The Fat Artist and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

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.
    A thin, bored-looking bald man with glasses and a white mustache sitting at one of the high desks beckoned to her. He wore a black suit with a red-and-blue-striped tie and silver cuff links on his wrists. Emily stood in front of the desk and waited for him to speak. He was scratching at something on his desk with a fountain pen. Without looking up from the desk, the man held out a hand for her customs form and passport, and said:
    “Do you have anything to declare?”
    “Yes,” she said, and handed him the card.

In November 1998 the Iridium Communications company launched sixty-six satellites into orbit. The company had ultimately intended to launch seventy-seven of these satellites to complete the network; the name Iridium was derived from the element with the atomic weight of seventy-seven. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999, the result of internal mismanagement coupled with an insufficient demand for its satellite phones. Although the Iridium global satellite communications network provided constant worldwide coverage, the phones were unwieldy and expensive, and were quickly pushed out of the market by the advent of roaming contracts between terrestrially based cellular providers who offered smaller phones with cheaper