Halibut on the Moon

by David Vann

“We should go.”

  “No, let’s hear about your life, your math. And the worst part about being you. And when you’re done, it’s John’s turn. I want to hear.”

  “I don’t have to do that.”

  “But you’re going to.”

  Gary swings his arms, some gesture of helplessness, and sits down hard on a leather couch. How many dark leather couches are there in this house?

  “Fine. I worry about money every day, can’t stop thinking of it, because I can’t really afford my mortgage. I think I may sell and move somewhere cheaper, like Wyoming or Montana or Idaho. I’m taking a road trip this summer to check it out. Mary and I are going together. We’d both sell and move somewhere without traffic or crowds or hot summers or high taxes, somewhere teachers can live. It’s ridiculous to try to live here as a teacher.”

  “Well that’s good to know. How come you never told me?”

  “I think your problem has kind of taken center stage.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Just all our lives, but that’s fine.”

  “Sorry. But what else? What else is bad in your life?”

  “I didn’t work hard as a student. I know I wasn’t ambitious. I wanted to be a marine biologist and that didn’t happen. Didn’t have the grades. And I missed my chance in basketball. Maybe could have done more there.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s enough.”

  “No.”

  “Fine. I worry whether I can really stay with Mary and not want to fuck some other woman at some point. And I wish she had tits. Happy to hear all this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I don’t know if I ever want kids. She wants kids. And she’s Catholic, expects me to maybe convert at some point, which is something I can’t imagine.”

  “Compromise,” Jim says. “You know I never did that for Rhoda. For Elizabeth either. Elizabeth had to go hunting and fishing with me even though she hated it. She was slow and I’d just leave her far behind on the trail. And she never wanted to move up to Alaska, hated it there, the endless rain and snow and nothing to do. Rhoda didn’t want commercial fishing or living on a boat, and she wanted me to accept her daughter more. I didn’t budge an inch with either of them. Just followed my plan. No one else’s plan has ever seemed real.”

  “You’re on to something there,” John says. “You do have to compromise and pay attention to someone else’s wants. It can feel good to try to make their dream happen. It feels nice to give, and you might even find you like their idea better.”

  “Well that’s great advice five years ago, or fifteen years ago. Too late now.”

  “You’re still here, and you’ll meet someone new. Even if it takes three more wives, you still have time to figure it out.”

  “Thanks for that curse. Three more wives.”

  “I guess we’re done with my story and my life,” Gary says. “Typical level of interest.”

  “Yeah, John’s turn.”

  “I’ve got no complaints.”

  “Well you do today. Even if you have to make them up.”

  “Well I can’t say I find pharmacy fascinating or ever have. It’s every day, for the last fifteen years, a lot of hours on my feet, kind of repetitive, more listening to complaints than you would ever imagine.”

  “My tooth hurts a little when I chew, or like if it gets cold, if I drink cold water.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Or at a party. Hey, you’re a dentist, maybe you can tell me . . . blah, blah, blah.”

  “I have a new one there, if it’s a party. Hey, you’re a pharmacist, can you score me . . . and then fill in the blank: Demerol, codeine, whatever.”

  “I get that too.”

  “Great you two have the keys to the kingdom and can chat about all the little people. But we should go. You moved your appointment. You made it all a rush.”

  “Come back for summer,” John says. “Stay here with us for a month or two, settle in. Some nice-looking single women around here, too, because the men are always taking off. Just hang out in the pharmacy with me for one afternoon and you’ll have all the dates you ever need.”

  “A month or two?” Jim asks. “I must seem right on the edge. Everyone offering me too much.”

  “You’re definitely looking over the edge at this point. And it’s true it’s not going to hurt, and it’s going to be a relief and all that, the end of pain and worry, but it’s also the end of everything, and you don’t know yet what everything could be. Seems a shame.”

  “It’s all kind of fucked anyway,” Jim says.

  “That’s not you,” John says. “Your mind has changed just recently, angry and negative, but I promise that’s not you.”

  “Well this Future Leaders of America convention has me all choked up,” Gary says.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jim says. “We have to go.”

  “One last cuddle and then say goodbye.”

  “Gary can make fun, but I am giving you a hug,” John says, and then his arms are around Jim and Jim feels embarrassed, all too much and too fast, and he realizes this is it, the last time he’ll see his friend.

  “Thank you, John,” he says, and he knows he’s about to sink again but he looks only at the floor on the way out and that gets him through.

  24

  “We’ll be passing Ukiah,” Gary says. “You should see Ginny.”

  They’re winding along a narrow creek toward the Blue Lakes, through a canyon. “I don’t feel up for that.”

  “You never feel up for seeing her, and she notices. She’s your sister. We can just say hi for fifteen minutes.”

  “You know she won’t let us stop for only fifteen minutes. And if Bill is there, we’ll have to talk with him too.”

  “He’ll be at work.”

  “The answer’s no.” The earth here red and so many cutaways for the road. Lined with manzanita.

  “Why don’t you like her?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Well why do you never want to see her?”

  “Do you enjoy seeing her?”

  “Not really.”

  “And why is that?”

  “The whiny voice, I guess.”

  “Yeah, I’ve never believed her voice, our whole lives.”

  “Well it is her voice, like it or not.”

  “No it’s not. It’s just a fake. We’ve never heard her voice, except maybe when she’s angry or crying. Maybe that was real.”

  “Well it’s only one small feature. Jesus.”

  “That’s the other problem, how religious she is. Like I want all that judgment shoveled onto me. Wheedling questions about my two divorces and about whether I’m going to church and everything pointed to whether I’m a good man, which of course I’m not.”

  “She’s not so bad. You make her sound mean.”

  “She is. Always smiling, always tittering because a laugh seems more friendly, and behind all of it is pure meanness and judgment, getting out her fork and turning me over to see if the other side is roasted enough yet. Just the way she looks at me.”

  “She has glasses, and the lenses are thick. It just makes her eyes look bigger so you think she’s examining you.”

  “Yeah, it’s only that. You’re right, little brother.”

  “Now who’s being mean?”

  They hit a flat section and then the Blue Lakes on the left. “Slow down.”

  Gary takes his foot off the gas and they hear the engine compression. “Want me to pull over?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  They pull in under weeping willows hung down to the water. The color not as blue today, washed out by the sky. Long narrow lakes between the road and mountain. Jim gets out and walks down to the edge.

  The sand rough, pebbled browns and reds and greens, a bit of blue. Water calm and clear, no one swimming at this time of year to churn it all up. Soft decay and mud only a few yards out. A rope with knots hanging, waiting. He remembers joy here, swinging on that rope wi
th John, fighting to push each other off, endless games invented out of nothing. Gary too young, six years younger.

  Small cabins all along here that you could rent, just ten by tens, enough for a bed and a bunk above. Shared toilets in the lodge. All changed now. There was in fact a different America. No drugs here then. No guns except to hunt. Almost no crime. Not just nostalgia but something lost. Now it’s a dangerous place, redneck in all the worst ways instead of the best ways.

  “Those six extra years,” Jim says. “I saw a place you never will. All gone. Even just a six-year difference. And over the next ten or twenty, you’ll see something different, too, something I couldn’t guess at right now.”

  “We’ll see them together.”

  “God, you sound like an after-school special, one of those crap things I’m supposed to find for David and Tracy to watch when I’m working. You wouldn’t believe how bad they are, how obvious.”

  “Thank you for appreciating that I’m trying to help you.”

  “Just do it in a way that’s not idiotic.”

  “And your thought that things change in six years is so smart. Of course they fucking change.”

  “Fine. I was trying to remember something, trying to remember what it felt like then, when life was a different thing entirely. But you’re right. It’s gone.” Jim pushes the toe of his boot into the sand just behind the waterline, watches it fill and cloud. “Let’s go,” he says.

  They climb out of this valley and descend into another and join Highway 101 and pass through Ukiah.

  “Not too late to stop and say hi,” Gary says.

  “Too late,” Jim says.

  They hit Cloverdale and don’t stop this time at Fosters Freeze. The world continuing to vanish behind Jim. Places that will never be seen again.

  He nods off, so exhausted still, and wakes as Gary takes the turnoff in Santa Rosa.

  “Almost there,” Gary says. “Afterward we can see your kids again if you want.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t do that again. Too hard. I already said goodbye.”

  “It’s goodbye for only a few months. You could see them again today.”

  Gary’s denial tiring, so Jim doesn’t answer. Santa Rosa so characterless, streets on a grid and just everyone living their lives. The therapist’s office in a nicer section, leafier.

  “Should I come in?” Gary asks when they’ve pulled up.

  “No, I think you already have your warnings.”

  “Okay. Have fun.”

  “Should be a hoot.” Jim walks past flowers expensively kept. Some famous botanist lived in Santa Rosa, a combiner of genes to make new varieties. Gardens and buildings named after him, but Jim doesn’t remember his name.

  “My receptionist said you talked about ‘blowing your head off,’” Dr. Brown says when they’re sitting. The trees in the background again, and Jim notices there’s a fence beyond them, overgrown and old and hard to spot at first.

  “Yep.”

  “Is that your plan?”

  “Unless it will come off in some other way.” Jim imagines unscrewing his head like a tick’s. Is his head in fact burrowed into something right now and he just doesn’t know? That would be a real lack of perspective.

  “Let’s set that aside for a moment,” Brown says. “We’ll return. But first tell me how it was to see your family.”

  “Better than I would have thought. My dad actually said he loved me. And he talked for basically the first time ever. Told me all about his gripes.”

  “Well that’s great.”

  “Yeah, and it didn’t matter. Everyone was good to me but it doesn’t matter now. I’ve turned some corner where it’s too late.”

  “What corner is that?”

  “The one where every question from the therapist seems idiotic. But I guess I turned that corner a lot earlier. So maybe this was a new corner.”

  “I’m of course not going to be hurt by whatever you say. I’m here to help you. Let’s keep the focus on you. What did you feel when your father said he loved you?”

  Dr. Brown is leaning forward and has his hands laced together, as if real discoveries are to be made. Jim can’t look at him anymore. Far too annoying. So he closes his eyes and wonders how it felt when his father said that. There’s light against his lids, leftover, slightly orange, and otherwise just darkness or nothing, and no thoughts are moving. Thoughts are only reports from far away, being sent to other people but not to Jim. “I don’t know.”

  “Remember. Hear him say the words again. See him.”

  Jim tries that. He remembers pretty clearly. “I can see him. But I’m not there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no me in the memory. No one who could have felt something, so I can’t say whatever that something was.”

  “Open your eyes.”

  Jim does that. Brown looks annoyed.

  “Do you want to be here, Jim?”

  “No.”

  “Then how am I supposed to help you?”

  “You can’t.”

  “I guess we return then to your comment about blowing your head off.”

  “Oh that little thing.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to recommend a place here, instead of going up to Alaska.”

  “Cuckoo’s Nest again?”

  “It’s nothing like that. It’s terrible that movie was made. This is a place where you would have help and be safe. Right now you’re not safe.”

  “But I am free, and I’ll take that. No pills, no guards, no terrifying nurse.”

  “It isn’t anything like that. Nurse Ratched doesn’t exist in real life.”

  “Too bad. That’s all that was keeping them alive, being able to hate her instead of just wanting to kill themselves.”

  “The same way you want to hate me?”

  “I think you’re reaching too far now. You’re not important enough. You’re just annoying and not very good at your work.”

  Jim can see that this hits. Only for a moment, but Brown has some sort of professional pride. “Right there,” Jim says. “That’s the problem. You’re not supposed to reveal any of you. But I can see you and your limits.”

  “I’m human, not a machine. And I’m trying to help you.”

  “Then you should have helped me. When I first arrived, I was willing, but you had one eye on the clock and the other on your wallet.”

  “You’re angry that you can’t find a way out of your despair, and I understand that. And it’s okay to blame me. But we need to do the real work now. Who is it in you asking for help right now? What does that Jim feel like?”

  “Is this one of those child self and six other selves things? Because all that is crap. There’s no self, no Jim, and certainly no group of Jims in here. And yeah my moods go up and down but I don’t become different people. There’s just the world stretching endlessly but empty, like tundra up in Alaska. It goes on and on, and that’s what it’s like inside, a wasteland you’d never be able to cross, only wind. Pressurizing at every edge but just nothing in the middle. So what I need is either a way to remove the pressure, so that it’s okay to wander endlessly in nothing, or I need there to be something on that tundra, someplace to shelter or hide or go into and make a life. One of the two. But wandering around in nothing under pressure is not something I can endure. I can’t keep doing that for years.”

  Dr. Brown is sitting back now in his chair, looking thoughtful. “That’s good, Jim. That’s a good description. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. That’ll be sixty dollars.”

  Brown’s smile is only a wince. “I want you to close your eyes now. Close them.”

  Jim is reluctant but does it.

  “Now imagine that tundra, that empty open space.”

  “Not hard. It’s always here.”

  “Now imagine yourself walking along, and I want you to see a cabin.”

  “That’s never there, but okay.”

  �
��Let’s make it something else then. Are there mountains?”

  “Yes. At the edges.”

  “Can you see a cave there?”

  “Yeah there are caves.”

  “Okay, walk into one of those caves. Find one big enough to be comfortable.”

  Jim can see tundra in the fall, when the blueberry has turned and there are so many colors, shades of red and yellow and green, and the mountains all snowcapped. A bull moose at the edge of one of the million small lakes and mosquitoes everywhere in dark clouds that shape-shift constantly. He’s following one of these and approaches the base of a cliff, and there’s a cave, cut like an eye into the rock, and when he steps inside it’s much larger than it looked. Dark ceiling with shapes hanging down, slick floor like the skin of a halibut, mottled green and brown. “The floor is the topside of a halibut,” Jim says. “I’m standing on its skin, and the cave is very cold, as cold as the ocean bottom.”

  “A halibut? The fish?”

  Jim tries to ignore Brown, who is fucking up the vision. The chamber he’s found feels sacred, the home of his totem animal, and maybe there could be some answer here. He walks over the slippery flesh and looks for the rise of gills, for the slow breathing.

  “What do you see?”

  “Just shut up,” Jim says, and he tries to breathe this air in the cave, wondering if it’s water, if he’s submerged, and he can see only shadows, without shape. Everything so dark. He’s walking with his hands out, and step after step brings him no nearer to anything. The cave extends as far as the ocean floor and is as featureless.

  “I’m just going to wander,” Jim says. “There’s nothing to find. I picked a totem animal who lives in a place unlivable. Under the pressure of ten atmospheres, and no light, and no solid ground, only mud that stretches for thousands of miles without feature. That’s exactly what the inside of my head is like. The pressure, the darkness, the lack of solid ground, the lack of feature or distraction or any other relief, just stretching on forever, and the thing is, I can’t do forever.” Jim can feel himself choking up at the thought of having to endure. Feeling sorry for himself again. “And now I’m fucking crying again about poor me having to face forever.”

  “It’s okay. Don’t be hard on yourself.”

  “I’m a fucking baby. There’s nothing wrong and I still fall apart.”