And Carey—she had truly blossomed. The combination of her simple, direct persona and the elaborate morbidity of her imagination was irresistible, and collectors outbid each other again and again in their clamor to own her corpses. Her gallery, Eliot&Sprain, held elaborate presentations of her work, releasing limited-edition illustrated chapbooks describing all the body parts that had been discovered so far in THE BURIAL PROJECT, or sending invitations so extravagant they could be mistaken for a wedding for her FORGIVE/FORGET show. In that one, bodies stood upright, dancing with each other, at a party frozen in time. Dead, but alive; real, but simulated. Working-class, talented beyond measure, obsessively prolific, and coated in an easily digested political gloss, Carey’s professional identity was clear as a bell.

The work itself, however, was what held my attention. It was so detailed, so labor-intensive, and produced at such a brisk pace—one show every year, radically rapid for artwork that complex—that I saw it for what it was: the compulsive productions of a restless mind. Carey was lucky that the world had decided it was salable; she would have made it either way. I knew this because I was exactly the same.

I was jealous, and fascinated, and I wasn’t the only one. It seemed that everyone, even people outside the art world, now knew about their place upstate, knew what they were up to, who was in love with who, who was being invited. I was desperate to be their guest. I tried a dozen different ways to find out how to apply, but they had no listed phone number or website, and nobody I was friends with seemed to know them personally—only of them, like I did.

I tried walking into Johnson Reuchtig, that cavernous, whitewalled cathedral of money on 21st Street and West End Avenue, to inquire at the desk. The gallery girl, her hair two long, shiny brown curtains that swept across the papers in front of her, looked at me with confusion and said with disdain that there was no formal process to apply. It was private property. I.e.: Get out. I felt like I’d tried to invite myself to a stranger’s summer house by asking when the deposit was due. In the intervening four years between Carey’s plaster show and that moment, Pine City had moved so many rungs ahead of me that the distance between us had become officially unnavigable.