Big Fish

  Is any man ever kinder to animals than Edward Bloom? somebody might offer. If there is one, show him to me; I’d like to see him. Because I remember when Edward was just a teenager and he was just so kind to the animals, all of them . . .

  Edward isn’t in Specter all that often, of course; once a month for a couple of days at best. Although the truth is that their rich new landlord arrived there one afternoon with a broken down car, one afternoon after forty years of his life had already gone by, the townspeople do what they’ve always done—make things up—but now, instead of the simple fish stories that had satisfied them before, it is the history of the life Edward Bloom never lived in Specter that engages them, a life they wished they had, and the life, finally, he came to live in their minds: as Edward Bloom re­invented them, so they reinvented him.

  And he seems to think this is a pretty good idea himself.

  That is, he didn’t seem to mind.

  BUT THAT’S ANOTHER STORY. In this one, things don’t go so well with Jenny. It has to happen, doesn’t it? A young woman just out of the swamp, and beautiful, as beautiful as anybody ever is, left all alone for so long. Oh the dark hours in which her youth is spent! She loves Edward Bloom—and who can blame her? No one doesn’t love him. But he, Edward, he has the key to her heart, and he keeps it with him when he’s gone.

  There is something a little strange about Jenny, everybody begins to notice. The way she sits by the window now day and night staring out. People pass by and they wave but she can’t see them. What she’s looking at is far away. Her eyes glow. She doesn’t blink. And this time Edward’s gone for a long time, longer than before. Everybody misses him, of course, but Jenny especially. Jenny misses him the most, and this brings out the strange parts.

  It’s something somebody might have mentioned to Edward when he brought her in, the differentness about her. But no one there seemed to know Jenny Hill or her folks. Nobody. Yet how had she lived out in that swamp for twenty years without a soul knowing? Can this be?

  No, it can’t. But maybe nobody mentioned this to Edward because it didn’t seem right. He was so happy. She seemed like a nice enough young woman at the time. And she was.

  But no longer. No one can see Jenny Hill all cold and hard at the picture window staring out and think nice. They think, There’s a woman who’s in no mood to be nice. And her eyes glow. Really and truly. People go by the house at night and they swear they can see faint yellow lights at the window, two of them, her eyes, glowing in her head. And it’s kind of scary.

  Of course, the garden goes to hell in a hand basket. Weeds and vines overtake the rose bushes, finally strangling the life out of them. The grass in the yard grows, rises and falls from its own weight. A neighbor feels like helping her out with the yard, but when he goes over and knocks on her door, she doesn’t answer.

  Then what happens happens too quickly for anybody to act, mesmerized as they are by the despair emanating from the little white house. But in a matter of days the vines grow from one side of the house to the other, finally covering it over until it’s hard to know there is a house there at all.

  Then it rains. It rains for days and days. The lake rises, the dam almost bursts, and water begins to collect in the yard around Jenny’s house. Small pools at first but the small pools meet, grow, and finally encircle her. The edge of the pool spills out into the street, and washes in close to the house next door. Water snakes find the big pool and thrive there, and trees whose roots can’t cling to the shallow soil fall. Turtles rest on the trees, and moss grows thick on their trunks. Birds no one has seen before come and nest in the chimney of Jenny’s house, and at night strange animal sounds can be heard coming from that deep dark place, sounds that keep most of the town shaking in their beds.

  The swamp stops growing after a certain point, when the house is surrounded on all sides by yards of deep, dark, mossy water. And my father returns, finally, and sees what has happened, but by this time the swamp is too deep, the house too far away, and though he sees her glowing there he can’t have her, and so he has to come back to us. The wandering hero returns, he always comes back to us. But when he leaves on business this is where he goes, this is still where he goes every time, and he calls to her but she won’t speak. He can no longer have her, and that is why he is so sad and tired when he comes home, and why he has so little to say.

  How It Ends

  The ending is always a surprise. Even I was surprised by the ending.

  I was in the kitchen making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. My mother was cleaning the dust from the tops of the window frames, dust that you never see unless you step on a ladder and look, which is what she was doing, and I remember thinking what a sad and horrible life she must lead, to spend even a moment of it cleaning up these dusty distant frames, when my father came in. This was around four in the afternoon, which was strange because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even seen him when the sun was up, and looking at him in the full light I saw why: he didn’t look so good. He looked terrible, in fact. He dropped something on the dining-room table and walked into the kitchen, his hard-soled shoes clicking against newly polished floor. My mother heard him, and as he stepped into the kitchen she stepped gingerly down, and dropped the cloth she was using on the counter beside the bread basket, and turned to look at him with what I could only characterize as a look of desper­ation. She knew what he was about to tell her, tell us. She knew because he had been undergoing all these tests and biopsies, the nature of which they felt in their wisdom was best kept from me until they knew for certain, and they knew for sure today. That’s why she had been dusting the tops of the windows, because today was the day they would know and she hadn’t wanted to think about it, hadn’t wanted to sit there thinking of nothing else but what she might learn today.

  So she learned.

  “It’s everywhere,” he said. That was it. It’s everywhere, he said, and turned to leave, my mother following him quickly, leaving me to wonder what, besides God, was everywhere, and why it upset my parents so. But I didn’t have to wonder long.

  I figured it out before they even told me.

  HOWEVER, HE DID NOT die. Not yet. Instead of dying, he became a swimmer. We’d had a pool for years but he’d never really taken to it. Now that he was at home all the time and needing the exercise, he took to the pool as though he had been born in water, as though it were his natural element. And he was beautiful to watch. He cut through the water without seeming to displace it at all. His long pink body, covered in scars, lesions, bruises, and abrasions, shimmered in the reflecting blue. His arms swept in front of him with such sincerity, it was as if he were caressing the water instead of using it to move in. His legs moved with froglike precision behind him, and his head dipped below and broke the surface like a kiss. This went on for hours. Submerged for so long his skin soaked the water in and turned his wrinkles pure white; once I saw him peeling away this skin in chunky sheets, slowly, methodically, molting. Most of the rest of the day he slept. When he wasn’t sleeping I sometimes caught him staring off, as if in communion with a secret. Watching him, he grew more foreign every day, and not just foreign to me, but a foreigner in this place and time. The way his eyes sank into his head, bereft of fire and passion. The way his body shrank and wilted. The way he seemed to be listening to a voice only he could hear.

  I took some solace from the fact that all of this was happening for the good, that a happy ending would somehow occur, and that even this illness was a metaphor for something else: it meant that he was growing weary of the world. It had become so plain. No more giants, no all-seeing glass eyes, no more river-girls whose lives you could save, and who could come back later and save your own. He had become simply Edward Bloom: Man. I’d caught him at a bad time in his life. And this was no fault of his own. It was simply that the world no longer held the magic that allowed him to live grandly within it.

  His illness was his ticket to a better place.

  I know this now.
br />   STILL, IT WAS THE best thing that could have happened to us, this final journey. Well, maybe not the best thing, but a good thing, all things considered. I saw him once every evening—more than I saw him when he was well. But he was the same old man, even then. Sense of humor: intact. I don’t know why this seems important, but it does. I suppose in some cases it points to a certain resiliency, a strength of purpose, the spirit of an indomitable will.

  A man was talking to a grasshopper. The man said, “You know, they have a drink named after you.” And the grasshopper said, “You mean they have a drink named Howard?”

  And this one. A man went into a restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee without cream. The waiter came back a few minutes later and told him he was sorry, they were all out of cream. Would he mind taking his coffee without milk?

  But they were not even very funny anymore. We were simply waiting for the last day. We were telling the old, bad jokes, biding our time until the end came. He grew more and more weary. In the middle of a joke sometimes he’d forget what he was saying, or he’d give the wrong punch line—a great punch line, but a punch line that belonged to a different joke.

  The pool itself began to deteriorate. No one took care of it after a while. We were too immobilized with the contemplation of the end of my father. Nobody cleaned it or added the special chemicals that kept the water blue, and algae began to grow on the walls, turning it a deep, thick green. But Dad kept swimming in it up until the end. Even when it began to look more like a pond than a pool, he kept swimming. One day when I went out to check on him, I could have sworn I saw a fish—a small-mouth bass, I thought—break the surface for a fly. I was sure of it.

  “Dad?” I said. “Did you see that?”

  He had paused midstroke and was floating on top of the water.

  “Did you see that fish, Dad?”

  But then I laughed because I looked at my father, teller of jokes, eternal comic, and saw that he looked funny. That’s exactly what I thought, as I looked at him I thought, He looks funny. And sure enough, he hadn’t paused mid-stroke at all. He had passed out, and his lungs had filled with water. I pulled him out of the pool and called for an ambulance. I pushed on his stomach and the water poured from his mouth as from a spigot. I waited for him to open an eye and wink, start laughing, turn this real-life event into something that it wasn’t, into something truly awful and funny, something to look back on and laugh about. I held his hand and waited.

  I waited a long time.

  My Father’s Death: Take 4

  And so, finally, it happened like this

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

  My father was dying. Sheltered inside an oxygen tent at Jefferson Memorial Hospital, his small, emaciated body seemed bleak and translucent, a kind of ghost already, even then. Mother waited with me, but would leave to talk to the doctors, or take walks because her back was hurting, and that would leave me alone with my father, and sometimes I’d take his hand, and wait.

  The doctors, of which there were so many one referred to them as a “team,” were all very grave, even hopeless. There was a Dr. Knowles, a Dr. Millhauser, a Dr. Vin­cetti. Each was a specialist famous in his field. Each kept an eye on that part of my father that was his specialty, and reported his findings to Dr. Bennett, our old family doctor, who, as captain of the team, was a generalist. He synthesized the details of their ongoing reports, filled in whatever blanks they may have left out, whereupon he would give us the Big Picture. He sometimes flattered us by using the words he had gone to school to learn: renal failure, for instance, and chronic hemolytic anemia. This last, this anemia, he described as being particularly debilitating, as the body retained excessive amounts of iron, creating a need for periodic blood transfusions, an inability to assimilate red-blood by-products, skin discoloration, and an extreme sensitivity to light. For this reason, even though he was in a deep coma, the lights in my father’s room were always kept quite low; the fear was, were he ever to come out of this coma, the shock of all the bright lights would kill him.

  Dr. Bennett had an old, tired face. The rings beneath his eyes were like dark brown ruts in a road. He had been our doctor for years, for I don’t know how long. But he was a good doctor, and we trusted him.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said to us that night, his hand on my shoulder, our friendship deepening as we watched my father’s condition deteriorate. “I want to speak to you candidly now.”

  He looked at me, then at Mom, and seemed to think it over again before he spoke.

  “Mr. Bloom may not make it out of this one,” he said.

  And my mother and I, almost in unison, said, “I see.”

  He said, “There are a couple of things we want to try—we’re not giving up, not by a long shot. But I’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s sad, I—I’ve known Edward Bloom for a quarter of a century. I don’t feel like his doctor anymore. I feel like a friend, you know? A friend who wishes he could do something. But without the machines . . . ” Dr. Bennett said, and shook his sad head once, not finishing the sentence, and never starting it with an ending in mind.

  I turned and wandered away while he continued to talk to my mother. I went to my father’s room and sat in the chair beside his bed. I sat there and waited—for what I don’t know—and stared at those marvelous machines. This wasn’t life, of course. This was life support. This was what the medical world had fashioned to take the place of Purgatory. I could see how many breaths he was taking by looking at a monitor. I could see what his frenetic heart was up to. And there were a couple of wavy lines and numbers I wasn’t sure about at all, but I kept an eye on them as well. In fact, after a while it was the machines I was looking at, not my father at all. They had become him. They were telling me his story.

  Which reminds me of this joke. I’ll always remember his jokes, but this one especially I will remember. It’s a family heirloom. It’s one I tell myself still, out loud and alone, the way he told it to me, I say, There’s this man. There’s this man, and he’s a poor man but he needs a new suit. This man needs a new suit but he can’t afford to buy one, he can’t afford to buy one until he passes a store where there’s this suit on sale, and it’s priced just right, this beautiful dark blue suit with pinstripes—and so he buys it. Just like that he buys it and wears it right out of the store with a matching tie and everything, but the joke here is—and I guess I should’ve mentioned this earlier—the joke is it doesn’t fit. This suit doesn’t fit him at all. It’s simply way too big. But it’s his suit, right? It’s his suit. So to make it look good he has to place an elbow against his side like this, and his other arm out sort of like this, and he has to walk without moving one of his legs so that the cuffs will appear even, this tiny man in this huge suit—which, as I said, he walks out wearing, walks out into the street wearing. And he thinks to himself, What a nice suit I have! and walks with his arms just so—my father would make his arms just so—and dragging one leg behind with this smile on his face like an idiot because of this great buy he’s just made—a suit! on sale!—when he passes two old women on the avenue there. They watch him pass, and one of them shakes her head and says to the other, “What a poor, poor man!” And the other woman says, “Yes—but what a nice suit!”

  Which is the end of this joke.

  But I can’t tell it like my father did. I can’t drag my leg the way he did it, and so even though this is the funniest joke I have ever heard in my life, I don’t laugh. I can’t. Even when the lady says “Yes—but what a nice suit!” I’m not laughing. I’m not laughing at all.

  I’m doing the other thing.

  I suppose this is what roused him, brought him back to the world for a bit, thinking that if there was anytime I needed a joke, now was the time.

  God, he really cracked me up.

  I look at him and he looks at me.

  “Some water,” he says to me. “Get me some water.”

  Some water, he says!

  Oh and it’s his voice all right, i
t’s his voice, deep and booming, caring and gentle. Mom, bless her heart, is still out talking to the doctor. And I get him some water, and he calls me over, to his bed, his only son, me, his only child, and he pats a place on the edge of the bed where I’m to sit, right? So I sit. There’s no time for hellos and how are yous and we both know it. He wakes up and just looks at me in the chair where I am and then he pats a place on his bed where I’m to sit. I sit and he says, after taking a sip of water from the lit­tle plastic cup, “Son,” he says, “I’m worried.”

  And he says it in this real shaky voice so I know, don’t ask me how but I know that, machines or not, this will be the last time I ever see him alive. Tomorrow, he’ll be dead.

  And I say, “What is it you’re worried about, Dad? The hereafter?”

  And he says, “No, dummy. I’m worried about you.” He says, “You’re an idiot. You couldn’t get yourself arrested without me along to help.”

  But I don’t take it personal: he’s trying to be funny. He’s trying to be funny and this is the best he can do! Now I know he’s a goner.

  And I say, “Don’t worry about me, Dad. I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine.”

  And he says, “I’m a father, I can’t help it. A father worries. I am a father,” he says, so I don’t miss his point, “and as a father I’ve tried to teach you a thing or two. I really did try. Maybe I wasn’t around so much, but when I was, I tried to teach. So what I want to know is—you think I did a good job?” And as I am opening my mouth to speak he says, “Wait! Don’t answer that!” he says, giving a smile his best shot. But it doesn’t quite work. He can’t really make one anymore. And so he says, he says to me, dying on the bed in front of me, this man—my father—says, “Oh, go on, then. Just tell me before I die. Tell me what it is I’ve taught you. Tell me everything it is I’ve taught you about life so I can go ahead and die and so I won’t have to worry so much. Just . . . just go ahead and say it.”