Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Captain Minh was nearby. A man and a woman floated between them. Nobody else was in sight. The sea lifted, kept, and released her over and over.

The woman tried to keep the man’s head above the water when he passed out. She kicked the water, launching herself as high as her shoulders repeatedly, and slapped him, but he didn’t come around. She cupped his chin in her hand and tried to drag him along behind her, her face, smashed and puffed-up like a beating victim’s, turned up toward the sky. After a while he slipped away from the woman. The water flowed into his mouth with a sucking noise as he went under. The woman floated on, looking at the sky. Marie turned her own eyes up to the sun.

It clouded over slowly and then began to rain.

The rain, which was a hard one, fell down on her face and tongue with great force. The water on her tongue was new, and the purity of it on her eyelids brought her to life. Then she felt the fresh water reaching the cells of her stomach as if each one were being stabbed. She let her feet drop, kicked once, and lifted her head to look around.

She was alone. The rain drove up a low fog from the ocean’s surface, and she couldn’t see very far, she thought, but had no idea how far she was seeing where there was nothing to see. A swell coming toward her broke into two shapes, and one was another corpse that came right to her arms. It was the man who’d gone under some time ago, she didn’t know how long. She clung to the body and rested piecemeal as she had before, until the effort to find its lowering support was greater than the effort to float alone. The rain passed over, and now she was rested enough to know, at least, that she was here.

But in just a few minutes she was gone again, without strength enough to think, without mind enough to know if she was above or below the water. If she didn’t have a thought, still she had a sense that she’d been in this life for a day and a night and a day, that this was all there was, or ever had been, of this life, and that she had somehow reached, by floating, the bottom of everything. But she was wrong.

The stamp of endlessness driven down onto her mind was erased, washed away, the first time she passed out and slept, as the others had, and slipped beneath the waves. She might have been anywhere as she woke up with water in her mouth, disbelieving and startled, charged with the responsibility of taking a breath. The shock of finding herself here where she’d always been was like a birth. It became the common torture of her existence to sleep, choke, wake, and come back to the slave-labor of floating. She began to experience the process less and less as trying to stay afloat, and more and more as trying to stay in the air, trying to keep from crashing to the ground. Then it came to her that the ground was where she wanted to be, the place to lie down and breathe; and then she woke up, drowning.

The idea of lying down on the earth to take a deep breath seemed so wonderful it could only be put off; it was something worth waiting for, something to enjoy a moment from now, and then a moment from now.

Breathing was living. It was a living accomplished by no one, but a living that this No One had to accomplish on purpose, willingly, because she could not both sleep and breathe. She could not forget herself without dying. Nevertheless she forgot herself.

She left herself and drifted with a sense not of the water, but of something that was in it, a perfect and invaluable presence, a rubble of treasure growing up from the bottom of the world how many countless fathoms beneath until it touched and lifted her, bringing her face up to feel the air; and then it abandoned her and declined away into its origins so that she sank down again, not into water but into black, sharp, unconsolable pity. But it came back, growing out of nothing from the floor of life, and lifted her. It wasn’t just the most priceless fact and thing; it was her breath; it was the sole fact and thing.

By sunset she was only a baby, thinking nothing, absolutely adrift, waking to cough and begin crying, drifting and weeping, sleeping and sinking, waking up to choke the water from her mouth and whimper, indistinguishable from what she saw, which was the grey sky that held no interest, identity, or thought. This was the point when she reached the bottom of everything, when she had no idea either what she’d reached or who had reached it, or even that it had been reached.

The heavens looked huge today, as if their blueness rocketed out beyond the edge of everything and even beyond time itself, because their infinite spaces easily entertained great clouds like monsters that moved through them living their oblivious, prehistoric dreams. But Mr. Cheung wondered who it was who watched and who it was who slept. Behind the clouds, in the south, a clear patch was growing larger, and pretty soon emptiness would have the sky. That was the way, a dream of days followed by emptiness, the huge water turning over the grains of sand, neither one knowing which was big and which was small. Mr. Cheung was uneasy and sad. He would have to die, and the quiet knife of this fact wasn’t dissuaded by the interplay of milkiness and inkiness in the textures of the Atlantic under these clouds of October, or by his prayers, best wishes, or sorrow. His mood swelled and the action of the wind over the beach seemed full of power.

Since the death of his mother, Belinda, Fiskadoro was confused. If everyone in this world around him had died once, as he himself had died, then where had Belinda gone when she died the second time? How many worlds were there?

As a way of approaching these questions, he confided to Mr. Cheung, “I saw those skeleton in the cars that won’t go.”

“You’ll be a great leader,” Mr. Cheung said.

Fiskadoro didn’t know what his teacher was talking about, as he hardly ever knew what anybody was talking about. “I’m not like other men,” he reminded Mr. Cheung.

“No, I know that. You’ve been to their world and now you’re in this world, but you don’t have the memories to make you crazy. It isn’t sleeping under the moon that makes a crazy person. It’s waking up and remembering the past and thinking it’s real.”

“I saw the ashes driving the cars forever,” Fiskadoro said.

“Something big is happening today. I wish it was yesterday,” Mr. Cheung said. “I wish it was five minutes before this minute, when I went around wishing it was a hundred years ago. You know,” he said, “in this past I long for, I don’t remember how even then I longed for the past.”

This talk was only taking them away from what Fiskadoro wanted to ask. With some anxiety about being so direct, he got right to the question. He pointed off toward the northern horizon as far as their vision would carry, and brought his finger around in an arc through the chambers of the sky over the Ocean and held it out to the south. “I don’t know what es,” he said.

His teacher seemed to understand. “I don’t either,” he told Fiskadoro, “but we’re here.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I never knew.”

“Anybody know?” Fiskadoro asked him.

“Possibly my grandmother,” Mr. Cheung said.

The Lieutenant was lost. Small children were lost. The husband and wife who’d persevered and stayed afloat a long time were lost and still falling, probably, through the water toward the bottom, and everybody was lost who had flailed in panic, while their lives clung to them unreasonably, through the fields and barricades and over the faces of other people equally rabid to live. Marie was the last of three to be taken out of the water — Captain Minh and one other woman had been saved, and now the young girl Marie. Saved not because she lasted, not because of anything she did, or determined in herself to do, because there was nothing left of her to determine anything; saved not because she hadn’t given up, because she had, and in fact she possessed no memory of the second night, and couldn’t believe, to this day, that she’d spent twenty hours staying alive, breath by breath, without knowing enough to desire it; saved not because she’d held out long enough, because there was nothing to say what was long enough; saved because she was saved, saved because they threw down a rope, but she couldn’t reach her hand up now to take hold of it; saved because a sailor jumped off the boat, his bare white feet dangling from the legs of khaki pants, and pulled her to the ladder; saved not because her hands reached out; saved because other hands than hers reached down and saved her.