Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

“You look like you’re looking for something,” said the girl at the desk. She smiled broadly at him, in a way that suggested she might want to talk to him in a friendly, non-I’m-at-work way.

“Are you drinking coffee or tea?”

She gave him a look that wasn’t an are-you-crazy look, just a low-grade jitter of the needle on her what-the-fuck-o-meter.

“That’s why I was trying to decide back there. I mean what, not why. When I was walking back and forth.”

“What?”

Peter wondered if he was trying to flirt with her. If so, that coffee/tea thing was a train wreck of an opening line.

He remembered that he’d wanted to write a note on his hand with a permanent marker.

“I mean, hey, uh. Can I borrow a pen?”

She offered him the gnawed-on Bic that was in her hand.

“Actually, do you have like a, a permanent marker, like a Sharpie or something?”

She glanced at a mug on the desk that was Garfield’s head and full of pens. She found a black Sharpie in it and gave it to him. Peter uncapped the marker and thought about sniffing glue when he was really young. He held the wet, sweetly stinky point of the marker poised above his palm, but had totally forgotten what he was supposed to write on it. He stood there awhile trying to remember, couldn’t, and just pretended to write something on his hand while worrying about how obviously fake the gesture was, gave her back the marker, and slowly wandered out the door like a zombie looking for brains. He figured that from now on he should probably just leave out the back door to the parking lot to avoid her.

So Peter went home and spent most of the day drinking coffee and watching TV and making the air in the house crackle with uncomfortable tension between him and Megan, who sat at the kitchen table sorting through baby shower presents, such as baby clothes and one of those things with the big brightly colored beads on it that you can push around on the metal things.

In the afternoon Megan went upstairs to take a nap, and when she’d been up there long enough for him to assume she was asleep, Peter silently poured himself a generous swallow of vodka from Greg’s liquor cabinet, and as soon as it was in him Peter instantly felt calmer and happier and more at peace with himself than he had in a year.

The next morning he was surer on his feet with the fishermen. Peter had slept well that night. He still didn’t like getting up at three thirty in the morning, but he felt less like death warmed over, and made the drive to New Bedford in significantly less time than the day before. Then it was down to the docks, say hello to the yellow-jacketed soaking men in the boats, the same situation and same faces, dump the squid in the truck and he was off, hauling fucking ass down those adorable little New England highways to get the squid to the lab alive. His foot kept the pedal planted to the floor, the engine roared, and all those trees and fences and black-and-white cows wailed past him like he was playing Tempest and flying through space, hell yeah, warp speed, motherfucker, we are on a mission .

And when he got back to the lab, the scientists were pleased. Emma the blunt-faced Scandinavian counted thirty-two, we repeat, thirty-two , living squid out of the fifty or so he’d brought back. That meant a hundred and sixty bucks in his pocket. That could pay for at least two months’ rent in a storage locker. At this rate maybe it wouldn’t be so long after all till he could move out of Greg and Megan’s basement. He was getting good at this. He cheerfully fished the dead squid out of the tank, stuffed them himself into the special dead animal buckets, no longer icked out by it all, and before leaving he even remembered to ask Emma if he could park the squid truck at Greg’s house so he didn’t have to get up so early. She said no, because of some rule about school-owned vehicles being parked off campus property. Okay, whatever. At least he asked.

In the hallway he took a pull from the water bottle full of vodka and 7UP he’d brought with him, to give him the courage he needed to talk to the girl at the front desk in the lobby.

He smiled at her when he was in the lobby. She smiled back.

“Hi, weirdo,” she said. Peter figured there was a high probability she was flirting with him.

“What do you mean, weirdo?”

“You act weird. You do weird things. You’re a weirdo. So what did you write on your hand yesterday?”

“Nothing. I just pretended to write on my hand.”

“I know. I could tell.”

He explained to her about the squid truck, told her about the job.

He made her laugh. There is no better feeling in the world than making someone laugh. Her name was Amy. She thought the whole situation was kind of funny. She wasn’t wearing those ugly glasses today, and she really was pretty cute. She was a senior at MIT. Working the desk in this building was her work-study job. It was ridiculously easy, she said. All she had to do was just sit there for four hours on weekday mornings. She mostly just did homework. She also said she was in “biochem.” Peter asked her if she knew his brother. She blanked on him till he said, “Mr. Cast?” (Greg wasn’t the kind of PhDickhead who wants everybody to call him “Doctor.”) Of course she knew him. First she seemed a little impressed that Greg was his brother, and then Peter thought he saw something behind her eyes wonder what Gregory Cast’s brother was doing driving the squid truck, as if she expected the brother of a young professor at MIT to be making something of his life. But she seemed to find the fact that Peter was a loser kind of charming. Maybe it was refreshing to meet him, considering all the other guys she met around here were probably hyperambitious type-A types who didn’t expect to be crashing in their brothers’ basements and getting up at three thirty in the morning to drive a truck full of squid when they were twenty-seven. That’s what Peter told himself, though admittedly he was counting unhatched chickens. Then he surprised himself by throwing himself off a cliff and asking if she wanted to get a cup of coffee sometime.

“Or tea,” he added. She laughed. That was clever. Peter had actually successfully said something that sounded cool and was flirty and kind of clever. She said yes. If she had said no, then Peter really would have had to start leaving the building through the back door. But she said yes. She said yes. She said she was free tomorrow afternoon. With Amy’s logistical guidance, they arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Cambridge at three in the afternoon tomorrow. Peter left the building in a state of elation.

His days at this job would apparently be oddly structured: getting up insanely early in the morning, then a few hours of frenzied activity, then a long stretch of time in which he had nothing to do between getting off work and letting exhaustion take him under. Walking around and drinking the vodka and 7UP from his water bottle, he wandered the campus, he wandered the town, he wandered. He went back to Greg and Megan’s house and stole more vodka when Megan wasn’t looking. He took the whole bottle into the basement and, his mind racing with energy, he spent the afternoon drinking by himself in the dark basement while pacing around in circles until he passed out on the futon.

• • •

When the alarm woke him up at three thirty Peter was beyond hungover. A hangover doesn’t even adequately suggest what he was feeling. It was an evil black cloud. There should have been flies buzzing around his head. He tried to get out of bed and fell on the floor. In the bathroom his eyes were so heavy-lidded and bloodshot it looked as if he’d been punched in the face, twice. He got in the shower, even though he didn’t have time for a shower, and took a shower anyway, his logic going something like, Maybe if we take a shower, time will stand still and at the end of this shower it will still be now. He downed a glass of water and puked it out half a minute later. Hair of the dog, he thought, and twisted open another bottle of vodka, gulped down a few shots, and instantly felt a hell of a lot better. He dumped half the vodka in the bottle into his water bottle, filled up the rest with 7UP, and he was off, feverishly smoking cigarettes and speedwalking through the dark, empty streets of Somerville and Cambridge, occasionally unscrewing the cap of his water bottle and taking a sip of his tepid vodka-7UP mixture, trying not to think about how late he was, there’s the truck, keys, ignition, let’s go.