The Fat Artist and Other Stories (31 page)

“Hello?”

He was afraid of raising his voice too much.

The marine biology lab was all tile, plastic, stainless steel surfaces, garishly bright, and smelled like brine and fish. The best thing Peter had in his bag of experience to compare it to was a seafood grocery store. It smelled more nautical than the sea itself. The seaness of the smell of the sea was compacted here, concentrated. The smell was sickeningly thick.

Peter hadn’t bothered to dress up for the interview or anything. He figured they wouldn’t expect somebody applying for a job that was basically just driving a truck to wear a suit and tie to an interview. He’d look silly if he did. Plus he didn’t have any nice clothes anyway. Peter was wearing jeans, a button-down borrowed from his brother, and a smoky-smelling Goodwill denim jacket. It turned out he wasn’t under- or overdressed. The scientists in the lab wore jeans and T-shirts. Peter was met by a woman in her late twenties, not much older than himself. She shook his hand. She was wearing a fleece pullover. She had blunt features and blond hair she wore in a thick braid behind her head. She looked like a Viking. She looked like Hägar the Horrible’s wife.

“Peter Cast?” she said.

“Yeah, hi.”

“Emma. Nice to meet you.”

She had a friendly, slightly husky, lower-register voice. Something about her made Peter wonder if she was a lesbian. The phrase “lesbian Viking” popped up in his mind and stayed there.

“You’re Greg Cast’s brother, right?”

Not many people were in the room, just four or five that looked like grad students sitting around looking at paperwork. Two of them were huddled over an old computer with a green-on-amber display screen.

“So you’re ready to start getting up wicked early in the morning?”

“If that’s what I gotta do,” said Peter, trying to sound game, trying to sound like the kind of guy who liked getting up at three in the morning to drive a truck. He wasn’t really ready to start doing anything.

She led him to a big cylindrical tank with an open lid. The lip of the tank came up to their chests. Its sides were thick, pale green metal. The insides were smooth wet ceramic. An air-filtration pump thing beside it made a low white humming noise. It was full of squid. They varied in size—some were the size of a handspan, the biggest ones looked about ten inches, maybe a foot long. The squid aimlessly darted around inside the tank. Their head flaps undulated, and they languidly propelled themselves through the water with their pumping tentacles like slow-motion darts. It was at once fascinating, beautiful, and ridiculous to see how gracefully they moved, until they bumped their stupid heads into the sides of the tank. Some of them swam around a lot, some of them just floated. They looked bored.

Emma unhooked a long mesh net from a holder on the wall and dipped it in the tank. She swirled it around slowly, causing the squid to come alive with agitation, shooting every which way, bouncing off the walls, making the water wobble.

Emma snagged a couple of squid in the net and brought them out of the water. The heavily sagging net drooled water back into the tank. The squid hung limp and slimy in the net, weakly writhing their tentacles, trying to move their poor boneless bodies, totally out of their element. Emma dragged her hand in the tank to wet it, reached into the net, and grabbed one of them. Just like that. She held it by its tubular, torpedo-shaped head. She dropped the net back in the tank. The squid’s slick, shiny body was red and gold, like an apple, flecked with metallic sparkles. The thing wiggled its tentacles, dangling feebly in her hand. Its flat, weird yellow eyes glistened dimly, like silver foil, like dirty sequins. It was disgusting and a little terrifying. The smell was overpoweringly putrid, almost to the point of making him gag.

“These are the guys we’re after,” said Emma. “Want to hold it?”

Peter hoped this wasn’t some kind of test. Because no fucking way was he going to touch the squid. If that were the case he’d just find some other job, one that didn’t involve squid-touching.

Emma dropped the squid back in the tank. They walked around the lab while she explained the experiments they were running on the squid. Some of the squid were separated in smaller tanks. Peter listened to her talk and nodded comprehendingly and didn’t understand any of what she was saying.

She showed him the truck. It was behind the building, through a back door, parked at the bottom of a delivery ramp. It was an F-450 with a huge rectangular metal tank in the bed. There was an aluminum ladder bolted to the side of the truck bed, leading up to the rim of the tank. Peter climbed the ladder and looked inside. It was about half full with salt water.

“We have to change the water once in a while. It’s not ideal, but it’s what we’ve got right now. Basically, we need as many squid as we can get.”

She explained the job to him. Drive to New Bedford, get there around six, when the fishermen bring in the first catch. Get the squid. Bring them back. There were maps, directions, instructions. She gave him the keys to the truck and watched him drive it around the parking lot a few turns to make sure he could maneuver the vehicle.

“A lot of the squid are going to die,” said Emma. “They go into shock, and they’re dead by the time you make it back from New Bedford. So you gotta get the squid back as soon as you can. The dead ones are no good. We can only experiment on live squid. We pay you for every live squid you bring back.”

“So—you want me to speed?”

“No,” said Emma. “Definitely not. We’re not asking you to do anything illegal. I’m just saying, the longer you spend on the road, the more squid are going to die on your way back. We pay by the living squid. Interpret that however you want.”

The phrase “by the living squid” finally replaced “lesbian Viking” in Peter’s head. Of course she was saying, in a winking way, in a
I’m not actually saying this but yes I am saying this
kind of way: Yeah, speed.

“You’re hired,” she said, and gave him a tight handshake that made Peter self-conscious about his own feeble handshake. He thought of the limp, slimy squid in her hand. She sent him to accounts and payroll to sign tax forms and other formal documents. For technical reasons he had to be signed on as a contractor. To make the paperwork simpler or something. No benefits. So he pocketed the keys, followed her directions across the campus to payroll, got lost a couple of times, asked directions, found it, signed a bunch of stuff, went outside, chose a marble staircase to sit at the top of that overlooked one of the main lawn quad whatever areas of the campus, and smoked three cigarettes in a row, lighting the second off the first and the third off the second while watching the campus come to life, the students shuffling across the damp grass in their coats and hats with cups of coffee and satchels and backpacks, on their way to their first classes presumably, or labs, or wherever they were going. These kids were in their late teens and early twenties. Later they would probably go on to work on projects like satellites with giant lasers that kill people from outer space, and make a lot of money. While Peter, who was seven, eight years older than they were, would continue being broke and desperate. What he felt toward these kids walking across the grass while he sat on the steps smoking wasn’t quite hate or resentment. There was too much self-loathing mixed into his feelings for that. It requires more self-respect to hate and resent, it takes some self-confidence to believe that they’ve been blessed and you’ve been gypped by a capricious universe. No, Peter mostly blamed himself. He’d started the game on Go with two hundred dollars, same as anyone else, but had bungled it through bad moves and reckless investments. How do other people do it? How do other people navigate the world so easily, as if they already know the way, and never feel unmoored, lost, frantic, like their compasses have been fucked up from too much holding a magnet under them to watch the needle spin and spin, searching for a north that seems to be everywhere at once?

•  •  •

“Sometimes I think about just not talking for a while,” Peter said to Greg at lunch. Greg had taken him to lunch to celebrate his getting a job. Peter had thanked him effusively, even though it wasn’t really an unusual thing for Greg to buy him lunch, because Peter had no money. They were eating at a nice-ish place in Cambridge. Their table had a tablecloth and a flower arrangement on it. Greg ordered a calamari appetizer as a joke. The breaded calamari rings were tough to chew. They didn’t really taste like anything. The sauce they came with was good, but the calamari itself tasted like nothing.

“I mean, like, not talk for a long time. Like six months or a year or something. I heard that Buckminster Fuller did that. He just decided not to talk for like a year.”

“Why would you do that?” said Greg. “What good would that do?”

“Just to be silent,” said Peter.

Peter was slightly self-conscious about sitting in this restaurant, being ragged and dirty-looking and reeking of smoke. The undersides of his cuticles were perpetually dirty. At some point in his life he’d acquired yellowish-gray rims of filth around his fingernails that never went away no matter how much he washed his hands.

“You know, to figure shit out in my head until I’m ready to talk again.”

“If you can’t figure shit out talking, why do you think you’d be able to figure it out not talking? What have you got to figure out anyway?”

“What I’m going to do with my life.”

“Plus it would be difficult logistically.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, okay, say you walk into a store, you need to buy something. How do you communicate with the guy at the counter?”

“I’d carry a notebook and a pen around with me everywhere.”

“If you’re not talking for some Zen, self-searching reason, if you’re writing everything down and showing people the notebook, wouldn’t that mean you’d actually be spending way more effort just to communicate with people? What’s so Zen about that? It’s ridiculous. You’re just inconveniencing everybody else for no reason.”

Peter felt cornered. He had ordered a cup of coffee with his club sandwich. He’d only eaten half the sandwich, and that alone had been a labor, but had asked the waitress for three coffee refills. The cup was pretty small. With each refill he ripped open a sugar packet and dumped a fresh silken thread of sugar into the coffee, then separated the flaps of the sugar packet along the glued seams, flattened it, and tore it into strips, which he wadded into tiny balls with his fingers. When he ran out of sugar packets he went to work on the flower arrangement, fastidiously denuding the daisies of their petals and wadding those into tiny balls too.

“Um,” said Peter. “I guess so. I mean, you know. I don’t, um. Shit. I don’t know.”

“It sounds like you haven’t really thought this through.”

Half the daisies in the glass flute of water were now naked, sad-looking yellow circles on sickly thin stems. A pile of weird debris had accumulated on the tablecloth next to Peter’s plate, wadded-up bits of pink sugar-packet paper and daisy petals.

“Dude. Quit fucking with their flowers.”

“Sorry.”

Peter’s hands shot back from the half-stripped flower arrangement.

He put his hands in his lap like a reprimanded child. Then he started unwadding the tiny balls he’d made.

“I don’t think I’m gonna do it anyway. The not-talking thing, I mean. Not right now, anyway.”

Greg smiled deftly and nodded, like a therapist being nicely encouraging, only Greg did it with condescending irony.

“I think that’s a good plan.”

•  •  •

Peter did manage to sleep a little that night. Emma had said it was a bit over an hour’s drive from Cambridge to New Bedford, plan for an hour and a half, and he was supposed to get there before six in the morning. Plus the walk to campus took about twenty minutes. Peter didn’t see why he couldn’t just park the truck at Greg’s house, but he hadn’t thought to ask about it that morning. Maybe it had something to do with rules about campus vehicles off school property or something. We should ask about that. So that means we should get up at about three thirty to be on the safe side. Especially since it’s our first day and we should leave some slack time in case we fuck something up. Eight hours counting backward from that means we should go to bed at seven thirty.

It didn’t feel like it had been dark out for long when Peter went to bed. He lay there for four, five hours, not sleeping. Megan was watching TV upstairs, and the living room, where the TV was, was directly above the futon in the basement. The volume wasn’t loud but he could almost hear what was happening on the TV. But he must have fallen asleep eventually, because the skull-grinding electric throb of the alarm-clock buzzer dragged him out of a nightmare he was having about a guy with his arms and legs cut off who was stuck inside a refrigerator shitting blood into a hole in the bottom of it. He opened his eyes and didn’t know who he was or where he was. He saw the red digital numbers 3:30 glowing somewhere in the darkness outside his body and didn’t know what they meant. As he slowly recalled who he was, what was going on, and what he now had to do, he realized he would probably never get used to this.

He doused himself with cold water and struggled with Megan’s fancy, complicated coffeemaker, muttering the word
fuck
over and over as he fiddled with levers and buttons. At last he was able to make it make coffee, but it tasted weird. He’d probably done something wrong. He poured it into one of their plastic travel mugs and left for campus in the utter dark. The streets were empty and as silent as the streets of a semi-urban place like Somerville get. The sidewalks and buildings were dull orange from the streetlights. It was cold. Peter turned up the collar of his denim jacket and hugged it to himself, shivering. He walked with hunched shoulders and a quick, short, screw-tight gait, slurping the weird-tasting coffee and smoking cigarettes in continuous succession while he walked, concentrating on his feet. He had a headache that came at him in fuzzy broken radio waves of pain and his thoughts were like a screeching horde of freaked-out bats flapping around frantically, going nowhere. A part of him still worried constantly about whether he would ever feel life was still worth living if he could never get drunk or high again. He hoped there would come a time when he had no desire to get fucked up, and wouldn’t even think about it, and would be totally fine with being sober, but he doubted it would ever happen. It was like being offered the choice between a death sentence and life in prison. It’s like, I’ll choose life, I guess.