Halibut on the Moon

by David Vann

16

  He drives back to his parents. He will call Rhoda, because he’s not going to find her. She’s been hidden away. They saw him coming, the whole town boarded up, only dust and sun, the sheriff waiting on a rocking chair on a wooden porch or maybe even he has been locked inside. The saloon doors free to swing but no one in there except a bartender hiding behind the counter with his shotgun. Jim destined to spend his days alone. Every hoof fall of his horse a kind of earthquake felt a hundred miles away, warning everyone. Maker of ghost towns.

  He passes his old office yet again, starting to feel like he’s stalking his previous self. Main Street, from one end of town to another, back and forth, paved over now but otherwise the same as anything from Louis L’Amour. He’s read every one of them, in most cases more than once.

  He drives like a good citizen, passes the old green pier that holds nearly all his lake memories, and turns into the driveway, mounts the steps, reenters the sacred ground he’s been banished from. No laws hold for long.

  His mother in her usual position at the sink. As if the small house is a fort, his father looking out the front window and mother checking the flank, making sure the neighbors don’t invade over the fence, trampling the pansies.

  “I need to call her,” he announces. “I tried to find her but she’s hidden away somewhere.”

  “Jim,” his mother says.

  “Yeah.”

  “We can help you. You don’t need her.”

  “It’s been a lot of help so far. Real progress. But maybe I’ll just call her.”

  His father hasn’t even turned to look. Back of his head, wearing his cap right now, as if he’s outside. Big red ears.

  Jim steps into the thin hallway. Two small bedrooms separated by a long narrow bathroom with pink carpet. The old electric heater from his earliest memories, the clothes hamper where he was sitting when he first came and saw semen, so surprised and the most amazing relief. The bathroom seemed bigger then, and a kind of sacred ground for being the only place private, his bedroom shared with his older sister and then Gary.

  He stands at the toilet and pisses and can smell piss in the carpet. Why carpet a bathroom? Pouches of potpourri on the back of the toilet, crushed roses and cloves and whatever else to battle the piss. The small window high up always open, view of the garage and its bedroom above where each of them moved when they were old enough, though Gary was the first to use it successfully for sex. Privacy wasted on Ginny and Jim, both social misfits with too much time spent working and at church and doing homework. How many did Gary get to have up there?

  He flushes and then stands in front of the bathtub, which has been built into its own alcove wallpapered in roses red and pink, so claustrophobic. Even the tub itself is pink. This small space and so many hours, hundreds of hours through the years, the only place to cry after heartbreak, only place to view contraband, only place to think uninterrupted.

  He stands at the window and can see the trellis and strange seedpods, like snap peas except grown overlarge, curved and long and sharp like scimitars, brown and so rough and inedible, hell’s version of snap peas, what the garden can become. And what did they ever use the backyard for, or the shade from that trellis? He had to mow that small lawn hundreds of times, but no one ever sat there, too boxed in and limited. The places we live so strange, what they might say or fail to say about us.

  But this bathroom performing its function even now. No one intruding, no one calling for him. He’s allowed as much time here as he wants, and the others will steadfastly ignore that passing, too uncomfortable to contemplate. If he could bring in a sleeping bag and just live right here, he might get through two nights with his parents.

  But he steps outside into the hallway and time begins again and momentum and the fight with his family that must have begun before memory. He hasn’t even touched the receiver on the phone before he’s warned again.

  “Just leave her, Jim,” Gary says. “Don’t look back.”

  Jim dials the number he knows easily, and she answers right away, her voice more familiar than anything else here. “It’s me,” he says.

  “You’re freaking out my family.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Donna thinks you’re going to kill me. Are you going to kill me before you kill yourself?”

  “No.”

  “And how do I trust this?”

  “Can we have our usual talk?”

  “There’s no such thing. And especially now that you’re here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your parents are hearing this, and Gary?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you think there can be anything usual?”

  “No. You’re right.”

  “They still think I’m the problem?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well how are you feeling today? Are you okay?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “What are you feeling?”

  “Um. Hard to say standing here. I can’t think.”

  “You’ll have to just ignore them. I’m not going to see you in person.”

  “Yeah,” Jim says. He’s looking at the carpet, thick shag brown with strands of blonde. Almost like a woman’s hair, standing on some giant woman’s head. Unnoticed up here, inconsequential. Flung out in the next wash.

  “I feel shafted,” he says. “Thrown away.”

  “You think I threw you away?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m trying here, Jim. I’m trying to help you, because I realize everyone else you know is worthless for this. But I need you to be fair.”

  “Feelings aren’t fair.”

  “I know that.”

  “Okay. And yeah, I see how it was my fault, cheating on you.”

  “Twice. Or two sets of times. Who knows how many women each time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t do this,” Gary says. “Don’t torture yourself.” He has a hand on Jim’s back and is trying to grab the phone with the other.

  “Stop. I need to talk with her.”

  “Can’t you see she doesn’t help you? She only makes everything worse. All your problems are from her. I’m begging you at this point. You’re my brother. Please stop.”

  Jim is fighting to keep the receiver at his ear as Gary tugs on it.

  “You don’t have to talk with me if you don’t want,” Rhoda says. “You can follow your family. It’s fine with me.”

  “No. I need to talk with you. And I need to see you. You have to see me.”

  Gary has stopped tugging at the phone. Just standing behind Jim now, and Jim doesn’t know what he’ll do next. This dining room so fucking small, the ceiling about two inches over their heads, everything closing in.

  “I need to see you,” Jim says again.

  “Let’s focus on you, Jim. Take a deep breath and let it out slowly and close your eyes. Do it now.”

  Jim follows what she says, feels the shake and rattle on the exhale and realizes he’s panicking.

  “Now another deep breath and exhale and just focus inside, in your chest, in your lungs. Just put your attention there. Focus on your breathing. Are you tired?”

  “Yes. So tired.”

  “Just breathe and rest.”

  “Okay.”

  “And let’s come up with some things you can do today to relax. After we finish our phone call, you can do push-ups and sit-ups and maybe go for a run?”

  “Yes.”

  “That will help you relax and help calm your thoughts. And then you can take a shower.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. So you have a plan. And when you finish your shower you can call me again, okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” Jim is holding the receiver against his cheek as if it could be her hand. His eyes closed and swaying and focusing on his breath and feeling calmer, feeling a bit better.

  “I can’t believe you’re ten years younger,” he says.

  “It’s all right,” she says. “Just focus on your breath and do you
r push-ups and sit-ups and go for your run, have a nice hot shower, and then we’ll talk again. I’ll be here for you.”

  “You’re too good.”

  “I’m not, as you know. But who I am doesn’t matter now. You have a plan, and call me after your shower.”

  “You could talk to me. Maybe vary a bit from the fucking plan.”

  “I’m trying to help you, Jim.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Okay. I’ll go do my homework.”

  He hangs up the phone, gets down into push-up position, and begins the routine, safe again? He doesn’t feel safe. He feels murderous, so angry suddenly, so he pushes and doesn’t stop, goes past his usual thirty-five to forty and fifty, his chest and arms gone vacant, trembling, hollowed out for any strength at all, but he’s working from something more than muscle and pushes on to sixty before he collapses.

  “How many was that?” Gary asks.

  Jim can’t breathe, his throat and chest burning. He feels hinged, like his arms are wings, connected too awkwardly to the plates in his upper back. “Sixty,” he manages.

  “Do you usually do that?”

  “What do you think?”

  “She makes you self-destructive, even when she says she’s helping you.”

  “Not a time to talk. I have my homework now. Pretend I’m not here.”

  “We’re your family.”

  “We’ve already been through this, haven’t we?”

  Jim starts his sit-ups, hands laced behind his head, swinging all the way forward between his knees and back down again, the knuckles of his spine in the way, hitting too hard even on carpet. His body not made well for anything, half-suited to any purpose.

  He does a hundred, compacting his gut into a knot, then lies back and smells dust. “Mostly skin I’m breathing now,” he says. “Sloughed-off skin from all the years. Yours and mine and Ginny’s and Mom’s and Dad’s. I wonder what years I’m breathing right now. Can I breathe from when we were kids?”

  A slight buzz in his nose from dust, an allergen. He can feel the caverns in his forehead, the frontal sinuses, puckering, that strange metallic tug, metallic perhaps from blood, from iron. He’s had sinus problems for so long.

  The dust floating thick above the carpet throughout the entire house, up to perhaps knee level in high concentration and thinning above that, an atmosphere in different bands. The nostalgiasphere first, the layer most dense, where he’s lying now, a region of immense weight where time can slow or even stop moving and echoes of sound and smell and feeling can travel forever. Catfish with their wide tendriled mouths patrolling here as leviathans, fallen birds and smell of gun smoke and blood and everything grown larger. A place intent on suffocation, place of Bible stories with children ripped in half, towers falling, tongues without words, locusts descending. The sea parted and held back by a single human hand and the weight of that ready to rush in again, mountains of water overhanging and bending light and even the water smells of blood and can transform, all mutable here, nothing remaining separate or safe.

  Above that the beginning of loss of memory and self, the first thinning, burial without earth, dissipation only, disconnection from all that was felt or known before, and so it can’t have any name. Its nature is to remove name and then everything behind the name, until we reach the band above, where we normally live and breathe our adult lives, wondering whether something has been forgotten. All decision without basis, all feeling a remnant only. A thousand names and none of them matter. The confusosphere or fuckosphere, all you get to know from now on, only known antidote death.

  “You wouldn’t believe how much your religion has fucked my head, Mom,” Jim says. “I just thought of plagues and the parting of the Red Sea and that baby ripped in half, and even now as I speak I’m thinking of new ones, of the reed basket floating and snakes and Abraham’s knife raised and who knows what else. What a fucking nightmare you gave me.” David’s stone buzzing through the air and Goliath’s forehead waiting. How hot it must have been then in the endless desert, always desert. Sand closing in on everyone, flooding from all sides, the walls of the ark crushed, not meant for this kind of ocean, all the animals two by two filling their mouths with it as they try to breathe.

  He has to get outside. Strange to run in jeans and boots and a flannel shirt, but that’s what he’s wearing. “I’m going for a run,” he says, and he’s out that creaky metal door again. At least it’s not hot. A breeze just coming up, dark ripples on the water.

  The problem is two by two. That has always been the problem. If it weren’t for sex and everything attached to it, his life would have been fine. He’s always worked hard, he didn’t commit crimes, he was smart, and all would have been easy if not for sex. Or even if the desire for sex had been two by two, the desire for only one woman. He would have been fine in that case also. But desire is never for one. There’s always another, and always disgust and shame and guilt to go along with the relentless need.

  Heavy clomp of his boots on pavement. He’s going to destroy his ankles. He’s run plenty of times in the forest and across glades, firing off shots at a deer or chasing after one he’s wounded. Pavement, though, and the impact.

  From the very beginning, even from junior high, he had a sense of doom about picking one and about whether he would be picked. Every human rule, everything that holds us together, based on the lie of two by two, the basis for all law and social organization, and so everything destined to be broken. If he could destroy it all, every church and court and group with any authority, from the PTA to the Senate, he would. Every last bit of it burned to the ground because it was based on something impossible and untrue.

  “Fuck!” he yells, and punches himself in the head. But that hurts more than he would have imagined, so he won’t do that again. He keeps running past the elementary school, inland, away from the lake, feeling the throb of his head and tightness in his lungs and legs. His body still working. He stays in shape only so he can fuck. Otherwise he would sit in the dark and eat ice cream all day.

  He doesn’t even like Rhoda. Her condescension though she’s younger. The thinness of her lips when she kisses him. Or what she knows about him, everything she knows. He’s never been able to hide anything from her. But he has this desperation for her, wants her right now. Disgust and self-hate and as much need as a child. He’s had her, and it wasn’t enough. So how can he still want her? How can we be so imbecilic? What is it inside us that just endlessly misunderstands everything?

  He can feel the sockets of his knees, the balls grinding, and his ankles are made of pins that could shatter. He stops and bends over, panting, dizzy, sits down in the road. “Just run me over,” he says. “God that would be so much simpler.”

  The problem is that his existence continues. He doesn’t just utter that and then vanish or cut ahead to another time when something else might happen. He’s still sitting in the middle of the road, still has to wait through every moment, never able to fast-forward.

  He lies down, because maybe a car will be less likely to see him then. This pavement connects to the highway, and because of that connects to pavement everywhere else in the lower forty-eight. He could walk without touching earth all the way to Florida or Maine. Only Alaska is cut off by dirt and gravel road, which is perhaps why he moved there, to escape. But the only difference is four-wheel drive. Still complete worship of the car.

  He turns over on his stomach, feeling some warmth from the asphalt, even on an overcast day, then rolls a couple times, tucks his arms, like a worm.

  But this is only desperation, trying to find time away from his head, and it’s not fooled. Time still ticking too slowly, only a minute or two passed.

  So he stands and runs again, waiting for the activity to kick in and kill his thoughts. Every life reduced to the number of footfalls spent trying to run away from that life. How amazing it must have felt to just pull the trigger and blast him in the back and change everything. And then refuse all consequence, refuse to stay for all that would happen
afterward, putting the pistol to her head. So fast. She lived as a murderer for maybe a couple minutes, but because no one knew, she never lived as a murderer at all. We only are something when someone else knows, and it can’t be one person. It has to be the group. That’s when we become. What she did was no different than dreaming until the group knew.

  He wishes he had noticed her more and could remember her more. Plenty of time spent together but he was only half watching, as we are most of the time. He wonders about signs, and responsibility. Was her family supposed to save her? Is his family supposed to save him? That’s the entire purpose of this trip, to come down and visit the family and be saved. And Gary is trying at least, not that it matters.

  She was mean. There’s no doubt about that. Even her little dog was mean. Prune. What a name for a dog.

  What matters now is that Jim has to figure out how to become only a suicide and not a mass murderer. That’s the high goal he can reach for, the fruit of a life of hard work. Congratulations. When he was rolling on the asphalt, the magnum at his back felt gargantuan and certainly unyielding. And so heavy now while running. It will have its day.

  The sky is puckering, aiming at him, and shits out a light drizzle to accompany his run. Nothing romantic, no storm to help him discover something, just enough to annoy.

  But the run is doing its work. A natural painkiller for body and soul, some easing further in as his lungs and legs struggle. He has to keep pushing, and that focus is perhaps what does it. He makes an enormous square and comes back in along the waterfront and is watching the green pier in its jagged lurching until it calls him to climb its barricade, a fan of metal spikes around each side to keep intruders away. Jim can’t be kept away, though. He has no fear at this point, doesn’t care if he falls, clings to spike and wire and is standing on wood planking soon enough. Long thin walkway of his childhood over the tules and water, with a roofed area at the end and a picnic table also green and a slanting walkway down to the float where he swam and fished a million times, its four piles chewed away to half their strength over all these years despite the softened touch of rollers. At this point the entire pier needs to be replaced.