Illustration: Athier Mousawi

by David Vann

The late night lonesome stare at the fish tank, the only well-lit place in the world.  The fish were sleeping.  One on top of the other, like firewood or humans, the orange-and-black clown loach on the pale spotted Yo-Yo loach, wedged together between glass and black rock over gravel.  Claustrophobia.  Fenn turned on the fluorescent light, but still only a tiny red fin twitched.  Out cold.  He tapped on the glass until they woke up finally and fluttered about, joining him.

“I’m sinking,” he told them.  “Sinking fast.  There ought to be something I could do about this.”

The plecostemus had awakened, also, and was sucking algae, just hanging there, looking spiny and prehistoric.

“I’m not put together right.”

The plecostemus’ mouth a pale suction cup with rasps.  Below that, the brown-spotted belly and wide, spiny fins, frills everywhere.  On its back and sides, long lines of spikes, plate armor.

Fenn clicked off his lamp, then the fish tank’s light.  When his eyes had adjusted, he could almost see the shadows of the fish, narrow and glinting even in darkness.

“When I was hatched, my head was straight, one eye on either side.  I swam upright, just like you.  Then I hit adolescence and swam sideways.  My left eye migrated over the top of my head to where it is now, beside my right eye.  I can’t see far, I can’t see straight.  I’m hiding all the time and I can’t figure out my spine.  Even my mouth is on crooked.”

Then rising up the stairway, washing his face and hands.  Even the bar of soap looked terribly happy, pinkly bubbling in its little soap dish.  Gita, his fiancé, was asleep.  Fenn lay wide awake beside her for hours, knowing that if he cared for her, he would just let her sleep.  But he needed to be comforted, to be scolded and absolved.  Simply to be ignored like this was unbearable.  He scooted as close to her back as he could without touching, feeling the heat of her that had soaked into the flannel, letting himself be aroused by it, thinking—idiotically, he knew—that perhaps a little sex would fix everything.

But there was the moment a few afternoons before when Nina Badari, an undergraduate who worked on his magazine as an intern, had risen suddenly from her Audi as Fenn was carried past in Gita’s Ford.  Facing the oncoming Fenn, Nina threw back her dark hair and looked straight into him, so apparently perfect, so well adapted for the screen he had actually gasped.

The outline of her young breast as she had raised her hand last Thursday in an editorial meeting to ask him a question, as if he had been her teacher, or Mussolini—in that one moment, he had seen her fully naked, every olive-brown line, every smooth muscle.  He could almost hear a few mindless strains of Rota wafting up from the piazza.  Inebriated with a sudden fondness for nature metaphor, Fenn saw her young, muscled ribs were riffles in a stream, the firm curve from breast to shoulder a question mark become human, as sleek as the curve of a fish’s tail.  The adult, atrophied Fenn saw one endless filet.

So Fenn took a drive along Cayuga Lake and thought of the halibut of Ketchikan, of an ocean the smooth color of mercury, of an overcast sky that remained clear, refusing to let his mind stick on Gita or on Nina.  A halibut lies flat on the ocean floor, Fenn’s father had taught him, lies flat beneath everything, both eyes on one side of its head, its mouth stuck out at an angle, and refuses to move.  When it grows old and mean and devours the silver jig that has been ripping up and down, pounding the silt, no sport fisherman can reel it in.  The line has to be raised by fingertips, inch by inch, so slowly the halibut doesn’t perceive its own drift upwards until it’s at the surface being pistol-shot full of holes.

Fenn tried to think of other things, tried to focus on the bare trees churning past.  His daydreams always became violent.  In disgust, he turned up the hill toward the Cornell campus, rose past snow-covered couches on sidewalks, cathedrals, figures bundled unrecognizably, and, though he despised himself for it, parked behind the student union so he’d have to walk through the center of campus to reach his office.  This he did for Nina, for possibility.

But campus was only snow and wind.  Fenn scanned every bundled figure, nursed each disappointment.  His heart, it seemed to him, more a bilge pump than a fountain.

Three a.m., Fenn had glimpsed intimacy while watching the fiddler crab and clown loach in his aquarium.  Every night, the two played a gentle, repetitive game.  As the fiddler crab walked sideways along the edge where glass met gravel, the loach laid its orange-and-black striped body flat in its path.  The fish lay there insistently, affectionately, one round eye staring serenely upwards as the crab’s tiny legs felt and crawled their way over its body.  Once the crab had passed, the fish fluttered upright, swam past the crab, and lay down again.  Fenn watched and knew this would be enough.  This was all he wanted.

And what did Gita want?  Had he ever known?

Fenn pulled the collar of his overcoat more tightly around him.  He had not worn a hat, because he had wanted to remain visible.  Again for Nina.

Curious how private the snow.  The delicacy of sound Fenn’s boots made in passing left him almost happy.  Up the stone steps, down ivory halls into the warm, arid light, Fenn blew and wiped at his nose.  He felt his ears tingle to life and prayed.  Please, please, please.  Let there be a Nina.

But Fenn’s office was Ninaless.  The other students were working well, it appeared.  They had read most the page proofs, the “One No” stack had decreased considerably, the rejected manuscripts were sitting neatly in the mail basket.  But who cared?  Let the whole building collapse.  The only item on the cork board was an announcement that had been pinned there several days before and had provided entertainment ever since: the Ithaca Men’s Group was having an introductory meeting, inviting new members to come see what was up.  The jokes in here had been endless.  The title of the meeting, Our bodies, Ourselves: Recovering the Wild Man Within, had been crossed out and penned over by one of the staff to read Finding Our Foreskins.

Fenn laughed.  “Sounds like quite a shindig.”

“Weenie roast,” one of his students said as she stuffed a manuscript back into its envelope.

Fenn laughed again.  Could there be a part of Roy Fenn—a flap, a morsel, a tiny, appendaged piece—that was oddly stirred by this?  Was the face of longing to be found at the Ithaca Men’s Group?  Could it be hunted down, trapped, killed?  Perhaps he’d even get to paint his face.

Fenn laughed again.  The poor bastards.  He wasn’t that far gone.

“It’s too stupid,” Gita told Fenn over the breakfast he had prepared in contrition.  “You want us to stay together, but you’re not willing to show even the most basic respect.”

Fenn picking at a slice of lox, daydreaming of salmon, seeing the cohos flash and the old humpies roll at the surface, their upper lips grown hooked and crooked as beaks, their gray flesh and rotted skin trailing away in streamers.  This never happened to old halibut.  Old halibut rotted away in private, dying of nostalgia, buried in the sand hundreds of feet down.

“Anyway,” Gita said.  “You don’t want to talk about this right now, and I feel like I’m going to cry—more from disgust than anything else.”

“I’m sorry,” Fenn said.  What had he been thinking?  Where had all his contrition gone?  This morning, he had planned to make up for everything.

“I think you need to find another place to live,” Gita said.

Gita looking peculiarly beautiful.  Gita the forgotten, the indeterminate, only a few feet from him but untouchable as mercury, liquid metal stenciled from the bright air.  Soft skin, his memories of her eyes peering into every hollow part of him, tears on his cheeks and feelings from nowhere.

“This hurts,” Fenn said.

“That’s funny,” she said, looking down at her plate.  “This has all been very pleasant for me.”

Fenn unable to respond.  This inability a kind of plague, Fenn feeling abused.  “I’m sorry, Gita.  I’ve been horrible.  I do love you.”

“You amaze me,” Gita said.  “You’d say that, and then you’d do it all over again, wouldn’t you?”
Fenn looked down at the table cloth and said nothing.  He would keep things smooth.  At least until he had someone else.

Was this panic, or the ugly truth?  Fenn had no idea.

“What’s your shape?  If you were to graph out your life, Wild Man Fenn, what would you be?  A circle, a parabola, a square?”

Laughter from the Wild Men around him.  Fenn hadn’t planned on being singled out like this.  He was cold without his shirt, and his face itched from all the paint.

“A straight, rising line?”  Wild Man Gordon paused for effect.  “A curlicue, a loophole?”

“I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before.”

“Don’t think, Wild Man Fenn.  Know!”  The drums went wild.  “Tear off your face, your plastic mask.  Let the good father, the good husband, the good man, the good boy lie stunned and senseless!”

For what he considered the first and only time of his adult life, Fenn had a waking vision.  Like bleached bats or manta rays, he and these other white-bellied, nearly middle-aged men were soaring; everywhere over the land they soared, shrieking and flapping and swiveling their pale hips.

“She’s not my wife!” Fenn shouted over the drums.  Utter silence then, every white, warpainted face watching him, every power object held high—sticks, briefcases, Wild Man Guzynski with an actual pistol.  Fenn realized finally this was true.  Gita wasn’t his wife yet.  He wasn’t married.

“Speak your pain, Wild Man Fenn.”  This from Wild Man McDonald, who now wore only the top half of his business suit and had a strange tuft of hair glued to the end of his thing.

Fenn looked around at all these men: Smith, who was trying to break his booze habit, Gordon, whose son had said he didn’t love him, Harrison, whose wife and twenty-one-year-old lover had both left him, Guzynski, whose father had beat him, Wolff, who had always been called a fag, McDonald, who was afraid every day he might kill himself—all of them had told something, had exposed themselves, and now it was Fenn’s turn.

“Give up your pain!” McDonald roared, his tufted thing swinging.  “Let it not consume you!”

The drums going again, Fenn burning in all this heat and sweat and sound.  “I’ve never cared about anybody!” he yelled, then stopped, realizing this was indeed true, though later, of course, he would see it was the simplest of lies.

by David Vann

David Vann’s novel Legend of a Suicide is published by Penguin, and is available now in all good bookshops.