Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

“Hello,” said Charlene, tipsy.

The man stopped. “You must be our guests,” he said and bowed. “Jens. Apologies for the mess. Although they seem to like it messy around here. They are artists, you see.”

“You’re Jens?” said Charlene. “Jens Røed-Larsen?”

He smiled at her mangled pronunciation. “I am.”

“Your son wrote to me.”

“Lars?”

“No, Per.”

He looked at her. “There must be some misunderstanding. I don’t have a son named Per.”

“Per Røed-Larsen.”

“I have a daughter, Kari. And Lars. That’s all.”

“But Leif said that Per was your son. He’s writing a history of this place. He sent me a telegram saying. .” Her words drifted off.

Jens gave her a kind smile. “Leif says many things. You must remember this about him: he’s a born performer. He has a tendency to inhabit others. The Per who wrote to you was not my son. He is another Per.”

“What do you mean? Which Per is he?”

“This I cannot say.” Jens bowed again. “Goodnight. I wish you a pleasant night’s sleep. It can be difficult if you aren’t used to the light.”

After he had left them, Kermin shook his head. “These Norwegians are such bullshit. They do not look you into your eyes. They are like a cat.”

“A cat?”

“They never say what they mean.”

Despite being utterly exhausted, Charlene considered taking a sleeping pill when they reached the cabin, fearing the midnight sun might keep her awake. This proved unnecessary: within minutes, she and Radar were both asleep, his head nestled into her belly. Kermin lay down beside her and closed his eyes, but the light seeping in between the blinds pinched at his retinas. The skin of his eyelids was not thick enough.

He shuffled out to the porch and softly twisted the dial of his portable transceiver. The frequencies buzzed and chattered; he tuned the squelch, and his radio locked on to some distant signal before settling again and again into a wash of static. He had expected as much. They were at the end of the earth. He had not brought the dipole multidirectional antenna kit that could reach the horizons beyond the horizon. Perhaps he could tap into the Wardenclyffe tower before they left tomorrow and take a quick peek into the concave Arctic radio spectrum.

Then, somewhere at seventeen meters, a channel crackled. A sign of life. Humans carving out an existence on the pole. It was a garbled Russian weatherman. The Slavic gutturals popped and exploded and then evaporated into the churning shallows of white noise. He kept twisting the dial and caught a snippet of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” Michael Jackson’s young voice rolling up through the sleeve of static, exercising its magnetic pull before the song fell apart beneath the weight of its own interference, disappearing back into the tundra.

Kermin sighed. He was about to put away the radio when he struck upon an eerily clear broadcast at twenty meters. A chorus of drummers. African, perhaps. The beats were syncopated, hypnotic, the sum of their collective polyrhythms emerging and converging, conjuring a high-pitched harmonic tone that sounded like a wet fingertip traveling along the edge of a singing bowl. The harmonics hovered and bobbed and faded away again into the continuous lurch of the drumbeat. Kermin found himself pressing the radio to his ear and closing his eyes. A vision of whales surfacing on a vast ocean, brackish spray exploding into the air. The weightlessness of the sea.

“They’re noaidi drums,” said a voice.

Kermin opened his eyes and saw a perfectly round head. Their host was leaning casually against the porch rail, like a cowboy in the late afternoon. In one of his palms he held a handful of orange berries. He casually tossed one into his mouth.

“Do you want one?” he said, offering a berry to Kermin. “It’s a cloudberry. Very important up here. Cures all ills — even those you didn’t know you had.”

Kermin shook his head. “No, thank you.”

“The noaidi is like a shaman for the Sami people. He plays the drum to transcend this world and enter into the spiritual realm of the gods. The skin of the noaidi drum is painted with a map of this alternate reality. The shamans use the drums to open the avenues to ascendance.”

“And they broadcast this?”

“The Sami are modernizing. They’re still the subjugated people up here, but they’re not stupid. There’s a lot of territory in the north, and not everyone can make the noaidi ceremonies. Radios collapse distance.”

“Radios transmit across distance. Distance cannot collapse.”

“I suppose it’s all in the perception, isn’t it? The world is as we perceive it. During the war, a radio was the most precious commodity. It was how the underground communicated. It was how a family could hear news from the mainland. The Nazis knew this — whoever controlled the radio waves controlled the means of propaganda. So they seized all the radios in Norway. Except we found ingenious ways of hiding them. . Disguised as an iron. Or a bedpost. We would hollow out a log and put one inside and then stick it in the woodpile. You just had to remember which log contained the radio before you burned it.”

“My father was radioman in the war,” said Kermin.

“The most valuable man in the company.”

Kermin was silent.

“You don’t like me, do you, Kermin? You think I want to harm your child.”

“I don’t know you, so there is no way to like you or not.”

“I didn’t force you to come here.”

“You are not connecting Radar to your machine,” said Kermin. “So stop thinking about this.”

Leif smiled. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

“No, thank you,” said Kermin.

“Oh, come now, you’re leaving tomorrow, you came all this way — why not let me show you around a little? I promise, it’ll be worth your time.”

Kermin considered this. “I will only go for two minutes,” he said. “Then I come back.”

“However much time you can spare. Are you sure you don’t want a cloudberry?”

Kermin took the berry from his host. It had a sharp sweetness, a soft pinch on the tongue like the white currants back in Croatia, which he would pluck and squish between his fingers before popping them into his mouth. A wisp of memory he could not quite place sifted across his brain.

“It’s not so bad,” he said.

“Not so bad?”

“Comprehensive.” Kermin volunteered the word that Charlene often used with her smells. “Thank you.”

“Comprehensive? Okay. Kermin, I like it. You see? Would I lie to you? The cloudberry is comprehensive .”

Kermin followed Leif down a path lined with large triangular stones that looked like the oldest objects in the world.

“This place was so different during the war,” said Leif. “I used to think that war only changes us. But it also changes the land. It changes the rocks and stones around us.”

“I was child in the war.”

“Your father was a Chetnik, was he not?”

“Yes,” said Kermin. “So what?”

“I was simply stating a fact, not making a judgment.”

“My father was good man,” said Kermin. “He was fighting for his home. He was radioman, not this general making decisions for all of Chetnik army. He did what they tell him.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“You cannot blame small people for big problems.”

“I’m not suggesting your father was a bad man.”

“If my father did not fight for Chetniks,” said Kermin, “we would not have to run, and we would not go to Bergen and I would not get on this boat to America and then I would not meet Charlene. I would not have Radar. So this all good things.”