Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“Why didn’t you come? You didn’t come.”

“Those dinosaurs are extinct,” Maxwell told them all, looking around, “that means dead. But today we have—”

“Extinct! And are you telling to the Society for Science that Paris is not extinct?”

“Today we have Jake Barnes all over Twicetown—”

“Okay! Paris is not extinct. Okay,” William Park-Smith said, “we’ll go to Paris now.”

Maxwell laughed despite himself. “It’s because of our culture has taken this name that I—”

“Okay, let’s go to Paris now, let’s go to Paris now,” and Park-Smith made as if to escort Mr. Maxwell to Paris, offering him his arm.

What frustrated Maxwell in this situation was that of the five of them, he was the only one who couldn’t read. “If we’re done with the book,” he humbled himself now to say, “then I never will find out the ending.”

Park-Smith smiled and patted his springy orange coiffure like a starlet. “We have done so and finish the Ernest Hemingway.”

“Then I won’t find out the end.” Maxwell threw up his hands. “Obviously.”

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” William Park-Smith laughed almost like a bull being beaten. The others were a little embarrassed.

Mr. Cheung intervened. “If you come to my house with the book,” he told Maxwell, “we’ll read the ending together.”

Maxwell saluted him and put his arms across his desk, gripping the far edge, ready to give his complete attention to William Park-Smith in the hope of enlarging his understanding of the extinct race of dinosaurs.

They passed the book among themselves and read from it aloud, all but Maxwell, who listened carefully.

Under the onslaught of Bobby Calvino’s voice — joyless, gritty, and raw with drink — Mr. Cheung started feeling thirsty, completely parched inside, as if he himself were the one hung over. Two hundred million, sixty million, seven thousand—“One hundred and forty million years is a long time, and many changes took place,” Bobby strained to recite. With a shock Mr. Cheung saw the truth of his own extinction and it made him dizzy. They were ghosts in a rotten room.

He dropped the book when Bobby handed it to him, and took a minute, as he hunted for his place, to look at some of the pictures. “I believe page thirteen. I believe page thirteen,” Park-Smith said. But on page forty-one, Cheung found a drawing of a Chinese man holding a long, sharp cutlass: “The expedition always had to watch out for bandits .” He turned the page to find three men gathered around two massive bones on the floor of the world. Behind them, the filmy spirits of dinosaurs hovered in the clouds.

“Excuse me. My eyes,” he said, handing the book on to Park-Smith.

“The Discovery of Dinosaurs,” Mr. Park-Smith read. The certainty and satisfaction in his voice made Mr. Cheung feel that his own brain was turning into sandpaper. “East Windsor, Connecticut. ” Park-Smith read.

“. eighteen-eighteen. ”

“. No one knew to what creature the bones belonged. ”

Mr. Cheung wiped the sweat away from his upper lip. Today was one of those days when he couldn’t concentrate.

How would he get the Hemingway book for Maxwell? All the books came from the Marathon Public Library, which wasn’t public. Everything came from Marathon. Their own Society for Science was a breakaway faction of intellectuals, the jealous counterpart of the Marathon Society for Knowledge. There was something darkening his fingertips. All About Dinosaurs wasn’t green, as he’d thought, but faintly veneered with mold. Mrs. Calvino would read now. When she didn’t know a particular word, it was her style to hesitate before the sentence it was a part of, and wait for the others to guess which word she needed help with. Thinking of the personal ghostliness of his friends, how they would all someday be gone, he was surprised to hear her say, “Probably the rocks containing their skeletons lie out to sea.”

The dinosaur tracks in England all went from west to east, the book said. By what light was this fact called “knowledge”? Wasn’t it just one more inexplicable thing to mystify them, didn’t it subtract from what they knew, rather than add to it? The sabotage of knowledge by a wealth of facts — they weren’t professors, but guerrillas.

He already knew about these dinosaurs. They were the cousins of alligators and tortoises, and, though monstrous, they were also the relatives of the pale tiny saurios who sunned themselves on the wall of any building. If you held a saurio up to the sun, you could see the light shining through its bones. Hold him by the tail and he ran away, and in your grip the tail stayed behind, whopping mysteriously. The room seemed to be expanding all around him, turning yellow and hollow. The time of afternoon had come when the sun would cast its naked-making scrutiny into the room, staring at the five of them for just three or four minutes before dropping behind the Baptist Church to be spelled by relatively cool blue shadows. He recognized the old feeling. The inside of his mouth seemed as large as the room. The voices around him cluck-clucked mechanically, making no sense. It was the feeling again.

Without excusing himself he rose up and waded carefully from the classroom through a sea of molasses and ether.

The long hallway was open to the air at one end but barred by a locked iron gate. He intended to walk toward it and grasp those bars and breathe the air and look out into the day, but a wind whirled him around and he found himself transported through a tunnel of dust that narrowed toward the Tiny White Dot. The current of winds around his feet played with his steps-it was like trying to walk up the curving wall of a barrel. He sat down unexpectedly and softly. The profound familiarity of all this was nauseating. The White Dot rushed in utter silence up against his sight and exploded with unbelievable brilliance, the All White, the Ever White, the Ultimate White of the Nucleus, the Atomic Bomb.

He woke with a band of fire around his eyes and a taste of paraffin on his tongue, looking down at the face of William Park-Smith at rest in a bed of cobwebs.

Blinking, he righted the world. Park-Smith was looking down at him. “I think the back of your head has blood.” Mr. Cheung was on the concrete floor of the school’s hallway. Park-Smith had put a white candle in his mouth to keep his tongue down. The others were leaving, filing past Mr. Cheung and gazing down at him apologetically, with a bland, disowning fondness.

With Park-Smith’s assistance Mr. Cheung found his feet and sat himself at one of the school-desks, holding Mrs. Calvino’s terrycloth hanky against the back of his head, his wilted posture bespeaking confusion, defeat, and a guilty conscience. “I think I must be a desechado,” he said sadly.

“We are all desechados,” his friend said. “There are desechados and there are desechados.”

“Still,” Mr. Cheung said. But even as he said it, he remembered that a deep personal gloom always succeeded these baffling episodes. It was only to be expected.

“Wax in my teeth,” he told Park-Smith.

Mr. Park-Smith brightened. “I hope you aren’t chewing too much of your sugar cane,” he said with the gusto of someone enjoying a marvelous witticism. “We’ll have to melt wax and fill up the holes in your teeth!”

Even alone with him, Mr. Cheung was excruciated by Park-Smith’s idea of clever humor. Mr. Cheung let his eyes shut softly on everything.

“You feel bad.”

“Yes.”

“I feel bad too. You know about the boy washed up at Marathon. Can I tell you it worries me?”

“Why?” Mr. Cheung opened his eyes.

“It’s because for these swamp-people — that’s not our swamp-people, Tony. Our swamps don’t have the—” He made a gesture at his crotch.