“Why did you come today?” Mr. Cheung asked.
“A lot is interest me,” Martin said, “about the boy Fiskadoro, your once pupil.”
“What?” Park-Smith said. “He was kidnapped. He was returned.”
“A person have told me Fiskadoro is not the same.”
“Of course not,” Mr. Cheung said. “An ordeal, he’s had an ordeal.”
“A person have told me very, very not the same.” Martin picked up his burden and they all went in.
Inside, the quonset hut suffocated under layers of odors — smoke, mildew, mackerel both fresh and putrefied, fruit rinds dwindled to a state of fermentation — and at first Mr. Cheung stayed close to the door and the fresh air. Villagers waited outside in the dusk, keeping their voices low.
Martin lit a candle by the bed and moved around the place lighting others, making a big show out of each match.
Fiskadoro, the cause of all the trouble, lay in bed in the next room with a grey sheet full of holes pulled up to his chin, and the mother sat on an old car seat with her hands straight-armed onto her knees and her shoulders curled, hiding her breasts. She was in shock. So was the boy. Fiskadoro’s hair was caked with a thick even layer of mud that made him look large-browed and bald. He wore a headband of tiny shells. He had holes in each ear, top and bottom, with strings tied around through each hole. Mr. Cheung had seen such insignia among the swamp-people. He came close to the bed and peered down, “Fiskadoro. We want to lift up the sheet and have an examination.” Fiskadoro looked right at him, but didn’t acknowledge. As soon as Mr. Cheung drew the sheet back and saw the massive scab like a barnacle on the boy’s crotch, he realized what had happened.
He’d been half-expecting it and remained unblinking, but Martin and Park-Smith started dragging the breath down their throats.
“Can you remember an accident, Fiskadoro?” Mr. Cheung asked his pupil.
The boy didn’t answer.
The white bodyguard Sammy spoke up. “I promise you he don’t remember.” He glanced at the mother, as if perhaps he didn’t like talking about it in front of her. “They fix it up so the boys don’t remember.”
“Who?”
Martin said, “Sammy and me have visited to these people. Sammy many times. He saw and he knows.”
“They take this memory-juice,” Sammy told them. “First you remember every single thing in the world, then you don’t remember a-tall. Zip. Nothing. Nada,” he added in what was evidently a polite attempt to get the point across.
“They have a big ceremony, lot of days long, when it’s time to—” Martin pointed at Fiskadoro’s crotch and sucked the breath through his teeth.
“Subincision,” Mr. Cheung said. He drew the sheet back up to the boy’s chin.
“Horrible. Horrible. Horrible,” Park-Smith said.
“What they do,” Sammy said, “they take the boys supposed to get cut up like this, and they recite out a whole lot of things to say — these old men recite it out at the boys all day long. Then sundown every day they take all this stuff and grind it up with something—blood, Jesus, I don’t know what-all—”
“Mushrooms,” Martin said, “and a one blue pill.”
“—and when these boys drink it down, Sir, I swear they recite it all back, remember every word.” The small man’s white face was amazed. “I mean it takes all night to get it said, and these little — brown kids, they don’t never miss a beat. Next night it’s the same thing, only different speeches to learn. Three, four nights running they’ve got them out there in a clear spot by the village, cleaning out their brains, is how I’d say it, and then they get crazy and, Sir, I ain’t lying, those young boys rip up their own peckers with a jagged rock. I ain’t lying. Couple days after that, these same boys can’t tell you their own name, plus I hate to tell you what they sound like every time they go to piss out a drink of water.” He looked at the mother. “They heal up after a while,” he told her.
“You saw this take place?” Mr. Cheung asked.
“Seen it three times. But I don’t remember much.”
“You drank the memory-juice?”
“Hell no. You don’t think I’d wipe out thirty-two years of my life just to satisfy a load of niggers? Well, you know,” he said quickly to Martin and William Park-Smith, “them are niggers — about the low level of them burros go hauling the carts around these islands. What it was, they kept me up two days straight and had me looking in a fire, till I couldn’t’ve told you was I dreaming or was I real.”
“I think,” Martin said, “all what they have to remember back for the ceremony, es a lotta trash. Not important. The old fathers just only want the boys to forget. When es all done finish, the boys don’t even know they name.”
“Got a totally blank screen there,” Sammy told them, “just like if you unplugged their heads.”
“Do they know how to talk?” Park-Smith asked.
“They talk, they eat — everything, like anybody else,” Sammy said. “But first of all they blank out every two seconds. Couple weeks they’re regular again, but they never do get back the memories that happened before all that craziness, and the cutting.”
Mr. Cheung had never heard of this. “Incredible.”
“Horrible,” Park-Smith said again.
“But if a person found out the source,” Martin said.
“These swamp-people are the source,” Park-Smith said. “That’s obvious.”
“But I think of the blue pill,” Martin said, “and I wonder where does it come out of?”
“Now he puts a mark down on the map,” Sammy said. “I was wondering what we come here about.”
“The source of this kind of blue pill,” Martin said. “A lot is interest me about a problem like that.”
He lay flat under a sheet. There were men around him. Over his face a black face came down and said, “You met the Quraysh. You know who these Quraysh are? Mohammed’s family, exact. Mohammed’s tribe from over there.”
“Over there happens to be half the world,” a small one, scratching his big belly, interrupted with disgust. “You have a private history, a religion — privado, it’s your own, all your own.”
The black one’s sense of wounded dignity was so powerful it seized the air like a color. “I studied it in the Koran, The Human Bible, The Book of Mormon—”
“The Holy Bible.”
“The Human Bible. It’s new in Deerfield.” The black man disappeared. “Lookyer. Attende. I got it all in my bag.” The one with the big belly disappeared. There was a doorway now, beyond which, in another room, sat a woman. Desire moved inside him and stung him between his legs.
A small man with a big belly appeared, holding books in either hand. “Where did you get these sacred books?”
A black man snatched the books away from him. “Deerfield is the middle of civilization, not Cuba. Cuba ain’t. Deerfield machines print books. See?” The black one raised up a book. “Human Bible aqui. Cuba makes a big secret, but Deerfield gone print for everyone.”
The other man rubbed his face with his hands. “The world is repeating itself. The story of the world is happening again.”
“You call me I’m a trash-man. But I bring books. I travel knowledge.”
Fiskadoro attended their exchange carefully, understanding and remembering nothing.
When Park-Smith elected to sleep on Martin’s boat, Mr. Cheung went along with the idea, against his better judgment. The motion of water was soothing to him — he felt he’d developed an immunity to seasickness — but there was no telling how many of the things around him on this vessel were poison. His half-brother had lamps, a kerosene stove, fresh canvas, thousands of pre-End matches in tiny wooden packages, no shortage of rope or diesel fuel. He was called a “traveling man,” or a “trash-man,” the respectful and disrespectful terms for a pirate of the land, a scavenger and purveyor of radioactive goods. Only a few of them operated below Key Largo, wearing their protective suits as they gathered and transported various useful items just like the ones on this boat, taking off their suits and risking contamination long enough to barter their goods away without arousing the anxiety of the head-men, town councils, and Societies who bought them. But Mr. Cheung didn’t know, absolutely, that Martin sold contamination. He knew very little about his half-brother. “You’re a ghost, aren’t you?” Mr. Cheung guessed, watching Martin light his stove to warm some coffee. “You deal between the two worlds.”