Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

“Um,” said Peter. “I guess so. I mean, you know. I don’t, um. Shit. I don’t know.”

“It sounds like you haven’t really thought this through.”

Half the daisies in the glass flute of water were now naked, sad-looking yellow circles on sickly thin stems. A pile of weird debris had accumulated on the tablecloth next to Peter’s plate, wadded-up bits of pink sugar-packet paper and daisy petals.

“Dude. Quit fucking with their flowers.”

“Sorry.”

Peter’s hands shot back from the half-stripped flower arrangement.

He put his hands in his lap like a reprimanded child. Then he started unwadding the tiny balls he’d made.

“I don’t think I’m gonna do it anyway. The not-talking thing, I mean. Not right now, anyway.”

Greg smiled deftly and nodded, like a therapist being nicely encouraging, only Greg did it with condescending irony.

“I think that’s a good plan.”

• • •

Peter did manage to sleep a little that night. Emma had said it was a bit over an hour’s drive from Cambridge to New Bedford, plan for an hour and a half, and he was supposed to get there before six in the morning. Plus the walk to campus took about twenty minutes. Peter didn’t see why he couldn’t just park the truck at Greg’s house, but he hadn’t thought to ask about it that morning. Maybe it had something to do with rules about campus vehicles off school property or something. We should ask about that. So that means we should get up at about three thirty to be on the safe side. Especially since it’s our first day and we should leave some slack time in case we fuck something up. Eight hours counting backward from that means we should go to bed at seven thirty.

It didn’t feel like it had been dark out for long when Peter went to bed. He lay there for four, five hours, not sleeping. Megan was watching TV upstairs, and the living room, where the TV was, was directly above the futon in the basement. The volume wasn’t loud but he could almost hear what was happening on the TV. But he must have fallen asleep eventually, because the skull-grinding electric throb of the alarm-clock buzzer dragged him out of a nightmare he was having about a guy with his arms and legs cut off who was stuck inside a refrigerator shitting blood into a hole in the bottom of it. He opened his eyes and didn’t know who he was or where he was. He saw the red digital numbers 3:30 glowing somewhere in the darkness outside his body and didn’t know what they meant. As he slowly recalled who he was, what was going on, and what he now had to do, he realized he would probably never get used to this.

He doused himself with cold water and struggled with Megan’s fancy, complicated coffeemaker, muttering the word fuck over and over as he fiddled with levers and buttons. At last he was able to make it make coffee, but it tasted weird. He’d probably done something wrong. He poured it into one of their plastic travel mugs and left for campus in the utter dark. The streets were empty and as silent as the streets of a semi-urban place like Somerville get. The sidewalks and buildings were dull orange from the streetlights. It was cold. Peter turned up the collar of his denim jacket and hugged it to himself, shivering. He walked with hunched shoulders and a quick, short, screw-tight gait, slurping the weird-tasting coffee and smoking cigarettes in continuous succession while he walked, concentrating on his feet. He had a headache that came at him in fuzzy broken radio waves of pain and his thoughts were like a screeching horde of freaked-out bats flapping around frantically, going nowhere. A part of him still worried constantly about whether he would ever feel life was still worth living if he could never get drunk or high again. He hoped there would come a time when he had no desire to get fucked up, and wouldn’t even think about it, and would be totally fine with being sober, but he doubted it would ever happen. It was like being offered the choice between a death sentence and life in prison. It’s like, I’ll choose life, I guess.

He found the truck parked by the delivery ramp by the back door to the marine biology lab. He climbed up into the truck. It was battered and clunky, everything in it rusty, oily smelling, with puffy shreds of foam poking out of cuts in the bench seat and sticky hand-grime coating the steering wheel. He started the engine, switched the heater on full blast, and turned on the radio. He unfolded the sheet of yellow notepaper on which he’d written the directions to the commercial fishing docks, smoothed it out on the dashboard. As he drove the truck, he could both hear and feel the great quantity of salt water sloshing around in the tank in the back of it. If he stopped too abruptly at a light he felt the water heave against the front of the tank, and heard it splash over the sides. He wondered why there wasn’t a lid on it or something. It was a particular feeling of strange calm, driving a giant truck around in the middle of the night, completely alone — not sadness or loneliness, but a warmer feeling, a tingling-belly melancholy. For the most part he found his way, cautiously easing the enormous vehicle into the turns. He was pathfinding, trying to memorize the route. There was one hard-to-find turn that he fucked up and had to double back to take. He lost five or ten minutes, but learned that part of the route much better. Once he’d climbed onto the highway he was fine. He sat back in the seat and breathed easier, turned up the radio and twisted the dial, the green needle scrolling back and forth along the FM band, looking for anything halfway decent. It was the late nineties, and the airwaves were clogged with Alanis Morissette, Bush, Līve, Collective Soul, fucking Moby. Comfortably south of Boston the highway began to cut through areas less and less urban, and more fields and trees appeared on each side as the landscape opened up. He passed other cars from time to time, but mostly it was just trucks out on the highway, twinkling juggernauts, roaring engines and sighing gaskets. The last long stretch of the drive was on a smaller highway, through rural country that surprised Peter. He was surprised by the bucolic pleasantness of this part of Massachusetts — being a Midwesterner, Peter thought of the whole Northeast as a place paved over from one massive metropolitan area to the next, cities and suburbs connected by stark gray spiderwebs of industry. The sky was no longer black, still dark but gradually lightening. He could make out cows standing in clusters in green and brown fields off to the sides of the road. Like a lot of things in New England, Peter was realizing, the cows were more ideal, more picturesque than they were in other parts of the country. Back home in Illinois the cows were all nondescript dull brown ones — but these cows were the classic black-and-white kind, cartoon cows, the kind of cow a child would draw if you asked a child to draw a cow. They looked like what cows are supposed to look like. Peter appreciated that. He liked clouds that were fluffy, fire engines that were red, and cows that were spotted black and white.

Soon the sky had brightened into morning light, though because it was overcast the dawn was a more gradual process than usual. He could smell the sea. As he got closer to the shore, the forests and farmland fell away into more developed areas, houses, concrete. This looked more like what he expected of the East — a gray-and-brown place, metal and brick, drifts of mushy litter packed against the corners of the concrete barriers along the roadsides. The clouds looked yellowish green, tortoise colored. He made it through New Bedford: an old town, all that stately New England stodginess, all the little architectural filigrees corroded by time and weather, more recently overlaid with colorless industry, which had also already gone largely to rust. And there was the sea.