Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Neither of them said anything. The stereo played Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come . The tension in the music came from the jittery energy of the rhythm section mixed with that threnodic sound of the horns. Lana curled herself into a fetal ball, her knees squeezed to her chest and her arms wrapped around her ankles. Her face was turned away from Fred, looking out the window.

Fred ended the silence.

“You know,” he said. “I am not happy.”

She didn’t say anything.

As they rounded a curve and approached the turnoff to the main road, Fred saw the flashing red and blue lights of a police car on the trunks of the trees by the roadside. The white pickup truck they had seen in the parking lot was parked across two lanes of traffic, and two long lines of cars, headlights glaring and engines idling, were stacked up bumper to bumper on either side. A man and woman were sitting on a grassy berm to the side of the road with their heads between their knees and their hands cuffed behind their backs. Another man was standing with his legs planted apart and his palms flat against the side of the truck, and a cop was frisking him with one hand and holding a radio to his mouth with the other.

Fred stopped the car.

“What,” Lana said in a sleepy voice. Her eyes blinked open. Had she been asleep?

She looked at him over her shoulder, still curled away from him toward the window.

“You gotta get out of here,” Fred informed her, in a thin voice that was shrill and sick with panic. “You gotta get out of here right now before anybody sees you, those cops are gonna want to talk to me. I can’t have you in here. They’ll throw me in jail if they see you in here like that. Way way way way way too much to explain to the cops. Get out. Please please please get the fuck out of here right now please.”

“What? Where am I gonna go?”

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking— I don’t know, uh—”

The cop seemed to be looking in their direction. Fred cut the headlights, and then the cop was really looking at them.

“Wait,” said Fred. “Wait wait wait wait, okay. I know. I got an idea. Go up there and hide in that cannon. Nobody’ll ever look in there.”

“What?”

“You know the cannon in the parking lot on top of the hill? Commemorating the slaughter of Indians or whatever, hide in there, hide like in the barrel of the cannon, you’re skinny, you’ll fit in there and then I’ll know exactly where to find you when I come back and if they throw me in jail I’ll use my one call to call up my buddy Craig, and he’ll come get you. I’ll tell him where to find you but I don’t think that’ll happen because I’m basically pretty much sober now anyway and I can talk my way out of this, just please please please please get the fuck out right now.”

Lana got out of the car, slammed the door, and ran back up the hill along the dirt road. When she slammed the door the cop down on the road looked up and aimed his flashlight in Fred’s direction. Fred turned the headlights back on and eased the car forward.

• • •

She did like the dark. She didn’t make the Platonic mistake of associating the good and the beautiful and the light with the truth. That was saccharine and deceptive, like using a euphemism for something more accurately expressed in grubbier, more direct language, like saying “passed away” instead of “died,” or “make love” or “sleep with” instead of “fuck.” Her parents’ house in California vibrated softly all over with fake sweetness and light. She hated their money, hated their tasteful well-matched furniture, hated their sterile Thanksgivings. After Lana learned the word bourgeois she took enormous pleasure in applying the adjective to her parents. Lana was more interested in darkness and ugliness — the juice of life, the life/death force, the yin/yang, the eros/thanatos, the duende. She wanted to do and to have, in part to do and to have and in part to have done and to have had. She wanted to be a bohemian. Like Baudelaire. She wanted to be bisexual, and maybe commit suicide after doing or creating something brilliant. But at this particular moment she wished she were in her parents’ house in California, taking a tropically steamy shower, sneaking a glass of wine, and blazing through the satellite channels on her parents’ TV. Then she would sneak another glass of wine, smoke a joint, surreptitiously blow the smoke out the bathroom window, light incense, and read the diaries of Anaïs Nin in bed.

Lana had, in fact, found the cannon with the plaque on it again, but the opening of the barrel was so narrow that no one but an infant could have possibly fit in it. And then she had thought she heard somebody coming, so she ran into the woods and immediately proceeded to get lost. She walked through grass and woods, in a part of the country she had never been before; she could not have even located her position within a hundred miles on a map. She was alone. An hour ago, all her blood had been singing with the wildness and wickedness and novelty of everything she was doing. The silver paint on her skin reflected the moonlight. Her body glowed with otherworldly light and darkness yawned all around her.

She walked slowly. Twigs and rocks drove horribly into her bare feet. She walked on the edges of her insteps to minimize their surface area. Maybe because the alcohol was burning out of her system, the air began to feel much colder. Goose bumps prickled her body beneath the paint.

She had no way of telling time, but she guessed that hours were passing. She lay down in the grass. She stared at the ground, curled into herself like a snail, hugged her legs to her chest, flesh against flesh, warmth to warmth. She was exhausted: There was sand in her veins, all her inner machinery slogging along at half its regular rhythm. And she was hungry. She was very hungry, a sucking hollowness clawing at her gut. She didn’t exactly feel drunk, not anymore, but the universe pitched around like a ship in a storm when she shut her eyes. Yes. No. Yes. She was still drunk. She lay on the ground and looked up, imagined that gravity had inexplicably reversed itself, that her back was pressed against the ceiling of the sky and the clouds she saw were sailing over mountaintops six miles below her. She couldn’t lie down anymore; being still nauseated her. She had to stand up and move around. She got up, and all the blood gushed into her brain. She felt acutely conscious of her internal organs sloshing around in her body, everything out of balance and out of time. She might have fallen asleep. She couldn’t tell. The stars had shifted positions, the moon had moved. But it was still dark, and she had nothing to hold on to, mentally or physically, figuratively or literally. She tried to remember what had happened, but only decontextualized blots of memory remained of the night, certain noises, sense perceptions, images with contours inconstant and definitions blurry as if seen under water, a cloud and a tree and a car and a cannon and a hand and an eye and a blast of smoke and a sudden eruption of light and the warbling sound of a man singing songs about sex and death and love and the end of the world seventy-five years ago in a noise field of pops and crunching static, and in her consciousness the memories smeared continuously into dreams about fathers slitting the throats of their children on mountaintops thousands of years ago, and somewhere between waking and sleeping she had a vague thought that there is nothing as elemental as an unexplained light in the sky, or the sound of a voice screaming in the dark.

Then she looked to the north, along the distant ridge of mountains and across the rippling, light-dusted plains, and saw a cloud of fire in the sky. She looked, and saw four spirals of fire, blazing bright and revolving clockwise, like whirlpools of flame. The four spirals of fire hovered high in the sky, and they were moving. They darted from one place to another, and there were flashing white tendrils of electricity in the sky. And she looked below them, and saw four enormous gold machines below the four spirals of fire in the sky. The machines went where the fires went, darting rapidly from one place to another. Each of the machines had the appearance of a wheel inside a wheel. The inner wheel of each machine was perpendicular to the outer wheel, and the outer wheel spun clockwise while the inner wheel spun counterclockwise. The wheels were alive with light, and innumerable human eyes studded the rims of the wheels, and all the eyes looked in different directions, and blinked at different times. Inside each of the four machines was what looked like a living creature. Each of the living creatures had four wings and four faces. The living creatures moved inside the machines, but did not touch the wheels that revolved around them. Wherever the spirals of fire went, the machines went beneath them, and the creatures within went with them. Then everywhere the fields were consumed in fire, and she saw blood running in rivers from the gullies between the mountains. She saw a desert of white ash.