I Am Still an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot

Please join me in the way-back machine, the better to absorb a past glimpse of the future of fiction. Twenty years ago, William Grimes wrote a cover story, ?The Ridiculous Vision of Mark Leyner,? for the New York Times Magazine. The author was 36 and publishing Et Tu, Babe, a self-identified ?master jam of relentless humor and indeterminate trajectories? promising to carry forward the style of ?I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot,? itself a compact blast of nerve gas issuing from the November 1988 issue of Harper?s. If Donald Barthelme had been a Groucho Marx of funny experimentalists, here was a cackling Max Headroom describing, with photo-realist exactitude and cruelest surrealist imagery, a fantasy narrated by ?a feral child who was raised by huge and lurid puppets.? Cruising, hurrying, hurtling loopily, the story imagines a sort of road trip, one involving a restaurant pit stop:

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