Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

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, IIIthe 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.