Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  “Excuse me. My eyes,” he said, handing the book on to Park-Smith.

  “The Discovery of Dinosaurs,” Mr. Park-Smith read. The certainty and satisfaction in his voice made Mr. Cheung feel that his own brain was turning into sandpaper. “East Windsor, Connecticut . . .” Park-Smith read.

  “. . . eighteen-eighteen . . .”

  “. . . No one knew to what creature the bones belonged . . .”

  Mr. Cheung wiped the sweat away from his upper lip. Today was one of those days when he couldn’t concentrate.

  How would he get the Hemingway book for Maxwell? All the books came from the Marathon Public Library, which wasn’t public. Everything came from Marathon. Their own Society for Science was a breakaway faction of intellectuals, the jealous counterpart of the Marathon Society for Knowledge. There was something darkening his fingertips. All About Dinosaurs wasn’t green, as he’d thought, but faintly veneered with mold. Mrs. Calvino would read now. When she didn’t know a particular word, it was her style to hesitate before the sentence it was a part of, and wait for the others to guess which word she needed help with. Thinking of the personal ghostliness of his friends, how they would all someday be gone, he was surprised to hear her say, “Probably the rocks containing their skeletons lie out to sea.”

  The dinosaur tracks in England all went from west to east, the book said. By what light was this fact called “knowledge”? Wasn’t it just one more inexplicable thing to mystify them, didn’t it subtract from what they knew, rather than add to it? The sabotage of knowledge by a wealth of facts—they weren’t professors, but guerrillas.

  He already knew about these dinosaurs. They were the cousins of alligators and tortoises, and, though monstrous, they were also the relatives of the pale tiny saurios who sunned themselves on the wall of any building. If you held a saurio up to the sun, you could see the light shining through its bones. Hold him by the tail and he ran away, and in your grip the tail stayed behind, whopping mysteriously . . . The room seemed to be expanding all around him, turning yellow and hollow. The time of afternoon had come when the sun would cast its naked-making scrutiny into the room, staring at the five of them for just three or four minutes before dropping behind the Baptist Church to be spelled by relatively cool blue shadows. He recognized the old feeling. The inside of his mouth seemed as large as the room. The voices around him cluck-clucked mechanically, making no sense. It was the feeling again.

  Without excusing himself he rose up and waded carefully from the classroom through a sea of molasses and ether.

  The long hallway was open to the air at one end but barred by a locked iron gate. He intended to walk toward it and grasp those bars and breathe the air and look out into the day, but a wind whirled him around and he found himself transported through a tunnel of dust that narrowed toward the Tiny White Dot. The current of winds around his feet played with his steps-—it was like trying to walk up the curving wall of a barrel. He sat down unexpectedly and softly. The profound familiarity of all this was nauseating. The White Dot rushed in utter silence up against his sight and exploded with unbelievable brilliance, the All White, the Ever White, the Ultimate White of the Nucleus, the Atomic Bomb.

  He woke with a band of fire around his eyes and a taste of paraffin on his tongue, looking down at the face of William Park-Smith at rest in a bed of cobwebs.

  Blinking, he righted the world. Park-Smith was looking down at him. “I think the back of your head has blood.” Mr. Cheung was on the concrete floor of the school’s hallway. Park-Smith had put a white candle in his mouth to keep his tongue down. The others were leaving, filing past Mr. Cheung and gazing down at him apologetically, with a bland, disowning fondness.

  With Park-Smith’s assistance Mr. Cheung found his feet and sat himself at one of the school-desks, holding Mrs. Calvino’s terrycloth hanky against the back of his head, his wilted posture bespeaking confusion, defeat, and a guilty conscience. “I think I must be a desechado,” he said sadly.

  “We are all desechados,” his friend said. “There are desechados and there are desechados.”

  “Still,” Mr. Cheung said. But even as he said it, he remembered that a deep personal gloom always succeeded these baffling episodes. It was only to be expected.

  “Wax in my teeth,” he told Park-Smith.

  Mr. Park-Smith brightened. “I hope you aren’t chewing too much of your sugar cane,” he said with the gusto of someone enjoying a marvelous witticism. “We’ll have to melt wax and fill up the holes in your teeth!”

  Even alone with him, Mr. Cheung was excruciated by Park-Smith’s idea of clever humor. Mr. Cheung let his eyes shut softly on everything.

  “You feel bad.”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel bad too. You know about the boy washed up at Marathon. Can I tell you it worries me?”

  “Why?” Mr. Cheung opened his eyes.

  “It’s because for these swamp-people—that’s not our swamp-people, Tony. Our swamps don’t have the—” He made a gesture at his crotch.

  “The subincision.”

  “The subincision. This terrible business, I never heard of it before. But everybody knows all about it from somewhere.”

  “It’s something about magic and power.”

  “Voodoo? Voodoo? I told you the Voodoo is a disease!” “It’s not the same. Not Voodoo . . .” Weariness. He shrugged his brown shoulders in the white undershirt.

  “Where did you learn about such things?” Park-Smith asked. “Is it in a book?”

  “Do you know who told me about it? Martin, I think—Martin knows about everything. He should write a book, All About Everything.”

  “Martin! Well well, mentioning Martin, mentioning Martin, do you know who’s coming this way right now? Down through all the Keys?”

  “Who?”

  “Our half-brother!”

  “Martin? Que pasa?” Unable to focus on things, Mr. Cheung closed his eyes again.

  “Fact! Fact! Information from Marathon says he has left the North Deerfield forever!” Park-Smith unzipped one of the pockets of his silver suit. “I haven’t seen him, but he left gifts at my house.” From the pocket he took a half-pint bottle of Kikkoman Soy Sauce. “Never opened.” He set it on the desktop between Cheung’s pale hands.

  “What name is he using now?”

  “Cassius Clay Sugar Ray!” Park-Smith pronounced with delight the new name of his half-brother, who was also Mr. Cheung’s half-brother. The Asian-Caucasian half was brother to Mr. Cheung; the Negro part was brother to Park-Smith.

  Again with too much enthusiasm for his own intelligence, Park-Smith said, “He has become something of a desechado himself. Some very powerful magic has made him some very powerful trouble.”

  Mr. Cheung had stopped being fascinated a long time ago by the person now calling himself Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. He shut his eyes again. The White Dot . . . “I saw the Atomic Bomb again.”

  Such talk made Park-Smith nervous. “Are you able to walk? Come on, come on—I’m ready to help you home.”

  As the black man helped him across the sandy parking lot, Cheung thought, I’m from the other age—a former life—that’s why I remember the Atomic Bomb . . . He had read about the condition called epilepsy and was afraid it came from radiation. Or maybe, he thought, it’s a memory belonging to a ghost, which the ghost shoots into my head for viewing, the way a recording plays over Cubaradio.

  Cheung saw that he was being led toward the street perpendicular to his house. “Why are we going aqui?”

  “The dog, Mr. Manager,” Park-Smith said. “He wants to bite our legs.” At the edge of the parking lot, a starved black dog swept the ground with its nose, unaware of anything but the odor it was reading.

  Park-Smith wet the terrycloth with water from the neighborhood well, standing in the middle of the street beside the pump. They were catty-corner across the parking lot from the Cheung family’s back yard and its several ragged rows of sugar cane, and Mr. Cheung rested himself, placing a han
d on Park-Smith’s shoulder, in front of half a building with a sign over the door that read AMERICAN WOOD PRESERVER'S ASSOCIATION. “The dog’s gone now, Musical Director.”

  Mr. Cheung squeezed the cloth against his scalp, and the water dripped like strings of fire behind his ears and down his neck—his skin felt highly charged. “American Wood Preservers’ Association,” he said to Park-Smith. Mr. Cheung had a special fondness for this wooden communication because it was, as a matter of fact, well preserved.

  The Musical Director helped Mr. Cheung to his back door and led him along through the high-pitched queries of his children and the fretful conjectures of his wife, leaving him on the church pew in the parlor. Eileen Cheung, a thin woman whose black hair was plastered to her neck by the muggy heat of her kitchen, dabbed at her husband’s forehead with the cloth until he made her go away. All his nerve endings were still irritated.

  Drifting with his clarinet over the cool floors of his front parlor room, Mr. Cheung exhibited himself before a crowd in his imagination. Voters. I address you. I beseech you. Snakes. I charm you. And he lifted his ivory-white mouthpiece to his lips and muttered a few bars of Hindustan. This was the same crowd he’d addressed once, some years before, when running for Mayor of Twicetown.

  He thought his grandmother would come to listen, but instead Eileen came out of the kitchen, her manner, although she was sometimes a shrill person, softened out of respect for his condition.

  “Grandmother couldn’t get out of bed this afternoon.”

  It was yet one more thing in a day of sadness. “She was in all the big cities of the other age,” he said, pleading in Grandmother Wright’s defense before her maker. The beauty of sadness overcame him.

  “Is the legs again. The gout thing, what you call it.”

  “Keep them elevated,” he said. “What about her appetite? Is she still eating?”

  “She still eating and she still laughing. She drinking vegetable soup right now.”

  “Grandmother lives and lives,” he said proudly. “Just by surviving, she’s turned into the most important person in the world.”

  Suddenly he held his head in his hands and said, “The Cubans will be coming to put an end to everything. The Cubans have survived as a Communist entity, a governed state. Nobody seems to understand this, Eileen. Someday the Quarantine will end. We won’t be poisonous forever . . .”

  This was a variation of the speech he’d composed carefully a few years ago, in seeking the office of Mayor of Twicetown. He’d wanted the people to understand the future that awaited them, and something of the past. They didn’t even know, most of them, that Twicetown had been called Key West in the other age. But dud missiles had fallen there not once, but twice, giving the town a new name. The missiles still lay where they’d fallen. Many of his fellow citizens didn’t even know what they were.

  In his speeches as a candidate he had always begun: “I am a cultural entity. To be a cultural entity is not unique. What is unique about me is that I know about it.” His style had been out of keeping with contemporary passions and beliefs . . .

  But the Cubans would probably all die, too, down there in civilization’s heart. Pirates—the man now calling himself Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, for instance—traded contamination all up and down the Caribbean chain. Nobody cared. Nobody appreciated anymore how this poison would eventually come to make physical life impossible. “Nobody knows what’s happened to us,” Mr. Cheung told his wife.

  Eileen went back to Grandmother while Mr. Cheung searched under his church pew for a wooden box which he’d made himself and kept filled with marijuana. By the time he’d located it and his beloved Meerschaum pipe, he was too flooded with emotion to bother with anything except his clarinet.

  Mr. Cheung began to play the blues, the real blues, the blues from Europe in the eighteenth century, when men knew how to be passionately sad, and not hysterically frustrated and childish—Corelli’s Concerto Grosso. There was no sheet music for this piece; Mr. Cheung had arranged it as a boy listening to a cassette tape-player when such things still functioned. The people he played this number for were always noncommittal, and he couldn’t reasonably expect them all to be touched and moved. They were hearing only one instrument, while he remembered the interweaving of strings and reeds that culminated in a rush of tears, where the violins followed themselves into a forest of pity and were lost.

  He wanted to bring back the other age—just to get a look at it, the great civilization of helicopters and speedboats and dance parties atop buildings five hundred meters tall—but there was nothing he could do but to let that epoch pass, as it already in fact had, and to sit here with his clarinet in his lap, smoking marijuana in a cool Meerschaum pipe until the sun fell and sadness overcame him.

  THE PERSON WHO BROUGHT MR. CHEUNG his marijuana was Flying Man, one of the Israelites who lived in their dismantled boats on the Ocean side north of Twicetown. Flying Man never arrived by appointment, but simply appeared at the front door of Mr. Cheung’s house in his savage apparel, a belt of feathers and talismans girding his waist, the long thin braids of his dreadlocks parted to reveal his features, over which passed expressions, alternately hilarious and demented, that had no tie to his feelings. Generally he threw down a handful of dry green buds—he came as a patron, a friend of music, and charged Mr. Cheung nothing—walked uncomfortably around Mr. Cheung’s parlor, poked his head into the kitchen, sat down stiff-backed on the church pew to smoke some with the clarinetist in the Meerschaum pipe, which he revered, and then relaxed, red-eyed and sometimes delirious, to listen to the Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra at practice.

  Mr. Cheung always felt obligated to fumble through a few numbers for him with fingers that felt like rubbery bladders, while his legs seemed to get away from his body and go walking across the room, because Flying Man always made him smoke too much.

  When Flying Man came today, it was the same, only instead of disappearing after a short visit, by some trick he managed to make himself more visible, leaning forward and folding a large hand over each bare knee. “Oxrago playino, lissenup now mon. Go playino depachu.” He licked his lips, and Mr. Cheung expected that he’d now repeat himself a little more distinctly. But Flying Man only scratched his patchy beard.

  “Are you trying to say something?” Mr. Cheung asked.

  “Didn’ I jus’? This ain’ I say something right now? I say oxrago playino depachu, Man-jah.” Flying Man called forth his hidden energies to start putting more marijuana into the bowl of the pipe.

  “Mr. Flying Man. Two things, please. Please no more smoking for me, this is very important, because of my floating sensation.”

  In a few seconds, the Israelite said, “Numb’ two?”

  “What number two?”

  In Mr. Cheung’s thought, the conversation was now trailing away into mist and vagueness. I don’t wish to discuss these things with you because you seem to be made of porcelain. He was about to put this feeling into words when he was moved by a discovery of Flying Man’s breathing presence, the weight of life that filled the room. Suddenly recognizing one another as fellow entities sitting in the same universe, they began to laugh.

  “Cosmic laughter,” Mr. Cheung said. “A rich experience.”

  Flying Man looked desolate for a minute, then insulted, pensive, and stunned in rapid sequence. Then sunny, and delighted.

  Watching the activities of his face was hard work. Mr. Cheung couldn’t help responding with a matching gamut of emotions.

  “What I mean, oxra playino depachu, talking later. Jah go come soon soon, late late—Jah go come, that news when res’ with Jah.”

  “You have to speak”—Mr. Cheung demonstrated—“very, very, a lot, a lot, slow.”

  Flying Man seemed terrified—but then all of a sudden only too happy—to do this. “Okss—rah,” he said.

  Mr. Cheung shook his head.

  “Hey mon you bond, bond, mon.”

  “Band?”

  “Bond, a music, oxra.
”

  “Orchestra!” Mr. Cheung said.

  “Go—play—in—o—dee—pah—choo.”

  “The orchestra is going to play,” Mr. Cheung said.

  “Good good,” Flying Man said, plainly satisfied. He stood up, waved goodbye by clasping his two hands above his head, palms together as in prayer, and made ready to leave. “Thank you. Thank to Jah.”

  Mr. Cheung waved back happily as Flying Man left the house, walking as if his shoulders had no knowledge of his feet. “Of course,” he told Flying Man.

  In a little while, sitting by himself in the hot parlor with not a drop of sweat anywhere on his body, feeling astral and rarefied, Mr. Cheung blew the breath of life through his clarinet. It wasn’t music that mattered, but sound. Oh, to have these ears, capturing everything into his head! Which would be more miserable—anxiety tightened his chest—if you had to choose, if you had to choose: being blind, or being deaf? “One minute, please,” he said out loud.

  “One minute.” Was it possible that a misunderstanding had taken place?

  Hadn’t he just agreed to something? Hadn’t he just agreed that the orchestra was going to play? Hadn’t he just agreed that soon soon, late late, the orchestra was going to play in a depachu?

  THREE

  JIMMY’S BOAT HAD COME IN WITH THE DAWN, with the very first light, which rode the water through the channel from the east, from the horizon, rather than falling through the air from the sun. At that time of day they should have been two or three kilometers out at sea.

  Or they should have been coming in late in the day with the sun at their backs, hauling nets of fish. But the nets had been thrown out and then, when the confusion struck, almost immediately brought back into the boat. Now the nets lay empty in wet heaps on the stern while, with nobody there to see it, the Los Desechados came in on a sea almost the same grey color as the sky.