“You touch the people and they dissolve. There is nothing left but you. And you will not remember.”
But at this moment Fiskadoro remembered everything except his own name. He spent the next several minutes talking and talking and knowing just what to say. It was the right answer.
“On that day we shall ask Helclass="underline" 'Are you full?’ ”
Fiskadoro said, “And Hell will answer: ‘Are there any more?’ ”
Then it was Fiskadoro’s time. His mouth moved. He remembered every word they’d told him and he said them all at the proper times. Fiskadoro said, “No! But when the earth is crushed to fine dust, and your Lord comes down with the angels, in their ranks, and Hell is brought near — on that day man will remember his deeds. But what will memory avail him?”
He spoke for hours. Every word was in his mouth, and in his mind was his whole life. In his head a long tunnel had been opened, down which he could see all the way back to the moment he’d been born in hunger and fear onto a wall of light, and had awakened in this world between the mountainous thighs of his mother Belinda, and had been carried in her hands as if by two great clouds through an otherwise empty sky toward the comfort of her breast. He saw his father handing a china plate, a shawl, and a jug of brandy to the midwife. He smelled his father’s hair and his parents’ bedding, and recalled their conversation as they stood above him the first night he slept away from them on his own blanket, in a box.
All this time he held a sharp rock in his hand, waiting until the moment he wanted to make himself like other men. “When the two keepers receive him, the one seated on his right, the other on his left, each word he utters shall be noted down by a vigilant guardian.
“And when the agony of death justly overtakes him, they will say, ‘This is the fate you have striven to avoid.’ And the trumpet shall be sounded.’ ” He talked and talked. Toward the end he said stranger and stranger words, such words as “ephod,” and “teraphim.”
“And the going up to it was eight steps,” he said.
He couldn’t wait any longer.
“I will go down now!” he said. “And see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me!”
He couldn’t see anything below the level of his shoulders, and even then could see only his own orange and black fire-blindness, and so Zeid had to guide his hand, the one that held the rock, when he cut himself.
After he cut himself with the rock, nothing happened for a long minute. People only breathed. “We shall surely die,” two voices said, “because we have seen God.” But then there was only more breathing.
Someone took the head from his shoulders and led him by the hand back to his hut. Except for the fact that the fires seemed a little brighter than usual because he’d been so long in darkness, the swampy village of huts and people looked the same.
Fiskadoro lay in his hut with songs rising and falling outside it through the whole night. He was delirious. He didn’t know who came to him at some point in the evening to pierce the tops of his ears, or who appeared later to bathe his forehead and bandage the wound between his legs with a dressing of pungent glue and boiled leaves. In the morning he was stiff all over and felt like a sack of wet, chilly sand.
He was very let down, because everything had been heading toward this, and it was nothing. His head was a blank, he felt no pain. Now he was like other men.
When the white trader named _______ was making ready to leave, he came to Fiskadoro and said, “You about set to take off?”
As far as Fiskadoro knew, he’d never seen this man or this place in his life before. Every time he looked at something, it came up before his eyes for the first time, unexplained and impossible to understand.
“They’ll let you go, if you’re ready to go,” _______. told him. “You ready? You feel okay?”
“I fix now,” Fiskadoro assured this man, whoever this man was. But he was lying. He wasn’t at all well. He had a fever and couldn’t keep food down and hurt, every minute, between his legs.
_______ said, “Walk behind of me,” and took Fiskadoro with him to the water.
People Fiskadoro had never seen before stood in a place he’d never been before and waved to him, whether hello or goodbye he didn’t know, because only a minute after his words with _______, he’d forgotten whether he was coming or going.
“I don’t set foot on that road,” _______ said. “I go by the canal.”
As Fiskadoro stepped onto the raft after this stranger, his memories suddenly returned to him for a minute. He remembered that he was asleep in a dream and that his memory had been coming and going, as it generally seemed to do in dreams.
They traveled on a raft along a channel like a long tin roof between two oceans of mangrove that stretched to the horizon and appeared to be the whole world. Alongside the channel ran a road. For a long time Fiskadoro lay on his side with a groin of fire while _______ pushed them forward with a pole.
Fiskadoro sat up when they came to a patch of dead grey mangrove. Another dead patch followed; and suddenly they were in a lifeless place. The branches were bare as far as he could see. He thought that he must have fallen from one dream into a deeper dream, and he panicked inside without moving, because he was getting farther and farther away from waking and might never get out.
“Miami ef el ay,” _______ said.
For a long time, as Fiskadoro looked at it, he thought it was a storm of clouds, and then he assumed it was a big boat bearing down on them and he wondered what these people did when a boat was about to crush them. And then he realized that it was far away, it was made of houses, and then he began to understand that these houses were too far away to look at, that he was able to see them from this distance only because they were bigger than his mind could grasp.
Fiskadoro wept and trembled. “Was I ever see this before?”
“I couldn’t say,” _______ said.
Alongside them even the dead mangrove was gone. There was nothing but brown and silver ash streaked black in places. There was no end to it.
“Am I see it now?”
“I couldn’t say,” _______ said. “But I’d guess you were.”
_______ walked back and forth slowly on the raft, pacing out kilometer after kilometer across its brief length, pushing them toward the vision with his pole.
Fiskadoro saw that today was the day. Just by saying the words he’d made it come true. The earth had been crushed to fine dust. Someone had come down to see whether they had done altogether according to the cry of it, which was come unto him, and crushed it to dust. Fiskadoro put his arms around himself as the tears fell down his face. Today he would remember his deeds.
Ahead, on the road alongside the channel, tangled black autocars made a breakwater of wreckage, behind which, as far as Fiskadoro could see down the diminishing road, stretched a motorcade of burned-black cars and trucks, every size and shape, with their tires melted into the road’s ash. He’d never seen so many. He didn’t know where they were all going.
Every car — as the raft moved alongside them toward the clouds of buildings in the east — was being driven by a person made of brown bones who didn’t shift or flicker or turn his head, but Fiskadoro knew they were all aware of him. There were riders in every car, big and little, twisted into different shapes, all made of brown bones. Now he understood that his purpose in this dream was to die. He was sobbing so hard now, and with such shame, that he couldn’t make a voice to ask _______ what the death-ceremony meant by “Deeds.”