It took him a long time to learn these things about these strangers. Even to see them took him a long time, because they weren’t his people. At first they resembled nothing, because he didn’t know this place.
Once he’d come over the dunes, whatever he knew about the world was useless. He had to start over. Each day he learned something that was obvious.
He learned something each day, but he had no thoughts. Every time he started to think about something, there came another overpowering idea — he was hungry, hungry, hungry. Muddy hands offered him plants dangling filthy leaves, and he really didn’t know they expected him to bite into these things. They tore open big bugs with popping eyes that lived in the water like fish, and held the pale meat in his face, and he cried. They showed him how to eat. He knew how to eat, but he didn’t know these plants and bugs were food. They knew the plants and bugs were food, but they didn’t realize he knew how to eat. All of it was raw. They had fires in their village, but they didn’t seem to believe these fires were meant for cooking anything but potions. He couldn’t learn to like this food, but he learned to use it like medicine to cure his hunger. His head cleared and he looked around himself.
Fires sat on humps of earth in a swampy region and lit up the undersides of cypress leaves. Among the fires and trees there were small huts made of twigs, and he sat in the doorway of one of them. The ground dampened the seat of his pants.
In his mind he saw himself climbing over the dunes in pursuit of a girl from these swamps, but he didn’t know how many days ago this had happened. He thought of the places he’d left behind — West Beach, the steel music and dancing, and the Army. It came to him he didn’t want to be here. But it didn’t occur to him that he might leave, that he could travel. He assumed that he was dreaming and that he’d get out of this place only by waking up.
Swamp-people went in and out of the huts or squatted before the fires. A lot of them looked like desechados — humpbacked, or armless, or moving carefully in a way that said they were blind or drunkenly in a way that said something was missing in their heads. Fiskadoro shut his eyes hard, tensed the fibers of his body, and told himself to wake up. He shouted out loud and slapped his own face. When he opened his eyes, he was still sitting in the hut’s doorway and he was still surrounded by desechados moving through firelight under cypress trees that hung down out of a roof of darkness.
He couldn’t hear the Ocean, only the wind in the trees. He didn’t see any dogs or cats. Bugs and frogs made sounds that blended together into a great engine of noise. There was someone — more than one — inside the hut, looking at his back. He moved out of the doorway, backed up against the structure’s prickly wall, and put his arms around his shins and his forehead down on his knees. Believing that if he slept in this world he’d wake up in the one he’d left, he relaxed as much as he could.
The next morning the air was so cool and grey and wet that it made him cough to breathe it. A woman who had no arms or hands, only fins like a fish, came and watched him. A couple of little boys came around later and had a look at him and laughed. For a while he was alone, and then two men who seemed to think they were important people, who weren’t desechados but were nevertheless of a very small size, came and talked to him. In the usual way of dreams, he couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear him, but they managed to communicate. He made them understand that he was cold and thirsty. They gave him water in a plastic canteen just like the ones at home and a muddy blanket with a hole in it that he could put his head through. They told him he was not like other men.
By the morning’s end the air was a little warmer. Things got more visible, but the roof of branches overhead was so thick he never got a look at the sun. All day people came and watched him for a while as if he were a show. His stomach burned with shame, fear, and disgust. One little desechado boy had eyes on either side of his head, almost where his ears were. Turning sideways, he watched Fiskadoro with one eye for a while, and then he turned and watched Fiskadoro with the other one.
After the day had gone on for longer than most days in Fiskadoro’s experience, the two small men showed up again.
At first the two small men didn’t talk. A woman who had no nose, only two large nostrils in the middle of her face, brought a hollow log, like a tiny boat, with more leaves and more bugs riding in it. The two men cracked the bugs open and started eating the meat. When they offered a bug to Fiskadoro, he took it and cracked it open. They offered him water from a plastic canteen.
He asked the two men to tell him how to wake himself up.
They told him he’d changed a lot. He wasn’t anything like the person they used to know.
He said that didn’t make any sense. He ate some more of the bug’s fishy meat, which might have been tasty if cooked up with some spices.
They asked him if he’d taken on the body of another person.
He told them he didn’t think so. It looked like the same one to him.
Then why, they asked him, was he no longer like other men?
He insisted he was the same. It was everyone and everything else that had changed.
This was something they wanted to ponder. They left him alone for the rest of the afternoon, while desechados and other swamp-people came and watched him, all of them with thick helmets of mud caked on their heads and holes in their ears dangling knots of colored string, bits of metal or bright pebbles. He didn’t leave his place next to the hut — he was afraid that if he moved around in the dream, he’d find himself in the wrong place when he woke up. He was already so far from the Ocean in this dream, so distantly removed from the real world, that there wasn’t any sunset here. At the end of the day the shade just got larger and more ominous and moved up from under the trees and into the sky.
The longer he stayed here in this dream, the more people and things it produced. The floor of it, which had been only a dull rug with warts of huts and humps of fires, changed and yielded up its details: ground-running vines of various thicknesses, tiny grassy plants so low their round leaves were nearly imbedded in the dirt, beetles and ants on their errands along the reach of vines and underneath the fuzzy saw-toothed leaves of another kind of plant that was also everywhere underfoot. The dream’s undistinguished grey walls turned out to be a congestion of cypress and, in the wet hollows, mangrove and some other trees he couldn’t call by name, all woven together with slender green vines and barred across by frail dark ones. Out of this swamp-growth the patchy clearing of fires and huts had been hacked and burned, leaving too many trees, just the same, to let the day down. Faces came and went, and he started recognizing some of them. He saw also that the times for doing things were regular. They had three meals a day here, as in real life, and about three hours after dark everybody went quiet and slept through the night, and arose in the grey light to get together around the fires and look out of their sleep-blankened faces until they were wide awake and there was something to do. It was the first dream he’d ever peed in. They all, Fiskadoro too, did their business in pots behind the huts, and every morning people took the pots and dumped them out somewhere beyond the dream’s living walls.
The two men came to see him each day. One was Zeid, with a face impossible to look at, it was so much like an animal’s: black and furry, and as flat as if a heavy rock had been set down on it one day. The older and more presentable one was Abu-Lahab, who was in charge of all the fires — nobody was allowed to tend them but Abu-Lahab. Sometimes they talked about nothing, asking Fiskadoro to tell them about his life in the Army and to explain, as best he could, what had happened to change him. But as far as Fiskadoro knew, he hadn’t changed at all, not since the day he was born, and he couldn’t understand the question.