Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“How are you today, Grandmother?” Eileen said.

The old woman turned her head toward Eileen, seemed not to recall why she’d turned her head, and said nothing.

It had been fun to go out, hear a sound-show, watch the weird doings of the Israelites, but now Eileen was weary. The day still held too much time to get through and too many things to bother her. “Tony, we can just eat the fruit, okay? My back is too tired and weak to make supper. I figure out the hot sun ate all my strength.”

Her husband wasn’t listening. He stood by the kitchen door and studied the dirt yard as if it were a book of words. She could see he was deep into his thinking. To bring him back she said, “Tell me the Constitution. Tell me the Declaration Indepension.”

He took his mind out of the yard and looked at her. “Independence,” he said.

“Go ’head, say to me.”

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation,” he told her.

Eileen felt better as he settled into all these words. Whenever he told someone the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution it took the lines out of his forehead. Eileen often asked him for one or the other, because he was always thinking too hard. It frightened her, his habit of trying to keep the world in his mind, the whole world, to keep it turning in the space of his brain, from the start of time to the last day — that’s what brought on the terrifying fits—

“. the establishment of an absolute Tyranny, with a capital T, over these States, with a capital S. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. Period. Dash. ”

— explaining and explaining, working it all out in his head, coloring his attitude black, that’s what started the tiny cells in the brain popping and bursting—

“. swarms of Officers, capital O,” he said, “. and eat out their substance. ”

— four times she’d seen her husband go down, his eyeballs switched off, only the whites shimmering in the sockets, and it had crushed her heart, it had twisted the very life in her, to see his body with the soul gone out of it, jerking like a decked shark. I’m gonna slice some fruit, she thought, and that’s all the supper there is.

He went on and on without once having to stop and think. “. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our capital-C Coasts, burnt our towns. ” He was coming to her favorite part, the part about the capital-I, capital-S Indian Savages. “. and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless capital-I, capital-S Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. ” These Indian Savages had eventually warred-out almost everybody.

“. in the most humble terms. ”

Pretty soon he would get to the names. Eileen bit into the melon and only then realized how thirsty she was. She’d gotten too much sun. She dropped her slice of melon and covered her ears.

“. FREE AND INDEPENDENT,” he shouted, “STATES.”

Eileen wished he wouldn’t yell that part. She liked to hear him pull it out of his memory like a long necklace, every pearl the same. The Declaration of Independence was warm in her ears, and it soothed her to listen, just as it seemed a comfort to Grandmother that she could sit in this kitchen and look at the fire, chewing on something when there was nothing in her mouth, not even a tooth.

“Hancock,” Tony was saying, “Button Gwinnet, Lyman Hall, Geo period Walton, Wum period Hooper. ”

But this afternoon the Declaration only seemed to rouse his feeling, and now he wasn’t telling them the Declaration anymore — he was complaining about the names again. “You know Mrs. Castanette in our orchestra? She only calls herself that because she plays the castanets. It is a fact that her name is Margaret Swanson. But her husband now calls himself Swanson-Johnson. They don’t see how they themselves are the ones who — who mangle the way of things.” He moved his hands as if gnarling up a bunch of string. “In the time when it was cold, we, my family, we burned our copy of the Constitution to get the fire going one day. Everybody was in despair, the children were coming out crooked, every tide left dead poison fish, nobody put out the boats, nobody could get together and say, Let’s keep the fires going in our stoves — I remember this, my father told me and I remember a little bit. Our family burned a copy of the Constitution and all the books to stay alive, but first they memorized the Constitution, everyone took two paragraphs, they clung to the ways they knew — they did this, Eileen, because it would keep them going on, step by step. It isn’t good, calling yourself Swanson-Johnson, as if a name is a joke. Next a word will be a joke, and then comes a time when even a thought is a joke.” Worry swelled the tiny veins around his eyes. He sucked short gulps of air.

Eileen saw she hadn’t helped by bringing up the Constitution. “Tony, those veins around your eyes are getting big again. Please. Please, you finish worrying now, and get a happy face.”

“Grandmother knows,” he said. He sat down at the table and looked at Grandmother. “Not in her mind any longer, but still she knows inside her heart. But the people don’t think, even the people with minds.”

“I have to take a siesta,” Eileen told him.

Later, when she woke up and came from the bedroom, Eileen smelled something bad in the kitchen and found that Grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair and wet herself.

She went to tell Tony, because she always felt sick when something went wrong with Grandmother. It made her feel better, it made her feel less worried, to tell him about it and let him be the one to worry.

Mr. Park-Smith was in the parlor with Tony, and they were both excited, sitting together on the church pew and talking low.

“Grandmother wet herself,” Eileen told them.

But Tony just said, “Yes, yes, I know,” and then said to Mr. Park-Smith, “Let’s walk,” and together the two men left to go walking through the dusty neighborhood.

Fidelia came back from the neighbors’ and helped Eileen clean Grandmother with a cloth, lifting the black dress and trying not to look.

They ate. Eileen sliced out tiny pieces of melon, and Fidelia pushed them gently between Grandmother’s lips.

“Father coming,” Fidelia said — she always heard people coming when nobody else could hear.

He was without Mr. Park-Smith. Eileen didn’t like the way he looked.

He was pale and shaken, and she felt his fear and tasted something sour in her throat. “Did you go down? Tony? Tony, Tony, did you get a fit?”

He was all balled up in his thoughts again, thoughts that were making him tremble and turning the blood white under the skin of his face.

“Tony?”

“I have to make a trip to Marathon,” he said. “There’s been some news from the Marathon Society for Knowledge. The Twicetown Society is going to have a journey.”

ON THE SAME DAY THAT MR. CHEUNG learned he was going to make a journey — on that morning — as Belinda ate coconut meat off the shell, one of her dog-teeth fell out.

She held the hem of her shift to her gums and cried about it as if this tooth were everything. In her mind she saw the tooth as gigantic, the last tooth in the mouth of an old, old whale who was eating her.

She buried the tooth in the yard and said, “Mwe pa gene para sak pale pu mwe,” although she kept no shrine in her house and had no friends among the gods.