In this life Fiskadoro had seen Sanchez twice before — once on a morning after a party celebrating a baby’s birth into the Army, when he’d found Sanchez sleeping on the dirt of a path with sand crusted in the corners of his mouth and his nostrils ringed with dried blood; and another time, at the party celebrating Belinda’s burning, when this Sanchez had peed on the fire in front of everybody, and later fell in the sea and had to be pulled out. Sanchez’s mother had cried, and his father had driven him away and told him never to come back to the Army.
Fiskadoro stood looking down at Sanchez and trying to remember his whole name.
“Yeah,” Sanchez said, in a slick way that Fiskadoro disliked listening to.
“You looking better today,” Fiskadoro told him. “Face ain’t dirty.”
“Es ain’t what I ask you,” Sanchez said. “I ask you what you want, how much, and come on make a move.”
Fiskadoro freed one hand from the task of holding the briefcase and knocked on the table as at a door. “What’s you name in the real situation?” he demanded.
Obviously Sanchez recognized him. He was sober now, and a look of apology passed over his features. “My name Harvard Sanchez,” he said, and then, recovering some pride, he added, “relate to Los Desechados Sanchez family, even Leon Sanchez. He my father, Leon.” Harvard Sanchez looked at Fiskadoro, squinting his eyes as if Fiskadoro were down at the end of the street. “I don’t remember you too good,” Harvard confessed.
“That’s because of I eat something make everybody forget me,” Fiskadoro explained.
“Es ain’t what I ask you. I got buttons. How many you want?” He was referring to radiation-sensitive badges that made travel possible through the contaminated regions. He waved the wand of his geiger counter over a small pile of them that glittered like so many coins.
Fiskadoro just didn’t like the way this man talked. He seemed to be issuing some kind of challenge. “I be going in someday. Not today,” Fiskadoro said.
“Not today," Harvard Sanchez said contemptuously. “Today ’bout the last day. Quarantine end any minute. Bob Marley gone coming, Jah gone coming, everybody coming. Buy now.”
“I mean it what I say. Soon.” Fiskadoro wished he was going into the contaminated regions tomorrow, so he could show this man just who, out of all these people, was ready for danger. He knew that anyone who saw the City became a great person. “Even tomorrow,” he said suddenly. “I be go tomorrow.”
“Mañana!” Harvard Sanchez said. “Then you need buttons. How many? Come on. Everybody going la beach now. Big time today. Let’s go. Can’t wait. Buy now.” He gestured at the people going past. Everybody seemed to be headed in the same direction. All along the street the vendors were packing up their tables.
“I got buttons mi casa. I got buttons,” Fiskadoro said, moving on quickly, almost against his will.
He felt completely defeated when Harvard Sanchez shouted after him, “Fish-man!” Not least of all because it was his name.
When Fiskadoro reached his teacher’s house he found a whole lot of Israelites, black people with painted faces and wild shiny black braids of hair — feathered and animal-skinned Israelites who didn’t know how to talk — carrying Mr. Cheung’s grandmother away in her red rocker. Mr. Cheung was directing and encouraging them cautiously. Fiskadoro stood in the street.
His teacher noticed him and came over. “Fiskadoro,” he said.
“Si,” Fiskadoro said.
His teacher clasped his hands together over his belly, and then unclasped them and flung his arms wide. “These Israelites are going to have a ceremony. I’ve agreed that we’ll play some songs for them.”
“We got the music,” Fiskadoro said.
“Exactly, exactly. You understand.” Mr. Cheung looked a little ashamed of himself.
The Israelites moved past them carrying Grandmother Wright in her red chair, three on each side. Grandmother looked straight ahead. Her feet hung down in thick blue socks.
“We go play para tu,” Fiskadoro told the Israelites. He and Mr. Cheung followed along behind.
The six Israelites carrying Grandmother Wright in her red chair didn’t seem capable of tiring, but after the group of them had passed beyond Twicetown, with the old woman floating in their midst and Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro trailing them closely and nearly every vendor following also in a spontaneous parade, the Orchestra Manager found space for his grandmother on a mule-cart, and they put her aboard.
Grandmother faced out the back of the cart, rocking to and fro with each step of the burro, and she clutched the arms of her chair as she had clutched the side of the bunk on the boat that had saved her from the waves nearly ninety years before, as she had clutched the metal side-rails of the stretcher on which she’d been unloaded from the boat, and as she had clutched the higher railings of the bed she’d failed to sleep in at the naval infirmary at Sangley Point in the Philippine Islands.
Today was one of her clearer days. She was recalling these things on purpose — flinging herself onto these memories as onto a solid place while wild men followed her onto the beach — because the Ocean’s smell and the sounds of water were too much for her. It was better to recall in her mind a terror that was finished than to face, in some confusion, these salt waves and their very doubtful intentions.
The Israelites knew the proper place. It was only a few hundred meters downshore from their tiny village, a miscellany of lean-tos surrounding their wrecked vessel. They stepped hard, three or four of them, on the rear of the mule-cart and tipped it toward the sand, taking hold of the rocking chair. They set down Grandmother Wright with a thump before the mud flats some distance from the action of the waves.
There were more people here than Mr. Cheung had ever seen in one place at one time. Possibly, everyone was here. His wife Eileen had come along with the mob of vendors who’d left their tables behind and hurried here to watch and sell nothing. Eileen gave him a kiss and wandered off. At one point or another he saw every member of The Miami Symphony Orchestra, but they all pretended they didn’t see him. At least two dozen fishing boats sat where the outgoing tide had beached them, all in a row with their anchor lines sprouting from the mud, and most of the Army population seemed to be present. Fiskadoro’s two little brothers were here, the smaller one riding the shoulders of the larger. Mr. Cheung thought he saw Fiskadoro’s mother, but then remembered that she’d passed on. The bodyguards employed by his own half-brother, Martin, appeared and disappeared on the edges of the crowd; and Martin himself, and Park-Smith, also avoiding the two clarinetists, convened and dispersed in various corners of the gathering.
Only Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro played for the Israelites. But far from being disappointed in the ensemble’s size, these savage people were all enthralled. They came around and for once stood quietly in one place, tipping their heads, closing their eyes, and listening as if this music came from far away, or as if they were remembering it fondly from a time in their lives more sensible and beautiful than this one.
The Orchestra Manager and his pupil played improvisations based on the Sidney Bechet exercises. Fiskadoro played better than his teacher: as soon as he tasted the reed with his tongue, he forgot himself and turned into music. The tide lay far out, and their songs flew over the mud flats and died above the small waves. After an hour, as they took a break and Mr. Cheung cleared the spit from his mouthpiece with a bit of cloth, he said to Flying Man, “Tell me, please, what this is all about.”