Halibut on the Moon

by David Vann

  He can feel the wetness of the air, cooled by the lake. Holds his arm out the window with his hand cupped to catch it. Drives on the wrong side of the road to be closer to the water. Closes his eyes in the straight sections to feel what the movement is like, to be transported.

  But he’s so hungry that’s all he can really think of. He wants a chocolate shake. And a big burger with barbeque sauce and bacon. Our last comfort, food. When nothing else is available. Rhoda gone.

  He slows to a crawl at his parents’ house. All lights off. All sleeping soundly it seems, without a worry about Jim. The oak in the front yard seems enormous right now, dwarfing the house. The hedge too short, barrier to nothing.

  He continues on, slows again near Safeway and his old office, his other zone. A few stray cars forgotten and left in the parking lot. More lights and a private security car, someone staying awake to guard groceries. That has to feel worthless, a fake uniform and no gun, and no one interested in what you’re guarding. At least at the cash register he was doing something.

  Jim tries to appear menacing, idling the pickup and staring, but at a couple hundred yards staring of course doesn’t mean anything. Jim could be a tourist lost on his way to Konocti or Lucerne or some other fascinating local destination.

  So Jim moves on, stomach grumbling, thinking of going back and stealing the guy’s sandwich. He has no gun, so Jim could just beat him down and take the sandwich and even wear the guy’s hat and official shirt.

  Nothing is open. He’ll have to come to terms with starvation. He passes the diner, which is out cold. A&W also dark. Gas stations closed. The entire center of town a void, not even a bar open.

  But as he gets to the new section, toward the highway, there are a few lights and other cars, late-night wanderers, and the golden arches do in fact appear. Disgusting compared even to crap places like A&W or Fosters Freeze, and the enormous delicious bacon burger he imagines cannot exist here, but at least he will not starve. In Alaska the most improbable burgers, just to keep up with the idea of the place. As wide as a plate. No clue where they find the buns. And always offering some exotic meat: Caribou! Moose! Lynx! Lynx not really likely, of course, but who is ever going to check?

  He pulls up beside several other pickups to join men with tattoos and baseball caps, which would seem to make them belong, because Lakeport has become such a shitty place, but Jim is the one who belongs here, grew up here. He is the native son, born on these shores.

  “Mornin’,” he says to the person offering to take his order. A throwback to show who he is. The magnum tucked under his shirt again. He’d like an excuse to use it, so he’s not quiet. Speaks in a full voice. Let one of the tattooed fucks notice.

  But of course they don’t. He orders two fish filet sandwiches, as if they’re really going to use a filet for each one instead of mashed up baitfish rammed into a square and deep-fried. Looking forward to the small spooge of tartar sauce and the square of American cheese left on top like a thing forgotten.

  He stands at the counter waiting. Only three employees, all wearing hairnets as if they belong in a gang, all fat and soft and greasy, shaped by the food here. The empty heating tray, each sandwich actually made to order this late at night. He should personalize in some way, think of something to ask for, but his mind’s a blank.

  “Order fifty-one,” the woman says when she hands him the tray, as if there might be confusion.

  “Let me check the receipt,” he says. “Just to make sure I’m fifty-one.” He holds it up to the light, examines it, sees a fifty-one. Meanwhile she’s holding the tray in the air. “Yep,” he says. “I see fifty-one. Two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and a chocolate shake. Is that what you have there?”

  “Yes sir,” she says, and she doesn’t seem upset. Her job is so fucked that this fits in as a normal interaction. Mouth slightly open because of the extra oxygen needed for all that fat. Cheeks glistening.

  “May I have a glass of water?” he asks, taking the tray finally.

  “Yes sir,” she says and dutifully grabs a paper cup. “Ice?”

  “No thanks.”

  She fills the cup from a dispenser with a perfect small stream, water expertly controlled, and hands it to him with “Enjoy your meal sir.” All perfectly performed, the way he performed perfectly all those years as a checker. How many years was it? Maybe seven? Wishing everyone a good day no matter how unfair and insulting they were. Handling how many thousands of cans of soup and beans and cartons of milk. A large portion of his life spent that way. More time doing that than just about anything else except dentistry. Sleep has claimed the most hours probably, back when he was able to sleep, but after that standing beside a patient and after that standing beside groceries. Varicose veins now in both calves.

  He sits by one of the front windows, lit up for all passers to see, and consoles himself with the chocolate shake, which is more like clay slush with a memory of Hershey’s. Feeling of an impending stomachache even with the first mouthful, some pukey foreknowledge built into the taste.

  And this is only the beginning of the night. The night will be long.

  20

  Jim lies on his back on the floating dock at the end of the green pier. The four pillars rising around him darker shadows in the greater dark, reminders of the apostles.

  He has scaled the chain-link fence again and climbed the barrier of spikes and dodged every sand trap and wall of poison darts and swinging grindstone, leapt through fire and over snakes and outrun demons. The apostles not so far removed from that. He has seen photos of their pillars at Ephesus in Turkey, waved in Sunday school to prove these men were real and known, walking among the ancients. Maybe a couple thousand years more, though, to the Egyptians and pyramids. He was never great with dates. All of it pancakes into one dusty ancient day, one day in which the Egyptians rose and fell and also the Greeks and Romans and Chinese and Persians and all the others. Really that’s what has happened in his mind. All of that remembered as essentially the same day, the same one point of memory. The ancients can provide myth only, not history.

  Even seeing the photos of the pillars he has never believed the apostles were real. Accounts of their voyages along the Turkish coast and sending letters, but impossible to believe. And so boring. I bring good news. The Good News Bible. News, brother, in which nothing happens. Your soul is saved. John arriving on some big beach and telling the kids playing in the sand, hey, your sins are erased. All you have to do is hand over your cash and let him into your heart. A fund-raising trip for the early church. You have no idea our plans. We’re going to find new shores, maybe a whole new world, and sell Jesus for gold. We’ll build chandeliers hung by golden ropes, all paid for by kids as poor as you, wearing scraps, because there will be a billion of you.

  But that’s not really his church. His mother Lutheran, and technically he’s Lutheran, though he has no idea what it means. In all those hundreds of days in church, not once did they talk about what they were. Not once did they say, here’s the Catholic Church and what they believe, and now here’s the Lutheran Church and what we believe, and here are the reasons for the differences. And the Old Testament and the New Testament. He knows they’re following the new, but what are they supposed to do with the old?

  Never any explanation for what he is supposed to believe or for the culture that made him. Only requirements were to sing, stand at the right times, hand over cash, and be polite.

  Why it matters is that religion is the closest he can come to some sense of how he was made and who he is now. It’s the thing we all agree on without ever knowing what it is. And that must be the cause of the problem, because where else can he look?

  The float is rocking him now, small waves come from where? Who is on the lake in the middle of the night? No sound of any boat. The waves were made by something and have to be explained, but nothing we know of fits. Too small and close together to be boat waves. Too sudden and brief to be from wind. Too large and too many to come from a swimmer. So there mus
t be something larger swimming in the lake, breaking the surface for a moment and then submerging again. Not breaching but quieter than that, just lifting some enormous mass above the surface and then submerging quickly, and that causes a ring of small quick ripples to go in all directions, and Jim happened to be here to register them, perhaps the only one to do so. Otherwise God would not have been known. Jim the only priest, and he will have to walk now back to McDonald’s, a pilgrimage. He should lose a shoe along the way to create more struggle, a bit of drama. He’ll throw open the glass doors one-shoed and breathless and shout proof finally of God. His ripples felt, his existence. As far as I can tell, he’s like a carp but maybe a hundred feet long. Smell of rot, just like in the tules. Living in the deeper sections because these waves were small and smooth and regular so they had traveled far. If we go depth charge the middle of the lake, we might finally see the face of God.

  The tattooed masses will follow him out kissing their arms for luck. Talismans everywhere across their skins because they knew this moment was coming, knew all previous pantheons would have to rise up together to defeat the one larger god. Snakes and anchors, Ashleys and Marias and more mysterious gods known only by initials. Hearts and skulls and other body parts that have transcended flesh, brightly colored birds and crosses, swastikas, blood, and even golden-scaled fish, closest gods to this one and most able to form a sacred net. The navy won’t get here in time. It will take days for even the most modern cruisers to plow their way through land, Lakeport not close at all to the sea, so this fairy ring of inscribed gods will be the first attack.

  Into the water, all of them, swimming in dark night toward God, fearless, wanting to finally touch. No thought of whether they’ll have enough strength to return to shore, and so they venture on for half a mile, shedding shoes and jeans and shirts to not be dragged down, and all light is gone this far out, only occasional flashes as water is flung, and still they swim, slower now, a mile out, their numbers slimmer perhaps by a few but no less committed, throwing each arm forward toward knowledge, kicking, impatient for the body to catch up, the body always a weight and barrier and better shed. The last swimmers can no longer raise their arms but only stroke slowly beneath the surface, all quiet, the faithful still buoyed by hope and watching the darkness ahead for any sign, expecting something to surface until they’ve gone below, limbs locked and breath gone, and even then as they descend they are waiting for the embrace.

  Word has spread about God and the faithful who have gone to find it and capture or destroy it. A new crowd gathered at the shore, and someone has thought of all the Fourth of July fireworks and the fireworks barge, so they’re hooking up a jet boat to it now, one of the supercharged jobs sounding like a Harley and spitting smoke into the air. Actual sparks coming out its exhausts, raised like fires to heaven. Slick orange paint job and “69” decaled on the side. The plan is to depth charge God with this payload, delivered right now at high speed. The driver is upset he won’t be able to display his magnificent rooster tail of water behind the boat, because that would get the fireworks wet, but he’s otherwise pleased to have been chosen.

  Others want to be the chosen, also, and they’re swimming out to the barge and trying to climb aboard, so the whole thing is dangerously low and heaving and the already chosen are kicking others in the head to keep them from boarding. Screams of the faithful in the wakened night, and all of Lakeport brightening, lights along the shore, other boats arriving, the beach awash in crisscrossed wakes.

  His mother’s church group will be there, in their sixties and seventies, carrying dishes for a potluck. Her famous tuna casserole baked with an entire bag of potato chips to feed the faithful.

  One of the local kids is selling bread crumbs to feed the ducks, who must think night has passed and it’s now day. A man is offering five minutes on his binoculars for five dollars. Prostitutes are offering one last embrace before the end. A local minister has appeared to explain none of this is true, but he’s being ignored.

  The jet-boat driver has pulled the towline taut and then suddenly guns it, engine splitting the air, a crackling sound. The fireworks barge lurches forward and the masses on board all shift aft at an angle, hitting like dominoes and going down, the ones at the rear thrown overboard, a great splash and then moans and shouts of lost providence.

  The barge creates an enormous wake, and the jet boat’s bow is pointed skyward, the driver unable to see where he’s going, but he keeps it gunned anyway and the chosen battle for handholds, the losers falling away into the water.

  The jet-boat driver guided by faith, view blocked and night too dark anyway, and no signposts to where God might be. Derelict pervert boat owner transformed into high priest, and he clings to the wheel as gravity pulls him backward, keeps the big accelerator plate pinned until he blows the engine, a final shot of fire into the sky and the bow comes down with a slap and the barge glides forward and slows until it bumps his boat gently, companionably.

  New leaders now emerging on the barge, fights over what to do with the fireworks: strap them to the bodies of divers to take down as low as possible, or sink the barge after one big fuse is lit, or aim each rocket downward and let it torpedo. The recurring problem in all the discussions is that the fireworks can’t get wet. They don’t move or explode or work in any way once they hit water. Reaching God very frustrating in this way. Why can’t he come to the surface again?

  In the end there’s nothing to do except light the fireworks from the barge and have a show, Fourth of July early. Brilliant constellations in the sky above, mirrored on the water, and perhaps God will be impressed and want to see. But of course he never surfaces again, and Jim’s one contact with him was the only contact, so Jim is burned alive and his bones sawn into pieces afterward to keep a small relic in each house of the faithful. This is the best use of his life he can think of.

  21

  The air cold and damp, and no visitation of god and no crowd or carnival gathered. Jim’s life still without event. The problem is the struggle against nothing. And the pain in his head.

  He can’t lie on the float and just feel each curl of pain, so he’s up again, without even making the decision, and climbing around the spiky barrier then over the fence. No car passing to see him. He crosses the street to his parents’ house, where he’s parked the truck in the drive, and continues past to the garage, flicks on the light to see all the antlers, all the bucks they’ve killed over the years.

  Patches of hair still clinging to dried hide. Most looking bleached by time but a few racks still dark with velvet. He’s never really understood velvet. Some protective covering when the antler is growing, mossy, but why not regular? Why do only a few have it in the fall?

  Each of these sets of antlers was supposed to be a memory, a record, and he was there every year since he was a boy, but they’re all so similar he can recognize only a handful. So many guttings, the ripping sound of a knife through hide, impossible to locate each and connect it to the correct antlers, impossible to remember if this was in the lower glades or bear wallow or the burn and who might have been there and who took the shot. Even his own he wouldn’t be able to claim now.

  The dust in here making his sinus headache worse. The cold too. The bone of the skull so delicate, all the chambers, endless division, paper thin, visible on the underside of every trophy here, but what he doesn’t understand is where pain and pressure come from, how they’re possible. Each chamber fills with a mucus, and even if it’s infected and green and thick, so what? It’s still only snot. There’s no pump to pressurize. It’s not like hydraulics on a boat. It must be that nerves are made too sensitive, lying just over the wafers of bone.

  All the mysteries of pain he’s seen in dentistry, the patients who are not numbed by the first shot or even the next, the irregular pattern of nerves, unmapped and out of place. It should all be very simple, the one trigeminal nerve on each side of the face, in three branches, to lower jaw, upper jaw, and forehead. But it’s not always
that simple. One shot to block the mandibular branch and all pain to the lower jaw gone. He can drill away in tooth and bone and only the sound causes terror. But then a patient appears whose pain is not blocked, and Jim is reduced to witch doctor, all science gone and stabbing into the dark.

  Ghost pain, also, teeth that hurt long after, weeks after, when there’s no reason or even a tooth left at all. Only the desire for pain. What is Jim supposed to do then? The term used for mysteries is “atypical facial pain,” which just means who the hell knows. And what is he supposed to do for himself now? Knowing this pain comes from another branch of the same nerve that reaches into his lower jaw is not helpful. Semilunar ganglions the most beautiful half-moons shining just beneath the skin of his temples, the face a divided sphere, but the spaces are so vast. When he closes his eyes, he cannot believe all of this is happening within a few inches. Comets of pain flung in arcs and burning out only to be reborn again, and all from the tiny weight of a bit of snot. His patients would not believe how small their cavities are. No one could believe.

  He presses the nerves under his eyebrows, digs in with his thumbs, but the relief is so momentary and seems only to add weight, the pain strengthened. Codeine could take care of most of it, leave him pukey and dizzy and deadened, but the pain has lasted too long. He can’t take codeine for a year. At this point he can only suffer.

  He pulls the string to turn out the light, a hundred beasts vanished, and climbs the stairs, pushes the door open to the apartment above. Weak light in here, yellowed, and everything seems so small.

  Bed with the oldest mattress, thick and caved in the center, a back breaker. And only a single. A real trick to sleep with anyone here. No sheets on it now, only its cover, which is a pattern of pink roses, just like everything in the bathroom in the house. Windows above unable to open, suffocating in summer. Bathroom a broom closet in size, plywood painted white, essentially unfinished. But this apartment was perhaps the only place he felt true freedom. Young enough then, and though he didn’t have Gary’s luck, still he felt possibility, and his parents in the house could have been miles away.