Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“I don’t set foot on that road,” _______ said. “I go by the canal.”

As Fiskadoro stepped onto the raft after this stranger, his memories suddenly returned to him for a minute. He remembered that he was asleep in a dream and that his memory had been coming and going, as it generally seemed to do in dreams.

They traveled on a raft along a channel like a long tin roof between two oceans of mangrove that stretched to the horizon and appeared to be the whole world. Alongside the channel ran a road. For a long time Fiskadoro lay on his side with a groin of fire while _______ pushed them forward with a pole.

Fiskadoro sat up when they came to a patch of dead grey mangrove. Another dead patch followed; and suddenly they were in a lifeless place. The branches were bare as far as he could see. He thought that he must have fallen from one dream into a deeper dream, and he panicked inside without moving, because he was getting farther and farther away from waking and might never get out.

“Miami ef el ay,” _______ said.

For a long time, as Fiskadoro looked at it, he thought it was a storm of clouds, and then he assumed it was a big boat bearing down on them and he wondered what these people did when a boat was about to crush them. And then he realized that it was far away, it was made of houses, and then he began to understand that these houses were too far away to look at, that he was able to see them from this distance only because they were bigger than his mind could grasp.

Fiskadoro wept and trembled. “Was I ever see this before?”

“I couldn’t say,” _______ said.

Alongside them even the dead mangrove was gone. There was nothing but brown and silver ash streaked black in places. There was no end to it.

“Am I see it now?”

“I couldn’t say,” _______ said. “But I’d guess you were.”

_______ walked back and forth slowly on the raft, pacing out kilometer after kilometer across its brief length, pushing them toward the vision with his pole.

Fiskadoro saw that today was the day. Just by saying the words he’d made it come true. The earth had been crushed to fine dust. Someone had come down to see whether they had done altogether according to the cry of it, which was come unto him, and crushed it to dust. Fiskadoro put his arms around himself as the tears fell down his face. Today he would remember his deeds.

Ahead, on the road alongside the channel, tangled black autocars made a breakwater of wreckage, behind which, as far as Fiskadoro could see down the diminishing road, stretched a motorcade of burned-black cars and trucks, every size and shape, with their tires melted into the road’s ash. He’d never seen so many. He didn’t know where they were all going.

Every car — as the raft moved alongside them toward the clouds of buildings in the east — was being driven by a person made of brown bones who didn’t shift or flicker or turn his head, but Fiskadoro knew they were all aware of him. There were riders in every car, big and little, twisted into different shapes, all made of brown bones. Now he understood that his purpose in this dream was to die. He was sobbing so hard now, and with such shame, that he couldn’t make a voice to ask _______ what the death-ceremony meant by “Deeds.”

“They got stuck here while the whole Everglades burnt up around them,” _______ said.

There was a police car, with the red light on top. Even the police were skeletons.

“They couldn’t get outa them cars, and they couldn’t stay in.”

Fiskadoro felt the deep echo of these words, as if he heard them spoken from another place, from tomorrow, when he would be awake. He waited for the two keepers to receive him, and the vigilant guardian to note down each word, and the trumpet-sound. He bawled out loud for his lost life. His memory left him and he looked up at the giant desolation in grief and amazement once again, but also for the first time.

When, in just a few minutes, he had forgotten all these things again, Fiskadoro was glad. He lay in his bed in the midnight listening to the Gulf wash and wash the hem of the island and remembered the act of remembering those experiences, and that was bad enough. Then, as if the burbling permutations of the water were carrying it away, his ability to remember anything at all was gone again. In the darkness his eyes were directed up toward the thatched ceiling, but as he didn’t know the ceiling was there his sight reached on beyond it indefinitely toward nothing.

ITHINK WE SHOULD GO OUT IN THE YARD,” Mr. Cheung told Fiskadoro.

“Why?”

“The odor.” Mr. Cheung made a face. “Forgive me, this is your home, but it doesn’t have a pleasant odor for me.”

Fiskadoro made no objection and followed his teacher out into the yard before the quonset hut.

In the yard the boy looked here and there with some curiosity, because, Mr. Cheung guessed, he didn’t remember the outhouse, the three fenceposts without a fence, or even the Gulf of Mexico from ten minutes earlier when he’d stood in the doorway and watched Mr. Cheung pass between these fenceposts, with this outhouse and that Gulf behind him, and walk up to the broken steps and say, “I’m Mr. Cheung,” a name the boy had also probably forgotten. “Sit down,” Mr. Cheung told him now. “Do you know who I am?”

“Who?” Fiskadoro wondered.

“I’m your teacher, Anthony Cheung. I’m going to show you some things I have in my bag.” He jiggled the pillowcase he was carrying so that its contents clinked and rattled. “Please, let’s sit down,” he said, trying, himself, to get comfortable on the ground.

The boy sat down on the sand and leaned back on his elbows with his legs stretched out straight and his ankles crossed and seemed to think it was a joke when Mr. Cheung reached into his bag for an amethyst and said, “What is this?”

“Es a rock.”

“Yes, all right. A rock, a stone.” Mr. Cheung decided to limit this study to a very few objects, since most of those in his bag were all minerals from his collection — each with a different name, it was true, but to the boy, as he should have expected, one rock was like another rock. He set the amethyst on the sand between them. “Whatever you want to call it, that’s fine,” he said with some disappointment.

“Bueno, I gone call him a rock,” Fiskadoro said.

“And this?”

“Es a thread thing,” the boy told him.

“A spool. You’re right, we put thread on it. We wind it around like so — ah? Yes. Spool.”

“Espool,” Fiskadoro said.

Now Mr. Cheung closed up the spool inside his fist. “What do I have here?”

“Espool.”

“Have you heard that word before?”

“Yeh. Sure. Alla time.”

Mr. Cheung set the empty spool down next to the amethyst and reached into his bag. “And this is a chicken.”

“Naw!” Fiskadoro uncrossed his legs, leaned forward to take a better look. “Es a knife you know. Es ain’t a chicking.”

The teacher lay the clasp-knife down beside the spool. “I’m just testing you.”

He drew out a small brass bell, many decades old, very valuable, from China, and dangled it from his fingers and let it ring softly.

“Es a bell.”

“Right. Tell me all four things now. Point.” Mr. Cheung showed him. “A bell, a — what.”

“Es a bell, un espool, you got a knife, you got a rock.”

“Very good. Okay, close your eyes now, put your hands—” Mr. Cheung showed him, and the boy covered his eyes with his hands. “Can you tell me what I have now?”

“Bell. Espool. Knife. Rock.”

“Excellent. All right. I’ll put them back in my bag. My bell, my spool, my knife. There — my rock — all in the bag.”

“Si,” Fiskadoro said.