Lost City Radio: A Novel

PART ONE

ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, Victor said.

Do you know him?

Norma didn’t.

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

Great, she said. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Miss Norma:

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

Your biggest fans,

Village 1797

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

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

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

Victor shook his head.

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

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

She opened her eyes.

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

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

Do you know these people? Elmer asked the boy.

No, Victor said. A few.

Who brought you to the station?

My teacher. His name is Manau.

Where is he? asked Len.

He left me.

Why did they send you?

I don’t know.

Your mother? Norma asked.

She’s dead.

Norma apologized; Len took copious notes.

Father? said Elmer.

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

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

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

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

What do you want me to do? Norma asked.

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

You do.

You do too, he said.

What’s on your mind, Elmer?

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

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

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

He hardly said a word.

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

What about his people?

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

You’re joking.

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

What about the teacher?

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

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

What? Elmer asked.

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

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

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

Fine, she said after a while.

Good. Can he stay with you?

You want me to babysit?

Well.

Give me the week off.

A day.

Three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norma could do nothing but follow.

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

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

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

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

Are you new to the neighborhood?

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

It’s no trouble.

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

Thank you, Norma said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m sorry, Norma said. I can’t.

Of course you can.

No. I’m sorry. He’s not mine.

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

She’s not my mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The streets filled with people.

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

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

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

Rey and Norma met through mutual friends at a dance that same week. Rey was handsome in a broken kind of way: the kind of young man who had looked old his entire life. His nose bent subtly to the left, and his eyes hid in the recessed shadows beneath his brow. Still, he had a strong jaw and an incongruously silly, dimpled smile and, for this, Norma liked him. He smoked incessantly, a habit he would later give up, but that first night it seemed integral to who he was. A group of them sat together, talking about the city and the government and the university and the future. They spoke of the crowds that had filled the plaza: the people, always myopic, always easy to fool. Indians, Rey said, imagine! They don’t even know who the president is! It was all laughter and noise and the melting of ice cubes. They made fun of the president, who was weak and expendable and whose troubles were only beginning. The Illegitimate Legion! It was only a punch line then: how would these enemies be any different from those who had come before? Hadn’t