The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  Tessa smacked her notebook shut, crossed her legs, and tried to look natural. From the seat-pocket she slid a pamphlet with colorful cartoons detailing emergency evacuation procedures and pretended to read it. Odelia unlocked the plastic table in the seat back and unfolded it out in front of her. The stewardess reached across the seats to hand her a tray with a rectangular tin, napkin, fork, and knife on it, then unscrewed a small wine bottle, filled a wineglass half full, and handed these to Odelia. Tessa’s eyes followed the transferences of these objects with suspicion and a weak glimmer of hatred.

  Abraxas was fine. He’d quit feeding. He wasn’t asleep, but in a blissful daze: placid, smiley, making his gurgly prelinguistic baby noises.

  She drank half the wine. It wasn’t good. It had an unpleasantly piquant tang. She peeled back the rim of the rectangular tin container and removed the damp paper lid. Inside was a hot slimy fish dinner nestled in steamed carrots and broccoli. She picked at it with the fork, ate about half of it before she stopped because ingesting the food was making her mildly nauseated. She drank the rest of the wine and felt better. She gave the half-eaten meal on the tray back to the stewardess when she squeaked past them again with the cart.

  The edges of things were beginning to get hazy. Everything was growing a thin coating of blue-gray fungus, like time-lapse footage of a mold culture growing in a Petri dish. There was a jellyfish throbbing in her stomach. Her pulse quickened and she began to feel acutely conscious of her internal organs.

  She daydreamed that she was sculpting her body, molding flesh onto her skeleton like in the vision of Ezekiel, and when she was done building her body in this way she would kiss herself and breathe life into her lungs, get the heart thumping. She catalogued the systems of the body: skeletal, muscular, nervous, respiratory, circulatory, digestive, reproductive. She imagined the inside of her body, pictured herself swimming through the conduits of blood in a microscopic submarine, like in Fantastic Voyage. The cilia of her lungs wave around aimlessly and the spongy walls heave in and out. Billions of little wiggling fingers line the inner walls of her intestines; pulpy bits of that fish entrée come tunneling through, and the wiggling fingers grab them and pick them apart, absorb them into the walls, transferring nourishment to the blood, and the blood revitalizing the brain, and the brain converting matter into electricity and redistributing it to the rest of the body. My body is like a utopian civilization, Odelia begins to think. We all work together for the good of all. She expands on the analogy: The cardiovascular system is to the body as resource distribution is to the state, and

  digestive : body :: agricultural : state

  skeletal/muscular : body :: industrial : state

  reproductive : body :: cultural : state

  nervous : body :: political : state

  Everything fits so beautifully together. All elements work integrally toward the health and benefit of the whole. She reasons that if this is possible in the naturally occurring system of a single human body then it should also be possible in human society. Look at me: I am a utopia.

  Miles comes back and sits down. He’s done pacing up and down the aisle. Odelia burns to tell him about this idea.

  “I am a utopia,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I am a utopia.”

  “What?”

  “I am a utopia.”

  It doesn’t occur to her that she should have to add anything else to communicate the thought.

  “Hot damn,” says Miles.

  Miles’s tongue slithers in and out of his mouth twice to wet his lips. He’s waving his fingers. All of his fingers appear to undulate at slightly different wavelengths, like the tubular fingers of those medusoid creatures that lie along the ocean floor and ensnare passing fish who stray too close and absorb them into themselves. Or is she thinking of her intestines?

  “Nervous body, political state,” she explains.

  “Me no understand,” says Miles in a silly Mexican accent.

  “Look. If everything in the human body communicates and works together, then there’s no reason why many human bodies at the same time can’t communicate and work together for the benefit of all. We all just have to think of ourselves as a single body with no individual conflicting motives. We have to all think of ourselves as parts of a single biological entity. Everybody will work just as much as everybody else and there’s no need for money, no sexual jealousy . . .”

  Odelia spools out her dying sentence with her fingers circling in the air.

  “Oh,” says Miles. “Then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.”

  “What?”

  “Then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.”

  “What?”

  “She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes in shape no bigger than an agate-stone on the forefinger of an alderman, drawn with a team of little atomies athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep—”

  “Okay, stop,” says Odelia. “Not now.”

  Miles is quiet. He turns away from her.

  A little later he gets up and leaves. So does Tessa. They both leave their seats and disappear up the aisle. Miles’s yellow-and-blue Hawaiian shirt smears a wake of color in the air as he goes.

  Odelia begins to see patterns on surfaces. Kaleidoscopes projected onto everything. Like a net of lace woven out of semitranslucent metallic fiber, a spiderweb mapped onto everything. Aztec stuff: the snake god, the rain god, the war god, the sun god with a mane of flames and spirals for eyes and a lolling tongue. Coyolxauhqui, whose severed head is the moon; Quetzalcoatl, the psychopomp; Tepeyollotl, the god of earthquakes, echoes, and jaguars.

  The godheads slide down the concave walls of the airplane cabin and continue across the floor. Outside the window the clouds have begun to organize and form shapes, dendriform fractal sets with tendrils sprouting tendrils, curling out into infinity.

  The pattern of the fabric on the backs of the seats, ugly blue-gray with orange and brown horizontal stripes and orange flecks sprinkled all over it—this pattern is only painted on. Freshly applied to the backs of the economy-class seats with wet paint, and it’s dripping. The flecks of orange dribble into the blue and the colors ooze and slide down the back of the seat.

  Odelia remembers to breathe, sucks in a gulp of air, shakes her head and blinks twice. The image resets itself back to normal. Then it starts dripping again.

  She has to keep her fingers occupied. Her tongue thrashes in her mouth like a wounded snake. Fingers moving and muscles tensing and relaxing.

  Then Abraxas begins to scream.

  This is actually what reminds Odelia that he is there.

  She has been holding him. Has she been holding him correctly? One hand scooped under the butt and the other supporting the back, cradling him at two points to comfortably distribute his weight, to ease the circulation of cosmic energy through his little meridians, keep his bloodflow harmonious with gravity. She holds Abraxas to her chest and sways him back and forth.

  “Tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh shhhhhhh——.”

  He squirms in her arms like a giant earthworm. He struggles with her, smooth white fat arms and legs pumping crazily.

  He’s screaming.

  Now she’s trying to fight it. Now she’s trying not to try to fight it and that makes it worse. She feels her heartbeat quicken and hears blood battering in her brain and she’s sweating.

  “Please,” she says, whispering, unclear whether she’s saying this to Abraxas or to herself. “Please stop it. Please please please please please stop it.”

  He doesn’t stop it, nor does the (6aR,9R)-N,N-diethyl-7-methyl-4,6,6a,7,8,9-hexahydroindolo-[4,3-fg]quinoline-9-carboxamide that is in her brain. She sees interlocking hexagons in a chemistry textbook, valence bonds, Lewis dots. Honeycombs of hexagons latching onto the synapses, redirecting the rush of electricity like train-yard switches.

  The other passengers turn their heads and filch brief looks in her direction. Maybe the men give her looks of irritation and maybe some of the women even giv
e her looks of sympathy, but Odelia interprets every look as an indignant look, a look of condemnation. People who had been sleeping have woken up. They roll their eyes and dephlegm their throats with wet, guttural coughs. Some people stare. Other people try not to look at her.

  The baby continues to thrash, he continues to cry, and not just dry wailing but full-on crying, tears running and everything, and he continues to scream.

  He chokes on himself for a moment, sputters, stops, spits up. The grainy white splatter of her breast milk turned to puke slides down his chin and onto Odelia’s dress. She holds him close and fumps a hand on his back. When he recovers he sucks in a deep breath and starts screaming again.

  Miles and Tessa come back and sit down. Their breathing is heavy, their cheeks inflamed. Miles’s yellow-and-blue Hawaiian shirt is untucked.

  Miles drags his hands through his long hair and shakes it out like a wet dog drying off. He looks bewilderedly at Odelia. Abraxas screams. The baby’s face is red and afraid.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he says, pinching a foot. “Cootchie cootchie motherfuckin’ coo, little man.”

  Odelia looks at him.

  “Whatsa matter?” says Miles.

  “Miles. I don’t know what to do. He won’t stop screaming. He won’t stop screaming.”

  “It’s cool, it’s cool, it’s cool,” says Miles. “He’s fine. Relax. Relax. Relax.”

  His big hand lands on her knee and slides up her leg and squeezes the inside of her thigh. As Abraxas screams and thump thump thumps against her chest Miles leans over and kisses the side of her forehead. She feels the spit from his lips cooling on her temple.

  Odelia looks into Abraxas’s face. Abraxas opens his eyes. He opens his beautiful green-gold Miles’s-eyes eyes. His pupils are dilated.

  • • •

  Odelia thinks of the milk, surging out of her body and into his mouth. From body to body, life to life. She thinks of threads, she thinks of wire-thin nerves spooling from the tips of her nipples into the tiny mouth, latched, gumming, draining her, swallowing her electric currents. She eats, she drinks, he drinks her. Everything that goes into her goes in some way into him. When he was in her womb, a cable of flesh connected them. They’re still almost one body, their hearts still pump together in perfect syncopation, one continuum of flesh.

  • • •

  “O god,” she says.

  “What.”

  “O god o god o god.”

  “What?”

  “O god o god o god o god o god.”

  Miles grabs her face with the palm of his hand and twists her head until her eyes meet his and squeezes her cheeks hard until her lips pucker. He locks eyes with her and leans in until his face is an inch away from hers and every time he pronounces the letter F she feels a hot blast of his breath on her face as he hisses:

  “Please fucking get the fuck a hold of yourself and tell me what the fuck is fucking wrong with you.”

  Odelia points at the baby.

  “He got it from the milk.”

  A look of some concern manifests on Miles’s face. He releases the hand on her face.

  “Lemme see his eyes.”

  “No. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. You’ll scare him.”

  She clutches Abraxas and blinks several times rapidly, trying to will down the throbbing in her stomach and her chest and her brain. Tears well under her cheekbones. She tries to dam them back. Her vision blurs.

  “Come on. Let me see.”

  Miles pries open one of Abraxas’s eyes with a thumb and forefinger and the baby recoils and howls louder.

  “Look, let’s relax. It’ll be okay. All we can do right now is fucking, you know, is just ride it out. Odelia, listen to me. Relax. It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right. Okay? Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.”

  “Okay,” she whispers, so softly she almost can’t hear herself. “Okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay . . .”

  Holding the screaming baby, rocking back and forth in her seat, she has accidentally hypnotized herself with the sound of her own speech.

  The people around them whisper to one another. The world is a whisper chamber, hissing with all their secrets. The thrumming of the turbines, the peep of the wheels under the stewardess’s cart, the conversations of the other passengers: Every noise becomes amplified, sharpened but not demystified, demonized to a conspiratorial whisper.

  She looks out the window and sees bubble clusters sprouting, and realizes the plane is plunging underwater, fathom by fathom, into the ocean, swallowed in the maelstrom like a turd in a toilet, the massive shadows of whales gliding past, pressure pounding in her lungs, nitrogen gas frothing in her blood.

  No, we’re still in the air. We’re in an airplane in the air, dipping and weaving through the jet stream, miracles of Newtonian mechanics keeping us strung to our vector like a bead along a wire by the thrust of stirred flame and the shape of the wings.

  Look at what the human race can do!—lift us up and deliver us from one continent to another in a matter of hours, the hands of engineers animating inanimate matter, by the magic of math liberating stupid shivering primitives like us from the constrictions of time and space.

  Odelia squeezes her eyes shut tight and then loosens them. The light bleeding through her eyelids makes geometric patterns, chessboards and diamonds that flicker and flash in the darkness. She sees a woman three stories tall, a huge hill of flesh. She has long black hair made of iron cables and three faces. Each of her three mouths is chewing on a pig, and the blood runs down her three faces and down her body. Her body is covered with breasts that wrap around her torso in seven rows, and a jet of blood hisses from the tip of each nipple. The blood runs down her body into a lake of boiling blood on fire that she is standing in. The lake is full of impurities and abominations, expectorate and effluvia. All the blood and piss and sweat and come and shit and puke and tears that have ever come out of anyone’s body are in the lake.

  • • •

  She opens her eyes and looks at the thing in her lap. It won’t stop screaming. For the moment she’s not exactly sure what this thing is but she knows she must hold it. It will be bad if she lets go. Her hands are cold and slick.

  The man in the seat in front of her turns around to look.

  A mouth, a nose, and an eyeball appear in the sliver of space between the seats. The eyeball is a tender glistening globe, a prick of black rimmed in a band of blue. It is looking at her.

  “Hey,” the mouth says. “You going to change that kid’s die purr or what?”

  What? What the fuck is a die purr?

  The mouth, the nose, and the eye disappear.

  Oh.

  The moment the face parts go away she smells the perfect smell of shit. She wonders how long it has smelled like that without her noticing. This screaming thing is my child. It is my son. This screaming thing is my son and I have to make it stop smelling like shit.

  Odelia turns to Miles. He and Tessa are conversing closely. She’s whispering. Her hand is on his knee.

  “I have—” she says.

  Miles turns to look at her. Tiny bugs are crawling around all over his face.

  “I have—”

  Tiny bugs are crawling around all over Miles’s face. She closes her eyes.

  “I have to change the diaper,” Odelia says. Yes: That was a complete, coherent sentence. Good. She opens her eyes.

  Miles looks at her. His face is as blank as a blank sheet of paper rolled in a typewriter in front of someone with a blank mind.

  “Diaper. I have to change the diaper.”

  The world is receding into focus. Keep it there. Control it. Don’t relax. Control it.

  Miles scrunches himself sideways and Tessa folds her legs against her chest in her seat with her wrists wrapped around her ankles. Odelia squeezes past them with the screaming infant in her arms. Standing in the aisle, she asks Miles to hand her the bag underneath her seat.

  “The what?” says Miles, looki
ng at her as if she’s speaking in another language.

  “My bag,” she says. “The bag under the seat.”

  Abraxas writhes. He’s screaming in an almost non-baby way, screaming as if his insides are on fire. Screaming in the way she imagines the human sacrifice screamed when the Aztec priest cut a slash below the rib cage, reached under the ribs up to his elbow, groping the organs, feeling for the one that beat.

  She thinks that Abraxas is thinking this: Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. He needs to be comforted and she cannot comfort him. He doesn’t know what is happening. The bond between mother and child has been cut, and he is alone inside his own brain.

  “Oh—” says Miles, finally decoding the message.

  He reaches under the seat and hands her the bag with diapers and talcum powder in it.

  • • •

  Odelia walks down the aisle of the airplane, picking her steps like she’s walking on a sheet of oiled glass. She hears decontextualized segments of people’s conversations in passing, their voices hushed and accusatory, murmuring with judgment.

  Orange spots appear and disappear on the carpet and the ceiling. They appear in her peripheral vision but disappear if she looks directly at them.

  Inside the cramped lavatory, even with the door thumped shut and locked, she can still hear the nasty sibilance of damning whispers. The toilet and sink are made of stainless steel. So is the floor. The lighting is the color of an egg yolk. The room pitches and wobbles. She has to grasp the corner of the sink to keep her balance. She lays Abraxas on the steel floor, her hand protecting his head. He’s hard to hold, he’s squirming all over. He won’t keep still. Streaks of orange rust are draining down the walls. She peels his diaper off. It’s damp and heavy with urine and squashed pea-green shit. His skin is wrinkled from the moisture. His tiny tube of a penis. She wipes him off quickly. It’s a cloth diaper, but she dumps it in the toilet anyway and flushes. The hatch roars open and sucks it down to wherever it goes. She dashes him with a puff of talcum powder and wraps him up with a fresh diaper, careful not to prick him with the safety pin. He’s still screaming. Her hands are trembling. She feels so weak she might faint. She has to bend over the toilet bowl. Her stomach makes a fist and releases it. Her hands are clammy and white, gripped around the rim of the steel toilet. She leans her head over the bowl. Nothing comes out. Her hands shake. Somebody knocks on the door. She doesn’t answer. There’s another, angrier knock.