#denis johnson

He woke up, and the moon was falling down on him. The moon had him looney toons, a few monster things, a few ghosts, a few rrrrrrrrrr tiny psycho cyclers. He heard their howling: "Oh, I like that, I like that. Jimmy, Jimmy." It was his mother's voice. Out the window the moon had a rope laid right across the water to the shore. The Gulf was black as grease and the beach wasn't white; it wasn't quite blue; it wasn't grey. The moon had him looney toons. He stood at his parents' doorway and witnessed a thing in their bed, a monster with four legs in the moonlight. But it wasn't a crazy kind of thing, it was familiar, it was Jimmy and Belinda. Rrrrrrrrr behind him the tiny psycho cyclers rode the air into his home, and his father made a noise as if a bad thorn were coming out. The tiny motorcycle maniacs made rrrrrrrrrr boom boom bwa! boom boom bwa! that shot right through Fiskadoro. It wasn't the crying of tiny engines, it was the radio on the windowsill. The radio was playing Jimi Hendrix. (p. 19)

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Mr. Cheung and Maxwell took their seats at the same time. The history class was ready to start. William Park-Smith, at the front of the room, put on a pair of thick glasses that absolutely blinded him, and addressed the class with a shy wave of his hand. He still wore his flight suit, now streaked with dust and spangled with the stains of rice wine, soup, and gasoline. Beside the zipper, above his heart, he sported a radiation-sensitive button, as much as to say, "I am a believer in rationalism and the sciences." Mr. Cheung could see that the badge was counterfeit. Even those who believed in radiation and ardently feared it made no distinction between the real, original badges and the phony imitations. These days the white cardboard and red cellophane served more to identify than to protect. (p. 43)

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The dinosaur tracks in England all went from west to east, the book said. 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? The sabotage of knowledge by a wealth of facts—they weren't professors, but guerrillas. (p. 46)

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"And I go down on my knees on the deck to pray: 'You there up high! Heavenly Eye watching this trouble! Put your secret message in this book!'"

In the light of flames, Cassius Clay Sugar Ray held out his two hands together, the palms up, like the open pages of the sacred Koran.

"The line my finger pointed say, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

"I say, 'Scuse me what? What blessings?'

"One more line down the page, it said me again, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

"I say, 'Look at the sea all around! This is me I go drowning! Who talking about any blessings?'

"But one line, two lines, three lines—all over the page I see been Allah's one message for me: Would you deny these blessings of the Lord? It say that on those pages of the Koran thirty-two times. When Allah make a message, you don't get no question.

"Now I gone ask to you this," he said: "What that message mean?"

The men and boys around him knew he'd been carried on uncharted currents over the Ocean and washed up against the rotted pier at Plantation, above Key Marathon, and they knew the story of how he'd been carried in a hammock by the Plantation people into Marathon, a completely transformed individual bearing a book about Allah and news of an Alliance for Trading that would make a storm of business over the following decade, until boredom, laziness, and the easy life among laden fruit trees beside a generous sea made work seem too much trouble for the citizens of the Keys. Only the Gambling Alliance remained in effect—also the legend, always larger—and they knew these things by heart, but they didn't know what the message meant, Would you deny these blessings of the Lord?

"It mean, Give thanks," Cassius Clay Sugar Ray explained. "It mean even in the middle of the Ocean, give thanks to Allah. It mean, Dance with your partner. Get it while you can." (pp. 110-11)

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This music was good now, this was Dylan, the great poet of the times of hard rain:

You know sometimes Satan Comes as a man- of peace...

Mr. Cheung tried to fix himself somewhere at the edge of the crowd, to the left, to the right, back ten steps toward the sea, where he might be able to hear the words. But he stopped listening and only wandered over the sand stupidly, like a puppy who'd been smacked on the ear. I suppose, he spoke inside himself, that I'm very much like Mother. But he could hardly make out the tone of his own ruminations inside all this head-hammering rhythm. History, the force of time—he was aware he was obsessed in an unhealthy way with these thoughts—are washing over us like this rocknroll. Some of us are aligned with a slight force, a frail resistance that shapes things for the better—I really believe this: I stand against the forces of destruction, against the forces that took the machines away. (pp. 122-23)

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". . . . But the people don't think, even the people with minds." (p. 129)

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