Unusual Destiny

[whats part of the piece, now? where does it end and i begin?

what defines waste? what did i lose? what am i missing? what's it like inside? is it dark? is it quiet? is it peaceful? do i feel like im somewhere i cant come out of? does it feel like a place or no place? does it feel like anything?]

I'll start at the beginning, not because it makes the telling more interesting but because it's best to have everything in order when the timeline is disputed, as it is here.

I was ten or eleven when Cary and I met for the first time. It was right at the start of the housing bubble, just a couple months before 9/11. My family had just moved in down the street from his in this massive new development in the Connecticut suburbs. Grey curbs, the sloped ones you could skateboard up or down, nuclear families with commuting husbands and bored, tired wives, houses painted in jewel tones, streets named after trees and midwestern states.

It was summer. I was upset by the move and determined to make no new friends. I probably would have stayed in my bedroom until the school year started, except I began noticing gatherings of neighborhood kids at Cary's house almost every day, this prepubescent gaggle hooting from his backyard. My parents noticed too, and they went and chatted with Cary's mom Danielle, and of course she invited me, and I was embarrassed and angrily told off my parents. But I was secretly thrilled to finally have something to do.

What I expected were some lawless, possibly violent unstructured activities, but when I finally showed up one afternoon, everyone was seated in a semicircle around a little raised platform, probably built from scrap wood by Cary's father. It was a little stage, and Cary was miming.

Here it's easy to question my memory: would a group of ten or so preteens really willingly spend a significant portion of their summer break watching someone their own age do stuff like a mime routine? It seems impossibly weird, not just that we'd watch but that anyone our age would have devoted the time to learn something like miming. It seems like something an unpopular child would do in a failed bid for attention. Wouldn't the other children get restless and want to make noise, wander off and ride their bikes or something? Of course. But they didn't.

There are things we're willing to accept as normal when we are young that are beyond the comprehension of adults.

And the other thing was, Cary was talented, even then. He had a number of performances. Magic tricks, feats of endurance, impressions of teachers and parents I hadn't yet met. And he was tweaking them constantly so that each time we came to that stage in his backyard, we saw something new and surprising. In the one act that has really stuck in my mind - for reasons that will become obvious - he played a mime trying to put on your typical invisible-rope-and-glass-walls performance who kept walking into the walls and objects he'd created and injuring himself, poking out an eye and then twisting his ankle, breaking both arms in a dramatic fall from the stage, shouting in agony so forcefully that he unwittingly locked his jaw open. This play ended with him scooting around the lawn like an earthworm, single remaining eye rolling, face distended, while we the audience laughed uproariously.

The thing to note here is that at the beginning, it was about entertaining others.

Later on, a lot of people claimed to have been best friends with Cary growing up. I won't embarrass myself by saying anything like that. For several years, I was really just a member of the entourage. Although his wasn't the biggest or nicest house on our cul-de-sac, everyone always seemed to end up there, and when the neighborhood kids aggregated there for parties, events, or one of his performances, I pretty much always found myself on the sidelines.

In fact, I'm not sure Cary even knew my name until quite a while later. We had all graduated from eighth grade together, and everyone else was preparing for their first year at the local high school, but my parents and Cary's decided to send us to a charter school the next town over. I didn't have strong feelings either way about it, but for Cary it meant splitting with his entire friend group, and he was pretty broken up about it. There was no backyard entertainment that summer.

It didn't take long for him to acclimate to his new environment, though. The charter school placed a strong emphasis on public speaking and the arts; things he was basically born to do. Being the only person there who had any history with him, I was by default roped into Cary's many bands, student films, and performances.

Although he excelled in school plays and presentations, this was around the time Cary started getting into weirder shit. Our art teacher, a youngish guy with a similar fondness for eccentricity, gave lessons on Maurizio Cattelan and Yoko Ono, then progressed to stuff like Lani Beloso's period blood paintings and Chris Burden's "Trans-Fixed," in which he was crucified on a Volkswagen Beetle.

Cary started doing little performances of his own, tentative ones. People took it as a joke at first, even when one morning he arrived at school, went straight to the bathroom, and stapled the tops of his ears to his earlobes. His parents were called, and punishment meted out, but I think the takeaway for him was that his work could only begin in earnest once he was an adult. He seemed certain that establishing himself as a serious artist would require devising even more alarming statements.

He was particularly taken with Tehching Hsieh's "One-Year Performances." In one, Hsieh spent an entire year without entering any building, car, or other shelter. In another, he locked himself in a cage with nothing but basic amenities and spent a year there without speaking, writing, or experiencing any form of media.

To willingly deny oneself so much is a fascinating concept to contemplate, and everyone in the class had a strong reaction to it, but Cary's was unique. While we all argued whether Hsieh was a masochist, idiot, or political activist, Cary sat silently with a concerned look. It could've been empathy, but in retrospect I read it as professional jealousy. Like when someone else tells the same joke you had on the tip of your tongue.

Although it has been reported that what he did later on was spontaneous and that his infamous "Fifteen Year Plan" was something forged after the fact, I believe he really did come up with it around this time. I never saw the document, but if I'd seen something like it peeking out of his bookbag, it wouldn't have surprised me in the least. By senior year of high school, Cary's ideas were already well outside the scope of what was acceptable socially, in or out of the school.

Early senior year, he caused a great deal of consternation (and expense) when he broke a hole through the drywall in the administration office, clambered through, and walled himself in. He was discovered immediately and suspended, but even the threat of expulsion didn't prevent him from submitting a painting in blood and feces as his art final, something that made even our tolerant art teacher pretty upset.

By this time I'd come out as gay, and I spent most of my evenings at Cary's house, often eating dinner with his family and walking home to sleep after my parents had already gone to bed. His parents were pretty liberal. Mine kind of just stopped looking up when I walked into the room.

[would you believe that i can tell who's in the room with me by the impact of their feet and the vibration of their voice. before they touch me i know whether it will be michael's rough hands or danielle's cold, gentle ones. michael angry with me, i know, for what i did to his perfect child. danielle's thoughts are more complicated. sometimes she comes in and hits me and other times she holds my hands in hers, caresses my knuckles, avoiding my fingertips, and tears wet my forearms.]

I didn't know what to do with my life, and at some point near the end of the school year Cary swept in and coached me on my applications to a bunch of local places. He was going to the art college at the University of Hartford, and I tagged along at their school for liberal arts.

In college, he was in my life and he wasn't: we'd pass each other walking through campus and at orientation events, but never discussed living with each other or anything. I'm still not sure if he really wanted me there or if he was just being nice.

Socially, Cary was always hard to read. He wasn't at the center of any group, everyone just accepted him, like treating him the same as the other outcasts would throw the world off balance. Not a stereotypical cool kid, but confident, with this aura that made everyone around him more willing to shut up, to laugh when he did something so funny and odd that no one could describe it later.

But anyway, I've gotten off track. Without the supervision of his parents, Cary completely immersed himself in the freaky stuff the other avant kids were doing and dove into his own pieces, which grew in scope and intensity. The first one was a black windowless box he and his friends built on the quad. Cary was supposed to be sealed inside for a week, but the administrators got wise to it and were terrified he'd asphyxiate in the box, so they had it carefully pulled apart. It had only been a few hours. Cary crawled out and walked back to his dorm.

After this embarrassment he was subdued through the end of the semester, when he moved off-campus with his new friends into a huge three-story house, one of those early 1900's places with an enormous wraparound porch perpetually buried in weatherbeaten mildewy furniture. I didn't hear much from him after that; just the odd stilted catch-up when we'd meet at the same bar or cafe. He didn't like to advertise his work - if I had to guess, it was equal parts distaste for the medium and to prevent security from preventing him from completing his pieces. These pieces were guerrilla works executed off campus, or quickly and decisively in the middle of everything. This was the first time he began to get outside attention.

The earliest successful one I can remember was Hair Piece. The pun obviously intended. Cary had this gorgeous, lush blonde hair that he always kept at shoulder length. It was the source of a great deal of conversation for both the girls and gay guys in high school.

One of his art major buddies worked at an electrolysis place in Hartford. They went together for a couple months and zapped everything off: head, eyebrows, facial hair. I think they left the eyelashes, maybe it's too dangerous to get a laser that close to someone's eye. The whole time he wore hats on campus, but people could kind of tell what was going on and most people thought he had cancer or something. He announced the whole thing in a leaflet that also detailed his next piece, a performance taking place during the month of November, during which he would communicate verbally only with an electrolarynx - one of those vibrating machines people who've lost their voice boxes put on their necks to produce sound while they mouth words.

Cary had always had issues with authority, but this was the first time he received blowback from his peers, and I imagine it surprised him. There was an article in the school paper, The Informer, arguing pretty fiercely against what they called the appropriation of a disability. As an able-bodied person, Cary was essentially roleplaying handicaps, was the gist of it. Cary didn't help things by spending December wheeling himself around campus on one of those mechanics' dollies. I saw him a couple times rolling noisily on his knees through the hallway to each classroom, scabs all over the backs of his hands from scraping them on the pavement.

Although most people on campus viewed him as a curiosity, a minor celebrity even, the administration wasn't amused. He would've been stopped or punished, except letters started coming in. Some artists of note in the city who'd begun to hear about his exploits. They made a conditional donation to the art college. So Cary stayed, and kept going.

[in common life there was no one i wanted to be around. no one but myself. shouldn't i count?]

There's not much to say about this next period that hasn't already been said a hundred times over. It's well recorded. The escalating fame, leaving college in his last year and moving to New York, the ill-fated residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This was his superstar period. If there's one thing I want to note, it's that Cary just kept doing whatever he felt like doing, and nothing else. He never advertised any products or did any paid events. Never even got his portrait taken by Ryan McGinley. Cary never sold out. His image as this ascetic bald guy totally purified of outside influence was entirely intentional, I'm sure, but it was basically true. He really had no connections to money or to celebrity, except that which was thrust upon him.

At this point we had totally lost touch. I don't get the impression he had, or wanted, friends. I think the friends he did have probably objected to the stuff he was doing. Like Flayed Alive. That was horrible. His mom called me afterwards and begged me to go talk to him at the hospital, but I couldn't get in even after I pretended to be his brother. I guess he wouldn't see any family.

The way I finally got back in touch was kind of funny. I had graduated and gotten a job fact-checking at Conde Nast, and had finally finagled a piece in the New Yorker: they thought it would be fun to have me profile Cary in the lead-up to his most medically intensive piece, Touchless, given that we had history.

I thought it would be weird seeing him, but he didn't have the Steve Jobs tortured genius attitude I was expecting. There was no big make-up hug or anything, but he greeted me warmly and we caught up like friends. I told him what his family had been up to, and he seemed genuinely interested. I didn't ask why he hadn't stayed in touch.

The interview was pretty boilerplate. For all his wild ideas, Cary was never that eloquent. He talked mostly about the procedure, which was grotesquely fascinating: a doctor would scoop out the pad of each finger, the fingerprint and everything beneath, and install a little rubber half-moon in its place. His thumbs were left alone.

At the end, although I knew he'd find it stupid, I asked him why he was doing it.

"Few people understand what it is to look for a sensation and find an absence." He frowned, unsatisfied by this answer. It was too specific.

"Why you, though?" I asked.

"Some people never do a single meaningful thing. Some people try to do too much. But what they have in common is that they accomplish nothing special. Just a lot or a little junk." He was searching for the right words. "Others find they've got an unusual destiny."

We shook hands when it was time to leave. That was strange for me. I couldn't stop wondering what would be the last thing he'd touch with those fingertips.

As expected, there was a huge outcry when news of the piece broke. Our interview did numbers. People were upset I hadn't pushed harder. Cary's mom stopped talking to me.

After that he vanished. Nobody heard a word from him for a couple years. It was rumored he'd become a monk, because of course it was. Or that he'd set out on some impossible journey like Bas Jan Ader and died. I thought he'd just gotten tired of the city and needed some peace and quiet. We were all wrong, I guess. He just needed time to prepare.

[every place is familiar, like here, at a desk. i can feel the chair, the flat wood against my wrists when i type, a cool breeze from an open window. sometimes i just walk around the room and try to create a perfect mental image, with color and clarity, knowing how it looked when i was young and how it must have changed, and when this image exists i go inside of it, inhabit it. i sit again and look out the window. it's lovely outside.]

The rest of it I learned the same way everyone else did. It came out in bits and pieces, a flood of information that first fascinated everyone but which quickly became horrible.

First the blog went up. None of the posts were signed, but the photos were obviously Cary, and once the press caught wind everyone was sending each other links. There was a mysterious new work coming. There were diagrams of a skull, photos of Cary being fitted with specialized equipment. Afterward, but before the blog was scrubbed, I went back and checked the comments, and some people had figured out from the schematics what was going on even back then. Most of us had no idea.

I don't want to spend a lot of time writing about this, sensationalizing it, so I'll be brief. Cary had found a doctor in Europe somewhere, a fan of his, with skill and access to all the equipment he needed. Over the course of a month or so to provide for recovery from each surgery, the doctor would remove Cary's senses, starting by scraping out the retinas of his eyes, then damaging the olfactory bulb just below the front of his brain to reduce sensations of taste and smell and replacing the eardrum with a protective film to prevent vibrations from being picked up (eliminating it completely would allow bacteria into Cary's middle ear and brain). There were a few other smaller surgeries. I guess Touchless had been the first component.

The piece was called Becomes Internal.

As you'd expect, the outcry was immediate. No one could get in contact to stop him or even try to talk him out of it. Every respectable news organization refused to cover the piece. It didn't matter; the entire thing would be broadcasted live on Cary's blog.

The worst part for me was when his family went on TV and begged him not to do it. It was exactly like watching the family pleading for the life of someone captured by terrorists, except I knew them, and I knew him, and he was both the victim and the destroying monster.

Everyone was in touch during this. Kids from the cul-de-sac who hadn't spoken in fifteen years, college acquaintances, anyone from the art world I'd overlapped with in my writing career. We were all asking each other how we could stop it, what power we had to change Cary's mind, and the answer was the same as it had always been. He was completely in control of his own fate.

Nobody else that I knew watched. I did. I don't know why. Maybe I felt like there would be no point if no one watched.

It was both less offensive and more terrible than you'd expect. The videos weren't gruesome, just clinical and a little bloody and strangely emotionless: Cary would be wheeled into a bright room, anaesthetized, and work would begin. They'd post updates on the progress and his healing between surgeries. The true psychological effect lay in knowing the end result. In some ways it felt like watching a horror movie where you know what's about to happen but feel like you can't look away. I don't know if that was by design.

Then, after the final surgery, the one to remove his vocal cords, the videos stopped and the blog went dead.

[it's stupid. everything is. what was the point? there's never one. not to anything. it's as if i hadn't done it. it's as if everyone had done it. billions of caveblind creatures waiting for their needs to be met.

this doesnt interest me. i was always surrounded by a certain type of person. always looking for an answer. not me. i don't know and never did. it's not important. there was never any point.]

Becomes Internal was all anyone talked about for a while, and then like all things it became part of the background noise. Something people would bring up in comparison to incredible feats of self-destruction, or at parties to freak out anyone who hadn't heard about it. The videos stayed up for a few months and then vanished with the rest of the blog. When you went to the website it was just a black square.

Cary never came back to New York. We didn't think he was dead, but when we talked about him, it was always in the past tense. It felt like his story was over. Life went on for most of us. I never heard from his parents again, although his sister emailed me years later about her application to intern at the magazine I was working for, and I made sure she got it.

A long time passed. I got married and moved across the country with my husband. I had reconciled with my parents; we flew back on occasion and spent polite, uneasy holidays with them. I kept writing. I got asked to write about Cary, some sort of retrospective, but at the time I didn't think it would be a good story. Not without an end, a neat bow to tie everything up in. I didn't think there'd ever be one.

The blog was updated one day. I forget how I found out. I'd stopped checking it years earlier. The first post was titled "fifteen year plan completed," with a photo attached of a white lined piece of paper, like one you'd rip out of a school notebook. On it were the names and descriptions of just about every one of Cary's pieces, written in a shitty juvenile scrawl and dated 9-21-05.

The question I've gotten most since then is whether I think it's real. Knowing what you now know about Cary, what do you think?

Since then there have been regular posts. He's still going with them right now; you can go and read them if you like. They're tapped out all lowercase, the language isn't always graceful but keep in mind the rubber fingertips. His sister says he types out each bit again and again, sometimes hundreds of times, until his editor can figure out what he's trying to say.

The site looks like it was built haphazardly in HTML. He probably did it himself, before. Titled it Unusual Destiny. I wonder if he remembered our conversation, or if that's just a phrase he liked.

When you read it you think, why the livestream? Why the blog? I know my answer, but it's by no means the only one, or even a popular one amongst the slew of hypotheses. You can add to them if you're interested in doing so. Just know you're following his actual thousand-year plan, a sort of hypertext one that's layered beneath the processes of existence and thought like the code beneath the surface of a webpage, or an intention settled into a dimension beyond expectation or consequence. Grandiose, but that's Cary.

I don't keep up with it anymore. I write stories for a living, and enough of my life has gone into this one. I hope this is the last word I'm expected to give on it.

What was it all about? It's hard to say. A lonely child who gave up everything to be remembered forever. A man with an illness too engrossing to ignore. Someone who became uninterested in other people, maybe. But I'm editorializing. Think what you like.