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.
***
"My name is Fiskadoro." He was aware that mucus flowed from his nostrils, but he felt he would demean himself by wiping it away. "My father is dead."
The others nodded. Harvard gouged a depression in the sand with his toes and placed a heel in it.
"My father is dead!" As soon as he'd said it, Fiskadoro saw he'd made it true again–again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn't simple. It wasn't one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person's life was to drink it.
***
He moved his hands as if gnarling up a bunch of string. "In the time when it was cold, we, my family, we burned our copy of the Constitution to get the fire going one day. Everybody was in despair, the children were coming out crooked, every tide left dead poison fish, nobody put out the boats, nobody could get together and say, Let's keep the fires going in our stoves–I remember this, my father told me and I remember a little bit. Our family burned a copy of the Constitution and all the books to stay alive, but first they memorized the Constitution, everyone took two paragraphs, they clung to the ways they knew–they did this, Eileen, because it would keep them going on, step by step. It isn't good, calling yourself Swanson-Johnson, as if a name is a joke. Next a word will be a joke, and then comes a time when even a thought is a joke.
***
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.
***
Nodding down into a nap beneath the canopy of her memories, she jerked awake and saw the form again in the early mist of the second morning and the third day–a rock, a whale, some white place to cling to, sleep, and breathe. And in her state of waking, she jerked awake. And from that waking, she woke up.