Benjamin Hale: The Fat Artist and Other Stories

They had been so much in love, remembering it made Peter almost physically sick with regret. Peter would always remember this one particular time, when he and Gina had first gotten together, when they were having sex, and they had looked into each other’s eyes and said “I love you,” which they had just started saying to each other — there was something about that one time, it was hard to explain. It was hard to explain because it was such a commonplace-sounding thing when you’re describing it, something predictable, that anyone could experience, that anyone could say. That’s one of the irritating tragedies about being a person these days, is that love is a clichéd emotion, sadly, something used to sell stuff, and it’s hard to talk about it earnestly without sounding like somebody on daytime TV. But this feeling had happened to Peter exactly once in his life, then. It was a moment that, Peter felt, no matter if he and Gina stayed in love or not later on, would tie them together forever. He knew he might not have a moment like that ever again with anyone. In retrospect he was glad it had happened to him at least once. But by the time the thing with her friends from UIC happened, Peter had lost all agency in their relationship. At first it had felt like they had been moving forward, together, at the same time, but by then, Gina was leading and Peter was tottering along behind her every step of the way. She decided when they would have sex and how, she decided what they ate, what they were going to do, what they were going to watch on TV. Sometimes she even walked a pace ahead of him on the street when they were out together. Peter had relinquished any control, and was now helpless, dependent. She removed the need for him to make decisions, she protected him, made him feel loved, safe, taken care of. And she had slid into nagginess, was always castigating him for something, sniping at his every fault, from his pitiful inability to ask his boss at the music store for more hours to what shirt he would wear, and whether or not he would button the collar. Once, when they were driving to a party, trying to follow some complicated, barely sensical directions a stoned friend had given them, Peter, who was at the wheel, had accidentally called Gina “Mom.” But Peter still loved her, even now. Since they broke up she had quit drinking and using on her own. She had never been as bad as he was. He saw her the last time he was in Chicago, a few months ago, during the couple of days he had free between rehab and the halfway house. They had lunch together. Lunch. The least intimate meal of the day. She had been impenetrably distant and polite. As if they were acquaintances. Gina hadn’t seemed happy or unhappy. She was just flat. Flat as the green line of a dead person’s heart monitor on a hospital show on TV. She wasn’t the same person anymore. It was totally Invasion of the Body Snatchers , when the aliens replace someone you love with an eerily disaffected doppelgänger, a person who looks exactly like the person you love but who you know just, just isn’t.

• • •

The people at the marine biology lab were a little disappointed with him when Peter made it back to Cambridge. Just a little, which was okay. Peter was used to people being disappointed with him. It turned out a lot of his squid had died on the way back. He hadn’t realized how quickly they could die when they were in shock. Peter watched as the lesbian Viking marine biologist fished around in the tank for the squid with a long net. Standing on the ladder on the side of the truck, swishing the long, skinny net in the tank full of squid, she reminded him of one of those guys in Italy with the striped shirts and the hats who do the thing in the boats with the long poles. One netful at a time, Emma raised the squid dripping and squirming from the water and carefully dumped them out into five-gallon plastic buckets that one of the grad students who worked in the lab held out for her. They counted the squid as they collected them. They were paying him five bucks a squid. He’d picked up almost forty squid at the docks that morning, but by the time he got back, apparently only eighteen of them were still alive enough to pay for. The ninety-dollar take that day was the first money he’d made since he got fired from the record store, almost a year ago, when he was living with Gina in Chicago. Emma told him to get the dead squid out of the tank and put them in these special buckets they used to throw away dead animals. As Peter stood at the top of the ladder in the cold, fishing with the net for dead squid, these sad-looking, bloated lumps of jellied fat, he wondered if he couldn’t make some money on the side by taking the dead ones to a Chinese restaurant or something. He didn’t see why not. Maybe they wanted live ones too, like how you’re supposed to cook lobsters alive. Squid are dead when you eat them, right? A dead squid’s a dead squid. Maybe he could sell them to the restaurant where he ate calamari with Greg. He counted twenty dead squid. That meant his haul was overall more dead than alive. If he’d made it back with all the squid alive, he would have made almost two hundred dollars.

Peter finished putting the dead ones in the special buckets. Then it was like, well, guess it’s time to go now. He walked through the building toward the front entrance, the way he’d come in the day before, and was in the sort of lobby area when he remembered that he’d wanted to ask Emma if it was okay to park the squid truck at Greg’s house, so he didn’t have to get up even earlier than crazy early to walk to campus and get the truck. He stopped in the middle of the floor of the lobby area and looked at the front door. He’d heard once that there was a phrase in French, because they have a lot of phrases for those kinds of weird feelings that are hard to describe but are incredibly specific, for that weird feeling you get when you realize you just forgot to say something you’d meant to say to somebody before you left, and at the moment you realize this, you’re not so far away from the place you just left that there’s no point in going back now, but you are far enough away that if you did go back and say it, it would be kind of awkward. Peter stood there for a moment, then turned around and started walking back to the lab, then thought, whatever, fuck it, we’ll just try to remember to ask her about that tomorrow, and turned around again and started walking back toward the front door of the building. But then he had the thought that, knowing him, he would probably also forget to ask tomorrow, and he should probably just ask now because he was already fucking here and it was fresh on his mind, so he turned around again and again stalled out when his increasing anxiety about facing the awkwardness of going back to the lab dragged him to a halt. Maybe we can write a note to ourselves on our hand, he thought, to remind us to ask Emma about the truck. Let’s write it in permanent fucking marker, like a Sharpie, and if we write it today, then it’ll probably still be there tomorrow, and even if it washes off a little then the mark will still be there, which will be enough to remind us. So he turned back around.

“Are you okay?” said the girl at the front desk who’d given him directions yesterday. “Can I help you?”

Peter realized that to an outside observer, such as the girl at the desk, he’d just been slowly staggering back and forth in the lobby of the building looking confused.

“Um,” he said.

He walked up to the desk. The girl was drinking a hot liquid again, which might have been coffee or tea. It steamed up her glasses. She was a little on the heavy side, but she was very sweet looking and had bright, smooth skin, and Peter began to think she was kind of cute. Her glasses were ugly, though, and took away from her face. He tried to imagine what she would look like without the glasses. Peter hated it when he caught himself thinking things like this, because they made him feel like an asshole. He couldn’t help it; they just popped up. When Gina broke up with him, a period of time began that started with a time of utter darkness, during which he got fired from the music store, evicted from the apartment, crashed his car, got beaten up outside outside of a bar and fell asleep in the snow. Then he went to rehab, and then the halfway house, and now this. During that whole period of his life, that kind of thing — girls, love, maybe even sex, that stuff — had been so far out of the question that there was no point in even thinking about it at all, except for small things he almost couldn’t help, like looking at Robin’s breasts during his exit interview.