Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

As the plane climbed steeper and higher Abraxas woke up and started crying. The pressure throbbing in his head. Odelia held him to her chest and rocked him as he struggled. His pink monkey face was contorted in a grimace. She kissed the top of his head.

“Shh—. Shhh—.”

How confused, how exhausted he must be. They had already been traveling by boat and bus and train for days and were ragged and dirty and tired before they even got on the plane. Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep , she thought-projected to the baby.

“Nnn nik ik eeaaah,” said Abraxas.

“Hey, kiddo,” said Miles. “Be cool.”

Abraxas quit crying and flopped his head into the nook of Odelia’s body where her neck met her shoulder. His tiny hand fingered the edge of her dress.

“It hurts him,” Odelia said to Miles, whispering. “The pressure.”

“Poor baby,” said Tessa, talking across Miles’s lap. “He doesn’t know how to pop his ears.”

“God, I hope he’s not gonna cry the whole flight,” said Odelia.

“No shit,” said Miles. “Eight hours, Jesus. He’ll be all right. Won’t you?”

Miles reached over and tugged on a plump pink foot, which almost set Abraxas crying again. He uttered a couple of starting-up noises—“uk! uk!”—that could have been the prelude to a shrieking fit. Odelia saved it by kissing the top of his head and blowing on him with her lips brushing his skin. A trick she’d discovered by accident. She didn’t know why it worked, but it usually did. She would kiss the top of his head and blow on his skin and say, intoning it again and again like an incantation:

“I will keep you from harm. I will keep you from harm. I will keep you from harm.”

His head was downy and soft and he smelled good, sweet — he smelled new. The incantation worked. He slumped back into a zonked-out daze.

Miles produced three chocolate candy bars from the luggage under his seat, wrapped in a plastic bag and wrapped again in foil. He offered one to Odelia.

“No thanks. Not right now.”

“Suit yourself. It’s here when you want it.”

He gently put the candy bar in her lap. Miles smiled. Miles smiled his billion-kilowatt smile, a jester’s grin that could have hovered disembodied in midair, a sly smile full of fun and sex and mischief. God, how Odelia loved it. She liked to imagine what Miles must have been like as a child. She hoped he’d been a neighborhood menace, running through gardens, shooting bottle rockets at beehives. Life was a cartoon to him — Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, explosions and music and silly sound effects and a surreal plasticity to time and space. She loved it. She loved him.

Miles and Tessa ate their candy bars. They were giggling. The chocolate muddied their teeth. The soporific purr of the jet engines put Odelia to sleep. She and the baby fell asleep together almost as a single entity melting into the corner, Paris vanishing beneath them, behind them.

• • •

The baby’s squirming woke her up.

He cried a little—“uk! uk! eh!”—meaning I’m hungry . She unbuttoned the top three buttons of her dress and Abraxas groped frantically for her breast.

A middle-aged woman walking up the aisle slowed her gait as she passed their seats. She was wearing purple and had pearl earrings, and her brown hair was piled on top of her head like a loaf of bread. She cast a look of revulsion at Odelia.

Miles turned to her and said: “Whatcha lookin at, honey? It’s nature.”

The woman didn’t answer and clipped away up the aisle.

“How long was I asleep?” said Odelia.

“I dunno. A while.”

She blinked and smeared the ivory mucus from the corners of her eyes. The air in the cabin had become denser and mustier with cigarette smoke.

Odelia squished Abraxas to her chest. The nipple inflated into his mouth and he pulled at it with his gums, his tiny wrinkled hands hugging her breast. He latched onto her nipple. She felt the milk surge through her glands and into his mouth. One eye peeled open languidly and peeked up at her. His eyes were the same green-gold as Miles’s eyes. To feed a creature who came from your body with your own bodily fluid: Odelia pondered this, its philosophical profundity, while she took the candy bar in her lap and picked back the foil with her fingernails. She was onto a deep truth. She was searching her mind for the next step in the thought, in the way you search over and over for a lost object in the place where it should be but isn’t. She thought about the things she’d been reading lately: The Golden Bough, The Hero with a Thousand Faces , and the Seven Sermons to the Dead . She had a feeling that things were coming together in her head; that this jigsaw puzzle of interconnected ideas was almost in place. She was thinking about magic and religion and love and birth and sex and death and eternal returns and the circles of myth. She looked out the window and ate the candy bar and fed her son.

Five miles below them lay the Atlantic Ocean: blue-black and vast, its crashing waves diminished to ripples. She could see the shadow of the plane on the surface of the water, and a beaming circle of light. She thought about all the animals swimming in the ocean below them. Eels and stingrays and giant squid and fish with bioluminescent lamps dangling from their heads so they may see in the dark, who live near the bottom where we cannot go because the pressure would crush us. And whales — blue whales, these animals a hundred feet long each that glide under the surface of the water like massive phantoms and speak to one another in low haunting songs across fathoms and fathoms.

The word fathom would always make her think of Miles. He had been an actor in college, where they met, before they dropped out to join the revolution. He had always played spirits, sprites, tricksters, the lords of misrule. He had played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet , Ariel in The Tempest . She looked out the window at the sea below, thinking of mystery and whalesong and deep beautiful darkness, and thought, Full fathom five thy father lies … but could not remember the rest. Without looking away from the sea, the plane’s shadow, its iridescent halo, her forehead resting on the windowpane that was warm from the sun, she said softly, knowing if she gave him the first line Miles would finish it:

“Full fathom five thy father lies—”

Miles immediately answered: “Of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes: nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”

She looked at Miles and smiled. Here we are in the sky, moving westbound fast enough to chase the sun over the curvature of the earth, and the sea is full of mysterious creatures and I am feeding my child with the milk of my own body. She was in love with the beauty and mystery of life on Earth.

“Miles,” she said. “I love you.”

She reached out her face to kiss him. Miles kissed her back. His lips felt sticky and strange. She pulled back and looked at him. His grin was crazily stretched across his face like a rubber mask. He put his wide, strong hand on her shoulder and tried to massage it a little, but the angle was awkward and his skin felt wet and bloodless, and his touch, although it was meant to be comforting, felt all wrong, like when you see a little kid petting a cat backward. His pupils were dilated.

“Oh,” said Odelia. “Did you take something?”

Miles nodded and his eyebrows did a Groucho Marx up-and-down, up-and-down, and the grin stretched a little wider, the rubber mask of his face threatening to snap.

“So did Tessa,” he said. “Eight-fucking-hour flight, figured might as well. You know you just did too, right?”