Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

He awoke in total darkness.

Every part of his body ached. For a moment he wondered if he was dead. But could death really be this painful? Once you got through the difficult part of dying, surely they should at least cut you some slack and make you comfortable? No, death was too simple a solution for his lot. He would live and he would suffer.

He tried to deduce his condition. From what he could tell, he was lying on his back, covered in what felt like a thin layer of sweat. He could also feel that his underwear was soaked through. A familiar, swiftly cooling sensation. When he rolled his tongue across the roof of his mouth, he tasted the metallic tang of blood.

He tried to sit up. His head pounded. The sound of crackling glass beneath him. Something wet and squishy against his hand. This, he realized, was the apple core. He reached out and felt blindly through the darkness, felt the cool perforations in the metal wall. He was still in the engine room. So he was definitely not dead. But. . the lights were out. Strange . He wondered how long he had been in there. Was it nighttime? Surely someone would’ve found him by now. Where was Moses? He sat there in the darkness, listening. An absence. The great capacitors around him, normally so full of life, were cold and quiet.

He wiped the blood off his chin. That’s weird, he thought, because if the capacitors are quiet, then that means —

Panicking, he stumbled to his feet, groping around in the dark for the door to control. He hit his head on a low ledge and then finally managed to locate the handle of the door, which he opened to find a darkened control room. A small window in the corner provided the only light. At least it was still daytime outside. But why were all the lights out? He stood, listening. The speakers, lifeless. Not even a hint of static. Nothing.

The signal! The radio signal is dead! The one thing he was supposed to be able to do in this world and he had failed at doing it.

He fell over himself trying to get to the stack, punching at the backup microwave channel to get it up and running, but he quickly found that none of the systems were online. The power. The power was out. He was disoriented, but he knew this shouldn’t be happening. They had two fancy backup generators that should’ve automatically kicked on at this point. In the dimness, he stumbled toward the generator room, his vision wobbling dangerously before he leaned over a trash can and vomited up the apple and the remnants of the Marmite toast.

The generator room was also dark. The twin Generacs simply lying there. He tried to manually start them with a pull cord, but, try as he might, he could not get them to catch. He bent over, panting. The oddest sensation of stillness. He placed his hand against their circuitry, closed his eyes. It was the same feeling he had had in the engine room. An utter absence.

He wandered back into the darkened control room and picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. He clicked the hook switch several times, but the line was dead. Damn . He had no way of letting the station in Manhattan know what was going on. Maybe his mother was right: he should get a cell phone. For emergencies like these.

He looked at his calculator watch. The screen was blank. He squeezed and re-squeezed the mode button, to no avail. Had the watch just run out of batteries? This would be an amazing coincidence. He looked up at the clock on the wall. Its second hand was motionless, the time frozen at 2:44. The exit sign was also dark.

What the hell was going on? And why had everything stopped working — him included — at exactly the same moment?

He felt his way over to the bathroom and, out of habit, flicked on the light switch. Nothing happened. So he was forced to peel off his urine-soaked jeans in the darkness, tripping over the toilet as he hopped up and down on one foot. He fumbled for the faucet and, to his relief, found this working as usual. Thank God. Civilization had not completely disappeared. Using a damp paper towel, he awkwardly wiped at his groin. He changed into the extra pair of sweatpants he kept in his cubby in case of just such an accident, rinsed out his mouth, and gargled some of that horrific-familiar yellow mouthwash. The alcohol stung where he had bitten into his tongue.

Through the dimness, he peered at himself in the mirror. He could just make out the contours of his outline. It was faint, but it was an outline nonetheless. He was still Radar.

He went back into the control room, examining the racks and racks of state-of-the art equipment. Everything completely dead. He touched the cold chassis of a phase modulator, then leaned in and smelled its circuits. No semblance of signal. Minutes earlier, this stack had been brimming with carefully choreographed current. But now? A wasteland.

He was suddenly reminded of the last blackout, in 2003. By coincidence, he had also suffered a grand mal then, just before the power went out. He had been riding his bike when he smelled a scent of burning lilacs and was taken by that feeling of tumbling back into himself. He had just managed to pull over to the side of the road when he felt himself actually tumbling over his bike and into the reeds. He woke up covered in mud, bleeding from a crescent gash in his arm. A wary duck was eyeing him from a little spit of marsh water just beyond. He nodded to the bird, conspiratorially, as if what had just transpired had all been on purpose. The duck had nodded back.

That night, when the lights had not come back on, Radar had wandered the darkened streets alone, pining for lost current. As New Jerseyans partied around him, grilling their defrosting meats and retiring to make blackout babies, he had communed with utility poles, pressed palms to traffic lights, searching for any errant scraps of wattage. The grid, the grid. How he missed the grid. He vowed never again to take that cushion of electricity for granted. Thereafter, he carried a AAA Energizer in his fanny pack as a kind of talisman against the darkness.

Now, sitting alone in the dim control room, filled with a growing feeling of helplessness, he excavated the battery from its pouch and began rolling the cylinder between his palms, warming the metal.

What should he do? He was a radio engineer with no radio frequency to engineer. He idly turned on the portable shortwave that he kept on his desk but found that this, too, was dead.

How could everything have gone dead at once?

Battery in hand, he stepped outside, blinking in the bright sunlight. At least there was still that. It was a beautiful summer day, if only a touch humid — the kind of day that makes you forget the taste of all other days. The sky was a sheet of uninterrupted blue, infinite and resilient and altogether unaware of the dark, broken machines that lurked indoors. He spotted a black plume of smoke rising from somewhere to the west, in Kearny. Such black-looking smoke could never be a good thing. The burning of that which should not burn.

Radar gingerly made his way out onto the creaky catwalk that led across the swamps to the base of the transmitters’ twin antennae. The antennae soared above him, two latticed, triangular fingers pointed heavenward. He sensed their silence, the absence of signal emanating from their tips.

But their silence was not the only silence. From this vantage point, the Meadowlands was normally a humming palace of movement, of planes and trains and automobiles sliding through on their way from here to there. Yet the familiar river of sound from the turnpike was gone. He listened. Birds hummed and twittered across the swamps. No sound of freight. No burring upshift of tractor-trailers. From somewhere in the distance, he heard the call of a police siren. And then, overhead, the muffled wup-wup of a helicopter.