The Fat Artist and Other Stories

The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Benjamin Hale

Simon and Schuster (2016)

Tags: Fiction, Literary, Short Stories (Single Author), General

Fictionttt Literaryttt Short Stories (Single Author)ttt Generalttt

Prize-winning author Benjamin Hale’s fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.As in his debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, the voices in these stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a US congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives that form the vast tapestry of American life. Hale’s work has earned accolades from writers as disparate as novelist Jonathan Ames, who compared discovering his work to watching Mickey Mantle play ball for the first time; Washington Post critic Ron Charles, who declared him “fully evolved as a writer,” and bestselling author Jodi Picoult, who simply called him “brilliant.” Pairing absurdity with philosophical musings on the human condition and the sway our most private selves and hidden pasts hold over us, the stories in The Fat Artist reside in the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation.

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For my brothers, James and John

And in memory of Ryan Gosa

When they became outlaws they gave themselves new names. He chose Miles Braintree: the first part after Miles Davis, the second after Braintree, the T’s southernmost stop on the Red Line. She chose Odelia Zion: Zion for the Promised Land, and the baby name book said Odelia means “praise God,” but mostly she just liked the sound of it. Hamlet’s Ophelia but not quite.
Lives of the Saints
tells of the murdered virgin Odilia, patron saint of the blind. Can be shortened to Delia, Ode, O. A martyr, a lyric, a letter.

•  •  •

Miles had had his disagreements with SDS, split the organization before it crumbled, and formed the Obscure Reference Collective with a handful of other radicals disgruntled with the direction the movement was taking. The bloodhounds were sniffing from day one, ORC’s plot to firebomb the New York Stock Exchange was botched by inside treachery, and the remaining true believers went into hiding. Odelia followed Miles to Paris, where they stayed for a few months, and then to Tangier. Money wasn’t a problem. Miles had money.

•  •  •

In Tangier they spent two years sitting on woven mats in cafés, eating roasted dates and drinking coffee as thick as motor oil, smoking kief from hookah hoses, sometimes holing up in their second-story two-room flat for two, three, four days at a stretch without putting on clothes, drinking wine, smoking, tripping, making love, friends sometimes dropping by to join in, the daily rising and setting of the sun as inconsequential and amusing and unreal as a TV show.

They burned incense and lit candles at night, and the days were bright blue, blinding bright, their flat acrid with the smoke of goat meat crackling below their unglassed windows. Bare-footed brown legs pattered in dirt streets and in blue alleyways resonant with voices squabbling in Arabic and French. The streets were a jumble of North African and Western clothes: It wasn’t uncommon to see a man wearing a keffiyeh and a double-breasted pinstripe suit. The call to prayer echoed across the city at dawn. That’s why they’d come here, in part; to do the William Burroughs thing, do the Paul Bowles thing. The sunlight was sharp and harsh and made every shadow look as if it were painted on with ink. They took hashish and heroin and acid and opium and other, more exotic drugs, the names of which Miles told Odelia and Odelia forgot. Miles learned to fish for octopus: You dive down in the shallows, stick your arm under a rock, and let the octopus wrap itself around your fist, then you swim to the surface and beat it against a rock till it lets go, which also tenderizes the meat; then hang the octopus to dry on a clothesline. Dead tentacles dangling from strings. For a while they had a pet monkey, but it got sick and died. Miles and Odelia were married in a ceremony conducted in a language neither of them understood, officiated by a poet from Rhode Island in a turban with half his face painted red. Odelia gave birth to a boy they named Abraxas, after a Gnostic deity mentioned in a Hermann Hesse novel, who simultaneously embodies all eternal cosmic dualisms: life and death, male and female, good and evil. But soon they began to itch with paranoia. Strangers were following Odelia in the streets. A tall man in a gray suit and a gray hat showed up everywhere she went. Letters from friends in the States arrived with pages missing, the seals of the envelopes broken and taped back together. Miles thought he could hear the ghostly-faint feedback signal of a wiretap whenever he picked up the phone, so one night he ripped it out of the wall and threw it in the fire. It melted and stank, and then they had no phone.