Halibut on the Moon Read online

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Can you say how your mind has been made? Can you say where your thinking comes from or where your personality comes from, why you are certain ways and not others?”

  “I don’t have to say. I just am.”

  “That’s great, honestly. That is the perfect and healthy thing anyone would want to be. I wish I could be that. I’m happy for you, and I want you to keep that. Even if something happens to me, you have to keep that, because it’s worth more than anything else in this world.”

  Sausalito and Marin, San Rafael and half a dozen other towns in the sprawl north of the gate, all rich but dumpy looking. Empty places, but every place empty now to Jim. He realizes he’s not seeing clearly. Encased in rain and spray and low cloud, but that’s only the minor distortion.

  “Everything does look different,” Jim says. “I thought I was feeling the euphoria, that it would last for a while, at least until we got to Santa Rosa, but it’s gone already and I do see every house, every building as depressing and small and unbearable, and all of California closed in, and the sky too low. It really is like that, as if everything is moving toward me but will never reach me.”

  “You might be okay, actually, talking so much about what you see and how you feel. That’s supposed to be a good sign, right? I was warned about when you’re not talking.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right. Maybe something has shifted. I don’t know.”

  “Well we’ll find out soon enough. We’ll be at the therapist in another half hour or forty minutes.”

  “The therapist doesn’t offer much. If he were there in my final moments, he’d write down some notes about how I’m holding the gun. Why is it you close one eye when you hold the barrel to the side of your head? What does that mean? Have you always felt unsafe? When did it begin? When did you first close that eye?”

  “Stop!” Gary yells.

  Jim is surprised by the volume, by the suddenness of it. “Fuck, okay. Sorry, little brother.”

  So Jim tries to be a good citizen: just sit on his end of the bench seat and not say anything, not even think anything, not wonder about source or meaning. Impossible anyway to say how the thoughts began, how despair began, how he ended up here now. He watches the landscape open, green hills and fields dotted with large oaks, oak savannah it’s called, though artificially cleared. Who knows what it looked like hundreds of years ago, whether this was an open valley or filled with trees. All green at the moment, the prettiest time in California, before it all turns brown.

  The Cherokee woman his ancestor married, what about her parents or grandparents? One of those generations would have reached back to the Stone Age, to hunter-gatherers, so recent here, a pocket in time. Other side of the country, on the East Coast, in Virginia, but the same life, fishing and hunting, gathering native plants. No therapists, no cars or roads, rituals for each stage in life and always belonging. Would he have been suicidal then, or is it only in this time and culture that his equation turns out that way? Can you think about suicide when you have to think every day about finding food?

  Jim would like to go back, has always wanted to go back. He loves hunting and fishing, and there was a time when all was plentiful. Even just seeing what happened to Alaska in the seventies is an unspeakable loss, all the big halibut gone from Southeast in only a decade, and the salmon will be next. He doesn’t want any of the stuff of modern life, only everyone gone and the land rich again, and he’ll go back two hundred years or five hundred years, as long as it takes.

  Dr. Brown, the therapist, has encouraged him to think of what his freer life might be. What if he didn’t have to be a dentist, what if he didn’t have to need Rhoda and could let her go, what if he decided to just not worry about the $365,000 he owes the IRS, a thousand for every day of the year? That’s a debt that will never leave, but he could leave. His passport still works. The IRS hasn’t prohibited him from leaving the country. So what if he just drove to Mexico or flew to Asia or Africa, somewhere he could live cheap, drawing all his cash first before he goes? It’s possible. It is possible. But he sees himself alone in a room somewhere, always alone. He doesn’t know how leaving becomes a life, how it becomes filled with other people. Aren’t the people we have already the only people we will have? Isn’t our family what makes us, forever, and the woman we love?

  “I couldn’t leave my children,” he says, and then realizes he’s spoken aloud.

  “What?” Gary asks.

  “Sorry.”

  “What do you mean by leaving your children?”

  “Something Dr. Brown said, that I could just leave, go to Guatemala or Africa and never come back, change my life, but I’d have to come back to see David and Tracy. I couldn’t just leave them forever. And you, Mom, Dad, Ginny, Rhoda. I can’t just leave.”

  “Well yeah. You need us to help you through this. We’re the ones who love you. You have to let your family help you.”

  “I guess his point was that family might be what’s killing me. And my job and all the stuff of my current life. Not that it’s your fault, but just the way things are. Maybe getting away is my only chance.”

  “He can’t be saying that.”

  “But he is.”

  “He can’t recommend you leave us.”

  “A therapist is not out to preserve anything. Most people don’t know that. They’re only trying to free the individual. In some ways, suicide fits with what they do. He wants to free me from everything that’s causing pressure, including everything inside, so he should let me just do it. All pain and suffering gone, forever.”

  “If he ever recommends suicide, you tell me, and I’ll strangle him myself.”

  “He’s not going to recommend it. But he is willing to recommend leaving any social bond or job, leaving family and all responsibility. Like throwing all the heavy shit off the boat when it’s sinking.”

  “The boat still sinks, because there’s a hole in it somewhere. They don’t sink from being too heavy, unless you’re talking top-heavy and rolling.”

  “True.”

  “I think you’re thinking more of airplanes, having to jettison cargo when the fuel is running low.”

  “It was just a metaphor.”

  “Well.”

  And then he’s thinking of Rhoda, just like that, his brother a distraction for maybe forty minutes before she’s taken over again. He wants to see her, right away. He’s thinking of her from behind, buried all the way in and grabbing a fistful of her hair, and he has a boner already. He jacks off maybe five times a day now, even though he’s been warned that sexual exhaustion is part of the end, part of how the end is made possible.

  He looks out the side window so nothing will show on his face. Can other people tell when we’re thinking about sex?

  Being here in the truck is unbearable. He feels encased in lead and held down. He has nothing to say to his brother. He just wants to fuck. If it can’t be Rhoda tonight, he’ll find someone else. She’s probably fucking her new man, Rich. Some loser from Konocti with no money who’s named Rich, ridiculously, but he has what Jim wants. Some shit bag who never worked hard but happened to be in the right place. No fairness in this world, no reward for doing things right, and certainly no reward for being smarter. Thoughts are only a curse. He wants his brother’s brain, thinking nothing while drinking a can of beer, feeling oddly happy for no reason at all and not wondering about that, not a single reflection on his own existence.

  “You’re moaning,” Gary says. “Or groaning or something. Some low sound. Are you even aware you’re doing that?”

  Jim turns forward, stares out the windshield. So much for hiding. “No. I wasn’t aware.”

  “Is that happening more, that you don’t realize what you look like and sound like?”

  “How would I know? Just think about your question.”

  “Well have other people noticed?”

  “What other people? I’m alone up there, remember? There’s no furniture, even.
Just a folding card table and two folding chairs. I haven’t been going into work. I can moan all day and no one will notice.”

  “You can’t go back there.”

  “It’s where I live. It’s my new house. I just had it built.”

  “Just leave it.”

  “Momentum. That’s the most important word in our lives. We have to follow momentum, even if we know what’s coming isn’t good. You can’t fight it. Like trying to swim upriver. If you struggle, you’re faced the wrong way and see even less of what’s coming.”

  “That’s the biggest load of shit you’ve said so far.”

  “Is it?”

  “There’s no river. And this isn’t you. You have to come back to who you are.”

  “But this is me.”

  “I know my brother. I’ve known him all my life, from my earliest memories, and I know he laughs and makes jokes and has fun and likes to hunt and fish and doesn’t let pressures get him down. But he went to college and met Elizabeth and started to feel some pressure, about getting married and providing for his family, and it was dental school, also, when you were in San Francisco. Something happened in those couple of years. And then you had to serve in the navy up on Adak and that pushed you a bit further. Then you had a son, and I think you were happy about that, but then you cheated on your wife and broke up your family as your daughter was born, and that put you lower, feeling guilty, and then you met Rhoda, and she was the worst. She brought you down far lower than the rest of it. So there’s no mystery about what happened, or when, and there’s no momentum. There’s only bad choices, and you can stop making those choices. Don’t go to Alaska, and don’t ever see Rhoda again. Come back to California and live with me and return to school to get your certificate and become a teacher if that’s what you want. See your family more. You need to be with us, and then you’ll be fine. See your kids more too. Where I live in Sebastopol is only twenty minutes away from them. You could see them all the time.”

  “What is it that’s so bad about Rhoda?”

  “It’s what she does to you. She makes you so unhappy. I don’t know how she does it.”

  “She makes me see who I am.”

  “That’s not you, only you around Rhoda.”

  “I’ve been up there three months and haven’t seen any of you, including her. So this is the me when I’m around me.”

  Gary doesn’t respond to that, so Jim looks out his window again. Fields, mostly, in the area south of Santa Rosa. Farm country. Petaluma a small town, really. He always thinks of California as too crowded, overrun by people, but it’s not true. Plenty of open space still. Not like Alaska, though, where you might hike five hundred miles and never cross a road if you set out in the right direction.

  The basis for every decision unfirm. He left California because it was too crowded and the hunting and fishing not good enough anymore, but the fishing is dying in Alaska now too, and if he spends most of his time in Fairbanks, he’s living in a town with people just like living in a town with people anywhere else.

  Gary believes everything is clear, but nothing is clear, not one of those moments in his history. Jim doesn’t know why he’s done anything he’s done. All conscious decisions understood later to be something other than conscious.

  “This is the truth,” he says out loud. “We think we know what we’re doing, and why, but we don’t.”

  “The most important thing you have to remember is that you’re not thinking straight right now. Nothing you’re thinking right now is the truth. You’re suffering, and everything is thrown off by that. You’re like a compass next to a magnet. So don’t trust any of this. Just trust your family. We’ll get you through.”

  2

  Dr. Brown may not actually have a PhD. It’s unclear. What he does have is an enormous wall of glass that looks out to overgrown forest, trees all moving now in the wind. Jim is staring at the storm in close, and then that idea seems like the perfect metaphor for therapy, so he smiles.

  “And what is that smile about?” Dr. Brown asks.

  “You have my head in your backyard. That’s why you have this big window. You know that no one can look at a forest and not see themselves.”

  “That’s right. It functions as a Rorschach test. Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “Isn’t that being too obvious?”

  “Obvious is okay. We’re trying to see together, as clearly as possible.”

  “A storm in close, that’s what I see, everything bending and blown. And when the wind accelerates, nothing is ready for that.”

  “But it all bends and comes back, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me more about the wind.”

  “It doesn’t have a source. And there’s no limit to how quickly it can accelerate or what it can become. I know from being on the ocean fishing and seeing what it does. In an hour the entire world can change.”

  “The ocean is the best Rorschach test, the largest and purest. Our unconscious. What was it like to be out there?” “It was freedom, and never the same moment twice. The water never looked the same, or the sky. The sky has been taken over by the water too.”

  “How far out were you?”

  “A couple hundred miles a few times. Not as far out as you can go. But anything past about twenty-five miles might be more or less the same. There’s no land and no safety.”

  “And what happened when the wind came?”

  “It builds waves more quickly than you would think. It arrives with them already made and they keep increasing, getting steeper, starting to break. But that’s not what’s terrifying. It should be. It’s the real danger. But all you can focus on is the sound of the wind, the way it howls and whines and sings using everything on the boat: the outriggers, which are these long poles with drogues suspended for balance to keep us from rolling side to side so much, and the antennas and railings, all of it becomes tuned and produces noises you wouldn’t believe, some of them like ghosts. You wonder what a sound is, and you can’t imagine it could come from the boat. It begins to seem to come from outside, from something else that might be near.”

  “It’s not the real danger, but it’s where you focus and what you’re afraid of.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what is that now? What takes all your focus now?”

  “Sex. Sex with Rhoda. All the ways I want to fuck her.”

  “And that’s not the real danger?”

  “No.”

  “And what is the real danger now? What are the waves?”

  Jim has his eyes closed, remembering the Bering Sea, the size of those waves, thirty feet, like three-story buildings looming above and breaking white, dumping enough weight onto the deck to make the entire boat flex and bounce, then gone. Rising up from all sides. “I don’t know if the waves are there or not,” Jim finally says. “You can’t hear them until they come in close. You can’t see them because it’s night. The storms always come at night, not only in my life now but also at sea, as if they know they have to be metaphor. We never had a big storm hit during the day, not once. They always waited for the most terrifying time to get us.”

  “Where do the waves come from?”

  “Maybe from everything I’ve done that’s bad, from cheating on my wife and breaking up our family, not being there for my kids. From breaking up my second marriage too. Not only cheating but seeing prostitutes and passing along crabs.”

  “But waves only last for a short time in the ocean, right? A storm builds them, and they might cross the entire Pacific, thousands of miles, but then eventually they hit shore and are no longer a problem, right, and they probably diminish before that?”

  “Yeah, and that’s how inside is different and not like the ocean. In here, all waves grow over time, and they circle the entire globe and come back again, like the Southern Ocean actually, and I never know when that will be.”

  “Is that the most frightening part, t
hat you don’t know when they will hit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there something you could do to help prepare yourself for the next time they come?”

  “I don’t know.” Jim is staring at the trees, watching them bend, and he knows the force of that will be magnified a million times, that there’s no limit.

  “Maybe there’s something we can say about the waves when they arrive, something to remember about them, a kind of mantra. What is it that you know about the waves now but forget when they arrive?”

  “I forget the size of my body.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When the waves hit, my body swells. It becomes enormous, under too much pressure. Especially my head. And my hands.”

  “What words would help you remember their real size?”

  “This is not my body.”

  “Hm. I don’t know if I want to use that. Seems too easy to harm your body then. We have to find some other words. What other words can help you remember?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The words have to come from you. Something to remember the real size of your body and to remember that you can be safe again after the waves pass.”

  “My body will return. It will come back.”

  “Maybe something more particular than that, something to focus on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, let’s use that then, for now. My body will return. It will come back. Although I don’t like that either. Sounds like reincarnation, like it’s okay for the body you feel then to go. We can’t use that.”