Fiskadoro

by Denis Johnson

  He’d been bent on improving his chances, and he’d almost gotten out a life jacket as they’d crashed—as soon as Captain Minh spoke to him and smacked the faces of the helicopter’s dials and instruments with alarm, the Lieutenant had turned in his seat and managed to move people off the service locker, ordering them at gunpoint to squeeze themselves impossibly against the others as he stood up, and Marie knew she had to move or he would shoot her, so she did her best to crush the bones of the people behind her to give him room. He had the locker’s lid raised ten centimeters and one hand caught in its open mouth and touching a canvas life jacket, his revolver in the other hand, when the craft descended, very slowly, to the water’s surface.

  They were raised once by a wave, and Marie was beginning to wonder how long they would float here before they were rescued or starved to death, when Captain Minh leapt from the door, which now, only two seconds after their touching down, was filling with water. Marie waited, while her heart beat twice, for the people between her and the door to jump also, and then she clawed and broke her way through them and into a sea which was suddenly up to the level of her throat.

  She swam away, and when she turned around, treading water, the helicopter was gone.

  Upturned heads floated around her in a green waste. Between the blasts of wind rolling over it, there wasn’t a sound but the water. The shock of being here was no greater than the shock of being defiled by this filthy secret, the noises the ocean made all alone in the middle of itself. Its infinitesimal salt bubbles hissed and breathed, and the surface water turned over and licked along itself and coughed softly.

  Under these circumstances the China Sea looked like nothing. Here was the difference between something big—as seen from the craft, horizon to horizon—and something enormous, engulfing, mind-erasing, seen only in series, swell after swell, too absolutely filled with itself to admit any mercy, to know its name or take any thought. It was as if, having found herself all wet, she’d taken an astonished breath to say, “Look what happened!” but was stalled in the astonishment and couldn’t exclaim, or even exhale.

  In a moment another head popped up streaming with water, eyes closed, black hair plastered to the scalp, and drew a deep breath, like a baby being born. She didn’t know this one—but it was the Lieutenant, unrecognizable, somehow, having lost not only his beret, but also his rank, his name, his personality. The Lieutenant had no life preserver, and no revolver.

  Her skirt and blouse were heavy. She let herself go under while she tore her blouse open, kicked upward, broke the surface, went under as she took off the blouse, thrust to the surface, lost the world of air while she pulled at the button on the side of her skirt and yanked the garment down over her hips, and came back to the possibility of breathing again as she loosed her knees from its girth and kicked it from her ankles. She didn’t think. She only wanted a place to stand, rest, and eat and drink the air.

  She kept her head up among the other heads, losing and regaining sight of them when a swell lifted and dropped her.

  At first they all treaded water, not caring how the exertion drained them. Within a few minutes Marie was more tired than she’d ever been, and then she didn’t think anymore, except to wish she could lie down.

  Captain Minh was the first to go over on his back. The others did so right away. It gave them a style of rest, more breath, and more time; and though it exposed their backs to a huge world of liquid and somehow, therefore, wracked their nerves, it took their eyes off a sea higher than themselves and showed them something bigger-—the sky.

  The sky was a major discovery, holding an element of hope that charged among them and got them talking. Marie said some things in English, and then in French, just to be heard. The others answered importantly, with interest, though no answers were required of questions like “What time is it?” and they asked each other questions of their own—“Where do you think we are?”—in French, and said other things in Vietnamese, and gave opinions and looked at the sky. Captain Minh organized an effort to stay together, getting the others to take off their clothes and link themselves like a chain by clutching shirtsleeves or pantlegs. The Lieutenant wouldn’t contribute his pants because he didn’t want to take off his shoes. Some of the others warned him against this, in French, and Captain Minh argued with him in Vietnamese. The Lieutenant, already breathless, shouted, “Fack you, body boy!”

  The talk gave over to the work of breathing, and they were voiceless now except to gulp air or clear their throats. Marie answered the others only briefly, and asked only, “Ou etes vous?” and occasionally turned her head, looking for anyone. People talked only to locate themselves among others, and now it appeared they were nine. The center of the group were a man and his wife, who called to each other often and said, Marie supposed, “Here I am!” and “I see you!” Because these two signaled themselves the most, the others took them as markers in the ocean and stayed near, keeping their chain of laundry slack so as not to have to fight each other’s drift. Marie used the man and woman angrily, let them do the work of crying out, and saved her own strength for keeping her face turned away from the swells that broke over her head if she didn’t lift it slightly out of their heaving approach.

  The effort this kind of floating required wasn’t too great, but her neck ached and soon the back of her skull felt flat and numb and her spine burned, all from the repeated task of lifting her head. The surface that had seemed so black and heavy from above, whose motion had seemed so blubbery and incidental, now proved active, populous, and resourceful, throwing up generations of fingers that clawed her face, worms that raced across her nose and mouth and choked her, small whirling mouths that swallowed and abandoned her hair. It was windy. The whitecaps that had seemed so widely separated now came relentlessly, their froth blasted by small gusts into rainbows. Their mist strangled her. Her lips were chapped and raw with salt, her eyes stung, and before long her face hurt as if she’d been beaten. She began to cry. She’d already passed the point of thinking that she might swim until she got out of here to continue the business of life, and had come to the point where she swam because it was, in fact, life’s business, the thing to be carried on until she died.

  They watched the Lieutenant go down. He let go of their improvised lifeline and struggled to give up his shoes, and then his pants. He struggled again as he went under repeatedly, and he begged the others for some kind of help, but soon he was paralyzed and wordless and all alone, although he was right there among them, and then he was gone.

  Before nightfall the wind blew gentler, the swells were born smaller and more courteous, and life got better. But then night fell, and there was no more seeing in this life.

  In the dark they stayed near each other, fought to keep near when one lost hold of the lifeline, though clinging to one another was fatal, and they called to one another and answered—there was never any talk about why. It was understood that they would stay together, though Marie had forgotten by now who they were, how many, what they looked like. Hands were sought, voices chased with precious strength, the touch of hands slipped away, voices were lost. People went silent, gasped and choked. It occurred to her that these people were falling asleep. Her own changeless condition was a paralysis that somehow found a way to move when the water lapped her nostrils and she panicked, snorting and coughing, and sculled again. She passed beyond waking, but she didn’t sleep. And yet it was hard to tell the difference. For a while there were some stars, and a blurred half-moon, but they disappeared without her noticing and then there was only herself in a floating dark of no particular dimension but full of soft aimless noise. Uniformly, infinitely, and permanently it hissed, and along the fabric of this sound it burbled and squeaked, it flushed and spat. In the action of water it trilled and sang. It spoke; it rolled words over words. It knew—and, in a kind of shock, it ceased; in the water of it it reconsidered; it cleared its mind and opened its eyes and saw itself.

  Her ears were filled with water, her tongue so
swollen she could hardly shut her mouth on it, but still she tasted the ocean, and she heard it. Her nostrils were closed tight and she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or not. She realized the stars might not have gone away, but that the salt might have blinded her.

  At some point in the dark two hands clutched and held her, someone trying to stay afloat. She poked their eyes and bit the fingers digging into her arms. She kicked their stomach and tore herself away. A little later, as she began to let herself sink, finding no difference in her mind anymore between the blackness of air and the blackness of water, something frond-like touched her cheek, and something more solid bumped her shoulder—a person—and she grabbed at the neck, held on to the collar of an undershirt. There was no resistance; the person was dead. The body went under a ways, but she was able to use it to help keep herself above the water a little longer. She rested with her head on its back, until it went under deeper, and she kept it near, straddled it a while and finally stood on it for a second at a time, keeping her chin above the swells, while it washed downward and came up again to give her feet its slight support, until she lost it.

  When the sun came up the first day, its light was unbelievable. There was strength in it. Marie felt saved. The time in the water now seemed longer than all her life before. Her life before had been a preparation for this water, and the sun finally becoming a whole circle and clearing the surface, flying out of the water into the sky, paid for and explained everything. She laughed and felt powerful. Her stomach ached and the thirst, as the sun touched her lips, was all of a sudden more fateful than the need for air. She drank some water. Her throat was swollen nearly shut, and her tongue had forced itself halfway out of her mouth. She was hardly able to swallow.

  Captain Minh was nearby. A man and a woman floated between them. Nobody else was in sight. The sea lifted, kept, and released her over and over.

  The woman tried to keep the man’s head above the water when he passed out. She kicked the water, launching herself as high as her shoulders repeatedly, and slapped him, but he didn’t come around. She cupped his chin in her hand and tried to drag him along behind her, her face, smashed and puffed-up like a beating victim’s, turned up toward the sky. After a while he slipped away from the woman. The water flowed into his mouth with a sucking noise as he went under. The woman floated on, looking at the sky. Marie turned her own eyes up to the sun.

  It clouded over slowly and then began to rain.

  The rain, which was a hard one, fell down on her face and tongue with great force. The water on her tongue was new, and the purity of it on her eyelids brought her to life. Then she felt the fresh water reaching the cells of her stomach as if each one were being stabbed. She let her feet drop, kicked once, and lifted her head to look around.

  She was alone. The rain drove up a low fog from the ocean’s surface, and she couldn’t see very far, she thought, but had no idea how far she was seeing where there was nothing to see. A swell coming toward her broke into two shapes, and one was another corpse that came right to her arms. It was the man who’d gone under some time ago, she didn’t know how long. She clung to the body and rested piecemeal as she had before, until the effort to find its lowering support was greater than the effort to float alone. The rain passed over, and now she was rested enough to know, at least, that she was here.

  But in just a few minutes she was gone again, without strength enough to think, without mind enough to know if she was above or below the water. If she didn’t have a thought, still she had a sense that she’d been in this life for a day and a night and a day, that this was all there was, or ever had been, of this life, and that she had somehow reached, by floating, the bottom of everything. But she was wrong.

  The stamp of endlessness driven down onto her mind was erased, washed away, the first time she passed out and slept, as the others had, and slipped beneath the waves. She might have been anywhere as she woke up with water in her mouth, disbelieving and startled, charged with the responsibility of taking a breath. The shock of finding herself here where she’d always been was like a birth. It became the common torture of her existence to sleep, choke, wake, and come back to the slave-labor of floating. She began to experience the process less and less as trying to stay afloat, and more and more as trying to stay in the air, trying to keep from crashing to the ground. Then it came to her that the ground was where she wanted to be, the place to lie down and breathe; and then she woke up, drowning.

  The idea of lying down on the earth to take a deep breath seemed so wonderful it could only be put off; it was something worth waiting for, something to enjoy a moment from now, and then a moment from now.

  Breathing was living. It was a living accomplished by no one, but a living that this No One had to accomplish on purpose, willingly, because she could not both sleep and breathe. She could not forget herself without dying. Nevertheless she forgot herself.

  She left herself and drifted with a sense not of the water, but of something that was in it, a perfect and invaluable presence, a rubble of treasure growing up from the bottom of the world how many countless fathoms beneath until it touched and lifted her, bringing her face up to feel the air; and then it abandoned her and declined away into its origins so that she sank down again, not into water but into black, sharp, unconsolable pity. But it came back, growing out of nothing from the floor of life, and lifted her. It wasn’t just the most priceless fact and thing; it was her breath; it was the sole fact and thing.

  By sunset she was only a baby, thinking nothing, absolutely adrift, waking to cough and begin crying, drifting and weeping, sleeping and sinking, waking up to choke the water from her mouth and whimper, indistinguishable from what she saw, which was the grey sky that held no interest, identity, or thought. This was the point when she reached the bottom of everything, when she had no idea either what she’d reached or who had reached it, or even that it had been reached.

  The heavens looked huge today, as if their blueness rocketed out beyond the edge of everything and even beyond time itself, because their infinite spaces easily entertained great clouds like monsters that moved through them living their oblivious, prehistoric dreams. But Mr. Cheung wondered who it was who watched and who it was who slept. Behind the clouds, in the south, a clear patch was growing larger, and pretty soon emptiness would have the sky. That was the way, a dream of days followed by emptiness, the huge water turning over the grains of sand, neither one knowing which was big and which was small. Mr. Cheung was uneasy and sad. He would have to die, and the quiet knife of this fact wasn’t dissuaded by the interplay of milkiness and inkiness in the textures of the Atlantic under these clouds of October, or by his prayers, best wishes, or sorrow. His mood swelled and the action of the wind over the beach seemed full of power.

  Since the death of his mother, Belinda, Fiskadoro was confused. If everyone in this world around him had died once, as he himself had died, then where had Belinda gone when she died the second time? How many worlds were there?

  As a way of approaching these questions, he confided to Mr. Cheung, “I saw those skeleton in the cars that won’t go.”

  “You’ll be a great leader,” Mr. Cheung said.

  Fiskadoro didn’t know what his teacher was talking about, as he hardly ever knew what anybody was talking about. “I’m not like other men,” he reminded Mr. Cheung.

  “No, I know that. You’ve been to their world and now you’re in this world, but you don’t have the memories to make you crazy. It isn’t sleeping under the moon that makes a crazy person. It’s waking up and remembering the past and thinking it’s real.”

  “I saw the ashes driving the cars forever,” Fiskadoro said.

  “Something big is happening today. I wish it was yesterday,” Mr. Cheung said. “I wish it was five minutes before this minute, when I went around wishing it was a hundred years ago. You know,” he said, “in this past I long for, I don’t remember how even then I longed for the past.”

  This talk was only taking them aw
ay from what Fiskadoro wanted to ask. With some anxiety about being so direct, he got right to the question. He pointed off toward the northern horizon as far as their vision would carry, and brought his finger around in an arc through the chambers of the sky over the Ocean and held it out to the south. “I don’t know what es,” he said.

  His teacher seemed to understand. “I don’t either,” he told Fiskadoro, “but we’re here.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I never knew.”

  “Anybody know?” Fiskadoro asked him.

  “Possibly my grandmother,” Mr. Cheung said.

  The Lieutenant was lost. Small children were lost. The husband and wife who’d persevered and stayed afloat a long time were lost and still falling, probably, through the water toward the bottom, and everybody was lost who had flailed in panic, while their lives clung to them unreasonably, through the fields and barricades and over the faces of other people equally rabid to live. Marie was the last of three to be taken out of the water—Captain Minh and one other woman had been saved, and now the young girl Marie. Saved not because she lasted, not because of anything she did, or determined in herself to do, because there was nothing left of her to determine anything; saved not because she hadn’t given up, because she had, and in fact she possessed no memory of the second night, and couldn’t believe, to this day, that she’d spent twenty hours staying alive, breath by breath, without knowing enough to desire it; saved not because she’d held out long enough, because there was nothing to say what was long enough; saved because she was saved, saved because they threw down a rope, but she couldn’t reach her hand up now to take hold of it; saved because a sailor jumped off the boat, his bare white feet dangling from the legs of khaki pants, and pulled her to the ladder; saved not because her hands reached out; saved because other hands than hers reached down and saved her.