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 upshore 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 to 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 seems to wander hopelessly near the place of their burning; but all of them were smiling and no longer touched with pain.
Some decades ago we all thought the end of the world would be quick. A bomb would go off, and the explosion, or its immediate aftermath, would split time into a before and an after. We don't think about the apocalypse much in these terms anymore, because our possible apocalypses have been replaced with a near-certain one, one which will be slow coming. Though it will be no less transformative, it will be leisurely enough to allow some of us to ignore it. And yet the threat of the other kind of apocalypse may be no less real than it used to be, certainly no less than in 1985, when Denis Johnson wrote the post-nuclear apocalypse novel Fiskadoro.
Society in Fiskadoro, such as it is, clings to the Florida Keys. In Miami, ashy skeletons are still sitting in their cars, but Key West, now called Twicetown because the two bombs that fell on it both proved to be duds, is a thriving center of what one might call enterprise. People's shanties are cobbled together from whatever they can find, from carseats and old church pews, and what work there is seems to mostly be limited to subsistence fishing boats. Many people speak a kind of Spanish-English patois that makes the book seem like the closest thing out there to Riddley Walker. Civilization may have survived in its more developed forms in Cuba; the citizens of Twicetown get Cuban radio stations. Into this life Fiskadoro is born, a son of an ordinary fisherman, who cries when his father is killed and who wants Anthony Cheung, who plays with the Miami Symphony Orchestra--a ragtag group of amateur musicians who have appropriated the name in a gesture of desperation for civilization--to teach him out to play the clarinet.
Fiskadoro is a book about remembering and forgetting. Mr. Cheung and his associates gather weekly to be read to from the few books that remain, including a child's book on dinosaurs and, apparently, The Sun Also Rises. They grasp after the knowledge that will keep them connected to a past which has disappeared, but the knowledge itself is partial and flimsy: "The dinosaur tracks in England all went west to east," Mr. Cheung recounts. But "[by] what light was this fact called 'knowledge'? Wasn't it just one more inexplicable thing to mystify them, didn't it subtract from what they knew rather than add to it?" When the society barters for a book about the bombing of Nagasaki, a book which can at last tell them how they got to where they are, the reading causes consternation and disbelief, even a vague conviction that reading it alone has brought the hurricane that rages outside--to know about apocalypse is to invite it again. Mr. Cheung's Grandmother Wright is one of the few people who can truly remember the "before" times; she spends much of her day reminiscing privately about her experiences as a girl during the Fall of Saigon and her escape by helicopter--a set of carefully drawn memories which seem as if they were lifted out of another of Johnson's novels, like Tree of Smoke.
But if Grandma Wright is the past and Mr. Cheung a baffled, uneasy present, Fiskadoro is the future. One day he wanders off from his home on the old Key West army base and is taken in by a group of "swamp-men" who practice a form of Islam and believe Fiskadoro to possess the soul of another teenager who drowned. They inflict on him a ritual circumcision--which they call a "subincision," and which he must do himself, with a sharpened rock--that leaves him without the ability to generate new memories. When he returns to Twicetown, he remembers no one, but he has become an expert clarinetist: "He has forgotten how not to play," Mr. Cheung notes. Fiskadoro represents a hope for the future that lies in forgetting the past; unlike Mr. Cheung, he has unshackled himself from the need to know what has happened before:
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?
The thought gives Mr. Cheung panic, but the novel suggests that there is a kind of hopefulness in the innocence of Fiskadoro. A belief, perhaps, that saving the world lies not in remembering the past, Santayana-like, but in forgetting it, and embracing the eternal present. In this light, one begins to see the cobbled-together, resourceful nature of the society that has grown up around Fiskadoro as something beautiful. The novel ends with an image of great ambiguity: a white shape on the horizon that may be a ship from Cuba coming to "save" them, or perhaps even another explosion, marking a new kind of destruction. But Fiskadoro suggests that whatever happens, it won't be another line in the sand that divides the before from the after, but another turn in a constant renewing.
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