Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“The subincision.”

“The subincision. This terrible business, I never heard of it before. But everybody knows all about it from somewhere.”

“It’s something about magic and power.”

“Voodoo? Voodoo? I told you the Voodoo is a disease!” “It’s not the same. Not Voodoo. ” Weariness. He shrugged his brown shoulders in the white undershirt.

“Where did you learn about such things?” Park-Smith asked. “Is it in a book?”

“Do you know who told me about it? Martin, I think — Martin knows about everything. He should write a book, All About Everything. ”

“Martin! Well well, mentioning Martin, mentioning Martin, do you know who’s coming this way right now? Down through all the Keys?”

“Who?”

“Our half-brother!”

“Martin? Que pasa?” Unable to focus on things, Mr. Cheung closed his eyes again.

“Fact! Fact! Information from Marathon says he has left the North Deerfield forever!” Park-Smith unzipped one of the pockets of his silver suit. “I haven’t seen him, but he left gifts at my house.” From the pocket he took a half-pint bottle of Kikkoman Soy Sauce. “Never opened.” He set it on the desktop between Cheung’s pale hands.

“What name is he using now?”

“Cassius Clay Sugar Ray!” Park-Smith pronounced with delight the new name of his half-brother, who was also Mr. Cheung’s half-brother. The Asian-Caucasian half was brother to Mr. Cheung; the Negro part was brother to Park-Smith.

Again with too much enthusiasm for his own intelligence, Park-Smith said, “He has become something of a desechado himself. Some very powerful magic has made him some very powerful trouble.”

Mr. Cheung had stopped being fascinated a long time ago by the person now calling himself Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. He shut his eyes again. The White Dot. “I saw the Atomic Bomb again.”

Such talk made Park-Smith nervous. “Are you able to walk? Come on, come on — I’m ready to help you home.”

As the black man helped him across the sandy parking lot, Cheung thought, I’m from the other age — a former life — that’s why I remember the Atomic Bomb. He had read about the condition called epilepsy and was afraid it came from radiation. Or maybe, he thought, it’s a memory belonging to a ghost, which the ghost shoots into my head for viewing, the way a recording plays over Cubaradio.

Cheung saw that he was being led toward the street perpendicular to his house. “Why are we going aqui?”

“The dog, Mr. Manager,” Park-Smith said. “He wants to bite our legs.” At the edge of the parking lot, a starved black dog swept the ground with its nose, unaware of anything but the odor it was reading.

Park-Smith wet the terrycloth with water from the neighborhood well, standing in the middle of the street beside the pump. They were catty-corner across the parking lot from the Cheung family’s back yard and its several ragged rows of sugar cane, and Mr. Cheung rested himself, placing a hand on Park-Smith’s shoulder, in front of half a building with a sign over the door that read AMERICAN WOOD PRESERVER'S ASSOCIATION. “The dog’s gone now, Musical Director.”

Mr. Cheung squeezed the cloth against his scalp, and the water dripped like strings of fire behind his ears and down his neck — his skin felt highly charged. “American Wood Preservers’ Association,” he said to Park-Smith. Mr. Cheung had a special fondness for this wooden communication because it was, as a matter of fact, well preserved.

The Musical Director helped Mr. Cheung to his back door and led him along through the high-pitched queries of his children and the fretful conjectures of his wife, leaving him on the church pew in the parlor. Eileen Cheung, a thin woman whose black hair was plastered to her neck by the muggy heat of her kitchen, dabbed at her husband’s forehead with the cloth until he made her go away. All his nerve endings were still irritated.

Drifting with his clarinet over the cool floors of his front parlor room, Mr. Cheung exhibited himself before a crowd in his imagination. Voters. I address you. I beseech you. Snakes. I charm you. And he lifted his ivory-white mouthpiece to his lips and muttered a few bars of Hindustan. This was the same crowd he’d addressed once, some years before, when running for Mayor of Twicetown.

He thought his grandmother would come to listen, but instead Eileen came out of the kitchen, her manner, although she was sometimes a shrill person, softened out of respect for his condition.

“Grandmother couldn’t get out of bed this afternoon.”

It was yet one more thing in a day of sadness. “She was in all the big cities of the other age,” he said, pleading in Grandmother Wright’s defense before her maker. The beauty of sadness overcame him.

“Is the legs again. The gout thing, what you call it.”

“Keep them elevated,” he said. “What about her appetite? Is she still eating?”

“She still eating and she still laughing. She drinking vegetable soup right now.”

“Grandmother lives and lives,” he said proudly. “Just by surviving, she’s turned into the most important person in the world.”

Suddenly he held his head in his hands and said, “The Cubans will be coming to put an end to everything. The Cubans have survived as a Communist entity, a governed state. Nobody seems to understand this, Eileen. Someday the Quarantine will end. We won’t be poisonous forever. ”

This was a variation of the speech he’d composed carefully a few years ago, in seeking the office of Mayor of Twicetown. He’d wanted the people to understand the future that awaited them, and something of the past. They didn’t even know, most of them, that Twicetown had been called Key West in the other age. But dud missiles had fallen there not once, but twice, giving the town a new name. The missiles still lay where they’d fallen. Many of his fellow citizens didn’t even know what they were.

In his speeches as a candidate he had always begun: “I am a cultural entity. To be a cultural entity is not unique. What is unique about me is that I know about it.” His style had been out of keeping with contemporary passions and beliefs.

But the Cubans would probably all die, too, down there in civilization’s heart. Pirates — the man now calling himself Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, for instance — traded contamination all up and down the Caribbean chain. Nobody cared. Nobody appreciated anymore how this poison would eventually come to make physical life impossible. “Nobody knows what’s happened to us,” Mr. Cheung told his wife.

Eileen went back to Grandmother while Mr. Cheung searched under his church pew for a wooden box which he’d made himself and kept filled with marijuana. By the time he’d located it and his beloved Meerschaum pipe, he was too flooded with emotion to bother with anything except his clarinet.

Mr. Cheung began to play the blues, the real blues, the blues from Europe in the eighteenth century, when men knew how to be passionately sad, and not hysterically frustrated and childish — Corelli’s Concerto Grosso. There was no sheet music for this piece; Mr. Cheung had arranged it as a boy listening to a cassette tape-player when such things still functioned. The people he played this number for were always noncommittal, and he couldn’t reasonably expect them all to be touched and moved. They were hearing only one instrument, while he remembered the interweaving of strings and reeds that culminated in a rush of tears, where the violins followed themselves into a forest of pity and were lost.

He wanted to bring back the other age — just to get a look at it, the great civilization of helicopters and speedboats and dance parties atop buildings five hundred meters tall — but there was nothing he could do but to let that epoch pass, as it already in fact had, and to sit here with his clarinet in his lap, smoking marijuana in a cool Meerschaum pipe until the sun fell and sadness overcame him.