik’s mass, and the heave and throes of the boat. Radar’s shoulders were sore from crashing against one wall after another. Yet he had almost grown accustomed to the rhythms of the egregious rolling and pitching. Even if the rules of the world had gone haywire, he sensed a method to this madness. When the boat reached the top of its tilt axis, his body was already readying itself for the release and the counter-tilt.

They slammed against the door to the lounge and then collapsed onto the floor. The lounge was abandoned. The Little Mermaid was playing silently on the television. Radar lay there, panting, watching Sebastian merrily sing and leap about on the screen, when a single idea occurred to him: Ivan. He need to find Ivan. If he was with Ivan, all would be okay.

“I’m going upstairs,” he said.

“Better to stay here,” said Lars. “Who knows what’s out there?”

The boat reversed its roll. The ship groaned.

“I’m going!” said Radar. “I’ll be right back.”

Back in the stairwell, he staggered upward. His load was lightened, but it seemed as if the higher he went in the ship, the worse the pitching became. He finally made it to the top corridor, staggering, falling, grabbing hold of a stowed fire hose. He could see the hallway literally twisting and torquing like a Slinky.

Everyone up here must be dead! Thrown overboard or smashed to smithereens!

After some desperate balletics, he managed to make it to the doorway of the bridge and threw it open, expecting carnage.

But there was no carnage. The scene was one of remarkable serenity. And there was Ivan, standing at the helm, feet planted like a matador, nine fingers upon the wheel.

Oh, sweet, sweet Ivan!

Ivan’s face was completely calm, his eyes betraying no sense of unease as his gaze held fast into the very depths of the storm. It was a standoff — man versus nature — and seeing him like this, Radar could not bet against man.

Next to him, the chief mate, Akaki, was hunched over the radar, his face barely six inches from the screen. Several paces away stood Captain Daneri in his crisp white uniform. He looked as if he were attending a funeral. One hand firmly gripped the bridge console, but otherwise none of the three seemed particularly bothered by gravity’s complete disintegration.

Radar opened his mouth to convey his simultaneous terror and joy at seeing them. He wanted to tell them about Otik, about the water in the hold, about the twisting hallway, about seeing his own death.

“Blow me shivers!” he called out.

The needle in the room did not flicker. No one paid him any heed. Ivan, hands on the wheel. Akaki, studying his computers. Daneri, staring grimly ahead. It was as if he didn’t exist.

Radar took hold of a chair, then the bridge console, then made it to the helm.

“Ivan,” he said. “Ivan. What’s going on?”

“A squall,” said Ivan. “Big squall. Radar didn’t see it.”

“Radar never sees it,” said the captain.

“Radar did see it,” said Akaki.

“Only once we’re inside the goddamn headwall,” said the captain. “And then radar sees nothing.”

Radar was briefly confused, until he realized they were referring not to him but to the object of Akaki’s attention. The technology, not the person.

“How does she feel, Mr. Kovalyov?” the captain said. “Tell me something good.”

“She’s pushing three, four to starboard. I can hold,” said Ivan, gripping the wheel. “But if wind changes we are buried.”

The captain nodded. “What’s your height, Mr. Akakievich?”

“Twelve meters,” said the chief mate. “Fifty-three knots from the north-northeast. Holding. Gusting.”

“Hijo de puta,” hissed Daneri. He lifted the phone to the engine room and said, “Full ahead, Mr. Piskaryov. Give me more. I want more. We need to cut these down.”

“There’s a band ahead,” said the chief mate, staring at the radar.

The captain hung up his phone. “Keep her steady, Mr. Kovalyov. Pull port if you need, but don’t let her get turned. I don’t want to lose one goddamn box, you hear me? Not one goddamn box!”

“There is a band ahead, captain!” the chief mate said again.

“I don’t care what you see on that cursed machine!” shouted the captain.

“I have never seen this,” the chief mate said, almost contemplatively.

Radar looked out through the windows, across the great deck of the Aleph. The windshield wipers squeaked away, back and forth across the glass — a pathetic show of resistance, given the immensity of the storm that surrounded them. At first he could not see much. The deck lights were all ablaze, but his visibility was still limited by the thrashing rain to a series of glimpses of a huge and unrelenting sea. And then there was a clap of lightning and he saw it all. What before had simply been a series of fantastic rolls and pitches now revealed itself to be a maelstrom of wind and rain and great white-capped waves that rose out of the darkness before crashing wildly against the deck, the stacks of containers lurching and leaning beneath the savagery of the ocean. The ship — once so big in port — now seemed so utterly small and helpless against this raging sea — a slight little dagger of a thing. And then the rain came at them again, pounding against the windows like a volley of bullets, the windshield wipers persisting but doing nothing to dispel the chaos outside. Having glimpsed the magnitude of their foe, Radar saw the odds now swinging back firmly in favor of nature’s eventual triumph, even with a wizard like Ivan at the helm.

“Dios mío,” said the captain.

Radar looked up. At first he could make out nothing through the blur of wind and rain. The boat bent toward its bow, and it was as if the great sea had taken a moment to rest, a moment to contemplate the extent of its destruction. And then Radar saw it: a mighty, incomprehensible wall of water rising above them, higher even than the bridge upon which they stood, thirty meters above the Plimsoll. The Aleph, stupefied, helpless to the world, was headed directly for it.

“Mr. Kovalyov—” the captain hissed.

“I see it, I see it,” said Ivan. “What do you want? There’s nothing I can do. .”

The chief mate looked up from his radar.

“Mater bozhya,” he whispered.

The boat churned up the flank of the giant wave, doing its best to climb into the sky, but eventually she lost her momentum, for there was only so much her propeller could manage against the laws of physics. The wave, previously content with existing as a mountain of potentiality, finally lost its patience with the ship. The tremendous cornice of white water at its zenith exploded like a volcano and let loose a thundering avalanche of sea down onto the Aleph’s deck.

There are few sights as impressive as a wave breaking across a ship. It is the truest of force equations, an honest meeting of liquid and solid, where solid is forced to wonder what liquid might do, where solid resists, re-tabulates, converses, barters, prays, and then reemerges triumphant. Or not. Radar sensed such a negotiation only for a split second before the shockwave from the impact shook the bridge and he was tossed like a doll to the floor.

When he stood up again, he could see nothing through the windows. For an instant, he thought that the boat had simply vanished, that the wave had acted like a giant eraser and banished them from existence, but then he realized that they were still on the ship, and they still existed, so the ship must exist, too. Maybe she had split off and sunk, taking all of her cargo with her? Maybe they were sinking already and they had precious few moments together before the ocean burst through the windows. But no, there she was: with great effort, the outline of the Aleph surfaced from the grim sea like an ancient sea creature heaving itself from the depths. She was still intact. She had made it through.

“How many boxes?” the captain was yelling.

The chief mate was at the window, counting, fingers touching fingers.

“How many boxes are gone, Mr. Akakievich?!”

“At least fifteen, sir,” he yelled. “Maybe more.”

Radar peered out into the storm, the green and red bow lights still glimmering through the rain. He could see the patchwork quilt of boxes, so small and vulnerable against the sea. Most were still in place, but he could also see what the first mate was looking at: two stacks in the bow were shorter than the rest and now were tilting dangerously with each swell.

“Tell me what is gone!” said the captain.

“I have to check the computers, sir!”

“Hijo de puta.”

Ivan was still manning the wheel, his face crooked into the faintest of smiles.

Radar came up to him. “How did you know how to do it?”

“I didn’t,” said Ivan. “I never know.”

Radar looked out across the deck, wet with the sea still churning out thirty-foot waves, though after the monstrosity they had just survived, the rest was child’s play.

Through the slashing rain, something caught his eye. He blinked. Just past the gunwales, somewhere over the second cargo hold, he could’ve sworn he had seen a horse galloping across the decks, weaving around the stacks of containers. He stared out into the storm but did not see the creature again.

“Captain,” said Radar, “are any of these containers said to contain horses?”

• • •

THE STORM SUBSIDED, though the seas retained their swell for many hours afterwards. Down in Moby-Dikt, the cleanup had begun.

Otik lay on his cot, dead to the world, while Lars worked furiously to restore order from the chaos. Radar picked up the bow saw and began to help him. The precious bird heads, so carefully looked after, were strewn all over the floor. Many had rolled into dark corners, and it took time to find them. And still some had been lost. They had boarded the boat with 1,387; after the storm, they could find only 1,381. Otik, normally so protective of his heads, only groaned.

“I want off,” he said. “I want land. I want real land.”

After three hours, Radar collapsed into his own cot, exhausted. They had done the best they could. Time would tell whether the storm had doomed the show.

Lars stood by the workbench, swaying, his eyes empty.

“You should get some sleep,” said Radar.

“I won’t sleep again,” said Lars.

“Ever?”

“In the north, you learn to sleep half the year and then stay awake for six months, like a bear.”

“Yeah, I’m not quite there yet,” said Radar.

“You did wonders today,” Lars said suddenly. “We couldn’t do this without you.”

“Oh? I feel like I’m always in the way.”

“You’ll see,” said Lars. “Otik doesn’t forget. Things will be different now.”

6

They crossed the Atlantic without further incident. On the tenth day, they stopped in Lisbon, where they unloaded — or supposedly unloaded—50,000 pounds of “lubricated materials,” 75,000 pounds of “tractors or tractor equipment,” 20,000 pounds of “explosive and/or non-explosive chemicals,” 33,000 pounds of semiconductors, 25,500 pounds of “potato product,” and 70 tons of flat carbon steel. They took on containers said to contain 1,000 cases of port wine, 10,000 pounds of green olives, 20,000 pounds of leather hide, 2,000 bottles of milk, 15,000 pounds of young wool, 9,000 pounds of “footwear and/or foot apparel,” and a 1976 Mercedes-Benz fire engine.

In the Canary Islands, more containers were exchanged and shifted. Among other things, they dropped off the containers said to contain the milk, the wool, the footwear, and 950 jackhammers. They also dropped off the fire engine, which drove off the docks after sounding its siren, as if in thanks for the safe passage. They picked up 5,000 pounds of live lobster, 22,000 pounds of frozen fish, 30,000 pounds of “cola and diet cola product,” 65,000 pounds of “precious gemstones,” and 14,000 traffic cones. At no point in the loading and unloading did Radar see any evidence of the horse he had glimpsed in the middle of the typhoon.

They rode the Canary Current down the west coast of Africa, past Senegal, through the turbulent waters of Cape Palmas, and into the Gulf of Guinea, where they stopped briefly in Lagos to pick up five hundred tons of crude oil. Captain Daneri, nervous about pirates, stationed his crew on the gunwales with high-pressure hoses pointed at the sea while he stalked the bridgewings with a rifle in the crook of each arm. As if knowing who they were up against, no pirates elected to appear. The captain looked almost disappointed at the ease with which they slid out of Nigerian waters.

From Lagos, they crossed the equator, hugging the coast near Gabon so as to mitigate the Angola Gyre working against them. Nearly two weeks after leaving New Jersey, they were forced to anchor just south of Point Noire, next to several Taiwanese oil tankers, while they waited to gain admission into the Congo River.

Captain Daneri fumed at the delay.

“The system crumbles,” he muttered into his maté.

While they waited, the tropical sun sent temperatures in the hold soaring. Otik, who had not fully recovered his strength since the storm, tried halfheartedly to work on the damaged bird heads, but the sweat poured off him in sheets and he soon fell back into bed. Radar noticed that he had lost a considerable amount of weight during their ten days at sea, and his eyes now appeared sunken and dull. Despite his pallor, Otik’s demeanor toward Radar had softened dramatically. Just as Lars had predicted, Otik now approached him with an almost off-putting tenderness, given his previous vitriol.

“You always remind me of Kermin,” said Otik from his bed. “I miss this man every day.”

“I shouldn’t have left.”

“You had to leave, burazeru. You had to come with us.”

Burazeru. Brother. A word he had heard passed like a secret handshake between two boys while they played soccer on a street in Belgrade. A word he never thought he would hear directed at him. An elusive connection that would always, by definition, exclude him. He was brotherless. Until now.

Burazeru. His skin prickled.

“You mean it?” he said.

“Without you, there can be no show. Ti si dobar covek, Charlie Brown.”

Even if it was not true, it meant the world to him. For the first time in his life, Radar felt as though he might be on the right path.

“Otik, when we were back in New Jersey, you said my father wasn’t coming back,” said Radar. “How can you be so sure?”

“I didn’t know what I was saying, burazeru. It was long night. I was tired.”

“But what do you think happened to him, really?”

Otik rubbed his face. “I don’t know.”

“What is it?” asked Radar.

Otik sighed. “There is type of puppet tradition in Java called wayang golek,” he said. “They are using wooden rod puppets. Very beautiful. When puppet dies in play, the puppeteer hangs puppet next to stage, on special hook, so audience can see puppet. Puppet is not gone. Puppet is still there.”

“I don’t understand—”

But at that moment, they heard a giant explosion outside the boat. Radar ducked.

“What was that?” said Radar.

“We are under attack,” said Otik. “They have come for us.”

“Pirates?” said Radar.

More thundering booms echoed from outside.

“What should we do?” Radar whispered.

With a groan, Otik extricated his body from the bed and hobbled out into the hold. Radar cautiously followed.

“Where are you going?” asked Radar. “Don’t you think we should stay here?”

“Let’s go meet these men who will kill us. Let’s shake hands and congratulate,” said Otik, and he started up the stairs.

Radar stared after him, shocked. It seemed less an act of courage than a hopeful attempt at suicide.

“Wait!” said Radar, following him up the steps. “Wait for me, burazeru!”

They emerged onto the deck to find that it was already dark. They must have lost track of time. Night came quickly in the tropics, always at the same hour. The Aleph, contrary to what they expected, was not being overrun by a band of marauders. All was calm on her main deck. They heard the sound of guns again, but some distance away. They hurried to the balustrade and peered out across the water. In the moonlight, they could just make out what looked to be an old man-of-war, nestled in a cove, intermittently blasting its guns into the dark, jungled coastline. Each time its cannons fired, the bush would light up, and they watched as shadows of trees trembled and collapsed beneath the onslaught. Yet beyond this little war, the forest was endless, unaffected.

“What are they doing?” asked Radar.

“It’s Cabinda,” said Ivan, who appeared next to them at the balustrade with his guitar. “It belongs to Angola, but it is not attached to rest of country. Same old story. The Cabindans want to be their own people, but they cannot escape their motherland.”

“But why are they shooting?”

Ivan started to strum his guitar. “Ooo-ooo-ooo, Ju-lia, she split me in two, Ju-lia,” he sang.

“Would you cut that racket!” The captain’s voice came from above. His head appeared in silhouette over the bridgewing. “Quit that singing! Respect this night. Du calme, du calme.”

Ivan abruptly fell silent. They were left with only the sound of the man-of-war’s cannons caressing the darkness and the great silence that echoed from the country beyond.

• • •

AFTER WAITING THREE DAYS in the open ocean, they were finally given the crackly go-ahead to enter the mouth of the Congo. The Aleph turned, her engines fired, steam was applied to valve, and into the continent she went. At Banana Station, they picked up a pilot to help them run the river, but they were barely three miles upstream when a second transmission came over the wireless, this time from a different man: their permission had been rescinded and they were to turn back at once. It was an inauspicious beginning. Captain Daneri raised an eyebrow, looked at the pilot, and then flipped off the radio.

“We never heard it,” he said. “If we did not hear it, it does not exist.”

They chugged on. Ivan guided the big ship through a snarl of lush islands that looked untouched by man or beast and around an arcing bend carved from a rise of palisade cliffs. A map of the river lay on the table before him, but he did not consult it, nor did he seek advice from the pilot, who now dozed in a corner. They glided by the old river port of Boma, where they saw a handful of children wave at them from the docks, and then they were passing beneath a large suspension bridge. A truck rumbled across. Such a feat of engineering looked out of place amid all this greenery.

“The next bridge is two thousand kilometers up the Congo,” Captain Daneri said as they passed underneath its span. “Two thousand kilometers! No bridges for two thousand kilometers! Write a song about that, Mr. Kovalyov. Write a song about Congo, a country of no bridges.”

On the right, the sad squalor of Matadi slid into view: a town built on the promises of the sea and the betrayal of a nation. Corroded petrochemical tanks, the burned-out chassis of an abandoned truck cab, clusters of dusty red-roofed shacks rising up into the hills. A dog scratched itself on the riverbank, taking no notice of their arrival.

But arrived they had. Radar stood on the bridgewing, agape at their proximity to what before had only been an idea. This idea had now become a place, though the place felt like a pale imitation of the idea.

“Welcome to Africa,” said Lars. “It is the beginning of the end.”

• • •

“NOW THAT WE ARE HERE,” announced Otik, “I can inform you this was also the worst two weeks of my life.”

The three of them had been standing on the crumbling docks of Matadi for almost an hour. Before disembarking, they had all donned the bright yellow polyester tracksuit of Kirkenesferda. With one leg in the bottoms, Radar had realized his tracksuit had in fact been meant for his father. He had wanted to disappear then and weep for everything that was and wasn’t anymore. But the other two were already waiting for him, so he zipped up the jacket, put on his graffitied trucker’s hat — which, as fate would have it, was also yellow — and followed them off the ship and down the gangplank.

“There were some low points,” admitted Radar. “But we made it.”

“I have lived through war, bombing, everything,” said Otik. “And I will never get on another boat again.”

“We’re getting on another boat, Otik,” said Lars.

“Nope. I will walk. I don’t care how far it is. I will walk until my legs break off, and then I will crawl.”

They stood in a cluster, like a group of cheerleaders with no team to cheer. Radar was still buzzing with the notion that he was actually in a place that could not be called New Jersey. Occasionally, embarrassed that someone might hear him, he would sing under his breath, “Af-frik-a,” in what was no doubt a highly dubious accent.

Shortly after their arrival, Captain Daneri had disappeared into the town, along with most of his Russian crew, save for two young sour-faced seamen left on watch. The captain had given no word of explanation or instruction. After such an ungracious exit, Radar wondered if they would ever see him again.

The day wheezed away like a deflated balloon. The sun slinked quickly behind the hills, leaving the river valley in uncertain shadow. The Aleph, a modest vessel in Newark Bay, here dominated the quay, leaving room for only one small feeder boat from South Africa, the Colonel Joll, which looked as if it had been here for some time. Unlike in the frenetic ports they had visited before now, there was no movement to get the dozen or so rusting gantry cranes to begin unloading the Aleph’s cargo. Radar was not sure what, if anything, was to be unloaded besides themselves.

“So what happens now?” he asked finally.

“We wait,” said Lars.

The great river flowed by them, carrying all and carrying nothing. A slight breeze brought the scent of burning down from the hills and into the river valley. Radar, despite having stable land beneath his feet for the first time in days, felt as if he were sinking.

Finally, a sweaty man in a beige uniform approached. He looked very, very tired.

“Vos papiers?” he said, although he did not look at them as he said this, but rather at a stain on the dock next to their feet.

Lars handed the man a bulging manila folder with all of their paperwork. He had spent months obtaining the requisite visas, permits, and transport permissions from various consulates, embassies, and government officials. What he could not obtain he had forged. He had even invented several Congolese intelligence officials who had given “Le théâtre de Kirkenesferda carte blanche absolue” to pass anywhere within the Democratic Republic of Congo unmolested. These papers contained many official seals. Radar thought it was impressive work.

The man glanced through the folder very quickly. Evidently, he was not impressed.

“Y’a un problème avec vos papiers,” he said.

“Quel problème?” Lars asked. His French was impeccable. “Tout est là.”

“Y’a beaucoup de problèmes.”

“Beaucoup?”

“Beaucoup de problèmes,” the man confirmed.

“Mais ça n’est pas possible.”

“Vous devez venir avec moi.”

“Mais que faire de notre conteneur?” Lars called after him, pointing at the boat.

“Il ne bouge pas.” The man turned and began walking toward a small, windowless building. What he said was true: the container did not appear to be going anywhere.

• • •

THE HARBORMASTER’S OFFICE WAS air-conditioned, but the air conditioner was not working very well. It would make a horrible chattering noise and then proceed to die a dramatic death before repeating the process all over again. The harbormaster took no notice. His desk was covered in a stack of large leather-bound ledgers. The office was completely empty except for the desk and a yellowing poster of the president tacked to the wall. There was no place to sit, so they stood.

The harbormaster selected one of the ledgers from the bottom of the stack and began to write in an entry.

“Qu’est ce qu’il y a dans votre conteneur?” the man asked without looking up.

Lars cleared his throat. “C’est indiqué sur le papier.” He pointed at the folder on the desk.

The man stopped writing. “Quel papier?”

Lars sighed. “Props. Des décors de théâtre,” he said. “Nous sommes des artistes.”

The man resumed writing. “Il y a un problème. Vous n’avez pas le permis nécessaire.”

“Le permis est là.” Lars pointed again at the manila envelope. “Tout était arrangé avant. Je vais vous montrer.”

“Avant, ce n’est pas maintenant.”

“Et c’est quand, maintenant?”

“Ce permis est périmé. Il n’est pas valide.”

“What is he saying?” Otik asked.

Lars rubbed his beard. “He’s saying he wants some money. Un encouragement.”

At this, the harbormaster looked up. His cell phone began to ring. Radar recognized the ringtone as a popular song, but he could not place the title or the artist. All he knew was that the song was sung by a sexy black woman in tall boots. Ana Cristina would know who she was. He longed for her then. Why couldn’t she just be here? They would go find a bar and share an ice-cold Coca-Cola. Maybe a Diet Coke if she preferred. They would talk about this woman in tall boots. They would talk about many things.

The harbormaster began to speak loudly into his cell phone and stride around his office, gesturing like a conductor. Radar understood that much of this show was for their sake. When he finally hung up, the phone immediately rang again. He answered and repeated his performance. They waited, watching as this man spoke rapidly in his native tongue. Though his demeanor was aggressive, he was not angry; he appeared perfectly content with this exhibition of verbal combat conducted through his small device. After a long while, he hung up. The phone immediately rang again, but he made a great show of not answering it, throwing it into a drawer before sitting down at his desk.

“Vous comprenez?” he said.

“Je comprends,” said Lars. “Combien pour le permis requis?”

The man was searching the drawers of his desk. “Vous avez de la chance que je vous aide. J’ai le formulaire ici.”

“Combien?” repeated Lars.

“Eh bien. .” said the man. “Mille dollars.”

Otik snorted. “He is full of shit,” he muttered. It was nice to see him back to his old self.

“How much does he want?” whispered Radar.

Lars reached into his pocket and took out a little roll of money. He placed four battered American twenty-dollar bills on the desk.

“Voici, quatre-vingts. C’est tout.”

The harbormaster considered this meager pile of money as if it were an insect. He paused, then reached out and took the bills.

“D’accord.”

Radar watched as the man filled out the form with great care. Stamping and counterstamping both the back and the front. If this was a bribe, it was an elaborate, well-documented bribe.

“Dans notre pays, la forme triomphe de tout,” the man declared. “Nous avons appris cela des colons.”

He had become quite cheerful as he showed them outside. It was already dark. Captain Daneri and the crew were still nowhere to be found.

Lars turned to the harbormaster. “Qui est responsable des trains, ici? Nous devons envoyer notre conteneur à Kinshasa.”

“Ils sont morts.”

“Mort? Qui est mort? Les hommes ou les trains?”

“Tout est mort,” the harbormaster said, and he smiled in the way a man smiles when he knows more than he says but does not know how to say it. He bade them goodnight and walked off into the darkness.

7

Without anything else to do, they returned to the ship. Lars asked one of the pimpled seamen on watch where they might find the captain.

“Ya pokhozh na suku?” The youth smirked. Apparently, he did not know.

They were about to retire down to their den of bird parts for the evening when they heard a whistle coming from the docks.

“HELLO! WELCOME TO AFRICA! HELLO!”

They looked over the bulwark and saw a thin black man waving at them. He was dressed in a simple white tunic.

“Are you speaking to us?” said Lars.

“AFRICA IS THE FUTURE! AFRICA LOVES YOU!”

“Is he speaking to us?” asked Lars.

“YOUR CAPTAIN!” the man said from below. “YOU ARE LOOKING FOR YOUR CAPTAIN?”

“You know where he is?” Lars called down.

“Of course,” said the man. “Your captain is my friend. He is at the Hôtel Metropole. Everyone is at the Metropole. I will take you there.”

The man’s name was Horeb. He was a Muslim. They knew this because these were the first two things he said when they came down off the ship.

“My name is Horeb. I am a Muslim,” he said. “I love all people.”

“Well, I am atheist,” said Otik. “I hate most people.”

“It is fate that we met!” cried Horeb, hugging each of them. “How do you like Africa?”

“We haven’t seen much of it,” said Lars. “Mostly the docks.”

“The river’s very big,” said Radar.

“The river gives life.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Radar, trying to be complimentary.

“Of course. Africa is the most beautiful place in the world. And Congo is the most beautiful place in Africa,” said Horeb. He took a step back. “Are you a football team from Europe? No. You are too fat to be a football player. Maybe you are the coach?”

Radar remembered that they were still wearing their matching yellow tracksuits.

“Maybe we should change,” he said.

“We do not change,” spat Otik. “It is beginning.”

“You can take us to the Metropole?” said Lars.

“I can take you anywhere you want, my friends.”

Horeb led them to a motorcycle with a small rickshaw lashed to the back by several unsteady-looking cables. They piled into the cart, though Otik took up most of the seat by himself.

“Okay?” said Horeb. He kicked the motorcycle into gear. The engine coughed and spat and then settled into an uneasy putter.

“The fuel is no good here,” he said. “They have huge tanks of pure petrol right there, but do we get any? No. It is shipped far away.”

“You’re from around here?” Lars called up to him.

“I was born in Yaoundé. My father was from Cameroon. My mother was Senegalese, but she was born in Paris. I moved to Matadi when I was ten. In that time, there used to be many more Muslims here. Not anymore. My brother moved to Gabon three years ago. He became frustrated with Congo.”

“So you are Cameroonian? Or Congolese?”

“I am African. Most Congolese don’t think of themselves as Africans anymore. They only think about their tribe or their town. Or maybe their parents’ families. But this is a real problem. We must have a global mind. Only when we stick together will we defeat the forces against us.”

“What forces are against you?”

“I fill my moto with dirty petrol, and the tanks are right there. This is a case of bad management. This is a failure of vision. This is a form of warfare on the people,” said Horeb as he drove out of the marina. “Tell me, why do you think Islam has been so successful? Muhammad taught us to believe in universal humanity. It is not about being from Saudi Arabia or from Egypt or Tanzania. It is about being blessed with life. Africa is blessed with life.”

“Africa is blessed with many things — some good, some not so good,” yelled Lars against the sound of the engine. “It’s a big place.”

“Congo is a big place. They call it le serpent à deux têtes—‘the snake with two heads.’ Kinshasa in the west and Kivu in the east. But nothing connects the two. No roads, no trains, only the forest and the river. It’s a big place, but people’s heads are small. They cannot see past their village, so they turn inside, you understand?”

They wove through the darkened streets. They passed a bar, Chez Maman, with blinking Christmas lights overhead. Loud dance music was blaring from within. People watched them as they went by, but Horeb took no notice. He pointed out the buildings.

“That is the old tourist office. They used to have so many tourists here. L’entrée de l’afrique, they called it. And this was where they came. . That is one of the banks, but it is closed now because they ran out of money. . That is a Greek restaurant that used to be very good, but now it is very expensive and very bad. . That is the church. It is the most important place in this town besides the petrol tanks. This is a Christian country now. People must believe in something. When you go to sleep hungry, you must believe in something so that you have a reason to wake up in the morning.”

Horeb stopped in front of a statue of a nearly naked man, a quarry hammer lifted above his head.

“He is the African Worker,” he said, pointing at the statue. “He built the railroad. Notice his hammer. It is always raised, but it will never come down.”

“What do you do when you are not driving us around?” asked Otik.

“I am lifting my hammer,” said Horeb. “But it will not come down.”

A group of men approached Horeb’s motorcycle. They quickly closed around it, placing their hands on the back of the bike and the canopy of the cart. Two of them began to argue with Horeb animatedly, pointing at the three of them sitting in the cart. Horeb shook his head and spat something back. He pushed one of the men away. The man pointed at Radar and then pointed at his own eye. Horeb revved the motor and nosed the bike through their midst. He waved for them to get out of the way. One of the men gripped the cart and started to jog alongside them. Radar thought the man would jump in and possibly kill him, but at the last moment Horeb accelerated and the man yelled and finally let go.

“What was all that about?” asked Lars when they were finally free.

“People don’t understand,” Horeb shouted back at them. “Everyone wants something, but they don’t understand that today is not the last day. There are many last days to come.”

• • •

L’HÔTEL METROPOLE was a three-story triangular stone building, an impressive colonial edifice whose elegance had dimmed over the years into a kind of ersatz melancholy; the place now felt like a theater set of itself.

“How much do we owe you for the ride?” asked Lars as they extricated themselves from the cart.

“What?” said Horeb, looking shocked.

“For the ride, how much?”

“Oh no,” he said. “You have given me the gift. Let me show you inside.”

Otik and Lars shared a look, but then they followed Horeb through the musty lobby into a large, open courtyard circumscribed by three walls. Inside this piazza was another world, completely removed from the dusty, squalid town that surrounded it. Against a backdrop of potted palm fronds, a mustached man in tails was playing ragtime at a piano that had no top. A white poodle sat by his feet. The floor of the piazza was tiled in a checkerboard pattern, and in the middle of the courtyard a little fountain bubbled away. There were a dozen or so candlelit tables draped in linen, each set for a full meal. The tables were all empty except for one cluster of patrons toward the back. Among them Radar saw Captain Daneri and several people he didn’t recognize.

As they approached, Captain Daneri spotted them and leaped to his feet. His face was glowing.

“Ah, welcome, welcome! Have you been exercising?” he said, seeing their outfits.

“We have not,” said Lars sharply.

“Never mind then, never mind. Estaba bromeando.”

“We weren’t sure where you’d gone.”

“Here, of course. The Metropole. It’s my old haunt. Just imagine this place in its heyday,” he said, gesturing. “I don’t like to spend much of my time on land, but if I had to choose one place besides my home, it would be here. I’ve lost many a night in this hotel. But come over, come over.”

The captain eased them past the fountain. “Everyone, allow me to introduce miei passeggeri. They are theater—” He clapped a hand to his mouth. “They are here on official business — the nature of which I cannot disclose.”

Radar, terrified, looked over at Lars. He wondered if Lars knew that it was he who had given away the nature of their mission. But if Lars was perturbed, his face revealed nothing.

The captain gestured at a strange, withered man with incredibly pasty skin, who, despite the time of night, was wearing a sun hat and dark glasses. A folded parasol rested against his chair.

“May I present Brother Ireneo Funes. He is—”

“Professor,” said the man, in a strange, high-pitched voice. “I’m no longer in the order.”

There was something wrong with the man’s skin. It was stretched thin and almost translucent, as if two or three sizes too small. It reminded Radar a bit of Mikey Melange, the cart collector at the Stop & Shop, who had been burned badly in an auto accident as a child and spoke in a husky whisper.

“Of course, apologies,” said Daneri. “Professor Funes is from Uruguay, I am sad to tell you, though he does much to reverse one’s impression of that vulgar country. He’s a collector of rare books.”

“All books,” corrected the professor. “Rare or otherwise.”

“Yes, rare or otherwise,” repeated Daneri. He swiveled his attention. “And this, of course, is the very rare and very lovely Mademoiselle Yvette Michel.”

She was lovely indeed. Her short blond hair was covered in a sparkling blue headband, and a thin, lemon-colored evening frock hung from her shoulders. The headband and the dress belonged to another time, but on her it belonged only to this time.

“Enchantée,” she said, blinking through a tendril of cigarette smoke. In the candlelight, the color of her eyes was somewhere between blue and green, like the color of the sea on a cloudy day. She smiled and then frowned ever so slightly, and such a juxtaposition managed to convey both an innocence and a knowledge that this place, this evening, this hotel, this world, had been constructed as a stage for her and her alone. Radar could not tear his eyes away from her.

When no one filled the silence, she said, in a velvety French accent, “I like men who dress the same. It is why I married a lieutenant.”

“And why did you marry him and not me?” cried a round-faced man with long, sweaty hair.

“Parce que vous êtes une bête sauvage.”

Everyone seemed to think this was very funny.

“Yes, this bête sauvage is Fabien,” said Captain Daneri. “He runs the hotel. Or tries to run the hotel.”

“The hotel runs itself,” said Fabien. “I just complain.”

“Fabien’s family came here just after Lord Stanley, isn’t that right?”

“My great-great-grandfather was Camille Janssen, governor general of the Congo Free State. He was one of the first assholes from Belgium to arrive on African soil. And now I am one of the last Belgian assholes on African soil, at your service.”

“You give yourself too much credit, Fabien,” said the captain.

“It’s a common habit of an asshole.”

“Well, sit, sit,” the captain said to his guests. “Join us. We’re drinking sixty-year-old Courvoisier.”

“The cognac is older than the nation,” noted Fabien.

“Fabien also has a legendary cellar of French wine that would be the envy of any restaurant in Paris,” said Captain Daneri. “What would you like?”

“I’ll try the famous cognac, thank you,” said Lars.

“I will have water,” said Otik.

“Don’t be a fool,” said the captain.

“I will have cognac,” said Otik.

“Me as well,” said Radar.

He had never had cognac before. It had always sounded like a cleaning product to him, something to rid the bathtub of its rings. But if Lars was trying it, then he would, too.

“And some food, if you have any,” said Lars. “We didn’t get a chance to eat.”

“Of course!” said the captain. “Fabien, can we arrange un petit dîner for my guests?”

Fabien snapped at a waiter and gave him a series of rapid instructions in French.

“So tell me, what is with these outfits?” asked the captain, who was wearing his crisp commodore whites. “They make you look like American gangster rappers.”

“It’s not true,” said Yvette. “I think they’re very handsome.”

Daneri held up his hands. “I yield to her opinion on such matters, of course, but I think they are an odd choice to travel in. You are like a women’s volleyball team.”

“Are you really in the theater?” Yvette asked Lars, leaning forward.

Lars blinked. The question hung in the air. Radar braced himself. He wanted to run from the courtyard. Horeb could moto him to some faraway place so he would never have to see these people again. He was tired of not saying what he shouldn’t and guessing what others were thinking of him. He wanted to go back to his little radio station and tend his frequency, free from the burden of face-to-face contact.

“Yes,” said Lars. “We are performers.”

“And what do you perform?” asked Yvette.

It was clear that she expected answers to her questions. Radar could sense in her a lifetime of getting answers.

“We. .” Lars stopped.

Otik broke the silence.

“We,” he said, gesturing to the three of them, “are the most famous group you have never heard of and will never hear of.”

“Really?” said Yvette. “But I just heard of you.”

“After tonight you will never know us again,” said Otik.

“C’est une prédiction.”

The waiter arrived with a tray of snifter glasses. The cognac that was older than the nation was carefully poured into each, snifted, swirled. The scent of time’s density.

Captain Daneri raised his glass. “To the most famous group we have never heard of and will never hear of again.”

“Hear, hear,” said Fabien, sipping at the Courvoisier. “Eh bien, ça y est.”

“So may I ask how your adoring audience finds you?” asked Yvette.

“They don’t,” said Otik. “We have no audience. This is whole point.”

“So what you’re saying is that it’s impossible for me to see one of your shows.”

“Correct.”

“But it’s a pity, isn’t it?”

Lars tapped Otik’s shoulder. “What Otik means is that our shows occur in a very particular time and space. The staging itself is the art form. They aren’t meant to be seen — they’re meant to happen.”

“If you ask me,” said Fabien, “it sounds like a lot of bullshit.”

“Oh, chut, mon chéri. No one asked you,” intoned Yvette. She turned to face Lars. “Pardon me for asking — I have only been to the theater a very few times — but doesn’t a show depend upon the relationship between the actors and the audience? Like a connection. This is the whole reason for the performance, yes?”

“This is one school of philosophy,” said Lars. “That there must be a witness for a performance to exist in the first place. I think for us, the notion of audience is not limited to a group of people sitting in chairs, watching the stage. The universe can also be an observer. The atoms, the quarks, the elemental bonds — all of these can pay witness to the show. There are many ways to alter the course of time.”

“Tu entends ça? Quelles conneries!” said Fabien.

“La mécanique quantique sonne souvent comme des conneries pour les personnes sans instruction,” said Lars.

“You speak French well,” said Yvette.

“You speak English well,” said Lars.

“I learned it from watching Hollywood movies.” She smiled. “Bogart and Bacall are my teachers.”

The waiter returned with three steaming plates of food.

“This is grilled catfish with a local vegetable called tshitekutaku and cassava cakes, which they call fufu,” said Fabien. “I thought you might like an introduction to native cuisine. If you don’t like it, I will have the chef killed instantly.”

“Thank you,” said Lars. “That’s a lot of pressure.”

“We don’t do things softly in this country,” said Fabien. “It is either the best or the worst. There is no in-between.”

“Yes, thank you,” said Radar. “It looks wonderful. Please don’t kill the cook.”

“May I ask how many of these shows you have done so far?” said Yvette as the plates were served.

“Since 1944, there have been four,” said Lars. “This will be the fifth.”

“Oh la! It is a true event!” She clapped her hands. “And I suppose you can’t tell me where you plan on performing?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lars, taking a bite of his food. “If the show was expected by its viewers, this would change the nature of the performance, you see.”

“I do see.” She smiled. “Can you at least give me the title? That can’t hurt, can it? I promise I won’t tell. Will you tell, Fabien?”

Fabien made a fart sound with his mouth.

“This is delicious, by the way,” said Radar.

“Good. I’m glad you like it,” said Fabien. “I will spare the chef. This time only.”

Lars was chewing his fufu thoughtfully.

“It’s called The Conference of the Birds,” he said finally.

This was news to Radar.

“Like Attar’s poem,” said Professor Funes, who had not said a word all evening.

“You know it?” said Lars.

“I’m familiar.”

“Professor Funes is familiar with most things,” said Captain Daneri.

“Well, do tell,” said Yvette. “What is it?”

Funes sipped at his cognac. He tilted his head, as if recalling a distant memory, and then began to speak in his peculiar, high-pitched lilt. “Mantiq al-Tayr was written by Farid ud-Din Attar in 1177. Attar himself was not a Sufi. . but one could say he was heavily influenced by the non-dualistic transient spiritualism of Sufism, and this is reflected in his poem.”

“Non-dualistic transitory — what is this?” said Fabien.

The professor recoiled at the question.

“You don’t know how much your query pains me,” he said wearily. “I am trying to deliver you the part, when every atom in my being strains to deliver you the whole.”

“Chut, Fabien, don’t distract him,” said Yvette. “Tell us about the poem, Professor. The poem — we want to hear about the poem.”

Funes cleared his throat. “I assume you want me to summarize. . I have learned that this is what most people mean when they say they want to hear of something. Or do you want me to recite the poem itself? It’s over forty-five hundred lines long with both prologue and epilogue.”

“Correct, Professor,” said Daneri. “A summary is in order.”

“I would love to hear him recite it,” said Lars. “I haven’t heard it aloud before.”

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” growled Daneri. He turned to the little man, whose impossibly pale skin had become flushed and blotchy. “Professor, there will be time to recite it later. For now, a précis; the night is still young.”

The professor nodded, coughed into his hand, and began to speak stiffly, as if from a memorized script: “The poem begins with a conference of the birds. They are kingless. The hoopoe stands up and says to those congregated, ‘We are not kingless; we do have a king. He is Simurgh. They found one of his feathers in China, and from the majesty of this single feather, rumors have spread throughout the land of his utter magnificence.’ The birds are enchanted. . They want to see their king. But the hoopoe warns them that the path to the Simurgh is fraught with great peril and many dangers. And so, hearing this, the birds begin to come up with excuses for why they can’t go on the journey. The nightingale says she is in love with the rose and cannot go; the parrot says his beauty has caused him to be caged; the falcon says he already has a master; the duck says he cannot be far from water. . and so on. These are the excuses of life. To each of the doubters, the hoopoe delivers a story, slowly convincing them through his tales that to not find Simurgh would be to live a life without meaning. . to exist without existence. And so, reluctantly, the birds agree to seek out their king.”

“It sounds to me as if the hoopoe is their king,” said Fabien. “He’s the one giving orders.”

“The hoopoe gives no orders. . The hoopoe is the storyteller. He shows them the way by describing those who have denied themselves spiritual fulfillment, those who have lusted after fame, wealth, bodily delights. But he gives no orders. . The hoopoe is the poet, the guide.”

“What is a king but a rotten man with a good story?”

“Go on,” said Yvette. “Don’t listen to Fabien. He’s still mad I didn’t marry him.”

The professor, looking quite annoyed, gathered himself and again took up the script: “On their way to see their king, the birds pass through seven valleys, each presenting a series of challenges to the flock. First they must pass through the Valley of the Quest, where they see, for the first time, the impossibility of the task laid out before them. Some birds turn back here, others die from fright, but most press on. From there, they enter the Valley of Love, where they confront the dangers of passion. More birds burn up, seethe with lust, or fall under the trance of beauty. Then they enter the Valley of Understanding, where they realize the limits of worldly comprehension — that knowledge is nothing but stones in the palm.”

“But do you agree?” said Fabien.

“With what?” said the professor curtly.

“That knowledge is stones in the palm.”

“I’m recounting the poem for our guests. It’s not for me to comment on the truth of its content. Were I to spend my life commenting on the world that I see, I would never see the world.”

“I would just think you would have an issue with such a characterization given your—”

“Fabien, arrêtez-vous! Personne n’aime un trouble-fête.”

Funes smiled, slightly. “Soon you’ll be nothing but a memory,” he said to Fabien.

“The poem, Professor, please. What happens in the poem?” ordered Yvette.

He continued, briskly now: “From here the birds, greatly diminished already, pass through the Valley of Independence and Detachment, where they realize the smallness of all things. . then the Valley of Unity, where they realize the sameness of all things. . then the Valley of Astonishment and Bewilderment, where they confront the true glory of God’s creation. And finally, the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness, where they realize that for all that they have realized, they realize nothing. . They themselves are nothing. Along the way, many birds perish in any number of ways: they are eaten, frozen, drowned, starved, maimed. . They die of hunger, heat, madness, and thirst. Of the thousands and thousands that began the journey, only thirty birds make it past the Valley of Nothingness. They step out of this valley, beaten and exhausted, their spirits drained, and they step into the realm of the Simurgh. They are desperate to finally lay eyes upon their king, whom they have traveled so far too see. . but instead they meet only the Simurgh’s herald, who tells them to wait by a lake. This is almost too much to bear for the exhausted birds. They wail and complain, but wait they must, and as they wait, filled with self-pity and contempt for this Simurgh who makes them wait, they stare into the lake. And in this lake they see their reflections: thirty birds, thirty reflections. And then they realize: the Simurgh is them. Si-murgh in Persian means ‘thirty birds’. . Their divine leader is within them.”

“It’s beautiful,” whispered Yvette.

“Africa must find its Simurgh,” a voice said.

The table turned as one. Horeb was standing only a few feet away. In the candlelight, dressed in his tunic, he resembled a prophet. The sight was startling.

“Casse toi, bicot!” growled Fabien.

“He’s with us,” said Lars.

“You know him?”

“He’s our hoopoe,” said Lars.

“I am their hoopoe, monsieur,” said Horeb. He looked as if he would say more, but then he bowed slightly and receded back into the shadows.

“Well, I think it’s a lovely story and will make a perfect play,” said Yvette. She raised her glass. “To the thirty birds.”

The glasses came together. Clinked, receded. Above them, the night remained.

“What do you think of all this?” Yvette said.

Radar realized she was speaking to him.

“Me?”

“Yes, are you the silent member of the troupe? Harpo to your two brothers? He was always my favorite Marx Brother.” She crossed her eyes and puffed out her cheeks and somehow was all the more lovely for doing so.

“Well, I. .” he stammered.

“What I want to know,” the captain interrupted, “is why puppets? We had a puppet theater in Buenos Aires, and I’ll tell you, it made me deathly afraid as a child. I think they enjoyed frightening children. They had a wolf puppet that gave me nightmares for years. I’ve seen real wolves, and none was as frightening as the wolf puppet.”

Radar felt Lars staring at him.

“Do you know how we might get our container on the next train to Kinshasa?” said Lars. His voice had grown hard.

Daneri sensed his intrusion. He held up his hands.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m just a simple man of the sea.”

“There hasn’t been a train to Kinshasa in ten years,” said Fabien. “There are small trees growing between the tracks now. The locomotive is stopped somewhere between here and Songololo. Trains require maintenance, oversight, money. We don’t have any of that here.”

“So then how do we get our cargo to Kinshasa?” asked Lars.

“By truck. Like everyone else. The road’s pretty good except where the rains have washed it away.”

Lars considered this. “And who do we talk to about renting a truck?”

“I’m going that way,” said Professor Funes.

Daneri snapped his fingers. He pointed at Radar. “Remember I told you about my friend who orders the books? It’s him. He’s the keeper of the great library.”

“If we can fit both containers on the bed of the lorry, I’ll take you,” said the professor.

“You will?” Lars’s eyes brightened. “That would be amazing.”

“But no guarantees,” said the professor. “The Mitsubishi has seen better days.”

“Haven’t we all?” said Fabien.

“Of course,” said Lars. Then, to Funes: “We’re grateful for whatever you can provide.”

The professor dabbed a handkerchief against his lips. “I have a small barge just north of Kinshasa. I load up there and then head up the river. But I can drop you in the city or wherever you’d like.”

Lars and Otik looked at each other.

“We’ll go upriver with you as far as you can take us and then figure out the rest,” said Lars.

“But you don’t know how far I’m going,” said the professor.

“Wherever you’re going, we’re going farther.”

“Oh, a clue!” shouted Yvette. “I love clues!”

“I’m leaving first thing tomorrow,” said Funes. “Or as soon as I can get those fools to unload the books off your boat.”

“Good luck with that,” Daneri chuckled. “Work seems to be optional around here.”

“It’s frowned upon,” said Fabien. “If the sun still comes up whether I work or not, then why make the effort?”

Daneri turned to Radar. “Africa,” he said, “will make you lose your mind.”

“Mon chéri, you cannot blame this on Africa,” said Yvette. “A man will always lose his mind, no matter where he is.”

• • •

THEY FINISHED THEIR FOOD, and the plates were cleared. The last of the cognac was savored and dispensed with. Fabien disappeared into his famous cellar and came out with a rifle and three bottles of a vintage Bordeaux, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Gold, and a metal canteen of some local gin that smelled and tasted of gasoline.

“Mais pourquoi le fusil, Fabien?” implored Yvette.

“Parce que je suis ton protecteur.”

At some point, the piano player stopped playing familiar medleys and seemed to devolve into experimental free jazz. The poodle shifted positions. Captain Daneri told them a long story about an island off Argentina inhabited only by women who never aged. At one point a glass was thrown across the courtyard into the fountain for emphasis.

Fabien waved it away.

“I own this place. I can do what I want,” he said, and with that, he stood up and shot his rifle into the air. Roosting birds fluttered away. The shot echoed across the courtyard. Lights turned on. A woman stuck her head out the window.

“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?”

“Tout va bien. Retournez vous coucher! Allez, au lit!” shouted Fabien angrily.

After his sixth or seventh drink, Radar began to lose the sensation in his fingertips. The night expanded, contracted. The courtyard became all courtyards that were, that would be.

Sometime past midnight, Otik and Lars announced that they had to be getting back to the boat.

“But why?” moaned Daneri. “Where else would you rather be than here?”

“Tomorrow is another day,” said Lars. He turned to Fabien. “Merci pour la nourriture et les boissons.”

“Merci pour les conneries.”

“Professor Funes.” Lars bowed. “We’ll see you at the docks tomorrow. We sleep on the ship, so we’ll be ready whenever you are.”

As if by magic, Horeb had materialized again from the shadows.

Yvette turned to Radar. “Are you going with them?”

Radar stood up, slamming his knee into the table. The multitude of glassware shuddered.

“Sorry,” he said. “I probably should.”

“Oh, don’t,” she said. “The morning’s still not for a long time.”

Radar looked at Lars, who raised his hands and said, “It’s your choice. We’re going, though.”

“If it’s all right, then, I think I’ll stay,” said Radar.

“Of course you’ll stay,” said Daneri. “That’s a good lad.”

“Whatever you want,” said Lars. “But when the truck leaves, we leave. We don’t wait.”

“Don’t worry,” said Daneri. “We’ll get him back to you in one piece.”

At some point, the last of the wine was finished. As if on cue, the man at the piano stopped playing abruptly in the middle of one of his long, spastic compositions. He dramatically threw a sheet over the topless piano and then nodded, formally. Daneri, and Daneri alone, stood up and gave him a long, loud standing ovation. The poodle followed the piano player as he exited stage left.

“It’s all so bloody brilliant,” said Daneri, collapsing back into his chair.

Radar was just beginning to wonder why he had not gone home with the others when a figure appeared in the courtyard. It was Ivan.

“Ivan!” he cried, waving with both hands. “We’re over here.”

Radar could not remember when he’d last been so glad to see someone.

“Hello, Radar,” said Ivan.

“Yvette, Yvette, Yvette,” Radar said. “This is Ivan. He can sing. You should hear him sing. He knows everything about the stars. He’s the most amazing person in the world.”

“Quels compliments,” said Yvette. “Enchantée.”

“Madame.” Ivan kissed her hand. “Nous nous sommes déjà rencontrés.”

“Vraiment?”

“Ca fait quelques années.”

“And he speaks French,” said Radar. “So that’s true.”

“How did your business go?” grunted Daneri.

“What business?” said Radar. “What business, Ivan?”

“Your friend has interests in town. Do you want to tell them, Ivan?”

“This town is no good,” said Ivan. “It’s dying.”

“Careful, Mr. Kovalyov. We’re with the locals.”

“We’re not locals.” Fabien lit a cigarette. “You act surprised. This town has been dying a long time. It’s our hobby to die. We quite enjoy it.”

“Fabien, don’t be rude,” said Yvette. “They will never come back.”

“They’ll come back. They are vultures. They pick at the body. Why else would they be here?”

“For a woman,” said Daneri.

“We’re here to do a show with birds,” slurred Radar. He put his hand over his mouth, but it was already too late.

“Yes, tell us more, my little Harpo,” said Yvette. “Your friends are so mysterious. What is this all for? And what’s this about puppets? What are you really doing here?”

Radar gazed across the table at her.

“All of us came here not by choice, you know,” she said. “No one comes here by choice.”

“I come here by choice,” said Daneri.

“Vanushka, get him to say something,” Yvette cooed to Ivan. “Tell him we want to know the truth.”

Everyone was looking at Radar. His head was spinning.

“Excuse me, please,” he said.

He got up from the table and began to walk. He was not sure where he was going, but he knew he must leave. He slid through a pair of palm fronds and then up a staircase. There were voices behind him, but he did not stop. Soon he found himself in a long hallway of rooms. He walked past a door that had a little figure made of sticks hanging on it. He stopped, his skin bristling. He raised his hand to knock.

“They haven’t been back in a long time,” a voice said. “They haven’t claimed their things.”

It was the piano player and his dog. They were entering a room down the hall.

“Who is it?” said Radar.

“I never knew their names. A man and a woman. They left some time ago. Fabien won’t rent it out, though. He keeps it for them. Not that he could rent it out. No one comes here anymore.”

Radar stood there, swaying.

“I like your dog,” he said. “What’s his name?”

“Pascal,” the man said, and disappeared into his room.

Radar followed the hallway, running his palm along the walls. He found another staircase and went up and up until he came to a door. He assumed that the door would be locked, but when he tried the handle it opened, and he found himself in the cool open air of the rooftop. It reminded him of the deck of the ship. He looked out across the city and saw the Aleph lit up at the docks. Suddenly, he desperately wanted to be back there. The ship had become his home now. He could barely remember New Jersey.

One half of the roof was taken up by a giant billboard, illuminated by two large fluorescent lights that buzzed into the night. Insects swirled and dived around the lights in a frenzy. Radar walked over to the front of the billboard and saw a giant smiling man in a tie, talking on a mobile phone. PARLEZ À L’AFRIQUE! PARLEZ AU MONDE! declared the sign to the citizens of Matadi. Radar stepped forward to the edge of the roof. Normally he was terrified of heights, but he felt very calm. He looked down to the street below. He thought he saw Horeb in his white tunic, waiting by his motorcycle.

He placed his toe against the ledge, felt the spot where the building ended and the air began. He knew that if he jumped he would survive. This would not be the way he died — not here, not now, not in a mangled heap next to Horeb’s rickshaw. If he jumped, he knew he would get up and walk away from the fall.

“Don’t go so close,” he heard a woman’s voice say behind him.

He turned and saw Yvette standing on the roof. She looked unsteady in her heels. Behind her in the doorway, Ivan appeared. She took a step toward Radar.

“Please, Harpo, mon chéri,” she said. “I don’t want you to fall.”

Instinctively, he inched backwards. Ivan came up beside her.

“Ho,” said Ivan. “Come back from the ledge, my friend.”

“What’s your business here?” Radar said to Ivan.

Ivan took a step forward, and Radar raised his arm by his side, as if he were about to jump.

“Captain Daneri said you had business interests here. What do you do?”

Ivan reached out. “Come back from the edge. You had too much to drink, my friend.”

“Please,” breathed Yvette. “I don’t want you to fall. We only just met.”

“What is it?” said Radar again, raising his arm threateningly. “What do you do, Ivan? What did you not tell me?” For an instant he felt himself lose his balance and thought he might actually fall. He flapped his arms, and both Ivan and Yvette flinched before Radar righted himself.

Ivan sighed. He pursed his lips and then looked at the ground.

“I have a child,” he said. “I have a little girl. Her mother lives here.”

Radar blinked. “What?”

“In one week she will be four,” he said. “Her name is Anna, like her grandmother.”

Radar took this in. The lights from the billboard buzzed.

“She does not call me her father. For her, she has no father,” he said. “I have not earned this, to be her father. It is very hard for me to see her and not to tell her. I can hold her, but I cannot give her what she needs.”

No one moved. And then Yvette said quietly, “I had a child. He was taken from me.”

She did not say more, and no one asked for more. Then Radar took several steps toward them, and Ivan and Yvette each seized one of his arms. She laughed nervously, and they stood on the roof in silence like this, the scent of burning still around them. The sparse lights of the town beneath, the ship, the river that swallows all rivers, the sky.

Ivan pointed. “It’s difficult to see, but there is a star there.”

“Where?” said Yvette.

“There.” He took her shoulder and pointed. He was pointing with the hand that was missing a pinkie. The absence of the finger somehow made his pointing more precise.

“Alpha Centauri,” he said. “It is brightest star in sky. You can only see it here, in the south. I did not see this star until I was eighteen. It was greatest night of my life. I had read about it, but I had never seen it with my own eyes. Seeing it with your eyes changes everything.”

They huddled and looked.

“There, do you see? It is brightest.”

“Yes, I think so,” said Yvette.

“It looks like one star, but it is actually two, Centauri A and Centauri B. And a little red dwarf named Proxima. All three form star. You can’t tell them apart with your eyes.”

“Who is little red dwarf?” whispered Yvette, leaning into Radar. “Who is my Proxima? Is it you, Harpo?”

“This is nearest star to us besides our sun,” said Ivan. “That light we see is only four years old.”

“So young,” she murmured.

Radar was staring at the immensity of the sky. “We are really alone, aren’t we?” he said.

“Not so alone,” said Ivan.

“Come down to my room,” said Yvette. “Both of you.”

It was not a request. They descended back into the hotel. Yvette’s room was decorated with hanging tapestries and various wooden masks. Clothes were draped everywhere, drawers open. A smell of what he realized was her perfume.

“How long have you been here?” asked Radar.

“Long enough,” she said.

She fished a record from the shelf and put it on. The vinyl was in bad shape. The dust and scratches could be heard, but the singer was French and sang so beautifully that the three of them sat there in a stunned silence, listening to the little miracles of heartbreak. Then Yvette got up and walked over to the table. She picked up a long tube.

“You don’t want any, Vanush?” she said to Ivan.

He shook his head. “I must see the stars.”

“You can always see the stars, my love,” she said.

All of a sudden, he began to sing. “Yvette, Yvette, she’s loveliest woman I’ve never met. .”

She smiled, clutching the tube to her chest. “Go on,” she said.

“Have you two met before?” asked Radar.

“Only once, I promise. .” said Yvette.

“Someday I’ll write song about all this,” said Ivan. He shook his head. “Tonight I will write song about this. Do you have guitar?”

Yvette held out her hands. “Ma chambre est nue.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I will find.” He got up and left the room.

Yvette came to Radar and held out her hand. “Come,” she said.

“Where did he go?”

“Come.”

They parried open the mosquito nets and slinked into bed. She took off Radar’s hat and placed it on her head. Even in his drunken haze, he winced, thinking she would be repelled by his baldness, by his tuft, by his Radar-ness. But she only smiled, letting her hand drift down his face before unzipping his jacket and pulling off his undershirt. He was suddenly aware of his skin as a surface that could be touched. She shivered out of her frock and lit a candle by the bedside. He thought of Ana Cristina then. He wondered whether she would be mad or not. It was too late to be mad. It was too late to be anything.

“Have you ever smoked before?” she said. She was wearing his hat and nothing else.

He shook his head, staring into those eyes. What had those eyes seen?

“The flame will bring the smoke to you. Don’t breathe too hard. Hold it in. And remember to smile.”

She spat on her finger and moistened the tip of the pipe and then brought it to his lips. He shut his eyes and drank in the smoke until his lungs stopped working. When he exhaled, his whole body went up into the ceiling. The smell familiar and not familiar. He had been here before, in this bed, with this woman. He had been here before, but then, he had never been anywhere at all.

“What happened to your husband?” A voice that sounded like his.

Yvette was smoking the pipe. She exhaled, closed her eyes.

“I killed him,” she said. She turned and looked at him. “No. It’s not true. He walked into the forest and never came back.”

The pipe was offered again to Radar. He could barely lift a hand to decline, and so he took more, and the world began to fade.

“I shouldn’t,” he whispered. “My epilepsy.”

“My little Proxima,” he heard her say. “Have you ever been with a woman?”

“Yes,” he said. Then: “No.”

“Would you like to be with a woman?”

He could feel himself sweating. The syrup of his gears.

“There’s a girl back home.”

“C’est une fille chanceuse.”

She came close. He could feel her breath on his neck. He could feel her skin, or the dream of her skin. He opened his eyes briefly, and through the scrim of the mosquito net he saw Pascal, the piano player’s dog, watching them.

8

Radar awoke with a start. He blinked at the canopy of mosquito netting above him. A pile of dead insects had pooled in a low spot. The air was thick and damp. His head was pounding. He tried to remember where he was. This could not be New Jersey, could it? He turned and saw her bare shoulder and the night came flooding back.

Shit!

The truck. He was going to miss the truck. Shit!

He jumped out of bed, naked, and tried to locate his tracksuit among the jumble of clothes on the floor. There was no sign of Ivan or his guitar.

Yvette stirred in the bed.

“You’re leaving?” she murmured.

“I hope,” he said. “They might’ve already left without me.”

“They wouldn’t,” she said, stretching. “They admire you.”

He laughed. “Yeah, right.”

She wrapped the sheet around herself and put on his trucker’s hat.

“Can I keep this?”

He blinked, rubbing his head. “Okay,” he said.

“Will you remember me?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, jimmying his heel into his shoe. “I don’t think I can ever forget.”

“Welcome to the Congo, my little Proxima.” She leaned in and kissed him. “I hope it’s better for you than it has been for me.”

He ran through the lobby and out into the street. The rush of morning traffic. Motos and trucks crawling about. A wash of pedestrians, carrying things, selling things. Almost instantly, a crowd of people formed around him.

“Monsieur, diamants? Diamants, monsieur?” The voice was assured, as if they had known each other forever.

“Taxi, caïd? Boss, you need taxi?”

“Croisière de fleuve, monsieur? Très belle, très belle.”

“Besoin d’une ceinture?” A little boy held up a stick, from which hung several ratty belts. He was pushed away by another.

“Des cigarettes! Des cigarettes américaines! Authentique!”

“Carottes? Crevettes?” A pot of steaming prawns was thrust into his face.

A gentle hand, pressing at his wrist. “Des femmes, monsieur? Ladies? Very beautiful. .”

Another hissed into his ear: “Du kif? De la cocaïne? Qu’est ce que vous voulez?”

He was helpless in the face of their advances. Hands prodded and shoved him, urging him this way and that. Slowly, he was tugged down the street. He was sure he had already agreed to buy hundreds of diamonds, arranged for four taxis, and bought and sold a kilo of cocaine. In the short time he had been outside, he was already a major player in the Matadi import/export scene.

He felt a firm hand on his shoulder and panicked. It was no doubt a police officer, arresting him for his substantial black market dealings. Or maybe it was a rival drug dealer, coming to shoot him for treading on his turf. He turned, fearing the worst.

It was Horeb. Oh, Horeb! Savior of men!

“This way,” said Horeb, parting the crowd. “Follow me.” He yelled something, and the masses began to complain, chastising Horeb for taking their prize. With arms outstretched, he guided Radar to a side street, where his moto awaited.

“Thank you,” said Radar. “I didn’t know what to say to them.”

“There’s not much fruit in Congo, so when people see it on the tree, they want to pick it,” said Horeb. “Of course if they grew their own fruit, they would have plenty to eat, but conditions make this difficult. We’ve been taught to make do however we can. It’s Article Fifteen.”

“Article Fifteen?” Radar grimaced. Now that he was safe in the back of the moto, he could feel the full expanse of his headache. A vast, throbbing tundra. He thought he might be sick.

“A gift from Mobutu,” said Horeb, wheeling around the bike. “Article Fifteen is an amendment to our constitution. But it doesn’t exist on any paper, only in the mind of the citizen.”

“What do you mean?”

“According to Article Fifteen, it’s okay to steal a little to get ahead. Not too much, but a little. Because if you do not, you see, your neighbor will. Article Fifteen says that a little corruption is not only expected — it is necessary to survive. Even when Mobutu died, Article Fifteen lived on.”

“Do you steal?”

“Stealing is the twenty-third sin in the eyes of God. The thief shall have his hand cut off.”

Radar was too tired to point out that Horeb had not answered his question. He settled back into the cart and closed his eyes. He felt exposed and naked without his hat.

“I hope they haven’t left,” he said.

“You think they would leave without you, my friend? You are one of them.”

They arrived at the docks to find a flurry of activity, a stark contrast to the evening before. One of the old gantry cranes was creaking and straining as it lifted Moby-Dikt from the hull of the boat. The harbormaster was standing next to Otik and Lars on the docks, watching the crane’s progress. Occasionally he would lift his arms and gesticulate, as if giving directions, though no one paid him much attention.

Radar got out of the moto and hurried over to them.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“As you can see, you aren’t,” said Lars. “Things move very slowly in this town. We had to pay our friend here another bribe. ‘Des frais de déchargement,’ he claimed. Apparently the first bribe did not cover this fee.”

The harbormaster waved his arms. The crane stopped, then started again, belching out thick black smoke.

Captain Daneri emerged on the gangplank of the ship. Next to him was Professor Funes, shaded by a great white parasol. They were deep in conversation, speaking rapidly in Spanish. As they approached, Daneri saw Radar and smiled.

“Our little bird returns! My boy, I heard all about it.”

Radar felt himself turning crimson. “Where’s Ivan?” he asked quickly.

“Mr. Kovalyov has not been seen this morning. He’ll surface. We leave this afternoon, and he does not miss a departure. He, like me, lives to depart.”

After some negotiation, it was decided that Moby-Dikt would be loaded onto the bed of the tractor-trailer, and the container of books would be bolted on top of this. It was a precarious arrangement, made all the more precarious by the age of the truck. Professor Funes hadn’t been kidding. The Mitsubishi looked as if she had been resuscitated from a scrapyard. Many of her parts were in the process of falling off. Yet, like the rest of the country, she endured: when the driver started her engine, there was only the briefest of stutters before she woke up and revved to life. Evidently, she was using the good petrol.

“We must go,” said the professor. “It’s nine hours to the launch on a good day.”

With tears in his eyes, Daneri hugged each of them long and slow, as if he were memorizing the weight of their bodies.

“You’re going places where I’ve never been,” he murmured. “I admire you. I admire your course. May we meet again. An honor. Ustedes son mis héroes.”

Radar watched as he strode up the ramp.

“If you get lost,” the captain called, “you can always follow the water back to the sea.” He kissed his fist and then he was gone.

“I like that man,” said Otik.

“I thought you hated him,” said Radar.

Otik shrugged. “I changed my mind.”

There was only room in the truck cab for Professor Funes, his driver, and one more, but Otik and Lars opted to ride in Moby-Dikt and continue with their repairs. Time, it seemed, was now of the essence. Radar had just decided that he would join them in the back — not so much to help in the preparations as to sleep off his hangover — when Horeb approached them.

“Pardon me,” he said. “But I would like to come with you.”

“What?” said Otik, startled. “With us like how?”

Horeb bowed. “I would like to be your guide.”

Otik exchanged a look with Lars. “Our guide? Who says we need a guide?” he said.

“Last night, you said I was your hoopoe.”

“Last night we are saying lots of things. Last night was last night. Just because you give us ride to hotel doesn’t mean you are suddenly—”

Lars put a hand on Otik’s shoulder.

“Do you know the river?” he asked Horeb.

Horeb shook his head. “I went to university in Kinshasa, but I’ve never been past there.”

“So how would you guide us if you don’t know anything?” said Otik.

“I cannot guide you on the river, but I can be your voice. I speak French. I speak Kikongo, Lingala, Kele, and Swahili. And Arabic. And a little Portuguese, too. And I know how to deal with the Congolese mind. The river can be dangerous, not only for the currents but also because of the people who live on it. Some of the villages do not like new faces. This is where I can help you.”

“We don’t have money, if this is what you want,” snapped Otik.

“I don’t want money. Allah will provide. I want to help with your show. I’m an actor.”

“You’re an actor?” said Lars.

“Yes. A very good actor. I’ve been on television.”

“The show has no actors,” said Otik.

“Do you have carpentry skills?” asked Lars.

“I have many carpentry skills.”

“Can you play the drum?”

“I grew up playing the drum. I learned how to speak on the drum.”

“Please, let us confer,” said Lars. He gestured for Radar and Otik to join him in conference. Radar was surprised to be included in the quorum and even more surprised when Lars turned to him first.

“What do you think?”

“Me?” said Radar. “I don’t know. He sounds like he’s telling the truth. I like him. But I don’t think I’m a good judge, perhaps. I don’t know what you’re looking for.”

“Otik, what’re we looking for?”

“I told you: this is not how we choose our members,” said Otik. “We don’t even know him. I don’t believe he doesn’t want money. Everyone wants money.”

“How do we choose our members? We didn’t know Radar.”

“Yes, and I lodged formal complaint, if you remember. No offense.” He nodded at Radar.

“None taken.”

“We have certain standards to uphold,” said Otik. “We cannot keep watering group. What about our philosophy? What about Brecht? Artaud?”

“Let’s not fool ourselves,” said Lars. “A happening is not about what we think before. A happening is about the happen.”

“Okay, yes, you always say that, but you forget we have planned for ten years to—”

“To what?” said Lars.

Otik was silent.

“This is now,” said Lars.

“I know this is now. You don’t need to tell me this is now.”

“Do we have another tracksuit?” asked Lars.

Otik sighed. “We have another one. There is Thorgen’s old suit.”

“Radar? What do you think?”

“I say. . yes. Why not?”

“If we take him, he becomes exactly like us,” said Lars. “There’s no hierarchy here.”

Radar laughed.

“What?”

“I’m just not so sure that’s true,” he said.

“What do you mean?” said Lars, looking shocked.

“I mean it’s you two, then me,” he said. “It’s not a bad thing, but we’re not all equal here.”

Otik grabbed him by the shoulders. “Hey. Hey!”

“What?”

“Burazeru, you must understand. Trust is the most precious. This is why I cannot just say yes to anyone. To be one of us, you must be ready absolutely to die. Whole team has died before. But we said, ‘Okay we do it again.’ Lars lost everyone, but he said, ‘Okay, I do it again. I believe in this.’ Before, I didn’t know if you are ready to die. Now I know.”

“Okay,” said Radar.

“You are like us.”

“Okay.”

Lars smiled. “So? Otik?”

“I don’t trust him,” said Otik.

“Why?”

“He is not telling us everything. Why does he suddenly want to come on trip? Suddenly he is actor, suddenly he is very interested in everything we do.”

“You heard him—”

“Yes, I heard him, blah blah blah,” he said. “And I also do admit, we need two more hands.”

“So?”

“Okay. Okay,” Otik sighed. “But let me lodge formal request to clarify recruitment process.”

“Formal request duly noted.”

“Because one of these days we are going to invite real maniac and I will be very upset.”

“You want to be the only maniac?” Radar asked.

“I hate you.”

“I hate you, too,” said Radar, smiling.

The three of them approached Horeb.

Lars cleared his throat. “You will not be our guide.”

Horeb nodded, looking defeated.

“We can’t pay you anything, either,” he said.

“I told you. I don’t want money,” said Horeb.

“I know. That’s why we’d like to invite you to be the fourth member of our troupe.”

Horeb’s eyes lit up. “Really? Not joking?”

“Really. Welcome to Kirkenesferda.”

He bowed. “I am very honored.”

“Radar will catch you up on what we do during the drive.”

It was time to go. Horeb ran to his moto and picked out a small bag and his prayer mat. Radar looked around for Ivan, but there was still no sign of him. He wrote a quick note and went over to the chief mate.

“Please give this to Ivan,” he said. “Tell him ‘Thank you, from Radar.’”

Akaki nodded.

“Tell him I will never forget him or his songs.”

“Yes,” said Akaki. “I tell him.”

Radar was not convinced he would, but there was nothing more to do except pile into Moby-Dikt. He looked in vain one last time for his friend, and then the doors were latched and closed. The truck shifted into gear and they bade farewell to the dream of Matadi.

• • •

FOR THE FIRST HOUR of the drive, Radar descended into a swarthy melancholy, no doubt encouraged by the liquor still lingering in his body. He would never see Ivan again. He had betrayed Ana Cristina. He had abandoned his mother. And for what? He glanced around their little hovel. Otik and Lars had settled down to their respective workstations. Horeb had carved out a space for himself among several great spools of wire and was reading from a book. He had been a part of the team for less than an hour, and already he appeared as if he belonged, in a way that Radar had never managed.

Radar closed his eyes and tried to sleep but could not. One of the generators had been fired up to provide them with electricity, and though a little exhaust fan whirred away in the corner, the room quickly became stuffy and uncomfortably hot.

Otik’s motion sickness returned, and he began the now familiar routine of quietly puking into a bucket. Lars and Radar had grown so accustomed to this that they did not bat an eye, but Horeb grew concerned. He went over to the electric kettle and busied himself brewing some tea from several small bags of spices he produced from his knapsack.

“Here,” he said, presenting a mug to Otik. “For the stomach.”

Otik eyed the mixture skeptically but took the mug and gruffly mumbled a word of acknowledgment.

Horeb came over to Radar with a second mug of the tea.

“Thank you,” said Radar, accepting the offering.

“How do you feel, my friend?” said Horeb.

“I’ve been better. I’ve also been worse.” Radar sipped the tea. It was bitter and peppery, but it reminded him of Charlene and home. “What is this?”

“Búku oela. A pan-African tea. I made it up myself. One could say it is post-traditional. Rooibos from South Africa, grains of paradise from Nigeria, calumba from Mozambique, ginger from Morocco. It heals the body and brings peace to the soul.”

Radar wished he could hear his mother give her olfactory report on the tea. He wondered if she would be able to smell all those countries.

“How did you learn to make it?”

“If I’m being honest with you. . the Internet,” he said, smiling. “The Internet will save Africa.”

Horeb glanced over in Lars’s direction. He leaned in close.

“I’m very honored to be part of your team,” he said quietly. “But I’m not really sure I understand what your team does. Can you explain this to me, please?”

Radar was baffled about why Lars had nominated him to be purveyor of information, particularly because he was the newest member and least qualified to describe what the group did. He barely understood it himself.

“I can try. But I can’t promise it will make sense,” he said, sitting up. He took another sip of the tea. He already felt better. The post-traditionalism was working.

As soon as Radar started talking, however, he found he had a lot to say. Much more than he thought he knew. At first he was worried that the history he was relating was not quite right — that he was leaving out critical details or shifting dates or mispronouncing names. He kept waiting for Lars or Otik to intervene and take over the role of storyteller. When they did not, he began to gain confidence, and there came a point at which he was no longer worried about whether he was getting it right or not. The story had become his. The story had become more than itself.

Fig. 5.5. Selected diagrams (1–5)

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler

Using the book his mother had given him as a springboard, he pointed to the diagrams as he told Horeb the history of the group, beginning with the labor camp for teachers in Kirkenes during World War II. The pictures, in their realness, in their little bordered truth, gave him courage.

“They were kept in two camps,” he said, pointing at the map of Kirkenes. “Here and here. This was where the idea for the group formed, in the breaks between heavy labor. The science teachers got together and began talking about science, and war, and theater, and they found they had a lot in common. When they were not working, there was nothing to do but talk. And out on the edge of the world like that, ideas can become big things. Ideas can become bigger than reality. And that’s why they went through with it. It was also desperately cold that winter. You can see the average temperature was minus twenty. The mind slows to a crawl when it’s that cold outside. But they knew it would one day be spring again. That one day the war must end.”

He waited for Lars to tell him he was full of crap. That he was making all of this up. But Lars stayed quiet, and so he went on. He described the creation of the Bjørnens Hule in the middle of the wilderness, pointed to the map of grass-roofed huts revolving around the Wardenclyffe tower.

“Do you know what a Wardenclyffe tower is?” Radar asked.

Horeb shook his head.

“Nikola Tesla invented it. He was a Serb. . one of my people. My father used to go on and on about him. Tesla came up with an idea that all electricity could be free. .” And so on. He talked about the experiments with electricity and nuclear physics, the preparations for the elusive performance on Poselok Island that was only discovered by two Russian fishermen many years later. He described the look of amazement on the fishermen’s faces. He recounted the Gåselandet show, destroyed by the massive Tsar Bomba, and the mysterious films of the exploding theater wagon that surfaced and were played at various underground parties to psychedelic soundtracks. He described the films even though he had never seen the films, even though he had seen only a series of stills in the book. But maybe this was enough. Maybe telling a story of the event was more powerful than witnessing it yourself.

“This was their theater wagon,” he said. He talked about the symbolism of the wagon at length, what it represented, its history in Europe first as a religious beacon, then as a satellite of safety against the state, then as a vessel of narrative transmigration. He did not know he knew all of this. He did not know he knew the term “narrative transmigration,” but out it came with all the rest.

Horeb didn’t ask a single question. He kept nodding and saying, “Yes, I see. Yes, I see,” though Radar didn’t know if, in fact, he actually did see or whether he was just playing along. When Radar got to the performance in Cambodia, he paused and looked over at Lars. But Lars was deeply ensconced in his work with the puppets. If he was listening in, he did not show it. So Radar narrated the tragedy of that night in Anlong Veng as if he had been there himself. He described Siri, Lars’s mother, the beauty of a woman who was so gifted and so strong, surrounded by all these men. She was a mother, a craftswoman, a visionary, a beacon of optimism in even the darkest of times. He began to feel his eyes growing misty. He described the sight of the wagon burning, the feeling of watching all that work go up in smoke. He pointed to the map of the killings. The sound of gunshots. Siri on the ground, looking at her husband, their hands reaching out to touch fleetingly before the life left them both.

Radar paused. “I’m sorry,” he said. He took a deep breath and pointed to the line on the map representing Lars’s escape with Raksmey to the Thai border.

“When they were within a hundred meters of the Thai border crossing, Raksmey stepped on a land mine,” he said. “His left leg was torn apart by the explosion. Part of his face was sheared right off. They heard shots behind them, and so he waved for Lars to go on and leave him. Lars tried to drag Raksmey. . but finally gave up. Those last thirty feet he had to walk on his own.”

There was a silence. Radar thought maybe he had gone too far.

“You’re a very good storyteller,” said Horeb. “You should write this down.”

“It’s already written down.” Radar pointed to the book.

“I mean, in your words, like how you said to me,” said Horeb.

“I’ve only ever written a Little Rule Book for Life.”

“Like a Koran?”

“Not quite.”

“But I’m serious. When I listen to you, I feel your words. You have a gift. When you tell me about this terrible tragedy in Cambodia, it’s like I am there. I am remembering, too.”

“You remember what?”

“When I was four, I saw a man shoot my father in Yaoundé.”

Radar blinked. “Why?” he said.

“My father owned a factory. The man was a Marxist. I didn’t know any of this at the time. . I was just a little boy. All I knew was a man came and made my father fall down, and then my father disappeared and never came back. My mother had already gone back to Senegal, so I grew up with my aunt and uncle. And they taught me Islam. I lost my father, but I found my belief.”

“What happened to the man?”

“They beat him to death. They beat him. I was too young to tell them to stop.”

Radar looked up and saw Lars standing next to them. He was holding a yellow tracksuit in his hands.

“It’s for you. It’s our uniform,” said Lars. His eyes were wet.

“Thank you,” said Horeb, bowing. “I will wear it well. Live long and prosper.”

• • •

RADAR WAS IN THE middle of telling Horeb about Kermin, the great puppet designer who had resurrected Kirkenesferda from the ashes by organizing the fourth bevegelse, in Sarajevo’s library, during the middle of the Balkan war.

“And Kermin is my father,” he declared proudly.

“And so why is your father not here?” asked Horeb.

Radar opened his mouth and then shut it. He was about to try and explain the blackout in New Jersey when the truck slowed and came to a stop.

The door to the container was unlatched. Professor Funes appeared beneath his parasol.

“A stop,” he said. “For petrol. And the calls of nature.”

Radar looked at his watch. They had been driving for almost three hours.

They hopped down from the container, some more nimbly than others. Radar blinked in the bright sunlight. The truck was parked at a dusty filling station that housed only a single pump. There were four other trucks ahead of them in line, each stacked high with goods — bananas, furniture, PVC piping. The station was in a town that seemed to consist mostly of tin-roofed houses with a couple of mud streets running between them. A large church could be seen rising above the rest of the buildings. Somewhere, a radio was playing rumba.

Horeb, now wearing the yellow tracksuit, washed his hands and face using a bottle of water and then placed his mat on the ground by a grove of spindly trees. He began to pray.

When Radar came out of the restroom, Horeb was still praying. Otik and Lars were already clambering back inside Moby-Dikt, but it would still be some time before they would get fuel, since the line of trucks at the pump had not gotten any shorter.

He did not want to go back inside just yet, so, feeling surprisingly adventurous, Radar ambled down a side street. It was remarkable how even a day in a new place could acclimatize you. Yesterday morning, he would have done no such thing. Yesterday he was a coward who had never been to Africa, who knew only of New Jersey and recumbent bicycles and radio stations. But now? He was an explorer. A man in the world. Dusty streets were the new normal.

He came across a group of young boys who were kicking around an old soccer ball wrapped with tape. As soon as they saw him, they stopped and stared.

“Hello,” he called out timidly, suddenly aware of himself as foreign.

The kids continued to stare. One boy scratched at his balls.

“Bonjour,” Radar tried. “I am Radar.”

“They don’t see many mundeles around here,” said Horeb, materializing behind him.

“Mundeles?”

“White people,” said Horeb, laughing. “Would you like to play?”

“Play?” Before Radar could say more, Horeb dived among the children and expertly dribbled the ball around the kids with his feet. Soon, the children began yelling and laughing, trying to get it back. But when Horeb kicked the ball to Radar, the kids stopped again and stared.

One of the kids pointed, said something to Horeb.

“They want to know where you come from,” said Horeb.

“New Jersey.”

“New Jersey?”

“It’s next to New York.”

Horeb began to talk to the children.

“What are they saying?”

“Children are always so funny. They want to know why you look the way you do. I’m trying to explain to them, but it’s not easy. Why does anyone look the way they do?”

All at once, everything felt very familiar. He had been here before.

“Tell them I wasn’t always like this,” he said.

“What?”

“Tell them I was born black like them.”

Horeb raised his eyebrows.

“Tell them.” He knew it was impossible, but he had talked to these children before. He had seen these same expressions of wonder. He had stood under this same sun.

Horeb dutifully translated.

“They want to know what happened to change you into a mundele.”

“Tell them. .” He was trying to remember what he said the first time. “Tell them it was a machine. Tell them it was electricity.”

Horeb shook his head. “These are children. They will believe you. Some of them have never seen a mundele before.”

“I’m not lying,” said Radar. “It’s the truth. It was a machine.”

Horeb studied Radar’s face.

“Tell them,” said Radar. He needed the children to understand, just as they had understood the first time. “Tell them I went to Norway, in the north, where there’s snow, and a machine changed me. Tell them it also made me very sick. I got seizures. This leg grew weak. Tell them this is why I can’t play soccer very well.”

Horeb took a step toward him. The sun was hot overhead, and Radar felt his head begin to spin, but he did not look away. The feeling of déjà vu receded. Everything was new again. He could feel the sun, and Horeb was coming closer. In his previous life, this would have been the time when he would have had a seizure and the children could have seen for themselves what the machine had done to him, but now he did not seize. He stayed awake, staring into Horeb’s eyes, and he knew then that he would never seize again. He knew he had been cured. Cured by his father’s electromagnetic pulse.

Horeb brought his head very close to Radar’s until their foreheads were touching.

“Enna lillah wa enna elaihe Rajioun,” he whispered. “Jazaka Allahu Khairan.”

“It’s the truth,” said Radar. “It’s the truth.”

Horeb put his hand against the soft part of Radar’s neck and then turned and began to speak. The children listened and stared.

“They want to know why you changed.”

“Tell them it wasn’t my choice,” said Radar. “But I’m the same person I was before. Tell them I’m like them. Tell them this never changes.”

Horeb nodded. He spoke. He spoke for a while. When he was done speaking, a silence settled over them, until Radar limped over and kicked the ball and the children whooped with delight and easily took it away from him. Horeb swept in and recaptured the ball, and soon it was the two of them in their yellow tracksuits against all of the children. Horeb would keep the ball, pass to Radar, who would lose it, and the children would pass it around before Horeb would win it back again. The simplest of games, but enacted here, it was a pure and untouchable act that superseded all else. Language, color, time, place — none of it mattered when the ball was moving.

“Ahoy! We’re leaving!” Lars shouted from the filling station.

Horeb clapped his hands and said something to the children. They came crowding around Radar, touching him, hugging him.

“Mundele ndom, mundele ndom,” they cried.

“What does that mean?” Radar asked.

“It means ‘the white black man.’”

“Is that good?”

“You tell me.” Horeb laughed.

9

It was early evening by the time they reached Kinshasa, though Radar never saw the great city, for they did not stop. He only heard the shouts and the sounds of traffic, the crowds, the cries of anger, the brief caress of laughter, bursts of music from open windows, and the endless chorus of honking. At some point they heard the telltale screech and crash of an accident, followed by screams. For Radar, it was completely and solely an aural city. A city of the imagination.

“It’s easy to forget your soul in Kinshasa,” said Horeb as they passed through. “I was there to study. I made my brain larger, but sometimes I didn’t remember my heart.”

“What did you study?”

“Linguistics. International relations. Religious studies. I wanted to be a translator and interpreter for the UN. But I couldn’t focus on my work. I was going in too many directions. I lost my way. So I ended up leaving after two years.” He looked down. “You must think I’m stupid to throw away an opportunity like that.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” said Radar.

“I’ve never been able to finish what I start. It’s my curse. I always try to remind myself that when Muhammad started preaching, no one believed him — no one but his wife. Nothing came easy for him. He had to earn it. . with patience. With patience and wisdom and belief.”

They listened to the mutter of a moto approaching and passing their truck.

“When people live too close together, you see the best and worst side of them,” said Horeb. “You step over human waste in the street, but you are also given food by strangers. You see people robbed by guns, but you also see young men helping old women carry their bags. Sometimes you see the good and evil in the same afternoon. Everyone understands how difficult it is to live like this. It can make you hard, like a nut, but it also leaves you open for hope, for the words of a prophet — whether this is Jesus, Muhammad, or even”—he gave a little laugh—“one of our presidential candidates. Every nut has a soft inside.”

“Is that true? I feel like I’ve met nuts with no insides.”

Horeb smiled. “We need a great leader. We need a young Nelson Mandela in Congo, who can bring the people together. This country has so much. It can be the most prosperous country in all of Africa. It can be a symbol of cooperation. But this leader must not lead because he is seduced by power. He must lead because his only option is to lead, because the world demands him to lead.”

“Maybe this leader is a she,” said Lars without looking up from his work. It was the first thing he had said since giving Horeb the tracksuit. Radar realized he had been listening the entire time, and that what had passed between him and Horeb had in fact passed between them all.

• • •

THEIR DESTINATION was a small fishing port called Mikala. The truck rumbled down a dirt track, and when they finally stopped and the doors to Moby-Dikt were thrown open, they saw that they were once again on the banks of the great river, though 450 kilometers upstream. The same river but never the same river. The water still as glass and at least three kilometers wide.

Lashed to the docks were perhaps thirty small barges, all in varying states of rust and decay. The beach nearby was covered with small fishermen’s pirogues — canoes dug out from tree trunks. The fishermen had splayed their nets across the beach to dry. A single, ancient gantry crane rose above the docks.

As soon as they jumped down from the container, they were immediately surrounded by a crowd. People were pushing and jostling one another to get close, but not too close. Radar noticed that, unlike the scene that morning in front of the Hôtel Metropole, no one was trying to sell them anything. Instead, everyone was staring at Professor Funes, who stood beneath his parasol a short distance away, talking to his driver.

Indeed, as Radar watched, the crowd began to shift toward Funes. The driver immediately brandished a club and blew on a whistle. The crowd halted. The driver started to speak, waving the club above his head. Radar noticed that almost everyone in the crowd was holding a small package. Then a young man broke from the crowd and extended his package to Funes with one hand, his other hand holding the elbow of the outstretched arm. A hush fell over everyone. Radar thought the driver might hit the man with his club, but Funes stepped forward, folded up his parasol, and took the package. He lifted it to his forehead and made a little bow. Funes said a few words to the man in the man’s language. The man clasped his hands together and bowed back, beaming. The crowd held its breath and then, with an exclamation, everyone began to push forward. The driver blew his whistle, but no one was listening anymore. Another man held out his package, and again Funes repeated the ritual of receiving the gift and touching the package to his forehead. Packages were being extended from all directions. Funes calmly took each one, repeating his gesture of thanks. The crowd now stretched back off the docks and up into the village. More were coming down from the hills. Everyone was carrying a package.

“What’s going on?” Radar asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Lars.

“He’s the Tatayababuku,” Horeb said quietly, without taking his eyes from Funes.

“The what?”

“The father of books. The Tatayababuku is a sorcerer who knows all things. They think his books give him power. So they give him gifts for his library. They think he will protect them.”

“Those are books?” said Radar. “How do you know all this?”

“Everyone knows about the Tatayababuku. His magic is powerful.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this?” said Otik, a note of suspicion in his voice.

“Better to see for yourself,” Horeb said with a smile.

They watched as Professor Funes received the books. Each book was wrapped in newspaper or brown wrapping paper. More and more people came down to the waterside, and the pile beside him began to grow. The driver managed to keep the crowd mostly at bay, until one woman threw herself at Funes’s feet. She was sobbing. In her arms she was holding a small child, whom she offered up to Funes. The crowd immediately grew uneasy.

“Her child is sick,” said Horeb. “She’s asking him to heal the child.”

For the first time, Funes looked uncomfortable. He cautiously touched the child’s head and then murmured to the mother. She was led away, weeping but smiling.

“They don’t actually believe the books are magic, do they?” said Radar. “How can they?”

Horeb pointed at the crowd. “They must believe in something. I think Americans believe in much stranger things, yes? Guns? Plastic surgery?”

“That might be true,” said Radar. “But who told them this? Who told them the books were magic? Did he say this? Who started giving him books?”

“How does anything begin?” said Horeb. “Did Islam begin with Muhammad’s first revelation or when his wife became his first believer? You should ask the Tatayababuku about who started this.”

The sun began to set over the river. The water turned gold and red and then silver, forming a perfect mirror to the sky.

When there were no more books to be given, Funes raised his right hand above his head and silenced the throng. He produced a small book from his pocket. After a moment’s pause, he began to read in his curious high-pitched voice. A poem in French.

“It’s Baudelaire,” whispered Lars after a moment. “He’s reading Baudelaire.”

“He’s not reading,” said Horeb. “He knows it by heart.”

Indeed, the book was only a prop. The professor was speaking from memory. The crowd listened intently. When the poem was finished, the professor bowed again, then began walking toward the water, his driver following closely. The crowd shuffled forward. Funes walked onto one of the barges, all the way to the end, and, with everyone watching, ceremoniously ripped out one of the pages from the small book from which he had just read, held the page aloft, and then tossed it into the river. The page fluttered, somersaulted, came to rest on the surface of the water. There was a silence, and then someone from the crowd let out a trilling ululation. A cheer rose up. And now Radar and the others were surrounded by people singing, clapping, dancing.

“What just happened?” Radar asked.

“He released the good spirits into the river,” said Horeb. “The bad spirits remain in the books.”

The scene quickly morphed into a kind of organized chaos. The truck was backed right up to the water’s edge. Crowds of people began to haul the barges out of the way, and from downriver came another barge, pushed by a stout white tugboat — the pousser. This tug-and-barge operation, Radar realized, was to be theirs. The barge was guided into the newly vacated space by the docks. Several men scampered up the scaffolding of the gantry crane and into its cab. Radar could not imagine the old rusty creature actually turning on, let alone lifting a heavy container, but amazingly, the crane fired right up. A crowd of men put chains around the container of books on the back of the truck and then attached the crane’s hook. The cable went taut, the crane whinnying from the effort of extracting the container from its perch. Radar stepped backwards, sure that the chains or the crane would break, but gradually the container rose and swung perilously toward the barge, hundreds of hands guiding its path. The crowd seemed unconcerned with the danger of such an operation. Everyone wanted to touch the container, to help it on its way. The crane screeched, complained, turned, and — miracle of miracles — deposited the container onto the barge. The process was repeated with Moby-Dikt. Many hands guided the box, and soon the two containers lay parallel on the deck of the barge. A group of men went to fetch the pile of book offerings and stacked them neatly next to the first container. Radar made a rough count. Around five hundred books had been given to the Tatayababuku.

By the time all of this was finished, dusk had already settled across the river. The water had turned the color of wet steel. A cloud of mosquitoes had descended upon them, and perhaps this was why the crowd around them had subsided, but Radar still felt eyes watching his every move. Horeb went off to pray, while Funes’s driver built a small fire on the front of the metal barge. Radar thought this was a risky maneuver, given that boats and fire don’t usually mix very well, but no one else appeared troubled by this incongruity. At least the smoke from the fire did wonders in keeping the mosquitoes at bay.

Professor Funes, who had disappeared into the pousser, reappeared in the firelight.

“It’s too late to leave tonight,” he said. “They don’t dredge the channels anymore, so you must know the precise way, and even then there’s no telling if it’s clear, because the river changes every day. I would buy all the food you need here. Enough to last at least one week. We’ll stop only at night, and you can never be sure what will be on offer.”

Radar wanted to ask him about what he had witnessed that evening, about the books, about why the people believed in his magic. But before he could say anything, the professor bade them good night and withdrew.

“So what do we do now?” said Otik.

Lars smiled. “Anyone want to go shopping?”

They looked around at the darkness. The eyes watching them.

“I’ll go.” It was Horeb.

He disappeared into the crowd of faces. He was gone a long time, but when he came back he was bearing two large fish on a stick. Behind him, several men were carrying sacks of rice and three large bundles of bananas.

“Give me forty dollars,” said Horeb. “Please.”

“Forty dollars,” repeated Otik.

“For the food,” he said. “I’m not sure it will last us the whole time, but there are villages along the way. You can always buy fish. It’s the one thing we do have in this country.”

The fish had long, proboscis-like snouts. Horeb expertly cut and cleaned them with a series of easy, precise movements that Radar found mesmerizing.

“What kind are those?” he asked.

“Elephant fish,” said Horeb. “Their eyes are small, but they use an electric field to see underwater. They are also delicious.”

The fish were tossed into a pan above the fire, alongside a pot of rice and some cassava paste. They listened to the sounds of insects and the silence of the river and the elephant fish sizzling against the heat. The eyes, always watching them.

Horeb was right. The fish was delicious. Succulent and sweet, tasting of river and earth and flesh, it was just about the best thing Radar had ever eaten. He could almost taste the faint hum of an electronic field on his lips. For a couple of precious seconds, he forgot about the mosquitoes dive-bombing him from all directions.

“Let it be known that I am not pleased to be back on boat,” said Otik. “But also let it be known that I am pleased to eat this fish.”

“Thank you, Horeb,” said Lars. “We’re lucky to have you on board.”

Horeb cleared his throat.

“So I am wondering: what can I do for this team? Besides get you fish.” Radar realized that this was the question he himself had not dared to ask. A tinge of jealousy. Through his simple directness, Horeb was already poised to surpass him in the pecking order. Radar needed to learn how to be direct like Horeb. To reach out and point to what you want.

The fire crackled. No one said anything. After a moment, Lars got up and went inside Moby-Dikt. He reemerged carrying several drums.

“You said you can play.”

Horeb took one of the larger djembes and examined the surface of the skin. He turned the drum around and around in his hands.

“I haven’t played this kind of drum before,” he said finally. “I usually play the log drum of the Lokele.”

“You see?” said Otik. “I told you. He doesn’t play. He says he plays so he gets this job.”

“It won’t speak the same language,” said Horeb.

“Try,” said Lars.

“Hand me another,” said Horeb, and he took the two drums between his knees.

The first beat hit Radar so hard in the chest, he nearly fell backwards into the river. The sound — clean, flat, true — was unlike anything he had ever heard before. A sound to be felt and tasted. A sound that penetrated deep into the marrow of his bones. Then came the next beat, and the next, Horeb working back and forth between the two drums, high and low, the rhythm picking up now, shifting, finding itself, sliding into a groove, pulling back. Horeb paused, took a breath, eyes closed, and then the drumming rolled down again, rising into the night sky, his palms caressing the skin of the drums as if he were conversing with the heavens, fingers flexed up, fingers flexed down, speaking to the night, the beats flying out across the surface of the river.

Radar heard a whoop from their invisible audience. A quick series of ululations. The darkness was filled with people. Otik looked around, his eyes alight. Radar had never seen him like this before. He heaved up his great body and hurried into Moby-Dikt. He came out with birds in his hands.

“Lars,” he hissed. “The scene, the scene. This is happening now.”

Lars leaped up and disappeared into the container. He emerged with a large piece of canvas in his arms.

“Help me with this, would you?” he called out to Radar.

Radar held one end of the canvas as they unrolled it against the side of the container. Lars went back inside and came out with several spotlights, which he pointed at the scene. He went back in, connected the cords, and then there was light.

Radar gasped. Such was the magic of the theater. They were instantly transported. A valley surrounded by tall, rugged mountains. A cloudless sky. A sun on the verge of setting. A lazy river. This valley was the world now. He could feel the audience shifting, making room for this new truth.

Otik touched the birds’ necks, flicked some switch, and they sprang to life. The crowd murmured as the two birds rose into the air, playing against each other, diving, falling, whirling across the backdrop of mountains. Radar realized there were actually four birds: the two in the air and then their shadows against the backdrop, which were like them but also distinct. The birds’ wings were beating to the rhythm of the drums, and Horeb was watching the birds dive above his head. It was as if he were guiding them with his music, high and low, high and low, each bird to each tone. Or perhaps the birds were guiding him — it was no longer clear who controlled whom. Every single eye in the audience watching every single movement of those two little puppets as they united, separated, drifted, spun, circled, floated, soared, plunged. The two birds bound together in understanding, never far from each other, whispering, talking, laughing: Here we are, here we are, they said, know us if you can.

Radar felt a gear turn in his chest. He knew then what he must do. He ran into the container and fetched one of the transceivers and a speaker. He plugged the speaker into the generator, connected it to the transceiver, and clicked on the radio dial, sweeping the signal across the shortwave frequencies so that scraps of voices, music, static, electricity were scooped from the invisible spectrum and transformed into sound by the radio’s internals. Bits of Kikongo, French, pop music, reggae, hip-hop, sermons, all bleeding in and out from that uncertain fuzz. Radar closed his eyes and spun the dial. That little dial between thumb and finger became an extension of him, its sounds his sounds, its search his search.

At a certain point the radio fell upon the sound of drums, and Radar paused there. Horeb’s drumming mixed with the drumming on the radio, the beats oscillating and intertwining. The birds and their shadows seemed to respond to this doubling — their pace increased, back and forth, back and forth. At one point they crashed into the backdrop, fell, then recovered, flying high above their heads, out of the light of the fire, disappearing into the vast bowl of darkness.

There was a splash. Horeb abruptly stopped drumming. Radar cut off the radio.

He was afraid to look over at Otik, fearing that he would be furious about losing his birds or furious that Radar had ruined the show with his impromptu addition. But when he finally did steal a glance at him, he saw a broad smile stretching across his face.

“Burazeru,” Otik whispered. “I am home again.”

Around them, the crowd was silent. There was no clapping — not that there needed to be, but after such an intimate display of aerial courtship, the silence was a bit unnerving. Slowly, though, Radar understood. They had all paid witness. There was no need to say what was already said.

And then he heard it, faint but nonetheless certain: drumming. At first he assumed it was coming from the radio, which he must not have turned off properly, but then he realized it was coming from the opposite bank. First in one place, then drums all up and down the river, carrying out across the water.

Horeb was sweating, smiling above his drum, the spotlight illuminating him from below.

“They heard the message. They are calling back to us,” said Horeb.

“What are they saying?” said Radar.

Horeb listened. “They are speaking a different language,” he said, closing his eyes. “But I think they say, We see you, we see you, we see you. . He is coming, he is coming, he is coming.”

10

Radar was awoken by a great commotion outside. He opened his eyes, his head still lingering in a dream he could not remember. The other cots in the container were already empty. He leaped through the mosquito net, tripped, and ran to the door. Blinking against the morning sun, he saw that the pousser had started to pull the barge out into the river. The docks were crammed full of people waving, crying, shouting, clapping, dancing. Funes was at the stern, holding a book, waving back at them. Radar had to admit, it was nice to have such a send-off, even if the attention technically wasn’t directed at him. He gave an embarrassed wave and then went over to where Horeb, Otik, and Lars stood watching.

“If they think he will bring them better life, they are getting big surprise,” said Otik.

“They want to believe,” said Horeb. “A better life can only come through belief.”

“Belief is for stupid people. I can believe this book will save me with all of my heart, and I will still be majorly fucked.”

“What do you believe in, my friend?” said Horeb. “Why have you come all this way?”

Otik started to answer but was interrupted by a long, withering blast from the boat’s whistle, which scattered the crowd.

The pousser spun the barge around and pointed them upstream. Soon, the town and its crowds of people disappeared around the bend, and just like that, the river and the jungle became the entirety of their existence. A man whom Radar had not seen before was standing at the bow of the boat, holding a long striped pole, which he would dip into the river every five seconds while shouting, “Ah yeah mayee!”

“What’s he doing?” asked Radar.

“He’s measuring the depth of the river,” said Horeb. “Without him, we are in trouble.”

“Ah yeah mayee!” called the man.

As they went on, the constant rhythm of the sounder’s declaration, coupled with the little expert dip and twirl of his canary yellow pole, became the measure of time’s passage. That pole, plumbing the distance between surface and bottom, was the engine of their progress. If the pole stopped twirling, so too would they.

“Ah yeah mayee!”

Professor Funes had retired to his cabin in the pousser and would not emerge for the rest of the day. Radar found this strange, but he did not have long to contemplate his absence, for there was much activity around the container. After the previous night’s performance, both Lars and Otik were visibly excited.

“How did you know to do this?” Otik asked Radar. “With radio signal?”

“Ah, have you met my father?” said Radar. “I grew up with radio signal. I was taking apart radios before I could speak.”

“It is perfect. It is so fucking perfect. It is just what we needed and we did not even know it! Kaprow calls this ‘art of life.’ But we must have many radios. How many do you have?”

“Three.”

“No, it won’t do. It won’t do. We need at least fifty. Maybe eighty.”

“Where are we going to get eighty radios?”

“Was the drumming okay?” Horeb asked

Otik ignored him. “We must rehearse!” he cried. “We must make wagon!”

Otik, now manic, hurled himself around the barge like a loose rhino. He seemed no longer bothered by the fact that they were on a barge, though the river here was decidedly calmer than the open ocean. Together, the four of them pulled the theater wagon out of Moby-Dikt piece by piece and constructed it on the bow of the barge, attaching the top, the wheels, the curtains, the spotlights, the wings, and the scrim. Radar had to admit it was an impressive sight, a sight that beckoned with promises of a show as the river flowed beneath and the lush landscape slowly spun and revolved around them.

But plans to rehearse quickly receded as technical problems arose when the vircator was installed inside the wagon. Something was wrong. The chips would no longer entangle. Unlike the pair last night, the birds refused to fly. They lay motionless on the deck, appearing as if they had all fallen out of the sky at once. Even Horeb’s beating of the drum would not coax them out of their stillness.

Otik — sweating profusely and cursing a beautiful blue streak (“Jebeni kuchkin sin! Serem ti se u carapu!”) — retreated back into Moby-Dikt and began to furiously tinker away. Any offers to help were venomously rejected.

“Let him be,” said Lars.

“He doesn’t like me,” said Horeb, staring after Otik. “What did I do?”

“It takes a while,” said Radar. “Believe me. It’s nothing personal.”

“He’ll come around,” said Lars. He handed Radar a straw cowboy hat. “For the sun. It can be bad. You’ve got to protect yourself.”

Radar took the hat and sheepishly put it on.

“Thanks,” he said, aware of himself and all that he was not.

“Nice,” said Horeb. “Like John Wayne.”

“You know Morse code, correct?” Lars said to Radar.

“I found Xanadu, didn’t I?”

“I didn’t want to assume. It is a dying language.”

“You think I could grow up in Kermin’s house and not learn CK?”

“It would be unlikely,” Lars admitted. He handed Radar a Morse key. “We’ll set up a station for you, stage left. You’ll be the one who sends out the opening sequence. We begin every performance with that line from Numbers — you know, ‘What hath God wrought?’”

“Baltimore, 1844,” said Radar. He plugged the Morse key into the radio and then clicked out the message: — •••• •— •••• •— •••• —• •• —•• •— ••• •• ••——• •••• — The rhythm of dits and dashes flashed out across the water and over the green islands of floating hyacinth.

Horeb, who was sitting nearby, hit the drums in precisely the same rhythm, alternating the high and low drum for each dit and dash:

“What language is that?” he asked Radar.

“It’s Morse code. Each letter has a different coded sequence,” said Radar. “W is di-da-da. Short then long long.” He demonstrated: —

“Ah, in drumming it is different. It is not letter by letter. The drum is speaking the same words you speak with your voice.”

“Wait,” said Radar, turning to him. “You’re actually speaking with the drum? I thought you were just drumming.”

“Of course I was speaking,” said Horeb. “Did you not hear it? Why do you think they were answering me last night? I wasn’t sure if they would understand, because I was drumming in Kele, which is an upriver language, but they heard me and answered. They were drumming back in their local language — I think some form of Teke or Lingala, but I could still understand what they were drumming.” He demonstrated. “‘He is coming, he is coming.’”

“But how did you learn how to speak on the drum? I thought you said you’d never been up the river before?”

“I haven’t. I learned to drum-speak while I was at university in Kinshasa. I was studying linguistics, you see, and there was a drumming club. We met in the cafeteria in the evenings. I think it was formed to preserve and study the drum language of the river tribes. You know, most of these boys are not learning the drums anymore. They have mobile phones, they want to get to the city, they don’t care about the old ways,” he said. “But I’ve always liked languages. I’m good at them. I can imitate almost anything I hear. My aunt and uncle used to call me le perroquet when I was little. One of the students in the club, Boyele, he was from the Lokele tribe, near Kisangani, and he knew how to talk with drums. He is the one who taught us. He is an amazing man — I think he is the first person from his village to go to university. He always said he was going to go back and build a hospital there. . I don’t know what became of him.”

“This is where we’re headed,” said Lars. “Maybe we’ll see his hospital.”

“This area is very famous for its talking drums. But the Lokele don’t use skin drums like these. That’s why I was wondering if it would work. I learned on a drum made from a log with a long hole cut out of it. They call it a bongungu.”

“But how do they talk with it?” asked Radar.

“The drumming language is like speaking words. When you play, you sound out a word. Like lisaka.”

He played: Two taps on the low drum, and then one on the high drum.

“But Kele is a tonal language. A lot of African languages are. Depending on how you say lisaka, it can mean different things.

Every syllable can be soft or hard, and this changes the meaning. each syllable said soft, means a puddle, or like a wet piece of land. with the last syllable hard, means a promise that you make to someone. And with two syllables hard, means poison.”

“Seems pretty easy to screw up.”

“For people not used to tones, yes. When you drum, all you can drum is the soft and the hard, not the actual syllable. The drum has a soft tone”—he played the low drum—“and the hard tone”—he played the high drum.

“Like the dot and the dash.”

“The Lokele call it the male and the female. . But because you cannot say the word, only the tones, when you drum this”—he hit soft soft hard —“it could be ‘li-sa-ka,’ as in puddle, but it could also be ‘bo-son-go,’ the river current. So you must say more than just the word. You must talk around the word to let the others know what you mean. So ‘moon,’ which is normally koko, becomes he drummed this out, “which means ‘the moon looks down at the earth.’ Or if you want to drum ‘don’t worry’ which is owangeke, you must actually drum which means ‘take away the knot of the heart and throw it up into the air.’”

“Don’t worry,” Radar said, and tapped out the Morse code: beat out Horeb.

Lars, who had been watching them, jumped to his feet.

“This changes everything,” he said. “Horeb, you’ll be our chorus. You’ll narrate the story with the drum. Do you think you can do that?”

“I don’t know that many phrases in Kele. I only went to drumming club for one year.”

“It doesn’t matter. Use the words you have. That’s all we can ever do. Radar will fill in the gaps with Morse code, yes? But I want people to hear the story before they see it. I want people to feel it before they know what it is. Radar, you’ll do the equations as well. I’ve got them here.”

• • •

THEY PRACTICED. They practiced that day and the next. Radar worked his radios, scrabbling up sequence, tapping out code. His stage-left station became an elaborate array of Morse bugs, keyboards, speakers, cables, and shortwave radios. Otik finally got the vircator up and running, and the birds leaped off the barge and began to fly again, first in pairs, then in groups of four, and finally in great swarms. Lars set up a projector that sent out images of diagrams and equations. In the evening, as the birds flew across the beams of light, you could see snippets of these equations come to life, the bodies of the birds a flickering canvas that would materialize out of thin air like wisps of smoke. Occasionally, actual birds would come to investigate the swarm, perhaps thinking there was a school of fish to feed on, but after a moment of confusion, in which they would recognize something familiar in the strange puppet forms and yet also sense the distinct shroud of otherness, these living birds would lose interest and fly on.

Fig. 5.6. “Projected Flock Equations”

From Radmanovic, R. (2013), I Am Radar, p. 620

Meanwhile, Horeb was studying the text of Attar’s poem, working out the words and phrases, taking breaks only to sleep, eat, and pray. With his limited vocabulary on the drum, he did his best to translate the story of the birds into music, his beats intertwining with the Morse code beeps until the two of them had developed a sonic rapport that wove open the night:

Fig. 5.7. “Conference of the Birds, Drum/Morse/Radio Palimpsest”

From Radmanovic, R. (2013), I Am Radar, p. 621

As darkness fell on the river, the pousser would slow and they would search out a calm area where they could shelter for the night. Their barge would soon be surrounded by men in pirogues offering fish, dead monkeys lashed to sticks, baby crocodiles, cassava, reed baskets filled with squirming fluorescent caterpillars. And books. Books and books and books. As in the first village from which they had launched, everywhere they went these neatly wrapped books were paddled out and offered to Funes, who emerged from his pousseur to receive them, foot braced against the bow railing, hands extended as if he were a king surveying his domain.

That first night on the river, one of the villagers, after spotting the theater wagon on the barge, asked Horeb what it was for.

“A performance,” Horeb said in Lingala. “These men have come from across the ocean to put on a performance.”

The villagers interpreted this to mean that the performance was meant for them. Word spread through the village, and soon everyone was on the beach, ready for the show.

Radar looked over at Lars.

“What do you think?” Lars asked as they gathered in conference.

“They are waiting. They will be pleased,” said Horeb.

“Seems okay to me,” said Radar.

“We see it as public rehearsal,” said Otik. “We don’t get too upset. We don’t get mad.”

“It’s not traditionally what we do,” said Lars.

“What is tradition? Shitty rules made by shitty people,” said Otik.

“A debatable point, but I see what you mean,” said Lars.

They assumed their positions: Horeb at the drums, Radar at his console, Otik at the vircator, Lars with the lights, the projector, and the hand crank for the scrolling backdrops and the shadow puppets. The show began in total darkness, and then the lights rose across a barren desert and they were off. The shadow puppet of the hoopoe appeared, and then the birds — great swarms of birds encircling him, encircling the boat, the village, everything. A barrage of drumbeats announced their entrance. Radar found a radio station of a man humming to himself — he could not imagine who this was or where this man must be humming, but there it was, and there it was now on the stage.

Hmmm hmmmm hhmmmmm.

Radar listened to the drum, nodding his head, and then he began to tap out code on the Morse bug. As they had before, Horeb and Radar slipped into mutual understanding. Not that Radar could tell exactly what Horeb was saying with his drum, but he knew without knowing as he introduced another radio signal, this one full of static and what sounded like a sermon. He tapped his key alongside Horeb’s drum, as if they were strolling down a path together. For a moment, everything meshed perfectly. The birds overhead, thousands of wings engulfing them, flashing into the light, melting, everyone listening to the hoopoe’s story. The villagers oohing and laughing as the projectors lit up wing and beak, equations dissolving and evolving. Desert melted into the first valley, the Valley of the Quest, and the backdrop scrolled, then suddenly a light fizzled and popped. There was a shower of sparks on the boat, and a clump of birds plummeted out of the sky like stones into the river. They heard Otik swear loudly from behind the wagon.

“Cancel this show, cancel this fucking show!” he bellowed. “Stop! Stop! Stop! I hate this motherfucking shit. Nabijem na kurac ove jebene ptice!”

Radar stopped keying and turned off his radios, but Horeb did not stop drumming. Radar looked over at Otik and Lars, knowing they would not take well to this act of insubordination. But then he heard the people. Unlike the crowd the night before, the people of this village seemed to love what they were seeing. They whooped and cried, and several drums were brought out onto the beach and played, and Horeb began to match the beats. As Otik retreated into the container and Lars worked to fix the broken lights, women, men, children began to dance. Leg, hand, limb flashing in the firelight. Whistles of delight, ululations, catcalls, a shiver of chest, a pounding of feet into earth. Circles formed around the best dancers, and above them the birds still flew, diving, dipping, as if egging the people on.

After it was done, they were mobbed by the villagers coming onto the barge, shaking their hands, hugging them, smiling. A crowd of boys came to Radar and touched his radios. He found a station that played some kind of African soukous hip-hop, and the kids all showed him their moves, brushing hands against face, popping shoulders back and forth, jumping onto and off of knees.

Horeb said that they had been invited to meet the chief of the village.

“I don’t want to meet any chief,” said Otik, still toiling away at his vircator.

“It would be rude not to accept this invitation,” said Horeb.

They made their way through the village, lit only by the bright blue glare of the occasional battery-operated fluorescent light. A smell of charcoal and meat cooking. The forest open, breathing around them. In a large mud house they found a man in blue jeans, T-shirt, and a dinner jacket seated at a plastic table. A radio sat on a shelf.

“Bonjour,” he said. “Je suis le chef.”

Horeb spoke with the chief for a long while. Outside, the entire village was watching them through the doorway.

“He says he is grateful for this gift we have given his people,” said Horeb. “They will never forget it. They want to give us a goat as a sign of their appreciation.”

“Tell them we don’t want any goat,” said Otik. “Tell them we want to buy that radio. We need radios.”

Horeb spoke with the chief.

“He says he’s sorry, but he cannot give you his radio, because it is important for the protection of his people. He listens to a radio station called La Voix de la Rivière, and this is where he gets the news for his village. This is how they find out if the rebels are coming back.”

“The rebels?” said Lars. “What rebels?”

“He cannot give you the radio, but he offers you a goat.”

“We don’t want any goat,” said Otik.

“I am telling you. . it’s very rude to refuse a goat,” said Horeb. “Usually, a goat is only given as a wedding gift. So you see, it would be unwise to not take the goat.”

They took the goat, though the goat was not pleased to be taken. He bleated and wailed.

On their way back to the barge, Radar noticed several of the children who had danced to his radio, standing and staring at him, hands on their heads.

“Bonjour,” he said. “You are good dancers.”

They giggled and hid their faces. One boy jumped out again and began to gyrate, to the great amusement of all. He was wearing a dirty grey sweatshirt that read NY GIANTS SUPER BOWL XXXV CHAMPIONS, 2001. Though it must be said that Radar did not know much about sports, he was fairly sure the Giants had not, in fact, won that year. He remembered this because he had eaten too much guacamole at a Rutgers alumni Super Bowl viewing party, and his sense of loneliness after the game was matched only by the curious postmortem displays of despair by Giants fans, who looked and acted as if a loved one had just died a horrible death.

“His shirt is wrong,” he whispered to Horeb. “The Giants lost the Super Bowl in 2001.”

“This happens,” said Horeb. “Someone once said Africa exists in a parallel world. When they have a big game like this in America, they make winning T-shirts for both teams. It is America, you see — they must plan for all possibilities. The television cannot wait for the people to go back to the factory and say, ‘Oh, so-and-so has won, please print this shirt.’ And everyone waits patiently on the field. No. . this would not happen in America. So they print both shirts, but only one team can win, and so afterwards they send the shirts of the losing team here. They donate them to the starving Africans and they feel very good about themselves. So you see, there are many little boys and girls running around with a different history on their chests.”

“Should I tell him?”

“I think he already knows,” said Horeb. “He knows which world he lives in.”

• • •

AND SO IT WENT. Up the great river they chugged, past a forest without end, spending long days in the sun, broken only by brief and torrential rainstorms that forced them to head for shore, the rain lashing at the theater wagon and the two containers. They would throw tarps over the equipment and run for cover.

During these storms, Radar would curl up in his cot and listen to the rain pound against the metal roof of the container. He could feel the doubt creeping in then, the little parakeets of discontent imploring him to say what precisely he was doing here. The sky poured buckets, and he was left to wonder if it had all been a mistake.

201-998-2666: Dear Ana Cristina, I miss you. I have come to see life as a collection of diminishing failures. I know this sounds depressing, but I don’t mean it like that — to fail less badly is something to aspire to. Also, I have begun to write. R

He waited in the doorway of the container, watching the rain fall and waiting for the message to not send. But instead of dying in his phone, the icon changed to a checkmark. The text had gone through! Tiny miracle of miracles! Maybe it was the rain. Maybe the ladders of water were conducting his messages into the heavens. Suddenly he felt guilty. He considered texting Ana Cristina and telling her everything that had gone on in Matadi. But some messages, he realized, could not be sent.

201-998-2666: Mom! I’m here! I’m okay. Everything is fine. Have you found Tata? I hope you get this. Love, love, love, RADAR.

This, too, was released. He waited, but no answer came back.

• • •

THEY STOPPED BRIEFLY in Mbandaka, a forgotten river city, both bigger and smaller than it ought to be. They purchased supplies and diesel for the pousser’s engines and for their own generators, which they were now running day and night, since it was the current from these generators that kept the birds alive and on which their entire show depended. While in Mbandaka, they heard about the unrest upriver. A rebel group had come down from Ituri to take control of a new diamond mine near Basoko. There were stories of mass rape. Whole villages disappearing.

“We cannot be sure what is true,” said Horeb. “That region has been stable since 2002. I’m not saying it is impossible that this is true, but in general, you must say the rebels are interested in the two heads of the serpent and not the body. The war has changed recently. It is less political, more like an exercise in capitalism. Capitalism without regulation. These rebel groups, they are like start-up companies in your America. They want to make money. So if they are killing people, it is for an end.”

“That doesn’t sound like a start-up company,” said Radar.

“I cannot guarantee your safety, but I would not worry. It is your choice.”

Radar worried. Professor Funes emerged briefly to collect his books and then disappeared back into his cabin before they could ask him about the rebel situation. It had been like this ever since they had left. Not once had their host come out to watch their rehearsals or shows, to investigate the action occurring on the deck of his barge. At first this behavior had struck Radar as most unusual, but soon his absence blended with everything else that was strange on the river. It simply became a part of the reality.

And so, as the sun rose in the sky, they pulled out of Mbandaka as if nothing had changed, as if that which had been said could not be known and so had not been said.

11

For such a grand river, the Congo had surprisingly few boats navigating its waters, bar an occasional fisherman’s pirogue. On the third day, they passed a barge full of perhaps three hundred people and animals that had gotten stuck on a sandbank, but the pousser did not stop, and they chugged on past.

The sounder, always, swinging his pole: “Ah yeah! Mayee! Ah yeah mayee!”

Once, they passed a hand-painted sign sticking out of the water: LE SANDWICH, it read, in careful sans serif. An arrow pointed upward.

“It is unlikely,” said Horeb.

Radar tried to monitor his radios for news of the rebels, though he could not understand the language. Nor was he ever able to locate La Voix de la Rivière.

Yet even if he could not understand what exactly the radios were saying, he made several breakthroughs with their transmission. On the third evening, he figured out how to wire the radios to himself. Using very sensitive electrical nodes adapted from a heart rate monitor he had found in a forgotten drawer inside Moby-Dikt, he connected the radios to several contact points on his temples, wrist, and chest. It took him a while to adjust the sensitivity of the connection and to figure out exactly how he could control the dials without touching them, but once he had determined the correct voltage and resistance, the rest came fairly easily. It was as if the radios had become a natural extension of him. All he had to do was simply envision the radio switching channels and it would change, just like that. When he came upon something in the spectrum that felt right, the radio would hold, as if it too knew what was needed for the performance. This freed up Radar’s hands to flutter across the Morse key and the mixing board.

Horeb was impressed. “I cannot drum with my mind,” he said.

“Not yet,” said Radar.

• • •

201-998-2666: Ana Cristina, I’ve become the radio and the radio is me! When I get back I have things to tell u. How are you? I think of u everyday. Of your lips and the sound of your voice. I’m trying to remember everything — ><-

The birds, for their part, had also gone through a kind of evolution. The first few days, they had flown only when called upon and then they would dutifully return to the wagon and fall quiet. But gradually they had developed a mind of their own. They now roosted all over the boat, in the container, on the roof of the pousser. They always traveled in pairs. At all hours of the day and night, you could invariably spot a few pairs flittering about here and there, even in the pouring rain. Otik, who had begun acting more and more erratic with each passing day, did not seem to notice or care about the unraveling of his flock.

“They are entangled,” is all he would say.

“I still don’t know what this means,” said Radar.

“I believe also two people can become quantumly entangled,” said Otik.

“Two people?”

“Yes, two people. These two people are two people, but also same person. Everything that you do affects other person, even if you never meet him.”

“Okay,” said Radar. “So have you ever been entangled with someone?”

“Not anymore,” said Otik. “Once, but not anymore. It is untangle that hurts.”

Though they resembled live birds in beak, wing, and feather, the puppet birds continued to project a muddled signal of sentience. They would sit huddled and quivering, staring at Radar with empty eyes as he entered Moby-Dikt and lay down on his cot. Several pairs of birds had even taken to nesting in bed with him. He would reach out in the darkness and touch their bodies, feeling the quiet churn of their gears. They were warm to the touch, but not with the warmth of life. Radar tried to figure out what was required for something to be considered alive. Was it sufficient to just appear alive? If no one else could tell the difference, wasn’t that enough?

Order had not completely disappeared, however: when Otik fired up the vircator, the birds would still respond to their creator, leaving their perches to converge upon the wagon, forming a great mass that, as soon as the drums began, swarmed into the air as if on command.

“It is command — of course it is command. They are electrical, I command them,” said Otik when pressed, though the precise degree of control he exerted over them was becoming less and less clear. Increasingly, pairs of birds could be seen breaking away from the pack in the middle of a rehearsal and flying off across the river and into the jungle. The flock was still large, but there were noticeable gaps now. Radar wondered what a man might think wandering through the jungle and coming across the carcass of a bird puppet.

“Why do they fly away?” asked Radar.

“This is malfunction — of course there is malfunction,” said Otik. “Everyone malfunction — you malfunction, I malfunction. Remember, what we are doing is very complex and even crazy. More crazy than rocket science, more crazy than human clones.”

• • •

201-998-2666: Hello Mom. The smells! I wish you could smell these smells! R

On the fourth night, they had again moored near the bank, though this time no village was in sight. A couple of pirogues approached from downstream, the men offering a meager assortment of fish that Horeb examined and declared inedible. The men in the pirogues presented no books, which by now was highly unusual. Blasphemous, even. Indeed, the country in these parts felt swollen with a sinister brand of quiet. Like a recently abandoned crime scene. Except that there was no body, no crime.

Another coal fire was lit on the deck of the barge to discourage the mosquitoes, and chairs were pulled round. Lacking any other food, Horeb went about making fufu paste in a pot. Radar sat near one of his radios, writing in his journal. Lars and Otik sat together, quietly arguing about some obscure dramaturgical point, a conversation that had no doubt been going on for years. The man with the sounding pole huddled just on the edge of the firelight, smiling at something small and precise and entirely his own.

They had all settled into a strange routine, the kind of routine men fall into when they are trapped in the pursuit of the divine. Nearby, their goat, whom they had named Bertolt Brecht, bleated softly, homesick. And still: a hundred or so birds shivered and watched them from all around the barge. Not quite watching. Waiting. For whatever would come.

Radar found himself looking up at the vast compartment of stars above. He thought of Ivan then; wondered whether he was back across the sea already. Whether he would ever see his child again. He tried to find Alpha Centauri, with its A and B and its little Proxima, but one star blurred into the next, and when he found what he thought must be it, he was immediately consumed with doubt. What he lacked was Ivan’s certitude. To be certain was almost better than being right.

Suddenly, Professor Funes appeared in the firelight. The sight of him caught all of them off guard. Lars and Otik stopped talking. Horeb looked up from his cooking. Radar lifted up his pen in the middle of the sentence. Funes stood there in hat and dark glasses, his blanched skin glowing in the light of the flames.

And then, before anyone could say anything, he spoke:

“Come you lost atoms to your Centre draw,

And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:

Rays that have wander’d into Darkness wide,

Return, and back into your Sun subside.”

A rustling from the birds. Bertolt Brecht bleated quietly in the shadows.

“The last lines of Attar’s poem,” said Funes. “FitzGerald’s translation, 1887. I’ve wanted to tell you this for some time.”

They stared at him. No one spoke until Radar got up from his seat.

“Would you like to join us?” he said.

Funes shook his head. “I can’t.”

More silence. Radar pressed his luck. “We haven’t really seen you around much,” he said.

“You must understand that everything is quite painful for me.”

Radar peered at the professor’s skin. It was stretched too tight in places, and had grown lumpy in others. The skin did not match the man.

“Are you ill?” he asked. He was immediately ashamed of his impertinence, but Funes did not look offended by the question.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Though in all of human history, my condition has been documented only once before.”

“What’s your condition?” said Radar. His forwardness was quite out of character, but then, he also boasted a condition documented only once before.

After a moment’s hesitation, Funes sank into Radar’s vacated chair.

“I’ve taken this river hundreds of times,” he said. “It is never the same river twice.”

“It’s my first river,” said Radar. “Well, if you don’t count the Passaic, back in New Jersey.”

“It counts. If it’s watery and it flows, it’s a river,” said Lars.

“Barely water. Mostly toxic waste,” said Otik.

“It’s getting cleaner,” said Lars.

“Clean, my asshole,” said Otik.

“No, thank you,” said Lars.

Radar could see that Funes was growing uncomfortable.

“You’ve lived here a long time?” he said, trying to include him in the conversation.

Funes said nothing at first. They all watched the bent frame of their host. His eyes were transfixed by the fire’s glowing coals. Radar was just about to fill the space left behind by his silence, but then Funes began:

“I am from Uruguay,” he said. “I grew up in a modest house not far from the river in Fray Bentos. My mother was a washerwoman. Her name was María Clementina. I never knew my father. My mother rarely spoke of him. You can find all of this in the archives of Fray Bentos. I was unsettled as a child, but I had a good mind for names and places. . I could tell you the time without the aid of any watch. It should not come as a surprise that I was able to read from a very early age, even though my mother herself was illiterate. When I was seven, I fell off a horse and was badly injured. To this day, I carry a limp on my left side and my knee aches when the weather changes.”

“Me, too,” said Radar.

Funes glared at him. Evidently this was not a dialogue. He resumed: “My mother sent me away to Catholic school in Montevideo, though how she found the money for my tuition I still don’t know. But I did well there. . I was good at following instructions, and I didn’t ask many questions that did not have answers. When I turned eighteen, I swore my life to God: I became a monastic. I joined the Benedictine order at the Abadía de San Benito, in Luján. This too can be confirmed in the various public records. After two years in Luján, I heard about an opening at a monastery in Africa. Knowing this might be my only opportunity to see the world, I jumped at the chance. This is how I came to Zaire. The year was 1971. I joined the Monastère du Quatre Fleuves, near Kisangani. I barely spoke a word of French when I arrived, but the brothers took me in. There were ten of them. This has been recorded in several sources as well. They were kind men, with patience that could last one thousand years. It’s a pity our bodies and minds abandon us so soon — only the soul can take advantage of such patience. Soon after my arrival, Mobutu started his campaign of Zairianization. This was a difficult time for the young country. . The government seized all properties from foreign nationals and former colonials and gave them out to Mobutu’s friends. Some would say the country was already lost at this point, though the end would not come until much later. Luckily, we were sheltered under the church’s wing. It was a kind of immunity, but we all knew it could not last forever.

“I had noticed during my time in Kisangani that the town did not have a proper library, aside from that at the college. Books had always been a refuge for me, perhaps because I had always been an outsider wherever I went. And so I decided to start a small library for those who might take similar comfort in the realms of the imagination. . At first, it was mostly exegetic and hermeneutic texts. We had various translations of the Bible left behind by missionaries in transit, but I made an appeal to several schools in Paris and Montevideo and also New York City to send us their old secular books. I didn’t expect any response, but soon the books came — at first just a few, but then more and more. A woman in Paris sent us three hundred detective novels, which the children of course loved. We still had a reliable post system back then. . The river was open, and the mining companies had regular flights. It was all quite sophisticated. Our little library grew. I housed it in the old greenhouse in the back of the monastery, and the children would come. Many of them began to work for me as docents, organizing the books, making library cards, resealing bindings. We had all kinds of books. Lots of poetry, travel novels, plays, American literature — Melville, Twain, Steinbeck. I will not recount every title at La Petite Bibliothèque de la Connaissance, but it was well used. The sign above the door squeaked in the wind — I can still hear it now. . I will tell you that some of the other brothers in the order disapproved of the library. They claimed I was wasting my time. They didn’t consider the contents appropriate, but I was of the mind that God was in all books, and we should not bar the path to spiritual awakening, for there are many ways to climb up the mountain and feel His glory. At least this is what I told myself.”

He paused as a pair of birds flew out of the darkness and settled in the space beneath his chair. Funes looked down at them and then continued:

“Then the day I knew was coming finally arrived. The rebels came from the jungle and attacked the people. They were upset with the way the country was being run — or not being run — and they held us colonials responsible. I was, as usual, in the library. . I heard the shots. And my first instinct, I’m ashamed to admit, was not to go to my brothers’ aid but to protect the books. I locked the door and put a chair against it. But it was not enough, for soon the rebels came for me. . They shot down the door. They rushed in; they were so angry, swearing, cursing — it was as though they had been looking for the books this whole time, as though they blamed the books for their misfortune. None of them could read or write a word, but here they were, standing in my little library, fuming at the idea of such a place. One of them held me while they sprayed gasoline all over the shelves. What a waste of gasoline, I thought. I asked them why they were doing this, but all they said was ‘Be calm, be calm, Papa.’ They made me watch as they lit each shelf. . I couldn’t bear it. I broke away from my captors and I ran. . I ran straight into the flames, and the last thing I remember feeling was not the presence of God, as I might have expected — no, I was overwhelmed by this great sense of human effort. . to write, to live, to destroy. So much effort in the world, and in the end, all for nothing.”

“These don’t sound like the words of a monk,” Lars said from the shadows.

Professor Funes nodded slowly. “You’re right. I was never a monk. I only came to realize this much later.”

“But you survived?” said Radar.

“I awoke several days later. I had never expected to wake again, of course, but the family of one of my docents had found me in the library alive. He had gone into the flames and rescued me. I was badly burned, very badly burned, but alive. The books had collapsed on me, you see. . It turns out books are actually quite difficult to burn because of their thickness, because of their density, and so they formed a kind of shield around me. The father of this docent was one of the village healers. He wrapped me in aloe vera and sandalwood leaves and gave me a narcotic to chew for the pain. . Still, I could not move, as nearly all of my skin had peeled off. The ash from the books had cured into my flesh. It was like a balm. Even as I lay in such a painful state, I could also see how very lucky I was. Undoubtably, I was and remain grateful to the docent and his family, who risked their lives to shelter me. Soon after I awoke, it did not take long for me to discover that everything was different. Everything was not as it was. . Time had disappeared.”

He stopped speaking. Bertolt Brecht gave a little yip. The sounder was gently singing to himself.

His high-pitched voice began again: “Time, of course, had not disappeared. It was I who had changed — irrevocably. It took me a while to realize how, for once one changes, there’s no way to compare what it was like before the change, because you, the one who must compare, are already different. Bertucci called this ‘the conundrum of self-parallax’ in his Treatise of the Psyche. But eventually I came to comprehend my condition. Put simply: the fire had gifted me with the capacity for perfect and complete memory. Or cursed me, as it were. I had gained entrance into the Akashic Records, the record of all records. As unbelievable as it sounds, this has been my reality from that moment forth. I have become a catalog of existence. During those long months of recovery, while I lay in bed nursing my wounds, I remember every single crack in those hut walls. . I can draw them for you now. I remember every single call from the yellow-throated cuckoo that presided over the acacia adjacent to my window. . I gave him no name, knowing it would only deepen my curse. I remember every smell that came in from the cooking stove behind the little garden. I could recount every single meal during those three months, though every meal was the same. I remember every bee, every millipede, every lizard that crossed my sight and even those that did not. Before, I had only the slightest grasp of the Kele language of the natives, but, lying in bed and hearing them talk around me for perhaps a week, I already knew over a thousand words and could speak them perfectly. . If I wasn’t quite fluent, then I spoke as if I were one of them, as if I were a mirror. What, then, is the difference between this and fluency? I realized we were nothing but imperfect copies of those around us.

“And then there were the books. The first thing I did when I was well enough to speak was to demand books. Now that the library was gone, these were hard to come by, but they were brought in from the college, which was under government protection and had been spared from the rebels’ assault. I opened each book I received and just as quickly shut it, for I had already absorbed its contents. It was a kind of constant torture — reading no longer yielded the pleasure it once had for me: I was invariably hungry for more, and yet my hunger could never be satiated. I read every book in that library before I could even rise from my bed. I read and read and never reread, for once was more than enough. When I had read all the books in Kisangani, I had them send for more from Kinshasa and from South Africa and Kenya. I wrote letters to all of my contacts in Paris, in London, in New York, in Buenos Aires, anywhere I could find. . I explained what had happened; I explained that I needed more books, that I would die without my books. All this before I could walk. The books began to come. . My friends around the world took pity on me. And I read like an addict, like a man gasping for air.” His voice fell into a kind of trance. “I read Homer and the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes. I read Plato and Aristotle and Lucretius and Cicero. I read Virgil and Ovid and Sappho and Seneca. I read Saint Augustine. I read the Koran and the Torah and the Talmud and the Bible again for the first time. I read Dante and Machiavelli and Chaucer and Marlowe. I read Dogen and the Sutras. I read all of Shakespeare. I read Bacon and Milton and Dumas and Vaughan and del Castillo and Swift and Cervantes and Diderot and von Kleist and Goethe and Corneille and Mistral and Rochefoucauld and Molière and Rousseau and Voltaire and Burke and Pelayo. I read Khaqani and Rudaki and Rumi and Khayya¯m and Hafiz and Saadi and Attar. I read Defoe and Asturias and Sterne and Stendhal and Verga and Carducci and Blasco Ibáñez and Hugo and Verne and Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert and Baudelaire and Sand and Verlaine and Paz and Maupassant and Ibsen and Wordsworth and Austen and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats and Blake and Scott and Carpentier and García Márquez and Puig and Cortázar and García Lorca. I read Dickens and Stevenson and Eliot and Wilde and Cabrera Infante and Onetti and Thackeray and the Brontës and Proust and Borges and Carroll and Trollope and Ruskin and Hoffman and Nietzsche and Emerson and Dickinson and Whitman and Melville and Hawthorne and Shelley and Poe and Gogol and Pushkin and Turgenev and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Blok and Leskov and Chekhov and Pessoa and Thoreau and Alcott and James and Twain and Naipaul and Calvino and Nabokov.” Horeb began to beat lightly on his drum.

And I read them in that order.”

He stopped. A cavity where drum and voice had once been.

“The small house where I was staying was overrun with books. Thousands of books. My hosts were gracious, as ever, but they had grown weary of these deliveries. Their son, my docent, was doing his best to organize the books, but their sheer volume was already putting them in great danger if the rebels should ever return. I could no longer look my hosts in the face, because I already knew too much about them. From that very first look, I knew them better than they knew themselves. Memory is a weapon too powerful for any one man to yield. . I have come to realize that forgetting is our greatest gift. This is one memory I shall never have: the memory of how not to remember.”

His face suddenly looked stricken. He tapped his parasol against the barge. The birds fluttered beneath him.

“One day they asked me to leave. . Of course, knowing them, I already knew such a request was coming. I already knew everything that was coming before it came, because the future always arises from the past. I managed to thank my hosts, and then I fled to the jungle with my books. I did not even pay my respects to my brothers’ graves or the burnt ruins of the monastery. I was too distraught. You can still see these ruins on the banks of the river. But I soon found I had other troubles. After the fire, my skin had become extraordinarily sensitive to the sun. The ash had turned me the most terrible color of white. . Well, you can see for yourself what I have become. Before, I was dark, almost like a Peruvian. But now. .” His voice drifted. “Their son, the docent, insisted on coming with me. I forbade him, but he would not hear of it. He was to be the first of what would later become an army. Together, we built a large, five-walled structure by the river — a pentagon. The perfect repository for my books. I thought it would hold all the books I could ever possibly want. I set about writing a hundred letters a day, asking for more books. More books for my African library. I gave gentle instructions for the books they might want to send. Get me Krleža and Slaveykov and Oe, I would write, and the books continued to come, but there were not enough. There were never enough. The more I read, the more I knew I had not read. And so I realized something must be done. I left my library in the hands of my docents and spent one year traveling the world, telling my story, showing my burns. I pleaded for more books. I negotiated the donation of 573 libraries and private collections — in Murmansk, in Bulawayo, in Alta, in Akron, in Havana, in Bangalore. I met with publishers in Madrid, New York, Frankfurt, Milan, London. I asked them to send me anything they could spare. This was the same year I met Alfonso Daneri in Buenos Aires. He agreed to be one of my shepherds. .

“You can’t imagine how painful this travel was. . One year in the world for me was like ten thousand lives lived for other men. I can now easily draw a map of every city in the world. I can recount house numbers, the arrangement of flowers in the windowsill. . the shape and make of door knockers, mailboxes, linden trees, sewer grates, traffic lights. I can never forget any of it. . It’s torture, torture. . I can’t convey the torture. But it was worth it, this pain of remembering. It was worth it for the books. You see, people took up my cause with great enthusiasm. Each of them thought that they, and they alone, were saving my library — and they were right, but what they did not realize is that there were thousands like them, each believing they were making the world whole again. And so: the books came. They came by the crateful. . by the boatful. So many books. . fourteen thousand boatloads. As the country collapsed, my library grew and grew. Suddenly the problem became not where would I get the books but where would I put them. I had to build another pentagon. And another. My team of docents grew. I don’t know how word spread, but they came from all over the country. You will meet them. . soon. I trained them in the arts of classification, and it became their enormous task to organize all of these books.”

“How many books are we talking about?”

“The larger the library, the more uncertain the collection. . This is the third law of accumulation, as stated by Jarmuch Hovengär. Even I do not know exactly the number of books we have. Of course, we also started to amass many copies of the same book; we had over four hundred copies of Anna Karenina alone. We had thousands of Bibles, all editions, all translations. We continued to accept donations, but I also had to become more selective. At a certain point, I already had most books. So I started to fill out the edges of the collection. I made contacts with liaisons working in different countries, in different languages, and they would ask me what I wanted and I would simply say, ‘Get me one of every book.’ People like it when you tell them this. It turns them into bloodhounds. . They would send me the most spectacularly rare books for free, to the middle of Africa! For many of them it became a religion.”

“What did people think of it here?” Radar asked.

Funes nodded, as if he knew such a question was coming. “As big as Congo is, there is only one river to the ocean. Stories started about the library, about what kind of place it was — perhaps my docents were the ones spreading these stories. It does not matter. People started to make pilgrimages. First only a couple, but then they came in streams. They came if they were sick. They thought the books held powers. . They would go inside the stacks and pray. I claimed no power, of course. I was happy for my docents to show them the books and the catalog. As long as they didn’t harm the collection. Many who came to the library claimed they had been cured. Of what I cannot be sure. I did not lead them to this conclusion, but then, I did not dissuade them from believing in it, either.

“And then came the wars. For many years, the river was impassable. . It was too dangerous, even for me, the Tatayababuku, as they now called me. Kisangani was in very bad shape. Many people died. There was fighting all around. I heard gunshots every night and the collection lay stagnant — only a few books trickled in here and there, through clandestine channels. But the library was never harmed. Even the rebels knew that they could not touch what lay inside. And after the war ended, the local people began to give me books.”

“Why? You didn’t need books.”

“I don’t claim to know the African mind. I have played along, but I have never deceived anyone. The library is part of this country’s history now. It’s a part of the world’s history. And I can tell you, I was the first to get back on the river after the war was finished. Even when the UN would not run their boats, I was there. The people knew who I was. They saw my crates. And my crates gave them hope.”

“So how big is the library now?” said Radar.

“Neither I nor anyone could say for sure. What I can say is that it is by far the largest private collection of books in the world. Over the years, we’ve built sixty-one interlinked pentagons. Each pentagon holds one hundred twenty thousand books, give or take. We’ve carved out the space from the jungle and still we don’t have room. . We must always build more. Three hundred and fifty docents are under my employ — they tend the collections, fight the collections. Knowledge is transient. We battle the insects, the humidity. . The books themselves are always expanding. They can never be happy with the space they have.”

“Do any scholars come to use your library?” asked Lars.

“If they came, we would not turn them away. Our location is not the most accessible, I admit, but a library must be open to all who wish to use it. I’m not foolish enough to believe it’s simply about preservation. It is also about use. A library dies without use.”

Fig. 5.8. “La Bibliothèque du Fleuve Congo”

From Radmanovic, R. (2013), I Am Radar, p. 705

“You’re already dead,” whispered Horeb.

“I’m sorry?” said Funes with a smile.

“I said, ‘What of the African authors?’” said Horeb. “Are they in your library too?”

“Of course,” said Funes. “Pentagon forty-eight, sections fourteen and fifteen are devoted to African literature.”

“Two sections only?”

“This is not my doing; I’m only the vessel, not the contents,” he said. “But I don’t find it a coincidence that this is the same continent that housed the great library of Alexandria, the closest we have ever come, until now, to a universal library. This continent is where knowledge was born and where it shall die.”

Radar got up, went into the container, and came out bearing a book. He handed it to Funes.

“For your library,” he said.

Funes studied the book carefully. He examined it as a doctor examines a patient, touching the cover, the spine, the tips of its pages.

“I’ve never seen this before,” he said. “It’s quite unusual to find a book I’ve never seen. Per Røed-Larsen. Who is he?”

Radar gestured at Lars. “His stepbrother.”

Lars shook his head. “I have no stepbrother,” he said.

“An author who doesn’t exist?” said Funes.

“Why do you need the author when you already have the book?” said Lars.

12

On the eighth morning, Radar awoke, shivering, entangled in the lingering tendrils of dream panic. In the dream, he had been seated at the dining room table with his parents. They were all very thirsty — none of them had had anything to drink for days and days. The only way to get water was from a small bird, which they passed around and squeezed, pressing their thumbs into the soft tuft of its belly. If you squeezed hard enough, a single drop of liquid would come out of the bird’s beak. It was barely enough to wet the tongue. Radar was caught between the desperation of his own thirst and not wanting to watch his parents die of dehydration. When it came to him, he squeezed the bird and nothing came out, not even a drop. He squeezed harder and harder, until he began to feel bones breaking. .

He sat up in his cot. He was thirsty. His joints ached. Like Funes, he had inherited a body sensitive to changes in weather. Perhaps a storm was coming. Or perhaps this was the first sign of malaria. Or sleeping sickness. Or any of the hundred maladies, known and unknown, that he might catch out here.

Outside, he could hear the steady throb of Horeb beating his drum. And then he heard something else: a faint beep. An unfamiliar chime. He searched through his belongings and found the source: the cell phone. A battery icon was blinking in the top left corner. The phone was dying. He realized that Lars had not given him the charger. The phone had subsisted this whole time on a single charge and was now signaling its inglorious death.

The phone beeped again.

“What is it?” he said.

He examined the pixelated screen and saw another icon blinking. An envelope. The number 4. Hands trembling, he thumbed at the buttons. The messages must have arrived in the middle of the night, in the middle of his dream.

The first two were from Ana Cristina:

• • •

609-292-4087: Radar! I thought u died or something! When i got your text i literally jumped up n down:) javi laughed at me: O how is congo???? Can’t wait 4 u to get back! My mama and her empanadas will b waiting:) xo ac

609-292-4087: Also lights came back on!!! All of a sudden like they were never off! 4 real so weird! PS what are u writing???? — ><-

He read and reread and re-reread the messages. He wanted to swallow this collection of pixelated words and live off their nutrients forever. If his life stopped here and now, he would have no complaints.

He finally flipped down to the third message. It was from a strange number.

• • •

387-33-275-312: MY SON IS BORN. RADAR RADMANOVIC. MOTHER IS FINE. BABY IS FINE. I AM FINE. KAKAV OTAC TAKAV SIN. 73, K2W9

“Tata?” he said. What the hell?

Frantically, he pressed the call button, waiting, praying that somewhere in this jungle there was a cell tower that could propel the call into the stratosphere. The long-distance connection sputtered, clicked, engaged, the heavens parting. A single ring. His cell phone went dead.

“No!” he yelled. “No!”

He cradled the device. He had not even gotten to the fourth message! The words somewhere inside this plastic shell. His father had texted him? From where? And what could this text mean? “My son is born”?

“Lars!” he shouted. He kicked open the mosquito net, tumbled out of bed, and tripped over a bucket of electronics before emerging from the container. “Lars!”

As soon as he stepped outside, however, he sensed a difference in the air. A heaviness. The river was cocooned in a haze, the banks on either side barely visible.

He found Lars drinking coffee by the fire pit. His eyes were puffy. He didn’t look well.

“Do you have the charger for this phone?” he asked, holding up the mobile.

Lars gave him a weary look. He shook his head. “I think I left it in the van,” he said. “I’m sorry. We could probably cook something up.”

“Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

“I feel a little off. Something I ate, I think. I’m sure it’ll pass.”

Radar drifted up to the side of the ship, where Horeb was drumming. He looked out at the hazy sky.

“It’s foggy,” he said to Horeb.

“That isn’t fog,” said Horeb.

Professor Funes, whom Radar had not seen again since his speech several evenings ago, emerged from the pousser in the shadow of his giant parasol, his driver in tow. They made their way out onto the deck of the barge. The professor did not acknowledge Radar or Horeb as he and his driver spoke rapidly in Lingala, gesturing at the horizon. Radar realized this was the first time Funes had been outside in the daylight since their departure.

The birds flew overhead. Of the thirteen hundred or so that had once made up the original flock, there were only a couple of dozen left. It seemed this last night in particular had taken a toll. The few that remained appeared especially restless, flitting this way and that.

Funes walked to the head of the barge. A few birds dived and tried landing on his parasol, bouncing awkwardly off its dome. He lightly jiggled the umbrella as if shaking off a layer of rain, but otherwise he ignored the creatures.

“What is it?” said Radar, approaching them.

Funes continued speaking with the driver for some time before breaking into a wet, hacking cough. It was a cough that came from deep inside the lungs, a cough that instantly revealed the extent of the decay within. The parasol trembled as Funes doubled over, scattering a few lingering birds into the air. Finally, when he had regained his composure, Funes turned to Radar. His face was blotched in an irregular pattern, like the map of a coastline.

“Smoke,” he whispered hoarsely. “That is smoke.”

By the afternoon the smoke had enveloped them. The air was thick with ash; it smelled as if the sky had been expelled from the inside of the earth. No one on the barge spoke. Otik retreated to the theater wagon and the malaise of his vircator. Perhaps he was trying to beckon the few remaining birds, who now seemed to have little or no connection with the performance and only hung around the barge out of reluctant familiarity. Lars, complaining that he felt unwell, stayed inside the container all day, making little notations into a black book that he kept by his cot.

Radar tried listening to his radio for some news of the smoke, but he heard only the usual hodgepodge of sermons, rumba, and indecipherable mutterings. He made an attempt at jerry-rigging a power cord for the cell phone, but the voltage was not right, and when he connected it to the power source he smelled the telltale scent of burning circuitry. He quickly unplugged the phone, but it was already too late. He would now have to dismantle the chassis and examine the motherboard. This would take hours. He halfheartedly started in, but he found his momentum had been sapped. He couldn’t concentrate. He went up to the bow again and tried joining Horeb’s drumbeat with his radios, but Horeb waved him away.

“I need to speak alone,” he said. As he said this, a distant drumming rose from the northern bank. Horeb’s head shot up like a rabbit. He listened, then answered on the drum:

“What’re you saying?” asked Radar.

“I’m saying: ‘He is near, he is coming, get ready. .’”

“Who is near?”

But Horeb had gone back to banging out the same pattern on his drums. Again and again, the mantra was repeated, dismantled, copied, and dispersed into the haze.

At some point, they entered the magical hour when the tropical sun began to tumble from the sky, the story of the day draining away into nothing, light becoming shadow and shadow becoming light. Standing at the stern, Radar reached out and caught a piece of skin floating through the air. It was a page, charred, still warm to the touch. For a brief instant, Radar could almost read the text on its face, but then the paper dissolved in his hands. He looked and saw that the river was full of these ashen pages, floating like lily pads. Pages drifting through the sky. It was snowing in the jungle.

“Ay yeah! Mayee! Ah yeah! Mayee!” called out the sounder.

They came around a bend in the river, and then there it was. The source of all things. The fire. The world was on fire.

He could hear the flames. He could hear them because the pousser had cut its motor and the sounder had gone quiet. They glided toward the fire, which arced up forty, fifty feet into the air, the smoke so thick and black it looked as if it were made of hair. The current began to slow their progress, pushing them away, the river urging them not to come any closer. They reached a standstill, an equilibrium, and for a second it felt as if they were turning back, but then the pousser fired its engines and pressed them forward, toward what Radar now knew could only be the library.

From the deck of the barge, they watched the world collapse. Even from this distance, the heat curling the hair on their skin. A heat like no other. A heat of creation.

“Lars. .” Otik called, and Lars emerged from inside, woozy. He stopped and stared.

The barge slid up against a sandy beach. A fireball exploded into the sky. The gangplank was extended, and Professor Funes limped down it, stumbling, coughing in the smoke. He was without his parasol. His hat blew off into the reeds, revealing a stark white skull. Once on the riverbank, he started to move toward the fire, shielding his face from the waves of heat.

Radar looked and saw that the woods were suddenly alive with faces. They watched as Funes walked down the beach toward the flames. Above him, the birds were gathering, following.

Horeb was standing at the bow with his drums, drumming to the faces in the woods. All at once, Radar realized he was the one who had told them to do this.

He is near, he is coming, get ready. .

Funes had reached the flames. He paused. The birds overhead, waiting as one.

“The show,” said Lars. “It’s now.”