Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

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Tessa was doodling with a red crayon in the Moleskine notebook she’d picked up at the duty-free shop in the Aéroport de Paris-Orly, drawing roses with yonic envelopes of petals and clumsy childish houses with curlicues of smoke coiling from the chimneys that twisted into labyrinthine designs, became fans of peacock feathers with human eyes and the segmented vasculatures of dragonfly wings.

Odelia was still nursing Abraxas. She switched breasts after he sucked the heartside one dry. No noticeable effect yet.

“I guess I assumed you knew,” said Miles.

“Assumed. How would I? I thought it was just a fucking candy bar.”

“Relax,” said Miles. “Nothing is just what it is. Everything is always something else. There is no just, only everything being something else.”

He repeated this a few times, more to himself now it seemed than to her, codifying it into a mantra, trying the revelation on for size, seeing if it made any sense. When he was done he turned to her again and said: “I’m sorry. What’s done is done, O. The only thing to do now is just relax and let it flow. Like Heraclitus: Everything flows. Don’t fight it, baby. Don’t fight it.”

Odelia knew he was right about that. It only goes bad when you try to fight it. She tried to relax: breathing deeply, in through the nose and out through the mouth. Miles and Tessa had a significant head start on her. She’d been asleep, though she didn’t know for how long. And they didn’t know either.

Miles got out of his seat and starting walking up and down the aisle.

A stewardess rolled up with a cart. Her hair was bound in a drum-tight bun, her hips snug in a militaristic uniform with brass buttons flashing all over it.

“Steak or fish?” said the stewardess.

She startled Tessa, who was hunched over her drawings in the Moleskine.

“What?” said Tessa.

“Steak or fish?”

“What?”

The stewardess bent closer to her and articulated, her mouth opening and closing histrionically around the shape of each word:

“Steak — or — fish?”

Tessa turned away from her and shot Odelia a look of wild-eyed animal panic.

“She’s asking what you want to eat,” said Odelia.

“I don’t want anything,” said Tessa to the stewardess.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes yes I’m sure I don’t want anything I don’t want anything.”

The stewardess turned to Odelia.

“Steak or fish?”

“Fish, please. And also white wine.”

Tessa smacked her notebook shut, crossed her legs, and tried to look natural. From the seat-pocket she slid a pamphlet with colorful cartoons detailing emergency evacuation procedures and pretended to read it. Odelia unlocked the plastic table in the seat back and unfolded it out in front of her. The stewardess reached across the seats to hand her a tray with a rectangular tin, napkin, fork, and knife on it, then unscrewed a small wine bottle, filled a wineglass half full, and handed these to Odelia. Tessa’s eyes followed the transferences of these objects with suspicion and a weak glimmer of hatred.

Abraxas was fine. He’d quit feeding. He wasn’t asleep, but in a blissful daze: placid, smiley, making his gurgly prelinguistic baby noises.

She drank half the wine. It wasn’t good. It had an unpleasantly piquant tang. She peeled back the rim of the rectangular tin container and removed the damp paper lid. Inside was a hot slimy fish dinner nestled in steamed carrots and broccoli. She picked at it with the fork, ate about half of it before she stopped because ingesting the food was making her mildly nauseated. She drank the rest of the wine and felt better. She gave the half-eaten meal on the tray back to the stewardess when she squeaked past them again with the cart.

The edges of things were beginning to get hazy. Everything was growing a thin coating of blue-gray fungus, like time-lapse footage of a mold culture growing in a Petri dish. There was a jellyfish throbbing in her stomach. Her pulse quickened and she began to feel acutely conscious of her internal organs.

She daydreamed that she was sculpting her body, molding flesh onto her skeleton like in the vision of Ezekiel, and when she was done building her body in this way she would kiss herself and breathe life into her lungs, get the heart thumping. She catalogued the systems of the body: skeletal, muscular, nervous, respiratory, circulatory, digestive, reproductive. She imagined the inside of her body, pictured herself swimming through the conduits of blood in a microscopic submarine, like in Fantastic Voyage . The cilia of her lungs wave around aimlessly and the spongy walls heave in and out. Billions of little wiggling fingers line the inner walls of her intestines; pulpy bits of that fish entrée come tunneling through, and the wiggling fingers grab them and pick them apart, absorb them into the walls, transferring nourishment to the blood, and the blood revitalizing the brain, and the brain converting matter into electricity and redistributing it to the rest of the body. My body is like a utopian civilization, Odelia begins to think. We all work together for the good of all. She expands on the analogy: The cardiovascular system is to the body as resource distribution is to the state, and

digestive: body:: agricultural: state

skeletal/muscular: body:: industrial: state

reproductive: body:: cultural: state

nervous: body:: political: state

Everything fits so beautifully together. All elements work integrally toward the health and benefit of the whole. She reasons that if this is possible in the naturally occurring system of a single human body then it should also be possible in human society. Look at me: I am a utopia.

Miles comes back and sits down. He’s done pacing up and down the aisle. Odelia burns to tell him about this idea.

“I am a utopia,” she says.

“What?”

“I am a utopia.”

“What?”

“I am a utopia.”

It doesn’t occur to her that she should have to add anything else to communicate the thought.

“Hot damn,” says Miles.

Miles’s tongue slithers in and out of his mouth twice to wet his lips. He’s waving his fingers. All of his fingers appear to undulate at slightly different wavelengths, like the tubular fingers of those medusoid creatures that lie along the ocean floor and ensnare passing fish who stray too close and absorb them into themselves. Or is she thinking of her intestines?

“Nervous body, political state,” she explains.

“Me no understand,” says Miles in a silly Mexican accent.

“Look. If everything in the human body communicates and works together, then there’s no reason why many human bodies at the same time can’t communicate and work together for the benefit of all. We all just have to think of ourselves as a single body with no individual conflicting motives. We have to all think of ourselves as parts of a single biological entity. Everybody will work just as much as everybody else and there’s no need for money, no sexual jealousy…”

Odelia spools out her dying sentence with her fingers circling in the air.

“Oh,” says Miles. “Then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.”

“What?”

“Then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.”

“What?”

“She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes in shape no bigger than an agate-stone on the forefinger of an alderman, drawn with a team of little atomies athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep—”

“Okay, stop,” says Odelia. “Not now.”

Miles is quiet. He turns away from her.

A little later he gets up and leaves. So does Tessa. They both leave their seats and disappear up the aisle. Miles’s yellow-and-blue Hawaiian shirt smears a wake of color in the air as he goes.