Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

“Oh, I almost forgot,” said the mortician. She reached into the pocket of her lab coat and handed him a small ziplock bag. “I was asked to give this to you.”

Inside the bag there was a small metal key.

• • •

AS PER RØED-LARSEN POINTS out at length in Spesielle Partikler (pp. 693–705), the official police report on Miroslav Danilovic’s death is a curious document. While it offers seemingly superfluous details about the “deceased wearing [the] lower half of [a] yellow tracksuit, seated in front of a bowl of milk,” it remains vague about the actual cause or essential circumstances of the death itself. One of the officers who signed the document, Officer Stanislav Radic, was later dismissed from the police force under suspicion of extortion and bribery. Miroslav’s obituary in Naša Borba, the only Serbian paper to carry an announcement of his death, was brief, if complimentary, mentioning the graffito and the cult of the black theater boxes. It did not reference a theater project in Sarajevo.

Røed-Larsen elaborates on Miroslav’s role in Kirkenesferda Fire, that group’s famous Sarajevo performance, which ran for only four nights in the eviscerated shell of the National Library of Bosnia, from August 24 to 27, before it was cut short by the Markale marketplace massacre. He writes:

[Miroslav] was perhaps the most talented of all the puppet-makers. . more so, it could be argued, than Ragnvald Brynildsen, the original, or even Tor Bjerknes, who so beautifully oversaw the design of Kirk Tre in Cambodia with Kermin Radmanovic. What separated Miroslav [from the others] was his erasure of the connective tissue between puppet and puppeteer. His objects moved without intervention; they literally took on a life of their own, in which the puppeteer became just another spectator to the miracle at hand. (999)

Per Røed-Larsen, for all his thoroughness, fails to mention what happened to the rest of the family. After the war, Danilo Danilovic moved back to Višegrad. The farm had been untouched in his absence — all was accounted for except one thing: the elephant had vanished. He would eventually sell the farm and move to a house not far from the bowed shadows of the Turkish Bridge, which he would visit each evening until the day he died.

Mihajlo Danilo, his only remaining son, lived in semi-hiding as a bricklayer in a hamlet outside Belgrade, occasionally writing to his father. He returned once to Višegrad for a reunion of sorts, but neither father nor son could say he recognized the other. Eventually his underground network of supporters began to unravel and he was forced to flee to Argentina, where he worked reshelving books at a municipal library, even though he could not read a word of Spanish. Over the years, many of his friends and colleagues, former paramilitaries and Srpska army officials, were arrested and brought to trial by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Mihajlo Danilo was never captured. He remained at large, existing only in the memory of those who had once known him.

August 10, 2010

On the day that would change everything thereafter and much of what came before, Radar Radmanovic rose before his birdcall alarm clock could tweep out its dreaded tree swallow soliloquy and stumbled into the shower. He closed his eyes as the warm curtain of water enveloped him, letting his forehead come to rest against the same geodesic turquoise tiles that had counseled his bathing for the past thirty years.

The horror. Last night he and Ana Cristina had gone on their fourth date — fifth if you counted their Slurpie meeting on the A&P loading dock, which Radar often did. After each of these dates, he would wake up the next day panic-stricken and horrendously embarrassed, positive he had done or said something that had subsequently ruined his chances of ever seeing her again.

That was my last glimpse of paradise, he would always think, just as he was thinking now, forehead pressed against tile.

Indeed, his relationship with her was one of the universe’s great mysteries: why would beautiful, lovely Ana Cristina — with her duotone lipstick and those impossible hoop earrings and that smile (so effortless!) that revved his transmission and numbed his knees — why would a girl like that stick around with a guy like him? It defied all rational thought. Unless of course she was perpetuating their connection merely to gather amusing stories that she could later share with her muchachos —but such mean-spirited behavior was not like her. No, not like her at all — Ana Cristina was a giver, not a taker. This he had learned as they sat side by side in darkened movie theaters (four times now!) watching terrible movies, his leg inches from hers; he, petrified, unable to listen to a single line from said terrible movie as he contemplated when and if and how he should fulcrum his arm up and over and around her shoulders.

And last night he had finally done it. He had counted to three (or four — he couldn’t remember now) and his arm had shot into the air completely without grace, bordering on some fascist salute, but somehow when it had fallen back to earth it had found an uncertain home around her frame, and it was as if she had been waiting for that arm, because after a moment she had let her head fall — no: drift— onto his shoulder. And then, while Radar was pleading for his body not to shut down, something monumental had transpired. He couldn’t even satisfyingly reconstruct the minute procedures that led up to its apotheosis, but somehow, they had kissed . They had actually kissed. Briefly, her lips had grazed his. It was an event he once could’ve only dreamed about, during all those commercial transactions at the A&P. He had pined after her for months as she plied her trade in checkout lane number 2 before he had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out in what would be one of the most awkward date proposals known to mankind, and now—

Sweet Jesus!

He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and gargled the yellow mouthwash that he hated but continued to buy. The reflection that regarded him, with a degree of curious disgust, was not the reflection of a handsome man. Bald since birth, jaundiced, a nervous, torsadée curvature to his spine that caused his whole body to naturally list to starboard — he would be the first piece of merchandise plucked off the assembly line by a disappointed quality control. And yet, here he still was, rattling down the line, unplucked.

And they had kissed.

Radar returned to his bedroom and dressed slowly, like a man dressing for a funeral. He knew he should feel ecstatic, that this should be the single greatest morning of his life, that he should be singing arias, and yet he could not dispel this lingering sense of dread.

As he struggled into his jack-o’-lantern socks, the alarm clicked on again and the tree swallow began to maniacally twitter out its wake-up call. He made no move to switch it off. The swallow should suffer as he suffered. The swallow should feel the full weight of living on its little swallow back.

While the bird tweeped and tweeped, he went over to the bedside table and opened his Little Rule Book for Life, a hot pink journal he had bought for $1.99 at Dollar Daze, and into which he added, on average, one rule per week.

He wrote:

Rule #238. Don’t do it because you can. Do it because you must.