The Fat Artist and Other Stories (12 page)

Lana had, in fact, found the cannon with the plaque on it again, but the opening of the barrel was so narrow that no one but an infant could have possibly fit in it. And then she had thought she heard somebody coming, so she ran into the woods and immediately proceeded to get lost. She walked through grass and woods, in a part of the country she had never been before; she could not have even located her position within a hundred miles on a map. She was alone. An hour ago, all her blood had been singing with the wildness and wickedness and novelty of everything she was doing. The silver paint on her skin reflected the moonlight. Her body glowed with otherworldly light and darkness yawned all around her.

She walked slowly. Twigs and rocks drove horribly into her bare feet. She walked on the edges of her insteps to minimize their surface area. Maybe because the alcohol was burning out of her system, the air began to feel much colder. Goose bumps prickled her body beneath the paint.

She had no way of telling time, but she guessed that hours were passing. She lay down in the grass. She stared at the ground, curled into herself like a snail, hugged her legs to her chest, flesh against flesh, warmth to warmth. She was exhausted: There was sand in her veins, all her inner machinery slogging along at half its regular rhythm. And she was hungry. She was very hungry, a sucking hollowness clawing at her gut. She didn’t exactly feel drunk, not anymore, but the universe pitched around like a ship in a storm when she shut her eyes. Yes. No. Yes. She was still drunk. She lay on the ground and looked up, imagined that gravity had inexplicably reversed itself, that her back was pressed against the ceiling of the sky and the clouds she saw were sailing over mountaintops six miles below her. She couldn’t lie down anymore; being still nauseated her. She had to stand up and move around. She got up, and all the blood gushed into her brain. She felt acutely conscious of her internal organs sloshing around in her body, everything out of balance and out of time. She might have fallen asleep. She couldn’t tell. The stars had shifted positions, the moon had moved. But it was still dark, and she had nothing to hold on to, mentally or physically, figuratively or literally. She tried to remember what had happened, but only decontextualized blots of memory remained of the night, certain noises, sense perceptions, images with contours inconstant and definitions blurry as if seen under water, a cloud and a tree and a car and a cannon and a hand and an eye and a blast of smoke and a sudden eruption of light and the warbling sound of a man singing songs about sex and death and love and the end of the world seventy-five years ago in a noise field of pops and crunching static, and in her consciousness the memories smeared continuously into dreams about fathers slitting the throats of their children on mountaintops thousands of years ago, and somewhere between waking and sleeping she had a vague thought that there is nothing as elemental as an unexplained light in the sky, or the sound of a voice screaming in the dark.

Then she looked to the north, along the distant ridge of mountains and across the rippling, light-dusted plains, and saw a cloud of fire in the sky. She looked, and saw four spirals of fire, blazing bright and revolving clockwise, like whirlpools of flame. The four spirals of fire hovered high in the sky, and they were moving. They darted from one place to another, and there were flashing white tendrils of electricity in the sky. And she looked below them, and saw four enormous gold machines below the four spirals of fire in the sky. The machines went where the fires went, darting rapidly from one place to another. Each of the machines had the appearance of a wheel inside a wheel. The inner wheel of each machine was perpendicular to the outer wheel, and the outer wheel spun clockwise while the inner wheel spun counterclockwise. The wheels were alive with light, and innumerable human eyes studded the rims of the wheels, and all the eyes looked in different directions, and blinked at different times. Inside each of the four machines was what looked like a living creature. Each of the living creatures had four wings and four faces. The living creatures moved inside the machines, but did not touch the wheels that revolved around them. Wherever the spirals of fire went, the machines went beneath them, and the creatures within went with them. Then everywhere the fields were consumed in fire, and she saw blood running in rivers from the gullies between the mountains. She saw a desert of white ash.

Lana looked around her, and saw that she was standing in a field of tall grass. She looked behind her, and saw the hill: Beyond that was the road. She heard the sound of a truck rumbling down the road and letting off pressure from its gaskets in short, sneezy hisses. To her left she saw the power plant—the squat, ugly building with its two char-black smokestacks. She realized that at some point she must have crossed the railroad tracks, because now she saw that they were behind her. Now the half moon shone big and low above the outline of the mountains. She thought she could see the beginnings of dawn skirting the eastern horizon. Ahead of her, across the field, she saw a row of utility poles, standing along a thin dirt road like a fence of crucifixes, connected by positive parabolas of wire drooping from one to the next. She saw a tall, narrow house at the end of the field where two dirt roads intersected, and there were lights on in a few of its windows. She walked through the field toward the house. The grass thrashed around her. It was still dark when she reached the house. The wooden boards of the front porch felt comfortably flat and hard under her blistered, bare feet. She pushed a button beside the front door and heard the doorbell sound from inside the house. She heard movement inside. After a while, she heard the clunk of a bolt being unlatched, and the door shrieked open on dry hinges.

An old woman peered through the mesh of the screen door at her: She was small and frail, and the texture of the skin of her face looked like crumpled silken paper. She pushed open the screen door and stepped out of the house on tiny white bare feet. The old woman wore a dark blue bathrobe. Her face was the face of someone who has just seen something terrifying, or sublimely beautiful. It was the expression of religious experience. She was breathing heavily and unevenly. Her chest shivered, it seemed her lungs were struggling to draw oxygen. Her hands were shaking.

Lana stood before her in the dark, on the porch. Her body was glowing with an otherworldly light. The woman’s lips quivered. Her eyes were wet. The woman took a step forward and reached out to her with delicate white arms.

I
. Apparent magnitude is the measure of the brightness of celestial objects. The maximum brightness of Mars is –2.4, a full moon is –12.

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