Daniel Alarcon - Lost City Radio

The kelp reminded him of home, of the green moss that clung to the lower limbs of the trees. Was it possible to explain? How it formed curtains of green swaying in the wind, its lowest edges skimming the surface of the river? He tried. The color was just right: a deep, dark green, nearly black, soggy and waterlogged. “Can you picture it?” he asked.

She said she could.

They sat listening to the sea. It was neither cold nor warm. A bank of clouds had fissured, jagged bands of light breaking through. Victor asked, “Are you still dizzy?”

Norma scooted closer to him. “No,” she said. “Are you?”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

Norma smiled. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re a strong boy, aren’t you? You may be stuck with me for a while.”

He jabbed his driftwood sword in the air. For a moment, it was just the ocean and its rhythms. “Is that all right?” Norma asked, and something in her voice made Victor blush. He didn’t answer right away.

“My mother loved you,” he said. “Everyone in my village did.”

Norma said nothing.

The stooped woman had made her away across the beach, dragging her sack behind her. Victor stood suddenly and walked over to her. She smiled and kept working, scooping the sand into the metal screen, letting the smaller grains fall through. Whatever remained, she dropped into her sack. “Auntie,” Victor said, “can I help?”

“Nice boy,” the woman said.

He took a handful of sand, and let it fall through his fingers, then offered her the pebbles stuck to his palm. She smiled and dropped them into her sieve. They didn’t fall through. She thanked him and tossed them into her bag. She patted his head, and nodded at Norma. “Nice boy,” the woman repeated, “helping an old woman like me.”

“Won’t you sit and rest with us a moment?” Norma asked.

The woman smiled, exposing a mouthful of pinkish-red gums. “Oh, you young people have time to sit and rest! Not me!”

“I’ll gather rocks for you,” Victor said.

She sat and handed Victor her sieve. He knelt down and scooped a handful of sand into it. He ran his tongue along his teeth and stared at the sand as it slipped through the wire netting of the sieve. When he was done, he brought it to the woman for inspection.

“Very good,” she said. From an inside pocket, the woman unrolled a piece of bread. She tore off the crust and offered it to Norma and Victor, but both refused. She ate only the doughy, white inside of the bread, chewing slowly, methodically. A tiny radio hung around her neck by a shoestring. After finishing her bread, she took the single battery from her radio, rubbed it between her palms, then replaced it. The radio crackled to life, spitting out scratchy sound, static, voices.

Norma glanced at her watch. “One of the daytime shows, Auntie,” she said. “Love advice or police reports.”

“On Sunday,” Victor announced, “I’ll be on the radio.”

The woman looked up. “How nice.”

“I’ll say your name. If you want me to.”

She glanced at Victor. “That would be just fine.”

Victor was on his knees again, sifting pebbles. The woman began explaining to Norma how she had stumbled upon this work, how her husband had been in construction. She wanted to talk, she couldn’t help it. Victor listened as she told how her husband had fallen from a beam and died, how she had approached his partner and begged him for something to do. She’d stayed home all her adult life. What could she do? This is what she was offered. She sold the pebbles to a concrete mixer on Avenue F.

“He cheated me,” she said, her voice breaking. “My husband promised me. He said he wouldn’t leave.”

“They do that,” Norma said. “They say those things. They may even mean them, Auntie.”

Victor listened and emptied the sieve into her sack of pebbles, and twice interrupted to ask her name. Both times, the woman ignored him and stared at Norma. “Are you from Lost City, madam?”

Norma blushed and nodded.

Smiling, the woman took Norma’s hand in hers and squeezed. “Why weren’t you on the radio this morning?”

“A day off, Auntie. That’s all.”

“You’ll be back?” the woman asked. “Tomorrow?”

“Or the next day,” Norma said.

A flock of sea gulls circled overhead. The clouds were thin and gauzy now. “I’m so happy,” the woman said after a while. “I’m so happy you’re real.”

Norma held her hand and stroked the back of her neck. Victor sat and placed his hand on the woman’s back. She was dirty and smelled of the sea. She had crumpled into Norma’s embrace and didn’t even notice Victor.

“Auntie,” Norma said, “is there anyone I can help you with?”

The old woman leaned back, nodding. “Oh, Norma,” she whispered. She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. “I had a man type it for me,” she said. “What does it say?”

Norma read two names aloud, and the woman nodded. “God is merciful,” she said. “Tell them I work this beach. They’re my children.” Then she gathered her things, and thanked them both. “But especially you, boy,” she said. “Give Auntie a kiss.”

She bent down and offered him her cheek. Victor kissed her obediently.

When she had walked a little ways, Victor grabbed his sword. Then he grabbed a handful of sand and dropped it into his pocket. He stared off into the ocean, scanning from right to left across the horizon. His mother, of course, wasn’t there. But Norma was, walking just ahead of him to the highway, holding the old woman’s list in her hand, tightly, so it wouldn’t fly away.

WHEN HE was still a young professor, as the war was beginning in earnest, Rey revived his old pseudonym to publish an essay in one of the city’s more partisan newspapers. The central committee had decided it was worth the risk: a calculated provocation. In spite of the paper’s tiny circulation, the essay caused something of a controversy. In a series of articles, Rey described a ritual he had witnessed in the jungle. He named the ritual tadek , after the psychoactive plant used, though he claimed the natives of the village had more than a half-dozen discrete names for it, depending on the time of year it was employed, the day of the week, the crime it was designed to punish, et cetera. Tadek , as Rey described it, was a rudimentary form of justice, and it functioned this way: confronted by a theft, for example, the town elders chose a boy under the age of ten, stupefied him with a potent tea, and let the intoxicated child find the culprit. Rey had witnessed this himself: a boy stumbling drunkenly along the muddy paths of a village, into the marketplace, seizing upon the color of a man’s shirt, the geometric patterns of a woman’s dress, or a smell or sensation only the boy, in his altered state, could know. The child would attach himself to an adult, and this was enough. The elders would proclaim tadek over and lead the newly identified criminal away, to have his or her hands removed.

If Rey’s article had been merely an anthropological description of a rarely used ritual, that might have been the end of it. This much was not controversial, as the jungle regions in those days were known primarily for being unknown, and the lay person could hardly be surprised by a violent pagan rite emerging from the dark forest. But Rey went further. Tadek , he argued, had been near extinction, but was now experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Furthermore, he refused to condemn it, did not call it barbarism or give any pejorative spin at all to his descriptions of its cruelty. Tadek , in Rey’s view, was the antique precursor to the absolutely modern system of justice now being employed in the nation. Wartime justice, arbitrary justice, he contended, was valid both ethically (one could never know what crimes were lurking in the hearts and minds of men) and practically (swift, violent punishment, if random in nature, could bolster the cause of peace, frightening potential subversives before they took up arms). In measured prose, he applauded a few well-publicized cases of tortured union leaders and missing students as successful, contemporary versions of tadek , whereby the state assigned guilt based on outward signifiers (youth, occupation, social class) no more or less revealing than the geometric pattern of a woman’s dress. The drunken child was perhaps extraneous in a modern context, but the essence was the same. Tadek ’s presence in the jungle was not some vestigial expression of a dying tradition but a nuanced reinterpretation of contemporary justice as seen through the prism of folklore. The nation-state, in wartime, had finally succeeded in filtering down to the isolated masses: to condemn them now for re-creating our institutions in their own communities was nothing less than hypocrisy.