My sister made videos of herself eating things.
It began with the very simplest of meals: my mother had prepared a cup of instant Maggi, topped with an egg fried in a pool of oil at the bottom of the wok.
As a mother, she was quite average. Still, it had to be said that she made an excellent egg. My sister, fourteen at the time, set her phone up on a little tripod she had bought from Daiso. She held the cup in her left hand and chopsticks in her right. She still crossed her chopsticks, which was wrong.
But who was there to tell us, on most days?
Our mother was always at work. The egg was more an exception than a rule. After cooking, our mother disappeared into her room for the evening, leaving my sister ample time to get herself set up with the camera.
Our father left her two years ago for a woman he had met while shopping for a new toilet seat.
Since then, he has hinted to me on numerous occasions that he would like me to unscrew the fateful toilet seat from the bowl and bring it to his new apartment. He hinted this to me by buying me a screwdriver and asking me to do it. He even cried.
I said no out of principle, even though I hated the toilet seat and would have loved to part with it.
Why was I so reluctant? Not totally sure. I was scared, maybe, that once I unscrewed the toilet seat and once I brought it to him so that he could install it in his new apartment, he would be done with me forever.
Silly me. There are worse things than being estranged. He could have a stroke, or early onset dementia. There are so many worse things to sever a relationship than a toilet seat. As always, I used the bigger and scarier things out there, abstract as they were, to belittle my fears and concerns. Scared of the dark? One day I will die. Sweating in P.E. class? One day the sun will eat the earth. And before this happens, Singapore will sink into the ocean.
Yet my awareness of catastrophe never erased the facts: I still hated the dark; I was still sweating through my sports uniform; I still resented that my father had a new life; etcetera.
So I sat there, in P.E., drenched and foul-smelling.
So I curled in my bed, afraid to hazard even the short distance in the dark to the bathroom.
So I sat triumphantly on the toilet, seat still tightly attached.
Then, I thought of all the worse things going on in the world and felt immeasurably more dreadful.
These thoughts were distracting me. This bothered my sister. “Sorry, sorry. I spaced out. The video looks good though.”
I always said sorry twice. The first sorry was for the person to whom I was apologizing. The second was for nobody in particular. It was just something I spoke into the world whenever the opportunity arose. It was not a prayer so much as a penance for the accident of my birth and the insufferable waste that I believed was mine alone to answer for.
“Rina!”
I was a being without drive or ambition. I sat at home on my gap year, which I had only taken because, given the choice of what to pursue as a career or as a subject of continued study, I froze.
I failed to envision a future for myself with the same clarity as my classmates and friends: Anish wanted to be a doctor, and Alisha wanted to be a necromancer.
And even if ‘necromancer’ was not a real job title, Alisha, at the very least, believed in herself. Besides, the word she sought was there: she would figure it out eventually and become a spiritual medium.
My parents did not care enough about me to force me into a career. I have been alienated from my father since I refused to steal the toilet seat, even though he still invited me to things for show, and my mother was wealthy enough that it did not bother her so much that I sat on my ass and did nothing all day except when my sister needed help.
She didn’t even know that my sister had such a lucrative side job.
Today, my sister was eating several boxes of donuts. The boxes, of course, were flattened and in the recycling bin already.
I sat behind the camera. Given that my sister had a tripod, she had no real reason for wanting me there. What she had instead of a real reason was a burning desire not to be alone. For all the people who watched her, of which there were regularly over a million, innumerable eyes always floating above her like translucent cybernetic phantoms, she was unsatisfied. And for all the food she ate, she was completely and utterly unfilled.
“Does it look good? Are you sure?” She would ask the same questions repeatedly, even after her videos were published.
“Yes,” I would assure her, because, for all my faults, I was very good at this one thing, which was assuring my sister, specifically her, that I was there, that I was watching her; I made her feel as though she was not alone.
I was there for her behind the camera, and I commented on all her videos. I had six accounts just to do this. My comments were quickly drowned out by everyone else’s, but I know she appreciated them just the same.
I was there for her in the gym, walking on the treadmill next to hers, which was always whirring for how high a setting she put it on. I stood outside the door as she threw up, the fast-food scent of her vomit mingling with the Kirei Kirei hand foam she squeezed into the toilet bowl when she was done, to mask the scent of her sickness.
“Yes,” I told her, because it was impossible to know what else there was to say to her when she was in these moods. I was unsure whether her audience was filled with people enraptured by her mouth, her throat, or her eyes. Her mouth was a dark, moving hole. Like a trash compactor, it was filled up with things that had structure and form; her jaw opened and shut, teeth coming together in a holy communion that gave and gave even more, a gesture repeating itself like that between two hands in applause, form becoming formlessness.
There, food became nothing more than a mess of sugars and saliva.
When she swallowed, you could see, if you watched closely enough, a lump moving down her gullet and into the abyss of her impossibly beautiful body, infinitely and effortlessly more beautiful than mine. Her eyes, though, were the most incredible spectacle of all; through all the food, her eyes remained hungry, never once losing the glimmer of desire.
Ravenous girl. Her usernames were always some alphanumeric variation of HungryG1rl97.
It was strange, though, that my sister and I turned out so differently, even if our upbringings had been the same.
Absence is tolerable, but indifference really hurts. It was not our mother’s unavailability that we suffered but the overwhelming sense that she did not care. It was as if she gave birth to nobody; as if we appeared, from thin air, in her house, and somebody told her that she had some responsibility to prevent us from dying.
Our mother worked in a bank. As far as I knew, she was fine with it. She didn’t seem to have very strong feelings either way.
Only her fatigue ever made itself clear. She fell asleep everywhere: on the couch, at the dining table. Even in the rare moments we all went out together, she sometimes stretched out on the table of the food court and went quickly to sleep. This made me feel, sometimes, like a terrible inconvenience, a drain on her already depleted energy.
It’s easy to understand why my sister wanted attention from the Internet. It was the kind of thing that felt easy to psychoanalyze and draw obvious conclusions from. I watched her, all through life, slowly lose hope in attaining the affection she desired at home.
When she was young, she used to present our mother with gifts: beaded bracelets, drawings, other things that parents usually enjoyed receiving from their children. Yet all these were met with dismissal. Our mother’s dismissals were always kind, but they were dismissals nonetheless: “It’s beautiful,” she would say, “but it would suit your sister more.” “You’re so talented,” she would say, “go show your father.”
And, of course, our father was receptive until he wasn’t. To his credit, he was always enthusiastic, when he was still a part of our family. It was only surprising how quickly he was able to stop caring. We heard the fight from the other room; it had been totally one-sided. He told our mother that being with the other woman made him feel alive. He told our mother that she had wasted years of his life. I remember wondering if he was angry at my sister and I too.
My mother responded to him quite simply, then, and so softly that I had to really focus to hear it: “Okay, leave.”
Only, the next day, he did leave. He apologized to my sister and me quickly before dragging an already packed suitcase out the door. We heard the beeping of the lift, and then silence. I felt numb, unable to react. My sister let out a heaving sob. Our mother did not leave the bedroom.
“Sister,” my sister said, one night, “Maybe McDonalds tomorrow. Or not. I don’t know. I’m tired of this eating thing.”
“Anything you want,” I said,
“Anything they want,” she said, gesturing at the desktop in her room, right at its center.
I nodded. She turned off the lights. I could have sworn I heard her cry in her bed, but I could never be sure of these things. If I ever asked her about it, she would have told me I was imagining it, and I would almost believe her, watching the car lights go by on the back wall and convincing myself that the sounds she made were figments of my own imagination. It is not that I believed her but that I wanted to: I wanted to believe every word she ever said. I wanted to believe her, but I also desperately wanted to witness her in her entirety, and I also wanted to stop lying to myself; these impulses could not be reconciled.
We did buy McDonalds the next day, a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of it. She sat down with it, a small kingdom of burgers. Her makeup was perfect. It was her least favorite thing about all of this, she told me. When the oil slipped out of the food, down her chin, collecting her foundation as it rolled, a beige droplet of dew, leaving a strip of paler skin in its wake. She always scrubbed her face to get all the oil out. “I hate it,” she said, “it feels so dirty.”
In some sense, I suppose, we had always been ignored. It was easy to see how this might lead someone to pursue approval elsewhere, especially where it was so freely given and for something so simple as eating.
It must have felt nice, after a lifetime of lukewarm reactions, to stumble into a world where the base act of putting food in one’s mouth became cause for congratulation. And it did. It did feel nice, even where I sat.
All I did was encourage her. Still the heat emanating from the screen reached me too. I liked to imagine that this all wouldn’t be possible without me. I knew this wasn’t true. Love wasn’t something I found easy to recognize. It was something I wanted to see, to feel. I wanted to be assured of its existence.
OMG I LUV U
AMAZING !!!!!!!!!!!!
GIRL OF MY DREAMZ
So easy. Love was spelled out over the Internet. Pixels and light. Perfect simplicity. Yet I was afraid, still, because a thing given is also easily taken away. Like fans, or a father. People gained and lost things; such was life. There was also the resentment, which existed everywhere, seeping into the cracks of our vision.
ATTENTION SEEKER
EEEEW THIS IS ACTUALLY V GROSS
It was better to live vicariously through my sister, knowing that if her fans ever turned on her, or if they ever said anything cruel, I could slip quietly back into nonexistence.
I could pretend that none of this ever mattered to me at all. It was easier that way but still terrifying. If all this were to end, where would that leave me?
“Hi everyone! Welcome back to my channel. I know you don’t want to hear me talk, so I guess I’ll get straight to eating.”
She smiled widely at the camera, pink lip gloss shining in the glare of the ring light. “Yes!”
She picked up the first burger, and she brought it to her mouth, which opened widely and obediently. She took a big bite, consuming a third of it in one go. With focus and drive, she finished it.
She picked the next one up, and then the next. She took a break, drinking the Diet Coke between burgers five and six. She smiled again, lips oily, gloss smeared. She was pretty, even against the sad pink backdrop I helped her make out of wrapping paper.
She trailed off: “Now I’m going to, I’m—”
Stopped short, she looked straight into the camera, and her smile faded. I nodded at her, as if to say, ‘I’m here. I’m here. Hi! Everything is fine!’
But, for the first time, she ignored me.
She stood up. I picked the camera up quickly, noticing that her face was out of frame. The tripod was still attached, but I could not remove it without causing the camera to shake. Then, standing, she ate. She ate until all the food was gone, both of us still standing.
Unprecedentedly, she wiped her oily hands on her shirt as she did when she was a child, when my mother would read magazines at the dinner table. My sister used to wipe her hands on herself, shouting, “Dirty! Dirty!” My mother would raise her glance in a bored rage. “Stop it, stop!” Then, as if she had given herself completely and absolutely to hesitation, her body stopped. As if she had found stillness.
I was not sure if her mind had followed her into the quiet, unsettling calm of her figure. Or if it kept going in spite of her body, which was in a momentary stasis so profound and perfect that it made me feel as though it was my expectation of movement that was unusual, rather than her lack thereof.
Time began to dilate, so much so that I felt that an hour had passed in these two seconds of quiet.
I only found out how long she stood still for—two seconds—once I rewatched the video.
Of course, it was not as magical in the video as it was in real life, because I was holding the camera, and I moved, as people tend to.
But she was not finished yet.
Shortly after she was still and unmoving, she became naked.
Her hands, which were already on her shirt from having begun to wipe her fingers on it, clenched, gripping the fabric the way a child would a crayon. Then she pulled up, revealing herself to the camera. I stood quietly, not sure of what to do.
My sister was older now, eighteen, and her body was similar to mine, only better. A perfectly straight line ran down her ribs to just a centimeter above her navel. The eleven-line was visible even after the burgers. She had a small mole on her collarbone, a perfect circle.
“I don’t know where the food goes,” she said, smiling. Then she took off the rest of her clothes. “See?”
She broke eye contact with the camera to look at me, as if she were checking that I was still there.
She fell to the ground gracefully and slowly, into a cross legged position. I say she fell and not that she sat. This is because she did fall. I have no doubt that it was by accident that she landed there, in that position, even though it was perfect.
When she was on the ground, she did a couple of things. She uncrossed her legs, leaned forward. She whimpered. She crawled like a cat and looked around as though she was trying to find something, and then she curled up by the sofa. She got up again and walked around aimlessly. The evolution of man.
All this time, I followed her with the camera, all while unsure if I was right to keep the camera rolling, to track her with it.
But I was afraid to turn it off, knowing how my sister was. Everything was to be as she wanted it, and often one had simply to guess what the right thing to do was in the moment that the choice arose.
She ambled back to where her clothes lay dormant on the floor. There, she picked it all up, one by one. The underwear, the shirt, the leggings. First, she ate the underwear, chewing it for an uncomfortable two minutes before harrowingly swallowing it. I could see the shape of it, all bunched up, in her neck. Before she moved on to the shirt, she looked at me, this time pleadingly. That was my cue to stop recording, finally. It was an imperfect system.
She walked up to me and snatched the camera out of my hands. She threw up later, between the hours of two and three a.m.
Over the next couple of days, I watched her watch herself, naked and feline and curled up.
She was always playing it on the desktop screen. I stood at the door, always left ajar. I watched the screen too.
There was something in the look in her eyes as she picked up the underwear, brought it to her mouth. “I could post this,” she said, “I’d probably make even more money.”
I wanted to ask her why she was holding off; usually, she was very particular about posting her videos on time. She did not like to leave her fans waiting. More than this, she needed to be fed, not in the conventional sense but instead to satisfy her more abstract emotional needs.
I was with her all day, except when she was in school. I felt a small and dense ache each time I saw the hunger in her gaze. I knew the look very well because it also tended to make me feel small and invisible, like I could never feed her. Like my attention did not matter to her, or to anyone.
Then I began to catch my sister filming without me.
No more eating. She was only filming herself naked and doing increasingly bizarre yoga poses on various pieces of furniture. First she was doing a very subpar downward dog on our kitchen counter, back hunched and legs bent at different angles.
Then she was mangling the tree pose, badly attempting headstands against the wall, relaxing in what could only be described as a fucked-up pigeon pose. Bird of paradise, with no wings.
I walked right past her, fueled by pettiness. I was trying to produce a shoddy performance of disinterest. Her doing this without me felt like a rejection, even if I was not sure whether I had any real desire to get involved.
The more she filmed herself, the more I became convinced that it could only have been to contribute to some very highbrow subsection of performance art that I was hopeless to understand, let alone participate in. I was a witness once more to the spectacle of her body, although now I tried to hide my interest, only watching her covertly out of the corner of my eye.
In her room, she would splice these new videos into her eating videos so that you would have the jarring experience of watching her nakedly desecrate the practice of yoga between items of food she was eating. Styrofoam packets of Hokkien noodles. Child’s pose. Giant bowl of pasta. Warrior pose. Bags of cotton candy. Cow pose.
I had a lot of free time once I was no longer obliged to be behind the camera for her. I saw Anish and Alisha a lot.
Their career plans had not changed, all while mine had not yet materialized. I was still floating aimlessly in what felt like an empty world without gravity. Around now, an invitation came in the mail. My father was inviting me and my sister to his Lunar New Year Party.
I walked the envelope to the toilet, and I flushed his invite away. I did not want to see my father. I barely wanted to go outside. Maybe my sister’s videos were all there was to tether me to anything.
On a Friday night several weeks later, she turned in her bed and whispered, “we eat, and we move, that is all we do.”
I was just outside her room. I had the mind to inquire further but thought better of it. She screamed in the dark, from some nightmare. The contents of this dream would remain, as it were, a mystery to me: she never told me what happened in her sleep.
The morning after, she was up before me, which was itself a rare thing. When I went to check on her, she was already hunched over by her desktop. She was deleting videos. This surprised me. She was usually quite the hoarder, piles of hard drives in a small storage box under the desk.
“What are you doing?’
“Oh,” she said, “getting rid of some old stuff.”
She was deleting the last month. Her nude yoga videos and the spliced eating-yoga content, which I knew she had spent hours making.
I could not help but feel as though the mass deletion was a waste. There must have been a pervert out there who would have really enjoyed it; it was a waste not only of my sister’s energy but also of the love that somebody might have had for it. Throwing almost anything away is a waste of love, just as it is a waste of substance.
The deletion took about thirty minutes, after which she stood up and smiled. “All done.”
“Did you ever send those to anyone?”
“No,” she said, “but I described them to some people, and they said they wanted them. I don’t know, though. I got a little scared.”
That was probably fair. You never know what perverts are capable of. I scrolled on my phone, reading the news. Somebody found a body in the water tank of a nearby HDB block. I wondered how it would taste. Disgusting. Sad, of course, for the woman who was dead.
I heard the soft groan of the living room door. Our mother was home. We ignored it. “Hey,” my sister said. She was next to me, face pressed to my cheek.
“Can we go buy some cake?”
As if I had never left, I sat behind the camera as she ate the mountain of cake. Our mother was asleep.
This time, it was more than I thought even she would be able to consume. But my sister made easy work of it, scoffing it down with an impossible dignity. She was perfectly composed, even though I was sure that her body ought to be on the verge of bursting. She was a black hole. It was a true marvel, and for this reason alone I was certain her fans would forgive her for the hiatus. There was frosting all over her face. It was a cute purple, almost decorative; it matched her headband. She wiped all the cream off on her forearm. “Mmmmm,” she said, “it’s good to be back.”
She winked into the camera. I turned it off. She melted into the chair.
“How many views did my last video get?”
“Four million,” I said.
“That’s a lot.”
“Yeah.”
Momentary quiet. We inhabited the silence together.
Sometimes I wondered how she handled it. I did not think the human brain should have been capable of tolerating this sort of perception, always so overwhelming. Like thirty hamburgers. Like a wall of cake.
She laughed. She always laughed. “It’s never enough though, is it?”
She was picking vanilla crumbs out of her hair. I did not know whether to be relieved or worried. She stretched her back and sighed. She looked at me.
But when I looked back at her, her eyes were already elsewhere. Elsewhere, and not so hungry anymore.
***
Rumpus Original Art by Ian MacAllen
