What I loved about Carey’s work was the pure, absolute, hard-edged resistance of it. Death—actual death—genuinely resists being called an artwork. The work of decay resists even being shown. It resists easy, clean, thoughtless profit by relating to our darkest fears. To re-create dead bodies and call them a work of art is to get people to ask what exactly they are paying for when they view an artwork.

Death doesn’t resist the commodified conversation—it is perhaps the peak of such a conversation—but it nonetheless resists being replicated. A deliberately grotesque dead body is a work of visual art that (most) people will not take photographs of.

We can’t alter the machine. We can, however, inject sites of confusion, distance, forgetting. Even then—it is futile. It is. But still—I try. I try to make paintings that reach inside people, open the refrigerator door of their chest, take out the eggs, one by one, and throw them on the floor. The shells break, the yolk oozes into the cracks of the hardwood—and they forget, if only momentarily, about the machine they live in. It is true that few people can afford to own my paintings, but there is a sweet and sour satisfaction in the twin facts that those very same people cannot afford to be perceived as selfish, and that they will lend a work to any reputable museum at the drop of a hat. Artworks might be commodities, but unlike stocks, their value is almost completely derived from social impact.

Carey knew all that. And she did it better. She had really tried. And I wanted to know the whys and hows. I wanted to know everything about her. I’d lied about the degree because it was convenient in the moment; because I didn’t want to make Tyler uncomfortable; because I wanted him to like me—no, because I needed him to like me. I had my reasons, I told myself. Good ones.

I wasn’t the only one too spiral-eyed to drive myself home; dozens of cars still littered Max’s driveway. The caterers and a cleaning van passed me; they’d almost certainly be taking dirty plates directly from the arms of passed-out guests.

My truck was unlocked, keys tucked in the visor, as requested. The road home was empty, the sun was shining, and with the wind whipping through my hair and the hard plastic of the steering wheel under my fingers, it all felt very free. After so long in the prison of Manhattan, where you were never unlocked, where you took your laptop to the café toilet with you, it was a rush to be in a place where nobody wanted the meager things you owned. Sure, it was because they already had something better, but still, it felt nice.