Daniel Alarcon - Lost City Radio

“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.