The Fat Artist and Other Stories (4 page)

•  •  •

She opens her eyes and looks at the thing in her lap. It won’t stop screaming. For the moment she’s not exactly sure what this thing is but she knows she must hold it. It will be bad if she lets go. Her hands are cold and slick.

The man in the seat in front of her turns around to look.

A mouth, a nose, and an eyeball appear in the sliver of space between the seats. The eyeball is a tender glistening globe, a prick of black rimmed in a band of blue. It is looking at her.

“Hey,” the mouth says. “You going to change that kid’s die purr or what?”

What? What the fuck is a die purr
?

The mouth, the nose, and the eye disappear.

Oh.

The moment the face parts go away she smells the perfect smell of shit. She wonders how long it has smelled like that without her noticing. This screaming thing is my child. It is my son. This screaming thing is my son and I have to make it stop smelling like shit.

Odelia turns to Miles. He and Tessa are conversing closely. She’s whispering. Her hand is on his knee.

“I have—” she says.

Miles turns to look at her. Tiny bugs are crawling around all over his face.

“I have—”

Tiny bugs are crawling around all over Miles’s face. She closes her eyes.

“I have to change the diaper,” Odelia says. Yes: That was a complete, coherent sentence. Good. She opens her eyes.

Miles looks at her. His face is as blank as a blank sheet of paper rolled in a typewriter in front of someone with a blank mind.

“Diaper. I have to change the diaper.”

The world is receding into focus. Keep it there. Control it. Don’t relax. Control it.

Miles scrunches himself sideways and Tessa folds her legs against her chest in her seat with her wrists wrapped around her ankles. Odelia squeezes past them with the screaming infant in her arms. Standing in the aisle, she asks Miles to hand her the bag underneath her seat.

“The what?” says Miles, looking at her as if she’s speaking in another language.

“My bag,” she says. “The bag under the seat.”

Abraxas writhes. He’s screaming in an almost non-baby way, screaming as if his insides are on fire. Screaming in the way she imagines the human sacrifice screamed when the Aztec priest cut a slash below the rib cage, reached under the ribs up to his elbow, groping the organs, feeling for the one that beat.

She thinks that Abraxas is thinking this: Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. He needs to be comforted and she cannot comfort him. He doesn’t know what is happening. The bond between mother and child has been cut, and he is alone inside his own brain.

“Oh—” says Miles, finally decoding the message.

He reaches under the seat and hands her the bag with diapers and talcum powder in it.

•  •  •

Odelia walks down the aisle of the airplane, picking her steps like she’s walking on a sheet of oiled glass. She hears decontextualized segments of people’s conversations in passing, their voices hushed and accusatory, murmuring with judgment.

Orange spots appear and disappear on the carpet and the ceiling. They appear in her peripheral vision but disappear if she looks directly at them.

Inside the cramped lavatory, even with the door thumped shut and locked, she can still hear the nasty sibilance of damning whispers. The toilet and sink are made of stainless steel. So is the floor. The lighting is the color of an egg yolk. The room pitches and wobbles. She has to grasp the corner of the sink to keep her balance. She lays Abraxas on the steel floor, her hand protecting his head. He’s hard to hold, he’s squirming all over. He won’t keep still. Streaks of orange rust are draining down the walls. She peels his diaper off. It’s damp and heavy with urine and squashed pea-green shit. His skin is wrinkled from the moisture. His tiny tube of a penis. She wipes him off quickly. It’s a cloth diaper, but she dumps it in the toilet anyway and flushes. The hatch roars open and sucks it down to wherever it goes. She dashes him with a puff of talcum powder and wraps him up with a fresh diaper, careful not to prick him with the safety pin. He’s still screaming. Her hands are trembling. She feels so weak she might faint. She has to bend over the toilet bowl. Her stomach makes a fist and releases it. Her hands are clammy and white, gripped around the rim of the steel toilet. She leans her head over the bowl. Nothing comes out. Her hands shake. Somebody knocks on the door. She doesn’t answer. There’s another, angrier knock.

The baby is still screaming. She picks him up and holds him and opens the door.

•  •  •

Once, Odelia and Miles went hiking in the mountains outlying Tangier. Well, more than once, many times. But this once, this once, it was a blazing afternoon, the sky so bright it was almost white, the air salty, the pale green line of the sea visible from the mountains. Miles had been reading an Alan Watts book titled
The Joyous Cosmology
. They were walking and talking about the sublime harmony of the natural world. Miles told her that this was the joyous cosmology.

There was Miles, sun-browned and bare-chested in the sand-colored mountains of Morocco, stretching his lean arms out heroically, as if welcoming the embrace of the universe. The sky, the sea, the land. What a beautiful place. What a beautiful day.

“Look around you! Look! It’s the joyous cosmology!”

They made love right there in the sand under the open sky in the middle of the day. His sweat smelled like truffles. She licked it off his neck.

She asked him to recite the Queen Mab speech for her. She lay smiling on the sand with their clothes bunched under her head for a pillow and felt the sun’s heat on her bare stomach and watched Miles’s lean, dirty, darkly tanned naked body twisting in the desert as he began, “Oh, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you . . .”—and he rocked and tumbled through the speech, shouting it at the mountains. When he came to its end, he ran to a different place and assumed a different voice, and said Romeo’s line:

“Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talk’st of nothing.”

Then he ran back to Mercutio’s place and answered Romeo’s interruption:

“True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy.”

They put their clothes back on and continued hiking. They met a shepherd who was switching his flock along the trail: the dust cloud, the flies, the racket of wooden bells knocking at their necks and desultory bleating. They offered to smoke their hashish with him and he greedily accepted. They sat with him under a creaking desert palm tree and smoked the hashish. There weren’t six words of language common between them, but they seemed to understand each other well enough. His brown skin was withered, weather-beaten to the texture of a crumpled brown paper sack. He had so few teeth she could count them, and his tongue was black. He got up to go.

They kept walking. A little while later they saw a stray sheep. The sheep was bashing its head against a rock. Over and over. There was a skinny boy who looked about ten years old sitting nearby on a log, watching. He was doodling in the dirt with a stick. They could tell by his face that he was the shepherd’s son. The sheep kept bashing its head into the rock, over and over. Blood ran down the side of the rock and curdled in the sand. A shard of the sheep’s skull had cracked open, like a little door, and a string of brains dangled out of the sheep’s head.

The boy saw Miles and Odelia, and he pointed at the sheep, shrugged his shoulders.

That was before they met Tessa, and before she came to live with them, before the man in the gray suit and the gray hat started following Odelia everywhere she went, before Miles ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it in the fire, and before Abraxas was born.

•  •  •

The woman in purple was standing outside the lavatory door, with her pearl earrings and her brown hair piled on top of her head like a loaf of bread. She put her hand on Odelia’s arm. Odelia flinched at her touch. The woman said:

“Oh dear. Did you have the fish?”

•  •  •

Abraxas screamed for the remaining duration of the flight. The airplane dove into Miami-Dade, and as it roared down the runway, Odelia turned to Miles and told him she had to take Abraxas to a hospital.

“He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine,” said Miles. “You can take him to a doctor in Mexico if you want. But he’ll be fine. We can’t lose you. You’re never gonna be able to get back to us.”

“I’m not taking him to a Mexican hospital,” said Odelia. “I want to be in America. I want to be in a place where people understand what I’m saying.”

“You won’t be safer. You’ll get caught. They’ll figure you out.”

“I’m scared to death. Miles, I’m scared to death.”

•  •  •

Abraxas wasn’t screaming anymore. He was too tired to scream. He’d settled into a persistent tearful whimper. She held him, she tried to make him understand that she was there and that she loved him, but she knew that inside himself he was completely alone.

She kissed the top of his head, blew her warm breath on his skin, and said, incanting it, again and again: “I will keep you from harm. I will keep you from harm. I will keep you from harm.”

Even though she knew he couldn’t understand her, she felt like she was telling a lie.

•  •  •

It was light out when they descended the airstair onto the tarmac, roughly the same time here in Miami as when they’d boarded the plane in Paris. The air was oozing with humidity. Odelia left Miles and Tessa at the connecting plane. They didn’t kiss good-bye. They didn’t even hug. They just sort of stood there and looked at each other. Odelia was crying. Miles gave her some money. A hundred dollars. She had nothing else with her except for Abraxas. Miles and Tessa got on the plane to Mexico.

•  •  •

The sky was pink, the air jungly with moisture. The heat was sickening. A row of thick-trunked palm trees skirted the runway and the leaves of their brittle fronds clicked together in a slight breeze that did nothing more refreshing than blow the heat around. The tarmac was chaotic with crisscrossing streams of traffic, pedestrian and vehicular. Men in blue jumpsuits and caps walked around with bright orange batons and drove baggage trains that scuttled like grumbling, beeping caterpillars across the concrete, and all the passengers who had just deplaned from the international flights funneled into the doors of the airport in a blizzard of languages, snapping at their children and grunting miserably under the weight of their luggage. Odelia joined the crush and was carried by the crowd through the doors. With her fingers Odelia smeared tears out of her eyes, which she was sure were bloodshot and swollen-lidded from crying. Inside the airport the crowd tapered into a line that was corralled into a maze of switchbacks cordoned off with red ropes looping through rows of metal stands that looked like silver chess pawns. The floor of the large room was covered with thin gray carpet. Outside the maze of ropes men in green-and-brown military fatigues stood by with German shepherds on leashes. Several of the men in fatigues were sitting in a circle of folding chairs, drinking bottles of Coke and smoking cigarettes and watching a TV that was bolted to the wall in the corner of the ceiling. A lazily revolving metal ceiling fan whipped the rising smoke into a rapidly vanishing eddy. They were watching the commentators bicker back and forth about McGovern dumping Thomas Eagleton from the Democratic ticket. Eagleton had frail nerves. He’d undergone electroshock therapy and had troubles with drinking.

Men and women in crisp airport uniforms trawled along the line, distributing stubby pencils and customs declaration forms.

Odelia had no plan and nowhere to go. There was the question of how she was going to make it through customs, which was coming closer and closer as she shuffled toward the front of the line. There was the question of money, or rather the question of having almost no money. She thought about how she might be able to get back to her parents in Troy, New York. Maybe she could take a train or a bus. It was August 1972. She was twenty-four years old and she hadn’t seen or spoken to her parents in four years. She wanted to see her parents. They did not know they had a grandson. She was going to change her son’s name. A smiling young woman in a blue airport uniform handed her a customs declaration form and a stubby pencil.

“Welcome to the United States,” she chirped, and moved up the line.

The baby whimpered and looked up at her, exhausted, his eyelashes caked with dried tears. Emily looked at the rectangle of starchy white paper the woman had given her. It was a hieroglyphic scramble of small print and dotted lines and boxes. Was she carrying any meats, animals, or animal products? Disease agents, cell cultures, or snails? Awkwardly balancing the baby against her shoulder with her arm and holding the form, she began to try to fill it in with the stubby pencil.

She had no legitimate identification with her. Passport, driver’s license—all of that was gone, and she could not remember if they had been lost or deliberately destroyed. She only had her forged Canadian passport. Her baby did not have a social security number, and she could not even remember hers past the first three digits. She was afraid she was going to cry again. She looked around her for someone to ask for help. The people in front of her were speaking in French and the people behind her were speaking in a language she could not even guess at. Instead of filling in the customs form, she turned the card over and with the stubby pencil wrote on the back:

MY NAME IS EMILY BARROW.

I AM AN AMERICAN.

I AM A WANTED CRIMINAL.

MY CHILD IS SICK.

I AM TURNING MYSELF IN.

I WILL TELL YOU ANYTHING I KNOW

ABOUT ANYONE.

PLEASE HELP ME.

She underlined the last sentence. When she made it to the front of the line she was made to stand and wait until one of the customs officers’ desks opened up. When there was a place for her the uniformed man at the head of the line unhooked a red rope from a stand and allowed her to pass through.