Halibut on the Moon Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  In his riveting new novel, internationally bestselling New York Times Notable author and Prix Medicis étranger winner David Vann reimagines his father’s final days.

  Middle-aged and deeply depressed, Jim arrives in California from Alaska and surrenders himself to the care of his brother Gary, who intends to watch over him. Swinging unpredictably from manic highs to extreme lows, Jim wanders ghostlike through the remains of his old life, attempting to find meaning in his tattered relationships with family and friends. As sessions with his therapist become increasingly combative and his connections to others seem ever more tenuous, Jim is propelled forwards by his thoughts, which have the potential to lead him, despairingly, to his end.

  Halibut on the Moon is a searing exploration of a man held captive by the dark logic of depression struggling to wrench himself free. In vivid and haunting prose, Vann offers us an aching portrait of a mind in peril, searching desperately for some hope of redemption.

  For my stepmother, Nettie Rose.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  TEXT LOGO PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  EXTRACT FROM BRIGHT AIR BLACK

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY DAVID VANN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  The plane descends but there is no San Francisco to see, only cloud and rain in close over the wing, rain at hundreds of miles an hour a horizontal thing only, without fall, without anything light enough to fall. A terrific pressure, insistent, panicked, disappearing and reappearing and come from some terrible source, breath of a god in anger.

  Jim waits and hopes, but for what?

  Turbulence seems to be the plane’s own movement, seems to come from inside, the wing trying to shake something off, but it’s a movement in the most enormous river, an irresistible current. The skin will rip, aluminum peel back.

  And then waves appear below, whitecaps, scum foam in water muddy brown. All in thin lines, ordered, not the waves of oceans but forced by wind generated right here, newborn waves only minutes old and grown already to full height and breaking and flung a quarter mile from the shore where they began. Our movement is in one direction only, and never a return.

  Jim cinches his seat belt for landing, but why? Yellow buoys, rocks of a breakwater. The strip appears below, grass to the side, and they touch down and loft again, a moment of refusal that suspends and might extend forever, but then they touch and their full weight slams forward, engines blown back, brakes gripping, and all is slowed and all pattern of air broken and rain falls downward again.

  His brother will be waiting. Gary. Younger brother, now his brother’s keeper. Jim become something fragile.

  A man in yellow rain slicker waves lit batons to guide. No one around him, endless expanse of pavement.

  Final brakes at the gate, and in the moment of surge forward, the last momentum, all rise as one, impelled from their seats, except Jim. He’s missed some signal. He would be willing to stay right here for a while longer. He has no idea what to say to Gary, and he knows Gary will have no idea either. Here to escort his older brother to the therapist. The therapist has warned that Jim should not be left alone.

  When the others have gone, he rises and takes his valise from the overhead. Brown leather, heavy, holding his pistol, a Ruger .44 magnum, the one Dirty Harry used. Legal to bring on board as long as the shells are in his checked baggage. Separate his guns and shells. More advice from the therapist.

  He’s the last one to emerge, and Gary the only one left waiting at the gate, standing on thin gray carpet. A nod of recognition, some relief. One stage passed, his brother safely delivered from Alaska. Everyone agrees Alaska isn’t good for Jim and never has been. Especially this winter, living alone in a new house on a ridge far from neighbors, living in darkness at the edge of the arctic.

  “Red-eye?” Gary asks, their way of saying ready, from hunting, as if they’re heading out now at dawn for the lower glades, one driving and the other standing in back of the pickup holding a rifle. Gary looks nervous and so young, thirty-three, six years younger than Jim. But bigger, and Jim can never get used to this. Gary was always the shrimp, shorter than everyone in his year, fast enough still to be on the basketball team, but tiny and thin, and then at Chico, in college, he grew. Most delayed growth spurt anyone had ever heard of, and now he’s over six feet and broad shouldered, thick chest from chopping wood and building his own house and coaching basketball at the junior high.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Jim says.

  They walk in silence to baggage claim, the aisles almost empty. When they arrive, the bags are out and people loading carts, a lot of coolers taped shut and frozen-goods boxes, everyone bringing back halibut at this time of year, mid-March, no salmon. A connecting flight through Seattle, but still, many of these people were with him in Anchorage. He wasn’t aware so many Alaskans had Californian family. He began in Fairbanks, a small plane, ten or so on board. Only thirty thousand people in Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-biggest city. Outpost in darkness and cold so far from anything. Every light shining straight up into the heavens because of the ice fog, looking as if all has been beamed from above.

  He grabs his green duffel, army surplus, slack, filled to less than a third. The only one not to have packed his bag fully, and what does that mean? Does he need to be more attached to his things and carry more with him? Will that help? He has his shells now, a box of them, within maybe a foot of the magnum. He should be less attached to the pistol and think less about it. He knows that much.

  “What’s wrong?” Gary asks as they walk through an underground tunnel to the garage.

  “What?”

  “You’re wincing.”

  “I am?”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He becomes more aware of it, the spiral that extends upward from his right eye, track of pain. “The sinus headache, almost always there, worse after a flight.”

  “You can’t have surgery, get some relief?”

  Jim is a dentist, so he knows exactly how brutal the surgery would be, the risks, knows the surgeon will be goofing off after Jim is under, making jokes as he cuts away parts of the inside of Jim’s head, close enough to the optic nerve to cause blindness, close enough to the brain wall to puncture through.

  “You can’t just tough it out. You need to come at this thing from all directions, and stopping the physical pain is part of that.”

  Jim stops walking and looks at his brother. Handsome face, so much more handsome than Jim, who has receding hair and a weak jaw, slack cheeks, caves around his eyes from the insomnia. Gary has none of these. And no wrinkles, only new skin, healthy, eyes clear, hair wavy and blond, long, almost to his shoulders. Still single and always with a different girlfriend, though the current one, Mary, has lasted for a while, so who knows. But Jim envies his younger brother, not only his youth and looks and the women but also his simplicity. He just never stressed out about anything. Felt free to have some beers and hang out with friends and not worry about money or school or family or work. Jim never drank, never could just hang out, worried always about everything, wo
rked his way through high school and college at Safeway, went to church, married the second woman he dated, divorced, married again after almost no dating, divorced again. What made Jim this way and Gary different?

  “You look good,” Jim says. “Happy and healthy.”

  “Thanks,” Gary says. “But this is about you today.”

  “Maybe it would help if it weren’t about me.”

  They’re really looking at each other now, longest eye contact of their lives, probably. All very strange, and strangely empty. Jim feels nothing as he looks into his brother’s eyes, except that this is odd. Blue eyes with hints of yellow or gold. Golden boy Gary. He can feel himself about to laugh.

  “Okay,” Gary says, and looks away. They walk again.

  Euphoria, that’s what Jim keeps feeling, several times a day. He can feel it building now, a protective coating from inside. Groundless, without direction, like sitting in soup. Why does anyone think they can control what they feel?

  “I’ve looked up to you all my life,” Gary says as they walk. “I need my older brother back. You have to pull it together.”

  Jim laughs, a low chuckle, genuine. It sounds real. It feels real. “I’m here,” Jim says. “It’s all going to be okay.”

  It’s a long way to Gary’s pickup. An old one, rust brown. “You should get a new truck,” he says.

  “It’s only twelve years old. A sixty-eight. It still runs.”

  “But barely, right? It’s a Dodge. I should know. My Suburban breaks down every other week. Chevy is the same as Dodge, right?”

  “What? They’re not the same.”

  Jim has to jam his stuff between them on the bench seat because of the rain. And he thinks what Gary has said is funny. You’d better pull it together. Making threats, because that will certainly help.

  They pull onto Highway 101 going north, driving along the water. The waves white and breaking but so tame. No fetch here to build, and the water shallow everywhere along the edges. He and Gary commercial fished for a year on a boat Jim had built, sixty-three-foot aluminum. His dream of escaping dentistry.

  “Nothing compared to what we saw, huh?” he says. “The waves.”

  “Yeah. We saw some waves alright.”

  “I thought we were going down that time in the straits.”

  “Yeah. I thought so too. That looked pretty bad.”

  They were long-lining for halibut in the straits between the Aleutians, at the edge of the Bering Sea, and the line caught on the bottom. The problem was that the seas were thirty feet and breaking, and this line was pinning them down in sick ways. Whenever a wave rose beneath, they were pulled down into it, pressurizing.

  “You know, it’s a bit like that,” Jim says. “The depression, the low points. It’s like how our boat was held back and as everything around rises it only pressurizes. It’s something like that. Not a perfect description, but something you’ve felt anyway. Do you remember that?”

  “I remember. A feeling inside isn’t like that, though.”

  “Oh, it’s much worse. Much stronger. A thirty-foot wave is nothing. A few tens of thousands of pounds of aluminum held down through a wave is something light by comparison.”

  “That’s the problem, the self-pity. You have to get over that. Self-pity is an endless path down.”

  “There is an end.”

  “Don’t talk about that.”

  “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do, talk about it?”

  Gary drives, both hands on the wheel. The rain blown in white gusts across the road, cars kicking up spray everywhere. The ocean disappearing and appearing again, red taillights showing even in daylight it’s so dark.

  “I want to talk,” Jim says. “I feel like it now. I feel pretty good. I’ve been in that house alone for too long, just talking with Rhoda on the phone, no one else.”

  “I called.”

  “Yeah, a few calls from you and others, but nothing to fill a day. The longer ones have been with her. She helps me plan my day, how I’m going to get through it, step by step.”

  “She’s poison. You need to stay away from her.”

  “I’m the one who screwed up.”

  “She’s bad news.”

  “Ah, Rhoda, Rhoda, Rhoda. What is she? You all liked her well enough at our wedding.”

  “It’s not complicated. She’s just bad news.”

  “But it is complicated. She can take a hundred forms. She’s every fish in the sea at once.”

  “Don’t do the crazy talk.”

  “But I am a bit crazy, right? If I’m thinking about suicide and I need a therapist and I need you to escort me? If I drive, I might just yank the wheel into oncoming traffic, or take Highway One and fly off a cliff. So I might as well enjoy the freedom. Because if everyone thinks I’m crazy, I can say anything. And I’m telling you Rhoda is not what any of you imagine. She’s better and more. She’s tougher than any of us. Her mother just blew a hole in her husband with a shotgun, right in their living room as he’s trying to run away. Shot him in the back from maybe ten feet and then offs herself with a pistol. No hesitation.”

  “It’s probably not good for you to think too much about that.”

  “But it is. There’s not some safe place I can go. You and Mom and Dad think there’s a safe place.”

  “Well staying away from her would be a start. And visiting us.”

  “You’re all more dangerous than she is.”

  “Stop that.”

  “This is why you’re more dangerous. Because you’re not honest. She’s honest, and far tougher. Less than a year ago she loses her parents like that, and here she is now, talking me through my day, helping me make a plan, even though nothing happened in my life. Where’s my great tragedy to blame for being so fucked up now?”

  They’re on the city streets. Some idiot designed 101 to pass the longest possible way, through about fifty traffic lights.

  “I’d like to see a prostitute,” Jim says.

  “You don’t want to do that, at least not here.”

  “You used to go to Nevada, right?”

  “Yeah, but that’s different, and it’s legal, an entire old-time town built for it, with plank sidewalks and dirt streets. They make it look real. Saloons and hoop dresses and whiskey in old bottles. They even changed the bottles.”

  “I want to go. I need to see that before I die, so we need to go this trip.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “I’m supposed to talk. Everyone wants me to talk, and then they don’t want me to talk. I’m telling my brother I want him to take me to that Wild West town where I wear my six-gun and do a bunch of whores. I want to feel free. I never did anything. And who cares now if I catch something to make my dick fall off. It doesn’t matter.”

  Gary isn’t responding. Just white-knuckling the wheel and staring at the car ahead, stop and go, stop and go.

  “It would be so easy,” Jim says. “It would be just so easy, at any moment, and think how long a day is, how many moments in every single day, and the nights even longer. No one around at night. Only me.”

  “Please,” Gary says, his voice really pleading, desperate. “Please try. I know you can get back to your old self.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jim says. “I’m not trying to hurt you. But there is no old self. There’s nothing to go back to. That’s what people don’t understand. There’s no self at all. There’s no one home.”

  A kind of groan then from Gary, a sound of despair, nameless.

  “I’m sorry,” Jim says, but Gary seems incapable of responding now. So strange. In his time of need, Jim will have to take care of everyone in his family. He will need to reassure, but what would any reassurance be but denial? Only Rhoda will be frank with him. The hard truth, something she’s always liked, and something he’s always been afraid of, though when you’re far enough gone, the fear goes away too. Fear is only when there’s something to save.

  “I’ve been thinking about Mom and Dad,” Jim says. “I k
now you don’t want me to talk right now, but I’m going to talk anyway. I’ve been thinking I have this core feeling that I’m a piece of shit, that I’m not good enough, and I wonder where that came from. It must be them. I can’t have been born with it. I’m thinking it must be from Mom’s religion more than anything else, from telling me even now I have to have god. Because the problem is I don’t have god. So what am I supposed to do then?”

  “You’re almost forty years old. Just don’t go to church. Don’t blame them.”

  “I don’t go to church, but that’s the problem. Inside I know I’m good only if I do go and I do believe.”

  “That’s your problem. Don’t blame them.”

  “Why are you protecting them? Are they suicidal? Do they need to be treated carefully right now?”

  “Well what does Dad have to do with it?”

  “He just expected me to work, because he was expected to work, and he expected me to be a dentist like him, but he knows I’m nothing just like he’s nothing.”

  “You’re not nothing. You have a ridiculous amount of money. I’m a teacher. I can tell you about nothing.”

  “But you wanted to be a teacher. That’s the difference. I didn’t want to be a dentist, and neither did Dad.”

  “Well then change. Do something else.”

  “There’s this weird thing about dignity. I did the commercial fishing because I love boats and fishing. That was a dream. But when it didn’t work out, all I could do was go back to dentistry, because everything else lacked dignity. I’d be taking a big step down. I can’t do that.”

  “Nobody’s putting a gun to your head.”

  “Well except myself.”

  Gary doesn’t respond to that one. Crossing the Golden Gate now, narrow lanes and water thrown by trucks to cover the windshield, all blind and then seen again, red steel and red lights and all submerged.

  “I’ve been thinking about our heritage,” Jim says. “That there was a chief in my name, Jim Vann, and one in my son’s name, David Vann, and even Dad’s name goes back. There are other Roys, though they used the full name, Royal. And it’s not just the Cherokee chiefs, but also further back the Vanes with Raby Castle in England and one of them accepting the surrender of a French king, given a golden gauntlet, and Henry Vane, I think it was, who was the governor of Massachusetts, also, when it was a colony, and helped found Harvard but later was beheaded when he returned to England, and we have a famous pirate, also, Charles Vane, and medieval knights and we’re even related to Roy Rogers. I grew up thinking we were nothing, that we came only from farmers, because Dad never said anything, and then I find out we have these higher origins, and I wonder if there’s something in me that knows we’ve failed, that we’ve gone too low now, and will never be satisfied.”