Halibut on the Moon

by David Vann

  “There’s nothing that will work anyway. The waves can become anything, and they’re inside. There’s no escaping them.” Jim can feel his pulse hard now, fingers swelling, head beginning to swim.

  “You look uncomfortable. What are you feeling now?”

  But Jim can’t speak. He closes his eyes and sees the tracery of pain in his head and feels the gulf below, something to fall through endlessly as it grows in size and pressure.

  “Tell me what you’re feeling, Jim.”

  “It’s more like quicksand than waves, more like sinking or falling as it grows around me, and I won’t be able to breathe. Everything tightening.”

  “This is panic, Jim. It’s natural. It’s okay. When we feel overwhelmed, we panic, and that’s our way of surviving. You’re a survivor. You’re going to get through this. You’re doing exactly the right thing. Now I want you to just focus on your breath, on your exhale. Let it out all the way, slowly. Yes. And now again, let your breath out slowly. This is what you’ll do whenever this happens, just know that it’s all okay and all you have to do is focus on your breath. The panic is your clearest sign that you want to live.”

  Jim wonders if this is true. Does he want to live?

  “I need to ask you some questions, Jim. I’m sorry to do this when you feel uncomfortable, but we have only a short time, so I have to start asking now. Just keep focusing on your exhales, letting your breath go and letting everything be easy.”

  Letting everything be easy. That’s what Jim would like. No longer struggle.

  “Have you had thoughts of hurting yourself?”

  “Hurting myself? Only suicide, but not hurting myself. I don’t want to feel any pain. I’m tired of pain.”

  “Is it the sinus pain still?”

  “Yes, but more than that, some kind of grief about my life, some pain about who I’ve become and everything I’ve done and also what’s waiting for me, the IRS and all that.”

  “I’m sorry. There’s so much to talk about, but I need to just ask a series of questions now. I’m required to.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have you imagined how you might commit suicide? Have you imagined the method?”

  “Yes. My pistol.”

  “Do you have your pistol with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “In this room?”

  “No. In the truck, in my bag.”

  “Have you separated your gun and shells, as I asked?”

  “Yes. But not separated far.”

  “Would you consider giving the pistol to someone now for safekeeping, until you’re feeling better?”

  “No. I like having it.”

  “Have you imagined hurting anyone else, shooting anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? What about Rhoda, if you see her and she wants to be with another man and you feel angry?”

  “No.”

  “Even though she lost her parents that way? That doesn’t make it possible for you to think about shooting her?”

  “No. I would never do that.”

  “And what about your children, David and Tracy? When you see them, if you feel sad and don’t want to leave them, is there any chance you might try to take them with you, kill them first and then kill yourself?”

  “No. No.”

  “Are you angry at them, or at your ex-wife, Elizabeth?”

  “No. She’s fine. They’re fine. I want them to be happy. I would never hurt them.”

  “Okay.”

  Dr. Brown pauses a moment and swivels to the side to look at the trees. He’s only a few years older than Jim.

  “I can’t be saved,” Jim says. “Thank you for trying, but there are too many hours alone. It just goes on and on and everything hurts. My whole body hurts.”

  “I’d like you to try some medication. I was trying to avoid that, but you’re fighting against so much, the medication will help. It changes your mood. Instead of falling, you’ll be on solid ground. You’ll be more stabilized.”

  “How long does it take to work?”

  “It takes several weeks.”

  Jim smiles.

  “What’s that smile about?”

  “Like being on a ship in a storm and someone says help is coming in several weeks.”

  “Look, Jim.” Dr. Brown is leaning forward across his desk now. “You’re suffering, but you’re a smart man, and you know you have your children to live for and you know there’s still so much you can do in life. I don’t normally talk like this during therapy. I try not to give my opinion. But you’re in a crisis now, and you need to know you can get through this. So I’m telling you I’ve seen people suffering far more, with less to live for, who pulled through. Sixteen years I’ve been doing this. What you have to do is give your pistol to someone to keep for you. And you can’t be left alone, not for the next couple weeks until the medication stabilizes. I’m going to talk with your brother and make sure he understands that. Okay?” “Okay.”

  “Let’s go talk with him now, then. And you did good work today, talking about the waves. You’re better able to understand and express what’s happening than anyone else I’ve worked with who’s feeling this way, so that’s an excellent sign.”

  “The signs are all good. The omens.”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t use that word.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of the helplessness, the sense of fate in the Greeks. We’re not determined by omens.”

  “But what if that’s all we’re doing here, reading signs? What if there’s no changing course but only trying to see what’s coming?”

  “You can always change course. But let’s go out now and talk with your brother.”

  Dr. Brown rises and crosses the room to open the door. He seems self-conscious, awkward in his walk, as if he’s worried what Jim will think of his walking, and this makes Jim smile.

  Jim pauses at the door, makes a broad sweep of his arm letting himself out, a grand gesture. He likes this thought, a grand gesture of exit. Maybe that’s why suicides kill others first, to provide some punctuation, to make it all mean more than nothing. He has, in fact, imagined shooting Rhoda first, on this very trip if he has a chance to meet her, but it’s not an abstract thing, an idea of the meaning of it all. It’s pure rage and satisfaction. A gun demands to be used. A heavy pistol like a .44 magnum, meant for bears, wants carnage like in Dirty Harry. It’s in the nature of the thing itself, and it matches something inside Jim, some anger that the world wasn’t put together right, that all rules were meant to screw him from the first.

  Dr. Brown follows him to the pickup and has made no comment about his gesture at the door. Every small tic examined, but not the grand gestures.

  Raining still, and Jim doesn’t care. Dr. Brown has an umbrella but Jim strides bareheaded, steps in whatever part of a puddle is in his line. He likes the feeling of the rain, cold but nothing like Alaska. Reassuring to have the sky finally touch, to be able to reach it after all the taunting.

  “Well here we are,” he says when he reaches the pickup.

  Gary has rolled his window down. “Don’t just stand there in the rain,” he says. “Come around and get in.”

  “I like it here,” Jim says.

  Dr. Brown stands close enough to cover him with the umbrella, a disappointment. Wet smell of Brown in close, or is that the smell of Jim’s jacket? Wool that he’s used on hunts and camping, washed but still holding every campfire and the blood of mountain goats and Dall rams, caribou, deer, salmon, halibut. Reassuring.

  “I’ve prescribed medication for your brother,” Dr. Brown tells Gary.

  “And what about for my brother?” Jim asks. “Any help there?”

  They ignore him. Neither even looks at him, but he knows he spoke aloud.

  “It will take two weeks to settle, so he can’t be left alone during those two weeks. His guns and shells have to be separated, and any other guns where he might be staying, and really someone should be keeping his pistol
for him at this time. He shouldn’t have it.”

  So strange to be talked about in this way. And no mention of the danger he might take others with him. What kind of warning doesn’t include that?

  Gary is nodding as if these are simple directions. How to make a soup, or the turns to find the highway again. And why this sudden belief in the medication? Why didn’t he start weeks ago, while he was still reliably alive for several more weeks?

  One shoulder still taking rain, getting colder. “Enough of this,” he says. “Just give me the medication. You should have given it to me before.” He feels angry suddenly, so angry. The short session, overcharged, and standing here in the rain being talked about as if he’s a child.

  “We’ll go back to my office,” Brown says. “All three of us, to talk for a few minutes, then I’ll give you the prescription.”

  “And I’ll pay.”

  “Yes.”

  So the three of them walk back through the rain into the office that pretends to offer no shelter, pretends to be open to the forest. Three men who will huddle around a campfire and try to understand something about what to do next and why, because what meaning has there ever been, from the first time men huddled around fire? All the struggle to survive, for hundreds of thousands of years, every single person struggling, and for what?

  Dr. Brown offers him a small towel. “To dry your head,” he says, and Jim laughs.

  “What?” Brown asks.

  “That’s perfect. My head’s wet. We found the problem.”

  “Please,” Gary says. “Please try here. You’re not trying.”

  “I’m not trying. Says he who’s been through the same struggle, felt the same things, been the same person.”

  Gary is so big and looks so small, helpless.

  “Let’s sit,” Brown says, so they do, Jim and Gary on the couch at opposite ends, slouched low.

  “We have a plan,” Brown says. “And the purpose of a plan is to make everything easy and clear. It’s okay if you feel confused, if you feel angry, if you feel a range of things. That doesn’t affect the plan. No matter what you feel, no matter what happens, you just follow the plan. And the plan is this: you don’t leave Jim alone, Gary. You or someone else with him at all times, and that includes sleeping in the same room with him at night. Guns away from him, with shells separated. No big knives, no keys to the car. Jim is at the highest risk. He has to be watched. If you want, he can enter a facility right now, a hospital, where he’ll be under care and supervision. This is a crisis time. But I can’t put him there against his will. It has to be his choice, made freely.”

  “A nuthouse?” Jim asks. “You’d put me in a nuthouse?”

  “That’s not what it is. It’s a place with professional help and supervision.”

  “Fuck that. I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. No thanks.”

  “Okay, fine. We’ll take that off the table. But Gary, you can’t let him be alone. And Jim, you can’t go back to Alaska alone. I don’t recommend you see Rhoda during this trip, either.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling him,” Gary says.

  “I’m going to see her if I can. She’s not the problem.”

  “It’s true she’s not the problem. But your desperate feelings about her push you in the wrong direction. It’s better to avoid high-stress situations right now. Anything that makes you feel angry.”

  “We’re supposed to feel angry when we’ve been screwed, right? Isn’t that an appropriate feeling?”

  “The problem is the swing. You feel euphoric and then you crash into despair and rage, then euphoria again, then completely lost and desolate, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s actually a pretty good description.”

  “You feel that?” Gary asks.

  “It’s why I’m so fun to be around. Such good entertainment value.”

  “The medication will level things out, keep you from swinging so far in either direction.”

  “I won’t feel the euphoria?”

  “No.”

  “But I like it. Can’t someone come up with a drug that kills only the lows?”

  “Cocaine,” Gary says.

  “Let’s not talk about recreational drugs,” Brown says. “You certainly don’t want to add that. And our time is up. I have another appointment. But I’ll write the prescription right now and give you a couple samples to start.”

  “So that’s it?” Jim asks. “I fly down from Alaska to be saved, and this is it? Medication that will help two weeks from now, and a warning to my brother to watch me as if I’m a child?”

  “I think you know we’ve talked about more than that. You made good progress today in talking about the waves.”

  “Waves?” Gary asks. “What waves?”

  Brown is bent over his prescription pad, scribbling. Happy to be finished with Jim, and wouldn’t everyone be happy to be finished with Jim, including Jim? And isn’t this Jim smiling at this thought? Nice one, fucker. Laugh yourself to the grave. “Finished with Jim,” he says. “We all want to be finished with Jim. Rhoda too. She wants me to leave her alone so she can move on to her new life with Rich, the poor fuck from Konocti. Wants to marry him.”

  “I’m sorry, but our time is up. We’ll have to talk more about Rhoda next time. We’re meeting just three days from now, correct? At two p.m.?”

  “That’s right,” Gary says. “I’ll bring him back down.”

  “Don’t forget the wet naps,” Jim says. “In case I make a doo-doo.”

  “I’ll show you to the door,” Brown says, rising. “And that’ll be sixty dollars, please.”

  “Callous fuck,” Jim says. “This is my life, right at the end.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Brown says. “You can get through this, Jim. You have everything to live for still, including your children, and you can make changes in your life. For now, just focus on the next three days.”

  “That’s a world of time. How about one day?”

  “Even better.”

  Jim hands him three twenties and takes the prescription and samples. “Fuck you for not giving a shit if I die right now.” Brown takes the money. He’s holding the door open and doesn’t say anything. He isn’t even looking at Jim. Wavy hair, sideburns, probably trying to be a ladies’ man, picking up women by analyzing them and offering to fuck them two weeks from now.

  “Fine,” Jim says and walks out.

  “You can’t tell your therapist to fuck off,” Gary says. “You need him.”

  “You can fuck off too.”

  “That’s great. You’re really trying here.”

  “If you knew what the middle of the night is like, when I can’t sleep, then you’d be a tad disappointed, too, at what’s been offered today.”

  “Let’s focus on real things, then. We’re going now to see your kids. Think of them when it’s the middle of the night. Think of them without a father for the rest of their lives.”

  3

  Wide streets in Santa Rosa, lots of trees. They climb into small hills, Hidden Valley, go up Oak Hill Drive and the house is on the left. His son, David, playing basketball in a short, curved driveway with a hoop too low. Blond hair, too long, parted down the middle and feathered back, his son looking like a girl, a pink plastic comb in the back pocket of his bell-bottoms, which are too tight.

  “We never looked like that,” he says.

  “It’s fine,” Gary says. “They all look like that now. My hair is long too.”

  “Well I don’t like it.”

  They pull into the driveway, and David comes running for Jim’s side of the truck, smiling, and that does make Jim grin. There’s nothing like how your children love you, no matter who you are or what you’ve done.

  “Dad!” Such a simple thing.

  Jim opens his door and his son gives him a hug, then his daughter, Tracy, is there, too, unbelievably cute, only eight years old, wisps of blonde hair held in butterfly barrettes, wearing a pink sweater. She feels so soft and small when he picks
her up.

  “I made you a present,” she says.

  “Oh really?” he says. “What’s that?”

  “Hiya, Jim.” It’s Elizabeth, his ex-wife, come out to the driveway also, standing a bit farther away. She looks happy and healthy, wide smile. They’ve gotten along fine in all the years of their divorce, never fighting in front of the children, which is good.

  “Well,” Jim says, feeling overwhelmed. Tracy is a bit heavy to hold now, so he lets her down.

  Then everyone seems to be talking at once. He can’t focus. Elizabeth asking how his trip was, his son asking if they can go hunting, his daughter wanting to show him the present, Gary saying something about this evening. It’s all too much, and he can’t tell what he feels. Like being buried and flying at the same time.

  So he stands in the cool air, under clouds massed and gray, heavy but not dumping rain at the moment, and he keeps one hand on the hood of the truck for balance, warm from the drive. He can smell the engine.

  What’s odd is that his children don’t know. They don’t realize how far gone he is. All the adults know. Even Elizabeth, whom he hasn’t really talked to, is looking at him strangely, understanding something, but David is focused only on hunting, going today, right here in Santa Rosa.

  “I don’t think there’s anywhere to hunt here, sweetie,” Elizabeth says, but David is insistent.

  “We’ll just use the pellet gun,” he says. “Just go for quail.” Thirteen years old, so young he’s not quite real. Hard to believe there’s a mind in there working independently. Changing so fast he’s a stranger now to Jim. How did the David from three months ago, at Christmas, become this David? There have been changes, and Jim wasn’t there. He must have a secret life too. Jacking off all the time, no doubt, just like Jim, but his face looks so innocent and smooth it’s hard to believe. Are his thoughts of girls, or hunting, or homework, or friends, or his father, or something else? Jim wouldn’t know.

  What Jim wanted was for them to have a year together, his son coming up to Fairbanks for the school year, but David said no. So every visit will be this way, with something changed and lost and never made continuous or believable, never known.