“They got stuck here while the whole Everglades burnt up around them,” _______ said.
There was a police car, with the red light on top. Even the police were skeletons.
“They couldn’t get outa them cars, and they couldn’t stay in.”
Fiskadoro felt the deep echo of these words, as if he heard them spoken from another place, from tomorrow, when he would be awake. He waited for the two keepers to receive him, and the vigilant guardian to note down each word, and the trumpet-sound. He bawled out loud for his lost life. His memory left him and he looked up at the giant desolation in grief and amazement once again, but also for the first time.
When, in just a few minutes, he had forgotten all these things again, Fiskadoro was glad. He lay in his bed in the midnight listening to the Gulf wash and wash the hem of the island and remembered the act of remembering those experiences, and that was bad enough. Then, as if the burbling permutations of the water were carrying it away, his ability to remember anything at all was gone again. In the darkness his eyes were directed up toward the thatched ceiling, but as he didn’t know the ceiling was there his sight reached on beyond it indefinitely toward nothing.
I THINK WE SHOULD GO OUT IN THE YARD,” Mr. Cheung told Fiskadoro.
“Why?”
“The odor.” Mr. Cheung made a face. “Forgive me, this is your home, but it doesn’t have a pleasant odor for me.”
Fiskadoro made no objection and followed his teacher out into the yard before the quonset hut.
In the yard the boy looked here and there with some curiosity, because, Mr. Cheung guessed, he didn’t remember the outhouse, the three fenceposts without a fence, or even the Gulf of Mexico from ten minutes earlier when he’d stood in the doorway and watched Mr. Cheung pass between these fenceposts, with this outhouse and that Gulf behind him, and walk up to the broken steps and say, “I’m Mr. Cheung,” a name the boy had also probably forgotten. “Sit down,” Mr. Cheung told him now. “Do you know who I am?”
“Who?” Fiskadoro wondered.
“I’m your teacher, Anthony Cheung. I’m going to show you some things I have in my bag.” He jiggled the pillowcase he was carrying so that its contents clinked and rattled. “Please, let’s sit down,” he said, trying, himself, to get comfortable on the ground.
The boy sat down on the sand and leaned back on his elbows with his legs stretched out straight and his ankles crossed and seemed to think it was a joke when Mr. Cheung reached into his bag for an amethyst and said, “What is this?”
“Es a rock.”
“Yes, all right. A rock, a stone.” Mr. Cheung decided to limit this study to a very few objects, since most of those in his bag were all minerals from his collection — each with a different name, it was true, but to the boy, as he should have expected, one rock was like another rock. He set the amethyst on the sand between them. “Whatever you want to call it, that’s fine,” he said with some disappointment.
“Bueno, I gone call him a rock,” Fiskadoro said.
“And this?”
“Es a thread thing,” the boy told him.
“A spool. You’re right, we put thread on it. We wind it around like so — ah? Yes. Spool.”
“Espool,” Fiskadoro said.
Now Mr. Cheung closed up the spool inside his fist. “What do I have here?”
“Espool.”
“Have you heard that word before?”
“Yeh. Sure. Alla time.”
Mr. Cheung set the empty spool down next to the amethyst and reached into his bag. “And this is a chicken.”
“Naw!” Fiskadoro uncrossed his legs, leaned forward to take a better look. “Es a knife you know. Es ain’t a chicking.”
The teacher lay the clasp-knife down beside the spool. “I’m just testing you.”
He drew out a small brass bell, many decades old, very valuable, from China, and dangled it from his fingers and let it ring softly.
“Es a bell.”
“Right. Tell me all four things now. Point.” Mr. Cheung showed him. “A bell, a — what.”
“Es a bell, un espool, you got a knife, you got a rock.”
“Very good. Okay, close your eyes now, put your hands—” Mr. Cheung showed him, and the boy covered his eyes with his hands. “Can you tell me what I have now?”
“Bell. Espool. Knife. Rock.”
“Excellent. All right. I’ll put them back in my bag. My bell, my spool, my knife. There — my rock — all in the bag.”
“Si,” Fiskadoro said.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No,” Fiskadoro said.
“Do you know where we are?”
The boy rubbed his face and suddenly looked frightened and ill. “Maybe. I think about it. Ask to me later.”
“No, I won’t ask you,” Mr. Cheung assured him. “It’s not at all important.” He was wary of exciting the boy. He’d thought about this, about what it might be like to move from one day to the next, maybe from one hour to the next, and even, as looked possible in Fiskadoro’s case, from one minute to the next, without taking with you any recollection of the previous one. Surely it would break a person. Surely it would maim the soul.
But then again — if he had no memory of having once had a memory?
In such a case, where was the soul at all — had it been erased? This boy’s seriously ailing mother had to lock herself away from him at night: he crept after her with no more compunction than a little dog or a tomcat because, like a dog or a tomcat, he didn’t know who his own mother was beyond that she was female. But even a dog behaved as if there were people, places, and things it recognized — did that kind of behavior mean it remembered them? If so, then this boy’s soul lacked even the proportions of a dog’s.
“What do I have in my bag?” he asked Fiskadoro.
“Some thing you got.”
“Could you please tell me what things? Tell me four.” He held up four fingers.
Fiskadoro shrugged. “A few thing. Whatever you need.”
“Do you remember when I put them in my bag?”
“Sure. One time I remember.”
“When?”
“Long time ago.” Fiskadoro pointed with his chin at the distance.
“One time when you were a little boy?”
“Yeh. Before that maybe, I think.”
By Mr. Cheung’s estimation, not five minutes had passed. “What is your name?” Mr. Cheung asked him.
“My name Fiskadoro.” He never failed to remember his name. But everything else got away from him.
“Let me take you back inside, Fiskadoro. And then I have to walk. It helps me think.” He led the boy back toward his completely unfamiliar home to be given his lunch by the mother he’d never seen before. “There’s a woman in there. She’s not for you. Please don’t bother her.”
The day was unseasonably crisp. With the noon sun directly overhead the water was a blackness, not a liquid. His hands clasped behind him and his head bowed, he walked in under the Army’s high ceiling of palm leaves, and as he continued on the path he perceived beneath his feet an alternation of light with shadow. Would Fiskadoro see it? Looking down at his feet in a spot of brightness, would he remember his feet in the shade? Would Fiskadoro, in fact, looking down at his feet, even remember the rest of himself-his hands, his head? If he didn’t remember the inside of his house when he was out-of-doors, did he also forget the out-of-doors, even the fact of the out-of-doors, when he was inside? And if he were blindfolded a few minutes, would he forget what it was like to see — would he forget there was such a thing as “seeing”?
In the clearing around the well, the sweaty-faced neighbor-women were gossiping and cleaning rice, tossing handfuls of it in the air over straw mats and letting the wind seize away the dust and chaff. Respectfully they silenced themselves as the thinker passed.