Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

One: Goliath Girl

1 I didn’t know I’d killed him until the next day, when the paper reported the death of this man, Hazard Planet, that was his name. He was found at 34th and Strong, right where we’d parted. The paper said the police were investigating “the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.” As an architect of crime scene miniatures, I couldn’t imagine what would be so befuddling. He’d been found prostrate on the sunny sidewalk, clutching his throat with one hand, a knife still concealed in the other, canister of defensive aerosol , recently deployed, recovered near the body. Where was the ambiguity in that? Granted, it did seem a sensational pose for a dead man to be found in, as though he were anticipating a headline and wanted to make it good. He was asthmatic and had had an anaphylactic attack, a reaction to the pepper spray with which I’d showered his face, a spray one Goliath Girl 2 my father, ever hopeful I might one day prove to be lovably vulnerable, urged me to carry. I didn’t know the man now known to me as Hazard Planet was asthmatic, how could I? His breath was smooth as satin as he breathed on my neck, no rattle, no wheeze. I was surprised at how odorless it was, his breath. I would have expected the harshly lingering smell of long-digested onions or sausage, or the sharp sting of mossy putrefaction characteristic of the hygienically indifferent . He said, “Hey cunt, hey bitch, hey you hulking punk, hand over your punk money.” His voice rippled low, with a hint of gravel, barely audible, the sound the earth makes when plates briefly shift, a tectonic growl. This was just the sort of encounter I’d always hoped for. Even though I was hunched over, his hand tangled in my hair, I could feel him yearning en pointe as he tried to reach my ears, and he snarled, “Who are you to tower above the rest of us?” It didn’t go exactly as I’d imagined it. I would always be more raptor than quarry. You’d think with all the deterrent sprays on the self-protection weaponry market these days, not to mention those nerve-curdling tasers and heart-stopping stun guns, that a fellow with serious pulmonary complaints would steer wide of a life of crime. You’d think. What kind of felonious future can there be for a man who can’t leave home without his inhaler, a man who sucks on a nebulizer every night so he won’t be awakened by dreams of strangulation? I went to the police station and turned myself in. I spilled my story: innocent victim-to-be out walking in the world, madman with knife on the lurk, self-defense bull’s-eye spritz to the mug, autonomic flight from the scene, belated 3 trembling (okay, more on principle, but I’d been attacked, hadn’t I? Didn’t I deserve to quake, like any sensible jackrabbit hightailing it toward haven?), and later my usual denial (It’s all a swindle, this life, a misunderstanding, this body a hoax, I tell myself every night before happily dreaming of being a shrimp). The detective didn’t like it one bit that I’d hotfooted it straight home and collapsed in the living room in my favorite overstuffed recliner (purchased by my father from the Big and Tall store, whose strapping mannequins I could see eye to looming eye with when I was twelve), moving it as close as I could to the T.V. and the chipper faces of newscasters, always so radiant and heartening when detailing mayhem in their sing-song delivery, as though war and poverty and famine were only passing phases the world was going through in its upstart adolescence, nothing to sweat in the cush sanctuary of an American living room. I fell asleep in that chair, pleasantly shaken, elated at having finally been thought conquerable, a can of Raid in my hand, the only remotely volatile spray in this joint with the possible chemical muscle to halt the advance of a menacing assailant, the American flag snapping against a background of gently breeze-blown wheat on the screen, national anthem announcing the end of another day of television in Kansas. You’d think a chronicler of dastardly wrongdoing like me would be...