Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

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AT THE WCCA TRANSMISSION SITE, Radar relieved Gary on the night shift.

“Knock yourself out, man,” said Gary. Gary said this every morning.

Radar checked the Interplex circuits and restarted the backup microwave systems. He read the weather report live on the air at thirty-three minutes past the hour and walked the rickety catwalk out into the swamps to inspect the twin three-hundred-foot radio towers aging gracefully against the sky.

“Do it because you must,” he said to their soaring heights.

He sat in front of the stacks, listening to the financial news drone on and on. Occasionally he twisted a knob to tweak the signal. He got up and paced. He sat down again. He could not dispel the feeling that something was not right between himself and Ana Cristina. This feeling festered and metastasized and grew horns, until he finally broke down and dialed her cell phone from the station landline. It rang a painful number of times before going to voice mail.

“Hi, hi. Hello!” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “Ana Cristina? This is Radar. Hi. Just checking in. Saying hi. It was fun last night. I hope it was fun for you, too. Even if that movie was kinda bad. Well, terrible, really. One of the worst. But— okay . Nothing really to report here. Just — give a call at the station if you get a chance. Okay, bye. Bye. Talk to you later. Bye.”

Wow . That was ugly. Next time, he needed to remember to hang up before the beep, lest he break her voice mail with his social ineptitude. In fact, the call only served to heighten his unease. She was working today at the A&P. Maybe he could just pop over and say hello? It was clearly forbidden to abandon the station during the middle of his shift, but then this was a borderline emergency.

He checked and rechecked the signal. Everything was fine. Really, what were the chances of the station imploding during the short time he was out? He would be gone forty minutes, tops. No one would have to know.

“Look after yourselves, all right?” he said to the racks of machines.

He took a deep breath and slowly backed out of the station, closing the door behind him. He paused, listening, and then went out to the shed and fetched Houlihan, his noble steed. Once more, he clicked on his bicycle’s radio, calling upon Radio Skala’s infusion of Old World pluck to show him the way forward. The Guca trumpets and the polyrhythmic hither-thwack of the tapan drum blasted forth from the megaphone, weaving its mournful cocoon. Radar wheeled onto the main road and began pedaling fast and easy, bobbing his head to the beat, feeling his skin prickle and ping with the music.

The simple act of transporting his body from here to there did much to calm him. He regained some of his much-needed confidence. Yes, he, Radar Radmanovic, was a conqueror of hearts. Un conquistador! Ana Cristina was Mexican, or at least her estranged father was Mexican and still lived there, in a town called San Cristóbal, which was very beautiful, apparently. This was one of the first things he learned when he had finally worked up the courage to engage her in conversation at the checkout till. (“It’s beautiful there,” she had said while ringing him up. “But I can’t take his shit no more.”) Many of their first conversations had occurred like this, in the fragile space between the checkout beeps. All time was created equal, he knew, but this time between the beeps had been strange and long and wild time, around which the rest of his day had revolved. Oh, Ana! Ana Cristina! Do not abandon me now!

When the automatic doors to the A&P Express hushed open and the sweet, stiff hand of air-conditioning slapped him across the jaw, Radar caught his breath and stopped. There she was. In checkout lane number 2. Wearing those same hoop earrings, painfully beautiful as usual. He watched as she risped off a receipt and handed it to an elderly man in a fedora. Radar’s carefully constructed Houlihan-chutzpah collapsed like a house of cards. The universe could never support such an imbalanced union between him and her. He almost turned around and left right then and there. He would’ve, too, if not for the telling taste of bitter lemon on the back of his tongue.

Oh, crap. He knew exactly what would happen next: a fine-toothed gear fell out of the compartment in his heart and bounced against his ribs, zippering past his groin, down the hollow tube of his leg, before finally settling into the little microphone of his toe. The electric system in his body fluttered, he was enveloped in that familiar, cinnamon waft of doom, and then everything fell away. His vision skittered and finally blinked off. There was only his underwater breath, loud and echoing in the tunnel of his ears. The faraway world floated silently just beyond the cocoon of his perception. A hummingbird against his neck. He waited. And then: that peppery feeling of awakening. The wires sparkling with current. His wrists on fire. His vision whooshing in from the edges. He was back.

A petit mal seizure. Induced by stress or breakdancing or certain dog-whistle frequencies. More and more frequent now that he had stopped taking his meds. After ten years, he had finally decided that the meds essentially took the he out of him . He had begun to miss himself, flawed as he was. According to his parents, he had been blessed with epilepsy since birth, one of the many symptoms of his very particular affliction — an affliction so particular that the doctors had named it for him: Radar’s syndrome. Radar had spent his whole life seesawing between pride and shame for this personalized diagnosis, which he tempered by referring to it only as “me problems,” usually in an embarrassing faux Jamaican accent, usually in the dying swoon of the evening, and usually when he was alone, which was usually always.

Fig. 3.1. “Petit mal #7”

From Wolcott, D., and Henry, H., Epilepsy & Seizures, vol. 3, as cited in Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 884

The diagnosis did bring up a seemingly larger philosophical question: How many medical cases were required for a condition to be officially deemed a syndrome ? If there had been only one incidence of the disorder in the history of the universe, was it still worthy of the title? Or was it just another example of extraordinarily bad luck? The underlying assumption behind the doctor’s diagnosis must’ve been that his luck would eventually be shared by others, that no experience could possibly be that unique, so we might as well go ahead and call it a syndrome now, because somewhere down the line there was going to be another poor sucker with exactly this same set of symptoms: the epilepsy; the sallow pallor; the comprehensive alopecia (save his patch— “me patch!” ); the partial left-side paralysis; the irregular dark splotches on nipple, calf, and groin; the complete lack of social proficiency.

Meanwhile, Radar had been standing still long enough that the automatic doors decided he was no longer human, or, at the very least, no longer relevant, a nonmoving object that could safely be closed upon. And so they closed, only to squawk open in protest as they crashed against his backpack, the impact dislodging Radar’s mesh trucker’s hat, which was spray-painted with his call sign, K2RAD, in bright red, “urbanized” lettering. He had just purchased this very cool personalized accoutrement from a graffiti artist on the street in Newark. At the time, he remembered wondering why everyone did not transform their lives using one of these hats, which so effortlessly announced to the world one’s hipness totale .