Daniel Alarcon - Lost City Radio

“Talking doesn’t help,” Trini said. “I’ve learned that. It’s why I never ask.” The light changed, and they crossed the street toward home.

THE TELECENTER was crowded at this hour. A pale, unhealthy-looking man with greasy hair gave Norma a number: it entitled her to booth number fourteen. Then he gave her a form and motioned for her to sit. “You write the numbers here,” he explained, “and I dial them for you.”

Norma nodded. “How long is the wait?”

“Thirty minutes. Maybe more,” the man said, scanning his list. He looked up with a smile. “But you must have a phone at home, madam. Why are you here with us?”

Norma blushed. She did, of course, have a phone, but what difference did that make? It never rang. Is that what the man wanted to hear? That she, too, was alone? She ignored his questions and asked him for a directory.

“A local call, madam?” the man said, then shrugged and pulled the tattered book from beneath his desk. Norma thanked him in a whisper.

The end of a working day — all over the city, it was the same. Evening in America, past midnight in Europe, already tomorrow morning in Asia. Time to call and check in, to reassure those who had left that you were on your way, that you were surviving, that you hadn’t forgotten them. To reassure yourself that they hadn’t forgotten you. Norma sighed. There were twenty-five phones in twenty-five cubicles, each with its overflowing ashtray, and each, she could see, occupied. Men and women hunched over, cradling the receivers tenderly, straining to hear the voices on the other end. Most had their backs to the waiting area, but she knew them even without seeing them: these were the voices she heard every Sunday. She knew them from the needy murmur that rose in the room — always that sound. The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it. Where were they calling? That voice, where was it coming from? The whole world had scattered, but there they were, so close you could feel them. So close you could smell them. You had only to close your eyes, to listen, and there they were. They respected the telephone, these people. They handled it as if it were fine china: for special occasions only. The radio was the same. It was even more. Norma hoped no one would recognize her.

She had sent Victor to sit, and she found him now, seated beside a young man with a shaved head and a tattoo that ran diagonally across the side of his neck. Victor had saved her a place, no small accomplishment in this crowded room.

“Manau,” she said when she sat down.

Victor nodded.

It was not a common surname; at the very least, Norma could be grateful for that. She had already decided they would not go home that night. Elmer might have sent someone there, to wait for her to arrive, to bring her and the boy in. Elmer was afraid, of course, and this wasn’t irrational: ten years on, and still the government took no chances with the war. No, going home wasn’t safe. Instead they would find this teacher, this Manau. They would ambush him: squeeze it out of him, whatever he knew. She felt she might strike this man when she saw him. That was the kind of anger she felt: how many times in her life had she hit someone? Once, twice, never? She thumbed through the phone book and found it: twelve different Manau households, in nine different districts. No Elijahs or E. Manaus. He lived with his parents then. Of course. Two could be discarded by the fancy addresses. Rich families don’t send their young to places like 1797 to teach.

She carefully wrote the ten numbers on the form the greasy-haired man had given her.

“What will we do when we find him?” Victor asked.

“We’ll ask him what he knows,” said Norma. “What else can we do?”

“Okay.”

Norma closed the phone book. “Why?”

“What if he won’t talk to us?”

She hadn’t considered that. Not really. By what right would this Manau, this spineless creature, withhold anything from her? Norma was about to answer when her number was called. “Come with me,” she said to Victor, and they stepped through the people to the front desk. She gave the greasy-haired man her form, and took Victor by the hand to their booth. “He’ll talk,” she said to Victor, to herself.

It was hot, and there was barely enough room for the two of them. They pressed in. There was only one chair and a small table with a phone, a timer, and an ashtray. Victor stood. The phone had a green light that blinked when the call was patched through. They waited in the airless booth, and the boy said nothing. The man at the counter dialed their way down the list of numbers. Norma picked up the phone, each time seized by an expectant, implausibly optimistic feeling. Six times she asked for Elijah Manau, and six times she was told there was no such person. She was beginning to suspect he didn’t have a phone, that it was all a waste, when on the seventh call, a woman with a tired voice said, “Wait, wait. Yes, he’s here.” Norma wanted to shout. The woman cleared her throat, then yelled, “Elijah, you have a call!”

Norma could hear a voice, a man’s voice, still far away. “Yes, mother,” it said, “I’m coming. Tell them to wait.” If he was surprised, Norma couldn’t hear it. It was as if he’d been expecting their call all along.

IN THE weeks that followed, whenever Trini came over to visit, he would tell Rey of the latest IL transgression, the latest threat. It was only a matter of time, he said. We’re in for trouble. Rey began his own work in Tamoé, and together they shared stories about the teetering ship of the state as seen from the inside: its myopic bureaucracy, its radical incompetence made manifest in Tamoé or in the prison’s dark terrors. Rey’s father chimed in, that it had always been that way, that everything was always getting worse. He could be counted on for a dose of pessimism. A half a year passed, Rey met Marden, he returned to the university. Trini filed reports and made official complaints, but nothing came of it. Another guard was killed today, he told them one evening, looking distraught, and Rey told his uncle to be careful. Quit, Rey’s father said, but there weren’t many other jobs available. Bodyguard, security guard — and were either of those really a step up? Safer?

Just before the war was declared, ten months after Rey was released from the Moon, the prison officials made a tactical retreat, ceding an entire pavilion to the IL. It was a truce of sorts, and it held for longer than anyone had expected it to: for a year, and most of another. Trini continued to work at the prison, and no one entered the IL’s pavilion. The IL taught classes there, held trainings, and the prison officials preferred not to think of it. Every now and then, an operative was caught and tossed in with his comrades. They clothed and fed him: he had survived the Moon to be nursed to health within the prison’s liberated territory.

It was in November, nearing the war’s second official anniversary, when the inevitable happened: the prison break that marked one of the IL’s first successes in the city. A tunnel the length of four city blocks had been dug beneath the prison walls into an adjacent neighborhood, rising out of the earth in the living room of a rented and then abandoned home. The press went crazy, and a scapegoat was urgently needed. Those in charge wanted a peon, a single man with no family to make a fuss. They found Trini.

When he was arrested, Trini was living with Rey’s father. They came on a Sunday afternoon, kicked in the door, and threw everyone against the walls: Rey, his father, Norma, Trini. They would’ve taken them all if Norma hadn’t threatened them: I work at the radio, she said. I’ll make a big fuss. She was only an intern then, but the soldiers weren’t going to take any chances. They took Trini. He didn’t resist. They took Rey, too, but only as far as the street, and then they let him go. The woman wouldn’t stop yelling.