Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

This is the man we, the Quraysh, all came from.

Fiskadoro didn’t know what Zeid was talking about.

As the little man led Fiskadoro outside into the noisy village, boys were throwing firecrackers into the flames, howling and screaming as the explosives went off amid the sound of drums and tore apart the fires and tossed coals and brands at their feet. Older boys joined the two of them as Zeid led him wherever they all were going, the boys also driven along by painted men like Zeid. Some of the men carried a massive head, covered with sparkling beads, that wobbled above their ambling procession along the trail out of the village and looked back at the boys with jutting, outraged eyes.

For two days and nights the men fed Fiskadoro and the other boys only cookies tasting of dried mud, and made them learn speeches, longer and longer ones. They recited the speeches to the boys; and in unison, to their amazement, the boys recited the speeches back.

By the end of the first day Fiskadoro felt as if he’d run down a beach until his eyes were blind and his legs were numb and had leapt into the sea to find it full of words. The tide of them rose above his chest and throat and spilled into and out of his mouth.

Fiskadoro was the first to go. The older men hemmed him around, breathing and groaning in a way that would have scared him if he hadn’t been senseless with exhaustion and hypnotized by fire. Words were said over him, and magic gestures accompanied the lowering of the big head down over his own. Through the glassy eyes of the head the brightness of the fire was shattered and magnified painfully. They knocked on the head with sticks and half-deafened him, but he managed to hear the rhythm of drums in the village blurring into one repetitive signal and the voices of women and children singing songs that made no sense.

He couldn’t see straight, his neck was tired, his voice was loud and hollow in his ears when he spoke, and he had to breathe the same air over and over. By the time the ceremony began, although he remembered everything he was supposed to remember, he’d forgotten he was wearing another head, forgotten his voice hadn’t always been huge and dark, forgotten what it was like not to be dizzy. He believed now that his head was outside of him, all around him, and that all around his head were his dreams and thoughts. He was inside-out. The wild tempo of the village percussionists cut through the trees and found his ears. The languid song of voices fell down like rain over the clearing.

“The Sovereign Lord,” Zeid said, shiny and orange across the fire, blasted by Fiskadoro’s glass vision into a dozen of himself, “ the Holy One, the Giver of Peace, the Keeper of Faith; the Guardian, the Mighty One, the All-powerful, the Most High; the Creator, the Originator, the Modeler; the Unbecome, the Unborn, the Unmade; the Dissolver of Space and of Time, the Weaver of the Web of Appearances, the Inbreather and Outbreather of Infinite Universes; the Formless, Non-existent, Imperishable, and Transcendent Fullness of the Emptiness; the Voidness; the Eternal God.

“Who has the power to mystify, how did he get it, how does he keep it?”

Fiskadoro said something but couldn’t hear his own answer.

“Does there not pass over a man a space of time when his life is a blank?”

Fiskadoro knew the answer and said it.

“You touch the people and they dissolve. There is nothing left but you. And you will not remember .”

But at this moment Fiskadoro remembered everything except his own name. He spent the next several minutes talking and talking and knowing just what to say. It was the right answer.

“On that day we shall ask Hell: 'Are you full?’ ”

Fiskadoro said, “And Hell will answer: ‘Are there any more?’ ”

Then it was Fiskadoro’s time. His mouth moved. He remembered every word they’d told him and he said them all at the proper times. Fiskadoro said, “No! But when the earth is crushed to fine dust, and your Lord comes down with the angels, in their ranks, and Hell is brought near — on that day man will remember his deeds. But what will memory avail him?”

He spoke for hours. Every word was in his mouth, and in his mind was his whole life. In his head a long tunnel had been opened, down which he could see all the way back to the moment he’d been born in hunger and fear onto a wall of light, and had awakened in this world between the mountainous thighs of his mother Belinda, and had been carried in her hands as if by two great clouds through an otherwise empty sky toward the comfort of her breast. He saw his father handing a china plate, a shawl, and a jug of brandy to the midwife. He smelled his father’s hair and his parents’ bedding, and recalled their conversation as they stood above him the first night he slept away from them on his own blanket, in a box.

All this time he held a sharp rock in his hand, waiting until the moment he wanted to make himself like other men. “ When the two keepers receive him, the one seated on his right, the other on his left, each word he utters shall be noted down by a vigilant guardian.

“And when the agony of death justly overtakes him, they will say, ‘This is the fate you have striven to avoid.’ And the trumpet shall be sounded.’ ” He talked and talked. Toward the end he said stranger and stranger words, such words as “ephod,” and “teraphim.”

“ And the going up to it was eight steps,” he said.

He couldn’t wait any longer.

“I will go down now!” he said. “ And see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me!”

He couldn’t see anything below the level of his shoulders, and even then could see only his own orange and black fire-blindness, and so Zeid had to guide his hand, the one that held the rock, when he cut himself.

After he cut himself with the rock, nothing happened for a long minute. People only breathed. “We shall surely die,” two voices said, “because we have seen God.” But then there was only more breathing.

Someone took the head from his shoulders and led him by the hand back to his hut. Except for the fact that the fires seemed a little brighter than usual because he’d been so long in darkness, the swampy village of huts and people looked the same.

Fiskadoro lay in his hut with songs rising and falling outside it through the whole night. He was delirious. He didn’t know who came to him at some point in the evening to pierce the tops of his ears, or who appeared later to bathe his forehead and bandage the wound between his legs with a dressing of pungent glue and boiled leaves. In the morning he was stiff all over and felt like a sack of wet, chilly sand.

He was very let down, because everything had been heading toward this, and it was nothing. His head was a blank, he felt no pain. Now he was like other men.

When the white trader named _______ was making ready to leave, he came to Fiskadoro and said, “You about set to take off?”

As far as Fiskadoro knew, he’d never seen this man or this place in his life before. Every time he looked at something, it came up before his eyes for the first time, unexplained and impossible to understand.

“They’ll let you go, if you’re ready to go,” _______. told him. “You ready? You feel okay?”

“I fix now,” Fiskadoro assured this man, whoever this man was. But he was lying. He wasn’t at all well. He had a fever and couldn’t keep food down and hurt, every minute, between his legs.

_______ said, “Walk behind of me,” and took Fiskadoro with him to the water.

People Fiskadoro had never seen before stood in a place he’d never been before and waved to him, whether hello or goodbye he didn’t know, because only a minute after his words with _______, he’d forgotten whether he was coming or going.