Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

1.1 Radar’s Certificate and Record of Birth.

1.2 Patient R, Longitudinal Section 8.

1.3 The Wardenclyffe Tower at the Bjørnens Hule, Kirkenes, Norway.

1.4 The Treriksrøysa.

1.5 “Gåselandet/Novaja Zemlya Kart Series #4.”

2.1 “Karta Oticica Abrahama” (1853).

2.2 Miroslav of Hum’s Gospels (1168).

2.3 Eadweard Muybridge, “Animal Locomotion. Plate 63” (1887).

2.4 “Miroslav’s Robotic Swan v2.1.”

2.5 Tuffi plunging from the Schwebebahn into the River Wupper (1950).

2.6 “M. Danilovic’s Black Box Theater.”

2.7 National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Winter 1993.

2.8 Postcard of Neutrino Collision, Hydrogen Bubble Chamber (1970).

2.9 “Danilovic’s Umbilical Mirror.”

3.1 “Petit mal #7.”

3.2 “Blue Box from Modified Western Electric Test Equipment.”

3.3 Car Alarm Incidents in Kearny, N.J., June 17, 1990.

3.4 “R2-D2, Halloween, 1988.”

3.5 Sample Tests, KHS Gymnasium PA System (March 1990).

3.6 “Something’s Fishy on Times Sq. Jumbo TV.”

3.7 Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Oscillating Cathode Electromagnetic Pulse Generator.

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

3.9 Notes from Den Menneskelig Marionett Prosjektet.

3.10 Jens Røed-Larsen at the Bjørnens Hule (1968).

3.11 Kirk En Heavy Water Shoe Dip.

3.12 Frame still from Kirk To, Gåselandet.

4.1 Nón lá Hydrostatic Buoyancy Analysis.

4.2 L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System.

4.3 Pavillon de l’Indochine à L’Exposition Coloniale Internationale de 1931, Bois de Vincennes, Paris.

4.4 Jean-Baptiste de Broglie to Georges Lemaître, telegram, July 16, 1938.

4.5 “R.R. Sounds & Noise, 0.5–1.5 years.”

4.6 “Sign for Machine .”

4.7 “The Island of Rak.”

4.8 “A neutral current event, as observed in the Gargamelle bubble chamber.”

4.9 Manifest from AF 931, Bangkok — Phnom Penh, March 2, 1975.

4.10 Map showing movements of Northern Sector Khmer Rouge rebels from Ratanakiri to Phnom Penh (January — April 1975).

4.11 Tuol Sleng prisoner #4816.

4.12 The initial telegram, November 10, 1979.

4.13 Traditional Khmer Lkhaon Nang Sbek, featuring a scene from the Reamker epic.

4.14 Notations from “Freeman Etude #18,” by John Cage.

4.15 Figure of Sequence 9a, 12: “Intermingling puppets, cascading, choreographed Brownian motion.”

4.16 “Revised Dock & Pulley System. Reverse Ball & Socket Joint Guywire v4.3.”

5.1 “Parts of Shipping Container” and “How to Load a Ship.”

5.2 Detail from Den Menneskelig Marionett Prosjektet.

5.3 “Gåselandet Still Sequence.”

5.4 “Massakren og Escape på Camp 808.”

5.5 Selected diagrams (1–5).

5.6 “Projected Flock Equations.”

5.7 “Conference of the Birds, Drum/Morse/Radio Palimpsest.”

5.8 “La Bibliothèque du Fleuve Congo.”

April 17, 1975

It was just after midnight in birthing room 4C and Dr. Sherman, the mustached obstetrician presiding over the delivery, was sweating lightly into his cotton underwear, holding out his hands like a beggar, ready to receive the imminent cranium.

Without warning, the room was plunged into total darkness.

Though he had been delivering babies for more than thirty years now, Dr. Sherman was so taken aback by this complete loss of vision that he briefly considered, and then rejected, the possibility of his own death. Desperate to get his bearings, he wheeled around, trying to locate the sans serif glow of the emergency exit sign across the hall, but this too had gone dark.

“Doctor?” the nurse called next to him.

“The exit!” he hissed into the darkness.

All through the hospital, a wash of panic spread over staff and patients alike as life support machines failed and surgeons were left holding beating hearts in pitch-black operating theaters. None of the backup systems — the two generators in the basement, the giant, deep-cycle batteries outside the ICU, usually so reliable in blackouts such as this one — appeared to be working. It was a catastrophe in the making. Electricity had quite simply vanished.

In birthing room 4C, Dr. Sherman was jolted into action by Charlene, the expectant mother, who gave a single, visceral cry that let everyone know, in no uncertain terms, that the baby was still coming. Maybe the baby had already come, under shroud of darkness. Dr. Sherman instinctively reached down and, sure enough, felt the conical crown of the baby’s skull emerging from his mother’s vagina. He guided this invisible head with the tips of his ten fingers, pulling, gathering, turning so that the head and neck were once again square with the baby’s shoulders, which still lingered in Charlene’s birth canal. He did this pulling, gathering, turning without seeing, with only the memory infused in the synapses of his cortex, and his blindness was a fragile kind of sleep.

As he shepherded the child from its wet, coiled womb into a new kind of darkness, Dr. Sherman heard a distinct clicking sound. At first he thought the sound was coming from the birth canal, but then he located the clicking as coming from just behind him, over his right shoulder. Suddenly his vision was bathed in a syrupy yellow light. The father of the newborn, Kermin Radmanovic, who had earlier brought a transceiver radio and a telegraph key into the birthing room in order to announce his child’s arrival to the world, was waving a pocket flashlight wrapped in tinfoil at the space between his wife’s legs.

“He is okay?” asked Kermin. “He comes now?” His accent was vaguely Slavic, the fins of his words dipping their uvular tips into a smooth lake of water.

Everyone looked to where the beam of light had peeled back the darkness. There glistened the torpedo-like head of the child, covered in a white, waxen substance. The sight encouraged Dr. Sherman back into action. He first slipped his finger beneath the child’s chin, but when he felt no sign of the umbilical cord wrapped around the neck, he yelled, “Push!”

Charlene did her best to comply with the order, her toes curling as she attempted to expel the entire contents of her abdomen, and when the breaking point was most certainly reached, surpassed, and then reached again, there was a soft popping sound and the rest of the baby emerged, the starfish body tumbling out into the dim mustard glow of this world.

Kermin leaned in to catch a first glimpse of his new child. Ever since his wife had come hobbling into his tiny electronics closet, staring at her dripping hand as if it were not her own, time had begun to unravel. The labor had come three weeks early. His fingers — so steady as he mended the cathode ruptures and fizzled diodes of his broken radios and televisions — suddenly became clumsy and numb at their tips, as if they were filled with a thick, viscous sap. In the hospital parking lot, he had taken the old Buick up and over the curb onto a low, half-moon shrubbery, which had not weathered this trespass well at all. As he ushered a blanketed Charlene through the rotating doors, Kermin had looked back at the battered shrubs, lit by the ugly glow of the parking lot’s blinking fluorescents, and wondered in that moment if they were prematurely introducing the future into the present.