He sighed with relief, listlessly checked his watch for the third or fourth time and frowned at the continuing nonappearance of his train. As he did so, his right hand semiconsciously sought out his gut, cupping and probing the surplus flesh as though searching for a key to its existence, some way perhaps to disentangle himself from it. Four years ago, at thirty-one, he had been slim, even skinny. Back then, not in truth so long ago as it seemed, his twin passions had been the flesh and the mind. More specifically, his loose-hipped girlfriend, Lucilla, and Carrying the Can, his PhD dissertation on television comedy. But ever since The Can had been published to quite favorable reviews, leading to both his appointment as Lecturer in Ocular Studies at the University of the Metropolis and, on the strength of his elation, to a proposal and consequent engagement to Lucilla, his feelings had begun to alter. All the energy he had once expended on lust and learning had been diverted into his feelings for food. He did not binge and purge, he was not exactly a problem eater, but dinner, he realized rather sadly, had become his favorite part of the day-more important than either the work that preceded it or the sex that, albeit less and less these days, came afterwards. The real turning point, he knew, although he shuddered to think of it, had come three years earlier, five months after the publication of The Can and as he was beginning research for his next book project, when it had become plain to Chester, suddenly and painfully plain, that he had reached the limits of his own cleverness. He was sitting in his office one afternoon reading an article on the phenomenology of video nasties when he realized with a start that it made no sense to him at all-the prose seemed, all of a sudden, as dense and pathless as an old-growth forest.