Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  Fiskadoro didn’t know what to say. He felt sorry for Zeid, but there was nothing he could do about whatever had happened to make the old man just as ugly between his legs as he was in his face.

  Abu-Lahab talked to Zeid in frustration. Finally Abu-Lahab also lifted the hem of his own skirt. There was something wrong with him, too.

  Did Fiskadoro understand what they were getting at?

  I see there’s something wrong with you, Fiskadoro said. Your penes are all banged up.

  We’re like other men, they told him. And you’re not.

  Throughout the rest of the day, until the somber afternoon turned black and Fiskadoro couldn’t see them anymore, Zeid and Abu-Lahab brought other men around who lifted the hems of their skirts or unhooked the flies of their pants, and showed him. Fiskadoro discovered that they were telling the truth. He wasn’t like these other men.

  A couple of days after Fiskadoro had recognized this fact about himself, Abu-Lahab came along to Fiskadoro’s hut and sat down beside him. Was he feeling all right? was the first question he asked, and Fiskadoro told the old man that he was feeling fine, but got cold at night. Abu-Lahab was delighted with this answer. Did the boy know that he was the keeper of fires here, and that his name, Abu-Lahab, meant Father of Flames? He promised to start making the fires a lot higher and hotter.

  Fiskadoro thanked him, but Abu-Lahab didn’t leave right away. Instead he began clearing his throat and shifting around as if the ground were alive and he’d sat down on it by mistake, and told Fiskadoro that a long time ago there was a village where the young men and women grew restless. People from far away kept visiting their village and spreading all kinds of lies about a place where everyone was always happy, where a party went on day after day without stopping, where everybody danced, ate food, drank liquor, and made love. As soon as they’d had a little time to think about this never-ending party, the young people wanted to go. One morning before anybody else was awake, they all held their breath so they wouldn’t make a sound and left the village together. It took them several days to reach the place, and when they arrived they found out that these lies they’d been hearing were almost true—people were dancing, getting drunk, making love. But nobody knew them there. To gain courage among strange people, the youngsters drank too much wine and one of them got drunk and fell in the sea. The others ran home to their elders. The whole village felt terrible. The youngsters were ashamed because they’d been tricked by lies and had lost a friend. But the trouble with a lie is that it’s easier to believe than the truth. After a while the same young people forgot what had really happened, and one morning they all left again when there was no one awake to stop them. They went back to the party, saw once again that they’d only tricked themselves, saw that they’d always be strangers at this gathering, and started back home. In a little while they noticed that the friend they’d lost was with them, traveling along some distance behind. It was the same person, the same soul, and they recognized him. But a soul has no name and has nothing to say. Forever and ever, a soul is like a baby who hasn’t been born, to whom nothing has happened yet. And so a soul with a new body has a new face and a new name, and remembers new things. Their friend’s soul didn’t remember who it was supposed to be. It began crying and talking the wrong language. To keep it from running away, its friends had to beat its new body with their hands until it was quiet. Then they carried the soul of their good friend, which was now inside a completely different body and remembered completely different things, back to its home. But the soul’s new eyes had never seen its old home, and it never remembered. Still, still, still, Abu-Lahab insisted, it was the same soul.

  Fiskadoro said nothing, because he felt only contempt for this idea. There were ghosts everywhere who had the same names, the same memories, and the same friends and relatives that they’d had when living. The kind of soul Abu-Lahab talked about wasn’t any kind of soul at all. Their twisted notions about these things explained why they didn’t see any of the ghosts among them, walking around their village, sitting beside the fires, wandering in the dark. These swamp-people were concerned only with the future, with things that would happen at some later date—Zeid and Abu-Lahab talked about it all the time—a ceremony to be held soon, in which Fiskadoro and some younger boys would be changed until they were like other men.

  When he saw the white trader visiting various huts around the village and heard him say, “North Deerfield,” Fiskadoro recognized the words and thought of Ernest Bodine, the horrible white gambler, talking to Cassius Clay Sugar Ray in the North Deerfield. But the trader didn’t look at all like Cassius Clay Sugar Ray’s depiction of a North Deerfield person. He had no fangs, and wasn’t much bigger than Fiskadoro. He wore tall slick boots that kept his feet dry, and a canvas belt with a gun and a canteen hanging off it, but otherwise he looked like anyone.

  The villagers didn’t seem to mind that this white man walked around the place bothering everybody. Nobody traded with him, but they were all happy to pass the time and accept his gifts. He ate their food, slept in a hut, went out on the trails with the men looking for two-headed snakes, and generally seemed to be having a friendly visit out here in the muddy swamp. Now and then he rested with his back to the warmth of a fire and watched the people go by, looking for somebody to answer his questions.

  Eventually the trader came to ask Fiskadoro the same two questions he asked everyone.

  “You like candy, boy? You know where they get them little pills, boy?”

  The man said his name but it came out without sound, “_______.” He smiled out of a small and innocent face, hunkering down where Fiskadoro sat against a tree and offering him a red ball of sugar candy.

  Fiskadoro took the candy and put it on his tongue. He closed his eyes and floated away on its sweetness.

  “Where you get all the stuff goes in the juice? Stuff they dry down to the wafers. Got to come out of some sort of hospital, right?”

  Fiskadoro shook his head and shivered.

  “Or maybe like a science laboratory, someplace like at.”

  The man waited a minute without getting an answer.

  “Someplace where it ain’t all bombed out.”

  Fiskadoro didn’t know what this man called _______ was trying to say. Fiskadoro himself said nothing because he didn’t talk in this part of the dream.

  Later, when they came on one another as they both paced the village with nothing to do, Fiskadoro told the trader, “Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray say you take me West Beach.”

  The trader looked at him in surprise. “I could take you as far as Key Largo,” he said.

  “When?”

  _______ unhooked the canteen from his canvas belt and took a swallow. “I could take off about any time after the ceremony,” he told Fiskadoro. “Whenever your business here is done with. How’s at sound?”

  When he heard these words, and saw the look on the white trader’s face, Fiskadoro understood that his whole purpose in the dream was to go through the ceremony and make himself like other men.

  While these people didn’t see any ghosts, Fiskadoro considered himself a ghost among them, one of the waking world, and he took to wandering the village like the other less visible ghosts—a few hundred meters from end to end, a path that took him past the dark entrances of huts, through clouds of smoke and a mist of voices speaking a language that made no sense. The children liked him and sometimes followed him around, trying to touch his crotch or give him bits of food. A lot of the time he felt heavy and lifeless, and he started worrying that this wasn’t a dream at all, but the real thing. Now in the evenings Abu-Lahab built up the fires so they leapt and flared, and the stormy light yanked at the shadows so that the branches, vines, and huts seemed to cower back and then suddenly stand up and dance. The children began staying up late, drumming with sticks on hollow logs. When one night the drumming went on for hours past dark, Fiskadoro retreated into his hut and wouldn’t come out, although he never slept inside it and
hardly ever let himself be found under its roof and in its smelly darkness. The two people who lived there were nowhere around. He stayed inside, hunched in a ball on the floor of rotten grasses, and cried. A little later, Zeid appeared and called him out of the hut. Zeid was alone. His face was covered with orange clay that looked green in the odd light. Fiskadoro sat before the hut and saw Abu-Lahab moving from fire to fire, scattering handfuls of powder from a bag at his waist. Violet, red, and sky-blue smoke rushed out of the flames. Meanwhile Zeid knelt beside Fiskadoro and caked the boy’s head with mud, using tender motions and speaking soft words, and then without warning he drove something sharp into Fiskadoro’s earlobe. Shivering and crying, Fiskadoro waited while Zeid moved to his other side and drove the thorn or needle through the flesh of the other ear and then tied strings through each hole. In a way that was comforting, he took Fiskadoro’s hand and told him that Mohammed lived a long time ago. The Sovereign Lord, the Lord God, the Mighty One, the Most High, gave Mohammed half His power and said, It isn’t for you to keep. Give this power to the people, some to the men and some to the women. It will save them when Hell is brought near. Mohammed went to the people but most of them didn’t believe he had any power. Show us your power, they said. Mohammed moved a whole mountain from one place to another, but the people said, That mountain has always been where we see it now. Show us again. This isn’t a power to move, tear down, or raise up, Mohammed told them. It’s the power to go on living after Hell is brought near, the power to make babies and keep generations living on the Earth. We already have that power, the people said, and left Mohammed alone. As they were leaving he said, No!—but when the Earth is beaten into dust, and your Lord comes down with the angels all around him, on that day you’ll remember your mistakes, but what good will it do you to remember? Only one man believed Mohammed, and that man believed him only a little. When Hell was brought near, this was the only man who stayed upright. Everyone else was dead. The man stood on a mountain looking for a woman to make babies, but everyone else was dead. He called his dog, but his dog was dead. Then he heard Mohammed calling him: Are you dead? No, I’m alive, the man said. If I call you as you called your dog, Mohammed said, will you come? I’m coming, Mohammed, the man said. He crossed a valley and went halfway up a mountain to Mohammed’s cave. He went inside but it was dark, and there was nothing there but a two-headed snake who talked to him with both heads at once. I am Mohammed, the snake said. You aren’t Mohammed, the man said. No, but I’m a man, the snake said. You aren’t a man, the man said. No, but I’m a part of a man, the snake said. You aren’t a part of a man, the man said. No, but I can be part of a man if a man wants the power to make babies, the snake said. Eat me where you find me. Where I go between your legs, make yourself like me. Thus sayeth Mohammed, the snake said, and he was gone. The man looked all day for the cave’s door and almost died of thirst before he found it. When he got outside he went to a stream and drank from it for half the night, and slept beside it for half the night. When he got up in the morning he opened his pants to relieve himself, and he found the two-headed snake there.

  This is the man we, the Quraysh, all came from.

  Fiskadoro didn’t know what Zeid was talking about.

  As the little man led Fiskadoro outside into the noisy village, boys were throwing firecrackers into the flames, howling and screaming as the explosives went off amid the sound of drums and tore apart the fires and tossed coals and brands at their feet. Older boys joined the two of them as Zeid led him wherever they all were going, the boys also driven along by painted men like Zeid. Some of the men carried a massive head, covered with sparkling beads, that wobbled above their ambling procession along the trail out of the village and looked back at the boys with jutting, outraged eyes.

  For two days and nights the men fed Fiskadoro and the other boys only cookies tasting of dried mud, and made them learn speeches, longer and longer ones. They recited the speeches to the boys; and in unison, to their amazement, the boys recited the speeches back.

  By the end of the first day Fiskadoro felt as if he’d run down a beach until his eyes were blind and his legs were numb and had leapt into the sea to find it full of words. The tide of them rose above his chest and throat and spilled into and out of his mouth.

  Fiskadoro was the first to go. The older men hemmed him around, breathing and groaning in a way that would have scared him if he hadn’t been senseless with exhaustion and hypnotized by fire. Words were said over him, and magic gestures accompanied the lowering of the big head down over his own. Through the glassy eyes of the head the brightness of the fire was shattered and magnified painfully. They knocked on the head with sticks and half-deafened him, but he managed to hear the rhythm of drums in the village blurring into one repetitive signal and the voices of women and children singing songs that made no sense.

  He couldn’t see straight, his neck was tired, his voice was loud and hollow in his ears when he spoke, and he had to breathe the same air over and over. By the time the ceremony began, although he remembered everything he was supposed to remember, he’d forgotten he was wearing another head, forgotten his voice hadn’t always been huge and dark, forgotten what it was like not to be dizzy. He believed now that his head was outside of him, all around him, and that all around his head were his dreams and thoughts. He was inside-out. The wild tempo of the village percussionists cut through the trees and found his ears. The languid song of voices fell down like rain over the clearing.

  “The Sovereign Lord,” Zeid said, shiny and orange across the fire, blasted by Fiskadoro’s glass vision into a dozen of himself, “the Holy One, the Giver of Peace, the Keeper of Faith; the Guardian, the Mighty One, the All-powerful, the Most High; the Creator, the Originator, the Modeler; the Unbecome, the Unborn, the Unmade; the Dissolver of Space and of Time, the Weaver of the Web of Appearances, the Inbreather and Outbreather of Infinite Universes; the Formless, Non-existent, Imperishable, and Transcendent Fullness of the Emptiness; the Voidness; the Eternal God.

  “Who has the power to mystify, how did he get it, how does he keep it?”

  Fiskadoro said something but couldn’t hear his own answer.

  “Does there not pass over a man a space of time when his life is a blank?”

  Fiskadoro knew the answer and said it.

  “You touch the people and they dissolve. There is nothing left but you. And you will not remember.”

  But at this moment Fiskadoro remembered everything except his own name. He spent the next several minutes talking and talking and knowing just what to say. It was the right answer.

  “On that day we shall ask Hell: 'Are you full?’ ”

  Fiskadoro said, “And Hell will answer: ‘Are there any more?’ ”

  Then it was Fiskadoro’s time. His mouth moved. He remembered every word they’d told him and he said them all at the proper times. Fiskadoro said, “No! But when the earth is crushed to fine dust, and your Lord comes down with the angels, in their ranks, and Hell is brought near—on that day man will remember his deeds. But what will memory avail him?”

  He spoke for hours. Every word was in his mouth, and in his mind was his whole life. In his head a long tunnel had been opened, down which he could see all the way back to the moment he’d been born in hunger and fear onto a wall of light, and had awakened in this world between the mountainous thighs of his mother Belinda, and had been carried in her hands as if by two great clouds through an otherwise empty sky toward the comfort of her breast. He saw his father handing a china plate, a shawl, and a jug of brandy to the midwife. He smelled his father’s hair and his parents’ bedding, and recalled their conversation as they stood above him the first night he slept away from them on his own blanket, in a box.

  All this time he held a sharp rock in his hand, waiting until the moment he wanted to make himself like other men. “When the two keepers receive him, the one seated on his right, the other on his left, each word he utters shall be noted down by a vigilant guardian.

 
; “And when the agony of death justly overtakes him, they will say, ‘This is the fate you have striven to avoid.’ And the trumpet shall be sounded.’ ” He talked and talked. Toward the end he said stranger and stranger words, such words as “ephod,” and “teraphim.”

  “And the going up to it was eight steps,” he said.

  He couldn’t wait any longer.

  “I will go down now!” he said. “And see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me!”

  He couldn’t see anything below the level of his shoulders, and even then could see only his own orange and black fire-blindness, and so Zeid had to guide his hand, the one that held the rock, when he cut himself.

  After he cut himself with the rock, nothing happened for a long minute. People only breathed. “We shall surely die,” two voices said, “because we have seen God.” But then there was only more breathing.

  Someone took the head from his shoulders and led him by the hand back to his hut. Except for the fact that the fires seemed a little brighter than usual because he’d been so long in darkness, the swampy village of huts and people looked the same.

  Fiskadoro lay in his hut with songs rising and falling outside it through the whole night. He was delirious. He didn’t know who came to him at some point in the evening to pierce the tops of his ears, or who appeared later to bathe his forehead and bandage the wound between his legs with a dressing of pungent glue and boiled leaves. In the morning he was stiff all over and felt like a sack of wet, chilly sand.

  He was very let down, because everything had been heading toward this, and it was nothing. His head was a blank, he felt no pain. Now he was like other men.

  When the white trader named _______ was making ready to leave, he came to Fiskadoro and said, “You about set to take off?”

  As far as Fiskadoro knew, he’d never seen this man or this place in his life before. Every time he looked at something, it came up before his eyes for the first time, unexplained and impossible to understand.