Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

It was a little after midnight. Peter wasn’t tired at all. Peter had a meeting with his prospective employer the next morning at eight.

“Why so early?” he’d asked his brother.

“They’ve already been working for two hours by then,” said Greg. “They get to the lab around six. They have to start working that early because the fishermen bring in the catch even earlier than that.”

The job was driving this truck with a tank full of salt water on it from the marine biology lab at MIT to the docks in New Bedford to pick up all the squid the fishermen hauled in along with the fish. The fishermen just threw the squid back and kept the fish, but MIT needed squid to run experiments on. So he was supposed to get there early in the morning, before the boats came in, ask them to give him their squid, then drive back to MIT, deliver the squid. He would be paid by the squid.

Greg said he had put the word in for Peter. He said they weren’t interviewing anybody else. The job was as good as his; this interview was basically a formality. He said they’d been trying to get students to do it, but none of them wanted the job because it didn’t pay that much and you had to get up at three in the morning to do it. Greg said he’d seen the thing for the job on the job-posting thing, the bulletin board, in the student quad cafeteria whatever area for weeks and weeks and nobody had torn any tabs off it. So he went to the marine biology lab and asked the guys who worked there what the job was and what it entailed and how much it paid. And then he asked them if they’d mind giving his younger brother, Peter, a job.

“What did you tell them?” said Peter.

“Not everything. I said you were in kind of a tough spot and needed to make some money, get back on your feet.”

“What do you mean back?”

“I told them you’d be a reliable worker. So please don’t embarrass me.”

So they didn’t know everything. Everything was that Peter was a twenty-seven-year-old addict with ten thousand dollars in credit card debt, a criminal record, and no college degree, who’d been living in a halfway house in Illinois until last week. But now he was here. So?

Actually, that wasn’t everything, not even close. But those were the big things.

Okay, so we have to be there at eight. It takes like, twenty minutes to get there. Okay, so let’s get up at seven. That means we should go to bed now.

Peter opened his brother’s liquor cabinet. Inside it was a sight that amazed and ashamed Peter, a sight that probably always would: a bunch of bottles of liquor that were half full, three-quarters full… you know, bottles that have been opened, but aren’t empty. Greg was the kind of person who could pour himself a glass of Scotch or whatever, drink it, and then stop drinking and go to bed or whatever, instead of drinking until either there was nothing left to drink or he physically couldn’t drink anymore.

Peter got a glass out of the cupboard and poured himself about three fingers of what looked like expensive Scotch. He looked at it, set it down, and poured another finger. He took a sip, put the glass back on the kitchen counter, and started looking around the kitchen for something he could turn into a funnel to pour the Scotch back into the bottle with. He ripped a page out of a National Geographic with a picture of whales on it and rolled it into a funnel. He stuck the skinny end into the neck of the bottle and dumped the glass into the fat end. The page instantly got all damp and floppy. Some of the blue ink from the whales slid off the page and got in the Scotch, tiny ribbonlike clouds of whale-colored ink in the Scotch. Oh no. We’re fucking this up. The whisky was running down the sides of the bottle and getting all over his hands and the counter. While Peter was doing this it occurred to him that his mom had a funnel that she used for cooking somehow. A funnel had some sort of cooking-related function. Remember we used to play with it when we were a kid? When we would make potions? Peter had once covered it in aluminum foil and worn it as a hat when he was the Tin Man for Halloween, and Greg had been the Scarecrow and Lindsay had been Dorothy. There was no Cowardly Lion. This led to the thought that Greg and his wife had a pretty nice house and everything, full of grown-up stuff, and they cooked, and they might have an actual funnel somewhere in the kitchen, one that was made to be used as a funnel, made out of metal or plastic or something. But it was too late now.

He put the stopper back in the bottle, wiped the bottle and the counter off with a paper towel, put the bottle back in the liquor cabinet, thought about how weird it was that they even had a liquor cabinet and if they had a fucking liquor cabinet they probably had a fucking funnel, then he looked in the liquor cabinet and realized there was in fact a funnel in the liquor cabinet, washed the glass and dried it and put it back in the cupboard, went downstairs, set the alarm clock Megan had given him for seven, took off his clothes, got in bed, and stared at pink tufts of fiberglass insulation stapled to wooden beams in the basement wall until the alarm clock went off.

As soon as he hit the button that shut off the buzzer he was suddenly incredibly sleepy. He heard Greg and Megan moving around upstairs. He fought his way into the same clothes he’d worn the day before, went upstairs, pissed, splashed water on his face, and combed his hair with his hands. His skin looked pink and puffy, and his eyes were narrow and swampy looking. The whites of his eyes were dull gray. He joined them in the kitchen.

“How’d you sleep?” said Megan.

“Bad,” said Peter.

“I’m sorry.”

She was making coffee. Their coffeemaker looked like a futuristic robot or a spaceship or something.

Greg and Megan were both healthy, good-looking people. Greg had always dated girls who were way above Peter’s looks-bracket. Megan had small hands and buggy eyes and skin and hair right out of commercials for skin and hair products. She looked like a pregnant woman on TV. Some pregnant women get fat feet and things like that. But Megan just had a perfectly compact, round belly, like she had a beach ball under her shirt. It looked like when she gave birth it would just kind of make a harmless popping sound like the sound of a cartoon bubble popping, and then she’d go back to exactly what she looked like before.

“You want a ride to the campus?” said Greg. “I’m going to my office early anyway.”

Fuck. We can’t say no. There’s no point. We’re going to the same place anyway, it doesn’t make any sense for us to walk now.

He’d planned on smoking cigarettes while he walked to the campus, and if Greg drove him that meant he wouldn’t get to do that and he probably wouldn’t have time for a cigarette until after the interview.

“Thanks,” said Peter.

They were eating bagels and cream cheese. Peter couldn’t eat anything. He was hungry, but he couldn’t eat anything. He drank four cups of coffee and afterward was light-headed and slightly nauseated.

Greg was reading the newspaper.

“Can I have the funny papers?” said Peter.

Greg slid the cartoon pages out of the newspaper and gave them to him. Peter gulped coffee and read The Far Side first, then Calvin and Hobbes , then started working his way through the other ones, which are never, ever actually funny, like Hägar the Horrible.

“So,” said Megan. “Are you going to start looking for a place soon?”

“Megan,” said Greg.

“Well, yeah,” said Peter. “I’ll be out of here pretty soon.”

Greg read the newspaper, ate his bagel, and began to fiercely ignore their conversation.

“I figure maybe a couple weeks,” said Peter. “Depends on when I get my first paycheck and stuff like that. Really soon though.”