Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“You saw this take place?” Mr. Cheung asked.

“Seen it three times. But I don’t remember much.”

“You drank the memory-juice?”

“Hell no. You don’t think I’d wipe out thirty-two years of my life just to satisfy a load of niggers? Well, you know,” he said quickly to Martin and William Park-Smith, “them are niggers — about the low level of them burros go hauling the carts around these islands. What it was, they kept me up two days straight and had me looking in a fire, till I couldn’t’ve told you was I dreaming or was I real.”

“I think,” Martin said, “all what they have to remember back for the ceremony, es a lotta trash. Not important. The old fathers just only want the boys to forget. When es all done finish, the boys don’t even know they name.”

“Got a totally blank screen there,” Sammy told them, “just like if you unplugged their heads.”

“Do they know how to talk?” Park-Smith asked.

“They talk, they eat — everything, like anybody else,” Sammy said. “But first of all they blank out every two seconds. Couple weeks they’re regular again, but they never do get back the memories that happened before all that craziness, and the cutting.”

Mr. Cheung had never heard of this. “Incredible.”

“Horrible,” Park-Smith said again.

“But if a person found out the source,” Martin said.

“These swamp-people are the source,” Park-Smith said. “That’s obvious.”

“But I think of the blue pill,” Martin said, “and I wonder where does it come out of?”

“Now he puts a mark down on the map,” Sammy said. “I was wondering what we come here about.”

“The source of this kind of blue pill,” Martin said. “A lot is interest me about a problem like that.”

He lay flat under a sheet. There were men around him. Over his face a black face came down and said, “You met the Quraysh. You know who these Quraysh are? Mohammed’s family, exact. Mohammed’s tribe from over there.”

“Over there happens to be half the world,” a small one, scratching his big belly, interrupted with disgust. “You have a private history, a religion — privado, it’s your own, all your own.”

The black one’s sense of wounded dignity was so powerful it seized the air like a color. “I studied it in the Koran, The Human Bible, The Book of Mormon—”

“The Holy Bible.”

“The Human Bible. It’s new in Deerfield.” The black man disappeared. “Lookyer. Attende. I got it all in my bag.” The one with the big belly disappeared. There was a doorway now, beyond which, in another room, sat a woman. Desire moved inside him and stung him between his legs.

A small man with a big belly appeared, holding books in either hand. “Where did you get these sacred books?”

A black man snatched the books away from him. “Deerfield is the middle of civilization, not Cuba. Cuba ain’t. Deerfield machines print books. See?” The black one raised up a book. “Human Bible aqui. Cuba makes a big secret, but Deerfield gone print for everyone.”

The other man rubbed his face with his hands. “The world is repeating itself. The story of the world is happening again.”

“You call me I’m a trash-man. But I bring books. I travel knowledge.”

Fiskadoro attended their exchange carefully, understanding and remembering nothing.

When Park-Smith elected to sleep on Martin’s boat, Mr. Cheung went along with the idea, against his better judgment. The motion of water was soothing to him — he felt he’d developed an immunity to seasickness — but there was no telling how many of the things around him on this vessel were poison. His half-brother had lamps, a kerosene stove, fresh canvas, thousands of pre-End matches in tiny wooden packages, no shortage of rope or diesel fuel. He was called a “traveling man,” or a “trash-man,” the respectful and disrespectful terms for a pirate of the land, a scavenger and purveyor of radioactive goods. Only a few of them operated below Key Largo, wearing their protective suits as they gathered and transported various useful items just like the ones on this boat, taking off their suits and risking contamination long enough to barter their goods away without arousing the anxiety of the head-men, town councils, and Societies who bought them. But Mr. Cheung didn’t know, absolutely, that Martin sold contamination. He knew very little about his half-brother. “You’re a ghost, aren’t you?” Mr. Cheung guessed, watching Martin light his stove to warm some coffee. “You deal between the two worlds.”

“Es expectable. I’m a half-and-half. Like the boy.”

“Why did they take him?”

“Remember they losted a boy on West Beach?”

“The subincised boy. The one who drowned, yes.”

“Well well,” said Martin, who knew all about trading, “now they made a trade.”

“But they didn’t keep Fiskadoro. He couldn’t have come by himself. Why do you think they let him go?”

“What they gonna worry where he live? He belong to them now.”

“It makes a little sense,” Mr. Cheung admitted. “Not much.”

The coffee was warm. Martin turned off the stove and gave him a cup.

“This will keep me awake,” Mr. Cheung said, looking with distaste at his coffee in its metal mug. He sipped of it; he didn’t like coffee, particularly when it might be radioactive, but he would rather have been contaminated than impolite. He held the mug between his knees and watched the brown liquid keep its level against the boat’s subtle rocking. “You’ve been among those people?”

“The Quraysh,” Martin said. “The original first tribe of Mohammed.”

“They aren’t the Quraysh. That’s your fantasy.”

“I believe what they told to me. They told to me, We are the Quraysh.”

“What happened to you when you went visiting? Is this your trouble I’ve heard about?”

“What you heard?”

“Nothing. Only that you had some trouble up north.”

“I got the wafer. The other traders wanted it, but the elders said no more trading after me.”

“And now they don’t want you up in North Deerfield,” Mr. Cheung said.

Martin smiled falsely and swirled his coffee in its mug. “Be a lotta business right here to keep me. I tired of the north.”

It was a familiar story. Mr. Cheung withheld comment.

Martin sat down across from him on the edge of the other bunk in the small cabin, their knees almost touching. “I have some of the wafer.”

“Wafer?”

“First they making a liquid, the memory-juice. When es dry, they got you call him a wafer. I have one. I traded to them.”

“Will it work? Will it make me remember?”

“You?”

Mr. Cheung was surprised he’d said it. But he wanted to remember his previous lives.

“We give it to the boy ,” Martin said. “Maybe he have memories where to find the blue pill.”

Mr. Cheung felt desire turning him into someone else. “Give it to me!” He ached for want of it. He was angry.

He half-woke in a dark place, lying on his side. He started to turn over and the pain woke him fully. He stood up through the pain, moving in search of an end to it. He found a person, a child. He found a woman and got near to the smell of her, touched her leg in the dark, found her knee, and slid his hand up higher. She moved a little and opened her legs. He felt of the hair between her legs and moved his fingers in it, looking for something. She woke up and closed her legs with great strength, and slapped him around the head. He felt how she kept her wrist loose, in a way that was familiar, so that the fingers whipped hard against his ears, his nose — one caught the corner of his left eye. He fell back and the pain struck him again between his legs. “Fiskadoro — you can’t sleep here no more.” It was dark. He didn’t know who she was. Or who he was.