Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  “Lieutenant Komatsu had never seen anything like it . . . A huge volcanic eruption with many layers of smoke rising from it. The black cloud ring was churning like a thing alive . . . The sun coming from behind gave the illusion that the cloud was undergoing instantaneous changes of colors—from red to blue to yellow . . .”

  Mr. Cheung believed he was dreaming of a previous birth-and-death existence as he visualized what Roderick Chambers recited. Which one was I? he asked himself.

  “. . . he opened the cabin window and stretched his hand out. Quickly, he pulled it back in. Even with a glove on, it was as if he had plunged his hand into live steam . . .”

  I was there, Mr. Cheung told himself. The locks were blown from the doors. As the bombs fell, already we were forgotten. The bomb said, I will not remember.

  “All Nagasaki surely had been destroyed. And he was about to fly into that ominous cloud. Cold perspiration . . .”

  I was there. My eyes burned up. It was the only thing I felt. I remember.

  “I can’t stand it! ” someone shouted suddenly.

  My eyes burst into flames. I died.

  “That’s just what it says in the book!” Roderick Chambers said. “Look here—you read it: 'I can’t stand it!’ someone shouted suddenly, and when Lieutenant Komatsu turned he saw Chief Petty Officer Umeda vomiting.”

  A man in the front turned around to address everyone. “The book is telling us what to say.”

  Thunder clapped and a window-board fell in, dangling by a couple of nails. There were screams. “Shut that back up,” Roderick called over the noise.

  “But that’s what it says in the book!” the man he’d handed the volume to said. “ ‘Close . . . the . . . window,’ he gasped. ‘Close it! Quickly!’ ” The man waved the volume around above his head, and Roderick Chambers snatched it back.

  By now Mr. Cheung was so convinced that he was only dreaming that he felt let down and disappointed in the whole experience. It wasn’t real, it was only a dream. His seasickness seemed to be coming back. He had a terrible headache and he felt nauseous.

  “. . . either the fumes or the heat,” Roderick Chambers read above the protests of the hysterical listeners, “had given him a terrible headache and he felt nauseous.”

  Because they were all in the house now—her two youngest sons, her baby brother—Belinda felt large and strong: older, but older in a way she liked. She sat on the bed beside Drake and Mike, both of them curled up against the chill. Pressy took it on himself to throw more wood into the stove, trying to show the world that he’d come around here to be a help. The noise of rain grew smaller, then louder. The storm’s eye was passing. “Only one who walk out in a lightning gone be Bruce Lee,” she said, stroking Drake’s hair.

  “Es who?” Drake asked, lying on his side and turned away from her, staring slack-mouthed at the sleep that was coming over him.

  “Bruce Lee. He was all over letric, with letricity for eyes. He could hear letricity inside you and tell you if you lying or not.”

  “Where Bruce Lee come from?” Drake asked.

  “Come from China. Down deep in a hole in the world.”

  “Mama, you telling me bullshit?”

  “Es a story,” she said.

  “Es letric inside the batteries,” Pressy told them. He was sitting against the wall, with a view of Sarge in the kitchen, trying not to flinch when the thunder rolled over the Army. The lightning was far away now as the storm’s whipping tail passed east by northeast, up toward Marathon. He listened to Belinda’s stories and kept watch on his dog, willing to wait all night, if it had to be that way, for Sarge to get back his courage.

  Mr. Cheung wasn’t alone in thinking that reading about the bomb had brought on a totally destructive storm. The others wept and shouted that the reading must be stopped. “We need a discussion time!” “We’re bombing the Keys!” “That doesn’t make sense,” Roderick Chambers insisted, but he was obviously nervous himself, probably, Mr. Cheung thought, because he faced a wall of panic. “Make sense?” people cried. “Make sense?”

  When lightning struck the field outside, its glare through the gaps in window-boards lit up a room full of people whipping their heads down between their knees in unison. “There’s nothing to be afraid of! We’re in the best building! The lowest stone building, the strongest!” Roderick Chambers shouted.

  Ah, God, Mr. Cheung thought.

  On the trip home the next day, Mr. Cheung didn’t get seasick. He enjoyed the ride, though it went on a little too long, and he had a good time leaning on the rail and sighting at the shoreline so that it seemed to be going by too swiftly to keep track of. The beaches were hard as slate and almost yellow after the heavy rain, imbedded with boards and branches and lacquered with black leaves and red and white oleander petals. The sea was bottle-green. Everything was invisible below its cloudy surface, and so the Catch stayed out in the deeper water.

  The reading of the Nagasaki book, the attempt at understanding, the reconciliation of the Twicetown and Marathon Societies, the whole experience had been a failure. Now the confusion was only deeper and more troubling. It would have been easier, Mr. Cheung believed, to have accepted their ignorance about the destruction if only they all hadn’t been aware that sixty years ago, any little child could have told them all about it. “I’m giving up on that kind of history,” he told Maxwell, who had done his turn comforting Bobby Calvino, today’s victim of seasickness.

  “I know,” Maxwell said. “I think maybe it just keeps us away from the practical things.”

  As they passed Big Pine Key, a tall island given over mostly to rice paddies, they saw naked boys above the water on a low cliff, jumping on the lip of it until the soil that had been undermined by the waves gave out beneath them and they tumbled into the Gulf, laughing at life while their families thought they were at work in the fields. “Is Maxwell,” Mr. Cheung asked, “your first name or your second name?”

  “It’s one name.” Apologetically Maxwell added, “It’s very simple that way.” He went down in Mr. Cheung’s esteem for having thrown away part of his name. Later he surprised Mr. Cheung by saying, “I think there’s an alien life-form inhabiting inside my body,” and finally he disgusted the Orchestra Manager completely by telling him in confidence, as they were docking, “Our Society rejects too much. Some of that Voodoo may be a helpful thing, I think so.”

  SIX

  BECAUSE HE WAS THINKING DEEPLY, Mr. Cheung moved without appreciation of his feet along a route that wasn’t the shortest one. By the time he took a minute to look around, he was over on the east side of town, ten minutes’ walk from the road to the Army, where he’d been headed.

  Hardly anyone lived on Twicetown’s eastern edge. Fishermen toured the area in groups to keep the desechados from putting up shelters here, and within a few minutes Mr. Cheung passed one of these informal patrols. They eyed him closely and greeted him—“Buenas!” and “Hey there!”—and he wondered if any of them knew Fiskadoro. The seagoing people, from here to Marathon, all took an interest in one another. Maybe he should have told them the boy had returned.

  He came out of an alley and walked alongside One.

  The rubble of brick and concrete buildings One had plowed through had been moved back, over the years, to create a kind of stone arena in which it rested impressively, and this clear space of sand and chewed asphalt with an Atomic Bomb laid out in it had become a gathering place for political and religious functions. When a great man died he was brought here. The missile itself was almost as big around as a house. A person could count to six before the fastest runner in Twicetown raced from end to end. Its skin was scorched and welted, in some spots still olive drab, in others stripped of all paint and shiny as glass. The other one, the one called Two, was just a black warhead overgrown with grass in a field north of town. But One was intact, from head to tail. People said it was an American bomb that had gone off course.

  Keeping left, Mr. Cheung entered a pocket of industry, passing
the bottle factory and the candle factory, both of them closed now and awaiting the time when some flurry of demand would call forth a great man to pry the boards from their windows and take them through the cycle of confused life and premature death generally enjoyed by businesses along the Keys. There were other buildings in the neighborhood that had never hosted any such resurrections and inside of which the machines hulked inscrutably, scaring away the people who might have lived in them. Even Mr. Cheung walked past these places with a dread of something that lurked here hoping to churn people into grease.

  William Park-Smith was waiting for him on the road out of Twicetown, resting in the shadow of a brick wall behind which grass grew up through an old foundation. He had one of his combat boots off and his face down in its mouth, apparently inhaling the odor of leather.

  He hopped up to join Mr. Cheung, walking along lopsidedly with one bare foot. “Do you think we’ll get the clarinet?” he asked.

  “It isn’t about the clarinet,” Mr. Cheung said. “It’s about my pupil Fiskadoro, who’s returned now.”

  “Yes, yes. But I thought of the clarinet.”

  With nothing to talk about, Park-Smith developed an ear for the enticements of vendors, delaying the whole trip several times only to buy nothing in the end, until the two musicians passed beyond the fringes of town, beyond the vendors and then into the region where the asphalt gave out and the dirt thoroughfare, heavily trafficked with nomads and beggars, cut through a kind of beach jungle interrupted by the rubble of buildings. Park-Smith stopped and took off his other combat boot, then walked along barefoot beside the Orchestra Manager carrying a shoe in either hand.

  He wished that Mr. Cheung would chat about a few matters. The walk seemed longer without any conversation to relieve its sameness. The Manager was very preoccupied. He lived too much inside his head. “We’ll require, you know, to spend the night there,” Park-Smith concluded, acknowledging the lateness of the hour—the sun was low in the west. “Won’t tomorrow be soon enough?”

  “It’s urgent. The young brother Drake came to me this morning.”

  “Yes, yes—you sent him to me.” Immediately Park-Smith was worried. “Don’t you remember?”

  In another hour they reached the Army. The fences that once had separated the compound from civilian Florida had long since disappeared, and the coconut and date palms that seemed to gush from every square meter of unpopulated earth overcame the dwellings, so that the habitation blended into the countryside around it. Now it was sunset. Among the trees the shade was no longer shade, but darkness.

  Behind Fiskadoro’s house, just offshore, an old fishing boat hovered in a violent, rusty light, attracting villagers. And there was Martin, known lately as Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, standing in water up to his bare knees and resting a hand on the anchor line. The late hour gave to the beach an ineffable wanness. The boat and the people seemed small and far away.

  “He has a boat now?” Park-Smith said when he recognized their half-brother.

  Mr. Cheung stopped and looked. “We should have guessed,” he said. “They traded a boat for the book.”

  “The Nagasaki book!”

  “We should have guessed.”

  They were only a few meters from Fiskadoro’s door, but they waited to greet Martin—who was waving to them as he marched through the water hefting a sun-bleached canvas duffel bag—because in any situation it was always best to find out, first of all, what Martin’s presence might signify.

  “The white bodyguard,” Park-Smith said, seeing that Martin was accompanied.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Martin shouted as he and the white man approached. He dropped his duffel bag on the sand and patted Park-Smith’s shoulder and said, “How is our father?” He shook Mr. Cheung’s hand and said, “How is our mother?” It was an old joke; both of these people were dead.

  Martin indicated the white man, who rested a rifle across his shoulder. “Sammy Goodman. Tony and Billy are my brothers, good men. Sammy Goodman is a good man. I am called Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. I am a good man.”

  Mr. Cheung said, “Your new name has reached me.”

  “You traded a boat with the Marathon Society?” Park-Smith asked. Martin only smiled as if he didn’t understand the question, and Park-Smith said, “Perhaps?” But Martin only smiled.

  “Why did you come today?” Mr. Cheung asked.

  “A lot is interest me,” Martin said, “about the boy Fiskadoro, your once pupil.”

  “What?” Park-Smith said. “He was kidnapped. He was returned.”

  “A person have told me Fiskadoro is not the same.”

  “Of course not,” Mr. Cheung said. “An ordeal, he’s had an ordeal.”

  “A person have told me very, very not the same.” Martin picked up his burden and they all went in.

  Inside, the quonset hut suffocated under layers of odors—smoke, mildew, mackerel both fresh and putrefied, fruit rinds dwindled to a state of fermentation—and at first Mr. Cheung stayed close to the door and the fresh air. Villagers waited outside in the dusk, keeping their voices low.

  Martin lit a candle by the bed and moved around the place lighting others, making a big show out of each match.

  Fiskadoro, the cause of all the trouble, lay in bed in the next room with a grey sheet full of holes pulled up to his chin, and the mother sat on an old car seat with her hands straight-armed onto her knees and her shoulders curled, hiding her breasts. She was in shock. So was the boy. Fiskadoro’s hair was caked with a thick even layer of mud that made him look large-browed and bald. He wore a headband of tiny shells. He had holes in each ear, top and bottom, with strings tied around through each hole. Mr. Cheung had seen such insignia among the swamp-people. He came close to the bed and peered down, “Fiskadoro. We want to lift up the sheet and have an examination.” Fiskadoro looked right at him, but didn’t acknowledge. As soon as Mr. Cheung drew the sheet back and saw the massive scab like a barnacle on the boy’s crotch, he realized what had happened.

  He’d been half-expecting it and remained unblinking, but Martin and Park-Smith started dragging the breath down their throats.

  “Can you remember an accident, Fiskadoro?” Mr. Cheung asked his pupil.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  The white bodyguard Sammy spoke up. “I promise you he don’t remember.” He glanced at the mother, as if perhaps he didn’t like talking about it in front of her. “They fix it up so the boys don’t remember.”

  “Who?”

  Martin said, “Sammy and me have visited to these people. Sammy many times. He saw and he knows.”

  “They take this memory-juice,” Sammy told them. “First you remember every single thing in the world, then you don’t remember a-tall. Zip. Nothing. Nada,” he added in what was evidently a polite attempt to get the point across.

  “They have a big ceremony, lot of days long, when it’s time to—” Martin pointed at Fiskadoro’s crotch and sucked the breath through his teeth.

  “Subincision,” Mr. Cheung said. He drew the sheet back up to the boy’s chin.

  “Horrible. Horrible. Horrible,” Park-Smith said.

  “What they do,” Sammy said, “they take the boys supposed to get cut up like this, and they recite out a whole lot of things to say—these old men recite it out at the boys all day long. Then sundown every day they take all this stuff and grind it up with something—blood, Jesus, I don’t know what-all—”

  “Mushrooms,” Martin said, “and a one blue pill.”

  “—and when these boys drink it down, Sir, I swear they recite it all back, remember every word.” The small man’s white face was amazed. “I mean it takes all night to get it said, and these little—brown kids, they don’t never miss a beat. Next night it’s the same thing, only different speeches to learn. Three, four nights running they’ve got them out there in a clear spot by the village, cleaning out their brains, is how I’d say it, and then they get crazy and, Sir, I ain’t lying, those young boys rip up their own peckers with a jagged
rock. I ain’t lying. Couple days after that, these same boys can’t tell you their own name, plus I hate to tell you what they sound like every time they go to piss out a drink of water.” He looked at the mother. “They heal up after a while,” he told her.

  “You saw this take place?” Mr. Cheung asked.

  “Seen it three times. But I don’t remember much.”

  “You drank the memory-juice?”

  “Hell no. You don’t think I’d wipe out thirty-two years of my life just to satisfy a load of niggers? Well, you know,” he said quickly to Martin and William Park-Smith, “them are niggers—about the low level of them burros go hauling the carts around these islands. What it was, they kept me up two days straight and had me looking in a fire, till I couldn’t’ve told you was I dreaming or was I real.”

  “I think,” Martin said, “all what they have to remember back for the ceremony, es a lotta trash. Not important. The old fathers just only want the boys to forget. When es all done finish, the boys don’t even know they name.”

  “Got a totally blank screen there,” Sammy told them, “just like if you unplugged their heads.”

  “Do they know how to talk?” Park-Smith asked.

  “They talk, they eat—everything, like anybody else,” Sammy said. “But first of all they blank out every two seconds. Couple weeks they’re regular again, but they never do get back the memories that happened before all that craziness, and the cutting.”

  Mr. Cheung had never heard of this. “Incredible.”

  “Horrible,” Park-Smith said again.

  “But if a person found out the source,” Martin said.

  “These swamp-people are the source,” Park-Smith said. “That’s obvious.”

  “But I think of the blue pill,” Martin said, “and I wonder where does it come out of?”