Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

“I need to go,” Radar said suddenly.

“To Xanadu?”

“I’ll be back. I swear. I just need to go.” He kissed her forehead. “Thanks, Mom.”

“What did I do?”

“Everything,” he said. “I’m lucky to have you.”

“Don’t go,” she said. “Not you, too.”

“But I’m going to find out what happened to him.”

“At Xanadu ?”

“That’s all I’ve got right now.”

She stared at him and narrowed her eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He realized his folly. She was his wife, for God’s sake. It was a bond of intimacy, however flawed, that he would probably never experience. She had a right to know.

He sighed.

“Kermin was the one who caused it,” he said.

“Caused what?”

“The blackout.”

“Kermin? As in my husband ?” She blinked. “How?”

He shook his head. “It’s complicated. But when I went into the shack today, I found an electromagnetic pulse generator. It’s very powerful. It had exploded, and it must’ve sent out a pulse that was amplified by the antenna in our backyard.”

“Is he okay?” Her voice rose.

“He wasn’t in there.”

“But why would he do something like that?”

“I don’t know. I got a message on one of his radios to meet this guy at Xanadu.” He reached into his backpack, pulling out the little figurine. “And I found this. Have you ever seen it before?”

She took the stick figure from him. Touched its face with her fingertips.

“It’s strange, but I can’t feel him anymore,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”

“We’ll find him. I’ll go to Xanadu and then I’ll check the hospitals if I have to. He didn’t go far. He couldn’t have gone far.”

“The hospitals?” she said.

“I don’t think it came to that, but we have to be open to—”

“Wait, don’t go,” she said suddenly. She dropped the figurine and grabbed his arm, her fingers digging into his skin. “Don’t.”

“ Ow, Mom. Let go. Easy .”

“ Please ,” she said. “Don’t go. You’re all I have left.”

“It’s gonna be fine, Mom. He’ll turn up. You know him. He probably freaked out when the pulse happened.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. I should’ve listened to him. . and now it’s too late.”

He was trying to pry off her fingers. “Mom, just let go for a second.”

“He was right the whole time.”

He stopped. There was a note of surrender in her voice that had caught his attention. Her hands suddenly went limp.

“Right about what?” he said.

“Oh, my sweet,” she said quietly. “I can’t believe what I did.”

“What did you do?” he said. “You’re kind of freaking me out right now.”

She was very still. Her eyes, looking out into an invisible distance.

“I. .” her mouth opened, hung there. “I almost killed you.”

“No, you didn’t,” he said. “You saved—”

“I did!”

Startled, he looked at her. The moment hung, swayed, tottered. Almost on cue, the record began to skip.

“Your seizures, ” she whispered.

“Oh, Mom,” he said. “ Stop . I can go back on my meds if you—”

“No, you don’t understand. It was all my fault .” Her eyes were filling with tears. “Your seizures, your hair. Everything. It was all because of me .”

He got up to fix the record. When he clicked the needle into a new groove, Caruso’s tenor again filled the room. The lightness of his voice drifting over a pincushion of notes.

“Mom,” he said, still from the floor. “A lot’s just happened. Tata’s not here, I understand. But don’t be too hard on yourself, okay? Just go easy. They’ll put the power back on, we’ll find Kerm—”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“I am listening to you.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “You were black . I mean, when you were born, you were black.”

“Wait,” he said. “What?”

All at once, he was overcome by a deep and acutely painful sense of déjà vu. As if she had already told him this. As if he had already sat by this record player, listening to this exact melody, looking up at his mother as she sat on the bed in this precise way. It had all happened before. It was as if they were merely rehearsing lines from a play.

“What do you mean, I was black ?” Hearing himself say the words again for the first time.

“I don’t know why I did it. He told me not to go.” The glint of tears on her cheeks.

“Did what?” he said.

She got up from the bed.

“Did what ?” he repeated. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I just needed to find out what had gone wrong.” She was moving the bedside table, the smelling bottles tinkling against one another, one spilling onto the floor, filling the room with a strong scent of lilies. The candle trembled.

She was down on her hands and knees, prying at a loose floorboard.

“Hey, Mom. Don’t do that,” he said. “What’re you doing?”

He was about to go over and stop her when the board came up and then she was reaching inside the floor and pulling out something from the depths. A folder. Manila. Dusty. She wiped it off, came over, laid it in his lap.

“What’s this?” he said.

“It’s for you,” she said.

Fig. 3.8. “Black Baby’s Condition Remains a Mystery”

From the New York Post, April 25, 1975

Inside, there were pages and pages of newspaper clippings. He moved over to the candlelight and squinted at the text, though, again, he already somehow knew what he would find. “Caucasian Couple Give Birth to Black Newborn at St. Elizabeth’s,” “Easter Miracle in New Jersey,” “Doctors at a Loss to Explain Child’s Appearance.” He saw his name. His parents’ names.

His hands felt as if they were not his own. He saw a copy of a birth certificate, the blurry picture of a baby lying in an incubator. He had seen this picture before. He felt a rushing sensation in his ears. Another burning wash of the familiar frissoned his body’s circuity.

“I’ve never shown this to anyone,” she said.

“This. .” He tapped the picture of the incubated baby. “This is me?”

“Not even Kermin,” she said.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”

She didn’t say anything.

He felt the heat in his face. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me about this? I mean, this seems pretty fucking important, right? Pretty fucking important to let your son in on. .”

“I know—”

“Were you just never going to tell me?”

She was weeping suddenly, uncontrollably, and his anger parted as he watched her crumple onto the bed.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, all right. It’s okay.”

“Your father. . Your father didn’t like to talk about it,” she said finally, wiping her face. “So we just left it. We left it and hoped it would go away.”

“But—” He was staring at a journal article, “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male.” A diagram of skin cells surrounded by a mote of long, polysyllabic words. “I don’t understand. Why was I black ? I mean, how is that even possible?”

She slid down beside him on the floor. Put her hand on the page, touching a cross-section of dermis.

“It was just the way of things,” she said slowly. “There were theories. There were theories, but no one could prove anything.”