The thin woman has seen this confusion many times before. Five times in fact. First there was she. She alone. Completely alone. Then came Polina the Windbag in her sable coat with one booted foot. Then the imponderable Rosa Imaculada, Crazy Rosa whom she could do without. Then Little Nina appeared from Marseilles with her belly sticking out, then Wlibgis from Holland, from Zwolle, ravaged by cancer, then proud Maimuna from Dakar, and finally beautiful Ulrike from the birthplace of Mozart. Angry, beautiful Ulrike. The youngest of all. Every bit as innocent as the recently arrived tend to be. The skinny woman stares at Ulrike’s face. She tries to record the image in her mind: the raised jaw, the forced hardness in her gaze, just now turning away. The girl’s bright violet-blue eyes begin to glance cautiously past her, finding the white, which is everywhere, which is nowhere. In her eyes, distress.
The thin woman has seen this. Many times she has been forced to speak, but so what? She almost prefers to speak. She is also speaking to herself, repeating over and over how things are, telling everything as best she can. When she speaks, everyone falls silent and listens. Everyone hears, once again, where they are, perhaps, right now. Hearing this is important. Just as taking communion can be important for some people, or lighting a cigar after a meal. For others it might be a weekly manicure, a pedicure, or a daily trim of the dry skin from their cuticles—each just as compulsive, perhaps a bit painful but undeniably pleasurable. So she will tell. She is happy to tell!
* * *
The thin woman remembers how it feels to wake up here. How it feels to open one’s eyes, to sit up, to touch the white beneath in disbelief. Is it land or frozen snow? It isn’t cold, and it isn’t hot. Plastic? Latex? Painted concrete? It isn’t hard, and it isn’t soft. She stood up, feeling excellent, empty, and numb in a good sort of way: the pain that had gnawed at her stomach and the staggering dizziness were wiped away. Of course she had managed exceedingly well with her pain and dizziness—she was a pain professional, after all. She was a hunger artist, after all. “No, no, and once again no”: that had been the doctors’ opinion about her last project. Secretly of course they hoped she would continue to the end. They wanted to see, even though they didn’t admit it, how the body and mind would function in controlled extremis. Officially they were obliged to warn her, practically to threaten her. Professionally they could do nothing more than demand that she interrupt the “test” and end her questionable experiment, “full stop”. This wasn’t the first time she had met scorn even as the same people viewed her with a mixture of admiration and horror.
It all started at the little apartment on Carroll Street. With her mother’s gaze. That was where it began. But the fact that her art had begun to arouse scientific interest—that was new and motivated her to push on. Her weight loss methods had been as deliberate as an ascetic yogi’s. At times they had driven her into a trance, yet she pressed on with more cycles of the regime. On the final day of the experiment, a few hours before stepping on the stage, she had drunk several tepid cups of an Ayurveda tea named “Internal Peace”. Her mind spun in a dervish dance, round and round and round as she reeled in the staff kitchen at the Jewish Museum, in her hand a paper printed with the presentation she would soon read in the auditorium. It was a blissful state and yet frighteningly fragile. Temporary. No person, not even she, could live forever on nothing but adrenaline, pain, and vertigo.
She had learned the dervish dance long ago. She had been hanging around Coney Island, at Astroland, which had just opened, staggering along in a famished stupor even as she rode the Cyclone again and again. That night her bed spun and shook as soon as she closed her eyes. That was her fifth week devoted to losing weight and the first night when she had finally understood: this relationship, and only this relationship, was meant to be for life. Hunger, my love. Under the covers they made a secret pact: I trust in you, and you trust in me. I will never eat you away, and you will never stop fighting by my side.
Of course some minor slips occurred. At a cousin’s bar mitzva, she secretly devoured twenty marzipan cookies. The hunger flew into a vengeful rage and threatened to leave her entirely, but she begged forgiveness and vomited. That time the hunger was appeased.
She was seventeen when she received the keys to her first home of her own. Even though it was little more than a closet and next to her parent’s flat, she had the freedom to do whatever she pleased, and of course that terrified them. Of course she experimented some. She gave herself injections of Smirnoff in her thigh, using her friend’s insulin syringe. Every now and then she got high with a couple of pals. A few times she engaged in some moderate shagging. But the hunger was most important and most dear to her. It fought with her like a trusted friend, against her enemies, until she made the mistake of her life and betrayed it. Because of a man.
The skinny woman knew she had atoned many times over for the betrayal of her youth. The hunger had returned to her after a series of reconciliation cycles, but in a way it still seemed somehow hurt, somehow . . . conditional. It always seemed to demand more of her; a day limited to five organic carrots was now an
