The Fat Artist and Other Stories (32 page)

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.

He drove through the open gates of a chain-link fence and onto a wide asphalt blacktop by the docks. Rigging clinked against mast poles, the docks creaked, waves softly slapped against the seawall. The sky was cluttered with seagulls. The water was choppy and the ugly green of oxidized copper, the line of the horizon an indistinct gray smear. It was barely daybreak, and there were fishing boats anchored at the docks, already come in from their first catch, and more in the harbor that looked to be on their way in. Peter parked the truck as close to the docks as he could, killed the engine, and stepped from the truck cab’s soporific cocoon of artificial warmth into the sharply pointed cold of the morning, made colder by the sea. Here again was that overpoweringly putrid smell of fish and brine.

He walked timidly out onto the dock with his hands crammed in his jacket pockets. The boat lurched in the water. The boat was a huge, complicated piece of machinery, rigging, nets, enormous gears for releasing and dragging up the net. Everything on it was wet and filthy. Fish everywhere, slapping their bodies, dying on the embossed sheet-metal deck. Machinery creaked, squealed, hummed. Peter could hear the fishermen working on the boat, their boots clanging on the deck, their voices shouting over the din of machines. He was nervous about approaching them. He didn’t quite know what to say, and was afraid they would make fun of him.

The dock swayed very slightly. In the boat, fishermen in caps and bright yellow foul-weather gear were sorting through fish on conveyor belts. On the conveyor belts and here and there all over the deck, fish flopped around, their mouths and gills gaping, their blank, disclike eyes seemingly looking at nothing. Peter found it a little amazing how long fish survive out of water. They take so long to die.

“Hey,” Peter called down to the fishermen on the boat from where he stood on the dock.

They hadn’t heard him.

“Uh—hey? Um—?”

One of the men looked up at him. The others kept picking through the fish with their work gloves. There were rows of big blue plastic barrels, the size of garbage cans, full of fish, lined up on the deck alongside the conveyor belts. The men tossed some of the fish into the barrels, some back into the sea, and let some move past them on the conveyor belt and fall into a hole that emptied somewhere inside the hull of the ship. There seemed to be a system.

“Good morning,” said the fisherman who had looked up at him.

“Um,” said Peter. “I’m from the biology lab at MIT? Can we have your squid?”

This last sentence felt strange in Peter’s mouth, but the fisherman was unfazed. Peter imagined fishermen as having big, bushy beards. A couple of the men on the boat did in fact have beards, but not this one. He did have a sharp New England accent, though. At least he had that.

They gave him their squid. Peter followed the fishermen’s lead during the process of getting the squid. They had done this before and were used to people from MIT coming for their bycatch.

“Where’s Emma?” said the man who’d spoken to him.

“I’m her new squid man,” said Peter, and imagined a superhero named Squidman.

They invited Peter on board. On the deck of the swaying anchored boat he stepped gingerly among the dying fish, trying not to squish them. They were gross, alive, frightening. The fishermen largely ignored him, but Peter still felt inadequate and embarrassed among them. These were men who had real jobs,
really
real jobs, who got up before dawn and worked with their hands and knew how to do things. These were men who knew how to operate complicated machines, who knew how to do practical, useful things, who knew how to catch fish. There were fish out there in the ocean, and these guys got in their boat and went out there and got them and brought them back. Just like that. These were men who were not easily frightened, not easily overwhelmed. Some of the fishermen looked younger than Peter, and Peter was ashamed that he was as old as he was and didn’t really know how to do anything useful.

Soon the wire handle of a heavy plastic bucket full of squid was sinking painfully into the flesh of his hooked fingers. The squid wriggled and squirmed in the bucket. Their tentacles stretched, thrashed, suckers sticking to the sides of the bucket. It was like holding a bucket full of aliens. The smell was pointedly sickening. Peter tried to breathe through his mouth. Sometimes when you see animals that are hurt or trapped, you wonder what they’re feeling. You wonder if they’re in pain, if they’re afraid. Peter found that it wasn’t easy to do that with squid. It was hard to anthropomorphize them, to project human emotions onto them. They were just too scary, too weird looking.

Peter dumped the squid into the tank on the truck and went back for another bucket, and so on, feeling less uncomfortable with the task with each bucketful. He did the same with a few other fishing boats that were docked there that morning, and began to feel like an old hand. It was fascinating to watch these animals that were so helpless and awkward when slopped together in a bucket instantly come alive when he dumped them in the water, suddenly moving with otherworldly graceful ease. He got back in the truck and began the task of following the directions in reverse, which was harder, especially in New Bedford, a town he had even less familiarity with than Cambridge—as in, none—plus he’d driven in in the dark. But he felt good now. He was at work. The fishermen had understood, and helped him, and given him their squid. He turned the radio up and found a station that played a stretch of non-suck songs, and was back on the highway, looking at the trees and black-and-white cows standing along the fences.

On the fairly long and boring drive Peter’s mind fell into patterns of thinking about Gina, the way iron filings filter themselves into magnetically predictable patterns on a vibrating surface. Last fall and winter, before things completely fell apart, Peter and Gina had been living together in a squalid apartment in a fairly sketchy area of Humboldt Park. He was working twenty, thirty hours a week at a music store in Logan Square, and Gina was going to school part-time at UIC and waitressing at a steakhouse. There was this one time, though, when it was almost the end of the fall semester for her, and Gina had invited over a friend of hers from school and his girlfriend. Peter couldn’t remember either of their names now. They’d only met that one time. They were nice people. Peter couldn’t really remember anything about them. It was a Saturday afternoon in a Chicago December, which means it was brutally cold with an arctic windchill. The weather had been flirting with the idea of snowing all day. They had all holed up in Peter and Gina’s apartment, smoking weed and drinking and playing Monopoly. Their apartment was on the second floor of a half-dilapidated wooden house that had been divided into dubiously up-to-code apartments. It was cluttered with desiccated houseplants with dust-coated leaves that the previous tenant had left, and poorly insulated and poorly heated, such that they spent that winter always draped in blankets and wearing hats inside, and had two space heaters going at once, cheap ones from the hardware store, metal boxes with grates of glowing orange filaments that hummed and made clicking and clinking noises, as if broken parts were rattling around loose inside them. And still it was fucking freezing in the apartment. Peter had landed on a trick that seemed like a good idea at first, which was to boil water. He’d been boiling a pot of water on the stove for mac and cheese, and noticed that the steam raised the room’s temperature. So he would keep a soup pot full of water boiling on the electric stove all afternoon and night until they went to sleep, filling the apartment with hot moisture, fogging it up like a bathhouse. It was strangely pleasant to breathe the warm, humid air; it felt good in the lungs and on the skin. It was probably good for all those half-dead houseplants too. One night both Peter and Gina passed out dead drunk—not an uncommon occurrence that winter—and forgot to turn the stove top off. When they woke up the next day the pot was ruined, the red coil of the stove eye having burned away all the water and then gone to work on the pot, causing the Teflon coating to crackle and peel in curdled flakes, turning the outside of the black pot a brassy reddish-brown color. The insides of the kitchen windows were glazed with sheets of ice as thick as fingers.

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.