Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Fiskadoro said nothing, because he felt only contempt for this idea. There were ghosts everywhere who had the same names, the same memories, and the same friends and relatives that they’d had when living. The kind of soul Abu-Lahab talked about wasn’t any kind of soul at all. Their twisted notions about these things explained why they didn’t see any of the ghosts among them, walking around their village, sitting beside the fires, wandering in the dark. These swamp-people were concerned only with the future, with things that would happen at some later date — Zeid and Abu-Lahab talked about it all the time — a ceremony to be held soon, in which Fiskadoro and some younger boys would be changed until they were like other men.

When he saw the white trader visiting various huts around the village and heard him say, “North Deerfield,” Fiskadoro recognized the words and thought of Ernest Bodine, the horrible white gambler, talking to Cassius Clay Sugar Ray in the North Deerfield. But the trader didn’t look at all like Cassius Clay Sugar Ray’s depiction of a North Deerfield person. He had no fangs, and wasn’t much bigger than Fiskadoro. He wore tall slick boots that kept his feet dry, and a canvas belt with a gun and a canteen hanging off it, but otherwise he looked like anyone.

The villagers didn’t seem to mind that this white man walked around the place bothering everybody. Nobody traded with him, but they were all happy to pass the time and accept his gifts. He ate their food, slept in a hut, went out on the trails with the men looking for two-headed snakes, and generally seemed to be having a friendly visit out here in the muddy swamp. Now and then he rested with his back to the warmth of a fire and watched the people go by, looking for somebody to answer his questions.

Eventually the trader came to ask Fiskadoro the same two questions he asked everyone.

“You like candy, boy? You know where they get them little pills, boy?”

The man said his name but it came out without sound, “_______.” He smiled out of a small and innocent face, hunkering down where Fiskadoro sat against a tree and offering him a red ball of sugar candy.

Fiskadoro took the candy and put it on his tongue. He closed his eyes and floated away on its sweetness.

“Where you get all the stuff goes in the juice? Stuff they dry down to the wafers. Got to come out of some sort of hospital, right?”

Fiskadoro shook his head and shivered.

“Or maybe like a science laboratory, someplace like at.”

The man waited a minute without getting an answer.

“Someplace where it ain’t all bombed out.”

Fiskadoro didn’t know what this man called _______ was trying to say. Fiskadoro himself said nothing because he didn’t talk in this part of the dream.

Later, when they came on one another as they both paced the village with nothing to do, Fiskadoro told the trader, “Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray say you take me West Beach.”

The trader looked at him in surprise. “I could take you as far as Key Largo,” he said.

“When?”

_______ unhooked the canteen from his canvas belt and took a swallow. “I could take off about any time after the ceremony,” he told Fiskadoro. “Whenever your business here is done with. How’s at sound?”

When he heard these words, and saw the look on the white trader’s face, Fiskadoro understood that his whole purpose in the dream was to go through the ceremony and make himself like other men.

While these people didn’t see any ghosts, Fiskadoro considered himself a ghost among them, one of the waking world, and he took to wandering the village like the other less visible ghosts — a few hundred meters from end to end, a path that took him past the dark entrances of huts, through clouds of smoke and a mist of voices speaking a language that made no sense. The children liked him and sometimes followed him around, trying to touch his crotch or give him bits of food. A lot of the time he felt heavy and lifeless, and he started worrying that this wasn’t a dream at all, but the real thing. Now in the evenings Abu-Lahab built up the fires so they leapt and flared, and the stormy light yanked at the shadows so that the branches, vines, and huts seemed to cower back and then suddenly stand up and dance. The children began staying up late, drumming with sticks on hollow logs. When one night the drumming went on for hours past dark, Fiskadoro retreated into his hut and wouldn’t come out, although he never slept inside it and hardly ever let himself be found under its roof and in its smelly darkness. The two people who lived there were nowhere around. He stayed inside, hunched in a ball on the floor of rotten grasses, and cried. A little later, Zeid appeared and called him out of the hut. Zeid was alone. His face was covered with orange clay that looked green in the odd light. Fiskadoro sat before the hut and saw Abu-Lahab moving from fire to fire, scattering handfuls of powder from a bag at his waist. Violet, red, and sky-blue smoke rushed out of the flames. Meanwhile Zeid knelt beside Fiskadoro and caked the boy’s head with mud, using tender motions and speaking soft words, and then without warning he drove something sharp into Fiskadoro’s earlobe. Shivering and crying, Fiskadoro waited while Zeid moved to his other side and drove the thorn or needle through the flesh of the other ear and then tied strings through each hole. In a way that was comforting, he took Fiskadoro’s hand and told him that Mohammed lived a long time ago. The Sovereign Lord, the Lord God, the Mighty One, the Most High, gave Mohammed half His power and said, It isn’t for you to keep. Give this power to the people, some to the men and some to the women. It will save them when Hell is brought near. Mohammed went to the people but most of them didn’t believe he had any power. Show us your power, they said. Mohammed moved a whole mountain from one place to another, but the people said, That mountain has always been where we see it now. Show us again. This isn’t a power to move, tear down, or raise up, Mohammed told them. It’s the power to go on living after Hell is brought near, the power to make babies and keep generations living on the Earth. We already have that power, the people said, and left Mohammed alone. As they were leaving he said, No! — but when the Earth is beaten into dust, and your Lord comes down with the angels all around him, on that day you’ll remember your mistakes, but what good will it do you to remember? Only one man believed Mohammed, and that man believed him only a little. When Hell was brought near, this was the only man who stayed upright. Everyone else was dead. The man stood on a mountain looking for a woman to make babies, but everyone else was dead. He called his dog, but his dog was dead. Then he heard Mohammed calling him: Are you dead? No, I’m alive, the man said. If I call you as you called your dog, Mohammed said, will you come? I’m coming, Mohammed, the man said. He crossed a valley and went halfway up a mountain to Mohammed’s cave. He went inside but it was dark, and there was nothing there but a two-headed snake who talked to him with both heads at once. I am Mohammed, the snake said. You aren’t Mohammed, the man said. No, but I’m a man, the snake said. You aren’t a man, the man said. No, but I’m a part of a man, the snake said. You aren’t a part of a man, the man said. No, but I can be part of a man if a man wants the power to make babies, the snake said. Eat me where you find me. Where I go between your legs, make yourself like me. Thus sayeth Mohammed, the snake said, and he was gone. The man looked all day for the cave’s door and almost died of thirst before he found it. When he got outside he went to a stream and drank from it for half the night, and slept beside it for half the night. When he got up in the morning he opened his pants to relieve himself, and he found the two-headed snake there.