Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Author:Daniel Alarcon [Daniel Alarcón]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061748707
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

IT WAS only ten days before, as they drank palm wine and waited hopefully for a breeze, that Zahir had invited Manau to touch his stumps. “Be kind to an old man,” he said, though Manau did not think of his landlord and friend as old. “I’m sad today.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s about time you did. You stare.”

Manau blushed and began to protest, but Zahir interrupted him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everyone does.”

The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the sky dimmed toward a lacquered blue-black. It was the edge of night in the jungle: a nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed around the kerosene lantern. Manau sipped his wine from a gourd. Nico had been gone for months now, and no one had heard from him. That night and every night, Manau was careful not to mention Zahir’s son. When the wine loosened his tongue, Manau felt he might confess, but then he was unsure what to say, and so said nothing. Nearly half a year had passed this way. A harvest had come and gone.

In a few hours, the night breezes would blow, Manau would excuse himself, and wander off to look for Adela, forgetting Nico and his unfortunate father for another day. If the moon was out, or even if it wasn’t, he would invite her to swim.

Now Zahir was waiting, eyes shut tight, holding his arms out for inspection. Manau took another sip from his gourd and set it on the floor. He placed a hand over each stump, felt the rough skin against his palms. He held Zahir’s right arm by the wrist, and went over the wound with his thumb. Where it had scarred, the flesh turned in on itself, like a sinkhole or a crevasse or the dry and jagged bed of a stream.

“It’s been seven years,” Zahir said, opening his eyes. “Seven years today.”

Manau let go. He had come to think of his landlord’s stumps as a cruel birth defect, a trial Zahir had always borne. Of course, this wasn’t true. He knew it wasn’t. Still, it was startling: seven years ago yesterday, Zahir could scratch his temple, light his own cigarette. He could love his wife with ten more possibilities. Manau looked down at his own hands, and they seemed like miracles. He cracked his knuckles; they gave off a satisfying pop. He wiggled his fingers, then caught Zahir watching him.

“I’m sorry.”

“You get used to it. Really. Do you believe me?”

Manau made a point of looking Zahir in the eye. “Of course,” he said.

The dark began just a few feet beyond the steps of Zahir’s raised hut. The towns people shuffled by, nearly invisible, now and then calling a greeting. Manau felt unable to speak. In a little more than a week, he would leave this village, and all the stories he’d heard here would seem burdensome and foreign, woeful tales foisted upon him: his crippled friend, the dozens of missing, the town and its never-ending battle against the encroaching forest.

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