Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  “They’ll let you go, if you’re ready to go,” _______. told him. “You ready? You feel okay?”

  “I fix now,” Fiskadoro assured this man, whoever this man was. But he was lying. He wasn’t at all well. He had a fever and couldn’t keep food down and hurt, every minute, between his legs.

  _______ said, “Walk behind of me,” and took Fiskadoro with him to the water.

  People Fiskadoro had never seen before stood in a place he’d never been before and waved to him, whether hello or goodbye he didn’t know, because only a minute after his words with _______, he’d forgotten whether he was coming or going.

  “I don’t set foot on that road,” _______ said. “I go by the canal.”

  As Fiskadoro stepped onto the raft after this stranger, his memories suddenly returned to him for a minute. He remembered that he was asleep in a dream and that his memory had been coming and going, as it generally seemed to do in dreams.

  They traveled on a raft along a channel like a long tin roof between two oceans of mangrove that stretched to the horizon and appeared to be the whole world. Alongside the channel ran a road. For a long time Fiskadoro lay on his side with a groin of fire while _______ pushed them forward with a pole.

  Fiskadoro sat up when they came to a patch of dead grey mangrove. Another dead patch followed; and suddenly they were in a lifeless place. The branches were bare as far as he could see. He thought that he must have fallen from one dream into a deeper dream, and he panicked inside without moving, because he was getting farther and farther away from waking and might never get out.

  “Miami ef el ay,” _______ said.

  For a long time, as Fiskadoro looked at it, he thought it was a storm of clouds, and then he assumed it was a big boat bearing down on them and he wondered what these people did when a boat was about to crush them. And then he realized that it was far away, it was made of houses, and then he began to understand that these houses were too far away to look at, that he was able to see them from this distance only because they were bigger than his mind could grasp.

  Fiskadoro wept and trembled. “Was I ever see this before?”

  “I couldn’t say,” _______ said.

  Alongside them even the dead mangrove was gone. There was nothing but brown and silver ash streaked black in places. There was no end to it.

  “Am I see it now?”

  “I couldn’t say,” _______ said. “But I’d guess you were.”

  _______ walked back and forth slowly on the raft, pacing out kilometer after kilometer across its brief length, pushing them toward the vision with his pole.

  Fiskadoro saw that today was the day. Just by saying the words he’d made it come true. The earth had been crushed to fine dust. Someone had come down to see whether they had done altogether according to the cry of it, which was come unto him, and crushed it to dust. Fiskadoro put his arms around himself as the tears fell down his face. Today he would remember his deeds.

  Ahead, on the road alongside the channel, tangled black autocars made a breakwater of wreckage, behind which, as far as Fiskadoro could see down the diminishing road, stretched a motorcade of burned-black cars and trucks, every size and shape, with their tires melted into the road’s ash. He’d never seen so many. He didn’t know where they were all going.

  Every car—as the raft moved alongside them toward the clouds of buildings in the east—was being driven by a person made of brown bones who didn’t shift or flicker or turn his head, but Fiskadoro knew they were all aware of him. There were riders in every car, big and little, twisted into different shapes, all made of brown bones. Now he understood that his purpose in this dream was to die. He was sobbing so hard now, and with such shame, that he couldn’t make a voice to ask _______ what the death-ceremony meant by “Deeds.”

  “They got stuck here while the whole Everglades burnt up around them,” _______ said.

  There was a police car, with the red light on top. Even the police were skeletons.

  “They couldn’t get outa them cars, and they couldn’t stay in.”

  Fiskadoro felt the deep echo of these words, as if he heard them spoken from another place, from tomorrow, when he would be awake. He waited for the two keepers to receive him, and the vigilant guardian to note down each word, and the trumpet-sound. He bawled out loud for his lost life. His memory left him and he looked up at the giant desolation in grief and amazement once again, but also for the first time.

  When, in just a few minutes, he had forgotten all these things again, Fiskadoro was glad. He lay in his bed in the midnight listening to the Gulf wash and wash the hem of the island and remembered the act of remembering those experiences, and that was bad enough. Then, as if the burbling permutations of the water were carrying it away, his ability to remember anything at all was gone again. In the darkness his eyes were directed up toward the thatched ceiling, but as he didn’t know the ceiling was there his sight reached on beyond it indefinitely toward nothing.

  I THINK WE SHOULD GO OUT IN THE YARD,” Mr. Cheung told Fiskadoro.

  “Why?”

  “The odor.” Mr. Cheung made a face. “Forgive me, this is your home, but it doesn’t have a pleasant odor for me.”

  Fiskadoro made no objection and followed his teacher out into the yard before the quonset hut.

  In the yard the boy looked here and there with some curiosity, because, Mr. Cheung guessed, he didn’t remember the outhouse, the three fenceposts without a fence, or even the Gulf of Mexico from ten minutes earlier when he’d stood in the doorway and watched Mr. Cheung pass between these fenceposts, with this outhouse and that Gulf behind him, and walk up to the broken steps and say, “I’m Mr. Cheung,” a name the boy had also probably forgotten. “Sit down,” Mr. Cheung told him now. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Who?” Fiskadoro wondered.

  “I’m your teacher, Anthony Cheung. I’m going to show you some things I have in my bag.” He jiggled the pillowcase he was carrying so that its contents clinked and rattled. “Please, let’s sit down,” he said, trying, himself, to get comfortable on the ground.

  The boy sat down on the sand and leaned back on his elbows with his legs stretched out straight and his ankles crossed and seemed to think it was a joke when Mr. Cheung reached into his bag for an amethyst and said, “What is this?”

  “Es a rock.”

  “Yes, all right. A rock, a stone.” Mr. Cheung decided to limit this study to a very few objects, since most of those in his bag were all minerals from his collection—each with a different name, it was true, but to the boy, as he should have expected, one rock was like another rock. He set the amethyst on the sand between them. “Whatever you want to call it, that’s fine,” he said with some disappointment.

  “Bueno, I gone call him a rock,” Fiskadoro said.

  “And this?”

  “Es a thread thing,” the boy told him.

  “A spool. You’re right, we put thread on it. We wind it around like so—ah? Yes. Spool.”

  “Espool,” Fiskadoro said.

  Now Mr. Cheung closed up the spool inside his fist. “What do I have here?”

  “Espool.”

  “Have you heard that word before?”

  “Yeh. Sure. Alla time.”

  Mr. Cheung set the empty spool down next to the amethyst and reached into his bag. “And this is a chicken.”

  “Naw!” Fiskadoro uncrossed his legs, leaned forward to take a better look. “Es a knife you know. Es ain’t a chicking.”

  The teacher lay the clasp-knife down beside the spool. “I’m just testing you.”

  He drew out a small brass bell, many decades old, very valuable, from China, and dangled it from his fingers and let it ring softly.

  “Es a bell.”

  “Right. Tell me all four things now. Point.” Mr. Cheung showed him. “A bell, a—what.”

  “Es a bell, un espool, you got a knife, you got a rock.”

  “Very good. Okay, close your eyes now, put your hands—” Mr. Cheung
showed him, and the boy covered his eyes with his hands. “Can you tell me what I have now?”

  “Bell. Espool. Knife. Rock.”

  “Excellent. All right. I’ll put them back in my bag. My bell, my spool, my knife. There—my rock—all in the bag.”

  “Si,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  The boy rubbed his face and suddenly looked frightened and ill. “Maybe. I think about it. Ask to me later.”

  “No, I won’t ask you,” Mr. Cheung assured him. “It’s not at all important.” He was wary of exciting the boy. He’d thought about this, about what it might be like to move from one day to the next, maybe from one hour to the next, and even, as looked possible in Fiskadoro’s case, from one minute to the next, without taking with you any recollection of the previous one. Surely it would break a person. Surely it would maim the soul.

  But then again—if he had no memory of having once had a memory?

  In such a case, where was the soul at all—had it been erased? This boy’s seriously ailing mother had to lock herself away from him at night: he crept after her with no more compunction than a little dog or a tomcat because, like a dog or a tomcat, he didn’t know who his own mother was beyond that she was female. But even a dog behaved as if there were people, places, and things it recognized—did that kind of behavior mean it remembered them? If so, then this boy’s soul lacked even the proportions of a dog’s.

  “What do I have in my bag?” he asked Fiskadoro.

  “Some thing you got.”

  “Could you please tell me what things? Tell me four.” He held up four fingers.

  Fiskadoro shrugged. “A few thing. Whatever you need.”

  “Do you remember when I put them in my bag?”

  “Sure. One time I remember.”

  “When?”

  “Long time ago.” Fiskadoro pointed with his chin at the distance.

  “One time when you were a little boy?”

  “Yeh. Before that maybe, I think.”

  By Mr. Cheung’s estimation, not five minutes had passed. “What is your name?” Mr. Cheung asked him.

  “My name Fiskadoro.” He never failed to remember his name. But everything else got away from him.

  “Let me take you back inside, Fiskadoro. And then I have to walk. It helps me think.” He led the boy back toward his completely unfamiliar home to be given his lunch by the mother he’d never seen before. “There’s a woman in there. She’s not for you. Please don’t bother her.”

  The day was unseasonably crisp. With the noon sun directly overhead the water was a blackness, not a liquid. His hands clasped behind him and his head bowed, he walked in under the Army’s high ceiling of palm leaves, and as he continued on the path he perceived beneath his feet an alternation of light with shadow. Would Fiskadoro see it? Looking down at his feet in a spot of brightness, would he remember his feet in the shade? Would Fiskadoro, in fact, looking down at his feet, even remember the rest of himself-—his hands, his head? If he didn’t remember the inside of his house when he was out-of-doors, did he also forget the out-of-doors, even the fact of the out-of-doors, when he was inside? And if he were blindfolded a few minutes, would he forget what it was like to see—would he forget there was such a thing as “seeing”?

  In the clearing around the well, the sweaty-faced neighbor-women were gossiping and cleaning rice, tossing handfuls of it in the air over straw mats and letting the wind seize away the dust and chaff. Respectfully they silenced themselves as the thinker passed.

  He’d been assured by Martin and Martin’s companion Sammy that Fiskadoro’s memory would come back to him in a while—though they didn’t seem to think he’d ever remember his past—but, for now, each time the boy witnessed the sunrise he saw it for the first time.

  There was something to be envied in that. In a world where nothing was familiar, everything was new. And if you can’t recall the previous steps in your journey, won’t you assume you’ve just been standing still? If you can’t remember living yesterday, then isn’t your life only one day long?

  Mr. Cheung unclasped his hands from behind him and gestured in the air. He was walking in circles around a date palm over and over through the same few regions of light and dark. He couldn’t have explained why suddenly he felt such panic.

  OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, Fiskadoro got back his ability to remember current events. But his memory for the past, for the time before he’d come back home, was gone forever. His earliest recollection was of lying in the darkness and remembering the village of swamp-people; as far as he knew his life reached back no farther than that moment when he’d lain in bed and remembered that he had died.

  There was something real about him that came out of the memory and wouldn’t go away. It was slowly healing, but still he screamed every time he peed. Every day when he woke up, it was still split open at the end, like a fish just cleaned.

  In the dream, his first purpose had been to go through the ceremony and make himself like all other men, because he was different from all other men in the dream.

  Now he was awake, and he was different from all other men who were awake. Now he didn’t have to go through the ceremony, but it was too late.

  They all told him he’d been alive before, in another world very much like this one. Why couldn’t he remember it?

  Mr. Cheung didn’t want him just to learn the clarinet music. Mr. Cheung wanted him to eat the wafer, remember things, and tell Cassius Clay Sugar Ray where the blue pills were found. “I don’t know where the blue pills come,” he kept telling Mr. Cheung.

  “But the wafer will help you remember.”

  “I not gone remember, Manager, because of I don’t know.”

  “But how do you know you won’t remember, if you don’t remember what you know?”

  “I remember that I don’t know.”

  Talking about it made them both crazy. Mr. Cheung was strong, and he worked hard to move through all the words, but he kept bumping into the same ones over and over. “You’ll remember who you are.”

  “I don’t wanna remember who am I. Es me already, right now today. If I remember, then I gone be somebody else.” During these conversations Fiskadoro’s head hurt and his thoughts went around and around, but the thing that words couldn’t change was that in between his legs he wasn’t like other men, and so nobody could make him do anything: because when they talked to him they were talking to a person who was partly in a dream. They were sending their voices into another place. They were uselessly calling out to where the words of their own place didn’t work.

  Eventually Mr. Cheung gave up trying to get him to take the wafer of memory. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray traded the wafer to someone in Marathon, and whatever that person found, by swallowing it, belonged to that person. Nobody knew what had returned to that person, what knowledge of things that were lost.

  Mr. Cheung had insisted, “You must take the drug again to remember who I am, who you are, and who this woman is.” But he’d refused the drug because he already knew that this was Anthony Terrence Cheung, his clarinet teacher and Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra. And he already knew that he himself was Fiskadoro. And Fiskadoro already knew who this woman was—his mother. He knew she wasn’t for him, and he wasn’t supposed to bother her at night. He understood, but didn’t remember, that in the world before his dream and his death his mother had been everything to him, that she had gradually become only a part of the world, but the biggest part, and had turned eventually into just one person in the world, but the person he loved the most. Fiskadoro didn’t mind knowing about this, but he didn’t want to remember it. His mother was sick. She was getting smaller and smaller. After she closed her eyes there would be a hole in the air where she’d been, and then nothing where she’d been, only the air. He didn’t want to eat the wafer. He didn’t want the hole in the air to be a hole in Fiskadoro. He didn’t wan
t to remember what he was losing.

  Fiskadoro was proud of himself because he was really learning to play the clarinet—Mr. Cheung said that he’d forgotten how not to play. The notes on the page flowed into his eyes and out of the instrument and into the world as music. And he was a much better reader of words now, too. Sometimes, but not all the time, when he read to Mr. Cheung from one of the books the teacher brought around, instead of marks on a page Fiskadoro saw images in his mind.

  Sometimes, when his brother Drake came around, Fiskadoro told him about reading and tried to interest him in a book, but Drake was a fisherman. He liked boats, not books. People said Drake looked just like their father. Mike, the youngest brother, didn’t look like anybody yet. He didn’t mind being read to, but he didn’t seem to listen very carefully. He spent most of the time with the neighbors, because Belinda was getting too weak to take care of him. Fiskadoro spent very little time with either of his brothers.

  Most of the time he spent healing. Belinda had taken the strings out of his ears, and the holes where they’d been were closed to dots now. His groin was well, but he would always be different from other men.

  Being different from other men sometimes sent him walking far down the beach, down among the huge green flies and the stink that rose off the garbage pit and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Belinda’s ashes would be thrown away here after her body was burned.

  The gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the weedy sand near the pit. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther up-shore he always saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing. They reminded him of Mr. Cheung.

  More than once he saw others here, also different from other men: ghosts who had appeared out of the sea—from the shipwrecks, from the End of the World, from the plagues, from the cold time, from the kill-me—drowned sailors and frozen children, young maidens bleeding down their legs, sick old men and women and cancer-wasted fishwives who seemed to wander hopelessly near the place of their burning; but all of them were smiling and no longer touched with pain.