The Fat Artist and Other Stories (35 page)

“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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ALSO BY BENJAMIN HALE

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Benjamin Hale

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2016

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Jacket art: Private collection
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-7620-0

ISBN 978-1-4767-7622-4 (ebook)

Table of Contents

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