Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“There’s something spiritual going on here,” Mr. Cheung said, “a symbolic thing. But I don’t want to learn what it is. I’m certain of this.”

She laughed. It hit him hard — she almost never laughed these days. “What’s to be afraid of about a little boat that’s just only pretty?”

“I don’t wish to be caught up inside these forces,” he said. “They aren’t my forces.”

But what were his forces, after all? Now, on a pleasant morning that was fairly cool, relatively dry, somewhat brightened by the hope of these lunatic aliens and Eileen’s uncustomary good cheer, he grew concerned about his philosophical stance, and wanted to stop in a patch of shade and consider it. Eileen was saying something about coins — she wanted melon from a vendor. Mr. Cheung held up a finger to request her patience while he asked himself these questions: What are my forces? With what am I aligned? I am not aligned with anything real, only the past. I am against everything.

It was an excellent thought. Against everything! What a beautiful day to be alive, to walk with one’s wife, to see the lonely truth!

Shyly he took Eileen by the hand. “No forces are my forces. I am against everything that is happening,” he said. “I will this. I will this from my heart and mind.”

“Thank you, thank you, Senor Mister Mayor, I already heard this speech until a thousand times.” She picked a slice of melon out of a row of them on a vendor’s collapsible table and backed away, sucking on it loudly and pointing at Mr. Cheung, to whom the young vendor held out his flat palm and said, “What you go give me on that melon now? She already eating it till es gone. I want hunnut dollar now. Es my best one I ever have of a melon since I born. ”

Mr. Cheung gave the man a copper penny from his coinpurse. “I see you as a decayed person,” he said as he watched the man’s face. “Electronic machines once managed all the money, did you hear about it? In those electronic times, nobody made a drama from one small piece of melon.”

The vendor’s flat face went cold. He popped the copper coin into his mouth and swallowed it. “Penny ain’t nothing.” He shooed them away with a fluttering hand. “Go, go, you steal my melon, happy days, you welcome, bye-bye, keep touch, I don’t care.” He turned his back on Mr. Cheung, and Eileen made as if to throw the rind at a spot between the vendor’s shoulder blades, laughing.

Mr. Cheung reached out to take another slice of melon. “Two for a penny!”

His hand was shaking. He was astonished at his own anger. “Look who coming now!” Eileen said.

She took her husband by the elbow and pulled him toward the road that emptied onto the beach, where a mist of dust boiled toward them from a crowd of racing urchins — dozens, and most of them too little to wear clothes — followed by ranks of other people in order of advancing age: adolescents, parents and uncles and aunts, weary but smiling old people, and then Bill Banks, distiller and proprietor of the great sound-shows, leading a party of his employees, who happened also to be his family, and a gang of burros pulling two carts full of his sound equipment. The slowest bunch, stumbling behind the carts and breathing all the dust, were the sad old drunks and the wild young drunks, harassed by dogs, confused by rice brandy, paired up to support one another at the finish of this long march from Twicetown. Wherever Bill Banks appeared, these people seemed to hover, not just because he made wine and brandy, but because his appearances meant excitement and dancing — yet Bill Banks himself was a small, skinny person with a face that said he didn’t understand and a posture that claimed he was sorry for everything.

Mr. Cheung was happy for Eileen. “I told you a show would come.”

“Si, and I told you Bill Banks converted now,” Eileen said. “Look, look there at Mother, she right there by the second cart.”

It was true. He hadn’t picked her out — Mother always dressed in ragged pants like a fisherman, and from a distance she might have been anyone. Mother was nobody’s mother; she was the leader of the Church of Fire, a group without a building since their roof had fallen in. She ruffled Bill Banks’s hair, kissed his hand, gave him a hug, and climbed, quite nimbly for a silver-haired old white lady, onto one of the scaffolds for the sound equipment. “They gonna have a microphone up here for me in two minutes,” she shouted. “But I never have done my talking out of a microphone before so I’ll get a start on things right here and now — shoo! Shoo!” she said to the children climbing onto the scaffold. “You’re turning into monkeys. Little monkeys.”

“Hurry up, Larry Wilson,” Eileen muttered, recognizing one of the boys setting up the electric boxes and loudspeakers. “Music time.”

They got the generators going, and the red-and-white police lights on the scaffolds began to whirl behind Mother’s grey head.

“It was predicted in the Bible,” Mother said in a rich, clear voice that carried out to the shore toward the Israelites at work on their tiny white ship, “that the scientists would look down through a telescope of a kind to see the prehistoric beginnings and they’d say, We see monkeys a-crawling at the start of time and turning into humans. And do you know what?” She bent over with a hand on her knee, pointing to the people on her right, “Do you know what?”—pointing to those in front of her, “Do you know what?”—now pointing at the left—“It happened just like the Bible did predict it. Gimme that microphone. I never used one,” she said in a suddenly amplified voice whose ringing blurred into a piercing yowl. She shouted at the black microphone and the yowling got worse until she dropped it onto the scaffold and clapped her hands over her ears and stomped on the instrument with her bare foot. It jumped off the stage and burrowed into the sand. The crowd cheered and clapped and whistled while she screamed, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I got something to tell you-all — we’re turning into monkeys! Monkeys is the point of it, backsliding out to the deep-down primitive state where Bob Marley can’t never find us!” She could hardly be heard because the crowd went on applauding, without hostility, but clearly preferring their own noise to hers. Soon the music started, and it caught them by the throats — loud guitars that sounded to Mr. Cheung like someone rhythmically beating the life out of a frog until the singers rasped, “I’m er-reddeh f’love! — Ooh baby I’m er-reddeh f’love .” Mr. Cheung enjoyed trying to make out the words. Feeling a little stupid, he danced with Eileen, merely standing in one spot and bobbing his head. He was delighted to see his wife having such a good time.

When he caught sight of Mother standing, somewhat dazed, beside a loudspeaker, he held up a finger to Eileen and then went over to help the old woman get away from the noise. “Don’t stand beside the speaker,” he told her. “Sometimes it makes vibrations to confuse your thoughts.”

“You’re dead right about that one,” she said, letting him help her across the sand.

Mr. Cheung considered her a part of his neighborhood — though where she lived, he had no idea — because the old Church of Fire stood close to his house and he laid eyes on it every day. “Can I get you a slice of melon, or some yellow fruit?” he asked her.

“No way. My stomach feels all backward.” Clutching his wrist, she settled herself to sit on the beach. “Wild business. I thought they blew all those electric things up,” she said. “They’re just a nuisance — did you hear that thing screech ?”

Mr. Cheung hoped she was finished talking, so that he could go away. “I’ll leave you now,” he said.