The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  “What did you tell them?” said Peter.

  “Not everything. I said you were in kind of a tough spot and needed to make some money, get back on your feet.”

  “What do you mean back?”

  “I told them you’d be a reliable worker. So please don’t embarrass me.”

  So they didn’t know everything. Everything was that Peter was a twenty-seven-year-old addict with ten thousand dollars in credit card debt, a criminal record, and no college degree, who’d been living in a halfway house in Illinois until last week. But now he was here. So?

  Actually, that wasn’t everything, not even close. But those were the big things.

  Okay, so we have to be there at eight. It takes like, twenty minutes to get there. Okay, so let’s get up at seven. That means we should go to bed now.

  Peter opened his brother’s liquor cabinet. Inside it was a sight that amazed and ashamed Peter, a sight that probably always would: a bunch of bottles of liquor that were half full, three-quarters full . . . you know, bottles that have been opened, but aren’t empty. Greg was the kind of person who could pour himself a glass of Scotch or whatever, drink it, and then stop drinking and go to bed or whatever, instead of drinking until either there was nothing left to drink or he physically couldn’t drink anymore.

  Peter got a glass out of the cupboard and poured himself about three fingers of what looked like expensive Scotch. He looked at it, set it down, and poured another finger. He took a sip, put the glass back on the kitchen counter, and started looking around the kitchen for something he could turn into a funnel to pour the Scotch back into the bottle with. He ripped a page out of a National Geographic with a picture of whales on it and rolled it into a funnel. He stuck the skinny end into the neck of the bottle and dumped the glass into the fat end. The page instantly got all damp and floppy. Some of the blue ink from the whales slid off the page and got in the Scotch, tiny ribbonlike clouds of whale-colored ink in the Scotch. Oh no. We’re fucking this up. The whisky was running down the sides of the bottle and getting all over his hands and the counter. While Peter was doing this it occurred to him that his mom had a funnel that she used for cooking somehow. A funnel had some sort of cooking-related function. Remember we used to play with it when we were a kid? When we would make potions? Peter had once covered it in aluminum foil and worn it as a hat when he was the Tin Man for Halloween, and Greg had been the Scarecrow and Lindsay had been Dorothy. There was no Cowardly Lion. This led to the thought that Greg and his wife had a pretty nice house and everything, full of grown-up stuff, and they cooked, and they might have an actual funnel somewhere in the kitchen, one that was made to be used as a funnel, made out of metal or plastic or something. But it was too late now.

  He put the stopper back in the bottle, wiped the bottle and the counter off with a paper towel, put the bottle back in the liquor cabinet, thought about how weird it was that they even had a liquor cabinet and if they had a fucking liquor cabinet they probably had a fucking funnel, then he looked in the liquor cabinet and realized there was in fact a funnel in the liquor cabinet, washed the glass and dried it and put it back in the cupboard, went downstairs, set the alarm clock Megan had given him for seven, took off his clothes, got in bed, and stared at pink tufts of fiberglass insulation stapled to wooden beams in the basement wall until the alarm clock went off.

  As soon as he hit the button that shut off the buzzer he was suddenly incredibly sleepy. He heard Greg and Megan moving around upstairs. He fought his way into the same clothes he’d worn the day before, went upstairs, pissed, splashed water on his face, and combed his hair with his hands. His skin looked pink and puffy, and his eyes were narrow and swampy looking. The whites of his eyes were dull gray. He joined them in the kitchen.

  “How’d you sleep?” said Megan.

  “Bad,” said Peter.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She was making coffee. Their coffeemaker looked like a futuristic robot or a spaceship or something.

  Greg and Megan were both healthy, good-looking people. Greg had always dated girls who were way above Peter’s looks-bracket. Megan had small hands and buggy eyes and skin and hair right out of commercials for skin and hair products. She looked like a pregnant woman on TV. Some pregnant women get fat feet and things like that. But Megan just had a perfectly compact, round belly, like she had a beach ball under her shirt. It looked like when she gave birth it would just kind of make a harmless popping sound like the sound of a cartoon bubble popping, and then she’d go back to exactly what she looked like before.

  “You want a ride to the campus?” said Greg. “I’m going to my office early anyway.”

  Fuck. We can’t say no. There’s no point. We’re going to the same place anyway, it doesn’t make any sense for us to walk now.

  He’d planned on smoking cigarettes while he walked to the campus, and if Greg drove him that meant he wouldn’t get to do that and he probably wouldn’t have time for a cigarette until after the interview.

  “Thanks,” said Peter.

  They were eating bagels and cream cheese. Peter couldn’t eat anything. He was hungry, but he couldn’t eat anything. He drank four cups of coffee and afterward was light-headed and slightly nauseated.

  Greg was reading the newspaper.

  “Can I have the funny papers?” said Peter.

  Greg slid the cartoon pages out of the newspaper and gave them to him. Peter gulped coffee and read The Far Side first, then Calvin and Hobbes, then started working his way through the other ones, which are never, ever actually funny, like Hägar the Horrible.

  “So,” said Megan. “Are you going to start looking for a place soon?”

  “Megan,” said Greg.

  “Well, yeah,” said Peter. “I’ll be out of here pretty soon.”

  Greg read the newspaper, ate his bagel, and began to fiercely ignore their conversation.

  “I figure maybe a couple weeks,” said Peter. “Depends on when I get my first paycheck and stuff like that. Really soon though.”

  “Where are you thinking of living?”

  “Well, okay, this one time I was driving by this storage place. You know, where they have all those storage lockers? I once helped a buddy of mine move his shit out of one of those things. Some of them are pretty big inside. His was temperature controlled too, so it was even warm in there. You know what the rent for those things is? It’s like fifty bucks a month. And I thought, fuck, man, I could just rent one of those and live in it. Just put a mattress in it or something, a thermal sleeping bag, maybe get one of those electric camping lanterns. Boom. There you go. Super-cheap place to stay.”

  “What about taking showers?” said Megan.

  “Thought of that. I’d take showers in the locker room at the rec center. Just like once or twice a week. I read this thing about how modern Americans take way too many showers anyway. It kills the good bacteria. You don’t really need to shower more than once a week.”

  Greg folded his newspaper.

  “You’re not going to live in a storage locker,” he said.

  “Why the fuck not?” said Peter.

  • • •

  After breakfast Greg drove him to the campus. Greg was thirty years old. He worked in a chemistry lab at MIT where he did something that involved testing chemicals on rats. Their sister, Lindsay, was twenty-five. She was in her first year of law school. Peter was twenty-seven, and he was nothing.

  “Go in there and ask, they’ll tell you where it is.”

  “Okay,” said Peter. The car door was open and Peter was halfway out of it. The car was making a soft, irritating bong-bong-bong sound because the door was open.

  “I’m going home after I finish in the lab,” said Greg. “If you wait around till then I can give you a ride back, but it’ll be a while. I don’t know how long you’ll be. You can walk around and explore the campus if you want. Or you can go into Cambridge. There are bookstores and coffee shops; you can kill a day there. Or you could come by my office before
noon and we can get lunch. Or you could just walk home, it’s not that far.”

  Peter started to freak out a little. Greg was giving him too many options. Too many choices to make. When Peter started to get freaked out, when he started to feel like a loosely put-together thing unraveling uncontrollably in every direction, he tried to use a trick they’d taught him in therapy: Try to boil everything down to just one decision at a time. Just choose one item from a pair of options, then go on to the next. Either this or that. Pick one. Next decision.

  “I don’t know,” said Peter.

  “Well, if I don’t see you later I’ll assume you went home. Okay?”

  That made things a little easier. Peter walked up to the building.

  It was early and not many people were on the campus yet. It was November. The weather was wet and bleak and made the grass look greener. It was a cold morning. It was an ugly day. Or beautiful. Whatever. It wasn’t either. He never thought of a day as beautiful or ugly. He knew what beautiful and ugly days were supposed to look like, but he wasn’t the sort of person who really cared about the weather.

  He could see a clock on another building. We should buy a watch, he thought. He had about five minutes. He lit a cigarette and realized that it might take awhile to find the place he was supposed to find—that he might not be able to just walk in and instantly be there. So if we smoke this cigarette, we might be late for the interview.

  Decision: He put out the cigarette even though he’d only just lit it, and went inside. Decision made. He had analyzed the situation, weighed the options, and made a decision, like an adult.

  “Can you please tell me where the marine biology lab is please?”

  Peter was embarrassed by how small and weak his voice sounded. He was trying to be polite. The girl behind the desk didn’t hear him.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She craned her neck and slightly tilted the flap of her ear toward him with her finger. She was a sweet-looking, pudgy girl. She was drinking coffee, or some kind of hot drink in a paper cup that steamed up her glasses. Maybe it was tea.

  “Can you please tell me where the marine biology lab is?”

  “Which one?”

  “Um. I don’t know. The one where they do stuff with, um, squid?”

  “Do stuff with squid?”

  “You know, do like, experiments? Study them?”

  She looked down at something on her desk, somehow figured out what he was talking about, then gave him directions. His shoes were wet and they squeaked on the hard vinyl floor. The halls were dark and he didn’t see anyone else in the building. He found the right room eventually. He didn’t know what time it was when he knocked on the door. He was probably late. Nobody answered. He opened it and stuck his head inside.

  “Hello?”

  He was afraid of raising his voice too much.

  The marine biology lab was all tile, plastic, stainless steel surfaces, garishly bright, and smelled like brine and fish. The best thing Peter had in his bag of experience to compare it to was a seafood grocery store. It smelled more nautical than the sea itself. The seaness of the smell of the sea was compacted here, concentrated. The smell was sickeningly thick.

  Peter hadn’t bothered to dress up for the interview or anything. He figured they wouldn’t expect somebody applying for a job that was basically just driving a truck to wear a suit and tie to an interview. He’d look silly if he did. Plus he didn’t have any nice clothes anyway. Peter was wearing jeans, a button-down borrowed from his brother, and a smoky-smelling Goodwill denim jacket. It turned out he wasn’t under- or overdressed. The scientists in the lab wore jeans and T-shirts. Peter was met by a woman in her late twenties, not much older than himself. She shook his hand. She was wearing a fleece pullover. She had blunt features and blond hair she wore in a thick braid behind her head. She looked like a Viking. She looked like Hägar the Horrible’s wife.

  “Peter Cast?” she said.

  “Yeah, hi.”

  “Emma. Nice to meet you.”

  She had a friendly, slightly husky, lower-register voice. Something about her made Peter wonder if she was a lesbian. The phrase “lesbian Viking” popped up in his mind and stayed there.

  “You’re Greg Cast’s brother, right?”

  Not many people were in the room, just four or five that looked like grad students sitting around looking at paperwork. Two of them were huddled over an old computer with a green-on-amber display screen.

  “So you’re ready to start getting up wicked early in the morning?”

  “If that’s what I gotta do,” said Peter, trying to sound game, trying to sound like the kind of guy who liked getting up at three in the morning to drive a truck. He wasn’t really ready to start doing anything.

  She led him to a big cylindrical tank with an open lid. The lip of the tank came up to their chests. Its sides were thick, pale green metal. The insides were smooth wet ceramic. An air-filtration pump thing beside it made a low white humming noise. It was full of squid. They varied in size—some were the size of a handspan, the biggest ones looked about ten inches, maybe a foot long. The squid aimlessly darted around inside the tank. Their head flaps undulated, and they languidly propelled themselves through the water with their pumping tentacles like slow-motion darts. It was at once fascinating, beautiful, and ridiculous to see how gracefully they moved, until they bumped their stupid heads into the sides of the tank. Some of them swam around a lot, some of them just floated. They looked bored.

  Emma unhooked a long mesh net from a holder on the wall and dipped it in the tank. She swirled it around slowly, causing the squid to come alive with agitation, shooting every which way, bouncing off the walls, making the water wobble.

  Emma snagged a couple of squid in the net and brought them out of the water. The heavily sagging net drooled water back into the tank. The squid hung limp and slimy in the net, weakly writhing their tentacles, trying to move their poor boneless bodies, totally out of their element. Emma dragged her hand in the tank to wet it, reached into the net, and grabbed one of them. Just like that. She held it by its tubular, torpedo-shaped head. She dropped the net back in the tank. The squid’s slick, shiny body was red and gold, like an apple, flecked with metallic sparkles. The thing wiggled its tentacles, dangling feebly in her hand. Its flat, weird yellow eyes glistened dimly, like silver foil, like dirty sequins. It was disgusting and a little terrifying. The smell was overpoweringly putrid, almost to the point of making him gag.

  “These are the guys we’re after,” said Emma. “Want to hold it?”

  Peter hoped this wasn’t some kind of test. Because no fucking way was he going to touch the squid. If that were the case he’d just find some other job, one that didn’t involve squid-touching.

  Emma dropped the squid back in the tank. They walked around the lab while she explained the experiments they were running on the squid. Some of the squid were separated in smaller tanks. Peter listened to her talk and nodded comprehendingly and didn’t understand any of what she was saying.

  She showed him the truck. It was behind the building, through a back door, parked at the bottom of a delivery ramp. It was an F-450 with a huge rectangular metal tank in the bed. There was an aluminum ladder bolted to the side of the truck bed, leading up to the rim of the tank. Peter climbed the ladder and looked inside. It was about half full with salt water.

  “We have to change the water once in a while. It’s not ideal, but it’s what we’ve got right now. Basically, we need as many squid as we can get.”

  She explained the job to him. Drive to New Bedford, get there around six, when the fishermen bring in the first catch. Get the squid. Bring them back. There were maps, directions, instructions. She gave him the keys to the truck and watched him drive it around the parking lot a few turns to make sure he could maneuver the vehicle.

  “A lot of the squid are going to die,” said Emma. “They go into shock, and they’re dead by the time you make it back from New Bedford. So you gotta get the squ
id back as soon as you can. The dead ones are no good. We can only experiment on live squid. We pay you for every live squid you bring back.”

  “So—you want me to speed?”

  “No,” said Emma. “Definitely not. We’re not asking you to do anything illegal. I’m just saying, the longer you spend on the road, the more squid are going to die on your way back. We pay by the living squid. Interpret that however you want.”

  The phrase “by the living squid” finally replaced “lesbian Viking” in Peter’s head. Of course she was saying, in a winking way, in a I’m not actually saying this but yes I am saying this kind of way: Yeah, speed.

  “You’re hired,” she said, and gave him a tight handshake that made Peter self-conscious about his own feeble handshake. He thought of the limp, slimy squid in her hand. She sent him to accounts and payroll to sign tax forms and other formal documents. For technical reasons he had to be signed on as a contractor. To make the paperwork simpler or something. No benefits. So he pocketed the keys, followed her directions across the campus to payroll, got lost a couple of times, asked directions, found it, signed a bunch of stuff, went outside, chose a marble staircase to sit at the top of that overlooked one of the main lawn quad whatever areas of the campus, and smoked three cigarettes in a row, lighting the second off the first and the third off the second while watching the campus come to life, the students shuffling across the damp grass in their coats and hats with cups of coffee and satchels and backpacks, on their way to their first classes presumably, or labs, or wherever they were going. These kids were in their late teens and early twenties. Later they would probably go on to work on projects like satellites with giant lasers that kill people from outer space, and make a lot of money. While Peter, who was seven, eight years older than they were, would continue being broke and desperate. What he felt toward these kids walking across the grass while he sat on the steps smoking wasn’t quite hate or resentment. There was too much self-loathing mixed into his feelings for that. It requires more self-respect to hate and resent, it takes some self-confidence to believe that they’ve been blessed and you’ve been gypped by a capricious universe. No, Peter mostly blamed himself. He’d started the game on Go with two hundred dollars, same as anyone else, but had bungled it through bad moves and reckless investments. How do other people do it? How do other people navigate the world so easily, as if they already know the way, and never feel unmoored, lost, frantic, like their compasses have been fucked up from too much holding a magnet under them to watch the needle spin and spin, searching for a north that seems to be everywhere at once?