Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

After the day had gone on for longer than most days in Fiskadoro’s experience, the two small men showed up again.

At first the two small men didn’t talk. A woman who had no nose, only two large nostrils in the middle of her face, brought a hollow log, like a tiny boat, with more leaves and more bugs riding in it. The two men cracked the bugs open and started eating the meat. When they offered a bug to Fiskadoro, he took it and cracked it open. They offered him water from a plastic canteen.

He asked the two men to tell him how to wake himself up.

They told him he’d changed a lot. He wasn’t anything like the person they used to know.

He said that didn’t make any sense. He ate some more of the bug’s fishy meat, which might have been tasty if cooked up with some spices.

They asked him if he’d taken on the body of another person.

He told them he didn’t think so. It looked like the same one to him.

Then why, they asked him, was he no longer like other men?

He insisted he was the same. It was everyone and everything else that had changed.

This was something they wanted to ponder. They left him alone for the rest of the afternoon, while desechados and other swamp-people came and watched him, all of them with thick helmets of mud caked on their heads and holes in their ears dangling knots of colored string, bits of metal or bright pebbles. He didn’t leave his place next to the hut — he was afraid that if he moved around in the dream, he’d find himself in the wrong place when he woke up. He was already so far from the Ocean in this dream, so distantly removed from the real world, that there wasn’t any sunset here. At the end of the day the shade just got larger and more ominous and moved up from under the trees and into the sky.

The longer he stayed here in this dream, the more people and things it produced. The floor of it, which had been only a dull rug with warts of huts and humps of fires, changed and yielded up its details: ground-running vines of various thicknesses, tiny grassy plants so low their round leaves were nearly imbedded in the dirt, beetles and ants on their errands along the reach of vines and underneath the fuzzy saw-toothed leaves of another kind of plant that was also everywhere underfoot. The dream’s undistinguished grey walls turned out to be a congestion of cypress and, in the wet hollows, mangrove and some other trees he couldn’t call by name, all woven together with slender green vines and barred across by frail dark ones. Out of this swamp-growth the patchy clearing of fires and huts had been hacked and burned, leaving too many trees, just the same, to let the day down. Faces came and went, and he started recognizing some of them. He saw also that the times for doing things were regular. They had three meals a day here, as in real life, and about three hours after dark everybody went quiet and slept through the night, and arose in the grey light to get together around the fires and look out of their sleep-blankened faces until they were wide awake and there was something to do. It was the first dream he’d ever peed in. They all, Fiskadoro too, did their business in pots behind the huts, and every morning people took the pots and dumped them out somewhere beyond the dream’s living walls.

The two men came to see him each day. One was Zeid, with a face impossible to look at, it was so much like an animal’s: black and furry, and as flat as if a heavy rock had been set down on it one day. The older and more presentable one was Abu-Lahab, who was in charge of all the fires — nobody was allowed to tend them but Abu-Lahab. Sometimes they talked about nothing, asking Fiskadoro to tell them about his life in the Army and to explain, as best he could, what had happened to change him. But as far as Fiskadoro knew, he hadn’t changed at all, not since the day he was born, and he couldn’t understand the question.

One afternoon, in order to explain themselves a little better, they took Fiskadoro out behind his hut and asked him what he thought he looked like.

He told them he didn’t think he looked like anything.

But down here, they wanted to know, down here where he peed, down here where he was a man? What did he think he looked like down here?

He told them he didn’t know what to tell them.

Zeid wore a denim skirt. He lifted the hem of it and showed Fiskadoro that there was something wrong.

Fiskadoro didn’t know what to say. He felt sorry for Zeid, but there was nothing he could do about whatever had happened to make the old man just as ugly between his legs as he was in his face.

Abu-Lahab talked to Zeid in frustration. Finally Abu-Lahab also lifted the hem of his own skirt. There was something wrong with him, too.

Did Fiskadoro understand what they were getting at?

I see there’s something wrong with you, Fiskadoro said. Your penes are all banged up.

We’re like other men, they told him. And you’re not.

Throughout the rest of the day, until the somber afternoon turned black and Fiskadoro couldn’t see them anymore, Zeid and Abu-Lahab brought other men around who lifted the hems of their skirts or unhooked the flies of their pants, and showed him. Fiskadoro discovered that they were telling the truth. He wasn’t like these other men.

A couple of days after Fiskadoro had recognized this fact about himself, Abu-Lahab came along to Fiskadoro’s hut and sat down beside him. Was he feeling all right? was the first question he asked, and Fiskadoro told the old man that he was feeling fine, but got cold at night. Abu-Lahab was delighted with this answer. Did the boy know that he was the keeper of fires here, and that his name, Abu-Lahab, meant Father of Flames? He promised to start making the fires a lot higher and hotter.

Fiskadoro thanked him, but Abu-Lahab didn’t leave right away. Instead he began clearing his throat and shifting around as if the ground were alive and he’d sat down on it by mistake, and told Fiskadoro that a long time ago there was a village where the young men and women grew restless. People from far away kept visiting their village and spreading all kinds of lies about a place where everyone was always happy, where a party went on day after day without stopping, where everybody danced, ate food, drank liquor, and made love. As soon as they’d had a little time to think about this never-ending party, the young people wanted to go. One morning before anybody else was awake, they all held their breath so they wouldn’t make a sound and left the village together. It took them several days to reach the place, and when they arrived they found out that these lies they’d been hearing were almost true — people were dancing, getting drunk, making love. But nobody knew them there. To gain courage among strange people, the youngsters drank too much wine and one of them got drunk and fell in the sea. The others ran home to their elders. The whole village felt terrible. The youngsters were ashamed because they’d been tricked by lies and had lost a friend. But the trouble with a lie is that it’s easier to believe than the truth. After a while the same young people forgot what had really happened, and one morning they all left again when there was no one awake to stop them. They went back to the party, saw once again that they’d only tricked themselves, saw that they’d always be strangers at this gathering, and started back home. In a little while they noticed that the friend they’d lost was with them, traveling along some distance behind. It was the same person, the same soul, and they recognized him. But a soul has no name and has nothing to say. Forever and ever, a soul is like a baby who hasn’t been born, to whom nothing has happened yet. And so a soul with a new body has a new face and a new name, and remembers new things. Their friend’s soul didn’t remember who it was supposed to be. It began crying and talking the wrong language. To keep it from running away, its friends had to beat its new body with their hands until it was quiet. Then they carried the soul of their good friend, which was now inside a completely different body and remembered completely different things, back to its home. But the soul’s new eyes had never seen its old home, and it never remembered. Still, still, still, Abu-Lahab insisted, it was the same soul.