And I ate and drank all of these without even the deftest nod of consideration for harmony of the palate or of the stomach. I simply ate my offerings in the order in which they came to me, and if that meant following a box of powdered chocolate donut holes with a platter of eel and salmon sashimi followed by a grilled BLT dripping with sizzling bacon fat and American cheese, all while alternately sipping a lukewarm bottle of Budweiser and slurping noisily from the straw that punctured the plastic lid of a strawberry milkshake from Shake Shack—then so be it. And so it was.
• • •
Soon the table in the corner of my exhibition chamber on which the people lay their offerings was piled so high with foodstuffs that they began to tumble over the edges and onto the floor, where they were kicked around and trodden flat by many feet. A few hours after opening, there was no room left in the refrigerator reserved for chilled items, and so cartons of ice cream quickly became containers of warm, sweet milky glop in the early-summer heat. When my waiters were not busily clearing away refuse or transferring the food and drink items from the on-deck table to my dining table, they were employed in swatting away the flies that had discovered us. The visitors would linger on far beyond their allotted viewing time, hoping to wait long enough to watch me insert into myself some of the food they themselves had brought—but more often than not they waited in vain. I simply had too much to eat. I had such a backlog that it often took me hours after the offerings had been left for me to get around to eating them. The museum staffers, equipped with their institutional walkie-talkies, would frequently have to remind the dawdling visitors that there was still a very long line to enter the exhibit, and that they should be considerate of others and give them a chance to see the Fat Artist. Later they erected a sign warning visitors they were allowed only a maximum twenty-minute viewing period. When the people finally had to go, they would slowly back away from the exhibit, slightly disappointed—but only slightly, for although they would not get a chance to witness me actually ingesting their food, they left knowing they had caught a glimpse of something great.
No one—not one person—ever attempted to speak to me, and I certainly did not ever initiate conversation with them, nor did I ever deign (or dare?) to make eye contact with the visitors. To them I was a like a wild, exotic animal, like a panther pacing ferociously behind his bars—a being not to be interacted with, but marveled at. Once, I recall, only once, a curious child reached out a finger and curiously poked the flesh of my thigh while I was eating. I did not react. The child’s mother tore his hand away and, her fist shaking the offending arm, scolded him in a severe voice, saying, “Never, ever touch the art in a museum. You know better than that. Do you understand me?” The child nodded silently and held back tears.
I ate on.
• • •
I became keenly attuned to the secret rhythms of the cosmos in the course of my consumption, digestion, and excretion. I had to. I would of necessity eat very slowly, in order to prevent vomiting. Do not pause—I told myself—you may eat slowly, but you may never stop eating. This mantra I inwardly repeated to myself over and over as I ate. Just keep the food flowing. I learned how to keep the muscles of my bladder and sphincter permanently relaxed, so that it required no conscious effort of my own to expurgate my bodily wastes. My urine and feces slid easily out of my body and disappeared down the rubber tubes, vacuumed away into oblivion. The input–output relationship between eating and defecation, between drinking and urination, became as unconscious and as physically effortless as the inhalation and exhalation of air. My body was an ever-flowing continuum, connected at both ends to the material effluvia of the external world. I achieved a Zenlike state of serene hypnosis, a harmonious fusion of being and becoming, oblivious to all but the hands that brought the food before me to my mouth. In, out, in, out: like an element of nature, like a river, like the waters of the river flowing forever and anon unto the sea, where it rises to the heavens and falls again to the earth, a never-ending samsara cycle of death and rebirth, entering and exiting, my body nothing more than a passive and temporary holding chamber for the things of this world.
I ate on.
• • •
In this way the days continued. Days following days compiled into weeks following weeks, and with every passing minute I grew fatter and fatter. In the first few weeks of my exhibition the constant surge of curious visitors abated only slightly. My weight skyrocketed. After the first week I was already up to 712 lbs (323 kg), having comfortably surpassed my personal goal of gaining 200 lbs (91 kg) from my starting weight of 493 lbs (224 kg) in the first six days. Maybe because of my initial hubris, I faltered a bit during the second week—whatever the reason, I succeeded in gaining only another 51 lbs (23 kg), ending week two at just 763 lbs (346 kg). However, during week three I rebounded from that disappointing second-week slowdown, going full steam all the way up to 870 lbs (395 kg). My body mass index was estimated at 114.8.XI
I was pleased with my work, but obviously, if I was to reach my ultimate goal of breaking the record for the fattest human being in known history by well surpassing the 1,600 lb mark (≈726 kg), I still had a very long way to go: I would have to nearly double my weight.
I steeled my innards for the journey ahead, and ate on, ate on.
• • •
As my weight increased, I lost my sense of linear time. Because of the monotonous nature of my days, my entirely stationary existence, and the oneiric effect that a life purely devoted to eating works on the mind, sunrises and sunsets became events that only barely registered in my consciousness. At first I counted the days, but after a few weeks I completely lost track of how much time was passing, like someone forced to live deep in a cave or a windowless prison. There existed only the food before me and the readout of the scale affixed to the wall. The boundary blurred between my sleep and my wakeful life. Soon I dreamt nothing but dreams of sitting in my bed and eating.
By the time I had surpassed 1,000 lbs (454 kg), I had essentially lost all significant autonomous mobility. I could not have gotten out of bed unaided even if I had wanted to. I could still move my legs a little, certainly, and I could shift slightly in bed. I could wiggle my toes, and I could move my head. But aside from that, I had now successfully eaten myself utterly immobile. I was now less like an animal and more like a plant, rooted to the spot, helplessly subject to changes in my external environment while passively accepting whatever nourishment the world brought my way.
I could still move my arms as well, although the procedure of using my arms to move food from the table to my mouth was an increasingly wearying one, encumbered as my bones and muscles were by the pendulous bags of limp flesh that dangled heavily from them. Although I never rested from eating during museum hours, I sometimes had to rest my feeble arms. During these times it was necessary for my waiters to climb onto my bed and feed me by hand, gently guiding forks and spoons laden with food into my open mouth. My knees had disappeared from view beneath my stomach, and my nipples had long ago retreated from view somewhere in the many folds of fat in my chest. Breathing—mere breathing—had become so difficult that it physically tired me.
For the first month or so that the exhibition was open I had been capable of rolling over in bed by myself, but this now being quite impossible, museum employees had to do it for me. I assume and hope they received some extra compensation for this unpleasant chore. When the museum closed at the end of each day, five or six male museum workers pushed me over onto my left side, in which position I spent the night. First thing in the morning, another five or six museum workers would push me onto my right side, in which position I stayed for another three hours or so, until the museum opened at 10:00 A.M., when they returned to push me onto my back again for public viewing. This was done to prevent bedsores.
The museum closed on Thursdays. I considered Thursday my sanctioned day of rest. I did not have to eat anything on Thursdays—or, rather, no one came to feed me, until the midafternoon, when the
interns would come to clean the exhibition chamber, feed me a modest meal, and bathe me. I came to—well, not exactly look forward to these calm, reflective days, for as I said, I had lost my sense of time, and when these days came they were always a pleasant surprise—but certainly relish them when they came. These five strong young people were ebullient college students with nonpaying internships at the museum. I enjoyed their company. They felt free to converse with me, and I came to know them each by name: Christine, Dave, Nora, Lindsay, and Geoff. They worked only on Thursdays, which most of the museum employees had off. They would arrive bearing a meal on a tray, which I consumed with gusto while they swept and mopped my exhibition chamber and squeegeed the glass walls. After I had eaten, they would wash me. I cherished their weekly bathing of my body—afterward I always felt so cool, fresh, and reinvigorated. First they cut my hair, clipped my fingernails and toenails, trimmed my beard, and swept away the leavings from my body and from my bed with little brushes. Then they would heave me onto my side, and all working together they would sponge wash and dry my back and my side. Three of them would stand on the bed and hoist up one of my enormous legs for the other two to bathe. Then they would roll me over onto my other side to wash the parts they had missed, then roll me onto my back and wash my front, lifting up my giant arms to scrub my armpits, cleansing my body of all the bits of dried food that had fused to my chest and stomach, always remembering to lift up my many heavy flaps and rub the damp sponges in those hard-to-reach crevices where mold would develop if the weather had been humid. Then they left me, all high fives and waves and sunny smiles.
Then Friday came, and on I ate.
By the end of the second month, I was up to 1,345 lbs (610 kg).
I ate on.
• • •
As I have said, I no longer retained a reliable sense of the passage of linear time, but I believe it was around the end of the second month when I noticed the stream of visitors to my exhibit had steadily decreased. I suppose the initial hype over my exhibit had died down, and public interest had begun to fade.
There were even some brief stretches of time when I had nothing to eat, because too few visitors had come bearing offerings to me. During these times I had to ask the museum staff to order food for me. There was a dark period during which I actually lost about fifteen pounds, and was unable to gain them back: For nearly a week my weight appeared to have plateaued at around 1,360 lbs (617 kg)—which worried me deeply, as I still had quite a long way to go, and yet had already come so far. I had only to gain another 240 lbs (109 kg) before reaching 1,600 lbs (726 kg). Due to the relative dearth of visitors, the only way I could get my weight gain back on track was to each day send my waiters out to pick me up nine or ten buckets of KFC, which I requested they dump out before me on my dining table in a big pile. These emergency food supplies were generously paid for by the Guggenheim Foundation. My waiters, being otherwise unneeded, would take long breaks, leaving me in my solitude to forlornly snack upon my mountain of fried chicken parts. Several days of repeating this procedure did the trick nicely, and my weight began to climb again. But still. I found this sudden drop-off in my public appreciation troubling.
I ate on, anyway.
• • •
Then one day it happened: an entire day when no one came. My waiters unlocked the doors to my exhibit in the morning, and the hot sun slowly climbed all the way to the zenith of the summer’s pale blue proscenium of sky and began to fall back down the other side, and not a single person visited me.
I cried. I was stricken with a sharp panic—which expanded into a dull terror as the evening at last came on—that the world had forgotten me. And then, I was angry. To hell with “angry”—I was enraged. A hot flower of fury bloomed in the fertile soil of my wounded heart. I screamed and railed at my waiters. I waved my fat fists in the air, and in a voice hoarsened with bitter tears I demanded to know why Tristan Hurt, the inventor and sole practitioner of Fat Art, had become subject to neglect.
They shut my exhibit doors and turned their faces away.
I ate on.
• • •
Days passed. No one came to feed me. So I ordered my waiters to bring me great steaming piles of chicken, to bring me hundreds of pepperoni pizzas, hot and sodden with grease. Indeed, I had almost reverted to the diet of my year of solitude, the very foods that had made me fat to begin with. I looked down at my body. One would scarcely believe, seeing me, that buried beneath all this flesh was the stalwart and handsome man of six feet and an inch in stature and a mere 200 lbs (91 kg) that I had once been. Except for my head, I scarcely any longer resembled anything identifiably human. It would have been unjust to compare my body even to that of, say, a hippo. My body looked more like some large aquatic mammal that had washed up on a beach and died—it had the same floppy lifelessness to it, the same squishiness and dimpled, pulpy, rotten-looking texture. My flesh had developed a pallor and stickiness that seemed almost amphibian. My body was so soft and so giving that I was able to stick my arm into the folds of my stomach and sink it in all the way to the elbow before meeting any resistance.
Still, I had more weight to gain. I ordered my waiters to bring me food. They brought me eighteen pizzas for lunch. They brought me thirty-five Big Macs. They brought me forty packages of kosher beef franks and three gallons of half-and-half with which to wash them down. I do not know if the foundation was still paying for my emergency rations. I think my waiters had been given some sort of company expense card. They were probably out buying themselves three-martini lunches with it when they were not delivering me my own endless lunch. Parasites. They brought me twenty racks of pork ribs. One day they merely brought me thirty loaves of Wonder Bread, forty pounds of shaved Black Forest ham, and a gallon tub of mayonnaise. They told me to make sandwiches for myself, and then they disappeared for three days. No one came. They didn’t even leave me a knife. I had to spread the mayonnaise with fat, clumsy fingers. The ham spoiled fast; I ate it anyway. When they came back, they started putting their cigarettes out on me for fun. My nerve endings were buried many layers deep; I felt no pain.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 13