Denis Johnson: Fiskadoro

Mr. Cheung stood on the beach holding his clarinet in one hand. He and Fiskadoro were standing, as a matter of fact, between two civilizations, standing together at the southern edge of the crowd of people and at the northern edge of the crowd of seagulls, who’d come around to see what was happening through eyes too tiny to hold any questions. The seagulls walked back and forth at the border of water, all bellies and beaks, throwing out their chests with an air of flat assumption like small professors. Fiskadoro looked back and forth between these seagulls and Mr. Cheung, and Mr. Cheung guessed what he was seeing.

The Cubans will come, the Manager recited to himself, the Quarantine won’t last forever. Everything we have, all we are, will meet its end, will be overcome, taken up, washed away. But everything came to an end before. Now it will happen again. Many times. Again and again. Something is coming and something is going — but that isn’t the issue. The issue is that I failed to recognize myself in these seagulls.

On the boat she hung onto the bunk’s right edge with both hands and never once let go of it. Each motion of rising and suddenly unsupported sinking shocked her awake.

In the hospital, each time she passed into sleep, she woke up immediately.

The last of it, the bottom she’d sunk to by staying afloat, would have meant nothing if she hadn’t stayed alive. It only made sense when a person had a name, like Marie, and a body, like this wasted old one, and a place like this rocking chair, and a breath, like this one she was taking now.

By now all the clouds had passed them by, and the blue atmosphere looked thin enough that Mr. Cheung expected to see faint stars behind it. Though it was sunny, a haze came down over the water and made it seem the beach led down to the end of all thought. A few feet past the licking edge of water there was nothing. Sounds came out of it that made no sense — a talking of horns, a shifting song of voices, and something too low and too deep to hear which was still much more definite than the other sounds. Everyone on the beach was silent. Mr. Cheung was frightened.

One day the Quarantine would be lifted, and the Cubans would come. If today was that day, then the shape of something, a white shadow framed by dull swords of light in the place out there beyond the end of all thought, was a Cuban fleet.

Ship or shape, it came in slowly as the tide.

One day they would all be dead. If today was that day, then everything was clear. Now the sounds and visions and ideas coming at them from beyond the end of all thought were real. Now the white boat, or was it a cloud, came for the Israelites out of the fog of their belief. In all likelihood it was a ghost-ship, and the Israelites were ghosts, and the man standing at the bow was a ghost who had come for them, it was clear in the draw of this white, white vessel — unless the light happened to be playing tricks, it wasn’t touching the water at all — clear from the majesty of it, the sense that it floats in the air and not in the waters of the world, floats in the heart of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

Nodding down into a nap beneath the canopy of her memories, she jerked awake and saw the form again in the early mist of the second morning and the third day — a rock, a whale, some white place to cling to, sleep, and breathe. And in her state of waking, she jerked awake. And from that waking, she woke up.

DENIS JOHNSON was born in 1949 in Munich. His first novel, Angels , was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction in 1984 by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His volumes of poetry include The Man Among the Seals, Inner Weather and The Incognito Lounge . He lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.