Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

He wasn’t sure if this was even true, but it sounded good, and it gave him a little dose of precious momentum. He underlined “must.” Twice.

Do it because you must.

The double underline was clearly redundant, the two lines canceling each other out with their excess of enthusiasm, like giving the double middle finger to someone in very close proximity. He tried crossing out one of the lines.

Do it because you must.

He sighed. Such a collision of failed revisionism was a fairly decent summary of his life up until this point. No matter. He donned his fanny pack and trucker’s cap, finally slapped the tree swallow out of its misery, and pattered down to the kitchen.

Two Grundig Ocean Boy radios were blaring away simultaneously in the middle of the breakfast table, flanking a morose-looking ceramic pig centerpiece. An uncapped jar of Marmite, like an offering to this altar of sound, sat next to a plate of half-eaten toast. Clear evidence his father had been on the early-morning prowl. Radar sat down in front of the twin radios, trying to parse the dueling signals in his head. It was an exercise in the impossible. His father was constantly haunted by the thought that he might be missing an important bit of news on a station he wasn’t listening to, so he often had at least two radios going at the same time, though sometimes it could be as many as six. Kermin claimed an ability to pay attention to multiple signals at once, but Radar had a working theory that his father listened to them all so that in the end he wouldn’t have to listen to any of them.

Radar killed one of the Ocean Boys and skizzered the dial of the other to WCCA 990 AM, the financial news station where he worked as head engineer. A familiar prattle of market indices spilled forth from the speaker. Good . All was well at transmission. He clicked off the second radio. He admired the vacuum of silence left behind before he lacquered a healthy dollop of his father’s Marmite onto a slice of seven-grain. Radar hated the Marmite like he hated the mouthwash, but family ritual often trumped logic, and Kermin kept a vast supply of the awful stuff close at hand. As rule #98 stated, Belief is 90 % proximity and 10 % conviction. (Well, maybe the nihilist arithmetic in that one needed to be massaged a bit. It was probably closer to 70/30.)

His mind drifted back to the sequence of the night before. It was not that anything had gone wrong, per se. At least nothing that he could put his finger on. They had even kissed again when they parted ways outside the movie theater. It was a tentative kiss, but it was a kiss nonetheless, one that suggested a future filled with more such kisses.

He cringed again. It was not just that his measuring stick for physical contact was akin to that of a middle schooler — it was that literally every time he opened his mouth, a disaster was waiting to happen. Case in point: While he and Ana Cristina were waiting in line to buy popcorn, Radar had panicked, thinking they were not chatting as much as normal people on normal dates did. So he asked her: “Have you seen any good television movies lately?”

What? Even as he was saying it, he saw that such a question was already dying and curled up in a fetal position on the floor. What an unfathomable idiot he was. He had meant to say “television shows,” but then his mind froze and he transitioned midsentence into “movies,” perhaps because they were in a movie theater, which unfortunately resulted in the very narrow category of made-for-television movies. Very few made-for-television movies were good — it was like starting a race with your legs tied together. Radar knew this much, even though he was not really one for television, which was why his original question had been flawed from the very beginning. He wouldn’t even have been able to sustain a conversation if she had said something like “I enjoy reruns of Friendship. ” (Was this even the name of a television show? Or was it merely a complex and precious phenomenon that could develop between two people?) All he could have responded with was “Yes, well, my father enjoyed M*A*S*H, and I watched fuzzy episodes of Muppet Babies for a time on one of our many pocket televisions when I was younger, until my father went crazy and destroyed them all. You see, in his heart I think he was still a radioman, just like his father, and just like me. Maybe he was protesting the death of listening. Do you like to listen? I do. Not to brag, but I would call myself a professional listener.”

But he said none of this. Just the dead television-movie question lying on the floor in front of them. To her great credit, Ana Cristina, looking puzzled, had just laughed in that way she did (where everything in the world seemed both terribly unimportant and important at the same time) and said he was “such a weirdo.” He could not disagree.

Radar bit into his Marmite toast and chewed through his distaste.

She would break up with him today. He just knew it. And truthfully, he probably deserved it. It had been an amazing ride, but the dream could not last forever. She had most likely realized — somewhere in the middle of that kiss — what a terrible kisser he was, what a fumbling, mechanical albatross he was, and, by natural extension, what a terrible mistake this whole endeavor had been. She had realized (and one could not blame her) that things could never work out between a perfect little slip of creation like herself and a malfunctioning human-shaped fabrication like him. But she would be gentle about it. The next time he called or went into the A&P, she would get that sad, inevitable look in her eyes and then she would say, “Radar, we need to talk,” and he would try to take it like a man. In truth, he wasn’t sure how he would take it.

“Have you seen any good television movies lately?” he asked the melancholic pig centerpiece on the breakfast table. If only he could pretend he was a normal person. He didn’t even have to be a normal person; it would be enough just to act like a normal person. Artificial intelligence experts had long ago given up on creating actually intelligent robots — their goal was simply for robots to behave like intelligent beings.

“Television movies?” a woman’s voice said from behind him. “I can’t say that I have.”

Radar wondered briefly if he had been teleported back into his date, whether he was reliving some parallel existence, some second chance where he could be the suave Casanova he had always dreamed himself to be. But this fantasy instantly evaporated as soon as he turned around. There stood his mother in her lab coat.

“I haven’t seen a good movie in ages,” she said, already rummaging through her vast cabinet of tea above the stove. “Have you?”

The cabinet held all sorts of incredibly rare samples from around the globe, one perk of Charlene’s position as head quality-control aromatist at the International Flavor and Aroma Corporation, a position she still held despite reaching and now surpassing the age of retirement. Every morning, she selected her steeping ingredients based upon an elaborate but completely arbitrary formula guided by the phase of the moon, barometric pressure, karmic vibration, and whatever particular ailment she happened to be suffering from. Foot pain required two laces of Tasmanian kelp, a dash of white asparagus extract, and a pinch of powdered tiger shark cartilage. Indigestion called for a teaspoon of fiesole artichoke leaf infusion, two pinches of gentian and Codonopsis root, a drop of bee saliva, and a generous handful of Israeli black horehound.

“What is a television movie, anyhow?” she said. She put the kettle on and began assembling a small collection of glass jars on the countertop. “Is that a movie that’s made for television or a movie that is just being shown on television? Because I think there’s a difference.”