I ate on.
• • •
A week or two later—though really, I had no idea how much later, but if I were to hazard a guess—Olivia visited me. I had not seen her in nearly a year and a half.
When she came, my preliminary food table had nothing on it. Like the forgotten idol of a vanquished tribe, no one had brought me any offerings for many days. The only visitors I had received in the past week or more were people who had come to visit the main wing of the museum and had somehow wandered into my exhibit by accident. My exhibition chamber was out of the way and difficult to find for ordinary patrons of the museum. To see the Fat Artist required museum visitors to follow signs taped to the walls directing them to an emergency stairwell and into the service elevators, which were the only elevators that went all the way up to the roof of the building, and if the people were not following a large crowd—as had been the case in the early days of the Fat Artist, when the exhibition first opened—then it was easy for people to assume they were in the wrong place, or were somewhere they were not allowed to be, and they would turn around. I had begun to suspect that the signs directing visitors to the Fat Artist had been mistakenly removed, perhaps by some well-meaning janitor who was not aware the performance piece on the roof was still ongoing.
On certain days, my waiters would simply open up my exhibit in the morning and then disappear, returning only twice in the day: once, at lunchtime, to drop off the food I had requested of them earlier that morning, and then again only when it was time to close the doors in the evening. I usually smelled beer on their breaths when my waiters came back in the late afternoon to shut the exhibit for the night. Sometimes they would not even show up to unlock my chamber until it must have been close to noon.
I worried that I would never achieve my minimum goal of 1,600 lbs (726 kg). I had managed to fatten myself all the way up to the impressive—but insufficient for my purposes—weight of 1,491 lbs (676 kg). I knew this weight comfortably put me in the positions of (1) the fattest human then known to be alive, and (2) second fattest human in all recorded history (Carol Yager was still well ahead of me). But with this knowledge came two piercing little fears. The first was the fear that I would not be able to surpass the daunting record set by the great Carol Yager in 1994. I had a mere 109 lbs (49 kg) to go before I tied with her, but my weight gain was slowing with every day of the public’s persisting disinterest in my important art. My second fear was that no one would even record it when I attained my desired peak weight—as it seemed that I, Tristan Hurt, had been forgotten, even by my caretakers. The ebullient young interns employed to bathe my body on Thursdays no longer turned up. I was extremely dirty, and much in need of a bath. My body had not been shifted in a long time, and I feared the bedsores that might be developing beneath me.
A few days before Olivia visited me, I had found myself begging a lost-looking group of Japanese tourists for food. They were the first visitors to my exhibit in many consecutive days. At first they seemed not to understand. They took pictures of me pointing to my open mouth and pantomiming the act of eating by picking up an invisible object on my barren dining table (my waiters had been negligent) and bringing it to my mouth, then histrionically rubbing my leviathan belly with both hands as I made yummy-yum-yum noises. One of them eventually figured out what I wanted, and, in a hesitant way that suggested she was not entirely sure if it was “okay” to interact with me, she opened her purse and produced a packet of M&M’s, which she tore open and dumped into my waiting palm. I crammed them all at once into my mouth, chewed with quick, greedy chomps, and swallowed. They laughed as they searched themselves for more food and took more pictures.
Olivia came to me wearing a pretty and simply cut white dress. My waiters had come back not long before to deliver my lunch—which was, as per my usual request, nine buckets of fried chicken and four two-liter bottles of Dr Pepper—and then left. I didn’t know where they were. They probably wouldn’t be back for the rest of the day. I had come not to rely on them to be there for me. They were not even bothering to clean my exhibition chamber anymore. They simply allowed the chicken bones and pizza boxes to lie on the floor exactly where they happened to land when I ineffectually threw them from my bed. The floor hadn’t been swept in weeks. A black and thrumming swarmcloud of flies was my only company.
I believe I was up to a respectable 1,510 lbs (685 kg) when she came to visit me. Unfortunately, she did not come bearing any food. My waiters had at least been courteous enough to arrange the nine buckets of fried chicken within my arm’s reach all around me on my bed. This is what I was eating when Olivia came to visit me. Rather than any food offering, she was holding a bouquet of blush-colored roses. Her off-blond hair was bound in a ponytail. I watched her emerge from the door to the roof and walk toward my exhibition chamber. It was a muggy, overcast day, the sky smeared with thick gray clouds and threatening rain. A purple umbrella in a compressed state dangled by the strap of its handle from one of her thin, knobby wrists. Olivia is a small woman, and I considered the fact that I was then about fifteen times heavier than her; and then, having nothing to do with the thought considered, put it away. On her feet were black and glistening medium-heeled shoes with an open toe. They were the most beautiful shoes I had ever seen her wear, and I wondered what, if anything, occasioned this outfit: the dress, the shoes, a string of pearls, I believe (though that may be my imagination encroaching on my memory). She looked as if she were on her way to a charity dinner. I listened to her shoes clop on the asphalt-and-tar surface of the roof as she crossed it on her way to my exhibition chamber.
Olivia stood at the foot of my bed, holding the bouquet of fat-petaled roses shieldlike before her chest. Her face was scrunched into a look of timid wonder admixed with patent revulsion.
I ignored her. I could not have possibly stopped doing what I was doing: I was both artist and art. I continued to slurp bits of meat from the chicken parts heaped high before me.
Olivia cleared her throat.
I did not look up.
“What are you doing?” she said. That thin, squeaky voice that had always reminded me of an articulate piccolo bounced off the glass walls of my exhibition chamber, filling the room with a mellifluent tintinnabulation of tinny echoes.
I looked up at her from my bed. The beautiful shoes she wore added little confidence to her posture; she still carried herself like a hunchback. She looked, as she always had, uncomfortable in her skin.
I swigged from my massive plastic bottle of Dr Pepper, emitted a thunderous belch, and continued, unmovable and impervious to language, to snack.
Olivia stood at the foot of my bed, nervously fingering the pink petals of the flowers.
“God, it smells so bad in here,” she said. “Do you even realize how you smell?”
I made a dismissive snorting noise and squeezed a shrug out of my amorphous shoulders. The exertion exhausted me.
“This room smells like death,” she said.
I said nothing. I was busy peeling the skin from a leg of chicken—I’ve always loved the way fried chicken skin slides so easily away from the pale wet meat beneath, like a silk slipper. I lowered the chicken skin into my always-hungry mouth.
“This whole thing isn’t about me, is it?” she said.
I said nothing. I licked the last bits of meat from a chicken leg and tossed the bone from the bed to join the others on the floor. There was a soft drumming of thunder in the sky.
“Anyway. I won’t stay long. I came for two reasons,” she said. “The first reason I came is to tell you some bad news. I’m really sorry. I don’t know if anyone has told you . . . ?”
The rest of her sentence was implied by raised eyebrows and widened eyes. I’m sure the curious look on my face belied that whatever her bad news was, I had not heard it.
“Your father died,” she said.
Olivia walked up to the side of my bed.
“Here,” she said, and handed me the flowers. I accepted them mindlessly. I r
ested the flowers on the rolling dunes of my torso.
“He had a brain aneurysm,” said Olivia. “Apparently it was very sudden. I happened to see his obituary, and I called your mom. I always read the obituaries. They’re my favorite part. So, I just thought you should know.”
Olivia stood there and looked at the filth scattered all around the room.
“What day is it?” I said, distractedly fingering the damp petals of the roses.
“Friday,” said Olivia.
“No—what is the date?”
She dug her cell phone out of her purse and looked at it.
“August twenty-ninth,” she said.
I had entered the exhibit in May. Had I really been here nearly four months?
Time passed. Above the glass ceiling the sky was a snake pit, squirming with thick muscles of green and black vapor. Soon the clouds broke into rain. Pebbles of rain came down on the roof of my exhibition chamber in pulsing waves of crackling water. The echoes of the rain warbled in the big cubical glass room and lines of water chased each other down the walls, warping and distorting the view of Central Park.
“I’m going now,” said Olivia.
“Please don’t go now,” I whined.
“I have an umbrella,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Please.”
She looked at me with unmistakable contempt.
“Okay,” she said.
Her voice was barely audible over the clatter of the rain echoing in my glass box. The room had become dense with fog, and the glass was nearly opaque with condensation. The inside of my glass box was a small, self-contained universe—nothing had to exist outside of it. I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space. This room was my kingdom, over which I both presided as monarch and all by myself constituted my only subject.
“Hold me,” I pleaded. I could hear the infantile croak in my own voice.
Olivia scooted aside my rolling glass dining table, removed several buckets of fried chicken from the strategic places where my waiters had nestled them against my flesh, and lay down beside me on my bed. She slid her feet out of her shoes, they tumbled clop-clop to the floor, and with careful movements she curled herself beside my mass. She put a hand on my chest and stroked my greasy wet hair with the other. She nuzzled her hair in the crook of my armpit. Rain pummelled the roof. I permitted myself to weep.
When the rainstorm abated, Olivia sat up in the bed, rubbed her eyes, and looked at her watch. She sat on the edge of my bed and put on her shoes.
“Please, Olivia,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”
She stood up.
“Wait—” I said. “What was the other reason you came? You said there were two.”
“The other reason was that I wanted to see if anyone had come to get you. But I see now there’s nothing I can do. I just don’t see how it’s possible. I’m sorry.”
“Come to get me? What do you mean? Come get me for what?”
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “Good-bye.”
Olivia turned and walked out of my box and into a sunny, newly wet world of petrichor and flashing puddles. The light outside had that steamy, crisp, golden quality it sometimes does when the sun breaks out after a long torrent of rain. I watched her go. I don’t know whether or not I would have tried to follow her, even if I had been physically able to move.
Where were my waiters? It was very late. The angles of the shadows were low, stretched long over the wet, golden world.
After Olivia left, I ate the flowers she had brought me. I peeled them apart, petal by petal, put them in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. They had a velvety texture. I felt their lush, wet kisses of life on my tongue. Their strong, sweet odor was undercut by a pointedly acrid taste. I munched slowly on the flowers, internalizing them, making them part of my body.
No one came to feed me.
* * *
I. What, at this late stage (or any other), is truly unprecedented? The anonymous eyes, minds, and hands that overlaid extra-semiotic images on the raw found walls of Lascaux merely forged after the forms of nature, and only because of this very forgery of form is such anodyne work (still!) exalted: typical of self-serving bourgeois approval, then, I’m sure, as now, and my sympathies are with those early cave artists. (“Ooh,” I imagine their naïve fellows saying, “it’s a horse! It’s a buffalo!”)
II. “The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed”(Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form). I myself was once nude (I was a work of art), but now have become again merely naked: as embarrassed and defenseless as Adam out of Paradise.
III. Somewhere (and where on earth does one hear such things?) I heard that, if one is dying of dehydration (in the desert, or wherever you are), one may drink one’s own urine once: There is more water than poison in it the first time round, and it will hydrate the body for another revolution. But don’t drink the next batch: It’s more toxins than hydration. I’m afraid my own leather jacket was just that: twice-recycled piss.
IV. Suicide is the last remaining method by which an artist might claim original authorship; the risk is, of course, that one will never know whether the gamble worked.
V. Was, was: As I sit here, alone, naked, and unable to move, with the summer sun roasting the flesh of my enormous belly and my backside rotting against my mold-blackened bedsheets, I have begun to think of my life in the past tense.
VI. I can at last admit, now that I am probably about to die, and now that the New York art world has as far as I can tell ceased to exist (for the city appears to have been depopulated), that the New York art world was a house so haunted with bullshit that wandering its darkened hallways we sometimes felt like pseudoscientists with silly pieces of beeping, blinking equipment, searching empty rooms for something we wanted to be there, but wasn’t. Admittedly, under any closer than the most pedestrian scrutiny, whole paragraphs of criticism could vanish, like grasping at smoke, as they either meant nothing or expressed ideas so simple they hardly needed to be articulated. Where else but in art criticism was there so little to say and so much space to fill? All of it is gone, now. Do I mourn it? Yes, for even now I remain confident there were babies to be found alive in that sea of bathwater.
VII. We have time for an amusing anecdote: Sometime later, in her apartment, I was perusing Olivia’s bookshelf while she was in the shower, and found two identical copies of Kafka: The Collected Stories. One was battered and dog-eared, with multiple creases in the binding—clearly her own—and the other was brand new. On the inside front cover of the brand-new one the exact same inscription appeared, only this one was signed, “Love, Olivia.” Clearly she had bought the book, inscribed it in this way, then had second thoughts, bought another copy, and signed it without “Love.”
VIII. I.e., “taring” the scale.
IX. Again, I make no claim to the originality of this observation; Luis Buñuel of course beat me to it with Le Fantôme de la liberté.Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
X. Pizza-flavored potato chips? Yes. One food may be flavored like another. Third-stage simulacra, what Baudrillard called “the order of sorcery.”
XI. (For reference, a BMI above forty is considered morbidly obese.)
Phil Grassley—still strong, healthy, and handsome in the year of his imminent retirement—stood six feet on the mark in bare feet and khaki shorts on the kitchen floor of his home in a suburb of Houston, cooking enchiladas. Veronica had just called. Phil could tell from the in-and-out reception that she was on her cell phone and driving with the top down. She had called to
say she was almost there. She was in the neighborhood, but had managed to get lost in this labyrinthine subdivision of courts and runs and drives and lanes and culs-de-sac lined with behemothic white houses, and needed further directions in order to locate the behemothic white house that belonged in particular to Phil.
Phil was thinking about the fact that he was about to retire. On the one hand, after so many years of working, he’d been greatly looking forward to spending the rest of his life sailing his catamaran, fishing, and drinking beer. On the other hand was Veronica. This meant that, at least for now, the scales were just about balanced. Not that he couldn’t continue this affair with her after he retired, but for some reason it seemed like that would be hard to do. If he wasn’t working, then excuses not to come home on certain nights would be more difficult to conjure up. He had met Veronica three weeks ago. She was new at the office. They’d had sex last weekend. She was thirty years old. When she was born—born—Phil had already been married to Diane for six years. Just to put it in perspective. Veronica wasn’t beautiful. She was frankly a bit on the pudgy side. She was attractive, yes, but not in a way that turns heads on the street. Take a look at her picture on the laminated ID card she wore at work, and then take a look at the girl wearing it: The camera wasn’t kind to her. What she had instead of beauty was a certain glow, a certain verve, a certain fun, sexy energy, which was more powerful than just run-of-the-mill physical beauty. Phil’s wife, in her day, had been a beautiful woman—in that run-of-the-mill way. In thirty-six years of marriage, he had never once had anything with Diane quite like the night and subsequent morning he spent one week ago today with Veronica. She had, for instance, given him a blowjob. Bam! First night, first thing, right out of the gate. He hadn’t asked her to. No sooner were their clothes off than his old cock was in her young mouth and she was sucking on it ferociously, until he had no choice but to squirt his come between her cheeks. Diane had never, ever, not once in thirty-six years of marriage, thought to do that without being asked.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 14