Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  “Now he puts a mark down on the map,” Sammy said. “I was wondering what we come here about.”

  “The source of this kind of blue pill,” Martin said. “A lot is interest me about a problem like that.”

  He lay flat under a sheet. There were men around him. Over his face a black face came down and said, “You met the Quraysh. You know who these Quraysh are? Mohammed’s family, exact. Mohammed’s tribe from over there.”

  “Over there happens to be half the world,” a small one, scratching his big belly, interrupted with disgust. “You have a private history, a religion—privado, it’s your own, all your own.”

  The black one’s sense of wounded dignity was so powerful it seized the air like a color. “I studied it in the Koran, The Human Bible, The Book of Mormon—”

  “The Holy Bible.”

  “The Human Bible. It’s new in Deerfield.” The black man disappeared. “Lookyer. Attende. I got it all in my bag.” The one with the big belly disappeared. There was a doorway now, beyond which, in another room, sat a woman. Desire moved inside him and stung him between his legs.

  A small man with a big belly appeared, holding books in either hand. “Where did you get these sacred books?”

  A black man snatched the books away from him. “Deerfield is the middle of civilization, not Cuba. Cuba ain’t. Deerfield machines print books. See?” The black one raised up a book. “Human Bible aqui. Cuba makes a big secret, but Deerfield gone print for everyone.”

  The other man rubbed his face with his hands. “The world is repeating itself. The story of the world is happening again.”

  “You call me I’m a trash-man. But I bring books. I travel knowledge.”

  Fiskadoro attended their exchange carefully, understanding and remembering nothing.

  When Park-Smith elected to sleep on Martin’s boat, Mr. Cheung went along with the idea, against his better judgment. The motion of water was soothing to him—he felt he’d developed an immunity to seasickness—but there was no telling how many of the things around him on this vessel were poison. His half-brother had lamps, a kerosene stove, fresh canvas, thousands of pre-End matches in tiny wooden packages, no shortage of rope or diesel fuel. He was called a “traveling man,” or a “trash-man,” the respectful and disrespectful terms for a pirate of the land, a scavenger and purveyor of radioactive goods. Only a few of them operated below Key Largo, wearing their protective suits as they gathered and transported various useful items just like the ones on this boat, taking off their suits and risking contamination long enough to barter their goods away without arousing the anxiety of the head-men, town councils, and Societies who bought them. But Mr. Cheung didn’t know, absolutely, that Martin sold contamination. He knew very little about his half-brother. “You’re a ghost, aren’t you?” Mr. Cheung guessed, watching Martin light his stove to warm some coffee. “You deal between the two worlds.”

  “Es expectable. I’m a half-and-half. Like the boy.”

  “Why did they take him?”

  “Remember they losted a boy on West Beach?”

  “The subincised boy. The one who drowned, yes.”

  “Well well,” said Martin, who knew all about trading, “now they made a trade.”

  “But they didn’t keep Fiskadoro. He couldn’t have come by himself. Why do you think they let him go?”

  “What they gonna worry where he live? He belong to them now.”

  “It makes a little sense,” Mr. Cheung admitted. “Not much.”

  The coffee was warm. Martin turned off the stove and gave him a cup.

  “This will keep me awake,” Mr. Cheung said, looking with distaste at his coffee in its metal mug. He sipped of it; he didn’t like coffee, particularly when it might be radioactive, but he would rather have been contaminated than impolite. He held the mug between his knees and watched the brown liquid keep its level against the boat’s subtle rocking. “You’ve been among those people?”

  “The Quraysh,” Martin said. “The original first tribe of Mohammed.”

  “They aren’t the Quraysh. That’s your fantasy.”

  “I believe what they told to me. They told to me, We are the Quraysh.”

  “What happened to you when you went visiting? Is this your trouble I’ve heard about?”

  “What you heard?”

  “Nothing. Only that you had some trouble up north.”

  “I got the wafer. The other traders wanted it, but the elders said no more trading after me.”

  “And now they don’t want you up in North Deerfield,” Mr. Cheung said.

  Martin smiled falsely and swirled his coffee in its mug. “Be a lotta business right here to keep me. I tired of the north.”

  It was a familiar story. Mr. Cheung withheld comment.

  Martin sat down across from him on the edge of the other bunk in the small cabin, their knees almost touching. “I have some of the wafer.”

  “Wafer?”

  “First they making a liquid, the memory-juice. When es dry, they got you call him a wafer. I have one. I traded to them.”

  “Will it work? Will it make me remember?”

  “You?”

  Mr. Cheung was surprised he’d said it. But he wanted to remember his previous lives.

  “We give it to the boy,” Martin said. “Maybe he have memories where to find the blue pill.”

  Mr. Cheung felt desire turning him into someone else. “Give it to me!” He ached for want of it. He was angry.

  He half-woke in a dark place, lying on his side. He started to turn over and the pain woke him fully. He stood up through the pain, moving in search of an end to it. He found a person, a child. He found a woman and got near to the smell of her, touched her leg in the dark, found her knee, and slid his hand up higher. She moved a little and opened her legs. He felt of the hair between her legs and moved his fingers in it, looking for something. She woke up and closed her legs with great strength, and slapped him around the head. He felt how she kept her wrist loose, in a way that was familiar, so that the fingers whipped hard against his ears, his nose—one caught the corner of his left eye. He fell back and the pain struck him again between his legs. “Fiskadoro—you can’t sleep here no more.” It was dark. He didn’t know who she was. Or who he was.

  Martin took his brothers to Twicetown on his boat the next day. The weather was as expected for this time of year, cloudy and offering rain by the afternoon. Mr. Cheung told himself he’d come back here soon, but right now he’d had enough excitement. He didn’t even want to see the boy.

  He wanted to avoid the mother, too, but Belinda waded out to the boat through the high tide to have a word with him.

  She looked up into his face, and knocked on the side of the boat as if she thought he couldn’t see her. And in fact, he’d been behaving as if he couldn’t: though it was time to say goodbye, he hadn’t yet said hello—he still resented Belinda for denying him the clarinet. “How are you?” he said.

  “Oh, about in a middle,” she said. The engine throbbed deeply. It was hard to make out her words. She squinted up at him. “I got a trouble in my tit, Manager. Dureza.”

  Now he wished he’d shown her more kindness. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Es a medicine on that boat he fix me?”

  Mr. Cheung shrugged his shoulders and showed her the empty hands of somebody who couldn’t help.

  “Seem like getting bigger,” she said.

  “Often these things are nothing,” he told her. “Cysts, we call them. They don’t grow.”

  “Not today,” she said.

  “Si. Not today.”

  “No medicine?”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Okay. No problem.” She didn’t leave, but stood hip-deep in water with one hand flat on the side of the boat. He waited while she looked back at Sammy, the bodyguard, in the dirt before her house. In what Mr. Cheung felt must be an uncharacteristic display of good humor, the little white man was down on his haunches, copying every motion of the l
ittle boy Mike. The boy was getting annoyed. “The last night,” Belinda said.

  “What is it?”

  “Fiskadoro, the last night. The last night he bothering me.”

  “Last night?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He bother his own mother.”

  He really didn’t know what the woman meant. “Fiskadoro is very—sick.” He wished for another word, but it was the only word that came. “He’ll get better. Not now, but in a few days, a few weeks. I’ll look in on him. I’ll come often,” he promised.

  “Keep touch,” she said, and turned and waded back toward her house.

  ONE NIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, just before he forgot it all again, Fiskadoro remembered a lot of what had happened and where he’d been. And he remembered the people he’d been among.

  It was no struggle for them to live, but it took all day, they thought. They thought they had everything they needed—some plants, some huts, some ceremonies. They never appealed for help to the ghosts of their friends and neighbors. They thought the soul was a blank and empty thing that did nothing all day long, and as far as they were concerned there weren’t any ghosts living in their village. But they were wrong: their air was unbreathable because it was turned into syrup by the cries of ghosts, the presences of ghosts, the secrets of ghosts.

  On sunny days the snakes lay out on the trail soaking up the light, and they took any snake with two heads, except for the venomous coral snakes, and instantly ate it alive in order to swallow its strangeness and power. In the case of two-headed coral snakes, these they fed with frogs stuffed with mushrooms, and when the rapto came over them, the two heads would start quarreling until one head struck the other and the snake killed itself. And the tattoo so many of them wore, the line with a loop at one end, like the empty outline of a spoon, was the snake trying to swallow its first head with its second mouth.

  It took him a long time to learn these things about these strangers. Even to see them took him a long time, because they weren’t his people. At first they resembled nothing, because he didn’t know this place.

  Once he’d come over the dunes, whatever he knew about the world was useless. He had to start over. Each day he learned something that was obvious.

  He learned something each day, but he had no thoughts. Every time he started to think about something, there came another overpowering idea—he was hungry, hungry, hungry. Muddy hands offered him plants dangling filthy leaves, and he really didn’t know they expected him to bite into these things. They tore open big bugs with popping eyes that lived in the water like fish, and held the pale meat in his face, and he cried. They showed him how to eat. He knew how to eat, but he didn’t know these plants and bugs were food. They knew the plants and bugs were food, but they didn’t realize he knew how to eat. All of it was raw. They had fires in their village, but they didn’t seem to believe these fires were meant for cooking anything but potions. He couldn’t learn to like this food, but he learned to use it like medicine to cure his hunger. His head cleared and he looked around himself.

  Fires sat on humps of earth in a swampy region and lit up the undersides of cypress leaves. Among the fires and trees there were small huts made of twigs, and he sat in the doorway of one of them. The ground dampened the seat of his pants.

  In his mind he saw himself climbing over the dunes in pursuit of a girl from these swamps, but he didn’t know how many days ago this had happened. He thought of the places he’d left behind—West Beach, the steel music and dancing, and the Army. It came to him he didn’t want to be here. But it didn’t occur to him that he might leave, that he could travel. He assumed that he was dreaming and that he’d get out of this place only by waking up.

  Swamp-people went in and out of the huts or squatted before the fires. A lot of them looked like desechados—humpbacked, or armless, or moving carefully in a way that said they were blind or drunkenly in a way that said something was missing in their heads. Fiskadoro shut his eyes hard, tensed the fibers of his body, and told himself to wake up. He shouted out loud and slapped his own face. When he opened his eyes, he was still sitting in the hut’s doorway and he was still surrounded by desechados moving through firelight under cypress trees that hung down out of a roof of darkness.

  He couldn’t hear the Ocean, only the wind in the trees. He didn’t see any dogs or cats. Bugs and frogs made sounds that blended together into a great engine of noise. There was someone—more than one—inside the hut, looking at his back. He moved out of the doorway, backed up against the structure’s prickly wall, and put his arms around his shins and his forehead down on his knees. Believing that if he slept in this world he’d wake up in the one he’d left, he relaxed as much as he could.

  The next morning the air was so cool and grey and wet that it made him cough to breathe it. A woman who had no arms or hands, only fins like a fish, came and watched him. A couple of little boys came around later and had a look at him and laughed. For a while he was alone, and then two men who seemed to think they were important people, who weren’t desechados but were nevertheless of a very small size, came and talked to him. In the usual way of dreams, he couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear him, but they managed to communicate. He made them understand that he was cold and thirsty. They gave him water in a plastic canteen just like the ones at home and a muddy blanket with a hole in it that he could put his head through. They told him he was not like other men.

  By the morning’s end the air was a little warmer. Things got more visible, but the roof of branches overhead was so thick he never got a look at the sun. All day people came and watched him for a while as if he were a show. His stomach burned with shame, fear, and disgust. One little desechado boy had eyes on either side of his head, almost where his ears were. Turning sideways, he watched Fiskadoro with one eye for a while, and then he turned and watched Fiskadoro with the other one.

  After the day had gone on for longer than most days in Fiskadoro’s experience, the two small men showed up again.

  At first the two small men didn’t talk. A woman who had no nose, only two large nostrils in the middle of her face, brought a hollow log, like a tiny boat, with more leaves and more bugs riding in it. The two men cracked the bugs open and started eating the meat. When they offered a bug to Fiskadoro, he took it and cracked it open. They offered him water from a plastic canteen.

  He asked the two men to tell him how to wake himself up.

  They told him he’d changed a lot. He wasn’t anything like the person they used to know.

  He said that didn’t make any sense. He ate some more of the bug’s fishy meat, which might have been tasty if cooked up with some spices.

  They asked him if he’d taken on the body of another person.

  He told them he didn’t think so. It looked like the same one to him.

  Then why, they asked him, was he no longer like other men?

  He insisted he was the same. It was everyone and everything else that had changed.

  This was something they wanted to ponder. They left him alone for the rest of the afternoon, while desechados and other swamp-people came and watched him, all of them with thick helmets of mud caked on their heads and holes in their ears dangling knots of colored string, bits of metal or bright pebbles. He didn’t leave his place next to the hut—he was afraid that if he moved around in the dream, he’d find himself in the wrong place when he woke up. He was already so far from the Ocean in this dream, so distantly removed from the real world, that there wasn’t any sunset here. At the end of the day the shade just got larger and more ominous and moved up from under the trees and into the sky.

  The longer he stayed here in this dream, the more people and things it produced. The floor of it, which had been only a dull rug with warts of huts and humps of fires, changed and yielded up its details: ground-running vines of various thicknesses, tiny grassy plants so low their round leaves were nearly imbedded in the dirt, beetles and ants on their errands along the reach of vines and underneath th
e fuzzy saw-toothed leaves of another kind of plant that was also everywhere underfoot. The dream’s undistinguished grey walls turned out to be a congestion of cypress and, in the wet hollows, mangrove and some other trees he couldn’t call by name, all woven together with slender green vines and barred across by frail dark ones. Out of this swamp-growth the patchy clearing of fires and huts had been hacked and burned, leaving too many trees, just the same, to let the day down. Faces came and went, and he started recognizing some of them. He saw also that the times for doing things were regular. They had three meals a day here, as in real life, and about three hours after dark everybody went quiet and slept through the night, and arose in the grey light to get together around the fires and look out of their sleep-blankened faces until they were wide awake and there was something to do. It was the first dream he’d ever peed in. They all, Fiskadoro too, did their business in pots behind the huts, and every morning people took the pots and dumped them out somewhere beyond the dream’s living walls.

  The two men came to see him each day. One was Zeid, with a face impossible to look at, it was so much like an animal’s: black and furry, and as flat as if a heavy rock had been set down on it one day. The older and more presentable one was Abu-Lahab, who was in charge of all the fires—nobody was allowed to tend them but Abu-Lahab. Sometimes they talked about nothing, asking Fiskadoro to tell them about his life in the Army and to explain, as best he could, what had happened to change him. But as far as Fiskadoro knew, he hadn’t changed at all, not since the day he was born, and he couldn’t understand the question.

  One afternoon, in order to explain themselves a little better, they took Fiskadoro out behind his hut and asked him what he thought he looked like.

  He told them he didn’t think he looked like anything.

  But down here, they wanted to know, down here where he peed, down here where he was a man? What did he think he looked like down here?

  He told them he didn’t know what to tell them.

  Zeid wore a denim skirt. He lifted the hem of it and showed Fiskadoro that there was something wrong.