"WHO was the greater man?" Bloomberg said. "You get just one try. Sir Francis Drake or the prophet Isaiah? Take your time answering. It's not as obvious as it seems."

"How can you compare them?" Andy Chudko said. "They were in two different fields."

"The answer seems obvious only at first. Be very careful."

"I don't think it seems obvious at all," Chudko said.

I stood in the doorway. Bloomberg and Andy Chudko occupied the beds. Anatole was supine, two pillows beneath his head, hands folded on his chest. Chudko sat on my bed, facing the doorway, his right foot (extended to infinity) at a 45degree angle to the door (when closed). I noted other angles, elevations, intervals, and then situated myself carefully on the chair by the window, between the beds, facing past both men toward the open doorway, toward the corridor or trade route. Chudko's head and torso met without benefit of a neck. His whole body in fact seemed welded, part joined to part in bursts of heat and pressure. His silver guitar was on the other chair, the chair by the door.

"I don't understand you, Bloomers. Gary, you room with this guy. What do you make of him?"

"Our next secretary of defense."

"My roommate will be glad to hear that I'm off my diet as of an hour ago. I think he'll rejoice in that."

"I do. I definitely approve."

"I've seen my mistake," Bloomberg said. "I thought I would become more efficient if I ate less. I thought the discipline of dieting would be good for me. It would make me quicker in body and therefore quicker in mind. It would give me a sense of physical definition and therefore of spiritual awareness. This was all wrong. I thought I would feel better if I weighed less. I thought I would have more respect for myself. I thought I'd gain in selfassurance and in the general loftiness of my ideals. None of this happened. It was all part of the Jewish thing, you see. I thought the selfcontrol of dieting would lead to the selfcontrol needed to unjew myself. But it didn't work out that way. As I lost weight, as I continued to struggle against food and its temptations, I began to lose the idea of myself. I was losing the idea of my body, who it belonged to, what exactly it was, where all the different parts of it were located, what it looked like from different angles and during the various times of the day and evening. I was losing the most important part of my being.

Obesity. What I had considered selfcontrol was really selfindulgence. To make me pretty. To give me quick feet. I realize now that these things aren't important, that they're nothing compared with my individual reality. I dropped to twoninety, then to two eightytwo. My selfawareness started to fade. It was a terrible shedding of the skin. I was losing more and more of myself. I was losing more of the old body and more of the newly acquir............