The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  • • •

  And now a cow was standing in the road. Peter saw it, of course, and knew what it was. It was a cow, one of those picturesque black-and-white New England cows, and it was standing in the road, in the middle of the lane that Peter was currently driving in. It might have been that Peter was going so fast that he wouldn’t have had time to stop anyway, but Peter didn’t even brake. The sight of the cow just confused him. The few long fractions of seconds that passed between seeing the cow and hitting the cow with the squid truck were just like, Hey, that’s not supposed to be there. That cow is supposed to be over there, behind the fence with the other cows.

  The cow made a hideous noise that was a combination of mooing and being hit by a truck, rolled into the air, and smashed the glass of the windshield. Peter was stomping on the brake and the accelerator at the same time, the truck was on its side now, and now, after maybe blacking out for a moment, Peter was heaving open the driver’s-side door, pushing it against gravity, realizing how drunk he was and wondering how badly he was hurt. His hands were shaking. He crawled out of the wreck as fastidiously as he could. He put a hand to the side of his head, which hurt, and his fingers came back red. It was almost unbearably painful to inhale breath, which maybe meant he had broken a rib or two against the seat belt, and one of his knees seemed to be so fucked up he could hardly walk—one leg of his jeans was dark red and he didn’t even want to look at it. Okay, so. What now?

  He saw where the cow was lying in the road, and limped over in that direction. Several hundred gallons of salt water had splashed onto the road, along with a streak of diffusely strewn chunks of metal and the dust and crumbs of blue-green glass blasted scattershot across the asphalt. The cow was alive. It was lying on its side in a pool of blood made thinner by the water. It was wet—its hide was sleek and glossy with blood and water. Blood trickled from its open mouth, and its chest rose and fell like bellows, the air rushing in and out of the mouth and nostrils. Its shiny black eyes were desperate and scared. All around them, draped bizarrely over the cow’s body and lying inert in useless, slimy piles of tentacles, were the squid. The squid, in perhaps a collective dying gesture, had all released their ink sacs, and had covered the whole scene with their ink. The water and the cow’s blood and Peter’s blood mixed with the oily, briny-smelling squid ink. The runny puddles of ink had rainbows swirling in them. It was about seven in the morning.

  Peter sat down on the shoulder of the road, and watched the cow dying and the squid dying.

  A farmer, presumably, a man who at least looked like a farmer, who looked to be in his fifties maybe, in heavy rubber boots and a Mackinaw, had hopped over the wooden fence by the roadside, the fence that separated what was supposed to be the car space from what was supposed to be the cow space. The glittering stardust of shattered glass crunched under his boots as he approached the scene. With his hands on his hips, he looked at the dying cow, and looked at the squid flopped pell-mell across the road, squirming their tentacles and squirting their ink into the blood and water. He went to Peter, and offered him a hand.

  • • •

  It had been dark in that crack house in Chicago, even darker for Peter because his eyes were still adjusting to the indoors. The only light on was in the kitchen, where he could see a couple of plump girls sitting at a table, smoking and talking rapidly in Spanglish, and a bunch of black dudes were sitting in the living room in puffy, metallic-gloss coats. They were all drinking forties they kept in their laps and some of them were smoking. They paid no attention to Peter. Peter recognized some of the guys, some he didn’t. The couple of guys on the couch were playing Super Mario Bros. on a dusty, beat-up-looking NES, the original console, which you didn’t see much anymore even then, passing the controller back and forth between them, switching turns when Mario died, which happened often because they sucked. Peter watched them play Nintendo while Dominick was counting the money, going into the kitchen, coming back with Peter’s crack. The guys playing Super Mario were drunk and high and not putting much effort into it. The only sounds in the room were beer swishing around in bottles when somebody took a swig, the music on the game, and the silly boing!-boing!-boing! noises Mario made when he jumped. Soon Peter was also high and sitting on the couch, and thinking about how weird it would be if there was a loud boing! whenever a person jumped in real life. They were on one of the underground levels, with the “scary” Mario music that goes do-do-do-do-do-doot . . . do-do-do-do-do-doot . . . Peter held his lighter to the pipe and felt that hot, corrosive froth in his lungs and the beautiful feeling that went with it. In a way, smoking crack makes you feel like when you get the star of invincibility in Super Mario. Suddenly the music speeds up really fast and you’re flashing with inner energy and anything that touches you dies. And then it wears off, and you’re back to being normal Mario—the same as before, but now you feel less than you should be, or could be. Peter watched them playing the game: Mario kept sliding off the bricks and falling into chasms, getting killed by the plants that go up and down in the tubes, just running right the fuck into the turtles and mushrooms. Peter was getting irritated watching them play. It’s like, dude, come on, it takes a pretty fucking remedial player to let Mario get killed by a fucking mushroom. When they finally exhausted all of Mario’s lives and got a Game Over, Peter asked if he could play. They gave him the controller, and watched him sail through World 1-1, as he had done so many thousands of times since his childhood that the landscape of the first level was etched in his brain, in his soul, he probably could have done it with his eyes closed, going by sound and muscle memory alone, collecting every coin and bumping every secret box, getting every 1-Up Mushroom, Fire Flower, and Invincibility Star to be got. When he came to the end of World 1-2, just to show off, he entered the Minus World. The guys on the couch were astounded. They had seriously never seen that shit before. “The fuck you doin’, motherfucker?” said the guy next to him. “Walking through rocks and shit?” Peter glowed with pleasure, with pride. The Minus World is a glitch in the game at the end of World 1-2. At the end of the level—the very, very end, where the green tube is that you go into to leave the level—you can stand on top of the tube, crouch jump, move slightly to the right, and moonwalk into this secret space, and it looks like you’re gliding right through a solid brick wall and into the space where the three Warp Zone tubes are, and there’s this hidden tube you can go down that takes you to . . . the Minus World. It takes you to World –1, World –2, and so on. The Minus Worlds are a bunch of fucked-up, unfinished, or rejected levels that the programmers left floating around in the game, and some of them are almost, what, like, psychedelic. Mario swims through a level of black water where all the tubes are neon pink, shooting fireballs at neon-blue plants and white squid, and there are these big blank blue rectangles where there’s simply nothing there, like a hole in the universe of Super Mario. It’s as if Mario has traveled to the distant, frayed edges of space and time. He must now look into the void. It’s a little frightening. At some point in this world, the Plus World, the world outside, it had begun to snow, and snow in earnest, coming down in thick, heavy clumps of snowflakes so big they were almost snowballs. The snow was piling up in the corners of the windows, and the house acquired that still, densely muffled acoustic quality a house gets when it’s covered in snow. The guys on the couch had become enrapt in watching Peter play the game, and Peter himself was in a shamanlike trance, his mind had been sucked into the game’s vortex, he had fully broken through the living membrane and entered the pixelated otherworld. Being high on crack probably helped this. He took hits off the pipe between worlds, when Mario pulled down the flag and entered the castle and the game tallied up his coins as fireworks went off. He was being cheered on now, all the guys were rooting for him. He was racing, racing through the game, heart pattering, the controller hot in his hands, the buttons getting slippery with sweat under his thumbs. He was winning. He was going to beat the game. He was a star. He was a hero.

  T
hen someone stood in front of the TV.

  Peter loosed a warbling, inarticulate shriek and ducked his head to see the screen.

  He looked up, refocused his eyes on the Plus World, and was genuinely astonished to realize that the person who stood between him and the Nintendo was Gina. Astonished wasn’t even quite the right word. It was more like, like cognitive dissonance, a feeling of seeing a certain thing in a context so unfathomably out of place that it simply does not register, and your subconscious spends a few seconds doubting whether you’re really seeing what you’re seeing before your conscious mind can catch up.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” said Gina.

  Uh-oh: language. Brain problem. Brain-related problem. Language receptors not good right now.

  “Uh . . .” said Peter. “What?”

  Peter blinked, trying to think. The game screen still left a rectangular wake of light in his vision. Gina was covered in snow. She was wearing snow boots, a coat, a hat, a scarf. He flicked a glance outside. Snow. It was dark out. What time was it? The past was trickling back to him.

  “I’m getting more beer,” he said.

  Peter had been sort of planning on smoking a little bit here and then going to the store and buying the beer with his credit card. He wasn’t exactly sure if he had any credit left, but that was a bridge he’d cross when he came to it.

  He tossed aside the controller and stood up. Head rush. His knees were trembly and weak. He realized he was very hungry.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get the beer.”

  “Forget the fucking beer.” She was furious, but quiet, almost whispering. He knew she was afraid of the guys who hung out at Dominick’s place. “Dan and Jessie left a long time ago. You were gone for five hours. I was so worried.”

  “Uh—” Peter looked around the room. Everyone was staring at him. He didn’t know where to put his hands.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” said Gina. “Do you still have the money we gave you?”

  Peter must have known, somewhere in there, that hours, not minutes, were passing. Later, he thought the whole thing was kind of like the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Captain Picard dies in this world, and then he wakes up in another world, and lives out a full, happy life as a flute maker on a rustic, primitive planet, and then dies in that world and wakes up again just a couple seconds later on board the starship Enterprise again. Only this was sort of the opposite of that. Only it wasn’t really like that at all, actually, because when Peter had entered into a separate time-space, into the Minus World, real time was still going on without him just like normal, and Gina had been embarrassed, at first, when he was taking so long, and then embarrassed and nervous and scared when he’d kept on not showing up and it had begun to snow, and then mortified as her friends gave up on him and were putting on their coats and leaving, and then Gina had been stomping around for hours, panicked and desperate, in subzero weather and rapidly accumulating snow, calling his name in the streets, calling out his name as if he were a lost child.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was written very slowly over the course of the last ten years or so. Some of these stories I began a long time ago, and others are newer. They appear more or less in chronological order. Because this book came together so gradually, I’ve been in a lot of places over the course of writing it, and a lot of people have helped me.

  Thanks first to Brian DeFiore and Cary Goldstein for being my team in publishing—whose support and confidence I’ve come to rely upon.

  I am gratefully beholden to Bard College, both for the Bard Fiction Prize in 2012 and later for welcoming me back to teach, and to my colleagues there, especially Robert Kelly and Mary Caponegro.

  A special thanks is due to Bradford Morrow, a tremendous editor and friend, and Conjunctions, where several of these stories, in slightly different forms, debuted in print. Great thanks is also due to Lorin Stein for publishing one of these stories in The Paris Review.

  I want to vociferously thank Lan Samantha Chang, Connie Brothers, and everyone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Thanks also to Tobias Wolff, who helped me fix a broken part of one of these stories. Thanks to Brian Morton and Sarah Lawrence College. Thanks to T. Geronimo Johnson, and everyone at UC Berkeley’s SCWP (it was great while it lasted).

  I am grateful to Kathryn Hamilton and her theater company, Sister Sylvester, with whom I spent a very weird couple of weeks in Detroit in 2013, out of which one of these stories emerged, and I am particularly indebted to Terence Mintern.

  Thank you, Micaela Morrissette, for staples, tape, pens, countless other favors, and general help with just about everything.

  Thanks also to the following people, each for their own different and important reasons: Jonathan Ames, Matt Beckemeyer, Christopher Beha, Caroline Bermudez, Ethan Canin, Edward Carey, Eleanor Catton, Sam Cooper, Moira Donegan, Jennifer DuBois, Cara Ellis, Julia Fierro, Gwenda-lin Grewal, Kevin Holden, William Melvin Kelley, Alexandra Kleeman, Chris Leslie-Hynan, James Han Mattson, JW McCormick, Eric Morgan, Sara Ortiz, Andres Restrepo, Karen Russell, Kate Sachs, Maggie Shipstead, Bennett Sims, Alexander Singh, Ted Thompson, Sergei Tsimberov, Graham Webster, Chris Wiley, and Jenny Zhang.

  Endless love and thanks to my parents and my brothers.

  And thank you, Caitlin Millard. You know what for.

  © PETE MAUNEY

  BENJAMIN HALE is also the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared, among other places, in Conjunctions, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Dissent, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing. Originally from Colorado, he is a senior editor of Conjunctions, currently teaches at Bard College, and lives in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley.

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