Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Martin took his brothers to Twicetown on his boat the next day. The weather was as expected for this time of year, cloudy and offering rain by the afternoon. Mr. Cheung told himself he’d come back here soon, but right now he’d had enough excitement. He didn’t even want to see the boy.

He wanted to avoid the mother, too, but Belinda waded out to the boat through the high tide to have a word with him.

She looked up into his face, and knocked on the side of the boat as if she thought he couldn’t see her. And in fact, he’d been behaving as if he couldn’t: though it was time to say goodbye, he hadn’t yet said hello — he still resented Belinda for denying him the clarinet. “How are you?” he said.

“Oh, about in a middle,” she said. The engine throbbed deeply. It was hard to make out her words. She squinted up at him. “I got a trouble in my tit, Manager. Dureza.”

Now he wished he’d shown her more kindness. “I’m very sorry.”

“Es a medicine on that boat he fix me?”

Mr. Cheung shrugged his shoulders and showed her the empty hands of somebody who couldn’t help.

“Seem like getting bigger,” she said.

“Often these things are nothing,” he told her. “Cysts, we call them. They don’t grow.”

“Not today,” she said.

“Si. Not today.”

“No medicine?”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Okay. No problem.” She didn’t leave, but stood hip-deep in water with one hand flat on the side of the boat. He waited while she looked back at Sammy, the bodyguard, in the dirt before her house. In what Mr. Cheung felt must be an uncharacteristic display of good humor, the little white man was down on his haunches, copying every motion of the little boy Mike. The boy was getting annoyed. “The last night,” Belinda said.

“What is it?”

“Fiskadoro, the last night. The last night he bothering me.”

“Last night?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He bother his own mother.”

He really didn’t know what the woman meant. “Fiskadoro is very — sick.” He wished for another word, but it was the only word that came. “He’ll get better. Not now, but in a few days, a few weeks. I’ll look in on him. I’ll come often,” he promised.

“Keep touch,” she said, and turned and waded back toward her house.

ONE NIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, just before he forgot it all again, Fiskadoro remembered a lot of what had happened and where he’d been. And he remembered the people he’d been among.

It was no struggle for them to live, but it took all day, they thought. They thought they had everything they needed — some plants, some huts, some ceremonies. They never appealed for help to the ghosts of their friends and neighbors. They thought the soul was a blank and empty thing that did nothing all day long, and as far as they were concerned there weren’t any ghosts living in their village. But they were wrong: their air was unbreathable because it was turned into syrup by the cries of ghosts, the presences of ghosts, the secrets of ghosts.

On sunny days the snakes lay out on the trail soaking up the light, and they took any snake with two heads, except for the venomous coral snakes, and instantly ate it alive in order to swallow its strangeness and power. In the case of two-headed coral snakes, these they fed with frogs stuffed with mushrooms, and when the rapto came over them, the two heads would start quarreling until one head struck the other and the snake killed itself. And the tattoo so many of them wore, the line with a loop at one end, like the empty outline of a spoon, was the snake trying to swallow its first head with its second mouth.

It took him a long time to learn these things about these strangers. Even to see them took him a long time, because they weren’t his people. At first they resembled nothing, because he didn’t know this place.

Once he’d come over the dunes, whatever he knew about the world was useless. He had to start over. Each day he learned something that was obvious.

He learned something each day, but he had no thoughts. Every time he started to think about something, there came another overpowering idea — he was hungry, hungry, hungry. Muddy hands offered him plants dangling filthy leaves, and he really didn’t know they expected him to bite into these things. They tore open big bugs with popping eyes that lived in the water like fish, and held the pale meat in his face, and he cried. They showed him how to eat. He knew how to eat, but he didn’t know these plants and bugs were food. They knew the plants and bugs were food, but they didn’t realize he knew how to eat. All of it was raw. They had fires in their village, but they didn’t seem to believe these fires were meant for cooking anything but potions. He couldn’t learn to like this food, but he learned to use it like medicine to cure his hunger. His head cleared and he looked around himself.

Fires sat on humps of earth in a swampy region and lit up the undersides of cypress leaves. Among the fires and trees there were small huts made of twigs, and he sat in the doorway of one of them. The ground dampened the seat of his pants.

In his mind he saw himself climbing over the dunes in pursuit of a girl from these swamps, but he didn’t know how many days ago this had happened. He thought of the places he’d left behind — West Beach, the steel music and dancing, and the Army. It came to him he didn’t want to be here. But it didn’t occur to him that he might leave, that he could travel. He assumed that he was dreaming and that he’d get out of this place only by waking up.

Swamp-people went in and out of the huts or squatted before the fires. A lot of them looked like desechados — humpbacked, or armless, or moving carefully in a way that said they were blind or drunkenly in a way that said something was missing in their heads. Fiskadoro shut his eyes hard, tensed the fibers of his body, and told himself to wake up. He shouted out loud and slapped his own face. When he opened his eyes, he was still sitting in the hut’s doorway and he was still surrounded by desechados moving through firelight under cypress trees that hung down out of a roof of darkness.

He couldn’t hear the Ocean, only the wind in the trees. He didn’t see any dogs or cats. Bugs and frogs made sounds that blended together into a great engine of noise. There was someone — more than one — inside the hut, looking at his back. He moved out of the doorway, backed up against the structure’s prickly wall, and put his arms around his shins and his forehead down on his knees. Believing that if he slept in this world he’d wake up in the one he’d left, he relaxed as much as he could.

The next morning the air was so cool and grey and wet that it made him cough to breathe it. A woman who had no arms or hands, only fins like a fish, came and watched him. A couple of little boys came around later and had a look at him and laughed. For a while he was alone, and then two men who seemed to think they were important people, who weren’t desechados but were nevertheless of a very small size, came and talked to him. In the usual way of dreams, he couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear him, but they managed to communicate. He made them understand that he was cold and thirsty. They gave him water in a plastic canteen just like the ones at home and a muddy blanket with a hole in it that he could put his head through. They told him he was not like other men.

By the morning’s end the air was a little warmer. Things got more visible, but the roof of branches overhead was so thick he never got a look at the sun. All day people came and watched him for a while as if he were a show. His stomach burned with shame, fear, and disgust. One little desechado boy had eyes on either side of his head, almost where his ears were. Turning sideways, he watched Fiskadoro with one eye for a while, and then he turned and watched Fiskadoro with the other one.