What had put him here was starch and bad habits. His love for junk food, the bliss produced, was shameful to him when he observed its true profoundness, the way the evening journeys to the bodega had subsumed his life, left him drooping, his face submerged and folded into itself. He had taken to looking quickly into the mirror, taking no pleasure from his own face, his gray eyes and strong jaw, but rather checking his appearance for a range of the more disturbing faults - unshaved sections, spots, jutting hair - and, correcting those, he kept away from reflections.

All this was the result of a 20-year-engagement with food created in factories, food produced along an assembly line, formed by injection molding, food designed to luxuriate on the tongue and drift down the esophagus like a mermaid swimming to an undersea caven, to rest peacefully in the stomach. Food that came wrapped in foil packaging with attached coupons.

What the process of the next year would be - if he could hold himself to it, if he could do the 6 day schedule and avoid all things battered and fried - was unpeeling, of removing the layers, to get to - what? An image, he supposed

He'd once lived with a woman, very briefly after college, and they had been sitting in bed looking at each other's bodies. She was strong, with a curve in the belly, beautiful and admired, but she felt fat, and she said, isn't it strange that you don't think of anything else?

And that was part of it, the constant recursive self-judgement of physical form.

If he felt he could call his friends and offer to share an hour walking across a bridge and looking at the East River, he would have engaged more people more often. But New York was a city of interiors. David was interested in the processes of things, the shapes of things. Faced with a brick wall he would want to discuss the reason for the shape and length of the bricks, the history that went into that; when he didn't know, he would make it up, craft a bricklaying character. It was these moments which were pure narcotic for him, and he regretted that he was outside the pale of so much life by being so fixated on the small; he would have liked to have brought more people into his tiny world, pulled them away from the circle of good restaurants and expensive shoes and showed them the pleasure to be found in...

You see, the real the contemplation of the tide in the East River on a sunday afternoon, watching the boats.

He was almost always the biggest person in the gym, tallest and fattest, but that was to be expected, and the expected interchange of mating glances between the sweating and slender did not include him. He noted it dispassionately; the gym was forcing him to live inside his body and being excluded from the regular intercourse of flirting stung, but slightly, now that he was taking steps to include himself. Visualizing his body as a tightened machine, he found himself imagining better sex - and what a luxury that would be, distant as it might be, to not have to be concerned about unveiling his chest in its softness - but business meetings; it would be a distinct pleasure to spend $70 - an hour's salary - on a shirt made by Italians, or Italian-owned sweatshops, to wear cream-colored pants that showed his long legs with a green shirt and black leather shoes shining like the eyes of young women, to sit there around a buffed table with a sheaf of papers in manila envelopes and not feel any need to compensate, to luxuriate in the power of voice, mind, and body, with no component missing. Except for money, which he couldn't bring himself to worry over.

David was, for the first time, attacking his body as a problem, ignoring what it represented and going after what it was; the corpulent situation in which he found himself, at 28, was analogous to an accounting error, say, a misplaced decimal point, that had led to incremental additions of compound interest in the wrong accounts, and he was here now, and internalized Internal Revenue Service, looking at his reflection in the Y, waiting. He had gone from being a sympathizer in his own cause to an angry critic, and one day in the last month, like an Anarcho-Syndicalist at Davos, had burst in on the perpetual board meeting of his inner humonculi and shot them all dead, bounded on the table, and proclaimed an end to gluttony.

His enemy in the gym was himself;

That state of shame and fear was

Alan had introduced the term “mangina,” gay slang for anus, into their conversation a few months ago, and it had become the defining perjorative of this new gym push. The semantics of the word had naturally extended from a referent to the erotically accepting male anus during homosexual intercourse to include the whole man, as in, “it's fine if you want to take a little break; that's entirely expected behavior from a mangina,” and continued out to “manginish,” the tendency to act like a mangina, and “manginahood,” the continued state of being a mangina. It was the fear of that state - of living behind a fence of fat and inner chaos - that motivates David greatly.

hood, and he was determined to step past it into a new bold life which, he admitted, would probably be mostly similar but less tiresome when there were four flights of stairs to be climbed.

So David, less from the desire to be handsome - for at this point in the workout, after weightlifting, he was ready to give up all claim to sexual attractiveness in exchange for a nap and a milkshake, and more to avoid the label of mangina, kept hammering his feet in circles.

So he used the cross-country machine, placing his feet into the strange footholds and jiggling energetically until his forehead turned to a faucet, glueing his shirt to his back.