Lost City Radio

ONE

THEY TOOK Norma off the air that Tuesday morning because a boy was dropped off at the station. He was quiet and thin and had a note. The receptionists let him through. A meeting was called.

The conference room was full of light and had an expansive view of the city, looking east toward the mountains. When Norma walked in, Elmer was seated at the head of the table, rubbing his face as if he’d been woken from a restless, unsatisfying sleep. He nodded as she sat, then yawned and fiddled with the top of a pill bottle he’d taken from his pocket. “Go for some water,” he groaned to his assistant. “And empty these ashtrays, Len. Jesus.”

The boy sat across from Elmer, in a stiff wooden chair, staring down at his feet. He was slender and fragile, and his eyes were too small for his face. His head had been shaved — to kill lice, Norma supposed. There were the faint beginnings of a mustache above his lips. His shirt was threadbare, and his unhemmed pants were knotted around his waist with a shoestring.

Norma sat closest to him, her back to the door, facing the white city.

Len reappeared with a pitcher of water. It was choked with bubbles, tinged gray. Elmer poured himself a glass and swallowed two pills. He coughed into his hand. “Let’s get right to it,” Elmer said when Len had sat. “We’re sorry to interrupt the news, Norma, but we wanted you to meet Victor.”

“Tell her how old you are, boy,” Len said.

“I’m eleven,” the child said, his voice barely audible. “And a half.”

Len cleared his throat, glanced at Elmer, as if for permission to speak. With a nod from his boss, he began. “That’s a terrific age,” Len said. “Now, you came looking for Norma, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Victor said.

“Do you know him?”

Norma didn’t.

“He says he came from the jungle,” Len continued. “We thought you’d want to meet him. For the show.”

“Great,” she said. “Thank you.”

Elmer stood and walked to the window. He was a silhouette against the hazy brightness. Norma knew that panorama: the city below, stretching to the horizon and still farther. With your forehead to the glass, you could see down to the street, to that broad avenue choked with traffic and people, with buses and moto-taxis and vegetable carts. Or life on the city’s rooftops: clothes hanging on a line next to rusting chicken coops, old men playing cards on a milk crate, dogs barking angrily, teeth bared at the heavy sea air. She’d even seen a man once, sitting on his yellow hard hat, sobbing.

If Elmer saw anything now, he didn’t seem interested. He turned back to them. “Not just from the jungle, Norma. From 1797.”

Norma sat up straight. “What are you telling me, Elmer?”

It was one of the rumors they knew to be true: mass graves, anonymous villagers, murdered and tossed into ditches. They’d never reported it, of course. No one had. They hadn’t spoken of this in years. She felt something heavy in her chest.

“It’s probably nothing,” Elmer said. “Let’s show her the note.”

From his pocket, Victor produced a piece of paper, presumably the same one he had shown the receptionist. He passed it to Elmer, who put on his reading glasses and cleared his throat. He read aloud:

Dear Miss Norma:

This child is named Victor. He is from Village 1797 in the eastern jungle. We, the residents of 1797, have pooled our monies together and sent him to the city. We want a better life for Victor. There is no future for him here. Please help us. Attached find our list of lost people. Perhaps one of these individuals will be able to care for the boy. We listen to Lost City Radio every week. We love your show.

Your biggest fans,

Village 1797

“Norma,” Elmer said, “I’m sorry. We wanted to tell you ourselves. He’d be great for the show, but we wanted to warn you first.”

“I’m fine.” She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m fine.”

Norma hated the numbers. Before, every town had a name; an unwieldy, millenarian name inherited from God-knows-which extinct people, names with hard consonants that sounded like stone grinding against stone. But everything was being modernized, even the recondite corners of the nation. This was all postconflict, a new government policy. They said people were forgetting the old systems. Norma wondered. “Do you know what they used to call your village?” she asked the boy.

Victor shook his head.

Norma closed her eyes for a second. He’d probably been taught to say that. When the war ended, the government confiscated the old maps. They were taken off the shelves at the National Library, turned in by private citizens, cut out of school textbooks, and burned. Norma had covered it for the radio, had mingled with the excited crowd that gathered at Newtown Plaza to watch. Once, Victor’s village had a name, but it was lost now. Her husband, Rey, had vanished near there, just before the Illegitimate Legion was defeated. This was at the end of the insurrection, ten years before. She was still waiting for him.

“Are you all right, Miss Norma?” the boy asked in a small, reedy voice.

She opened her eyes.

“What a polite young man,” Len said. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on the table, and patted the boy on his bald head.

Norma waited for a moment, counting to ten. She picked up the paper and read it again. The script was steady and deliberate. She pictured it: a town council gathering to decide whose penmanship was best. How folkloric. On the back was a list of names. “Our Missing,” it said, the end of the g curling upward in an optimistic flourish. She couldn’t bear to read them. Each was a cipher, soulless, faceless, sometime humans, a harvest of names to be read on the air. She passed the note back to Elmer. The idea of it made her inexplicably sleepy.

“Do you know these people?” Elmer asked the boy.

“No,” Victor said. “A few.”

“Who brought you to the station?”

“My teacher. His name is Manau.”

“Where is he?” asked Len.

“He left me.”

“Why did they send you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your mother?” Norma asked.

“She’s dead.”

Norma apologized; Len took copious notes.

“Father?” said Elmer.

The boy shrugged. “I’d like some water, please.”

Elmer poured the boy a glass, and Victor drank greedily, trickles of water running down the sides of his mouth. When he finished, he wiped his lips on the sleeve of his shirt.

“There’s more,” Elmer said, smiling. “Have some more.”

But Victor shook his head and looked out the window. Norma followed his gaze. It was a colorless, late-winter day in the city, the soft outline of the mountains disappearing behind the fog. There was nothing to see.

“What do you want me to do?” Norma asked.

Elmer pursed his lips. He motioned for Len to take the boy. Victor rose and left the room without protest. Elmer didn’t speak again until he and Norma were alone. He scratched his head, then held up the pill bottle. “These are for stress, you know. My doctor says I spend too much time here.”

“You do.”

“You do too,” he said.

“What’s on your mind, Elmer?”

“The show isn’t doing well.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “Am I right to say that?”

“Two reunions in six weeks. People don’t want to be found this time of year. We always pick up in spring.”

Elmer frowned and put his pills away. “This boy, Norma: he’s good. Did you hear him? He has a nice, helpless voice.”

“He hardly said a word.”

“Now wait a second, hear me out. This is what I’m thinking: a big show on Sunday. I know 1797 is touchy with you, and I respect that, I do. That’s why I wanted to introduce you to him myself. He doesn’t know anything about the war. He’s too young. So spend the week with him, Norma. It won’t be so bad.”

“What about his people?”

“What about them? They’ll show up. Or we’ll get a few actors and he won’t know the difference.”

“You’re joking.”

Elmer put his hand on her shoulder. His eyes were small and black. “You know me, Norma: I’m mostly joking. I’m not a radio man anymore, you forget that. I’m a businessman. If we don’t find anyone, we’ll send him home, bus ticket’s on us. Or we’ll give him to the nuns. Point is, he’ll give the show a pick-me-up. And we need this, Norma.”

“What about the teacher?”

“What about him? The prick. He should be in jail for abandoning a child. We can call him out Sunday too.”

She looked at her hands; they were pale and wrinkled in a way that she never could have imagined. This is what growing old was, after all.

“What?” Elmer asked.

“I’m tired. That’s all. The idea of getting some guy lynched for abandonment…It’s not why I get up in the morning.”

Elmer grinned. “And why do you get up, dear?”

When she didn’t answer, Elmer put his hand on her shoulder. “That’s life, Norma.”

“Fine,” she said after a while.

“Good. Can he stay with you?”

“You want me to babysit?”

“Well.”

“Give me the week off.”

“A day.”

“Three.”

Elmer shook his head and smiled. “Two, and we’ll talk.” He was already standing. “You do great things for this radio station, Norma. Great things. And we appreciate it. The people love you.” He knocked on the door, and a moment later, Len came back in with the boy. Elmer beamed and rubbed the boy’s head. Len sat the boy down. “Here he is, here’s my champ,” Elmer said. “Well, son. You’ll be staying with Norma for a while. She’s very nice and you have nothing to worry about.”

The boy looked a bit frightened. Norma smiled, and then Elmer and Len were gone and she was alone with the boy. The note was there on the table. She put it in her pocket. Victor stared off into the wide, alabaster sky.

HER VOICE was her greatest asset, her career and her fate. Elmer called it gold that stank of empathy. Before he disappeared, Rey claimed he fell in love again every time she said good morning. You should have been a singer, he said, though she couldn’t even carry a tune. Norma had worked in radio all her life, beginning as a reporter, graduating to newsreader, redeeming the tragedies it fell on her to announce. She was a natural: she knew when to let her voice waver, when to linger on a word, what texts to tear through and read as if the words themselves were on fire. The worst news she read softly, without urgency, as if it were poetry. The day Victor arrived, there was a suicide bomber in Palestine, an oil spill off the coast of Spain, and a new champion in American baseball. Nothing extraordinary and nothing that affected the country. Reading foreign news was a kind of pretending, Norma thought, this listing of everyday things only confirming how peripheral we are: a nation at the edge of the world, a make-believe country outside history. For local news, she relied on the station’s policy, which was also the government’s policy: to read good news with indifference and make bad news sound hopeful. No one was more skilled than Norma; in her vocal caresses, unemployment figures read like bittersweet laments, declarations of war like love letters. News of mudslides became awestruck meditations on the mysteries of nature, and the twenty or fifty or one hundred dead disappeared in the telling of it. This was her life on weekdays: morning readings of foreign and local disasters — buses plunging off the mountain highways, shootouts echoing in the slums by the river, and, in the faraway distance, the rest of the world. Saturdays off, and Sunday evenings, back at the station for her signature show, Lost City Radio, a program for missing people.

The idea was simple. How many refugees had come to the city? How many of them had lost touch with their families? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The station saw it as a way to profit from the unrest; in the show’s ten years on the air, Norma had come to see it as a way to look for her husband. A conflict of interest, Elmer said, but he put her on anyway. Hers was the most trusted and well-loved voice in the country, a phenomenon she herself couldn’t explain. Every Sunday night, for an hour, since the last year of the war, Norma took calls from people who imagined she had special powers, that she was mantic and all-seeing, able to pluck the lost, estranged, and missing from the moldering city. Strangers addressed her by her first name and pleaded to be heard. My brother, they’d say, left the village years ago to look for work in the city. His name is…He lives in a district called…He wrote us letters and then the war began. Norma would cut them off if they seemed determined to speak of the war. It was always preferable to avoid unpleasant topics. So instead she asked questions about the scent of their mother’s cooking, or the sound of the wind keening through the valley. The river, the color of the sky. With her prodding, the callers revisited village life and all that had been left behind, inviting their lost people to remember with them: Are you there, brother? And Norma listened, and then repeated the names in her mellifluous voice, and the board would light up with calls, lonely red lights, people longing to be found. Of course, some were impostors, and these were the saddest of all.

Lost City Radio had become the most popular show in the country. Three, sometimes four times a month, there were grand reunions, and these were documented and celebrated with great fanfare. The emotions were authentic: the reunited families traveling from their cramped homes at the edges of the city, arriving at the station with squawking chickens and bulging bags of rice — gifts for Miss Norma. In the parking lot of the station, they’d dance and drink and sing into the early hours of the morning. Norma greeted them all as they lined up to thank her. They were humble people. Tears would well up in their eyes when they met her — not when they saw her, but when she spoke: that voice. The photographers took pictures, and Elmer saw to it the best images were slapped on billboards, pure and happy images hovering above the serrated city skyline, families, now whole again, wearing resplendent smiles. Norma herself never appeared in the photos; Elmer felt it was best to cultivate the mystery.

It was the only national radio station left since the war ended. After the IL was defeated, the journalists were imprisoned. Many of her colleagues wound up in prison, or worse. They were taken to the Moon, some were disappeared, and their names, like her husband’s, were forbidden. Each morning, Norma read fictitious, government-approved news; each afternoon, she submitted the next day’s proposed headlines for approval by the censor. These represented, in the scheme of things, very small humiliations. The world can’t be changed, and so Norma held out for Sunday. It could happen any week, or at least she used to imagine it could: Rey himself could call. I wandered into the jungle, he might say, and I’ve lost my woman, the love of my life, her name is Norma…If he was alive, he was in hiding. He had been accused of terrible things in the months after the war: a list of collaborators was published and read on the air; their names and aliases, along with a shorthand of alleged crimes. Rey had been called an assassin and an intellectual. A provocateur, the man who invented tire-burning. More than three hours’ worth of names, and it was decreed that after this public accounting they could not be mentioned again. The IL was defeated and disgraced; the country was now in the process of forgetting the war ever happened at all.

At the end of the first day, Norma gathered her things and the boy, and they left for her apartment on the far side of the city, an hour away by bus. Victor seemed bewildered by it all. She imagined herself in his situation, in this strange and unhappy city of noise and dirt, and chose to interpret his silence as strength. All afternoon, the boy had slept on the sofa in the broadcast booth, waking every few hours to stare morosely at her. Besides asking for water, he’d hardly spoken at all. Once, as she read the news, she winked at him, but this had elicited no response. Now she held his hand as they rode, and thought of the jungle: Rey’s jungle. She had only seen it in photographs. It seemed to be the kind of geography that could inspire terror and joy in equal parts. The IL had been strong in Victor’s part of the country. They had camps hidden beneath the heavy canopy of the forest, and had organized communities of Indians in revolt against the government. They stored weapons and explosives that might still be there, buried in the loamy earth.

The bus rolled through the streets, in fitful half-block spans. The city sang chromatic and atonal: honks and whistles and the low rumbling of a thousand engines. The man seated next to them slept, his head lolling about, his briefcase tight against his chest. A heavyset boy a little older than Victor stood, his face frozen in a scowl, brazenly counting money, daring anyone to take it. It was the same every day, but Norma felt suddenly that she should have taken a cab or a crosstown train, that the spectacle might be overwhelming for a boy from a jungle hamlet. And it was. Victor, she noticed, was trying to slip his little hand out of hers. She gripped it tighter and looked down at him sternly. “Careful,” she said.

He glared and pulled his hand free, waving his liberated fingers in front of his face. The bus jerked to a stop, and he dashed off, through the door and into the street.

Norma could do nothing but follow.

It was the purple-hued end of the day. The boy was off and scampering down the sidewalk, in and out of the shadows. His footsteps went tap tap on the concrete, and Norma was alone in a part of the city she didn’t know, on a street quieter than most. The buildings were low and thick, so stoutly built they seemed ready to sink under their own weight, their stucco walls painted in mottled pastels. Victor’s spindly legs carried him down the block. There was no way she could catch him.

But she should have known by now how the city works. She was born here and raised here, and still its gestures bordered on the perverse, even more so after the war. Now it was something else entirely, something stranger. A white-haired man approached from a nearby doorway. He wore a thin, gray jacket over a yellowed undershirt. “Madam,” he said, “is that your boy?”

Victor was a tiny moving shadow bouncing in the orange lights of the streetlamps. She nodded.

“Pardon me,” the man said. He raised two fingers to his mouth and blew, piercing the low noise of the street with a sharp whistle. A head shot out of each window, and a moment later, a man or woman was standing at the door of each building. The man whistled again. He smiled benevolently at Norma, his warm face touched with red. They waited.

“Are you new to the neighborhood?”

“I don’t live here,” Norma said. She was wary of being recognized. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

“It’s no trouble.”

They waited for a moment longer, and soon a matronly woman in a pale blue housedress was walking up the block, Victor in tow. The man spoke to himself as she approached — here you are, there we go — as if he were coaching her. She held the boy’s hand firmly, and he was hardly struggling at all. With a smile, she led the boy to Norma. “Madam,” she said, bowing, “your son.”

“Thank you,” Norma said.

A bus gurgled by, imposing silence on them. The three adults smiled at each other; poor Victor stood stiff, a prisoner ready for marching. Night was falling, a cool breeze whispering through the street. The man offered Norma his jacket, but she declined. The woman in the housedress turned to Norma. “Shall we help you beat him?” she asked graciously, straightening the folds of her dress.

The government counseled solid beatings of children, in the name of regaining that discipline lost in a decade of war. The station ran public-service announcements on the subject. Norma herself had recorded the voice-overs, but she’d never actually hit a child, having no children of her own. It shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did. “Oh, no,” Norma stammered. “I wouldn’t dare ask for help.”

“It’s no problem,” the white-haired man said. “We look out for each other here.”

They watched Norma expectantly. Victor, too, with steely eyes. They were such helpful people. “Maybe just a slap,” Norma said.

“That’s right!” The man leaned over the boy. “It’s how we learn, isn’t that right, son?”

Victor nodded blankly. Norma was struck again by how strange the city must seem to him. The truth is, everything had changed. She didn’t even recognize it anymore. She’d heard of places in the countryside where life continued as it always had; of villages in the mountains, in the jungle, where the war had passed by, unperceived. But not here. Parts of the city had been abandoned, the IL had detonated buildings, the army had torched entire neighborhoods in search of subversives. The Great Blackouts, the Battle of Tamoé: wounds severe enough to be named. 1797 had not been spared, either. She could see that in Victor’s eyes. We are in a new stage, the president had announced, a stage of militarized calm. A rebuilding stage. An unruly child should be punished. The woman held Victor by his shoulders. But how do you do it? Victor was a skeletal thing, a nothing child, easily broken. He didn’t blink; he stared.

Norma raised her right arm up above her head, stalled for a moment. She brushed her hair back. She knew what she should do: let gravity guide her, imitate all the mothers she’d seen in the streets, in the markets, on public transport. Her duty. She closed her eyes for a moment, long enough to imagine it: Victor’s head flopping to one side like a doll’s, a red handprint blooming on his cheek. He wouldn’t make a sound.

“I’m sorry,” Norma said. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

“No. I’m sorry. He’s not mine.”

The woman nodded, but she hadn’t understood. She smothered Victor in an embrace. “Your mother spoils you, boy,” the woman said.

“She’s not my mother.”

Norma’s fingers had gone numb. She looked at the boy and felt terrible. “He’s not mine,” she repeated.

The woman in the housedress rubbed the child’s bald head. Without looking up at Norma, she said, “You sound so familiar.”

Above, the streetlamp flickered on. It was night now. Norma shrugged. “I get that a lot. We should be going. Thank you for everything.”

“She’s from the radio,” said Victor, folding his arms across his chest. “Lost City.”

The white-haired man looked up, startled. “God is merciful.”

Norma watched the glow of recognition pass across their faces. She pulled Victor toward her, took his hand in hers. “Don’t talk nonsense, child,” she scolded.

But it was too late. “Miss Norma?” The woman stepped closer to her, as if by looking at her she could tell. “Is that you? Say something, please; let me hear you!”

At her side, the man’s smile was bright and orange beneath the streetlamp. “It’s her,” he said, and whistled a third time, while Norma muttered protests.

The streets filled with people.

BEFORE THE war began, those of Norma’s generation still spoke of violence with awe and reverence: cleansing violence, purifying violence, violence that would spawn virtue. It was all anyone could talk about, and those who did not or could not accept violence as a necessity weren’t taken seriously. It was embedded in the language young people used in those days. It was the language that her husband, Rey, fell in love with.

He also fell in love with Norma. She was studying journalism; he was finishing his thesis in ethnobotany. The university then was falling apart, strained well past capacity, underresourced and overcrowded. The buildings were crumbling, the classes choked with students. Professors were shouted down in midlecture, and graffitied walls announced the coming war. The president warned ominously of occupying the grounds, using force to punish the dissidents. In his famous Independence Day speech just before Norma met Rey, the president stepped on the dais in the main plaza and condemned “that illegitimate legion of rabble-rousers that provoke chaos and disrupt the general order!” He pounded his fist in the air, as if beating an imaginary enemy, and was met with thunderous applause. The president announced new measures to combat subversion, and the teeming crowd surged with approval.

The following day, the newspapers published the entire text of his speech, along with panoramic photographs of the plaza from the air, a weltering sea of flesh beneath the summer sun. It was impressive: the masses overwhelming the confines of the plaza, overrunning the fountain, pushing up against the steps of the cathedral. Of course, the president had rigged his reelection, but from the looks of it, he needn’t have bothered with fraud. Men hung from street lamps, clutching banners, tambourines, and drums. Round-faced children smiled for the cameras, waving tiny flags they had made in school with crayons and newsprint and plastic straws. This was almost a year before the war began, when the government seemed invincible. The crowd, it was later revealed, had been paid for their ser vices, for their enthusiasm. They’d been bused in, had accepted donations of rice and flour for a day’s work cheering the speech. Many of them came from distant villages and didn’t even speak the language. They cheered on cue like good workers, collected their payment, and went home.

Rey and Norma met through mutual friends at a dance that same week. Rey was handsome in a broken kind of way: the kind of young man who had looked old his entire life. His nose bent subtly to the left, and his eyes hid in the recessed shadows beneath his brow. Still, he had a strong jaw and an incongruously silly, dimpled smile and, for this, Norma liked him. He smoked incessantly, a habit he would later give up, but that first night it seemed integral to who he was. A group of them sat together, talking about the city and the government and the university and the future. They spoke of the crowds that had filled the plaza: the people, always myopic, always easy to fool. Indians, Rey said, imagine! They don’t even know who the president is! It was all laughter and noise and the melting of ice cubes. They made fun of the president, who was weak and expendable and whose troubles were only beginning. The Illegitimate Legion! It was only a punch line then: how would these enemies be any different from those who had come before? Hadn’t the war been just around the corner for fifteen years? It was impossible to take seriously, so they drank more and joked more, and spoke most obliquely about sex. Norma felt deliciously lost in the music, in the rising heat. She leaned in closer to the new stranger. He didn’t pull away. She drank furiously. His foot tapped the rhythm, and she realized she’d been speaking for a while and had heard nothing for longer. Conversation was impossible. Their table emptied in pairs, their friends slipping onto the dance floor, until it was only the two of them. It was nearly midnight before Rey finally asked her to dance. They were in an old building with high ceilings, the band playing loud and brash, energized by the cathedral-like acoustics. Brassy bursts of sound cut through the din of the dancers and the drinkers. Rey took Norma by the arm and led her to the middle of the floor. He spun her and held her close, young in his movements, his old face adorned with a wry smile. During the third song, he pulled her in and whispered in her ear, “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

The rhythm caught them and spread them apart again, the heat of his breath still tickling her ear. What did he mean? She felt his hand on her back, guiding her across the floor. The hall was filled with flashing colored lights, like a dream she’d had once or a film she’d seen. They moved. Rey was gliding through the crowd, in time with the song. Bam! A snare, a cymbal, a pulse within the music: the tight skin of the drum singing war! She was drunk, she realized, and her feet were moving without her. He led and she followed, and when the music brought them back together, she took her chance to tell him she knew only that his name was Rey.

He laughed. He raised his hand up Norma’s back and pulled her closer, so close her lips almost touched his. She could breathe him. Then he spun her away, twirled her like a plaything.

They danced for the rest of the night and hardly spoke at all.

When the party broke up, he offered to accompany Norma home. This was before downtown was abandoned; there were little bodegas still open, selling gum and toasted plantains, aspirin and cigarettes. Rey bought a candy bar, and they shared it as they waited for the bus. There were young people everywhere, on every corner, sharing smokes, raising their voices in cheerful arguments — that four a.m. logic, that drunken lucidity. Norma’s curfew had come and gone. It was summer, and there was even a moon in the sky, or a sliver of one, and the couples that walked by clutched each other tightly, beautiful people all of them. It seemed the war would never come.

Norma and Rey cramped together in the back row of a crosstown bus, their legs pressed up against each other. Rey wrapped his left arm around her. She felt his thumb rubbing her shoulder. Norma had nowhere to put her hands, and so she dropped them on his thigh. Her index finger stroked the fabric of his jeans, and it amazed her, because she was not this type of girl. His black hair had been combed back earlier, but with all the dancing, it was starting to fall in his eyes. It was nearly dawn, and the bus rolled lazily along empty avenues. He played absentmindedly with the silver chain around his neck, then pulled a cigarette from behind his ear. There was a match stuck in the end. While he looked around for a place to strike it, she asked him what he had meant by such a strange question.

Rey smiled and pretended not to remember. His eyes closed, as if he were still hearing the loud crash of a cymbal or the blare of a trumpet. “Nothing,” he said.

“I’ll guess then.”

He nodded. They were in the back, the window open to the night air. He bent forward and lit the match against the back of the seat, where two names had been scratched into the metal with a pocketknife: LAUTARO & MARIA, FOREVER. Rey slung his right arm out the window and blew smoke over his shoulder. He watched her.

“You must be somebody’s son,” Norma said. “And by somebody, I mean somebody famous. Why else would you ask me?”

“Somebody’s son?” he asked, grinning. “Is that what you think?” He laughed. “How astute. Aren’t we all somebody’s children?”

“What’s your last name?”

“You’ll have to ask your friends.”

“Why would you ask me that unless you were well known?”

He smiled coyly. “I don’t aspire to fame.”

“You’re clearly not an athlete.”

He took a puff from his cigarette, blue smoke trailing from his lips. “Is it obvious?” he asked, amused. He flexed his bicep and pretended to be impressed with himself.

Norma laughed. “Are you a politician?”

“I hate politicians,” he said. “And, in any case, there’s no such thing anymore: only sycophants and dissidents.”

“A dissident then.”

He grinned and made a show of shrugging his shoulders.

“If you were, why would you tell me?”

“Because I like you.”

There was something so confident about him, so brash, it was almost distasteful — except it was intoxicating. She remembered this night: the dancing and the drinking, their easy and light conversation in the early morning hours, so enthralling they didn’t even notice the bus ease to a stop, or the idling rumble of the motor, or the flashing lights. It was a roadblock, only a few stops from her house. She remembered apologizing to Rey for the hassle, after he had come all this way to drop her off. Rey frowned but said not to worry.

Then a soldier was aboard, holding a flashlight in one hand, his right arm resting on the barrel of his rifle. Rey took two quick puffs from the end of his cigarette and tossed it to the sidewalk. He exhaled into the bus. The soldier took his time, let his gun do the detective work, and each tired passenger handed over identification papers without argument. When the soldier got to them, Norma took a good look at him and realized he was young, just a kid. It emboldened her, or maybe she just wanted to impress Rey.

“You don’t have to point that thing at me,” Norma said, handing the soldier her ID. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Be quiet,” said Rey.

The young soldier scowled. “Listen to your boyfriend.” He patted his gun gently, as if it were an obedient child. “Where’s yours, boyfriend?”

“I don’t have identification, sir,” Rey said.

“What?” the solider barked.

“I’m sorry. It’s at home.”

The soldier examined Norma’s ID under the flashlight, then handed it back. “There’s always a wise guy,” he mumbled, turning to Rey, then leaned over them out the window and yelled for an officer. “You’re coming with us,” he said to Rey. “Sorry, girlfriend, looks like you’re going home alone.”

A quiet panic seized the bus. Every head turned to face them, though no one made eye contact. Only the driver pretended not to notice: he held the steering wheel tightly and looked straight ahead.

“I’ll go,” Rey said quietly. “We’ll straighten this out. My ID is at home. It’s no problem.”

“Good,” the soldier said. “We all hate problems.”

“Where are you taking him?” Norma said.

“You want to come?” said the soldier.

“No, she doesn’t,” Rey answered for her.

They led him off the bus. Norma watched from the window as they put Rey in a green military truck.

There were only a few more stops to her house. Norma rode them in silence, the cool air in her face, aware that everyone was aware of her. She felt young and frivolous: she was a drunk girl coming home from a party when everyone else, it seemed, was shaking off sleep, on their way to work. They felt no pity for her. Fear perhaps, or anger. As she got off, she could feel the bus exhale, as if she were a bomb that might have exploded, and now they were finally safe.

It was at her front door, as she was digging in her pockets for her keys, that she found Rey’s ID card. Or rather, it was his picture. The name belonged to someone else.

TWO

OF COURSE, he’d heard Norma’s voice before. In 1797, the owner of the village’s canteen had a good radio, with an antenna long enough to get a signal from the coast, and so, each Sunday, the women and the children and the remaining men crowded in to listen. It was what they did instead of church. They gathered an hour before to eat and drink and gossip. Potatoes, mushy overripe fruit, and thin silver fish salted in broth. Loud voices, the beginnings of a song. They brought portraits of their missing, simple drawings that an itinerant artist had done years before. They hung these on the walls, rows of creased and smudged faces Victor didn’t recognize, whose mute presence made the village seem even smaller. Then, at eight o’clock, there was a hush, and static, and that unmistakable voice through the tinny speakers: Norma, to listen and heal them; Norma, mother to them all.

They were waiting to hear the names of those who had left. Boys, some only a few years older than Victor, wandered away, leaving 1797 emptier and smaller each year. They grew up and became men elsewhere. A few returned, after being gone for years, to choose a wife and take her away, or to tend their father’s plot of earth. But most never reappeared. It was all the women spoke of: where had their husbands gone? Their sons? Sad mothers still lamented the days of forced conscriptions, when their boys had been rounded up in the plaza and given rustic wood carvings in the shapes of machine guns. The children fell on their stomachs and slithered across the dirt; the mothers watched them, terrified: oh, how they played.

Victor had heard all the stories. Even when he was a boy of six, with the war long over, his mother sent him to hide in the trees whenever an army truck belched its way into the village. He watched from the forest: angry sergeants picking carefully between the plumpest chickens, ordinary soldiers carrying rucksacks bulging with fruit. Did the soldiers notice the village had no young people? When the truck left, Victor and all the other boys emerged from the jungle to be received by their mothers with kisses and tears. Everyone knew the children who left on green trucks never came back.

Some left for work, especially since the war ended and there was no more need for fighters. Mostly to the capital, or to labor on the highways being built up and down the coast, or over the spine of the mountains to the sierra. There was always work in contraband along the eastern border, and the fisheries in the north hired anyone willing to work seven days a week. Some, it was said, made it to the beaches, cultivating dreams of foreign women, making a living selling trinkets to tourists. These were the rumors anyway, but really no one knew for certain. There was no resentment toward the lost, only sadness at being left behind. Those who remained placed their hopes on the radio. The village had entrusted a few letters to passing travelers, but nothing had ever come of it. So, they waited for Sunday and the next and the next. Those evenings impressed upon Victor the danger of remembering. His mother, he assumed, was listening for news of that phantom, his father. Victor prayed: that she’ll forget me when my time comes. He planned to set out for the city one day too; he’d known it since he was a little boy. Happiness, he’d decided, was a kind of amnesia.

This is how it happened: Victor went off to school one morning and returned to a house filled with mourners. His mother had drowned, they said. They repeated the words, various women in tones of concern and affection, but none of it made any sense. What would they do with him? The women around him grieved loudly, they wailed and sang dirges in an old language he couldn’t understand. No one explained a thing. No one had to. His favorite place in the village was an empty field at the edge of the jungle, a sometime park, sometime trash dump full of flowering wild plants and lizards with golden eyes, a field alive with the cawing of invisible birds — they can bury me there, Victor thought, they can bury me now because it’s all the same to me. He could feel his fingers tingling. He had the strangest sensation of sinking, a curtain falling, his life going black. The women coddled him, fed him, sang, and prepared his things.

“Can I see her?” he asked.

They took him to the river’s edge. It was swollen with the previous week’s rain, and the water spun and quaked like a living thing. Victor could hear the adults whispering about him: Adela’s boy is here, Adela’s boy. He tried to ignore it. The village was there, and the men who wouldn’t acknowledge Victor — the men who should have saved her — and his classmates, too, all eyes trained on a rock halfway between the shores, jutting above the water line, wrapped fiercely in white foam. His mother’s body cut the current too, slumped, clutching the stone as if it were a life raft when, more likely, it had killed her. The men were trying to string up a safety line from the other bank. They seemed helpless. Above, the skies were clear and deep blue, betraying no trace of the last week’s storms. Her body, Victor realized, wouldn’t stay there forever: the men might reach her before the current carried her away, but, just as likely, they would not. She’d been fishing, one of the women said. She lost her footing in the eddies where blind silver fish gather to eat and be eaten, the village’s staple food. She must have been distracted, because these things never happen. Then the river had carried her here.

Now the women were telling him things that made his head hurt. She’s with your father now, they said, and Victor felt sick to his stomach imagining that dead and empty space. Victor had never known him. His mother told stories, but they were few and vague: your father was from the city; he was an educated man. Not much more, not even a name. But they were together now, the women said, and Victor blinked and wondered what that could mean. The river churned, and his dead mother clung to a rock, the moiling currents poised to take her away, downstream, toward further indignities. A boy approached him and then another, until Victor was surrounded by his friends. Together they waited for the disaster to end, and nothing was said. It was in their faces, in the shifting weight of their bodies: the tension, the despair, the relief that it was not their mother, dead, astride a rock in the river. One of the boys touched him, took him by the shoulder or squeezed his arm. Only a few moments more, Victor thought, and the river would undress her, strip her bare, exposing her skin, the muscles of her back. The men were rushing, but not fast enough. Elijah Manau was among them, Victor’s teacher, his mother’s lover. Victor had watched them walking through the village together, nearly every night since his best friend Nico left, never touching hands until they stepped into the forest. Manau worked alongside the men now, more frantic than the rest, more flushed and helpless. They were the two men of her life. Victor tried to catch Manau’s eye, but couldn’t.

She was dead anyway, he thought, why rush? For a moment, he hated these men, who moved as one to save her body but who had not saved her. They couldn’t feel what he felt. Nico had left 1797 a few months before. Now his mother was gone, too, and the town might as well implode and sink into the earth. She clung to the rock. Nico’s father worked clumsily, glancing up at the river, now back at his stumps and the knot he could not quite tie. He had the rope between his teeth. He’d lost his hands in the war.

“Good for nothing,” Victor muttered to himself. “Useless cripple.” It was the cruelest thought he’d ever had.

The line was nearly set, stretched taut across the river. Who would wade into the current to pull her free? The men had fashioned a raft to carry Victor’s mother’s body back to shore. They organized themselves, and there was Manau, barreling into the water, and the village watched breathless, and Victor knew before it happened that he wouldn’t reach her in time. Manau was up to his chest in its turbid black waters when the river surged, and she let go. Victor never saw her face, only the back of her, his mother set free, her body bobbing and sinking beneath the surface, and then she was gone.

Victor had lied to Norma at the station. He knew why they’d sent him: there was no reason to stay. His mother had prepared it all. She’d wanted him to leave, they said, and it was her instructions that formed the essence of the note he carried to the station. The women of 1797 had sewn the note carefully into the pocket of his pants — there are thieves on the road, they warned him — along with a small sum of money, and a list of all the town’s disappeared. Take it to Norma, they’d said, and he promised he would. He looked at the list, at the dozens of names filling two columns on both sides of a sheet of lined paper. Nico was there, the very last name, but the others he didn’t recognize. One of them was his father, but Victor didn’t know which one. There were so many, strangers mostly, young men who had gone and never returned. Did they suppose Victor could bring them back?

Just to have the names read would count for something. Victor’s voice filling the crowded canteen would be enough. The old spinsters, the men who remained, his classmates — they would celebrate him, as if he had done something extraordinary: conquered a foreign land, crossed a frontier, or subdued a monster. He would read, that would be all; read the names and remind the radio listeners to pray for his mother, who had drowned and been carried by the river to the sea.

This was only three days ago. Since then, his life had acquired a velocity he could scarcely comprehend. Everything was out of order, the contents of his world spilled and artlessly rearranged. Here he was, watching the river boil and steal his mother. Here he was, planting a cross in the sweet-smelling field at the edge of town, a dark-clad throng of mourners behind him at a respectful distance. Here he was, having his head shaved — these were the protocols of mourning — and saying good-bye to his friends, one by one, trying not to cry.

Though his contract was for one more year, the town didn’t have the heart to make Manau stay. He’d been in love. It was what everyone said, and Victor knew it was true. Manau would travel with Victor to the city. He’ll help you, the women told him, and so they left 1797 at dawn, in the back of an old truck, mist still clinging to the hillsides, along a red-earth road cut through the jungle. A small crowd, a half-dozen women, some of his schoolmates, gathered to wish him luck. Victor carried a small, woven bag with a few belongings: a change of clothes, a photograph of the city his mother had saved from a magazine, a bag of seeds. On either side was the forest, a wall of green and black shadows. The truck bounced along the road, through deep ruts pooled with water, and left them in a village named 1793.

Here they waited, but no boat came. The morning grew hot and bright. There was a sign by the river, and a few young men waiting in its shadow. At noon, a small launch came, just a raft with a motor. He would take six, the captain said, but a dozen people pushed their way aboard. The vessel swayed and trembled. Victor sat on his bag and put his head between his knees. There was so much noise: the captain barking out prices, the passengers shouting back. A few people got off, cursing the captain: “Abuse!” a woman yelled. She had a baby in her arms. Then the engine came to life, and everyone pressed together tightly. Victor stayed low while the rest stood; he looked out between legs and baggage at the surface of the black river and the mass of vegetation that curled over the water’s edge. The launch pushed upstream. Victor felt Manau rub his head, but he didn’t look up.

The provincial capital was called 1791. It was an inelegant town of wooden houses clustered around a clapboard church. The bus, they were told, would come that evening or perhaps the next morning. No one could say for sure. “Where can we eat?” Manau asked, and the bespectacled man who sold tickets nodded in the direction of the market.

Victor and Manau wandered among the stalls where the old women were closing up and putting away their wares for the day. They shared a plate of cold noodles and soup. Manau ordered a beer and drank from the bottle. Patriotic songs played over the loudspeaker. “Your mother told me to take care of you,” Manau said. The skin around his eyes was puffy and red.

Victor nodded but said nothing. It seemed for a moment that his teacher was trying to make a joke.

“But who’s going to take care of me?” Manau asked, his voice cracking.

They successfully wasted the day, playing marbles in the plaza, visiting the church to light a candle for his mother. Manau read a newspaper he found beneath a bench. It was damp and yellowed, but only two weeks old. In the late afternoon, they slept a few hours with their backs against the town’s only lamppost, then the bus appeared just before midnight, and 1791 came to life. Women rose to sell silver fish and cornmeal, cigarettes and clear liquor in plastic bags. Small, wiry men carried packages twice their size to and from the bus. The driver and his passengers ate hurriedly, plates of rice steaming in the nighttime chill. Young men smoked and spat, raised their hats at the girls selling tomato sandwiches. Dozens of people gravitated to the bus, were pulled into its orbit. It was loaded in the yellow-tinged darkness, by a group of boys Victor’s age, who clambered atop the roof, tying packages to the rack in an impossible bundle. And then, as soon as it began, it was over: now they were leaving, the doors closing, the bus pulling away with a grunt of the motor. Victor had never seen so much movement. The district capital disappeared, spent by its burst of energy; the women went back to sleep, the men to drinking. In a few moments, the single streetlight had faded, and there was only the heat of the crowded bus and the complaint of the engine.

The road was bumpy, and Victor hardly slept, his head knocking against the window a dozen times in the night. Manau gave up his seat to an old man, sat stolidly on an overstuffed suitcase in the aisle, eventually sleeping with his head cradled in his hands. Victor was alone, and he’d never left the village before. Outside, there was only darkness, the blue-black sky indistinguishable from the earth. Just before morning, a thin line of red appeared at the horizon. He was in the mountains now. In the dim violet light, the ridges seemed like the ruddy spine of an alligator. Beside him, the old man slept, snoring fiercely, his head back and mouth agape, a stack of shiny plastic sheets in his lap. They looked like giant photographs. Victor had seen something like this in school. In a book. He thought he could recognize in them bones and the shape of a human chest. The old man’s white hair was thin, his lips parched. Victor looked down again at the photographs: there were ribs! He touched his own, felt his skin slide over the bones. He felt his own chest, with the pictures before him like a map, this cloudy photo of a man’s heart. They shone and had the color of science about them. He wanted to touch them, but the man’s hands lay over them, even as he heaved and choked in his sleep. The sky was stained orange, now yellow, and the world outside was revealed, dusty and fawn, a scarcely living disappointment. Something dry and withered poked out from the pebbled earth. The bus moved slowly. Victor wanted to hold the photographs up to the light. When the man coughed himself awake, Victor tapped him.

“These?” the old man said, smiling. “I’m sick, child.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So is my wife,” he said. “She’s sorry. And my children too. And me.”

The bus was waking now, but most of the curtains were still pulled to block out the rising sun. In the distance, the mountains seemed to be made of gold.

“Are you going to be okay?” Victor asked.

The old man frowned for a moment. “I’ll show you.” His fingers were thick and calloused. Pulling off the first of the sheets, he reached over Victor and placed it against the window. The morning light shone through the film. Victor saw a man’s chest, his rib cage, his arms at his sides. Victor even saw his spine. The image cut off just above the jaw, a slab of white jutting unexpectedly into the frame.

Victor looked at the photograph and then at the old man. “Is it you?” he asked.

“Have you seen an X-ray before?”

Victor admitted he hadn’t. He’d never heard the term before.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

The man sighed. He had a deep, red scar on his cheek, and he touched it carelessly. “My bones and my heart,” he said in a singsong voice. “My lungs and my brain and my blood!”

“Everything?”

“Everything,” he said brightly. “I am the complete man.” He coughed and pulled another X-ray from the stack, placing it against the window. “These are my lungs,” he said and clapped his chest. “My puny, weak lungs.”

There were tiny holes in the tissue, like scattered coins.

“Diseased lungs,” the man whispered. He said there was a hospital, in the sierra outside the city, for veterans. He said he’d had medals, but he sold them when the war ended, to pay for his medicines.

“My father died in the war,” Victor said, and it was a fact he thought might be true, lost and dead being brothers.

“I’m sorry, child.”

It was nothing to say that his father was dead because he’d never really known him. His mother being dead? That was a secret wound, something dark and hidden, not to be told. Victor coughed.

“Don’t get too close to me, child. Not until I’m better. The air at the hospital is clean and dry. They’ll fix me up.”

They were silent for a while, and around them, the passengers shook off sleep, or held stubbornly to it. Manau hadn’t looked up yet. The bus rumbled along. They were between ranges, on a rocky plain. There was nothing green, nothing at all that seemed to be alive. Tufts of pale, weedy grasses grew in the shadows at the base of the rocks. A stocky plant with needles. “A cactus,” the old man said. To Victor, it looked as foreign, as strange as the moon or any distant planet. It was an ancient ocean, dry, disappeared. He imagined waves and currents and silver fish. He felt the note rubbing against his skin. His secret, his mission. Like the X-rays, the note was the picture of his insides. Next to him, the old man drifted in and out of sleep. Eventually, he coughed himself awake, and when he did, he winked at Victor. “I’m going to be fine,” he whispered just before his eyes clamped shut, his head falling back against the seat.

The man woke for good when the bus started climbing. “Almost there now,” he said. Then Victor took the note from his pocket, breaking the stitching with his long pinky nail. He didn’t know why he did it exactly; he just wanted the old man to know.

The old man unfolded the paper and read slowly. He turned it over to the list of names. “Have mercy,” he mumbled. “Are you traveling alone?”

Victor shook his head, and pointed at Manau. “My teacher is with me.”

The old man seemed reassured. “Shall we wake him?”

“He’s very tired.”

But Manau was up already. He kneaded his stiff neck and offered the old man a handshake. “We’re going to the radio,” he said when the old man asked what plans they had. “We’re going to see Miss Norma.”

“Will you see her, do you think? Will you really see her?” The old man looked back and forth between them, his face suddenly animated.

Manau shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

“Have you been there before? To the city?”

“Yes. I was born there.”

The old man sighed. “So you know the place. It’s where the soul of this country is.”

“In the city, they say it’s out here.”

“Who can tell?”

Victor couldn’t follow. The old man turned and smiled. He asked for the list and pulled a pen from his pocket. He held the note against his thigh and wrote a single name in a bouncing, jagged script that shook along with the bus. “It’s my son,” he said to Victor and Manau. “You understand.”

He got off in the next town. The hospital was there, a large, imposing building of brick and steel surrounded by an iron fence. Victor had never seen such a large construction. It looked like a factory he had seen in a picture once, dominating the minuscule town. “Home,” the old man said. “You’re not far now, child. Stay alert.” Then he folded a few bills into Manau’s palm. “Take care of him,” he said. Manau promised he would. The old man gathered his X-rays and his bags, and shuffled down the aisle.

Not long after, the bus crested a pass, and shacks began to appear along the sides of the road. First one or two, then clusters of them. Then they were a steady presence as the bus descended to the coast. The road was better, and the bus seemed to be gliding now. Victor finally fell asleep and awoke to honks and shouting, the city’s noise like a great engine: movement, a sputtering motor, the squalid borders of the capital, its sidewalks overflowing. The city had emerged all at once, the bus crept slowly through the crowded streets, and Victor peered out of his window. He wanted it all to be over. There was no sun, only a gray sky above, the color of the parchment he once did his school lessons on: at home with an oil lamp on the table, his mother frying fish, checking his penmanship and his spelling. That world was gone. The city moved like a forest moves: first sound, then sight, everything invisible and shadowed, a place full of walls. He felt glad to be on the bus, and he prayed it wouldn’t stop. This can’t be it, he thought. There were so many people and so much stone. There’s another, better place ahead, but then the bus was slowing, and then it was pulling into a lot, vendors ready to pounce at the arriving passengers: women with baskets of cheese balanced atop their heads, men selling batteries and sodas and lottery tickets adorned with pictures of the Virgin. Everyone yelling. “Let’s wait a moment,” Victor said. “Please.”

Manau nodded. The bus emptied, and still they stayed put. I’ll make him move me, Victor thought. All he wanted was to sleep, to dream of places he had left behind, of his mother letting go, of rivers and people as transparent as ghosts.

The bus driver lumbered down the aisle and informed them they had arrived.

“We’re aware,” said Manau.

“You two got somewhere to go?” the driver said. He glared like an animal.

“We’re getting off.”

“Good,” he said. It was clear he didn’t believe them.

Then Manau’s hands were on Victor’s back, ushering him through the bus and out the door. What if he had said no? No, I’m not getting off. No, send me home. There’s nothing for me here. My father is a phantom and my mother is floating on the river, halfway to the sea by now. Maybe it wouldn’t have been different at all. Maybe—

They stood on the sidewalk for a moment. Manau was almost smiling. Of course he was: he was home. Victor had imagined approaching a city gentleman, a man in a top hat and severe black suit, and asking, “Which way to the radio, good sir?” He didn’t have to. It was there ahead of them, an antenna piercing the sky.

NOW THE street had filled, and he was surrounded by a hot and panting mass of strangers. Victor buried his face beneath Norma’s arm, closed his eyes, and willed the moment to pass. The white-haired man had disappeared, and the woman, too, both absorbed by the rushing crowd. Victor breathed Norma’s city smell, the scent of acrid smoke on her clothes, and felt her heart beating. Was she afraid too? Voices rose around him, urgent human sounds, the heat of shouted prayers, calling Norma, Norma, Norma! And so it was everywhere, he thought, this worship of her. Not just in my faraway village, but here too, in the central city, in the capital. He looked at the people, at the dark forest of men and women. There was no way out except through them. Norma was warm, but he could feel her body tense. He had brought all this on, this rush of needy pleas, of outstretched hands fingering tiny, faded photographs — all of this, by simply saying her name. A bearded man pressed closer, wailing toothlessly, his hands caressing an unseen figure as he repeated a name again and again. There was something pained in his eyes. He wore too-small rubber sandals, his toes pushing out beyond the soles, grazing the dirty pavement. He looked sicker than the man with the X-rays, closer to death. Victor could see their insides. The people were upon them, tangled and anxious; and suddenly they were moving, Norma holding him tightly, Victor unwilling to let go.

The white-haired man appeared and whistled again. He waved his arms frantically, and then, quite unexpectedly, there was silence. “Form a line,” he ordered. The crowd thinned and spread and organized itself. Victor felt he was watching a choreographed dance. He looked up at Norma: she was pale and tense and afraid.

A moment later, a table and two chairs had been arranged for them. The line of people snaked down the block. A hundred eyes were upon them. It seemed they had no choice but to sit. The white-haired man apologized to Norma and Victor.

“What’s going on?” Norma asked. “I can’t.”

“One name per person!” the white-haired man shouted. “No more! No cutting in line or you’ll lose your ration card!”

He turned and smiled at Norma. “I’ll begin, if you please, madam.” He closed his eyes. “Sandra. Sandra Tovar.”

Someone passed Norma a pen and a piece of paper. She looked at the page and back at the white-haired man, saying nothing.

“Aren’t you going to write it down?”

Norma blinked.

“I’ll do it,” Victor said.

“Can you?” Norma lowered her voice. “Can you write?”

He nodded and took the pen. “Sandra Tovar,” the white-haired man said again, and Victor wrote the name carefully. The man thanked them both and stepped to the side with a bow.

Victor took dictation. The line moved slowly: each person stood before Norma, patted Victor on the head, and uttered a single name. They lingered, each of them, until Victor had written the name out and Norma had checked it. She thanked them in a tired voice, offered her condolences. She promised to read the name on the air. A few names she had to spell for him, and for those moments, it seemed he was in school again, back home where nothing had changed. The chatter of the people became the sound of rain in the forest. And so it was all a nightmare; perhaps he had never left the village. He filled a page without thinking. He kept his head down, his eyes on the paper, on these names, on his own hand carefully tracing letters.

Then: “Adela.”

He’d been at it for twenty minutes when he heard his mother’s name. Victor looked up to see a thin, unshaven man holding a knit cap in his hands. Victor thought for a moment he must know the man, that the man must know him, that his two-day journey was over, that there was some sense in all this. Victor put the pen down. He noticed for the first time that it was night.

“Adela,” the man said again in a low voice. He began spelling it.

“I know how to write it,” Victor said. How could he not?

“What manners!” a woman in line said.

“Do you know her? Do you know my mother?”

The man frowned. “Who are you, boy?”

Victor felt suddenly light-headed. It wasn’t his mother at all. It couldn’t be: how many Adelas were there? He heard Norma ask if he was all right. Through nearly closed eyelids, he saw the man put on his knit cap and walk away quickly.

“Victor?”

He leaned over and threw up beneath the table. Then there was a commotion. “Don’t hold up the line!” a voice called. “Move the child!”

Someone handed Victor a glass of water. They were surrounded again. How long had they been there? The white-haired man was yelling, but this time no one was listening. Norma had him in her arms. “We’re going,” she whispered to Victor. “We’re going. Can you stand?”

He nodded. He was wobbly on his feet, but he managed.

The crowd parted, but they let their fingers graze over Norma as she passed — light, inoffensive touches, hopeful touches, as if she were an amulet or the image of a saint. Their hands washed over Victor as well. There was noise, shouting, an engine backfiring. The crowd swelled. It was impossible to tell how many people there were, or where they had come from. They towered over Victor and blotted out the sky. He wanted to tell Norma that he was sorry. He cowered. The people loved her, and he understood this. They called her name. They would never hurt her. He was safe.

Victor and Norma escaped the crowd through narrow alleys and crooked paths, the noise and the people fading with each step. The dirt beneath their feet was packed hard, cut by tiny streams of water drawn on the path like a system of veins. The farther they got from the crowd, the faster they went: soon they were running, Norma ahead, Victor doing his best to follow. His palm stuck to hers, his heart raced, and then they had emerged in a wide, desolate plaza graced with palm trees, lit by orange streetlamps. The buildings were ornate and self-important, but the fountain at its center was dry and gathering dust. An Indian woman sat on the curb, stooped over a coloring book, an infant asleep in her lap, and she didn’t even look up at them. A lone soldier stood watch in front of one of the buildings, rocking back and forth on either foot, machine gun at his side.

Norma and Victor waited a few minutes, catching their breath, not speaking. A man tipped his hat as he pedaled his creaky bicycle across the plaza. It was night, Norma told him, and the city lived indoors at these hours. “It’s all these years of curfew. We’re accustomed to it now.” It didn’t look at all like the same place Victor had seen that morning. The people had vanished. After a while, a cab rolled by, tapping its horn lightly, and Norma stopped it with a wave of her arm. They rode silently across the city, Victor with his face pressed against the window, his heart still beating raggedly. He was sure he saw them in every shadow: the lost and the missing, huddled on corners and in doorways, asleep on benches. The cabbie drove and tried to chat with Norma, but she seemed to be in no mood to talk. She kept her lips pursed tightly, only nodding or responding when decorum demanded it. The driver didn’t mind: he complained about his work, making a joke of it, his voice raspy and affected. “After a few hours,” the cabbie said, “I lose feeling in my legs.”

Norma sighed. “That sounds dangerous,” she said.

Victor heard her alter her voice, draining it of its sweetness. The driver didn’t know. He couldn’t know.

It was dark when they arrived at home. Norma’s apartment had a wide window that looked out onto a quiet street. She had said it was small, but to Victor it seemed palatial. “You’ll sleep here,” she said, and pointed to the couch. A neon sign cast a harsh blue light over the room. Norma explained that it was a pharmacy, that you could buy medicine there. She turned on a lamp, and the shadows dispersed. He could see she was tired. He expected to be reprimanded, but instead she slipped away into the kitchen and set some water to boil. Victor sat on the sofa, staring at his hands. He was afraid to look at the strange apartment.

Norma emerged with tea and a basket of bread. “Are you feeling better?”

He hadn’t eaten all day, and the emptiness in his stomach stirred. She must have seen the hunger in his eyes. “Eat,” Norma said. “A boy needs to eat.”

The bread she served was strange: square, with a neat brown trim, its center a white the color of milk. Victor bit into a slice, and it dissolved in his mouth, coming apart like string. Still, he ate greedily, and it felt good. He strained to swallow mouthfuls of the stuff, but it expanded like bubble gum, rolling over his teeth and against his cheeks. He looked up. Norma, he realized, was smiling. He stopped chewing.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I was just watching.”

Victor nodded. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t like the abandoned elderly that crept through town with their bent wooden canes, but she was older than his mother, and didn’t have the copper glow his people had. She was pale, and her black hair fell straight in a ponytail down to the middle of her back. She gave the impression of not caring so much what she looked like. In 1797, Norma would have a hard time finding a husband. Victor ate and watched her. Her angular face contained a geometry he didn’t recognize, like the bread she offered him, built of right angles. Maybe the softness of her voice clashed with her sharp features. He’d never seen anyone like her up close, not that he could remember. No one this color. After having listened to her for so many years, strangely, it had never occurred to him to put a face with that voice. He had never wondered what she looked like, not once. Did anybody? That lack of imagination struck Victor as strange: had he thought of her as some kind of spirit? As a voice without a body or a face or even a soul? More ghosts. He’d never thought of her as real.

“You must be tired,” Norma said after a while.

Victor nodded.

“I’ve never been to the jungle,” she said.

He chewed and nodded. “It’s different,” he offered.

“I imagine it is,” Norma said. Could she see how tired he was? Did she know what he wanted to tell her? They were silent for a moment.

“You don’t want to talk, do you?” Norma asked.

“No,” Victor said, surprising himself. There was too much to tell.

THREE

IF NORMA were honest, she might remember Rey’s disappearance as what it was: a series of tiny flashes of light, a rising sense of danger, and then, in place of some plosive event, only this: a surreal, mystifying stillness. He leaves for a trip into the jungle — a trip like dozens he’s taken before. Then there is the cold, hard fact of his silence. No news, no word, and Norma’s life changing with each passing day, flattened beneath a crushing weight, bled of its color.

It had been ten years now.

The early days were torturous: a pain emanating outwards from each cell in her body, and the fact of his absence everywhere. She stopped strangers in the street, inspected the faces of people on buses and trains, their wrinkles, their smiles, the shapes of their tired eyes, even the shoes they wore. Each day her husband did not return, she felt herself losing her balance, the work of carrying on too much and too cruel. The ways she missed him were endless: his smell still pervaded their apartment, that mixture of sweat and cheap soap. She missed his dimpled cheeks, his kiss, and the affected way he read the newspaper, as if his sharp gaze could bore a hole in the text. He folded it into lengthwise thirds and was embarrassed to admit he indulged only in the sports section. She missed this, too: his body, his touch. His hands running up and down her back. Her own fingernails finding his spine, clawing, as if she could tear into him. She missed the face he made, always the same anguished expression, eyes flittering closed, deep concentration, and when he was behind her, she loved it, but she missed seeing him, seeing the blood rush to his face, the clouding of his features, the release. At night, she stayed awake and thought of him, too afraid to touch herself. Dread was everywhere. What if he never came back?

For ten years, he had existed in memory, in that netherworld between death and life — despicably, sadistically called missing—and she had lived with the specter of him, had carried on as normal, as if he were away on an extended vacation and not disappeared and likely dead. In the beginning, she had played detective, and in a sense, everything had been easier since she stopped. Not given up; simply stopped. In the first year of his absence, she had visited each of his colleagues at the university to ask for information. Where had he gone? It was a bent older gentleman who told her: he wasn’t sure, but he’d heard the number 1797. What was he researching? Medicinal plants, said another, but this much she knew. Had they heard anything? And here they all shook their heads and looked away.

One professor told her Rey’d had a taste for psychoactives, jungle juju, he said, but this wasn’t news, was it? Norma shook her head: of course not, of course not. It was a bright autumn day, and the war had been over for two months. The list of collaborators had been read on the radio a week before. The professor scratched his beard and looked distractedly out the window at a swatch of blue sky. His office and his person were in disarray. “Maybe he just lost it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s just a thought. Took too much of something. Went native.” He smoothed the wrinkles of his suit. “Maybe he’ll snap out of it. Maybe he’ll wander back.”

Norma shook her head. It made no sense. “What about the list they read? What about the IL? Was Rey IL?”

Why did she ask? Did she even want to know? It was the same every time: a blank look, a stammered response, and then a pause as her husband’s colleagues took the measure of her. Doors were closed discreetly, blinds drawn, telephones unplugged — all this at the mere mention of the IL. But the war was over, wasn’t it?

This professor turned to face her. They had known each other socially — Christmas parties and birthdays, nothing more.

“Were you followed?” he asked.

It hadn’t occurred to her. “Who would follow me?”

The professor sighed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I knew your husband well. We were at the Moon together. He wasn’t IL. He couldn’t have been.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone knows there was no such thing.”

Norma was silent. She hardly breathed.

“It was a government invention, a fraud. Something the Americans cooked up to scare us.”

“Oh,” she managed.

“You’d do well to be careful when asking questions such as these.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Someone might misinterpret.”

Norma thanked him for his time, gathered her things and left quickly.

She scoured the papers for any news, but there was so much to tell about the end of the war. Who had time for a missing professor? There were battles to write about and lists of casualties to collect. The country seemed to be collapsing on itself: a shootout between decommissioned soldiers erupted in an underground bar in The Thousands. A man in Asylum Downs was run out of the neighborhood, his house set ablaze after his name had been listed among the collaborators. It was the war in its death throes, every day something new, the violence sputtering to its anarchic conclusion.

Still, the city was becoming accustomed to the idea of peace. She knew by now what his absence meant, but when the war ended, there was euphoria, a sudden and unexpected reason to smile. Norma had expected Rey to come home, sunburned and smiling, haggard perhaps, but alive, shaking his head and telling the tale of another close call searching for medicinal plants at the edge of a war zone. He was a scientist, first and foremost, an ethnobotanist committed to the preservation of disappearing plant species. This is what he told her, and for a time, she believed him. She had always wanted to believe him. When they were newlyweds, she had asked him: what about that night we met, the dancing, the ID? Where did they take you?

“They cured me,” Rey told her. “They took me to the Moon and they fixed me right up. No more,” he said. “I’m not interested in politics. I’m interested in living.”

So he went into the jungle and returned with stories of insects the size of his hand, of dense, verdant valleys and their mysteries, of fluttering birds plumed in electric colors. And then he didn’t return, and Norma waited. Then word filtered around the radio of a battle fought near the town of 1797 in the eastern jungle, of men captured and some killed. The rumors said many were buried and would soon be lost in the impossibly thick forest. They said it had been a slaughter, a victory celebration in the form of mass graves and anonymous dead — what does the end of a war mean if not that one side ran out of men willing to die? Peace was coming, now it was here. The battle near 1797 was ignored. And there were others: the war’s coda, a string of killings in faraway places that were better left alone. In the city, there had been a battle as well, but now it was over; couldn’t the people be forgiven if they noticed the sky for the first time in years, mistook its opaline glaze for sunlight, and began to forget?

There were two kinds of lists in those days, official and unofficial, and each contained different tallies of dead and missing, of exiled and imprisoned. With the right connections, Norma thought, she might be able to see those other lists, the real ones, that grim accounting of the war and its yield. But she never did. The next months passed in a haze, Norma going through the motions of living. She appeared at work, read the news without understanding or even attempting to understand what she was reading. She asked for a break from her Sunday-night show. Her many fans called in, expressing concern: was Norma all right? She had made the rounds at the university, been told in a variety of ways that the IL was not real, that her husband would be coming home, that it was only a matter of time, that he was on a drug binge in the forest, that the stress had finally gotten to him. Many refused to see her at all, citing their busy schedules or family obligations, but she sensed they were afraid of her. She didn’t eat, spent a few nights a week at the station, afraid to go home and confront the empty apartment. When she returned to Lost City Radio, she was dispirited, her honey-voice weary, but the calls came anyway, by the dozens: with the fighting over, people were now asking, with sudden abandon, where their loved ones had wandered off to.

One day, when her condition could no longer be ignored, Elmer suggested they go to the prisons. Rey had been mistaken for an IL sympathizer, Elmer reasoned, which explained his name on the list that had been read on the air. He’d been found lost and wandering through the eastern jungle, and arrested. There, among the various half-dead in prison, she might find him, and, if he were there, strings could be pulled. Elmer was a friend then. He encouraged her. Papers were filed, permits granted, and the station, still currying favor with the newly victorious government, promised a positive report on conditions inside. The war had been over for a year.

Norma and Elmer drove to the prison in the station’s four-by-four, through neighborhoods of haphazard construction, past homes with street numbers scrawled in chalk on the outside walls, past shanties topped with metal sheeting. They presented their papers at various roadblocks, some manned by uniformed soldiers, some by neighborhood thugs, and everything was solved with a few coins and a deferential smile. Children chased the truck as it sped by, waving through the billows of dust. They drove through communities whose essential feature was their color: a burnt, dry shade of yellowish gray, everything bathed in murky sunlight. These were the areas that Norma could just make out from the station on a clear day, where the mountains first appeared and city seemed to end — only it didn’t. It never ended. More people arrived each day as the jungle and the sierra emptied of human life. The capital’s new residents made homes here, in the inhospitable folds of the lower mountains, in the city’s dry and teeming servants’ quarters.

The prison was a sprawling complex, its watchtowers rising high above the surrounding neighborhood in a district known as Collectors. There were crowds of people by the visitors’ door, women selling newspapers, sandwiches, and knickknacks to bribe the guards with: foreign coins, plastic key-chains, old comic books. Norma and Elmer waited in line with restless mothers, with anxious wives and girlfriends. They were all turned away.

Except Norma and Elmer, who passed through the first of a half-dozen locked doors: they stepped into a long corridor to another lock and another young man with a weapon. Each time, they were told to pull up their right sleeves, and the guard stamped their forearms. At the next gate, the guard would count the number of stamps, add his own, and wave them through. Eventually, they were ushered into a spare, windowless room with humming fluorescent light above. There were three metal folding chairs. They sat down to wait.

“Don’t be nervous,” Elmer said after a while. “It’s not so bad. Look at your arm.”

So she pulled back her sleeve once more and inspected the blurred purple markings. There was no state seal or a flag or code of any kind. She smiled. CITY’S BEST OFFICE SUPPLY, VETCHER BROTHERS CANNERY, A–1 WINDOW REPAIR, THE METROPOLE HOTEL, ELEGANCE WITHOUT COMPROMISE. This was her security clearance.

“I expected something more official,” said Norma.

“That’s because you haven’t been here before.”

Then a gruff man in a faded-olive uniform appeared and showed them to his office. He didn’t shake hands, or even look at them, but the name tag on his uniform said ROSQUELLES. He sat down at his desk and announced that no one had informed him of their visit. “How do I even know who you are?” he asked.

They had decided it would be best for Elmer to speak, so as not to offend the official. With a nod to Norma, Elmer pulled some papers from his inside pocket. “We have letters.”

But instead, Rosquelles stared at Norma, his gaze between menacing and dismissive. “Woman,” he said, “why would you want to go in there?”

The office was dank and disordered, crammed with file cabinets that seemed ready to vomit their contents all over the floor. A cheaply framed photograph of a Swedish mountain scene hung askew. This was popular then, a way of idealizing life in the country’s provinces: transforming the lost, war-ravaged hamlets into tidy Scandinavian villages with crystalline streams and quaint windmills, hills covered with bright swaths of green. Norma almost smiled. Our mountains are not like that.

She considered mentioning Rey, explaining that there had been some kind of mistake, but then she thought better of it. “We have approval, sir.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I suppose I don’t understand your question then.”

Rosquelles sighed. “Inside we have the killers and the beasts and the assassins that we should have disposed of the moment we found them. These are the people you want to see?”

“I’m a journalist, sir.”

“I hate journalists,” Rosquelles said. “You make excuses for these killers.”

“No one is making excuses for them anymore,” Elmer said. “The war is over.”

“It’s not over in there,” the official said.

“Yes, sir.”

“How many prisoners are there?” Norma asked.

Rosquelles shrugged. “We quit counting years ago. It’s a steady population now. No more growth. We don’t take prisoners anymore.”

“I see,” said Norma.

“We kill them first.”

“I see,” she repeated.

He stood up. From a cabinet, Rosquelles removed a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a bag of cotton balls. He opened the bottle, soaked a cotton ball, and passed it to Norma. He pointed at her forearm. “You don’t need those anymore. You’re with me.”

She hesitated.

“Take it,” the official said. “You might as well clean it now. The kids outside will charge you fifty cents.”

When they had finished, Rosquelles led the way with a jangling of keys, out of the office, along a dark corridor, then up a spiral staircase into a system of fenced-in raised causeways above the prison proper. They walked above the yard, along its perimeter: from this height, Norma could see the ocher mountains dotted with shanties, and below her, the prisoners standing in the dusty yard, staring back at her. A group of men were being led in stretching exercises by a fellow prisoner, others seemed to be debating among themselves. Some looked up in disgust, others with calm disinterest. The sun was bright, and they squinted up at the visitors. There were whistles and catcalls at Norma; she was a woman, after all, in a community of caged men. Some followed her, swarming and clamoring in the yard below, kicking up clouds of yellow earth, laughing. “Baby,” they called, and they said other things as well: about her pussy and the taste of it, about what they would do to her. Norma reached instinctively for Elmer’s hand, and he gave it to her. She didn’t feel safe. The causeway groaned with each step, and she imagined the entire structure collapsing, depositing her on the prison yard to be devoured. No one could save her, not with a knife or a gun or an army. Rosquelles ran his keys against the chain-link sides of the causeway. His graying hair was oily, and the back of his neck glistened. Periodically, he spat through the fence on the prisoners.

There were others, Rosquelles explained, locked in cells below the ground in lightless, stiflingly hot tombs. “These,” he said, motioning over the yard, “these are the good ones.”

“Can we see them?” Elmer asked. “The others?”

Rosquelles shook his head. The others were the ones who had shaken the country to its core. Out here were the soldiers, the triggermen. The leaders were below the ground, held incommunicado, only dimly aware that the war had ended, that they had lost. “Are you looking for someone in particular?”

“Yes,” said Norma, at the exact moment that Elmer said, “No.”

Rosquelles smiled. “Well, which is it?”

“My husband,” Norma said. “There was a mistake.”

A steady group of men had tracked the visitors’ progress around the yard, but most had given up trying to elicit any response at all, had broken off. A few sat on their haunches, smoking and spitting. The sun glowed brightly, and Norma felt faint. She coiled her fingers around the chain-link fence, steadying herself.

A prisoner invited Norma to sit on his face.

“Animal!” Rosquelles shouted. He turned to Norma. “I’m sorry, madam. We don’t make mistakes.”

The prisoners responded with curses and laughter, and they called him by name. “Rosquelles!” they called. “Killer! Is that your girlfriend?”

He frowned. “You have fans,” Rosquelles said. “This is no place for a woman. Are you well?”

Norma nodded. “May we see the lists?”

“There are no lists,” he said.

They continued around the causeway above the yard. The men below were unshaven and dirty, shirtless and sunburned. The elevated metal corridor opened every fifty meters into a watchtower. Rosquelles greeted each guard the same way—“Friendlies behind!” Still, the young guards had fear in their eyes, and they kept their guns trained on Norma and Elmer until they had walked past.

Rosquelles led them to the observation tower, the highest one, two flights of stairs above the causeway. There were two soldiers inside and an imposing array of weapons trained on the prisoners below. Norma peered out: from this distance, the imprisoned men moved like ants, a dizzying and chaotic display. She studied them through binoculars: their faces, the lines of their jaws, their brows, and saw nothing and no one who could be her husband. He would recognize her, wouldn’t he? And he would call out to her? But he wasn’t there. She’d known it, of course, but hadn’t allowed herself to think too much. What options were there? He’d been near the battle. There were prisoners and there were dead: wouldn’t it be better to find him here, locked up among the warriors? Or was he a leader, entombed below?

No one had ever accused him of such a thing.

Maybe they saw her watching them. Maybe it was their way of mocking her interest. The buzzing crowd fell apart and regrouped in straight lines, row after row of thin, dark men. “Killers!” they chanted. They were fearless. Some smiled.

Norma turned away, stared into the mountains. Without the shanties, it could be a postcard.

Rosquelles shook his head. “They’re going to sing.”

Where before there was confusion, now there was order. Were these the same men who had chased them around the yard, the same feral pack of sun-scarred, hungry prisoners? A murmuring rose from below, a scratch of a melody, nothing more. There was a code at work, the men held their arms at their sides, statuesque and military. What could Rey be doing here, if he was? They were less than human, they puffed their chests and stood straight, and their faces were stern now. They were cogs of a machine. They sang.

“Is the IL real?” Norma asked. She could think of nothing else.

Rosquelles looked at her, disbelieving. He turned to Elmer. “Who is she?”

“I’m sorry,” Norma said. “It’s just that—”

“Why don’t you ask them?” Rosquelles said, waving his hand at the prisoners below.

“What about the Moon? Are there still people there?”

“Woman, are you mad?”

Norma said nothing. She closed her eyes and listened as Elmer apologized on her behalf. Her Rey wandered the jungle and inhaled the soggy odors of the forest, he loved birds and verdure and the smell of wood smoke. He was not IL, because he told her he wasn’t. He’d said those words, hadn’t he? He wasn’t IL, because the IL did not exist.

“Why are we here?” Norma whispered.

Elmer blinked his eyes. “You wanted to do this.”

“Fire a warning shot,” Rosquelles said to the guard.

The guard aimed at the ground in front of the prisoners and let off a few shots. Dust bloomed in tiny mushroom caps. The men kept singing. Norma looked over her shoulder at Elmer, and he shrugged when he met her gaze. The bullets kept coming at regular intervals, advancing toward the line of men. They sang, and Rosquelles cursed. There was something mechanical about them, something terrifyingly disciplined. The war planners hadn’t counted on that mania. It had been the key to their success. The country’s history was dotted with guerrilla episodes of varying intensities: here and there, a ragtag militia fired by an empty ideology or a provincial grievance, a lightly armed band led by a quixotic upper-crust dropout — it happened all the time, twice a generation, and ended the same way: the insurgents marched themselves to starvation, were felled by malarial fevers. They played at war on the fringes of the nation-state, then gave up as soon as the shooting began. The IL had been different. They didn’t give up. They began the war and never planned for a truce. They wanted everything.

The guard fired a few more shots that pierced the ground in front of the singing prisoners. Norma watched the young soldier, beads of sweat gathering on his hairline, the heavy kick of the weapon pushing against his shoulder. The bullets advanced, and the men sang in unbroken harmony, about the war and the future, their paeans to outdated dreams. Some closed their eyes. It was prison opera, replete with bullets and dust and scorching light. The young soldier fired steadily around the men. They didn’t flinch. “Sir,” the soldier asked, “may I?”

Rosquelles shook his head. “I’m not allowed to hit them,” he explained to the visitors.

Norma read disappointment on the young soldier’s face. Elmer took notes, studying the scene. The sun had bleached everything of its color. She might fall at any moment.

The bullets whizzed by, the prisoners singing in sonorous swells. Rey sang, too, he’d always sung to her in a comically bad voice, with off-key trills, a theatrical falsetto. He sang because it made her laugh. Sometimes he sang in the crowded streets, in the park by the Metropole, unperturbed by the weary frowns of passersby. Another crazy, what can you do? I’m crazy, he’d tell her later, I sing because I’m crazy about you; Norma turning red, embarrassed, heat in her face. At home, too, songs of love, saccharine tunes from the era of the troubadours. She could hear the urgency now in the shots, the young soldier’s longing to snipe one, just one, maybe wound him, a bullet to the shoulder, a slug in the meat of a prisoner’s thigh. To watch a man fall — what joy! It’s not possible Rey is dead. The singing forced Norma’s eyes closed, she could feel the sun burning against her eyelids. A minor chord, a sad melody, an image: her Rey in his underwear, crouched at the foot of the bed, singing. Something romantic, something sappy. You are my sunshine…or something even cheaper than that.

“He’s not here,” Norma whispered to Elmer.

The sun buried them in white light, and the shots continued steady, rhythmic. Melodies drifted skywards.

“Just one, sir?” the soldier said.

Rosquelles frowned wearily. He took Elmer’s notepad from his hands. “I’m going to have to hold on to this,” he said. “You understand.”

Elmer said nothing. He reached for Norma’s hand, and she let him hold it. She stepped closer to him.

“Show me the lists,” Norma said to Rosquelles. “Please.”

“What was the name? The one you’re looking for.”

She told him.

Rosquelles raised an eyebrow. “Never heard of him. Did he go by any other names?”

She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”

“How do you expect to find an answer if you don’t ask the right questions?” Rosquelles sighed. “It was a big war, madam. A very big war with many, many players.”

“Sir?” the soldier asked again.

The official nodded with a smile. “Oh, to be young and brainless again!”

Then there was a shot, and a man collapsed: third row, second from the back, so that most of the prisoners didn’t see him fall. They sang, looking straight ahead. The downed man had been hit in the stomach. He slumped to his knees and tumbled forward, prostrate in the dust. His burnt-copper back arched, his arms buried beneath him. He was praying. Norma was too: her fingers curled tightly around the chain links, her nails digging into her palms. Rey wasn’t coming back.

SHE SLEPT with the door open every night. At one time, when she was more hopeful, she had thought: if Rey were to come back tonight, he would see right away that I am sleeping alone. That had been the logic at first, but now it wouldn’t be truthful to say that she expected anything of the sort. It was habit, pure and simple, of the kind whose origin was vaguely recalled but which existed nonetheless, a constant and unchanging fact of life. Her door was open.

But this night, the boy had come. He was there, resting on the couch. The apartment was small: from the living room, one could see through to the kitchen and into the bedroom. It wasn’t exactly self-consciousness that Norma felt; it was an awareness, sudden and stark, of her solitude. It wasn’t the boy. Victor said little. He was a tangle of emotions and wide-eyed observations buried beneath a rigid silence. She didn’t know what he had seen, but it had rendered him nearly mute. He was small, thin-boned, and there was nothing at all imposing about him. She guessed he would be as content to sleep on the cool tiled floor of the kitchen as on the soft, pillowed couch. But he was there. She could have hidden his frail body in a cabinet under the sink, and still she would feel his presence. It wasn’t him: it was his breath, his humanness, so close to her in the apartment. In the space that had been hers and Rey’s, that had then been only hers. A sealed place, an impregnable store of memories where time had stopped for nearly a decade. Visitors? She could count them on her fingers. Without Rey, she had lived like this: spectacularly alone.

Victor slept on the couch, breathing softly in the humming blue light of the pharmacy. The blanket covered nearly all of him, except his feet, and these stuck out, his toes curling and straightening as he dreamed. The place was too small. They’d always meant to move to a bigger apartment when they had children, and they’d tried. She was thirty-two when Rey disappeared. They’d never stopped trying. On their last night together, they’d tried. The doctors had said there was nothing wrong with her, that he was in perfect shape, that these things took time. So time passed. When Norma and Rey were married, they’d daydreamed of a gaggle of children, a half dozen, each more beautiful than the last, each a more perfect representation of their love. His hazel eyes, his hair curling skywards. Her delicate hands, long, stately fingers. Her aquiline nose — not his that crooked slightly to the left — but Rey’s skin tone, more suited to the sunny places where they would vacation once the war ended. They built variations of themselves, portraits of their unborn children, unique amalgams of their best features. My voice, Norma said, for speaking. No, Rey said, laughing: mine, for singing.

They made love regularly and hopefully, just as the doctor prescribed. And nothing. Passionately and desperately — still nothing. When he didn’t return, Norma’s period didn’t come for ninety terrible days. She wrestled with the possibility of raising his child alone, almost allowing herself a glimmer of happiness — but it was only stress, her body as traumatized as her heart, shutting down, slowing very nearly to a standstill. She discovered in the mirror one day that she’d lost weight, that she was as spent, as ragged as the soldiers returning home from the countryside. All bone, gaunt and pale. She wasn’t pregnant: she was dying.

Now the boy slept with his face buried in the cushions of the couch. Norma turned on the radio: softly, a melody, strings, a wistful voice. The boy did not stir. She edged the door closed, the blue light vanished. She was alone again, in darkness. She undressed.

FOUR

YEARS AGO, a lifetime ago, it went this way: on a moonless night, Rey and a few friends tossed back shots of grain alcohol and then tested their aim against the front wall of the school, rocks against brick and glass. They were drunk and alive, just boys playing a prank. But that same night, something else happened: a small, homemade bomb exploded inside the mayor’s office. This was the war’s prehistory, its unnatural birthing, more than a decade before the fighting would begin in earnest. It occurred in a distant town, in a country as yet unaccustomed to such things. The blast awoke a restless, confused crowd. Fire tore at the roof, and windows were blown into the street in neat, glowing shards. The men lined up with pails of water, but it was no use. The water ran out, or their resolve did, and so they stopped. The sky was black, a soft breeze blowing. The building smoldered. It was a beautiful night for a fire.

Rey was only thirteen years old, but he would end up in jail that night, locked away for his own safety. Outside, a crowd would be calling for his head, gripped with the paranoia only a mob can feel. The jailer, his father’s brother Trini, would be preaching calm. Inside, Rey’s father, headmaster of the aggrieved school, would be red-faced and shouting, “What did you do, boy? What did you do?”

THE TOWN’S jail was two blocks off the plaza, sharing a quiet side street with the humble homes of maids and stonemasons. The exterior of the building was a pale blue, adorned with a rudimentary painting of the national seal, which, if examined up close (as Rey often did), was as blurry and inexact as the pixilated photographs that ran on the front pages of the town’s only newspaper. An old Indian maxim — DON’T LIE, DON’T KILL, DON’T STEAL — was inscribed in severe black lettering above the door-jamb, perhaps giving the sleepy jail an import it didn’t deserve. Rey liked the jail: he liked to sit with his uncle, whose job, it seemed, consisted of waiting for trouble to manifest itself. According to Trini, there wasn’t enough of it. He complained bitterly about the quiet town, and liked to tell stories of his year in the capital. There was no way of knowing which were true and which were false. To hear Trini tell it, the city was peopled with thieves and louts and killers in equal parts. To hear Trini tell it, he’d been a one-man crime-fighting machine, justice patrolling the crooked streets, all grit and courage. The city! It was hard to imagine: a rotten, dying place, even then, crumbling and full of shadows. But what did it look like? Rey couldn’t picture it: the boiling, black ocean, the jagged coastline, the heavy clouds, the millions draped in perpetual dusk. Here, there was bright sun and real mountain peaks capped with snow. There was an azure sky and a meandering river and a cobblestone plaza with a trickling fountain. Lovers held hands on park benches, flowers bloomed in all the municipal flower beds, and the aroma of fresh bread filled the streets in the mornings. Rey’s hometown ended ten blocks from the plaza in any direction, giving way to dusty lanes and irrigated fields and small farmhouses with red-thatched roofs. Trini described a place Rey couldn’t imagine: a city of glamorous decay, a place of neon and diamonds, of guns and money, a place at once glittering and dirty. Everything here bored Rey’s uncle: the undulating countryside, the sharp teeth of the gray mountains, the scandalously blue sky. Most of all, the simple people, incapable of hatching plots against each other, or unwilling. Wholesome and therefore disappointing. “Why’d you come back, Uncle Trini?” Here Rey’s beloved uncle always fell silent, as if under a spell.

“There was a woman,” he’d say, and trail off. He’d fiddle with the keys to his kingdom, that empty cell. “There’s always a woman.”

Uncle Trini told stories and locked up the drunks that came in raving, the same ones who knew him by name, the ones who began all their confessions with the words: “I was minding my own business when…” It was part jail, part hostel for the hopeless drinkers, part psychiatric retreat for the colorful, if not criminal, elements of the town. And most nights, Rey rushed through his homework, walked the four blocks to the cramped little police station, and sat on the front step with his uncle. Together they waited for something to go wrong. The ordinary crimes of the countryside: purse-snatching was as common as the graceless theft of fruit from a market stall. Murders occurred twice each decade, usually the tragic finales to disputes over land, livestock, or women. The drunks. “Trini!” they’d protest when the sergeant brought them in, and Rey’s uncle, impassive, would throw up his hands and unhook the keys from his belt loop. “Welcome back!” he’d say and smile despite himself. “Trini,” the drunks would plead, but they knew it was no use, and Rey watched them hang their heads and stagger in, chastened. Later, after the sergeant left for the night, Trini would send Rey to the store for liquor, his nephew bounding through the empty streets to Mrs. Soria’s all-night bodega, where you had to knock a certain way—taptap tap tap tap—before she would open the window and show her wizened face, squinting in the dim light: Who’s there? It’s me, madam. It’s Rey. She’d hand him a bottle topped with a scrap of a plastic bag held tight by a rubber band, ah, the homemade stuff…Made in wooden vats and old bathtubs she kept in her courtyard, emitting odors her tenants grumbled about, the stuff that came out clear, stinking like poison, the stuff Trini drank, wincing, an involuntary spasm shutting his right eye. But Rey’s uncle was a magnanimous drunk. He described the warm sensation in his chest, liquor’s sweet embrace, described his mind under its influence as a tower built of loose, unmortared bricks, and he prattled on about the woman, the one who’d seduced him, whose ass was a most delicious thing, the one with blue eyes and a tiny scar on the side of her neck, which she covered with her curly, brown hair. She had ruined the city for him by getting pregnant. She’d sent her brothers after him. “They beat me, boy,” Trini said, still incredulous years later, “right in the middle of the street, in broad daylight. Me! A uniformed officer!” Rey listened, his uncle’s words losing their borders to drink, syllables bleeding into each other. And the drunks gathered at the rusty bars of the cell to listen, to offer their condolences, their slurred and pithy advice: leave her, forget her, drink. Rey and Trini smiled. Trini’s confessions, like those of his jailed charges, presupposed a circumstantial innocence, a helplessness, a purity of intent. He had a son—“I have a son,” Trini shouted at the sky — somewhere in the city he’d been chased out of. After a few hours, Trini let his nephew take a shot — a small one — or pour a little in a plastic cup for the locked-up drunks, who had been stirred by the ammoniac smell of the stuff. Rey saw that the captives loved him in those moments. They took the drink with the reverence of the devout accepting Eucharist. He made them promise to be good. Rey made them swear. “Trini,” they called out, “tell your nephew to quit torturing us.” They drank, and the hours passed like this, until it was early morning. Rey’s head spun, and he played with the radio until he got a scratchy signal, news from the capital or old Cuban songs or a show of weather predictions for Indian farmers. Eventually, everyone fell asleep, woozy, in their assigned places: the drunks on the cool floor of the cell, Rey and his uncle on the steps of the jail, the sky creeping toward orange, and day already breaking on the other side of the mountains.

And then, when he was thirteen, there was an explosion at the mayor’s office, and, on the same night: the windows, the stones, the school. Rey and his friends had donned bandannas to cover their faces, nascent guerrilla tactics, like in the papers that came from the capital. Just that week, an arrest had been made, a man caught in a house full of weapons. He would spend a few years in prison, take advantage of an amnesty, and be released. Later, he would consolidate five disparate factions and form the IL, but no one knew that then. It had been big news in Rey’s town, because the arrested man had spent part of his formative years there, before moving to the capital.

But really, who could worry about such things: wasn’t there always someone trying to start a war in this country?

Under cover of night, Rey and his friends set out to prowl the streets. Stray dogs, here and there a bum resting in a doorway, the town asleep, the four boys raced down alleys. Rey and three friends—“Who? Which ones?” his father asked later on, but Rey wouldn’t say. It didn’t seem right to give them up. The town at the hour had seemed abandoned. It was easy to imagine that you owned it: every corner, every low-slung house, every park and park bench. The steps of the cathedral, the palm trees that listed gently west, the fields at the edge of town where the hungry mice scurried and stole grain. The whole of it — yours. It was easy to imagine you were the only ones in the streets, but you were wrong.

The school. There were no watchmen, only a wrought-iron fence held together with an ancient padlock. Easy to climb over. Later, “What did you do,” his father asked him, “and why?” Rey’s arms were bruised where the crowd had gotten hold of him, the tight clasping of hands and fists.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Anything?”

Rey choked on a cough. Outside, the crowd clamored for justice. “I didn’t do that,” he clarified.

“Explain,” his father commanded.

So he did: the boredom that had led to setting small fires in the field behind the clinic, the flames that had cast orange shadows over the gravelly earth, the smooth stones that had glowed in the firelight, and then, the target shining and obvious, calling them from the other side of town. The evening was clear and cool. It felt good to run with a pocketful of rocks. They stopped at Mrs. Soria’s bodega—taptap tap tap tap—with coins they’d pooled together, and the liquor burned but they choked it down, closing their eyes as they swallowed, everything emerging jagged and blurry. “Why?” his father asked again, but Rey couldn’t come to any conclusions about his own motives. He looked his father in the eye, a thirteen-year-old, still not sober three hours after his last swig, and felt something approximating pity, his father’s black eyes like pools of oil, his father’s graying hair, his face creased with disappointment, not a bad man, at least not at home. At school, he was a tyrant, of course, but in this sense, he was normal, no better or worse than any other headmaster. And Rey didn’t hate school, at least not with the passion that his friends did.

“I don’t know,” Rey said. Is it possible to confess without acknowledging blame?

The fact was, he shouldn’t have been caught at all. Rocks thrown at the school building on any other night? Harmless. A few windows shattered. What might have happened? Would anyone have thought to blame the son of the headmaster? There were dozens of poor kids from poor families, children with ashy knees and grim faces, who would have been blamed first. No one saw Rey. An elderly neighbor claimed to have spied four boys, but they were just shadows, laughing and carrying on. They could have been anybody. Then there was a flash of light and the boom: this changed everything. The explosion brought the army into town the next day. They came with guns, determined to find a culprit.

These things would come later, and still, that night, there was no reason to get caught. Rey and his friends raced to the plaza to see it. Curiosity, nothing more. His friends had disappeared into the crowd, hadn’t they? Hadn’t they drunk as well, weren’t they in awe of the fire and as full of adrenaline? Why did you throw rocks at the school (in the end a meaningless crime, something that might have gone unnoticed on any other night), his father asked, but just as logically he could have said: Son, how did you turn the town against you? Why did you bring this all on yourself? On us?

Something important had happened. Rey knew it at once. The mayor’s office was a small building, and when he arrived in the plaza, it seemed ready to collapse. Flame clung to the wooden roof beams. Glass had melted into yellow and red shapes, transfigured. Burning papers, burning chairs. Someone ran to tell the mayor. A plume of smoke curled into the sky, and there was heat. Everything had the air of urgency, of that long-wished-for, long-awaited trouble. And Rey was still drunk. He felt it in his breathing, in the strange glare of the fire. He felt shy and self-conscious. The fire crackled, and then the roof beam fell in a shower of embers. Smoke. The crowd gasped. Rey pulled his handkerchief up once again, resolved to find Trini, to share the excitement of this moment. His friends were gone, dispersed and disappeared, and Rey felt invisible at the peripheries of the crowd, but he was not. It took only a few moments for him to be spotted: ambling about unsteadily in the shadows of the plaza, wild-eyed, a dark bandanna covering his mouth and nose. As if terrorists dress this way! As if there were a uniform! But there he was, at the edge of the scene, looking very much the part.

Similar pictures had run that week on the front page of the newspaper — photographs of the arrested man in his youth — at a protest over school fees, and this was all it took.

“I’m innocent,” he told his father later in the cell.

“You’re stupid,” his father said. “They think you tried to kill the mayor.”

And in response, the town had nearly killed Rey, right there in the plaza. The tailor, who had made Rey his first suit, grabbed him by the arm and called out, “Here he is!” There was a struggle; the angry crowd surrounded him, his face still covered, and they yelled:

Arsonist!

Criminal!

Terrorist!

They didn’t yet know who he was. The fire burned hot, and they puffed their chests out, a pack hungry for retribution. It was an instant, only an instant before his bandanna was removed, and then the crowd gasped again: the headmaster’s son! A terrorist! They recognized his face, and he recognized theirs: the butcher with his heavy mustache; the mayor’s secretary with her perpetually worried look; the stooped, old grounds-keeper, his leathery skin taut and gleaming. His town, the people who had raised him, aghast, betrayed. They surged at him, to eat him, Rey supposed; it was that kind of anger. He was an animal ready for slaughter. Just in time, Trini stepped out of the crowd, took his nephew away by the arm, led him ahead of the crowd, to the jail, the town parading behind the headmaster’s captured son, certain they had found their terrorist.

YEARS LATER: the party where he met Norma, the evening he toyed with her. You don’t know who I am, do you? They’d danced until the question had its own weight, until Rey himself was wondering who he was and why he had said it. Was he the boy who had stumbled into a crime, the boy who eventually fled the town for the city with his father and uncle? There was a drum and then a cymbal, a syncopated beat being broken and repaired. Who am I? What am I? Involved, he thought, I am involved. In what? Ah, he was asking himself too many questions. Dance, don’t think. In things I can’t talk about, not even to myself. Certainly not to her. A sympathizer? It sounded inessential and soft. Unimpressive. He watched her, her face in shadow, now in light. I am the vanguard, he told himself, and had to frown at the pomposity of the phrasing. Enough: the band played, and his feet moved, and he kept his eyes on her hips as they swayed. Can she see me? His hand was steady at her back. Music! Then they were on the bus, and then there was a roadblock, and in a moment of panic, he had given away all of his secrets, stuffed them in her pocket. She suspected nothing. He expected the worst.

He rode in the green truck that morning, forcing himself to think of his uncle Trini, of other, more hospitable jails. Trini would get him out of all this, would place a call to an old colleague. There were others in the truck, would they be as lucky? A bearded man in a wrinkled suit had the frazzled look of a man who had dressed quickly. Why would you wear a suit to jail? Rey wondered. A couple of young hardheads, stone-faced and bored. The younger one picked at his ear with his impossibly long pinky nail. The other practiced various poses of disinterest, staring into space as if his worst enemy were floating there, begging to be killed. A few ragtag students sat across from Rey, looking bewildered and drunk, undeniably scared. One of them had lost it, and he sobbed now into his hands. His ears had acquired an unearthly red color, as if they might start bleeding on their very own. No one comforted him. A soldier sat at the front end, rifle in his lap, rather unimpressed by the lot of them.

It was just before morning, the truck chortling through the vacant, predawn streets. Every pothole shook the old truck like a tremor, but even so, Rey managed to doze off. There was no curfew yet, but it was quiet at that hour. Rey had learned that night of the fire to mistrust quiet: somewhere, something was burning. Of course. Of course — because the army had come to his town the next day to ask questions. Because his friends hadn’t come to his defense. Rey had assumed they’d come forward on their own, but they never did. They’d been afraid, or been told to keep quiet. Because Rey had spent that night asleep on the floor of the cell, wrapped in a blanket that left his feet exposed to the chill, his cheek on the dank floor of the jailhouse. He was a tall, lanky boy — a stupid boy, his father had said, but not a bad one.

When his anger had subsided, Rey’s father said, “We’ll have to leave, son.”

The thought made Rey impossibly sad. “Where will we go?” he asked, but of course he knew the answer. The city, the city: it’s where everyone went. They cried together, father and son, and then slept on the floor. Like criminals. It was the only safe place in town for them. Trini let the drunks go so that father and son could have the cell to themselves.

The mayor, affable and corrupt, stood outside with a crowd behind him. Trini begged them all to go home, said that it would all be settled in the morning. And it was: the green army trucks pulled over the ridge, unloading a division of soldiers ready to speculate with guns about the origins of the fire. They poked around the ashes of the mayor’s office and then through the home of the primary suspect, where even the soldiers remarked on his youth. The angry crowds hid in their homes, afraid to seem too interested, eager to let the authorities do their work. In Rey’s home, the soldiers found a few books on unsavory topics, espousing points of view that had been deemed dangerous in the capital, though the decree had never made it to Rey’s town.

They took Rey’s father in for questioning. He was released a week later, with a few bruises and a broken rib. Hadn’t Rey’s father taught that arrested man, the one found in the city in a house full of weapons? And how is it that a young man from this town of upstanding citizens was transformed into a criminal? And who was responsible for such a tragedy? Everywhere there were rumors. The school board said it was a shame they had to let Rey’s father go. They gave him two weeks to vacate the house they had rented him, and planned a modest party, which none of the teachers attended. Rey went, dressed in his suit, prepared to say good-bye to his father’s colleagues. He was seething. “They’re afraid, son,” Rey’s father said. “Don’t blame them.”

Now Rey felt the jab of a rifle in his gut. “Wake up, lover boy.” It was the soldier who had taken him off the bus. He was grinning.

Rey didn’t have it in him to protest. His neck hurt, and his temples throbbed. Stepping out of the truck, Rey could see it was morning. They weren’t in the city anymore, but in a completely empty place: a bleached, airless planet. The ground was brittle and flecked with glass, pockmarked with craters of all sizes that stretched ahead and all around him in the semidarkness. There were dunes and hills that he could just make out.

“Where are we?” Rey asked the soldier.

The soldier didn’t respond.

“The Moon,” said the bearded man in the wrinkled suit.

The prisoners were chained together in a group. “Walk straight ahead,” one of the soldiers said, “exactly in the footsteps of the man in front of you.”

The Moon is a minefield then, thought Rey. The man in the suit was chained in front of him, and he turned now, and smiled. He raised his chained hands and scratched his beard. “It’s easy for me,” he said. “I have small feet. It won’t be so easy for you.”

“I’ll be okay,” Rey said.

A shot rang out, not close by but somewhere in the distance. The procession paused for a second. There were the muffled, faraway sounds of people laughing.

“Have you been here before?” Rey asked the man in front of him.

The man bit his upper lip and nodded. “This is my second home.”

They walked, enchained, toward the horizon.

FIVE

NORMA IS not a mother. Not in any sense, not remotely. In her apartment, there were two houseplants that could attest to this fact, houseplants whose dusty, dying leaves had bent hopefully and desperately toward light and were now in abject surrender, wilting and forgotten. She lived alone — not for herself, not selfishly, but alone. Her public life was the radio, where she was mother to an imaginary nation of missing people. Her private life was antiseptic and empty, a place for memory, music, and solitude. Norma, who was not a mother, couldn’t comfort a child suffering from a toothache, or discipline one who had broken a piece of china. She couldn’t brush tangled hair painlessly or sew a patch on the worn knee of a pair of pants. These things didn’t come naturally to her. She had no pets: not a clumsy dog clawing at the door for her; not a tabby cat waiting to emerge languidly from behind a bed frame, to acknowledge her with yellow eyes and then slink away. There were no living things to make demands of her except her dying plants, not in her solitary apartment, not since Rey had vanished, no one who asked to be fed, or who needed to be washed, no one who awoke, sweating furiously and shouting, from adolescent nightmares.

There he was then, her first lesson: that morning, before dawn, Victor awoke with a scream.

It was torture to summon those kinds of emotions, the kind mothers routinely have: heart-swelling sentiments of selfless love. It was hard enough to pretend on the radio each Sunday. How could she do it now? Her impulse was to shut her door, to block out the sound — only the door was already closed. There was no escaping him: a human being, a child and his pain invading her space. She rubbed her bleary eyes and rose.

She found the boy still shaken, spent with the force of his yelling, heaving and panting, shirtless and thin, eyes red, looking every bit an animal liberated from a zoo. “Victor,” she said. Norma felt she should touch him, but where? How? She put her hand on his head, and sat on the sofa — her sofa, hers and Rey’s — and the boy melted into her. It was natural, instinct: he didn’t hesitate at all. His hands clasped tightly around her. “It’s all right,” Norma said, “it was just a dream.” It was a phrase she’d heard before, in a movie or on one of the radio soap operas.

He was breathing heavily, and the beating of his heart shook him from the inside. She could feel him trembling.

REY DISAPPEARED, and she didn’t see him again for nearly a year. Norma took his ID card, with that strange, foreign-sounding name, and carried it with her. It felt dangerous to own it. She was curious. She should ask someone about it, she thought, one of their friends at the university, but just as quickly decided she couldn’t. It would be some sort of betrayal. The man had secrets, and she suspected they were what made Rey’s young face seem old. How dramatic it had all seemed, how exaggerated, the music and the lights and his absurd and self-important question. Then afterwards, once he had been taken away, the faces of the passengers on the bus, accusing her — rich girl, white girl, disturbing their morning commute with idiocies, putting all their lives in danger, teasing the soldier. It was somehow shameful, but what could she do now, he was gone, and Norma had only the memory of that night and a strange ID to remember him by. She was afraid to ask anyone if they had seen him or heard from him since the night of the party. She was afraid to tell anyone that he had been taken away, that she had seen it. In any case, she wasn’t sure whom she should tell.

Norma kept quiet but found herself cultivating a fondness for Rey in his absence, even though she had only known him that one evening. Or perhaps that was why: it was as if she had seen him die — and what could be more intimate than that? What if hers was the last friendly face he saw? The last friendly touch? She thought of him at night, wondered when he might appear. She dreamed of marrying him, because it seemed the most romantic act possible. She thought of ways to inquire about him without raising attention: a note? A phone call? Every day the tension rose, and every day, at the university, she expected to find him there among the milling crowds, at the center of some circle of students, cigarette in hand, blithely holding forth about his brief imprisonment. What if she saw him? What if he asked for his ID? She daydreamed about this: I’ve been carrying it, she’d say. She would make sure to smile the way her mother had taught her, that way that her mother had sworn beguiles men without giving away too much. Her mother, the expert on men. Norma often came home from the university to find her alone, glassy-eyed, the radio serenading the empty house. “Your father is off carousing,” she would slur. “He’s abandoned me.”

Norma would help her to the bedroom at the end of the hallway, undress her, and put her to bed, all the while repeating stories neither of them believed: “He’s working late, mother. Don’t be so suspicious, it’ll make you old.”

Other times, at the dinner table, Norma’s father and mother spoke in curt monosyllables, and Norma played along. She did her best pantomime of pleasant family life until her eyes crossed and her thoughts slipped away from her, and there he was, Rey blowing smoke through the open window of the bus, smiling stupidly, unaware he was about to vanish. Pass the rice, her father would say, and it would take Norma a moment to place herself again. What’s the matter with you? Nothing, Father. She would pass the plate with wobbly hands, her old man frowning and turning to her mother: You’ve spoiled this girl too much. And her mother would nod, meek in his presence, accepting blame for any and all errors, for the disappointing comportment of the girl on whose education they were wasting all that money. None of this had to be said; Norma knew it by heart, her father’s cold logic, but preferred not to think of it, preferred to think of Rey, mysterious and brave, and not her home with its stillness and its tension and its secrets.

Later, when she and Rey were a couple, she told him that she’d thought of him while he was gone, before she even knew him, and wondered aloud why her mind had wandered in his direction. He grinned. “I’m irresistible,” he said, as if stating a fact.

It was vanity, but she had to know: “Did you think of me?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“It’s an old story,” he said.

They were near downtown, in a district called Idorú, outside a movie theater that only played Bollywood films, English-Bengali-Hindu monstrosities. It had been two years since the night they met, a year since Rey had reappeared. He was buying tickets, and now he led her inside. She reached for his hand. The theater played the same movie for two months or more, colorful epics that drew hordes of young girls for the choreographed dance routines, and swarms of teenage boys for the battles with ornate swords and sabers. “I can’t understand Hindi,” Norma whispered, but Rey explained there was no need for translation, that the stories were simple. And it was true: the villains were so recognizable they were met with whistles and boos every time they appeared on screen. The heroes were applauded boisterously, of course, and Rey joined in. He took her hands and clapped them together, and in the low darkness, she could see his smile. Norma was uncomfortable and hot, the theater was loud and smelled of sweat and liquor. On screen, the actors chattered incomprehensibly. “Why do you bring me to these places?” Norma whispered.

“Because they exist. Aren’t you curious?”

The movie played continuously and the lights never came on. “All kinds of things happen here,” Rey said, “and all kinds of people come.” He was in the midst of educating Norma about her city. “You live too well,” he’d told her importantly one day. “You don’t know what this place is really like. I’ll show you.”

“That’s cute, country boy. I was born here.”

He’d insisted.

The theater, the dark guts of it, was something she’d never encountered. The people lit cigarettes and threw their butts at the screen, laughing, and the film was as impenetrable as the audiences’ reaction to it: men sang, and women danced, exchanging glances heavy with longing. The audience cheered approvingly when a mustachioed rogue kidnapped a woman, and clapped again when the same man was killed. There were jeers whenever a kiss failed to materialize, and hoots at the svelte, doe-eyed lead, whose silken black hair shone with an otherworldly gilt. Arguments dissolved into song, and the audience came and went from the theater as if it were a waiting room, as if the film were an excuse and completely beside the point. The doors creaked open, washing the screen in pallid yellow light, and she found it hard to concentrate on anything in particular. Language was the least of it: a drunk strummed an out-of-tune guitar in the corner of the theater; in the darkness, a multitude of voices promised to kill him with it.

After an hour, Norma asked to go.

But Rey wasn’t done. He walked her through the dense neighborhoods on the edges of downtown, past turn-of-the-century houses with peeling paint and glassless windows covered with thin, white sheets hooked on nails. Houses that looked like tombs, once-bright colors obscured by layers of soot — finally, heads poking out, always a woman with fierce eyes, craning to see what was happening, what the noise was, who was coming up the street, who was leaving and with whom. Ornamented ladies, grim-faced men, loud packs of boys who wore their sneakers without laces, the tongues flapping out in some strange salute. Neighborhoods like these are networks of impulses, Rey said, human, electrical, biological, like the forest: in the summer, inexplicable carnivals of flesh; in the winter, blankets in the windows and darkened homes. It was winter that day. “They use candles,” Rey said. “Like in the mountains.”

If Norma had known the future, she might have said, “Like we all will, when the war comes to the city,” but she couldn’t know, so she didn’t.

No one knew how bad it would get.

She clutched his hand and pressed close to him as they made their way down the crowded sidewalk. “What’s the forest like?” she asked.

He considered her question, which she had asked more than once simply because she loved to hear him speak of it. “It goes on forever. It’s endless invention, it’s gaudy, it’s gnarled trunks and rotting husks, sunlight peeking through the canopy, and bursts of rain hitting the roof of the forest like tapping on metal. And color, color, color.”

“You don’t sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet.”

Rey smiled. “Can I be both?”

“But you’d rather be a poet.”

“Who wouldn’t?” he said.

They walked on, and Norma only wanted to talk about love. The sidewalks were dirty, and the gutters and the streets, and she was imagining the jungle as he described it: its vastness, its astonishing impurities, its beautiful people and their customs. She didn’t want to see the city, not this part of it, not the ugly part. She was tired, and her feet ached, and on the other side of town, there were cafés and restaurants and parks where people wouldn’t rob you. “Were you always like this?” she asked. “Don’t you know how to treat a woman?”

“This is where we lived,” Rey said, ignoring her, “when we first came to the city.” He pointed at the second-floor window of a green house. “Don’t you want to see it?”

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

His face fell into a sad smile. He was hurt.

“You look tired, honey,” Norma said. “Let’s go home.” By home, she meant the room he rented near the university. She slept there some afternoons, into the early evening, then took a bus to her parents’ house, crawled into her own bed, and stayed up thinking of him. Now Norma pulled close to Rey, stood on her tiptoes to kiss his temple. “Are you still having the nightmares?”

“Not so bad.”

“When are you going to tell me,” she said, “when are you going to tell me what they did to you?”

Now Rey frowned, then caught himself. “When we’re married,” he said.

NORMA HELD Victor until his breathing slowed. He looked at her with needy eyes, then shut them tight. “Are you okay?” Norma asked, but Victor didn’t want to talk. He wanted to sleep again, he said, if he could. “Do you want me to stay here?” Norma asked, and the boy said he did. She lay beside him on the couch, he was thin, after all, and the two of them fit snugly. He buried his face in her side, and she let him be. After a while, Victor was asleep again. She’d wanted to ask him what he had dreamed, but somehow it seemed wrong. In a strange place among strange people, he had the right to private nightmares.

She rose again at daybreak. Without waking Victor, Norma made her way to the kitchen to brew some coffee. She turned on the radio, just low enough that she could hear the crackle and hum of the signal, the morning host’s raspy voice reading the news. They would have to be at the station in a few hours, she and Victor, and God knows what would be waiting for them. Not for her, she was safe, for the boy. Elmer had promised a tearjerker. She looked back into the living room. The boy was still asleep. Even at this early hour, they were planning things for him, even as he slept. It’s no wonder he was having nightmares; it must not be hard to sense your own helplessness. He must have known yesterday at the station, and later, when he darted off the bus. Poor boy, poor family, poor friends that had believed the lie of her affection and sent him here, sent him to her. How do you tell them it’s a show? Lost City Radio is real, but not real. That honey-voice wasn’t something she controlled, it simply was. The morning newsreader, her replacement, droned. He had no charisma. An emergency landing in Rome without casualties, a tropical depression threatening to erupt into a hurricane, the findings of a study about the causes of diabetes. She couldn’t help but think of the ways her reading would have been different, better. Locally, there was nothing: potholes filled with great fanfare, ribbon-cutting ceremonies planned for newly painted buildings, a famous writer caught with a prostitute down by the docks. In Miamiville, an overnight fire had destroyed a house, leaving seventeen people homeless. Faulty wiring, the newscaster read. Then he cleared his throat, moving on — had she heard right? Norma was struck with the image of a smallish house in that district, expelling seventeen people from its flaming shell. Seventeen people? she thought. She sipped her coffee and counted them on her fingers: a father, a mother, four kids, a grandmother who spoke only the old language, an uncle, an aunt, four more kids, a cousin just visiting with his sometime girlfriend, a distant great-aunt’s favorite nephew and his pregnant wife, and how many more? An entire village would be on the sidewalk now, on the streets, Norma thought. They would sleep in the park, all of them, or on the rocky beaches with whatever blankets they had salvaged, with whatever trinkets to remind them of the life they’d once had. It made Norma shudder. They’d shake off the ashes and stay together, they have to: once separated, a family can never be made whole again, not here. They’d disappear like trash scattered in the breeze.

Norma’s own family wasn’t like that, no extended lineages or childhood memories crowded with cousins. No one to disappear on her. Her recollections of family were oppressively small: just her and her parents. She could count their dislike for one another as a separate person, a monster that stalked them, or she could count them each twice: the people they were together — disfigured, unhappy, resentful — and those they might have been if they had not married each other. Or, if she were really intent on expanding the family tree, she could count her father’s mistresses as well. There were a dozen of these well-dressed, dark-haired women Norma’s mother hated and envied, and Norma simply hated. They came and went, changed names and faces, but Norma was aware of them always: their perfume, her father’s guilty grin.

Only Rey had a smaller family: he was the only one left. His mother had died so young Rey scarcely remembered her at all, and Rey’s father, he’d told her, died a few years after they moved to the city. No brothers or sisters. Rey had lived with his uncle Trini after that. But who knew really? He played tricks with the past; he always had. If he is alive, she thought, he might still be at it, even now. That cold, dreary day at the door of his first home in the capital, Rey had insisted they knock, just to see. Norma hadn’t been so sure.

“Do you remember anybody from the block?” Norma asked. “Will they remember you?”

He shrugged. “I’ll tell them I used to live here. It’s no big deal.” He seemed sure that it would be enough. “That, plus my smile, plus this beautiful young lady.”

Norma blushed. The steps creaked as they climbed to the second-floor landing.

Rey made her knock. The door was old, made of wood that had swelled and shrunk and aged with decades of summer heat and humid winters. It was somehow illicit, her being there, on the wrong side of town, knocking on a stranger’s door, visiting the museum of her lover’s early life. She kissed Rey; she knocked again. On the other side, Norma could hear a slow shuffling of feet and the metallic click of a few locks. It seemed the door was about to open, but there was a pause. “Yes?” a voice called out. It was the airy, weak voice of an old man. “Who is it?”

There was silence. Rey grinned, but he didn’t say anything. Norma elbowed him. “Come on,” she whispered. Hadn’t he dragged her up here?

“Who is it?” the old man repeated, confusion in his voice. Rey made a show of zipping his lips. Norma could feel herself turning red, aghast at the rudeness of it. She wanted to laugh. “Say something!” she hissed, but he cupped his hand to his ear as if she were calling him from far away.

She cleared her throat and was about to speak, but Rey covered her mouth with his hand.

“Father,” he said. “It’s me, Rey.”

MIDMORNING FOUND Norma and Victor in the control room, wearing ancient headphones, listening to the sounds of actors straining to imitate the jungle accent. A string of them had come and gone. They had plied Victor with candy and pastries and toured him around the station as if he were royalty. Everything else seemed to have been quickly forgotten. Still, here they were, the red lights on the console rising and falling to the rhythms of the actors’ voices, Len in the sound booth, furiously typing out his inimitably melodramatic scripts. Elmer surveyed the room the way a duke might observe his duchy. Behind the smudged glass, a sad-looking man read about leaving his village to work on the dam, only to have it destroyed in the war. He was an actor, of course. “Bombs!” he shouted. “The sound drowned—” He stopped and coughed into his hand. “Is this right?” he asked. “It doesn’t sound right. Who wrote this?”

Norma cringed. They were on the fifth or sixth take. The actor had Shakespearean training, or so his résumé claimed. Each time he finished, he looked up hopefully at Len, who looked at Elmer, who shook his head. Next take. Norma took her headphones off and sighed. Elmer let the smoke filter from his open mouth. He looked bored. His brown suit was worn to a dull sheen at the knees and elbows. Victor seemed to be enjoying himself though, laughing and even correcting the actor when he mispronounced a word. Now, with her headphones off, Norma felt the true absurdity of it: the actor dove into another take, looking down intently at his text, reading soundlessly behind the glass. Halfway through, Elmer was already shaking his head no. Len tapped the feckless actor on the shoulder. The man put his paper down, and left the sound booth, dejected. Victor laughed.

“The promo’s on in thirty,” called Elmer on the intercom after the actor had been shown out. Len clapped twice. Victor had been told not to touch anything, but he’d never seen a place like this, and obviously his own curiosity was strangling him. He interrupted a few takes by pushing the wrong button. He apologized, everyone except the actor laughed, and then a few minutes later, Norma caught Victor staring at another blinking light, as if daring himself to touch it.

“It’s like a helicopter,” he’d said over and over when they first showed him in. He’d seen them floating in the skies above the village, he said. Drug eradication programs, Norma supposed. He’d drawn a picture and asked his teacher what they were. “There’s an Indian word for it, but I wanted to know the real word.”

“What was the Indian word?”

Victor thought for a moment. “I can’t remember,” he said.

Now the boy played. She could see it in his eyes: the station was a chopper, this control room speeding around the nation, over valleys and rivers, along its coastline and over its deserts. She was dreaming with the boy, and it made her happy to see him distracted. He seemed suddenly young for his age — or was it only that yesterday he had seemed so old?

Len tuned in the station. A commercial for detergent faded out, the sounds of children playing. They all settled in to listen. There was a crackle as it began, then the plaintive sound of a violin emerging from a low, gravelly rumble. The voice-over began:

This Sunday on Lost City Radio…From the jungle comes a boy…To tell a story you won’t believe…It will touch your heart…Bring you to tears…Bring you joy and hope…Hear the harrowing tale of his journey…By foot to the city…And the dreams that brought him here…Can Norma help him find his loved ones…? This Sunday, on a very special Lost City Radio…

Here the violin gave way to nature sounds, birds chirping, water bubbling steadily over smooth stones, and then, the boy’s trembling voice, saying simply: “My name is Victor.”

Len clapped. Victor beamed.

“Bravo!” said Elmer. “Norma?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Are you kidding? He did it in one take! The boy’s a natural.”

Victor fiddled with a knob on the console, and a wave of sound streamed from the speakers, then disappeared. They all turned to the boy. “I didn’t walk,” he said.

“Of course you didn’t walk.” Elmer scratched his forehead and lit another cigarette.

Norma stood up and pushed her chair to a corner of the small control room. “It’s not even possible, is it?”

“It sounds fine,” said Len.

Elmer cleared his throat and sent the boy out with the promise of food just beyond the door. Victor rose without complaint. Len turned the volume down and followed the boy out. The door swung closed behind them.

“What’s wrong, Norma?” Elmer asked once they were alone. There was a low buzz from the speakers, like the sound of a balloon deflating. Elmer ran his fingers through his hair. Norma didn’t say anything right away. He loosed his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. “Talk,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“I’m tired.” Norma slumped back into her chair. “I’m no good at this. He woke up crying this morning.”

“Children cry, Norma. What can you do?”

“That’s it exactly. I don’t know.” She bit her lip. Rey used to cry the same way, used to wake up in a sweat, a fever, a fit. Those nightmares.

“This show bothers you?” Elmer said. He pulled off his suit jacket and draped it over the console, burying the little red lights.

“He didn’t walk, Elmer. And we can’t send him back. We can’t trick him.”

“Norma, you know how this works.”

“Promise me.” She looked him in the eye. In spite of it all, he had a kind face, round and pudgy, an almost featureless softness to it. When he smiled, as he did now, his cheeks bulged, his eyes shrank to a squint. He’d aged, but they’d been friends. Once, on a day when her sadness had been so profound she could scarcely speak, Norma had even allowed him to kiss her. It was after the prison, when everything was lost. This was years ago and so far in the past she could barely remember it.

“I’ll try,” Elmer said.

“Thank you.”

He stood up, fumbled through his pockets for a cigarette. “What will you do with him?” he asked. “Does he talk?”

“A bit,” Norma said. “He seems nice enough.”

“Careful he doesn’t steal anything.”

Norma smiled. “What is there to steal? You don’t pay me enough.”

“Complain to the government, not to me,” said Elmer, cigarette dangling from his lips. “I can’t do anything, Norma, you know that.” He offered her a smoke, but she shook her head.

“Let me look for his people,” she said. “I’ll take the list and go.”

Elmer looked up. “Why?”

“He ran off last night. Got off the bus and ran into a neighborhood down by The Cantonment. Can you imagine how scared he must be?”

“He didn’t seem scared in here.”

“Elmer, you’re not even listening to me. He woke up screaming this morning.”

They were quiet for a moment. Elmer scratched his head. “What did I promise you? A day off?”

“Two.”

“Have you looked at the list?”

“No,” she said. “Have you?”

“Haven’t had time.” He sighed. “We have nothing on these people, you know? Not even districts. Just names. I could guess that they’re scattered somewhere in Newtown, but beyond that, who knows?”

The city was an unknowable thing, sprawling and impenetrably dense, but there were nearly sixty names on the list, and some of them must be alive.

“I’ll have to run it by legal, of course. Vet all the names first,” he said.

“Of course.”

They were interrupted by a rap at the window. Victor had entered the recording booth through the side door. Len stood behind him. The boy waved. Elmer and Norma waved back.

Elmer pressed the intercom button. “How you doing there, kiddo?”

Victor grinned. Len gave a thumbs-up. His voice crackled back a few moments later. “He wants to know when we can leave.”

Elmer smiled at Norma and hit the intercom. “Where does he want to go?”

The boy gave a soundless answer, and then Len was back on: “Every-where. He says he wants to go everywhere.”

“Isn’t that something?” Elmer said to Norma.

“It’s great.” She could see the boy was happy. “It’s wonderful.”

“It’s progress,” Elmer said. “Go on, Norma. Do what you want. It’s not what I had in mind.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I’m not sure exactly. I’m tired of seeing you sad. That’s all. I thought this might be good for you. You’ve been in a rut.”

“It’s not like giving me a puppy, Elmer. He’s a child.”

“I know he is.” Elmer leaned closer. “I thought it might shake you up a bit. I saw 1797 and I thought of you. What can I say?”

“Nothing. You can’t say anything. You never can.”

“What are you talking about?”

She stopped. “I don’t know.”

He threw up his hands. “Norma, can I tell you something?” He sighed. “When I say I care about you, it’s because I do. That’s all. Now, you want to look for his family, that’s fine. Live your life.”

“Thank you.”

Then Elmer asked for the list. She had it, didn’t she? While she searched her pockets for the scrap of paper, Elmer turned back to the intercom. “Bravo,” he said. “You’re a good boy.”

In the recording room, Victor flexed his biceps.

IT WAS Rey’s own fault if she had a hard time letting go. He was into disappearing acts. Before her very eyes, a gun-wielding soldier pulls him off a bus. He resurfaces a year later; “the Moon” is all he says when she asks where they took him. And then, at the door of a second-floor apartment in a squat, green building at the western edge of downtown, Rey resurrects his own father, whom he had perversely killed off, just like that. Why? These things stayed with her, formed into solid structures in her mind: My husband can venture into a war zone and return unharmed. He can, he has, he does, he will again. The dead come back to life. He exists outside death. A strange faith to have, certainly, but was it Norma’s fault?

Rey’s father opened the door and looked his son up and down. Norma stood at one side, feeling uneasy. “Is that you?” the old man whispered. “Is it?”

“It’s me, Father,” Rey said, and the old man seemed not to believe it, seemed not to trust his eyes at all. He reached out and touched Rey’s face, the slightly crooked nose, the dimpled smile, the heavy brow. Rey pushed into his father’s touch the way a housecat might. Norma turned away, suddenly embarrassed, focusing instead on the water-stained wall.

The apartment seemed hardly big enough for one. Everywhere there were stacks of papers rising from the floor, each crowned optimistically with a palm-sized stone to hold everything in place. There were dictionaries everywhere, on the desk, on the coffee table: French-Wolof, English-Russian, Spanish-Hebrew, Quechua-Catalan, German-Portuguese, Italian-Dutch. Norma and Rey sat on the sofa, its springs poking uncomfortably through the fabric, and waited for the old man to bring water. Norma listened to the complaints of the old pipes, a gurgling, groaning sound from deep within the walls. She turned to Rey. “You’re a piece of shit,” she said.

He smiled and nodded in agreement, but she wasn’t joking. She couldn’t grasp the callousness of it: to present his father as dead, then to spring him on her like this?

The old man’s eyesight was failing, but he maneuvered expertly through the apartment. The tray hardly trembled in his hands, and he spilled no water. Rey cleared a spot on the coffee table and, after the old man had refused space on the couch and sat instead atop a pile of newspapers, they each took their mason jar of water and raised it in a toast. “To reunions,” the old man said. They were quiet for a moment, sipping the turbid tap water. Then Rey’s father coughed into his wrinkled hand. The room was dim and moldering. “Where have you been?” he said to his son. “Waiting for me to die?”

There was an odd silence between the three of them. Rey sat still, as if considering what his father had said. Norma blinked away a fly that had landed on her face.

“Well, don’t let’s start there,” the old man said, laughing, and he waved away the question, as if scattering smoke or fog, as if it had meant nothing at all. His face was yellowed and tired, his few hairs combed straight back. His bald pate was severe and pale. “Are you well, son?”

Rey nodded.

“I get by,” the old man said. “And thanks for asking. Do you see your uncle?”

“Now and again.”

It was an interview, and Norma was superfluous. The old man had barely acknowledged her, and Rey hadn’t introduced her. She sat, trying to be invisible, while father and son stared each other down, ping-ponged questions at one another: studies, health, money, distant family ties.

When they seemed to run out of topics, the old man pulled a pack of cigarettes from a drawer and offered them around. Rey took one, and then the two of them were smoking. They held their cigarettes the same way, between their second and third fingers. It looked odd. “You should quit, son,” the old man said.

“I will. You should too.”

The old man nodded. “So who is this pretty young lady?”

“This is Norma.”

The moment called for a smile; Norma did her best. The old man nodded and tipped an imaginary hat. Then he placed his hands in his lap and said, “Child, you deserve better than my derelict son.”

“Don’t fill her head with ideas,” Rey snapped.

“Has he told you?”

“Told me what?” Norma asked.

“That they took him to the Moon.” The old man eyes were gleaming. He shifted on his pile of newspapers, gave her a wry smile. “My son is a wanted man,” he said.

“That’s why I don’t visit you, Father,” Rey said, shaking his head. “You talk crazy.”

“But how long has it been since you saw each other?” Norma asked. As soon as the words were spoken, she regretted getting involved.

They both shrugged, together, as if on cue. “Not so long,” Rey’s father said. “A year. He lived here when he came back. Have you told her?” he asked again.

“Came back?”

“From the Moon,” Rey said.

“I know they took him,” Norma said. “I was there. It was two years ago.”

“You were at the Moon? How romantic: you met my boy at the Moon?”

“No, sir.”

“My son, the terrorist,” the old man muttered. “It’s what you get for talking loud in this country.”

“But I was there when they took him,” she said. Her most private memory: the bus, the vanishing. The long weeks of waiting, of falling in love with a stranger. “I—”

“We’re getting married,” Rey said, interrupting her. “Norma is my fiancée.”

Norma shot Rey a fierce glance. He pinched her leg.

“Aha!” the old man exclaimed, putting his water down. He clapped and smiled like a child presented with a new toy. “I knew there was a reason you came!”

There was hardly any air in the apartment, and barely any light. The smoke had gathered in clouds at the ceiling. Married? The old man seemed genuinely delighted, watching intently as Rey pushed the table away from the dilapidated couch. He bent down on one knee. Norma looked at Rey, at the old man, puzzled, dismayed. Then Rey was speaking, and this was exactly as she hadn’t pictured it: in a cramped apartment on the wrong side of town, in winter, in front of an old man risen from the dead. “Norma,” he was saying, “will you be my wife?” It had been two years since they’d met, and the time had passed so quickly. Rey grinned wildly, the old man clapped, and the totality of it was too strange.

“Yes,” she said, scanning back and forth between Rey and his father. It was the only answer that occurred to her. The walls looked as if they might cave in. Rey’s father was up again. “Spirits,” he called. “A drink!” Norma examined the simple silver ring Rey had just placed around her finger. “Is this just a show?” she asked. “For him?”

“It’s for us,” Rey said.

The old man came back with a bottle of clear liquor, emptied his water into a potted plant that stood wilting next to a stack of books, and beckoned Rey and Norma to do the same. He poured them both generous shots and again proposed a toast. “If only your mother was alive. Have you told Trini?” Rey’s father said. He was talking fast, very nearly running out of breath. The old man was excited. “When will you have the ceremony?”

“We don’t know, Father.”

The old man squinted. “Will I be invited?”

“Of course!” Norma said.

“Of course,” Rey added.

Things were happening that Norma didn’t understand. The old man poured some liquor onto his handkerchief, and cleaned the lenses of his glasses with it. “Let me see that ring,” he said. Norma held her left hand out, and the old man shook his head. “I see your career is not so lucrative, son.”

“I should have been a poet like you,” Rey said, and the old man laughed. They raised their glasses again, and everyone smiled.

“But child,” the old man said, turning to Norma, suddenly serious. “If you’re smart, you won’t take this name of ours.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

The old man and his yellow skin; the old man and the crooked teeth of his yellow smile. His lonely, wrinkled face. The room full of smoke. “This is no time to play dumb, child.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Rey said. “My father’s talking crazy.”

In the control room, years later, Elmer scanning the list: “Norma,” he said abruptly. “We have a problem.”

“I love you, Norma,” Rey said.

Those nightmares, Rey, where do they come from? What did they do to you?

“Our name is tainted, child.” The old man bit his lip and looked down. “I did my part, and my son has done his. I promise you: you don’t want it.”

“And I love you, Rey.”

The boy rapped on the window. He pressed his face to the glass and puffed his cheeks out. He was a beautiful boy.

“Norma, I’m sorry,” Elmer repeated, “but we have a problem.”