In the Channel Bowl Cafe, in Juneau, the stuffing is held inside the counter stools with duct tape. Alojzy, a seventy-seven year old ex-goldpanner and commercial fisherman, scoffs at the Springsteen that the chef is playing on the stereo as he flips eggs, drops local blueberries into pancake batter (the blueberry pancakes here are called Fancycakes), splits open a reindeer sausage with a paring knife. Hacks 27 fillets of halibut into workable parts: parts that can huddle together into pearlescent patties. Alojzy scratches his fontanel—nothing of the halibut there. He knows his name means "famous warrior," knows that he has to use an axe as a cane. He watches the chef pack halibut paste, readying the awful white bun with mayo and iceberg. He reads the lunch special: Buttwich and salad. He says, "In a world full of idiots, you have to go to the place with the fewest idiots."

*

This is an insufficient end for a beast whose name means holy flat fish, for a beast the Catholics reserve for the most sacred of days, taking its flesh into their mouths prayerfully. For a beast that can grow to 483 pounds, who can, with its body, feed over a thousand people—more if sides, like salad, are included. For a beast who, once caught, and hauled to the ocean's surface, in order to kill it, needs to be repeatedly shot. This is the beast who, after we turn its body into burger, we name after own asses. Here, through the halibut, we turn the holy into the joke. We can giggle as we eat it.

*

Beyond the griddle and the stools and the awesome puke-green gold-flecked counter, all ten bowling lanes of the Channel Bowl are occupied, each with a single bowler. Even the sounds of their strikes sound lonely, isolated. Like the state itself, the sounds of these pins colliding—plasticized rock maple against plasticized rock maple—lack any kind of ultimate grandeur. Though pathetic, the sounds are too lonely to attain the position of final. Order matters. Acceptance matters. Like the state, the sound is second-to-last. Penultimate. Almost ultimate, but not quite. Ever almost something. Ever beside, but never quite embodying, greatness.

*

Any time a part is accepted into a whole, there is a period of adjustment before we can force terms like comfort and warm bosom onto this confusing sort of assimilation.

*

The U.S. bought Alaska on special. Alojzy wonders about all kinds of folly, wonders if he was wrong when, all those years ago, he associated geographical extremity with a lack of idiocy.

*

"This is the fish," says Günther Hansel, after catching the world's largest halibut, "that I have been fishing for all my life." Nina Simone replaces Springsteen on the stereo. Though there is no guitar in the song, Alojzy strums his flannel'd potbelly, says, "Blah, blah, blah." The third blah is the same as the others, but still, it is ultimate.

*

All my life, Alojzy mutters, then stops muttering.

*

In magnitude is a lack of possession. We cut our food to fit our mouths.

*

According to L. Pierce Clark, in his article, "The Psychology of Idiocy," one of the symptoms of amentia is the inability to detect the parameters of concrete objects—not only the inability to distinguish between large and small objects, but especially the compulsion to make (if only mentally) large objects smaller, more manageable for those "fixated on the lowest stages of progress."

*

We use knives and teeth and naming. With these tools, we carve the holy from the halibut, take the final syllable away from flat fish and give it to our own locker room sniggering over our own locker room rear ends. "It's a fucking flounder, Al," Rich says as he gums his Buttwich, and Alojzy pounds his good fist on the counter, and the bowler on Lane 9 rolls a turkey.

*

An axe that's used as a cane and that has fallen to the floor of a diner looks so out of place there—the thing stripped of its original function: the bullet now used to apply lipstick; the fish so far out of water...

*

Ice pellets today. On the coattree of the Channel Bowl Cafe, Helly Hansen raincoats commune with Helly Hansen waders via their dripping to the floor. Here, there is intimacy in defrosting, even if we are not defrosting together. Here, is the ocean as puddle, the weather made tiny by the diner.

*

Clark maintains that another aspect of idiocy is insisting that what is popularly cold (according to median human perception) is warm, and that what is warm is cold. In this forced misinterpretation of a thing's temperature, is a devaluing of the thing, a megalomaniacal revising of a thing's reality in order to fit our own skewed (read: idiotic) context. We ridicule that which is more powerful than us in order to subjugate it, leash it to the yard, tell it when to sit and speak. In this way, the winter here is a witch's tit, the holy fish, our tuchus.

*

Lane 9's doing well. No one cheers for his sixth strike in a row.

*

In relation to water temperature, the halibut is a boreal fish—it prefers long, cold winters, short, cool summers. In such climates, the water becomes cooler the deeper one goes, but only to a point. After a certain depth, the currents foster an odd reversal, and the water then becomes warmer the deeper one goes, as if the oceans here are palindromic. The halibut thrives in water that is about 36-degrees Fahrenheit, oftentimes having to withdraw deeper and deeper in order to uncover that kind of warmth. The lower it sinks, the warmer it gets. The Channel Bowl's griddle is set for 350 degrees in its middle section. There, the pulverized halibut comes to an idiot's temperature.  

*

The term, palindrome, derives from the Greek: palin, meaning "again," and dromos, meaning "direction." Clark maintains that another aspect of idiocy involves the retracing of one's own misguided steps, over and over again, as if in mantra. Palindromes are neat, if idiotic. In an essay involving Alaska and idiocy, I promised myself not to use the word, Palin. It's not idiocy, Clark says, to break one's vows if those vows themselves are idiotic.  

*

In the strike, the best we can do while bowling, the ultimate throw, is a nothing-left-standing. A decimation. A total falling down. A clearing of the alley. A fostering of absence. Silent. Alone.  The pins setting themselves up for the fall again and again, the bowlers trying not to commune...  

*

The Greeks used the notion of the palindrome to describe the movement of the crabs on the beach. Baby Dungeness crabs, their shells beautifully intact and still bright red, are often found in the stomachs of caught halibut. Though baby Dungeness crabs are often found (their shells beautifully intact and still bright red) in the stomachs of caught halibut, an online search for "Halibut Crab Relationship," yields pages and pages of such popular results as: CRAB STUFFED HALIBUT BAKED TO PERFECTION, CRAB TOPPED HALIBUT STEAKS, and PERFECT SEAFOOD PAIRINGS (Pinot Gris with crab, Pinot Noir with halibut). In our stomachs, as in our ethos, neither remain beautifully intact, or still bright red.

*

All perfection is, is the best that we can do. Sometimes, this means being an idiot.

*

In Anchorage cafes, Buttwich special on Mondays. In Nome, Tuesdays. In Glenallen, Wednesdays. In Skagway, Thursdays. Here, if the days of the week were to correspond to water temperature as we go deeper and deeper, Friday would lead to Saturday, which would lead to Sunday, and Sunday would repeat itself before becoming Saturday again. Here, in this part of the ocean, everything is on special all of the time.

*

Palindromes are neat, if idiotic.

*

Through a mouthful of Buttwich, idiotic can be oceanic.

*

Fifty miles southeast of the Channel Bowl Cafe, the twin glaciers—North and South Sawyer—calve simultaneously at the end of the Tracy Arm fjord. They belch their icebergs into Holkham Bay, while the bulk of their icy bodies remains in a slow retreat. Here, is it idiocy, or birthright, to confuse forwards with backwards?

*

Like the glaciers, we throw apples at the bully, even as we retreat from him. I will resist here any dumb watery joke about keeping things at bay...

*

Alojzy, cursing the music, the town, the menu, and Rich, moves on to discuss how, when he was liberated from the German concentration camp, he ran with his fellow emaciates into the nearby woods. "No one knew where we were going," he says, "but when we felt we had run long enough, even though we were starving and thirsty, we fell to the dirt and we fucked, goddamn, we fucked."  

*

Birthright: propagation, ancient and out of our hands. About this, the halibut says nothing, keeps its goofy right eye on the crab ahead.

*

In the distance, is that a claw, or the woods?

*

Birthright: subjugation, ancient and out of our hands. 1,000 portions from one big body. All it takes is a sharp knife.

*

...a flat-fish bigger than a whale, or goo on a bun garnished with the most mundane of our lettuces? A goo we have to call pearlescent to force the preciousness of its source.

*

At some point, the relationship between propagation and subjugation must move and belch like the glaciers. At some point, they must double-back and become themselves in some desperate attempt to return to any beginning, however redundant.

*

Where is the penultimate on the continuum of the palindrome?

*

...the holy, or the edible?

*

Clark calls our idiocy our "'ancient past,' so significant, possibly, in the life of every human being." Lane 9's final throw hugs the edge of the alley. Just as it's about to curve inward toward the pocket, the ball decides against it, falls opposite, into the gutter. Lanes 8 and 10 surround this with lonely strikes. A perfect idiocy. Nina, probably not thinking of fish or lunch specials or glaciers, or Germany, or Alaska, asks through speaker static, "Do I move you?" Alojzy frowns. Like the halibut, he says nothing. In the frost on the Channel Bowl window, then-Governor-hopeful Tony Knowles, having finished his Buttwich and wiping the mayo from his chin, in an answer to another kind of question, writes "WIN" with his pinky.

__

The poet, Alberto Rios, when writing about grief, talks of "turning away from the explosion." When something explodes, he says, it's our instinct to turn toward the sound and the light—to turn toward the loudness. Instead, in writing, he says, we must try to turn away from it, and then record what we see. It's that stuff, the stuff we see in the opposite direction that really tells the story.  When my friend, Alojzy died, I tried to write this elegy for him, but couldn't avoid sappiness. So, I turned away from the explosion and found buttwiches and idiocy and palindromes. I really don't know how the hell that happened, but here's the shitty elegy:

We imagined we were picking grapefruit, grapefruit in Alaska, even though the woman told us to get out of her yard. We picked—stroke or no stroke—and you climbed onto the fence-rail, held to the branches with your cane, the axe-blade end of it. We made up stories about the light there, gave it pets, and the leaves. We cursed Juneau and Rockefeller, the children who died in this season's ski accidents. At first, you said peaches, disturbing the swallows who nested there and screamed. But the light was more than peaches, greenish, and your beard spilled like milk and your glasses fell and you stank of sauerkraut and Spirytus cut with cherry cough syrup, some trick of palatability learned from a father. Either the branches shook or you did. The woman stood at her kitchen window, telephone at her ear, and you said something about people who talk to themselves, bats who are outcast because they can see. Their voices, like your back now, straight roads to some other sky. You don't fall, tell me that, after the liberation of the camps, you all ran into the woods and, ribcage to ribcage, conceived children there—before food and water, before saying a goddamn thing to the goddamn moon. Your hands are full of, I don't know: easy light and swallow's egg and sons who've disowned you, but grapefruit, definitely grapefruit. And goldfish and their eyes. Goldfish or the forearms of the Polish boy, ripped from his body and thrown to the pond. Forearms with gills who breathe Zyklon and grapefruit and water.  This light is full of goldfish and eyes. The police are on their way and we hide behind grapefruit. With your cane, you halve it, and the light and we know: there's oxygen and stitches, ribs and guilt, a hometown harvested for its best juice, the life for the pith. You don't have to laugh, or trap air into a leaf, pop it with your palm like a balloon to warn bears. You halve it and we know because there it is: forest floor, a cabbage, every excuse, the most beautiful asshole in the world.