“Es expectable. I’m a half-and-half. Like the boy.”
“Why did they take him?”
“Remember they losted a boy on West Beach?”
“The subincised boy. The one who drowned, yes.”
“Well well,” said Martin, who knew all about trading, “now they made a trade.”
“But they didn’t keep Fiskadoro. He couldn’t have come by himself. Why do you think they let him go?”
“What they gonna worry where he live? He belong to them now.”
“It makes a little sense,” Mr. Cheung admitted. “Not much.”
The coffee was warm. Martin turned off the stove and gave him a cup.
“This will keep me awake,” Mr. Cheung said, looking with distaste at his coffee in its metal mug. He sipped of it; he didn’t like coffee, particularly when it might be radioactive, but he would rather have been contaminated than impolite. He held the mug between his knees and watched the brown liquid keep its level against the boat’s subtle rocking. “You’ve been among those people?”
“The Quraysh,” Martin said. “The original first tribe of Mohammed.”
“They aren’t the Quraysh. That’s your fantasy.”
“I believe what they told to me. They told to me, We are the Quraysh.”
“What happened to you when you went visiting? Is this your trouble I’ve heard about?”
“What you heard?”
“Nothing. Only that you had some trouble up north.”
“I got the wafer. The other traders wanted it, but the elders said no more trading after me.”
“And now they don’t want you up in North Deerfield,” Mr. Cheung said.
Martin smiled falsely and swirled his coffee in its mug. “Be a lotta business right here to keep me. I tired of the north.”
It was a familiar story. Mr. Cheung withheld comment.
Martin sat down across from him on the edge of the other bunk in the small cabin, their knees almost touching. “I have some of the wafer.”
“Wafer?”
“First they making a liquid, the memory-juice. When es dry, they got you call him a wafer. I have one. I traded to them.”
“Will it work? Will it make me remember?”
“You?”
Mr. Cheung was surprised he’d said it. But he wanted to remember his previous lives.
“We give it to the boy,” Martin said. “Maybe he have memories where to find the blue pill.”
Mr. Cheung felt desire turning him into someone else. “Give it to me!” He ached for want of it. He was angry.
He half-woke in a dark place, lying on his side. He started to turn over and the pain woke him fully. He stood up through the pain, moving in search of an end to it. He found a person, a child. He found a woman and got near to the smell of her, touched her leg in the dark, found her knee, and slid his hand up higher. She moved a little and opened her legs. He felt of the hair between her legs and moved his fingers in it, looking for something. She woke up and closed her legs with great strength, and slapped him around the head. He felt how she kept her wrist loose, in a way that was familiar, so that the fingers whipped hard against his ears, his nose — one caught the corner of his left eye. He fell back and the pain struck him again between his legs. “Fiskadoro — you can’t sleep here no more.” It was dark. He didn’t know who she was. Or who he was.
Martin took his brothers to Twicetown on his boat the next day. The weather was as expected for this time of year, cloudy and offering rain by the afternoon. Mr. Cheung told himself he’d come back here soon, but right now he’d had enough excitement. He didn’t even want to see the boy.
He wanted to avoid the mother, too, but Belinda waded out to the boat through the high tide to have a word with him.
She looked up into his face, and knocked on the side of the boat as if she thought he couldn’t see her. And in fact, he’d been behaving as if he couldn’t: though it was time to say goodbye, he hadn’t yet said hello — he still resented Belinda for denying him the clarinet. “How are you?” he said.
“Oh, about in a middle,” she said. The engine throbbed deeply. It was hard to make out her words. She squinted up at him. “I got a trouble in my tit, Manager. Dureza.”
Now he wished he’d shown her more kindness. “I’m very sorry.”
“Es a medicine on that boat he fix me?”
Mr. Cheung shrugged his shoulders and showed her the empty hands of somebody who couldn’t help.
“Seem like getting bigger,” she said.
“Often these things are nothing,” he told her. “Cysts, we call them. They don’t grow.”
“Not today,” she said.
“Si. Not today.”
“No medicine?”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Okay. No problem.” She didn’t leave, but stood hip-deep in water with one hand flat on the side of the boat. He waited while she looked back at Sammy, the bodyguard, in the dirt before her house. In what Mr. Cheung felt must be an uncharacteristic display of good humor, the little white man was down on his haunches, copying every motion of the little boy Mike. The boy was getting annoyed. “The last night,” Belinda said.
“What is it?”
“Fiskadoro, the last night. The last night he bothering me.”
“Last night?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He bother his own mother.”
He really didn’t know what the woman meant. “Fiskadoro is very — sick.” He wished for another word, but it was the only word that came. “He’ll get better. Not now, but in a few days, a few weeks. I’ll look in on him. I’ll come often,” he promised.
“Keep touch,” she said, and turned and waded back toward her house.
ONE NIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, just before he forgot it all again, Fiskadoro remembered a lot of what had happened and where he’d been. And he remembered the people he’d been among.
It was no struggle for them to live, but it took all day, they thought. They thought they had everything they needed — some plants, some huts, some ceremonies. They never appealed for help to the ghosts of their friends and neighbors. They thought the soul was a blank and empty thing that did nothing all day long, and as far as they were concerned there weren’t any ghosts living in their village. But they were wrong: their air was unbreathable because it was turned into syrup by the cries of ghosts, the presences of ghosts, the secrets of ghosts.
On sunny days the snakes lay out on the trail soaking up the light, and they took any snake with two heads, except for the venomous coral snakes, and instantly ate it alive in order to swallow its strangeness and power. In the case of two-headed coral snakes, these they fed with frogs stuffed with mushrooms, and when the rapto came over them, the two heads would start quarreling until one head struck the other and the snake killed itself. And the tattoo so many of them wore, the line with a loop at one end, like the empty outline of a spoon, was the snake trying to swallow its first head with its second mouth.