Big Fish

My father had a way with animals, everyone said so.

Edward Bloom used his time wisely, reading. He read almost every book there was in Ashland. A thousand books—some say ten thousand. History, Art, Philosophy. Horatio Alger. It didn’t matter. He read them all. Even the telephone book.

An itinerant dad, home for him was a stop on his way somewhere else, working toward a goal that was unclear. […] It was as though he lived in a state of constant aspiration: getting there, wherever it was, wasn’t the important thing: it was the battle, and the battle after that, and the war was never ending.

At home, the magic of his absence yielded to the ordinariness of his presence. He drank a bit. He didn’t become angry, but frustrated and lost, as though he had fallen into a hole. On those first nights home his eyes were so bright you would swear they glowed in the dark, but then after a few days his eyes became weary. He began to seem out of his element and he suffered for it.

“Remembering a man’s stories makes him immortal, did you know that?”

“I wanted to be a great man […] I thought it was my destiny. A big fish in a big pond—that’s what I wanted.”

“I don’t want to eat anybody […] I just get so hungry.”

“That’s what this place is all about, Edward. Getting used to things […] This rain, this dampness—it’s a kind of residue. The residue of a dream. Of lots of dreams, actually.”

“I—I wouldn’t trust that dog […] I just wouldn’t take the chance, son. He didn’t get you before, but you never know about next time. S’unpredictable. So sit tight.”

My father took his chance and ran through the opening and didn’t look back. He ran through the darkness until it became light again, and the world turned green and wonderful […] When the road ended he stopped and breathed and found that Dog was right behind him, tongue lolling, and when he reached my father, he rubbed his warm body down against his legs.

And the sun set, and the moon rose, and the water in the lake began to gently ripple, and in the white light of the moon then he saw the girl, her head breaking the surface a good ways out, the water flowing through her hair and back into the lake, and she was smiling.

“At the time, of course, dying in the dark of that strange wood, he was far from grateful. But by morning he was well rested, and, though bleeding still from various parts of his body, he began walking, no longer knowing or caring where he was going, but just walking, forward, onward, ready for whatever Life and Fate chose to hurl at him next […].”

And as the old lady drew near they could see that it was here indeed, not in the box but back in the old lady’s head. […] And though they would have turned away they couldn’t, and as she looked at each of them, each of them in turn stared deeply into the old lady’s eye, and it was said that within the eye each of them could see their future.

“But a joke […] It’s funny for a minute or two and that’s it. You’re left with nothing. Even if you changed your mind every other day I’d rather—I wished you’d shared some of these things with me. Even your doubts would have been better than a constant stream of jokes.”

Simply by being who he was—no more, no less—my father was winning my mother’s heart.

They fell into a kiss.

My father cleaned this mess up every morning and every evening. He did it until the cages shone, until you could have eaten a meal off the surface of the floor, so spotless and clean had he left it.

“This is the girdle I’ve been waiting for all my life! And to think that you—you—I’ve been so unfair! Can you ever forgive me?”

However, the big black Helldog was aggravated. Edward had rudely come between him and a meal.

“You’re not necessarily supposed to believe it […] You’re just supposed to believe in it. It’s like—a metaphor.”

While my mother took care of the day-to-day things, he brought vision to the task. He made a list of the virtues he possessed and wanted to pass on to me: perseverance, ambition, personality, optimism, strength, intelligence, imagination.

The very idea of coming home at the same time every single day made him nauseated. Regardless of how much he loved his wife, his son, he could only stand so much love. […] He needed a break.

But he liked to leave me laughing. This is how he wanted to remember me, and how he wanted to be remembered. Of all his greatest powers, this was perhaps his most extraordinary: at any time, at the drop of a hat, he could really break me up.

He made me laugh.

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.

“There’s this man, and he’s a poor man, but he needs a suit, and—”

And that’s when I discovered that my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was just changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward in. All this time, my father was becoming a fish.