All art is quite useless.

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I, Tristan Hurt, am a Fat Artist. This is a modus of being quite distinct from “fat person.” Obviously, I am that as well; at my peak weight I believe, though unfortunately I cannot prove, that I was the heaviest (such is the admittedly crude rubric/analogue I have necessitated to adopt to read: “fattest”) person alive, moreover, possibly ever to have lived. While fat person indeed I may be, in my anomalous case, that of the Fat Artist, the adjective fat, applied to the noun artist, modifies not so much the man as the art. Fat is not (not just) a descriptor of the matter contained within my corporeal boundaries (i.e., my body—what in the quaintly benighted days of mind-body dualism would have been called on the gravestone I do not at this late stage hope to have, “ ‘all that [was] mortal’ of Tristan Hurt”). I am an artist, and fat is the medium in which I work. I have made my body into an art object.

I certainly do not presume to suggest my project is an unprecedented one.^I (I bore myself with the usual mentions: Abramovic, Acconci, Finley, Burden, Orlan, et al.) However, I shall maintain unto my death, which—as I sit here on this rooftop, unable to move, without food or water, alone and naked (as opposed to nude^II), abandoned, forgotten and forsaken by the world—I presume is imminent, that I have suffered uniquely and (if I may so flatter myself) more terminally than other artists who have adopted their own bodies as their primary medium.

I am thirty-three years old (please, should there be any gloss of the messianic over the age of my death, know that it is entirely accidental) and I am about to die.

•  •  •

When I was young—and at thirty-three I am young yet, although (Nos morituri te salutamus) I am about to die—I was a handsome man. In my late twenties my hairline began its slow vertical creep up the corners of my forehead and thinned on top, but that is all; my hair has always been this dusty-brown color and my eyes have always been these pellucid swirls of whale gray and celadon (every lover who looked into them described them as “sad”). My face—now swollen with loose pouches of fat that merge smoothly into my fat neck, which merges smoothly into my fat shoulders, and they in turn into the squishy mammarian saddlebags of my chest—used to sport robust and angular features, a boxy jaw, sharp cheekbones. In those bygone days when I was physically able to stand, I stood six feet and one inch and weighed about 200 lbs (91 kg). I was a relatively big man, and for most of my life had enjoyed the slight deference of authority that is paid to the substantial occupier of space—but I was not fat.

I would always lie to interviewers about my upbringing, and I never repeated the same lie twice. When they pointed out inconsistencies, I glibly manufactured more lies. Of course they knew I was lying, but that was part of the game, n’est-ce pas?, the Moriartian cat-and-mouse of it.

I was born (this is, so far as such a word means anything, the truth) in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in a leafy, moneyed Nassau County suburb on Long Island, a child of considerable wealth and privilege. My father was an investment banker, and my mother’s pedigree stretches back to a Mayflower Compact signatory. I tolerated my mother and hated my father. I’m half-Jewish on my father’s side; the wrong side, as far as Rabbinic law is concerned. We did not practice any religion, though. Nothing was worshiped in the many rooms of my father’s house; each December we erected both a menorah and a Christmas tree, and both were rather secular suburban objects, signifying only a certain season of the year. As a child I saw no conflict in displaying them together in the same room: Both were good, both were the harbingers of an increase in material abundance for me. I was lucky to have two older sisters to demystify the feminine for me early. I was a spoiled and intelligent child and a rebellious teenager, impotently upset that all the usual paths of rebellion had been trodden flat by the pioneers of twentieth-century male adolescence before me: Marlon Brando’s leather jacket of 1953 presaged Sid Vicious’s leather jacket of 1977, and by the time I donned the article, the thing had become a dead signifier,^III the sign having long ago devoured itself (like Beethoven’s Ninth; once a paean to religious ecstasy, later blasted from loudspeakers as the Third Reich marched down the grands boulevards of Paris). My adolescence was, though I was too naïve to realize it at the time, an off-brand cliché: cigarettes, drugs, safety pins, early attempts at sexual experimentation, interests/indulgences in the French avant-garde, German Expressionism, New York punk, high fashion, self-mutilation, Dada, Fluxus, etc., etc., sigh, etc. My mother wrung her worried hands over her troubled baby boy, while my father—stoic, implacable, cadaverous with sangfroid—did not seem to care; he seemed to regard his three children as household pets that his wife had purchased whimsically but promised to care for. Once, over dinner, I informed my father that he was a stooge of late-capitalist oppression of the third world. My father shrugged and took a sip of wine, as unfazed as if he had not heard me.

Expensive college, hypocrisy, expansion, experimentation, hypocrisy, growth. Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Bataille, Duchamp, Tzara, Céline, Artaud, Klein, Marinetti, Cage, Adorno, Debord, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan. Italian Futurism, Situationism, Lettrism, Bauhaus. The usual.

I was frustrated with Dada (and its children) in the same way I had been frustrated with the leather jackets of Brando and Vicious, spoiling the thing for future generations with too many layers of irony or recycled sets of meaning. A middle finger to the art establishment means very little in a time when the middle finger has long become de rigueur; after rebellion becomes fashionable, then fashion becomes expected—art collapses from rebellion fatigue, and collectors come like buzzards to pick at the remains. I found the dithyrambic had so entirely replaced the Apollonian that the prospect of taking a shit in someone’s living room and charging everyone to look at it wasn’t even fun anymore. My rage was impure; beset by second- and thirdhand rage anxiety. “Make it new,” as Pound said—easy for a high modernist in the first half of the twentieth century to say, isn’t it? How to make it new when making it new is the new old? The anxieties of the contemporary artist. Fuck it all—just get an MFA, or (a sunnier option) kill yourself.^IV

•  •  •

One weekend close to my graduation from college, I took my parents on a tour through the modern wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was getting along well enough with my parents at the time. I was twenty-two, and I had the adventurous feeling that my future lay splayed out before my feet like a resplendent red rug.

We came, I remember, to an Yves Klein monochrome (the only one at the Met): a vertical rectangular slab of material hanging on the wall, coarsely textured and painted thickly and uniformly in International Klein Blue.

Had I, Tristan Hurt, at that moment been elected to the honor of choosing an object to include in a durable capsule to be shot into outer space under sway of the vain hope that perhaps one day billions of years from now some alien race might find it, crack it open, examine the things therein, and ponder the geist of whatever creatures produced these beautiful objects, I might very well have selected that Klein monochrome (my choice would be different today, but, again, I plead the romance and enthusiasm of youth); and maybe, if their organs of visual perception happened to be sensitive to the same band of the light spectrum as ours, they would understand that human beings had been animals who were indeed capable of artificing beauty so sublime as to compete with (rather than merely imitate) the forms of nature.

My father stood before the painting. I watched him look at it. The filmy annuli of his nacre-colored eyes (I was born last, late, probably accidentally, and he was old even then) examined it as blankly as they would have the floral-print wallpaper in the dining room of a New England bed and breakfast. He tipped his head back and sleepily blinked at it; pale, swollen eyelids opened and closed on the image like the mouths of garden snails eating blueberries, and the flat zero line of his bloodless lips soured into a sardonic affect of boredom. He leaned forward to read the wall text with his hands clasped behind his back, as if he was thinking of buying it for me for my birthday if (though he couldn’t fathom why) I liked it so much, and was just checking the price tag. The placard beside it read:

Yves Klein. (French, 1928–1962) Blue Monochrome. 1961.

Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—is a strategy adopted by painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. Klein likened monochrome painting to an “open window to freedom.” He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own utopian vision of the world.

My father read the title aloud: “Blue Monochrome.”

He emitted a brusque, equine snort, and delivered his judgment: “No shit.”

That was all he had to say: quote—“No shit”—end quote. I tried to explain to him why the painting was beautiful. I probably proceeded to bloviate at great length about Yves Klein, about the unexpected violence in his work, the conceptual playfulness, even the dark sexiness of it, the deliberate provocation. Le Saut dans le vide. I fired every bullet of critical art theory at him that my education (which he had paid for) had loaded the chambers of my brain with. My father’s face slackened with contempt, a slowly deflating gray bag. The more I spoke, the further his understanding and interest in what I was saying got away from me, chugging indifferently into the distance.

When I finally fell silent, he waited a beat, and said:

“I guess it’s supposed to be art if you have to explain it.”

Perhaps, I thought, art needs the bourgeois in order to react against it. As long as there is a bourgeoisie to afford art without bothering to understand it, that underpinning rage of the artist may flourish, the rage of the captive animal biting the feeding hand, no matter if originality has been done to death. In that moment I more clearly understood the depth of the poverty in my father’s soul, and in that moment I more fully realized my father was a man with a worldview so far removed from anything worth loving that hating him was hardly worth the energy.

•  •  •

New York City. The enfant terrible loose in the art world, playing his role, making work, plucking strings, sucking on glasses of wine at gallery openings and committing long and unusual words to heart for use in the immediate future. Fashion, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, but never (I’m mildly embarrassed to admit) any real addiction: subsidized struggle, an MFA somewhere in there. My luck snowballed, then avalanched, was off and running on its own. Basel, Miami, Hong Kong. London. LA. Venice Biennales. Seven years later, I was famous (at least in some—the right—circles). Critics praised my work as ugly, angry, abrasive, disgusting, violent, scatological, pornographic, antisocial, and antihuman. It’s not terribly easy, mind you, to get called these things anymore. I lived as if my parents were dead.

•  •  •

Four thousand pink latex casts of artist’s testicles and (erect) penis covering entire interior of large, hollow, womblike enclosure illuminated from exterior by cunt-pink neon tubes, which viewer enters via spiral staircase through door in bottom of said enclosure. Artist mixes vat of artist’s own blood, urine, feces, semen, and vomit, stirs in block of melted wax; crystal chandelier is delicately submerged in heated mixture, then suspended from gallery ceiling such that cooling fluid coagulates in mid-drip; unsightly puddle collects on floor directly beneath, cools, hardens. Two thousand Manhattan telephone directories are shredded and scattered over gallery floor, artist spends five days living in gallery space intoxicated on various drugs, masturbating, urinating, defecating in shredded paper, scrawling obscenities and crude pornographic cartoons on white walls with Magic Markers. Artist films self defecating directly onto lens of video camera, projects footage onto four walls of darkened room, in reverse and slow motion; dark walls slowly recede into four giant, luminous images of artist’s anus.

My work was exhibited by Deitch Projects; my pieces found homes in the collections of Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian, among others. I became very wealthy. I squandered money lavishly, publicly.

Behold: Tristan Hurt, standing at gallery opening, glass of wine in hand, slovenly dressed in thirty thousand dollars’ worth of dirty clothes, face carefully peppered with four days’ stubble. I am pictured en medias schmooze with several other people as-or-more-famous than myself. This photograph appeared again and again in many similar variations, and the fame of the people with whom I stand in the photograph gradually increased; as it did, boat lifted by rising tide, so did my fame, so did the prices of my work, and so did my wealth. At a certain point I ceased to be Tristan Hurt, the blasé, angry young man infused with his perfectly suburban father-hatred, and became Tristan Hurt: Tristan Hurt, whose name stands alone.

•  •  •

One night my parents did come unannounced to an opening. They wanted to “surprise” me. Pleasantly, I suppose they assumed. I was, of course, busy, standing naked (rather, nude) in the middle of the gallery floor, masturbating into a raw steak folded in my fist when I saw them walk in. (This was a performance of my piece Pursuance: Artist stands nude in gallery and masturbates into holes cut in slabs of raw meat, which latex-gloved assistants then dunk in tubs of shellac and hang with clothespins, dripping, from suspended wires.) My father’s expression did not change as my mother fled the room. My father calmly walked out of the gallery after her. I was twenty-eight years old at the time.

Later, sometimes I would meet my mother for lunch when she was in the city, but I would not see or speak with my father again.

•  •  •

There is such a thing as a fame drive. Or call it a glory drive. Like the ability to sing, like a taste for cilantro, it’s something you either have or you don’t. With the exceptions of people who happen to be caught standing in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, or people who happen to be caught standing in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, almost everyone who ever becomes famous has it, while very few of the people who have it ever become famous, which is why to have it is a curse: It means you will probably feel like a failure for most, if not all, of your life. I have it. I envy and admire those who don’t. Those people can go to bed knowing that they are alive, healthy, and comfortable, and can be perfectly content with that. Those of us who have the glory drive cannot be content with just that. We are not happy unless the number of people we have never met who know our names is increasing. As with money and sex, only too much fame is enough, and there is never too much of it, hence never enough, hence we are never happy. A therapist once told me that people who have this doomed and repellant personality trait have it because of certain kinds of childhoods. What kinds, I asked him. He theorized that it happens to children whose parents tell them they’re wonderful on the one hand and on the other treat them as if they’re never good enough. They pump up your tires, take away your training wheels, and push you down a hill so you can go forth and live a life of restlessly straining to fulfill an inflated self-image, constantly making up for an inward feeling of inferiority. I thought: Mother, encouragement; father, denial—that’s right. That’s me. Feral children are lucky in that they don’t have to worry about this. God, to be raised by dingoes in the wilderness. That’s the best way to do it—this, life: Grow up thinking you’re a wild dog. If these children are out there, I hope for their sakes we never find them.

•  •  •

The fame, or glory, drive is, at least in men, a relative of, and collaborator and coconspirator with the libido. (Perhaps in some women as well—but I can’t speak to that; I only know that female sexuality is usually more complicated and interesting than that.) I won’t bore you with a locker-room litany of the models and actresses whose interiors I have explored. And I can attest that like the goose that laid the golden eggs, it’s just ordinary goose inside. The pleasure of fucking a model isn’t fucking the model, it’s showing up at the party with the model. That’s a pleasure in its own right, of course, but the real pleasure of sex while famous is fucking people who are less famous than you.

•  •  •

Olivia Frankel taught creative writing at Octavia College, and wrote quirky, bittersweet short stories about the doomed love affairs of artists. Or so I surmised; I never actually read them. She twitched and babbled in her sleep, talked too much in conversation, and ground her jaw when she wasn’t speaking. She had a thin, squeaky voice that sounded to me like an articulate piccolo. She was pale, and skinny as a bug, and always sat with her shoulders slightly hunched. We were not in love—not exactly—and the relationship did not last very long. We casually dated for maybe about five months. She was initially attracted by my accomplishment, my fame, my easy charisma, my intelligent conversation and sparkling wit, but eventually grew into the realization that I am, in certain respects, a fraud. They always do wind up scratching the gold leaf off the ossified dog turd, don’t they?—the smart ones, anyway, and the dumb ones will eventually bore me.

As a person, I was nearly as lazy as I was self-absorbed.^V I had never actually read very much. Almost nothing, really. All that critical theory in college and graduate school? All that heady French gobbledygook? Not counting the front and back covers, I probably read maybe a cumulative fifteen pages of it. That may in fact be an overgenerous estimate. I was, however, blessèd with the gift of bullshit—a blessing that took me far indeed. I knew the names of the writers I was supposed to have read, and could pronounce them with a haughty accuracy and ironclad confidence that withered on the spot those who had actually read them. Believe me, I could slather it on so thick and byzantine that most people—even those who did “know” what they were talking about—were dazzled to silence by the fireworks of obfuscation that burst from my mouth when I spoke.^VI

Olivia, however, learned to see through it, and was probably a bit irritated with herself for having been at first seduced by it. A few friendly interrogations over dinner on matters approaching the erudite were enough to reveal that I probably had not finished a book since high school. So, in the first few months of our nearly meaningless affair, back when Olivia was still at least ostensibly entertaining the possibility of allowing herself to love me, she bought me a present: a volume of the collected stories of Franz Kafka. Written on the inside front cover, in her filigreed female handwriting (but in rather assertive black marker), was the businesslike inscription: “Tristan— Here you go. Most of them are pretty short. Olivia.”

That sign-off was characteristic of her, by the way. No “love,” no “with love,” not even a tepid “best wishes.” Just her first name followed by a period, as if that alone constituted its own sentence.^VII

For her I was probably at most a brief, interesting infatuation or experiment. I don’t think she was ever really in love with me. She did once tell me I was the most, quote, “fake and pathetic person [she] ever made the mistake of fucking.” Much later, she also told me she would, quote, “call the cops on [me] if [I were to] show up [at her apartment] coked out of [my] mind [in the middle of the night] again.”

•  •  •

But all that is beside the point. I mention Olivia only by way of explaining how it was I came to admire Kafka’s haunting allegory, “A Hunger Artist.” A man sits in a cage and refuses to eat. He is gradually forgotten by the public. He starves himself for so long that everyone ceases to care. But his art goes on—unto his death. His last words are: “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I would have stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” When he dies, they sweep out his cage and replace him with a young panther. “The food he liked,” writes Kafka, “was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom.” The people crowd around the cage that now contains this creature so ardently alive, and “they did not want ever to move away.”

Starvation—my goodness, is that a dark metaphor, Mr. Kafka. Take a look at the cover of the book: Kafka peers out at you in grainy black and white, his dark hair slicked back from his temples, his eyes wide, wet, hunted-looking. His cheekbones are high and brutally sharp, his cheeks sunken. He looks malnourished already. We know his sisters died in Auschwitz, which is doubtless where this man’s skull would have wound up, scrabbled in a ditch along with thousands of other Jewish skulls, had tuberculosis not mercifully knocked him off at the age of forty in 1924. He died of consumption, as the Victorian euphemism goes—because the disease consumes one from the inside out—whereas I, Tristan Hurt, would set out to die of a different kind of consumption. What if—I wonder—Kafka had not coughed himself to death, but had lived long enough to be herded onto a cattle car bound for Poland, where the writer/insurance underwriter (who, like me, bitterly resented his father) would have been stripped, shaved, tattooed with a number, starved, and forced to dig his own grave? It would not have taken this wan, skinny little man very much time at all to begin to look like the men lying on the bunks and wincing at the daylight as the doors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau rolled open in the spring of 1945: horrifically thin, eyes sunken, ribs like claws. He was halfway there already. This man himself resembled the hunger artist. But in those penetrating but deeply sad eyes, evident even through the poor exposure and the fuzzy focus, there is a hunger beyond the merely physical—this man was starving not only because he felt caged in by his oppressive family and besieged by the zeitgeist of his interwar Prague, but was suffering a starvation of the soul, an insatiate hunger of the spirit.

The story was also very short, and while I quite honestly did not read very much of that book, I did at least read that story, and the beginnings of several others.

•  •  •

After Olivia terminated relations with me—citing as she did some pointed critiques of my personality and lifestyle—I gained a tremendous amount of weight.

Should you ever want to nearly treble your magnitude in a relatively short period of time, I recommend the following regimen: morbid depression, sleeping thirteen or more hours a day, addictions to alcohol and barbiturates, and lots of eating.

I spent much of the next year in bed. My finances were comfortable. I could afford it. I disappeared from public life. I ordered food in daily. Initially I relied heavily on pizza and Chinese food. Sometimes I ate large quantities of fried chicken. Sometimes I ate four to five canisters of Pringles snack chips in a single sitting. Sometimes I ate two or three gallons of ice cream for dessert. A typical day during this period might go something like this:

4:30 P.M.:	Rise, shine
5:00 P.M.:	Pick up phone, order three pizzas
5:10 P.M.–9:30 P.M.:	Sit on couch, watch TV while eating three said pizzas
9:35 P.M.–1:15 A.M.:	Naptime
1:15 A.M.–5:00 A.M.:	Wake up sobbing and chilled in sweat with wildly beating heart. Gobble fistful of benzodiazepines and crouch over laptop, drinking whiskey, eating ice cream, smoking cigarettes, and enjoying pornography until sleep comes again to take the artist away from this awful place

Groceries, drugs, liquor, laundry, etc.—it was almost astonishing how nearly everything that might require my leaving my home I was able to have someone from the outside bring to me (only in New York!). I spent most of my time in the nude; I donned a bathrobe to meet deliverymen at the door (sometimes). I kept the curtains drawn. No light came into my space. I did not wash my sheets either. They grew sticky, filmy. I expanded rapidly.

Ten months later, I weighed nearly five hundred pounds. Not that I was keeping track. This initial period of massive weight gain, while I was dimly aware of it, was more or less unintentional. I was not yet a Fat Artist—I was merely an artist who had allowed himself, by way of a largely sedentary and unwholesome lifestyle, to become extraordinarily fat. I was merely a fat artist.

Throughout this year I communicated with practically no one. It was surprisingly easy to drop off the face of the earth in a luxury loft apartment in a converted warehouse in Greenpoint. I did not come out, I called no one, never returned a call, nor did I answer anyone by e-mail or any other medium of communication, and I quickly became—by choice—friendless.

What drew me out of my malaise was not love, nor was it fear (not, at least, for my life), nor was it the intervention of friends or family, as I had no real friends and was estranged from my family. Rather, what drove me back into the world was the most powerful but prosaic mover in human civilization: money.

I was broke. I had been consuming a great deal, and I’d had no source of income for nearly a year. I had not sold a single piece, I had not done any hobnobbing, I had not appeared in a single photograph holding a single cocktail in Artforum’s “Scene & Herd.” I was missing in action in the art world.

I did not realize at the time that my refusal to communicate with anyone or even leave my home for a year had lent a mysterious luster to my absent celebrity. I had not been—as I had thought (as I probably should have been)—forgotten. Rather, my long and unexplained absence had acquired a strange quality of presence. I had created a vacuum of myself. At every gallery opening that year to which I had been invited and did not attend, there was a Tristan Hurt–shaped hole in the room, a phantom, a shadow, a void that was more glamorously conspicuous than my presence would have been. As if my prolonged disappearance were in fact an ingeniously crafted publicity stunt. Clearly an artist who chooses to abruptly vanish from society before the zenith of his career must be a creative genius locked in a fit of feverish productivity that ordinary people cannot ever hope to truly understand.

I do not know if they thought I was working. I do not know if they thought I was in a torturous state of nerves, for which I needed the dark romance of my solitude. I do not know if perhaps they thought I was sleeping until four in the afternoon each hateful day and then spending my waking hours shoveling gooey clumps of General Tso’s chicken between my industrious jaws and watching videos of big-dicked men ejaculating onto the waiting faces of girls while I soporated my brain with Ambien and bourbon with my listless penis sleeping in my hand like a beanbag. I do not even know if this knowledge would have detracted from, or in fact somehow added to, their newfound romantic notion of me as an eccentric recluse.

•  •  •

But as I said, it was nothing more—or less—romantic than a matter of grubby economics that drove me from my long hibernation. I had not checked up on my personal finances in many months. I simply had not been thinking about it. I’d had so much money at the outset of my long period of torpidity that I had somewhat blithely assumed my bank balance would remain always as inexhaustible as the horn of plenty of legends old. I did not open my mail for nearly a year. I kept a year’s worth of unopened mail in a black plastic trash bag in a closet. Whenever a piece of mail arrived, I immediately stuffed it in the bag. For a year I was, on some level, distantly terrified of how much money I was spending, and so I was disinclined to look.

Tax day came and went without my so much as bothering to call my accountant. Eventually I received an unpleasant call from the Internal Revenue Service. This prompted me to finally steel enough courage to investigate the state of my accounts.

With great trepidation fluttering in my weak heart, I exhumed the contents of the garbage bag in which I had been keeping all my unopened mail. I ensconced myself on the floor and ripped open each cursed envelope. Every piece of mail I opened revealed my financial situation to be graver than the last. Over the past year, the fortune I had acquired had diminished to nil. It was gone. Gone! Gone up my nose and down my gullet, gone through my idleness, gone into images of naked women subjecting themselves to hideous acts of willful degradation, gone into my brain and my veins and the fat of my body and splurted out of my anal sphincter and my penis, often into my dirty socks. The cost of the pornography alone that I put on my credit cards came out to something in the order of nine thousand dollars per month, to say nothing of the drugs, the alcohol, and the food, the food, the glorious food.

I was destitute!

I looked around my home. What did it look like? First, imagine a loft space in a converted warehouse in Greenpoint with twelve-foot ceilings, large, arch-shaped west-facing windows, a beautiful view of Midtown Manhattan, white walls and warm-toned glossy oak floors, track lighting, designer furniture, granite countertops, everything tastefully accented with objets d’art. Now make it dark. Draw curtains shut over windows so that no light gets in. Take considerable quantity of soiled clothing, drape pell-mell over furniture, scatter across floor. Fill room with empty beer bottles, empty whiskey bottles, stacks of oily pizza boxes. Moldy, soiled dishes should litter floor, coffee table, dining table, countertops; heap high in sink. Leave to rot for many consecutive months. When artist runs out of clean dishes, add top layer of paper plates, soaked transparent with grease. Add thick stench of sweat, semen, smoke, garbage, etc. Add generous quantity of cockroaches. Add mice. Add rats. Allow mice and rats to skitter freely across floor. Cease to care about cockroaches, mice, rats. Cease to notice cockroaches, mice, rats. Add cloud of flies. Do not even attempt to swat/shoo flies if/when said flies land on artist’s skin.

And it wasn’t only the massive weight gain: I had been ignoring all avenues of personal hygiene. Give artist long, tangled beard and long, knotted hair. Give him long, sharp fingernails and long toenails that curl under toes like demonic yellow hooves. Do not wash the artist. Make the artist’s skin sickly pale from long period of entirely interior and nocturnal existence.

Behold the artist.

•  •  •

First I made a feeble attempt at tidying up my living space, but quickly became discouraged by the overwhelming complexity of the mess. Next I turned my attention to my person. I trimmed and groomed my beard, cut my hair, clipped my nails (both finger- and toe-), showered, brushed my teeth, spat a brown spume of filth and blood into the sink and brushed them again, laundered some clothes and donned them. I was now a much more presentable man, albeit nevertheless a grotesquely obese one. I even liked the rich chocolate-brown beard I had grown. A good, thick beard has a way of dignifying a very fat man.

I reentered society. I reconnected with old friends. It was not hard to get back in the scene. The art world was appropriately appalled, revolted, saddened, intrigued, amused, and delighted with my new body.

My monstrousness made me highly visible. I went back to the parties, back to the VIP openings, returned to the photos in which I stood in the company of the hypermoneyed and/or famous, holding a glass of wine—and damned if I wasn’t bigger than ever.

Through whisper campaign and providence of gossip it became known that I, Tristan Hurt, had spent almost a year in monastic seclusion, working steadfastly on my most ambitious and important project to date: myself. I had spent the last ten months sculpting my body, working as hard on my physique as might an athlete, a bodybuilder, a dancer—but not for the sake of vanity, nor for agility, not to make my body stronger, more robust, or more beautiful. Like my sculptural work before it, my body art was to be deliberately grotesque, and, as Wilde opined all art is, quite useless.

Thus it was that I conceived the installation piece that would revitalize and conclude the career of Tristan Hurt, the Fat Artist.

•  •  •

I obtained generous financial patronage for the project from the Guggenheim Foundation. I worked closely with Italian “starchitect” Emilio Buzzati to design the structure in which I would be kept. A large glass cube, each side twenty-five feet long, was constructed according to our plans atop the roof of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum at Eighty-Ninth and Fifth Avenue. My exhibit was constructed on top of the long, flat roof of the rectangular addition to the museum that was constructed in 1992. Each side of my glass cube except the floor was constructed of thin steel girders structurally reinforced with crisscrossing steel cables, forming a grid of twenty-five five-by-five-foot squares, which were inset with plates of glass. The floor was concrete, poured in place, sanded smooth. The room was perfectly transparent all around. Visitors would enter through two wide glass-and-steel double doors in the east wall of the cube. An extravagant bed was constructed in the center of the room, with the back of the headboard flush against the north wall, such that the person sitting on the bed—that is, the Fat Artist himself—could gaze either in a southerly direction across Central Park at Midtown Manhattan, or up through the glass ceiling at the firmament above.

The bed unto itself was a work of art. I designed it. My bed was my last piece of inorganic sculpture. In style, it is deliberately imitative of Louis Quatorze-period furniture, except that those luxurious mid-seventeenth-century beds tend to feature tall posters and canopies with thick curtains, whereas my bed allowed none of these, as I demanded maximum visible exposure of my repulsive body from every angle in the room. In a visually musical series of symmetrical filigrees, the headboard slopes upward into a central peak eight feet from the floor. It is fashioned of mahogany, ostentatiously carved with decorative designs, and gilt with a thin film of gold. The bed is longer and slightly wider than a California king, and its frame was reinforced with sturdy steel rods, in order to support the extraordinary weight that would be pressed upon it. The mattress also had to be custom-made to fit the unusual dimensions of the frame, and also required a three-inch-diameter hole through its upper center. The mattress was designed to be firm and strong, but as comfortable as possible, three feet thick and vacuum-stuffed with a hardy and pliant foam insulation. The bed was covered with a sumptuous sheet of glossy purple velvet, and then piled high with a mountain of matching purple velvet pillows with tasseled fringes of gold thread. The bed was built inside the room on top of an industrial platform scale of the sort used to weigh automobiles and shipping containers. We affixed the scale’s large digital readout to the west wall of my exhibition chamber: accurate down to the fourth digit to the right of the zero, with data presented in both imperial and metric, numbers aglow, red on black. The bed was then weighed by itself and the scale’s zero reset so as to measure only any additional weight.^VIII Behind the bed—obscured from the public’s view of the installation—a hole was cut in the bottom-center panel of glass in the north wall, and we ran a thick rubber tube through the hole, wound it under the bed and up through the hole in the mattress. On the outside of the exhibition chamber, the tube connected to a low-pressure vacuum that would suck waste out of my body and into a septic tank that flushed into the museum’s plumbing system; inside the exhibition chamber, the tube emerged from the hole in the mattress and bifurcated into two smaller tubes, one narrow and one thick: my urinary and rectal catheters. Additionally, an eighty-gallon-capacity water tank was affixed to the north wall, beside my bed. A filtered hose siphoned clean drinking water from the building’s water supply into the tank, and another rubber hose ran from the bottom of the tank and was kept coiled around a hook within my reach on the headboard. A metal ball plugged the lip of the hose when I was not drinking. When I needed to drink water, all I had to do was put the hose to my mouth and push the metal ball in with my tongue to let the water dribble into my mouth. It was essentially a large-scale adaptation of similar drinking apparatuses commonly seen in the cages of hamsters, guinea pigs, and other pet rodents. In this way I would always be kept well hydrated.

•  •  •

On the roof of the Guggenheim Museum, on a sunny, pale blue day in mid-May of a year sometime in the spirit of the twenty-first century, I, Tristan Hurt, removed my clothes and handed them to an assistant, and with great effort hefted my 493 lb (224 kg) frame onto my bed. I gingerly maneuvered my body as museum staff workers inserted my penis into the narrower of the two rubber tubes, made a seal of adhesive silicone putty, and wrapped the bond in gauze for double reinforcement. Then I slowly turned over and allowed the workers to insert the other rubber tube into my anus, a good two inches deep, and likewise seal the bond with sticky silicone putty. The hole in the mattress was situated directly below where I was to sit, such that I could partially sit up on the bed with no discomfort, my back resting against the plush mound of pillows piled against the headboard.

Although I was naked, I was not indecent, as my genitals were obscured between my enormous thighs and beneath the rolling folds of my lower torso. I spread my legs on the glossy velvet bed and playfully wiggled my distant toes. I reflected on my luxurious comfort. I mentally remarked upon the pleasantly crypto-erotic sensation of the vacuum tubes sucking ticklishly at my penis and anus. I gazed at the faces of the museum workers surrounding my bed. That night the world would get its first glimpse of me at an invitation-only VIP opening exhibition. I was prepared to eat.

•  •  •

The concept was elegant in its simplicity: to turn Kafka on his head. “A Hunger Artist” in part derives the power of its allegory from the sheer horror of self-abnegation. Why on earth would anyone deliberately starve himself to death? But in a culture of abundance and affordable luxury, bodily self-abnegation no longer retains this primeval horror. Rather, the twenty-first-century middle-class American must actively labor not to become fat. Thus eating becomes moralized behavior. How often have you heard a woman describe a rich dessert as “sinful”? To eat is to sin—in secular society, the body replaces the soul. Good and evil are no longer purely spiritual concepts—these words have been transubstantiated into the realm of the flesh. At other times it seems as if the very process of eating has even become a chore—something associated with work. How often has a waiter at a restaurant asked you if you are “still working” on your meal? Perhaps eating for us has therefore also been stripped of the especial joy it might retain in a culture in which people are immediately conscious of the threat of want. In a culture such as ours Kafka’s story becomes deflated of much of its sting—we fail to feel the poison of it, because food exists for us in a different psychological space than it did for Kafka: We are a culture that moralizes the diet. Thus “A Hunger Artist” cannot strike its contemporary readers with the same fascination and revulsion. Indeed, far more apropos to an age of overabundance is a Fat Artist.

•  •  •

And I, Tristan Hurt, the Fat Artist, vowed to become the fattest human being in known history.

As I have said, I was forced by the necessity of objective measurement to equate “heaviest” with “fattest.” Before me, Carol Yager of Flint, Michigan, was widely thought to be the heaviest human on record. Prior to her death at age thirty-four in 1994 from massive kidney failure, Yager was estimated to have peaked at about 1,600 lbs (726 kg). Just below Yager was Jon Brower Minnoch of Bainbridge Island, Washington, who died shortly before he turned forty-two in 1983, having attained a peak weight of approximately 1,400 lbs (635 kg). I, Tristan Hurt, began my journey at a comparatively scrappy 493 lbs (224 kg), which meant I had to gain 907 lbs (411 kg) to even tie for second place, and I had to gain 1,107 lbs (502 kg)—half a ton—to tie the record, though preferably much more if I was to comfortably surpass it. The work I had before me was nothing short of daunting.

The parameters were thus: Anyone could bring me food of any sort—rather, the public was greatly encouraged to bring food—and I would have to eat it. There was but one rule for the visitors, that their offerings had beyond all reasonable contestability to be food—i.e., nothing inedible, impotable, or indigestible. No chewing gum, mouthwash, motor oil, cigarette butts, packing peanuts, cotton balls, chewing tobacco, shaving cream, rubber bullets, small toys, leather, paint, etc. Aside from this one broad guideline, any cuisine was permissible. And there were but two rules I designated to myself, the Fat Artist: (1) any food that is brought to me I must consume; and (2) during museum hours, I must be in the process of consuming (eating or drinking) at all times.

My exhibition chamber also contained a glass table on rollers, long enough so as to stretch wider than the industrial scale beneath my bed, high enough to come up to my midriff when wheeled over the bed, and transparent, so as not to obscure my fat beneath it. My dining table. Waiters were employed. The waiters wore black bow ties and tuxedo vests, and worked in shifts to attend to my dining experience at all times, clearing away my dirty dishes and continually presenting me with more food. The visiting public was to bring me offerings, which the museum workers kept on a table nearby to await their imminent consumption. The table was equipped with heat lamps to keep warm food warm, and a refrigerator underneath it for chilled items. The waiters would bring me the food when I was ready for it and clear away the refuse of whatever I had just consumed.

•  •  •

The VIP opening of the exhibition was held on a Thursday night in May. It was a beautiful evening. The temperature was consummate, hovering at about 70º F. The museum employees propped open the doors of my exhibition chamber, and the people milled about on the roof, ambling in and out of the open doors of my glass cube. My opening meal was specially prepared under the supervision of Philip Laroux, the chef de cuisine at the West Village’s preeminent three-Michelin-star restaurant, Pleonexia. Laroux also supervised the preparation of the hors d’oeuvres that were arrayed on a long table on the roof outside my glass exhibition chamber. The theme of the evening was food, and thus naturally I demanded that the hors d’oeuvres represent the height of culinary excellence. The hors d’oeuvres table was laden with colorful displays of foie gras, crystallized seaweed, oyster vinaigrette, carpaccio of cauliflower with artichoke and chocolate jelly, scallop tartare and caviar, white chocolate velouté, braised rabbit dumplings in broccoli ginger sauce and chili oil. The centerpiece of the display was an ice champagne fountain, 3D printed after my deliberately garish design: Five female nudes lay basking in sumptuous repose around the base of the fountain, which sloped curvilinearly upward into a deep bowl; the sides of the fountain’s bowl were studded with five erect penises carved from ice and complete with testicles; the fountain was filled with a great quantity of champagne, which tunneled through the hollow flutes of the ice penises and squirted in smooth golden arcs into the open mouths of the five nudes at the base of the fountain; the champagne gargled and frothed in their icy mouths and dribbled down their chins into the lower basin, where it was thrust back into the fountain bowl by a recirculating pump. The guests would catch the champagne by holding their glasses under the streams jetting from the constantly ejaculating penises of ice.

Meanwhile, for added effect, a string quartet played Eine kleine Nachtmusik in continual repetition. Achingly beautiful clothes abounded. Some people wore designer gowns and others, ripped neon mesh T-shirts. Jewelry flashed at slender throats. A photographer slithered through the interstices between bodies with his camera slicing at the night with blank razors of light. High heels clapped on the asphalt surface of the roof. Wineglasses tinkled. Hands shook hands, bodies embraced bodies, lips kissed cheeks. New inamorata were introduced to friends and colleagues. As the string quartet played, mellifluous songs of lovely female laughter rose and fell amid the burble of general conversation, in incidental accompaniment to the violins lacing their high sweet notes through the luscious velvet of the viola and the cello.

The roof of the 1992 addition to the Guggenheim was never designed as an exhibition space. We could not have constructed the exhibit on top of either of the two smaller towers included in Frank Lloyd Wright’s original building because they were not big enough, and we demanded the exhibit be constructed outside, for important aesthetic reasons I do not presently recall. Pipes, antennae, ductwork, and unsightly things like that crawl out of the hot, tar-spattered surface of the flat rectangular roof, and there really isn’t much room to move around. Before the opening, certain cautionary procedures were taken to assure the safety of the patrons, including a temporary guard railing to keep people from straying too close to the edge of the building. All night people awkwardly squeezed past airshaft ducts while trying not to dirty their clothes or spill their drinks.

The attendees of the VIP opening crowded at my bedside like family round a dying patriarch, munching the hors d’oeuvres they cradled in folded napkins in their hands, sipping champagne and murmuring with reverently muted conversation, while I sat nude on my enormous purple bed and ate.

My opening meal began with a bottle of ’97 Château d’Yquem and a modest tomato soup with minted crème fraîche, peekytoe crab, and julienned bacon. This was followed by a plate of langoustines and snails glazed in a light Hollandaise with cracked Basque pepper and parsley. I ate every one of them, scraping the puffy white meat from the sharp ridges of the lobster carapace, delicately sucking the slick mollusks from their shells. Following this, a course of veal cappelletti and truffles stuffed with ice-filtered lamb jelly, sweetbread, and mussels. At this point I swallowed the last of the Château d’Yquem and switched to a velvety yet robust 2000 Châteauneuf-du-Pape recommended to complement my main course, which one of my tuxedoed waiters forthwith displayed to me with a flourish while the other swept away the remains of my previous course, and I wiped my oily fingers clean with a moist towelette: an entire goose, braised in a champagne-butter reduction and stuffed with chestnuts, shiitake mushrooms, and venison sausage. For maximum effect two silver candelabras softly illuminated my meal, and I ate with fork, knife, and spoon, although I neither wore a bib nor draped my lap with a napkin, which would have obscured part of my fat body, for which I wanted maximum visibility; it did not take long before I took to wiping my hands on my plush purple bedsheets. Crumbs tumbled between my legs; drippings of sauce streaked my belly. It took me about an hour and a half to devour the entire goose. I had to work very slowly so as not to overstuff or exhaust myself. I did once have to move my bowels in the middle of the meal. This is something I would learn over time to feel less squeamish about. It is an oddly exhilarating sensation to defecate in full view of spectators while actually eating at the same time: to eliminate the arbitrary and bourgeois separation between not only the physical, but also the psychological spaces designated for the body’s admission versus evacuation of material.^IX My excrement, liquid and solid, simply slipped out of me when it was ready to go, with minimal effort on my part, and was immediately whisked away unseen, vacuumed straight out of my body via the tubes concealed beneath me. I don’t think anyone present even noticed. When I had slurped the last remaining edible sinews from the last remaining bones and ligaments of the goose, the dish was borne away and immediately replaced with a glass of forty-year-old tawny port and my dessert: a whole cheesecake, which I hacked apart and shoveled into my mouth one dainty forkload after another, dampening my bites with glass after glass of port. By the end of the night, this cheesecake took me longer to finish than the main course. Several times I nearly vomited, but each time I felt the bile racing up my throat, I clenched my mouth shut tight, steeled myself, closed my eyes, swallowed, and recovered—ready to eat on.

By the time I had almost finished the cheesecake, most of the VIP opening’s invitees had left. I was feverish, ill, sweating profusely, slightly delirious. As I sat nude on my giant purple bed, the edges of things had begun to acquire a silvery haze, like a faraway desert horizon, and my vision of the world before me kept sliding off its axis, stopping, getting back on, sliding off again. The exhibition was closing for the night, and my scale reported that on that first night, I had gained 23 lbs (10 kg) in one meal alone, finishing out the evening at a formidable 516 lbs (234 kg). Although I knew that in order to reach my goal of becoming the heaviest human being in known history I had approximately another 1,200 lbs (544 kg) to gain, and although I very well knew much of this initial weight gain was only temporary, as it would soon be evacuated from my perilously engorged digestive tract through the rubber vacuum tubes connected to my body’s lower egresses, I felt then an enormous inner swelling of pride at my achievement.

The last stragglers left the museum employees to clean up after the party as I sluggishly chased the remnants of my cheesecake across the platter with my fork and nipped at the dregs of the port. From my bed, in delirium, I watched the museum employees pick up the discarded fingerprint-fogged, lipstick-smudged wineglasses, sweep away debris with push brooms, dismantle the hors d’oeuvres table, and throw out the basinful of tepid water that my champagne fountain/pornographic ice sculpture had long since become. As if from twenty feet under water I looked languidly at my waiters, who stood leaning against the outer glass walls of my exhibition chamber with their shirts now untucked and unbuttoned at the throats, and the flaps of their undone bow ties dangling down, as they joked and chatted. They were smoking cigarettes and blowing the smoke into the warm May air, and looking out across the dark expanse of Central Park and the Upper West Side’s glittering wall of light. They did not look back at me. Nor did they think to speak to me as they wheeled away my long glass dining table, misted it with Windex, and wiped it down with squeaky rags. I watched them sweep and mop the smooth concrete floor of my exhibition chamber while passing a bottle of wine left over from the opening back and forth between them, and I faintly heard them make plans to join some of the other museum employees for a drink after they were done with their work. When they had mopped the floor, one went to return the mop and bucket to a janitorial closet while the other surveyed the room for anything they might have missed, and, finding nothing, pulled the doors shut, snaked a heavy chain through the door handles, secured them with a padlock, and left—all without looking at or speaking to me or acknowledging my presence in any way. He was simply at work, and I may as well have been an inanimate object in the room. I settled my weight against the pile of pillows at my back and watched him go. From my vantage point, propped up on the plush purple bed of my own design, inside my glass exhibition chamber atop the roof of the Guggenheim, I could see clear across the park, and gaze at the towering luminous rectangles of Midtown Manhattan to the south. Jets flew low overhead, red and green lights blinking, engines droning low streams of colorless noise as they gently descended toward JFK and LaGuardia. The city at night sparkled and hummed with heat, with light, with life, ardent life.

•  •  •

In the morning I awakened to the clinking sounds of a museum employee fiddling with the padlocked chain on the doors to my exhibition chamber. That day my exhibit was to open to the general public.

The roof was thick with humanity all day, from the museum’s opening at 10:00 A.M. until it closed at 5:45 P.M. The exhibition was hotly anticipated, as it had been hailed as a groundbreaking cultural event, preceded by a long campaign of advertising that had culminated with a massive billboard draped across the west-facing side of the Condé Nast Building. The opening-day visitors had purchased their tickets months in advance. The line to get into my exhibit coiled twice around the block, I’m told, with an average wait time of two hours. Once visitors made it into the museum, they were directed into two streams of traffic: one line to enter the regular museum, and the other line for those who had come only to view the Fat Artist. Still others had purchased tickets that allowed them to also see the exhibits in the rest of the museum before or after viewing the Fat Artist, and these people were allowed to choose their line, though most of them, for fear of not being able to make it to my exhibit later, chose to see me first. Velvet ropes corralled the line into the museum’s addition and stopped at the elevators, to which visitors were admitted in small groups of ten to twelve by museum employees who communicated with the staff on the roof through walkie-talkies that crunched and squawked in their hands. The elevators then ascended to the top floor, where staff herded the visitors outside onto the roof. And the people came, crowding into my exhibition chamber to watch the artist eat. Museum staff tried to keep the number of people on the roof to forty at most, but there were too few of them to properly police the behavior of the visitors, and the people thronged around my bed in such numbers that many were forced to stand outside of my exhibition chamber and peer in with faces puttied to the glass, breath blowing spots of fog. The late spring was slouching into early summer and the temperature was warm, and with the pulsing flux of sticky, sweating skin moving in and out of the room it quickly took on the thickly biotic aromas of a bath house, a public locker room, a zoo. Soon the interior of the box had become so opacified with condensation that it was difficult for those outside to see in. Tremulous beads of moisture gathered on the ceiling and dripped desultorily onto my bed, my body, my food. There was a constant, rushing din of people—so much humanity in all its vivacious grotesquerie—taking pictures, talking, giggling, pointing, watching me eat.

Food and drink of any sort is ordinarily prohibited in the museum, but special exemption was made for those who had come to view my exhibit. I was astounded—heartwarmed, even—by the magnificent variety of offerings the visitors brought me. They brought me shrimp cocktail. They brought me T-bone steaks. They brought me spare ribs, glistening with barbecue sauce. They brought me spaghetti and meatballs. They brought me pepper-blackened ahi tuna. They brought me to-go cups of split pea soup. They brought me chocolate cake. They brought me greasy paper boxes full of tandoori chicken. They brought me snickerdoodle cookies. They brought me waffles, soggy with whipped cream and blueberry compote. They brought me kebob. They brought me deli sandwiches. They brought me hot pastrami on rye. They brought me club sandwiches. They brought me egg salad sandwiches. They brought me Reubens. They brought me bagels with lox. Others came bearing fast food. They brought me Big Macs. They brought me Whoppers. They brought me Chicken McNuggets. They brought me Frosties. They brought me Baconators. They brought me Crunchwrap Supremes. They brought me Blizzards. I am told the street vendors quickly learned to capitalize on my exhibit, and clustered their carts on Eighty-Ninth and Fifth near the entrance of the museum for all the visitors who felt acutely embarrassed, seeing other people’s offerings, by not having brought any offerings themselves, and thus I saw a great abundance of New York street food: They brought me hot dogs, falafels, puffy cheese-stuffed pretzels, roasted corn nuts. Still others touched me with the personal warmth, the unexpected hominess of their offerings. These ones brought me dishes made from cherished family recipes for casseroles, for fudge brownies, for lasagna, for manicotti, for scalloped potatoes, for jambalaya, for lemon meringue pies, for key lime pies, for pecan pies, for rhubarb pies, for butterscotch cookies. They brought me plates of deviled eggs. They brought me dozens of raw oysters. They brought me chips: They brought me crinkling cellophane bags of Doritos, of Fritos, of Ruffles, of Lay’s. They brought me tubes and tubes of my beloved, orderly-stacked Pringles: They brought me Cheddar & Sour Cream, Honey Mustard, BBQ, Memphis BBQ, Jalapeño, Pizza.^X They brought me chorizo burritos. They brought me shrimp tacos. Naturally, star chefs from gourmet restaurants all over the city also sent up meals, desirous that the delicate works of their own ephemeral art, the culinary, be incorporated into this gastronomic spectacle, this stationary one-man saturnalia, this unmovable feast—that the fruits of their labor should be enjoyed by the Fat Artist, physically and spiritually sublimated into the flesh of his body. They sent me their choicest dishes. They sent me saddle of venison seasoned with celeriac, marron glacé, and sauce poivrade with pearl barley and red wine. They sent me duck breast with spaghetti squash, almond polenta, and pomelo molasses. They sent me cippollini purée with pickled onion vinaigrette. They sent me smoked lobster garnished with snap peas, mussels, and lemon-mustard sauce. They sent me crispy pan-seared red king salmon steak with parsley. They sent me anchovy-stuffed bulb onions with sage jus. They sent me za’atar-spiced swordfish à la plancha with chickpea panisse. Such heights of the culinary arts were amusingly offset by the more lowbrow offerings, which I also enjoyed and consumed. They brought me family-sized buckets of fried chicken from KFC and Popeye’s. They brought me pyramids of diminutive hamburgers from White Castle. Hostess snack products were popular offerings, selected surely for their artificiality, nutritional worthlessness, nostalgia value, and sheer cultural vulgarity: They brought me Twinkies, they brought me Hostess Cupcakes, they brought me Ding Dongs, they brought me Ho Hos. They brought me Mallomars. They brought me candy. They brought me Butterfingers, Three Musketeers, Snickers, Milky Ways, Whatchamacallits. They brought me Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They brought me cartons of chocolate chip chocolate ice cream with caramel fudge swirl, sweating in the sun. They brought me bags of sticky Campfire Marshmallows. They brought me dozens upon dozens of donuts, with pink frosting and sprinkles. They brought me jars of mayonnaise, jars of jelly, jars of peanut butter, jars of Grey Poupon mustard and bottles of Heinz 57. I have not even mentioned the beverage offerings. They brought me boxes of wine. They brought me chocolate malts. They brought me six-packs of Heineken. They brought me Perrier. They brought me two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola, of Pepsi, of Dr Pepper, of Mr Pibb, of Mountain Dew. They brought me bottles of fine French champagne. All this they brought me and more.

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.

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 rested 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.)