Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“Do you know who I am?”

“No,” Fiskadoro said.

“Do you know where we are?”

The boy rubbed his face and suddenly looked frightened and ill. “Maybe. I think about it. Ask to me later.”

“No, I won’t ask you,” Mr. Cheung assured him. “It’s not at all important.” He was wary of exciting the boy. He’d thought about this, about what it might be like to move from one day to the next, maybe from one hour to the next, and even, as looked possible in Fiskadoro’s case, from one minute to the next, without taking with you any recollection of the previous one. Surely it would break a person. Surely it would maim the soul.

But then again — if he had no memory of having once had a memory?

In such a case, where was the soul at all — had it been erased? This boy’s seriously ailing mother had to lock herself away from him at night: he crept after her with no more compunction than a little dog or a tomcat because, like a dog or a tomcat, he didn’t know who his own mother was beyond that she was female. But even a dog behaved as if there were people, places, and things it recognized — did that kind of behavior mean it remembered them? If so, then this boy’s soul lacked even the proportions of a dog’s.

“What do I have in my bag?” he asked Fiskadoro.

“Some thing you got.”

“Could you please tell me what things? Tell me four.” He held up four fingers.

Fiskadoro shrugged. “A few thing. Whatever you need.”

“Do you remember when I put them in my bag?”

“Sure. One time I remember.”

“When?”

“Long time ago.” Fiskadoro pointed with his chin at the distance.

“One time when you were a little boy?”

“Yeh. Before that maybe, I think.”

By Mr. Cheung’s estimation, not five minutes had passed. “What is your name?” Mr. Cheung asked him.

“My name Fiskadoro.” He never failed to remember his name. But everything else got away from him.

“Let me take you back inside, Fiskadoro. And then I have to walk. It helps me think.” He led the boy back toward his completely unfamiliar home to be given his lunch by the mother he’d never seen before. “There’s a woman in there. She’s not for you. Please don’t bother her.”

The day was unseasonably crisp. With the noon sun directly overhead the water was a blackness, not a liquid. His hands clasped behind him and his head bowed, he walked in under the Army’s high ceiling of palm leaves, and as he continued on the path he perceived beneath his feet an alternation of light with shadow. Would Fiskadoro see it? Looking down at his feet in a spot of brightness, would he remember his feet in the shade? Would Fiskadoro, in fact, looking down at his feet, even remember the rest of himself-his hands, his head? If he didn’t remember the inside of his house when he was out-of-doors, did he also forget the out-of-doors, even the fact of the out-of-doors, when he was inside? And if he were blindfolded a few minutes, would he forget what it was like to see — would he forget there was such a thing as “seeing”?

In the clearing around the well, the sweaty-faced neighbor-women were gossiping and cleaning rice, tossing handfuls of it in the air over straw mats and letting the wind seize away the dust and chaff. Respectfully they silenced themselves as the thinker passed.

He’d been assured by Martin and Martin’s companion Sammy that Fiskadoro’s memory would come back to him in a while — though they didn’t seem to think he’d ever remember his past — but, for now, each time the boy witnessed the sunrise he saw it for the first time.

There was something to be envied in that. In a world where nothing was familiar, everything was new. And if you can’t recall the previous steps in your journey, won’t you assume you’ve just been standing still? If you can’t remember living yesterday, then isn’t your life only one day long?

Mr. Cheung unclasped his hands from behind him and gestured in the air. He was walking in circles around a date palm over and over through the same few regions of light and dark. He couldn’t have explained why suddenly he felt such panic.

OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, Fiskadoro got back his ability to remember current events. But his memory for the past, for the time before he’d come back home, was gone forever. His earliest recollection was of lying in the darkness and remembering the village of swamp-people; as far as he knew his life reached back no farther than that moment when he’d lain in bed and remembered that he had died.

There was something real about him that came out of the memory and wouldn’t go away. It was slowly healing, but still he screamed every time he peed. Every day when he woke up, it was still split open at the end, like a fish just cleaned.

In the dream, his first purpose had been to go through the ceremony and make himself like all other men, because he was different from all other men in the dream.

Now he was awake, and he was different from all other men who were awake. Now he didn’t have to go through the ceremony, but it was too late.

They all told him he’d been alive before, in another world very much like this one. Why couldn’t he remember it?

Mr. Cheung didn’t want him just to learn the clarinet music. Mr. Cheung wanted him to eat the wafer, remember things, and tell Cassius Clay Sugar Ray where the blue pills were found. “I don’t know where the blue pills come,” he kept telling Mr. Cheung.

“But the wafer will help you remember.”

“I not gone remember, Manager, because of I don’t know.”

“But how do you know you won’t remember, if you don’t remember what you know?”

“I remember that I don’t know.”

Talking about it made them both crazy. Mr. Cheung was strong, and he worked hard to move through all the words, but he kept bumping into the same ones over and over. “You’ll remember who you are.”

“I don’t wanna remember who am I. Es me already, right now today. If I remember, then I gone be somebody else.” During these conversations Fiskadoro’s head hurt and his thoughts went around and around, but the thing that words couldn’t change was that in between his legs he wasn’t like other men, and so nobody could make him do anything: because when they talked to him they were talking to a person who was partly in a dream. They were sending their voices into another place. They were uselessly calling out to where the words of their own place didn’t work.

Eventually Mr. Cheung gave up trying to get him to take the wafer of memory. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray traded the wafer to someone in Marathon, and whatever that person found, by swallowing it, belonged to that person. Nobody knew what had returned to that person, what knowledge of things that were lost.

Mr. Cheung had insisted, “You must take the drug again to remember who I am, who you are, and who this woman is.” But he’d refused the drug because he already knew that this was Anthony Terrence Cheung, his clarinet teacher and Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra. And he already knew that he himself was Fiskadoro. And Fiskadoro already knew who this woman was — his mother. He knew she wasn’t for him, and he wasn’t supposed to bother her at night. He understood, but didn’t remember, that in the world before his dream and his death his mother had been everything to him, that she had gradually become only a part of the world, but the biggest part, and had turned eventually into just one person in the world, but the person he loved the most. Fiskadoro didn’t mind knowing about this, but he didn’t want to remember it. His mother was sick. She was getting smaller and smaller. After she closed her eyes there would be a hole in the air where she’d been, and then nothing where she’d been, only the air. He didn’t want to eat the wafer. He didn’t want the hole in the air to be a hole in Fiskadoro. He didn’t want to remember what he was losing.