Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“. he opened the cabin window and stretched his hand out. Quickly, he pulled it back in. Even with a glove on, it was as if he had plunged his hand into live steam. ”

I was there, Mr. Cheung told himself. The locks were blown from the doors. As the bombs fell, already we were forgotten. The bomb said, I will not remember.

“All Nagasaki surely had been destroyed. And he was about to fly into that ominous cloud. Cold perspiration . ”

I was there. My eyes burned up. It was the only thing I felt. I remember.

“I can’t stand it! ” someone shouted suddenly.

My eyes burst into flames. I died.

“That’s just what it says in the book!” Roderick Chambers said. “Look here — you read it: 'I can’t stand it!’ someone shouted suddenly, and when Lieutenant Komatsu turned he saw Chief Petty Officer Umeda vomiting.”

A man in the front turned around to address everyone. “The book is telling us what to say.”

Thunder clapped and a window-board fell in, dangling by a couple of nails. There were screams. “Shut that back up,” Roderick called over the noise.

“But that’s what it says in the book!” the man he’d handed the volume to said. “ ‘ Close. the. window,’ he gasped. ‘Close it! Quickly!’ ” The man waved the volume around above his head, and Roderick Chambers snatched it back.

By now Mr. Cheung was so convinced that he was only dreaming that he felt let down and disappointed in the whole experience. It wasn’t real, it was only a dream. His seasickness seemed to be coming back. He had a terrible headache and he felt nauseous.

“. either the fumes or the heat,” Roderick Chambers read above the protests of the hysterical listeners, “had given him a terrible headache and he felt nauseous.”

Because they were all in the house now — her two youngest sons, her baby brother — Belinda felt large and strong: older, but older in a way she liked. She sat on the bed beside Drake and Mike, both of them curled up against the chill. Pressy took it on himself to throw more wood into the stove, trying to show the world that he’d come around here to be a help. The noise of rain grew smaller, then louder. The storm’s eye was passing. “Only one who walk out in a lightning gone be Bruce Lee,” she said, stroking Drake’s hair.

“Es who?” Drake asked, lying on his side and turned away from her, staring slack-mouthed at the sleep that was coming over him.

“Bruce Lee. He was all over letric, with letricity for eyes. He could hear letricity inside you and tell you if you lying or not.”

“Where Bruce Lee come from?” Drake asked.

“Come from China. Down deep in a hole in the world.”

“Mama, you telling me bullshit?”

“Es a story,” she said.

“Es letric inside the batteries,” Pressy told them. He was sitting against the wall, with a view of Sarge in the kitchen, trying not to flinch when the thunder rolled over the Army. The lightning was far away now as the storm’s whipping tail passed east by northeast, up toward Marathon. He listened to Belinda’s stories and kept watch on his dog, willing to wait all night, if it had to be that way, for Sarge to get back his courage.

Mr. Cheung wasn’t alone in thinking that reading about the bomb had brought on a totally destructive storm. The others wept and shouted that the reading must be stopped. “We need a discussion time!” “We’re bombing the Keys!” “That doesn’t make sense,” Roderick Chambers insisted, but he was obviously nervous himself, probably, Mr. Cheung thought, because he faced a wall of panic. “Make sense?” people cried. “Make sense?”

When lightning struck the field outside, its glare through the gaps in window-boards lit up a room full of people whipping their heads down between their knees in unison. “There’s nothing to be afraid of! We’re in the best building! The lowest stone building, the strongest!” Roderick Chambers shouted.

Ah, God, Mr. Cheung thought.

On the trip home the next day, Mr. Cheung didn’t get seasick. He enjoyed the ride, though it went on a little too long, and he had a good time leaning on the rail and sighting at the shoreline so that it seemed to be going by too swiftly to keep track of. The beaches were hard as slate and almost yellow after the heavy rain, imbedded with boards and branches and lacquered with black leaves and red and white oleander petals. The sea was bottle-green. Everything was invisible below its cloudy surface, and so the Catch stayed out in the deeper water.

The reading of the Nagasaki book, the attempt at understanding, the reconciliation of the Twicetown and Marathon Societies, the whole experience had been a failure. Now the confusion was only deeper and more troubling. It would have been easier, Mr. Cheung believed, to have accepted their ignorance about the destruction if only they all hadn’t been aware that sixty years ago, any little child could have told them all about it. “I’m giving up on that kind of history,” he told Maxwell, who had done his turn comforting Bobby Calvino, today’s victim of seasickness.

“I know,” Maxwell said. “I think maybe it just keeps us away from the practical things.”

As they passed Big Pine Key, a tall island given over mostly to rice paddies, they saw naked boys above the water on a low cliff, jumping on the lip of it until the soil that had been undermined by the waves gave out beneath them and they tumbled into the Gulf, laughing at life while their families thought they were at work in the fields. “Is Maxwell,” Mr. Cheung asked, “your first name or your second name?”

“It’s one name.” Apologetically Maxwell added, “It’s very simple that way.” He went down in Mr. Cheung’s esteem for having thrown away part of his name. Later he surprised Mr. Cheung by saying, “I think there’s an alien life-form inhabiting inside my body,” and finally he disgusted the Orchestra Manager completely by telling him in confidence, as they were docking, “Our Society rejects too much. Some of that Voodoo may be a helpful thing, I think so.”

BECAUSE HE WAS THINKING DEEPLY, Mr. Cheung moved without appreciation of his feet along a route that wasn’t the shortest one. By the time he took a minute to look around, he was over on the east side of town, ten minutes’ walk from the road to the Army, where he’d been headed.

Hardly anyone lived on Twicetown’s eastern edge. Fishermen toured the area in groups to keep the desechados from putting up shelters here, and within a few minutes Mr. Cheung passed one of these informal patrols. They eyed him closely and greeted him—“Buenas!” and “Hey there!”—and he wondered if any of them knew Fiskadoro. The seagoing people, from here to Marathon, all took an interest in one another. Maybe he should have told them the boy had returned.

He came out of an alley and walked alongside One.

The rubble of brick and concrete buildings One had plowed through had been moved back, over the years, to create a kind of stone arena in which it rested impressively, and this clear space of sand and chewed asphalt with an Atomic Bomb laid out in it had become a gathering place for political and religious functions. When a great man died he was brought here. The missile itself was almost as big around as a house. A person could count to six before the fastest runner in Twicetown raced from end to end. Its skin was scorched and welted, in some spots still olive drab, in others stripped of all paint and shiny as glass. The other one, the one called Two, was just a black warhead overgrown with grass in a field north of town. But One was intact, from head to tail. People said it was an American bomb that had gone off course.