Halibut on the Moon

by David Vann

  He wouldn’t call it a soul, because that’s a tired thing shuffling around in chains and having to sing hymns and attend potluck dinners. The closest he can come to naming it is to remember those moments fishing in Alaska. When he was alone on his boat in a cove and the world stood still. He could hear individual drips from the trees and the cool air offered no resistance. Some part of him was able to travel then, to fill larger spaces. He feels the power of that now, some force in him that can grow without limit.

  The problem is that there’s no goal, nothing to attempt. There’s only sex, because there’s nothing else. Sex is what’s left, always. It will never end, and so perhaps it should be called the soul. Jim rubs at his boner in a way he hopes no one will see, and the hot ache of it makes him want to do terrible things, right now. He wants to stuff this into her mouth and cunt and make her swallow, and he wants to punish and master and make it known that he did not choose any of this. It was chosen for him and he objects.

  “In the name of the father, the son, and the holy sex,” he says.

  “What the hell?” Gary asks.

  “Just thinking of what is truly eternal, and that is our copulatory urge. That is what remains beyond us, our finest and highest calling.”

  “Think of your audience here.”

  “But I am. David should know. He should know as early as possible. He’s already a man.”

  “This is only the euphoria.”

  “Euphoria is clarity, truth. Naming what can never be destroyed. Finding what it is in us that lives.”

  “Are you talking about sex?” David asks.

  “Yes,” Jim says. “Talking about the sacred. You won’t find it in church. Everything there is dead and has been a thousand years. But you get a girl to come to your room when your mom’s not home, and when you first feel her with your finger, how wet and soft and silky she is, that’s when you come closest to what has made us.”

  “Stop, Jim. Tracy is hearing this too.”

  “I’m talking about source and origin. Reaching inside is reaching back. And the fact that you can be with girls only thirteen, or even twelve, just beginning, that’s the most incredible thing. You’ll never have that freedom again the rest of your life. So forget about everything else. I spent so much time on my homework and working at Safeway and going to church, being a good boy, but I should have been doing what your uncle did, just hanging out down at the pier at night with friends and beer and girls and putting all my life’s effort into getting inside. It’s the only goal, the only goal that matters.”

  “David,” Gary says. “You have to understand your father is not well right now. He’s not thinking straight. And Tracy, none of this is for you. Don’t listen.”

  “Don’t take away the only thing I have to offer. Right at the end, the truth. It’s the gift of all the failure. I know now what doesn’t matter, because I spent my whole life on it.”

  “Jim.”

  “Money, too, completely worthless. All I’ve made as a dentist. You need to know that, both of you, David and Tracy. Don’t make yourselves slaves to money. And don’t care what others think. Another worthless thing. Everything we’re told, all our lives, ignore all of it. Listen only to me right now, your father trying to help you.”

  But of course they won’t be able to hear, because that’s the truth also, that we can offer nothing. No one can believe anything they haven’t already learned. There’s no transmission possible, no shortcut.

  “We should take them back to their mother,” Gary says. “Just have dinner ourselves tonight.”

  “No. I get my full time, crazy or not. Especially at the end. Don’t take things away from me at the end.”

  “This isn’t the end.”

  “I think you know.”

  6

  Mary’s house is small but tucked away in some trees off a less-traveled road. Mary thin and lovely, dark haired, Italian heritage, or Spanish. Suddenly Jim can’t remember which, and he’s too embarrassed to ask. But she’s the kind of woman Gary has always gotten, more beautiful than the kind of woman Jim has ever gotten, not to compare or want to take a stone to your brother’s head when he’s out tilling his fields, but still, it creates this envy in Jim, the same as anger, not so far from rage, not far removed from the larger sense of unfairness and being fucked by everything in life and wanting to make some comment about that, some larger gesture and final, of course, and involving the magnum. Always back to the magnum.

  He could shoot her right now, and then his brother, and then his children, then visit Elizabeth, then visit his parents. What holds him back? Not something that can be named. It doesn’t seem to be anything at all, and in fact if he tries to feel it, it’s not there. Nothing holding him back. He simply hasn’t done it yet. It hasn’t happened. That’s all that can be said about why it hasn’t happened.

  “Hi there, Jim,” Mary says. He’s already standing in the driveway, not remembering when he left the truck or whether anything else has been said.

  “I don’t think I can say hi anymore,” Jim says. “I’ve said it so many times in my life, and what does it mean?”

  “Well just come in then, you silly goose,” Mary says and takes his arm. Jim feels like he’s eight years old. Mary teaches elementary school, and she’s identified Jim’s current emotional age right away.

  A lot of rugs and throw pillows, stuff on the walls and counters, no free space anywhere. Jim feels claustrophobic. Owls made out of macaroni, crocheted kittens, children’s drawings in crayon. Color everywhere, a storm of color like voices, manic, and he hasn’t felt this before. It must be the medication, already fucking with him. Making everything worse for two weeks. How can that be a good plan? Brown said it can increase his symptoms and add new ones. And if he suddenly stops taking the pills, that’s even more dangerous. Trapped on some narrow track going full speed toward something he knows can’t be good.

  Mary has sat him on the couch in the living room, and for some reason his children aren’t here yet. Outside still with Gary.

  “It would be so easy,” Jim says. “Really, you have to know. I’m a danger now to myself and others. I could do it at any time.”

  Mary has a nervous laugh, smiles at him like he’s made some joke, and then walks away to the kitchen. Can she really be that cowardly? How much warning does Jim have to give? Why is he not in a straitjacket?

  “Did you hear me?” he says, and he realizes his voice is too loud.

  “Oh Jim,” she says in her voice for children.

  So she really is completely incapable of dealing with him. And what about everyone else? How is his family supposed to help him? His children are too young. Elizabeth could maybe help, but she’s no longer his family. Gary is trying but can’t go where Jim needs to go. And his parents won’t. Only Rhoda will go there, but everyone is trying to keep him away from her.

  “What happens when it happens?” Jim asks. “What will you tell yourself then? Will you say,‘Oh Jim’?”

  Mary’s head shaking a bit, perhaps, as she looks down at the cheese and crackers she’s preparing, but her concentration seems absolute. She is completely denying that he could have spoken or that she could have heard. Just the cheese and crackers. Arranging them in cute little rows.

  “There,” she says brightly. “You must be hungry.” She sets the wooden cheese board on the coffee table, somehow finding space among all the colorful crap, the magazines and knitted things, things he can’t even see he hates them so much, and then she walks away, without ever having looked at him.

  His children and Gary still mysteriously absent, so he sits alone, has a cracker, whole wheat, a slice of cheese. Swiss, with holes, made with a shotgun. Do they shoot the cow while milking, to put the holes in the milk, or wait until later when they have the round of cheese? He imagines rolling them out of a barn, rounds of cheese as large as wheels, leaning them against hay bales and a line of men and boys with shotguns waiting for the command to fire. The way they shot pigeons in Tom Kalfs
beck’s barn, one rousting inside and the rest waiting under the sky, four shots each, a shell ready in the chamber.

  “The seas are so huge,” David is saying as they enter, and Jim has a vision of the future, his brother becoming a replacement father for David and Tracy, taking them hunting and fishing and telling them nothing about a life or how it should be lived, same as other fathers.

  “What are you talking about?” Jim asks, in a rare social moment, feeling some will suddenly to last a bit longer.

  “The moon,” David says. “We get to use the telescope tonight. You should see it. It’s so cool.”

  “He’s talking about seas on the moon,” Gary says. “I used to know the names of some of them, names like Sea of Tranquility or something, but I can’t remember now.”

  “They took a halibut up there once,” Jim says. “NASA wanted to see how it would adapt. A big one, almost three hundred pounds, in its own special Plexiglas tank, and they set it on the ground to let it flop, to see how high it would fly.”

  “Jim,” Gary says.

  But David and Tracy are both listening as if Jim is delivering news of the Messiah. “Imagine its white underside against the white dust and ash and sand or whatever it is on the moon, looking identical, like a mirror image, and that dark topside looking like the moon from farther away, patterns like craters. Dark side of the moon, essentially. The halibut has been waiting for this meeting, waiting for millions of years, brought home, finally. Destiny. And then it hits both ends, hard, like wings, and the gravity is so much less. Even on Earth, they can launch a few feet above deck. But on the moon, this halibut flew.”

  “Wow,” David says.

  “That’s right. The astronauts were supposed to measure how high, but their pole was only twenty feet. They saw it pass that two or three times, rising into thin air, wobbling like a great celestial jellyfish, white as milk, the underside that is so smooth and impossible, made of dreams.”

  “How long did it fly?”

  “They don’t know. None of them looked at their watches, and none of them could remember time or what it’s supposed to be. That flight could have been minutes or hours. They can’t say. And they can’t remember when it first took off, the first few feet of it rising. For some reason, that’s gone. All they remember is watching it fade into the sky above them.” “Whoa,” David says.

  “Silly goose,” Mary says. “You can’t bring a halibut to the moon.”

  “They did,” Jim says.

  “It couldn’t survive up there.”

  “They didn’t mean for it to survive. It was supposed to have one beautiful flight, is all. That’s all any of us are meant to have. None of us survive. The most we can be is an experiment. Billions of us are for nothing, but then maybe one of us has some use. Just think of all the other halibut who lay flat on the bottom of the ocean all their lives and died there in a place far more frightening than the moon, hundreds of feet down under colossal pressure, the pressure of having a mountain stacked on top of you, and no light, and so cold, but this one halibut is brought up from that world, put carefully in a tank on a boat, brought to Ketchikan or Prince Rupert and trucked all the way to Florida, thousands of miles, or maybe they flew the tank. I don’t know. They probably flew it in a cargo jet. And they take it to the launchpad and lift it up by crane, this tank held by straps being lifted alongside a rocket, hoisted up toward the nose cone. Just imagine that, clear Plexiglas with Alaskan water and this three-hundred-pound alien resting on the bottom, both eyes on one side of its head, looking more strange than anything we’ll ever find in space. They lower that tank onto a kind of gangplank that enters the nose cone and wheel it in and strap it in place. And when the rocket engines ignite, the halibut is the only one who can take the pressure, all the g-force. Nothing at all compared to the pressure where it comes from. It’s already flat and can’t be flattened more. It was made for this trip. It doesn’t mind the cold of outer space, and doesn’t need to breathe. All it needs is Alaskan seawater and no heating, no special care. Just a bubble filter to oxygenate the water, and some food pellets. Best astronaut there ever was. And patient. No need for psychological tests or precautions or worries about whether it might go crazy or get listless and suicidal or miss family too much, no need for communication back home. The other halibut don’t even know it’s gone. No parades down there, no stupid ideas of heroes or sacrifice.”

  “Jim,” Gary says. “Really, just sit down. The manic thing now, and you’re scaring everyone.”

  “Just focus on the story. Think of that halibut cruising two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles, and spaceflight is so easy for it. We don’t know what we’re made for. Who would have realized that a halibut is the best astronaut? You might not think at first about how well adapted it is to cold and pressure and darkness and endless time with nothing more than feeding off the bottom. You have to understand the beauty in finding what the halibut was meant for. When they finally arrive, the humans are essentially bonkers and on the edge of death, all fucked up from lack of gravity and normal human contact and sunshine and fresh air and from eating space goo and that orange drink, but the halibut is ready to go. But beyond that, not even worried about being ready or not, no thoughts at all, which is the best possible state of mind. No fear as some mechanical arm shifts its tank out onto the moon and then tips the tank. It sloshes out there, the first water to hit the moon, something that hunk of rock must feel, recognition of thirst or something like it, desire for things never known, just like when sexual desire first hits us, so foreign and strange and impossible, nothing like our previous experience, and even the air feels it, evaporation, a vacuum becoming air because of this water, feeling itself come into being, and to the halibut the place feels warm, easy, so light, a weightlessness it has never imagined, the most exquisite freedom. It flops not out of fear or any instinct it’s known before but this time out of pure joy, as much as a fish can know that. It’s not missing oxygen yet, has just been immersed, healthy and strong and now absolutely free. It hits both ends and knows flight, true flight, for the first time. Not restricted by the thickness of water. No resistance. Something no human has ever felt either, and no bird, to fly in an airless place, and without any suit. No barrier. Only the purest flight ever known, pure also because both its eyes are on the top side of its head. Any other fish would see the astronauts below, the lunar module, the surface of the moon, but not the halibut. It sees only emptiness above, undistracted, or maybe it sees Earth, a blue-and-white orb so far away, and knows the ocean is there, Alaskan waters, reaches for home, flops again against nothing to try to propel itself faster. What does a halibut think in that moment of flight? Until we know that, do we know anything?”

  Gary is holding him, which is so strange, holding him from behind, hands on his biceps. “Let’s just sit down,” Gary says, and Jim does it. He feels exhausted suddenly, so exhausted. He lies back against the couch and closes his eyes, curls to the side.

  “What’s wrong, Dad?” David says, but this is so far away Jim can’t respond. He needs to rest.

  Tracy does her nervous cute laugh, and he’d like to reassure her, be a father, be normal and who he’s supposed to be, but he just can’t. How did he ever do it before?

  7

  They let him lie down in a bedroom until dinner. No attempt, strangely, to remove his muddy clothing and make him take a shower. Too afraid of him, perhaps.

  His eyes the deepest sinkholes, caverns of ache, falling through to the backside of his head. Nose completely blocked, as usual, and throat raw from breathing through his mouth. He has trouble swallowing, and it’s not possible to have the next breath until after swallowing. A kind of panic, trying to clear that tiny passage. His life passing through the smallest hole. All we are is breath, and he can never get one.

  And thoughts, without end, his head never turning off. So tired they jump everywhere, his practice in Fairbanks at a standstill, patients all having their appointments postponed, over and over, death
for a practice. He was going to bring on another dentist before he left, but the few he interviewed could tell. They knew he was not well.

  And the ranch, whether the IRS will get it, whether he’ll ever see it again, the feeling of hot air coming up the lower glades, blowing against his face and the hairs on his arms, pure pleasure, seeing the patterns in grass, swirls and eddies from several hundred yards approaching, closest sense of god visiting us. His father standing there fat and hidden away but perhaps feeling the same pleasure. Who can know? His father grew up on a farm in another time, only ten years after the first flight, long before TV and when the moon was only myth, not something that could be reached, and certainly not by a halibut. His father peeled potatoes, woke before daylight, ran traplines. What else?

  Each of them a collection of myths but the gaps between the stories are enormous. Even what he knows of himself, even that is mostly gap, mostly unknown. Mary ignores every gap, forces a continuous story, one that all makes sense because it can’t do otherwise, and to Gary it has never occurred that there is a story or not, and his children are the center still of every story and can’t imagine any gaps yet, but they will when their father is gone. Jim’s problem is that he can’t enter his life, and he will pass along this problem.

  What he needs is to jack off. The only time he can forget breathing and thinking. So he gets up, groaning, and reaches to the bottom of his duffel for one of his Hustlers.

  The women are helping put out a fire, wearing large red firemen’s helmets and little else, handling hoses in ways that don’t seem focused on the task at hand. One is squatting down, her lips butterflied, and she looks so perfect, some airbrushed visitation from Mars or the pearly gates. A god he can believe in, Pussydon, god of the seas within us, endless water for any fire. Two of the women are having a water fight, nipples showing through wet, white T-shirts, hoses spurting into the air, and one of them is sitting on a thick dick, her leg held out to the side.