Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Olivia stood at the foot of my bed, holding the bouquet of fat-petaled roses shieldlike before her chest. Her face was scrunched into a look of timid wonder admixed with patent revulsion.

I ignored her. I could not have possibly stopped doing what I was doing: I was both artist and art. I continued to slurp bits of meat from the chicken parts heaped high before me.

Olivia cleared her throat.

I did not look up.

“What are you doing?” she said. That thin, squeaky voice that had always reminded me of an articulate piccolo bounced off the glass walls of my exhibition chamber, filling the room with a mellifluent tintinnabulation of tinny echoes.

I looked up at her from my bed. The beautiful shoes she wore added little confidence to her posture; she still carried herself like a hunchback. She looked, as she always had, uncomfortable in her skin.

I swigged from my massive plastic bottle of Dr Pepper, emitted a thunderous belch, and continued, unmovable and impervious to language, to snack.

Olivia stood at the foot of my bed, nervously fingering the pink petals of the flowers.

“God, it smells so bad in here,” she said. “Do you even realize how you smell ?”

I made a dismissive snorting noise and squeezed a shrug out of my amorphous shoulders. The exertion exhausted me.

“This room smells like death,” she said.

I said nothing. I was busy peeling the skin from a leg of chicken — I’ve always loved the way fried chicken skin slides so easily away from the pale wet meat beneath, like a silk slipper. I lowered the chicken skin into my always-hungry mouth.

“This whole thing isn’t about me, is it?” she said.

I said nothing. I licked the last bits of meat from a chicken leg and tossed the bone from the bed to join the others on the floor. There was a soft drumming of thunder in the sky.

“Anyway. I won’t stay long. I came for two reasons,” she said. “The first reason I came is to tell you some bad news. I’m really sorry. I don’t know if anyone has told you…?”

The rest of her sentence was implied by raised eyebrows and widened eyes. I’m sure the curious look on my face belied that whatever her bad news was, I had not heard it.

“Your father died,” she said.

Olivia walked up to the side of my bed.

“Here,” she said, and handed me the flowers. I accepted them mindlessly. I rested the flowers on the rolling dunes of my torso.

“He had a brain aneurysm,” said Olivia. “Apparently it was very sudden. I happened to see his obituary, and I called your mom. I always read the obituaries. They’re my favorite part. So, I just thought you should know.”

Olivia stood there and looked at the filth scattered all around the room.

“What day is it?” I said, distractedly fingering the damp petals of the roses.

“Friday,” said Olivia.

“No — what is the date?”

She dug her cell phone out of her purse and looked at it.

“August twenty-ninth,” she said.

I had entered the exhibit in May. Had I really been here nearly four months?

Time passed. Above the glass ceiling the sky was a snake pit, squirming with thick muscles of green and black vapor. Soon the clouds broke into rain. Pebbles of rain came down on the roof of my exhibition chamber in pulsing waves of crackling water. The echoes of the rain warbled in the big cubical glass room and lines of water chased each other down the walls, warping and distorting the view of Central Park.

“I’m going now,” said Olivia.

“Please don’t go now,” I whined.

“I have an umbrella,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Please.”

She looked at me with unmistakable contempt.

“Okay,” she said.

Her voice was barely audible over the clatter of the rain echoing in my glass box. The room had become dense with fog, and the glass was nearly opaque with condensation. The inside of my glass box was a small, self-contained universe — nothing had to exist outside of it. I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space. This room was my kingdom, over which I both presided as monarch and all by myself constituted my only subject.

“Hold me,” I pleaded. I could hear the infantile croak in my own voice.

Olivia scooted aside my rolling glass dining table, removed several buckets of fried chicken from the strategic places where my waiters had nestled them against my flesh, and lay down beside me on my bed. She slid her feet out of her shoes, they tumbled clop-clop to the floor, and with careful movements she curled herself beside my mass. She put a hand on my chest and stroked my greasy wet hair with the other. She nuzzled her hair in the crook of my armpit. Rain pummelled the roof. I permitted myself to weep.

When the rainstorm abated, Olivia sat up in the bed, rubbed her eyes, and looked at her watch. She sat on the edge of my bed and put on her shoes.

“Please, Olivia,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”

She stood up.

“Wait—” I said. “What was the other reason you came? You said there were two.”

“The other reason was that I wanted to see if anyone had come to get you. But I see now there’s nothing I can do. I just don’t see how it’s possible. I’m sorry.”

“Come to get me? What do you mean? Come get me for what?”

“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “Good-bye.”

Olivia turned and walked out of my box and into a sunny, newly wet world of petrichor and flashing puddles. The light outside had that steamy, crisp, golden quality it sometimes does when the sun breaks out after a long torrent of rain. I watched her go. I don’t know whether or not I would have tried to follow her, even if I had been physically able to move.

Where were my waiters? It was very late. The angles of the shadows were low, stretched long over the wet, golden world.

After Olivia left, I ate the flowers she had brought me. I peeled them apart, petal by petal, put them in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. They had a velvety texture. I felt their lush, wet kisses of life on my tongue. Their strong, sweet odor was undercut by a pointedly acrid taste. I munched slowly on the flowers, internalizing them, making them part of my body.

No one came to feed me.

I. What, at this late stage (or any other), is truly unprecedented? The anonymous eyes, minds, and hands that overlaid extra-semiotic images on the raw found walls of Lascaux merely forged after the forms of nature, and only because of this very forgery of form is such anodyne work (still!) exalted: typical of self-serving bourgeois approval, then, I’m sure, as now, and my sympathies are with those early cave artists. (“Ooh,” I imagine their naïve fellows saying, “it’s a horse! It’s a buffalo!”)

II. “The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed”(Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form ). I myself was once nude (I was a work of art), but now have become again merely naked : as embarrassed and defenseless as Adam out of Paradise.

III. Somewhere (and where on earth does one hear such things?) I heard that, if one is dying of dehydration (in the desert, or wherever you are), one may drink one’s own urine once: There is more water than poison in it the first time round, and it will hydrate the body for another revolution. But don’t drink the next batch: It’s more toxins than hydration. I’m afraid my own leather jacket was just that: twice-recycled piss.