Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

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.