Benjamin Hale: The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Odelia begins to see patterns on surfaces. Kaleidoscopes projected onto everything. Like a net of lace woven out of semitranslucent metallic fiber, a spiderweb mapped onto everything. Aztec stuff: the snake god, the rain god, the war god, the sun god with a mane of flames and spirals for eyes and a lolling tongue. Coyolxauhqui, whose severed head is the moon; Quetzalcoatl, the psychopomp; Tepeyollotl, the god of earthquakes, echoes, and jaguars.

The godheads slide down the concave walls of the airplane cabin and continue across the floor. Outside the window the clouds have begun to organize and form shapes, dendriform fractal sets with tendrils sprouting tendrils, curling out into infinity.

The pattern of the fabric on the backs of the seats, ugly blue-gray with orange and brown horizontal stripes and orange flecks sprinkled all over it — this pattern is only painted on. Freshly applied to the backs of the economy-class seats with wet paint, and it’s dripping. The flecks of orange dribble into the blue and the colors ooze and slide down the back of the seat.

Odelia remembers to breathe, sucks in a gulp of air, shakes her head and blinks twice. The image resets itself back to normal. Then it starts dripping again.

She has to keep her fingers occupied. Her tongue thrashes in her mouth like a wounded snake. Fingers moving and muscles tensing and relaxing.

Then Abraxas begins to scream.

This is actually what reminds Odelia that he is there.

She has been holding him. Has she been holding him correctly? One hand scooped under the butt and the other supporting the back, cradling him at two points to comfortably distribute his weight, to ease the circulation of cosmic energy through his little meridians, keep his bloodflow harmonious with gravity. She holds Abraxas to her chest and sways him back and forth.

“Tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh shhhhhhh—.”

He squirms in her arms like a giant earthworm. He struggles with her, smooth white fat arms and legs pumping crazily.

He’s screaming.

Now she’s trying to fight it. Now she’s trying not to try to fight it and that makes it worse. She feels her heartbeat quicken and hears blood battering in her brain and she’s sweating.

“Please,” she says, whispering, unclear whether she’s saying this to Abraxas or to herself. “Please stop it. Please please please please please stop it.”

He doesn’t stop it, nor does the (6a R ,9 R )- N,N -diethyl-7-methyl-4,6,6a,7,8,9-hexahydroindolo-[4,3- fg ]quinoline-9-carboxamide that is in her brain. She sees interlocking hexagons in a chemistry textbook, valence bonds, Lewis dots. Honeycombs of hexagons latching onto the synapses, redirecting the rush of electricity like train-yard switches.

The other passengers turn their heads and filch brief looks in her direction. Maybe the men give her looks of irritation and maybe some of the women even give her looks of sympathy, but Odelia interprets every look as an indignant look, a look of condemnation. People who had been sleeping have woken up. They roll their eyes and dephlegm their throats with wet, guttural coughs. Some people stare. Other people try not to look at her.

The baby continues to thrash, he continues to cry, and not just dry wailing but full-on crying, tears running and everything, and he continues to scream.

He chokes on himself for a moment, sputters, stops, spits up. The grainy white splatter of her breast milk turned to puke slides down his chin and onto Odelia’s dress. She holds him close and fumps a hand on his back. When he recovers he sucks in a deep breath and starts screaming again.

Miles and Tessa come back and sit down. Their breathing is heavy, their cheeks inflamed. Miles’s yellow-and-blue Hawaiian shirt is untucked.

Miles drags his hands through his long hair and shakes it out like a wet dog drying off. He looks bewilderedly at Odelia. Abraxas screams. The baby’s face is red and afraid.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, pinching a foot. “Cootchie cootchie motherfuckin’ coo, little man.”

Odelia looks at him.

“Whatsa matter?” says Miles.

“Miles. I don’t know what to do. He won’t stop screaming. He won’t stop screaming.”

“It’s cool, it’s cool, it’s cool,” says Miles. “He’s fine. Relax. Relax. Relax.”

His big hand lands on her knee and slides up her leg and squeezes the inside of her thigh. As Abraxas screams and thump thump thumps against her chest Miles leans over and kisses the side of her forehead. She feels the spit from his lips cooling on her temple.

Odelia looks into Abraxas’s face. Abraxas opens his eyes. He opens his beautiful green-gold Miles’s-eyes eyes. His pupils are dilated.

• • •

Odelia thinks of the milk, surging out of her body and into his mouth. From body to body, life to life. She thinks of threads, she thinks of wire-thin nerves spooling from the tips of her nipples into the tiny mouth, latched, gumming, draining her, swallowing her electric currents. She eats, she drinks, he drinks her. Everything that goes into her goes in some way into him. When he was in her womb, a cable of flesh connected them. They’re still almost one body, their hearts still pump together in perfect syncopation, one continuum of flesh.

• • •

“O god,” she says.

“What.”

“O god o god o god.”

“What?”

“O god o god o god o god o god.”

Miles grabs her face with the palm of his hand and twists her head until her eyes meet his and squeezes her cheeks hard until her lips pucker. He locks eyes with her and leans in until his face is an inch away from hers and every time he pronounces the letter F she feels a hot blast of his breath on her face as he hisses:

“Please fucking get the fuck a hold of yourself and tell me what the fuck is fucking wrong with you.”

Odelia points at the baby.

“He got it from the milk.”

A look of some concern manifests on Miles’s face. He releases the hand on her face.

“Lemme see his eyes.”

“No. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. You’ll scare him.”

She clutches Abraxas and blinks several times rapidly, trying to will down the throbbing in her stomach and her chest and her brain. Tears well under her cheekbones. She tries to dam them back. Her vision blurs.

“Come on. Let me see.”

Miles pries open one of Abraxas’s eyes with a thumb and forefinger and the baby recoils and howls louder.

“Look, let’s relax. It’ll be okay. All we can do right now is fucking, you know, is just ride it out. Odelia, listen to me. Relax. It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right. Okay? Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.”

“Okay,” she whispers, so softly she almost can’t hear herself. “Okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay…”

Holding the screaming baby, rocking back and forth in her seat, she has accidentally hypnotized herself with the sound of her own speech.

The people around them whisper to one another. The world is a whisper chamber, hissing with all their secrets. The thrumming of the turbines, the peep of the wheels under the stewardess’s cart, the conversations of the other passengers: Every noise becomes amplified, sharpened but not demystified, demonized to a conspiratorial whisper.

She looks out the window and sees bubble clusters sprouting, and realizes the plane is plunging underwater, fathom by fathom, into the ocean, swallowed in the maelstrom like a turd in a toilet, the massive shadows of whales gliding past, pressure pounding in her lungs, nitrogen gas frothing in her blood.

No, we’re still in the air. We’re in an airplane in the air, dipping and weaving through the jet stream, miracles of Newtonian mechanics keeping us strung to our vector like a bead along a wire by the thrust of stirred flame and the shape of the wings.