He’d been assured by Martin and Martin’s companion Sammy that Fiskadoro’s memory would come back to him in a while — though they didn’t seem to think he’d ever remember his past — but, for now, each time the boy witnessed the sunrise he saw it for the first time.
There was something to be envied in that. In a world where nothing was familiar, everything was new. And if you can’t recall the previous steps in your journey, won’t you assume you’ve just been standing still? If you can’t remember living yesterday, then isn’t your life only one day long?
Mr. Cheung unclasped his hands from behind him and gestured in the air. He was walking in circles around a date palm over and over through the same few regions of light and dark. He couldn’t have explained why suddenly he felt such panic.
OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, Fiskadoro got back his ability to remember current events. But his memory for the past, for the time before he’d come back home, was gone forever. His earliest recollection was of lying in the darkness and remembering the village of swamp-people; as far as he knew his life reached back no farther than that moment when he’d lain in bed and remembered that he had died.
There was something real about him that came out of the memory and wouldn’t go away. It was slowly healing, but still he screamed every time he peed. Every day when he woke up, it was still split open at the end, like a fish just cleaned.
In the dream, his first purpose had been to go through the ceremony and make himself like all other men, because he was different from all other men in the dream.
Now he was awake, and he was different from all other men who were awake. Now he didn’t have to go through the ceremony, but it was too late.
They all told him he’d been alive before, in another world very much like this one. Why couldn’t he remember it?
Mr. Cheung didn’t want him just to learn the clarinet music. Mr. Cheung wanted him to eat the wafer, remember things, and tell Cassius Clay Sugar Ray where the blue pills were found. “I don’t know where the blue pills come,” he kept telling Mr. Cheung.
“But the wafer will help you remember.”
“I not gone remember, Manager, because of I don’t know.”
“But how do you know you won’t remember, if you don’t remember what you know?”
“I remember that I don’t know.”
Talking about it made them both crazy. Mr. Cheung was strong, and he worked hard to move through all the words, but he kept bumping into the same ones over and over. “You’ll remember who you are.”
“I don’t wanna remember who am I. Es me already, right now today. If I remember, then I gone be somebody else.” During these conversations Fiskadoro’s head hurt and his thoughts went around and around, but the thing that words couldn’t change was that in between his legs he wasn’t like other men, and so nobody could make him do anything: because when they talked to him they were talking to a person who was partly in a dream. They were sending their voices into another place. They were uselessly calling out to where the words of their own place didn’t work.
Eventually Mr. Cheung gave up trying to get him to take the wafer of memory. Cassius Clay Sugar Ray traded the wafer to someone in Marathon, and whatever that person found, by swallowing it, belonged to that person. Nobody knew what had returned to that person, what knowledge of things that were lost.
Mr. Cheung had insisted, “You must take the drug again to remember who I am, who you are, and who this woman is.” But he’d refused the drug because he already knew that this was Anthony Terrence Cheung, his clarinet teacher and Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra. And he already knew that he himself was Fiskadoro. And Fiskadoro already knew who this woman was — his mother. He knew she wasn’t for him, and he wasn’t supposed to bother her at night. He understood, but didn’t remember, that in the world before his dream and his death his mother had been everything to him, that she had gradually become only a part of the world, but the biggest part, and had turned eventually into just one person in the world, but the person he loved the most. Fiskadoro didn’t mind knowing about this, but he didn’t want to remember it. His mother was sick. She was getting smaller and smaller. After she closed her eyes there would be a hole in the air where she’d been, and then nothing where she’d been, only the air. He didn’t want to eat the wafer. He didn’t want the hole in the air to be a hole in Fiskadoro. He didn’t want to remember what he was losing.
Fiskadoro was proud of himself because he was really learning to play the clarinet — Mr. Cheung said that he’d forgotten how not to play. The notes on the page flowed into his eyes and out of the instrument and into the world as music. And he was a much better reader of words now, too. Sometimes, but not all the time, when he read to Mr. Cheung from one of the books the teacher brought around, instead of marks on a page Fiskadoro saw images in his mind.
Sometimes, when his brother Drake came around, Fiskadoro told him about reading and tried to interest him in a book, but Drake was a fisherman. He liked boats, not books. People said Drake looked just like their father. Mike, the youngest brother, didn’t look like anybody yet. He didn’t mind being read to, but he didn’t seem to listen very carefully. He spent most of the time with the neighbors, because Belinda was getting too weak to take care of him. Fiskadoro spent very little time with either of his brothers.
Most of the time he spent healing. Belinda had taken the strings out of his ears, and the holes where they’d been were closed to dots now. His groin was well, but he would always be different from other men.
Being different from other men sometimes sent him walking far down the beach, down among the huge green flies and the stink that rose off the garbage pit and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Belinda’s ashes would be thrown away here after her body was burned.
The gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the weedy sand near the pit. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther up-shore he always saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing. They reminded him of Mr. Cheung.
More than once he saw others here, also different from other men: ghosts who had appeared out of the sea — from the shipwrecks, from the End of the World, from the plagues, from the cold time, from the kill-me — drowned sailors and frozen children, young maidens bleeding down their legs, sick old men and women and cancer-wasted fishwives who seemed to wander hopelessly near the place of their burning; but all of them were smiling and no longer touched with pain.
THE DAYS WERE COOLER, generally grey or sometimes overhung with tremendous white clouds whose shadows traveled the Gulf, and yet the dust on Towanda’s breasts and shoulders was mapped with perspiration when she came to see Belinda. Towanda carried a penny jug of potato brandy, a crumpled aluminum can faintly bearing a bleached design.
Belinda didn’t get up from her chair. Her eyes were sunk deep in brown circles, and the rest of her was the color of stale fish-meat.
Towanda smiled at this sick woman and nodded in an encouraging way. But when Belinda had swallowed some brandy and was passing back the can, her struggle was so great and her movements were so weak that Towanda gave up trying to look happy and just sat there wishing everything would go away.
Belinda noticed how her neighbor wiped the mouth of the can with her thumb before taking a swallow.
“You-all gone have to burn me up,” Belinda said.
Towanda’s face was twisted and her voice came out in whispers and squeaks. “Yeah,” she whispered. “You got it.”