Lost City Radio

ELEVEN

DURING THE summer of the eighth year of the war, a radio personality at the station where Norma worked disappeared. The authorities denied any involvement, but the rumors spoke of treason and collaboration with the IL. His name was Yerevan, and it shook everyone who knew him. Quiet and unassuming, of slight build and mottled complexion, Yerevan was a confirmed bachelor who lived for his radio show, a twice-weekly late-night classical music program. He taught a class at the university as well, specializing in the development of Western music after the discovery of the New World. He was popular and well liked among the students.

For a few weeks after his disappearance, there was a clamor. Yerevan and the station’s director had been very close, and so the radio was un-characteristically bold in his defense, broadcasting hourly proclamations of Yerevan’s innocence and demanding his release. Groups of university students kept vigil in front of the station. Fans of his show came as well, and there was a strange feeling to the demonstrations. An unlikely cross-section of the city had been assembled: aficionados of classical music, students of history and art, late-night shift workers, various insomniacs and shut-ins. Most had never seen the accused, but all knew his voice well and admired his keen taste and encyclopedic knowledge of the music. It was, as far as protests go, a joyful gathering. A string quartet, laid off from the recently dissolved City Orchestra, played for the crowd one evening at the hour Yerevan’s show would have aired. The radio, in an inspired decision, carried the performance live.

In spite of all this, Yerevan was sent to the Moon where he surely received the kind of welcome that Rey had survived nine years before. Two weeks passed, and Yerevan was not heard from. Everyone expected the worst. It was no secret by now what sorts of things happened to those who disappeared. He had been, in the year or so prior to his disappearance, a friend of Norma’s. She had recovered from her fear that night of the first Great Blackout, and proven her mettle on more than a few occasions. She was on the air now with some regularity, though the cult of her voice was not yet what it would become. Norma often stayed late at the station, editing pieces for the following morning’s news hour and, when her work was done, she liked to visit Yerevan in the sound booth. The soothing music was a draw, as was his quiet good nature, but mostly, she liked the feel of the room. It was the heart of the radio, and this was before she had become disenchanted with it all. She loved this place, the hum of its machines, its light and music and motion. A few times, she had produced the show, patching through calls from listeners who wanted to request a song or simply speak with Yerevan about music. There was a looseness to it that Norma liked: it was late night, and so there were fewer time constraints. Yerevan was content to let his callers talk, Norma happy to listen, and in these moments, she felt that the radio might actually serve a purpose.

What made the episode so curious was the revelation, a few weeks after Yerevan’s sudden disappearance, that there was, in fact, some truth to the rumors. Some of the callers, it was said, had been speaking in code. Norma, after consulting with Rey, went to discuss the situation with Elmer, and he admitted that the station director was afraid. It was, Elmer said, worse than they had previously suspected. The station had indeed been infiltrated. A search had been ordered for tapes of Yerevan’s recent shows.

“He was IL, Norma, and no one knew,” Elmer said. “What could we do?”

Norma had spent many hours with the accused, had monitored the calls, chatted good-naturedly with people she assumed to be music lovers, but who, in actuality, might have been terrorists. She’d even been on the air a half dozen times, introducing songs, discussing music with Yerevan. Had she implicated herself?

“Should I be afraid?” she asked.

Elmer nodded. He was thoughtful and capable, and it was universally assumed he would one day be director himself. “You can stay at the station for a while. We’ll make room for you and you’ll be safer here.”

That night, her exile began. It would be a month before she would go home again. The next day, the radio abruptly canceled any further protests, and even went so far as to ask the army to disperse those Yerevan supporters who remained. The forces of order complied enthusiastically with the request, and so dozens of students and music lovers and night-shift workers and even a few unfortunate passersby were beaten and then arrested in the lot adjacent to the radio. For an hour or so, there was a pitched battle, with stone-throwing and tear gas spreading in great, sickly clouds across the avenue. Many of the employees of the radio gathered in the conference room to watch the events from the broad windows, and Norma was among them. She had slept there that night, quite uncomfortably, in the same conference room where she would meet Victor eleven years later. Her neck hurt badly. She watched the battle, as they all did, without comment, foreheads pressed against the window, looking down. She was grateful for the tear gas: through its fog, there were intimations of great violence, but she was spared the sight of it. The battle had erupted in the middle of the day, but the station’s director decided to omit any mention of it from the news. He felt, quite justly, that his job had become far too dangerous. Within the year, he would authorize a report obliquely critical of the interior minister and pay for this mistake with his life. Elmer would happily replace him.

This was the sort of country it had become.

In 1797, it should be noted, Yerevan was not missed at all. Classical music was thought of as foreign and pretentious. The only fan of his show was the village priest, who had, by this point, been dead four years.

WHEN HIS only son was born, Rey was in the city, only vaguely aware that his mistress was due. These were the days when Norma was a prisoner of the radio station. They spoke on the phone four times a day, and each afternoon, he made a trip to the radio to see her. His life in the city, his life as a husband and scientist, was all-consuming; whatever had or might soon happen in the far-off jungle, Rey couldn’t fathom. In the here and now, he was worried about Norma. She wasn’t handling the stress well. She was losing weight and, when he saw her, she worried aloud that her hair was falling out. “Stay with me,” she asked him one afternoon, a week into her exile. Her eyes were red and puffy. “Stay with me tonight.”

They were drinking instant coffee in the conference room: the sun was setting, the mountains and the city below shone orange. Norma had a beleaguered look to her; her day was just beginning. She slept in the mornings now: a few days into her internment, the station director, at Elmer’s suggestion, decided to put her on the air overnight. Yerevan’s slot had to be filled. “It’s not like you’re sleeping well,” Elmer had said, and it was decided. These were the dead hours of radio, but, to everyone’s surprise, Norma had been inundated with calls, requests, advice, gossip. She played mostly romantic songs and, in between, let the people talk freely. The night before, as Rey prepared for bed in the empty apartment, he had listened to his wife’s voice and then dreamed of her. It was beautiful, narcotic, lulling, and he wasn’t the only one who thought so.

“It’s lonely here,” Norma said. “The entire place is empty. Just me and the watchman.”

“And the callers.”

She sighed. “And the callers.”

He took her hands in his. “They love you.”

“Can you stay?”

Her on-air shift ran from eleven to four in the morning, so Rey had time to go home and change before her show began. He made dinner for both of them, prepared an overnight bag, locked up the apartment, and was back at the radio at ten-thirty. The station was already desolate. They drank more coffee, strong and sugarless, and Rey could tell she was happy to have him around. A few minutes before eleven, they went to the control room, chatted for a few minutes with the evening host. He was short and thin, an awkward, prematurely white-haired man who had always had a crush on Norma. When he had packed his things and left, and they were alone, Norma threw her arms around Rey’s neck. An old ballad played, the record slightly warbled, the guitars falling in and out of tune. She kissed him. By the time the record ended, they were both unclothed and laughing. Norma strode across the studio, picked up the needle, and let the song play two more times before she began her show.

IT WAS a gift to be able to separate so thoroughly the two halves of his life. When he was home in the city, he rarely thought of the jungle, except in an academic sense: the mysteries of plant life, the demands of the climate, human adaptation to its exigencies. Sometimes an image from the cool heart of the forest: the mossy black trunk of an ancient tree, the white stones along the river’s edge, water-carved into the most fantastical shapes — and this was all. Not the people he knew there, or the woman who had beguiled him. His trips to the rain forest included a similar kind of disassociation: an hour or two outside the city, when the raw and disordered slums had disappeared and the road wove up into the still-uninhabited hills, Rey felt himself cleansed of worldly responsibilities, going backwards in time, a man returning to a more innocent and purer state. Outside the city, he never went by Rey. So complete was his transformation that the sound of his own name, his city name, had no effect on him beyond the limits of the capital.

He made his first trip to the jungle soon after returning to the university. It was a purely scientific expedition, before Trini’s murder changed his mind, a trip made under the guidance of a potbellied old professor who spoke three Indian dialects and walked the halls of the university chewing medicinal roots. The students were charged with writing technical descriptions of plants they found — about the sticky texture of the leaves or their acid smell — and they pressed samples into the pages of heavy books that the professor had brought for this very purpose. The jungle had seemed to Rey, from books, from conversations, from photographs, to be the exact opposite of the city where he had lived since he was fourteen. Uncharted and unknowable, a universe where the rules were still being ironed out and fought over, it was the frontier, and its draw was powerful. This was the first year of the war. Later, when Elijah Manau traveled the same paths, the jungle was already part of the nation — there were schools and roads maintained, at least in theory, by the state — but when Rey went for the first time, travel involved riding atop a truck or bartering with a villager for a canoe ride along the muddy rivers. They encountered natives, who spoke only their own impossible language. They washed in sweet-water rivers, and slept in hammocks, and instead of sleeping, Rey would stay up, eyes closed, listening to the rising and ebbing sounds of the forest, certain it was the most beautiful place he had ever heard.

The land belonged to whoever claimed it, and in those days especially, the dense forest was an ideal place to disappear, to hide from the eyes of the law. As the war progressed, the government would learn to keep an eye on those who came and went from the nation’s jungle regions. There were men who moved weapons and men who transported drugs. There were money men who bribed police officers or army captains or village chiefs. There were scouts who cased bridges for bombing, and men who pretended to be loggers or traders or even wandering musicians. And there were men like Rey, who left the city as credentialed students or scholars and who, somewhere along the way, became other people, with other names. These were men who never carried guns, men charged with something much more valuable: information.

He never saw Marden again. But by the time of the Yerevan episode, Rey and the man in the wrinkled suit had been seeing each other, off and on, for almost nine years, like furtive lovers: nine years of meetings at bus stops, of purposefully vague conversations and random duties, enough for Rey to come to know his contact, insofar as one could know a man like that. He came to recognize the man’s muted expressions of worry, the way his weight fluctuated with the intensity of the conflict. There were times when Rey’s contact looked positively ill, with unshaven, sunken cheeks, slack expressions, and unruly hair. As an agent, he was frighteningly transparent: days later, something, somewhere in the city, exploded, and by the next meeting, Rey’s contact had regained some air of calm. Then it began again. In nine years, they had even met socially, at various dinner parties where they had been introduced as strangers and played the part convincingly, exchanging a few polite words before studiously ignoring each other for the rest of the evening. Even Norma had shaken his hand once or twice; had commented, after a party, as she undressed in the blue darkness of their apartment, on the coldness of Rey’s contact, his unfriendly, unsmiling greeting. Rey felt compelled to defend him, but of course, he did not: he pretended not to recall — what was his name again? They were even colleagues of a sort: in different fields, at different universities. After the first Great Blackout, which had taken Rey and the entire city by surprise, their meetings were monthly, and the tasks so mundane it was possible for Rey to believe the war had nothing whatsoever to do with him. He left envelopes in trash cans, wore a bright red shirt and sat in a windowed café at an appointed time, or made calls to pay phones, never saying much more than an address to whoever picked up on the other end. His days as a well-known student leader were long past. He was invisible now. After returning from the Moon, he had never again made a speech, or spoken of politics in public, save for his aborted confession in the darkened bar the night of the first Great Blackout. Besides the man in the wrinkled suit, Rey knew nobody in the city who was involved. He had been as surprised as anyone to discover that Yerevan was a sympathizer. For years, Rey had thought of the war and his own involvement in it as an intimate act. Of course, he knew there were other people participating, but he never thought of them, never wondered who they were, felt no kinship with these mysterious and invisible allies. He didn’t read the paper much, except for sports, and gleaned what he knew of the war’s progress from the increasing militarization of the city streets. And he went home each night to Norma, who had decided to believe her husband kept no secrets.

In the jungle, where his mistress was preparing to give birth, it was the rainy season: the skies alternating between a deep blue and a dark, purplish black. The river had swelled, as it did every year, flooding the fields at the edge of the village. Rey never liked the rainy season: he found the consistent downpour overwhelming, dreary, in sharp contrast to the rest of the year, when the rain came in spurts, brief and violent showers that passed in the course of half an hour, followed by bright and garish sunlight. Travel, never easy, was nearly impossible during the rainy months. The roads were muddy, and the jungle violently overgrown. He had once spent ten days trying to travel a dozen kilometers between a town and a camp hidden in the forest. The jungle was crawling with secretive men. In the rainy months, it was all too gloomy.

In a city hospital, the boy would have been weighed and washed by white-clad nurses, held and inspected by doctors, showed off by a proud father passing out cigars. 1797 was not the city. It was a place with its own rituals, though, at this late date, with the war having bled the town of its men for more than half a decade, one might say the celebration accompanying Victor’s birth was half-hearted at best. That year, another eight young men had left to fight. Five would not return — another five names on the list Victor would take to the city eleven years later. The town was in no mood for celebrations. In the old days, a feast would have been prepared and a tree felled for a bonfire, but everything had changed, even the blessings: the standard incantation now asked specifically that the child be protected from bullets. It was common among young mothers to observe that their boys were only on loan to them from the armies.

One tradition had remained, in spite of the war, and it was the only one Adela insisted upon when Rey returned to 1797 six months later. He was sent into the jungle for a night, to ponder his child’s future with the aid of a psychoactive root. In its hallucinatory sway, Rey was assured, all kinds of truths would be revealed. He went unwillingly, but felt he owed it to the mother of his child, whom he had mistreated in every other way. He hadn’t been present at Victor’s birth; but then, no one expected this of him. He hadn’t helped choose the boy’s name, hadn’t been there to hold Adela’s hand or take the baby to his chest and feel the infant’s warmth. Rey had promised his father a grandson, but when it finally happened, he was unaware that his promise had been fulfilled. Rey’s father would never know. When Victor was born, Rey was at the radio station in the distant, gray city, half-clothed and asleep in an armchair in the sound booth.

That night, while Victor slept against his mother’s breast, Norma hardly answered the phones. She was content to let the songs do her talking for her, content to watch her husband sleep in the chair across from her. His presence calmed her. Around three in the morning, though, her strength was fading, she’d had her fill of coffee, and she decided to take a few calls, just to help her stay awake. What did she expect? One of the usual suspects: someone lonely or grieving, a man or a woman who found themselves unhappily and unwillingly alone. On a night like this, the radio felt like a public ser vice. She had acquired more than a few admirers in her brief run as Yerevan’s replacement, and she was not immune to pride. What harm could come from flirting now and again with a caller? They told her she was beautiful, or that she sounded beautiful, and was there really a difference? It was the middle of the night, the sound booth still smelled of sex, and she was happy. Norma patched through a few calls, listened with some interest as a woman described the confectionery her grandfather had once owned downtown. “It’s all gone,” the woman said with a sigh. She spoke with unhinged nostalgia, enough for Norma to suspect she’d been drinking. She was afraid to go down there now, the woman told Norma, afraid of what, if anything, had replaced her grandfather’s candy store. What if it was boarded up? What if there were squatters living there — a family of those mountain people?

Norma did not judge, she didn’t stop her. “Be nice,” was all she said. She played a song, then took another call, and was not surprised when a man’s voice announced that he’d been trying to get through all night.

“Well, now you’ve found me,” Norma said. “You’re live on the air. What can I do for you?” She played a jazz record in the background: something with strings and a bluesy trombone.

“You can’t do anything for me,” the man on the other end said. “Shouldn’t Yerevan’s show be on the air now?”

They had all been advised not to say his name on the air. She began to say that Yerevan was away on vacation — this was the line the station was using in emergencies — but something made her stop: the abrupt tone of the caller, perhaps, something in the sound of his voice. She shouldn’t have asked, but she did: “Who’s this?”

“Never mind who this is. The question is, who was Yerevan? An IL dog. That’s why you can find his body in a ditch by the Central Highway. This is what happens to terrorists.”

Before Norma could respond, the line was dead. She sat there for a moment, scarcely breathing. The jazz record stopped, and it was ten seconds before she gathered the presence of mind to play another. She grabbed one at random and put it on with trembling hands. It began too fast: she’d set the wrong speed. A horn squealed, a voice crept unpleasantly into the higher register. Meanwhile, the phone lines were lit up, every last one of them. She stared helplessly at the blinking red lights. Rey didn’t stir until she had called his name for the third time.

“MUSIC ONLY,” Elmer said when Norma called him at home. “Music only until I get there. No phone calls, not on the air or off.”

So she sat with Rey, and they played cheerful pop songs and said nothing. Under different circumstances, he might have sung for her, but instead, they put on one side of a Hollywood record, a musical, and went to the conference room. It was a clear night, just past three in the morning, that hour when the sleeping city seemed like the inside of a dimly glowing machine. They could see, from the radio’s high, broad windows, the coruscating grid of lights below: the Metropole and its blinking neon sign, the strings of orange streetlamps along the avenues, each pointing toward the center of town. From this vantage point, it did not seem an unpleasant place to live — no fire in the hills, no blackout. The shanties, in this light, might not be shanties at all. Norma and Rey could squint and imagine it to be an orderly city, like any of hundreds that exist in the world. They stood together, holding hands, and there was very little that could be said. The Central Highway ran over the mountains in the east — you couldn’t see it from here. Yerevan was somewhere along that road, in a place where he would surely be found.

Elmer arrived within the hour, looking harried and sleepy. “What are you doing here?” he said to Rey, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “It doesn’t matter,” he said and turned to Norma. “Tell me everything.”

Everything was very little. In a sentence or two, it was done: Norma sketched the voice, its dark timber, its tone of menace and violence. This was all. Yerevan, dead. Yerevan, IL. “Is it true?” she asked. “Do you think it’s real?”

Elmer nodded.

Rey watched and listened without a sound. He didn’t like Elmer, this pretend tough guy with a slouch and a paunch. He had the faraway gaze of a gambler who rarely wins, of a man who staggers home to punish his family for his own shortcomings. Rey almost smiled: he was exaggerating. There was no violence in Elmer. Rey could, if he wished, tell this man certain facts. He could tell him about the Moon, for instance, or he could speculate with some accuracy about the nature of Yerevan’s final hours. Nine days before, just after the rumor of Yerevan’s involvement had first surfaced, Rey had met his contact and asked what was being done for “our friend at the radio.”

Rey’s contact, the man in the wrinkled suit, had smiled wanly and taken a sip of his coffee before answering. “There’s very little to be done once a situation has reached this point.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t expect our friend will be on the air again.”

Rey nodded, but his contact was not finished. “The same would go for us, should it ever come to that.”

Now Rey watched Elmer pace back and forth across the conference room. Norma sat slumped in her chair, frowning. “People heard,” she said. “The phone lines lit up.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Elmer said. He rubbed his eyes. “They want us to raise a fuss. That’s what they expect. We can’t fall into that.”

“It’s done, though. People know.”

Elmer shook his head with a great and exaggerated slowness. “They’ll come for you, Norma, if we say anything.”

Rey understood then that they weren’t going to say anything, that Yerevan was going to disappear completely. Tomorrow, by the light of day, a peasant farmer would come across the corpse somewhere on the Central Highway. The war had been going on long enough for none of this to be a surprise. The farmer would be afraid. He might go to the police — not for answers, just to wash his hands of it — and they would promise to investigate and dispose of the body themselves. They were not paid to ask impertinent questions. Of course, more than likely, it would begin and end with the farmer. If he was a religious man, he might bury the body himself, or see to it that the body was well hidden behind a rock or in a ravine where no one would stumble upon it again. He would be too afraid to speak of it. Not to his wife or his best friend. Not at Mass on Sunday, when he went, head bowed, to confess all his sins of omission and commission. So Yerevan would lie there, for a day or a week or a month. Forever, if Elmer had his way. It would be the easiest and most convenient, to forget.

“Does he have a family?” Rey asked.

Elmer shook his head. “Mercifully, no.”

God bless him then. Rey had been saved by his family. By Trini. He would probably be dead otherwise, and no one had ever had to explain this to him. It was clear and frightening. In two weeks, Rey would see his contact again and ask, though he knew the answer, if Yerevan was dead.

His contact gave him a look Rey hadn’t seen in many years. It said, Why are you wasting my time?

There was a roundup underway, Rey’s contact said after a moment. Yerevan was just the beginning. Already a few operatives had disappeared. Rey listened to the dire speculation, and he meant to shrug; and by shrugging, Rey intended to convey something very specific: that he was tired, that it had gone on very long, this war, that he understood better than most that it couldn’t go on forever. Rey meant to imply that he wasn’t surprised at all: Yerevan, a sympathizer, had given up perhaps the one name he knew, and this man or woman had been picked up, and then…Rey had no illusions; he himself would have talked at the Moon, if only he’d had anything to say. The things they must have done to poor Yerevan. The torturers had had nine years to hone their skills.

But Rey did not shrug. Somehow, he felt too tired and defeated in that moment to muster even that simple gesture. Instead, he asked his contact, the man in the wrinkled suit, what it meant. “For us,” Rey said.

“We don’t know,” the man said. “We won’t know until it happens.”

Then they were silent while a couple walked by, arm in arm: the woman had tilted her head onto her boyfriend’s shoulder, and he walked with the regal confidence of a man who knows he is loved. She had a thin waist and long legs, and had maneuvered her right hand into her boyfriend’s back pocket. Rey felt intensely jealous, for no reason at all he could think of. His son was fourteen days old.

“We won’t see each other for a while,” Rey’s contact said. He briefly outlined some instructions for the coming months. Rey would be going to the jungle. He would have to be careful, more careful than before. Rey accepted it all with a nod. Then his contact stood and left. He didn’t pay the bill, nor did he offer much in the way of good-bye.

SIX MONTHS later, his boy was at that age when children begin to acquire a personality. It was miraculous. The rainy season was over, and Norma was home again. Yerevan had never been found, and the up-roar had faded almost completely. Some arrests had been made, but Rey felt certain that most were not IL at all, but those on the periphery: the students and laborers and petty criminals that fit a profile. An unlucky worker caught with a mimeographed flyer, a young woman who asked for an inappropriate book at the central library. They would be tortured, and some would die, but many would be released and swell the ranks of those too angry or too bitter to remain mere spectators of the conflict. In this manner, the war grew.

Now Rey was in the forest again, the city distant and almost unreal. His mistress strode barefoot across the wooden floor, and Rey watched the boy’s limpid, gray eyes as they tracked his mother across the hut.

“He can see!” Rey said.

Adela smiled. “Of course he can see.”

But Rey hadn’t said it correctly, or rather the words were not nearly precise enough: He did not mean to denote any ordinary kind of observation. It was something altogether new — how do you explain it? The boy, with his new eyes and unblemished personhood, was seeing. It was discovery, it was revelation. The boy peered into the unknown with the intensity of a scientist, and Rey felt immensely proud. He despaired at his own inability to explain. The boy can see! Rey thought again, and he felt his heart pounding. Maybe Adela had already become accustomed to the miracle: the boy pointing, his first finger, pudgy and minuscule, reaching out into the world; the boy, curious and undaunted by the size of the universe. The startling perfection of the child. Rey held his own finger in front of the boy, and Victor took it to his mouth, inspecting its texture with his gums.

They walked through the village that afternoon, for the first time, as a family. It was such a haphazard place: clusters of raised wooden huts, thatched roofs. Rey received the good wishes and hearty congratulations of a dozen men and women with whom he’d never shared so much as a word. He was prepared: a few phrases from the old language were all that was required. They appreciated him for trying. They laughed at his accent. They kissed the baby and moved on.

That evening, his first in 1797 since he had become a father, Adela sent him out into the forest to complete his ritual duty. Rey noted the name of the root in his notebook; he was, after all, still a scientist. The root was mashed into a paste, and Rey spooned it with his finger into his mouth, rubbing the mixture on his gums. It had a bitter, acid taste to it. He interrupted to ask questions, but no one answered him. A few minutes passed, and his face felt numb, and then he couldn’t taste anything at all. Adela kissed him on the forehead. The baby’s lips were pressed against Rey’s. “Now off you go,” Adela said. The old women who guided him into the woods were silent. They led him to the bank of the river, where the trees grew thickly, where tendrils of moss hung down over the skin of the water. The women left him, and he sat in the darkness, among the trees, waiting for something to happen. In his mind, he replayed the image of his boy, chasing movement with his little eyes, and the thought alone was enough to make him smile. Through the canopy of the forest, he could see the sky dotted brightly with stars. It was a moonless night. He closed his eyes and felt a throbbing against his lids, an incipient wave, now a shot of color. He thought of the war, his great and unforgiving taskmaster; he thought of its weight and its ubiquity. Everywhere but here, he said to himself. The trip was beginning. It was a hopeful statement and, of course, wholly untrue. The war, in fact, was right there, just over the next ridge, in a camp he would visit in just four days. Rey felt the divide between his lives disintegrating: at home, Norma was, at this hour, missing him with an almost animal intensity. He could guess that and he could, without much effort, reciprocate. For the first time ever in the jungle, he thought of his wife. Maybe it was vanity, to suppose that she needed him. She would never forgive him if she knew. He touched his damp forehead and reasoned it was the root, its dark magic beginning to loosen the tether of reality. Rey took off his shoes and then his socks, and stepped gingerly into the eddies at the river’s edge. The water was cool and calming. He stepped out, took off all his clothes now, and waded in again, this time to his chest. The water was all around, doing marvelous and inexplicable things to him: tiny, pleasurable pinpricks of cold all over his body. There were dazzling colors hidden behind his eyelids. My child, Rey thought, what of my child? The boy will grow up in this place, and he will never know me well. He will inherit this war I’ve made for him. Rey took a deep breath and sank below the water’s surface. He held his breath until his mind was blank and everything was still, then he rose and breathed, and then he did it again. He felt colors — to say he saw them would be inexact — he felt them all around, a fantastic brightness bubbling within him: reds and yellows and blues in every shade and intensity. He held his breath and felt he was drowning in a pool of orange. It was thrilling and terrifying and shed no light on his son’s future. He exhaled purple into the water: he watched himself blow clouds of it, like smoke. After an hour in the river, he got out, stood naked on the shore, and pondered the stars. He dressed, so that he wouldn’t catch cold. Periodically, stars fell from the sky, great waves of them in blinding cascades of light forming shapes: animals, buildings, faces of people he’d known. He tried to recall what he was there to accomplish. He pulled on his silver chain, put it between his teeth, and chewed on it until the metallic taste was too much. He crawled to the river again and rinsed his mouth. And then his face, and then he was in the water again, fully clothed this time, singing, whistling, drenched in electric colors.

A few hours later, he was sifting dirt through his fingers, trying to recall the name of a movie he had seen once as a boy. In his mind’s eye, a leggy blonde floated across the screen. An hour after that, he was asleep.

In the morning, the women went for him and brought him back to the village to feed him. He was groggy and sore. All this was duly noted. Already Rey was being followed, his movements, moods, and physical condition recorded by a mole recruited in the village. Three days later, he left for the camp where he was to meet a man he knew only as Alaf. The mole recorded Rey’s departure and speculated about which way he was headed. It was a guess, but a good one: that the man from the city was headed down the river and over the ridge. Some days, when the wind was right, the mole had heard shooting. There was, he felt certain, something noteworthy happening in that vicinity.

TWELVE

THE PORTRAIT was spread on the coffee table, its frayed edges held down by coasters, and Victor could hardly stand to look at it. He didn’t feel curiosity at all toward this man, or rather, toward this drawing of a man. A few seconds was enough to decide his father was an unremarkable-looking human being. He had a full head of whitish hair, and eyes and ears and a nose in all the conventional places. Maybe the drawing was no good. It certainly showed little imagination on the part of the artist: just the flat expression of someone caught unawares, looking sleepy. In the drawing, Rey did not smile. Victor squinted at the face. He had no memories with which to compare it. He didn’t speculate about any resemblance, and this was just as well: there was none.

Norma asked Manau to repeat what he’d said.

“That’s Victor’s father,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”

A dark silence descended on the room. Norma sank back into the couch, and her face turned a watery pink color that Victor had never seen before. She didn’t cry, but looked straight ahead, nodding and whispering to herself. Many times, she began to say something but stopped. All the quiet was discomforting. Victor felt the need to be somewhere else. He expected his teacher to say something, but Manau, too, was silent. Norma took another look at the drawing and then at him, until Victor felt the unpleasant heat of being scrutinized. She reached for him, but he was suddenly afraid. These people did not stop disappointing him. “Victor,” Norma said, but he backed away from her.

This time, he didn’t go to the street, but out of the room, through the only door available, into the kitchen. Norma and Manau let him go. The door swung open, startling the woman Victor supposed to be Manau’s mother. He was suddenly in another, warmer world. She dropped the spoon she’d been holding, and it fell into a pot on the stove. She gave Victor a careworn smile, then gingerly fished the spoon out. She held it before her, and it steamed. “Are you all right, child?” she asked.

Victor didn’t feel the need to answer the question, nor did Manau’s mother seem to expect a response. In fact, she took only a small breath before continuing. Victor pulled a chair from under the table, and before he’d even sat, she was talking, in her aimless way, about Manau and the sort of boy he’d been: “…So nice of you to come visit your old teacher because you do seem like such a thoughtful young boy, and I know Elijah had a difficult time there, but he himself was so kind when he was young and that’s what must make him a good teacher. I don’t care what the exams say. He’s such a nice boy, always was, there was a dog he took care of, just a street mutt, but he combed its hair and taught it tricks, and I dare say that people have always liked him, God is merciful. You do like him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Victor said.

“Oh, you are a good boy, aren’t you?”

A moment later, she had served him more tea and placed a bowl of soup before him. There was a beautiful piece of chicken, a drumstick, poking out from beneath the surface of it. His mouth watered. She wiped a spoon against her apron and laid it beside his bowl. Victor didn’t need much more urging, and he didn’t need the spoon. He attacked the submerged piece of chicken, wondering briefly if this was bad manners. It didn’t matter. Manau’s mother had her back to him, rinsing some plates in the sink, prattling on breathlessly about something or other: her husband, she said, was away on business. He drove trucks filled with electronics — had Victor noticed the box of plastic calculators just by the front door? “They come from China,” she added with great admiration, and he liked the sound of her voice. “Your mother is very beautiful,” she said. He had picked the chicken half-clean.

Victor looked up. It took him a moment to process, to understand. He wondered if it was worth explaining. “Thank you,” he said, when he had decided it wasn’t.

“WHAT IF,” Norma had once asked her husband, “what if something happens to you? Out there, in the jungle?”

It seemed naïve and ridiculous now, but she remembered asking him just such a question, something just as clueless and trusting. Maybe she’d never wanted to know. Rey had smiled and said something to the effect of “always being careful.” There were now, of course, multiple and unintended meanings of being careful. He had not been careful, she thought. He’d gotten some jungle woman pregnant and then most likely gotten himself killed. Then there was this boy and these ten years she’d spent alone, praying hopefully that her innocent husband would stumble out of the forest, unharmed. Did she even believe that? Had she ever believed it? She was, Norma realized, one of those women she’d always pitied. Worse, she was her own mother: a few details altered to suit different times, and still, an exotically costumed but quite conventionally deceived woman. Old school, uninteresting, common. And as alone as she had ever been. The moment, she felt certain, called for some explosive act of violence: for the rending and tearing of some heirloom or photograph, the destruction of a meaningful item, some article of clothing, but she was in a foreign and unknown house, on the other side of the city from her apartment and all the artifacts of her years with Rey: bizarrely, she was struck by the image of a burning shoe. If she were someone else, Norma might have laughed. She wanted, from somewhere deep inside her, to hate the boy. She closed her eyes; she listened to her own breathing. Manau hadn’t stirred; the poor man had no idea what to say besides his repeated apologies. It wasn’t clear any longer what he was apologizing for. For this bad news? For this drawing and all its implications? I should ask for details, Norma thought. I should needle him and see what he knows, but already the moment had begun to pass. The boy was off in another room, and she was alone in a strange house with this stranger and this portrait and this news.

“Is there anything I can do?” Manau asked.

She opened her eyes. “A drink?”

“There’s none in the house. My mother won’t allow it.”

“What a shame,” Norma said.

“It’s why my father is never here. Should we go somewhere?”

Norma shook her head and managed to ask if he had anything else to tell. “Not that this isn’t enough.”

“No,” he said. The quiet dragged for another moment, then Manau asked if they would stay the night.

Where else would they go? There was nowhere left in the city. She said something vague about being alone, then felt embarrassed as soon as she had said it. This was hardly the time for confessionals. Already this Manau knew things about her life that she herself had not known only minutes before. There were, she imagined, places in the country where no one knew her name or her voice, somewhere in the unsettled wilds of the nation, a place the radio had never arrived, where she could blend into the landscape, embrace spinsterhood, and live quietly with her disappointments.

“We’ll stay,” she said with a nod. “Did everyone know this but me?”

“In the village? No, only a few.”

“But they all knew my husband?”

“Sure,” Manau said. “Adela — Victor’s mother — she told me he came three times a year.”

“Sometimes four. He was working on…” Norma trailed off. What a helpless feeling. “Oh, it doesn’t matter what he told me, does it?” she said, her voice cracking. What hadn’t he lied about? This other woman — Norma very nearly retched at the thought, some jungle tramp fucking her Rey, their bodies pressing together, their sweat, their odors. Their pleasure. She covered her eyes. She couldn’t speak.

“I’m not happy,” Manau said. “I didn’t want to tell you this.”

“And I didn’t want to hear it.” Norma peeked through her fingers.

He nodded, and bowed his head, staring into his lap. “They love you in the village, Miss Norma.”

She took his hand and thanked him. “This drawing,” she asked. “Where did it come from?”

“There was an artist who came to the village. Years ago.”

She looked back at the portrait. “His hair is so white,” she said. She couldn’t remember if he had looked this old when she last saw him.

Her head hurt. She meant to ask for an explanation, but didn’t. Or couldn’t. A muffled voice came from the kitchen.

“He didn’t make it, did he?” Norma said.

“Madam?”

“He didn’t survive. I’m asking.”

“You don’t know?” Manau said.

“Isn’t it obvious by now that I don’t know anything?” It took all the calm she could muster not to yell it.

“They took him. It’s what Victor’s mother told me.”

“They?”

“The army.”

“Oh,” Norma whispered.

WHEN REY returned from the jungle after meeting his newborn son, he had resolved to end his activities. He hadn’t seen his contact since Yerevan was disappeared. It was all too exhausting. He felt, for the first time, that he had brought home some of the forest with him, something affecting and real, a germ, a curse. His life — his lives, their carefully maintained boundaries now breached, seemed overwhelmingly complex. He found himself thinking of the child the way a father ought to: with pride, with impressive and unexpected swells of love clouding his thoughts at the most inopportune moments. More than anything, he wanted to share this illicit joy with Norma, and this shamed him. What right did he have to be happy? Still, these things cannot be helped: they are biological, evolutionary. He wished he had a wallet-sized photograph of the boy — to show whom exactly? Strangers, he supposed. On the bus, he could pretend he was a real father, that he’d done nothing wrong. On more than one occasion, after a deep yawn, he explained to a passenger in the seat beside him, always a woman, that he was exhausted because the baby had been up all night. He said it knowingly, nonchalantly, or tried to. He liked the way the women smiled at him, the way they nodded and understood. They spoke of their own young ones, then pictures were shown, and good wishes offered. At home, he and Norma made love every night; at his insistence, they returned to the debauched and beautiful rituals of the first days of their pairing: sex in the morning, before dinner, before sleeping. Norma was happy, they were both happy, until some dark thought intruded and he remembered the kind of man he was, the kind who would lie and make mistakes and one day bring home a child from the jungle to be raised in the city. It was what had to happen: his son would have to be educated. He couldn’t very well leave the boy to play in the dirt, could he? But he and Norma would have their own child first, Rey decided optimistically: the two of them, and it would be wonderful, and in this way, she would forgive him.

At the university one day, he decided to take a walk. It was between classes, an hour and a half when he might have stayed in his classroom reading or correcting papers, but it was a nice afternoon, breezy, with skies that could be mistaken for clear. There were students about in packs, and it struck Rey that he could scarcely remember his own days as an undergraduate. It hadn’t come easy — he remembered that. He spent a year trying to get in. He did three years, then went to the Moon, returned a year later to resume his studies, and the two parts of his higher education seemed altogether unrelated. He met Norma, he met the man in the wrinkled suit, and this pair had changed everything he thought he knew about his life. Now Rey wandered off campus to the avenue, and then to the corner just past the university gates. There was a newsstand there, and a crowd of young men reading the headlines with hands in their pockets. Rey bought a sports paper, scanned the headlines. A rust-colored car idled at the corner, the radio blaring through the open windows. The driver wore mirrored sunglasses and tapped the steering wheel with his fingers. There was a girlie magazine open on the dashboard. Farther along, beneath a tattered awning, a man in a green vest sold puppies. He had a half-dozen in a single cage atop a slanting wooden table: eyes shut, tiny, the puppies awoke yawning, pawed around, and fell back asleep. The little beasts were putting on a show. A crowd of children had dragged their mothers to see them. A black-haired boy nervously poked his finger through the wire cage; an obliging puppy licked it sleepily, and the boy squealed with pleasure. Rey stood to watch, newspaper under his arm. He was watching the children, he realized, and not the puppies. I’ll bring my boy here, Rey thought. Why not? I’ll get him a dog. Various images of domesticity played out before him, and he smiled. Just then, a man tapped him on the shoulder. “Uncle,” a voice said.

The man had the boyish face of a high school senior, probably didn’t even shave yet, but something in his manner of dress was wrong. “What are you reading, Uncle?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’ve you got there?” the young man asked, pointing to the newspaper.

“Sports. Why?”

The young man frowned. “Let me begin again.” He pulled a badge from his pocket and flashed it, just fast enough that Rey could see its glint. “ID, please,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t make a fuss in front of the kids.”

“Oh,” Rey said, “is that what this is?” He smiled. These undercovers were getting younger and younger. He’d become accustomed to this, and never again would he make the mistake he’d made the night he met Norma. Just show them something, that was the rule now, show them anything. They weren’t looking for you, because if they were, they’d already have you. Rey took his wallet from his back pocket, made a show of taking out his university ID. “No fussing in front of the kids. And how old are you?”

“I’ll ignore that.” The undercover looked the ID over and nodded. “I thought it was you, professor. Trini was my captain,” he said, handing the ID back. “Come with me.”

“Trini?”

The undercover nodded.

“Do I have to?”

“You should.”

They walked together a ways, down the avenue past the next intersection, where the neighborhood began to change. Rey was determined not to pay attention to the cop. The clouds had thinned, and it was nearly sunny. A child craned his neck out of a second-story window of a dilapidated tenement, gazing wide-eyed at the street. Rey waved, and the boy waved back. The building was in such disrepair, it seemed held together by the clotheslines of its unfortunate residents. The boy ducked behind a curtain, returning a moment later with a stuffed teddy bear. The bear and the boy waved together.

Rey and the officer turned at the corner onto a nearly empty, unpaved street. A woman dunked her clothes into a bucket of water. She didn’t look up at them. They were blocks from the university now. “What’s this all about?” Rey asked.

The undercover scratched his temple. He pulled out his badge again and handed it to Rey. “It’s real, you know. You might show me a little respect.”

Rey shrugged and returned the badge.

“I knew your uncle. He trained me and I served under him. Before they turned on him.”

“And?”

“And I owe him everything. I loved that man. He was good to me. So I’m doing him a favor.”

“By following me?”

“By warning you.”

“I live within the law.”

The cop was just a kid. “All the good guys do.”

“Trini did.”

“Are all of you this rude?”

“All of us?”

“You know what I mean.”

Rey frowned. “I swear I don’t.”

“Listen, I’m just telling you what I know. I saw your name on a list. I saw both your names.”

Rey looked up. “I haven’t used that name in years.”

“Good. Don’t. Some people on this list are no longer with us.”

They had come to the end of the street. They doubled back. The woman was finished washing her clothes. She coughed as they walked by, and approached meekly to ask for money. She followed them for a bit, with an extended hand, but there was no conviction in her voice, and the young detective shooed her away. When they were back to the avenue, the undercover began to turn away from the university. “You were at the Moon, weren’t you?” he asked.

Rey nodded. “Years ago.”

“It’s busy over there these days. You don’t want to go back.”

There was nothing to say to that.

“Trini deserved better,” the cop said.

“We all did,” said Rey. “The world owes us.” He thanked the young man. “See, we’re not all rude.”

“It’s good to know. Be careful, that’s all.” The young man held out his hand, and Rey shook it. They turned in opposite directions down the avenue.

“MOTHER,” MANAU said, “you’re boring him.” He stood at the door of the kitchen, arms folded. Victor had the bowl of soup at his lips. A chicken bone lay on the table.

Manau’s mother blanched. “Now Elijah, don’t be rude.”

“The soup is very good, madam,” Victor said.

Norma patted him on the head.

“Your boy is so polite,” Manau’s mother said to Norma. “Not like my son.”

“Mother.”

“Thank you, madam,” said Norma.

Manau’s mother smiled sweetly. “Will you be staying then?”

Norma said they would. Manau’s mother nodded and went off hurriedly to prepare a bed. They would sleep in Manau’s room, of course. Norma didn’t even have a moment to answer. Then it was the three of them, in the kitchen. The boy had finished eating. He hadn’t touched his spoon. He turned his chair toward Norma and Manau, and the two adults sat. What else was there to do?

“Do you want to know about your father?” Norma asked.

The boy nodded. She couldn’t recall with any certainty how much time had passed: had it been a year or a day? Had the boy aged, or had she? There was nothing of her husband in him, or nothing that she could find: he was young still, and perhaps that was it, but his thin face and dark skin didn’t seem at all like Rey’s. He had small lips and smooth cheeks. Rey’s eyes had been hazel green, and this boy’s eyes were nearly black. Was it even true? Norma took a deep breath. None of it was the boy’s fault. She wanted her voice to come out steady. “The night I met him,” she began, “he was taken from me by some bad men. They hurt him and then they gave him back to me. I always knew they could take him again. He was very handsome, I thought so, and very smart, like you. He must have loved you, if he sent you to me.”

Manau cleared his throat. “Your mother told me. It was a few months ago. She wanted you to meet Norma one day. She didn’t expect that day would come so soon.” He looked down at his feet.

Victor rubbed his face. “Okay,” he said.

“This is too much right now. Isn’t it?”

The boy had nothing to say.

“It is, it is,” Norma said. “I left the station this morning, you know. They’re looking for us.” It wasn’t clear whom she was talking to. Norma stood and turned away. She opened the refrigerator, peering inside absentmindedly, inhaling its chemical coolness, and closing it again. I should climb inside, she thought. Shut myself in and die.

Her bones hurt.

“They won’t find you here,” Manau said. “They won’t look for you here.”

“Who’s looking for you?” Manau’s mother said. She had just walked in.

“No one,” Manau said.

“It’s complicated,” added Norma.

Manau’s mother looked hurt for a second. “I can see no one is tired here,” she said after a pause. She put her hands up. “Won’t you three help me with something?”

Norma, Manau, and Victor followed her out of the kitchen and into the dining room. There was a neglected, half-empty cabinet of glassware, and a sliding door with a long, slanting crack across its face. Beyond it was a square patch of grass no more than two meters across. A light was on outside, and Norma could see the small yard was well tended. She gave Manau’s mother a smile, this precious woman. She smiled back and pointed at the table, where an unfinished puzzle was spread out on a white piece of cardboard. Dozens and dozens of missing pieces were piled in each corner. Norma leaned over the still-forming picture: there were yellow buildings and a mountain beginning to take shape in the distance. A palm tree or two sprouted in the foreground.

“What’s this?” Norma asked.

Manau’s mother handed her the box. Of course: it was the Plaza in the Old Quarter. A few shoeshine boys sat on the steps of the cathedral. A woman in a sundress strolled with a parasol, to guard against the bright sunlight, and, in the center, a brass band with trumpets raised high played what was certainly a patriotic song. Norma could have been there the very day this picture was taken. It was easy to forget that the city had been beautiful once, that its elegant plaza had once been the beating heart of a nation’s capital.

“I just love puzzles,” Manau’s mother said.

They all sat down, Victor with his knees on the chair, and each took a handful of puzzle pieces to sift through. It was brilliant, Norma thought. This woman was brilliant. Norma wanted to weep. She stared down at the table. The puzzle suddenly absolved them of the need to speak, and they fell quickly into the rhythm of it: examining a piece, its colors and textures, scanning the box to see where it might fit. Her city as it had been once, the city where she’d fallen in love with Rey.

Manau’s mother took the box. “I grew up here,” she said to Victor, pointing with her pinky, down a side street that came off the plaza. “Just three blocks away.” She smiled and ran her fingers through her white hair. “It was just a village then.”

Norma’s mother had always called it a village, too, as in, “Your father has slept with every tramp in this village…” But so much had changed. As a girl, Norma had walked the four sides of this plaza. It didn’t exist anymore. For most city residents, its name evoked not this image from the not-so-distant past but something more recent: a great massacre that had occurred in the final year of the war. On Sundays, as a girl, Norma would go there with her father to watch the marching bands. It was a tradition in those days: a casual crash of a cymbal, and the city dwellers looked up from their reverie, and everything was put on hold. A half-dozen musicians and a conductor, quite presentable in a black suit, passing a hat through the crowd. Once, after a particularly rousing number, a conductor had taken the flower from his lapel and placed it delicately behind Norma’s ear. With a broad, gap-toothed smile, he announced the next song, and dedicated it to “a princess.” He said those exact words! She was nine years old, with pale skin and pretty eyes. She wore a dress with yellow flowers on it, and they were all looking at her. Then her father whispered that she should curtsy, and she did, to the appreciative applause of the gathered crowd. Even now, nearly forty years later, she was nodding to the crowd, thank you, thank you, color gathering in her cheeks.

BACK HOME, they had played games, too. Different kinds: they ran into the forest and hid there. They imitated the frantic music of the jungle animals and frightened the girls. Those were happy memories. The kids took turns reinventing the stories the old people told: about fires and wars, about rivers that changed course in the middle of the night, about Indians who spoke a language even older than their own.

These were strange times. Victor was among strange people. He had never asked his mother about the city, and there was no one else he would have trusted. Plenty of people told stories about it, but they had no way of knowing. Once, Nico returned from a trip to the provincial capital with his father and said he had seen a magazine from the city. Some of the younger kids didn’t know what a magazine was; Nico used the word for book. “But with more pictures,” he explained. “Pictures of the city,” he said, and everyone wanted to know pictures of what exactly. Describe it. Tell us — they were all dying to know. Nico said little. He was coy, almost smug. It was the way he drew a crowd to him, with a sly smile, always holding back, and he began his list: photos of wide streets, shiny cars. “Asphalt,” he said importantly, and the children nodded. Powerful factories, noisy machines, crowded parks — wait.

“Noisy machines?” Victor asked. He couldn’t help it. “What does a picture of a noisy machine look like?”

Nico grabbed one of the smaller boys by the shoulders and shook him. “Like this,” he said. Everyone laughed, even the boy. He was just happy to be included.

“What else?” Victor asked.

Nico frowned, and continued his list: churches, plazas, trains. These were just words, and they were all impatient for something more, something exactly right, something new. By the time Nico said “tall buildings,” the children, Victor first among them, groaned. Of course there were tall buildings — wasn’t it a city? Everyone had heard of those.

Nico laughed. “Oh, yeah, you know all about the city, don’t you?” He looked right at Victor. Nico picked up a stick. “Draw it then.”

“Draw what?”

“The city.”

Victor smiled. “You can’t draw a city.” He started laughing and, to his surprise, everyone laughed with him.

“Yeah, Nico. You can’t draw a city,” they echoed. They stretched the word out, let it linger: draaaaaaw.

But what if he had? What if you could? This is not what he imagined: not these people, not this house. Not this puzzle, not the radio, full of light and metal. Not any of it: not Norma and her mystery, not the image of the father he didn’t remember, not the list of names, the commercial, or the woman selling bread and cursing them. Draw the city: dark and dense, a knot that can’t be untied. Tall buildings, indeed. Shiny cars — he hadn’t come across one yet. Victor closed his eyes and yawned. It was the night of the longest day he could remember. He knew enough to know that it was cold outside.

In his life, Victor had told three lies that he considered important. The first, to his teacher, not Manau but a previous one. Victor cheated on a geography test — everyone had looked at the maps his father had left. He had let them; they were the only maps in town. With the passing of time, this transgression seemed less and less significant, but he could, if he tried, still recall the anxiety of that day. The second, to Nico: I don’t remember. Victor had said it with his jaw set, stern, so convincing he almost believed it himself. Swear, Nico said. Promise. And Victor did, without hesitation, though the memory of tadek never left him alone. The third, to his mother: do you remember your father? she’d asked him once, and there seemed, from the way her voice quavered, from the dull sadness in her eyes, to be only one correct answer. She pulled him to her when he nodded, and began to sob. She couldn’t have believed him.

THE WAY Rey figured it, this was the problem: you did not quit the IL — how could you, if you had never joined it? If its existence was not acknowledged, not even between you and your contact? The situation was alluded to, as if it were something that had sprouted, wild and unbidden, from the earth. It was remarked upon, shaped indirectly by your actions, but this fact you could not admit to yourself or to anyone. You read the news and, like all your countrymen, shook your head in dismay at the downward spiral of events. You didn’t allow yourself to feel responsibility for any of it.

Even at this late date, some nine years into the war, there were a few adventurous newspapers and radio stations that raised doubts as to whether any organized armed insurgency existed. It might have been shocking to hear if it hadn’t been so commonplace. Bogeymen, they said, created by the government with the transparent aim of manipulating a terrified population. Camps in the jungle — the very camps Rey had visited? Hogwash, aerial photographs doctored in a lab. The IL, they said, was shorthand for the many varieties of rage loose within the borders, an unrecognized complaint given voice, lumped together by the powers-that-be beneath one unseemly umbrella. It represented the inability of the governing and literate classes to comprehend the depth of the people’s unhappiness. Every angry young man with a rock in his hand — was he a subversive? The learned analysts scoffed at the notion, as if such a thing were unthinkable, but Rey listened and thought to himself: Yes. They are, every last one of them. Whether he knows it or not, that young man is doing our work. Our plan includes him, just as it included me even before the IL had a name.

Over the years, Rey had developed an intuitive understanding of the plan. Coordinated attacks on the more vulnerable symbols of government power: remote police outposts, polling places in distant villages. A campaign of propaganda that included the infiltration of newspapers and radio stations; the maintenance of camps in the jungle for arms training, in preparation for an eventual assault on the capital. Meanwhile, in the city, kidnappings and ransoms, in order to finance the purchase of weapons and explosives facilitated by supporters abroad. Daring prison breaks to impress the average man. No one had ever shown him a manual, nor did Rey know who decided which targets would be destroyed. Communiqués were signed simply THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE and appeared on city streets suddenly, as if dropped from the skies. The violence was ratcheted up: encircle the city, instill terror. The campaign depended upon military escalation from the forces of order, drew strength and purpose from the occasional massacre of innocents, or the disappearance of a prominent and well-liked sympathizer.

What did it all mean?

Consider the improbability of it: that the multiple complaints of a people could somehow coalesce and find expression in an act — in any act — of violence. What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement? Yet Rey had been a party to this for nine years. The war had become, if it wasn’t from the very beginning, an indecipherable text. The country had slipped, fallen into a nightmare, now horrifying, now comic, and in the city, there was only a sense of dismay at the inexplicability of it. Had it begun with a voided election? Or the murder of a popular senator? Who could remember now? They had all been student protesters, had felt the startling power of a mob, shouting as one chorus of voices — but that was years ago, and times had changed. No one still believed all that, did they? The war had bred a general exhaustion. It was a city of sleepwalkers now, a place where another bomb hardly registered, where the Great Blackouts were now monthly occurrences, announced in vitriolic pamphlets slipped beneath windshield wipers like shopping circulars. The government retaliated every fortnight with its army of poorly trained boy-soldiers, one or two died in the crossfire, and partisans took to the streets, filling the long avenues and clashing with riot police, before racing home to listen to descriptions of themselves on the radio news the same evening. Marches became riots of predictable fury, buildings burned while firemen watched, and so on and so on.

“Do you hate them?” his contact had asked early on, and when Rey said he didn’t, the man in the wrinkled suit shook his head. “You read too much poetry, young man. Be certain they hate you.” This was nine years before. Even then the soldiers fired into unarmed crowds. Even then anyone paying attention should have known what was coming. But they had stepped together into this chaos, the insurgency and the government, arm in arm, and for nine violent years, they’d danced.

The war, Rey hoped, would be finished before his son was as tall as a rifle.

He’d met these boys in the camps. Fourteen, fifteen years old. He met them on the same trip when he met his own son. They came from out-of-the-way places plunged in some craggy forested valley or balanced on a rocky promontory or stranded on a barren patch of desert. Places like 1797. They wore hard, expressionless faces, and were not concerned with what bullets could and could not accomplish. They did not expect to die. They all hoped to see the city one day. They told stories about it, spoke of marching down the wide avenues in formation, of being received as liberators. It was what the commanders had told them to expect. When? they asked. Soon. Next month. Next year. When military equilibrium is achieved. What does equilibrium mean? We’ll take the capital, the commanders said, and the boys repeated it to Rey, and he could tell they believed it. Meanwhile, they practiced making bombs in the jungle. None had even the cloudiest sense of what the war was about, and none had ever asked. They were happy to be out of their homes. Once a month, they marched into some town to kill a priest or burn a flag fluttering above a police outpost. They ambushed a military convoy on a bridge and shot at boys their own age, boys who came from towns much like theirs. They were paid in cash on good months, but in a pinch, they accepted promissory notes to be redeemed when victory was achieved. And so Rey, the man from the city, heard one question most of all from these eminently practical young men. “Sir,” they said. “We are winning, aren’t we?”

At first, he didn’t understand. Then it was clear they had money on their minds. “Of course,” Rey reassured them. “Of course we’re winning.”

In the city, it was impossible to speak of the war in those terms. Rey thought of it now as a race to stay alive. If he could survive until the weapons were laid down, if he could live to see that day, then his mistakes could be atoned for. When he saw Norma each night, and saw that she loved him, he despaired. He was most afraid of being alone.

There were quiet months when the war went on without him. Rey left on his single trip to the jungle and returned. He met his boy and dreamed of him and sulked guiltily around the apartment. He made love to his wife and bragged of his child to strange women. He was warned to put it all behind him, and this, finally, was what he intended to do when he met with his contact ten months after Yerevan had disappeared.

It had become a year-end tradition in the press to speculate about peace talks. It was all over the radio and the newspapers. Of course, it was impossible: the IL had no visible leaders, so who would represent them? No one expected it to happen, but they spoke of it because it made them feel better. It was no different when Rey and his contact met at a bus stop in The Settlement that December, near the hills that rose to the southeast of the capital. Rey was never afraid to meet his contact: the city was infinite, designed for hiding in plain sight. They walked to a dingy little bar that was really a poor family’s living room. Christmas lights were strung along the ceiling, intermittently casting splotches of faint red and green light. They sat at a wobbly wooden table and drank instant coffee. The owner stood behind his counter, listening to the radio and thumbing through an old newspaper. Beyond the bar, from the dimly lit room that comprised the rest of the house, Rey could hear a baby crying. He was anxious to say it: I’m out, I’m done, it’s finished, let the war go on without me. It was what he needed to say, but it stuck in his throat. The air was smoky, and then Rey’s contact announced he was going underground. It came as a shock. “And you should too,” he said. “From now until the end.”

“The end?”

Rey’s contact smiled wanly. “All good things must come to a close eventually.”

THIRTEEN

THE GOVERNMENT had not survived nearly a decade of rebellion without learning a few things about defending itself. Mainly, it had learned how and when and on whom to inflict great pain. Everyone talked eventually. Suspects were brought to the Moon every night and submitted to savage and primitive police work: if they were too strong, or if they had nothing to tell (it was still difficult to know the difference), they were flown by helicopter to the sea and tossed, flailing, into the murky waters below. Others were placed in the same tombs Rey had survived. Some of these suspects were released, and many others were buried in the dusty hills. By current standards, Rey’s stay had been luxurious.

In addition, and perhaps more important, eyes and ears had been recruited throughout the country — no easy task in a nation as large and ungovernable as this one. In the city, an army of street persons was paid to sift through the domestic trash of various suspicious men and women. This work had yielded a surprising number of arrests. Neighbors were encouraged to turn each other in, with cash rewards distributed discreetly to those who supplied useful information. Outside the city, progress was being made as well. In nearly every regional capital, and even in some remote villages, people were in place; people who, for a relatively small sum, could keep an eye on the strangers who passed through. They traded in gossip and insinuation, but were occasionally quite useful.

In 1797, this man was Zahir. He was typical of these ersatz agents: not naturally suspicious, or particularly inclined to support the government, and as far as the war was concerned, relatively indifferent to its outcome. Like many, he probably believed it would never end, with or without his minor involvement. He was, however, a conscientious father and husband, and therefore happy to accept the small but consistent monies offered, for the good of his family. His simple mandate was to keep an eye on things, and this was something he would have done anyway: as one of only a handful of fighting-age men still left in 1797, Zahir had come to consider himself the man in charge. Unlike the others who had stayed, he was not a drunkard, or dim-witted, and was generally liked by the towns-people. He was a married man with a daughter and a son and a small, unproductive plot of land. Zahir considered his new position — secret though it was — a ratification of his own opinion of himself within the village. Most people in 1797 probably didn’t know Zahir could read.

By the time Rey’s son was born, Zahir was an expert of sorts on the strange men who passed through the village and into the forest. They stopped to rest for a day or two, usually worn out, and by the way they carried themselves, Zahir could tell they were not from the nation’s tropical regions. He took spare notes about their demeanor, wrote down bits of overheard conversation, speculated about the origins of their accents. Their faces betrayed an exhaustion buried deep within, and this was their common trait.

There were few books in 1797 when Zahir was a boy. Once, a traveler passing through left a crime novel with the village as a gift. It caused a sensation. There was an elder who knew how to read, and he took it upon himself to share the novel with the boys. He read it aloud over the course of a month, and Zahir fell in love: there were detectives who wore hats and men who smoked in every scene; there were busty women drinking in out-of-the-way dives, and the odd appearance of a gun waiting to fire. The city it described was full of hoodlums and shiny cars and blind alleys where brave men fought with knives until only one was left standing. Nothing could have been more exciting. Zahir had loved its dark tension, as had all the boys his age, and so the reading of this book became a yearly event until the elder who organized it passed away. The novel itself was lost, or perhaps the village buried the book with him; Zahir couldn’t remember. By then, his schooling had already ended.

When he became an informer, Zahir thought of this book for the first time in many years, and was struck, as if by a distant love. His reports, he decided, would be like that novel, but to his dismay, they never came out quite right. The village was full of a darkness, a furtive movement that Zahir found impossible to explain. And the strangers: it was not enough to guess where they came from, where they were going. He wanted to capture the faces of these men, but no matter what words he used, they never seemed quite suspicious enough.

Rey, by virtue of his repeated visits, was the first man Zahir was able to describe reasonably well. He thought little of it, did not at the time consider it to be a betrayal of any sort. It was practice: this stringing together of words, these syllables lining up, and with them, an image taking shape. He wrote and rewrote it, labored until it was perfect, and though he was proud of his writing, Zahir didn’t think it was worth showing anyone, at least not yet. Who was this man anyway? Like everyone else in the village, Zahir saw the coquettish way that Adela spoke with the stranger, and neither approved, nor disapproved. It simply was. The man was nice enough, always polite, though not talkative by any stretch. He came three times a year, sometimes more. He spent his time with Adela, and then left for the forest. They said he was a scientist. Of course, no one in 1797 knew him as Rey.

The next month, when Zahir traveled to the provincial capital to turn in his report, he brought with him, in a separate pocket, his description of Rey — three carefully edited pages in which Zahir noted the color of his skin, the shape of his smile, the timbre of his voice, and in which he had invented a story for the stranger to inhabit: the man was IL, a leader, a guerrilla. He had invented tire-burning, he murdered police officers for sport. Zahir transcribed a confession that had never taken place, and these sections of dialogue were, he was certain, the best writing he had ever done. Of course, he wouldn’t show it to the government man, but Zahir liked knowing that he could. These meetings always made him nervous.

Zahir arrived in midafternoon, after traveling all day. It had rained throughout the night. The office was off a muddy side street, not far from the center of town, but then nothing was far from the center of town.

“Anything?” the government man asked after they had completed the requisite pleasantries and complaints about the heat. He had never given his name, but the man was nice enough. He was from the city. He leaned back in his chair. His dress shirt was undone and soaked through with sweat.

“It’s all there, boss,” Zahir said.

The man looked through it — there were only two pages — and frowned.

“Is it all right?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, and please don’t take offense. How much schooling do you have?”

“Sir?”

“School. How much did you do?”

Zahir reddened. No one had ever asked him such a thing. With the priest dead and the mayor gone, he might have been the most educated man in the village. “Four years, sir,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “If you count what the priest taught me, five.”

The government man nodded. He was a light-skinned man with a bad complexion, but when he smiled, there was something very gentle about him. He smiled now, and motioned for Zahir to sit. “I like you, you know that. You work hard. I’m embarrassing you. Don’t be that way. Listen…Well now…Out with it: I have a gift.”

He opened his desk and retrieved a small book. “I had this sent for you, from the city.”

It was red and small enough to fit in Zahir’s pocket. He flipped through it quickly and saw that the print was very small, smaller even than the Bible the priest had shown him once. Zahir had never seen a book like this one before. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing. It’s a dictionary. You’re very sharp for a villager,” the government man said, “and I thought you might enjoy it. It has words, along with what they mean.” He handed Zahir an envelope, then placed his palms flat on the desk and stood up. “I recommend you go to the market now. Prices only go one way around here: up.”

“Thank you, sir,” Zahir said. He stood and bowed. His heart was pounding in his chest. Had he been made fun of? There was prickly heat on his skin, and he was sweating. With a flourish, Zahir put the dictionary in his breast pocket and smiled. “I have something for you as well.”

“Do you?”

The stranger, Zahir thought. Why not? He was suddenly quite hopeful. He pulled the papers from his pocket, unfolded them, and passed them to the government man. “It’s about one of the strangers. One of the men who comes to the village.”

“Does he have a name?”

Zahir told him Rey’s other name. “And he’s a scientist.”

The government man examined the text. He read it slowly, the edges of his mouth creeping toward a smile, then looked up. “Now this we can use,” he said, beaming. “My dear man, you’re a poet. I knew you were.”

Later, Zahir would look up the word. He knew what it meant, of course, but he wanted to know exactly what it meant, and he would memorize the wording of the definition, and repeat it to himself, just for the sheer pleasure of the sound. A poet. That night, he would tell his wife, and she would not understand. She would pretend to sleep, but he would not believe her, and though the children would be asleep on the other side of a thin curtain, he would tickle her until she giggled, and then he would make love to her.

“Can I keep this?” the government man asked.

There was no going back. “Of course, sir,” Zahir said.

He took his money and left into the relative bustle of the provincial capital. There was a tiny bar at the corner, and he treated himself to a drink. Then another. Zahir drank by himself and looked up words in his new book: village, city, money, war, love. He had another drink and then another, and looked through his new book until it was too dark to see. When he left, it was nearly dusk, the clouds beginning to gather for the evening rain. A breeze blew, and the heat had subsided. He felt light-headed.

He found it in the market, on his way to wait for the truck back to 1797. The government man was right: prices only went up. Rice and dried beans and potatoes and yucca brought from the mountains, each month incrementally higher. In the village, there was always silver fish. Salted, boiled, fried. And plantains; and they made do, didn’t they? Zahir saw it then: a black and shiny machine worthy of — what was it the man had said? — oh yes, a poet. It was a radio, and it played gaudily, loudly from a stall at the edge of the provincial market. It shook him. He went closer. It had been years since he’d heard such an exciting sound.

“All stations,” the salesman said, turning the knob lazily — static, music, static, voices, music, static.

Zahir couldn’t help but grin.

“First payment today, you take it home in six months.”

He gave away his money without hesitation. And it kept him up at night: for half a year, he worried that he’d been swindled, but each month, when he went to collect his money, the salesman was still there, and the radio still played, and it lost none of its power to impress him. Where’s the money? his wife asked, but he never told her. I’m investing, he said. He wrote more and more with the help of his new dictionary and eventually got up the courage to ask the government man for a little raise. In six more months, he would own the radio, he would carry it home with him wrapped in a blanket wrapped in a plastic bag to protect the machine from rain. He had just enough money. He made calculations in his head. Six more months until he would shock his wife and his son and his daughter and the entire village. He would take his seat among the bags of rice aboard the back of an open truck, he would carry the apparatus against his chest as one might carry a child. The idea of this moment filled him with hope. I am a man in the employ of the government! I am the mayor of this town! And he was — who else would want such a task? Later, when the IL returned and took his hands, and Zahir could no longer farm or write, the canteen owner extended him a generous line of credit, on which he and his family survived for months. Then the rainy season came, and with it, a sense of despair Zahir had never felt before, and there was no war by then and no money available for faraway spies. The government man would not help him; in fact, he must have returned to the city, because the office was boarded up and inhabited by squatters who spoke an impenetrable dialect. Zahir asked around the provincial capital, but no one seemed to remember the government man at all. Inevitably, Zahir fell behind on his payments, and he canceled his debt to the storekeeper with this same radio, and on that day, he wept. He missed the war, he said to himself, those were the good old days. He gave the dictionary to his boy and told him to study hard, but Nico was never one for school. One day, when his teacher, Elijah Manau, reprimanded him for not completing his homework, Nico dropped the little red book into the river just to watch it sink.

IT WAS the tenth year of the conflict, and Rey’s contact had gone underground. Among the literate classes of the city, fear had become recklessness. Those who could flee were already gone. Yerevan had been dead for twelve months, not spoken of for nearly that long.

Rey and Norma were invited one summer evening to a dinner party at the home of a prominent socialite. She was a stylish woman of considerable wealth, who had married a man handsome and vapid enough to be elected senator. They owned a stake in the radio station. It was said that they had secretly pushed for the director to be eliminated after he made some controversial statements, and had handpicked Elmer as his successor. The senator, it was widely assumed, wished to be president. He had survived an assassination attempt four weeks before, in the first week of the new year. The radio had obligingly portrayed him as a hero, and this was his celebration.

They had to pass security twice to enter the party: once at the front gate, where the cab dropped them off, and then again, at the door. There were off-duty policemen in the foyer, one in each corner of the great open room, and one stationed at the foot of the staircase at the far wall. It was a pastel-colored wonderland, this party, full of charming men and well-dressed women. A soft, inoffensive music could be heard just beneath the sibilant chatter. There was something anachronistic about so much wealth: the very place smelled of money, and Rey said as much to Norma.

“Let’s be worldly,” she whispered. She had spent more than an hour getting ready for this night. Her hair shone, and she was beautiful. “Let’s pretend.”

The hostess greeted them warmly, apologized for the security. She gave no impression of knowing who they were, nor did she question their presence. She smiled with well-bred elegance and shuffled them off toward the drinks. Norma led Rey through the crowd. They saw Elmer, standing in the center of a tight circle, holding forth on the war and its meaning. As the newly installed director of the radio, his view on the state of the nation was quite sought after. He nodded at them both, but Norma pulled Rey on. A dark-skinned man in a tuxedo poured them drinks.

“At least the drink is strong,” Rey said to his wife.

She kissed him, then leaned into him and finished her drink quickly. When she kissed him again, her mouth tasted of liquor. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she said. “We’re celebrating.”

“Are we?” He took a sip of his drink. “The senator’s brush with death?”

“Not that.” She asked the bartender for another drink, then clinked glasses with him. “We should say hello to Elmer.”

Rey frowned. “I’ll wait here.”

It was petulant, and he regretted it immediately. But Norma didn’t mind; she pinched him and stuck her tongue out. She went off into the maw of the party. He admired her confidence, and couldn’t describe this mood he felt. Fearful? Anxious? It was noisier than he would have expected from a crowd like this. He stood by the table; he saw Elmer’s circle raise a glass to his wife. There was a smattering of applause. He should have gone with her. He was remote, and in this crowd, more alone than he had been in many months. When he thought no one was watching, he stirred his drink with his pinkie, then downed it.

“Ah, a connoisseur!” Rey looked up. A red-haired woman was smiling at him. “You’re Norma’s husband, aren’t you?” the woman asked him. When he nodded, she added, “She’s going to be a star.”

“She is,” Rey said, a bit unsure.

“Give me one just like his,” the woman said to the bartender. “But I’ll stir it myself.” She winked at Rey.

The woman was part of a group of people who had come to refresh their drinks. They all knew each other and looked familiar as they jostled good-naturedly for the bartender’s attention. It was early still, but already the woman was glassy-eyed and drunk. “Join us,” she said to Rey with a languorous wave of her hand. “We’re talking about…Oh, I don’t know. Gentlemen, what are we talking about?”

“The world? The war?”

“Life?”

“Oh, all of it,” the redhead said. “Everyone, this is Norma’s husband. What was your name?”

“Rey,” he said, and they all nodded approvingly, as if his were a special, accomplished name. “What a voice your wife has!” said a fat man. He smiled mischievously. “Does she…Pardon me, I’ve had a few and I shouldn’t ask, but I simply must know…Does she talk dirty?”

Rey was too stunned to answer.

“Gentlemen, I remind you this is mixed company!”

The fat man nodded at the redhead. “My apologies,” he said with a slight bow. “You’re a tough bitch.” Everyone laughed. “But sir, her voice is really quite marvelous.”

The rest agreed and offered congratulations, and someone brought him another drink. He drank it quickly. The lights, Rey decided, were too bright in this grand room.

He stood at the edge of the circle, and soon they had forgotten him again. They were indeed meandering from topic to topic: the price of shoes, the strange weather, the awful traffic just before curfew. Occasionally, the name of someone dead or missing surfaced, was lamented briefly, and then dismissed.

At one point, Rey heard his contact mentioned by name.

“What became of that one?” the fat man asked. “I haven’t seen him in ages!”

How long has it been? Rey thought to himself.

The redhead said he was on sabbatical. He had gone abroad, she said, to Europe. She was very pale, almost somber as she said it. Rey nodded; was she lying or had she been lied to?

“Who?” Rey asked, pretending.

“Oh, you know him,” the woman said. She looked familiar, though Rey was sure they had never been properly introduced. She was a physicist at the Tech, Rey thought, but couldn’t be sure. Was she IL?

“I took him to the airport myself,” she said.

The fat man shrugged. He took off his jacket and was sweating through his shirt. The flabby skin of his neck hung over his shirt collar. A cigarette dangled from his lips. “Where is that bastard?” he asked behind a curtain of smoke. “Italy? France? That lucky fuck.”

Rey smiled with the rest. He breathed deeply. He was, in a sense, free. Was his contact living in a dank basement in The Cantonment, or in a palatial Italian villa? It didn’t matter really. Rey scanned the room for Norma. He wanted to get away. The fat man was telling the sad story of how he’d been turned down for a visa.

“Where do you want to go?” someone asked.

“Anywhere.”

Rey offered the small group a smile and excused himself. He didn’t know anybody, and nobody knew him. The redhead raised her glass to him as he turned away.

A few hours passed quickly. Rey wandered in and out of a few different conversations, each touched by the war. A gaunt, well-dressed man described being kidnapped. He was lucky: he’d been held for only two days and so hadn’t been fired from work. Rey met a woman whose maid, it turned out, was IL. “Imagine,” she said, appalled, “the nerve of the girl to bring that ideology into my house!” Throughout it all, Rey stayed near the drinks, so much so that the bartender had one ready for him each time he approached. At one point, they struck up a conversation. Rey recognized the accent. He was from the jungle, but no, the bartender told Rey, he didn’t miss it. “There was no one left in my town,” he said. “Everyone is here now.”

Rey sat briefly on the steps. He wandered out onto the patio, where he was offered a cigarette. He smoked without pleasure, his first in many years. He watched the lights of the city bubbling in the distance, and when he came back into the great room, the party had swelled, and he felt, in his drunken state, that he would never find his wife in this multitude. It was nearly midnight by then, and the guests were separating into two groups: those who would leave before the curfew and those who would stay the night. The hostess milled through the crowd, encouraging everyone to stay. “We have a generator!” she proclaimed. She held a glass unsteadily in her right hand, its contents spilling on the hardwood floor. Her husband, the senator, stood by her side, and he, too, was visibly drunk. His face puffy and red, he swayed slowly from right to left. Rey wanted to hug the poor man. He still hadn’t recovered; this much was clear. His bodyguard had been killed, his driver wounded, and the senator was lucky to have escaped with his life. It had all happened in broad daylight, on a busy avenue four blocks from a police checkpoint, not far from the radio station. Rey smiled to himself. In a way, it was satisfying to know that the war had gone on without him. The usual spate of bombs and blackouts and extrajudicial disappearances had continued — but Rey felt, for the first time in many years, divorced from it and therefore innocent. He could embrace this stranger, this poor senator. He could appear at the good gentleman’s party and bemoan the nastiness of the current situation without feeling responsible for any of it. The senator had un-buttoned his shirt now, and was calling for the music to be turned up, for the lights to be turned down. In an instant, they were, and the grand room was entirely different. He’ll be president, Rey thought sadly, and he won’t live out his term. Host and hostess smiled. They didn’t want anyone to leave. They were afraid of being alone.

“Should we stay?” Norma had appeared at his side, quite suddenly, and her presence made him feel warm. All night he had missed her.

“Do you want to?”

She shrugged, then smiled. She did.

“Are you drunk?” he asked, and she smiled some more.

Many had already left, but now the lights were low, and hours had passed, and among those who stayed, it was as if an animal had been loosed. The scene was unrecognizable. The music was being played at a furious volume, the great room overwhelmed with dancers. It had happened all at once, a lightning strike. The staid function had been replaced with a bacchanal: coats were laid over the banister of the staircase; heeled shoes lined the walls, tossed there by the well-dressed women, who now danced barefoot. There was a faint smell of sweat in the room, and someone was playing with the chandelier, now brightening and now dimming the lights in time with the music. One of the cops leaned against the wall, another sat on the step, eyes closed, tapping his foot to the music.

Then Elmer was beside them, throwing his arm over Rey’s shoulder. Was everyone in here drunk? Elmer had a pasted-on grin, and his face shone with sweat. “You’ve got a hell of a woman,” he said.

“Of course I do.” Rey smiled at his wife. Elmer had them both now, his arms around them, and Rey felt the weight of the man on him. He was afraid the little guy might fall.

“I never liked you,” Elmer said in a low voice.

Rey looked up. Norma hadn’t heard. He would have dropped Elmer, except that this fact came as no surprise. “I know,” he offered instead.

“I love your wife,” Elmer said, again just for Rey. Then he laughed, and so they all did. Elmer planted a kiss on Norma’s cheek, and she blushed. He turned back to Rey, who could feel the little man’s breath on his ear. “If you hurt her,” Elmer whispered, “I’ll kill you.”

“Why so many secrets?” Norma said.

Elmer ignored her, smiling again at the two of them, as if he’d been commenting on the weather or the theater. “Has she told you yet?” he said.

“I haven’t,” Norma said, shaking her head.

“Told me what?”

“Can I tell him?” Elmer slurred.

“Tell him.”

Elmer turned to Rey. “Norma’s going to have her own show,” he said. “We just decided today. Every Sunday night. Her very own show. Tell him the name, sweetheart.”

“Lost City Radio,” Norma said. She reached for Rey’s hand. “Do you love it? Tell me you love it.”

Rey couldn’t stop smiling. He said the three words to himself. He was warm and happy. “I love it,” he said. “It’s wonderful.”

THAT YEAR, a man came to 1797 and announced that he was an artist. He set up shop in front of the village canteen, with only a stool and an easel and sheets of grayish newsprint clipped together, covered in plastic in case of rain. He had the antique look of a wise man, with a dark, wrinkled face and long, thinning hair that tumbled wildly down his back. His name was Blas, and he could draw the town’s missing. One had only to describe the person, and he would do the rest. His skill, he told those who asked, was listening.

For two days, Blas sat in front of the canteen door, waiting, and had no work. He seemed patient enough, content to pass the time leaning against the wall, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes of the coarsest tobacco. He ate his meals at the canteen, smiled occasionally, and did not, as many had expected, smell particularly bad. When someone approached, he greeted them politely, offered his ser vices, but wasn’t pushy. On the third day, he asked the canteen owner permission to display his work, and when this was granted, he spent one busy morning tacking up pencil drawings along the walls. Then he returned to his post by the door, to wait.

One by one, the villagers came through to see the exhibit. They were skeptical, of course, and none more so than Zahir. He still worked on his writing in secret, usually down by the river, on warm afternoons when it was not raining. He was not above being jealous, and the very presence of this man was somehow an affront: where had this man come from, and what could he offer the villagers that Zahir could not accomplish in words? Still, curiosity took hold, and Zahir strolled into the canteen, determined to be unimpressed. The old man nodded to him as he walked in, but Zahir pretended not to have noticed.

Inside, along the four walls of the canteen, were a dozen faces of men and women and boys that Blas claimed to have re-created from the descriptions of their loved ones. It was, of course, impossible to say if the old man was lying or, if he was not, if the drawings were in any way accurate. Even the loved ones could not say: memory is a great deceiver, grief and longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade. Still, there was something to these renderings, and Zahir recognized it immediately: they were undeniably human, these faces. These creased women with their sad eyes and dark hair; these prematurely old men with pendulous lips and sagging cheeks; these young warriors, now missing, boys whose very skin shone with an inexplicable bloodlust, an excitement and hunger for life they couldn’t help but betray. Together they formed a confused race of men anxiously awaiting some grave disappointment. It wore him down in a manner Zahir hadn’t anticipated and could hardly articulate. The village, of course, had been disappearing steadily for years, but it wasn’t until he stepped out of the canteen and into the afternoon sun that he felt so acutely the emptiness of the place. He was surrounded by it. There were the sounds of the breathing forest, the cawing of a bird, the distant and susurrant murmuring of water. What else was there? In fact, most of the village was there. In his grief, Zahir hadn’t noticed them. They numbered in the two hundreds, and there were no more than fifty men, one for every three women. Those who had seen the exhibit were, like Zahir, milling about in a daze. They had entered the canteen not quite knowing what to expect, and left despondent. Now only Blas seemed to know what to do. He began taking appointments right then for the following morning: half-hour interviews, he said, and a drawing by the end of the day. “Your name, madam?” he called out. “And the name of your missing?” and it was all carefully listed in a notebook. The women thronged around him, some shook with sobbing. Zahir stepped away from the knot of despairing women and sat on the stump of a fallen tree. It was damp and beginning to rot: a soft, pleasant perch from which to take it all in. The village’s women, who had seemed to him, only hours before, to be the very picture of steadfast resolve, had come to this. Even his wife was among them. Her brother had left for the war a few years prior, on an army truck with a captain who had promised every recruit forty acres of land when it was all over.

“But you can have a hundred acres here!” they’d told him. Wasn’t the forest infinite?

“Land on the coast,” said the captain in his city accent, “is more valuable.”

Zahir knew this place and its people: he’d lived his entire life in this forest, kissed a dozen different girls! Fought and beaten twice as many opponents! He had been one of them: one of these bare-chested boys, wrestling in the mud and climbing the trees that hung over the river, all the way to the top, for no reason at all other than to stare at the sky and let the mind go blank. What pleasure! He had followed the river’s edge to the cataract a day’s hike upstream, and let the water spray cover him, let it bead on his skin like fine drops of sweat. He had let the hugeness of that noise erase him. He had never been alone in his youth — not once in fifteen years. Where were they now? Those boys he’d shared his childhood with, those girls who were now women whom he had kissed and touched beneath the trees?

He looked up. There were hours yet to this day. The children had formed another circle around their mothers, not quite understanding what the fuss was about, and this, too, made Zahir despair — how could they understand? Didn’t they want to leave as well? Weren’t they just biding their time?

Blas drew more than seventy pictures in the village over the next week. Business, he told the regulars at the canteen, had never been so good. Many drawings, quite surprisingly, were of people who were not yet missing. Women came with their husbands, mothers with their sons. “We’re afraid,” they said, tears in their eyes. “He’s here now, but what about tomorrow?”

“I’M LISTENING, madam,” the old artist said. Blas had worked on his voice for years. It was important in his line of work to put women immediately at ease: he very nearly purred. It had rained for two days, and so he had moved into the canteen, at the far end. He pulled the curtain, and they were alone in this makeshift private studio: two stools, an easel, an array of colored pencils. “Tell me.”

Adela said nothing for a long moment. Her feet tingled.

“Does the boy look like his father?”

She shook her head. “He looks like me.”

“How old is he?”

“Twelve months,” she said. “A year.”

The artist rubbed his face. He leaned toward her. “The father. How old is the father?”

“Oh,” Adela said. “I don’t know.”

Blas turned the canvas around. It was empty, not a mark on it. “Don’t be nervous, dear,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Close your eyes and talk about him, and we’ll do this together.”

Adela took a deep breath. “He’s not from here. And that’s what you notice first. He comes from the city. His smile is like city people smile: halfway. He’s careful. His hair flops forward onto his forehead, but he’s always brushing it back with his palm. He has dimpled cheeks, and his eyes seem tired all the time. His hair is gray at the temples, with nearly white streaks, but he won’t admit it. I think he may dye his hair. He’s vain.”

“Should I draw it black then? Or white? Which is it?”

“Draw it true. It’s white.”

“Is he thin?” Blas asked.

Adela nodded.

“His skin tone, madam. Is he dark like coffee, or light like milk?” He still hadn’t begun to draw, not really; two very light strokes, vaguely parallel. His eyes were closed, and the point of the pencil just barely touched the paper.

“Like coffee,” Adela said, but her mind was wandering. “And he loves the boy, I know that, I can tell.” She paused. “But he doesn’t love me.”

“Madam!”

“A woman knows these things, sir. He has another life. He’s told me and I’ve known from the beginning. I know some other things, some things he hasn’t told me. I know that one day he’ll come and take my child from me. I swear he will. He’ll say it’s for the boy’s own good, and how can I argue with that? But then what will I do? I’ll be like these old women here, who can’t remember who used to love them or why they’re alive.” She took a shallow breath. “He’s cruel.”

“Madam, pardon me, what does he look like?”

“Oh, yes. His hair, for example. It’s beginning to fall out. Each time I see him he looks older. His nose is crooked, just a bit, to which side? Well, to the left. His beard doesn’t grow in evenly; isn’t that the strangest thing?”

“Strange yes, madam, but not the strangest.”

“You’ve seen all kinds of things.”

“Of course,” Blas said apologetically.

Adela rocked the sleeping child in her arms. “Every time he leaves,” she said, “I’m afraid he won’t come back.”

“Why are you scared?”

“His work is dangerous.”

The old artist didn’t look up and didn’t say anything. Dangerous work was the only kind that existed in those days. The country was at war. He selected another pencil, a lighter color, and his right hand moved feverishly around the paper. He rubbed the page with his thumb, blurring the markings. “Are his eyes far apart?”

“No.”

“Are they close together?”

“I’m not sure.”

“His hair is curly?”

She thought for a moment. “Wavy.”

“His forehead — it’s high like this? Or small, like this?”

Adela squinted at the drawing. “In between, I suppose. And more wrinkled. He’s getting older, did I tell you that?”

The child twisted in her arms, a tiny hand poking free, a small fist opening, closing, grasping at the air. In an instant, it was over, and the boy was completely asleep once again. Blas and Adela had both stopped to watch him.

“It’s a pity for your husband that he doesn’t look like this boy of yours. He’s a beautiful child.”

“Thank you,” Adela said. “He’s not my husband.”

“I’m sorry, madam. God is merciful.”

“Are we nearly finished here?”

“Yes, very nearly.”

Blas leaned over the page, touching up the drawing. He asked a few more questions: about the shape of the man’s jaw, the size and placement of his ears, the style in which he wore his hair, and how gray was it exactly, and how did she know it was grayer than he wished it to be.

“Don’t we all want to be young forever?” Adela said.

Rey flashed across her mind, images of him in various stages of undress. He was not a beautiful man and he was not even hers. But the child was. She looked at her boy, asleep: the drawing, she told herself, was for him. When Rey first came to her, he was surprised at how cool the nights were here when the days were so hot. He knew almost nothing about the forest. “What do they teach you at that school?” she’d asked, but it was what she’d loved most about him: he knew nothing, because he was a stranger. His foreignness, his accent, his gestures — they belonged to another place, and just being with him was enough for Adela to imagine another, less claustrophobic existence.

When Blas asked about the lips, Adela licked her own, as if she could still taste him. “They’re full,” she said. Blas drew, he erased, then he drew some more. When he was satisfied, Blas asked Adela to look very carefully. “Is this him?” he asked. He had a pitch, a tone of voice, prepared just for this question. He had posed it a thousand times since the war began, and the answer was always the same.

THE DECISION was made for them. By the time they thought to leave, there were no cabs to take them home. Not at that hour, not so close to curfew. The deserted city was a minefield. So they returned to the party, Norma and Rey, Elmer not far behind, and they found themselves once again in the great room, being served drinks by the bartender in a tuxedo. The man had taken his jacket off and was drinking himself now. Elmer spoke, but they couldn’t hear him, and they didn’t try. There was dancing all around them, and night had fallen heavily on the room. Where there was panic, there was freedom. What a giddy feeling! Rey took his wife by the hand, led her to the middle of the dance floor. He pressed his body against hers. She pressed back, and it was beautiful, and then they were moving, as they had once upon a time: there are things the body won’t allow you to forget. It had been too long since they’d danced. “Louder!” someone yelled, and the music rose even more. Her chin rested on his shoulder, and he could smell her. The chandelier shook. The darkness was nearly complete; Rey had to be careful not to lose her to the crowd.

FOURTEEN

THERE WERE rules, of course, even that first night. The program would run on a six-second delay. This took some of the pressure off of Norma. The calls would be screened and everyone warned not to mention the war. This was good advice, not just for the radio, but for life, because these days, someone was always listening. Neutrality was the word Elmer kept repeating. Not to be confused with indifference, Norma thought. People, she should keep in mind, went missing for all sorts of reasons, and the show was not to be a sounding board for conspiracy theories or gripes about this or that faction, or speculations about a certain prison whose very existence was a state secret, however poorly kept. The show, Elmer lectured Norma, was a risk, but a calculated one. There were hundreds of thousands of displaced people who would form the loyal core of her audience. Hope could be dispensed in small doses to the masses of refugees who now called the city home. They didn’t want to talk about the war, he guessed; they wanted to talk about their uncles, their cousins, their neighbors from that long-ago-abandoned village; the way the earth smelled back home, the sound of the rain as it fell in bursts over the treetops, the lurid colors of the countryside in bloom. “You, Norma, just be nice, the way you know how to be, and let them talk. But not too much. Get names and repeat names and the phone calls will come in by the dozens. Ask nice questions. Got it?”

She said she did. The very idea of it gave her chills. Her own show. Of course she got it.

“Need I mention Yerevan?” Elmer said, as a final warning. “Need I mention that he is no longer with us?”

She went on the air that first night with a dry, metallic taste in her mouth. Excitement, fear: things could go wrong, catastrophically, with a single phone call. The minister of state had called the station, to say that someone on his staff would be listening. The theme music, commissioned from an out-of-work violinist, played, and already Norma was sweating. Elmer was sitting in the sound booth with her, taking notes, paying close attention. Three — two — one:

“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome to Lost City Radio, to our new show. To all the listeners, a warm greeting this fine evening, my name is Norma, and I should explain a little about the show, since this is our first time.” She covered the microphone and took a sip of water. “No one needs to tell you that the city is growing. We don’t need sociologists or demographers to tell us what we can see with our own eyes. What we know is that it is happening rapidly, some say too rapidly, and that it has overwhelmed us. Have you come to the city? Are you alone, or more alone, than you expected to be? Have you lost touch with those whom you expected to find here? This show, my friends, is for you. Call us now, and tell us who you’re looking for. Who can we help you find? Is it a brother you’re missing? A lover? A mother or father, an uncle or a childhood friend? We’re listening, I’m listening…Call now, tell us your story.” She read the number of the radio station, emphasizing that it was a free call. “We’ll be right back after a short break.”

Cue music. Commercial. Norma could breathe again. No bombs yet. No explosions. “Well done,” Elmer said, without looking up. There were a few lines already lit up. They had been building up the show for a few weeks. The people were primed for this. The commercial began to fade. “Nervous?”

Norma shook her head no.

The engineer began his countdown.

“Now the fun starts,” said Elmer.

The first caller was a woman, whose thick accent said she was from the mountains. She spoke rather incoherently about a man she had known, whose name she could not recall at first, but who said he came from a fishing village whose number ended in three. “Can I say the old name? I remember the village’s old name.”

Norma looked up. Elmer was shaking his head.

“I’m sorry. You said the number ended in a three?”

It was all she had — was his name Sebastián? Yes, she was sure now and he came from the north.

“Is there anything more you can remember?” Norma asked.

“Sure,” the woman said, but it might get someone in trouble: private things, she said, there were dirty things. She laughed. This would be enough, she added. She would wait on the air for him to call back. She knew he would call. “I’m fifty-two years old,” she said slyly, “but I told him I was forty-five. He said he thought I looked even younger.” She spoke directly to her lover: “Honey, it’s me. It’s Rosa.”

Norma thanked her. She put the woman on hold, and the light blinked for a few minutes, then disappeared.

Meanwhile, there were others: mothers who called about their sons, young men about girls they had last seen in train stations or standing alone in the maize fields of their native villages. “The love of my life,” one man managed, just before breaking down, and in each case, it was Norma counseling, condoling, offering words of hope. “Are they thinking of me?” one woman asked of her missing children, and Norma reassured her they were. Of course they were. It was exhausting. Elmer was gleeful. The calls kept coming: from The Thousands and The Cantonment, from Collectors and Asylum Downs and Tamoé. Husbands confessed to have named their daughters after the mothers they hadn’t seen in a decade — but perhaps they were in the city now, perhaps they had found a way to leave that decaying village: Mother, are you here?

There were no reunions that day, but the calls never stopped. An hour after they had gone off the air, the phone kept ringing. Elmer twice changed the tape on the answering machine they had set up specially for the new show. He gave the two tapes to Norma the next morning. “For your listening pleasure,” he said. “You’re a hit.”

THE BEDS were prepared, the puzzle left unfinished, the lights turned low. Manau’s mother went off to bed, though not before giving kisses all around, and promising to knit the boy a warm hat. She asked what his favorite color might be, and he said it was green. She disappeared into a back room.

Norma still felt a buzzing within her. She wouldn’t be able to sleep. Even so, she said good night to Manau, then carried Victor to the sofa and tucked him in beneath a blanket. He didn’t resist being held. “What will we do tomorrow?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. It wasn’t just tomorrow she was concerned about; it was right now. Still, she told him not to worry. She sat in the armchair by the window. A dim yellow light came from the streetlamp. No cars passed. Curfew had begun.

It wasn’t long before Manau came. He said something about not being able to sleep. “Can I sit here?” he asked. She nodded, and he was mercifully silent.

She could guess some things by the boy’s age, but without Rey here to answer for himself, Norma was interrogating a ghost. Victor was eleven: where was I eleven years ago? Where was Rey? What were we like, and what wasn’t I giving him? She could kill him; if he were here, she would. At what point had their love become counterfeit? When had he begun to lie to her?

The most likely answer, she supposed, was that he had always lied. In one way or another. Hadn’t it been that way since the beginning? When they found each other again at the university, after his first disappearance, what was it he did? Remember, Norma, and spare him nothing. He pretended not to see me. Then, when you were there before him, unavoidable, human, flesh and blood, what was it he said?

“I’m sorry, do I know you?”

A fragile, tenuous lie; not that it hurt any less. Even now it made her angry, though it hadn’t at the time. It had shocked her. Left her speechless. She remembered now that moment of stark humiliation. She had imagined this meeting for months, had carried the missing man’s identification card in her purse at no small risk to herself — what if someone were to find it? And then to be dismissed so completely?

Later, he apologized; later, he explained: “I was nervous, I was afraid.” Later, he told her what he had lived through, but that day, it was all opaque, and she had to try very hard not to be disappointed, or not to let that disappointment show. He was not the man she’d met thirteen months before, certainly not the one she had recalled so fondly for so many nights, not the one she had daydreamed of while her parents fought like animals. He was quieter, thinner, less confident. His wool hat was pulled down nearly to his eyebrows, and he seemed to be wearing clothes that were not quite clean. There was nothing at all attractive about him that day they met again. What if she had walked away then? If she had handed him his ID and been done with it?

But that’s not what happened: instead, he lied, sadly, clumsily, and she stumbled on with her prepared speech. “I have something of yours.”

“Oh.”

She fished through her purse for it, and here, the moment she’d envisioned fell apart. The day had grown unexpectedly bright, and they were surrounded by students, strangers, noise. What was it her mother always said about Norma’s purse? “You could hide a small child in there. ” It was less a purse than an overflowing bag. A group of musicians across the way tuned up their instruments, preparing to play. Already a crowd was forming. Where was the fucking ID? Norma stammered an apology, and Rey just stood there, a bit uneasy, biting his lip.

“Are you waiting for someone?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

“Because you keep looking over my shoulder.”

“Am I?”

She saw him gulp.

“I’m sorry,” Rey said.

She laughed nervously. It was March, a week before her birthday, and maybe she felt entitled to his time. Later, she would wonder, but now she dragged him by the arm to a bench, away from the crowd, from the musicians. There she unceremoniously tipped her bag over, spilling its contents: pens that had run out of ink, scraps of paper, a tiny address book, some tissues, a neglected tube of lipstick she’d used only once — she wasn’t that kind of girl — a pair of sunglasses, some coins. “It’s in here somewhere, I know it is. You remember me now, don’t you?”

She rummaged through the detritus, and he admitted he did.

“Why did you say you didn’t?”

But when he began to answer, Norma cut him off. “Oh, here it is,” she said. She held it up to his face, squinting against the hard light. She had meant it playfully, but she saw now, as color rushed to his cheeks, how embarrassed he was. There were new lines on his face and dark bags under his eyes. His skin had yellowed, and she could see the sharp outline of his cheekbones. Rey must have lost fifteen pounds.

“I’m not what you expected?” Of course, he knew better than anyone how this last year had aged him.

She pretended not to understand. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

She handed him the identification card, and he held it for a moment. He rubbed the picture with his thumb. “Thank you,” he said, and started to get up.

“Wait. I’m Norma.” She held her hand out. “I wondered what happened to you.”

Rey smiled weakly and shook her outstretched hand. He nodded at the ID. “I guess you know who I am.”

“Well…”

“Right.”

“Where did they take you?”

“Nowhere really,” he said and, when she frowned, he added, “You don’t believe me?”

Norma shook her head. “Sit down. Please. You’re running away.” He sat, and it made her smile. “Should I call you Rey?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because I like you,” Norma said, and he didn’t answer. But he didn’t leave either. The student musicians were playing now, native music with native instruments, appropriately political lyrics. Nothing had yet changed at the university: banners still hung from the lampposts, walls were still adorned with ominous slogans. The war had begun only weeks before, in a faraway corner of the nation, and many of the students still thought of it with excitement, as if it were a party they would soon be invited to attend.

“You should have thrown it away, you know,” Rey said. “Or burned it.”

“I didn’t know. I thought maybe you might need it. I’m sorry.”

They were quiet for a spell, watching the students, listening to the band. “I was afraid something was going to happen to you,” said Rey.

“I have better luck than that.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m alive, aren’t I?” She turned to him. “And you are too. So you must not be as unlucky as you think.”

He gave her a weak smile and seemed to hesitate. Then he took off his wool hat. It was too hot for something like that anyway. He had gone white at the temples, shocking streaks of it on otherwise black hair. Or had she not noticed it that night, one year before? How could she not have?

He scratched his head. “Very lucky, I know,” he murmured. “It’s what everyone says.”

THINGS WERE unquestionably bad. The curfew had been tightened, the IL raids on police stations had increased; at the edge of the city, control of the Central Highway was fought over each night after dark. These were days of fear on all sides. For sympathizers, when it was over, it would seem that victory had been tantalizingly close, but this was a misreading of the situation. The IL was desperate for a decisive military victory; recruitment was down, and many thousands had been killed. The apparatus of the state had proved, after a decade of war, to be more resilient than anyone had expected. In this, the final year of the war, the IL had all but lost control of its far-flung fighters. Actions in the provinces were highly decentralized, tactically dubious, and often brazen to the point of being ill-conceived. Heavy losses were inflicted on increasingly isolated bands of fighters. Some platoons responded by retreating deeper into the jungle, no longer warriors and true believers but seminomadic tribes of armed and desperate boys. When the war ended suddenly, they refused to put down their weapons. They continued fighting, because they could think of nothing else to do.

Meanwhile, the IL leadership focused on what it could control directly: the urban war, the central front of which was the embattled district of Tamoé, at the northeastern edge of the city, a slum of one million bordering the Central Highway. The idea was to use Tamoé as staging ground from which to choke off the city: attack food convoys from the fertile Central Valley, starve the city, spark food riots, and then glory in the chaos. They very nearly succeeded. For the six months before the government offensive on Tamoé, the bluffs overlooking the Central Highway were the backdrop for great and violent confrontations. The insurgents laid bombs along the roadside and disappeared into the overcrowded neighborhoods of Tamoé. Truck drivers were kidnapped, their cargo set ablaze. Police checkpoints were attacked with stolen grenades. The army responded by increasing patrols in the area, and were greeted by snipers hidden in the hills or on rooftops.

In May of that year, a girl of five was killed in Tamoé, by a bullet of indeterminate origin. There were soldiers in the area, searching for a sniper. An angry mob gathered around the soldiers. More shots were fired, and the crowd grew. A soldier was killed. The Battle of Tamoé had begun. When this uprising was quelled, the war would be over.

But all of this happened after Rey left the city for the last time. If it weren’t for the boy, his son, Rey might not have returned to the jungle at all. His contact had disappeared, left him without any further direction, and it amounted to a welcome vacation. But he went anyway, because he couldn’t get the boy out of his mind. When he heard of the battle, he was in the jungle, far enough away to suppose he was safe. He spent an evening with the rest of the village, listening to the radio for news, and was surprised to find that the IL’s defeat did not surprise him. It was an all-or-nothing proposition, and it always had been: so now there was nothing. The tanks that ran through the narrow streets, the blocks and blocks burned to the ground, the fighting that raged for four days house to house — in their hearts, hadn’t everyone known this was coming? In the aftermath of the battle, while the government proclaimed victory and the rest of the city celebrated, the dry, dusty lots of the district became home to thousands of displaced families, all with sons and fathers missing: a city of women and children. The army kept them corralled together for weeks in a makeshift tent city while the government decided what to do with them. Rey would have recognized many of them, from his work there so many years before.

These are facts: had he postponed his trip by a month, he might have survived the war. If he hadn’t returned to see his son, a hundred young men and the handful of women camped a day’s travel from 1797 might have lived as well.

Rey arrived in the village only six weeks after Blas had left. 1797 was still abuzz with excitement, and now there were dozens of portraits that no one knew quite what to do with. Many were hidden away, others were displayed prominently in people’s homes. He found it strange, as if the village had doubled in size while he was gone. Everyone he spoke to had had a portrait drawn of someone, and all seemed eager to talk about it. The village had collectively decided to address the fact of its own disappearance. He was at the canteen one afternoon when an older woman stormed in, walked directly toward him. Rey was sitting with Adela and their boy. The woman didn’t waste time: after apologizing for interrupting their meal, she unrolled her drawings all at once and begged Rey to look at them. They were of her husband and her son, whom she hadn’t seen in five years. She spoke so loudly that the baby looked up and began to cry.

“Madam,” Adela said sternly.

Again the woman apologized, but she didn’t stop. She was pleading now. “Take these. Take them back to the city and show them to the newspapers.”

He coughed. “They wouldn’t survive the trip,” he said. It was the first thing that occurred to him, the first excuse, and it came out all wrong. “The drawings,” Rey added, but it was too late: the woman was not quite old, not yet, but in that instant, her face fell, and she aged a decade. She broke into a furious stream of words, berating Rey in the old language for his selfishness before walking off.

Rey and Adela finished their meal in silence. They walked back through the tiny village to Adela’s hut. He asked to carry the boy, happily observing that Victor had gained weight and grown in all directions. Adela was pensive, but he chose not to notice, focusing instead on his son, this magical boy who made faces and drooled with beautiful confidence.

“Are you going to take him from me?” Adela asked when they were nearly home.

If you listened carefully, no matter where you stood in the village, you could hear the river. Rey heard it now, a lazy gurgling, not that far off. He remembered the night he had spent, drugged, wading in the cool waters. The rainy season had passed, and now the showers that came were furious but brief. The sun, when it came out, was unforgiving. Adela stared at him. He had a difficult time remembering why he had ever come to this place.

“Why would you say something like that?” Rey said. He passed the boy to one arm and reached out to touch her, but Adela pulled back.

“You’ll take the boy one day and you’ll never come back.”

“I won’t.”

Adela sat down on the step, and Rey moved in beside her, careful not to sit too close. “Did you have me drawn?”

She nodded. “You’re going to leave me.”

“You have to destroy it,” Rey said. “I’m not joking. You have to.”

“I’m not leaving. You’re not going to take me to the city and put me in a little house and make me your mistress.”

The thought had not occurred to him, but it flashed now, instantaneously, as a way out. He turned to her hopefully, but saw immediately, in the set of her jaw, that she was serious.

“Of course not.”

“Play with him now,” Adela said, pointing to the boy, “because he’s mine.” She stood angrily and disappeared into the hut.

He didn’t want a mistress. For all her charms, he didn’t, in fact, want Adela. He was a bad man, he was sure, a man of convenient morals in inconvenient circumstances. Still, he could be honest with himself, couldn’t he? Rey wanted the boy and Norma and his life back in the city, and that was all. He didn’t want the jungle or the war or this woman and the combined weight of his many bad decisions.

He wanted to live to be old.

Rey sat the boy up on his knee so that Victor could look out. His eyes were always open, and this was what Rey admired most about his son. He was a hardworking baby: colors and lights and faces, he took them in with deep concentration. Rey tickled his son playfully on the stomach, and noted proudly how quickly Victor reached for his finger, and how strongly he held on to it. Rey pulled, and Victor pulled back.

The following day, Zahir returned from the provincial capital with his radio, telling everyone in town that the war was over.

NORMA HELD Rey’s hand when they checked into the hotel. It was a late afternoon of slanting orange light. Night was still an hour away. This was the first time, and they wore wedding bands Rey had borrowed from a friend. They carried dinner in a basket, as if they had come from the provinces. Norma covered her hair with a shawl.

“Yes, sir,” Rey said to the receptionist. “We’re married.”

“Where do you come from?”

“The south.” It wasn’t a lie, Norma thought, not exactly: it’s a direction, not a place.

“Girl, is this your husband?”

“Don’t talk to my wife that way,” Rey snapped. “You need to show more respect.”

“I don’t have to let you stay here, you know.”

Rey sighed. “We’ve been traveling all day,” he said. “We just want a place to sleep.”

Norma took it all in, saying nothing. The receptionist frowned, not believing a word of it. But he took the money Rey handed him, held the bills up to the light, and mumbled something under his breath. He handed Rey a key, and there was a moment of electricity right there, as it dawned on Norma what this meant and where she was headed. Her mother would not approve. Rey never let go of Norma’s hand. She was afraid he would.

It was an old building, where even the floorboards of the stairs creaked naughtily. Norma blushed at the sound: maybe she even said something about it — who could remember now? — and Rey laughed slyly and told her not to worry. “We’re here now. No one’s going to hear us.”

And no one did, because they were alone in the hotel that night. It was midweek. They might as well have been alone in the city. They went up early and came out late, when the sun was already up and blazing red in the sky. And it didn’t hurt, not the way she had expected it to, the way she had feared it might. And then afterwards, the most wonderful thing was being naked next to him, and the most surprising thing was how easy it was to fall asleep with him by her side. It felt safe.

It was dark, and Norma was drifting toward sleep, when Rey said, “I have nightmares.”

“About what?”

“About the Moon.” He breathed heavily — she heard it and felt it, because her hand was resting on his chest. “They tell me it’s normal. But sometimes I shout in my sleep. Don’t be scared if I do.”

“What happened?”

He would tell her, Rey said, but not then. He made her promise not to be frightened.

“I won’t be,” she whispered. She was stroking his face, his eyes were closed, and he was nearly asleep. “I won’t. I won’t ever be afraid.”

“Are you awake?” Manau asked.

Norma opened her eyes. The boy was still there. She was in the same strange house. A light was on by the front door, everything tinged yellow. It had grown cold, and she wondered what time it was. She thought of closing her eyes, of retreating again into dreams. Had she ever been happy? “I’m awake,” she said, but even this was a guess. Norma felt he was near — her Rey — she felt traces of him all around, even as her eyes adjusted to this half-light.

She hadn’t thought of her husband as alive in many, many years. Not quite dead, either, but certainly not alive. Not part of the world. If he had lived — and Norma had concocted all kinds of scenarios that allowed this — what difference, in the end, had it made to her? He’d never contacted her. He’d wandered the jungle, or escaped the country and fled to a more hospitable place. Perhaps he’d remarried, learned a new language, and forgotten with great effort all that he had previously survived? These were all possibilities, if she accepted that he had made it somehow. But it was unthinkable: how could he have lived without her?

The boy snored lightly.

Rey was gone, of course. And she was alone. The rest of her life spread out before her, vast and blank, without guideposts or markers or the heat of human love to steer her in one direction or another. What remained were flashes, memories, attempts at happiness. For years, she had imagined him as not-quite-dead, and organized her life around this: finding him, waiting for him.

“What are we going to do?” Manau asked.

She had spent all the Great Blackouts with Rey, each and every one, in a room just like this, darker even, telling secrets while the city burned.

“Some people call every Sunday. I’ve learned to recognize their voices. They’re impostors. They pretend to be whoever the previous caller just described: from whatever village in the mountains or the jungle.”

“That’s cruel,” Manau said.

“I thought so too.”

“But?”

“But the longer the show has gone on, the more I understand it. There are people out there who think of themselves as belonging to someone. To a person who, for whatever reason, has gone. And they wait years: they don’t look for their missing, they are the missing.”

She looked at Manau, unsure of what she expected from him. In a room just like this one, Rey had told her he loved her. “Is he alive?” she asked Manau suddenly. “Tell me, if you know. If you know, you have to tell me.” She didn’t want to cry, but she couldn’t help it.

“I don’t know,” Manau said. “No one does.”

THE WEEK of the Battle of Tamoé, the show was canceled. It was simply too difficult to screen calls. The answering machine filled up with the voices of worried, anxious mothers: there were tanks in the streets, and their boys had left to fight with ancient rifles that didn’t fire straight. Something was happening, and it was out of control. The district was being razed. News reports of the four-day battle were prepared at the Ministry of State, sent to the radio to be read as is, without comment, without any additional reporting. Elmer consulted with the senator, who asked the station to comply. Everyone knew of the little girl who had died, but she was not mentioned. In the official telling of it, the terrorized residents of Tamoé had asked the army to clear out the menacing IL. The Central Highway would be closed for the duration of the military activities, and emergency price controls placed on basic necessities. When this action was concluded, the radio announced, the war would be, for all intents and purposes, over.

Norma’s hour that Sunday was replaced by a prerecorded program of indigenous music. She had asked Rey, before he left for the jungle, if he ever came across a radio in the different villages he passed through. He said he never had.

“I would have sent you a message,” she said.

“You still can.”

So, from her perch above the city, Norma imagined him out there — where exactly? — listening to the radio, surprised to find that her show had been preempted, that the war was ending. Mornings, she read the news from Tamoé: it was spotty and deliberately vague, but someone like Rey would know enough to tell what was really happening. He knew the district, he knew what it meant when she said that the forces of order had advanced past Avenue F–10. He would know the center of the district had fallen, that what fighters were left had been chased into the hills. He would know that the government would not announce victory unless it was in hand. She hoped then that he wasn’t listening, that he was in the forest he loved, among the plants and the trees and the birds, that he would miss these unhappy days altogether, and return to the city only when it was finished, when there was nothing left undone.

By the middle of the second day of shooting, Elmer began making small changes to the prepared texts: fighting raged instead of continued. When these passed by unnoticed, he began culling some safe statements from the Lost City Radio answering machine, to be played on the air as firsthand accounts. In this way, the station was the first to report on the fires. Norma herself took some calls, listened as one or another desperate resident described the inferno that was beginning to remake the landscape of the district. They want our land, the callers said, they want our homes. The fire was still in the lower neighborhoods of Tamoé, and in the slums that bordered the Central Highway, but it was moving up the hill, and north from the highway. One caller after another made the same accusation: it was the army. They were setting fire to everything. They were bulldozing homes and setting fire to the rubble. At night, from the conference room, you could see the eastern district smoldering. By day, the smoke hung over the city, but was not mentioned in the newspapers or on most radio stations.

In 1797, the people gathered in the canteen to listen to Zahir’s radio. The reception wasn’t bad, and everyone took turns admiring the machine. Zahir, with whom Rey had spoken a handful of times, sat next to it, gracefully accepting congratulations on his purchase. By the third day, they were calling it the Battle of Tamoé on the radio, and the news was exclusively of a great fire. The shooting had stopped. In 1797, the villagers were crowded in — children, too, sitting under the tables, among their parents’ feet, or balanced on the windowsills. A soft rain fell, and Zahir turned up the volume of his new machine so they could hear, over the pitter-patter on the metal roof, about the latest block to fall to the army, or the newest official count of dead.

They listened as if it were a sporting match in which they had not taken sides. One woman thought she had a son who lived in this place — Tamoé?—but she couldn’t be sure. She sat uncomfortably, pulled a strand of her hair into her mouth and sucked on it nervously. She accepted condolences from the gathered crowd; her worry was authentic and her sadness complete.

Rey sat among them, unnoticed at first, but as the afternoon became evening, something changed. They had in their midst a real expert: the villagers were watching him. Finally, someone addressed Rey directly: an elderly woman whose voice he had never heard before. “Where is this Tamoé?” she asked.

“Yes,” the adults echoed. “Where is it?”

Rey blushed. “Tell them,” Adela said, and so he had no choice. He stood up, walked to the front of the canteen, and was, quite suddenly, a professor again. He had been a teacher all his adult life. His father was a teacher, and his father’s father, too, back when the town Rey had abandoned at age fourteen was a village no larger than 1797. Rey cleared his throat. “It’s the edge of the city,” he said, “north of the Central Highway, in the foothills of the eastern mountains.”

It meant nothing to them. “Is there a map I could use to show you?” he asked.

There was laughter: a map? Of the city — who would have such a thing? Adela had a map of the country, of course; he’d brought it himself.

The questions came furiously. Yes, he knew of it. Yes, he had been there. Was it big? He had to smile: compared with the village where they all sat, how could it be anything but? Hands shot up, and he did his best to keep pace. Who lives there? What kind of people?

“Poor people,” Rey said, and the men and women nodded.

“Where are they from?”

“They come from all over the country,” he said. The mountains, the jungle, the decaying towns of the north. From the abandoned sierra.

He was very polite, or tried to be, but the questions kept coming. Someone had turned the radio down: Rey could hear his wife’s voice, but couldn’t concentrate on the words. They wouldn’t let him listen. The villagers knew nothing about the war, and here they were, awaiting its end, wanting quite suddenly to know everything about it.

“How did it begin?” a man asked. He wore his black hair in a braid.

“I don’t know,” Rey said, and there was a clatter of protest. Of course he knew!

Which grievance was it and when? Had it begun that night he spent in jail as a boy? Sleeping next to his father on the damp floor, while an angry mob clamored for his punishment? Before that, long before that: everyone knew it was coming. But it had officially begun ten years ago, he told them. Nearly a decade. How? He forgot now. Someone was angry about something. This someone convinced many hundreds and then many thousands more that their collective anger meant something. That it had to be acted upon. There was an event, wasn’t there? Violence to mark a fraudulent election? An explosion timed to commemorate some patriotic anniversary? He thought he remembered an opposition leader, a politician well known and admired for his honesty, being poisoned, dying slowly and very publicly over the course of three weeks. The name escaped him now. Was this how it began? He didn’t know what to tell them, this roomful of curious faces; the radio turned down to a low buzzing and the evening having evolved into a disquisition on recent national history by an anonymous city-dweller. It was useless to plead ignorance in this setting. No one would believe him. The war, he decided, would have happened anyway. It was unavoidable. It’s a way of life in a country like ours.

The rain let up, and in this new quiet, the evening took on the austerity of a prayer meeting. He answered every question as it came, as well as he could. They had been at it an hour or more when there came the question he would die pondering. Had he ever known the answer? At one time, sure, but that was long ago. The question was posed by the owner of the radio, and there was an innocence to it that Rey appreciated, a genuine need to know, without a hint of malice. “Tell us, sir,” Zahir asked, already speaking of the war in the past tense, “who was right in all of this?”

FIFTEEN

IT WAS two in the morning when they climbed into Manau’s father’s car and willed it to start. Manau nearly flooded the engine — it had been over a year since he’d driven — but then the ignition caught, and the engine spat bursts of noise. Manau turned to Norma, flashing a satisfied smile that reminded her how young he was. Victor was half-asleep, resting his head in her lap, and she had laid a blanket on top of him. It was a long way to the radio station. The heater was barely working, and the night was unexpectedly cold. The city was still under curfew. They could make it there and be gone before the morning newscast. Before Elmer arrived.

The car moved slowly through the deserted streets, so slowly Norma imagined they were sightseeing. The headlamps splashed dim yellow splotches on the road ahead, and the engine failed twice before they made it to the first blinking red traffic light. Still, there was an air of leisure to the whole endeavor: the pleasing, throaty rumble of the engine, the city passing by in silence. Even the air had an agreeable crispness to it. Block after empty block; and it didn’t seem at this hour to be a city but a museum of a city, a place she was viewing as if from some distant future, an artist’s model built to demonstrate how human beings had once lived.

Manau eased the car down to the seaside highway, where they could see the beach dotted with fires. The tide had gone out, and the sand stretched for a quarter-mile, glowing orange and gold. The ocean, mute and black, pushed into the infinite, and the moonless sky was dark enough to be one and the same with the sea. A row of red lights bobbed at the horizon — the fishing trawlers, where at this hour men were sleeping, resting their bodies for the day’s work ahead. Norma had one hand over the boy, enough to feel him breathe; in the other, she held the list, which had been touched by a dozen people in the past week, had been creased, folded, nearly destroyed, saved, and stolen. It felt good to have it, but not like a victory so much as a reprieve. Ten years had passed, ten years that comprised a vast, inviolable silence, and then these three days, of which, she suspected, she would remember only noise: the chattering dissonance of many voices, sounds at once indistinct and pressing, calling her urgently in different directions. Wounding her, certainly, but no worse than the silence had.

The road rose back to the city, and there, as they came over the hump, was a police checkpoint, brightly lit with flood lamps, a patch of daylight within the darkness. It was still a half-mile ahead, but there was no way around it. The car chugged forward. The boy was still asleep.

“Do I stop?” Manau asked. She could see in the rearview mirror, even in the dim light, that he was afraid.

She bit her lip. “Of course,” Norma said after a moment, and by then, they were there already, there was no choice, and the ordeal was beginning. Or was it simply continuing? In either case, her body tightened, bracing as if for a great impact.

IN TAMOÉ, in the last year of the war, there lived a girl, age five. She didn’t like the army helicopters that flew over her neighborhood. This is what the war meant to her: helicopters blowing up dust and, with their great noise, keeping her dolls awake when she felt they should be resting. A nuisance. Her father had been in hiding for two years, fighting with the IL. He was an expert explosives man named Alaf. Before he left the family forever, he told his daughter that if soldiers ever came to the house, she should spit on them. He was a true believer. “Say it with me,” Alaf whispered. “They’re animals.”

“They’re animals,” the little girl repeated. She was three years old then.

“What will you do when they come?”

“Spit on them,” she answered and then began to cry. Two years later, she could not remember her father: not what he looked like, not the sound of his voice. Nor would her mother speak of him.

After she was killed by a stray bullet, a battle began in her name. Not spontaneously. The IL had been waiting for a blameless victim. She lived in a corner house without running water or electricity, a house that was always damp and cool and smoky. Its second story had not been completed, and so the roof was sometimes used by neighborhood IL snipers to pick off soldiers who patrolled the area. An army commander made the entirely reasonable decision to put an end to this nonsense. The girl was small for her age, and always had a cough. The day she died, she had not eaten enough and was walking to her friend’s house, hoping to be offered a piece of bread. Though she was hungry, she was also proud, and had resolved not to ask for it. But if it were offered—this, she had decided, was entirely different. Her mother was at the market, and there were shooters on her roof. Later, men would argue about which way she fell, the possible trajectories of the bullet or bullets that killed her, but the truth is, neither the army nor the IL snipers much noticed her when she first went down. Certainly, no one intended to kill her. The fighting continued for another half-hour. She had hidden behind an oil drum when the shooting began. She would later be described as holding a doll, as flaxen-haired and innocent, and she may have been all these things, but when she died, no one noticed her, just as no one had noticed her when she lived. Later, her face was put on banners that were carried to the edge of the district and then into the heart of the city by hundreds of well-meaning and outraged people who had never known her. They were met with bullets in the plaza that would be razed and renamed Newtown Plaza. There, many more people died, and then the war was over.

Her father never knew that his daughter died in this way, but it would be a mistake to say he was unaffected. The bond between parent and child is chemical, fierce, and inexplicable, even if that parent is a sworn killer. This connection cannot be measured; it is at once more subtle and more powerful than science. In the days before his daughter was murdered, Alaf felt a pain in his chest. For two nights, he couldn’t sleep. He ate little, and even went so far as to take his own temperature. He was certain he was dying, and he despaired. In his mind, Alaf began to compose a letter to send to his wife and daughter back in Tamoé, asking for forgiveness. He wondered if his daughter could read by now. How long had it been? How did any of this happen? He promised to learn a useful trade and devote himself to it. He described the exotic charms of a quiet and peaceful life, and it made his heart quicken: late breakfasts on Sundays, afternoons dedicated to home repair or to listening to a soccer match on the radio. He might walk his daughter to school on Monday. He and his wife might have a son. Or, it struck him, they could leave the city altogether and settle here, in the endless jungle where land was plentiful and the soil fertile. A small farm, he thought, and set about imagining a life he would never have. Of course, he did not actually write the letter, and so he did not send it. He died a few days after the Battle of Tamoé, not far from 1797, killed in an ambush before he so much as fired a shot.

THE PERSON Norma missed most of all in Rey’s absence was not Rey but the person she had been when she was with him. The roadblock brought it all back: there was a part of her — not a small part — that had been seduced at the exact moment the soldier pulled Rey off the bus so many years ago. She had become in her time with Rey a woman who lived alongside that danger, who, in one way or another, conquered fear in order to be with the man she loved. Because what did she remember from her years with Rey? Not the sword that hung over them, not the tension, the suspicions, but the laughter, the joking, walking down the street hand in hand, the happiness that existed in spite of everything else. The world collapsed around them, and still they stood together, imperturbable, calm; it was the relationship they had made, pliant and modern; the alchemy that happened when they turned out the lights, when they folded their bodies into each other and felt no shame.

She had to remind herself sometimes, because it was easy to forget: Rey had wanted her.

The road up from the beach was lit brightly, the bluffs on either side shining with a white fluorescence. The car rolled slowly to a stop, and there it was again: the point of a rifle insinuating itself into her life. Rey, she thought. She very nearly said it out loud. This was all routine. She looked straight ahead and not at the rifle to her left. There were two staggered rows of stones and razor wire lying across the road. To one side, a soldier, a boy about five years older than Victor, stood warming himself by a fire.

“Out,” the rifle ordered. If there was a body attached to the weapon, Norma decided not to notice it.

Already Manau was outside. She roused the boy, and a moment later, she was there, too, with Victor by her side, half-asleep. She held her hands over her head and faced the car the way she’d seen criminals do in movies. The boy-soldier demanded papers, identification, and she felt faint.

The jungle, Rey had told her many times, was a pharmacological paradise. Uncharted and unclaimed, the cures to all the world’s diseases were there, hidden, waiting to be found. It would take a generation or more to discover the gifts it held, if they didn’t disappear first. One of the war’s many unintended consequences — one of its only positive ones — was that it had rendered the jungle relatively inaccessible, therefore slowing the pace of its destruction. People fled the jungle. It was only a matter of time, Rey had said, until they fled to it: when the cities became too crowded, too choked with smoke and noise, when peace came and allowed them once again the freedom to roam within the borders of the nation-state.

“Can’t I come with you?” she’d asked him once.

“Of course. Once the war is over.”

She’d laughed then: “Silly, this war won’t ever end.”

Rey brought back stories of drugs that cured all kinds of ills, showed her the careful notes he took. The very nation might be saved by the forest: there might be a plant for every kind of miracle. “They have plants for potency,” he told her once, as he pulled her into the apartment and onto the couch. “Not that I need them.” That day, he still smelled of travel, of buses and smoke and places she had never visited. “Who have you been with while I was gone? Tell me, make me jealous…”

“A whole city of men wakes up with me whispering in their ears.”

“Stop.”

“It’s true,” she said, biting her lip, and already his hands were under her clothes, her body tingling. She was cold and hot all at once. Looking over Rey’s shoulder, she saw the door was open. He had closed it with his foot in his hurry to take her into his arms, and the lock hadn’t caught. Their neighbor’s ten-year-old son stood in the doorway, watching. He was wide-eyed and curious, just a child. “Rey,” Norma whispered, but he wasn’t listening. She felt she should shoo the child away, but then she didn’t care. They were behind the couch, and he couldn’t see anything. So she closed her eyes and imagined they were alone. It wasn’t hard to do. The war had always been with them, and she was accustomed to pretending.

“Hands up,” the rifle barked. He stepped to Manau and patted him down. He took Manau’s wallet out and flipped through it. He seemed disappointed by its contents. He held Manau’s ID up to the light. “This is fake.”

“It’s not fake,” Manau said. “Who has fakes?”

“Shut up.”

“Norma, tell them.”

“I said shut up.”

“Norma.”

It was cold, and her body stiffened. She turned to Manau and glared. Tell them what? These people didn’t want to hear her stories, they didn’t want to know of her disappointments.

“Where are you going?”

“The radio,” Manau said. “Norma.”

“Who’s Norma? Which Norma?”

“Norma Norma.”

For a moment, the rifle seemed to consider this possibility. With the end of the weapon pointed downwards, he told Norma to turn around. She did, and he examined her in the harsh, white light. He seemed suddenly nervous. “You’re Norma? You don’t look like Norma.”

“But have you ever seen her?” Manau said.

The rifle was raised suddenly to eye level, Manau pushed roughly against the car, the end of the weapon at his temple: “Are you ever going to shut up?”

“Please, not in front of the boy. It’s me. Really. It’s me.”

“They’ll all love you,” Elmer had said when it began. But how had he said it? With his head shaking and his lips pressed into a tight, disbelieving frown. “It’s that voice you have…” Norma had felt the unpleasant sensation of being pitied. And then Rey disappeared, and she’d felt it every day since: Rey’s absence clinging to her like some contagion. Elmer had been right, of course: they did love her. For years, she’d received perfumed letters full of names, modest gifts wrapped in newsprint. At the station, there were a half-dozen shoeboxes full of photographs with scalloped edges, each with an inscription noting which of the smiling faces in the picture might still be alive. And this was it: might be. This not knowing, this exhaustion — you could hear it in every voice that called, see it in the careful script of every letter. It was mercy they sought: an answer, a yes or a no to release them from the burdens of waiting and hoping and wondering. It was what she heard in the soldier’s voice, too: something unexpectedly timid, something afraid.

“I don’t believe you,” the soldier said. He still held the gun to Manau’s head. “You think I’m stupid.”

“No, no,” Norma said, “no one said—”

“Let me hear you.”

It was, in the end, what she was good at: being heard. She should have been a poet or a preacher. A hypnotist, a politician, a singer. Norma took a deep breath.

“Talk!” the soldier yelled, and she did.

“This evening,” Norma purred, “on Lost City Radio: from the jungle comes a boy…”

The soldier’s face became very serious. “Names. I want to hear names.”

“Names?” she asked, and the soldier nodded. She took the list from her pocket, and she gave him names. Which ones?

All of them. All of them, except one.

When she saw that he had heard enough, when he lowered the rifle and smiled with recognition, only then did she stop.

With great ceremony, the young man took the weapon with his left hand and pointed it upwards, the barrel against his shoulder. He kicked his boots together and, with his right hand, gave Norma a military salute.

“It’s an honor, Miss Norma.”

She blushed. “That’s really not necessary,” but already the other soldier had come and offered his salute as well. “We listen every week,” he said.

Norma huddled with Victor, who was now completely awake. It was cold for October, cold enough that they could see their breath. Victor blew clouds of it, and seemed charmed. Of course, he’d never seen his own breath before. Manau was shaken, but he took off his jacket and draped it over the boy.

Meanwhile, the soldiers busied themselves remembering names of people they had known. The younger one had dropped his cigarette before he saluted. Without it, he was still a boy, with big, red cheeks that made his face almost perfectly round. He ran to the oil drum by the side of the road, where he had stashed his bag. He returned with paper. The first soldier propped his rifle against the car. Apologizing for the delay, he spread the paper on the hood. He chewed the edge of the pen for a moment and began to write.

“May we wait in the car?” Norma asked. “It’s very cold.”

Again, the apologies: “Yes, yes, of course.” He turned to the younger soldier. “Get the door for Miss Norma.”

In another time, it would have been impossible to conceive of this, but now Norma let it happen: the young soldier opened the door for her and bowed deeply. When he had closed it, she accepted his docile, childlike smile the way she imagined a queen might: benevolently, as if she expected nothing less. Everything had changed. They had taken Rey to the Moon on a night like this. How many others?

Manau sat in the front seat, blowing on his hands. Victor was the only sensible one among them. “Why are we going to the radio?”

“We’re going to read the names,” Norma said.

“Where else do we have to go?” said Manau.

Victor looked at Norma, and when she nodded, he seemed satisfied.

A moment later, the first soldier knocked on the front window. Manau rolled it down, and a column of cold air filled the car. “It’s our list,” the soldier said, “for Miss Norma. And this”—he pointed to a second page, where he had written his name, his rank, the date, and the time in a crooked, childlike script—“is a pass I wrote. You can show it to anyone else if they stop you.” He smiled from ear to ear. She thanked him again. “Miss Norma,” he said, bowing. “A pleasure.”

They drove on through the sleeping city, through its vacant streets. The boy began to ask a question, but then seemed to think better of it. He was beyond surprise, and too tired to notice anything in the darkened streets. Every now and then, the car hit a pothole, and the windows shook, and the frame rattled, but a moment later, it had passed, and Victor could close his eyes again. Norma held him; the car had warmed, but the boy shivered in his sleep.

The security guard didn’t hesitate to let them in. She was Norma, after all, and this was still her radio station. He let the three of them pass with a deferential nod and then led them to the lobby where the boy had first presented his note. The lights were low, and it seemed they had stepped into the crypt of a church. Just as I remember it, Norma thought, as if she were returning to a childhood home. She had been here just the day before, but this is what life does to you: things happen all at once, and your sense of time is exploded. But what exactly had happened, and how? A boy had come. When? It began on Tuesday, she remembered, and now it was…She didn’t know. Whom could she ask? Everything was foggy: there was a list, she’d had a husband, he was dead or gone. He was IL, or he was not. The war had ended, or perhaps it had never begun. Was that it? Was that all? She held the boy’s hand tightly. Norma felt sure he had grown in these last few days, hours, and, at the thought, her heart was off at a gallop. It was a struggle just to stand. The security guard, she realized with some surprise, was still talking, had never stopped talking, though his voice hadn’t registered at all. She resolved to smile but made no attempt to listen. He was an old man with a shiny bald pate and pockmarked skin. He rubbed the boy’s head and pinched his cheek. He was thanking her effusively, and Norma couldn’t help but wonder what she had ever done for him.

With his key, he activated the elevator. The doors closed, and he bade them good-bye with a wave. They were inside.

“I’m tired,” Victor said. “I want to sleep.”

“I know you do.” Norma held him close. She was torturing the boy by keeping him awake, she knew she was — what was it she hoped to accomplish that could not be done tomorrow? “We’ll sleep soon,” she said, but it sounded less like a promise and more like a wish.

The overnight deejay was easy enough. She couldn’t remember his name, but they had met before. Many times. He knew who she was, of course. He had a young face and unnaturally white hair to go along with it. Norma put her hand on his shoulder. He was easy to lie to: the words were coming on their own now. Yes, Elmer had approved it. Yes, it’s fine. Yes, a special show. Call him? Of course, if you’d like, but he’s probably sleeping. You could use a rest? Couldn’t we all. A little laughter — she didn’t even have to force it. And have a great night. Yes, a pleasure. With Manau and Victor watching, she had an audience for all this lying, this manipulation of the truth; they were with her. Without even looking behind her, she could feel Manau nodding on her behalf.

But the displaced deejay didn’t leave. He shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“Yes?”

“May I sit in?” He smiled meekly. “It would be an honor, Miss Norma.”

It felt cruel, but the truth was there would be no room. “You understand,” she said.

“Of course,” he said, turning red. “Of course.” He slinked away, and Norma wanted to embrace him. Her eyes stung, and every part of her was sore. A waltz was playing: it was a woman, of course, and she sang about a man.

WHEN THE IL finally returned three years after the war had ended, it was a surprise to everyone but Zahir. He’d been waiting for them since the day a platoon came and took Adela’s man and two others away into the forest. Of course, Zahir knew nothing about the dispersed remnants of a once-mighty insurgency, so he couldn’t have known they were coming: it’s just that he had seen this man pass his son off to Adela and disappear into an army truck, the point of a rifle at his back. He’d seen the desperate way the man had looked at his son, the way the child clutched at his mother, and the way this woman began to sob. Such things do not go unpunished. The two other men said good-byes as well, and Zahir could scarcely remember what he had accused them of in his reports — oh, yes: he had wondered why they spent so much time in the forest. He had reddened at this thought: they were hunters.

It was not the IL Zahir was expecting, not specifically, but some form of castigation, celestial or otherwise, for his role in the war. Before that moment, it had seemed that his monthly reports were filed away and never seen again, that all his effort amounted to a simple exercise with no bearing on the war or on anything else. Then, that day, it became clear: he was not innocent. Three men died. That is, he could guess they had died: three men disappeared because of him. Because he had, on a whim, invented a story about a man he barely knew. Because he had padded his report with musings about what a villager might do in the forest with a gun besides hunt. Something would come to disturb his otherwise comfortable life. In the days after the platoon came, all guns and stern faces, the village continued listening to the radio, now broadcasting reports of victory marches in the city. Celebrations. It rained heavily that week, and they could see helicopters whirring below the purple clouds. They could even hear the rumble of distant explosions. Was the war really over? It was hard to know what to believe.

Then the fighting in the distance flared out, and the placid years began. His own son grew up strong. The school was rebuilt, and a procession of teachers from the city began coming to 1797. They didn’t stay long, but they took the place the army had once occupied in the village’s collective imagination: the only tangible evidence that somewhere a government existed, and it knew of them. This, too, was a positive development.

The IL arrived on an early October day of limpid sun, firing shots in the air and demanding to be fed. They gathered the village folk together, and one of them, a dark-eyed young woman, spoke shrilly of the victory that awaited them all. Still? Even now? She was thin enough and young enough that Zahir allowed himself to feel pity for her. Her hair was tied back loosely, and when she raised her arms, he could see dark stains. Then she fired a shot in the air, and it was as if a scrim had been lifted.

“But the war is over,” Zahir said. Softly at first.

A masked guerrilla walked toward him. Zahir knew what was coming, or thought he did, but when the butt of the rifle struck in his stomach, his vision went gray, and he doubled over, clutching helplessly at his midsection, fully expecting his organs to spill from his body. The guerrilla kicked him, called him a collaborator, and this word struck Zahir as right and just, and so he resolved to take his beating like a man. He heard a child crying out, and imagined it must be Adela’s boy. He felt something not unlike pride. He winced, pressing tears from the corners of his eyes, but the boots bruised him like tender caresses.

When he came to, the IL was announcing tadek. This he had not expected. His vision was blurry, and a dull pain spread out from his belly to encompass his entire torso, his heart, his neck. He blinked: his brain wasn’t right either. They had all been taken to a clearing, and the sun beat down on them with blistering intensity. He was being held up by two women, and everyone was there: an entire village of frightened adults standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a circle. Zahir stood rigidly, only vaguely aware that it had begun, that the boy was loose and drunken among them, ready to accuse somebody. He could barely see the child but could make out his rigid movements, stumbling now to the left, now to the right, hands before him grasping, as if teasing some meaning from the air. Each time he approached the edge of the circle, everyone tensed, and those most in danger backed up ever so slightly. The IL kept a strict watch, firing shots into the air. At one point, Victor sat down in the middle of the circle, balling his fists and pressing them against his temples, until an IL man stepped in, nudging the boy to his feet. “Go on,” he said. “Find the thief.”

It’s coming, it’s coming: Zahir could see now, and stand on his own, but the women still held him. One of them whispered in his ear: “Don’t be afraid.” It was Adela’s voice, but he didn’t turn or say anything in response. Maybe she was talking to herself, he couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t scared; three deaths would be atoned for. Wasn’t he responsible for this orphan? The boy tumbled and fell; now he stood again. There was dirt on his knee. He was crying, he was looking for her. “Mother,” Victor said, and Zahir felt Adela shrink behind him. No one, it seemed, had breathed in many minutes. The shots came every thirty seconds or so, and each time, the boy stopped and looked up, as if searching for the bullet’s trajectory in the bright sky. Then Victor found her — find me, Zahir thought — and trundled in her direction. It’s coming, it’s coming: but before he stepped forward to claim his guilt, Zahir was able to see the boy’s eyes: glassy with tears, fearful, focused on something distant and invisible, on some dark spot in the forest or a cloud shaped like a beast.

Then the boy touched him, and everything else happened in an instant: with guns at the ready, the IL led the town in baleful chant of “Thief! Collaborator!” The women were crying but they shouted, because they were afraid not to. Zahir caught sight of his wife then, her face red and teary, helpless and shrinking. Another woman held her so she wouldn’t collapse. Where was his son? His daughter? He squinted; there was so much light upon him; then he was lashed to a tree stump, and then he was screaming. The IL sang patriotic songs. His new life began with music.

THE SHOW Norma had imagined goes this way: suddenly, there are no restrictions, and all names are fair. The accusations that had been published after the war — that Rey had been an IL assassin, a messenger, or a bomb-thrower — these are rendered moot. There are only missing people, their innocence or complicity unimportant, irrelevant. The show begins: Norma plays a song, the calls come. I knew a professor, a voice says, he was my teacher at the university, and he disappeared.

When?

At the end of the war.

What did he teach?

Botany. He loved the forest, but not the way a scientist would. The way a poet would. He knew the basic stuff, the chemical composition of the soil in different river valleys. The patterns of rainfall and flooding. But that wasn’t it. What he most cared about—

And what was his name?

The caller hangs up abruptly. Next.

I knew a man at the Moon who was fascinated by jungle juju. He said everything we were seeing was a hallucination. That in the real world people didn’t do things like these to each other.

And what sorts of things were they doing to you?

Dial tone.

Another caller: I had a friend who worked once in Tamoé, gathering information for the census. He said the people had nothing except nearly infinite stores of patience, that they wanted only to keep what little they had and be left alone.

But why wouldn’t people leave them alone?

Each time, the callers come closer; it’s almost coy, the way they dance around him. After a dozen calls, Rey’s life has been described completely: colleagues, acquaintances, friends from every era of his short life. The boys who betrayed him that night of the fire have called to ask about him, and they have even apologized: we were afraid, they said. We were just children and the town wasn’t the same after Rey left. Where did he go? A call has come from a man who was with them the night of the first Great Blackout: when you said you’d been to the Moon, I winced. I’d been there too. And there are so many more: a cop who knew Trini. A man with a jungle accent who claimed to be an artist. A woman who was IL: she suspects that they knew the same people. But no one can remember his name. Who is this stranger? Can’t anyone remember? It’s been so long. Norma is sweating. Even in her imaginary show, she is balanced delicately above a precipice; even here she is afraid. Then it is her own voice she hears: I knew a man, she says, or was he a boy then, this man who took me dancing, who charmed me, who blew smoke into the bus as we rode together across this beautiful city, across the city as it was before the war — does anyone remember what a place this was? And this man, this boy, this lovely and terrifying child, he let me touch him and I loved him until a soldier came and took him away. For my entire life, he has been a great and disappearing angel, a vanishing act, a torturer, and now he’s gone and the question is, for how long, and the answer I fear most is forever.

And here the dream ends, here her grief runs into the reality of it. She can’t say his name. She tries, but she can’t. Someone else must do it for her.

It is nearly morning in the city and the war has been finished for ten years. Crimes have been forgiven, or at least forgotten, and still her Rey has not returned. She buried his father without him. She placed an obituary in the paper. It read: “Survived by his son…” The war had been over for three years then, and it felt like a lie. No one came to the funeral. She hadn’t seen the old man in many months. They had nothing to say to each other. Once, her father-in-law had made it past the screeners and onto the air. At first she hadn’t recognized him.

“Norma,” he’d said, voice breaking. “Where is he?”

“Who?” she asked, because she always asked. It was her job. “Why don’t you tell us about him?”

On the other end, there was a long pause. Breathing.

“Sir? Who are we talking about?”

“Your husband,” said the old man, now weeping openly. “My son.”

Elmer cut to commercial immediately.

And it felt then the way it always had, the way it always would: like someone clutching her throat, trying and very nearly succeeding in squeezing the life from her. The worst of it passed in a matter of seconds, but the recovery took days, even weeks. Or a lifetime. During the long, uncomfortable break, Norma felt no one would look at her. Elmer came in with a cup of tea. “The wrong name, Norma. I’m sorry, but the wrong name and we’re dead. You and me both.” He said it without looking her in the eye.

She put on a record and let it play through. When she began again, there was a new caller, a new voice that made no mention of Norma’s loss, and the show resumed without incident.

Early morning now, ten years without war, and Norma has come to this place again. She is moving without thinking now. Give the boy a microphone. Give Manau a microphone. Headphones all around. There is the couch where Rey and I made love. Close eyes: remember. Not now. Breathe. There are lights blinking, a record playing, and Norma feels as if she is the conductor of an orchestra, that the city just waking or just drifting to sleep is hers to control. Cue music and let it play.

Breathe.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she says when the song has finished. “Welcome to a special edition of Lost City Radio. My name is Norma.”

It has begun.

Rey described once the way the world melted in the heat of a psychoactive plant. Why was he so interested in these? The mystery, he said, lay in the discovery: whatever you hallucinated was something that had always been there, waiting to escape. The thrill, the surprise: what is it that you had buried from yourself? What emerged from the shadows, from the cobwebbed corners, from behind locked doors thrown suddenly, ludicrously, open? What did you find, Rey?

You.

Me?

You. Norma. You, in strange shapes and forms. As various animals, as air, as water. As light. As the dense and fertile earth. As a rhymed poem, as a song sung in a high-pitched voice. As a painting. You. As someone I don’t deserve.

When was this? Years ago. In the last year of the war. He nestled himself closer to her.

She has been talking now for a few minutes, and the realization scares her: the words are forming in her throat, not in her mind. The words are expelled and thrown into space before she has a moment to reflect on them. Rey. She’s said one of his names already, and so there’s no going back. Rey Rey Rey. There are no calls coming in. It is only her voice, roaming over the city. It might be, she thinks, despairing, that no one is listening. No one at all. Maybe this is the best way. The boy glances at her with tired eyes. “Who are you looking for?” Norma asks.

He shrugs, and she loves him. He looks nothing like Rey. “People from my village,” he says.

“Which is?”

“1797.”

“You have a list, don’t you?”

The boy nods. You can’t hear a nod on the radio. She asks him again, until he says yes, he does, and if he should read it.

Of course he must read it. Who else can get away with it? They won’t do anything to the boy. He is blameless. But she can’t bear it. Not yet. “In a moment,” she says.

But why wait? Isn’t this what she has always wanted? Isn’t this where her perfect show always ended?

“And you?” she says, turning to Manau. She has always loved shows with guests. There have been dozens of reunions in this room, nearly a hundred since the war ended — people have wept joyfully here, have embraced their loved ones, and have received the congratulatory calls of strangers. She has been witness to this, and perhaps if she hadn’t seen it, she wouldn’t believe it could happen. But now, it is as if she can feel the heat of those many reunions, this room suddenly peopled with ghosts.

“And you, Mr. Manau, who are you looking for?”

He seems surprised by the question. He shakes his head. His expression is glum. “No one,” he says.

“You came together. Tell us what that was like.”

The boy and his teacher look at each other, each hoping the other will talk. Finally, Manau coughs. “It’s a long way to come, Norma, for anybody. Especially for a boy of eleven, but even for me. We came on a truck and then on a boat and then on a bus that drove all night. Where else would we come? In this country, all roads lead to the city.”

“Let’s return to the list.”

“Of course.”

The boy says, “They’re the missing people from my village,” and before she can ask, he adds, “I didn’t know many of them. Only a few.”

“Do you want to talk about them?”

“Nico,” the boy says, “was my best friend. He left.”

“Everyone leaves,” offers Manau.

Norma smiles. “It’s true.”

“Aren’t you tired, Miss Norma?” the boy asks.

“Oh no,” Norma says. “Tired of what?”

“I don’t remember him, Miss Norma.”

“Nico?”

“Your husband,” Victor says. “My father.”

Norma blows the boy a kiss. “I know you don’t. No one expects you to.”

“I told my mother I did.”

“You’re a good boy.”

“I’m tired, Miss Norma, even if you aren’t.”

“Let’s read the list,” Manau says. “It’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” Norma says with a nod. She’s been stalling, she can’t stand it any longer. “It’s why we’re here. Are you ready? Will you read for us, dear?”

Victor nods. You can’t hear a nod on the radio. It is just past three in the morning when he clears his throat and begins.

And now she can’t even hear the names. Norma has her eyes closed, and the war has been over for ten years. Let the boy read, let him, they won’t do anything to him. They’ll send me to prison, they’ll reopen the Moon for my benefit, and welcome me as they did my husband. I’m sorry, Elmer. Maybe they’ll pretend it never happened. It’s the middle of the night, and no one is listening anyway. It’s just us. He reads very well, and Manau should be proud of what he has taught the boy. The names mean nothing, not to Manau, not to Victor. One or another is familiar, a surname he has heard before, but most are empty. There is his father’s name, and he nearly skips over this one altogether. Norma sits upright at the sound, as if someone has touched her. “Pardon me?” she says. “Could you repeat that last one?”

Victor looks up from his list.

“What a nice name,” Norma says. It’s all she can do not to scream.

And in an instant, it has passed: here are the names written by the old man with the X-rays, and the ones added by the woman at the beach, and by the soldiers just now. Victor reads these as well, his voice not wavering but gaining strength. Thank God no one is listening. Thank God it’s only us in this sleeping city. Close your eyes and imagine we are alone. Nearly three dozen names; what good can come of this?

In two minutes, it is finished.

“The phone lines are open,” she manages, as if this were just another show. She looks hopefully at the switchboard, but there is nothing, not yet. There must be a record here somewhere: a song, any song to fill the empty space.

And now, it is time to wait.

IF REY had no answers about how the war began, it was very clear how it ended: almost ten years after it had started, in a truck, blindfolded, surrounded by soldiers smoking and laughing and poking him again and again with their rifles. He was taken along with two other men from the village, but the soldiers, for some reason, only seemed concerned with him. “Where you from, man?” one of them asked.

Rey strained to see through the black cloth. There was only darkness. “You’ve never heard of it.”

“Junior’s read books. You should try him.”

“He’s from the city,” one of the other prisoners said.

“No one’s talking to you,” a soldier snapped.

They all laughed. They were just kids. Rey pretended he was somewhere else: flying, yachting even. He’d never done either. One of the village men had begun to sob. Rey was seated between the two of them, men about whom he knew very little. Why were they here? The man to his left was shaking. “Where are we going?” he asked, but the soldiers ignored him. Instead, the one named Junior said, “How’d you end up here, city boy?”

It took Rey a moment to realize they meant him. He sighed. “I’m not from the city.”

“IL piece of shit.”

“There’s no such thing,” Rey said, and he felt the business end of a rifle jab his gut. There was laughter.

“Keep talking, funny guy.”

“You’re famous,” another voice said. “You’re thinner than I thought you’d be. They say you plant bombs and kill cops. They say you invented tire-burning.”

Rey blinked against the blindfold.

“I bet you want to go home.”

“I bet he does.”

“But sometimes we don’t get what we want.”

The road out of 1797 had been bumpy, but the jeep managed, and once they were moving, everything changed. The smells changed, and the quality of the heat that surrounded them. The forest was not a monolithic entity: it was many places all at once. He’d been down this road that led away from 1797: grown over with vines, and above, a thick canopy of trees that broke only rarely. It was cool and damp. He listened: they had turned and were approaching the water. He’d been here as well, on one of his trips to the camps. At the riverbank, he was separated from the two village men. One of them begged: “I’ll tell you everything!” He pleaded with such ferocity that Rey had to wonder what it was the man knew.

Then they put him on a raft, hands still tied, eyes still blind. By the sounds of it, Rey felt the platoon had shrunk, or broken into smaller units. There were three or four soldiers with him. He couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. Yachting, Rey said to himself, for the last time. In the middle of the river, where the trees did not reach, there was golden sunlight, and for a moment, Rey allowed himself to take in its warmth. He luxuriated in it; he let the light make colors behind his eyelids, let it illumine scenes and images of people and places he loved and would never see again. These are the small moments one can appreciate fully only when death is near. “We’re almost there,” a voice said after a while, and Rey knew this to be the truth. They hadn’t come far, but then the camp had never been that far from 1797. A bend in the river, a hike into the forest from the bank. Two hours downstream at most. The water was calm. Rey was calm. If he hadn’t been blindfolded, he might have enjoyed the scenery: his beloved forest, the earth at its most garishly alive. Even from this vantage point, with most of its secrets hidden beyond the banks, it was impossible not to be impressed. These were the dark places that had enchanted him his entire life: he listened for the humming of the jungle, for a bird call or the chirrup of a red monkey. What had he come here for — in the beginning? Norma, he thought and, saying it softly to himself, he felt comforted. What had he come looking for, when he had everything? He’d had her. Norma, he said again, and her name was like the final word of a prayer.

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” he asked in the dark.

No one answered him, but then, no one had to. The sun warmed his face. A drop of sweat rolled down his forehead, beneath the blindfold and into his right eye. He nodded. “All right,” he said, blinking. “All right, okay then.” He was still nodding when the soldier everyone called Junior shot him in the chest.

Rey died instantly.

They were all boys, and though the prisoner was a stranger to them, they each mourned him in their private way. The war was ending, and Rey’s was one of the last bodies they would see. A battle awaited them at the camp, of course, but that would come tomorrow, and they would not fight it alone. They would come upon a tired band of IL fighters, among them a man named Alaf, who, like many others, would die before firing a shot. But that would be all noise and light, whereas Rey’s was a smaller, more intimate death. One of them pulled the silver chain from around the dead man’s neck. They checked his pockets, hoping to find money, but there was only a handwritten letter, of no use to anyone. They stared at Rey. From another raft on the river, a grinning soldier gave them a thumbs-up. One of them pulled off the dead man’s blindfold and closed his eyelids; another took his shoes. For many minutes, no one spoke. They let the current carry them, and they watched Rey, as if expecting him to speak. Finally, it fell upon Junior, who was the oldest, a three-year veteran, a boy of nineteen, to push the bound man’s body off the raft and into the river. It made a small splash, and, for a quarter-mile, it floated alongside them, bobbing and sinking facedown in the river. Still, no one spoke. One of the younger soldiers, of his own initiative, used the oar to push Rey’s body toward the shore. With this accomplished, they all felt better.