Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

“Where are you thinking of living?”

“Well, okay, this one time I was driving by this storage place. You know, where they have all those storage lockers? I once helped a buddy of mine move his shit out of one of those things. Some of them are pretty big inside. His was temperature controlled too, so it was even warm in there. You know what the rent for those things is? It’s like fifty bucks a month. And I thought, fuck, man, I could just rent one of those and live in it. Just put a mattress in it or something, a thermal sleeping bag, maybe get one of those electric camping lanterns. Boom. There you go. Super-cheap place to stay.”

“What about taking showers?” said Megan.

“Thought of that. I’d take showers in the locker room at the rec center. Just like once or twice a week. I read this thing about how modern Americans take way too many showers anyway. It kills the good bacteria. You don’t really need to shower more than once a week.”

Greg folded his newspaper.

“You’re not going to live in a storage locker,” he said.

“Why the fuck not?” said Peter.

• • •

After breakfast Greg drove him to the campus. Greg was thirty years old. He worked in a chemistry lab at MIT where he did something that involved testing chemicals on rats. Their sister, Lindsay, was twenty-five. She was in her first year of law school. Peter was twenty-seven, and he was nothing.

“Go in there and ask, they’ll tell you where it is.”

“Okay,” said Peter. The car door was open and Peter was halfway out of it. The car was making a soft, irritating bong-bong-bong sound because the door was open.

“I’m going home after I finish in the lab,” said Greg. “If you wait around till then I can give you a ride back, but it’ll be a while. I don’t know how long you’ll be. You can walk around and explore the campus if you want. Or you can go into Cambridge. There are bookstores and coffee shops; you can kill a day there. Or you could come by my office before noon and we can get lunch. Or you could just walk home, it’s not that far.”

Peter started to freak out a little. Greg was giving him too many options. Too many choices to make. When Peter started to get freaked out, when he started to feel like a loosely put-together thing unraveling uncontrollably in every direction, he tried to use a trick they’d taught him in therapy: Try to boil everything down to just one decision at a time. Just choose one item from a pair of options, then go on to the next. Either this or that. Pick one. Next decision.

“I don’t know,” said Peter.

“Well, if I don’t see you later I’ll assume you went home. Okay?”

That made things a little easier. Peter walked up to the building.

It was early and not many people were on the campus yet. It was November. The weather was wet and bleak and made the grass look greener. It was a cold morning. It was an ugly day. Or beautiful. Whatever. It wasn’t either. He never thought of a day as beautiful or ugly. He knew what beautiful and ugly days were supposed to look like, but he wasn’t the sort of person who really cared about the weather.

He could see a clock on another building. We should buy a watch, he thought. He had about five minutes. He lit a cigarette and realized that it might take awhile to find the place he was supposed to find — that he might not be able to just walk in and instantly be there. So if we smoke this cigarette, we might be late for the interview.

Decision: He put out the cigarette even though he’d only just lit it, and went inside. Decision made. He had analyzed the situation, weighed the options, and made a decision, like an adult.

“Can you please tell me where the marine biology lab is please?”

Peter was embarrassed by how small and weak his voice sounded. He was trying to be polite. The girl behind the desk didn’t hear him.

“I’m sorry?”

She craned her neck and slightly tilted the flap of her ear toward him with her finger. She was a sweet-looking, pudgy girl. She was drinking coffee, or some kind of hot drink in a paper cup that steamed up her glasses. Maybe it was tea.

“Can you please tell me where the marine biology lab is?”

“Which one?”

“Um. I don’t know. The one where they do stuff with, um, squid?”

“ Do stuff with squid?”

“You know, do like, experiments? Study them?”

She looked down at something on her desk, somehow figured out what he was talking about, then gave him directions. His shoes were wet and they squeaked on the hard vinyl floor. The halls were dark and he didn’t see anyone else in the building. He found the right room eventually. He didn’t know what time it was when he knocked on the door. He was probably late. Nobody answered. He opened it and stuck his head inside.

“Hello?”

He was afraid of raising his voice too much.

The marine biology lab was all tile, plastic, stainless steel surfaces, garishly bright, and smelled like brine and fish. The best thing Peter had in his bag of experience to compare it to was a seafood grocery store. It smelled more nautical than the sea itself. The seaness of the smell of the sea was compacted here, concentrated. The smell was sickeningly thick.

Peter hadn’t bothered to dress up for the interview or anything. He figured they wouldn’t expect somebody applying for a job that was basically just driving a truck to wear a suit and tie to an interview. He’d look silly if he did. Plus he didn’t have any nice clothes anyway. Peter was wearing jeans, a button-down borrowed from his brother, and a smoky-smelling Goodwill denim jacket. It turned out he wasn’t under- or overdressed. The scientists in the lab wore jeans and T-shirts. Peter was met by a woman in her late twenties, not much older than himself. She shook his hand. She was wearing a fleece pullover. She had blunt features and blond hair she wore in a thick braid behind her head. She looked like a Viking. She looked like Hägar the Horrible’s wife.

“Peter Cast?” she said.

“Yeah, hi.”

“Emma. Nice to meet you.”

She had a friendly, slightly husky, lower-register voice. Something about her made Peter wonder if she was a lesbian. The phrase “lesbian Viking” popped up in his mind and stayed there.

“You’re Greg Cast’s brother, right?”

Not many people were in the room, just four or five that looked like grad students sitting around looking at paperwork. Two of them were huddled over an old computer with a green-on-amber display screen.

“So you’re ready to start getting up wicked early in the morning?”

“If that’s what I gotta do,” said Peter, trying to sound game, trying to sound like the kind of guy who liked getting up at three in the morning to drive a truck. He wasn’t really ready to start doing anything.

She led him to a big cylindrical tank with an open lid. The lip of the tank came up to their chests. Its sides were thick, pale green metal. The insides were smooth wet ceramic. An air-filtration pump thing beside it made a low white humming noise. It was full of squid. They varied in size — some were the size of a handspan, the biggest ones looked about ten inches, maybe a foot long. The squid aimlessly darted around inside the tank. Their head flaps undulated, and they languidly propelled themselves through the water with their pumping tentacles like slow-motion darts. It was at once fascinating, beautiful, and ridiculous to see how gracefully they moved, until they bumped their stupid heads into the sides of the tank. Some of them swam around a lot, some of them just floated. They looked bored.

Emma unhooked a long mesh net from a holder on the wall and dipped it in the tank. She swirled it around slowly, causing the squid to come alive with agitation, shooting every which way, bouncing off the walls, making the water wobble.